Our family attended a Tom Chapin concert recently. For those of you with kids out there and who may not know him, he’s a great children’s singer/songwriter whose music you can take along on a roadtrip and listen to for days without getting tired of it. He’s also got quite a few great albums for grown-ups, incidentally.

Anyway, he performed a song I hadn’t heard before (although it’s over a year old by now). It’s a commentary on the state of elementary education in the U.S., and it hits the nail right on the head, if you ask me.

Check it out at www.tomchapin.com (to download and pass along) or watch the video below:

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Categories: Personal
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I had almost forgotten about the OLPC give-one-get-one campaign I took the opportunity to participate in last year. Well, the thing finally came today. I wasn’t really all that anxious to get it, so it didn’t bother me at all that it took a while. I thought it was more important that the real recipients get theirs first.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of a kind of unboxing. It’s really more of a series of pictures of the packaging/parts, since I had already unboxed the thing by the time I took these.

Simple cardboard packaging and plastic bags for protection

All parts arranged on the open box

Front of welcome brochure and power brick

The OLPC itself with the two random color elements that make it “unique”

Back of the OLPC, with battery removed

Battery and welcome letter

Inside of welcome brochure

Back of welcome brochure

The battery actually came mostly charged, which was a nice surprise. Turning the laptop on for the first time took me through a simple naming step and then right to the “hub”/home screen. It took a while to get there, but it was really, really simple. No series of screens that ask for all kinds of information, like on regular PCs.

My initial exploration of the software took me around to the Journal, Webcam app (called Recorder), Paint, Measure (seemed to enable you to analyze / show the sound from the microphone), wireless setup, Browser and a few other things. Looks very interesting so far.

Both my kids have expressed interest in fiddling with it. Should be a lot of fun.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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Here’s a quick tip: If you’re a Netflix subscriber and are having problems with the WatchNow feature, take a look at whether you have any caching proxy servers between the PC you’re using to watch a show and the Netflix servers (yes, that’s a long path and a very general statement, I know).

If, for example, you have a home network server with a caching proxy feature, try turning the proxy feature off. That helped me with MediaError(1400) problems, anyway.

If your ISP has a caching proxy, see if there’s a way around it, too. It may be a source of problems.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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I have the good fortune to be able to attend SD West this year. I’ve heard people at work rave about this conference right in my backyard, and was lucky to get approval to go this year.

Unfortunately I’ve been so swamped with work (really exciting new stuff, too) that I haven’t been able to prepare at all. In other words I still have no idea about what sessions to go to. Argh. To add to that frustration, the SD West website doesn’t make it really easy to plan your days for maximum efficiency. Double Argh.

Here’s how I like to plan my attendance: I have an idea at a high level about what kind of sessions I’d like to focus on (in my case .NET and People, Process & Methods mostly). So I need to be able to filter all sessions by those high-level criteria. Next, I need to figure out which sessions in those high level tracks are available at what time and how they may conflict relative to how interesting they sound to me.

The information provided on the SD West website provides some ability to filter and search for sessions, but it doesn’t help you with detailed planning.

So I decided to spend a little time pulling down all sessions as an Excel sheet (which the site allows, thank goodness), and started to shape and mold the sheet to my needs. The result is available for you to use as well, in case you’re as late as I am: sdwest08_all.xlsx (update: rename this file to have an .xlsx suffix after downloading, WordPress changed the extension on me).
(I think I have all sessions in there, but I noticed that one session seemed to not be fully downloaded (a session with quotes in the description), so I added it back by hand. Maybe there are others missing too, but I think that was the only one.)

You’ll see all sessions sorted by time, color coded by time slot/event type (keynotes, birds-of-a-feather), color coded by track, and with filters on each column. I also added a priority column at the beginning to perhaps help making decisions if you change your mind while at the event.

And, yes, I will most likely be wearing my Geek Tie at the event (it has a Red Verbatim Store’n'Go USB memory stick and a gray CaseLogic case at the end).

Categories: Personal, Software development
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[I may have a hard drive mini-series on my hands here, see previous post.]

If your computer has performance problems and you can’t quite explain why (you’ve ruled out startup items, spyware and such ilk), it may be worth looking at how your IDE controller manages hard drive data transfer. It should be using (U)DMA, unless your computer and hard drive is from the stone ages.

To check, go to Control Panel - System:

Click Device Manager and expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node:

Now double-click on a Primary or Secondary IDE Channel and go to the Advanced Settings tab:

If the Transfer Mode combo box doesn’t say “DMA if available”, you can change it, then restart the computer. That should switch Current Transfer Mode to (Ultra) DMA Mode (X) if your drive supports it, which it should.

But what if Current Transfer Mode doesn’t say (Ultra) DMA Mode (X) after that? What if it stays in PIO mode no matter what you set the Transfer Mode to and no matter how many times you restart? That’s what happened to my system. And it was slow as molasses starting up, since my boot/system drive was in that mode.

It turns out that Windows keeps track of the transfer statistics between your drive and the rest of the system. If Windows encounters a lot of transfer errors, it slowly dials the transfer mode back. So it can go from Ultra DMA Mode 5, to Mode 4, Mode 3, etc. all the way back to PIO mode. If Windows encounters DMA transfer timeouts, it will immediately go back to PIO mode. According to this support article on Seagate’s web site, those errors will be logged in the Windows Event Log, but I guess it happened so long ago on my system that the entries have been lost in the meantime.

According to the same Seagate article, the solution is to delete the corresponding IDE Channel device from Device Manager, restart Windows, let the system re-detect the device, reinstall the driver and restart one more time. Now DMA transfer mode should be back, and your system should perform much better.

You still might want to investigate why the mode got switched back to PIO. Look through the event log using Event Viewer, filtering by Event source type “disk”. Also, check the ribbon cable you use to connect the hard drives. It may have come loose, or it may not be of the right kind (it has to have 80 conductors, not 40) or quality. Using ribbon cables with too many hard drive changes can cause loose/broken connections between the connector pins and the cable.

Categories: Tech Toys
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As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the local Fry’s recently to get a replacement hard drive. What prompted me to do that was a warning from the BIOS of my computer saying that the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive was bad. I’m glad I listened to that warning. After replacing the drive, I put it in a separate machine to perform a safe erase (using Eraser, which can also be found on SourceForge), but not until looking at the S.M.A.R.T. information using SpeedFan. It told me that there were over 65000 excess relocated sectors, which means that the drive basically was running out of spaces to move bad sectors to when needed.

After this exercise I installed SpeedFan on my main machine as well, and found that I have another hard drive that’s not too healthy. So I may have to go out and get another replacement soon.

I also found a monitoring tool called ActiveSmart, which costs money (unlike SpeedFan, which is free), and can alert you via email or network messages when a drive is beginning to deteriorate.

While I’m on the subject of hard drives, another handy tool is DTemp, which shows you the temperature of your hard drives in the Windows notification area (and can show S.M.A.R.T. data, too). Keeping the temperature of your hard drives as low as possible is important to make them perform optimally and make them last as long as possible.

Categories: Tech Toys
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Okay, time for a little bragging :).

I was at the local Fry’s yesterday, buying a new hard drive to replace one that’s about to go bad, and on my way out I stopped by the magazine racks. Imagine my surprise when I saw this on the cover:

How cool to see the product you worked on so intensely be recognized with a magazine cover photo! If you look closely, you can even see one of my photos to the left of the big red circle in the little photo stack.

I’m still pinching myself a little just to make sure it’s not a dream.

The HP TouchSmart PC came in at number 7 on the top 25 innovative products. Not too shabby, I think. And I’m glad to see that the OLPC took third place ahead of it. I’m still waiting for the OLPC I’m supposed to get with my give-one-get-one donation, but I hear it will come any day now.

Here are some more pictures from the magazine:

Categories: Personal
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[Update 2008-07-24: This is now one of the most popular posts on my blog. Seems to me that a lot of people are having issues like this. Unfortunately there only seems to be a solution for Sony systems; look through the comments to see it .]

[Update 2008-11-29: I've looked around a bit more. The chipset used in the HP laptop is of the "Waikiki" Conexant HD audio variety, according to this forum post. Apparently there is an online petition, asking for HP  to release an appropriate driver, since some of the notebooks that use this chipset were marketed as "Vista Capable". The "Venice" chipset variant, apparently, is covered by updated drivers.]

[Update 2 2008-11-29: I think I may have found a package that solves my particular problem. I've put the computer to sleep several times now, and each time sound came back properly after waking it up again. The thing that seems to have done it is something called a UAA Bus driver. I got it directly from the HP FTP site here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp33501-34000/sp33867.exe There's also an article around the SP file here: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericSoftwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-47284-1&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en. I'm not sure this will help your situation, but it helped mine (so far, keeping my fingers crossed, maybe I'll run into other issues with it.) The article says it's for XP, but it seems to have worked on Vista SP1 as well.]

I have a laptop that has an issue with properly restarting the sound subsystem after Vista resumes from sleep. Microsoft brought out a hotfix about 6 months ago that supposedly fixed issues like this. On my system, the problem persists, even after installing Service Pack 1! I let the computer go to sleep, and when I wake it up again, there’s no sound. The sound device is listed in Device Manager as “High Definition Audio Device” and has the following Hardware IDs:

HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_14F1&DEV_5047&SUBSYS_103C30A5&REV_1000
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_14F1&DEV_5047&SUBSYS_103C30A5

I’ve tried just restarting the sound services (as admin: net stop “Windows Audio”, net stop “Windows Audio Endpoint Builder”, net start “Windows Audio Endpoint Builder”, net start “Windows Audio”), but that doesn’t work. Restarting the computer works, obviously, but is too slow to be a proper solution.

One thing I can to do to get sound back without restarting is remove the “High Definition Audio Device” from Device Manager and then Scan for Harware Changes. But it’s still annoying to have to do this. Since there’s no crash involved (no Windows Error Reporting possible) and no “yellow bangs” in Device Manager, I’m not sure how I would report this to Microsoft. They probably wouldn’t do anything about it anyway. They’d say it’s a driver issue. Talk to the driver vendor. Nice idea. Trouble is the laptop is older (it scores a 3.2 Windows Experience Index, not half bad) , and the vendor probably won’t bring out Vista drivers for it. So it looks like I’m stuck with a broken package.

Maybe a kind soul (at Microsoft?) will read this at some point and get in touch to help me troubleshoot the issue.

Oh well. Feels good to get it off my chest, though.

Categories: Software, Vista
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Vista Service Pack 1 is in the can. It’s no coincidence that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are “here” at the same time. They’re one and the same apart from the differences in “configuration”, i.e. Client vs. Server stuff. Server 2008 is the product that should have been released in a “Client” version under the Vista branding, but Microsoft caved to enormous pressure from the market and released it a little over a year too early.

Microsoft undoubtedly knew they could never afford to release a Server version in the state the code was in at Vista release. Corporations running mission critical things on Server would never adopt anything not rock solid. So Microsoft took the time they should have put into the “Client” version to finish things off properly for Server. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.

What can be expected of Windows “7″ after this? My guess is Microsoft will cave to market pressure again and release something not quite ready for the consumer market. With Vista, part of the reason for releasing too early was that Windows XP seemed to be getting too old. For Windows “7″ part of the reason will likely be a perceived need to catch up with Apple’s OS X.

With Vista, Microsoft was incredibly open about providing early builds to lots of people in order to get the quality right. And yet it wasn’t enough. It also seems that the biggest “achievement” that came from the openness was that people weren’t much impressed when the final product came out. In my view that’s a bit of a shame, because there are lots of truly great innovations in Vista (one of which is WPF). Microsoft will probably be more tight-lipped about Windows “7″ as a result. They might take a more Apple-like approach and keep things secret until the last minute. Surprise the world when they release Vista’s successor.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand what it is about Apple’s offer that makes it so compelling. It’s not OS X. It’s not iLife or iWork. It’s how it’s all wrapped up in an end-to-end package. Beautiful, well performing hardware; good OS; good everyday software with features that people find useable and useful, integrated with revenue generating .Mac Internet services. And all because Apple has control of the entire chain, from hardware to software and services. Heck, they even control the retail experience.

Microsoft doesn’t have an answer for that. They play a different game. They play in many arenas and with many, many different partners. The ecosystem Microsoft provides the basis for is much, much bigger than Apple’s. Microsoft can never be Apple. And I don’t think they should even try to be.

I’m hoping that Microsoft will not cave in to market pressure but chart their own course for Windows “7″. Perhaps kick off work for another “NT” project (from the Dave Cutler/NT 3.x days) and focus on creating an operating system that is focused on the total consumer experience. Throw away all backwards compatibility in the consumer market, if needed (ironically, sort of like Apple did for OS X.) Provide backwards compatibility through virtualization or by keeping a separate line for corporate mission-critical applications. But mainly chart a course that doesn’t look too much at Apple or Linux or anything else, but follows new visions for what can be done with software running on ever more capable hardware. They have enough smart people to lead the way. There’s no need to follow anyone.

Categories: Opinion, Vista
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The title says it all. Several attempts I’ve made at installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on x64 Vista boxes failed with Error 1603. After a prolonged Google search, I found a forum with someone mentioning to uninstall KB110806, which seems to be related to .NET 2.0 SP1. I forget the forum and the details.

Anyway, if you’re having trouble with .NET 3.5 on Vista x64, try uninstalling the KB110806 update. I’m going to assume you know where to do that if you’re reading this.

Categories: Software, Vista, WPF
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