shahine.com/omar/

C|Net is reporting that we are exiting the broadband hardware space. That sucks big time. I still have nightmares of all the linksys firmware upgrades and wacky hardware versioning schemes they have (trying to buy the lastest piece of hardware at Fry's is a challenge). Downloading firmware for my wireless/wired router used to be an almost weekly occurrence. Going back to older versions was just as common (cause the router would crash, become unresponsive etc). I'm hoping since Cisco purchased them things are better in that respect.

I swapped all my broadband gear to Microsoft because of UPnP support, quality web based UI and the fact that I knew the quality would exceed that of the competition. Back in the day, you could only have a single PPTP connection and the only products which could handle more than one connection at a time were the Microsoft software based NAT/Routers. I knew that our hardware would work really well with our technology and sure enough it worked.

I guess the only Microsoft hardware to last the test of time is the keyboard and mouse. Some other nifty hardware products were the Digital Speakers (these rocked), the telephone (heh) and the remote control (what a clunker)!

Thunderbird 0.6 is out. The best news is that they added support for IMAP IDLE. Sweet. I mentioned it on my blog a few months ago and the bug was voted high enough to get fixed. Thunderbird is my favorite mail client for non exchange mail as well as my favorite usenet reader.

They also added a real windows installer this time.

I only wish it had the three-column view like Outlook 2003. That view just rocks my world.

note: when I say “three-column view” I also expect the two line message list summary that outlook gives. Doing three panes is easy, doing the multi-line message list is the hard part .

Evan DiBiase chronicles his travles back to Windows from a Mac (via Dan Crevier).

My co-worker Mike Fullerton rants about his Mac. I actually found Mike's post pretty humerous.

Since I built my first do-it-yourself computer almost 2 years ago I was super interested in making sure that when the computer went to sleep (standby) it was silent. After all, what is the point of putting something into standby if the fans and HD were running?

Well, if you build your own PC, there are a number of factors that will determine if this is at all a possibility. First let’s start with a discussion of the different states your PC can be in.

S0 - Working State

In this state, your PC is awake and working

S1- CPU Stopped

In this state, your PC is technically in standby and this is the default standby state if S3 is not supported. Power consumption is Five Watts to Thirty Watts of Power.

S3 - Suspend to RAM (context saved to RAM)

In this state, your PC in standby and all fans, hard drivers and other devices are powered down into a sleep state. Power consumption is less than Five Watts.

S4 - Suspend to Disk(Context saved to HDD)

Otherwise known as Hibernate, your PC has saved the contents of RAM to the hard disk and is pretty much tuned off. Power consumption is less than Five Watts. This isn’t very useful for desktop PCees and is mostly used in Laptops where battery drainage is far better than if you are in S3.

Now, as I mentioned there are some requirements before you can use S3.

1. Motherboard must support S3
2. S3 support must be enabled in the BIOS (many motherboards do not do this and default to S1)
3. OS must support S3 (Windows XP does)
4. To wake your PC from S3 your USB peripherals (like keyboard and mouse) must be enabled to arm your PC to wake.
   1. From the device manager, you must select they keyboard, go to properties and select Allow this device to bring this computer out of standby. On a Windows Media Center you’ll want to do this for the Remote Control device.
5. The following reg key must be installed.

Step number 5 is the most critical step of all. Not surprisingly, a post that I wrote back in April of 2002 is the most frequently visited page on my web site. I get hundreds of hits a month to this page from people doing google searches on dumppo.exe and other related standby issues. My guess is that they are all having the same problem I had and would like to use S3 on their PCs. Sadly, the advice I offer on that post isn’t going to work because of the mysterious step 5 and the required regkey.

Here is a cool Outlook tip when using you M200 in tablet mode.

By default the button above the joystick is configured to type the escape key. If you go to the Tablet and Pen Settings Control Panel, you can change this to type delete. This basically allows you to rapidly read and delete items in Outlook w/o using the pen. Instead you use the joystick to move around outlook, and then the button above it to delete mail.

I scan and delete a lot of mail in Outlook and find doing it in Tablet mode very comfortable. I did this for about 2 hours on a recent flight. It was really a nice setup since I was on an American Airlines flight with Less Room Throughout Coach (don't ask, it was a ghetto 757).

Here is how you can get AUX in on your Audi. Read this post. Then go to autotoys and purchase an adapter for your specific car. Don't forget the tools to remove the radio. Don't cheap out, you need this!

It took me about 20 minutes and now I can throw away the cassette adapter. I can line in directly into my factory radio by pressing the CD button a second time (by default the car can have a second 6 disc changer, this basically fools the car into thinking it's connected to an Audi Factory CD changer). Instead it's connected to my iPod.

Congrats to Dennis on making AA Platinum. I've been an AA member since January 1998. That following year I made Platinum and have been so ever since (Gold is 25,000 flying miles a year, Plat is 50,000 and exec plat is 100,000). Being a member of a program like this makes traveling a whole different experience. For me it's almost a necessity since I am 6'3” and don't fit in most airline seats. I fly AA because they have More Room Throughout Coach (MRTC), and because I am plat I can book exit row seats when purchasing my ticket (which is a big perk). Of course other perks are:

• I have about a 70% upgrade success rate on flights. Flying biz/first class for the price of coach is priceless.
• I can pre-board meaning I can hog all that overhead bin space (just kidding, I travel light).
• I can call a special number for help with things w/o any hold time.
• I get double miles. In 5 years I have accumulated 800,000 miles. 200,000 more miles and I will be a lifetime Gold AA member (this rocks, but knowing my luck they will cancel this sort of secret when I reach 1 million in about 2 years).
• I can check-in at the First Class line at the airport (never do this any more cause of electronic checkin, but it's nice on International Flights).
• The seat next to me gets blocked on non-full flights
• I can upgrade my spouse with me.
• I get to use the special no faster than the regular security line. This is only a perk at SEA where the TSA are slow as ...

Each year I managed to just make the 50,000 mile cut-off for Plat. I don't think I will make it as now that my wife lives with me (we did the long distance thing for 4 years while she was in med school) I don't go back east enough. However, my credit card spending has compensated for any loss of miles .

The only downside to AA is that they are now flying this piece of junk 757's on transcon flights to/from JFK/SFO and BOS/SFO. That royally sucks since they have crap seats and cabins, and have Less Room Throughout Coach (they removed the extra legroom on these planes to cram more people on board like the sardines that we are).

A while ago I blogged about a new feature of dasBlog: the ability to highlight .NET code. Thanks to Scott Hanselman who let me know that I forgot to add the necessary xml file for the code highlighter to the 1.6 release :-(. As such I've uploaded it to the workspace. I'd rather not rev each and every download up there so this won't be rolled into a release till the next rev or hotfix if there is one.

Steps to install:

1. Download .zip file and expand
2. Copy CodeHighlightDefinitions.xml to the ftb folder in your dasBlog root.

The version in 1.6 is actually based on the AylarSolutions.Highlight v2.0 by Thomas Johansen. Thomas even has a cool demo of how you can integrate his work into Free Text Box. However, for dasBlog I chose a different route. You click a button and get a pop-up window where you paste in your code, parse to see the result, and then insert the raw html into the blog post.

Scott Watermasysk is taking a different approach in .Text. 

I'm typing this in the Westin Grand hotel in Washington, DC. I'm just a few short blocks from where I went to college. I arrived this afternoon, which I thought might not happen since I had a 30 min layover in DFW. I knew it was bad news when they made a last call announcement and I had 40 or so gates to traverse.

Once I got here I hopped on the Metro from National to Foggy-Bottom. It's amazing that the METRO and BART are almost identical. I walked down M street and all the way up to my alma matter. So many good memories. It's so fun to see your school through different eyes. DC is such an interesting place. The energy is very different from San Francisco (and the valley) for sure. I could definitely see myself living here at some point. Georgetown is so full of college students. It's so interesting how they are basically all still doing the same thing you would do on a nice warm sunny afternoon... and on a Thursday night. Hanging around, getting ready for a big night out on the town. Of course at Georgetown, big nights were Wed, Thu, Friday and Saturday... but not for me. I spent that time in the freaking science library trying to become a doctor. Glad that didn't work out .

Back at the hotel I was actually horrified that they charge $16 for 24 hours of Internet access. Thanks to the miracle of the open and unsecured WiFi network I've managed to get my fix for free.

Well, tomorrow should be fun. I'm doing some press interviews then up to New York City to hang with my family.

As an owner of the Toshiba 3500 Tablet PC I am blown away by the new M200. this is a review of the improvements and differences.

Specs

This Toshiba has no shortage of great specs. Intel P4 Centrino 1.7 ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 7200 RPM Hard Drive, nVidia GeForce FX ToGo 5200, 12 inch 1400x1050 display. These specs alone would make a sweet laptop. Fundamentally this just beats the pants off the 3500 and it really shows when using the machine. Toshiba went with Tier 1 type hadware (nVidia, Intel chipset etc) where the 3500 has some seriously sub standard parts.

Hardware Design

There still aren't any PC laptops that are as beautiful as PowerBooks. However, I'll give credit where credit is due. Toshiba has engineered something that is a great notebook and tablet. Small subtle things make a difference when using a tablet that may not matter on a non-tablet.

Screen

The screen is a very high resolution display device and it's small (12 inches). As such it's very difficult for a young guy like me to even make things out w/o getting real close. I improved this problem 95% buy increasing the overall DPI that windows thinks it's running on. See this post.

Keyboard

It "feels good". However, the Windows key is still in the wrong place. Please swap the Tilde and Windows Key. OEMs should not be allowed to change the basic keyboard layout.

Power Button

For one thing Toshiba made the power button a slider rather than a button. On the 3500 it was way to easy to hit the power button in tablet mode putting the machine into hibernate or shutdown.

Microphone

The microphone has been placed in a location that does not put it near the fan in both tablet and notebook mode (on the 3500 it was right above the fan in tablet mode).

Pen Buttons

There are a series of buttons that are adjacent to the screen that you can tap with your pen and program the actions (this is a nifty idea). You actually press down on the plastic screen in special areas that detect the pen.

Tablet buttons

The tablet "buttons" that used to provide easy ways to scroll, and hit enter in tablet mode are not replaced with a cell phone like joystick. This was a great idea as it's now directional as well as easy to control using the pen letting giving you quite a bit of flexibility in how you interact with Windows.

Build quality

Lets just say the 3500 felt like a flimsily piece of junk. Holding it did not instill a sense of confidence. Holding a Powerbook 12 or 15 inch makes you feel like you are in a Porsche 911 or something. You can feel that this is a well crafted piece of hardware. The M200 is no where near that experience but it feels solid. The case is made out of some kind of plastic or metal that feels durable, sturdy, and doesn't get "scuffed" like my 3500. The machine doesn't flex when I hold it, there aren't protruding panels and such. It's more curvy and less boxy. there aren't "stickers" covering screw holes and so on. The screen isn't warped, or unaligned like the 3500. It feels like a very solid piece of hardware.

Battery

The battery is physically smaller and thicker. This is a good thing as it's more compact. It's a bit heavier, but seems like a better and more usable battery. Battery life is far superior. After 2+ years and no power management software installed I got about 60 minutes in my 3500 battery. It also took 10 hours to recharge it fully if I was using it. This machine so far has been running on my entire cross country flight, and the reduced performance via speed step hasn't been all that noticeable. It seems to re-charge a lot faster.

Pen

The pen is more like a Pen! It's not semi square like the 3500 which would cause me to get impressions and soreness in my hand after extended use. The M200 pen is round and actually looks like a pen. The best part is, the pen is no longer docked in the same place as the screen. With the 3500, returning the Pen to the dock resulted in something in the task bar getting clicked, or the mouse moving due to the magnetic nature of the way the pen interacts with the display. The pen also has a sort of push action release like the Newton 2100 did.

And I found a little surprise in the battery compartment. An emergency pen. Wow, what a great idea!

Trackpad

Far better trackpad. The buttons are metal and not painted plastic like the 3500. The buttons also feel snappy and will look good after 3 years of use!

Stickers

There are 10 stickers on this machine. Time to whip out the Goo-Gone. Apple puts zero stickers on their hardware. Stickers are just freaking tacky.

Inking

Overall, calibration issues seem to be a thing of the past. The alignment of the pen seems good all over the screen (well as compared to the 3500).

Orientation

The hardware has some kind of mercury switch or similar device that can detect orientation. Toshiba has included some software (oddly named the Accellerome) that allows you to program events to occur based on quickly moving the tablet forwards and backwards, or left and right. Kind of interesting I guess, but I'm not sure what I'd use it for yet.

Software

Well, as any OEM, Toshiba spends considerable time and energy creating utilities, drivers and so on for this machine. Now, typically whenever I get a new piece of hardware I just repave it and install the stuff I want (repave = install Windows XP). I didn't do that this time though. As such I was horrified as usual with the number of pieces of software installed and the amount of overhead they take up. Most of this is just philosophical problems that I have with OEMs cluttering my life with stuff I don't want or need.

However, there is some good in this case. I counted roughly 15 entries in my add/remove programs that are Toshiba specific. Much of these things are optional, but if you want to use many of the hardware goodies I mention above you need these. One great area of improvement is that Toshiba nicely organized them in my start menu so that I don't have 15 new start menu entries for utilities. They are all grouped under "Toshiba" and then there are sub folders there.

Toshiba has made some welcome changes to the Power Management software. This was something I never installed on my 3500 cause it had a tendency to hard freeze my tablet. That was not cool. But the new version is much better designed, simpler and just seems to "work".

There is a new piece of software called the CrossMenu that gets invoked when you click the tablet directional button. It's actually a nice piece of software providing some useful functionality. It's even translucent, fades out and animates. Nice touches! This is the kind of stuff that Apple does well and it's nice to see Toshiba offer us some attention to user experience.

Finally there is a piece of software called ConfigFree for managing your net connections. This is one of those classic "No thanks, I can do this myself". Seriously, there is all this stuff in Windows for doing this. Unlike the Windows Power Manager which is fairly bare bones and begging for an OEM to write something different, this is just software that's unnecessary IMHO. Plus when I have network problems I have a long list of things to point my finger at:

• Comcast - Internet Provider
• Scientific Atlanta - cable modem
• Wireless Basestation - Microsoft
• Windows XP - client wireless software
• Windows 2003 Server - 802.1X authentication
• IT department - manages 802.1X
• Windows 2003 Server - manages certificates for above
• Intel - hardware nic
• M200 - host for intel hardware nic
• ConfigFree - why add something else to point my finger at?

The last thing I'll say is that I hate it when ISVs create software using non-standard controls, dialogs, etc. There is really no reason to create your own Tab control. Why waste time on crap like that when the platform does it for free? I view this as a deficiency in the platform or just pure ego when people create their own OS controls (of course there is good reason for providing controls that the platform does not provide).

For a good summary of the stuff that you don't need see Jonathan Hardwick's post.

Summary

This is a great sub-notebook and a wonderful tablet. It makes me "happy". My 3500 made me far from happy. If you change the DPI of windows things get a lot better (you can actually read the text on screen). In the hardware arena I give Toshiba an A-. For software they get a B-. The 3500 by contrast would get a C- for hardware (nice first try) and a D for software.

It's always a good day when you get new hardware. I cherish the days where I get new hardware in the office. It's like Christmas.

Today my Toshiba M200 appeared. This is a pimpin machine. I was really getting tired of my Toshiba 3500. That piece of hardware was so problematic. If it wasn't hard freezing, or overheating, or being slow with a jerky mouse cursor, or <pick annoying hardware behavior> I would feel like taking a sledge hammer to it. But man oh man has the tablet pc come a long way.

For one thing this is the first laptop I've owned that sports a higher screen resolution than any desktop I own (1400 x 1050). The machine also screams with a 1.7 P4, 7200 RPM drive and a 32 MB nVidia graphics card. The older Toshiba 3500 had some real sub standard I/O (Trident 16 mb shared memory graphics, non Intel chipset etc).

However, this thing also has a 12 inch screen. 1400 x 1050 on a 12 inch screen. You do the math. I can barely read anything it's so small. I'm not sure if I'll get used to this or not. I tried a few things like changing the XP font size to large etc. Nothing worked. I still had problems seeing things unless I literally brought the laptop uncomfortably close to my face. Plus, tablets have this sort of magnetic field on the screen so the screens actually aren't as crisp as say a normal laptop. However, on a hunch I tried something I've tried before (which looked horrible) but it happened to work!

Windows has a setting that lets you change the default DPI from 96 to 120. It requires a reboot and some special fonts or something, but it works! I mean, I can read everything now. Well there are some things that don't work so well, but generally it's a lot better than 96 dpi.

Tony Schreiner blogged about this a few months back. I didn't have any reason to try this back then... now I definitely do. You can also tweak IE 6 to render according to your dpi setting.

There are some gotchas that he mentions like sites that use px for font sizes (uh like mine) look the same size (if you add the regkey for IE 6 this is fixed). Also some applications like Office have their toolbar icons resampled which looks kind a bad. But at least I won't lose my eyesight .

I've released dasBlog 1.6. You can read the release notes and the new features and bug fixes.

There are many flavors for the the bits on the dasBlog workspace.

In short, there are many bug fixes, Atom 0.3 support, even better Search feature, some new macros, better permission failures, perf enhancements, log file archiving and some others.

Special thanks to all the workspace contributers for all their work!

On another note. I'm not sure I can bear doing another release on GotDotNet. I love GDN for some of my smaller projects, but it took me over 4 hours this weekend to checkout/checkin the entire source as well as upload 5 releases. Using the Windows Forms interface for GDN is like watching a turtle do the 400 meter dash.

I have some of the worst teeth in the world. My dentist makes about $2000 to $3000 bucks a year off my insurance and out of pocket. Each year for the past 5 years I've averaged at least one crown and 1/2 a root canal (yes I brush my teath and floss, but it's genetic). Getting a crown isn't very fun but yesterday I saw the coolest thing.

Usually when you get a crown it goes like this:

1. Take impression of teeth
2. Drill Drill Drill
3. Take impression of little nubby left
4. Make temporary crown and spent like 30 minutes adjusting it so your bite isn't high
5. Return in 2-3 weeks when new porcelain crown has been made
6. Remove cemented temp and adjust new crown (which is always too big) for 1 hour.
7. Cement new crown and adjust bite.
8. More than likely you don't make it to step 7. Something is wrong with new crown. temp goes back on and repeat 5-8.

Well no more. My dentist has this amazing CAD/CAM system where they make the crown right in the office. It goes like this:

1. Spray powder on tooth
2. Take 3D Image of tooth
3. Drill Drill Drill
4. Take image of little nubby left
5. Spent 30 min or so designing new tooth on computer in 3D
6. Send to CAM machine that creates new tooth out of a porcelain block in under 15 minutes.
7. Adjust crown and cement.
8. Adjust bite.

Simply awesome.

BTW, my dentist, is Sam Thacher. If you live in San Francisco I highly recommend. Tell him I sent you .

Thanks to some great comments and a specific one from James I have now replaced notepade.exe with the vastly superior notepad2.exe and prevented Windows File Protection from replacing the new notepad.

Here are the steps (warning, process with care, no warranties etc):

Method 1

1) Rename Notepad2.exe to Notepad.exe
2) go to %windir%\system32
3) Rename Notepad.exe to NotepadX.exe
4) go to %windir%\system32\Restore
5) Turn off hide invisible files in Tools->Folder Options->View
6) Select filelist.xml and right click->Properties and uncheck Read-only
7) Edit the file
8) Add:

<REC>%windir%\notepad.exe</REC>

to:

<Exclude>
    <REC>%windir%\system.ini</REC>
    <REC>%windir%\tasks\desktop.ini</REC>
    <REC>%windir%\win.ini</REC>
    <REC>*:\AUTOEXEC.BAT</REC>
    <REC>*:\CONFIG.MSI</REC>
    <REC>*:\CONFIG.SYS</REC>
</Exclude>

9) copy the newly renamed notepad2.exe (now named notepad.exe) to %windir%\system32

note: it turns out that for some folks, this doesn't work. It did not work for me on my tablet pc. Thanks to Shakeel Mahate here is method #2.

Method 2

1. Tools->Folder Options->View uncheck Hide protected operating system files. 
2. rename Notepad2.exe notepad.exe 
3. copy notepad.exe %windir%/system32\dllcache 
4. copy notepad.exe %windir%/system32 
5. A dialog will popup hit cancel 
6. Recheck Hide protected operating system files in the Folder Options dialog box

The dllcache contains copies of the windows protected files. The dllcache isnt itself protected.