shahine.com/omar/

This is just too funny. Vista Speech Recognition is pretty amazing, but I've felt like this on a few occasions.

I LOVE Lenovo. Maybe it's the fact that I LOVE my ThinkPad T60, or the fact that Lenovo folks have great blogs... or maybe even that all their little applications share the same start menu shortcut and grouping and icons. I can't think of any other PC OEM that has employees that blog about their hardware. I find it especially cool. You can tell from their posts that they love their product and they are proud of what they do and who they work for. That makes me feel better about my ThinkPad. They are also honest about things like Crapware.

Having just read their anniversary post on the Lenovo 3000 series I'm inclined to get the J115 for my parents. I'm also inclined to tell my sister to ditch getting the Sony Vaio and get a 3000 series laptop.

You know since giving up on a Mac Laptop years ago, I've owned two Sony's, one Compaq, two Toshiba's, a Dell and a Fujitsu. Lenovo is far and away the better laptop. My Dell had it's motherboard replaced 5 times.

I'm so happy the ThinkPads are available at Microsoft now (sanctioned by our IT department).

Oh, the best idea I've heard in a while is mentioned on the Happy Birthday Lenovo 3000 series. Replace the stupid S-Video port on laptops with an HDMI port. That would at least keep me from going crazy that all PC laptops still have VGA and not DVI on board. If you replace s-video with HDMI then you get the best of both worlds: VGA for legacy compatibility and projectors, and HDMI for digital video out.

I hope some one takes that idea and runs with it.

Head over to the PIX blog to find out more.

Hopefully this first big photo codec release for Vista was a lesson to all and this sort of thing is not repeated. Modifying a RAW file and not having that file work was a bit scary (even scarier is that it appears that I was the first person inside Microsoft to find and report this bug).

It worries me that Nikon's QA isn't all that. No one there dogfooded this product or uses Adobe software?

Anyway, I'm glad it's fixed and the Microsoft and Nikon folks worked together to address the problem quickly.

I admit, I'm an Intel man. I love their motherboards, core 2 duo, and so on. However, after reading this I'm a bit perplexed. What the hell is Intel doing waiting for SP1? I mean common.

I may just have to consider AMD next time around.

I'd also like to point out that the nVidia drivers for Vista are crap and featureless. I can't even change resolutions or add custom resolutions using their control panel. Meanwhile ATI (now part of AMD) has awesome Vista drivers.

When I read the AMD memo it just made me proud of the work that folks at Microsoft have done to get Vista out.

I'm writing this post on all the vista features that I love as I find them, but it's taking forever because I keep finding new things. Like did you know that robocopy is built into Vista? Kick ass!

Reeves has a rather humorous post all geeks can relate to.

You decide to update some piece of software or hardware that is working perfectly fine as it is. You do it because you want that new feature, bug fix, firmware update or whatever. You do it in a hurry, like 5 min before you need to walk out the door... and then you go Noooooooo!!!!! Because something went horribly wrong. Or you do it the night before you need to get up at 5 am for a flight somewhere... you know what I mean. You screw the thing up so bad you don't get any sleep and you hate yourself vowing never to do anything like that again.

I do disagree with Reeves' first point "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.". Um, that's not how we are built... .

I finally FINALLY got around to setting up my own source control server. I haven't been using one for all my little projects and it's been driving me crazy.

I thought it would be difficult. With dasBlog we use the excellent TortoiseSVN project to manage our Subversion source repository so I figured I'd see if I could use that.

I asked around on the dasBlog developers mailing list and a number of folks are using SVN with it's built in server and protocol support.

Problem is, setup was a bit complicated. But to make things easier some one has put together SVN 1-Click Setup. It is in fact a one click installer you run on your server.

IT ROCKS.

I set up DynDns on my kick ass D-Link DGL-4100 Broadband Gaming Router and added the correct port and now I can checkin and checkout from anywhere.

BTW, I installed it on my Vista Media Center since it runs pretty much 24/7.

Now I can sleep better at night, and another checkbox on the @Someday/Maybe list. Wohoo!

I knew there was a reason IE 7 has a wacky File Menu location.

It's something that someone designed into Vista. I accidentally pressed Alt in the Shell today and was greeted with this:

Hmm, not as ugly or weird as IE 7's, but at least I know where to point the finger now.

A few days ago my wife asked me to help her with some research data she is collecting that she has in an excel spreadsheet.

What I saw amazed me. It repeated all the headers within the table so that when she was scrolling around she could still enter data. She was in the process of averaging some columns etc.

So first thing I deleted all the text. Then I formatted the table. Next I showed Lora how to filter data based on columns and asked he what kind of info she needed.

So I showed her how to create a Pivot Table. In Excel 2007 mere mortals can create Pivot Tables, they don't need a Ph.D.

Anyway, today I showed her how to create a complex pivot table. When I was done she almost cried.

I asked her how she did this sort of thing before. She said she didn't want to talk about it . I assume that means manually.

Ouch.

They should teach people how to use Pivot Tables in college.

Anyway, I think Lora is pretty darned happy with this new knowledge.

Of course, I learned how to create Pivot Tables from the master, Dick Craddock.

WebGuide kicks the pants of Orb IMHO. The Vista SideBar Gadget lets me control my media center (view scheduled recordings, watch tv, listen to music, remote control my media center) from within my home on our kitchen PC or remotely at work.

This is a really well done piece of software. It's the holy grail of local, remote control, and streaming support for Media Center (Vista and MCE 2005).

For example, here is me controlling the audio on my MCE box from a web browser on my Kitchen PC. I can play files locally or control the Media Center via the web based remote control.

Here is a screen shot of the Vista SideBar with a list of my current recordings:

And the show playing in Windows Media Player

The setup software will configure your UPnP router to open the correct ports though. Nice.

[via Chris Lanier]

So a few days go I decided to build and deploy an add-in written using VSTO 2005 Second Edition on a Vista Machine. Needless to say this didn't work. I kept getting this error:

"The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869"

I emailed trusty Misha and of course he helped to solve my problem.

There are two things going on.

1. UAC is getting in the way and Visual Studio 2005 can't build an MSI out of the box that works correctly when your installer needs elevated privileges. VSTO add-ins need elevated privileges because they have to make change to Code Access Security.
2. Exceptions that are thrown during the install process are being obscured. Misha covers this in his post on the topic.

The fix for issue number 1 is to head over to Aaron Stebner's WebLog and follow his instructions for setting the NoImpersonate flag for your Custom Actions that set up CAS (in VSTO world this would be the SetSecurity project from the VSTO deployment article.

The fix for issue #2 is covered in Misha's post.

So, how do you make this magic all work with one single build step?

1. Download the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers.
2. Grab wirunsql.vbs and place it in your Setup directory.
3. Grab CustomAction_NoImpersonate.js from Aaron's post and place it in your Setup directory.
4. Open the project in Visual Studio 2005
5. Press F4 to display the Properties window
6. Click on the name of your setup/deployment project in the Solution Explorer
7. Click on the PostBuildEvent item in the Properties window to cause a button labeled "..." to appear
8. Click on the "..." button to display the Post-build Event Command Line dialog
9. Add the following command line in the Post-build event command line text box: cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)CustomAction_NoImpersonate.js" "$(BuiltOuputPath)"
   cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)WiRunSQL.vbs" "$(BuiltOuputPath)" "INSERT INTO `Error` (`Error`, `Message`) VALUES (1001, 'Error [1]: [2]')"
10. Build your setup project

     

My readership went from ~2,000 readers to ~3,000.

Here is what things looked like on Feb 15th.

And on Feb 16th.

Looks like FeedBurner is now reporting on Google Reader's subscribers. Cool.

Now that I am running Vista on all my machines I'm much more aware of all the hard drive clanking going on around me. On XP my machines would eventually get to a "resting point" where the machine would stop doing stuff.

On Vista it seems like "stuff" is always happening. I'm beginning to wonder just how much Mean Time To Failure is a number we might pay attention to for hard disks.

Anyway, my buddy Mike Fullerton posted a nice entry on how to find out just what the heck your hard drive is doing.

The big offenders on my computer?

1. FolderShare
2. Windows Live OneCare
3. SearchIndexer
4. Sidebar
5. Outlook

#3 and #5 seem to tag team together in a WWE Smackdown on the hard drive.

As much as I LOVE Slickrun, I have yet to install it on Vista. Why? Well because of the awesome start menu.

Now that Start++ is out, it brings some of the Slickrun functionality to Vista... must... try... it... out.

[via Tim Marman]

Well I've had my new ThinkPad for a few days now and have some thoughts on it.

Generally I like this laptop a lot. Installing Vista was a breeze. It looks very utilitarian and is a bit larger than I would have hoped (I've gotten really used to 3lb subnotebooks). But I don't want to compromise performance at this point so a fast Core 2 Duo and a 7200 RPM drive are in... I'll go back to subnotebook when Intel's new 45nm chips are out.

I wish the LCD was widescreen (like 13 inches) and that it was LED backlit and had a glossy finish. But that's about the only nit that I have. LED backlit screen would save some battery life.

The LED status icons are very functional. The BIOS is easy to use (I had to set that up to turn on the Trusted Platform Module and Hardware Vitalization) for BitLocker and Virtual PC 2007 respectively.

The keyboard is fantastic as is the tactile feel of all the buttons, trackpad and trackpoint device. Lenovo/IBM has always made the best trackpoint devices IMHO.

The laptop feels very solid. No flex anywhere. It's EXTREMLEY fast. I mean this think smokes my desktop machines.

Running Vista has been a breeze. Other than setting up BitLocker (more on that nightmare later) I basically did a clean install of Vista, then downloaded a single application called ThinkVantage System Update, and that program did all the work of downloading all the required, recommended and optional components and craplets . Big Kudos to Lenovo for creating a single unified application to update, download and install all the things required to utilize the enhancements on the laptop (like the volume buttons, trackpoint, fingerprint reader etc).

I would like to point out that the Lenovo craplets are pretty crap free. I mean these things take advantage of Vista. For example, look at this nifty Windows Mobility Center customization.

Nice integration! There are other nice touches like this.... but Lenovo gets big kudos for doing things properly. I'm also really impressed with their battery charging optimization that extends the life of your battery by not charging it if it's got more than 96% juice.

This is also the first laptop fingerprint reader I've used that doesn't suck and works reliably from the welcome screen before and after standby. I like using my finger to login to the computer.

Battery Life is decent but no where near the 5.5 hours I got with my Fujitsu P7120. So far I'm getting close to 4 hours with the 9 cell battery. This is with heavy usage of WiFi and Hard Disk.

OH, BTW, the Lenovo folks get mad props for blogging. It's no wonder they have the best PC Laptop Brand.

I think I might be stuck to this brand. It makes me feel happy and not pissed off. 

Today is my last day of Parental Leave. I go back to work on Monday (in a few hours). In many ways I'm really sad, but at the same time I'm glad to be headed back to work. I've been thinking about what I've learned in the past 8 weeks and how I think I will change things.

It turns out that 8 weeks is enough time that you can really pull back from work and not need to think or worry about it. When I go back I feel like I'll be starting with a clean slate. After 8 years at Microsoft it's a nice feeling.

Anyway here it is.

• Not a lot of men get or take this much Parental Leave. When people asked me what I was doing most of them were surprised or amazed. I was pretty much the only "dad" with a infant when I was out and about.
• The first 3 months of caring for a child are simply the hardest thing I've ever done. Our life has changed in many ways, but none of the changes are things I regret in any way. Life is just "different".
• I've gotten closer to my family in ways that simply weren't possible before. Having a child has really brought together our two nuclear families and they have been amazing in supporting us, visiting, and helping in countless ways. I'm really thankful and happy about this part. We could not have gotten where we are without their involvement in our lives. At the same time I think our daughter has really had a profound impact on their lives as well.
• The last 3 weeks have been amazing as our daughter has started to really interact with us; smile, giggle, grab, play and eat/sleep well.
• Not working is more than a full time job. I woke up every morning at 7 am and had a completely full day every day. It was harder work than going to work. I have a new found respect for stay at home parents. I completed a number of significant projects that I'll blog about later and it was nice to have some whitespace to do so.
• I've decided that jewelry was invented as a way for men to compensate for the significant hardship that pregnancy and nursing is. Having your body change over 10 months and then try and get back to normal is simply not easy and men get off easy. I can't understand how my wife must have felt and feels, but let me tell you... giving birth and being a mom is hard work with a significant physical, mental and emotional cost.
• Being home all day makes it really easy to get stuff done at home. Scheduling service appointments and such is way easier since you don't have to stress about being home and missing work.
• The Email behavior that I experience at work is simply a tax that is unnecessarily high. I've realized that too many of my cycles are spent not being productive and simply falling into a trap of just passively working... basically not doing things I need to do because it's too easy to stare at my inbox and triage email most of the day. This is going to stop.
• High volume RSS feeds are out. Even when I didn't have a day job I was unable to keep up with my RSS subscriptions. Gizmodo/Engadget and any site that posts more than 40 things a day is simply not in my RSS reader any longer. The signal to noise ratio on these blogs has gone in the wrong direction over the past 2 years. Most of the good stuff is picked up by the blogs with fewer posts anyway.
• Limiting yourself to watching 1-2 hours of TV a day is a good thing (or eliminating it entirely).
• Podcasts are simply amazing. There is so much good stuff out there now, including all the NPR and KQED podcasts.
• NPR is the best. Each year I find that I value their programming more and more and as a result increase our yearly donation to them.
• Cooking your own food saves you a ton of dough and is a lot healthier than eating out all the time. My wife and I have gotten in the habit of going to Whole Foods every Sunday and buying ingredients for 1 - 2 dishes that we cook that night and eat during the week. It's a huge time saver and we eat well. After all, from 6pm to 8pm every night it's all about hanging out with Sarah and then bathing her and putting her to bed. Around 9pm we are both finished and can't think of anything but going to bed. Life does feel a little bit like ground hog day.
• Simplification and efficiency are necessary. My life was pretty simplified before but I'm on a rampage now to really make all my technology stuff work for me, rather than have me work for it. I've sold a lot of gear I no longer use on craigslist and ebay and am in the process of streamlining the computers I use, how they are backed up and the number of gizmos required to make it all happen. This will be a work in progress.

Well, I guess that's it for now...