4/16/2010Have you ever wondered why: -
The windows on planes are set 6 inches below a useful height for anyone amongst us, save the shortest? It’s almost like they don’t want us to look outside. As a pilot, glass canopy and great visibility is always a raved about feature. So why rob passengers of the experience? Instead, you end up having to bend over to peek outside. Hmm… maybe that’s it… -
Families on vacation completely ignore the “Expert Traveler” sign and clog up the fast lane at airport security? -
People would park their shopping kart broad way in the isle, completely blocking traffic, and then wander off to look for something? Of course, you get the stink eye if you dare move the kart out of the way. Like I wanted your groceries anyway… -
Security at the local city/county building won’t allow a garage clicker in, but cell phones breeze right through? Supposedly it’s a one button detonator… with about 200 feet range… -
Marriage licenses are only valid for a short time, like 60 days? Anyone who’s ever planned a wedding will tell you, it takes a YEAR to do. Why not dispense with paperwork early and be done with it. Oh right, that' would be efficient… I should probably put these in a running list…  Later
C 4/8/2010OK, so I’ve been starting to look at new hardware… new iron to run my life on. I recently acquired a new Intel i7 Quad Core laptop for my mobile VM needs and am currently writing this article on my Asus Eee 1005HAB Netbook in flight to Boston, MA. Unfortunately, my servers at home, including the one hosting this article, are aging fast and will be in need of upgrade within the next 12 months.  I have therefore started looking at hardware, specifically, server type hardware. I’ve only just begun this process, but I ran across something so sweet, I just had to share. Now I know it’s not in production yet and I know even if it was, I would certainly NOT be able to afford it, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t put it on my Dream Hardware Wishlist! Just imagine what you could do with a 100-core processor! That’s right! 100-cores baby! 
A new upstart called Tilera has unveiled a series of 4 processors of which the Tile-Gx100 is the flagship. There’s also the Tile-Gx64, Tile-Gx36 (No, it’s not a typo. I can’t quite figure out why 36 and not 32 cores either.  ) and Tile-Gx16. Hey, maybe I’d be able to afford the baby in the family.  The CPUs are built on 40nm technology and top out at 1.5 GHz, which may be a little low unless your OS and apps were specifically designed and written to take advantage of multiple cores, which is mostly not the case today.  
Nevertheless, it’s nice to dream. And don’t worry, with mainstream octa-cores on our doorstop, mainstream centu-cores should only be about 6 years away from reality, according to Moore’s Law. Later
C Technorati Tags: Hardware
3/19/2010As I reflect on another week gone by, I have to say I like the “spring forward” for DST. It’s wonderful to be able to leave the office and walk back to my hotel room while the sun is still out. Of course it makes getting up in the mornings a little harder, but it’s a tradeoff I’m happy with.  This was an exciting week. I attended a preview event of the Visual Studio 2010 Launch, presented by Microsoft on site for our benefit. Jason Zander himself, the General Manager for Visual Studio (i.e. the guy who “owns” the Visual Studio product line), was there to present for us and get us excited! I’ve been playing with Studio a little bit, especially on my Netbook. Now that the great Launch event is almost upon us, I’ve had some time to reflect on the product. There’s good and not so good as you’d expect, but by far, the good outweigh anything else. Nevertheless, here are my thoughts, what I’m excited about and wish list items I’d like to see for the next version. This is of course very far from a complete list, but just my quick thoughts.
THE GOOD -
IntelliTrace – Think DVR for your code testing. This is the single most awesome new feature in the product in my mind. Giving testers the ability to record their testing sessions both visually and data wise and then making it possible for developers to come back and spin up a VM on demand, deploy all the proper code and run the same steps as the tester for the developer to see, debug and fix is… well AWESOME!!! -
Import/Export Debug Breakpoints – It’s a little thing, but if you’ve ever tried to collaborate with another developer on code and where to set a breakpoint, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is a nifty little time saver. -
Linq2SP – Well, the Linq is everywhere and now it’s in SharePoint too!  -
-
Optional Parameters for C# 4.0. OK, so this one’s just my pet peeve, but ever since I first switched to C# from C/C++, I’ve been waiting for optional parameters. Finally! -
Seems to have decent performance. The operative word here is *seems*. The demos were given on IBM Thinkpads which, isn’t the most awesome hardware around for demos, but it appeared to perform pretty well. I would recommend to Microsoft that they get some decent demo laptops though. You want things to be snappy in a demo. -
Tracepoints – The ability to collect predefined data at given trace points within the application’s execution cycle, will be very useful. The functionality is mostly self created for developers at this point. Having the IDE take care of that for us, will be a big help. THE BAD -
The Dependency Graph Generator will not identify reflection based calls. That means once you leave the reservation, your calls aren’t going to make it into the DGML that’s generated. I have this listed as a “bad”, but in all honesty, this is probably in line with anyone’s reasonable expectations of such a tool. -
TFS is a must. If you thought you could live without TFS before, this release ties so closely to TFS 2010 that it would be almost impossible to not have it. Can you say licensing? THE UGLY -
No run time, in-line variable/code correction while in IntelliTrace. This means you get to debug and work with a COPY IN TIME of the code that was running on the server when the bug was found. Once you fixed the bug in that COPY of the code, you’d have to find a way to merge it forward into the current code set. This is definitely one for my wish list for the next version. -
No Remote SharePoint server development or debugging. This one will probably bite us a couple of times. Another one for my wish list. It would be awesome if you could attach to code on a remote server and debug it. -
32 bit. So Visual Studio is 32 bit, not 64 bit. It provides complete support for developing and targeting 64 bit apps, but is itself not 64 bit. That’s not a big deal in my mind and I believe it’ll be the case in the next rev. It’s not really an “ugly”, at least not if you compare it to demos in VB.NET given to a developer centric audience in order to show off a developer tool! I’m still chuckling about that one. Overall I’m super excited about the upcoming release. I can’t wait to get the RTM bits on my machine. More than anything, I’m already thinking through how TFS would play into Best Practices for Application Lifecycle Management, Change Management and Quality Control processes for large scale enterprises in the future. Who knows. Maybe my book will have something about it… Later
C 12/19/2009OK Tony Dungee, I have a world of respect for you, but when you said on Sunday “The Cowboys don’t have ANY hope of beating the Saints.”, you should have known you were making a dangerous statement. That’s the same thing they said about the Patriots against the Rams in the 2001 Super Bowl. Nothing fires up a team like being discarded. So dear Mr. Dungee, with love and respect… EAT YOUR WORDS!!!  
Later
C 12/8/2009With the coming of SharePoint 2010, I’ve had to consider my options on my old laptop. I had an IBM Thinkpad T-60 which had served me very well. The only problem is that its 32 bit CPU won’t run SharePoint 2010 which is coming in all 64 bit format next year. So in order to be able to deal with my VMs, I would have to upgrade. I looked at all my options and wanted to get a new laptop that had enough iron to run all my VMs and more. Since the latest Paradox Interactive release, Hearts of Iron III, was coming (I love that game!) and it had a hefty hardware, especially graphics, requirement, I decided to get a total monster laptop that would could handle everything I threw at it. A desktop replacement or luggable to be sure. I didn’t care. I wanted the power. I investigated all the options and even considered buying an Apple Macbook Pro for the job. In the end there were three options I had to decide between. A Dell XPS, an Apple Macbook Pro and an Alienware machine. OK, I admit, the Alienware laptop wasn’t really realistic, but while you’re looking, you may as well dream, right? Of course price always plays into the equation so the Alienware laptop was eliminated right off the bat. I wasn’t really ready to make a switch to Apple hardware because of the premium they put on their name. The same hardware as the Dell, would end up being almost $1,000.00 more expensive!  I never quite understood that. Still don’t. Nevertheless, as I was getting ready to order the Dell, it occurred to me to check one more thing. Back in 2002, I ordered a powerful off brand laptop (Sager) from a little company called Powernotebooks.com. Even today it was a decent machine and back then it was top of the line. It had a 2.4 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM and 128 MB of dedicated video. It served me very well, only recently dying on me in the form of the power supply finally giving out. I wasn’t sure if Donald Stratton (CEO) and his crew was still in business, but I decided to give it a try. Imagine my delight when I found they were still booming along. I customized a Sager with Intel i7 quad core processor and 6 GB of RAM (capable of holding 12, but again, cost of the top memory was just not justifiable) as well as 1 GB of dedicated video. This monster would do it all! The cost came in almost $1,000.00 cheaper than the XPS from Dell so I took the plunge and bought the monster Sager laptop. I’ve had it for a couple of months now and I absolutely LOVE this machine! It was expensive for sure, but it’ll serve me well for many years to come… and the power supply even doubles up as a personal foot heater in winter!   I’ve been so happy and so impressed with the guys at powernotebooks.com, that I happily recommend them to anyone in the market for some powerful portable hardware. Later
C 11/18/2009Over the past week I’ve had two things happen to me that could have been catastrophic, but as it turned out, our humanity is still strong even though we’re so rushed that we don’t always take time to show it. First I left Boston last week on Thursday and I was so rushed that I forgot to pack my two external hard drives. Instead, I left them on the desk in my room at the Marriott Courtyard. I did not realize what had happened until Saturday night and when I called the hotel, they told me that I had to call the “Lost and Found” department the next morning at 9 AM. At 9:00 AM I made the call and was overjoyed when I was told that they had found my drives and I could pick them up that Sunday when I check back in. Then yesterday, I left my iPhone on the counter in the restroom when I was washing my hands. I was distraught over the loss, but was very happy this morning when it turned out someone had found it and had turned it into the gym trainer yesterday. Both cases could have been a disaster, but humanity prevailed! THANK YOU!!! Later
C
9/15/2009Boy, I can't wait for the SharePoint Conference so I can start talking about SharePoint 2010! Until then we're all under very strict NDA. In the mean time, I feel like a complainer, blogging about stuff that gets me irate. Thankfully, I did NOT upgrade my iPhone to OS 3.1 today. I was a little shocked after reading this article. Even the mighty Apple can stumble. I wonder how the Mac/PC commercial would look that tries to explain that one! :-P
Later
C
9/1/2009Well, maybe it's just me, but my Google Apps email is down for all of my domains. Standard Gmail still appears to work, but Apps Gmail went down around 4 PM EST and hasn't been seen since. Sigh... 6/15/2008
At first I thought it was just me having some WTF moments. I thought it could be my network… or my laptop… or a million other things… SURELY the great Google can't be DOWN!!! Can it?
Apparently it seems that it can… at least from my perspective. As of about 8:30 EST this morning, I've been unable to reach www.google.com consistently and conducting any Google searches from the search toolbar has been spotty at best. Shoot, I can't even do a Google search to see what the problem with Google might be! ;-) This is now the 2nd time that I have personally experienced outages with Google's services. The 1st time was when the Google IMAP Server Cloud went down in April. I don't mean to criticize, but when your product is depended on by millions around the world, it MUST be dependable! That means ZERO outage… EVER!!!
LIVE TO THE RESCUE!!! Luckily, Microsoft's Live (www.live.com) search is still fully functional! Don't you just LOVE having choices? Google down… no problem, just use Live!
As Raiders own put it (if he were in my shoes right now)… just Live baby! ;-)
Later
C
Kick it Fave it Digg it Reddit Del.icio.us 6/4/2008
OK, so I've not posted for a while… well, since I went solo really. There are a lot more little time consuming overhead items involved in starting your own company. This has kept me busy for the past couple of weeks. Of course, a lot of my time has been consumed by my registrar consolidation…
Stay tuned… much more useful and original content coming to this blog in the future… ;-)
Later
C
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