Microsoft Sql Server Installs Suck
May 29, 2008

I just wanted to go out on a limb and point out how much Ms Sql Server installations suck. The last two days at work I've been futzing around with Ms Sql Server 2005 to get it installed on my box (just for reporting services!) and finally got it to work after a 2.5hr install run each time. Then, I go home and decide to try out the new Sql Server 2008 CTP (hey, it's interesting and Sql Management Studio is nice) only to find new issues. After downloading and installing it, I find that it installed everything but the actual server itself. Oi.

Anyway, I noticed that Sql Server 2005 Compact was installed on my server here @ home and knew that Sql Server 2005 Compact had caused my install problems at work. I'm in the process of uninstalling it, but I just needed to rant.

Thanks.

T Minus Eight Days 'Till Total .NET
February 11, 2008

T minus eight days until I begin work for w3i and switch all of my development energies to .NET. I'm very anxious and looking forward to it. It's also going to mean some changes around the blog. Since my development work over there will be done using Microsoft's tools and ASP.NET, there's going to be a definite change in the content here. Rather than focusing on my usual Ruby and Ruby on Rails I'm going to have to shift my focus to look more at the Microsoft side of things. My recent tutorial series start on using MVC is just a taste of things to come. So, enjoy the new taste!

Vista Really Not Ready for Network Deployment
December 16, 2007

I've been fooling with domain support on my network recently and have ran into some serious issues with Windows Vista. The first is relatively minor, but fairly annoying. From time to time, when a roaming profile is enabled, Vista will totally forget custom sidebar gadgets. It's terribly infuriating to have to login and then logout and then login again just to get the correct gadgets on my sidebar.

The second issue that Vista has is a rather critical roaming profile issue. I recently had to dejoin my main machine from the domain and restructure it. Upon rejoining the domain, Vista refused to recognize my primary user's profile. Uh-oh!

I traced it down and it seems like Vista is storing user information somewhere on the system in a corrupt state. I have gone through all the recovery steps, disabled roaming profiles and even removing the local version of that profile all to no avail. At this point Vista is bitching about it's inability to load the profile (when it's been totally removed, and roaming profiles are completely disabled on the domain) and I'm done with it. The error is tied to the actual username and not the account itself. I've removed the account from the domain and all local references to the user data. If this were a client installation I can't even imagine how badly this would look.

If a box that was setup two days ago can demonstrate this problem, I really have to say that Windows Vista is not domain ready.

Seriously Considering a 360
September 29, 2007

Much to Emily's dismay, I am now seriously considering picking myself up a tasty little Xbox 360 sometime soon. I managed to snag another contract job which has definitely padded out my "happy Jordan fun-time" savings to the point where I can aaaaalmost afford to get one without using any un-budgeted resources. I'm still a little on the fence though, as I am with any big purchase.

I mean, the $350 for a Pro system is quite a few tasty burgers from Val's. Though on the other hand, being able to bypass all the PC gaming ass-hattery that's going on lately is quite a nice bonus. Coupled with actual online functionality within games and the presence of many great looking titles I'm really tempted. I'm definitely wanting for some Gears of War, Eternal Sonata, Geometry Wars, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Forza and Doom action. Not to mention when Hellgate finally comes out (if it comes out) for the 360.

Of course, I would take Draz's advice and buy it from Best Buy. Why? When the sales-droid begins "Would you like to buy the $20 extended warran"-yes. Why yes, I would like to buy your extended warranty. Although, I am sure that the droids are instructed NOT to offer the warranty for 360s now-a-days.

Then comes the next question... when to buy? I mean, Kotaku has info on a new bundle that might be coming and including the updated-not-sucky SKUs. But, do I really want to wait until around Christmas? I think not. I want to get some Gears of War and Geometry Wars action going now dammit.

So, summary... maybe. I still needs some convincin'.

Update: Looks like I won't be getting any Halo 3 action for awhile.

The Final Verdict on Windows Vista
September 07, 2007

I've been using Windows Vista for almost five months now and I'm ready to get it said. I like Vista. No, I love Vista. Now, this is a very rare occurrence for me to love a Microsoft Operating System so early in the game - but it has happened.

Many have argued that Vista lacks "anything new" and it "fiddles with an interface that already works" , and to them I say hogwash! Many have complained and pointed out that Vista is just pretty icing atop an already well baked cake - and they're right. We can debate the quality of baking here, but it is primarily delicious icing atop an already baked cake of usefulness.

Many will argue with you about how the aesthetics don't matter, but I believe that it really does matter. For me, what makes Vista so great isn't one or two big new things that add up to create a much better feeling experience. All of the icing, as it were, ends up making everything a little easier to use and in the end makes the whole system better.

Many directly complain about Aero just being there to "look pretty". My rebuttal is simply, "what's wrong with that?". If my interface simply looks better and I feel like it suits my tastes better, won't it make me happier in doing whatever I'm doing? Aero's new rendering engine makes everything render much more smoothly and appear much more attractively. This isn't even to begin touching on Vista's amazing new font-rendering engine which makes looking at XP's ClearType (which is worlds better than Windows 98's Font Smoothing which is...) painful.

Little features, too, help to make the difference. The customizable side-bar in Explorer is a change made that utterly revolutionizes the way I use Explorer and mscom save dialogs. I no longer need to hunt for any of my common folders, I just click and there I am. I am constantly reaching for it whenever I use an XP box. Even the progress bar representing hard disk usage has a noticeable impact on my daily use habits, since I no longer need to do the old "Right Click - Properties" shuffle.

Also, while it is available for XP, Windows Media Player 11 fits right in with Vista. I have to thank Andy for turning me on to this one, but it ends up being the best media player that I've ever worked with. The views are wonderfully thought-out with genre breakouts, album breakouts and artist breakouts. If you pull up a search that returns multiple albums, they are each seperated - so you never have the googlie eyed stare at 1,000 music results that you get with iTunes.

What's not to like? Gaming Performance. I've still got my XP partition around for gaming, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. I can observe noticeable differences in frame rates in Warhammer 40k, Battlefield 2 and just about everything else that I've tried under Vista Vs. XP. It seems like there's a lot going on under the hood, that we don't really have control over.

So, where do I stand now? I love Vista. It's not there for gaming, but as a day-to-day workstation - it makes a wonderful OS choice.

Note: I'm not even considering licensing issues. The OS market is so woefully messed up that there's no point in even discussing them.

I'm Disabling Automatic Updates
August 30, 2007

Well, I'm finally disabling Windows Automatic Updates on my PC. Nothing major here, it's just that MS loves to make my machine reboot in the middle of the night. Since I've been back on Tuesday I've come in and found my machine rebooted TWICE. No offense guys, but twice in one week is a bad amount of "automatic reboots".

How do you do this, you ask? Go to Control Panel - Windows Updates - Change Settings - "Download updates but let me choose them". It's not the simplest process, but it's not very complicated either. This will cause Windows to at least notify you of updates being present.

My Favorite Vista Tweak for Gaming
June 25, 2007

With my recent purchase of Halo 2 I've been forced to use Vista for a bit of gaming and have ran into a bit of a performance deficit. Throughout my gaming sessions, I noticed that there would be huge amounts of slow-down correlating to a high amount of disk IO. I thinks to myself, wtf? So I do a little digging...

I discovered a process called LocalServiceNetworkRestricted that was continually waking up and eating huge amounts of disk IO causing my system to drag painfully during any gaming. I did a little more digging and discovered that this service may or may not be related to SuperFetch.

Well, I really don't care if my applications start up 1 or 2 nanoseconds faster if it nukes my gaming performance so I decided to disable the SuperFetch service. You can find it under the Services control panel applet ( Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services ). Simply right click on it and select "stop". To my joy, it stopped the random disk IO load. If this helps you, you can make it permanent by right clicking on it and then going to "properties" and selecting "disabled" from the "Startup type:" option.

My scientific-in-the-way-that-Brainiac-is-scientific conclusion is that SuperFetch was causing an undue IO load on my system. Looking to improve your gaming performance? Give disabling SuperFetch a shot.

Another Vista Update
May 30, 2007

One more thing that I like about Vista - how it handles frozen programs. It used to be that when a program totally froze, itss contents were typically totally wiped. Even if the program was just not responding to GUI events - its contents were generally wiped out. Well, Vista caches the rendered window when it leaves the main buffer so that if the program stops responding, you can still see what the hell was on the screen.

One thing I don't like? How complicated they made scheduled tasks. It used to be a single click or so and then you'd have a nice new scheduled task. No more. There's something like four clicks and navigating a nested tree before you get down to being able to create a "basic" task.

Microsoft Wants Yahoo
May 04, 2007

Oh shit. Just as I was getting to like Yahoo Widgets. Yes, I do know it was Konfabulator before Yahoo bought it.

As an aside, I've just pulled up one of my really old Ruby scripts from 2002. That's right, I've been rocking the Ruby love since at least 2002. Wow.

An Update on the Vista DHCP Bug
April 26, 2007

I had started a thread awhile back to discuss Vista, and one of the things I've mentioned here has been a bug concerning Vista "randomly" dropping off the network with a large amount of work needed to get it back on. Well, I discovered the cause. It might be my specific machine - but activation triggers Vista to lose it's network address and be unable to re-attain one until "ipconfig" has been ran.

Also, if you are activating a different machine with the same key be aware that it doesn't work the first time around. You have to try to activate, and then "input a different number" except input your original number anyway. It worked for me. The joys of activation and changing hardware.

Windows Vista Home Premium Doesn't Include Aero
November 21, 2006

As a member of the Microsoft Developer's Network - I'm privy to new releases of Vista before everyone else. I just installed it on a nice little Dell box that I've got sitting around here at the office to test our software and reached a dismaying conclusion... Windows Vista Home Premium won't support Aero. Yes, that's right. Unless you buy the Business version you won't be seeing anything better than Windows XP with some Theme Packs. Seriously... why buy Windows Vista?

Update: It's because I'm not running an nVida based machine. There aren't any decent drivers released for any IBM chipsets yet. If you've got a Dell with onboard video (read; whatever you've got in your office) don't upgrade. You'll gain nothing. I think that it's a shame that Microsoft doesn't even tell you that it won't support Aero on your machine when you run their upgrade advisor in this situation (or even after, leading me to believe that Home Basic Premium 2006 XP++ Corporate Edition Deep Fried Collaboration Synergizing Version Product doesn't support it).

Update: I've got it running on my nVidia based box quite smoothly. MMUUUUUCH nicer than RC2. Almost unimaginably nicer. Quite good. Bravo!

Microsoft Activation Servers Down
September 11, 2006

So, I'm building a new machine at work today and I'm throwing on a brand-spanking new copy of Microsoft Windows XP. I get the machine up and running and start to go through Windows Update only to find out that I have to be "activated" in order to actually get any updates. Now here's the impasse. I go to activate, and their activation servers are down. I've always hated the concept of having to activate a $200 piece of software, and this only cements it in my mind. You know what the best part is? If I had pirated this software, I wouldn't have to deal with this BS.

More WGA Fun
July 21, 2006

So, Microsoft really is getting annoying with their new WGA program. Even Paul Thurrott is a pirate in Microsoft's eyes now. I just can't wait for them to couple WGA to automatic de-activation of PCs. I really do love conversing with India to make my PC boot after I've purchased a legitimate $150 O/S. It's just... it makes me all warm and fuzzy to know that my hard earned money was so well placed, when I could have simply downloaded it and had none of these issues.

Disabling Windows Update
July 20, 2006

So one of our backup servers rebooted in the middle of a sync recently in order to enact Microsoft's latest Genuine Advantage joy. I've now disabled Automatic Updates on all of my machines. Seriously, if it's not a "critical update" there's absolutely no reason to reboot my machines. Furthermore, there's absolutely no reason to EVER automatically reboot a machine running an 800$ OS labeled as "server".

WGA, Rebooting, and FireFox 2.0
July 17, 2006

So Windows Update rebooted my work computer last night. Apparently the WGA update that was released was so amazingly important that all of my long running processing tasks and file transfers should be killed so that my machine may reboot.

On the plus side, I discovered a new feature of the latest FireFox beta. If FireFox unexpectedly quits, it maintains a memory of the last layout, tab position, and loaded sites that you had and offers to restore. Quite nice, and will break me of the habit of bookmarking every interesting site that I only want to read once, but am afraid that my browser will crash on.

Microsoft Genuine Advantage
July 12, 2006

Windows has been bitching at me all week about a critical update that it has for me. One which will require me to reboot my machine. Know what it is? Microsoft Genuine Advantage. I don't really term it a "critical update". It's not critical to me to know that the copy of Windows I bought from Best Buy is legitimate. Frankly, I don't care one bit. Certainly not enough to restart my fricking computer.