Goodbye Chicago, Hello Tampa!

Posted on May 24, 2006 by ericgharrison
Tomorrow our cable modem is disconnected, so I’m posting this tonight.  On Friday we’re moving to the Tampa Bay area in Florida.  We have decided to hurry up and get down there so we don’t miss another hurricane season!
 
I’m excited about our new venture (HSI Technologies), and looking forward to getting down there and getting settled.  The only problem is that I will have to suffer without a high speed Internet connection for at least five whole days!  Oh the tragedy!
 
I remember many years ago when Bill Gates talked about the digital lifestyle.  People would be dependant on the Internet to do everything from getting the weather to planning their days.  I know that I definitely live that "lifestyle" and many of my friends do as well.  Not having Internet access for five days (three of which will be spent on the road anyway) may not sit high on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but in my case, the others are covered, so Internet access is the big crisis. That and trying to move a small reef tank aquarium across the country in the back of my Honda Element.
 
It reminds me of a time, about 7 years ago, when I was bitching to a friend that my private airplane wasn’t available to me because it was in the shop getting an annual inspection.  About mid-way through my rant I stopped msyelf and said something like "if the biggest problem in my life is that my personal airplane isn’t available on demand, I really need to just stop bitching…". 
 
Remains true to this day.  Now if only I still owned the airplane, then I’d have something to bitch about – it wouild probably still be in the shop.
 
See you in Brandon! – Eric.
 
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Beware cheap Xbox 360 faceplates

Posted on May 14, 2006 by ericgharrison
Some background: As we prepare to move to Florida, we are looking to simplify our home theater a bit.  Given how well the Xbox 360 works as a media center extender, we have decided to use it as our main media device in our living room. 
 
Just for fun, we bought some el-cheapo faceplates for the 360, two faceplates in one package for $19.  The faceplates went on just fine, and the tropical one looked nifty.
 
Now begins the interesting part. We also purchased a Harmony remote for the 360.  We use several Harmony remotes in our house, have recommended them to others, and installed them for clients.
 
When messing around with the remote, it worked quite well controlling our HP x5400 Media Center Extender in the home office.  However, when I brought it into the living room to see how well it worked on the 360, I found that it didn’t function well at all unless it was roughly 3 feet away from the 360 and directly in front of the infrared pickup window!  Not an ideal situation.
 
After much troubleshooting, I discovered that the cheap 360 faceplate was to blame for the problem.  I swapped it out and put the factory faceplate back on, and the remote began working appropriately. 
 
One thing that is quite interesting is the design of the infrared pickup in the 360.  Normally, you can see the IR pickup in the red window on a piece of home theater equipment by shining a flashlight on it.  With the 360, that won’t work.  The vast majority of the IR pickup window isn’t actually see through.  If you take the faceplate off of the 360 and look at the back of it, there is a plastic "stick" that projects from the IR window, which is what channels the IR beam down to the pickup about 1/4 an inch behind the faceplate.  I wonder why MS didn’t simply make the IR pickup window be just a 1/8" hole in the faceplate.  I’m sure it’s a global consipiracy to drive up the sales of red translucent plastic.
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What the hell is wrong with our (American) government?

Posted on May 11, 2006 by ericgharrison
 
You have got to be kidding me.  They are trying to collect records of every phone call made in the United States, just in the hope of maybe data mining it into finding a terrorist?
 
I’m not sure that innocent until proven guilty is applicable anymore.
 
This is almost as scary as the proposed legislation that would require ISP’s to track every email you send, and every web site you visit, except that it is apparently already happening.
 
A lot of these things are done in the guise of helping "the children".  Well what good will it be doing if "the children" end up growing up in a police state?
 
Perhaps we’re all terrorists now… Your papers please…
 
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VMWare 1, Virtual PC 0

Posted on April 3, 2006 by ericgharrison
I enjoy messing around with various versions of Linux. In order
to keep my desk from being completely overrun with computers, I’ve been
trying to use various distributions under Microsoft Virtual PC.
Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that if I attempt to run a copy of
Linux under Virtual PC at the full native resolution of the system that
I’m working on (1280×1024), it will not display properly. It ends
up looking like the alternating lines of the display have been shifted
over signifcantly. The best I’ve been able to do is set Linux to
use 1024×768 as the highest resolution, and then run Linux in a window,
rather than full screen, which deprives me of the "full" experience.

Recently I decided to download and install Ubuntu, and just for kicks, I decided I would try using VMWare Workstation
to host the OS. To make a long story short, it worked
perfectly. The OS runs at full resolution, which makes me very
happy.

Heck, even printing only took about 15 seconds to configure and send a print job.

So, if you’re planning on using a version of Linux in a virtual session
on your PC, give VMWare Workstation a shot. A free evaluation
version is available. I’m guessing I’ll be buying a license when
my eval time expires. At least the competition between VMWare and
Microsoft has resulted in a significant price reduction of their
respective products!

Posted from Firefox running on Ubuntu, running in VMWare Workstation, running under Windows XP SP 2.  Yeesh.

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A fast win with eBay

Posted on March 20, 2006 by ericgharrison
A long time ago, shortly after they first came out, Deb and I purchased a 20" iMac.  We use it around the house, sometimes on my desk, sometimes on hers, and it’s always fun checking out how the other 3% lives.  However, we need to box up the machine for a little while in order to declutter our home.  Unfortunately, because we’re shy on space, we threw the original box out shortly after we brought it home.
 
eBay to the rescue!  It took about 10 seconds to find an empty box (with foam inserts) on eBay and use the Buy It Now button to buy it.
 
Net time invested – a couple of minutes (had to make sure that the local Apple store didn’t have a spare one laying around).
 
Wow, this whole Internet thing just might be worth something afterall…
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Interesting situation with an HP photosmart printer

Posted on February 22, 2006 by ericgharrison
I have an HP Photosmart 7760 printer on my desk for the occasional color printout, or the even more occasional photo printout.  Recently, it began printing very slowly.  It was taking 15 minutes or more just to print out a test page.  I spent quite a lot of time trying to troubleshoot this.  I uninstalled and reinstalled the print driver.  I disabled spooling.  I rebooted about 800 times, with various incantations between each reboot.
 
Eventually, I noticed that the Windows logo that prints on the test page was kind of washed out.  The printer was reporting that the color cartridge was half full, so I started to wonder if the nozzles on the cartridge were clogged or something.
 
I removed the color cartrige, and the test page printed very quickly, albeit in grey scale.  Aha!  We were getting close!  I put in the photo color cartrige, and the page printed quickly, thus proving that the problem was not in the printer itself, but rather something to do with the cartridge. 
 
Lacking better tools, I cleaned the head of the cartridge with a paper towel and some water (which is not the correct way to clean it I’m sure!), and while the printout got a bit better, it didn’t speed up to any significant amount.
 
Finally, I replaced the color cartridge (goodbye $30!), and that fixed the problem.
 
Total time to repair – 4 hours probably.  I was almost to the point where it would have been cheaper to simply buy a new printer!
 
Anyway, next time your printing gets wonky, remember that it could be the ink cartridge and not Windows!
 
Next up, a story on printing problems caused by Windows XP itself…
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Halo 2 on the PC to require Vista?!

Posted on February 9, 2006 by ericgharrison
Oh this is rich.  Bungie (aka Microsoft) has just announced that Halo 2 will require Windows Vista (aka Godot) to run.  While I can imagine that Microsoft wants to help drive sales of Vista, this isn’t going to be the way to do it.  I can just see the discussion at the sales counter when Joe Consumer goes to buy a copy of Halo 2 for the PC…
 
Clerk: Ah, I see you’ve chosen Halo 2!  Great choice.  Very nice for a three year old game.
Joe: Uhhh…
Clerk: Yeah, it was released on the original Xbox a long time ago, and Microsoft, er, Bungie, just got around to porting it to Windows.
Joe: Um, yeah, but it’s like $50, so it’s awesome, right?
Clerk: You bet!  So I’m guessing you bought a new PC in the last week?
Joe: Um, no, why?
Clerk: Oh, well, you see this requires Windows Vista.
Joe: What’s that?
Clerk: It’s the new version of Windows that just came out.  It requires a PC with 200 terrabytes of memory and 3 jigawatts of processor speed (editors note: this is what Joe Customer will think Clerk said).
Joe: Does that work on my XP machine I bought 3 years ago, and how much is it?
Clerk: It might, but only if you upgrade the video card, and add more memory.  The upgrade will cost either $100, $200 or $800 depending on which one of the seven versions of Vista you want…  Of course, the real thing to do is to buy a new game PC for $2000.
Joe: <putting Halo 2 back on the shelf>Yeah, okay, thanks.  I think I’ll just go buy a Sega Revolution for $200…
 
I guarantee you that if Bungie was still a standalone company, they wouldn’t be tying it to Vista.  It’s not a good business decision.  Three years after the release of Vista? Sure, when the vast majority of your user base has upgraded, but not in 2006 or 2007.  However if you’re Microsoft, you can try this, and maybe even get away with it. 
 
I for one won’t bother with Halo 2 for the PC.  Both because of this ludicrous Vista tying, and I don’t need another copy of a game that’s only 1/2 done.
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The Ultimate Programmers Keyboard?

Posted on February 9, 2006 by ericgharrison
Over the years, I’ve come up with a lot of ideas for products, both real world and software.  Some of those would be:
1) Ear muffs with built in headphones
2) Surround sound headphones
3) A keyboard that works well for programmers, including instant macros, a billion shortcuts and more.
 
#1 was brought out by someone about 6 months after I thought of the idea – this was in the late 80’s or early 90’s.
 
#2 started appearing a while ago, again about 6 months after I first thought of it.  I guess I need to learn to react quicker to these ideas (that, and build a factory so I have the resources handy when I have an idea)!
 
Now it looks like #3 has possibly happened, but by accident rather than by design.
 
Logitech has a product called the G15 Gaming Keyboard.  I believe this may turn out to be a fantastic keyboard for programmers.  You can read their information site for all the relevant details, but consider this – it has a grand total of 54 programmable function keys!  That’s 18 keys, with three "banks" of programming.  Each key can be assigned to launch a program or run a macro.  Macros can be programmed quickly just by pressing the MR (macro record) key and then the "G" key you want the keystrokes to be associated with.  Program launching can be handled by using the configuration program.
 
The LCD display can display things like current media playing, a date / time / email status panel and system performance (CPU and memory utilization).  It can also be programmed using an included SDK.  In my case I was intending to use it to display certain server status information, but I haven’t gotten around to coding that yet.  However, DevExpress has come out with a plug in for their Refactor! Pro tool that displays the refactors available and various statistics about the code that you’re looking at.  I don’t know that it’s extremely useful, but it is cool.
 
The key feel is quite good in my opinion, but the keyboard overall is large.  Given everything that’s jammed on it, that isn’t a surprise, but if you have a tiny desk, you might notice the loss of space.  No Miguel, they don’t have a "natural" version.
 
Oh yeah, it has lighted keys (which can be turned off) to help with those late late late night coding sessions.
 
Do you code?  Do you think this keyboard might be useful to you?
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Another Western Digital drive failure

Posted on February 2, 2006 by ericgharrison
It seems that hard drive quality has gone downhill significantly.  I just had a 250 meg WD2500 hard drive fail.  The drive wasn’t even used that much. It was used periodically to create Ghost images, and today, when trying to Ghost my workstation, the drive wouldn’t spin up. I remember that I’d had problems with the drive before, but I had assumed that it was Windows XP being stupid.
 
The drive was manufactured in October of 2004, and the warranty expired in November 2005.
 
As you can see, many people have been encountering failures with these drives.  When I run to the store later to buy a replacement hard drive, it won’t be a Western Digital!
 
Western Digital – for when you really don’t care about your data!
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Stupid In Line Ads

Posted on February 2, 2006 by ericgharrison
As many of you have noticed, many web pages have "in line" ads that try to look kind of like links, and are actually advertisements.  Every now and then I notice a particularly stupid in line ad, which I thought was chuckle worthy.  See the attached photo.  I don’t believe it’s actually an eBay ad, but rather an affiliate or something where they get a piece of the action if you go buy a "dialog" through eBay.
 
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