Saturday, June 27. 2009
Home Network
I just finished off some updates to my home network so I thought I'd share a few pics of the main switch rack.
Here it is:
The big thing you will probably notice is that most of the switches are not used and some only very sightly, I do have more switches than I really need at present!
Here's what the box contains, working down from the top.
1) APC PDU – Power switcher.
2) Netgear POE switch
3) 3 COM POE switch
4) Netgear 10/100 Switch
5) Patch panel for the 22 outlets in my flat.
6) Netgear Gigabit Switch
7) HP 10/100 Switch.
How my flats split:
Kitchen:
2 Ports over cupboard on outside wall.
2 Ports over extractor hood/cupboards on inside wall.
4 Ports under worktop.
Living room:
2 Ports by TV.
2 Ports by Rear wall.
Bedroom:
2 Ports by door.
Office (Bedroom 2):
2 Ports by door.
4 Ports by Server/workstation PCs.
Airing cupboard:
2 Ports, yes I really do have 2 network ports in the airing cupboard!
Most of the ports come from the main Netgear Gigabit switch. Currently I have 3 ports connected to the 3COM POE switch.
I only intended to buy 1 POE switch but apparently their like buses. Having waited many months to get a good price on eBay the Netgear POE switch came up as a BIN so I immediately purchased it, then a few days latter I realised that I had one the 3COM POE switch I put a low-ball bid on, net result is 2 POE switches.
This has the advantage that I can have one POE switch powering devices that I want on 24x7 and the other powering devices that I might not want on all the time, so giving me better control over power usage.
If you want to know why I wanted POE switches you'll have to wait for another blog post!
The 10/100 Netgear switch was the original switch I purchased to service the flat before it ran out of ports and I wanted something faster than 100M. I'm leaving it in the rack as it might well stay with the flat when I eventually move out and it's filling a hole I'd have to buy a blanking plate for otherwise.
I was lucky enough to be given the gigabit switch and HP switch, currently the HP switch is also not used.
At the top of the rack is my latest purchase, a UPC PDU (Power Distribution Unit), this means that I can switch off all the unneeded network switches and should I need to I can hard reboot any as well – I needed to do that a few months ago before the UPS was connected when a very brief brownout put the Netgear gigabit switch in a funny state and took down my network.
If you look closely enough you will see the obvious problem – the PDU network comes from the gigabit switch, so if I have a dippy moment and power off that switch I can't switch it on again over the network (it would have been nice to see the APC PDU have 2x network ports!), so I will be sticking my head in the loft if that happens. Should the power fail and the UPS battery run out then the device will switch off, but it's set-up to automatically power on the Netgear switch when power is returned so hopefully I should regain control in that situation.
I've got a few little side projects under way and wanted the APC PDU to play with as it was, but it's turned out to be useful as the POE switches can be noisy when switched on (although I've hacked them and replaced the little 40mm fans for quiet ones which makes a big difference), having 3+ switches all running little 40mm fans can be really noisy when it's in the loft and your trying to sleep!
The whole lot is powered through a little APC UPS, I don't care much for the device, mainly because it screams when the power goes off and that's not amusing when it's in the loft – I've got a network monitor card for a SmartUPS so now all I need is to get a SmartUPS to replace the little one and I'll be happy.
The cabinet it's self is a plastic 19” 7U cabinet I got off eBay, sadly most of the Netgear and 3COM switches were to deep for the original configuration of the cabinet – hence the reason the door is not fitted as it won't close – fortunately their were 2 sets of mounts for the mounting brackets and I was able to bring them forward and the switches just about fit now (about 300mm) otherwise I had them resting on top of the case which was a bit naff.
Here's the switch depths of the 2 POE switches, the maximum I can get in my cabinet is 300mm and that has to include the power lead coming out the back of the switches.
At the back of the case theirs a bit snake of CAT5 that heads off all over the loft:
This was before I got the PDU, hence the mass of mains leads.
Wiring up the patch panel has been interesting:
You can see that was before I rearranged the switches.
Here it is:
The big thing you will probably notice is that most of the switches are not used and some only very sightly, I do have more switches than I really need at present!
Here's what the box contains, working down from the top.
1) APC PDU – Power switcher.
2) Netgear POE switch
3) 3 COM POE switch
4) Netgear 10/100 Switch
5) Patch panel for the 22 outlets in my flat.
6) Netgear Gigabit Switch
7) HP 10/100 Switch.
How my flats split:
Kitchen:
2 Ports over cupboard on outside wall.
2 Ports over extractor hood/cupboards on inside wall.
4 Ports under worktop.
Living room:
2 Ports by TV.
2 Ports by Rear wall.
Bedroom:
2 Ports by door.
Office (Bedroom 2):
2 Ports by door.
4 Ports by Server/workstation PCs.
Airing cupboard:
2 Ports, yes I really do have 2 network ports in the airing cupboard!
Most of the ports come from the main Netgear Gigabit switch. Currently I have 3 ports connected to the 3COM POE switch.
I only intended to buy 1 POE switch but apparently their like buses. Having waited many months to get a good price on eBay the Netgear POE switch came up as a BIN so I immediately purchased it, then a few days latter I realised that I had one the 3COM POE switch I put a low-ball bid on, net result is 2 POE switches.
This has the advantage that I can have one POE switch powering devices that I want on 24x7 and the other powering devices that I might not want on all the time, so giving me better control over power usage.
If you want to know why I wanted POE switches you'll have to wait for another blog post!
The 10/100 Netgear switch was the original switch I purchased to service the flat before it ran out of ports and I wanted something faster than 100M. I'm leaving it in the rack as it might well stay with the flat when I eventually move out and it's filling a hole I'd have to buy a blanking plate for otherwise.
I was lucky enough to be given the gigabit switch and HP switch, currently the HP switch is also not used.
At the top of the rack is my latest purchase, a UPC PDU (Power Distribution Unit), this means that I can switch off all the unneeded network switches and should I need to I can hard reboot any as well – I needed to do that a few months ago before the UPS was connected when a very brief brownout put the Netgear gigabit switch in a funny state and took down my network.
If you look closely enough you will see the obvious problem – the PDU network comes from the gigabit switch, so if I have a dippy moment and power off that switch I can't switch it on again over the network (it would have been nice to see the APC PDU have 2x network ports!), so I will be sticking my head in the loft if that happens. Should the power fail and the UPS battery run out then the device will switch off, but it's set-up to automatically power on the Netgear switch when power is returned so hopefully I should regain control in that situation.
I've got a few little side projects under way and wanted the APC PDU to play with as it was, but it's turned out to be useful as the POE switches can be noisy when switched on (although I've hacked them and replaced the little 40mm fans for quiet ones which makes a big difference), having 3+ switches all running little 40mm fans can be really noisy when it's in the loft and your trying to sleep!
The whole lot is powered through a little APC UPS, I don't care much for the device, mainly because it screams when the power goes off and that's not amusing when it's in the loft – I've got a network monitor card for a SmartUPS so now all I need is to get a SmartUPS to replace the little one and I'll be happy.
The cabinet it's self is a plastic 19” 7U cabinet I got off eBay, sadly most of the Netgear and 3COM switches were to deep for the original configuration of the cabinet – hence the reason the door is not fitted as it won't close – fortunately their were 2 sets of mounts for the mounting brackets and I was able to bring them forward and the switches just about fit now (about 300mm) otherwise I had them resting on top of the case which was a bit naff.
Here's the switch depths of the 2 POE switches, the maximum I can get in my cabinet is 300mm and that has to include the power lead coming out the back of the switches.
At the back of the case theirs a bit snake of CAT5 that heads off all over the loft:
This was before I got the PDU, hence the mass of mains leads.
Wiring up the patch panel has been interesting:
You can see that was before I rearranged the switches.
Tuesday, May 19. 2009
An unhandled exception has occurred. The image is not found.
A while ago I updated my exchange rate sites (Dollars2Pounds et al) to use the "new" ASP.NET Chart control, after some initial testing every thing appeared to be going well and the live websites were updated with the chart control.
Shortly after deploying the servers event log filled up with messages along these lines:
Event code: 3005
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred.
Event time: 5/19/2009 1:17:59 AM
Event time (UTC): 5/19/2009 12:17:59 AM
Exception information:
Exception type: ArgumentException
Exception message: The image is not found.
Request information:
Request URL: http://www.yuan2dollars.com/ChartImg.axd?i=chart_6_6.png&g=e036ff271be14badb39473c8d04f8609
Request path: /ChartImg.axd
T Stack trace: at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.ProcessSavedChartImage(HttpContext context)
at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.System.Web.IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)
I've been trying to get to the root cause for some time concerned that visitors to the websites were seeing blank images and I followed various suggestions based on image cache lifetime, temp folder permissions, phase of the moon and so on.
It wasn't until just recently when I followed Scott Hanselman's top tip of implementing elmah that the real cause of the problem became obvious.
It's Google causing all the exceptions! Well googlebot and other search engines.
Their right in front of me under the “ALL_RAW” heading of the server variables was the answer "Connection: Keep-alive Accept: / Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com"
I should have guessed that!
What happens is googlebot request the page, so the charting control creates the image and renders a image tag for it, caching the image for a predefined period of time. Naturally googlebot does what it does best, it saves that link to the image and tries to re-index it time and time again at a much latter date (weeks), by the time googlebot comes back for the image a second time the cache has long since been updated and naturally the image no longer exists and the naming convention of the image means that it's not going to get the replacement.
Recently I also ran some performance test with the charts in place using LoadImpact, they provide some limited and basic performance testing for free, but its more than enough for simple sites like mine to see that I had serious performance issues on my sites when more than a couple of visitors were hitting the site at the same time.
The charts on each pages were taking about one second to render (it's not surprising as I'm trying to render something like 26,000 data points for the 3 month USD/GBP chart and 7,000 for the other 3 month charts on a 2.4GHz P4). With the CPU fully pegged for a second trying to produce those charts it doesn't take long before the delay hits in if more than a couple of users access the page at the same time.
My fix for this has been fairly simple, the charts are now updated in the background by a cache expired event and are written to a static .png file with a fixed name. The charts are stored in a “Charts” folder and existing files are replaced with fresh images, the page is rendered with a normal img tag so when googlebot visits it can get the latest chart using the correct name and page rendering now happens in about 6ms.
Interestingly this performance fix has also seen a 10% increase in traffic.
Tips:
Shortly after deploying the servers event log filled up with messages along these lines:
Event code: 3005
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred.
Event time: 5/19/2009 1:17:59 AM
Event time (UTC): 5/19/2009 12:17:59 AM
Exception information:
Exception type: ArgumentException
Exception message: The image is not found.
Request information:
Request URL: http://www.yuan2dollars.com/ChartImg.axd?i=chart_6_6.png&g=e036ff271be14badb39473c8d04f8609
Request path: /ChartImg.axd
T Stack trace: at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.ProcessSavedChartImage(HttpContext context)
at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.System.Web.IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)
I've been trying to get to the root cause for some time concerned that visitors to the websites were seeing blank images and I followed various suggestions based on image cache lifetime, temp folder permissions, phase of the moon and so on.
It wasn't until just recently when I followed Scott Hanselman's top tip of implementing elmah that the real cause of the problem became obvious.
It's Google causing all the exceptions! Well googlebot and other search engines.
Their right in front of me under the “ALL_RAW” heading of the server variables was the answer "Connection: Keep-alive Accept: / Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com"
I should have guessed that!
What happens is googlebot request the page, so the charting control creates the image and renders a image tag for it, caching the image for a predefined period of time. Naturally googlebot does what it does best, it saves that link to the image and tries to re-index it time and time again at a much latter date (weeks), by the time googlebot comes back for the image a second time the cache has long since been updated and naturally the image no longer exists and the naming convention of the image means that it's not going to get the replacement.
Recently I also ran some performance test with the charts in place using LoadImpact, they provide some limited and basic performance testing for free, but its more than enough for simple sites like mine to see that I had serious performance issues on my sites when more than a couple of visitors were hitting the site at the same time.
The charts on each pages were taking about one second to render (it's not surprising as I'm trying to render something like 26,000 data points for the 3 month USD/GBP chart and 7,000 for the other 3 month charts on a 2.4GHz P4). With the CPU fully pegged for a second trying to produce those charts it doesn't take long before the delay hits in if more than a couple of users access the page at the same time.
My fix for this has been fairly simple, the charts are now updated in the background by a cache expired event and are written to a static .png file with a fixed name. The charts are stored in a “Charts” folder and existing files are replaced with fresh images, the page is rendered with a normal img tag so when googlebot visits it can get the latest chart using the correct name and page rendering now happens in about 6ms.
Interestingly this performance fix has also seen a 10% increase in traffic.
Tips:
- Watch your servers event logs.
- Implement ELMAH, it's crazy simple and very useful.
- Take advantage of the free load testing from LoadImpact, even if you only try it the once.
- If you are running IIS/Server 2k3/2k8 have Perfmon run in the background as you run the Load Impact tests and look at:
- CPU usage
- Error Events Raised
- Requests Current
- Requests Queued
- Request Execution Time
- and others that might be relevant.
- In perfmon save the setup somewhere easy to get to (i.e. the desktop) so you can just double click it to get your perfmon setup back quickly
Monday, April 06. 2009
Dinner Timer Lite 1.2.0 Released
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
Open Plan Offices – What a HUGE Mistake.
I read earlier today on news.com.au that Open-plan offices are making knowledge workers sick, say Australian scientists - No kidding!
Problems with open plan offices are hardly a secret. Joel has promoted office spaces for developers for a long time, it's also covered in PeopleWare - although sadly I don't think many managers actually read that book, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror covered it and I'm sure there are many more instances.
I think the whole office thing is back to front, if you insist on having an open plan office then the managers should be in the open plan parts and the knowledge workers should have the separate quiet offices – managers have to communicate more and know what's happening much more than the workers. Knowledge workers need to be productive and granted communications is really important but not as important as being able to focus on the work.
Now I'm sure most companies would want better value for money out of their knowledge workers and to have a better product on the market. I see a quiet working environment as a major step towards that.
So employers next time you are wondering why your software project cost so much money, why it was so late, why it's so buggy and not as good as the competitors and why there appears to be a skills shortage start by think a bit closer to home and how the business uses it's resources (sorry employees).
Sadly having an office has been seen as a status symbol. More fool the companies that make their knowledge workers work in a noisy office and tuck their managers away in nice quiet offices – You are wasting a fortune in employee productive. With the exception of a few, generally managers are only their to support the workers – without the workers the manager is pointless – the workers are the important bit! (Hint: Think about small companies, they do really well given the lack of managers).
I've had the miss-fortune to work in an open plan office situation for my last 5 proper jobs (I don't count my own business) over the previous 8 years and I'm one of those people who is really sensitive to the noise around me so I can totally agree with the findings.
Noisy environments are stressful, frustrating and prevent you from doing your job to the best of your abilities.
Most of my previous employers have been biotech, pharma or life science instrumentation but my current employer is a large IT focused software company and of all the places I expected to understand about the damage noise does I would expect my current employer to understand(*), sadly this is not the case.
Now the sound of developers working hard is quietness with a few keyboard strokes and the occasional conversation. If like my current position your do code reviews prior to checking in code then this adds to the background noise. If like my current position you have more than 1 person who loves the sound of their own voice and is loud then you are doomed.
Take the bug fixing part of the project when your trying to get the application out of the door (and probably didn't budget much time for bug fixing so it's critical to get it done asap). All the developers are fixing bugs, if you have an office of 20 developers, each fixing 1 bug/day which results in a 10 minute code review. That's 20 * 10 minutes of conversation about code reviews per day. Or put it another way 3 1/3 hours worth of background conversations happing every day.
If those code reviews are about 10 minutes apart then you get a full day of distractions for all of the 20 developer in that one office.
Guess what, it's so easy to introduce side effects and bugs whilst fixing a bug, especially if you are not concentrating, so whilst everybody is trying hard to concentrate to fix the bug and not introduce more they are subject to 50% of the time being a distraction caused by a code review happening in the office (and most likely once the quietness is broken other people will start chatting as well which makes it even noisier). Any then we wonder why so many extra problems get introduced during the bug fix cycle!
Personally I'm a late starter, I like working latter in the day when everybody has gone home and the office is quiet – I generally get more done during the last 1-2 hours than I'm able to do for the bulk of the day because of the background distractions. Many friends criticise me for being late, having the pleasure of missing the rush hour traffic to and from work, but you know what, it lowers my stress levels, I get more done and I'm happier and I guess whilst I'm not stuck in traffic that helps lower my carbon footprint.
Here's some hints to employers looking to get better value for money from developers (I'm sure this or variations of this apply to a lot of developers):
Here's what doesn't work:
Not long ago I changed jobs because my previous employer went into administration and at the end of the day I had 3 offers to choose from.
The first of these was offering £5k more than the one I accepted. Here's why I turned it down:
So how many employers would like to get someone at a discount of £5,000/year? I'm guessing quit a lot. Share holders – how happy would you be that the company you own part of is paying a £5,000 premium? That little office space is going to pay for it's self really quickly and it's highly likely that the cost of flexible working hours is nothing – sounds like a bargain to me.
So improved productive, cheaper staff, less stress and most likely lower employee turn over can all be achieved for free, all that needs to be changed is the mindset, so it's never going to happen is it.
If like me you are a developer and struggling in a noisy office for a company that doesn't get it and your kicking your self for taking a duff job and your now stuck finding something you prefer better because the economy fell apart then check out ChatterBlocker it works much better than music at drowning out background voices, it's not distracting, you can put it up loud if you need to without effecting others and it also works great in the background when listening to podcasts to drown out the noisy people in the office!
(*) although having said that they also think that paying for an employees eye test means paying the legal minimum and saving about £10 on the cost of a normal test, which given us developers spend the day staring at the monitor you'd think they would care about out eyes – they pay for Bupa, provide tea, coffee, fruit but save a few quid on the eye test – go figure! (Guess which bit HR are responsible for!)
(**) I wonder if in a few years time we will see a new set of health and safety litigation where knowledge works sue employers for damaged hearing caused by the constant use of headphones + music used on recommendation by their manager to drown out the background noise of the open plan office.
Problems with open plan offices are hardly a secret. Joel has promoted office spaces for developers for a long time, it's also covered in PeopleWare - although sadly I don't think many managers actually read that book, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror covered it and I'm sure there are many more instances.
I think the whole office thing is back to front, if you insist on having an open plan office then the managers should be in the open plan parts and the knowledge workers should have the separate quiet offices – managers have to communicate more and know what's happening much more than the workers. Knowledge workers need to be productive and granted communications is really important but not as important as being able to focus on the work.
Now I'm sure most companies would want better value for money out of their knowledge workers and to have a better product on the market. I see a quiet working environment as a major step towards that.
So employers next time you are wondering why your software project cost so much money, why it was so late, why it's so buggy and not as good as the competitors and why there appears to be a skills shortage start by think a bit closer to home and how the business uses it's resources (sorry employees).
Sadly having an office has been seen as a status symbol. More fool the companies that make their knowledge workers work in a noisy office and tuck their managers away in nice quiet offices – You are wasting a fortune in employee productive. With the exception of a few, generally managers are only their to support the workers – without the workers the manager is pointless – the workers are the important bit! (Hint: Think about small companies, they do really well given the lack of managers).
I've had the miss-fortune to work in an open plan office situation for my last 5 proper jobs (I don't count my own business) over the previous 8 years and I'm one of those people who is really sensitive to the noise around me so I can totally agree with the findings.
Noisy environments are stressful, frustrating and prevent you from doing your job to the best of your abilities.
Most of my previous employers have been biotech, pharma or life science instrumentation but my current employer is a large IT focused software company and of all the places I expected to understand about the damage noise does I would expect my current employer to understand(*), sadly this is not the case.
Now the sound of developers working hard is quietness with a few keyboard strokes and the occasional conversation. If like my current position your do code reviews prior to checking in code then this adds to the background noise. If like my current position you have more than 1 person who loves the sound of their own voice and is loud then you are doomed.
Take the bug fixing part of the project when your trying to get the application out of the door (and probably didn't budget much time for bug fixing so it's critical to get it done asap). All the developers are fixing bugs, if you have an office of 20 developers, each fixing 1 bug/day which results in a 10 minute code review. That's 20 * 10 minutes of conversation about code reviews per day. Or put it another way 3 1/3 hours worth of background conversations happing every day.
If those code reviews are about 10 minutes apart then you get a full day of distractions for all of the 20 developer in that one office.
Guess what, it's so easy to introduce side effects and bugs whilst fixing a bug, especially if you are not concentrating, so whilst everybody is trying hard to concentrate to fix the bug and not introduce more they are subject to 50% of the time being a distraction caused by a code review happening in the office (and most likely once the quietness is broken other people will start chatting as well which makes it even noisier). Any then we wonder why so many extra problems get introduced during the bug fix cycle!
Personally I'm a late starter, I like working latter in the day when everybody has gone home and the office is quiet – I generally get more done during the last 1-2 hours than I'm able to do for the bulk of the day because of the background distractions. Many friends criticise me for being late, having the pleasure of missing the rush hour traffic to and from work, but you know what, it lowers my stress levels, I get more done and I'm happier and I guess whilst I'm not stuck in traffic that helps lower my carbon footprint.
Here's some hints to employers looking to get better value for money from developers (I'm sure this or variations of this apply to a lot of developers):
- I will work for a lower salary at a place that I am able to be in late.
- I will work for a lower salary at a place that's quiet.
- I work better latter in the day so you get better value for money if I'm working latter.
- I'm not a morning person and mornings == stress for me.
- I get better work done in a quiet office so if you can't offer a quiet office then make sure I can work from home or work late when everybody else has gone.
- I happy when I'm able to give my best. Background noise causing me to work below par stresses me out, I'm more likely to leave if I'm stressed and unhappy with my work.
- I'm much more productive and happier given reasonable decent hardware and a few extra dev tools (R# etc).
Here's what doesn't work:
- Listen to music to drown out the background voices:
- This doesn't drown out the low pitch part of the voice.
- It is also uncomfortable to listen to headphones all day long.
- It discourages communication.
- If we are listening to internet radio your not going to like the bandwidth usage.
- To get a good cancelling effect you have the music loud, that annoys others and damages hearing(**).
- Noise cancelling headphones to drown out the noise in the office.
- These just don't work for voices.
- They also suffer from the same problems as music (except the bandwidth usage!)
- Lots of people in one big office trying to work with more than 1 loud person.
- Never ever ever combine sales or marketing people in the same office as developers.
- When employing someone think how loud and chatty they are and what effect that will have on the rest of your team.
- Please don't reward the loud chatty people by putting them in an office, loud and chatty people are having a negative effect on the rest of your team!
If you have 2 loud chatty people and they chat for about an hour over the course of a day and this disrupts just 6 other people close by guess what: that's a full day's worth of 1 persons work LOST, you've managed to employ 2 people but only get the benefit of one, and with it irritate the other 6, and guess who's likely to leave first – the chatty ones or the ones trying to work and getting irritated by the others? Guess who feels punished? Not the people chatting!
Not long ago I changed jobs because my previous employer went into administration and at the end of the day I had 3 offers to choose from.
The first of these was offering £5k more than the one I accepted. Here's why I turned it down:
- It was an 8 am start along with everybody else, no flexibility (despite being a 24 hour operating plant), so if I did have a problem with noise their was no chance of shifting my hours to get a quieter time of day to work in.
- They also wanted me to work late to communicate with the US – now they said I could occasionally start latter after the initial probation period if I was working a lot with the US and going home late. That just ends up confusing your body as to what's going on.
- The office didn't look particularly pleasant to work in from the bit I saw (and actually they didn't show me the actual office area during the interview)
- The coding part of the interview was done in a horrible meeting room and I was given a small screen that wobbled like crazy (I was nearly sea sick) – hardly a good sign.
So how many employers would like to get someone at a discount of £5,000/year? I'm guessing quit a lot. Share holders – how happy would you be that the company you own part of is paying a £5,000 premium? That little office space is going to pay for it's self really quickly and it's highly likely that the cost of flexible working hours is nothing – sounds like a bargain to me.
So improved productive, cheaper staff, less stress and most likely lower employee turn over can all be achieved for free, all that needs to be changed is the mindset, so it's never going to happen is it.
If like me you are a developer and struggling in a noisy office for a company that doesn't get it and your kicking your self for taking a duff job and your now stuck finding something you prefer better because the economy fell apart then check out ChatterBlocker it works much better than music at drowning out background voices, it's not distracting, you can put it up loud if you need to without effecting others and it also works great in the background when listening to podcasts to drown out the noisy people in the office!
(*) although having said that they also think that paying for an employees eye test means paying the legal minimum and saving about £10 on the cost of a normal test, which given us developers spend the day staring at the monitor you'd think they would care about out eyes – they pay for Bupa, provide tea, coffee, fruit but save a few quid on the eye test – go figure! (Guess which bit HR are responsible for!)
(**) I wonder if in a few years time we will see a new set of health and safety litigation where knowledge works sue employers for damaged hearing caused by the constant use of headphones + music used on recommendation by their manager to drown out the background noise of the open plan office.
Windows 7 .iso file handling – Close but No Cigar!
Typically when I have an iso file what I want to do is mount it as a DVD Drive, not spend 10 minutes burning the thing just so I can then read it on the same machine and in the process wasting a DVD and causing more environmental damage with the plastic. OK so that's useful if I take it to a different machine or need to boot from the disk, but that's rare for me now days.
Guess what, in Windows 7 you can burn a iso image to disk. Great, that's a nice touch, but you can't mount the thing!
One cool addition to Windows 7 is being able to create and map a .vhd (virtual disk) as a disk on the machine in Disk Management (I've not tried it yet – apparently you can even boot from it – freaky & cool!). Now tell me why can I do that and yet I can not attach a iso image file, that's massively frustrating.
What makes it really crazy is that when you download from MSDN you get .iso files, now even with Vista you have to go and get extra software to handle them. At least you can burn them easily in W7 but really, I should be able to download a SQL server 2008 iso from MSDN, right click and mount it in W7 and install it.
I store all the iso's I download from MSDN on a network share and access them as I need them. If I burn them to disk I just loose them, so the bulk iso storage works really well for me.
It's similar in Server 2008 R2, no option to mount the CD/DVD and by default the burn option isn't their either – but then that's for the best really as I'd want the default install to be locked down as much as possible.
I did wonder if their was some kind of legal, patent, copyright issue around the iso image thing, but Hyper-V can mount an iso image to be use as a CD/DVD drive in a Hyper-V instance so why can't Windows 7 do that?
Please Microsoft give us the ability to mount an iso image as a DVD drive!
Until they do I'm sticking with MagicISO which works a treat – and it's freeware! (Thank you MagicIso inc!).
I'm also hoping one day we see DVD drives that can do LightScribe or similar without having to flip the disk but I doubt we will ever see that (at least for a reasonable price!).
Guess what, in Windows 7 you can burn a iso image to disk. Great, that's a nice touch, but you can't mount the thing!
One cool addition to Windows 7 is being able to create and map a .vhd (virtual disk) as a disk on the machine in Disk Management (I've not tried it yet – apparently you can even boot from it – freaky & cool!). Now tell me why can I do that and yet I can not attach a iso image file, that's massively frustrating.
What makes it really crazy is that when you download from MSDN you get .iso files, now even with Vista you have to go and get extra software to handle them. At least you can burn them easily in W7 but really, I should be able to download a SQL server 2008 iso from MSDN, right click and mount it in W7 and install it.
I store all the iso's I download from MSDN on a network share and access them as I need them. If I burn them to disk I just loose them, so the bulk iso storage works really well for me.
It's similar in Server 2008 R2, no option to mount the CD/DVD and by default the burn option isn't their either – but then that's for the best really as I'd want the default install to be locked down as much as possible.
I did wonder if their was some kind of legal, patent, copyright issue around the iso image thing, but Hyper-V can mount an iso image to be use as a CD/DVD drive in a Hyper-V instance so why can't Windows 7 do that?
Please Microsoft give us the ability to mount an iso image as a DVD drive!
Until they do I'm sticking with MagicISO which works a treat – and it's freeware! (Thank you MagicIso inc!).
I'm also hoping one day we see DVD drives that can do LightScribe or similar without having to flip the disk but I doubt we will ever see that (at least for a reasonable price!).
Windows 7 Taskbar – FAIL!
Like many others I've been trying out Windows 7 just recently.
My trial of it didn't start well with the MSDN version being available around the same time as the public release – I mistakenly thoughts as a paying MSDN subscriber I might get it a little earlier but hey, I get to find out and fix any problems in my applications at the same time my users get to see the issues. Still at least my stuff doesn't eat your MP3's!
I installed a test version of W7 in a Hyper-V instance which didn't go all that smoothly either, first time around and I had to have a second go, but that might have been because I put the iso of Windows 7 on a NAS and a network problem may have crept in causing the installation not to find the files it wanted.
Next (I think) because I access my Hyper-V set-up using the Hyper-V MMC snap-in from my Vista box copy and paste doesn't work between the two machines so entering the product code and trying to paste the Url in to browse for the patch to stop W7 trashing my MP3's was painful. But hey, I should save my Hyper-V bashing for another day as I could go on for some time about that!
What really annoys me with W7 is what has happened to the taskbar.
Apparently I'm not alone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against change and I like a lot of what's changed over the years in Windows, generally it's been for the better.
With Vista, XP and those before it I actually like the quick launch toolbar. I like it having small icons and I use it heavily (I have 18 apps in there). I also like the notification area, not massively but for a lot of applications it's perfect. Theirs a number of application I don't want in their and think they should live else where (like the ATI stuff, SmartStamp, OpenOffice QuickStart) but I can live with that.
In XP Microsoft gave us the collapsing notification area and initially I adopted that but ended up finding it annoying, the worst of which was with Outlook email notification as I had times when XP would decide it should hide it and then you didn't get to see it hence ignoring new email (OK so not a bad thing) or other times when receiving a lot of emails it would cause the notification area to shrink and grow which was really annoying and had a side effect on the running programs and made it difficult to hit the correct icon.
There is one big problem with the quick launch, toolbar and notification area in XP and Vista and it's this that I believe Microsoft are trying to solve with the redesign in Windows 7. The problem is you can't fit much into the default Quick Launch and Notification areas.
So the way I see it is you have two options:
Let me explain why I don't like the new Windows 7 Toolbar:
I make the taskbar 2 units high. Nice and Simple!
You get a lot more running applications in the taskbar before it gets overly cluttered (to the point that my head gets cluttered before the taskbar).
On a default Windows Vista/XP set-up anything more than 6 icons in the notification area is a pain and similar for the quick launch area.
With 2 units high I have 18 quick launch apps, 13 notification icons, the date, time and day and currently 11 running applications without a problem.
Now I have a 22” wide-screen monitor so things are a little easier but I run exactly the same set-up at work where I have only a 19” square monitor and it works just as well, if not better as the quick launch and notification area don't take up hardly any room.
So you have two choices:
Either:
Personally, I think that the XP/Vista taskbar works well and that making it 2 units high solves the problems with the quick launch and the notification area and making the change in Windows 7 just introduces code that isn't needed and with no doubt lots of new and fun bugs.
Fingers crossed that theirs an option to use the previous taskbar implementation in W7 or failing that some amusing adverts mocking the new taskbar so the pain has some good.
My trial of it didn't start well with the MSDN version being available around the same time as the public release – I mistakenly thoughts as a paying MSDN subscriber I might get it a little earlier but hey, I get to find out and fix any problems in my applications at the same time my users get to see the issues. Still at least my stuff doesn't eat your MP3's!
I installed a test version of W7 in a Hyper-V instance which didn't go all that smoothly either, first time around and I had to have a second go, but that might have been because I put the iso of Windows 7 on a NAS and a network problem may have crept in causing the installation not to find the files it wanted.
Next (I think) because I access my Hyper-V set-up using the Hyper-V MMC snap-in from my Vista box copy and paste doesn't work between the two machines so entering the product code and trying to paste the Url in to browse for the patch to stop W7 trashing my MP3's was painful. But hey, I should save my Hyper-V bashing for another day as I could go on for some time about that!
What really annoys me with W7 is what has happened to the taskbar.
Apparently I'm not alone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against change and I like a lot of what's changed over the years in Windows, generally it's been for the better.
With Vista, XP and those before it I actually like the quick launch toolbar. I like it having small icons and I use it heavily (I have 18 apps in there). I also like the notification area, not massively but for a lot of applications it's perfect. Theirs a number of application I don't want in their and think they should live else where (like the ATI stuff, SmartStamp, OpenOffice QuickStart) but I can live with that.
In XP Microsoft gave us the collapsing notification area and initially I adopted that but ended up finding it annoying, the worst of which was with Outlook email notification as I had times when XP would decide it should hide it and then you didn't get to see it hence ignoring new email (OK so not a bad thing) or other times when receiving a lot of emails it would cause the notification area to shrink and grow which was really annoying and had a side effect on the running programs and made it difficult to hit the correct icon.
There is one big problem with the quick launch, toolbar and notification area in XP and Vista and it's this that I believe Microsoft are trying to solve with the redesign in Windows 7. The problem is you can't fit much into the default Quick Launch and Notification areas.
So the way I see it is you have two options:
- Go the Windows 7 route and redesign the toolbar – FAIL.
- Make the toolbar 2 units high by default – this works a treat for me!
Let me explain why I don't like the new Windows 7 Toolbar:
- The new taskbar is to tall – way to tall. It's smaller than my current Vista taskbar because I have that 2 units high, but the height for 1 unit in Windows 7 is not far off the 2 unit Vista one, so that means when I set it to be 2 units high it's massive - stupidly massive. I'll explain shortly why I like the toolbar 2 units high.
- I've never liked the grouping option of the Taskbar. I see that's on by default again, you can switch that off, or to group when it's full.
What I also don't get is why when grouping is on and you only have 1 instance of the app do you just get the icon but when it's off you get the icon and the application name? Why not the icon and app name normally? Although if you do show the application title like we are use to it becomes ever more confusing as to how you “quick launch” an application.
Anyway, I can never find the running application I want when grouping is on. - Theirs not really a quick launch bar any more, you can pin your applications to the toolbar instead. These are full height icons taking up a lot of space (width and height) and then when you launch the application guess what, the icon stays where it is looking just like the launch icon, except when you click it again it actually minimises the window.
Now some applications are slow to load, some get messed up and load outside the screen area or minimise incorrectly/badly on start-up or go straight to the notification area on start-up you could end up in a big mess figuring out what's going on with the W7 way of taskbar launching.
And if you've launched an application from the taskbar and want to start a new session of it (say you want another IE 7 because you've got to many tabs open in the current IE7) it's really not obvious. You have to right click the icon and then choose the application name from the menu. novel! - The notification area, if you use it correctly it's great and sadly some apps abused it. Now for something like Dinner Timer Lite you really want that icon showing so you can send the running Dinner Timer Lite instance to the tray and hover over it to see how long you've got left quickly and easily, not click an up arrow then hover.
Other application change colour or blink to inform you of things, this can be really useful, sometimes the icon changes such as when you mute the speakers and it's useful to see that at a glimpse, but for most of the time it's easy to ignore the notification area if you are not interested.
Still at least with the notification area there is some hope as you can set it back to how it was, Except, now that one little icon takes a lot of space and if you make the toolbar 2 units high you can only get 2 icons vertically, so the waste of space isn't especially resolved.
Here's how I fix the Vista/XP ToolBar problems:
I make the taskbar 2 units high. Nice and Simple!
You get a lot more running applications in the taskbar before it gets overly cluttered (to the point that my head gets cluttered before the taskbar).
- You get 2x as many applications in the quick launch toolbar.
- You get 3x as many applications in the notification area.
- You get to see the date, time AND the day of the week in the clock area (which I really like).
On a default Windows Vista/XP set-up anything more than 6 icons in the notification area is a pain and similar for the quick launch area.
With 2 units high I have 18 quick launch apps, 13 notification icons, the date, time and day and currently 11 running applications without a problem.
Now I have a 22” wide-screen monitor so things are a little easier but I run exactly the same set-up at work where I have only a 19” square monitor and it works just as well, if not better as the quick launch and notification area don't take up hardly any room.
So you have two choices:
Either:
- Implement a really easy change to Windows 7 and make the toolbar 2 units high by default, keeping everything else exactly as it is in Vista and XP so building on what you know and not introducing new code.
- Change the taskbar to a new way that people have to adapt to, change the way you quick launch applications, change the way you see your notification icons, introduce new and most likely more complex code to the Windows 7 Code base which will not have been tested as well as previous versions.
Personally, I think that the XP/Vista taskbar works well and that making it 2 units high solves the problems with the quick launch and the notification area and making the change in Windows 7 just introduces code that isn't needed and with no doubt lots of new and fun bugs.
Fingers crossed that theirs an option to use the previous taskbar implementation in W7 or failing that some amusing adverts mocking the new taskbar so the pain has some good.
Tuesday, December 23. 2008
DNS Problems
Wednesday, December 17. 2008
MSBuild Item List Iteration
Sunday, September 14. 2008
Build Indicator - Part 3 (The software)
This is part 3 of the Build Indicator series. In this part I describe the communications library and using this as part of a MSBuild task as well as the test harness.
Previous Parts :
License : Please use, copy and modify this code as you wish, all I ask is that you don’t take credit for the bits I wrote. You should ensure it’s fit for purpose before using it.
The Arduino build indicator works via fairly simple RS232 communications so you can adapt your own build monitor (or other system) to use the indicator easily, or download the Arduino build indicator library and use/modify to suite your needs. You can also download the firmare for the Arduino from here.
The library consists of 3 projects at this time :
All the software described here is written in C# and targets .NET 2.0 so it should be usable from any .Net 2.0+ project, you can add the AnalysisUK.BuildIndicators.Arduino.dll as a reference or include the project and reference that as part of the solution.
In the download is a Arduino.sln Visual Studio 2005 solution file which includes the main communications project, the MSBuild task project and the Test Harness WinForms program.
This project consists of four classes and one enumeration.
Using the controller :
The below code is from the MSBuild task and shows how to use the command and controller.
When the SendCommand method is called with the command this is sent to the Arduino which updates the output corresponding to the ProjectNumber to show the Status.
Included in the download is a MSBuild task. This can be included in a MSBuild project and called to update the status.
You can either copy the targets and task reference from the TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj MSBuild file or use the file directly. You will need to correct the AssemblyFile location.
The ProjectNumber and CommPort should be updated to the Comm port the Arduino is on and the appropriate project number.
To call the sample MSBuild tasks from a Visual Studio command line use :
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuildGood
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuilding
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuildFailed
The MSBuild targets are defined as :
Also included in the project is a test harness, this is a simple WinForms application which again uses the main communications project and provides a simple UI to exercise the build indicator.
I'm currently working on including the Arduino build indicator into CCTray for use with CCNET so that will be available in a future posting.
Previous Parts :
- Part 1 : The Hardware
- Part 2 : The Firmware
License : Please use, copy and modify this code as you wish, all I ask is that you don’t take credit for the bits I wrote. You should ensure it’s fit for purpose before using it.
The Arduino build indicator works via fairly simple RS232 communications so you can adapt your own build monitor (or other system) to use the indicator easily, or download the Arduino build indicator library and use/modify to suite your needs. You can also download the firmare for the Arduino from here.
The library consists of 3 projects at this time :
- The main communications project.
- A MSBuild task project.
- A test harness.
All the software described here is written in C# and targets .NET 2.0 so it should be usable from any .Net 2.0+ project, you can add the AnalysisUK.BuildIndicators.Arduino.dll as a reference or include the project and reference that as part of the solution.
In the download is a Arduino.sln Visual Studio 2005 solution file which includes the main communications project, the MSBuild task project and the Test Harness WinForms program.
The Communications project :
This project consists of four classes and one enumeration.
- ArduinoController – this is the main class to use for communicating with the Arduino.
- ArduinoSimulator – this is a mock of the main controller class which does nothing other than to write the command to the debug window, but is useful when hardware isn't available. It is a subclass of the main ArduinoController class.
- ProjectStatus – this is an enumeration detailing the project status.
- CommandBase – this is a base class which all commands to be sent to the Arduino should inherit from. Currently there is only one command but it may well be extended in the future.
- SetProjectStatusCommand – this is a command class which should be sent to the Arduino via the controller to set the project status.
Using the controller :
The below code is from the MSBuild task and shows how to use the command and controller.
SetProjectStatusCommand command = new SetProjectStatusCommand(ProjectNumber, (ProjectStatus)Status);
using (ArduinoController controller = new ArduinoController())
{
controller.CommPort = CommPort;
controller.Open();
controller.SendCommand(command);
}
When the SendCommand method is called with the command this is sent to the Arduino which updates the output corresponding to the ProjectNumber to show the Status.
Using MSBuild :
Included in the download is a MSBuild task. This can be included in a MSBuild project and called to update the status.
You can either copy the targets and task reference from the TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj MSBuild file or use the file directly. You will need to correct the AssemblyFile location.
The ProjectNumber and CommPort should be updated to the Comm port the Arduino is on and the appropriate project number.
To call the sample MSBuild tasks from a Visual Studio command line use :
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuildGood
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuilding
MSBuild TestBuildStatusIndicator.proj /t:IndicateBuildFailed
The MSBuild targets are defined as :
<Project DefaultTargets="IndicateBuildGood" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<UsingTask TaskName="AnalysisUK.BuildIndicators.Arduino.MSBuild.BuildStatusIndicator" AssemblyFile=".\bin\Debug\AnalysisUK.BuildIndicators.Arduino.MSBuild.dll"/>
<PropertyGroup>
<ProjectNumber>1</ProjectNumber>
<CommPort>COM5</CommPort>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="IndicateBuildFailed">
<BuildStatusIndicator CommPort="$(CommPort)" ProjectNumber="$(ProjectNumber)" Status="1" />
</Target>
<Target Name="IndicateBuildGood">
<BuildStatusIndicator CommPort="$(CommPort)" ProjectNumber="$(ProjectNumber)" Status="2" />
</Target>
<Target Name="IndicateBuilding">
<BuildStatusIndicator CommPort="$(CommPort)" ProjectNumber="$(ProjectNumber)" Status="6" />
</Target>
</Project>
Using the Test Harness :
Also included in the project is a test harness, this is a simple WinForms application which again uses the main communications project and provides a simple UI to exercise the build indicator.
Future parts :
I'm currently working on including the Arduino build indicator into CCTray for use with CCNET so that will be available in a future posting.
Thursday, August 28. 2008
Dinner Timer Lite V1.1 Released – and it's Huge!
Literally, huge. Below is a photo of my 22” wide-screen monitor with Dinner Timer Lite running. As you can see it fills the screen nicely with a big font – now you can easily see Dinner Timer Lite from the other end of the kitchen or further.
before you ask, yes you can make it smaller!
Just in-case you are wondering, yes that is the snowman build indicator on the left and it's not lit up because the build machine wasn't running (saving a little electricity and reducing the heat in the office!).
There are a few other cool additions to V1.1, these include :
Added Twitter notifier – now notify your friends and family automatically when you start dinner, when it will be ready, tweet notifications when it's about to be ready, when it's ready and through Dinner Timer Lite's unique overrun timer tweet when the dinners burnt.
Here's screen shot of setting up the Twitter notifier to send out a message when the timer has overrun :
Here's a screen shot of my Twitter tweets. You can also follow me as BookSwapSteve on Twitter
I've also improved bubble notifications – Bubble and twitter notifiers now support text template replacements. Include any of the following for them to be replaced with the appropriate values when run : {{RunMins}}, {{StartTime}}, {{EndTime}}, {{MinsRemaining}}, {{MinsOverrun}}.
Additional sounds for the sound notifier including : Cow moo, Air horn, Alarm beep, Alarm clock beep, Alarm ring, All clear, Ambulance, Aooga horn, Boat air horn, Boing, Boing2, Boxing bell multi, Bullet ricochet, Buzzer, Buzzer 2, Buzzer 3, Buzzer 4, Buzzer 5, Buzzer heavy, Buzz through loud, Buzz thru and Chainsaw.
The time options available in the drop down list is now user configurable and includes the ability to name the times. e.g. you can enter a timer called "Pizza" and have it set as a 12 minute timer, the list will then show Pizza which can be easily selected and when the timer is started it will run for 12 minutes.
Here's a sample of modifying the time option to show pizza :
The options boxes have been resized for the default Windows Vista font size.
I've also added warnings for opacity settings where the timer may not be visible and a extra context menu item has been added to the notification area icon to reveal the timer if it is difficult to see. Both myself and a few others had managed to get Dinner Timer Lite to be so transparent that we couldn't find it to restore it.
I've also changed the installer to be a single exe so no unzipping required and the binaries and installer are digitally signed so you know their genuinely from me (Analysis UK).
Their are also various under-the-cover improvements to facilitate some new features in the next release, including the first stage of splitting out of the notifiers from the main application with the intention of allowing developers to create their own notifier plugins, but thats going to have to wait for a future version before it's fully implemented.
before you ask, yes you can make it smaller!
Just in-case you are wondering, yes that is the snowman build indicator on the left and it's not lit up because the build machine wasn't running (saving a little electricity and reducing the heat in the office!).
There are a few other cool additions to V1.1, these include :
Added Twitter notifier – now notify your friends and family automatically when you start dinner, when it will be ready, tweet notifications when it's about to be ready, when it's ready and through Dinner Timer Lite's unique overrun timer tweet when the dinners burnt.
Here's screen shot of setting up the Twitter notifier to send out a message when the timer has overrun :
Here's a screen shot of my Twitter tweets. You can also follow me as BookSwapSteve on Twitter
I've also improved bubble notifications – Bubble and twitter notifiers now support text template replacements. Include any of the following for them to be replaced with the appropriate values when run : {{RunMins}}, {{StartTime}}, {{EndTime}}, {{MinsRemaining}}, {{MinsOverrun}}.
Additional sounds for the sound notifier including : Cow moo, Air horn, Alarm beep, Alarm clock beep, Alarm ring, All clear, Ambulance, Aooga horn, Boat air horn, Boing, Boing2, Boxing bell multi, Bullet ricochet, Buzzer, Buzzer 2, Buzzer 3, Buzzer 4, Buzzer 5, Buzzer heavy, Buzz through loud, Buzz thru and Chainsaw.
The time options available in the drop down list is now user configurable and includes the ability to name the times. e.g. you can enter a timer called "Pizza" and have it set as a 12 minute timer, the list will then show Pizza which can be easily selected and when the timer is started it will run for 12 minutes.
Here's a sample of modifying the time option to show pizza :
The options boxes have been resized for the default Windows Vista font size.
I've also added warnings for opacity settings where the timer may not be visible and a extra context menu item has been added to the notification area icon to reveal the timer if it is difficult to see. Both myself and a few others had managed to get Dinner Timer Lite to be so transparent that we couldn't find it to restore it.
I've also changed the installer to be a single exe so no unzipping required and the binaries and installer are digitally signed so you know their genuinely from me (Analysis UK).
Their are also various under-the-cover improvements to facilitate some new features in the next release, including the first stage of splitting out of the notifiers from the main application with the intention of allowing developers to create their own notifier plugins, but thats going to have to wait for a future version before it's fully implemented.
Monday, August 25. 2008
Moving from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 on Plesk - welcome to Server Application Unavailable errors
Friday, August 22. 2008
Analysis UK email problems
Vista 64 Blue Screen Hell
I recently updated my development box to a nice new quad core processor and with it stuck in 8Gigs of ram. I would have been more than happy to stick with Windows XP as I had on my old dev box but the 32 bit version is limited to 4G (more like 3.5G) of ram so all that extra goodness would have been wasted, hence I crazily decided to opt for Vista 64.
What a mistake! It's like using Windows ME all over again and we all know what a terrible product that was.
So to start with the motherboard an Asus P5Q PRO for some reason doesn't support sleep which is a big thing with Vista, I would go off to have dinner and come back to find the PC rebooting because it had gone to sleep. Sadly I wasn't always that lucky – it would often corrupt the CMOS and loose the date/time. If I had one of my Arduino based projects such as the connected it would also be frozen at the Bios Legacy USB detect stage.
I can't really blame Vista for what is a motherboard problem so I've disabled the sleep function and replaced it on the Start menu with Shutdown. When I wrote LazyLoad I didn't think it would be useful on Vista because of the improvements Microsoft made – It hasn't taken long for me to realise LazyLoad is still well worth running on Vista!
So onto the real big problem I'm having, almost daily blue screen of death's. This appears to be caused by the ATI graphics card – a Radeon HD 3650, just great. I regularly get a blank screen followed by Vista telling me it's recovered from a stopped graphics driver. However almost daily the screens start blinking darkness and then when I've had enough time to glimpse at the work I'm about to loose it all goes blue claiming an ati driver failed.
Just to really annoy me when the machine reboots Vista prompts with it's “Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown” and gives me a “Check for solution” option, it then appears to do something, followed by quietly hiding it's self never to be seen again, not a sorry we couldn't find anything, or a try the vendors web site for the latest drivers, or a yep we know another ati driver problem, nope, it just disappears as if it's embarrassed and wants to quietly leave the room having wet it's self.
I've had ATI cards before and not liked them, I really should have known better. Whilst looking for the link for the 3650 on the ATI site the search summed ati up for me. I entered hd 3650 and hit enter to search, not realising I had to change the “Select Site:” drop down. I got a JavaScript box saying “Please select a site.” and they kindly cleared my search text so I had to enter it again (whilst not making the same mistake of hitting enter) and then select the ATI site. How could something so simple be so unfriendly?
And what's with the improved TCP/IP stack in Vista. I though networking with Vista was supposed to be much improved. If I watch a movie that's on another machine one of two things happens, either the file explorer will freeze and show the green progress bar whilst trying to browse the folders or when I finally open the file my whole PC will freeze whilst Windows Media player opens the file. And if the other machine is busy doing something like a backup I really know about it on my Vista box (BTW – often the other machine is a Vista box!). I thought with 4 cores a gigabit network and an improved TCP stack Vista would still be usable whilst it tried to sort out connections with networked machines. My old XP box with it's single processor was is so much better for networking.
As for the new “improved” windows explorer, I so hate it, I mean really hate it. If I'm trying to copy files or folders with Explorer in details view (which I prefer) from one location to another I regularly end up with them going into a sub folder of the destination because of the change in the way the hover selection works as it's really difficult to get exactly between the folders when dropping. As for default view (list view) that's just to annoying, You've got loads of extra column headings and if you have a long file name it's often obscured, it looks like you can resize the columns but that doesn't work – you have to change to details view to do that – it gets me EVERY time and annoys me intensely every time.
Is it just me or has the audio stuff got worse, my last box (XP) pushed out the audio via the SP/DIF and headphones socket at the same time, I can't see how to do that in Vista, so if I want to switch from headphones to speakers I have to stop what I'm listening to, change the default or use something like WinAmp's settings to change the output (not easy to get to) then change to the RCA Digital output. What a pain in the ****, I want both outputs together – is that such a stupid requirement? I wonder if that's another Asus special.
I'm so very glad FireFox remembers the pages I had open, all to often I've been part way through reading an article for the PC to blue screen on me and by the time I'm back up and running I've forgotten where I found the article. Fire up FireFox and restore - magic! I so wish IE did the same, especially as it's a lot less stable than FireFox and crashes it's self frequently.
So in conclusion, it's really great so much effort has gone into the Aero to make Vista look nice whilst introducing whole new instability issues, revaming Windows Explorer to take annoying to a whole new level whilst totally defeating usability and that the TCP has been speeded up to the point that Vista to Vista networking freezes the machine and browsing a file share regularly messes up, that's on top of the slew of security measures which resulted in me being unable to browse my NAS without having to get into the depths of Vista settings.
I appreciate most of the problems are actually hardware (MB/Graphics card) but it's still annoying to have seen so much effort go into making the thing look nice only to have it fall over, I've seen it all to often with various products where the manufacture has put lots of effort into making the thing look really nice but failed to make a usable product (more on that and my home automation problems latter). Take for example software products that have their window an unusual shape - I know instantly that I'm not going to be able to use it, all to often I've tried software where the products a funny shape and the functionality and usability of the product are just so poor – please please please lets get back to making usable products and get over our obsessive desire for things to look pretty whilst not worrying about being able to use them.
Well the good news is in the hour it's taken me to write this the machines not blue screened!
What a mistake! It's like using Windows ME all over again and we all know what a terrible product that was.
So to start with the motherboard an Asus P5Q PRO for some reason doesn't support sleep which is a big thing with Vista, I would go off to have dinner and come back to find the PC rebooting because it had gone to sleep. Sadly I wasn't always that lucky – it would often corrupt the CMOS and loose the date/time. If I had one of my Arduino based projects such as the connected it would also be frozen at the Bios Legacy USB detect stage.
I can't really blame Vista for what is a motherboard problem so I've disabled the sleep function and replaced it on the Start menu with Shutdown. When I wrote LazyLoad I didn't think it would be useful on Vista because of the improvements Microsoft made – It hasn't taken long for me to realise LazyLoad is still well worth running on Vista!
So onto the real big problem I'm having, almost daily blue screen of death's. This appears to be caused by the ATI graphics card – a Radeon HD 3650, just great. I regularly get a blank screen followed by Vista telling me it's recovered from a stopped graphics driver. However almost daily the screens start blinking darkness and then when I've had enough time to glimpse at the work I'm about to loose it all goes blue claiming an ati driver failed.
Just to really annoy me when the machine reboots Vista prompts with it's “Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown” and gives me a “Check for solution” option, it then appears to do something, followed by quietly hiding it's self never to be seen again, not a sorry we couldn't find anything, or a try the vendors web site for the latest drivers, or a yep we know another ati driver problem, nope, it just disappears as if it's embarrassed and wants to quietly leave the room having wet it's self.
I've had ATI cards before and not liked them, I really should have known better. Whilst looking for the link for the 3650 on the ATI site the search summed ati up for me. I entered hd 3650 and hit enter to search, not realising I had to change the “Select Site:” drop down. I got a JavaScript box saying “Please select a site.” and they kindly cleared my search text so I had to enter it again (whilst not making the same mistake of hitting enter) and then select the ATI site. How could something so simple be so unfriendly?
And what's with the improved TCP/IP stack in Vista. I though networking with Vista was supposed to be much improved. If I watch a movie that's on another machine one of two things happens, either the file explorer will freeze and show the green progress bar whilst trying to browse the folders or when I finally open the file my whole PC will freeze whilst Windows Media player opens the file. And if the other machine is busy doing something like a backup I really know about it on my Vista box (BTW – often the other machine is a Vista box!). I thought with 4 cores a gigabit network and an improved TCP stack Vista would still be usable whilst it tried to sort out connections with networked machines. My old XP box with it's single processor was is so much better for networking.
As for the new “improved” windows explorer, I so hate it, I mean really hate it. If I'm trying to copy files or folders with Explorer in details view (which I prefer) from one location to another I regularly end up with them going into a sub folder of the destination because of the change in the way the hover selection works as it's really difficult to get exactly between the folders when dropping. As for default view (list view) that's just to annoying, You've got loads of extra column headings and if you have a long file name it's often obscured, it looks like you can resize the columns but that doesn't work – you have to change to details view to do that – it gets me EVERY time and annoys me intensely every time.
Is it just me or has the audio stuff got worse, my last box (XP) pushed out the audio via the SP/DIF and headphones socket at the same time, I can't see how to do that in Vista, so if I want to switch from headphones to speakers I have to stop what I'm listening to, change the default or use something like WinAmp's settings to change the output (not easy to get to) then change to the RCA Digital output. What a pain in the ****, I want both outputs together – is that such a stupid requirement? I wonder if that's another Asus special.
I'm so very glad FireFox remembers the pages I had open, all to often I've been part way through reading an article for the PC to blue screen on me and by the time I'm back up and running I've forgotten where I found the article. Fire up FireFox and restore - magic! I so wish IE did the same, especially as it's a lot less stable than FireFox and crashes it's self frequently.
So in conclusion, it's really great so much effort has gone into the Aero to make Vista look nice whilst introducing whole new instability issues, revaming Windows Explorer to take annoying to a whole new level whilst totally defeating usability and that the TCP has been speeded up to the point that Vista to Vista networking freezes the machine and browsing a file share regularly messes up, that's on top of the slew of security measures which resulted in me being unable to browse my NAS without having to get into the depths of Vista settings.
I appreciate most of the problems are actually hardware (MB/Graphics card) but it's still annoying to have seen so much effort go into making the thing look nice only to have it fall over, I've seen it all to often with various products where the manufacture has put lots of effort into making the thing look really nice but failed to make a usable product (more on that and my home automation problems latter). Take for example software products that have their window an unusual shape - I know instantly that I'm not going to be able to use it, all to often I've tried software where the products a funny shape and the functionality and usability of the product are just so poor – please please please lets get back to making usable products and get over our obsessive desire for things to look pretty whilst not worrying about being able to use them.
Well the good news is in the hour it's taken me to write this the machines not blue screened!