March 2008 Entries
Not the delivery service (though I love them too), but Uninterruptible Power Supplies. I just had a circuit breaker blow three times (until I figured out what was causing the problem!), but nothing bad happened to my systems. Considering how much I always have running, just having the power disappear is a Very Bad Thing(TM). I recently bought a ~$30 UPS power supply which is more of a fat circuit breaker strip. It's not all that powerful, but it's more than sufficient to keep me going for five minutes while I reset a circuit breaker. What a great investment! Don't...
I was deploying some files to IIS on a Windows Server 2003 box and I ran into quite a problem. I kept getting an error: Ticks must be between DateTime.MinValue.Ticks and DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks. Parameter name: Ticks when I would try to hit some of the pages. It was clearly not code related, and the stack trace indicated a problem with the compiler itself. I found posts talking about this error when you used serialized objects between different versions of the .NET Framework (something to do with changes to the DateTime object from 1.1 to 2.0), but that clearly wasn't...
After a long delay, I've published another Coding 4 Fun article. This one is a good start toward optimizing Windows startup. It scans your Startup folder and will start the items at boot-time instead of Windows. The advantage is that it can insert a delay between each application, or even wait for an idle CPU before launching one. It uses user controls, a background worker, threading, and a number of other cool features. This will be my last XP/VS2005 article. Everyone should be on Visual Studio 2008 now! As for Vista, well I'll try to make things work in both...
Not to be too annoyingly persnickety (gotta love that word!) but I had to capture this wonderful ad showing on Buy.com this morning. Who wouldn't want to customize their own gamong PC? Or is Gamong an ethnicity perhaps and I just offended someone... Doh!
A few Saturdays ago I participated in an industry panel at a University of Iowa ACM IT event. We discussed the IT field and employment in the near-future. My big message was about software being made into discrete components, composable, and extensible. There are all sorts of hot new technologies on the web in terms of user-facing functionality, but in terms of IT effort, these are the things that I see creating value and leading to better software. The software (online or offline) that becomes the most successful is that which is the least restrictive. If you create a...
Well this gave me a chuckle this morning! It looks like the "Reliability analysis metrics calculation executable" isn't very reliable! I'm not even entirely sure what it was doing, but it happened during a file copy. Yes -- I tried to copy a file on Vista. I know that's not recommended without SP1 installed, but I'm that crazy risky kind of guy! I think to measure problems like these someone needs to create a "Reliability analysis metrics calculation executable reliability analyzer application." Phew. That's hard to say!