Give Our Abilities Time

catching up

2011-03-27T14:17:00.001-04:00

(I've tried to write this "catching up" post several times in the last two years but I clearly lack blogging discipline.)

Here are some things I have done / am working on / am thinking about, categorized by my usual obsessions:

Tablet / collaboration stuff:

· I now have a ThinkPad X201 Tablet at work, and just a few weeks ago expensed an Intel SSD and loaded our new corporate Win7 x64 image on it. It's incredibly fast and I can get almost 2 hours on the small battery, I'd probably get 6 to 8 on the big battery but haven't tested.

· I know I have been blogging for years about how SharePoint is a crappy repository for OneNote notebooks, but in the OneNote/SharePoint 2010 world, I can declare this fixed. My main notebook at work lives in SharePoint and it has NEVER locked up on me when every previous incarnation of SharePoint has within the first day locked up. And I have both my home PC and my tablet syncing this notebook at all times. Can't really comment on how stable it is with active multiuser editing, but for my needs it has been great.

Media Center / video conversions:

· I replaced my iPod 5G ("Video") with a 2nd-gen 32GB iPod Touch. In Apple's classic "whatever you buy now, suck it up and realize that something better will be coming out within 3 months" fashion, this purchase caused me to miss multitasking by a few months and the Retina display by about 18 months. I also began harboring iPhone envy because of the great browser and Facebook app (I shamefully admit that in summer 2009 it didn't really occur to me that an iPod Touch could run iPhone apps or be used as a browser) but patiently waited its release on Verizon. But now I hear that the June/July iPhone 5 release will be worth waiting for, and so I am waiting for it. If that release is AT&T-only, and its improvements pushed to Verizon like 11 months from now, I will have to think about what to do. I currently carry a Blackberry Tour along with the iPod Touch, pretty much everywhere, and I recognize that it's a little ridiculous to have both devices when my employer does not enforce the use of any particular device.

· This past summer, I replaced my Linksys DMA 2100 with an XBOX 360 Slim. My home network has had its ups and downs (wireless sometimes has issues, then I installed powerline and it was great for awhile but then starting crapping out during video playback, then I switched back to wireless and turned on WMM and things have been fine, except when my router (Linksys WRT610N) has run for about two months, heats up, and resets itself to factory defaults so it needs to be reconfigured) but the XBOX has been a much better extender than the DMA. Only issue is that I never turned off the DMA, so when I have network problems or problems with my Media Center PC, it can fail to log in. I also enjoyed playing the Call of Duty series, but am too old and unfamiliar with the controller to not get pwned online.

· My last post was pretty popular regarding MKV conversion to iPod but now it can be told: I use EncodeHD for all on-demand iPod conversion, and I stole the ffmpeg command line out of its log file to use to automate my MKV to M4V conversion for the iPod. Comment if you want the command line or just download EncodeHD, get a couple of MKVs of the shows you watch and convert them to your preferred format, and look at the command lines it chooses. They were all similar enough that I just use the same one.

· Since I have an XBOX now, I have an additional option for watching HD content when DVRMSToolBox fails to convert an MKV to DVR-MS. EncodeHD has a profile for an XBOX 360, which converts to an MP4 of some sort. This format is playable both in Media Center as well as through the XBOX native "video library" function. Since I have noticed some shows have a tendency to fail to convert in DVRMSToolBox, I adjusted my scripts to place these files in a folder instead of moving to the Media Center PC for conversion to DVR-MS. My technique for looking at a bunch of EncodeHD-generated ffmpeg command lines didn't work even for TV shows as these command lines were sufficiently different, and factoring in the occasional movie made it impossible to generate my own command line that worked consistently. Then I noticed something in a 2-year-old EncodeHD changelog, which is that EncodeHD can be launched from the command line to encode! So this is what I now do:

o SABNZBd post-processing batch files have some "rules" that send non-DVR-MS-encodeable files to an XBOX temp directory

o A Scheduled Task runs a batch file every 10m to check that directory for files; if they exist it launches EncodeHD to convert the file for XBOX

o That batch file then moves the MKV elsewhere in case something happens (it fails something like 25% of the time because it attempts to launch EncodeHD while the file is still being copied from the other PC, so it's not "complete" yet and EncodeHD doesn't know what to do with it)

Photo / sync / backup stuff:

· I am using the latest Windows Live Photo Gallery combined with Windows Live Mesh to replicate pictures among several PCs so that we can tag the best pictures, write commentary in the Caption field, and then post them to Flickr. What's new since my last post on the topic is that, besides being now having Windows 7 on all computers in the house, I have been using the native functionality of Photo Gallery to upload to Flickr. Except for a few times, though this has NEVER accepted the file name as the title of the picture in Flickr (it repeats the caption), so that I have to fix every picture after I upload it, which has begun annoying me enough recently that I am considering other tactics. But Photo Gallery has such a nice interface to find tagged items (e.g. I tag pictures to post with "flickr" so I can easily select just those pictures for upload) that I put up with it. Hoping for a fix.

· Live Mesh seems widely complained about on its MS forum but my complaint is one I don't think I've ever found another complaint about, let alone an explanation - it is incapable of recognizing file moves or reorganization or the bringing online of a new PC that already has a copy of those files. The effect is that I have a large number of duplicate, triplicate and in some cases quadruplicate pictures and I don't really know how I can efficiently get rid of them all without looking at each pair/threesome/etc. to make sure I'm not losing commentary or person or descriptive tags. This is one of my projects and I am making slow progress at it.

· I suppose everyone knows that Mozy jacked up their price from $55/yr "unlimited" to a pay-per-GB price. In my case, it will go up to $110 or something, which is more than I'm willing to pay. I actually went as far as to inventory what all of the 100GB or so I am backing up: 44GB of pictures, 38GB of videos, 11GB in My Documents, and I'm not sure what all else. Probably dealing with duplicates will save some space but not enough to not get bent over by the new pricing plan on Mozy. So I am not sure if I will find another cloud backup provider (my colleague who referred me to Mozy in the first place has switched to BackBlaze) or if I will find a small repository for My Documents and then continue to use Live Mesh to replicate the rest between PCs in my apartment and periodically take a hard drive to work or to our basement storage closet in case of fire or something.

converting DVR-MS/MKV to iPod

2009-03-14T15:13:00.006-04:00

As I mentioned in my prior post, I have been "broadcatching" HD content in x264/MKV format, and converting to DVR-MS to play on my extender, and so far I've been pretty happy with it. I do have to keep my eye on things more than I'd hoped but it's working fine.

However, I had to find a new way to convert downloaded MKV content to the iPod. (A 30GB "iPod Video" or "5G" device. It's a couple of years old but it has worked fine, and my birthday's coming up in five months and the iPod Touch will probably be reasonably priced or replaced with something even more technologically awesome, if my dear readers get the hint :D ) It so happened that I came into possession of a bunch of MKV files for a 10-year-old show I've been watching a lot of, with no XviD copies available online.

First attempt: SUPER

Thus I turned to SUPER as it is free and seems to convert anything to anything else one you figure out its many options. My first try used these settings, which I, for convenience's sake, exported as iPod_Video:

Output container: mp4
Output video codec: MPEG-4
Output audio codec: AAC LC
video size: 320:240
aspect: 4:3 (as I edit this after the fact, should've been 16:9)
frame/sec: 30
bitrate: 1248 (in retrospect, could've been lower)
options: Hi quality, top quality, stretch it
(audio) sampling freq: 44100
channels: 2
bitrate: 96

(I know it would've been easier to show the picture, but I don't want to confuse my family by using my flickr account which is typically used for showing my entire extended family and friends pictures of my son.)

These settings resulted in a 54MB file that had no sound (in WMP, I didn't check iTunes/Quicktime). Several other attempts (that I cannot now remember, as it's been five days since I started working on this) were similarly slow and unsuccessful.

Second try: iPodifier/ffmpeg

I then downloaded iPodifier and set it up to watch the Recorded TV directory, figuring that MKV files were automatically converted to DVR-MS via the method documented in my previous blog post, and then iPodifier could pick them up for conversion to iPod Video-compatible MP4.

Seemed simple but, when I launched it, this showed up in the log window over and over:

3/8/2009 6:17:23 PM : Transcoding started: ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0330pm{TV}.mp4"

3/8/2009 6:17:23 PM : Transcoding finished successfully in 0min

According to the wiki this is related to some sort of problem that mencoder is having with the DVR-MS file causing an infinite transcoding loop, the first of its known issues. I am having the second known issue but had already renamed the files, so I just tried with a renamed file. Same thing:

3/8/2009 6:50:47 PM : Transcoding started: ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

3/8/2009 6:50:48 PM : Transcoding aborted

So I checked what ffmpeg had to say for itself:

C:\Program Files\iPodifier>ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

libavutil version: 49.5.0

libavcodec version: 51.48.0

libavformat version: 51.19.0

built on Nov 18 2007 09:00:58, gcc: 4.2.1 [Sherpya]

Input #0, asf, from 'C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms':

Duration: 00:43:53.6, start: 0.240000, bitrate: 2265 kb/s

Stream #0.0: Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s

Stream #0.1: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 696x480 [PAR 320:261 DAR 16:9], 980

0 kb/s, 23.98 tb(r)

Output #0, mp4, to 'S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4':

Stream #0.0: Video: libxvid, yuv420p, 320x240 [PAR 4:3 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 20

0 kb/s, 23.98 tb(c)

Stream #0.1: Audio: libfaac, 48000 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s

Stream mapping:

Stream #0.1 -> #0.0

Stream #0.0 -> #0.1

Unsupported codec (id=0) for input stream #0.0

Apparently this file had some sort of conversion problem between MKV and DVR-MS. A different file from the same batch had AC3 audio and converted with the command line:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

I had to remove iPodifier's suggested "threads auto" option as that doesn't seem to work on my relatively recent build of ffmpeg (SVN-r16596-Sherpya). iPodifier was also making a mess of the filename so this was about the point at which I gave up on iPodifier and just used command-line ffmpeg.

The size was still tiny (70MB) and you could tell in iTunes that the quality was much worse than my ~320MB episodes converted from XviD using my old method.

I tried again with qscale 4 (iPodifier's "Best" quality) and the result was a 107MB file in ~44 minutes. I didn't even watch it (because I overwrote it accidentally in the next run).

I tried again with qscale 3, having found this article and noting that it seemed to be a better tradeoff between quality and size. Its result was a 140MB file. On this one, I noticed that in both QuickTime and when synced to the iPod the audio goes out of sync pretty early on, and also that the rendered video size was actually 426x240, not 320x240 as I had asked it to convert to. I guess I don't know what it ought to do in this case, but the program I've been using gives me a letterboxed 320x240. iTunes accepted the import of the video and the iPod showed it properly, but maybe the other program (which typically yields a ~330MB file) is inserting the black bars into the material itself, hence its larger size? Seems silly given that iTunes (or maybe the iPod itself) can handle the conversion.

Pressing on, I tried again with qscale 2, resulting in a 214MB file, and tried again with qscale 1, which created a 721MB file. Both looked great, not noticeably different from each other, but it was with this run that I noticed that both files had out-of-sync audio (though qscale 2 was further off).

So I decided to stick with qscale 2, but needed to dig into the settings to fix the audio. Here was the command line I started with, courtesy of iPodifier (minus the "threads auto" option that didn't work in my relatively recent build of ffmpeg):

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -vcodec libxvid -qscale 2 "S:\Temp\myfile-qscale-2.mp4"

My guess was that the "async" parameter was the problem. I also imagined that dts_delta_threshold had something to do with it but I don't actually understand at all what the description ("Timestamp discontinuity delta threshold") means. Somebody fixed something at the bottom of this page by setting it to 0 so that may be worth a try as well. Yeah, I'm not that scientific with this shit. I tried async 1 and dts_delta_threshold 0, but the sound was immediately, horribly off.

Thus I tried async 1 with the dtb_delta_threshold option left off (per this admittedly several-builds-old post on andy vt's forum). I threw in -threads 2 and it went blazingly fast, but the sound was still worse than with the original async 4800.

This post suggested using async 2 so I tried that (with dtb_delta_threshold turned off). No luck.

I tried once more with async 2 and dtb_delta_threshold set to 1, but that didn't work for me, either. I decided that maybe MKV --> DVR-MS --> MP4 was not that efficient. But what converted MKV to MP4?

Third try: XviD4PSP

Good old ViDEOHelp.com. They offered like 8 ways to convert MKV to iPod MP4 and the simplest used XviD4PSP. Though I had no need for any of the formats described in the name of this free product, and was worried that most people are converting for use with newer iPods than mine, I figured it was worth an hour of my time to try given the many frustrating hours I'd spent on the other programs. On my first try, I used these settings:

Format: MP4 iPod 5.0G
Denoise/sharpen: disabled
Brightness/contrast: disabled
Video encoding: x264 HQ Ultra (yeah, it bothered me that only x264 and XviD options were present, but I gave it a try)
Audio encoding: AAC-LC ABR 128k

This worked! The result was 320x184 (which I guess makes sense given the 843 x 480 source resolution) and it was only a ~115MB file, but the play was very smooth and the sound was pinpoint-accurate.

I looked at the output in the XviD4PSP window to see if I could reverse engineer the command lines and utilities used, but I'm not sure. Clearly it is using the x264 utility for video encoding, and it does appear to output its settings, but I can't tell what it uses for audio or for muxing video and audio back together.

The major downside of this utility is that it doesn't appear to have a queue -- it's just one video at a time. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is much slower than DVR-MS to MP4 via ffmpeg -- that took 7 or so minutes for the file I was using to test, whereas XviD4PSP takes about 30 minutes for that same file. So, I can't queue up a bunch before I go to sleep and have them waiting for me in the morning. Nor can I schedule them until I figure out the underlying utilities that provide the actual conversion.

Update: I received a comment pointing out that there IS a queue -- you load each file and then click Save, and then you can load another, and so on until you click Encode to convert the whole batch. Frankly I'm using EncodeHD now which supports drag and dropped files, and it does all its work through ffmpeg so it's pretty fast.

But, it works and the quality is good. After a week of trying other methods and failing, that's saying a lot.

--sbreck

even though I swore off Media Center…

2009-03-04T21:34:00.003-05:00

…and have been happy with the switch, there are a few reasons I still use Media Center:

occasionally there is a conflict between my shows and my wife's shows and she gets dibs because she records so little TV compared to me (and doesn't know how to download her own shows)
the DCT 6412 that RCN gave me in my HD DVR package only has a 120GB hard drive, so I have seen a few shows get dropped off for lack of space and feel like I'm constantly having to watch shows more frequently than I'd like to keep them there
I still don't have pay channels and Big Love is back on HBO

Thus, for the above reasons, I still have SABNZBd+ and NZB TV running to grab a few shows that I would otherwise have missed, or might like to watch on my iPod. Typically I grab XviD versions with MP3 sound, which as I have mentioned before work fine on my Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender.

But, maybe I have watched enough HD content in the last few months, but I find myself wishing I could watch higher-resolution stuff on the extender. I've been here many times and tried many different conversions, usually resulting in multiple steps and many hours of conversion followed by disappointment (skips, halts, no sound, way-out-of-sync sound). But today I noticed Ian's link to an Engadget HD tutorial on automatically downloading and converting 720p quality content via DVRMSToolBox, so that you can just watch it right in the Recorded TV and enjoy skip, FF, resume, etc. at the native resolution of the file. Seemed relatively simple so I gave it a try.

First things first, I knew I didn't need uTorrent or tvRSS since I have the aforementioned SABNZBd+ and NZB TV running to automatically download the TV shows I want. Thus my first step was to download and install DVRMSToolBox.

After messing around with the extensions to be watched (need to add .mkv to both Watched Ext and Video Types, not just the former as Engadget's instructions state), I ran into another problem which is that I think the wrong action ("nativecommdetect" which I'm assuming is the commercial skip processing) is running and my "convert MKV to DVR-MS - mencoder" is never running.

To troubleshoot, I:

deleted all actions besides my own new action in the Processing Condition Editor -- it still tried to detect commercials
changed Delay Processing from Find Commercials to Ignore (this worked, and as I scanned the comments I found the same advice)

I started the sample file (Big Love 3x06, 1,528MB) at 6:48 PM by dragging it into the Recorded TV directory, and it was done 50 minutes later, with a DVR-MS file waiting in the same directory. In my quick check, it looked fantastic and the audio synced perfectly.

So, later, my wife and I cracked open a bottle of prosecco (someone brought it to a brunch we hosted recently) and sat down to watch Big Love. Less than 10 minutes in, it froze, and then a few minutes later I was offered the chance to reconnect to the Media Center PC. I was unable to do so. After some troubleshooting and cursing, I found that the PC was totally locked up; not even the mouse would move. Coincidence? I hard-powered it off and tried again. I hate to use my wife as a guinea pig but I was pretty curious if this was a usable conversion of the show. Fortunately, I made it all the way through the episode without incident so I downloaded a couple more MKV files with which to test. Having made it through two more, I can say that this is working pretty well for me. Finally, reliable HD content on the extender without having to do a ton of crazy conversion steps!

Thus, my thoughts turned to automating it further, such that the conversion takes place once the download is complete. Since all that has to happen to convert the file is to move it into the Recorded TV directory, I didn't think it would be too hard since SABNZBd+ allows you to launch scripts. My read of the documentation didn't seem to make it quite clear what actions launch the script (besides telling it manually in the web console). Regardless, I set a scripts directory within SABNZBd+ (http://yourserver:yourport/sabnzbd/config/directories/) and created a batch file called moveMKV.cmd in there. The batch file contains the following:

@echo off

echo moveMKV.cmd starting against %3...

if not exist %1\*.mkv goto :nomkv

echo ...moving %1\*.mkv to Recorded TV...

cd %1

move %1\*.mkv "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV"

echo ...moved

goto done

:nomkv

echo nothing to move

:done

echo ...done.

exit

Marvel at my batch file skills. Um, anyway, if it's not evident, it looks in the path of the newly downloaded file (%1) and if there's an MKV file in there, it moves it to the Recorded TV directory. %3 is the name of the job (which should be "Big Love 3x06" in the example) -- I'm just using it so I know what's running. To test, I just created a fake directory and fake MKV file somewhere and ran moveMKV.cmd twice. It worked both times. I think I might have confused the hell out of DVRMSToolBox with the fake MKV file, though, as it just sat there logging "Waiting to process file:" over and over until I deleted the file.

Then, I turned the batch file on by going to the Switches page (/sabnzbd/config/switches/) and choosing moveMKV.cmd as the Default user script (2nd last option on the right). To test, I searched Newzbin for a small x264 file and downloaded it. The script worked on the first try and moved the MKV file into Recorded TV as I'd hoped, at which point DVRMSToolBox's FileWatcher picked it up. Sweet!

Since I figured this out and wrote up the steps, it's been a couple of days and I've watched a couple more files without any hiccups. The picture is great, the sound is great, and the files start up much faster than XviD files. And the extender seems a lot more reliable and less likely to crash playing DVR-MS Recorded TV than lower-quality XviD files. The only downside is that the XviD content takes like 7 minutes to download and then you can immediately watch it, so it's closer to instant gratification than downloading a big MKV that takes 25 minutes, and then converting it for an hour. But when it's fully automated to happen in the middle of the night, so that stuff is waiting for you, it's really great, and I find myself watching stuff on the extender that I already have on my DVR just to avoid fast-forwarding through commercials...

Enjoy,

--sbreck

Windows Live Photo Gallery

2009-02-10T00:14:00.002-05:00

Since I'm the father of a 20-month-old boy, I take a lot of pictures, and put them up on Flickr for sharing with family members. My home PC is on Vista and so is my work tablet, so I've been using Windows Photo Gallery to tag the pictures with tags relating to people, places and events, and then tagging the best with a "flickr" tag, dragging these into Flickr Uploadr, writing up some commentary, and uploading them. My pictures are all stored in the default location in Windows and that directory is shared with my work user and my wife's user account on her (XP) laptop.

Every so often I get burned out on choosing pictures and writing commentary but the relentless demands of my wife and mother-in-law for fresh pictures never cease. So I usually still have to choose the pictures to show because my wife doesn't have Photo Gallery, and then I use Outlook to resize them and e-mail them to her, while she writes the commentary in GMail, sends it back to me, and then I paste it into Flickr Uploadr, one picture at a time. This does save me time because I don't have to write the commentary, but there has to be a more efficient way.

Besides this, and more importantly, our son has grown interested in pictures of himself and his relatives and friends, to the degree that he tells us "find picture of Oskie [his nickname for himself] pouring cat food at Grammy's house" or "picture of Oskie and Grammy and Mommy in the playroom". The way I had tagged everything made it pretty easy to do that search, though as has been noted in many internet comments, there was no good way to do an "AND" search as would be most efficient for my son's two requests -- if you search for Grammy Mommy it is as if you did Grammy OR Mommy and you get every picture with one or both of them in it. Clicking on the tag for one person and then using the search field to find the other person is how you solve that.

Since my wife has XP on her laptop, I also had to find something that was like Windows Photo Gallery but worked on XP. Windows Live Photo Gallery seemed to fit the bill so I installed it on all three machines. The Vista machines knew where the pictures should live, and I added my share to my wife's laptop. It began to process the pictures and build the list of tags and, after many hours, it seemed to have all the tags are in place.

First impressions were that Live Photo Gallery was a smarter and fancier version of Photo Gallery, with better editing tools and the whole People Tags thing, and it had the added benefit that it actually ran on my wife's XP PC.

However, after a few days of trying to tag pictures on my laptop and home PC and checking to see what syncs, I came to the conclusion that if you share a directory, you can only set People Tags on the machine on which the directory is shared. Using my laptop to tag people in pictures in the share sometimes set them, sometimes required dropping back to the gallery and hitting F5 a bunch of times on both computers before they set, and sometimes actually removed all the tags from the pictures.

This really started to piss me off and an earlier draft of this blog post had a long rant about it, when finally I took a breath, sat back, and asked myself if I was trying to make the program do something it wasn't meant to do, when in fact what the program wanted me to do was staring me in the face. So I set up Gallery Sync between my laptop and home PC, which ties into sync.live.com (the former FolderShare). I connected the laptop and desktop via crossover (the wireless router is in another room) but could see that they were syncing at like 10Mbit over wireless, so I turned off wireless and just copied all the stuff over from the laptop manually. Sync was smart enough to figure out that I did that, and just checked everything once I turned wireless back on and Sync could sign into Live. I can't blame Sync for not knowing that the private IP address was the faster network to connect to my desktop PC.

And, now all the People Tags work great, and Sync really seems to sync changes within 10 seconds, which is less time than it took to make one Live Photo Gallery library see the changes made to its underlying files from another machine.

One problem I saw tonight is that some videos and pictures ended up with the wrong "date taken," 1/31, and I can't figure out why this could be or how to fix it besides figuring out the date each actually was taken and fixing it myself. Even odder, the files are fine in the source directory -- I even renamed some of them and saw that they resynced in the little Activity window, but they still have the wrong date on my laptop.

I've also played with the Flickr upload but I'm not sure I've saved a step. As described many, many words ago in my first paragraph, I tag pictures so I can find them later, and if they are flickr-worthy I tag them with flickr. What I used to do was then drag this bunch into Flickr Uploadr, select them all and tag them with Oscar (supposedly there are a few viewers of my photostream who subscribed to this tag though I suspect there's just one and his name is Matt and he lives in Boston and if I told him that I almost never post anything on flickr besides pictures of Oscar my full photostream feed would probably suffice), name each picture and write commentary, and then upload the batch. Now I can type into the "caption" field in the same program I tag them with, which has the added benefit of being searchable later down the line. Then again, take a look at this blog very entry -- I'm not known for brevity and this is true of my flickr commentary as well. There is a couple-sentence limit on the Caption field in the picture so I ran out of that. I also am not sure what to do about the title. A clever or cute title is key to a well-received flickr picture but I'm not quite sure I want to rename the file given my (justified) lack of trust in Windows maintaining an accurate Date Taken for the life of the file. IMG_0540 or whatever places the file in a sequence that will always exist (until I get another camera as I just did, but, what can you do). So when the pictures are uploaded to flickr from Live Photo Gallery I have to create titles for them, finish my captions if they got cut off, delete all the tags and replace them with Oscar (again, I can't blame Live Photo Gallery for my use case, which is to have "private" tags in Windows and a far more limited set of "public" tags). Still, I could still use Uploadr but I'll stick it out with Live Photo Gallery for the next batch and see whether its advantages (of having the commentary local and searchable) outweigh the disadvantages of requiring post-processing. (Oh, and it takes like 20 seconds to log into flickr when you click Publish to Flickr.)

Finally, after all these years of thinking I was too smart for automated sync programs for your camera, I decided what the hell, I'll let Live Photo Gallery figure out which pictures are the latest for me, and put them in the right place. The first sync didn't know which pictures were newest and created a lot of duplicates in the directory. There should probably be a setting that figures that if the same file with the same Date Taken exists in the directory to which you're copying it, it shouldn't copy over those files. But I used DOS FIND to make a textfile of every file with a (2) in the name and then made a batch file from it which moved everything to a temporary directory (from which I could delete them). Incidentally, Vista is an asshole when it comes to searching -- *(2).JPG does not find any files called IMG_1234 (2).JPG as you would expect. Neither does "dir *(2).jpg" so maybe parentheses are a meaningful wildcard of some sort. Anyhoo, the next time I used Live Photo Gallery to import pictures it properly chose just the newest ones, so I guess it keeps its own records of when an image was imported rather than looking at what's in the directory to which it's importing. I would also like to import pictures from my laptop but suspect I won't be able to sync the two galleries that closely such that imports from camera to one gallery are recorded in the other gallery. That, I suppose, argues for doing it based on the contents of the destination directory rather than a separate database. But I'm willing to risk deleting extras and try it.

2008: the year in complaints

2009-01-03T00:56:00.002-05:00

Having a son has really cut into my blogging but a weight has hung over my head since I noticed a week or so ago that I actually have 10 subscribers on Google Reader. Instead of writing some long-ass blog entry with detailed, researched complaints, here are some short ones:

Treo and Palm in general -- that company is dead. I switched to Blackberry. The incredible stability of the Verizon Blackberry 8830 has been amazing compared to the Treo 600, 650, and 700p I suffered with for four years.
Windows Media Center -- I actually still use it but not to record TV. I got an HD DVR from my cable company for $9/mo and there is no way that will ever exceed all the money I spent on Media Center (PC, OTA HD tuner, extender, hard drives, antennas for OTA HD, etc.) and I still only get one HD channel reliably. And the SD cable picture sucked. When my cable company finally switched to digital (e.g. scrambled) cable it was time to choose Media Center or choose against Media Center. I chose against and so far, I miss 30-second skip (have to fast forward through commercials now) but other than that I have a much better picture and much more reliable recordings and behavior.
Motorola S9 Bluetooth headphones -- these are cool and I got them with gift certificates so I'm not, like, burning with anger at these flaws, but I'm hard pressed to find situations in which the music stream doesn't skip. And, Blackberry's media player won't play audio through the S9 when playing a video, which was a huge disappointment (I was hoping to stop using the iPod and to just use these on my BB to watch videos). And, the iPod connector thing is so flaky that for days I didn't think it worked with my model of iPod (G5 Video). (The truth is that you have to wake up the iPod from deep suspended mode (where it shows the Apple logo to boot up) with the Bluetooth adapter connected, then play some music, and only then can you play video. If you let the music or video playing stop, you can't get it to start the Bluetooth thing again.) I like the idea of having these lightweight headphones that can play music on my Blackberry, and sometimes it works great (like if you are standing still on the subway, and turn off the Blackberry's cellular antenna) for music, and at the gym it is useful to go cordless with the iPod, but the connection is just flaky. I will someday get an iPod Touch but I do hope that it has A2DP Bluetooth built in by that point, working with video.
Converting video -- I do this a lot as I grow obsessed with a TV series, buy the DVD or download all episodes from the newsgroups, and want to watch them on Media Center Extender at home or on iPod on my commute or on the treadmill at the gym. For the extender, make sure you get XVID video and MP3 audio. XVID + AC3 = pitch-shifted audio with silence every 5 seconds. (I heard that if you used stereo RCA jacks AC3 would be fine but that seems like a pain when I have an expensive Yamaha YSP amp with a coax digital connection which works fine for everything else.) So, basically no HD unless you find WMV content specifically converted for Xbox but I've found that can skip or have problems as well on the generally underpowered extender. For iPod, I use this random Aimersoft thing that has worked great (though not with AC3). Since I have to convert AC3 stuff to MP3 with AutoGK for the extender anyway, that leaves the extra step as conversions for the iPod. But basically it means that my PC is typically running some conversion process at all times.
ThinkPad X60 Tablet with Vista -- This is my work PC and has been for close to two years now. I am growing to hate it but I'm not sure what would be better given that the weight, the battery life with the big 9-cell battery, and the 1400x1050 12" screen are all great. Wireless is flaky as hell (lately I can't switch it off with the hardware switch and then get it working again without a reboot), docking takes minutes and it never remembers that the monitor extends to the left, and the fingerprint reader only lasts for about 6 sleep/wake-up cycles before it is no longer recognized. That happens with a lot of stuff. I am rebooting every other day these days and that's BS. If anyone has suggestions on a business tablet that is a real speed improvement with equivalent weight and screen resolution, I'm all ears.

I have a much longer entry about the Treo/Blackberry thing among my OneNote pages here but I'll save that for another time or maybe it will never leave the drafts. I'm going to try to blog more and write less in 2009. Happy New Year,

--sbreck

Canon video conversion revisited

2008-02-17T12:56:00.005-05:00

This is a follow up to my original post on converting videos from my Canon camera as, searching for something else, I came across this post by Omar Shahine on the same subject. As I was finding it very time-consuming to convert my videos one at a time with AutoGK (so they would play on the DMA 2100), and I ended up with something that was almost the same size and had the risk of not playing on the extender, I thought I would use a command-line script as he suggests:

cscript.exe "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\wmcmd.vbs" -loadprofile "C:\Users\sbreck\Documents\Canon.prx" -input "s:\temp\Oscar.new" -output "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\"

(Refer to Omar's post for links to Windows Media Encoder, the script, and workable settings for Canon.prx.)

Unfortunately, launching cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs crashes "Microsoft ® Console Based Script host".

For the sake of expediency, I turned to Charlie Owen's entry that shows a graphical method to do the bulk of my conversions, using Omar's settings, and that got me through the bulk of my conversions. However, I do like the idea of having conversions without me ever having to worry about them again, and I like even better the idea of picking up a bit of scripting, so I returned to Omar's solution.

Fortunately, the cscript.exe crash is easy to resolve. Read this KB article, and quickly you will see that it is a Vista / WME9 problem. Then install the hotfix linked there.

Now, the process. I have, under the default Videos directory in my profile, a directory called Oscar, 'cause that's the name of my infant son who is the subject of all these videos. I further have subdirectories called iPod and Original, because I'd like the main subdirectory to contain WMV videos suitable for playing on the DMA 2100 Media Center Extender, and I have a packrat mentality when it comes to digital media which drives me to amass more and more hard drive space for things I deem irreplaceable, such as unconverted Canon videos in Motion JPEG format. Anyway, I'd like to move these videos off the camera into a holding directory, place the converted WMV version in the main Oscar share, and then move the original to the Original subdirectory. And then back them up since you can never have enough copies of your kid's videos (and because I share out the backup for Media Center viewing because the backup server is always up).

To do this, I made a batch file that contains this:
@echo off
S:
cd \temp\Oscar.new
if not exist *.avi goto nonew

echo converting movies...
cscript.exe "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\wmcmd.vbs" -loadprofile "C:\Users\sbreck\Documents\Canon.prx" -input "s:\temp\Oscar.new" -output "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\"

echo moving originals to appropriate location...
move *.avi "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\!Original"

echo launching SyncToy to back everything up...
net use \\server\share /user:sbreck mypassword
if not exist \\server\share\some_file_that_exists goto done
"C:\Users\sbreck\AppData\Local\SyncToy\SyncToy.exe" -R"BackupVideos2"
goto done

:nonew
echo no new movies to convert
goto done

:done
pause
exit

and scheduled it to run every night at 4AM. My test runs were successful and so was a job I left in Oscar.new to test the scheduled task. So, now I just load the videos in there, and late that night they're converted and backed up automatically. Much slicker than any manual solution.

--sbreck

Since this is incidentally related to my Linksys DMA 2100 purchase, I will include it with the other postings:

DMA 2100 initial impressions

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

Canon video conversion revisited (this post)

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

2008-01-20T20:57:00.002-05:00

Late into the first night of DMA 2100 ownership, after setting it up and writing my first blog entry / review, I took the somewhat definitive step of moving my HP z552 back to my office so we could enjoy a living room without the incessant fan noise of the z552 and its sick-sounding USB hard drive companion. I continued to test, tweak and research the DMA 2100 and can report some additional findings:

Zoom not working on non-broadcast materials (XviD stuff from Video Library):
This guy suggested that the component video hook-up was the problem; when my HDMI cable showed up I found that it was not. Information \ Zoom does not do anything with videos in the Video Library in component or HDMI mode.

Xvid start delay:
According to TGB, this is very common. To me, it's not a big deal, a bigger deal is the delay in changing channels, but so far the primary DMA 2100 user in my apartment hasn't noticed that so if she isn't complaining, I'm not complaining.

Audio drop-outs:
I have noticed a problem with XviD more annoying than the start time. I have been watching Deadwood obsessively, and converted a bunch of, uh, downloaded episodes so I could watch them on my iPod on my way to work. On my commute I can watch about 15 - 20 minutes of Deadwood, so if I start one in the morning, and watch more on the way home, then I might want to finish it in the evening, so I'll launch it on the TV and skip ahead 40 or so minutes. Unfortunately, my Deadwood episodes consistently have audio that drops out every 8 seconds or so. Usually this problem seems to be with AC3 audio content, but GSpot shows that these episodes are just normal XviD and MP3, and should play the same as everything else. I was able to successfully watch most of them after converting them with AutoGK (just, literally, not changing anything except maybe the MP3 audio bitrate), but the season/series finale, which I am 12 minutes into, is still having the dropping audio problem. Not sure what the problem is but I will continue to investigate.

Network speed:
After a day or so of DMA 2100 ownership, I found XviD videos to be unplayably slow, and even recorded TV was extremely sluggish (taking seconds to register the skip). The reason, as I determined by going to the Network Test thing in Tasks, was very poor network performance. The first day it didn't give me any trouble but by the second day Network Test only showed 2 to 3 bars, below the "acceptable for TV" threshold. I remembered that the DMA came with a printed piece of paper saying that the MCE PC might have problems on Gigabit networks without following a certain KB article, but since I couldn't find the piece of paper, I figured it was far easier to pull the MCE PC's network cable out of my Gigabit switch and into my 100Mbit switch. This I did, and found my network problems resolved and the playing of recorded TV far snappier. (Xvid was still messed up when I tried to forward to 40mins on the sample Deadwood 3x04.)

Music:
A commenter noted problems with album art and other metadata that I haven't seen, but yesterday and today I've been listening to music (specifically the new Black Mountain record "In the Future", which is really growing on me, and I'm also obsessively playing the song "Dunwich" on the latest Electric Wizard record "Witchcult Today") and have seen a problem several times now. Stopping a song doesn't "take" -- you are listening to music, press stop, the song stops, and then you press the green button, and after a few seconds the song starts playing again. Once this happens, you can't press stop to make it stop; it's like it's playing in some stealth mode that you can't interrupt. I've been going to Tasks and choosing Close, which logs the extender out of the MCE PC, and then logging back in, but of course I shouldn't have to do that. I suspect playing a video or going to Live TV would stop it also, but haven't checked.

--sbreck

P.S. I am slowly assembling posts on the DMA 2100 from random problems, annoyances, bugs and fixes that I see. I'll keep posting them when a fully formed post on one or more issues appears, and will update this ending as I see them:

DMA 2100 initial impressions

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

Canon video conversion revisited

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

2008-01-13T23:14:00.002-05:00

Another step in the many changes I plan following the install of the Linksys DMA 2100 media center extender is to bring HDTV back into the system. Obviously Microsoft rolled over for the cable industry in disallowing CableCard or any other legal method of displaying broadcast HD content besides over the air HDTV, so I had to reintroduce a DViCO Fusion HDTV 5 USB Gold to my hp z552 after banishing it to my gaming PC awhile back. The problem was that the z552 would get so overheated from the processor-intensive act of showing or, god forbid, recording HDTV over the air that you could barely hear the TV over the fan noise. Now that I have an extender, I'm trying again.

First I downloaded an updated driver for my Fusion HDTV box and installed it on my Media Center PC. Then I added the tuner in Media Center (it was automatically detected along with the channel names). Then I ran through the digital antenna setup.

In case I haven't done this to death in other posts, here is a list of channels that work if you are on the Upper West Side with a west-facing window that looks into your neighbor's window, 12 feet away, and has a slight northern view if you crane your neck to the right:

channel	description	status
1021	WCBS-DT	decent HD signal
1041	WNBC-DT	slightly pixellated HD signal but it's working
1051	WNYW-DT (Fox)	nice HD signal but of course then when I went to record the new Terminator show it failed -- but then I manually recorded it without incident
1071	WABC-DT	works, I think it's HD
1091	WWOR-DT	not sure if it's HD but it works
1111	WPIX-DT (The CW)	nice HD picture
1251	WNYE-DT	works and is widescreen but the picture wasn't HD
1311	WPXN-DT	works but the program isn't HD and it occasionally pixellates
1411	WXTV-DT	no TV signal, removed
1471	WNJU-DT	no TV signal, removed
1501	WNJN-DT	no TV signal, removed
1681	WFUT-DT	good signal (though not HD) and in Spanish. they were playing "The Legend of Drunken Master" though so that's cool :)

(In other words, this is a list that I made for myself to know what channels to remove that you folks can look at or scroll past, wondering why the hell you read navel-gazing blogs like this in the first place. Probably because you searched Google for "DMA 2100 HDTV OTA" or whatever the hell term landed you here. Welcome!) There were other channels that the digital antenna setup showed had very poor signal strength so I left them off. Let me note that this is much better than it used to be. Maybe the new 2.63 driver is more tolerant of bad signals? I have the same Terk V55 sitting straight up in my window the same way I've had it for a long time, so maybe the weather was conducive to HD OTA signals tonight or something.

Anyway, I scheduled "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles", or whatever it's called, tonight, but unfortunately, Media Center threw a No Signal error right at 8PM. But when I went to the channel, it played fine, and when I pressed Record, it recorded the whole show. There were like two or three stutters in the recording but otherwise it looked and sounded great -- since I never download HD content and gave up on OTA a year or so ago I forget how good it looks. And having the computer recording the HD in one room while a different purpose-built device (the DMA 2100) renders it in another room means that you don't get the sense of an overheated engine or whatever the z552 sounds like when all its fans are blowing at high speed. It was a pleasant surprise to find that the DMA 2100 really handled the HD content without any complaints or stuttering (aside from what I just mentioned which I think was a signal, not DMA processing, problem). If only the writers' strike was over for the shows we watch, I'd be switching all my recorded series over to OTA HD immediately!

--sbreck

DMA 2100 initial impressions

Converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

Canon video conversion revisited

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the Linksys DMA 2100

2008-01-13T15:41:00.002-05:00

Update: I suggest looking at my follow-up post for a far more efficient way to do this.

-------

I have been trying to resolve a critical problem with the new Linksys DMA 2100 media center extender -- namely, that it does not play videos of my 7-month-old son that I take with my Canon camera. These videos are AVIs in "Motion JPEG" format, with PCM audio.

First, I used something called Aimersoft Video Converter, which is sort of a shitty package but has typically worked OK when converting downloaded stuff to iPod MP4 format. When I converted my camera videos to Xvid, they had audio that was just periodic clicks. I tried different audio settings in Aimersoft with Xvid but no luck. I tried converting them to WMV, but then they didn't play at all -- the extender threw a codec error.

I thus googled "convert Divx to Xvid media center extender" or something like that and found AutoGK, which actually had an option entitled "Standalone" for standalone players, with a sub-choice for "MTK/Sigma". I remembered reading chrisl's post on TGB which noted that the DMA has a Sigma chip while researching the DMA before buying it, so that seemed like the move for me. I thus got it and converted a video, and to my delight, it worked just fine. I then converted a bunch of others and unfortunately, none worked -- the audio kept clipping and echoing and was generally unlistenable. I remembered that I used CBR 128Kbit audio for the first conversion, and "automatic" for the rest. Thus, here is a working method of conversion of home videos for the DMA 2100 (short attention spans should focus on the items in bold):

Download and install AutoGK
You'll have to play with "Predefined size" in the output size settings but my videos are like 15MB to maybe 350MB so I chose "1/4 CD (175MB)" for those that are below that number.
- Note: Unfortunately, about a third of the videos seemed to end up with the audio cutting out and the picture becoming choppy partway through. The common thread was that the converted video ended up larger than the original.
- So if you only have small batches of similar sizes, I suggest setting the output size to be a custom size equal to its current size. For me, that always meant a slightly smaller size, and a video that played without any problems.
I clicked Advanced Settings and chose "CBR MP3, 128 kbps" since Auto gave me the screwed-up audio described above. For video, I used what I think are the defaults, "Auto width" and XviD
I pressed Ctrl-F9 and there was the key setting in the bottom right: "Enable standalone support" and the "MTK/Sigma" chipset.

As I create similarly-sized versions of original videos, I have to think about how much of an "electronic packrat" I am going to be. If I have DivX conversions of my originals that are approximately the same size, do I need to keep the Motion JPEG originals? I keep iPod copies because all of them so far are like 700MB. But another 5.5GB of movie files, when my kid's only 7 months old, indicates that I'll have like a terabyte of kid videos including the multiple copies by the time he's 3. That's not including the nightly backup copy I make to my VMware ESX server. Eh, if I run out of disk space, I'll buy some more. Hopefully upon reading this my wife will agree :D

----------

As an aside, it would seem that the primary function of AutoGK is for the conversion of DVDs into AVI format. Since the DMA 2100 doesn't play DVDs itself nor stream them from the Media Center, this also had a slight impact in that we can't play the two Baby Einstein DVDs that we occasionally bust out every other week (we are that sort of enlightened Upper West Side parent that strives to avoid parking our son in front of the TV). I ripped them to DVR-MS using CloneDVD and they played fine on the physical media center, but upon testing it yesterday morning I noticed a slight electronic hiss/rasp in the background. I thus followed these instructions and re-converted it just now. (Took just under an hour for two passes against 1/2hr of video. Hmm.) The result was a 400MB AVI (as opposed to a 1.12GB DVR-MS). On the PC, this file played just fine, with fine audio and video. On the DMA 2100, it also played just fine, albeit with a 5- to 10-second lag before it started playing (same as most other XviD content I've tried on the DMA) and also with parts cut off in "Zoom 2" mode. Ah well, for this, I doubt a 7-month-old baby is going to care. I converted the other Baby Einstein DVD and put them on the shelf, where they will remain forever.

--sbreck

DMA 2100 initial impressions

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

Canon video conversion revisited

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender

2008-01-08T00:24:00.002-05:00

I've been waiting for a few months and my wait is now over -- the Linksys DMA 2100 was finally released. Dell has it for $250, but Amazon didn't; too bad 'cause I have Amazon Prime (free 2-day shipping) for free this month. Anyway, I ordered it New Year's Eve, and it was delivered today.

In my pre-purchase research, I noted from the Linksys product page that it has an HDMI connection, which is obviously the desired way to connect to the TV. Unfortunately, I didn't have a cable so I popped my 7-month-old Oscar into a Baby Bjorn and set out for Radio Shack. WTF? No way am I paying $80 for an HMDI cable. And they have $130 HDMI cables? Who in hell would pay that? I hopped on the subway down to 79th Street and went over to Circuit City to find -- the same thing! Fucking Monster cables for $100+! Even the cheap cables, hidden over on the other side of the store, were $55! I'm sorry, but I'm too damn cheap to pay that for any cable. I walked up to Circuit City on 86th (by this time Oscar had fallen asleep) and they had $80 RCA (brand) cables! Fuck that, some Googling showed practically the same damned cable from Monoprice, who everyone loves, for $4.50 plus $2.50 in shipping and handling. What a scam these HDMI cables are! Even Radio Shack, who I used to think of as trustworthy and where I spent many a happy childhood hour, has gotten in on the scam.

Further research led me to sound output -- it has a digital coax output and my brand new Yamaha YSP-800 has one as well. This was all pre-arranged before the YSP-800 was allowed for purchase. I'm not entirely sure what to say about this thing but once I get rid of the extremely loud HP z552 and put it back in my office I'll have a better sense. So far I feel like it's been a good purchase, but there's still some weird audio nuances that I was trying to solve with surround sound, mainly having to have the thing turned all the way up to hear dialog but then being blasted out of my seat by music or sound effects. It's better with the YSP than with the 2.1 speakers I have been using but it will be easier still to tell once the z552 moves out with all its loud fans blowing all the time.

Additional items that helped my research were this TGB thread full of generally good reviews, which noted that the remote has a learning feature, so it could work the speaker volume and turn the TV on and off, and that 100Mbit (as it is not a Gbit device) is fine for streaming HD content. Some people said the remote sucks, and suggested the Logitech Harmony, but I figured I'd try it first before committing the money. (I don't love the remote because it does seem to miss one out of maybe like 10 button presses, but it hasn't been annoying enough to ask for additional monies to spend.) Ed Bott also wrote a nice review so that was all I needed to hear to go ahead and buy the thing. (He didn't mention the remote.)

totally as an aside:

TGB thread on ripping DVDs; I should do this for kiddi DVDs because we'll lose that functionality and for ease of use

The DMA 2100 showed up today and I set it up before dinner. Since my HDMI cable hadn't shipped yet (should have thought about that when I ordered) I had to go component video. Initially it looked kind of crappy but it picked 480p mode, and I was able to set it up in 1080i mode on my TV (Proview RX326, a 32" LCD with a purported 1366 x 768 resolution) and it looked reasonably clear. The colors seem a little washed out compared to how they look on the media center PC directly through DVI --> HDMI, but videos look fine. Supposedly when I attach it to the TV via HDMI it will automatically detect this stuff.

I had some problems with the setup but mainly it was my own stubbornness. First, I tried to set it up without installing the drivers, because Media Center seemed to recognize the extender. Then, I wasn't really reading the error that clearly when it suggested TURNING OFF the extender AND THEN BACK ON to try to resolve the problem in which it wasn't being found. Doing that made Media Center see the extender just fine.

Here are some problems I had:

No rights to see network shares.

This was a major problem for which a variety of solutions have been put forth on the Internet. I tried this suggestion to put shortcuts in Public Videos, but I didn't see them on the Extender. Upon reading that blog's comments, I ran MKLINK /D and was able to create links that were visible on the extender, but they appeared as empty folders. I then went to my PC and added ANONYMOUS LOGON rights to the shares but I didn't know how to grant that right to the directories themselves. And of course it didn't work. (Note to self: remove them when you get back at your home PC. I am blogging on my laptop in front of the TV :)

The Windows Perl Blog was the first thing I found suggesting a login script which explicitly enters your share credentials, but I was unsure of where to put the login script until I found this, which gave a very simple solution of sharing your own NETLOGON. It seemed inelegant to create explicit mappings, so I tried it with the symbolic links and it worked! So a summary of what I did is:

in C:\Users\Public\Public Videos, execute MKLINK /D MyVideos //myserver/myshare
create some directory and share it as NETLOGON, granting MCX1, or whichever extender user is appropriate, read-only access
create a batch file called mcx1.cmd or whatever you like. It need only contain NET USE \\MYSERVER\MYSHARE /user:someone-with-rights-to-your-share that-user's-password, but maybe it needs to contain @echo off as the first line and exit as the last, it is second nature for my batch files to contain that
execute lusrmgr.msc, open up your extender user (MCX1 for those of us with only a single extender), and assign that batch file (mcx1.cmd in my case), with no path, as the logon script
- Note: must have Vista Ultimate for this step to work
- Repeat: you must have Vista Ultimate for this step to work, otherwise lusrmgr.msc will throw an error stating this same fact.

Weirdly, after I did all this, I noticed that the shares I was watching before had returned to the Video Library, so, with the symlinks, I had two copies. Oh well, something to solve another day.

Any questions, please comment and I will try to answer.

Xvid is only supported codec

I knew this going in and so far most of my stuff seems playable. The main problem is that, nowadays on the Internet, it would seem that HD content is not in Xvid but rather in x264. If you have a lot of that, it won't work on your extender. Also, my prized copy of Repo Man doesn't play for some reason. Boy, I'm sure my wife will hate that. (To quote one of my many beloved quotes from that movie, "And then what, you woke up in a puddle?")

It does seem that Xvid stuff from a share is kind of slow to start. But, with one exception, it plays and tracks fine.

Missing Zoom #4 mode

That's the "hourglass" mode that I usually had broadcast (non-widescreen) TV set to. Without it, regular TV is either in a smaller window in the middle of the screen in Zoom #1, overlapping so that screen crawls are cut off at the bottom with Zoom #2, or crushed into 16:9 with Zoom #3. Zoom #2 is best but you notice it for credits and crawls and whatnot. Most crawls are ads which I don't need to see but, shit, most of the time I just watch TV shows I downloaded off the Internet so I don't see those crawls anyway.

A little more disturbing is that, with non-broadcast materials (OK, yeah, I'm talking about downloaded movies and TV shows), the zoom buttons don't work at all. So no matter what, that stuff is in zoom mode 2 and is getting cut off..

I'll write more as I work with this thing further. Tomorrow I have to cut the cord and move the MCE PC back to my office so my wife can see the real promised benefit of the extender -- a quiet living room like normal people have :D

Good night,

--sbreck

DMA 2100 initial impressions (this post)

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

Canon video conversion revisited

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

Reliability Monitor on my home PC

2007-12-30T23:55:00.001-05:00

(This article is the third in a fascinating series which includes analyses of my work laptop and my Media Center PC.)

Though I've had Vista at work for longer than I've had it at home, the longest-lasting OS install is my home PC, a Dell XPS 710 with the factory load. Reliability & Performance Monitor on this PC has data going back to May 2nd or just about 8 months. Here are the application crash statistics collected in that time:

Application	Version	Count
DllHost.exe	6.0.6000.16386	43
firefox.exe	(various)	10
VideoConverter.exe	1.0.23.0	9
iexplore.exe	(various)	7
wmplayer.exe	mostly 11.0.6000.6344	7
Explorer.exe	6.0.6000.16386	5
Acrobat.exe	8.1.0.137	3
HP_IZE.EXE	1.12.0.46	3
mcproxy.exe	2.0.150.0	2

… and 11 other one-off crashes.

DllHost.exe:
I can explain this. I was testing various software to convert videos from my camera to YouTube-suitable format and also to iPod MP4 format. One such piece of shit software called Apex Video Converter installed some ancient-ass xvid.dll that basically threw these errors every time I opened an Explorer window in a directory containing some videos. That was an annoying couple of days until I tracked this down.

Firefox.exe:
As I said before, I think Firefox can be unreliable on Vista, particularly with a bunch of add-ons. But at least it saves state periodically so it's not such a big deal. Lately the problem has gotten worse, but, without going into too much incriminating detail, I have started leaving something called NOVA running which runs up Firefox's RAM usage from its usual 200MB to numbers as high as 600MB or however high it gets until I catch it. So it's easy to blame Firefox but it probably is poorly written code in the NOVA interface. Or Java. Seriously, whenever sites launch the Java tray applet, I cross my fingers against a crash.

VideoConverter.exe:
This was the winner in the video conversion testing but mostly for convenience reasons that I won't go into and are probably the cause of the crashes. The less said, the less trouble I get myself into.

iexplore.exe:
I only use IE7 at home to check my work email through OWA 2007. And, if left running for some period of time, IE won't restore and instead shows the title bar with whatever is behind it, behind it. I don't know if this happens with other websites because I browse everything but work stuff with Firefox.

wmplayer.exe:
I have a slight suspicion that the indexing process that Media Player uses is not stable or handles ripped audio and video material from, er, various sources without much grace. Most of the time wmplayer is doing something with its database when it crashes.

Explorer.exe:
See the first (DllHost) explanation.

Acrobat.exe:
This is standard Acrobat Reader. A program I hate with a passion.

HP_IZE.EXE:
This I think is the HP Image Zone (or whatever) thing that installed with a photo printer I bought. I actually thought it might be nice to try another tool besides Windows Photo Gallery to manage my photos, particularly if it offered features like printing four wallet-sized photos on 4x6 glossy paper, but every time this thing indexes my pictures it gets about 96% through them in 10 minutes and then crashes. I have a lot of pictures in my \Users\me\Pictures folder but Pictures\Public Pictures are the ones from my camera. (The rest are my digital artwork and found pictures (mostly source material for art).) So something is not in whatever format HP_IZE can handle, and it crashes. Sloppy...

mcproxy.exe:
I had to look this one up to find that it's the McAfee Proxy Service. My feelings on the McAfee security products which came bundled with my Dell are in a previous blog entry so there's not much more to say about this piece of crap software.

Others:
Several crashes are related to the bad xvid.dll that I got from the wonderful Apex Video Converter -- they're other video conversion products that presumably called upon xvid.dll to try and convert the sample file (a downloaded episode of Grey's Anatomy for my wife to watch on her iPod, if you must know). The rest are just random crashes that you pretty much expect. I also averaged one "disruptive shutdown" a day from early August to early September, which I determined was due to problems with SATA Native Command Queuing. And, I've had five blue screens. Can't remember what I was doing and Reliability Monitor doesn't say much about it.

There you go. This concludes a fascinating examination of problems with my three computers. Stay tuned for an analysis of my event log, followed by the contents of my Start Menu. I hope I'm kidding...

--sbreck

Reliability Monitor on a Media Center PC

2007-12-30T22:22:00.001-05:00

When writing my prior entry examining my work TabletPC, I thought to take a look at what Reliability Monitor shows on my home PCs. Since I spent a lot of time starting early this morning hanging out in the living room with my 7-month-old, during a brief nap I screen-capped my Media Center PC's Reliability Monitor and pasted it into a WordPad document for later analysis. (I also confirmed that there's no good way to export the data to do something less time-consuming with it.)

Since this PC for the most part spends its entire life playing TV and, shall we say, downloaded TV, for my wife and I, its key application is ehShell.exe or the Media Center 10-foot interface. This PC has had a fresh install of Vista on it since May 26th so that is the timeframe we're working with. Here is the chart of failures:

Application	Version	Failures
ehRecvr.exe	6.0.6000.16386	36
ehShell.exe	6.0.6000.16386	23
wmplayer.exe	11.0.6000.6336	1
WebGuideTranscodeService.exe	1.0.0.0	1
mmc.exe	6.0.6000.16386	1
iexplore.exe	7.0.6000.16473	1
GSpot.exe	2.2.1.3	1
ehVid.exe	6.0.6000.16386	1

Note that this is EVERY failure I've experienced since I put my first clean install of Vista on my Media Center PC. This PC is used almost every night to watch TV and has been on a daily reboot schedule for about six months. (It will be moved back to my office within a week as I have a Linksys DMA 2100 on order -- keep an eye on the blog for details. This will move the UI work off of this PC, and make for a MUCH quieter living room.)

Why does ehRecvr.exe crash more than ehShell? What does it even do? (I assume it is the headless service that talks to the tuners, records stuff, etc.) Seeing these stats, I do remember that frequently when I resume from standby I see that error on screen, and no real descriptive information is given. Poking around on Google (constrained by site:microsoft.com; searching any process name has become a hell of shady "spyware prevention" sites), I see that there is a hotfix for those who have more than one tuner (which I do) that patches Qdvd.dll and one related to MPEG-2 decoders. Both are that wonderful type of hotfix that require a call to Microsoft. A search against site:msdn.com shows this comment on Aaron Stebner's blog (which I subscribe to and heartily recommend); following that advice I looked for ehrecvr.log but found only a zero-byte file in C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp. I suppose these crashes will remain a mystery for now; hopefully leaving the Media Center running all the time instead of waking it up for use and letting it go back to sleep all the time, or using an extender instead of the direct UI, will reduce the problem.

Onto ehShell crashes, which are annoying because, well, you've just been booted out of the "TV" back to Windows. As per Aaron's suggestion, I found an ehshell.crash from 8:30 this morning. I happen to remember this crash because before I went to bed, I left the Media Center PC in the Video Library looking at my "TV" sharee on my primary home PC. This folder contains a lot of, uh, found TV shows encoded in a variety of ways, and occasionally my Media Center PC will crash when in this folder, attempting to index TV shows for which it may not have a codec. I resumed the PC this morning to find it in that folder, and the shell would not respond to anything. Maybe returning to a networked location that wasn't quite available yet (due perhaps to DHCP renewal delay) crapped it out? Regardless, ehshell.crash was pretty useless as all it said was "Generic failure from Win32 that did not SetLastError()" followed by a bunch of messages related to layout.

In summary, I have no idea what is causing my primary ehRecvr crash (perhaps old drivers for my tuner cards?), and I am pretty sure what causes the ehShell crashes (TV rips with esoteric codecs). Since the two crashes do not seem to occur together (according to Reliability Monitor, ehShell has not crashed since November 14th) I guess it is safe to say that, on average, my Media Center PC experiences a crash 10 times a month -- though the trend is downward lately (6 crashes per month for the last two months). Still, think about it: your TV crashing on you more than once a week, despite rebooting it EVERY DAY, is sort of like a joke you might have made 10 years ago if someone suggested that Microsoft was going to make software for TVs.

--sbreck

Reliability Monitor and its analysis of my work computer

2007-12-29T22:47:00.001-05:00

First, my usual disclaimer:
Sorry I am such a lackadaisical blogger. Bizarrely, my traffic is basically the same whether I blog or not -- between 70 and 90 visits a day according to Google Analytics; although lately the trend is downward. I will try to get a series of shorter posts out more often than every 60 days. This is not one of these shorter posts.

Is there no way to gather more usable data from the Reliability Monitor? I ran it at work and it had data going back for three months, but seemingly no export capability. To get at the data, I screen-captured and pasted each screenful of data into OneNote, used "Copy text from picture", pasted them into TextPad to fix and put back into tabbed columns, and then pasted them into Excel. Now I can pull statistics like the following:

Application	Version	Failures
Outlook	12.0.6023.5000 (Outlook 2007, prior to SP1)	13
OneNote	12.0.4518.1014 (OneNote 2007, prior to SP1)	9
Firefox	various (1.8.20071.12718, the most recent, has crashed the most, and it seems that 1.8.20070.25881 was the most stable)	8
TabTip	1.8.20070.25881	7
Communicator	1.0.559.0 (2005) crashed 5 times, 2.0.6362.0 (2007) crashed once	6
Interwoven DeskSite (Manage32.exe)	8.2.87.0 (8.2, I think SP1)	6
Procmon.exe	1.0.0.0	4
SPCSCM.exe	3.4.0.6	3
Visio	12.0.4518.1014 (Visio 2007, prior to SP1)	3
Excel	12.0.6024.5000 (Excel 2007, prior to SP1)	2
NiAiServ.exe (Enteo NetInstall)	5.80.0.1399	2

...and 11 other apps crashed once.

So what information can we draw from this?

Outlook:
It's somewhat unfair to taint Outlook by problems caused by its add-ons, or the size (~2GB) of my OST file, but 13 crashes in two months (none were logged in December, it would seem) is a couple crashes a week. And also, I'm probably like everyone else in that Outlook is far and away my most used app. So I don't know if I rebuilt my OST in the December timeframe, or some add-on that was causing instability got disabled and I never noticed, but I guess it's been better lately. I'll have to revisit after running Office 2007 SP1 for awhile.

OneNote:
OneNote has no add-ons, so I would have to blame its instability on a) poor handling of the online/internet/offline transition and b) LiveSessions. I have a notebook that I use constantly that's on a file share at work, a few notebooks on SharePoint that I edit throughout the day, and maybe 15% I am in meetings taking handwritten notes with my tablet. I also spend about 15 - 20% of my time in LiveSessions with one or two colleagues, taking shared notes in meetings. Handwriting is pretty stable, I think it's the LiveSessions that cause some crashing, and some of it is just random lock-ups.

Firefox:
Before I looked at the above statistics, I would have sworn to you that, at work, far and away my least reliable application was Firefox, and I still feel that these stats don't capture every crash or lock-up that I experience with Firefox. It is telling that Windows Reliability monitor didn't log any Firefox crash for almost two months, between 9/20 and 11/15, while I guess it was on version 1.8.20070.25881 (or maybe some interim, extremely stable version between that and 1.8.20071.2514). I like to think that I have minimal add-ons in my work Firefox but I must have enough to cause a persistent instability, like freezing when I resize the window with an IE Tab page selected, or a freeze that just happens without using Firefox for awhile.

Why do I stick with Firefox because it's so unreliable? I guess my IE 7 experience was worse, or sufficiently different and lacking in functionality as compared to Firefox that it wasn't worth it. IE 7 didn't seem to have as robust a tab saving mechanism as Firefox, and it crashed often enough that a group of tabs that I meant to leave open were gone, and that really got on my nerves after awhile.

TabTip:
This is a TabletPC thing that Vista is convinced has some compatibility issue. I can't remember the error but Vista seems to periodically close it and throw some error message. Mind you, this has never happened when I'm actually in tablet mode or using tablet features, it happens when I'm doing something else altogether.

Communicator:
I don't remember this crashing, to be honest, so I don't know why.

DeskSite:
DeskSite likes to freeze up when you launch a document out of it -- it's not just a Vista problem, it happened a lot when I had XP, too. With the Vista error reporting feature turned on, most of the time I can actually find out why this is hanging -- typically it is Firefox but it can also be OneNote, Outlook, or Visio (which isn't really integrated with Interwoven yet and basically causes problems whenever it is launched).

I think I've already ranted about legal-specific software vendors, and I know this will be a popular search result because it contains the terms "Interwoven" and "SharePoint", so I will be gentle and note that despite my enmity towards the Interwoven product, its competitor (Open Text LiveLink eDOCS and whatever else they called it, formerly Hummingbird DM5) just a few days ago released their Office 2007 product. So, like, a full year after Office 2007 shipped. Shows you where the Open Text product is going -- down the toilet. (Disclaimer: The previous view is mine alone and does not represent the view of my employer)

Procmon:
If you forget about procmon and leave it running, you use up all your RAM and your computer falls to shit. Of course, you usually RUN procmon so you can figure out why something else is going to shit on your computer, so sometimes procmon is a symptom rather than a cause. Regardless, that's what's going on with my 4 procmon crashes, I think.

SPCSCM.exe:
I don't even know what the hell this is so I looked it up to find that it's the Sprint PCS Connection Manager. I delivered (and then took back two months later) an EVDO card to my colleague and so of course I installed the software for use on the trips to and from Chicago. I have a Treo 700p with PDAnet and the PCS software, despite the 3 crashes, was like 300 times more reliable than that piece of shit PDAnet. I'm glad I can get Internet access for free and only expensed $25 or whatever to my company. But I'd way rather not have to spend 20 minutes fucking with, and ultimately rebooting, my laptop to get stupid PDAnet to work. As I have said before, PDAnet is better than not having any Internet access, but not by much.

The rest:
I realize I'm detailing the apps that crashed on my work computer, which is inherently a fool's errand to begin with. But since I started it I might as well finish:

Visio: Visio 2007 Interwoven integration is non-existent, but for some reason it is enough to leave Visio.exe in memory, using 50% CPU and fucking up all other Interwoven calls, until you kill it. Hence the three crashes. I like to think that I am really good at Visio, but with 2007, if I can avoid using it, I will.

Excel: Excel is usually really good so I'm surprised to see these two crashes. I blame Interwoven for this, also. Maybe unfairly ;)

Enteo NetInstall: This company has like three support people in the U.S. and after two years of terrible service my company has ceased recommending its products. I try, on my computer, not to run NetInstall but there are some apps our IT people packaged that I need so I have to from time to time. This then leads to the inventory app running up my CPU utilization until the app is killed.

I was going to check my home PC against this, as I would think the results are very different, but I didn't realize how long this blog entry would turn out to be. I think that, in summary:

Reliability Monitor would be even more useful if it could export its data to help you pinpoint your worst-behaved apps
I think Reliability Monitor misses some crashes and hangs
Firefox is totally unreliable on my work PC but is excellent at home with the same add-ons plus a dozen more; WTF?
Interwoven DeskSite can cause unreliability
Microsoft products crash the most :D

Back soon,

--sbreck

Goodlink 5

2007-10-17T00:37:00.001-04:00

Recently I upgraded to Goodlink 5 on my Treo 700p. Observations so far:

It is slower, and has slowed down my whole Treo. Even Solitaire is sluggish.
Nice features for accepting calendar appointments -- you no longer have to send acceptance, or be prompted for a comment.
I thought the Conversation view (press "C" with a message highlighted for a shortcut) was useless, but then I had a bunch of email to get through after a long meeting and it actually helped me make short work of long threads.
Having an RSS reader is a great feature and the implementation is pretty good, but my main complaint is that it kind of fails at the main function of an RSS reader, which is to keep track of what you have and have not read. It's kind of annoying to read the same things twice or sometimes three times. And I only have I think 5 feed subscriptions. Still, I actually think it's a more professional implementation than QuickNews, which I actually paid for but never really use. (Having the feeds periodically refreshing might be the cause of Treo slowness. Still, QuickNews took like the entire 7-minute time period from waiting for the elevator to getting on the subway, and if you forgot to do it, forget it. I basically stopped using QuickNews months ago, but am reading feeds on the subway again.) The Good-like interface where the center button both opens and closes the article, and "p" and "n" go through the articles, is really well thought out and immediately easy to use. If they took more care in ensuring I didn't sometimes have to read the same things I would call this a must-have upgrade.
Related to the above, the news ticker thing (the way the RSS reader alerts you) is a bit annoying. It seems to scroll through articles a bit too fast, to the degree that it actually makes you sort of tense to not read them. But RSS feeds are a low, low priority item so maybe I should turn the bar off. Then again, I'd never read the feeds like with QuickNews. Hmmm…
Still getting used to the Send/Receive shortcut key changing from "s" to "z". Slightly annoyed about it. Have so far never meant to use the "filter by sender" function, though I suppose it could also be helpful in triaging a massive amount of emails.
The starred ("Priority") items could have used a little more thought, in my opinion. Or else I need to stop overthinking the function. (Eh, wrong blog for that ;) I extensively use Automatic Formatting in Outlook and initially thought this was kind of a neat way for Goodlink to have this as well. But for work, a critical Goodlink function is that high priority emails vibrate my Treo, and I use some rules to make sure the "crying wolf" factor is minimized -- e.g. your emails to me go in the jail if you forward a lot of inappropriately high priority vendor emails, or if you are a vendor that sends me high priority emails. So as much as I would like it for emails sent just to me to be starred, I need emails that are high priority to vibrate my Treo and I don't want SearchStorage.com or whatever vibrating it. Still, this is a nice first attempt at helping you separate low priority emails from higher priority, but it comes at the expense of the paging function I require in my line of work.
I've had Goodlink 5 for maybe two weeks and this morning I got the dreaded GX_ASSERT error, which meant I had to reprovision Good on my device. I don't know if I should blame Good/Motorola or Palm for that.

technorati: Palm, Treo, Goodlink

tagging

2007-09-10T22:39:00.001-04:00

I just added Blogger labels to all my posts. I don't think I added as many as I had Technorati labels but I was pleased that Blogger added this feature so the people that only care about OneNote can read those posts and the people that only care about MainSP2op.MSP can read those posts. (just kidding I didn't set a tag for that but seriously, that was a popular post at one point -- now it's all about GMail on the Treo) Anyway, in case there are any people that subscribe to this blog via RSS, I apologize for making the entire feed refresh.

Speaking of tagging, I have been using Windows Photo Gallery on Vista to tag my pictures. This of course started because we had a baby three months ago and eventually I wanted a fun way to distinguish pictures that had been posted to flickr, pictures that were of my wife and I, or of the three of us holding the baby, or of particular trips, etc. and my usual "directories that represent time periods in which the pictures were taken" method was making that kind of hard. My wife doesn't have Vista but mostly we look at pictures on our Media Center PC, which is running Vista so it has a nice interface to sort by tag. So it was in that spirit that I tagged this blog. Categories are nice. It must be some obsessive-compulsive bits of my psyche.

Still speaking of tagging and my compulsive nature, I have been working on adjusting genres of my MP3s. Yeah, of course I say that it's because of the baby -- you know, in case my wife wants to browse music by genre and doesn't want "Rock" to include such songs as "Evil Satan" by Acid King, "Sea of Rape (Pt1)" by Bible of the Devil, or "666lb. Bongsession" by Bongzilla while trying to bounce our 3-month-old son to sleep. (Yep, those are real songs in the Rock genre -- just going through A and B.) But it's also for me, because I would like to just shuffle genres of music when people come over and not have to run for the remote when something embarrassing comes on, like "Unholy Black Metal" by Darkthrone or "Desecration" by Deicide (who the hell characterized those as "Rock", anyway?). Windows Media Player kind of sucks for mass tagging but its Library function is actually very good for finding how things are tagged. I also own Tag & Rename which is far better for the granular stuff.

Anyway, two blog entries in one day has tuckered me plain out. Now to relax with some Deicide!

--sbreck

how I solved a significant Dell XPS 710 / Vista problem

2007-09-10T21:13:00.001-04:00

I have blogged before about my problems with my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet, but not so much about the probably more serious problems I've been struggling with on my relatively new (May 2007) Dell XPS 710. The XPS 710 is both the most expensive home computer I've ever bought and the most problematic. Put succinctly, it frequently locks up, hangs, freezes -- whatever you want to call it -- and I have to hard power it off. As I was using this blog entry as research to build my tech support call, I noted the following symptoms:

Things weren't too bad until I applied the latest series of patches, specifically the two Performance and Reliability patches
Lockups have occurred while searching from the Start Menu and choosing See All Results
Often a lockup would start with one app, and then spread to the rest -- I've seen this with things like filemon on multiple Vista machines and figured that was a cause, but at work I've seen Outlook and OneNote hold each other open and then get all the other apps to join their freeze-up party
I had more than one lockup when changing "Use this folder type as a template" and checking "Also apply this template to all subfolders" (as an aside, I wish I could default this across the board to "All items" -- what can I say, I'm just used to sorting by date)
Maybe it was a bad hard drive -- I began to notice Event ID 129 warning messages from nvstor32 in the event viewer stating "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." Often these preceded the lock-up.
I also saw ACPI Event ID 6 messages stating "IRQARB: ACPI BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot 2, function 0." Besides slot 2, this also happened with slot 5, slot 4, slot 19, and slot 24.
Switching in and out of full-screen mode in Unreal Tournament 2004 could lock up the machine

This latter led me on a quest that I think was a dead end but I'm not entirely sure. When I first bought the PC and ran it for a number of days straight I had the occasional lock-up. This seemed to go away, maybe with successful nVidia (graphics) driver updates, but after applying the Performance and Reliability patch (I think) it caused the lockups again, and so I started looking at video card temperature as a possible reason. I downloaded MonitorView and nTune and found that my nVidia 8600 GTS did in fact seem to be running pretty hot (124°F from a cold start in 2D mode), and also noticed that the fan was at its lowest setting. Using nTune, I could set the fan to the maximum and achieve a temperature of 115°F in 2D, though it would increase to 130°F or so during games. Turning the fan up and decreasing the GTS's temperature seemed to reduce lockups, though I would still have a few a day. And nTune was annoying, because it couldn't automatically set the temperature, so I put it in Startup and manually set it every time. What a pain in the ass to set this four or whatever times a day, and still have lockups.

After some searching on the nvstor32 129 errors, I found this MS Forums post and follow-on searches turned up this blog entry, which pointed me in the right direction. I turned off Native Command Queuing in the "nVidia nForce Serial ATA Controller" for my hard drive to see if that helped, and so far I have had my computer on for almost 30 hours without a freeze and reboot, whereas it hadn't lasted two hours for the last few weeks. I assume that by posting this I tempt fate and perhaps my computer will "hear" me and begin to freeze again, but hopefully others who have this problem will see my blog post and have similar success.

Now to figure out what exactly is Native Command Queuing, and find out why it would cause such a problem and why it only became such a problem recently. Did a Performance and Reliability patch turn it on? Did some nVidia driver update do it? Why was I plagued with this? Would Dell have known if I had just called them? So many questions, so little time in the day to answer them…

--sbreck

technorati: Vista Dell XPS 710 NVIDIA

I'm back, with some miscellaneous rants

2007-08-14T22:07:00.001-04:00

I recognize the shocking amount of time that has passed since I last blogged. Cut me some slack, we have a 2-month-old baby named Oscar now. Anyway, here are some little short rants to get out of the blogging standstill:

Palm sucks:

Why does my dad's Verizon phone that he got for free have a pretty cool and useful GPS function using the built-in locator, but we Treo owners have to spend hundreds for external GPS? He paid nothing, and I (actually, my company) paid $585 for my phone (upgrade from 650 to 700p out of contract), so why am I the one who has no GPS function? Palm deserves a beating.
I installed the 1.10 update so that my Treo wouldn't freeze up searching for a signal when I was on the subway. And now it's even worse. Palm, you suck. I'm switching to Blackberry as soon as I possibly can. Your platform is dead.
Speaking of Palm sucking, that Foleo thing is the most useless thing that they could possibly have done. Apple has an new convergence device coming out with a radical new user interface? How can we compete? Oh, I know, a little toy laptop thing that has to be connected to a Treo to work. Guess what? I have a $2200 laptop that has to go with me when I leave the office, so I can use Microsoft Outlook and Office, Interwoven document management, DTE time entry, and a browser. I can also take notes on it because it's a TabletPC. I don't need another slightly smaller and lighter laptop that runs half-assed versions of those apps on Linux.

Computers suck:

I am still plagued with OneNote sync problems with SharePoint ("This section contains changes that cannot be synced because access to the section file is denied. Correct the file permissions or save your copy of this section elsewhere."). Apparently this is a known issue, and you can only find out about it by reading the microsoft.public.onenote newsgroup.
McAfee SecurityCenter came bundled with my Dell and it is really annoying. Most annoying is when it downloads an update requiring a restart, which causes a loud bell sound and popup what seems like every 20 minutes. Can't they take a cue from Windows Updates, which pops up a balloon with a gentle "pop" sound? This throws me out of all-important Unreal Tournament 2004 games and makes me wonder why I have the program in the first place. I've already turned off the firewall (it didn't usually ask what to block, it just blocked, and the rules are too deeply hidden in the shitty user interface). And, yeah, I turned off the firewall of my own free will, so stop giving me grief about it every time I start my computer. Also, the virus scan finds the same two virii from some 8-year-old backups that it can't clean, plus a dozen cookies, so how much protection do I need and can this thing even give it to me? Verdict: McAfee SecurityCenter sucks.
I grow weary of Vista on my ThinkPad X60 Tablet. The laptop is awesomely fast and 1400x1050 on a crystal-clear 12" screen is the best thing ever, but at least once a week I have to hard-power it off because it crapped out while hibernating, or refuses to come out of sleep mode. Also, could the stupid bastard remember for once that I like to extend my desktop to the left, onto the other display? When docked, additional display on left; when not docked, normal screen. There. Was that so hard? Then why do I have a little screen adventure every time I put the laptop in the dock? Perhaps both of these issues are related to Lenovo drivers and not Vista. Regardless, it annoys me as a person that docks and undocks the laptop and takes it places. Did XP Tablet suck that badly? Why do I use Vista, anyway? These are things I shouldn't be thinking as someone Microsoft thinks will be driving Vista and Office 2007 upgrades in my vertical market.

I cannot promise I will blog again soon, but I will try.

--sbreck

technorati: Palm, Treo 700p, Foleo, OneNote 2007, SharePoint, McAfee SecurityCenter, Vista, Tablet PC, ThinkPad X60

updates…

2007-03-02T01:40:00.000-05:00

Sorry, semi-faithful readers, for being such a bad blogger. I keep writing these long things and then polishing them continually and then the next thing I know it's been another month without me posting anything. Also, this was a pretty busy month work-wise. Anyway, here's what I've been thinking about:

New X60 Tablet: I got a new tablet, a Lenovo X60. It's totally sweet. This is the blog entry I've been writing in little bits for a few weeks. I will be blogging about it next because it seems people found my X41 Vista install entry helpful. Also, people who subscribed to this blog because they liked Tablet PCs are probably wondering if I still use a tablet, or else they unsubscribed. I wouldn't know. Anyway, the tablet features of Vista are very good and I look forward to writing about them.
OneNote/SharePoint: Still the most popular search term leading people to this blog. I kept having my sections suddenly get "access denied" and turn read-only on me and it was driving me nuts. Weirdly, this never happened on my home machine. Then, trying to fix something else, I reset my settings in IE and all of a sudden I was being prompted for a SharePoint password instead of being booted out of my section. It was a refreshing change. Please see the comments of this entry on Jeff Borlik's blog for details. This entry helped me understand what might be happening in a way I never would have. Unfortunately, today in a meeting the problem returned, and I had some trouble fixing it. I have learned that I can usually exit OneNote, log out of SharePoint and close the browser, reopen the browser to my SharePoint page, open the section from SharePoint, and then the OneNote section will often resync properly. I just learned tonight that I have to close Outlook as well, because it too is integrated with SharePoint, and when you switch from office (connecting to SharePoint locally, or via NTLM authentication) to home (over the internet using basic authentication), the SharePoint authentication gets messed up. Anyway, I think SharePoint authentication is super picky and making it so that you have to reauthenticate frequently is annoying but prevents lockouts on your sections.
Vista Media Center on the hp z552: My Media Center PC is spiraling off into unreliability, and my wife is starting to lose her patience. I have it set to the shittiest non-interleaved picture possible, shut down every process that could be shut down, turned off Aero and anything that actually looks nice in the non-10' user interface, and still I have jerky video if the Media Center decides it's sort of busy (like, if you are watching a time-shifted program while something else is recording, or even watching a program while I am copying some files from my computer to the Media Center PC). It's annoying as hell. Now, we're sometimes seeing problems where it turns on, but is unresponsive to the wireless keyboard or remote or even a USB mouse that we've started to keep handy to try and reestablish control. Another neat feature is that sometimes it will make a bunch of those "doo-DEE, dee-DOO" sounds that mean it is finding and then losing devices, over and over again. I guess I will have to blow away the box and install real Vista. (I have RC2 now, which I upgraded from the factory XP MCE 2005 load.) However, I keep reading that HP has some drivers that are only on the factory-loaded machine's C: drive, and last time I was unsuccessful in Ghosting the machine, so I'm worried that my keyboard and remote will not work if I install from scratch. Also, I'm cheap, so I'm only buying the Home Premium Upgrade, so I have to do some complicated shit to install from scratch. Plus, stupid HP only has XP drives for the thing. Come on, the parts are probably similar to a bunch of new machines that run Vista, why have they frozen their old z552 page in time? (Aside: I went to the Dell site to look for Vista drivers for my over-3-year-old XPS Gen 2 prove a point that HP abandoned their old hardware while Dell did not, but the only Dell Vista drivers on the downloads page were like BIOS, diagnostics, and two monitor drivers. So Dell does the same thing, although maybe not with machines newer than three years old.) I hope the clean reload fixes my problems (this blog entry gives me hope), otherwise I think I am going to reload the factory image of XP MCE 2005 and see how that works for the basic stuff we need the Media Center to do. I had thought of buying a cool half-height ATI X1600 with an HDMI connector to future-proof the box, but I worry that it will overwhelm the power supply and cause the loud-ass annoying fans to run constantly instead of just half the time. Another option is to get an XBox360 to use as an extender so that the Media Center PC can come back in my room to keep things quieter in the living room, but I've heard that the XBox360 is pretty loud, also (though maybe that was just the DVD -- and I don't think we've watched one in three years). And of course there is always the option of giving up completely and going with a DVR from the cable company. At least then we'd get HD :/
Daylight Saving Time changes: I feel like this is the coming apocalypse and I couldn't be more annoyed at Microsoft. How long have people known about the March 11th time zone change? Far longer than when the first patches arrived a few weeks ago. Those were just in time to royally screw up everyone's calendars, and leave you in a situation where some people were unpatched and were sending you appointments that showed up at a different time for you than for them. When you have a software company saying things like "Please print out your calendars" and "Make sure you include the time of the appointment in the subject line when sending to others" and "Verbally confirm all appointments", that is basically like them saying, "sorry, we are complete idiots and could not have fucked this up any more than we did." Seriously, how can we be printing out calendars and verbally confirming appointments in the year 2007? If all these patches went out a year ago, which would be six months after the Energy Policy Act passed, or even six months ago (a year after the Act), pretty much people would be patched right now, at least to the degree that TWO FUCKING COMPUTERS WOULD AGREE ON WHETHER AN APPOINTMENT IS AT 1PM, NOON, OR 2PM. That this is not the case with 10 days left to go is evidence that Microsoft should be beaten for not addressing this. In my last blog entry, I ranted about the document management vendors being poorly prepared for Office 2007. This is even more inexcusable because like hundreds of millions more people use Outlook calendars on Exchange servers than use law firm specific DMSes. Thanks, Microsoft, for three weeks no one will be on time to any meetings, or court appearances, or deadlines that they set for themselves, or what have you. You have failed. (As an aside, it sort of amuses me to think of the possibility that for these three weeks no one will go to meetings, a sort of "National Quit Screwing Around in Meetings and Just Do Your Work Month", and American productivity will leap to new heights. Only complainers like me, who will pathetically try to go to our silly little meetings only to get annoyed when no one is there for our "weekly status meeting" or "bi-weekly project task list review", will not gain from this problem. And, the economy could start roaring ahead from all the cool inventions and innovations people come up with when they don't spend half their days in meetings. On the other hand, email servers could collapse under the strain of all the extra emails people will send because they are not in meetings. Anyway, you never know what will happen. Maybe I will eat my words, including all those bad curse words I put above. Ask me on April 8th(?), if I have not dug myself into an underground bunker by then.)

--sbreck

Vista setup on an X41 Tablet

2007-01-28T23:32:00.000-05:00

My wife pointed out that I was rapidly approaching the extremely low bar of one post per month I had set for myself, so I thought I'd jump the gun and blog about what I've been working on for the last few weeks. As I have blogged about ad infinitum, I have been running the full Office 2007 on my home PC since May, and Outlook and OneNote 2007 on my work tablet since early August. Since about November, I have seen my colleagues bite the bullet and load Vista on their primary work machines and complain about it. Then when we got RTM code back in mid-December the complaints started to turn to admiration, and people I worked with a lot started pressuring me.

"But I've got a shitty 4200RPM hard drive in my tablet," I said to myself. "Only 1GB of RAM is not enough for Vista." "My company is working on a standard Vista deployment, and then I will be able to take advantage of it and not have to set up my own laptop and lose a week's billable time." "Those bumbling idiots at Interwoven still haven't written any usable integration between Office 2007 and DeskSite."

(Can I take a moment to complain about this last one? How the hell can Interwoven not have any integration with Word and Excel 2007 two months after the RTM came out? What, exactly, have they been working on for the last 12 months? It's not just Interwoven -- Open Text (Hummingbird) and World Software (Worldox) won't have any integration for months, either. AND THIS IS THE MAJOR SOFTWARE THAT THEIR PRODUCTS SHOULD INTEGRATE WITH. The primary function of document management software is to, when you press File\Open in Microsoft Word or Excel, pop open a window that allows you to search the DMS repository and shows you recent documents you've opened from said repository. That this function does not work and is not expected to work for months, in any software from any law firm document management vendor, is a complete joke given the outlandish per seat and yearly maintenance that law firms pay. You know, a lot of law firms are considering throwing out their DMS vendor and just going with SharePoint due to their annoyance with substandard DMS products. That Office is going to be in retail stores on Tuesday, but DMS integration isn't going to be around until the 2nd quarter at least, just gives more credence that these vendors deserve to be thrown out on their asses.) (Caveat: Interwoven OffSite is a brilliant product and in general, DeskSite, Hummingbird DM, and Worldox have far more advanced functionality than SharePoint 2007 as a document management system. This, I suppose, is why we keep putting up with these delays from them.)

OK, totally out-of-the-blue rant over. After all that, why did I go Vista? Simple -- my hard drive died the morning after a flight back from Chicago. Using all the various safe modes all still refused to load the HKLM\Software hive from the registry. IBM Disk Diagnostics showed that I had a bunch of bad sectors. Faced with setting up everything all over again only to still be on XP Tablet Edition 2005 was just too depressing. So I loaded Vista. Here are some of my notes from the load in case you decide to do the same.

First off, Lenovo has added a ton of Vista drivers in the last week that weren't there when I set the laptop up. Go to the site if you are missing something. Almost all of it is there now. You can also try the Vista beta driver page for those things that aren't there yet. In some cases, XP drivers do work. (I warn you -- none of them change the fact that the X41 Tablet has a super-shitty 1.0 Vista Experience rating ;)

Now, in no particular order, are some challenges I faced in the install and my fixes. I hope it helps you if you are doing the same thing.

I had an error "No sound device installed" but installed the Audio Driver for W2K/XP. This install threw its own error ("This operating system is not supported by this software"), so I tried to "reinstall using recommended settings" which applied XP compatibility and made it work. On login, I got an error "No ADI codec driver is installed" but audio is working. I went into Device Manager, opened up the SoundMax Integrated Audio device and let Windows search for an updated driver online; it installed something and suggested I reboot. On restart, the error was gone.
I had one Unknown Device listed, but extensive Googling showed that it was the "ThinkPad PM Device". Installing the Modem driver (Conexant AC97) got rid of the Unknown Device.
Only recently did I get screen rotation working properly. It had always worked through the Windows Mobility Manager (right-click the battery icon) but you will want to check out the Tablet Shortcut Menu, and click Settings to get it to change orientation automatically. I originally thought that "Active Rotate" was kind of cool but eventually got rid of it because it took a long time to rotate the screen and sometimes did so unnecessarily.
I read somewhere that having the round Vista start button peeking out over a single-height taskbar caused some sort of moderately expensive graphics operation to occur when different windows came up and when orientation was switched. That sort of sounded like bullshit but I did give up a precious few dozen pixels at the bottom of my screen to try it out and I have to say, things seem slightly faster with the taskbar at double-height. (And, I have room for all 12 Quick Launch icons.)
I am using ReadyBoost with a 1GB Kingston DataTraveler U3. I can't really tell what all I get out of it but I do think Vista in general, with the USB stick, is faster than XP Tablet was on this PC. My coworkers swear that ReadyBoost works really well for them.
Fingerprint reader:
- I installed Trusted Platform Module, it didn't require a restart required, but I wasn't sure what that got me -- I still had a "Biometric Coprocessor" showing as an unknown device.
- Still no login with fingerprints, so I gave Fingerprint Driver and Software a try -- no love.
- Then, I found a link to the beta ThinkVantage Fingerprint Software 5.6… it works like a dream, and is much better than the previous version. It's just more reliable to see your finger swipes, and also always passes through the fingerprint from BIOS to login screen, whereas the older software I used was pretty hap-hazard about it.
- The real test will come in a few days when my password expires. In the old software, that would mean I'd have to delete all my fingerprints and recreate them because it didn't handle the password change well.
Hotkeys (mute, volume, etc.)
- Found the beta page and downloaded the Hotkey Features Driver, it didn't seem to do anything
- Strange, they do work, but are not integrated with the Vista volume. So when I unmuted in Vista, it didn't work, but when I pressed the hardware volume key above the keyboard, it did work. So it's working, I guess.
- Update: one of the latest batch of installs (Vista System Interface Driver and the Tablet buttons) seems to have restored the on screen display and tied the buttons to the Vista speaker systray icon. So everything is cool now.
Wireless
- Originally I grabbed the Intel driver for 2000/XP and downloaded; had to install in compatibility mode
- Later, an updated driver was released on 1/24, so I downloaded and installed it.
Power Manager
- The 1/22 update is Vista-aware now, and it's pretty cool -- all the settings are in the Power Plan now. I tried to dial some stuff back when on battery and jack everything up when on AC. Originally I was on High Performance with some tweaks to conserve battery, and I have to say that my battery life was not very good -- well under 3 hours whereas I could get close to 5 with XP Tablet. Now that there's a new ThinkPad Power Management Driver and some sort of new Vista System Interface thing, I will see how it goes.
You can install the Active Protection Center if you like. I did. The Vista version works fine. The XP version worked OK also except the system tray icon would not appear.
Getting the tablet buttons (rotate, Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc.) to work was a bit of a struggle:
- Tablet Shortcut Menu wasn't a Vista program but I installed it anyway, it doesn't work for the buttons
- I installed the X60 Tablet version; no luck either
- A new Shortcut Menu was put up for the X60 and X41, so I tried that -- didn't add button functionality either
- Finally, a 1/22 Tablet Button Driver worked like a charm.
I installed the BIOS Update but can so far report no differences, good or bad
I had a problem with my VPN disconnecting as soon as I attempted to send data over it; I unchecked "use remote gateway" and things started working again. This is OK for us since we are a small shop and devote 20 or so IPs from the server IP block to VPN clients, but I suppose you would have to troubleshoot further if you were more properly set up subnet-wise.

So what's left and what doesn't work?

Presentation Director is not Vista-compatible and doesn't run. Right now, the Fn-F7 key combination is not doing what I want it to and I would very much like to get this resolved. (It switches from LCD-only to VGA-only to LCD-in-800x600-and-VGA and then back to LCD-only. All of those options are shit. I want LCD-in-1024x768-and-VGA-in-the-same like I always had before.)
I can't get the hard drive firmware update to work -- it fails logged in as me, and it froze the whole machine when I was logged in as my local admin user
I would like to load the IBM stuff on the 5GB partition, but there appears to be no way to do this. Partly this is my fault because I greedily ripped open the replacement hard drive and started loading Vista (after creating a 5GB partition) before my recovery CDs showed up. But I had hoped that an option existed to load just the partition, and that's not the case. I'll have to Ghost the partition from one of my colleagues with an X41.
I don't see a version of PDAnet for Vista and the Treo 700p out yet. I will try it but I suspect it will not be easy. This is a bit of a bummer as I've got a long business trip to Chicago coming up at the end of this week.
I would like to get Vista to show underlined letters for keyboard shortcuts. It is inconsistent in doing so.
I would like to have pressing the power button prompt me what I would like to do, instead of immediately doing one of sleep, hibernate, or shut down. This was an option in XP which I miss. Between meetings, I will stand by; when I leave the office or client site, I hibernate; and when I install things or have problems, I restart or shut down. All initiated by pressing the power button and choosing S, H, R, etc. No more.
For all my complaints, I do have limited Interwoven DeskSite (and OffSite) integration working. I still cannot get File\Open to work, but if I launch all documents from DeskSite, they will open in the appropriate application and are saved and checked back in when closed. New versions have to be instantiated from DeskSite. I am told that FileSite does not work with Outlook 2007 but I am not fond of FileSite -- as a traveler who uses Outlook with RPC over HTTPS, I find FileSite is too stupid to understand that I can be online and switch to offline, or that I can be online but it cannot contact its DMS server. I sort of miss FileSite (its primary advantages were that the integrated apps launched super fast because it told them whether they were online or offline, and also you could insert documents or document links from within a message you were replying to) but its confusion when you hibernate online and then resume offline made it too difficult to use. And now it doesn't work, anyway.
I can't get Juniper Network Connect to work, and Juniper's site does not easily let me find updated versions if there are any. (In the transition from Neoteris to Netscreen to Juniper, my partner registration got lost.) Secure Application Manager does work (so I can use DeskSite and DTE) but Network Connect is good to use to sync up my offline files (and some OneNote files) at the client before heading to the airport. Since our PPTP VPN doesn't work through most client firewalls, Network Connect is important, particularly now that I've had a hard drive crash and almost lost notes from a meeting (fortunately you can copy over a .onecache file from one machine to another and it will sync up cached changes perfectly, even if you've already been using another cache file). I will always sync everything before moving my laptop from one building to another from now on.
Outlook is flaky in switching orientation -- sometimes it knows to move the reading pane from right to bottom, sometimes not.

Other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with Vista. It seems faster to log in and run, and the tablet features seem to be a bit more stable (e.g. TIP popping up and staying up, handwriting recognition), I already prefer the new start menu search function, the look is slicker (even without Aero which I am too underpowered to run), and I am of course liking full Office. It took a long time for all the drivers to come out but now that they are, most of the machine-specific features are working for me now. I will update this post or post links to an updated post if I can get some of the outstanding issues working. Please feel free to comment if you have questions, and I will try and help you if I can. If you have suggestions, I would really appreciate them as I've not exhaustively searched these (except the PDAnet and Juniper Network Connect issues).

Hope this helps you,

--sbreck

technorati: Vista, Tablet PC, ThinkPad X41, Interwoven, Office 2007

LibraryThing proves that I am a nerd

2006-12-31T00:05:00.000-05:00

I occasionally read the Chief Blogging Officer blog and find interesting things. One such was LibraryThing which happened to hit on a day in which I had a bunch of free time, my wife was out of the house buying maternity clothes (do you like how I dropped that blog-bomb so casually?), and I was feeling vaguely guilty that I hadn't blogged in so long. I thus decided to enter the readily accessible contents of my office bookshelf into LibraryThing and blog about it.

Now it can be told: I am a huge science fiction nerd. Basically, all I ever buy or read is science fiction. I have certain rules that I rarely break -- fantasy novels with elves, warriors, wizards, fairies, magic, etc. are cheesy and bad, and multi-volume series are generally bad (a rule I have broken with Gibson's two cycles, Neil Stephenson's excellent Baroque cycle, and now some Greg Bear and Jack McDevitt stuff I've read recently). But generally, if it is sci-fi and it is not too ham-handedly written, I am probably going to enjoy it. The weird thing is that, except for the NY Times which I read every morning, I only read when I travel and for the most part it's only when I'm on vacation. When I'm on vacation I will read like six science fiction novels. Then they go in the "nerd bookcase" so my wife's much higher-brow collection is not sullied by nerdy books. I ought to make a LibraryThing profile for her but I think my blog readers will wonder why we ever got together and decided to procreate. (Update: she posted her library) Also, they only let you store 200 books for free, and then they charge you. A pittance, but still.

Anyway, since this blog is primarily about what a nerd I am, let me describe the process of entering my 127 books into LibraryThing. I chose to enter only ISBN numbers so that my "actual" collection could be filed. Since I buy a lot of books when I travel, I found that British editions of my books were sometimes hard to find; for those, the best source was usually the National Library of Scotland. Mostly Amazon finds everything, including science fiction from the 60s and 70s which makes up the oldest part of my collection. However, with about every 10th book, I received an "HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error which I believe was coming from Amazon when I tried to add a book I'd found. I could always go back and then add the book again, but it did add a "blank" book to my list which I would have to manually delete.

After using the system a lot, I also found that sometimes a search against Amazon would not return a result at first; you have to search again. I suppose this was due to reliability of the API Amazon presents rather than a problem with LibraryThing, which is sort of an interesting comment on the reliability of "Web 2.0" services or "mash-ups" as you Web 2.0 kids like to call 'em. The mere fact that I just typed "Web 2.0" makes me want to punch myself. Anyway.

So, now that I entered all 127 of my books, what can I do now? I usually hate tagging things (although I will do it on Flickr for public vacation photos and whatnot) but I decided, what the hell, it will be an easy way to see just what percentage of my collection is science-fiction. (79%) The double-click-to-tag mode is nice, but not with multiple items -- click the "PowerEdit" button to tag multiple items. An easy way to find untagged books so that you could quickly tag them is just to sort by "Tag" in either the PowerEdit or regular mode and then just edit the tags. Later I found that tags chosen in the "Add Book" search screen will be persistent throughout multiple searches and adds, so if you have a bunch of, say, science fiction, you can just choose your tag and add everything.

I also wanted to see which of my books were most popular, which was easy to do by sorting on "Shared". The top 10 were:

Freakonomics, Levitt/Dubner
Neuromancer, Gibson
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Truss
The Diamond Age, Stephenson
Blade Runner, P.K. Dick
Getting Things Done, Allen
A Canticle for Liebowitz, Miller
Idoru, Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson
Count Zero, Gibson
(I hyperlinked them since book titles should be underlined, but the web has taught you that underlined words link you elsewhere. And maybe it will improve my Technorati ranking from 1,145,645 to something higher.)
Interesting. The most popular book is part of my minority of non-science-fiction books. And the most popular books that I own would seem to be those of William Gibson. To see how this compared to the LibraryThing world at large, I delved into the top 75 authors section of their Zeitgeist page, which is kind of cool. J.K. Rowling is the most popular author by far, which is not that surprising given that the first 6 most-popular books are Harry Potter books. (I have to say that, even though I was given the first three of that series in hardback, I have never read them.) Gibson appears at #45 on the list and Levitt does not appear. Like with Rowling, this is a function of Levitt only having written a single popular book versus Gibson's many books. Neil Stephenson is at #26.
I also doubt this is a truly representative sample of readers / book-buyers given that it consists of people who've entered their own books into one of several web sites. (A very brief look at Freakonomics on Shelfari to try and figure out where it stood versus LibraryThing showed that Shelfari only had 30 people who owned it (couldn't figure out its ranking) whereas on LibraryThing 2988 people owned it (making it the 52nd most popular book). I then compared Neuromancer to find that on Shelfari 30 people owned it while on LibraryThing 2736 people own it (making it 65th most popular). I think Shelfari either doesn't show the number of people owning a particular book properly, or it is not a very popular site.
A comment on the Chief Blogging Officer post suggested checking out BookTribes. I did the same search as above and found that it showed neither the number of readers nor the rank of the books for either Freakonomics (for which it had three hits, one with the wrong author) or Neuromancer. So BookTribes is less functional even than Shelfari, and probably has a smaller community as well.
Another thing you can do with your LibraryThing collection is get suggestions (as well as the cute but useless concept of UnSuggestions). This I know is not rocket science but is something my wife was searching for (as previously mentioned, she is far more literate than I) and thus I hope to be able to "friend" her soon and maybe it will reduce my nerd ranking to be paired with such a sophisticated lady. Uh, anyway, doing a "People with your books also have: fiction" search netted a number of books that I actually own but did not put down. In fact, of the 100 in this search, I actually owned 9 of them, and have read another 10.
To change it up a bit, I went to the living room bookshelves and added another 60 books (focusing on "my" books and those I had read rather than my wife's collection). This added some new books to my top 10 most popular (shown in bold below):

Freakonomics, Levitt/Dubner
Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris
Neuromancer, Gibson
Cryptonomicon, Stephenson
Snow Crash, Stephenson
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Truss
Quicksilver, Stephenson
The Diamond Age, Stephenson
Blade Runner, P.K. Dick
People's History of the United States, Zinn

So, half of what was out in the living room was the more popular stuff. Also, the Neil Stephenson books I own are more popular than those of William Gibson, as 4 Stephenson books are now in "my" top 10 and only one Gibson book.
Now that I've really updated my book collection to include everything that is really "mine" but is not hidden back here in the nerd zone, the percentage that is sci-fi drops to 66%. However, very few of the recommendations are from outside of SF, so it's like LibraryThing knows what I like even if I try to get all fancy on it. I do appreciate the "omit authors already in your collection" (as did my wife) as I have tended to glom onto SF authors and read all their books, so when I visit bookstores I just go straight to the S (Sterling/Stephenson) and B (Bear & Benford) sections. Anyway, new SF authors are more valuable to me than knowing that one of my favorites has written something new or that a certain bookstore has something that I had been searching for. (By the way, I once did a search for Bruce Sterling's Involution Ocean on half.com, was unsuccessful, but added it to my wish list. More than a year later, I got an email that it had located the book. It was like a nice surprise from the past. Thinking about it, I just did the same with paperback editions of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan and James Othmer's The Futurist which I saw in a bookstore recently but didn't feel was worth paying hardcover prices.) The main new author in my recommendations with whom I don't have previous ambivalent associations seems to be China Mieville. I in fact placed an order on half.com ($5.25) for Perdido Street Station which seemed to be the most popular. (Although I have to say that this guy's review and the subsequent comment made me laugh out loud.) I would have liked to support LibraryThing in some minimal way by buying using their Amazon link but half.com was $2 cheaper and Amazon got enough of my money at Christmas time.
Anyway, sorry this is such a departure from what I usually blog about, but I figured that this might be a little more accessible to my librarian readership demographic (even though they will make fun of me for the crap contained in my library, and also may realize that I have Thumbsucker and Masters of Atlantis on a "long-term loan" to use a librarian term). And also it fills the one-blog-entry-per-month-or-so quota I have set for myself.
--sbreck
technorati: LibraryThing, books

OneNote 2007 and SharePoint 2003 -- problems (update: resolved)

2006-11-19T21:20:00.000-05:00

I write this blog entry in frustration and will probably revert away from SharePoint. The experiment was a failure. Back to file shares and using VPN to access them.

Update: Never blog in anger. Scroll to the bottom to see how this problem was resolved.

Now that I've blown off a little steam, let me describe what I am trying to do. Chris Pratley left a comment on my prior entry to let me know that OneNote 2007 could work with notebooks stored in SharePoint 2003, and my Beta 2 collaboration entry said that with file shares, you share the FOLDER ( = notebook), not the section. So finally those two factoids sank in and I realized that maybe SharePoint 2003 might be able to store an entire notebook.

That would be cool, because I was just starting a project with a coworker who is on Vista and as such is afraid to use Juniper Network Connect (warning: PDF warning2: weird fonts) on his machine, and it is highly likely that our PPTP VPN doesn't work from this client. So if we were to do any kind of collaboration with both of us traveling, it would be way easier to use SharePoint than shares on our office file cluster.

I made a SharePoint Document Sharing Site, and then (here is the radical innovation) made a folder called "[Client Initials] [Project Initials] OneNote" under Shared Documents. I then copied the contents of the notebook I'd made on my file share into this folder. I then closed my notebook, and opened the one from SharePoint. So far, so good! I got my coworker to do the same, and we were in business! I had used the Group Project template, and as we looked at the sections to get the project started we realized that some didn't make sense, and one (Meeting Notes) that I'd moved my notes and agendas into would make more sense renamed to "Project Management" (which follows our Interwoven "matter-centric" folder structure -- please don't ask me who designed this) and the "Research" section would best be repurposed as "Client Supplied Materials" in the same vein.

Note to blog readers: do not rename OneNote sections. It leads to corruption of existing materials. That section of the notebook would no longer sync, despite multiple closings (leaving a Misplaced Section) and openings. The lesson of OneNote 2007 + collaboration is to make periodic offline copies if you care about the pages you create. Otherwise the sync will get all fucked up and you will lose important data, like the notes from a meeting. Or at least you will not be able to sync those notes back in until you close the notebook, reopen it, and then copy the notes in from the misplaced section. What makes a file refuse to sync? It is a mystery, but it has happened a lot.

After some time, I believe this particular client project notebook has stabilized and is syncing fine for my coworker and I. I will leave it in SharePoint for now but I don't entirely trust it and will keep my eye on everything I do and manually synchronize my notebook and make sure I see the checkmark as often as possible.

Since I felt I had stabilized my client notebook, it was time to take another step. I run a weekly meeting with my peer managers, my boss, and his boss which mainly revolves around the staffing of projects. (In case I haven't ever mentioned it, I manage a small group of consultants in addition to my billable client work.) Since we are busy as hell lately, I've been using the meeting agenda as kind of a way to keep track of open requests and the other various tasks of our group. In an ideal world, my peer managers and my boss, who all have at least OneNote 2007 B2TR if not already the RTM version, could add items to this agenda, follow up on their tasks, etc. even if they weren't able to attend the weekly meeting. Of course, they don't -- they barely even look at the agenda when I send it out, and still email me things like "can you put [some topic] on the agenda?" I won't get into further detail on this except to say that highly technical professionals with 6+ years of experience can sometimes be annoying Luddites…

Anyway, I figured that, in my peers' defense, they all work very hard outside of the office, and probably rarely have reason to VPN in. What I am touching on is probably worthy of a larger discussion beyond the OneNote/SharePoint context, but many places you visit as a consultant do not have workable VPN access, and VPNing into your office is somewhat of a dated concept, given security (you open a completely unprotected tunnel into your office LAN) and practicality issues (I get all my Outlook email via RPC over HTTPS, why can't I get the rest of my non-static data this way?). SharePoint should be a no-brainer here because, just like with Outlook, you could get your key files as well! (I won't get into SharePoint's overlap with law-firm-specific document management like Hummingbird (Open Text) and Interwoven, although I could probably get a much better job than I have now, which wouldn't require so much god-damned travel, if I could speak more intelligently on that subject. Ahem. Anyway.) So, for this reason, I thought that moving these files to a SharePoint site would maybe make it easy enough for my colleagues to actually participate in the agenda development and maintenance so that I don't have to remind them of their tasks for Monday every Friday morning like as if I'm a father or something of grown-ass men. Ahem. Anyway.

The other significant advantage of moving my files to SharePoint is that it lets me edit them on my home computer, in 1600x1200 on a 21" LCD screen, rather than in 1024x768 on my 12.1" ThinkPad X41 tablet. But, my tablet, which runs my work Outlook and my work Interwoven and my work DTE time entry system and everything else, can update in quasi-real time so that when I finally want to send the updated agenda out (for example), it is all synced up on the laptop and ready to go.

So, today I moved my files from the file share on the office cluster to a new folder I had created under my team site. To keep the speed up and save bandwidth, I Citrix'd into my office, opened SharePoint, switched to Explorer view, then opened the file share in another window and dragged the files in. (Note: if your file is called "Agendas & Minutes.one" you will have to rename it to "Agendas and Minutes.one" because the "&" is a reserved character. SharePoint doesn't tell you this in Explorer mode, it just refuses to copy. Uploading the file gives an error that is clearer.) I closed my file share notebook on both my laptop and my home computer (I can VPN into the office from my home computer, even though I know I shouldn't). Then I opened the new notebook from SharePoint. Both computers synced. So far, so good.

On my laptop, I started making some minor adjustments to one of the pages in my notebook and quickly noticed that it didn't allow me to do so. Shortly afterwards, the designation "(Read-Only)" appeared next to the page name. Remembering this from my short-lived ON2003/SP2003 days, I right-clicked on the section but the "Open for Editing" option has of course disappeared. "Oh," I figured, "my home computer has it open." Closed out OneNote on my home computer, closed it out on my laptop, waited for a bit, and then opened it on my laptop. It opened instantly but still said read only. It has now been about five hours and it's still read-only. I can't take notes in my notebook for tomorrow's meeting so I copied the agenda into my "generic meetings" section and then sent it to the team from there. Great.

So then I went into OneNote on my home computed, opened up the same notebook from SharePoint, made the edits, and then noticed the "This notebook is not connected" icon next to the notebook. I clicked the icon, pressed "Sync this notebook now", waited for five minutes, and finally received "This section contains changes that cannot be synced because access to the section file is denied. Correct the file permissions or save your copy of this section elsewhere." In the sync screen, this shows as error 0xE000004A. Remember, this is a BRAND NEW NOTEBOOK with three sections in it. One section is 15MB and has 100 pages in it (weekly meeting notes for two years) and the other sections are under 200KB. It is the "large" section that cannot be synced. What has it open? I am not in SharePoint; I just have the two computers with the file. This I thought was a radical new feature of OneNote 2007. Will the problem just go away tomorrow like similar OneNote problems? Is this something that happened because of the way I transferred the sections from my file share notebook to SharePoint? Is it because I upgraded the sections from OneNote 2007 B2TR to OneNote 2007 RTM? (Even though after I uninstalled B2TR, loaded RTM, and then launched RTM, nothing came up that indicated that it was doing anything to my notebooks, they just opened.)

Is the OneNote notebook syncing just this fragile? It seems not really ready for production use. Except that I am using it for production use, really for everything that contains data that I update regularly and want to share with colleagues, which is why I'm so frustrated.

Update: After having the same problem with my client page the next afternoon, I asked my colleague on the project, who also has responsibility (and administrative access) to support our server infrastructure, and it turned out that our SharePoint server was out of disk space. (It is somewhat of a "rogue" server (I'm the only one who really stores anything on it) so it's not monitored.) The condition was cleared and the manager document workspace was able to sync again. The client workspace is still showing as "Waiting for update" as of two hours ago but is sort of updating. So the moral is, before you get all huffy about SharePoint's viability as I just did, make sure you monitor your SharePoint server properly. I am still leaving this rant/entry up because I am still having a problem syncing my client billable production data, but my problem from last night was solved by what turned out to be a fairly obvious solution.

I don't suppose there's a debugging mode in OneNote 2007 that will show you a reasonable excuse for why a synchronization might fail?

Update2: Once I got home and connected my laptop to the internet, it seemed to find our SharePoint server, sync, and everything seems fine. It also continued to sync at work once the disk space condition was cleared, though its display did not reflect that.

technorati: OneNote 2007 SharePoint

Vista Media Center RC2 on hp z552 -- update

2006-11-05T15:49:00.000-05:00

So we (well, mostly, my long-suffering wife) have been living with Vista Media Center for a few weeks. Despite a relatively easy upgrade, my wife's patience was tried while I tried to work out three main problems: video stuttering (halting or jerky playback) while watching live TV, occasional loss of the wireless keyboard and remote control, and codec issues. I will discuss each as follows:

Stuttering Live TV

I believe this thread describes the same problem, and if you go to the very last page, I believe I finally solved it. The problem is that the video signal "stutters" or periodically halts while you watch live TV. A lot of answers were bandied about in the thread, including shutting off Windows Desktop Search and Windows Defender, but for me, it didn't go away until at one point Vista out of the blue suggested that my z552 was performing slowly, and that shutting off the Aero Glass interface would speed it up. I gladly did so and since then the stuttering has been gone. I still think leaving Desktop Search and Defender turned off can't hurt; I don't think the former can do much for you on MP3s and video files, and the latter should be unnecessary if you follow safe computing practices or mostly use the thing as DVR/stereo as we do.

Remote and wireless keyboard stop working

I saw this the night before I went on a business trip, and was able to fix it by hooking up a mouse, closing Media Center, and using the "keyboard connect" buttons on the front of the Media Center and back of the keyboard to make them talk to each other again. Then the next day, I got off the plane to find a voicemail from my wife asking for assistance. I walked her through the "keyboard connect" thing but was unsuccessful. (It is kind of timing-sensitive and sometimes just doesn't work.) She had to use the mouse as a remote for the remainder of her television viewing.

I have seen this problem recur a few more times since then, but, knock on wood, it seems to be less frequent. It is usually fixable with just the keyboard connect buttons. I hope that lessening the CPU and I/O load has let the keyboard connect more easily and that someday I can hide the mouse away as it is not an attractive addition to our media center cabinet.

Codec issues

I have been in codec hell since MCE 2005, and it continued to plague me in Vista. I believe I have finally solved it to my satisfaction. One of my primary problems with MCE 2005 was that HD content tended to have nearly inaudible dialogue (even turned up to 25) but then commercials, music, and action sequences would be too loud. So we would have to watch everything with a hand on the remote to be ready to turn down during music scenes. Remember, we have two computer speakers with a subwoofer plugged into our Media Center, no surround sound, no receiver, nothing like that. Sorry, we're audio Luddites in that respect.

I first installed an updated DefilerPak so that everything could be upgraded at the same time, but this broke Live TV and nearly all my AVI content. I uninstalled it and then reloaded just the latest version of ffdshow and AC3filter, but I still had problems with some AVI content which would sort of jerk and stutter during playback. What I did find (comment if you want me to post more on this, because I can) is that with later AC3filter builds, I can increase the center (voice) channel of 5.1 audio, which greatly lessens the volume differences between voice and other audio in surround sound audio. I let the stuttering be for awhile as the, er, jerky content was no longer being broadcast, but then MCE 2005 Media Center's UI starting showing a black screen while recording or when resuming from standby so that's what really drove me to upgrade.

Once upgraded, I had high hopes that Microsoft's default codecs in Vista might suffice, but the world of encoding HD and other content has always been ahead of Microsoft, and also is not fazed by licensing issues. So, thus I thought of ffdshow again, but discovered the newer ffdshow_tryout branches which are far more Vista-friendly and don't crash the thumbnail process as I described in my prior Vista Media Center entry. So I installed ffdshow_tryout and found that most of my content was now viewable and did not experience any stuttering playback. This included OGM content. One thing that didn't show after this installation was MKV (Matroska) content, which required the Haali Media Splitter to work. So far these codecs have been fine.

Two problems remained: one that has just now been fixed and one that I will have to work on. The first is the problem with black static or "fuzz" appearing in the brightest white parts of content other than live TV. This was reported all over The Green Button and quickly fingers were pointed at the ATI driver. I am happy to report that the latest driver has fixed this. (Apologies if the link doesn't work, ATI seems to have a shitty state variable system which renders the search feature unusable as clicking on each hit results in "your session has ended".) I no longer see these black spots and so it is clear that the driver update has resolved the problem.

The final remaining "codec" problem is that I have noticed that both video and audio from certain types of downloaded HD content is too jerky to be watchable now. This could perhaps be due to the driver update (I tested it after, unfortunately not before, the update) or that I have not tried to watch this content before. As I look at it, I see that the two really bad problems are with MKV content. Maybe I need to replace the Haali media splitter with something else? Stay tuned...

--sbreck

technorati: vista RC2 media center hp dec z552

Google Mobile (Gmail Mobile) on a Treo 700p

2006-11-02T21:43:00.000-05:00

Though I'm pretty happy with the mobile version of Gmail in my Treo browser, I am intrigued by Gmail Mobile which recently came out. Of course I immediately went to this site on my Treo, and found that "Your device does not support this filetype". (As an aside, this is true, read the FAQ: Verizon devices are not supported because the greedy bastards lock you into their "Buy-it-now" or whatever it's called version of BREW so you have to buy every Java app from them directly.)

Still, I don't like to pay for things and I do like to find new cool things to do with my Treo. Taking a look at the gm-Palm-Treo_700p.jad file that was downloaded, I found that it was a tiny text file that had as its first line:

ERROR: Gmail is not supported on your device

Hmm. It did, however contain a link to a JAR file, which I downloaded on my PC and attempted to launch. No go, which I guess is understandable.

OK, I have two possible approaches. One is to convert the JAD & JAR files into a PRC, which seems to be to be easiest. There are some instructions on Sun's site that tell you step by step how to do this and make it look as easy as possible: take your JAD & JAR files, run Converter.bat, and they magically become a PRC file that you can install. Unfortunately, the article is almost five years old, and in five years the MIDP has gone from version 1.0 to version 2.0 (heh, gotta love Sun) and it no longer includes Converter.bat or really anything recognizable from that article. As much as I would like to flip Verizon a big fat bird by easily installing a PRC, I am stymied at this time.

The other approach is to download "WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment" from Palm and install it so you can run Java apps on your Treo. You will have to fill out a form (hint: say you're a developer and that you work for a corporation in order to get authorized; I remember signing up for this download before and failing) and pretend to have a Treo 650, but then you can download it. I installed the JVM itself (J9JavaVMMidp20) and the two JSR-172 files in case we need "Web Services" to get to Gmail. I then saw that IBM Java VM appeared in my program list. I launched it and clicked Install, and then began typing in the URL I discovered earlier. Then I hit a snag -- there is no underscore character on the Treo keyboard, and you can't hit Ctrl-Space to bring up the list of alternate characters, and there isn't even a paste button. Shit! So I typed http://www.gmail.com/app instead. This came back with an error "The application descriptor was missing the required MIDlet-Name field". Remembering the JAD file I had downloaded before, I noted that it actually did contain this field, so it wasn't that the file wasn't compatible; to prove this I typed http://sbreck.blogspot.com in the URL field and got the same error. Hmm. Do you think maybe Google did this to prevent Treo people from installing this? That would be devious. So I typed in the JAR file URL and what do you know? After a security warning, it came back with "AMS successfully installed "Gmail" midlet"!

I launched it, logged in, and it seemed to work fine! Very speedy and nice. Java is a bit weird because it doesn't really work that well with the Treo four-way navigation (like to highlight buttons) but I would probably use this instead of m.gmail.com going forward.

Plus it was the satisfaction of running a Java app without paying Verizon that made it extra great. Go, Google!

--sbreck

technorati: Treo 700p Gmail Mobile Palm

upgrading an hp z552 to Vista RC2

2006-10-15T14:50:00.000-04:00

I have blogged before of problems with my hp z552 Media Center machine. When they began to affect my wife then I had to take action. I could either wipe it back to its factory install or go with Vista. Of course, I'd rather be using Vista.

Prep work

First, I had to do some research:

This guy has everything but the network card working in Vista -- the network card is pretty critical, I'm hoping I will be more successful. (Edit: I had no problems but I realize the thread dates back to RC1 or earlier builds.)
Aero can work with ATI X300 RC1 drivers on RC2
(Edit: working just fine for me)
Should recognize the Hauppage PVR-150 that the z552 comes with
(Edit: it did)

Then I had to take stock of what apps I would want to reinstall:

dCut (sometimes my wife appears on TV as part of her job, we like to edit and save these few-minute appearances and dCut is pretty easy to use)
mceWeather (killer app for the Media Center, particularly useful if you add the cities you travel to regularly)
WebGuide3 (for remote scheduling -- I am working on a blog entry on what I've done with this)
Codecs (currently I am running with ffdshow, I uninstalled AC3Filter very recently when I lost my audio device and hadn't had to reinstall it; basically I need whatever codecs let me view downloaded materials)
Preloaded software? I don't know, do I need Intervideo WinDVD? The Sonic programs? I will go forward without them and if I need them and they don't install from HP's site, well, then I will regret it. Until then, moving on...

Then I had to think about data and settings to move off the system as backup and so that I wouldn't have to Ghost the whole thing:

Moved my unwatched recordings off to my USB hard drive
Recording schedule (so that I could at least see what was scheduled if I couldn't import it into Vista)Pictures (I synced a copy to the USB hard drive and I also have a copy on my PC)
MP3s (as above)

I wanted to make sure I knew the drivers loaded and the hardware I was supposed to be working with. So I elaborately went through Device Manager. I know this is boring but I am taking these notes for myself so you can just skim it if you don't care what hardware is in a factory hp z552 image:

Computer
- ACPI Multiprocessor PC
Disk drives
- Generic USB CF Reader USB device
- Generic USB MS Reader USB device
- Generic USB SD Reader USB device
- Generic USB SM Reader USB device
- WDC WD2000JD-22HBB0
Display adapters
- RADEON X300/X550 Series
- RADEON X300/X550 Series Secondary
  - Both are using ATI drivers of date 1/24/2006, version 8.221.0.0
  - In Driver Details most files were variations of 6.14
  - I think I installed the ATI MCE version of the driver at one point since HP was supposed to be so far behind in their driver releases. Hopefully this is a common enough driver on Vista, or I can refer to this ATI Vista RC1 driver that I saw on some TGB thread last night.
DVD/CD-ROM drives
- HP DVD Writer 640b
Human Interface Devices
- (3) HID-compliant consumer control device
- (5) HID-compliant device
- (1) Microsoft eHome Infrared Transceiver
- (3) USB Human Interface Device
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
- Intel(R) 82801FB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2651
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 266F
- Primary, Primary, and Secondary IDE Channel
IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers
- VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
Keyboards
- HID Keyboard Device
- Microsoft eHome MCIR 109 Keyboard
- Microsoft eHome MCIR Keyboard
- Microsoft eHome Remote Control Keyboard keys
Mice and other pointing devices
- (2) HID-compliant mouse
Monitors
- Plug and Play Monitor
  - I know I tried to mess with a custom definition of my 32" ProView RX326 LCD to try and get the 1366x768 resolution it claims without overscan, but I must have given up and reverted to 1152x648 which doesn't cross the screen's edge, is recognized as widescreen by Media Center and looks awesome in the 10' interface, and is tolerable though not wonderful in regular Windows.
Network adapters
- 1394 Net Adapter
- Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCE-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
  - I hope I am luckier than the gentleman on TGB, because this thing needs to work.
- Wireless PCI 802.11b/g adapter WN4201B
  - Don't actually care if this works unless the NIC doesn't work, but really, I have done a ton of shit to get the Ethernet line run and I am not going back to 5Mbit wireless.
Processors
- (2) Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
Sound, video and game controllers
- (2) Audio Codecs
- (2) Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II (26xxx)
  - Hauppauge driver version 2.0.34.23209 dated 7/28/2005
  - I believe the critical driver is hcwPP2.sys with above version
- Legacy Audio Drivers
- Legacy Video Capture Devices
- Media Control Devices
- Realtek High Definition Audio
  - Realtek Semiconductor Corp driver RtkHDAud.sys version 5.10.0.5123 dated 4/15/2005
- Video Codecs
Storage Volumes
- (4) Generic volume
System devices
- ACPI Fixed Feature Button
- ACPI Thermal Zone
- Direct memory access controller
- Intel(R) 82801 PCI Bridge - 244E
- Intel(R) 82801FB LPC Interface Controller - 2640
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM PCI Express Root Port - 2660
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM SMBus Controller - 2580
- Intel(R) 82802 Firmware Hub Device
- Intel(R) 915G/P/GV PCI Express Root Port - 2581
- Intel(R) 915G/P/GV Processor to I/O Controller - 2580
- ISAPNP Read Data Port
- Microcode Update Device
- Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
- Microsoft System Management BIOS Driver
- Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio
- (6) Motherboard resources
- Numeric data processor
- PCI bus
- Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator
- Programmable interrupt controller
- (2) System board
- System CMOS/real time clock
- System speaker
- System timer
- Terminal Server Device Redirector
Universal Serial Bus controllers
- eHome Infrared Receiver
- Generic USB Hub
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 2658
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 2659
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 265A
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 265B
- Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB2 Enhanced Host Controller - 265C
- USB Composite Device
- USB Mass Storage Device
- (5) USB Root Hub
whew! There it is.

As a final check, I put the Vista RC1 DVD in the drive and then clicked Check compatibility online, downloaded and installed Windows Upgrade Advisor RC, and let it scan my system. For what it's worth, the Upgrade Advisor said I could run Vista and suggested Home Premium. It identified the following issues:

System
- It suggested installing a specialized HD Audio driver but also said Vista didn't support HD Audio. That's OK, I have 6-year-old Dell freebie speakers (2 speakers plus a subwoofer) attached to Media Center, no receiver, SPDIF output, or any of that stuff. Sound is not a big issue for our Media Center use given that half the time it is drowned out by the loud-ass fans on the z552.
- It suggested making sure my video card supports TV output. I have a DVI to HDMI connector so I am good to go there.
Devices
- It could not find information about my HP 4050 and suggested I visit HP's site. If I need to print ever again on the Media Center PC, I will revisit the issue.
- It also couldn't find information about my Accton WN4201B wireless card. As I said, I hope I don't need it (it did say no issue was detected for my Marvell Yukon NIC).
Programs
- J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 2
- ATI Catalyst Control Center
- PC Help & Tools
- HP Image Zone for Media Center PC
- Sonic RecordNow!
- ATI Desktop Component
- Sonic Express Labeler
- I can live with all of these except maybe PC Help & Tools which is the HP utility to run diagnostics and whatnot.

All the data I believed I cared about was fully stripped off, and I thought I had enough info to fully recreate the system if I needed to. Now, to back up the OS image itself. I downloaded PE-Builder and found an old copy of Ghost, but since I felt lazy I also happened across something called "Hiren's Boot CD" and burned a copy of that, since it seemed to include Ghost. I booted this CD and, well, it was basically a frustrating experience. Either you go into the network and you are faced with DOS NET USE hell (I could never get it to attach to my PC) or you run Ghost, load every combination of USB drivers, and find your keyboard stops working. I gave up. Either my setup is too complex for this boot CD or I really can't Ghost to a USB hard drive AND use a wireless, possibly USB keyboard.

Upgrade
So, having given up on doing a backup, I figured I didn't want to have done all this work for nothing, and decided to upgrade the existing installation in place. Maybe that's a bad idea, but there you have it. It sort of gave me an out if it turned out to be a disaster. I popped in the disk, saw the same warnings about ATI Control Panel, etc., and let it go. My wife came home and seemed dismayed at the "your upgrade may take several hours to complete" message. Ordered food and let it be. It took around two hours.

Post-upgrade
On its first boot after setup, it asked if I was at home, a business, or a public setting. Picked up my wireless keyboard to answer and… nothing happened. The remote wasn't working either. I guess that was somewhat to be expected so I grabbed a spare USB mouse and plugged it in. Fortunately Synergy had been left alone as part of the upgrade so I launched that and connected it to my laptop.

The first thing I noticed that Windows was looking for DocumentViewer.MSI for some reason. A quick Google search told me it was the HP Image Zone (which isn't supposed to work in Vista) and a quick search of the machine's hard drive said it was located in C:\hp\drivers\hpiz423\setup\DocumentViewer. Vista didn't like that file or the subsequent Unload.msi that was requested, so I decided to uninstall HP Image Zone. I had used it in the past to easily load pictures from our camera by sticking the SD card in the media center PC, but if it doesn't work with Vista, I guess we'll have to find another way. I realized later that this had left the HP Image Zone in the Media Center start page area so I uninstalled "HP Image Zone for Media Center PC" as well. Note to fellow Vista noobs: it's now "Programs and Features", not "Add/Remove Programs".

I let Media Center launch and went through the TV setup. Worked just fine; found my tuners and downloaded the Guide. And, my scheduled recordings were all there. It did say there was a conflict and sent me to Scheduled Recordings, but I couldn't see what the problem was.

Moving on, I set up my display for the previous 1152x648 (it had reverted to 800x600 and looked a little funky) and then set up my speakers (two). So far so good. Liking the new interface. Then I went into Videos and, well, then I got my first taste of the Media Center crash message, which was to tell me that Media Center had stopped responding, and that I could check for information on why, restart it, or (I forgot the third option). Hmm. It restarted and Media Center seemed to be working, so I moved on.

I then wanted to try and get the wireless keyboard working as a hopeful first step towards getting the remote working (and thus being able to turn the thing over to my wife). So I downloaded and installed the HP Multimedia Keyboard/Mouse Driver Update and rebooted the machine. Cool, the keyboard and its trackball mouse work now. Oh, and hey, the remote does, too! Sweet.

I repaired the Front Panel Display Service to try and get it working (or at least to be dim and show only the time rather than brightly scrolling "Welcome to the HP Digital Entertainment Center"). Vista then suggested that the program might not have worked, and suggested I run it again. I did, and just did "Modify" and modified the only thing I could modify. Now the front panel display seems to be working.

I then went to try the final test, watching a movie, and it failed. I went into Pictures & Videos and then Video Library, and was greeted by a crash. I thought to myself that maybe it was choking on old ehthumbs.db files, so I deleted them, but had the same result. Finally I actually looked at the details of the error and found that ffdshow.ax was the cause of the problem. I then uninstalled ffdshow and went to watch my movie. No crash, but the movie wouldn't play. Hmm, turns out it needs the Xvid codec. (I must have, er, gotten it from Blockbuster Online that way.) Googled "ffdshow Vista crash", found this TGB thread, and FaberfoX's suggestion to grab version 1.27 did the trick. Note: because of Vista security shenanigans, I couldn't remove the old ffdshow.ax. Maybe Vista was trying to protect my old MCE 2005 installation? Anyway, installing it to a new directory did the trick. Vista Media Center was now working to my satisfaction.

Summary
So far the experience following the upgrade has been pretty good, if it was a little frustrating getting there. I do wish I had been able to clone my drive so I could start fresh, but if the upgraded version is more stable than its predecessor (which won't be hard) then I think it was worth it. The new interface is cool and has certainly fixed some of my MCE annoyances.

Anyway, sorry for the longest and most boring blog post yet. It amuses me to think that it will be immortalized due to the sheer number of Media Center-tastic phrases that will result in Google hits. Hope you visitors find it useful!

more later,
--sbreck

technorati: vista RC2 media center hp dec z552

...in case you hadn't heard enough about OneNote 2007 from me

2006-09-16T17:43:00.000-04:00

I've installed this B2TR thing all the kids are talking about ("Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh" for those of my non-technical readers I have not driven away with my incessant nattering about OneNote and what have you). But I also had some more comments about OneNote 2007 that I had not had a chance to blog about. Here they are:

Fixes for shared notebooks on file shares: I think B2TR has fixed some of the problems I had with shared notebooks living on file shares -- my laptop would often refuse to sync with my home notebook after it had been syncing all day with the office notebooks, and then upon a reboot, would sync just fine but then refuse to sync in the office after waking up from hibernation the next morning. So far it's only been two days but it hasn't had problems syncing in the office, hibernating, and then syncing at home. This is good!
OneNote and SharePoint: I guess if you are not a moron like I can be sometimes, you probably realized that SharePoint 2007 was a requirement for a OneNote 2007 shared notebook.
URL handling: I've already complained about this in my Outlook 2007 post, but will take this opportunity to complain about the OneNote implementation as well because I think it is a really dumb idea. And I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which is like the complainer's capital of the world, so I'm just trying to fit in. OK. Take for example this URL, which was the deployment instructions for SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 a few months ago. If you click it, you see the content has been moved and replaced with a pointer to the new location. However, the URL you get when you click it is different than the one in my link. OneNote (and, I'd assume, all Office products) intercepts this click and tells you basically that it's a 404 error. Fortunately, it does launch the URL in Firefox so you can see how to get to the new location. (FYI, since it took me a few tries to find it, the proper replacement URL for the Deployment Guide for single and server farm environment is here.) So, in other words, there's really no reason to present you with this error. Worse, I expect that if a site was dead, OneNote would let my browser tell me that, but instead it intercepts this and refuses to launch. Seems to me to be wasteful code to have Office try to do something with URLs rather than pass them to a browser; I guess maybe it is trying to load Office documents itself rather than have the browser launch them? I can't tell how I feel about this in OneNote (like, maybe they are trying to remind you to update your URL in your OneNote page) but I previously wrote about how annoying I find it with Outlook.
Ink improvements: In many ways I find it freeing that I don't have to worry about the ink Guide and can just write on a page without worrying about whether it's a new paragraph or not. And ink-to-text conversion finally is smart enough to figure that I basically only want one font size per document, not 15 different ones depending on how big my initial capital letter was or whatever made it decide before. I also noticed that, in B2TR, the "Insert or Remove Extra Writing Space" tool has gotten far more granular than it was in Beta 2 -- by that I mean that in Beta 2 sometimes you would split the text one line above or below where you wanted it, but B2TR seems to have made it so you can split it wherever you want, which is good.
Messier text grouping / ink handling: However, one thing I've found that annoys me is that the "Insert or Remove Extra Writing Space" tool now creates a new text group with the text beneath where you split it instead of just adding blank lines. The real-world effect is shown in the following pictures:
- First, you type an agenda of points you're going to bring up in a meeting. Notice how it is all nicely grouped together:
- Now, during the actual meeting, you want to take notes under each point, so you use the Insert Writing Space tool to give yourself some room. After the meeting, look what you're left with:
- So, if you need to convert your notes to give to others after the meeting, you'll then find that you can no longer "snap" the text groups together like you could in OneNote 2003. So you have to grab the text itself and move it into the prior group. Now, check out how the second group overlaps the first -- that means it's going to be nearly impossible to move it into the first section, you'll have to cut and paste. This is a pain! I know that if you are just taking notes for yourself, or you have great handwriting, you could just send out your notes to everyone as-is and no one would care about whether it is all grouped together or not. But you are typically converting it into Word or an email, sometimes for people that don't have OneNote (or, certainly in my case, who don't have OneNote 2007) and you just can't send out handwritten stuff. I've found that the time spent moving stuff around (and particularly piecing together where writing in margins was, since conversion can change text position and leave writing in its old position, no longer related to text) has offset the generally better ink-to-text conversion, so it's a wash. If I know I have to spend time converting my notes from a meeting, I'm tempted to leave the ThinkPad in keyboard mode rather than tablet mode, and so what's the point of tablet mode then?
- Anyway, if I was to make this section useful rather than a complaint, I suppose I would suggest an option that allows you to snap the text groups back together for us OneNote old-timers. And perhaps a way of pinning writing to text or word positions? (Like, if next to the word "Third" above I wrote "didn't discuss". In OneNote 2003, if I first tapped the pen just to the right of the "d" in "Third", then it would know that I was writing on the same line as that word, and so it would stay with the text as I edited and/or converted stuff above it. In OneNote 2007, what I wrote would be its own text group, and would stick in its original position even as my editing made the word "Third" shift upwards. So then the writing would be out of context with whatever ended up in that screen position. So I'd like there to be a way to have writing follow OneNote 2003 rules at least as an option, or if I could somehow pin it to the word that it's supposed to be next to.
Sections moving around: I've noticed that since my upgrade to B2TR a particular section keeps sliding all the way to the right of my notebook on every few launches. It is supposed to be 2nd from left. The section is in a "shared" notebook that is really a share pointing to my personal home drive, secured to me. I made this section so I could take my notebook offline. Not sure why my Miscellaneous section keeps ending up on the right and it's easy to drag back, but that's what's happening. Strange.

Alright, I'm trying to keep my blog entries shorter and have descriptive headings in the bullets so people are more inclined to read them. So, with that, enjoy your weekend, I'm out...

--sbreck

technorati: OneNote 2007 B2TR

a month with Outlook 2007 (update: B2TR)

2006-09-15T23:29:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, a few things happened. First, I got annoyed with the lack of integration between OneNote 2007 and Outlook 2003. Second, I became very jealous of my coworkers who'd already gone to Outlook 2007. And, third, I realized I had been blogging until my fingers bled (well, not literally) since I upgraded OneNote, so I figured that because I use Outlook all day, every day, this upgrade would basically make me run out of disk space from all the blog material it would generate. So, uh, anyway, I gave in and upgraded my work laptop to Outlook 2007.

On the advice of my coworkers, I deleted my OST file first (we run in cached mode since we are out of the office a lot), and went ahead. Caching everything again and then converting the various categories to colors took a really long time, but then I was essentially in business.

If anyone has read my blog before, you are already aware that I don't really research other people's blogs except for specific problems, so this review may overlap with that of others. (Though I did just now before posting check the Known Issues list to see if anything was on there. No offense, but the Known Issues list kind of sucks.) I tried to highlight things, gossip-column-style, so people can skim this giant post easily. So let me start with the positive things about Outlook 2007:

Pros:

The calendar looks great now. Like, stunning. I like the "show next appointment" thing, multiple calendar viewing is even better, the view shows more stuff more clearly, the, um, to-do bar has some stuff on it (I'm great at creating tasks but not so good at part where you do them and mark them complete)... just remember to turn off "Download shared non-mail folders" if you regularly go to other peoples' calendars and are in cached mode. If you leave that checked, you will forever synchronize everyone's calendar you've ever looked at.
Though the main Outlook window hasn't changed its look much in my opinion (I tucked away a lot of the new UI since I only have 1024x768 resolution on my work Tablet PC), appointments and emails do use the "ribbon" UI and are very different. You can see a screen shot of an appointment here in case you haven't seen it yet. With both appointments and messages, they've basically moved some things into your face that were not that easy to find before. I'm starting to get used to it but still have to search for things periodically (like "delay send").
People are really into the Time Zones thing (see above link). I had a moment where it annoyed me (certain appointments seemed to maintain the time that they were received in regardless of the time zone my computer was in) but I really like it now (particularly since I learned that you can just click the Time Zone button for these appointments and the appointment will always show in the time zone you're in). For example, I like to have an appointment on my calendar for all my flights. The agency that my client uses has this Infotriever thing which will create the appointment in the calendar, but it is not time zone aware, so a flight taking off from Newark at 6:40AM that lands in St. Louis at 8:18AM will appear as an 98-minute appointment, when really 8:18AM Central should be 9:18AM Eastern. Likewise, the return flight takes off at 5:59PM and lands at 9:30PM or something, but you have to make sure the 5:59 is Central and the 9:30 is Eastern. You can easily fix this now by clicking Time Zone, and then adjusting the time zone entries as needed.
I've started flagging things for follow-up now that they've added the ability to display reminders even for flagged items outside the Inbox. This is kind of revolutionary because I used to make appointments or tasks like "fill out this peer review" or "reply to this with your notes from some webinar" and drag the e-mail in there just so I could set reminders. I suppose I could have left the message in the inbox and just set a flag & reminder, but then I have to stare at the thing every time I look at my inbox, and I want to use my inbox as a small list of things that I have to do or reply to, and the more things in it, the more stressed out I get. Basically, if I have to scroll my inbox (e.g. more than ~15 items) then there's too much in there. Now I can drag them into @Delegated or @Deferred and they'll fire a reminder when I need them.
Filing things in folders is easier because the whole "line" that the folder is in becomes active rather than just the name of the folder.
I like the preview of font & color changes in-line. Just a stupid thing that is thoughtful of them to put in there.
It's clever that Outlook recognizes that it's easy for people to accidentally press Ctrl-Enter and send a message they hadn't finished. So now Outlook 2007 asks you. But you can make it stop doing that. I left it on for awhile but I just got used to it.
Just for purposes of this blog entry, I subscribed to an RSS feed and I kind of liked Microsoft's interface. I had not thought to store RSS feeds in my work Exchange system because I subscribe to a lot of feeds and am way behind on reading them (7335 unread according to my RSSBandit) but I am not super satisfied with the 'bandit these days so I added a feed to my home Outlook and a few to my work Outlook and we'll see how it goes. So far I think that reading feeds in Outlook format is kind of a good thing, and the "download the full article as an .html attachment to each item" setting could be awesome for reading feeds offline. I am sure that Exchange administrators are whipping out their light-sabers in anger right now thanks to that option (that's an obscure shout-out to my STL homeboy), if they are not already angry about the idea of storing RSS entries in Exchange in general.

And, of course, this wouldn't be a "give our abilities time" post if I didn't complain, but before I do, I should note that I wrote all this over the past few weeks in bits and pieces, and just today I installed the Beta 2 Technical Refresh, so I am not sure which have been fixed and which haven't. I will update these as needed if I find that they have been fixed by "B2TR" (as they call it). And now, without further ado, let the complaining begin...

Cons:

It has sped up some since I first converted and it created my OST, but Outlook 2007 can be very slow. Synchronizing really slows it down; and not just on my slow laptop hard drive (and large PST file), but also at home, where my PST file is under 350MB. Like, sometimes to the point where Outlook goes "white" until it decides to finish synchronizing. It got so bad at one point that when I had a lot of stuff to file out of my inbox I had to go offline because it took like 30 seconds to move a single message.
- B2TR maybe launches 30 seconds faster, but that's still like a 2-minute launch time. I admit I have a big OST file (1.2GB) but so does every attorney at my clients.
The "spell check before sending" setting seems messed up. Often I am asked "The spell check was interrupted before the message could be sent. Do you want to continue?" even though I have simply clicked Send. In some cases, it actually does a full spell check but still asks the question. I turned it off because it got so annoying.
- They fixed this in B2TR but I noticed that the spell check is not respecting the "Ignore original message text in reply or forward" setting. Which is to say, I have it set, and it is still checking. I definitely don't want that because you come off as a totally pedantic asshole if you check other people's spelling in anything but a document they asked you to review.
I think having Outlook handle URLs is a bad idea. I used to process e-mail on the plane by clicking URLs from e-mails so I could then delete the e-mail even though I knew it wouldn't launch. Firefox would attempt to launch, fail, then when I got somewhere with internet access, I pushed the Try Again button, and got right into the site. Even if I had to close Firefox or reboot, SessionSaver would keep the tab open until I closed it. Now, Outlook 2007 is trying to be too smart for its own good, and tell me that it "cannot locate the Internet server or proxy server". Yeah, I know that, because I'M ON A PLANE. Let my browser deal with it. Also, it processes your credentials like for internal secured sites or the CCO areas of Cisco's site in IE even if your default browser is Firefox, so if you don't already have that site open in your Firefox tabs, you end up entering your credentials twice. Outlook needs to get out of the way of checking that a URL is valid and just pass it along to the default browser.
In Public Folders, there's no Reply to All button available, and Alt-L doesn't work as a Reply to All shortcut. I have to right-click and choose Reply to All from the context menu. Is this to annoy me so I am happy to see public folders disappear when Microsoft finally kills them? No, because it's true in every other mail folder besides Inbox. I can't even understand what might have made them decide to do this.
In a new appointment, Alt-L has changed from "move cursor to Location field for appointment" and is now "save and close the appointment". This will take some getting used to. Also, Alt-S doesn't work any more. I guess a lot of keyboard shortcuts that I have mastered in my years of having only a laptop keyboard and no mouse may change. God damn, am I ever a nerd to complain about that. Seriously, every blog entry I ever write is like peppered with keyboard shortcuts. I am like totally OCD for keyboard shortcuts. Is that wrong? Is that weird? I seriously thing keyboard shortcuts save you time and wrist strain and the more you learn the happier your computing experience can be. Yeah, that I just typed that last sentence is really evidence of a warped mind.
I am seeing that the selection or focus will jump off the active e-mail (and moves to the preview pane) until you restart Outlook. It's like the Reading Pane is activating itself and stealing focus from your message, and doesn't happen when the Reading Pane is turned off. This will sometimes get so bad that even if you have a message open maximized, and use Ctrl-[ (I mean "less than" but HTML won't like that) to go to a previous message, it will boot you back to the main Inbox screen, and then you will see it switch focus to the preview pane.
- Haven't used this with B2TR long enough to see if it's been fixed; I will update or remove this if a couple of days go by without this happening
In the inbox, using Tab to move between selecting a folder, the message list, and the reading pane either doesn't work anymore or visits many more fields than it used to. This exacerbates the above problem because you keep getting thrown into the reading pane, and you used to be able to Tab or Shift-Tab out of it. Now Shift-Tab seems unable to leave the reading pane.
- FYI, this seems to be fixed or alleviated in B2TR. There are more tab stops than there used to be, but it does work now.
Moving an open item into a calendar folder now leaves the original message at the end rather than the beginning of the appointment. Half the time the body text is unreadable due to conversion from HTML to Rich Text (the calendar appointment format) so you want the message right at the top like it used to be. (I didn't bold anything in here because it was such a lame complaint.)
The Word instance being used as the e-mail editor sometimes dies. You will see that clicking in the body of the message does nothing (I've seen this happen in a calendar appointment as well) so you think Outlook has frozen, but if you click another field like To: or Subject: and click back into the body, the cursor returns and you can type again. I have Word 2003 on my work laptop, and I believe Outlook 2007 uses a minimal version of Word 2007 as the editor so that it can coexist with older versions of Word. So this may be a problem with "minimal Word 2007" that is addressed with full Office 2007. I haven't had the problem at home, for example, but then again, I don't write nearly as many emails at home as I do at work.
- I've only written about 10 emails in B2TR so that's probably not a big enough sample to see if this is still occurring or not.
It's also a little flaky sometimes as to whether it lets you click a URL link or not. I see this more in RSS feeds than in e-mails; you'll know it's happening because you have to move the mouse to keep the cursor as the "finger" and see the URL for more than a half a second. This I believe is part of the same rendering problem as above because it is fixed by clicking outside of the body of the message and then back in the message.
- I just saw this within a few hours after my upgrade to B2TR, so I can attest that this hasn't been fixed.
You used to be able to associate a contact with an appointment via the "Contact" field in the bottom right, but the only way I could figure out to do that was to insert a shortcut to the contact in the body of the appointment. That made me go and take a look at contacts that I knew I'd associated together (like two individuals who were married, or a person and their assistant) and it seemed that the associations were no longer there.
- In B2TR, it looks like there is a new "Business Card" button under Insert in the Include group for both Calendar and Contact forms. This sticks a VCF file into your appointment as an attachment. I'm not sure if this would update if you updated your contact but I kinda doubt it. In an appointment, that's not such a big deal, but in a contact you'd probably want a live link rather than a static copy of the contact so you could update both peoples' addresses at once or something. It is not as nice as the old Outlook 2003 feature.
I experienced some sort of calendar / public folder bug. We have a lot of distribution lists that have public folders associated with them which stores all mail sent to the folder. For some reason, I found that I was missing an appointment sent to the group. In the Outlook 2003 days, I would just re-open the meeting invite and accept it again. However, in Outlook 2007, the appointment appeared to be an exact copy of the one as sent by the meeting organizer. For that reason, it wouldn't let me accept it, file it, drag it, or copy and paste it into my calendar; each time I tried it told me I was the meeting organizer so I didn't have to do this. Finally I had to open up someone else's calendar and copy it into my own. I could understand Microsoft trying to idiot-proof this (for example, if you send a meeting to a distribution list you're on, you shouldn't have to accept or even see the appointment, but in Outlook 2003 you did see it), but it was wrong and didn't realize that I wasn't the meeting organizer. Very annoying.
- Still saw it in B2TR

Alright, that's enough out of me on this subject. If anyone knows how to fix any of these or just wants to commiserate, the comments button is very nearby...

--sbreck

technorati: Outlook 2007

technology turns against me part 2: Windows Media Center

2006-09-10T16:28:00.000-04:00

OK, so I know I'm the last loser in the world not using the new Vista Media Center. I bought an hp z552 and it came preloaded with MCE2005, and since my wife is its primary user, I can't just go installing whatever I want. That said, the thing seems to be testing me to try and make me figure how far it can push me before I snap. I love Media Center and I love having a functional computer in the living room but this thing is like a child that I am slowly watching spin away into delinquency. OK, I'm being overly dramatic, so let me just post the various things that it's doing:

Not recording

This is the newest and most disturbing trend. My wife appeared on the Saturday Today Show a few weeks back and had set it up to record as she always does before her appearance. (She is on TV usually once a month.) Of course it was too early in the morning for me to catch her live so I didn't even think about getting up. When she returned home, I was awake, so we sat down to watch. Nothing. No trace of the fact that it was supposed to have recorded. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that I at first attempted to blame her for not correctly setting it up. Foolish choice on my part. She is the one who uses the Media Center most of all, she sure as hell knows how to set up a damn 20-minute recording. A quick look at Event Viewer showed something I'd never seen before: "Manual Recording was not recorded due to a temporary failure caused by either a system malfunction or a power loss." So for whatever reason, it just didn't record. And I was in the doghouse because I'd insinuated that she didn't know how to schedule a recording... later, something similar happened when she turned on the TV to find that a program just wasn't recording, and then had to press Record to kick it off. Its error message was: "Recording of [a TV show that I shall not name on the blog for fear of embarrassed wife] began late on 8/23/2006 10:13:57 PM due to a temporary failure caused by either a system malfunction or a power loss and stopped on 8/23/2006 11:02:54 PM." How can this be happening after 16 months of essentially trouble-free operation? And, do so few Media Center users look at their event logs that these errors are essentially invisible on Google?

Losing time

One possible explanation for the above may be this even more annoying problem, which is that the Media Center stopped maintaining accurate time. Each suspension would lead to a 10-minute or so loss or gain in time. Once it resumed and was just about exactly three hours behind (and no, I checked and it hadn't reverted to Pacific time). I checked the Internet Time tab on the Time & Date control panel applet, and when I tried to update from both time.windows.com and time.nist.gov I received some error telling me that it didn't have a handle to tell me what the error was. So maybe whatever service gets the time from the internet was broken? But what would that have to do with a system malfunction or power loss?

Frequent failures to download the guide

A final possibly related problem was that every time I'd turn on the Media Center, I'd see a tray icon that said that "Media Center is downloading the Guide" or something like that. Annoyingly, that tray icon never seemed to go away. For the same two-week period, the event log filled with messages like this: "Event Info: Unable to link service to lineup. File validation error - mismatched guide package. The Guide listings service is not currently available. Please try again later." I set up my cable provider again through the main Media Center "Set up TV" wizard, and still got the messages. Then, they disappeared.

I know I rebooted the Media Center during the month I had the above three problems, since that's the easiest way to troubleshoot a problem that there is. And the fact that it just kind of went away makes me wonder if there was some internet thing going on causing the problem -- like maybe time.windows.com was down or was giving unexpected responses, and/or the Guide download file format was messed up for a week. So far things have been recording and the time has been correct when the Media Center resumes, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Here are some other problems I've been having:

Exiting the Media Center app before standby

I somehow believe this is either an HP patch that caused this or a Microsoft patch, but I have to say that I don't like it. Basically, every time we return from standby, it shows the desktop for a second, then the green button appears in the middle of the screen, and Media Center launches with its loud syntho-horn noise. I suspect this is an HP patch to "fix" the problem where the front-panel display can't change from some embarrassing crap you watched last night upon return from standby. But the noise is driving my wife nuts, particularly when the thing turns itself on unexpectedly to download the Guide or something while she's sitting right next to it using her computer. I don't care that much about the display, I'd rather have the old behavior back.

"Overheating" and blowing its fans loudly

I recognize that as a smallish, usually quiet device that lives on a shelf that is enclosed on three sides, the z552 has different cooling issues than my desktop computer does. (Which sounds like an air conditioner when I am playing UT2004, which is often.) But basically, these days, the z552 can't play a movie or record a TV show for more than like 10 minutes without blowing its fans really loudly for a few minutes. It's really loud and really annoys my wife. (I think she thinks she has "done something wrong" to the machine to cause it to do this. Hehehheh) I wish I knew how to monitor the temperature to see if it really needs to be blowing air or if somehow the tolerances for when it kicks off the fans could be adjusted. I know I could probably take the upper shelf out of my entertainment cabinet, but that would look even more ghetto than it does now (with the sticking out of the cabinet an inch or so 'cause it's not deep enough).

Codec issues

Finally, I will admit something without going into much detail. I download movies and TV shows via BitTorrent. Making it easy to share them with my wife so she could watch them when I was out of town or we could easily watch them together was a primary driver behind the purchase of the Media Center. The lure of buying an HDTV (Proview RX326) was that we could watch the programs in really good quality. Because these files use various encodings that were not part of the Microsoft standard or for which Microsoft cannot send a codec on demand (DivX, Xvid, AC3 or OGG sound encoding, etc.), additional non-Microsoft codecs must be installed. As I had a slight acquaintance with the packager from a forum I used to frequent, I had used DefilerPak since 2002 on my other computers, so I installed it on the z552 in May 2005 and it had worked fine for me ever since. However, I had always noticed that HD-quality recordings had extremely difficult-to-hear dialogue. The voices would be very low, but then whenever there was music, explosions, cars revving engines, etc. they would be very loud. I knew this was due to the fact that HD content was typically encoded with surround-sound audio, and I only had two speakers and a subwoofer. Media Center knew I had a 2-speaker system when I set it up, but still did not know how to balance the mix appropriately so that voices could be audible. This became more pronounced when I bought the DViCO FusionHDTV 5 USB, and found that even legitimate over-the-air HDTV broadcasts had the same problem with inaudible voices. Finally, I started to poke around in the DefilerPak settings, but could find nothing to set up channels. So, I figured, why not upgrade to the latest version of DefilerPak? Bad idea. Basically, nothing would play after that -- Media Center-recorded TV, movies with Xvid, regular movies downloaded like 5 years ago, etc. After messing around, I ended up with a combination of ffdshow and AC3filter, and that basically got me back in business. Most importantly, I found that I could use the AC3filter control panel to jack the "Voice" (center) channel to +20dB, and then I finally resolved my sound problem! But a new problem introduced was some jerkiness in certain downloaded materials. I don't want to mess things up by playing around with codecs again, but if it continues to be a problem once a certain half-hour pay cable show returns to the air, I am going to have to dig in and see what happens.

OK, this post is long enough. If any of you people can give any suggestions in the comments, I would truly appreciate it…

--sbreck

technorati: Media Center MCE hp

technology turns against me part 1: Treo 700p

2006-09-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

Lately I feel like, as I finally achieve a relatively stable equilibrium on my work Tablet PC despite switching to beta software for two of my critical applications (Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007), certain other key weapons in my technological arsenal are falling to shit. Maybe you can only have one technology item work well for you at a time.

Anyway, the point of this short blog entry is to note that, with no provocation, on Wednesday I began receiving the GX_ASSERT error with my not-much-more-than-two-month-old Treo 700p. Again. This time, I knew not to have a tantrum, and instead calmly waited until I got to work, and then:

asked to have my Goodlink user and cached profile blown away and recreated
hard reset my Treo
downloaded the OTA setup from get.good.com
reinstalled Good
re-set all my Good settings (e.g. delete certain annoying autotext, turn off most of the reminders)

Then I was back in business. I know it was punishment for thinking the other day, "Hey, the Treo 700p / Goodlink 4.9 combo has been worked great for kind of awhile now!" It's like it heard me, and decided to show me why Palm is ditching their OS for some Linux thing... OH NO I DIDN'T

--sbreck

P.S. hahaha, speaking of technology turning against me, the Blog This thing with OneNote/Word also failed me. (It popped up a username and password box that would accept no usernames or passwords or even the Cancel button.) I would say it was due to Blogger testing out their beta editor for some lucky group of people and breaking their API for the rest of us schmucks, but then when I went into Word I found it had yet again lost my account credentials for this blog. WTF Microsoft, do you write the credentials on a napkin or something?

technorati: Treo 700p Goodlink

issues with OneNote 2007's new collaboration features

2006-08-27T20:01:00.000-04:00

Now that I've been using OneNote 2007 Beta 2 for a few weeks, I have used the LiveSession feature in 35 meetings (I counted so I'm not exaggerating on this. welcome to my world...). Some were contiguous so I kept the session open, but still, that's a lot of sets of notes to have taken. I can thus consider myself some sort of LiveSession SuperNerd and am adequately credentialed to complain and give suggestions on this product. I have already discussed LiveSessions in some detail in my overall review of OneNote 2007, so I will try not to repeat myself, but now that I've used them a lot I have grown less happy with them. Here goes:

o Losing sync: My coworker and I have a serious problem which has been showing up frequently. It is that the session will sometimes "hiccup" such that he can see me typing and appears to be able to type as well, but I can't see what he's typing. The fix is usually for him to exit the session, delete the section that was shared, and open the invite again to launch the session. This can take focus away in meetings since we first have to determine that there is a problem via IM, and then it takes some time to fix it. In a half-hour meeting, if you spend 5 minutes trying to fix a technical problem, you've missed a lot of the meeting. I for a second threatened to switch back to OneNote 2003 if this isn't made more reliable in the next few weeks, but of course I won't, I am just going to rage impotently :(

o No sharing pages, only sections: I'm still annoyed with the per-section sharing thing, and miss the old per-page thing. I think that

o Worse performance: I don't think performance is as good in a LiveSession as it was in the old shared sessions. Maybe that's because I have 6-12 pages in my sections now that I have to share versus one or two, or maybe it's because Beta 2 hasn't been through much performance tweaking (which I HOPE is the case because OneNote is relatively unusable when you have "Sync automatically" turned on), but seeing someone else's typing is not nearly as instantaneous as it was in OneNote 2003.

I also talked about Shared Notebooks in my prior OneNote 2007 review, and if I had written this review at the end of the work day on Friday, I would have had only great things to say because I think I have finally figured them out. Here are some good and bad things about shared sections:

o Share the notebook, not the file, and you'll be fine: The number one revelation that has worked for me is that you must share sections at the notebook (folder) level rather than the section level. Yes, it works to place shortcuts as I suggested before (see the part after the struck-through section), but you can't then force them to sync if you want to stay offline because, well, letting it attempt to sync while you're not connected to the file share that your notebook lives on makes performance suck. What you have to do is create notebooks, then do a File\Open Notebook\name of share on which your sections live, and then you will be able to deal with the shared sections with far fewer hassles. So here's what I did at work:

· \\work-server\my-public-share\my-client-name which stores notebooks for my St. Louis project, one huge one that is all my personal notes, one that will become the real shared notes which will be our archive when the project is done, and one that is a small section for that week's notes. The latter only exists because you can't share pages, only a section (yeah, this isn't the first and it's not the last time I'll be complaining about this)

· \\work-server\my-private-share\OneNote which stores all my private notebooks. This was my second big revelation, which is that rather than take "personal" or otherwise non-shared notebooks offline like you did in OneNote 2003, you should store them in a share and let them sync, even though you don't need to share them with others. It's possible that this still works but OneNote was horribly confused in my case because our My Documents is a DFS share that we take offline. Don't do this. So every single notebook had a sync icon, but was also stored locally, which might be why the "Sync automatically" setting was causing such crappy performance and why my notebooks would disappear sometimes.

§ Speaking of the "notebook disappearing" point, I will suggest to Oliver Sturm that he do what I did, which is to make sure that sections on a server that he wants to take offline are accessed only from a Shared Notebook (e.g. File\Open Notebook\type the share name). Before, I was getting misplaced sections all the time, and now, it hasn't happened since.

· \\home-machine\share-for-home-sections which is where I keep things like the section that stores my blog in case I want to write on the road and my section for miscellaneous stuff like appliance purchase info and whatnot. This was one I'd tried to make work first and finally found out the File\Open Notebook trick, and it's been working like a charm. Make sure you delete all remaining shortcuts to sections that live in the shared notebook, or you will see wackiness.

o Don't try to outsmart OneNote or it will corrupt your files: I have several sections with which I'm having a problem:

· My miscellaneous home stuff section is throwing an 0xE0000898 error and advises me to report the bug. Somehow, between copying it around and creating shortcuts to it and using OneNote to move it and whatnot, finally something snapped. I have a single page in the bottom that I cannot delete, and I get "An unknown error occurred while trying to open this page". It must have been a bad sync between laptop and desktop that caused it. I had to move all the pages to a new file, delete the old file, and then rename the new file to be what the old file was.

· My client section had somehow become corrupt, and I suspect I need to blow away the cache on my laptop, but I did all this work to consolidate my notes and my colleague's notes that I really don't want to lose. I think there is something seriously wrong with the syncing, because my VPN connection showed over 400MB read in syncing these files, when they are both about 25MB apiece. Every time I try to sync, it seems that OneNote reads 100MB or so and writes a tenth of that, but never finishes. I seriously hope I haven't lost my changes (which were moving a bunch of notes from my personal into the new shared section). I can watch the files sync for hours but I worry that they'll never finish. :(

§ The weird thing is that it shouldn't be that slow over the VPN -- I VPN'd in on my home machine and opened up the shared notebook for this client and it only took a few minutes to synchronize completely (except for a few pages that OneNote knew I was trying to sync on my laptop). It read 657MB to open these 64MB of shared files. Maybe I'm just not letting the laptop stay connected long enough? Does OneNote really need to read 10 times as much as the size of the OneNote file to synchronize it? Or is the count of bytes that your network connection keeps not accurate?

That's all I got for now. I'll follow up if my new system works, and if you googlers have any suggestions on how to minimize the LiveSession problems, I'd love to hear 'em. I'd like to thank Dan Escapa for his link to my review and of course for his work on the product which, despite all my complaints, is a pretty revolutionary update to an already great product.

--sbreck

P.S. excuse the funny-looking bullets, Word 2007 refused to post this to Blogger so I had to paste it in.

technorati: OneNote 2007

More on OneNote 2007 / Word 2003 coexistence

2006-08-10T22:19:00.000-04:00

To reiterate from yesterday, my goal is simply to stick with my company's required word processing platform, Word 2003, but extract meeting notes out of OneNote 2007 in a format that people can use, edit, etc. The primary problem is that bullet point formatting of multiple-line bullets that looks great in OneNote is all messed up in Word 2003.

Let me show you an example. Here's what the standard bullets look like in OneNote 2007:

And, pasted into Word 2007 (or Sent To Word, or Published to Word) they look very similar:

The only real difference (besides more generous margins) is that the bullets aren't as WingDing-y. That's maybe a good thing for professional documents.

Now, take a look at what you get when you try to paste, send, or publish this same data into Word 2003:

It's total crap.

I tried the new Publish to PDF option, but PDFs cannot be pasted from in any reasonable way. This is one of the many reasons why PDFs suck. The PDF looks fine (except that the table is too narrow) and has text in it, but if you paste that text into Word, it is like one giant run-on sentence. Doesn't matter if you choose Copy as Text or Copy with Formatting.

So, I'm not an idiot, I created a bunch of styles to relatively easily clean things up, but I really wish it would paste in USING the styles so I didn't have to highlight every bullet point and apply my style. I recognize that Microsoft probably hasn't yet paid much attention to people who don't upgrade the whole suite, so maybe they greyed out the Send to Word option knowing that, as a Word 2003 user, it would only lead to grief?

--sbreck

technorati: OneNote 2007, Microsoft Word

OneNote 2007 review

2006-08-09T23:39:00.000-04:00

I upgraded to OneNote 2007 (Beta 2) at home about two months ago but only really used it to blog. This Monday I upgraded to OneNote 2007 on my work tablet, and used it for two and a half days, and so far I have some mixed feelings. As you are learning if you read my blog, I have not bothered to go and read the reviews of others before writing this.

Here an old list of things I noticed after first upgrading my home PC:

Scrolling the middle mouse button over the page tabs on the right no longer jumps from page to page; you have to press Ctrl while scrolling to do that
You can now create hyperlinks within OneNote (Insert->Hyperlink, just like in Outlook) -- this is basically a requirement for blogging and beats the several extra steps of my previous solution, EnterLink. I use this a lot now and am very happy it was included.
Speaking of blogging, you can blog from OneNote with fairly clean HTML, as you could not before. File-->Send To-->Blog, then Word launches, then you click Publish (as Draft if you like). On Blogger it appears in a giant font in the WYSIWYG edit screen and you may have to clean up double-spacing but that's better than the Blogger Add-in for Word (in which the HTML formatting was often all types of messed up to the degree that you'd have to delete tag pairs in the HTML editor view) and also better than pasting from OneNote into the Blogger editor.
The folder organization makes more sense. Folders on the left, sections on the top, and pages on the right. Seems clearer. Now to figure out the keyboard shortcut to switch between folders…
There is now a scroll bar for page tabs instead of the annoying arrows on the top or bottom. For those of us who use browser forward and back keys to switch between pages, this means you don't have to press one tab per "page" to get to them.
Chris Pratley blogged about Napkin Math which I think is awesome.
I have another blog entry in progress on Windows Desktop Search but suffice it to say, it isn't working for OneNote at home (though it is working just fine on my work laptop, on section files that I've upgraded). It only searches the current page at home.

Here are a lot of observations I made now that I've got OneNote 2007 on both my home and work PC:

Shared notebooks and folders:

Behind the scenes, the folders are kind of confusing. Is it "My Documents\My Notebook"? "My Notebook.OneNote2003" for files you upgrade in place? Or is it now "OneNote Notebooks" for everything? But what's all that stuff that still in the former two sections? I guess I'm not supposed to worry my pretty little head about this stuff and I know My Documents at home and at work are backed up, so if I have extra copies of crap, well, then some portion of my 142MB of OneNote files representing over two years of my billable client work might be unnecessary. Oh well.
Wait, I just noticed that I was typing into a shared section that I moved into the proper folder and nothing was happening, so apparently, you can't open a section and then always have a link to that section. By that I mean I can't have in my "Personal" section, a link to this blog section stored on a share on my home PC. I have to access it always through the "Recent Opened Sections" link. That sucks.

Not true: if you create a shortcut in the proper folder under OneNote Notebooks, you are good to go -- I don't think there is a way to do this without dropping to the file system but at least I can do this to set things up on my home and work PC.

Generally, while it's not as good as shared sessions, it is still an awesome leap forward and I will probably be demonstrating it to my coworkers at some point. With a network share or SharePoint as a back-end, many interesting things can be created in terms of client folders, shared brainstorming areas for vendor/technology teams, or even a knowledge base (assuming Windows Desktop Search can index a file stored in SharePoint or on a network share).

I have to say that I spent a bit of time today trying to convince my colleague on our St. Louis project to do this, and was unsuccessful. What is the argument for two people with their own different working styles to share a OneNote section? Do you need to? My arguments were flimsy but he is willing to try it out. More on this later.

I've been watching it sync between my laptop and desktop and it's pretty good. I somehow suspect the "Sync this notebook now" option is one of those panaceas since if you sync both at once, you still won't see the change for 30-120 seconds, but it's definitely good enough that you could work on a file with others and be reasonably satisfied with the synchronization speeds.

Shared (now called "Live") sessions:

Even though the help file says different ("If you initiate a shared note-taking session, you can select the pages that you want to share", "To select the pages that you want to share, hold down CTRL or SHIFT, and then click the page tabs of the pages that you want to add."), I can't figure out a way to share only one or just a few pages. It in fact says "All the pages in the current section will be shared" when you click "Start shared session". I typically have a big old section for notes for a project (over 425 on my current project) and I really don't want to share all the pages. That would really not perform very well and would annoy the crap out of my coworker having to deal with what will definitely be a bunch of duplicate pages afterwards. For now, I will keep a small section for the meeting notes for a given visit, and suggest that my coworker do the same so that he can easily clean or move notes from that section to his main client file. Or maybe we will use the same client file in SharePoint…
Along with the above, it seems now that shared sessions will now be conducted on a per-section basis. I suppose this fixes both the OneNote 2003 problem in which people who are booted off of a session and rejoin it get a new duplicate page which is active in the session, and the ON2003 problem in which shared pages show up in whichever section you happened to have open at the time. It is nice that it no longer duplicates pages and live sessions are now more "persistent", but it seems slower than ON2003 shared sessions, probably because I had 6-7 pages shared that I didn't need to share. I hope that the real version allows you to determine specific pages you want to share, as the help file says you can.
Because of this, you can't edit the pages that were shared until you move them from the Live Session area to another section. This represented a change for my coworker that he found annoying, as typically we both take notes, and then split up the responsibilities for editing them into minutes afterwards. He can't edit in line because he didn't start the session.
So I'm not entirely negative about changes to shared sessions, I noticed that now handwriting is supported in a shared session and can be mixed with the other person's typing. This is very good news! I don't think I'm going to switch back to handwriting mode for meetings (too much of a pain to convert, at least with OneNote 2003) but it's nice to know it's possible.

Ink stuff:

No more "guides". This was a recommendation back in the day to make sure your conversion to text went smoothly, and though I psychologically miss it (and maybe it will be a disaster when I try to convert handwriting), I also realized while taking notes today in ink that the guides also made me worry too much about writing size, whether the line wrapped onto the next, and whatnot, rather than just taking notes naturally. I haven't converted anything inked in Outlook 2007 yet, so it's too early to say if this is going to be a problem.
Somehow I don't think the pressure sensitivity is quite as good in OneNote 2007 as it was in OneNote 2003. The lines seem very uniform compared to 2003.
I converted ink to text from notes I took using a OneNote 2003 section that I then upgraded. Sometimes the conversion was perfect, and I was pleasantly surprised, but there were also some things that converted really poorly. It's too early to tell on this.

Output functionality:

While offline on the plane to St. Louis, I attempted to email a note. (I wasn't ready to upgrade to Outlook 2007 on my work computer at the same time as the OneNote upgrade, so I'm still on Outlook 2003.) Nothing happened. I tried again when I was on the ground. It didn't work. In fact, none of the email functionality worked -- E-mail, E-mail as attachment, or E-mail as PDF. The latter went so far as to create the PDF and then did nothing. My coworker upgraded to Outlook 2007 along with OneNote 2007 and he is able to email just fine. I think I'll be upgrading in the next day or so, I can't resist...
I have also lost the ability to export to Word. I can paste into Word, but the formatting of at least bulleted text is all messed up and has to be fixed manually. (The bullets seem to grow further and further from the text, and subsequent lines "dangle" closer and closer to the bullet and away from the leading text. I have no idea if this is a style problem or could be fixed by editing OneNote 2007's default bullet styles, but I couldn't figure it out and spent most of a flight from St. Louis on this.) I may give it a try at home where I have Word 2007, but I can't upgrade my work laptop from Word 2003 because of support from my IT department, iManage integration and co-existence with everyone else I work with, and a numbering product I use regularly (that so far hasn't been able to clean up the formatting either). Of course Send to Word works great when you have Word 2007. I'm not sure what I'm going to do except maybe write shorter sentences that don't overlap their bullets…

Overall, it seems like a much slicker product than OneNote 2003 was. I think I'll get used to some of the differences. Mostly, I hope that once it's out of beta it will better support those of us unable to upgrade the entire Office suite.

--sbreck

technorati: OneNote 2007

Treo / Goodlink update

2006-08-07T19:47:00.000-04:00

See yesterday's entry for background

Well, at work today, I found that my IT guys were ready to release the 4.9.1.46_EN Palm client to me, so I let them. They also found two cached profiles on the Good server, and deleted and recreated my account and thus sent a new PIN. I hard reset, OTA'd myself a fresh copy of the client, and to my great relief, I was able to get past the "Error 65, Press R to reprovision" which was the bane of my Sunday.

So, some combination of:

deleting cached profiles on the Good server
deleting my user account on the Good server and recreating it
updating my Goodlink client to 4.9.1.46_EN

fixed my problems.

--sbreck

day of Treo / Goodlink frustration

2006-08-06T17:46:00.000-04:00

1) woke up at 10:30 to find my Treo 700p constantly rebooting

2) after experimenting with depriving the Treo of its battery for various lengths of time, it became clear that only a hard reset would fix the problem

3) resynced with my work laptop, it took back its identity from Hotsync

4) popped in the SD card and I took it up on its offer to restore Goodlink from its backup, which was only a week or two old

5) Error: "You need to re-connect

Press 'R' to reprovision

65: Session must resync"

6) press R, Treo reboots

7) repeat entire process several more times, increasingly fighting off urge to throw Treo out a window, but realize that my employer paid almost $450 for the device. go to gym, run, stretch, ice, eat breakfast

8) delete all the Good apps from Treo and from SD card, download OTA setup, find old PIN from when I first got the 700p, run OTA setup

9) receive the error 65 again

10) delete GLLogDB (only Goodlink file I could find) in C:\Program Files\palmOne\me\Backup\, hard reset again, resync everything

11) guess what? error 65

12) leave apartment to pick up a few groceries so as to suppress urge to take hammer to Treo

This is like the fifth weekend day in the last few months I've given up to fix a problem with my Treo that just showed up out of the blue, so that I would have a working device on my weekly St. Louis trips. Fuck Palm, I should have bought a Q.

--sbreck

update: fixed

ThinkPad X41, ten weeks later

2006-07-04T20:19:00.000-04:00

I wanted to follow up on my post on getting an X41 with a few more observations on good and bad things I mentioned then. For the most part, I am very happy with the X41, but since I am a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it is in my nature to complain. I have kept a list of the complaints and I share them with you now. Some are follow ups to my original post, and some are new observations I've made. So, if you're thinking of getting an X41 and you happen to run across this blog entry rather than one of the many others that have been written, well, hell, dude, read on:

Follow up:

I uninstalled the Client Security Software and now just use the fingerprint driver. This solved the problem of having to launch another configuration wizard every time I rebooted which would then error out because it didn't like my password. I have since applied a BIOS password which works well for BIOS, but is not always successful in passing through the authentication all the way to login as it is supposed to. I've also noticed that in certain situations on login, the software will appear to register a successful fingerprint read, but will then revert back to the login screen, making me swipe my finger again.
For whatever reason, the cursor problem (wherein the cursor jumps down to the bottom right or, less often, left of the screen and sometimes clicks) has rarely reappeared. Someone on either tabletpcbuzz or the ThinkPad forum mentioned that uninstalling the Virtual CD application (sorry, I can't remember what it's called) was the solution -- I did that and though it didn't fix it at first, it seems that I can't remember the last time the cursor jumped down to the corner. I'm sorry if that isn't very definitive but I suggest trying it and then waiting a week or so for results.
The battery life is still great. However, I am finding that its connection to the laptop now feels slightly loose after only a few months of use. Admittedly, the laptop has been to and from St. Louis 7 times since I got it, and has also been to and from Madrid and Las Vegas.
The pen holder is poorly engineered in my opinion. It is getting harder and harder to make the pen click in to stay in place properly.
I think I press the forward and back keys more by accident, when I mean to press a cursor key, than on purpose. But they are still sometimes useful. I think that overall I might rather not have blank keys there than have the navigation keys. Maybe I would have a different opinion if I was less sloppy of a typist. Or I just need more time -- after all, I did eventually get used to the horrible design of the Fujitsu keyboard, in which PgDn, PgUp, Home, and End were not real keys but rather required you to use function keys.

New:

The utilities launched by Fn-key combinations are slow to launch. Compare pressing Windows-L, which immediately locks your computer in most circumstances, to pressing Fn-F2, which when I just tried now, took almost 10 seconds to let me press the big "lock computer" button. I've reverted to the old standby, Ctrl-Alt-Del followed by Enter. This I am told is a requirement to maintain your dignity at my client, as there have been many reports of email and desktop wallpaper pranks perpetrated by mischievous IT staff people when laptops are left unlocked. There is no equivalent to turn on or off the wireless radio, unfortunately, so accessing that utility via Fn-F5 is another 10-second wait.
I find I miss very much that my old Fujitsu T3010D left power flowing to its USB port while it was in standby. What this meant to me is that I could charge my Treo through the USB cable while leaving the laptop in standby overnight. Now I either have to bring my Treo charger, remember to charge my Treo during the day or while I'm using the laptop in the hotel room, or leave my ThinkPad on overnight to charge the Treo, which seems wasteful. I wish one of the ports in the ThinkPad still supplied power when the laptop was in standby mode.
The function keys, in my opinion, are shifted leftward a bit more than I am used to. The main impact is when I'm using MindManager and mean to press F2 ("edit topic text") and instead press F3 ("collapse everything in the map except the branch you're in"). Also, F2 is "rename" in Explorer whereas F3 is "bring up a giant and mostly useless search panel". Both are annoying. I don't think F3 does anything in the other program with which I use F2, Excel.

technorati: ThinkPad X41 TabletPC

Treo 700p

2006-07-02T22:35:00.000-04:00

So I switched from a Treo 650 to a 700p. The main reason I started this blog entry was to note my solitaire stats in case they do not transfer over to the 700p:

Games Played:	2287
Games Won/Lost	362/1953
Longest Win Streak	4
Longest Loss Streak	34
High Score	1825
Average Score	129
Average Game Time	0:25
Longest Game	123:21 (must be a mistake)
Shortest Win	1:47
Total Time Spent	6028:37

6028/60=100.46 hours of solitaire played. So like four 24-hour days of solitaire. Or, over the year or so that I had the Treo 650, 100.46/365=0.27 or 15 minutes a day, every day. That's really pretty impressive. My commute is like 25 minutes each way, about 10 of which are walking to the train or from one train to the other. And of course I have only commuted by subway three days a week for the last 10 months -- I am in St. Louis two days a week and usually stay put on the weekends.

(As an aside, I'm using the awesome new OneNote 2007 "napkin math" feature in which it does simple calculations in-line. Chris Pratley wrote that it was one of those things they created with no "use case" but just because they thought it would be cool, and I find that almost every day that I use OneNote, which is basically every day at work because I go to a lot of meetings, I wish I had it. Can't upgrade to 2007 until all my colleagues do.)

OK, on to the Treo 700p. Things that are great:

EVDO is much faster than whatever the shitty sub-modem-speed network the 650 used. Goodlink like blasted down onto it, and flightaware.com is far faster than it used to be.
Hiding your password in Blazer (the browser) for sites that require authentication
Blazer deals better with putting you right to your site if you switch to something else
Most of my apps (except Solitaire) installed right onto the 700p without messing it up
The sync cable charges the device now, very nice touch (although I would characterize it as an oversight that the 600 and 650 cables didn’t charge off of USB)
I don't know if it's the 700 or Goodlink 4.8.1.14, but I no longer have to manually change the time zone in Goodlink. The "Use Palm time zone" setting never really worked for me on my 650. As a person who went from EDT to CDT twice this week (STL Tuesday-Wednesday and ORD Saturday-Sunday) this feature is useful.

Things that aren't so great:

I lost my stats in Solitaire :(
The keys are going to take some getting used to -- Home is where Power/Hangup was, and Power is now where Menu used to be.
The Verizon store (42nd & 6th) took like an hour from the time I was able to order to when I was able to walk out of the door. And, before that, I went and waited for half an hour at the 57th & 6th store before being told they didn't have it.
The VZAccess Manager software is not letting me onto the internet on my laptop. Strictly speaking I am not sure I have a BroadbandAccess account, but I showed a printout of this page to the sales guy and he said I didn't need it. I assume he is wrong and that's why I can't connect. It's a bit annoying because I'd rather pay (or, in my case, expense to my company) for a service I intend to use than screw around all night to try and kludge it so it works.

Update: I instead installed PDANet for the Treo 700p. I have owned this for the 600 and 650 in the past and it was OK with my old tablet, but never really worked well on my ThinkPad X41. So I was really hoping that Verizon's own VZAccess Manager tool would be better, but I'm noticing a day later that it can no longer even find the phone by Bluetooth (which worked last night) or USB (which never worked). Meanwhile, PDANet (or maybe Goodlink?) threw up a bunch of messages that the Dial-Up Networking stack is in use but then ran solidly for like an hour. DSLreports showed 548Kbps which is certainly good enough for me -- in fact that's more than twice as fast as the connection in my hotel room in St. Louis. So, if Verizon's salesman doesn't know how to sell me the BroadbandAccess service and tells me I don't need it to use the Treo 700 for high-speed internet on my laptop, then I assume I am not violating any terms of service.
A day or so later, I resumed my laptop from standby and tried again. It quickly disconnected, shades of my prior experience with PDANet, but on the second try I was able to sustain a connection. It wasn't quite as good as the first one, since another DSLreports test showed 240Kbps, but that's what I get in the hotel so it's still definitely usable.

If service is dropping in and out, like on a subway, apps will freeze when it's trying to look for service or briefly connects to service. This is pretty annoying and I may just end up turning off wireless before I go on the subway, which is also annoying (plus I enjoy the little email catch-up when the 2/3 stops at 72nd St during my morning commute).

I have to admit that I didn't look for other reviews so if you've read other Treo 700p reviews that mentioned the same stuff, then I apologize for wasting your time. I just have been such a slacker about posting that I figured I would procrastinate this entry forever if I actually wanted to also research it...

--sbreck

technorati: verizon treo 700p

MainSP2op.MSP

2006-06-08T19:34:00.000-04:00

Since it seems like many of you find this blog by searching for MainSP2op.MSP, I felt like I should link to the file that contains it to help you out:

Choose the Office2003SP2-KB887616-Client-ENU.exe from this page. Extract it to get the MSP file.

FYI, Blogger sucks today... (that page contains far too many variations of the word "blog" for its own good but clearly they have the blogging world fairly well researched)

playing with iTunes playlists

2006-05-29T14:33:00.000-04:00

All of a sudden iTunes lost track of all the files in a playlist I'd created for a car trip a few months ago. I believe I made the playlist in Winamp and then imported it into iTunes (after some frustration, leading to this blog entry/rant), and then synched it to my iPod. I know it's still on my iPod because I listened to it on the plane last week. It's true, however, that I hate and avoid launching iTunes, so maybe it's now gone because iTunes lost it.

Anyway, the point of this blog entry is to document for myself how I fixed it. And because I never blog (except this weekend's flurry of angry entries) and the point of blogging is to put stuff out there for yourself and hope that your audience likes that stuff and your voice and what have you. Or you don't care about your audience, which, given my lack of any sort of traffic tracking, may actually be the case. My audience is, I guess, my wife and one or two coworkers. Anyway, sorry to digress. Most of this fix came from Rob Brooks-Bilson:

1) Backed up My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library.itl to *.iTunesSux (I'm mature like that)

2) Opened iTunes Music Library.xml in TextPad, the world's greatest text editor which I encourage you all to buy

3) Searched for my playlist name

4) Found that iTunes stores songs in the playlist by TrackID, fortunately they were sequentially numbered from 1455-1528

5) Searched for 1455 to find the first track (PROTIP: you will find any given integer string often in the iTunes XML file, prefix your search with [key]Track ID[/key][integer]1455 to be accurate (and also replace the [] brackets with "less than & greater than" XML/HTML brackets))

6) found that it was in the /sounds/mp3 hierarchy as per my playlists (an idea that should allow my wife and my Media Center PC to use the same playlists despite storing MP3s on different drives and in different folders as long as they maintain the hierarchy), but needed to be in the file://localhost/D:/sounds/mp3/ hierarchy because iTunes is too STUPID to choose a default music library location and build its library off of that (or I'm too stupid to find that option :)

7) searched and replaced each of the 80 tracks in the playlist

8) opened up the ITL file, zeroed it out, and saved it (Rob says this causes iTunes to think its library is corrupt, and thus will rebuild it to reflect your changes to the XML file)

9) launched iTunes, and it ran through "Importing iTunes Music Library.XML" for a minute or so before telling my my ITL file was corrupt and that it had replaced it

10) iTunes then opened up and my playlist was fine.

And after all that, I noticed that, in iTunes' defense, the playlists I'd just imported (the Witch self-titled album, which is awesome -- doomy heavy metal with J Mascis on drums and a weird folk singer on vocals; a semi-new Bolt Thrower ("Those Once Loyal"), which is like every other Bolt Thrower album so if you like Bolt Thrower, and I like Bolt Thrower a lot, you'll like "Those Once Loyal"; and the new Cat Power "The Greatest", which is very different from the prior two albums but I'm trying to find new music that I can listen to on car trips when others are in the car with me) were listed with ../ to represent d:/sounds/mp3/, so maybe iTunes does have a default file location.

Anyway, just a quick blog entry for myself into which I snuck a music review. For those who are left hanging by the prior entry, I have OneNote 2007 working fine, and have an entry I'm working on with a review. In fact, I'm going to try and blog from OneNote now…

Office 2007 Beta 2: 2nd try's the charm

2006-05-28T18:29:00.000-04:00

OK, so I got my computer to boot and show its desktop again.

Now I needed to find MAINSP2op.MSP so I can have a working (or uninstallable) Office 2003. My work had the Office SP2 "FullFile" available so I downloaded that and extracted it. It had MAINSP2ff.MSP instead, so Windows Installer balked when I tried launching Outlook and pointing it at that file. Oh well. I downloaded just the Client version and extracted, noting that it contained MAINSP2op.MSP as I'd been looking for. Then I had to download about six or seven more updates, extract the MSP files, and point to them, but Outlook eventually loaded. Word, too, seemed to be working just fine. Now that my system seemed to be back in action, it was time to cripple it again...

I decided that maybe Office 2007 was confused by IE 7 and that my problem with IE 6 after installation was just a fluke. I checked MS's site and found that IE 6 was a requirement for Outlook 2007. So I just installed Office 2007 again, without doing anything to IE. I created a restore point first :)

I also noticed that my restore point had reinstalled Google Desktop Search. So I uninstalled it (and had no problems this time, curious). This still left me with not enough room, so I cleaned up the temp directory.

When installing Office 2007, I chose to "Customize" rather than just Upgrade. My options were:

Remove all previous versions

Install InfoPath and Publisher on first use (which may be never)

Everything else at default

Upon completion, I rebooted. I happily noted that my desktop came up this time. I was even happier to find that IE 6 still worked. So I launched Outlook. Other than it coming up with the title bar "Inbox - <0w> - Microsoft Outlook", nothing was too weird. I also noticed that, this time, Outlook didn't crash on the way out. So far, so good.

Launched Word. I am typing in it now so it’s clearly working. So far the only thing that hasn’t worked has been Autocorrect Options (nothing happens when I press the button; I wanted to turn off smart quotes etc. so as not to put non-legit character codes in my documents / blog posts). I tried to attach an image to see if Flickr can be used for image storage, but it cannot. That’s too bad.

OK. Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m now going for the real reason I did all this: OneNote 2007. Wish me luck.

Office 2007 Beta 2: recovering from the damage

2006-05-28T16:29:00.000-04:00

After logging in as a different user and trying Safe Mode, Explorer would still not run so I still had no start menu, taskbar, etc. I decided to use System Restore to refer back to the time before I installed IE7. This did not work, though for a moment I was excited because my AVG Anti-Virus seemed to launch and update its pattern file. I did the restore from Safe Mode and while logged in as Administrator rather than my own usual user without thinking, but I don't think was the issue. (There are no files outside of C:\WINDOWS and maybe C:\Program Files covered by System Restore, so nothing is "personal" to a given user.)

I noticed that Office 2007 was not in the list of actions in the System Restore list. So I guess that install didn't make a restore point. Thanks, Microsoft. So, while logged in as myself in normal boot mode, I reverted back to "Printer Driver Microsoft Office Document Image Writer Installed", hoping that maybe it was one of the IE 7 required hotfixes that screwed me, not Office 2007 itself. (Note: without a start menu, you must know that System Restore is C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Restore\rstrui.exe to run System Restore.)

This didn't fix it either. So apparently whatever happened ruined my Windows Explorer shell to a degree that was not evident when I successfully booted up after the Office 2007 install. One thing I noticed was that none of the files replaced by the System Restore were different versions. Has System Restore not been taking the snapshots? Or do I need to reboot again after System Restore for things to work? Taking the easy route, I rebooted again. I saw the taskbar appear and disappear so that didn't work.

I ran rstrui again and this time reverted my (nonexistent) changes. Then on reboot I went back to the day before ("Windows Defender Checkpoint"). This worked! Now to see how screwed up things really were…

I checked and IE had been reverted back to version 6. With some trepidation, I launched Outlook to see what version it was and received a Windows Installer message asking where MAINSP2op.MSP was located. I searched my hard drives and it wasn't on there, and when I cancelled the message box, I was told that "MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version". Word launched, asked for MAINSP2op.MSP a bunch of times, and then failed. Well, I guess I knew I was going to mess up Office 2003 with this install, so I figured I shouldn't waste a bunch of time fixing it, but I didn't want to start off my Office 2007 install based on a messed-up Office 2003 install.

Next steps:
Uninstall Office 2003
Checkpoint my system in System Restore
Install IE 7
Install Office 2007 Beta 2

Great way to spend a weekend, huh?

Office 2007 Beta 2

2006-05-28T02:07:00.000-04:00

So I upgraded to Office 2007 Beta 2 on my home computer this weekend. I wanted to blog from Word / OneNote (the Blogger add-in for Word sucks) and I really wanted to check out the new version of OneNote. I decided I could live with some incompatibility between home and work Office suites since I basically take my work laptop home with me every day.

Here has been my experience so far:

First, I find that I only have 1GB free on my C: drive and thus not enough room to install. Besides the Program Files and WINDOWS directories, the only files of significance are those of Google Desktop. I attempt to uninstall several times (shitty uninstall program tells you to restart but then immediately the MSI thinks the program that tells you to restart failed, so it reverts back) and finally follow the instructions found here. OK, I've got 2.5GB free now.

Next, I install Office 2007 Professional Plus. The install works fine, please note that I just clicked "Upgrade" (after thinking about the ramifications of this for a bit) and it did all the work.

I launched Outlook, it complained about my GoogleDesktopSearch plugin, but launched and worked fine. I have noticed now that it throws an error when I close it. I tried to remove the plugin from Tools->Options->Other->Advanced->Add-ins like in Outlook 2003, but there is no longer any such option.

I try Word. It seems to be working fine although I was a little unclear on how to apply back the normal style after choosing something else. I want to set up the blogging thing, so I click the big Office button and choose New Blog. It asks me questions about my Blogger account and about how to deal with pictures. I'd like to upload them to Flickr but I'm not sure what I would post in there, so I click the help. MHT file, so I tell Firefox (default browser) to launch IE. It doesn't launch.

I click IE on the Quick Launch bar. It doesn't launch then, either.

Looks like the Office install fucked up IE. I only use it for my work OWA and those few things that need to be in IE Tab so it's not the end of the world. I do notice, however, that Office 2007 seems to launch it for things even though Firefox is set as my default browser.

I decide to install IE 7, figuring Office 2007 would like that much better. I run the install, and restart when requested. My computer, after I log in, sits there with my background and nothing else for 15 minutes while I type this entire blog entry up to this point. Finally I get annoyed, notice that Task Manager works, and launch Explorer. I get a task bar for a second and then it disappears. I launch cmd. Then from it I do a shutdown -r -t 1 which restarts the computer. So at least that works.

On restart, I notice that the taskbar appears briefly during startup but then immediately disappears. That's where I am now. My home computer does not log in. I am fucked. It is 2AM so I am just going to go to bed and hope this thing fixes itself overnight.

I upgraded to an X41 Tablet

2006-05-07T21:53:00.000-04:00

I got a ThinkPad X41 tablet for work about two weeks ago, as a replacement for my Fujitsu Lifebook T3010D. After spending the weekend configuring it so it had everything my old Fujitsu did, I took it to EMC World and took notes for four days. I've had some office days and my usual weekly St. Louis trip to work with it so I wanted to get my impressions down. I'll start with the good, then let the complaining begin, and then I have a section called "The different" for those of you who wonder what it's like to switch from an older TabletPC to a new one.

The good:

The fingerprint login makes so much more sense than anything else that I can't imagine how I lived without it on the Fujitsu. Swipe to unlock the BIOS and it lets you all the way through login. Forget typing your password on that stupid on-screen keyboard while people stare at it.
The battery life is awesome -- four and a half hours with wireless versus two without (and, no joke, only 1.25 with) on the Fujitsu. I barely worried about running out of power during the many days I've been at EMC World and it would have been a nightmare with the Fujitsu.
The screen is much clearer than the Fujitsu -- seeing them next to each other, the Fujitsu seemed to have a thick coating over the screen.
The flat side of the pen feels right and helps it fit nicely into the case
The rocker is recessed, which was not the case on the Fujitsu and led to a lot of unexpected right-clicking and erasing
Much better engineered form factor: it's thinner and has rubberized grips in the right places for comfortable use in tablet mode.
More generally, this is a solid piece of hardware compared to the Fujitsu (or my coworkers' Dells). Very strong case and excellent keyboard. It's really a well-designed machine.
I'm digging the forward and back keys. I assume my reader(s?) know that these work in Outlook (to switch between folders) and OneNote (to switch between pages)...
The utilities are fairly slick (albeit not 100% bug-free). I like the concept of Access Connections very much, in which it will switch me to my nearby Lexmark printer in my office, my LaserJet 4100 at home (courtesy of a generous individual at a downtown law firm who retired it), and the printer at my St. Louis client.

The bad:

The Client Security Solution software is not exactly right -- I have a wizard that runs every time and refuses to accept my password. This is different than (though relies upon) the IBM Fingerprint Software which does work just fine. I am not sure exactly what Client Security Solution does (besides encrypt your hard drive) but I was sort of hoping that it would get me into sites and programs for which I need to enter my password. I have a very slow and somewhat annoying email conversation going on with Lenovo tech support which I hope someday resolves this, but I have my doubts.
My cursor sometimes jumps to the bottom right -- the effect is that all of the sudden the Time Zone applet pops up. This sounds like a hardware problem, but it only happens in Outlook, not OneNote or the various other applications I use. It's really annoying.
ThinkVantage Access Connections sounds like it would be helpful and cool, but is actually a pain in the ass. I ended up uninstalling it because of the following:

Drops connections if Wireless Zero Config finds them first, so you connect to something, start working, then Access Connections wants to get in on the action so it disconnects you, then takes its sweet time reconnecting you. Sometimes it doesn't actually reconnect you.
It cannot be connected via Ethernet and wireless connections at the same time. Doesn't sound like a big deal unless you're me and you split your day between docked at your desk and wireless in a meeting. Leaving the wireless off while you're docked means that it has to turn on wireless, find it (see above since our office wireless uses slightly complicated authentication and IAC can never get it right the first time), and then reconnect all your programs which have probably crapped out while the above was happening. Much easier to leave both on so that they quickly recover when you undock or otherwise go off LAN.
It is also buggy. Sometimes it will freeze trying to connect to something new.

The TIP occasionally freezes when clicking an incorrectly recognized word.
The flat edge of the pen and clip dug into my index finger when I was writing a lot at EMC World. The problem with any TabletPC pen is that the rocker switch is just in the way of proper finger placement when writing.
I'm afraid the spring-loaded pen release mechanism is going to blast the pen into someone's eye; or at the very least, cause me to lose it. I already had an embarrassing moment in a Monday morning staff meeting in which the thing went flying.
The Fujitsu remembered that when it was on battery, the screen brightness should be low, and then when I plugged it in, the brightness should be high. The ThinkPad, despite its fancy and separately configured power profiles, does not seem to have this feature. Weirdly, though, it does still know to jack the brightness up a bit when I plug in power, just not all the way up. So I have to remember to turn the brightness down when switching from hotel use to conference/meeting use...
On the X41, Outlook doesn't always seem to remember (for example) the orientation of the reading pane, which I recall the Fujitsu handling just fine.

The different:

I hated the Fujitsu's keyboard at first because the home, end, PgUp, and PgDn keys were only accessed by pressing Function plus the cursor keys. But now that I'm used to it I'm finding it a little difficult to accurately hit those keys even though they are in the normal places they should be.
Loss of Windows key -- and the Keyboard Customizer Utility does not provide usable replacements. (I'd like to be able to use a key combination for Windows like Shift-Fn rather than lose a left or right shift, Ctrl, or Alt key.) I have gotten good with Ctrl-Esc for Start Menu functions and using Fn-F2 to lock the screen is an acceptable substitute. In general I think the Fn key utilities are pretty useful.
I worried that my biggest adjustment would be losing the touchpad for a TrackPoint. I do not use a mouse when at work (since I work at too many different surfaces to bother to bring one, and I'd always been fine with the touchpad) so the integrated input device is a big deal to me on my laptop. I think I'm getting used to the TrackPoint now that I'm getting the hang of the scroll, tap-to-click and tap-to-drag features. I still think the TrackPoint gives you a bit less control than a touchpad does. And I am speaking as a person that remembers when my boss at IBM was given a TrackPoint keyboard hand-made by the inventor of the TrackPoint himself, and thinking, "wow, that's a really cool input device". (Of course, my next thought was, "Why would you ever not just use a mouse?" It didn't occur to me to think of laptops since at the time I'd never seen anything more portable than the PS/2 model P70...) So I've used a TrackPoint on and off since 1993.
Different buttons on the tablet screen:

Enter and Esc are useful
The function ("suitcase") button has more useful functions than the Fujitsu edition
Function button has a more useful menu than the Fujitsu
I missed the Ctrl-Alt-Del button from the Fujitsu but now realize:

first, there IS a button (albeit tiny and unlabeled)
second, I don't need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del anywhere near as much because I use the fingerprint sensor to log in)

To give you a real synopsis in case you didn't want to read all those words, I'd say that thanks to the battery life and generally professional package make this a totally worthwhile upgrade for me (despite the fact that it has the same RAM, slightly better graphics, and is only 200MHz faster). I'm sorry to my TabletPC posse that I didn't get much into the tablet-specific stuff; if you are unfamiliar with TabletPC features there are plenty of reviews out there of this model. I've had a tablet for almost a year and a half and so I just wanted to compare that model (Fujitsu T3010D) to this model.

Technorati tag(s): TabletPC

SpeedFiler review

2006-04-20T15:22:00.000-04:00

I've been trying out SpeedFiler from Claritude after reading Omar Shahine's review. I myself am a big user of Ctrl-Shift-V to move messages to folders in Outlook, and I type the name of the folder (assuming it's open in that view e.g. I've already opened its parent folder), and thought that an enhancement to that practice would be very helpful for me. However, I didn't like SpeedFiler at all and after a few days I stopped using it. Here were my issues:

1) Speed: it takes over a second to pop up when I press Ctrl-Shift-V.

2) Functionality:
2a) It doesn't let me file non-email items in email folders like Outlook does. So when I wanted to file a response to an appointment I sent that contained some useful information, it wouldn't let me do it. And, because I'd allowed it to replace the Move to Folder function altogether, I had to go to Folder view in Outlook to drag the thing in.
2b) Worse, I can't file a message into the Calendar to make an appointment (keyboard shortcut that I know by heart: Ctrl-Shift-V, "Cal", Enter), something I do pretty regularly. It just sticks it into the calendar at the moment you filed it, so you have to go back and change the date and time, invite people, whatever.
2c) No integration with the "Recently used folders" or whatever the folders under the folder pulldown are called. So when you file something with SpeedFiler, it doesn't update the folders you see on the Outlook menu. I know you can type the folder name quickly with SpeedFiler but if you file in arrears you find "hotspots" where you had a few active email threads going and so you keep filing things into the same few places.

3) Bugginess:
3a) It seems to not want to pop up sometimes, like if I'm filing a lot of email. It seems to "exhaust" itself so that I have to close the email and reopen it to file it.
3b) OneNote (known issue according to the readme:

SpeedFiler does not prompt to file messages sent using other application's "Send To Mail Recipient" feature [KI-SF-0002]
If you use another application's "Send To Mail Recipient" feature to send a document via e-mail, SpeedFiler may not prompt you to file the outgoing message. This is because some applications activate Outlook in a such a way that the add-ins are not loaded.

3c) I turned on the option to let it file into Public Folders, but it doesn't see all the branches of our public folders. As in, my choices are only half of my firm's public folders.

4) Little Annoyances:
4a) I started evaluating this product because I like to use keyboard shortcuts for everything and thought this would save me the "hassle" of opening every folder in the Move to Folder hierarchy before I could use typedown. However, it has stolen Alt-N from me, which I use to invite people to appointments. That's annoying.
4b) I am finding the file on send option annoying because it always picks Sent Items as the default. I guess I thought this product would remember where I filed things and offer to file them there. So like if I'm emailing back and forth with an individual that works for me, I probably want to store that correspondence in his file. And if I'm filing stuff in my inbox, it offers the last place I filed something as my first choice, so I just do a Ctrl-Shift-V followed by Enter. However, I have to type out the folder name every time. Yeah, I could just turn that off and periodically file my sent items like I do now, but then what's the point of a $20 utility for which that's one of its selling points?

I guess I was hoping that it would somehow intelligently figure out that messages to me from certain people were likely to be filed in certain folders. But mostly I'd hoped that the program would be more useful than it is. That plus the little errors and annoyances just made me satisfied with regular Outlook.

--sbreck

Circuit City is confused...

2006-04-13T21:02:00.000-04:00

...or else the TabletPC / Media Center hybrid has finally happened!

This was in Circuit City's insert in last Sunday's NY Times.

Sorry for blogging so little these days. I am going to EMC World on the 24th and will try to blog that.

iTunes frustration

2006-03-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

I am months late to the debate sparked by Dave Winer when he railed against iTunes back in December but I'm a shitty blogger like that. I myself have been wondering why I dislike iTunes so much and this weekend when my wife complained about how hard it was to load music onto her iPod when her mother, one of most computer-challenged individuals we know, finds it so simple to use. Thus I have been thinking that there is something wrong with me and how complex I have made our home setup that my wife is unable to easily use iTunes.

Here is what we do with music in my apartment. I download MP3s from various sources or rip my own CDs and store them in a directory structure where it is vaguely categorized by genre and then artist - album name. I make sure that the music is tagged properly and includes album pictures by using the awesome Tag & Rename. For many years I have made playlists out of this music in Winamp, and this is what I've tended to use as a home stereo and synchronize to my iPod via ephPod. I never used iTunes because when I got my first iPod ("for Windows") in 2002 you had to use MusicMatch, which sucked, and I never tried iTunes when it came out. ephPod worked great because you could load the playlist, it would load all the songs if they were not already on the iPod, and then they would appear in the Playlists section of the iPod. So this was how I grew accustomed to using my iPod, and when my wife got one, I taught her to do the same as well.

I had always backed up my MP3s to a machine called NEMESIS (which, since we're talking about music, is named after a song on the High on Fire album "Surrounded by Thieves" -- in fact, all my machines are named after songs on this album except the Media Center PC, which is named HESSIAN after the song "Cometh Down The Hessian" on the "Blessed Black Wings" album). Before I had HESSIAN, NEMESIS was supposed to be the media/backup server for the apartment with its whopping 60GB RAID1 array. (I later added a single 120GB drive to it.) So I set up a lot of scripts to back up MP3s, My Documents, digital pictures, and my Outlook PST to this box. It happens to have an LTO2 tape drive in it now, but for whatever reason I cannot get it to consistently back up without throwing a million event log errors (I think mostly related to the ancient Compaq PCI SCSI card and/or the fact that it's a 400MHz PII that I bought in 1998). Anyway, when HESSIAN showed up on the scene, it became clear that I should also be storing MP3s and pictures on it to play or show in my living room, so thus it has come to pass that I have three copies of all my MP3s and digital pictures.

So for my wife, I had always figured that whatever solution she used to load MP3s onto her iPod would cleverly whichever of the stored MP3s on the network she wanted. This scheme had worked well when she was using my original iPod for Windows (5GB 1st gen), as all I had to do was make sure my M3U playlists were non-locational (e.g. they referred to relative directory paths rather than absolute like d:\mp3\ or whatever) and she could just load them with ephPod. However, when she got an iPod Mini, ephPod no longer recognized its directory structure, so we had no choice but to go with iTunes.

Having no desire to make it so that every computer in the house had its own copy of my 30GB MP3 collection, I assumed I could easily add songs from their network location to her iTunes library, and then she could sync them. However, this was not quite as easy as I would have hoped:

1) Her computer is connected to the wireless network. 802.11g, 54Mbit "Excellent" connection, but it's really only about 5Mbit in practice. iTunes chews on the songs for about 15 minutes every time you sync because of this. It just really sucks when the songs are remote. Not Apple's fault that my wireless network uses a repeater and also has to compete with 12 other visible networks in my building and the one across the back yard, but I would think that it does not need to exhaustively examine files that are already added to the library.

2) How do you add an album as a playlist in one easy step with iTunes? You cannot do this. The easiest way I've found is to create the playlist manually, name it, copy the directory locally, and then drag the directory from Explorer onto the playlist. This is what you'd think File-->Import Playlist, or dragging an M3U file to the playlist area, would do, but that's not the case.

3) I find the synchronization process to be somewhat random and annoying. I know I'm the only fool who knows that the "bing-bong" of the New Device sound and appearance of the system tray icon means that my device is recognized and I can now (manually) sync it, but it seems that it takes a long time for iTunes to recognize this. Further, I can see that, for less technically savvy individuals, nothing is simpler than connecting the iPod to the computer, which launches iTunes, synchs, and disconnects the iPod. Maybe I'm just used to my prior (manual) process and because ephPod only works when the iPod is connected, but usually I connect my iPod because I want to add music to it, and I don't think to launch iTunes (or whatever) beforehand to add the music. So inevitably I connect my wife's iPod to her computer in order to begin the process of adding some music, and then it starts synching really slowly over the wireless network, and I have to sync it again when it finally completes. If she wanted something on it quickly before running out to the gym, well, that isn't going to happen unless we remember to launch iTunes first.

4) In an optimistic attempt to have the Media Center PC be the center of our living room entertainment system (and also to not have to sync everything wirelessly), I had switched my wife to sync using iTunes on that PC. However, the DRM stuff on purchased iTunes quickly became a pain in the ass. (And I think that, as DRM goes, iTunes is fairly benign.) Here's the deal: my wife wanted to use her computer, with her mouse and her monitor, to buy music rather than the Media Center PC at couch distance with an HP remote keyboard/trackball combo. So the problem with that was that I couldn't come up with a good way to copy from her My Documents\My Music\iTunes\ directory to that of the Media Center PC easily without doing security stuff, and then having her click to play every song she purchased (or doing a "Re-download all my purchased music") before every sync. So her newly purchased music often wouldn't be available after syncing her iPod with the MCE PC. I gave up and went back to wireless access to remote MP3s on her own computer, and am copying new MP3s that she wants to her computer. Yep, the beginnings of a fourth copy of all my MP3s.

All these add up to having it be a big pain for us to use iTunes, whereas everyone else in the world thinks iTunes is really easy to use. I agree. I am willing to admit that perhaps I have lost sight of how complicated my setup is, and/or how simple everyone else in the world's setup may be. At some point, I will wire my apartment for Ethernet, and the slow sync issues will presumably disappear. But this is just one of these things where everyone in the world thinks something is great, and I just can't imagine it. All I want is a fairly simple way to share MP3s with my wife while allowing her to buy music that she can sync to her iPod. And it's not like we're entirely small potatoes Apple customers -- I owned a 5GB "iPod for Windows", a 15GB G3, and now a 30GB Video, and my wife has a 4GB Mini and has her eye on a 4GB Nano. That's like $1700 in iPod purchases throughout the years, so that's no joke. I like the devices very much, and I also like my method of synching with ephPod. So if somehow you could purchase music through ephPod, maybe that would be the best option overall…

--sbreck

Technorati tag(s): iTunes, ephPod, iPod

a few OneNote/TabletPC annoyances

2006-03-11T15:38:00.000-05:00

So that I don't fall too far behind on this blog, I wanted to speak out about a few annoyances now that I'm a veteran of the TabletPC and OneNote. If you know any way to fix 'em, please feel free to comment:

OneNote and Word integration broke somewhat recently. Now, every time I do a File-- to-- I am first asked what format I want to use. The only one that works is Single File Web Page (e.g. MHT). Then Word launches, but has no File or any other menus. Since mostly I am presenting my notes to a client, I would like to use a Word template that includes a header and footer. Thus I have to press Ctrl-N to open a new Word document which does have the menus. Then I have to do a File-- so that my choice of template is available. Then I copy from the original (menu-less) Word document into the one from the template, save it, and close all three Word windows. This is annoying.
I know I have discussed this before in another context, but the fact that OneNote launches Word differently than when I do so from my start menu annoys the crap out of me. Besides the above issue, it means that if I had Word open for any other reason and do a File-- To-- I get prompted about multiple changes to NORMAL.DOT by the OneNote-launched instance, and have to answer several dialog boxes to exit. I basically close Word now before I let OneNote launch it. This, too, is annoying.
OK, I apologize to the TabletPC community for neglecting them for the last three months, so here's one for you. One nice thing to do for meetings is to type everything you want to talk about in a note page as bullet points or whatever and then write comments on it during the meeting. Seems logical that you would discuss the first bullet point, and write your notes underneath it, using the Insert Extra Writing Space button as necessary. However, most of us use 10-point font, but College Ruled OneNote paper is like 16.5-point. And, Insert Extra Writing Space tends to follow the point size of the font, rather than the writing space. So you're always starting to write, finding that the guide wants you to write in 10-point height, and then trying to make your letters big enough to "stretch" the guide, and then you lose track of what the person in your meeting was saying in the first place. The best thing about OneNote is that you can write right on a pre-prepared agenda whenever you think of something you want to talk about in an upcoming (or not yet scheduled) meeting, keep these agendas around for when you actually get a chance to meet, and write the responses/resolutions right into OneNote. But the whole dragging the Insert Extra Writing Space thing around and fixing your font size is tiresome.

Update: Not only am I behind in my blogging, but also my reading of key blogs. Looks like Chris Pratley has had his team address some of these issues in OneNote 12.

I hope and assume OneNote 12 will fix this, but what has recently become a big annoyance with shared sessions is that if two people type at the same time on a line, the line becomes hopelessly screwed up to the point where you can't even tell what it used to say. So me and my coworker have taken to adding all these extra lines and then trying to guess who will type into which line. I've also noticed a few times that shared sessions on less-reliable wireless networks sometimes have dropouts which will eat entire paragraphs of notes. I'll be typing and then all of the sudden a block of what my coworker typed will overwrite it. It's annoying. I've noticed this mostly in big meetings with a lot of people on wireless at once (presumably saturating the WLAN) or when my coworker has problems with his other Office apps.

OK, any longer and I'd never have written this. If you like really long, more TabletPC-focused information, check out my post on my 1-year anniversary of using a TabletPC.

--sbreck

technorati: TabletPC, OneNote

SAN woes

2006-02-25T15:56:00.000-05:00

Normally I try not to write about the things I am actually doing at work for paying clients. I tend to not want to give away my own or institutional knowledge for which my firm should charge clients. That's why I stick to discussions about collaboration technologies (OneNote, SharePoint, document management) and personal technology (Treo, TabletPC, Firefox, Microsoft Media Center).

But I've been getting frustrated designing for Network Applications storage as part of my current project. And my prior engagement involved in part carving up storage for Windows servers on an EMC Symmetrix. And I've talked with clients about offerings from Compellent, Falconstor, Hitachi, and HP over the years. I guess I would call my market the middle tier of storage; mainframes are not used and only the occasional Unix system is ever connected to these boxes. Mainly they are for Exchange or Notes clusters, Microsoft SQL server clusters, file clusters and/or NAS, VMware ESX servers, and Windows server boot drives. Ideally the storage controller is used as a mechanism to replicate these systems to another site for DR purposes.

Having worked with some of the major vendors in this middle tier I need to speak my frustration. I do not profess to be a storage engineer so I would not mind any corrections, differences of opinion, or even personal attacks by commenters for this post. I am merely expressing my frustration that nothing is perfect is the small slice of the storage world that I play in. Here are my frustrations:

Network Appliance
This is theoretically the new darling of mid-tier storage, but I grow frustrated with their architecture. Their strength is NAS and in many ways NAS is quite appealing. Consolidating some servers? Want to do it without reconfiguring all your apps? Just have the NAS pretend to be FS1, FS2, NYFS18, whatever. Also, you need far fewer NAS heads than file servers to serve the same amount of data. And, in the NetApp world, snapshots of file systems on NAS are far smaller than snapshots of block storage. And you just have the sense that a custom Linux kernel designed for serving files will do so at a faster rate and far more reliably for far longer than a Windows server.

But, you still need some features that require separate servers when you choose NAS. File share virus protection requires a separate server which must hook into reads and/or writes of every file. Yep, the limiting factor on file serving speeds just became Windows! You could argue that if you protect against viruses via desktop scanning, email gateways, and network edge scanning, you're safe enough, but you still have foreign devices that come onto your network. You could also argue that permissions auditing on a NAS system is not nearly as complete as what you would get in Windows (assuming you set that stuff up). And, in the case of my current client, no NAS can run the docsntss.exe service that DOCS Open requires to properly secure documents. It's a law firm, old document management issue, but if you have that issue, you can't use NAS for your documents. If you were also thinking of using something more sophisticated than RoboCopy or XCOPY /D to replicate data out to branch offices, and you didn't want to put a NetApp NAS in every branch office because you were, I don't know, fiscally responsible or something, then you might want to use FRSv2 in the new R2 release of Windows Server 2003 to replicate file data. Again, that ain't happening with NAS. It's not that I don't still believe in NAS (though you'd have to show me more sophisticated things coming from other vendors, such as running real-time scanning on the NAS head itself) but in my current assignment we've decided against it and in favor of clustered file servers.

However, it is the provision of block storage via iSCSI where I find NetApp falling short. I know that NetApp's strength is that you can make a big-ass RAID group and share all the spindles with a variety of applications. So they're ahead of EMC (Clariion) in my opinion in that they actually can do this. But having RAID4 or RAID-DP be your only options here are wreaking havoc in assigning spindles to write-intensive applications like Exchange and SQL. Maybe I'm gullible or an idiot, but I was given, and am sticking with, a write penalty of 6 for RAID-DP. That means that a group of servers that as a whole are performing 3900 reads/sec and 1100 writes/sec on 500GB of data would require over 58 spindles to handle the I/O load, or over 8TB allocated. So, yeah, you have more spindles to use, but you need more because the controller has to perform so many operations to do one write to a RAID-DP array! (The same 3900 reads / 1100 writes would only need 39 spindles in RAID10.)

And, snapshots of iSCSI block storage, because they are just files served off the NAS head, require their same size again for a snapshot. Granted, you have a lot of extra space on the array because you had to use so many spindles, but that just means you are wasting a ton of disk just to provide the performance that far fewer RAID10 disks could perform!

And iSCSI itself, though no fault of NetApp's, is not perfect. Certain legal software vendors recommend against it because its 1Gbit storage path speed is considered too slow. The only card I know of that boots off of it, the QLogic 4010, does not support jumbo frames, which causes consternation among networking types as creating headers for 8K SCSI packets adds overhead in calculation time and a reduction in size of the data portion of the packet. (QLogic will fix this with the introduction of the 4050.) And the otherwise excellent VMware ESX Server doesn't support iSCSI until they finally decide to ship ESX 3.0 some time in the next 6 months.

Finally, a flaw of at least the NetApp 900 family is that it only takes Fibre Channel disks. So if you, in a law firm environment, would like high-capacity storage for infrequently accessed data like disk backups and litigation support images, you need a different unit (a FAS3000 or R200) or you need to pay a fortune for 300GB FC drives. This is true as well of the EMC Symmetrix.

So, for these reasons, the NetApp offering is not perfect. Yes, I may unfairly disregard NAS because of a requirement of nutty old legacy apps. And I may misunderstand the performance of RAID-DP. And I haven't surveyed the iSCSI HBA offerings closely enough, so I may be missing an offering that allows both boot-from-SAN and jumbo packets. And I may not be aware of a newer NetApp FAS model that supports both FC and ATA disks. But all of these taken together cause me some dissatisfaction with the NetApp Filer offering.

Stay tuned for my discussion of the EMC product line. I find that they, too, provide no single product that meets all my needs.

This post was not sanctioned by my company (the name of which I've declined to disclose on this blog anyway); all beliefs are my own and do not reflect those of anyone else.

technorati: NetApp NAS SAN iSCSI QLogic EMC

as if I didn't post to this blog infrequently enough...

2006-02-20T18:12:00.000-05:00

...I now have a new blog based on another interest, making fun of the New York Times Metropolitan Diary column. Read or subscribe if this also interests you.

productivity/GTD blog links

2006-02-13T00:37:00.000-05:00

I recently saw a copy of David Allen's book Getting Things Done on my coworker's desk, which I started reading, put down, and recently picked back up again after a four-month hiatus. I may write more later if I see my productivity rising dramatically but I did want to tell my coworker which GTD and productivity-related blogs I read, and figured I could do a little blogrolling in the process...

Gary Slinger: A one-time commenter who writes an excellent blog. I particularly recommend his Implementing GTD with a Blackberry series.
43 Folders: Simple, yet genius productivity tips. If you don't read Merlin already you should.
Tasks and Time Management in Outlook (12): Neat info on task functions in the next version of Outlook
What's the Next Action: Useful tips; I believe the author is part of the TabletPC community
MarkTAW: Updated even less frequently than the blog you are now reading, still contains some excellent GTD articles.

technorati: GTD