Archive for February, 2007

Was following a thread on a forum and someone posted the following.

Lance: Still got your Malibu?
Vincent Vega: Aw, man. You know what some fucker did the other day?
Lance: What?
Vincent Vega: Fucking keyed it.
Lance: Oh, man, that’s fucked up.
Vincent Vega: Tell me about it. I had it in storage for three years, it was out for five days and some dickless piece of shit fucked with it.
Lance: They should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
Vincent Vega: Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it. I’d have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him doing it.
Lance: What a fucker!
Vincent Vega: What’s more chickenshit than fucking with a man’s automobile? I mean, don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle.
Lance: You don’t do it.
Vincent Vega: It’s just against the rules.

Pulp Fiction aside, it’s mildly amusing, annoying, frustrating, whatever… that I get away scot-free from a near nasty accident during the first snow of Redmond after some guy nearly rear ends me. Only later, to have some buffoon key the hood and drivers side. I don’t get why anyone would do that really. Unless they wanted to boost their ego in front of some drunken friends or whatever. Who knows. It’s not like they saw the look on my face after the fact. In so many ways I wish Seattle and the US in general was CCTV’d up the arse like London is. I’d hope that there’d be the day where you could actually file a police report, give them the time the car was parked at the location then they’d just review the CCTV for those times and get a nice picture of the perp.

Of course with 20/20 hindsight I could say that we should’ve taken Julie’s car. Who would really mess with a college student’s a to b car, especially when it’s a cute little Chevy Aveo with a bubble butt . We could’ve probably parked it in the same exact spot at the same time and the person would’ve left it alone. Or we could’ve not gone to the next pub after seeing her brother-in-law perform and been out of there before the incident happened. Who knows… It’s only a car, sure, it is however for most the second most valuable investment behind a house.

Anyway, what can you do. It’ll be a couple hundred bucks to fix, and hopefully won’t affect the premium on the insurance despite them shelling out $2200-2700 to fix it. Oh and not to mention that it’ll affect the trade-in value if I plan on selling the best car ever anytime soon but hey, it’s the best car ever. Don’t think that’ll be happening for some time to come (like when the Tesla is about the same price).

With the recent February CTP release of Longhorn Server I finally decided that since my Dell PowerEdge 2900 hasn’t really been fully configured. It’d be a good time to give Vista… err Longhorn Server a shot.

I’m still waiting in limbo for my fresh install with Exchange 2007 (waiting on that one little app that will make it all work like magic) on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition x64 R2 (PLEASE PLEASE let them have some common sense with naming sometime this century).

The install of Longhorn Server went perfectly. I didn’t even have to provide drivers for my Dell PERC 5/i RAID controller which is awesome and as expected. The entire install took only 15 minutes which is great considering it’s a quad core server with 4GB of 667MHz FB-DIMM’s. I noticed right away that the no network connection icon was down there in the system tray so I immediately went to Device Manager. The two embedded NIC’s (Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708C’s) were just showing as Ethernet adapters.

Figuring first that the 2003 x64 drivers would work I went to the big RAID driver I’ve got, it wasn’t there. No biggy, it’s probably not mounted. Popped open Disk Management saw 3265GB (RAW) and nearly died of a heart attack. Remaining calm (knowing Microsoft couldn’t have just done something so stupid as wipe my drive), I gave the unmounted partition a drive letter and crossed my fingers as it was assigned to R: and showed the right amount of free space and NTFS. Now I’m sure the PM that thought this was a good idea had the best intentions but for the love of god man think again. Don’t you ever scare me or anyone else like that again. RAW == brand new drive / empty drive / drive with nothing on it. Don’t you dare say that my 3TB array is empty. List it as UNMOUNTED and pop a bloody dialog stating that I need to assign a drive letter. The last thing you want is some system admin working away on 100′s of systems to just format a drive with critical data on it.

I tried installing the NIC drivers from Dell and they didn’t work. I then tried the drivers from Broadcom for the NetXtreme II 5708C and they didn’t work. I then tried whatever Broadcom drivers came in Longhorn Server and those didn’t work. Finally I Googled and found, this, so I then tried the RIS drivers and unfortunately those didn’t work either. In fact Windows wouldn’t even boot complaining about the driver’s digital signature being unverified. So after trying every possible driver my 20 minutes with Longhorn Server is over and I’m going back to Server 2003. Maybe with Beta 3, maybe once Broadcom get there butts in motion (this isn’t a bloody Creative soundcard guys it’s a critical enterprise level NIC that’s shipped on nearly ALL 9th gen Dell servers, you’ve got Vista RTM get moving, Server shouldn’t be much of a leap). Clearly the issue is with the NDIS v5 Broadcom are using. And it’s probably also the root cause of all the issues I’ve been having with Virtual Sever 2005 and this NIC back on Windows Server 2003 as well.

There’s a part of me that just wants to give in and buy the Intel Pro/1000PT Dual Port PCIe x4 NIC and have the drivers built in and not have to worry but I’m not about to waste $170 on another NIC when I’ve got one that should be working perfectly. What a headache.

It’s been driving me nuts ever since I started using Vista but it’s finally been fixed. Apparently not caused by Plus! Live for Messenger nor WLM 8.1 itself but some bad bits for the Microsoft wireless mouse I’ve got. The fix went up on Windows Update the other day and since then things have been fine. The KB article for the fix is amusing to me since it talks about the issue possibly being caused by CyberLink software. Cute since this is a clean install and nothing other than WLM and Office 2007 have been installed. Either way the “HID Non-User Input Data Filter” fixes the auto away status in Messenger. My power management for disabling the monitors after 15 minutes has worked fine and the update hasn’t changed that. Jason Tsang also has a bit more information regarding the update.

This year I had the pleasure of watching the Super Bowl on my Samsung HLS-5688W over QAM free and clear from the wall outlet direct to the TV. The game was decent. Found the touchdown on kick-off to be quite hilarious. Then the first 5 minutes of play to be equally hilarious due to both teams sucking. Then after that the rain didn’t help matters and it was another boring football game.

Now the things I noticed and the main reasons for watching this year were technical things. Like the first down line not doing too well on the white full yard lines. Next and the main reason for this post was the utter lack of quality at some point during the camera and the signal going into the DSP of my DLP. I actually had to go into the settings of the TV and move the picture up because CBS seemed to be broadcasting it so badly there was an annoying half inch black line at the top. Even after doing that I noticed some ads just weren’t centered vertically. Ignoring that. They simply need to have better encoding of this stuff, more bandwidth, something, as soon as they’d get in close on a player on the sidelines that would be running just a bit the picture would go blocky and all that glorious 1080i content just looked like crap on my 1080p TV. And honestly this isn’t just a problem with CBS, all the networks, service providers, whoever, aren’t really doing a good job for motion content. Hire Joel and Brandon or something , oops they’re already taken…

That being said, when they had a nice stable picture it was just jaw dropping. Blades of grass, little specks of rain. Brilliant. And shame on all those SDTV ads, yuck. I can’t wait for the day to have a full hour of TV in 100% HD… Oh wait I do, it’s on 82-5 here, KCTS-HD .

First an obvious one from the Sidebar… This is a known bug but it’s stupid and annoying. Notice anything in the linked screenshot? According to the Sidebar and according to the Display Settings the gadgets and such should be on the right side of my left monitor. Obviously they’re not. After a restart of the PC the Sidebar ends up in that location. At which point you have to pull up the properties again and set it to the right side of monitor 3.

If you have a sharp eye you might have also noticed something else. This one is a shell bug. Notice the taskbar has a bit more going on than it should? Especially over in that right side there’s just stuff that should definitely be black.

Here’s another example, you can clearly see what’s happening here. The taskbar glass effect is grabbing the wrong portion of the image for the effect. It’s taking the image from the 2nd monitor not the 1st. Here’s the actual background image (converted from a BMP). Jon and I thought the fix would be to just turn glass off then on so I restarted the DWM service that didn’t work. Neither did a restart. So we’re not sure if this is the same known bug we’ve seen during the beta or something else. The fix however is to turn on the auto-hiding of the taskbar. Immediately after doing that the problem is fixed. Disabling the auto-hiding breaks it again .

One other thing you’ll notice from the background image is that it doesn’t quite match the screenshot of the desktop. Well this is more of a feature request and something that can be done with UltraMon but something clearly the shell team didn’t have time nor thought was worthy of doing for Vista. Basically I’ve got 3 24″ monitors at 1920×1200. I’ve got my main monitor 1 set to the middle where I like my taskbar. 2 is to the left, and 3 to the right. The problem is that I’m a bit more of a pixel perfectionist than most and so having one desktop background spread across all 3 monitors is a must. There’s only 2 ways of doing this. First is to use a third party app like UltraMon. And the second approach is to pop open Paint or Photoshop and create an image that’s the right size (5760×1200) in my case. Then paste in the 3 images to create one image to stretch about whichever way you’d please.

Now logic would dictact that WYSIWYG with the background image. You’d expect it to go 123, left, middle, right. Well that’s not the correct logic according to the methods used for the Desktop Background settings in Vista. If you have a set up similar to my circumstances, which I’ll concede many don’t… *cough* stupid speech recognition vulnerability. Then I’m just like some at ZDNet and I’d just be making something of nothing. However, if you also have Aristotle like perfection you’ll want to make sure your multimon background is set up right.

To do this you need to remember that Windows will start the background image from your “main” monitor and you need to have things set to Tile mode. In my case the monitors go 213. So while the start of image should be at the left mine is in the middle. Next you have to make sure the image flows and overflows from left to right, regardless of monitor numbering. To better illustrate this click here. Well, I hope that better illustrates things with the description:

1, Middle monitor = Left side of image in Photshop.
2, Left monitor = Right side of image in Photoshop.
3, Right monitor = Middle of image in Photoshop.

If not then maybe heading over to shellrevealed would be a good idea . Tell them that you want to be able to set a different background image for each attached display and not have to deal with this mess. Finally if you like the backgrounds shown or want to see some other cool stuff head over to mandolux.

UPDATE: Dom and I were discussing how annoying desktop icons have become. I was ranting about how I wish the Recycle Bin were a sidebar thing instead of being the only desktop icon that I’d have floating around. So I disabled it in Personalization. He instead just unchecked Show Desktop Icons from the Properties menu on the Desktop. I gave this a go just for the heck of it since I’ve still got a couple other temporary icons on the desktop that I didn’t want to move and low and behold. The bloody taskbar glass bug was resolved. Obviously there’s something funky going on here and I’m sure it wasn’t really considered to be significant enough to fix since not enough people would hit it. At any rate, just a work around for anyone who wants to know…