Vista Sidebar

I have been playing around with the Vista sidebar.  There are a lot of really neat gadgets that you can download for it.  One disappointment was that I couldn’t find a gadget that showed me my computer’s IP address.  There are some that show you the IP address for your wireless card, but for a desktop computer that is about worthless.

After some investigation, I figured out why I couldn’t find a gadget to show me my address.  The sidebar has a good API for things like cpu % used, mem % used, and wireless configuration, but not the ip address for an ethernet card.  I figured out how to do that after spending some quality time with Google.

The trick is to use WMI along with javascript or vbscript.  I finally finished my IP status gadget tonight.  It displays the following:

• LAN IP address.
• Optionally, it will also show your public IP address (through a helper asp page).
• A flyout that shows all available information on your card (DNS servers, DHCP Server, Lease expiration, etc.).
• A settings dialog to let you put in the asp page url to get your public IP address.

I am quite satisfied with it at this point.  Everything has been coded in vbscript.  It seems like most of the examples that you find are coded in javascript.  Some samples mix and match between the two.  But for this I decided to just use vbscript.  Now if only I could figure out how to put it in a seperate file! 

 <edit> It was accepted this afternoon and is available to download.  Like all sidebar gadgets, this is free.  Click here to try it! </edit>

New Vista Experiences

Yesterday I purchased a new 400gb drive to install Vista Business on.  I finally got my quarterly Action Pack shipment.  In the Action Pack was Vista Business Upgrade, Office 2007 Enterprise, just about every other Office program (Visio, Expression Web, etc), and Sharepoint Server (2006? 2007?  I can’t remember). 

I shut down my desktop computer and installed the new hard drive, removing an old 60gb drive in the process.  I figured I would just boot from the Vista disk and install it that way.  Noooo, that would be too easy.  Apparently the Upgrade version has to be installed from XP Pro.  Ok, well I have XP Pro from the Action Pack, so I will just install that, then install Vista.  And that worked, except for some reason Vista marked the drive it was installed on as the K: drive.  Yuck!  And of course you can’t change the drive letter on the drive that you are booted from. 

Next try was to start the Vista install from my existing XP installation.  Yeah, just try to get XP to boot if you installed Vista in a way that it doesn’t know about your existing XP.  I messed with the command line tool to try and get the boot menu straightened out (BCDedit).  After spending too much time googling and reading, I finally just used the XP recovery console to get back to XP.  Then I deleted the partition that Vista was installed on.  I was going to do the install from within XP and choose a clean install on the new hard drive.  And of course that didn’t work.  This time it was because of the driver for the IDE channels.

Tonight I will unplug the hard drive that my existing XP install is on, and then install XP on the new hard drive.  I then intend on installing Vista as a clean install over the new XP install.  What I am trying to get is a clean install of Vista.  I don’t want a Windows.old folder that is impossible to access, and also impossible to delete.  As far as I am concerned, this is just a waste of space.

I need to keep the existing XP drive around until I can get drivers for all my peripherals.  I also want to do a clean install of Vista, because I know that my existing XP has a lot of junk in it, from registry entries for programs that aren’t even installed to programs that I have not used in over a year, mainly games.

Vista Home Premium

I ended up purchasing the upgrade version of Vista Home Premium.  After thinking about it, I am installing it on my laptop.  After having to uninstall a bunch of stuff and deleting stuff from My Documents so that I would have 10Gb free space, I finally got the upgrade started.  Of course it warned me that a bunch of programs probably wouldn’t work when the upgrade was finished (including Visual Studio 2005 and Virtual PC 2004!).  And then it started chugging away, while warning me that it will reboot multiple times and would take hours!

I am installing this on my laptop because there aren’t any files on there that I don’t have backed up.  It will also take less time to blow away than my desktop computer would.

<edit> I am just editing this post for completeness sake.  I ran into a few problems with the install (really, with post-install) on my HP laptop.  HP does not support Vista on my laptop.  But then after trying to find Vista drivers for my HP printers, it doesn’t look like HP supports Vista at all!  On Vista, my touchpad was just listed as a mouse.  So I spent a couple hours trying to find a driver for it.  One thing that has always bugged me about touchpads is the tap-click feature is always enabled by default.  When I type, I tend to rest part of my hand on the touchpad.  Next thing I know, I accidentally tap the touchpad and I am typing somewhere else on the screen.  So getting the driver for the touchpad to disable tap-clicks was essential.  I ended up downloading the Alps touchpad driver from Dell.

The video chipset is an ATI Radeon Mobile 9000igp.  And of course ATI doesn’t have a Vista driver for that (too old?).  I found a driver from Toshiba through one of those driver download sites (sorry, can’t remember which one).  The driver is for XP.  But at least it lets me set the screen resolution higher.

My laptop still has a Win Experience score of 1.0, mainly due to the video card.  That is even with having the video card get a full 128mb of memory (the most that the bios will let me give it).  When I bought the laptop, it had 512mb of RAM for the whole system, and only 16mb reserved for video RAM.  The 512mb was divided into 2 sticks, only one of which is easily replaceable.  Previously I had removed the easily accessable 256mb stick and replaced it with a 1gb stick.  With 128mb reserved for video, that gives me 1.25gb of system ram.

Now if only the video card was replaceable! 

To Vista or not

Vista is being released sometime this week (I can’t really tell if it is today or tomorrow).  And I have been thinking about getting it.  From looking at the different versions, I think that I will be going with Ultimate so that I have all the home options plus can join it to my SBS domain.

But is it worth getting?  Pros: I will need it to test my software, it has more media capabilities than XP Pro, and I can get a new computer.  Cons: $, setting up a new computer.

Even if I get a new computer, I will not get rid of my current desktop computer.  I built this computer.  It has a P4 2.4ghz processor, 2Gb RAM, 4 or 5 hard drives (I can’t remember how many I am up to), one of the drives is in a “cradle” so that I can slide it out and slide another drive in (good for backups!).  It also has a beefy video card driving dual 17″ flat screen LCDs.  But it has been awhile since I have rebuilt XP on it, so it is getting slow.

So I will probably get a new computer.  I will install all my usual programs and games on it, then I will take an image of it, so that rebuilding it will be a lot easier.

SourceGear Vault

After finally getting it installed (so much for actually reading the documentation), and using it this evening, I have to say I really love Vault.  And really it isn’t specifically Vault, but source control entirely.  I have been experimenting with have a collection that held another collection of a class.  And serializing it out to an XML file.  It was basically MasterCollection, that inherits CollectionBase, and held GroupCollection, which also inherits from CollectionBase.  GroupCollection held Accounts.  The idea was there would only be one MasterCollection, there can be more than one GroupCollection which holds many Accounts.  No problem so far.  Until I tried to add a variable Name to the GroupCollection.  The name never got serialized.  What I got was <ArrayOfArrayOfAccounts></>. 

I ended up trying many different ways to fix this.  I would check the code out of Vault, make changes to it, see if it worked, and if it didn’t, I’d just revert the check out and check it out again.  Sometimes I would check in the code so that I could look at it later.  This allowed me to experiment without having to copy the folder to another place on the hard drive.  I already have multiple copies of previous projects laying around and can’t tell which is the latest/greatest.  With Vault, I put in comments what I changed/modified.  So I can look back at it later.

And something else that I noticed for the first time today.  I use the personalized Google page for my homepage.  I have a tab set up just for the different blogs I look at.  Sometime Google snuck in a new feature.  It now shows me the date and/or time of the posts.  So I can tell by looking at the date (if the date posted is not today) or the time (if the date posted is today) and know if I read it or not.  Each post also has a + that you can click to expand to read the whole post.

I just hope that it shows up correctly for stats when I look at a post using the Google site.

Progress, sortof

I have mostly finished with the gui portion of the project.  There are a few details to finish up with, namely coming up with the registration code format.  Also, tying it to the website, which isn’t completed yet either.

In the process of testing, I determined that my way that I was going to store data will not work.  So I deleted that section and started over.  But after I deleted the section and saved it, I thought it would be nice to be able to see how I did it before.  This led again to getting Vault set up and running.  Well, I am working through the dependencies now.  First, I had to install IIS (I am using WinXP in a Virtual PC to run Vault).  Once that was done, it then told me that I needed to install the .Net 1.1 framework.  So I go to Windows Update, which lists 67 critical updates.  This is essentially a clean OS install.  Adding .Net 1.1 framework made it 68 updates.  Right now it is on #8.

And on it goes…

Off topic rant

My older son (who is 8 years old) has recently begun to like country music.  Or specifically one band, Rascal Flatts.  This started because they did a song on the Cars movie soundtrack.  He received their new CD for Christmas this year.

Now I don’t mind him listening to country music.  I like country music myself.  And he could be listening to a lot worse!

But now that he is starting to pay attention to music and radio stations, I learned about the sorry state of affairs in FM programming.  I usually only listen to XM radio.  I have the boom box in my office at work and the car kit in my vehicle.  The only time that I listen to anything else is I turn on the local AM news/talk station to hear traffic reports, usually only after I am in a traffic jam.

There used to be one station that I listened to on FM.  It’s format was 80’s music.  But they changed a while ago to 80’s – today, and I don’t particularly care for today’s pop music.

Now the local stations have done a format dance again.  The oldies station is now country music (making it two country stations in the area), and the former 80’s station is now oldies (which is now defined as 60s-80s).

It has been tried in the past to have two country stations in the area.  It hasn’t worked in the past, but that doesn’t keep radio stations from trying.  I just wish the established country station would be the one to change format and dump their morning show.  And this is mainly because their morning show has a guy pretending to be an old woman.  That just drives me nuts.

As far as I know there are only two FM stations in the area that have kept the same format for years.  One is the aforementioned country station, the other is the classic rock station.  The one-time 80’s station was a gospel station when I moved to this area.

Enough ranting.  Back to regularly scheduled programming 🙂

Getting started (or kicking yourself to open the IDE)

As I sit here, it is now Monday night.  I don’t have much to show for my free time over the weekend.  No finished product, no finished website, nothing.

Well, I did get the domain name and hosting set up.  That took about 15 mins.  I played around with the IDE, but haven’t finished anything.  Now I looking at refactoring just about all my code to make it prettier and to have it use just one XML file to store everything.  I may just leave it using 2 files, just to save time.

But just managing to get started in the evening is tough.  Right now I am installing Win98SE in Virtual PC 2004.  Between web surfing, playing the PS2 with my son, and playing with my other son, I usually do not sit down at the computer until 8:30pm.  Because this is not my ideal coding time, I have trouble convincing myself to get busy instead of playing games, etc.  My ideal time to code is from 10pm – 2am, but that is not compatible with first shift job that pays the bills!

I remember reading something on Joel’s blog about there being a bug in the process between thinking about opening the IDE and actually opening it.  I definitely suffer from that bug!

So what I have done is download TimeSprite.  Hopefully the fact that I am monitoring my time will provide some incentive.

Update to the blog

Well, I am taking a new direction.  This blog has been private for a few months.  My partner and I were using it to communicate software ideas and do pro/cons of those ideas.  However, none of them were ever fleshed out.

So I have gone through and deleted all those posts and made the blog public again.

I am also still looking for my killer idea.  Mainly this is still looking at what “pains” I face day to day at work.  One of the big pains that I have been dealing with has been in keeping track of passwords.  I am an ops tech for a large telecom company.  As part of my job, I have to interface with multiple systems (both internet/intranet and legacy systems).  Most of these systems do not use the standard NT login.  They each use a username of different lengths, have different password requirements (length, complexity and number of stored passwords before you can reuse them).  One person that I talk to regularly in the company keeps his usernames/passwords in a Word doc.  Another has post-it notes plastered over his monitor.  I have kept mine a little bit safer (I email them to myself).

None of these are good solutions to the problem/pain.  So I hacked a simple VB.Net program together that encrypts everything and stores it in a XML file.  But it is definitely not ready for primetime!  So I could clean this up and try marketing it.  But the market is definitely full of password managers.  What would be my USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?  If I were to try marketing this, I would definitely go for the corporate market (not B2B though).  What I mean is that I would market it as ideal for a business user to purchase.  They would not need admin rights to install it, as it would not need to be installed to be used.

Argh, I am sooo fed up with crappy UI

Or how I spent this evening.

My one goal for this evening was recovering files from a hard drive.  The hard drive had lost its partition information.  The program that I regularly use for this purpose (RecoverMyFiles) was not working well.  It gave me a divide by zero error when trying to do a Fast Format Recover.  The Long Format Recover took hours (around 12 hours if I remember right) and was not able to recover much of the files.  It could not rebuild the folder structure and a lot of the filenames had @s in the names.

So I go searching google for lost partition hard drive or something like that.  I downloaded a couple programs to try out.  One had a nice looking UI, but the button images did not make any sense at all.  And that one wanted to phone home when exiting.  ZoneAlarm caught it doing that, so all it guaranteed was that I was going to uninstall it.  Somehow the clueless wonders that wrote the program didn’t manage to get it listed in Add/Remove programs.  Luckily they had a uninstall link in the start menu programs folder.  Both of the programs that I downloaded had big readability problems.  Poor english, using custom boxes for “tips” that did not have scroll bars, so you could only read about half of the tip.

Another program thought it was so good, that there wasn’t any reason to offer a trial version.  I paid for that, realized it would not work, and then had to open a support ticket to get a refund.  If I do not get a reply back by tomorrow evening, I will have to charge it back, which means instead of a $25 sale, they get $0 in sales and $25-30 in bank charges.  Maybe that will make them rethink not having a trial version.

Well I finally got the files recovered.  I used a DOS program called SpinRite to fix the hard drive, then a program called GetDataBack for FAT to recover the files.  A whole evening wasted!

And I still don’t know why I get that divide by zero error in RecoverMyFiles.  I am waiting for a response from support about the bug I sent them.  They did give me a debug version so they could capture more information.