Helpful Error Message

Here’s an error message that is really helpful. I got this error when uninstalling Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer CTP1. I wanted to uninstall it before installing Beta 1 of Expression Web.

Good Guys Lonestar Nationals in Fort Worth

I am off to the 14th Lonestar Nationals tomorrow. The original plan was to go with my 8 year old son. We were thinking we might stay with my brother-in-law who lives between Fort Worth and Dallas. However, one of my nieces was going to be staying with us for the weekend, so we were going to go up to Fort Worth for the car show and then have dinner with my brother-in-law and his family. This way my son gets time with one of his cousins here in town Friday and Saturday night, and gets to have a couple of hours with his three cousins in Dallas.

Now things are interesting. My other brother-in-law (father to the niece that was staying with us and brother to the brother-in-law in Dallas) is buying a car in the Dallas/Fort Worth area this weekend, and he needs a ride up there. I know he was looking for a 88-89 BMW 3-Series Convertible with less than 50K miles. I will have to wait until tomorrow to get the details on the Bimmer.

Instead of driving my Mini Cooper S Convertible with my 8 year old, I will be taking my wife’s Acura MDX with my brother-in-law, his daughter and my two sons (8 and 11). And we will be staying overnight. I don’t know the sleeping arrangements yet, but I suspect the three kids will stay with the three cousins in Dallas and my brother-in-law (the local one buying the car) and I will stay at the Omni. Why the Omni? Because the brother-in-law in Dallas works for Omni and I expect we will get an employee discount.

I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.

Vista build 5728 & Virtual PC

I installed Windows Vista build 5728 (kind of a “post” RC1) under Virtual PC on my laptop and my workstation at work. All works well on my workstation at work, but I cannot get network access from my laptop.

Vista will run fine on my laptop until I change the setting for the Virtual Machine’s Network property to Shared Networking (NAT). This setting is necessary for Virtual Machines on my laptop to get access to my wireless network connection. It works flawlessly with Windows XP Virtual Machines. I will be testing this with Ubuntu Linux next.

When I set the Shared Network property Vista loads up to the desktop then hangs. No, it is not just really slow. It hangs. I think it hangs just before (or as) it loads the Sidebar.

I will probably give up on Vista on my laptop within Virtual PC. Without Internet access there is no point. I was going to do it to make it easy to do development for the Sidebar on my laptop.

Top Down Record Set

It has been a beautiful week (weather wise), and the top to my convertible has been down for 4 days straight. Cool! I am driving my wife’s Acura MDX (Sport-ute) tomorrow, so the Mini Cooper will stay in the garage… with the top down. This looks like a good time to start a record.

If you have a daily driver convertible what is your record for keeping the top down?

Convertible Top Up or Down… When Parked

I have been wondering about something. Yesterday and today the weather was pretty mild (about 60 in the morning and 90 in the late afternoon). I left my car parked at work with the top down. In South Central Texas the sun can get brutal. The question is… is it bad to leave the top down all day while at work?

The reason I ask is because I am thinking long term. I am going to own my Mini Cooper S Convertible for a very long time. What this boils down to is which is worse. Will the top mechanism wear out from up and down use everyday or the interior wear out from constant exposure to the sun.

Both the roof and the interior are black (yea, I know). When it is 100 degrees the interior is baking hot… even with the windows cracks. But when I went to the car and it was 88-90 degrees the interior felt fine. But what about long term.

What do you think? Would you leave the top down and risk cooking the interior, or put the top up and risk wearing out the mechanism?

Mini Cooper Rattle

I was driving around yesterday (Monday) and kept hearing a rattling noise in my car. Now, my Mini Copper is only three months old, so I rather perturbed at this. I was reaching around the passenger seat for the seatbelt. It was loose, but snugging it up didn’t help. I tried removing everything from console. Granted, the console only has three items. 1) The remote to my garage door, 2) a pen, and 3) an empty Tic Tac box. The Tic Tac box is behind the garage door opener to keep it from sliding rearward. Hey, it works… and the garage dor open is always in reach (the console opens by the lid sliding backwards).

Well, I am rambling. I tried to feel around the rear cup holder which is stuffed between the support arms of the console. I eventually reached in the cup holder and… Lo and Behold… there were two steel balls from my son’s magnetic construction toy.

Go Figure!

Firefox Issue

I installed Firefox 1.5.0.7(a fresh download and fresh install). When I started Firefox I received this message:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

I did a little digging and could not get an exact answer, but stumbled on one myself. I read some things that mentioned this could be a profile issue. Since I did a fresh install I didn’t care if I deleted the profile. And that was the key. I navigated to this folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

and prceeded to delete the folder/profile there. However this did not solve the problem by itself. I also had to edit the profile file:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini

I removed the two sections in the INI file labeled Profile0 and Profile1. I saved the file and Firefox started right up.

Windows Vista Build 5728 Works “Out of the Box”

I managed to start the download to Vista build 5728 yesterday evening before leaving for my son’s Cub Scout Pack Meeting. I ran the install on my desktop while watching Prison Break & Ghost Whisperer. Before heading off to bed I checked to see if the network was working.

Whoopee! Vista build 5728 connects to the Internet right out of the box. No problems with Marvell drivers or TCP Checksum Offload settings. It just worked.

I will start doing more testing later. I have three items I want to test right off:

1. Nero 6 – I want more than Vista’s CD/DVD burning capability.
2. Kodak DC280 Camera – Has Kodak finally gotten drivers to Microsoft.
3. Weather gadget – I started programming my own, but gave up. How is Microsoft’s.

That’s it for now.

Another Windows Vista – Build 5728

Well, I have barely had time to get Vista RC1 (build 5600) working and we have another version available. Build 5728 is now available as a download only. Get your copy here.

I have a Cub Scout Pack Meeting with my 8 year old son tonight, so I don’t know if I will have time to download and burn it to DVD tonight. Hopefully I will as I have been having a hard time with Vista RC1 running in Virtual PC on my laptop. I had it working, but with no network. When I the Shared Networking (NAT) setting Vista will boot within Virtual PC, but it hangs as soon as I click on the desktop. I may have done something wrong by changing this setting while the Virtual Machine was running and corrupted the VM. I was planning on reloaded RC1 from the DVD into a fresh VM. Now I will just do that with build 5728.

Of course, I will let you know as soon as I get it up and running (in Virtual PC on my laptop or dual booting on my desktop).

Virtual PC and Wireless Network

I was trying to test something and needed to run Virtual PC on my laptop. I could not get the Virtual Machine (Windows XP Pro or Windows Vista RC1) to recognize the network. Virtual PC emulates an Intel 21140-Based PCI Fast Ethernet adapter. I understand that. However, it should be “mapping” that to my Wireless adapter on the host PC.

I finally found an answer on Virtual PC Guy’s Blog. For me I had to set the Networking to Shared Networking (NAT). To set this make sure your Virtual Machine is shut down. Then highlight the Virtual Machine in the Virtual PC console and click on Settings. Highlight Networking on the left. Set it to Shared Networking (NAT).

Once I did this the Virtual Machine detected the network just fine.

Microsoft Expression Web Beta

I am a little late with this, but PC Magazine did a review of Microsoft’s new Expression Web beta. This will replace FrontPage in Microsoft’s web design arsenal. I have taken a quick look at it myself, but have not had time to create anything with it yet.

I am thinking about pitting this against Dreamweaver MX 2004 (the newest version I have) tosee which is easier for casual web site design and maintenance. FrontPage is the champ in the casual web site arena, so I have high hopes that Expression Web will more than fill FrontPage’s shoes.

Here are some links for you:

Microsoft Expression Web
PC Magazine’s Review of Expression Web Beta

Widescreen Gaming

I have a new laptop with a killer video card. This has allowed me to get serious about gaming on a laptop… something I never thought I would do. Anyway, I just thought I would get things started on how current (and not so current) games do on a widescreen laptop. This information will apply equally to a desktop with a widescreen LCD flat panel monitor.

I have only found one game that truly supports my widescreen. Granted, many games I have tested so far can handle the resolution of my display, which is 1440 x 900. However, they stretch the content to fill the screen. It makes people look fatter than they actually are.

Here are the games I have tested so far:

Hitman: Blood and Money Demo
GTR 2 Demo
Tomb Raider Legends Demo
Need For Speed Most Wanted
FarCry
Halo
Max Payne
Timeshift Demo
F.E.A.R. Demo
Quake 4 Demo

Out of all these games only one truly supports widescreen. Tomb Raider Legends. TRL has an option in its graphics setting for wide-screen. When you turn that on the entire screen sucks in and you see more scenery to either side. Very cool!

On the downside, Need for Speed Most Wanted only goes up to 1024 x 768. Since I don’t want the stretch I set my display to maintain a fixed size for content that does not fill the screen. So I play NFSMW with a big black border.

All the other games support my resolution, but stretch to fill the screen. Max payne impressed me because it is over 6 years old (I think), and I didn’t expect it to support my unusual resolution.

VW Eos – On The Road

I saw a VW Eos on the way home from work yesterday. It was black with a tan interior… visible because the top was down. If you read my review of my Mini Cooper S Convertible you will note at the end that I mention as a possible regret that the Eos was not available at the time I bought my Cooper for a comparison. The Eos has a little more horsepower than the Cooper S, and it has a retractable hard top. I really want to know how quite it is compared to my cloth top. VW claims a 0-60 time of 7.52 second. BWM/Mini claims the Cooper S Convertible will hit 60 in 7.0 seconds. I have read reviews that put the MCSC as fast as 6.8 to the magic road testing number. I thought the VW was going to be faster. It is the same engine in the GTI which I have seen in road tests at 6.5.

Anyway, now that I have seen one I need to find the time to get over to the VW dealer and test drive one.

USB Switchblade – Very Scary Stuff

If you thought your password was safe think again. Hak.5’s web site goes into the details of what it takes load a USB thumbdrive with the tools necessary to retrieve and crack the passwords on a Windows machine. It is more complicated than I can digest at the moment, but I can tell you a few items:

The program can retrieve the Windows password file, as well as any user IDs and passwords stored in IE and IE’s auto complete. His means the user ID, password and even credit card numbers that you use on web sites can be accessed.

The ability to get the actual password is based on a weakness in the way Windows stores passwords. In a nutshell, if your password is less than 15 characters long Windows uses an old hash algorithm (LM hash) that makes it easy to use a brute force mechanism to decrypt your password.

Some USB keys use a U3 technology to let Windows see them as a CD-ROM drive and autorun the software on them… even if the computer is locked by the user. This is really scary as you can walk up to a workstation and plug in the USB key, wait a few seconds and walk away with the user’s password file. You then take the USB key to another machine and run a crack tool to read the LM hashed passwords.

If this doesn’t scare you then you clearly don’t care about security. Have fun thinking about how this could be turned into a virus. The article is designed to show the strength of passwords, so you know whether they are strong enough. As a programmer I can easily see writing this into an ad ware program. Instead of writing the data to a USB key just write it to a server. You could remotely collect user IDs, passwords, credit card numbers.

 You can read the article to get a better understanding of this “Instant USB Password Recovery Tool.” I on the other hand need to change my password to something longer than 15 characters.

Vista Interface Comparison

Well, it seems that part of having a blog is linking to other blogs. Long Zheng has created a series of screen captures that do the best job I have ever seen at showing the differences between the various “flavors” of Microsoft’s Windows Vista interface. You will need to mouse over “version” names below each image to see it change on the fly. Very cool. Check them out here.

MSDN/Technet Event

I attended the MSDN & TechNet events in Austin yesterday. It was held at the Regal Gateway Stadium 16 Theater. We were about 20 minutes late. I could only leave so early and it was on the north side of Austin and traffic held us up. The first session was on Exchange Server. Boring! That was a shame. We use Lotus Notes where I work, so this was totally useless information.

I was really hoping the Windows Vista session would be first. Then we could have skipped the Exchange session and actually caught an early matinee. Oh well. The Vista session was only a little bit of a kool-aid drinking affair. The first 20 – 30 minutes were on the Aero Glass interface. The rest was worthwhile for support personnel that will be deploying Vista over a lot of computers. The showed how it was possible to extract out just the version you want to install from the DVD. If you didn’t know there is one DVD that contains all the versions of Vista. The Product Key you enter determines what version gets installed. They also show how you could inject other application and settings into the install. This is great for corporate customers that are going to strip the games and drop the OS on a few thousand workstations. It would not take much effort to great a “package” that included all the standard corporate application, and all the drivers for the hardware that a company has invested in.

The real thing I was there for was the .Net information. They covered what it would take to ping a computer, send e-mail, write a web listener, and ftp from within your own .Net code in Visual Studio 2005. This was perfect for me because I have done all of those things except the web listener in my own code in Visual Basic 6.

The other sessions were on Altas, which is Microsoft’s way of implementing AJAX. This was kind of neat, but didn’t seem to great to me. It looks like Microsoft’s implementation might be a little limiting compared so some “Web 2.0″ sites I have seen. I didn’t walk out of that session thinking I would write some of the stuff I have seen.

Finally there was a session on using names pipes as a method of have computers (or services on a computer) talk to each other. This went way over my head, and seemed like a complicated we to pass some textual information between machines. However, my coworker thought is was very good. He is a .Net developer already and he thinks this would be a great way to help get information across our firewall in a safe and secure way. Whatever. I learn that when I have to worry about creating web services that need to talk across a firewall. In the mean time I need to get started with just build some web sites with Visual Studio.

ABS Works in Mini Cooper

I mentioned in my review of the Mini Cooper S Convertible (on my actual web site) that I had not had an opportunity to test the ABS capabilities. Well, that opportunity presented itself this morning. I must have been daydreaming about the Microsoft MSND/TechNet event I went to yesterday. I almost ran a stop sign at 60 mph. However, I came out of my “dream” in time to slam on the brakes.

The ABS kicked in and the car hauled to a stop with the typical strong vibration of the brake pedal. It was drama free except that I went about one car length into the intersection. This is a Mini Cooper; one Mini car length is about half a regular car length. I didn’t hit anything, but got a few looks from people who clearly think I am nuts. Oops!

Windows Vista & .NET Framework 2.0

I am off to Austin tomorrow for a couple of Microsoft events. Hey, it gives me a chance to drink the kool-aid. The events are:

Get Connected with the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
Gear up with Microsoft Windows Vista and Exchange Server

Vista and Exhange Server are in the morning while .Net is in the afternoon. I am sure the Vista portion will be a serious kool-aid drinking affair.

I’ll let you know how they go.

Two Solutions for Vista RC1 Internet Problem

I have two solutions to the “connect to some sites” issue. One solution was to update the drivers to the Marvell 9.10.2.2 drivers from their web site.

The second solution was disabling TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4).

Since there are no 9.10.2.2 drivers from Marvell for 64-bit Vista, the TCP Checksum solution is the only one I know works.

Now I am going to test some left over compatibility issues, and see if I can notice a performance difference between the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Windows Vista RC1.

I also need to decide if I want to make the switch to Vista permanent. I noticed with RC1 (32-bit) that I could insert the disc while running XP and it would offer to install as an upgrade. Cool! Unfortunately, that would be a permanent switch. I know I am not ready for that.

I’ll be back when I have more.

Vista RC1 Internet Working

I got Vista RC1 (build 5600) working with the Internet. As you recall (from below) I was able to connect to some sites but not others. And the behavior was completely repeatable.

The solution was a setting in the configuration of the network adapter (built on to my ASUS motherboard). Here is how I fixed it (all credit goes to Rob Sydor):

Click on Start orb
Right-click on Computer
Click on Manage
Click Continue
Select Device Manager on the left
Expand the Network adapters on the right
Right-click the network adapter
Click on Properties
Click on Advanced
Select TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4) on the left
Set value to Disabled
Click OK, and clock the Device Manager

All was working, without even rebooting. The screen flickered a couple of time as it processed this information and when I ran IE it went immediately to Microsoft Live.

All this was with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista RC1. I did not need new drivers. I am going to try installing the 32-bit version of Vista RC1. I am curious to see the performance difference, though it will be hard to tell without some kind of benchmark between the two since I can’t have both running at the same time.