Why is this man laughing?

 

There’s a story behind that picture and it’s pretty much what you would think it is.

Dave Anthony toasts his achievement after driving his truck on top of a Kent house he was demolishing. Anthony said "it was a hell of a way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend."

Somehow, it's not too surprising that alcohol was involved.  The full story can be read here.   I wonder how close he came to being a candidate for a Darwin Award?  At the very least, he should get an "Honorable Mention" for this stunt.

It gets better with the followup story:  Driving your pickup truck onto the roof of a house and getting your picture in the newspaper doesn't make a whole lot of sense when police want to talk to you about a $2,800 set of tires purchased with a stolen credit card.

Courtesy of Raymond Chen from The Old New Thing.

Tech Tags: Beer Morons

Time to get a new PC

My home PC died last Friday and I'm waiting for it's replacement to show up. I've had the machine for years and it's been running 24/7, something was bound to fail. The fan on the video card was starting to lock up and I'm pretty sure that the main hard drive is toast. It was a decent machine back in 2002, an Athlon XP 2000 with fast memory and drives.

The new box will be dual cores with lots of memory and RAID 5. I've lost 4 drives in the last year, I wont use another desktop without RAID. I looked at getting Dell, but I really didn't want to spend a lot of money. You can get cheap boxes from Dell, but not with what I wanted.

I like spec'ing out the components, you never know exactly what you will be getting from Dell. I've had good luck with custom boxes built by MWave. I basically picked out the components that I wanted and they assembled it and burned it in for me for a small fee. It's already been shipped, I should have it early next week

This is what I ordered:

• Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe: A decent motherboard with everything I need on it, including RAID. The onboard sound board isn't the best one, but it will do for my needs. I'll probably salvage the Audigy card out of the dead machine if I need a better sound card.
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Brisbane): Two cores and energy efficient. I never get the fastest CPU, I always bring down a few notches. The difference in speed will not be perceptable and I can spend the extra money on more memory, which will make the machine faster.
• 2 GB Ram: With Vista, 2 GB is the bare minimum. I'll probably bump it up later
• GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256D GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card: It's fast, it's cheap, and it's got a big honking heat pipe to cool the card without a fan. Not having a fan means a quieter PC and one less moving part to break.
• Maxtor 250GB SATA-300 drives: MWave had these drives fro $60, so I bought three of them for the RAID 5 array. With Maxtor's purchase by Seagate. it looks like these products were being discontinued.
• Lite-On LH-18A1P 18X DVD RW drive: I've had good luck with Lite-On drives before and it was a good price. It's not their fastest writer, but it will be fast enough for the media that I'll be using for it
• No floppy. The only time I have used a floppy in the last box was to flash the BIOS of the motherboard. If I can the new one to boot from a flash drive, I wont need the floppy. I may end up installing one as it's the typical way of installing RAID drivers when you do a Windows install. I could grab the floppy drive from thedead PC or get one that also has a memory card reader
• Antec Sonta II case: I'v always liked Antec cases and power supplies and the Sonata is the right case for me. It's big enough to make working in the case easy, and it's very quiet. The main fan is 120mm, instead of 80mm. It can run slower (less noise) and push out more air than the 80mm fans. Another nice feature is that the fans and the hard drives are mounted on rubber, that really cuts down on the vibration noise.
• Vista Home Premimum: I have mixed feelings about this one. I need more Vista hands on experience, but the horror stories are starting already. I could always install XP, if this OS is truly that awful, but I would prefer to work with Vista. This will also be my first experience with a "Home" labelled OS. I've been using XP Pro at home, but I rarely use the Pro functionality. I'm staying with the 32-bit version, even though the processor will support the 64-bit OS

Fortunately, the important files have been backed up. I put together a FreeNAS box a couple of months ago and I've been backing up source code and documents to it. The next time you buy a new PC, take the old one and toss FreeNAS on it. It just works.

Tech Tags: Antec New+PC AMD Geforce ASUS FreeNAS

Is Microsoft Dead?

I was reading Mike Gunderloy's new blog, A Fresh Cup, and I came across a link to an article titled "Microsoft is Dead", by Paul Graham.  Paul's view is that Microsoft is no longer relevant and we live in "Web 2.0" world that Microsoft doesn't know how to play in.  He states that there are four things that killed Microsoft: Google, "the desktop is over", broadband Internet, the rise of Apple.  He's just plain wrong.

I'll give him Google.  Microsoft has never been able to catch up to Google in the search engine game.  I stil don't see how Google being the king of the hill for search engines means that Microsoft is dead.  That's like saying because apples are red, oranges suck.  It doesn't work that way.

People have been saying that the desktop is over for years.  Sun has been saying that, in one form or another, for the last 20+ years.  That has always felt like wishful thinking than future reality.  Lots of applications are well suited to run as web applications, but not all of them.  The desktop experience is just so much more richer in terms of the UI and the access to the machine than the browser experience.   Today's PC's have so much horsepower that it boggles the mind.  Why would you not want to use it?

Paul states that the rise of broadband Internet means that you have less of a need for desktop because you will faster access to the server.  All it really means is that your applications that get data from the Internet will run faster.  I use SourceGear's Vault for source control.  Vault runs a web service, but the client is a fat app.  When I changed my home ISP from TW RoadRunner to Verizon FiOS, I saw a decent performance boost when I used Vault from home to access files from the office.  Being a fat client, it can cache a lot of the data and save many round trip requests for data.  If it was a web only client, it would have been much slower, plus have all sorts of security headaches because the file system interaction. 

I have yet to see the "Web 2.0" equivalent to PhotoShop.  Silverlight opens the door to more robust web applications, but it still has limitations.  Oh wait, that's a Microsoft technology, better leave that one out.  What about office productivity applications.  Microsoft Office is a giant fat client, but so is Open Office.

What about the rise of Apple?  With the move to Intel CPU's and updated operating systems, the Apple Macintosh market share has increased over 38% within the last year.  Heady stuff and good for Apple.  Still, we are talking about going from roughly 4% of the market to around 6%.  When you view their rise in those terms, it's less of a threat to Windows.  He mentions Apple and then writes something that is just so wrong on many levels:

...Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

There are some seriously flawed statements there.  Just because the only people you see are using Macs, that doesn't apply to the entire population.  It just means that your sample set is not representative of the whole population.  I'm a computer guy and I have a few Macs and some Linux boxes.  I'm also a Windows developer and that's where most of my computer usuage occurs.  There last few lines are just insulting and are remarkably fact free.

Why do people get stuck in the useless us versus them argument?  The whole "Microsoft is Evil" argument is tired as well as the monoply charges.  There's enough room in the market place for various operating systems.  Just because you prefer one, doesn't mean it's the right choice for everyone else.

I usually ignore these types of articles, but this guy was just so wrong, it just jumped out at me.  It's clear he has an anti-Microsoft bias.  There's nothing wrong with that, but his reasoning had nothing behind it.  Paul, it's time to venture out of your "Web 2.0" bubble and see that the world is big enough everyone to play in.

Jeremy Clarkson does more than laugh at rice

I really wish I could get "Top Gear" here.  I can just watch that show for hours.  The only way I get to see any episodes is through YouTube.   I just came across this little gem:

 

watch video

Where Jeremy Clarkson destroys the worst modified car on the planet. He does more than laugh at rice, he takes action.

Ed Dague's blog has a new home

This is old news, but still worth mentioning.  Ed Dague's blog has moved from Blogspot to a new location hosted by the Albany Times Union.  If you want to learn how local news stations work, his blog is required reading.

Domain name change

As of today, the address of this blog is now http://anotherlab.rajapet.net/.  The old name, http://anotherlab.blogspot.com, still works but you'll see the new name in your browser's address field.   I made the change after signing up for Google Apps.  I wanted to have a personal email address with my own domain and Google Apps will do that for free.  I've had rajapet.net parked at GoDaddy for the last few years (for a side project that never got off the ground), I figured I might as well use it.

After going through the steps with my domain registrar to map my domain name to Google's mail servers, it was then a trivial matter to add a CNAME Record to rajapet.net have it point back to ghs.google.com.  Once I verified that the registration had been posted to that series of tubes, I went in to the Blogger Admin page and assigned anotherlab.rajapet.net to the blog.

I signed up for Google Apps mainly for the vanity email address, but now that I have it, I want to use more of the features like the Calendar.

I'm using more and more of Google these days.  Their Google Browser Sync extension was the feature that made me switch from Opera to Firefox for most of my web browsing needs.  I bounce back and forth between six machines between the office and home and I have the same bookmarks on each machine and Google takes care of it for me.  I have been an Opera fanboy for the last few years, it took a lot to make me switch.

My blog is run on Google (Blogger).  I have a GMail account and I use Google Talk to interact with one of our remote contract programmers.  After playing around with a few desktop based RSS Readers, I switched to Google Reader.  I for one, welcome our new Google Overlords. 

 

Tech Tags: Google+Apps GoDaddy Blogger CNAME

Fun with COM and console Delphi applications

I try to make my setup projects upgradeable in place through Windows Installer.  This means that if a previous application has already been installed, the installer will do a silent uninstall before installing the new version.  The fun part is saving the current user settings across the uninstall/install divide.  Depending on the application being installed, the settings could be in the registry, a web.config files, or some other location.

What I end up doing is making a copy of the settings before the old app is removed, then restoring the settings after the new app has been installed.

Windows Installer is pretty good about firing off the save settings and restore settings actions at the appropriate time.  It's not so good at handling the actual save and restore bits.  I wrote a couple of Delphi console applications to handle that work.  With a just a few command line options, they know which application to save the settings from and how to restore them.  My installers write the app's installed location to the registry to make things like this easier.

One of the applications is an ASP.NET application.  The new version uses the .NET 2.0 Framework version, it's replacing a .Net 1.1 version.  The web config files have changed substantially, I can't copy the web.config from the 1.1 version and use it with the .NET 2.0 version.  Since I only need to save a couple of settings, I'm just having my Delphi console app ({$APPTYPE CONSOLE}), read those settings from the old web.config and update the new web.config.   I'm creating a couple of instances of IXMLDocument and reading from one and writing to the other.

To keep the size of the console app down, it doesn't use forms.  Since IXMLDocument uses the MSXML parser, it requires that the COM runtime be initialized.  That's all and good, I just call CoInitialize(nil) and match it with CoUnitialize.  When I started testing the new code, the call to CoUnitialize would crash the app, but only outside the debugger.  Those are the fun ones to debug.

Calling our trusty friend Google, I was able to quickly find a useful link.  I needed to call Application.Initialize as the first statement in the project files.  That's standard for most applications, but not usually used for console apps.  I added that line (plus the references to forms) and the error went away.  Very nice.  It added 300k to the size of the executable. Not so nice.  I looked at the source code to Application.Initialize and it consisted of just the following line:

if InitProc <> nil then TProcedure(InitProc);

So I made that the first line of code and removed the reference to forms.pas.  Everything worked, and the file size didn't take the 300k hit for code it really didn't need.  There's a lot to be said for having the source code to your runtime libraries.

Tech Tags: Delphi COM CoInitialize InitProc Windows+Installer Upgrade+In+Place .NET

SQL UPDATE from another row in the same table

My SQL skills are getting rusty.  I have some code where I needed to quickly copy a field from one row in a table to another row in the same table.  Bascially, a self-referencing UPDATE. I knew I could so it with a simple UPDATE statement, but I forgot the ANSI syntax.  Self-joining UDPATE statements can be a little squirrelly, so it's best to follow the ANSI standard.  So I went looking for the Master, Mr. Joe Celko.

I did a quick google through the newsgroups on celko update "sql Server", and I found what I was looking for on the third match.  If you really want to learn SQL as a language, Celko's books are very good.

This is what I ended up using:

UPDATE mytable
   SET filterdata = (SELECT src.filterdata
                       FROM mytable src
                      WHERE src.keyid = 5)
 WHERE keyid = 1

The table and field names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Tech Tags: Celko Update self+join SQL SQL+Server

Understanding SQL Server error 18456

I came across an odd problem with SQL Server Express.  We have a test server with various versions of SQL Server installed for QA to use.   Of the QA techs was unable to connect to the instance of SQL Server Express when he used a SQL Server login.  The code was not returning an error error code, so I decide to take a look at it.

I tried connecting to Express from MS SQL Server Management Studio under that account.  SSMS returned an 18456 error, basically it couldn't connect.  That was just slightly more useful than what I had before, but it provide two things.  It ruled out the app as cause of the problem, and it gave something that I could google with.

The best match I got was Understanding "login failed" (Error 18456) error messages in SQL Server 2005, on the SQL Protocols blog.  Basically, the error 18456 error is purposely vague to prevent nasty people from trying to hack into your server.  To figure out why the login failed, you need the "error state".  Error state is not returned to the client, but it's written to the log file.  That file will be in the LOGS folder of that instance of SQL Server under the name ERRORLOG.   From the log file, you'll get more information about why the login failed:

2007-04-10 09:54:45.14 Logon       Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 8.
2007-04-10 09:54:45.14 Logon       Login failed for user 'youridhere'. [CLIENT: 10.0.0.1]

From the first line, we get the eror state.  Yay, it's 8.  So what does that mean?  The states are documented in the blog posting reference above, but I couldn't find it in my copy of the BOL.  It is documented in the online version (and probably in the latest BOL) at SQL Server 2005 Books Online.  Here are the documented states:

State	Description
2	User ID is not valid.
5	User ID is not valid.
6	An attempt was made to use a Windows login name with SQL Server Authentication.
7	Login is disabled, and the password is incorrect.
8	The password is incorrect.
9	Password is not valid.
11	Login is valid, but server access failed.
12	Login is valid login, but server access failed.
18	Password must be changed.

Any other error state is considered to be an internal error.

So it boils down to the password being incorrect, which in this case it was. 

Tech Tags: SQL+Server+2005 Error+State 18456 Login+Failed

Aero Glass on my ancient GX400

My latest video card arrived this morning and installing it was a much better experience than what I went through with the Diamond card. I have a Dell Optiplex GX400 that is about 5 years old. I installed Vista Ultimate on it so I could test apps under Aero Glass. That had ruled out VMWare. The GX400 has 5 empty PCI slots and an AGP4x slot. Since most new cards are PCI-Express or AGP8x, I tried a PCI based card. That experiment failed and I ordered a BFG GeForce 7600GS OC. It claimed to work with just about any AGP slot.

When it came in, I removed the old card and plugged in the BFG card. I turned on the PC and booted Vista up. Vista recognized the card and installed the GeForce 7600 drivers that apparently come with Vista and requested a reboot.

After the reboot, I was in 640x480 hell, but after a little twiddling I had a decent resulution and refresh rate. I did have to refresh the Windows Experience Index. It was at 1.0, hel back because of the video card. The graphics rating went from 1.0 to 5.9, and Vista enabled the Aero Glass theme automatically. The overall number was 2.7, but the CPU was the weak point, memory and HD access were 4.1 and 5.3. Good enough for what I need to do.

The BFG card was cheap in cost ($150+), but it came with a decent feature set. It will drive two monitors and I didn't have to install any drivers. It has 512MB of it's own memory and fully supports DX9. Not bad, not bad at all.

Fixing Wise Installation System 9 problem with shortcuts in Vista

We were testing one of installers under Vista and the dreaded "User Account Control" dialog was being launched for every shortcut that was created by the installer.  Running the applications referenced by the shortcuts did not through the UAC, just the shortcuts.

I took a look the shortcuts and they didn't have a direct link to the apps.  Instead they looked like this:

"C:\Program Files\Company\App\UNWISE.EXE" /W1 "C:\Program Files\Company\App\INSTALL.LOG"

This was Wise 9's attempt to mimic the self-repair feature of Microsoft's Windows Installer.  If you are using Wise 9 Professional, you can fix this by opening the shortcut action in the setup editor and clearing the self-repair checkbox.  If you have the Standard version, you'll have to edit the installer script (.wse) with a text editor.  For each shortcut, you would remove the line of script reading 'Flags=01000000' from the Create Shortcut script action code block.  This is documented in the Altiris Knowledgebase as article 23832.  I found that article by searching the Altiris support forums and I came across this message thread.

Tech Tags: Vista Wise+Installation+System User+Account+Control Shortcut unwise.exe

I'm not impressed with Diamond Multimedia support

I have a older PC that I just installed Vista. I want to make sure that our apps place well under that OS and I don't want Vista as my primary OS just yet. Usually I do that kind of testing under VMWare, but you don't get the full experience of the OS when it's virtualized.

This PC is older, a Dell Optiplex GX400 and has a NVIDIA TNT2 video card. It's a perfectly OK card, but Microsoft and NVidia are not doing a Vista driver for that card. So Vista is running it with the Standard VGA Graphics Adapter driver. The SVGA driver is better than I thought it would be, but it's slow and is running at 60 hz. I'm not terribly concerned over the speed, but the flickering is driving me nuts.

I got the OK to get a new card, and that's when the fun began. To get Vista's Aero Glass theme, you need a decent video card that has DX9 support. The GX400 has an AGP 4X port and a bank of PCI slots. No one is making AGP 4X cards anymore, it's AGP 8X or PCI-Express these days. I looked up the specs on a BFG card that claimed to be AGP 8X/4X, so I fired off an emaill to them to see if their card would work with my ancient PC.

While I was waiting for a reply, I saw an article on The Inquirer about companies releasing Vista ready PCI cards. Diamond had released a PCI card based in ATI's Radeon 1300 chipset and it sounded like it would do the job. After a few days of no response from BFG, we ordered the Diamond card. Immediately placing the order, a reply came from BFG that said their card would work.

The Diamond card came in today and I tried installing it. I removed the Nvidia card from the AGP slot and put the Diamond card in a PCI slot. There are 5 PCI slots, all of them were available. The machine wouldn't recognize the card. I tried a number of things (telling the BIOS not to expect an AGP card, moving the Diamond card to another slot, putting both cards in. With both cards in, the machine would not recognize either card.

Either it's something flaky with the Diamond card, or more likely, it's Dell building a PC that only works with AGP cards. Past experience with Dell has led me to the conclusion that the card slots on a Dell motherboard are purely decorative. I decided to call Diamond technical sipport to rule out their card.

Almost immediately, I was connected to technical support person. I forgot his name, let's refer to him as "Stan". Stan was not very helpful. It was clear that he was reading from some sort of script and deviations from that script were verboten. I explained that the PC would not make it past POST when the Diamond card was installed. He asked what OS was installed. I said "Vista, but that's not important right now". He asked what driver was installed. I told him that Vista did not support the current card and was using the SVGA driver that comes with Vista.

He asked me to uninstall the SVGA driver. I asked why and he said that having the wrong driver was a common cause of video card problems. I declined to do so for the following reasons:

• The problem occurs at boot time, video drivers are not loaded until the OS loads. My machine was nowhere near that point.
• It's the standard VGA driver that comes with Vista. It's the driver that gets loaded when you uninstall a vendor video driver.
• I doubt that Vista would let you uninstall it in the first place.
• The Diamond card had to work with SVGA driver or you would be unable to install Diamond's driver.

Since I declined to uninstall the driver, Stan's demeanor and he basically said there was nothing more he would do. I thanked him for his time and hung up.

This card is being sent back and I doubt that I would ever buy another Diamond Multimedia product. The BFG card is on order, hopefully that will be a better experience.

Tech Tags: BGF NVidia DiamondMM AGP PCI Vista Aero+Glass Poor+Support

Notes on installing Delphi 2007

I got the email yesterday from CodeGear. It was a link to download the newly released Delphi 2007. I will be getting the DVD from CodeGear as part of the Software Assurance that I have, but I wanted to try the new installer. This is their first release using installer technology from InstallAware. As it happens, I'm considering switching from Wise For Windows Installer (WFWI) to InstallAware, so it's a good oppourtunity to see their installer in action.

The installer is a minimal (4MB) installer. It grabs the bits that it needs from the Internet from the bits that it needs and the bits that you want. It took a while to download the installer. There were three options, HTTP, FTP, and Galileo. From my office, none of them worked. Once again, our SonicWall firewall has safely protected me from downloading stuff that I need. After a few attempts, I went to Plan B. That was my home PC. I remoted into that box, immediately downloaded the installer without any grief and copied the file back to my office PC.

Once I had the installer, I ran it on my Vista box. The Vista box is my backup PC and I just put Vista in it to test our apps under a hostile environment. The first thing installer did (after I answered "Continue" to the ever present UAC) was to announce that it needed the .NET 2.0 SDK and it was going out to get them. It transferred about 360MB or so of .NET parts and then installed them.

After about 30 minutes or so, I got the "Welcome to the InstallAware Wizard for RAD Studio Setup" page in the setup dialog. Which led to the EULA and registration pages. Oddly enough, it defaulted to "CodeGear" as the company name. Come on folks, that value can be read from the registry. The "Next" button flickered as I typed into each field. I don't know that that's Vista, Windows Installer, or InstallAware. I'm guessing it's Vista's non-support for my ancient NVIDIA TNT2 card that it treats as a standard VGA device.

Then I was prompted for what features to install. I have the Enterprise version, there were many features. It wanted about 1GB and called itself "CodeGear RAD Studio". After one more confirmation prompt, the installer went back to the mothership to download the bits it needed.

It was done after 90 minutes. Now comes the fun part. How many of the Delphi 2006 components will work as advertised?

Tech Tags: Codegear Delphi+2007 Sonicwall Vista

John Backus, RIP

*--------------------------------------------------------------*
	Program BACKUSJW
*
* This program notes the passage of the creater of the
* Fortran Language
*
      integer count
*
      print*, 'John W. Backus, RIP'
      print*, '1924-2007'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Led the team that designed Fortan in 1954.'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Server on the committees that design ALGOL.'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Invented the first Function-level'
      print*, 'programming language '
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Won the Turing award in 1977.'
*
      do counter = 1, 15
          print*", 'RIP'
      enddo
*
      end
*--------------------------------------------------------------*

Tech Tags: John+Backus+Fortran+Turing+Award+Winner+Algol+Functional-Programming

Why I'm looking forward to "Orcas"

I have stayed away from the Visual Studio betas (I beta test enough stuff already, thank you), but the more I hear about the next version of Visual Studio (code named "Orcas"), the more inclined I am to installing it in a VMWare session.

Scott Guthrie has been running a series of blog posts about the new language features coming in "Orcas".  His post about Extension Methods caught my eye.  In a nut shell, Extension Methods let you new methods of an existing object type, without having to subclass that object or modifying the object.

You bascailly create a new static class with a static method.  The first parameter has the keyword "this" prepended to it.  This informs the compiler that the new method should be added to the class referenced by "this".

Codegear does something similiar with Delphi 2007 to allow it be a non-breaking upgrade from Delphi 2006.

Scott also has a good example of how to use LINQ Extension Methods to query an XML file.  That for me was the first I really got the value of LINQ.

Automatic properties look pretty cool.  It's just syntactical sugar, but it goes down pretty good.  I have always been in the habit of creating properties for the public variables of a class in C# and Delphi, this makes it a little quicker write on the C# side.

Tech Tags: Orcas Extension+Methods LINQ Automatic+Properties

Julie Lerman's coming to town

On Tuesday, Julie Lerman is coming in from Vermont to do a presentation about ADO.NET Orcas at the TVUG meeting.  This will be the first meeting held at our office, it should be a cool presentation.  I saw her speak last year at a TVUG meeting and she's very good.

Thinking about WAIS, Gopher, and ExecPC

I was reading a post by Brad Abrams, where he was wondering why WAIS and FTP had died out.  While I disagreed with the idea that FTP has died out, WAIS is one of the long gone technologies of the Internet.  Unless you were using the Internet in the early '90s, the odds are that you have no idea of what WAIS was.  WAIS is over.

I remember trying it and not being terribly impressed by it when I got my first dialup Internet account (to get cheap access to ExecPC).  In the late 80's and early 90's, ExecPC was a super (as in huge) BBS, run on a bank of 386 machines.  At the time, ExecPC was one of the best places to get Amiga and DOS freeware and shareware.  While writing this post, I found out that ExecPC was still up and running, just without any modem access.  You can telnet into it from here.  I took a quick peek and it looks exactly the same as as it did the last time I logged in, back in 1998.

I got my first fast modem from an ExecPC auction.  Back in the days where 14,400 baud modems were the top end and 9200 was the norm, US Robotics had their own HST protocol that ran 16,800 downstream.  You only got HST speed when connecting to another HST modem, but the better BBSes had a least one HST modem.  One fine day, ExecPC upgraded their modems and they auctioned off the older ones.  A buddy and I got a couple of Courier HST Dual Standard internal models.  I think we paid about $150 each, at the time HST Dual Standard were going for $500.

If two those modems were not the original prototypes from US Robotics, then their serial numbers were still in the single digits.  These were full length cards and they had wires running all the place..  They worked great though.  After a couple of months, I was able to trade mine in for a new external Courier V.Everything modem.  This was back in 1994 and it was probably the fastest modem available on the consumer market.  I was able to upgrade it to the V.34 and V.90 standards when they became available.  It was is built like a tank.  I had stopped using it 7 years ago, when I got broadband, but my in-laws used it until last year, when they finally got broadband.

ExecPC was run in Wisconsin and it was expensive to call from NY.  ExecPC had a deal with an ISP named Concentric Research (CRIS).  If you had a CRIS account with a local dialup number, you could access ExecPC through the CRIS Unix shell as a local call.  When you dialed into CRIS with a terminal program, you got dumoed into a menu, from which you could access ExecPC.  It had other things on that menu.  You could drill down into WAIS and Gopher space, you could run Lynx (a text based browser), Pine (a text based email app), or even drop down to a Unix shell.

I had that CRIS account so long ago, they didn't offer a PPP connection when I signed up.  I had to use their SLIP implementation.  And this was with Windows 3.1, which didn't have native support for the Internet protocols.  I remember having to go through all sorts of gyrations getting the Trumpet Winsock to work.  You take for granted how easy it is to hook a PC up to the Internet these days, prior to Windows 95 you had to do some work to get it set up the right way. 

It's kind of funny what pops out of the deep recesses of memory by the reference of an archaic acronym.

Tech Tags: WAIS FTP Gopher HST Dual+Standard ExecPC Trumpet+Winsock Concentric.Net

Where is puterSoft.com?

Don't you hate it when a software component vendor disappears without warning?  In some of our applications, we use a custom datetime edit control named TPSCDateEdit.  This is part of a package from a company named puterSoft.  We have been using it for about 5 years and when we migrated our Delphi code to Delphi 2006, we got the Delphi 2006 version of their code.

Well, we discovered an annoying cosmetic bug.  If you exit a TPSCDateEdit control without entering in a date, the text of the control gets the date '12/30/1899'.  12/30/1899 is the day that the world began if you are a COM based life form.  The control was saving the right data (or in this case the lack of data), it was just the display that looked ugly.

So the first thought was to check puterSoft's web site to see if this was a known issue and had a fix or work around.  That failed and when I tied to ping the domain name, that failed.  I did some playing around on http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and I learned that it was hosted at DiscountASP.net and that DNS lookups are failing.  If you perform a DNS lookup for puterSoft, it goes into a loop and DNSstuff is smart enough to break out of that loop. 

I can't tell if puterSoft is gone or something is all fracked up with DiscountAsp.net's DNS records.  I've emailed Sergiy at puterSoft to see if they are still around.  I also fired off an email to DiscountAsp to see if they can tell me anything.  After 20 minutes, I got a reply back from DiscountASP.NET that the account has been cancelled.  That's Not Good^tm.

Since I'm not going to get any resolution from puterSoft in the immediate future, I decided to take a whack at it and see if it was a simple fix.  And it looks like it is.

When you exit a TPSCDateEdit, the following methods are called:

• TPSCCustomDateEdit.PostValue
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.SetDateTime
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.UpdatePopup
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText

Other methods are called, these are the ones important here.  UpdatePopup has the following logic:

 

If Text <> GetAsText Then
  Text := GetAsText;

 

The code in GetAsText looks like this:

 

function TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText:String;
begin
  Result:=DateTimeFormat.ToString(DateTime,Kind)
end;

By changing that code to this:

function TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText:String;

begin

  if DateTime <> 0 then

    Result:=DateTimeFormat.ToString(DateTime,Kind)

  else

    result := '';

end;

 

I get result that I want. And life is good again.

Tech Tags: puterSoft DiscountAsp Delphi TPSCDateEdit DNSstuff

FinalBuilder to the rescue (again)

One of our applications has an installer that is created with Wise InstallBuilder 9.  The application is built from our shiny buildbox under the control of FinalBuilder.  When FinalBuilder builds the application, it does everything locally on that box.  With one exception, the installer.  The installer script file resides on another box, and our QA department uses the same installer to test various versions of the installer.

To keep our builds separate from QA's builds, I have FinalBuilder set to call the Wise compiler with a variables file.  That file is created each time FinalBuilder runs and it defines the version number, the name of the setup.exe and where the setup is created.  By sharing the installer source script with QA, we ensure that our test builds match their final layout.

Which was all good until QA edited that file on a machine that has Wise installed to a non-default location.   For some inane reason, Wise stores the location of the their runtime files in the script file.  When you open that file with the runtime in a different location, Wise throws up a dialog and prompts you to save the correct value in the file.

We have been invoking FinalBuilder from a script and that prevents the Wise dialog from being displayed.  So the build script hangs at that point.  The only way to get control back is to kill the wise32.exe process.  Why does Wise need to store a hard coded path in a script file when it already knows the location of the path?

That's annoying.  However, using FinalBuilder makes problems like this trivial to fix.  I added a Copy File action to the FinalBuilder build script to copy the install script to a second file.  That would allow us to pick up any changes that QA makes to the script.  I then added a Text Replace action that did a search and replace on "D:\PROGRA~1\WISEIN~1" with "C:\Program Files\Wise Installation System".  And our builds are back in business.

Tech Tags: Wise InstallBuilder FinalBuilder Automated+Builds

Windows Home Server goes Beta 2

Windows Home Server has reached Beta 2.  Foe those of your playing the home version of "Name That Beta", Beta 2 means that Microsoft has is now soliciting external testers to try the new OS.

I've been running FreeNAS for a couple of weeks without incident, so naturally I decided to see if I wanted to take a perfectly good running NAS and replace it with an unstable beta. It does some cool things that I don't do with FreeNAS, so I decided to see what was needed.  It needs a Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, and two or more drives with at least 300 GB space.

That seems a bit steep for a head-less device.  I'm running FreeNAS on a box that is at least 5 years old.  A 1 ghz Celeron with 256 MB RAM.  I started with a couple of 20 GB drives (remember 5 years ago) and added a 250 GB drive.

FreeNAS is working just fine, I think I'll leave it alone.

Tech Tags: FreeNAS Windows+Home+Server