Recently in Geeky Stuff Category

I know a bit about electronics and electrical theory. As an amateur radio operator, a big part of the licensing exam had to do with electrical theory, and I've done a quite a few projects in the past building things like radio transmitters and other basic projects, most of which use a 555 timer :). However, there's this aspect of electronics that's always baffled me that maybe someone can answer for me.

Why is it that it seems like with every device that has a digital volume control seems to have this point where one click is too quiet, then the next click is too loud. It seems that every device with a digital volume control I've used has this issue; my car stereo, my iPhone, my iPod, and so on. Just like horsepower and torque always intersect at 4242 RPM, there seems to be this magical point in electronics where need to be halfway between whisper quiet and ear splitting, and it's just not there. Is it a quirk of MOSFETs, a conspiracy, or something else?

Bill Anderson, one of the lead program managers just announced on his blog that the product I've spent the last 2 years working on just went gold. Right on schedule, too.

The last week was a whirlwind of craziness wrapping everything up, and it sure felt nice to end the week on a positive note. I came into the product team a few months before the Beta 1 release shipped, and it's been really being a part of seeing the product progress from that point to what was signed off on yesterday.

Yay.

I've seen plenty of crazy errors before, such as these two that made the DailyWTF a while back.

But this one really made me scratch my head...

Text:

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Remote Desktop Disconnected
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This computer can't connect to the remote computer because an error occurred on the remote computer that you want to connect to. Contact your network administrator
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OK Help
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Screencap:

Well.... alrighty then!

It seems like the last couple of years I've been holed away in my office slaving behind a computer. I've spent so much time working on this software I kind of took for granted that we're shipping a product that people are excited about. It was really cool to see the product I've been working on featured in an article, and on the cover of Windows IT Pro magazine.

Some of the features in particular that were highlighted from the mundane stuff like the new setup application to the new hotness like Internet-based Client Management, and native mode, and before that, Network Access Protection are feature areas I've become very intimate with in my time with this product team. To see press coverage about them is really neat. It just goes to show that there really are people who use this product and it makes me more excited than ever to finally get it out the door.

Link is here: Windows IT Pro article on ConfigMgr 2007.

Update: Looks like the link requires a subscription. Sorry. :(

Here's a clue as to why I haven't been writing often.

Working well into the evenings? Check. Working through the weekend? Check. Having to work late on my Birthday? Check. Wondering what the hell I've gotten myself into? Check. The push to get the next beta of the product going has been a ridiculous amount of work, and it shows no signs of letting up. But, I can't say that my job is not fulfilling, and I work with some great people. It's cool being passionate about your job rather than just doing stuff.

I've been with this group for almost a year now, and thus far it's been great, and a real challenge. Nobody ever said working on a product team would be easy, though.

In October of 1997 I bought my second car, a 1968 Pontiac Firebird 400. This week, I sold it to somebody else. I bought it as an ugly, puke green, rusted up beater..

..but, it could smoke the tires up and down the block.

After several years, I had all the body damage fixed up nicely, had the car painted a much more attractive black metallic, spent countless hours rewiring the electricals, working on the motor, and making it much nicer. I even had it transpored here up to Washington when I moved.

Living in an apartment complex with no tolerance for car work, my car needing maintenance, and not having any chance to drive it or keep it in good shape. I made the decision to sell. After listing, it didn't take long to find a buyer, and now my muscle car is gone.

On the one hand, I'm sad, but on the other hand, not so much. The new owner will take good care of it, and I have one less attachment, which is always nice. But, I will still miss it.

What would Steve-o announce? Would it be a new Apple Tablet? Would it be the rumored Airport Video? Would it be a new iPod? Nope, it was a bunch of bullshit.

A $99 iPod case? I don't give a flying fuck if it's leather, $99 for a freakin leather case that you still have to pull your iPod out of to use still is just ridiculous. It's not like it's a couture case or anything, it's a leather version of the vinyl version that used to be free. Hey, they give you a pull tab thingy to pull your iPod out.

Then there's the Apple iPod Hi-Fi. I love their marketing spin on it: "iPod Hi-Fi delivers crystal-clear, audiophile-quality sound." Yeah, "crystal-clear audiophile-quality sound" from your crappy MP3s ripped at 128kb CBR. As an audiophile, why in the fuck do I want to replace my $3000 or so of audio equipment with this thing? Are there not enough similar offerings already from other companies that don't cost as much as a brand new iPod? It's a fancy iPod dock with speakers. Hey, that's novel. Go Apple.

I'm getting worried that they are starting to really lose any inspiration or drive with their iPod line if their big product launch is an accessory that I can never see myself wanting or needing, and something so ridiculously overpriced and useless, that I wonder who thought it was a good idea. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide which item each sentiment refers to.

I won't go into the new Mac Mini, since that's no real surprise (hey a refreshed Mini with a CoreDuo, didn't see that one coming), but I still don't think it's anywhere close to being a serious threat to the Media Center market. Maybe in a couple of years.

I love Bloglines, and I subscribe to many blogs in the Weblogs, Inc. family. Around Christmas, I noticed that entries from Weblogs, Inc blogs, such as Joystiq, Engadget, and others would duplicate, triplicate, on and on. I lodged a compliant to the CEO (since the contact forms were broken on many of the sites), and after a few days of torture, it was fixed. Now, it's back again. Is it just me? Are other aggregators doing this? It's driving me crazy.

For the most part, I love Apple's iTunes for Windows. In many regards, it's no where near as polished or nice as Windows Media Player, but, well, I'm an iPod user, so I'm kind of shit out of luck if I want to use anything else, and iTunes is still a damn good media player and manager application. With that said, there's 10 things that really, really piss me off in iTunes from a usability perspective. Some things are Appleisms that never should have been ported to Windows, and others that just plain suck, and I wish there were registry hacks or other workarounds for.

1. Apple's SDK sucks. I'm immensely pleased that Apple opened up facets of iTunes to programmers with their COM interface introduced in 4.5. However, I wish they'd go the next step and allow for more extensibility within the application itself. The plugin SDK opens up some functionality within the application itself, but it requires painful programing and the use of full-screen "fake" visualizations to do anything. I want to be able to right click on a song within iTunes and be able to have it go out and find album art. Sure, there's cool programs like the AI BE program that go to Amazon to find your album art and song integration, but it still requires running a separate program. Maybe if they opened up their SDK to do more, some of my other gripes could be fixed, too.

2. Porting the OS X style selection behavior to Windows. This one bugs the hell out of me on my Mac, so why in the hell do I want this contradictory behavior under Windows. This behavior being that if I am shift-selecting a block of items, if I move up, it doesn't unselect from the selected item, it selects from the top. This drives me up the wall. I understand that when you're using OS X, this behavior should be consistent across applications. But, things don't work this way in Windows, so why did Apple have to port this behavior over?

3. Let me choose how I want to delete files. When I hit 'delete' to kill a block of songs, it pops up with a dialog box that asks [Cancel] [Keep Files] [Move to Trash]. The default is Keep Files. I despise this option. It will remove the files from iTunes, but leave them sitting on your disk. I want either a) Move to Trash to be default b) Keep Files to be removed completely or c) my preferred option: add a check box that says whenever I delete files, it just deletes them. At the very least, I wish it could keep track of files that I used Keep Files with. Often times, I choose this by accident and end up with a bunch of orphan files on my disk. This requires me to go through the time consuming process of having it re-add everything in my music folder only to delete those files again. It's a pain in the ass.

4. Don't stop a synchronization when there's a warning. This happens far too often, I start synchronizing my iPod and walk away. I have a few thousand songs to sync, so it will take a while. I come back after a couple hours only to find a dialog box saying, "Could not sync song X because of Y," with nothing synchronized. This is a non-actionable dialog, I can't cancel my sync and find the file. So, why should it stop a synchronization?

5. While we're at it, I want a log of synchronization problems or warnings. So, synchronization hangs because of, say, a missing file. I fix the missing file. But, oops, there's 30 more missing files. But, I'll have to synchronize again and again and again until I find all the missing files. This is way more painful than it should be.

6. Help me to better manage my library. Why is it I only find out about problem files after I've tried to modify them? I'll rename a bunch of files, and they will have (!) next to them. This requires me to go in and manually locate the files. It's a pain.

7. Internationalization needs work. Why can't iTunes help me to convert non-Unicode localized tags into Unicode? I have written a program to help me with that and plan to use the COM SDK to help tie it into iTunes (see gripe #1), but that's just a band-aid. In addition, I'd really, really love it if iTunes was smart enough to know the difference between A and Ａ (or narrow-A versus wide glyph A). It makes searching a pain in the ass.

8. Inconsistencies between iTunes and the iPod. My iPod is smart enough to sort when The, or A is in the song title. If something starts with The, it will alphabetize it properly (i.e. not put it in the "T" group). Why isn't iTunes smart enough to do this?

9. Broken duplicate checking. Apple fucked this one up. Its duplicate checking used show duplicates based on song title only. Now it shows duplicates based on artist and song title. This stinks. I can have 10 songs that have the same title that are technically the same song (but say, one has an artist's name in Hangul, and the othe ris in English), it won't show as a duplicate. While we're at it, why can't Apple do more to determine duplicates? This is way, way pie in the sky, but why not implement some sort of Musicbrainz-style fingerprinting or other hueristics to determine a duplicate other than simply going by title. Even the title isn't fool-proof (see #7).

10. iPod sharing between computers is more painful than it should be. I sync my iPod in the morning and come to work. The first thing I have to do is place my iPod on manual sync mode on my work computer. Play counts will update properly, but not star ratings. I cannot use party shuffle. I cannot share my iPod library (unless I add my iPod library to my work iTunes). I will then go home and will have to place it back on automatic sync. This sucks. Using my iPod at work should be as simple as using it at home, without having to jump through all these hurdles only to get extremely limited functionality. I'm not asking to be able to easily auto-sync my iPod from multiple locations, I just want to be able to use my iPod at work without having to go through 5 different dialogs and not having anything other than play counts to take home.

iTunes is a great program, but aside from its standard gripes (it's slow, it's ugly, it crashes a lot, it consumes a fuckload of resources, etc), there's some simple usability faux pas that if Apple addressed (or allowed others to fix with a better architecture), it'd make the program much better to use. Maybe even better than Windows Media Player.

I have always liked Google Desktop, so I was excited to try out 2.0 once I heard about it. They most certainly did not disappoint. Its most obvious new feature is the use of the Google Sidebar, it's a lot like Desktop Sidebar (and, of course, the Longhorn sidebar), but much speedier and less resource intensive. It's very slick and usable -- so much I'm even sacrificing a portion of my single monitor at home to use it (something I would have never considered before).

Desktop search is improved to be less browser-centric and using some convenient modal dialogs before forcing you into a browser. Very nice. It even has better Outlook integration with a search bar that integrates directly into the application.

About the only problems I've seen were with its multi-monitor integration (stupid crap like things appearing on the primary display when selected from the secondary display), and it seems to have some inexplicable issues with some XML feeds.

None of these problems take away from its coolness as a whole. Hey, Google, release a Mac version already. You're killing me.

I love Audioscrobbler. It's been faithfully tracking my musical listening habits at work for over a year tracking almost 25,000 tracks played. The Audioscrobbler people had this last.fm site for a while, and I dabbled with it a couple of times but was less than impressed. It was like, oh goody, more streaming audio I'll never listen to.

Now, it looks like Audioscrobbler is dead and has completely morphed into last.fm. Gone is the nice, minimal user interface that quickly lets me find people with like musical tates, see what my friends are listening to, and track my own listening habits. It's been replaced with this ugly, slow, and clunky thing that makes it hard to find anything. At least it's still tracking my musical listening habits.. I think..

Ugh.

P.S. I'm only slightly joking, the new interface (once you find it) is quite nice and feature-filled, but it's just too much. I miss the minimalism, form, and function of the old version.

My apologizes to syndicated viewers (that means you, LiveJournalers) if my XML feed takes another dump today.

I just upgraded to Beta 3 of MovableType. One nice feature that took me by surprise was the ability to refresh your blog templates. It finally eliminates the exercise of going to the Six Apart site and downloading the latest templates.

It doesn't fix the problems of me having to reapply any customizations, but so much of my customizations are stored in modules now, it's not as big of a deal to fix it. I'm going to hold off on reapplying customizations anyway until they freakin' fix Dynamic Publishing which is horribly broken still. I really hope Six Apart pulls that together soon, because it's totally hosed right now.

It's going to be great once it comes out of beta. I can't wait.

I bought an Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard a couple of months ago, and while it generally works really well, it's been pissing me off with its memory settings. I have Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PT memory, DDR400 memory with 2.5-3-3-6 latency. When my motherboard has the 1009 BIOS, I can set the DDR speed just fine to 400MHz, but even if I forcefully set the latency settings to 2.5-3-3-6, it forces me to use 3-3-3-7. What the hell? If I upgrade to the latest BIOS: 1010 or the beta 1010.3, I can set the latency settings to 2.5-3-3-6 just fine, but it forces me to run the memory speed at 333MHz. I can run the 1006 BIOS and set BOTH the memory speed to 400 MHz and the latency to 2.5-3-3-6, but then my system is unstable and randomly crashes.

I just can't fucking win. At this point I'm running with 1009, because even though I can't get the latency speed right, I'd rather run at 3-3-3-6 and 400 MHz than 2.5-3-3-6 and 333 MHz. Corsair's official response: It's a bug in the ASUS BIOS. I tend to trust them, as they have been nothing but awesome to me throughout two RMAs and even cross shipping my memory during a second RMA.

I just wish ASUS would get it right so I could have a reliable BIOS that both has the correct latency and correct memory speed. It's total bullshit that it can't even get the settings right when I forcefully override them in the BIOS settings.

That saying was written in a guide that's published here to help programmers understand various standards of internal development. I laughed at this since it's so true. Today I realized I had been a victim of this very statement. I'd been writing multi-threaded applications for a few years now. I figured I had understood most of the nuances and problems associated with multi-threaded programming.

Today I was trying to debug a weird problem in a multi-threaded program I had written in C#. While diagnosing the problem, I noticed another bizarre behavior. It turns out that I was a bit overzealous with some of the threadlocking that I was doing. This was one of the first multi-threaded programs that I had written in C#, so I was still trying to pick up the .NET way of using multi-threading. It looks like in an effort to fix a bug (or many) I thought was threading related, I went and put a bunch of locks on variables that didn't need to be locked. It ended up slowing the whole thing down to a crawl (not to mention causing various network functions it was performing to time-out because of it). Oops.

Now that it's fixed, it feels about 30-40 times faster. Gee, perhaps that's because my multi-threaded program was getting so mucked up that at 50 threads, it was running like it had only 2.

It just goes to show you, threads really do cause new and exciting failures, even for those who should know better.