Bragging time

On Friday, I successfully passed Microsoft Certification exam 70-561. This now makes me a MCTS: .Net 3.5, ADO .Net Applications.

I am going to do a few more exams over the coming year, but I’ve yet to decide what the next one will be.

One small gripe about my laptop

I absolutely love my new laptop, especially since I put an SSD in it. I have one small gripe however, and that is with the keyboard, or rather the lack of one key that I have become very reliant on, that is the “Right Mouse Key”.

I am often too lazy to plug in my mouse, or often (like now) not in a position to do so (reclining in a comfortable chair with my Feet up, and the laptop on my lap), and I have become quite used to the keyboard shortcuts for all the applications I use, which is why I have always loved the right mouse key, but alas on the Dell Precision M4400 laptop, no such key exists.

Having said that, just in doing my research for this rant, I have in fact discovered that Shift+F10 does the same thing, problem solved! Still would  be nice to have a single button for this though.

Laptops, SSD’s, vhd’s and Hyper-V

I recently splurged and purchased one of these for my new laptop. I was finding hard to justify the extra expense for the 128GB over a 64GB SSD, knowing full well, that if I was careful I could run an OS and all the applications I normally use on 64GB, but I thought… what the hell. This weekend I discovered the “boot from vhd” feature of Windows 7, and I can say I am so glad I spent the extra money.

I have successfully created a dual boot for Windows Server 2008 R2 running on a 25GB vhd stored on my SSD. It is a bit of work, mucking around with DISKPART and BCDEDIT, but once it’s set up, it just works a treat, and thanks to my SSD, the speed is awesome. My main reason to do this was to play with Hyper-V as I have been charged with setting up a build server and test server at the client I am currently engaged to.

New Laptop

having recently gone back to work after returning from a year in Buenos Aires, I have been tooled up. One of those tools as you may already have seen from my previous post is a new laptop, and just by way of showing off, I thought I’d post the specs up.

• Mobile Workstation AW-M4400n - Dell Precision M4400n-series Base
• Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo Processor T98002.93GHz, 6M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB
• 8GB (2x4GB) 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 15.4 " Ultrasharp(TM) WUXGA (1920x1200) RGBLED Display with TrueLife(TM)
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M, 512MB dedicated memory
• 8X DVD + /-RW Drive
• 2nd Hard Drive 120GB SATA (5400RPM) Hard Drive (External)
• Integrated 0.3 Megapixel VGA Webcam with Single Digital Mic for WUXGA LCD
• Wireless Network Cards -Intel WiFi Link 5300 (802.11 a/g/n 3X3) MiniCard

I have also made the decision (as many other Readify people have) to install Windows 7 RC on it. So far there have been no serious problems, but there are a few things I have found and I will blog about them as I find and (hopefully) fix them.

The first one was Google Chrome not working, but there are many posts about this, however even after this, Chrome does seem to be a little unstable from time to time, the end result of which is I end up spending half my time in IE8 which I have no real problem with.

The second problem was the bluetooth issue I talked about in my previous post.

I do get a little bit of instability from Visual Studio 2008 from time to time. I think it has something to do with Team Member Presence information in VSTS Team Explorer, and so I turned off this feature and it now seems to be a lot more stable.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7 RC,laptop

Windows 7 and Bluetooth Issues on DELL M4400

Since yesterday evening I have been trying to get Internet connection sharing happening between my new brand HTC Touch HD, and me brand new Dell Precision M4400 running Windows 7 RC.

as could be expected, there were some issues. In fact, I still haven’t managed to get it working, but I am 1 step closer to a solution. The first and most overriding problem was that the device drivers on my DELL weren’t working properly. A quick google search and a few clicks later, and I found this discussion on notebookreview.com from someone having the same problem as me with their M6400.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=340326

So I tried it, and sure enough it worked. I decided to do the right thing by the community and reply to the thread, thanking them and adding the DELL M4400 to the list of laptops that it works with, as well as adding a link to the right driver downloads for the M4400, but alas, even after registering with the website, it appears as though I don’t have the necessary privileges to reply to the forum. So I will disseminate the information here on my blog.

So if you have a DELL Precision M4400 and are trying to get your bluetooth to work, you need to

1. Download these drivers from DELL 
2. Open the folder where the downloaded executable resides
3. Right Click and select “Troubleshoot Compatibility”
4. Select “Troubleshoot Program”
5. Select “The Program worked in earlier versions of windows, but won’t install or run now” and Click “Next”
6. Select “Windows Vista” from the top of the list and select “Next”
7. Click “Start the Program”

At this point the bluetooth drivers should install no problems.

I have now successfully created a bluetooth connection between my phone and my PC, and can happily use some of the bluetooth networking features. Unfortunately, Active Sync doesn’t quite seem to connect properly over bluetooth, I think it’s a problem with “Windows Mobile Device Center” on Windows 7 RC, and of course I still haven’t been able to get Internet connection sharing working. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Technorati Tags: bluetooth,Windows 7 RC,Internet Connection Sharing,DELL

New phone, was happy, then… suddenly… not

A few days ago I was the happy owner of a new HTC Touch HD phone which I have been happily playing with. Sure it might not be as trendy as the iPhone, but I was pretty impressed. It has a 5 Megapixel camera, as well as a lower res camera for video conferencing. It has WM 6.1, plus HTC’s own Touch Flo home screen which gives you some of the iPhone look and feel that Windows Mobile is seriously missing. I was starting to really enjoy it, downloading all the applications I wanted on it, connecting it up to my WiFi network and watching You-Tube videos on it, etc… then it came time to change my SIM card. I opened the back, took the battery out, replaced the SIM card, replaced the battery, and then this.

The phone would not boot, the OS would not load. I tried 20 different things, changing the SIM card back, doing a soft reset, without SIM card etc… nothing helped. The only thing that did eventually fix the problem was a hard reset. This means wiping ALL your data. So I am currently trying to re-install all the software I had up and running. Not very happy, starting to loose confidence in the device, and starting to wonder whether I should’ve purchased an iPhone.

CityRail not just biased towards iPhone

It seems that a number of mobile application developers have fallen foul of CityRails timetable copyright antics. At one stage CityRail even went to the extent of scrambling their website in order to stop people screen scraping. I repeat, it may be true that they legally own the copyright to this information, but that is in no way helpful to the people who want (and dare I say have a right to) this information. It’s not that hard, really. Other governments have managed to do it, what is wrong with the NSW Government.

Government 2.0

Reading an article in The Age about CityRail’s attempts to stifle a very useful iPhone application reminded me of a seminar I attended at Web Directions North 2008 on Government 2.0. The thrust of the seminar was basically for governments to encourage this sort of effort. They are the sacred holders of the information that the public need, they should release this information and let the general population use it in the way they see fit. Governments don’t always have the best ideas, or even if they have great ideas, they don’t always have the necessary resources to realise them. In the past forward thinking governments have found abundant creativity and resources if they simply provide the information and let the community do what is needed with it. Sure you may need to provide some disclaimers for legal purposes, something like “While <insert name of government agency here> supports development of third party applications based on the data we provide, we cannot vouch for the accuracy of the program, nor it’s suitability for any particular use” I’m sure every application developer would be happy to include this in there terms of service.

In this specific incident, CityRail has used the copyright argument saying we own the timetable information. Which is probably legally true, but at the same time totally unhelpful. People like Alvin Singh should be rewarded for there creativity and effort, not threatened. He has even offered to give CityRail the source code on which to build a better application. CityRail should take up his offer, or at the very least, bring out a competing application that is more accurate (ie includes the latest information about service disruptions, etc…), and has better features, that will quite naturally defeat Alvin Singh’s application.