February 2006 - Posts
Got these from the balcony.
This post from Mitch got me going on Virtual PC Differencing Disks. While they seem like a good idea, I have found that the differencing disk grows to a size comparable to the size it would have been if you'de simply copied the VHD file and gone from there. The risk of rendering all your differenced disks unbootable and corrupt to save a couple of hundred meg of disk space just doesn't seem worth it. When Virtual PC becomes smart enough to allow minor changes to the base disk (like applying OS patches), I'll give them another go.
... featuring Craig McMurtry from the Windows and Platform evangelism group at Microsoft. Craig will be speaking on Windows Communication Foundation (code named Indigo). Full details
here.
To accommodate the Commonwealth games, the end of daylight savings has been moved. To add this change to your Windows time zones, get
this official Microsoft patch.
Jump into it.
After taking delivery of my new Inspiron 9400, I repaved the hard drive and began setting up the OS just the way I like it. I was mindlessly going through the Dell disks reinstalling all the drivers and apps that looked interesting, when suddenly the laptop became unbootable - every time Windows started an error came up saying "autochk program not found", and an endless re-boot cycle ensued. I'd modified boot.ini to get rid of the old XP Home settings, and though I'd stuffed something up. After repaving and starting again, I came to install Dell MediaDirect - it had a few errors during install about drive X not being found (which I guess is one of the hidden Dell partitions I deleted.) After I tried to reboot, same problem again. After the third repave, old Dell MediaDirect didn't get a look in.
I just listened to the very brief (which I like) podcast by
Dr Neil. Neil and I fall on the opposite ends of the XP/ agile debate on some topics, but we probably agree on more things than we disagree upon, and he is a decent bloke to boot. Probably more of interest to Australian's due to the local content. Every time I read "Dr Neil" I end up singing the old Might Be Giants Dr Worm song on my head - it gets quite disturbing. They call me Dr Worm - I'm not a real doctor but I am a real worm. I am a genuine worm ....
I've been listening to last years PDC and TechED US DVDs while in the car over the last few weeks, and have been really impressed with the quality of the content. I missed out on a fair bit of news last year during my travels, and whacking the DVD and listening along as I drive (or on the train) has been a great way of catching up. I wish the content was available on MSDN for everyone to get, but I appreciate the commercial reality of forcing people to pay for the DVDs if they didn't attend the event.
I'm not sure if they do it all regional TechEds, but in Australia you get the TechEd US DVDs as part of your registration. Considering the disks cost many hundreds of dollars, it is a great bonus for attending.
Also, the PDC content is available free online at the moment at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/Default.htm. I'm sure it will only be up for a limited time, so get in now.
Greg's story about his shabby treatment from a local web hosting company prompted me to record the ongoing battle I'm having with WebCentral. I was with WebCentral for 4 years, and were moderately pleased with their service. It was expensive but reliable and they managed to stay below my pain threshold for looking for a cheaper alternative. When I went away on my trip and started posting large pictures, my bandwidth spiked considerably, and I began paying ~300 bucks a month in excessive bandwidth usage, which really hurts when your living off your savings.
I decided to switch to WebHost4Life, which has no excess bandwidth usages. I went through the normal painful paper process of cancelling my account at WebCentral, and the account was closed on 22 Nov. Despite the closure, WebCentral still charged me for the next full calender year, about 1000 bucks. I rang up straight away, and got the "terribly sorry - reversing the credit card charge now". As of today, they still haven't reversed the charge, despite over a dozen phone-calls chasing it up. The operator I got today was extremely rude - when I enquired about whether it would be a fair action to query the credit card charge at the end of this week if a refund hadn't been made, the response I got was, wait for it, "Yeah, whatever". Good stuff from Australia's largest hosting company and three-time winner of the Microsoft Hosting Service Provider of the Year.
About a month ago I got a call from some researcher at WebCentral who was trying to work out why so many customers where moving away from them. It doesn't take a rocket scientist...
Updated 16/2/06: Refund came through today, and I got a nice call from a seniour accounts person apologizing for the delay. They agreed the situation had not been a good one on their part. Apology accepted. Best of luck WebCentral.
In preparing and presenting on the VSTS performance tools for WDNUG, I came to the conclusion that I had mixed feelings about the offering. The Load Tool in VSTS Tester Edition looks good - getting a load test together is pretty easy, the tool is feature rich, and I get the sense that using the tool in anger (rather than in a demo) would be a good experience.
The profiler from VSTS Developer Edition is a different story. The more I use it, the less I like it. The main gripes I have:
- No line-by-line breakdown. I hope I haven't missed something obvious to enable this, but the lack of this feature is a real short-coming, particularly considering the cost of VSTS.
- No graphical display of caller/caller relationship. Compuware's DevPartner uses a tree view with collapsible nodes to make this really easy - check out their free edition if you're still on VS2002 or 2003.
- I haven't had much joy with sampling as a viable profiling technique, though I could see how this would be useful for a large system profile. For most folks doing Windows Forms or ASP.NET applications, going straight to instrumentation will be the best option.
I could see that with enough experience, the Profiler would become an effective tool. However, the out-of-the-box experience could be a lot better. Maybe its worth wait for V2 of VSTS Developer before switching over to this profiler. Its a pity Compuware doesn't have an entry level profiler available to fill this void for VSTS.
Mitch alerted me to this to this post by David Lemphers. Dave doesn't name names of the MVPs who he feels are undeserving of the recognition, so it is hard to defend the program against the criticism of unnamed individuals. To quote Dave: "Then there are those that make the loudest blip on the radar, but don’t necessarily add value, that score a guernsey. And also those who just get their MVP through perpetuation, or high-profile." As someone who has been in the program for 4 years, I can probably think of 2 people who I have met who fit this category. Out of about 2000 MVPs going around.
Onto Dave's solution of having a constantly revolving award cycle. I think it would be against his employer's interests (hence the title of my post). I can only talk with authority on the Australian situation, but I'd imagine my observations have some application elsewhere. There are only a small number of people with the time or inclination to do all the shitty work of being an ongoing MVP. Cleaning up a venue at 9.30 at night after a user group meeting isn't fun. Staffing an MSDN stand or a HOL at a Microsoft stand and hearing an unhappy customer whinge about Microsoft isn't fun. Working through the constant churn in the MSDN Connection program isn't fun. Missing out on spending time with your family to do a slide deck for some-one else's user group isn't fun.
On the flip side: attending TechEd as a speaker is fun. The MSDN Subscription that comes with the program is fun. The Global Conference is fun. The MVP Dinner is fun. The recognition is fun.
My point is not to whinge, but to demonstrate to Dave and other MVP sceptics that the program is a two way street. If you are changing the ground that the street is built on every year (which is Dave's suggestion) I reckon you'd end up with a mess.
Come and catch a sneak peek of my
Code Camp presentation at
WDNUG this Wednesday at 6.30pm.