Totalled

June 24, 2008 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

Last weekend, my parked Audi was hit by a speeding vehicle.  The damage was pretty major: body, mechanical damage, and a bent frame.

Thankfully nobody was hurt.

Yesterday, my insurance carrier has declared the car a total loss.

It was in good condition with only 48000 miles on it.  I planned on keeping the car for a few more years. 

These things happen.  On to plan B. 

But I am irked about the timing.  I planned to make my next car a hybrid.  Gas prices have spiked.  Hybrids have gone up in price and I understand that some models have wait-lists.  For example, if I want a Prius, I might have to wait months.

Now what do I do?

Tags: blog, Personal

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Digipede on Mono

June 6, 2008 at 8:53 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

I am routinely asked if the Digipede Network can run under Mono.  The main scenario people want is to run Digipede Agents on a mix of Windows and Linux boxes.

My answer has always been the same:

Not now, maybe never, but this would not be technically challenging.

A while back we researched what it would take to get the Digipede Agent working on Linux.  At the time, the Mono project was less mature.  Finding out what worked was mostly a game of just trying it.  We eventually gave up, because a dependency on WSE2 turned out to be a blocker.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to see what it would take to finish this task.  I haven’t paid much attention to the Mono project over the years, but Moonlight gave me hope that Mono has made a lot of advances since we tried last.

It has.  Still using Visual Studio, I #ifdef’ed out a few noncompliant functions and got it working with the Mono runtime.  It was surprisingly easy.  Kudos to Miguel de Icaza, Novell, and the Mono team. 

So now I have it working in the lab on a Linux VM.  Checking in to a Digipede Server, it is able to run our .NET development patterns.  Of course, it can also run command-line applications with Linux-specific binaries.  Pretty cool.

This is not ready for release.  Not only is a supported product more than just bits, but I took a few shortcuts in getting the bits to work! 

Now if someone asks me if it Digipede Network can run under Mono, I can say

It does in the lab, it may never get released, and this is ultimately a market and product decision. 

So now we can do it, what shall we do with it?

Tags: .NET, Digipede, Mono, Novell

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.NET on Server Core

May 19, 2008 at 6:22 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Dmitry Sotnikov provides the steps to get PowerShell — and of more general interest, .NET 2.0 —  running on Windows Server 2008 Server core.

While this is a stopgap until Microsoft officially supports this configuration, it could still be useful. 

Now the question for me is, will this work for running Digipede components?

Tags: .NET, Digipede, PowerShell, Server 2008, Server Core

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Come on Google, support i-names for OpenID!

May 18, 2008 at 10:35 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Playing with the Google Friend Connect demos last night, I found that my i-name doesn’t work as an OpenID.  No big deal, after all it is a preview release.

Today I went to add a comment on a blogger.com blog and tried my i-name there.  Nope.

What’s up, Google?  Why aren’t you supporting i-names?  Oversight, planned for release, bug, or politics?  I really hope it isn’t the latter.

Tags: Blogger, Google, i-name, OpenID

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An SP1 by any other name would . . .

February 19, 2008 at 9:51 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous

Mary Jo Foley writes there’s no Windows Server 2008 SP1 in the works.

Why?  Because the first RTM of Server 2008 is called Windows Server 2008 SP1.  This is due to Server 2008 and Vista sharing the same core code and components.

Hmm.

This makes only marginal sense, and then only if Microsoft commits to keeping the service packs synchronized across the Windows 6 product family.  I think this will be less confusing to customers.  We’ll see if this synchronization happens. 

Regardless of Microsoft’s plans, the SP1 designation on Server 2008 is misleading.  Most of the server components of Windows 6 will remain without a service pack until SP2.

Customers who like to wait for initial service packs still will — unless they are duped into thinking they’ve already got it.

Tags: Microsoft, Server 2008, SP1, Vista, Windows

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Vista SP1 available after all. Kind of.

February 7, 2008 at 3:49 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

According to Mary Jo Foley, Some won’t have to wait until March for Vista SP1.  Cool.  I’m installing it now.

Tags: Microsoft, SP1, Vista, Windows

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More blog changes

November 9, 2007 at 8:56 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1 with its new tagging support — very cool that they included an importer from Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Added my twitter feed to the sidebar.  You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/rwandering

Added new phone-only templates:  both iPhone and Windows Mobile users should see a simplified version of my blog.

Tags: blog, Wordpress

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PowerShell v2 CTP

November 6, 2007 at 10:31 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Congratulations to the PowerShell team for getting out their CTP.  I grabbed it this morning to make sure the Digipede AddIn works against it.   Yes it does.

Cool stuff.

Couple of things:

1. WS-MAN needs to be installed before installing the CTP (this What’s New post implies that the remote-shell features need it, but not that it is required).  I hope this is only for the CTP and will not be required in the eventual release.  Any extra requirements make it harder for ISVs to integrate PowerShell into their products.  If you do not have WS-MAN installed yet, go here to get it: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=100350&clcid=0x409
2. This new version comes with a “Graphical PowerShell”.  This appears to be similar to the Shell Tools PowerShell Analyzer product, and not a replacement console.  If you are looking for a better console, check out the other Shell Tools product, PowerShell+.

I will spend more time with the CTP soon and likely have more comments then. 

Tags: .NET, CTP, Digipede, Microsoft, PowerShell, PowerShellV2

Comments (1)

Quote of the day, 10/30/2007

October 30, 2007 at 12:22 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Miscellaneous

Today I was in a conference call doing a demonstration of the Digipede Network. 

One of the demos includes using Excel as a front-end to a distributed code-behind calculation.  A common follow on question was asked (heavily paraphrased),

what about code trapped in Excel workbooks?

The answer is, yes, we can (and have several customers that do) distribute Excel workbooks for distributed execution.  Our software moves the workbooks, launches Excel through COM, executes calcs in the workbook, saves them, and brings back the workbook. 

The prospect says,

That is both commendable and horrifying at the same time.

Heh. 

As is most of the work we’ve done to provide stable, registration-free COM contract for the Digipede COM users.

Tags: .NET, COM, Digipede, Excel, QOTD

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Solution found to "The problem with Vista"

October 12, 2007 at 8:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Vista has a cool feature called “Problem Reports and Solutions”.  This tracks problems and periodically looks for their solutions.  These kinds of problems include system and application failures, connectivity issues, etc.

Today it notified me it found a new solution, so I immediately went to see what it was:

Of course, immediately I thought which problem with Windows Vista?  And I’m not being sarcastic here.  I’ve had several intermittent issues with Vista related to networking, hibernation / sleep, sluggishness, etc.  (btw, the sarcasm is best applied to the possible solutions ;). 

So I clicked on the link and got a dialog with this further information:

Again, my question of which problem.  Nothing in the main part of the text says anything other than “the problem” and the “Technical Information” box describes some generic problems.

I would like to see two improvements here:

1. Improve the solution title

Instead of “the problem”, how about:

Follow these steps to improve the reliability of Windows Vista.

The actual title may be limited to the software product to which it relates.  If so, that is a shortcoming, because the actual messaging is pretty unhelpful . . . and it opens Microsoft up to further sarcastic jabs.

2. Provide more information about why this solution was chosen for me

The dialog is pretty unhelpful.  Instead of sending me to the knowledge base, how about some specifics about my own machine?  Something like:

There are X problem reports on your system indicating that this update will improve the functioning of your system.  Click “here” to view these reports.

I would actually like to know specifically what this update is intended to fix.

Tags: KB, Microsoft, Vista

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