Mr. .NET

Notice: This post contains absolutely no technical value; and is fairly large.  Once I started writing I didn’t stop until the last period.  The end result is a little chaotic; but I thought it was decent enough to hit the “Publish” button.

A big snow storm blew through Michigan and Northern Ohio yesterday, and more crap was dropped again today.  Today was also the day I came back to Columbus from my parent’s house in the middle of Michigan.  Its typically a 4.5 hour drive with no stops along the way, I expect to be slowed down a little bit due to the weather and make it in 5 hours.

The trip started out great, very little snow fall and the roads were clear with no blowing; I was traveling the speed limit for a long time.  A few miles before the Michigan/Ohio border, conditions changed drastically.  The snow was coming down thicker,  it was blowing across the road, and it’d gotten 6 degrees colder.  It wasn’t too much longer before a cop was parked along the side of the road with his lights on, alerting everyone to the presence of ice in the area.  I increased the amount of distance between myself and the car ahead of me.

Before the cop was completely out of sight in my rear-view mirror I came across the first of what would be about a dozen accidents along the freeway.   Then another, this one vehicle had spun around at least 180 degrees and was now facing the wrong direction, fortunately not in the road.   The traffic in front of me began to slow down, I dropped back a little bit, but the icy conditions triggered the ABS and I couldn’t drop back anymore.  Two vehicles ahead of me had the same problem and I was gaining on them quickly, I was able to change to the left lane but so did they; so I took the only option left; the median.  *CRASH*

“#$@#$”

Once I came to a rest I got out my phone and started to call my dad, I see the girl in the red car that hit me is already on the phone as well.

“hey…..yeah….I just got in an accident…..I don’t know, I’m checking now”

“I’m so sorry!  Are you okay?” she asks.

“It’s alright, I’m fine; are you okay?  Holy crap, I didn’t get hit!   Do you have any damage?”

“I’m okay. Yeah, I hit the back of their truck.”

I leave my car where its at and proceed up the embankment and wait for the traffic to clear before crossing the road.   The couple in the truck asks if I’m fine; I tell them that I’m alright and actually came through unscathed.  I’ll stick around for a police report, and then find out whether I need a tow truck to get out of the median.   The girl in the red car is talking to her parents now, she breaks down crying.  We all tell her it isn’t her fault; black ice is a bitch.

A few minutes later a tow truck driver shows up, none of us called him; later on I realize he was sent out to help get everyone’s vehicles along the right side of the road so its a little safer for the passing traffic.   Once he passes on that information he heads out to the next accident down the road on the northbound side.  A fire truck is on the scene at the accident previous to ours, so I head to my car to see if I can get it up the embankment without a tow truck.  The girl in the red car has already moved hers over to the right side of the road.  I make it up most of the way before my tires give and start spinning.  I try backing out and going forward again to no avail.

A fireman is walking up to my car so I put the car in park and get out.  Before I spin around he’s already got his hands on the back pushing.  I apologize for putting it in park on him.  With his help I’m up the embankment and on the side of the road.  He asks me if I was involved in this accident, I tell him yes; but I’m okay and my vehicle didn’t suffer any damage; I was waiting to see if I would be needed as a witness.  He tells me to wait in the car and he’ll find out if they need me there.  Not 10 seconds later he comes back and tells me to go ahead and leave, but be careful starting out; the whole road is a sheet of ice.  A few minutes later the passing traffic stops and I make my way out.

I’m home now, 6.5 hours later.   The roads sucked pretty much all the way home from there.  Out of this experience one thing really sticks out in my mind

“Man, its weird to walk across a freeway.”

Not my health anyway.  I’m up in Michigan for Christmas/New Year’s and I’ve been trying to sneak some work in while I’m here, using the dining room table as my makeshift desk.  Wednesday afternoon I got up to do something in another room.  When I came back to the dining room a few minutes later, I found one of my parent’s cats on top of it; proud that he knocked my glass of sprite all over my ipod, my new phone, and next to my laptop.

I lucked out for the most part.

My laptop came out okay.  Unlike other laptops I’ve owned, the MacBook Pro doesn’t have a ton of openings on the bottom of it, basically there is a battery compartment and a few screw holes.  The ports on the side seemed to be above the water level as well.  So aside from the panic, quick/forced shutdown, and disconnection of everything, there was nothing to worry about.

My phone also came out okay.  Despite sitting in the middle of a pool of soda, the worst it suffered was a streaky exterior after wiping it dry.

The ipod; however, bit the dust.  It refused to turn on for a while, then I noticed some liquid in the dock connector so I took some alcohol to it to dry it out.  It turned on right after that and appeared to be fine.  10 minutes later it was displaying its extremely low power display and has since refused to turn on, even after charging over night.  I suspect some liquid did get inside even though it seems to be sealed up pretty tight.  I’m tempted to give it a bath in alcohol to see if I can get anything out of it; but part of me just wants to get a replacement and be done with it.

So if anyone at work is wondering why I suddenly disappeared on Wednesday, now you know

Its the only explanation.  I’ve blogged in the past about my problems with traveling: missed, delayed, and canceled flights.  Overnight stays in the airport, the left wing of the aircraft suddenly dropping out of the sky.

Earlier today I blogged about the flight from chicago being delayed.  And it was.  When Luc and I finally got on the plane and situated the captain informs us that due to the strong winds in chicago we will be sitting on the runway for about 45 minutes to get in line with the other flights coming in.  After a bit the pilot informs us it’ll be an additional 25 minutes.

Once we finally get off the ground the flight is rather uneventful until we begin to land, then we see why all the flights were delayed.  Lots of turbulence had the cabin bouncing around quite a bit.  We safely land and find out the flight to Tulsa from Chicago had also been delayed.  Upon landing in Tulsa Luc and I head down to baggage claim so I can pick up the bag I checked.  The conveyor spins around and around, until it finally turns off….no bag.  After checking with United I find out that because my flight came in so late they did not have an opportunity to unload and load it back onto the flight to Tulsa.  But it is in Chicago and should make it on the next flight down tonight.

Do I want to come and get it tonight or should they drop it off at the Lodge?

After getting to the room I bring out my laptop and start doing searches to find out where this flight is at, but the only info on it is that it arrived yesterday.  Some searches at United’s site shows that the flight was canceled.  Joy!

I’m scared to think of what tomorrow will bring.

The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal has come up with a much better list of Peace prize nominees.  With the exception of the Burma monks (because the latest protest was so recent) I think all of them would have been eligable for nomination and winning.  All of them more deserving than Gore and a UN group.

Found via one of the political blogs I subscribe to, but when I saved the link I forgot to save the source as well.

While reading my gaming feeds last night I came across an odd turn of events. These articles came out in the opposite order; but you can see the quandary clearer if you go in this order:

40GB’s loss of backwards compatibility explained

SCEE managing director Ray Maguire said Sony will use the money it dedicated towards backwards compatibility to invest in new games or to perhaps lower prices so more gamers can afford to buy a PS3.

Sony considers selling manufacturing facilities to Toshiba

The second time in less than a month, Sony is supposedly considering selling its chip manufacturing plants to rival electronics company Toshiba. According to a report by Reuters, “Sony was in negotiations with Toshiba to sell its manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki, also in western Japan, for advanced microchips including the Cell microprocessor.” The Cell processor is a vital part of the PS3 architecture and is one of the costliest and most powerful aspects of the system.

So Sony is going to drop backwards compatibility because it costs too much. And they are supposedly looking to sell a chip manufacturing plant that makes the Cell processor to a rival so they can pay not only the manufacturing cost but an additional profit margin to Toshiba?

Of course there could be other advantages to the sale, consolidating Cell processor manufacturing to other facilities. The factory was losing money, so make the profitability someone else’s problem. But the juxtaposition of those two articles makes one wonder what else Sony is thinking, or not thinking as the case may be.

I think that the lack of backwards compatibility may cause less systems to sell. I picked up my PS3 in July when they announced the price drop. Since I’ve had it I’ve played, maybe, 10-12 hours worth of PS3 games…that could be really stretching it though. On the other hand I’ve played numerous hours of PS2 games on it, I played God of War all the way through (~10 hours), gotten through to Midea being stolen in DQ8 (~14 hours?), almost finished the prologue to Kingdom Hearts 2 (~6 hours). And thats just what I can remember.

A while back a note was added to the documentation of the System.Drawing namespace stating:

“Classes within the System.Drawing namespace are not supported for use within a Windows or ASP.NET service. Attempting to use these classes from within one of these application types may produce unexpected problems, such as diminished service performance and run-time exceptions.”

Today the Windows Forms Documentations Updates blog clarifies what this means.

“We don’t mean they won’t work in an ASP.NET application or that we are trying to cover up some known bug that occurs when you use them in a service. The bottom line is that if you call Microsoft Product Support Services regarding a problem you have using a System.Drawing.* class in a service, they will not offer free support.”

I won’t offer my opinion on this as I can see several things going on here. But I do hope they change their tune and support the scenario again.  An ASP.NET control that generates HTML for a barcode is a hack, the only way to do a barcode correctly is to create an image, something that will also now require the use of another library to create the image in order to be 100% supported now.

I will, however, put forth some speculation, just something that came to mind while I was writing this post.  When GDI+ was announced there was also mention that in the future it could be updated to use hardware acceleration.  I dug up this link from Google that talks about that very thing: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/GDInext.mspx Now, if GDI+ (i.e. System.Drawing.*) were to become accelerated then there is the very real possibility that it would be impossible for the System.Drawing stuff to work outside of a Windows Forms environment.

There are some things that counter this idea.

• Why put the note up there now?  Currently all of the GDI+ features appear to be implemented in software rather than hardware.  So if there was a change to be made the System.Drawing team could make sure it still uses the software implementation rather than the hardware one if running outside of a windows application.
• Why accelerate GDI+ now when WPF just came out?  That would surely send a mixed signal to some people.

A question that falls in with this is that Windows Vista makes use of available DirectX acceleration for its window drawing.  Could this mean that Windows Vista’s GDI+ implementation is already hardware accelerated and the note is added so that things don’t go downhill when run on Windows Longhorn server?

Speculation is fun!

It starts already?!? I was watching one of the cable news networks when I saw a commercial for Mitt Romney. I don’t think its too much to ask that the parties get a little bit closer to having a nominee before pushing them, is it?

At least I have TiVo so I could skip the commercials when I watch something recorded.

Normally seeing this kind of news would upset me, but it wouldn’t have taken 10 minutes on the part of an employee to avoid the whole problem.

Mayor to Bill Sony for Launch Day Costs

According to a local news station, Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, says he plans to send an invoice to the Sony Style store in Copley Place Mall for city costs incurred during the PlayStation 3 launch day.

Reports note that Menino says the city is not in the mood to pay for the 12 police officers that had to be dispatched to the Sony Style store at Copley Place. Rather than pay for the officers’ pay out of the city’s General Fund, Menino says he will be sending a bill to the Sony Style store.

So why do I blame Sony? Easy, every time I’ve waited outside CompUSA or GameStop for some big deals or preorders its always been done in an orderly manner. The stores execute this in two ways…first get everyone in a line, second hand out item vouchers to people in line in order. Can’t get a voucher for the item you want? Too bad, so sad.

Now this sort of easy process wouldn’t work in all cases. For example there would be a ton of work for any big-box store to do the same thing with all of the items they put on sale the day after thanksgiving. However, they can and should do it for the ‘big items’ that they know people are coming for.

I know the whole idea of these deals is to get people in the store so they’ll buy something else while they’re there…but sometimes you’ve got to realize that putting people’s health in jeopardy just isn’t worth it.

Just as I was watching the last of my TiVo’d episodes of Night Court I happened to catch my desktop PC’s monitor enter power save mode. The only problem is that I have power saving set to turn on only after an hour, and I just used it a few minutes ago. A few seconds later the POST screen is showing and then Windows spits out a nice error message: Cannot find file \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG. Thats the third time in three days, on three computers I’ve seen that error — fortunately I get paid to fix or paid to find the people to fix the problem on two of those. This one is my problem to deal with though; and I don’t really like to go a day without XM Radio or iTunes.

So I spent much of the late night/early morning hours trying to figure out what is wrong with it. It turns out the partition info on the primary hard drive has fubar’d itself. Time for a reinstall (since chkdsk didn’t fix it) and now it just constantly reboots.

Then install .NET, iTunes, XM Radio, et. al. before I can sleep peacefully.

Update: Fixed a mistake I made where I said I didn’t want to go a day with XM/iTunes. That should have been ‘without’ not ‘with’. And I’m now installing Windows update 39 of 42 on my fresh install of XP Pro w/ SP2.

This week I noticed something odd with my TiVo. Some of the weekly shows it should be recording, weren’t getting recorded. I wasn’t too concerned about it, I figured a scheduling conflict had just come up. But now it has gone too far; after watching the Wings trounce the Chicago 5-2 I immediately flipped back to tivo to watch CSI. But there was no CSI. It didn’t record one of the three shows I look forward to each week, the others being MythBusters and Monk.

Curses!

Luckily it was only 10:30pm and TiVo’s support line is open until 11pm EST. Unfortunately my TiVo is a Toshiba unit and they don’t offer support on them; for that I’ll have to turn to Toshiba who’s support line is only open from 11am – 7pm weekdays.

For now it looks like I’ll just have to remember to watch the toob at the right times….ugh!

I now return you to the regularly scheduled silence.

Oh yeah…why the title? I’m paying TiVo $12.95 a month for a service that isn’t working. At the very least they could help me rule out whether it is the TiVo software/service or a hardware problem before telling me to go see Toshiba about the problem. I have a feeling when I call Toshiba tomorrow they’re gonna tell me its a TiVo problem.