Russ Nemhauser

This is What I'm Talking About

russnem — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:44:00 GMT

The Gu himself, Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, wrote a blog entry yesterday about some power productivity features that people can get with a new VS 2010 update. It only took me a few seconds to find two classic examples that clearly illustrate one of the things that frustrates me about Windows: There is no consistency.

Take, for example, the following screen shot that Scott includes in his post:

Don't those "On / Off" switches look cool?? There's just one problem. No where else in any of Windows do options have this interface for turning things on or off. People are used to checkboxes. There was nothing wrong with checkboxes. Everyone was used to them. So while this may LOOK cooler to some people, it's different behavior. It copies the switches iOS now. But one reason they were made like that for iOS was because people weren't going to be using mice - they would be using their finger, which is less precise.

Next, take a look at another screen shot he included:

If you look at the little triangles, you will see that they point down when the node is expanded and they point to the right when the node is closed. But if you look back at the first screen shot, those triangles point to the lower right when the node is expanded, and appear all in black (there is no discoloration in the other window's arrows). Furthermore, the arrows on the second screen shot are filled in gray. The ones in the first screen shot are gray outlines. Also, they're different sizes.

I'm not commenting on the particular features that Scott is writing about, I'm commenting on how there is so little attention paid to details like consistency. Call me nit-picky, go ahead. I deserve it.

Installing Win7 From a USB Drive

russnem — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:10:00 GMT

Friend and all around nice guy Steve Smith wrote this blog entry about how to install Windows 7 from a USB key. Quite a few steps, but I've done this before so I know it works. I began thinking what the Apple story would look like and smiled: 1. Download OS X and save it to your USB drive. 2. Reboot. :) Seriously, though, I had to track down lots of steps when I did it a few months ago so Steve's entry will be helpful to many.

Hosting - There Is a Difference!

russnem — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:10:00 GMT

Several weeks ago I did a WordPress installation on a friend's server so they could update their site themselves. They use GoDaddy for hosting because it was cheap. You get what you pay for. I can't stress this lesson strongly enough. Ever since I completed the installation, I noticed dreadful performance on anything that needed a database call. I complained to GoDaddy on three occasions but nothing was really done except to say that in a shared hosting environment "sometimes" the performance slows down. I had hosted my blog www.russology.com on WordPress for a couple of years now but I just signed up for Crucial Web Host and moved my blog to my new shared hosting account last night. Lightning by comparison. The WordPress pages load so fast it's like static HTML, even the ones that hit the database (MySQL 5). Crucial Web Host is $25 per month. Some might balk at that number. After all, GoDaddy is something like $5 per month. But as I said earlier - you get what you pay for. Crucial uses cPanel, phpMyAdmin, and other very common tools. GoDaddy uses a bunch of different things that aren't really intuitive and sometimes give me problems. One thing is for sure - I certainly don't miss seeing GoDaddy's advertisements as I do what I need to do on my domains or hosting account.

SEHException in MSTEST

russnem — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:52:00 GMT

Anybody ever had MSTEST freeze after the test run and then, when you close the DOS prompt you see a message very briefly about an SEHException? This happens on the same two test projects every time, yet my other test projects don't cause this. Any insight would be appreciated.

Vista Default User Profile

russnem — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:10:00 GMT

I created a user and customized tons of settings, then copied that user to the Default user from the System control panel. However, some of my settings didn't take. For example, my start menu items and colors are all there, but I hid the Sidebar - only it still shows up when I create a new account and log in! Also, all those icons in the systray that I hid appear for the new user as well. The default home page in the IE7 (google.com) and the default search provider (Google) didn't work for the new user based on my new profile either - they went back to msn.com and Live Search. I want EVERYTHING that I did to be used for EVERY new user created on the box - not just a few of my customizations. Can anyone offer any assistance? FYI, the machine is not on a domain.

Thoughts on Mix, Ballmer, and the iPhone SDK

russnem — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:04:00 GMT

I am a software developer and architect (currently using Microsoft technologies) so of course I was interested to watch the sessions from the MIX conference that just happened last week in Las Vegas.

Incidentally, I visited the on-demand web site for MIX using my default browser (Safari on Mac) and of course the page wouldn't load. Go figure - a web page written by Microsoft that doesn't work in Safari, a standards-compliant browser. But I digress.

Ray Ozzie is just not a good public speaker. He didn't seem excited at all (and he sure didn't get ME excited with his subject matter). His talk sounded like he was reading a newspaper article, not engaging the audience. In addition, his slides had whole movies playing with demos while he was speaking. This is confusing because your mind wants to see what's going on in the movie. So you can hear Ray speaking but your mind isn't listening to him because it's trying to figure out what it is seeing in the movie.

FINALLY Scott Guthrie came on. I have always really liked Scott, ever since the first session I saw him give. In my opinion, Scott is simply the best bet Microsoft has and has had for a couple of years now, regardless of product group or division. Unfortunately he wasn't on too long before he introduced the IE8 guy, but I know he'll be back, and I hope he's the one giving the demos later!

I like the Developer Tools that the guy demo'd for IE8. Those will be useful.

Web Slices is an interesting concept, and obviously born from the Web Clip functionality introduced in Safari about a year ago now. But unfortunately the implementation of Web Slices is very sub-par. At this point (and I could very well be premature and/or incorrect on this point), there appears to be no operating system integration at all, like Apple gave us in Leopard. In other words, if you want to see updated Web Slices, you have to open IE8 and then click on each and every one that you have to view it. I also have to admit that I'm not sure, as a developer, I would want to add extra code to my pages or my site if I want to support Web Slices. The code would be IE8 only, and I think we all know what writing IE-only code has gotten us in the past when we wanted to support more than just IE.

One of the first things Scott did with regard to Silverlight was to show a movie montage of some of the live usage of Silverlight on the Internet. I have to say that I only found 2 or 3 of those particular examples compelling. Most of the other ones you'd never know were Silverlight at all. Could have just been embedded videos or animated images. I would be curious to see a REAL demo real of Silverlight in use today. And, note to Microsoft: We get that it can play videos.

I thought it was really funny when the Cirque de Soleil employee came on the stage and was holding that big tablet PC with the web cam strapped on to it. So 2001.

There were a few demos of Silerlight on mobile devices, and I have to say that after watching this video the other day, I was not excited at all. The Silverlight mobile applications looked jumpy during animations; slow to respond, and honestly, a little outdated already. I don't think this is a limitation of Silverlight. I believe it's a limitation of the hardware capabilities of the devices they showed – some of which are quite new.

All in all I'd say that Silverlight is good for the web, but (contrary to what Rocky Lhotka said in his recent blog post) Silverlight is not the future of the web. It will be a part of it, but that will be about it. Only time will tell if I'm right.

Next, I watched the keynote where Steve Ballmer was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki. I thought it was great, for the most part. Steve Ballmer used to be my favorite speaker to watch. After I watched Steve talk about something I'd want to go right out and buy it or try it or develop on it or install it. This all changed for me over the past two years when I realized that Steve Ballmer is perhaps one of the world's best salesmen. That's what he does, and that's what he's supposed to do: sell Microsoft to people every hour of every day of every year.

After I tried Macintosh computers, iPods, and iPhones, however, I realized that talk is cheap. There was a reason why I had been frustrated a lot. I just thought that was a cost of using a computer. I didn't realize it was merely a cost of using Microsoft products until I actually tried other ones.

That being said, one of the things Steve said in the interview with Guy Kawasaki at Mix was really just ignorant, incorrect, and a feeble attempt to deflect the potential impact of what the iPhone SDK and selling your iPhone applications on the iTunes store really means to developers.

Of Apple's announcements of the iPhone SDK, Ballmer said, "They just announced a new runtime today, yesterday, and it sure seems they're trying to charge a whole lot more money for it than anybody else on the face of the planet. I think they want to take 30% of every bit of revenue that you'd collect on their runtime. I'm not sure a lot of the software developers that I know are going to be very interested in that, but it may mean that Apple is not welcoming open, royalty-free runtimes on their platform, we'll have to wait and see." I'd like to set the record straight, and then you can judge Ballmer's statement for yourself.

First, I can download the Apple SDK for free and develop all I want. If I choose to, I can pay $99 to join Apple's Developer program, which gives me things like support and resources that I wouldn't have if I didn't join. I'd like to reiterate – it includes support. If I want developer support from Microsoft, I have to pay something like $200 per incident (at least that's what it was a couple of years ago the last time I used it). So Ballmer's statement that Apple is charging money for the new runtime, and charging more than anybody else on the face of the planet, is just a lie. There WILL be a nominal charge if iPod Touch users want to upgrade, but the new runtime (called 2.0) will be available to all iPhone users as a free download.

Second, as an iPhone and iPod Touch developer, I can sell my application on the iTunes store, thereby reaching every single owner of an iPod Touch and and iPhone in a single place. That is millions and millions of people. And I don't pay a cent for this, either. The only time I pay Apple is if someone buys my application, and I'm even responsible for setting the price. If somebody buys it, iTunes takes 30% of that sale. I get 70%. I pay no credit card fees, no hosting fees and no bandwidth fees. Ever. In fact, I can even choose to make my application available for FREE, in which case I pay nothing.

Paying nothing to get my app in front of every owner of my target platform, and then keeping 70% of the revenue sure seems like a pretty incredible deal to me. There's no business for me to run. There's no hosting issues for me to deal with. All I have to do is focus on what I do best – developing software and depositing checks into my bank account on a monthly basis. So I put the question to you all, especially anyone who has ever written an application they wanted to sell. Do you think 30% is unfair and demonstrative of Apple being unwelcoming to mobile software developers, as Ballmer does?

I have one final thought on watching these two keynotes. Because they chose to make these videos available in Silverlight only, I was forced to watch the stuff from my web browser, sitting at my desk. I couldn't watch it on my big living room TV like I can with the Apple conference sessions using iTunes and Apple TV. Unfortunately Microsoft's disconnect within itself proves frustrating yet again. I couldn't even watch this on my living room TV on my Xbox 360 if I had that whole Media Center PC / Extender thing going on in my house. This is over 3 hours of video that I had to watch, sitting at my desk. And I haven't even gotten to the sessions yet. Not exactly a good delivery mechanism for lots of content. I shutter to think what it's going to be like to sit at your computer and watch the Olympic events that aren't televised.

Code Analysis or Check-In Policy for Warnings

russnem — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:50:00 GMT

I've been doing a bunch of Google searches today trying to figure out how I might be able to raise a violation if somebody tries to do a check-in when there are more than 100 warnings in the solution. Because (as far as I know, anyway) the only object available to you in a check-in policy is the PendingCheckin, I'm finding it difficult to implement this. Does anyone know how I can approach this? I'm aware that Visual Studio will raise a violation when the number of warnings reaches a certain number, but this number is way too high for us. I thought of doing it as a Code Analysis policy, but several questions came up with that approach as well. First, in order to write a custom code analysis policy, I have to use th FxCop SDK 1.35, don't I? There isn't a "CheckInPolicy" abstract base class that I can just subclass, is there?

Visual Studio 2008: November of THIS Year?

russnem — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:41:00 GMT

It was formally announced by Microsoft today that Visual Studio 2008 will be released at the end of this month. The only thing I'm going to say at this point is that it seems WAY too soon to me. I'll make blog posts after the release and we'll see if my gut feeling was right or wrong (and I have absolutely no problem being wrong).

Multiple Sitemap Index Files in Robots.txt

russnem — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:00:00 GMT

I have been searching around using Google but I can't find an answer to this question.

A robots.txt file can contain the following line:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex.xml

but is it possible to specify MULTIPLE sitemap index files in the robots.txt and have the search engines recognize that and crawl ALL of the sitemaps referenced in each sitemap index file? For example, will this work:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex2.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex3.xml

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

Internet Explorer's Reign of Mediocrity

russnem — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:42:00 GMT

I saw this on digg.com today and I have to admit that I am one of the (apparently THOUSANDS) of people who are tired of having to tweak their standards-based code just so that IE 6 and 7 (MIcrosoft's browsers which do NOT adhere to web standards) can display their web pages the way the developer or designer originally intended. With IE's reduced market share due to the success of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, combined with Microsoft's several-year development cycle to release IE 7 - a browser that doesn't even bring IE up to date with the competition - I think people are really just starting to say, "You know what? Screw you." What do YOU think? http://digg.com/programming/Digg_this_if_you_re_tired_of_IE_costing_you_money_no_ads_involved Please comment! Opinions are welcome.

Windows Forced Restarts

russnem — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:44:00 GMT

Recently I came in to work to find that my computer had restarted some time during the night. I thought there was a power outage, but that wasn't the case. Apparently an automatic update was installed, which forced a restart of the computer.

How can Microsoft allow this? How can they simply restart the computer no matter what the user might have open or what long-running jobs happen to be executing? There was no warning whatsoever.

If you ask me, this kind of crap is absolutely unacceptable. I asked around and others agree - they said they've lost work because Microsoft forced their computer to reboot. My opinion is that Microsoft needs to release a hotfix that prevents this from happening. I don't mind restarting Windows (when I have to use Windows), but it should happen when it's convenient for ME, not for Microsoft.

There are people who will tell me that there are frequent security updates to Windows that, if not activated by restarting, put the whole network at risk. Well that's fine. Just disable the network and don't let me reconnect to it until I've restarted. But shutting down the whole computer? Come on. Is this still the 90's and no one told me?

MySpace & Me

russnem — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:31:00 GMT

I'm very excited to announce that Monday I joined MySpace as a Software Architect. This is a site that has 200,000,000 members and something like four billion page views a week. I can't back this up with paperwork, but I'm fairly sure this is one of (if not THE) most visited site on the entire internet. They don't have hundreds of servers, they have thousands. I'm very much looking forward to learning a lot here and offering whatever I can to the team. MySpace uses ASP.NET and SQL Server - quite the interesting case study for these technologies. We use Team Foundation Server for source code control. Each contributor uses Visual Studio 2005, and many projects follow an agile methodology called Scrum. Anyone who is a member and has ideas for new features or functionality is welcome to email me at rnemhauser (myspace.com is the domain). PLEASE do not email me with errors or problems. Tom, the first friend any new member has, receives these messages and they ARE read. I'm interested in new, out-of-the-box ideas, no matter how crazy. Check out my MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/russnem

Backups in Today's World

russnem — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:30:00 GMT

Like many people in today's world I have an absolutely enormous amount of data stored on my various hard drives. Aside from my 320 GB+ of iTunes music and video, there's a significant number of photographs and well over 150 gigs of captured and rendered video. There's also the code for almost every software development project I've ever worked on. The databases for my current projects will also exist and some are so large that a local backup would be far more beneficial that trying to FTP 5 gigs of data down. All this stuff needs to be backed up, but of course DVDs are out (even the dual layer ones) because they store less than 10 gigs each. Even with two dual layer DVD burners in my Mac Pro I'd have to sit here for who knows how long putting in almost 50 blank discs every month. I'm very curious. What are most people with hundreds of gigs of stuff using to back up their data? Is tape backup still around these days? Would a 750 GB or 1 TB drive in an external FireWire 800 enclosure be my best bet? Any advice would be appreciated.

Disconnecting WM5 Device From Exchange Server

russnem — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:52:00 GMT

My Windows Mobile 5 phone currently is set to synchronize with Exchange Server. When I set it up, I had to agree to a corporate security policy that put an automatic key lock on my phone every time it wasn't used for 15 minutes. I guess they think they have secrets to keep. I have to enter my password to unlock the phone. Now I want to get that email off my phone but I can't figure out how to do this. I can't key this automatic key lock off my own phone. I have nothing selected in the Exchange Server settings - not contacts, tasks, email, etc. I've even changed the URL to the email server, but nothing seems to work. Can anyone help me out on this?