If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know of my growing dislike of some modern Anti-virus software, well I’ve another axe to grind. The other day I arrived at work to discover that my long running overnight tasks had failed, in fact my machine was showing a nice Blue Screen of Death. Fortunately I now happen to sit next to the system team so I leant over and asked them to take a look. To cut a long story short we discovered that McAfee has a problem with Gigabit network cards. Now you may think that one machine BSODing isn’t an issue but it turns out to be cause of why a number of our servers were rebooting, so my misfortune was the system teams gain as they’d been scratching their heads about the servers. McAfee have released a patch for the problem but again I’m left wondering how time we’ve wasted using McAfee against the cost of dealing with a maybe-get virus.
Computers and Internet
UK SOA and Business Process Conference
I attended this seminar this week and I thought I do a quick review;
Keynote: Why BPM Matters – Mark Raskino
A good key note where Mark did an excellent job of putting across the importance of process management. Sure it had a lot of Analyst/Marketing phrases that usually make me cringe e.g. ‘the trough of disillusionment’ 
but Mark trod that line well and I enjoyed it. What I especially liked about it was that it brilliantly covered areas that I’ve been struggling to get noticed, I just hope I get hold of the slide deck – or better still a webcast!
Keynote Address: Realising the Potential of SOA – Gavin King, Mike Woods
Well I was a little disappointed with this, perhaps unfairly. This felt like a Microsoft Marketing exercise, I don’t know what it is but the mere mention of BizTalk sends me to sle…..ep. There were some little gems in there and if you’ve never heard of you-know-what then you’d probably have enjoyed it. Having said all that I did take away that Microsoft are very serious about this and are really pushing it, hurray!
Keynote Address: Business Process Management on the Microsoft Platform – Harsha Karunarantne, Adi Hofsteien
Again some interesting points, especially about RealWorldSOA and the Business Process Alliance. One of the members of the Alliance was Adi’s PNMSoft. Although it was a thinly veiled advert for the company I did enjoy the presentation and it did seems to be a working example of all the things I believe to be correct. So that was nice.
Microsoft Vision for Sofware+Services – Marc Holmes
Hmm. I thought this was a bit muddled. It seemed to be about Software as a Service (SaaS) but if it was then I disagree with Marc’s definition. Marc used Exchange as an example, arguing that because it has many channels that makes it a "S+S". No. By that premise almost every 1/2 way decently implemented client-server application would be S+S. I looked up SaaS on wikipedia (yes I always grin when anyone uses that to back-up their claims) but their definition is spot on…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application
delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software
application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a
third-party) the application for use by its customers over the
Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but
rather for using it.
That, for me, is the important difference between a client server application (albeit on the web). IMO Marc’s channel argument is just weak, Exchange is a good example of separating out the presentation layer – that’s all.
BizTalk Server R2 Tour – Harsha Karunarantne, Jeff Johnson
Grr, a bit annoyed about this one. I understand the relevance of RFID and WCF but I couldn’t help thinking, "why BizTalk", all the way through it. Great news that a device abstracted API has been written to use RFID tags but why deploy that with BizTalk? Why not deploy DirectX 10 with BizTalk too 
? Ok I can see the benefit of using it but I really think they should separate out the Reader layer with the Management layer and provide the Reader layer to anyone who wants to use it. Then lots of talk about WCF, and the usual failed demo (quite a few failed throughout the day). Hmm yeah, I dare say it’s great news but I can’t help feeling that when someone celebrates such an obviously needed feature there must be something worryingly wrong the original roadmap. I think the problem was that for people who enjoy BizTalk this must have been very old news, and for others it just wasn’t interesting. For me it felt like, "look you can communicate with a service using WCF". Wow.
BizTalk v. Next ‘Oslo’ – Mike Woods
I like the idea of Oslo but I’m not sure how practical it will be. For example, if they have some form of identity server in the cloud that everyone can use, then why would I install Federation Server? Still sounds like a good idea, and yes I would say this *is* (or could be) an example SaaS.
Overall I enjoyed the day, bit dull in places, bit marketing, but I did come away with renewed enthusiasm for business process management – well done MS UK.
Windows XP system died, how to keep Vista
My annoying drive with XP went wrong AGAIN. That’s the 3rd time now and it really seems ill. I ran CHKDSK and it froze so I think the disk is an ex-disk. However, this presented a problem. I’d sensibly installed Vista on a separate disk but it still uses the dodgy disk to host the boot manager so Vista won’t boot without that. After a lot of reading about BCD Editors and the like and finally removed the ill disk. Sure enough the PC couldn’t find a system. So I put Vista DVD in and went into the repair. This is quite a worrying process as it asks a lot of language questions as if it is going to install it. Happily once past the language screen you get the chance to repair. One of the options is to examine start-up problems so I did that. It realised that the bootmanager was missing and told me it had repaired the problem. I rebooted and still no system. Hmm, I was about to give up when I tried to boot from my data disk. Aha, Vista had put the bootmanager onto the "wrong" disk but after telling my BIOS to look there for a system everything seems fine! I’ve checked that my faulty disk is still within it’s warranty so if worse comes to worse I’ll send it back. Although then I’ll be faced with how to add XP to an existing Vista setup <gulp>. Then again if I get a new graphics card perhaps I won’t need XP.
Too scared to add code, replaced by too much work to add code?
I don’t think many people will disagree with the practice of adding unit tests and striving for 100% code coverage. However, I think there is a very real downside to it. It wasn’t so long ago that I was faced with making a change to some code that had zero unit tests and a fair amount of coupling. I hated making that change and it was the coding equivalent to treading on egg-shells. After a period of refactoring and creating unit tests the story is better…or is it? I no longer have such a fear when it comes to changing that code, I know that even if I don’t find the correct unit test to run the continuous integration process will run it and complain if there is a problem. However, I am now faced with a different dilemma, every code block I add I need to create a unit test for it. There is no escaping the fact that it does take some extra time to write the tests and it does impact on the here and now. Of course I will write them because it will be better in the long run but my real fear is that you start to code differently because subconsciously you start to avoid doing things that require you to write extra tests. Consider this very simple example of checking an age…
totalAges = newAge + currentTotal
Now really I should throw a specific exception if the age is negative…
if newAge < 0 then throw new AgeNotValidException
but if I do that I’ll need to write another unit test to ensure that this exception is raised. The little devil on my shoulder says, "but that’s not likely to happen is it, no need to do that, it’s not in the specification, why add it, look at all the other code you’ve yet to write, etc, etc". It is a matter of pride in your work and ultimately you should always do the right thing, but I can’t help feeling this is like red-tape. I wonder how much Test Driven Development dynamic language developers will use?
ITunes anger re: DRM
I’ve recently created a dual boot system of XP and Vista and made my first purchase from iTunes, I downloaded the Ricky Gervais pod casts series 2. It didn’t go well, I paid the money but the download failed half way through but eventually I managed to get the full audiobook. I put said download on my iPod and enjoyed the crazy brain of Carl, all this using XP. So last night I installed iTunes on Vista and downloaded series 3. Dragged the download onto my iPod and got, "you are not authorized" or some such message. To say I was angry was probably an understatement. I dragged the files into a shared (XP & Visa) drive and rebooted into XP, where I happily copied the files over. So this morning I thought I’d revisit Vista. When I double-clicked the download in iTunes it said I wasn’t authorized BUT it then offered me the chance to authorize this machine which I took. So…a) why didn’t I get that chance in the first place b) why doesn’t it recognize the "machine" rather than the OS c) why bother when it knows I’ve purchased it!? I hate DRM, everyone that pirates audio/dvd etc will always find a way and poor paying saps like me get the worst experience ever…I still get very angry with the seeming 1 hour anti-piracy intro’s on DVDs. So please entertainment industry ditch this stupid DRM concept and stop telling me not to pirate the film I just bought/rented.
3D ALT-TAB in Vista
I realise that I’m probably the only person in the World who didn’t know how to do this, but just in case ;)…
Every time I see a demo of Vista they use a 3D version of ALT-TAB to cycle through the open windows. After installing Vista my ALT-TAB would only give a very useful but non-flashy thumbnail version of the applications. The trick is to use START-TAB rather than ALT-TAB, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/flip3D.mspx
Funny seminar title
I was looking at an XP seminar in London and the following raised a smile…
Programmers maybe from Mars, Customers maybe from Venus, but Why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus?
Clarke Ching
Mad dialogs
In keeping with the tradition of outing nonesense dialogs…
Mix 07 UK
I attended Mix 07 UK last week so I thought I’d give a quick review.
Day 1: 11 September 2007
Mix:UK 07 Keynote
I’d watched a number of presentations from Mix LA so the keynote didn’t really contain anything new but it did reinforce the message that Silverlight seems like a viable platform.
Total Experience Design (Paul Dawson, Matt Bagwell)
I’d made a decision to avoid low-level technical session in favour of learning about user experience design so I went along to this session. It was quite interesting and the messages I took away from the session were; people that enjoy an application will get more from it, rich experiences are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Building Silverlight Applications using .NET – Part 2 (Scott Guthrie)
Joined the second part of this session with the hope that it would be more advanced than the previous part. Although I didn’t get an awful lot from this there were a couple of gems; 1. Multiple file uploads (worth the entrance price) 2. The use of Silverlight as a non-UI tool 3. The reliance on the browser cache (shame but I can understand it).
[Insert really good title here.] (Hoss Gifford)
A nice idea this one and Hoss seems like a good guy with a real enthusiasm for his work. The basic idea was to come clean an explain what goes wrong with (artistic) projects. I didn’t get a lot from this one although my designer g/f enjoyed it, I guess it was one for the non-developers.
Developer Panel
I must admit I got little bored with this one. It was billed as Cloud vs Client but IMO that was an argument for two years ago. I think everyone understands the basic advantages/disadvantages of both and when to combine the two. I did find one of the audience questions interesting, I’ll paraphrase it, "if my country requires that I adhere to strict rules governing the access/security of my customers data, how can enforce that if the data is in the cloud and could potentially be stored in countries where the rules are different, non-existent or even counter the rules of my country?". Tough one.
Day 2 to follow…
Reducing vibration noise from a PC
My main PC sits in an upstairs room. Although the machine (was – more on that later) pretty quiet to be around you could hear a very real rumble when downstairs. I needed to come up with a way of isolating the PC from the floor to stop this noise. I’ve been looking into getting some form of rubber matting such as that used to reduce noise in heavy machine shops. Last night I remembered an old HiFi trick, cut a squash ball in half and put that under the PC. I tried it today and it seems to have done the trick, I can’t hear it from downstairs now…I’m sure the neighbours will thank me too 
.
.However, the machine has recently developed an annoying vibration noise when closer to it, it seems to resonate through the case as putting pressure on the case seems to stop it. So I’ll need to open it up and try to ascertain what is causing this – I hate any noise from my PCs.
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