andrewhuey.org

Dazzle Video Creator Platinum

2008-11-20T20:53:00.002-05:00

I recently pickep up a Dazzle Video Creator Platinum from Woot. My idea was that I'd take the last few videotapes I own, convert them to MPEG-4, then toss the tapes and the VCR. I had a bit of an adventure getting the software installed and working under Vista. This blog entry helped out a bit. It would be nice if Pinnacle would just allow you to download the full install for their Vista-compatible software, but instead you have to stumble through the install of the XP version, then run a patch install. Once you've got that done, and you've got the Vista driver for the device installed, it works fine. I'm in the middle of converting an old anime VHS tape to MPEG-4 right now. I'm hoping it'll be watchable on my Apple TV when I'm done with it. If it all works out OK, I have a few other random tapes to convert, then I'm done with VHS forever.

defunct tech magazines

2008-11-20T19:03:00.002-05:00

Related to my post about PC Mag yesterday, here's an article about defunct tech magazines. I have fond memories of a few of the magazines on his list -- Byte, in particular. That was a great tech magazine. Looking through the comments after the article, I see mention of Amiga World, which was another great magazine, about a great computer. On a somewhat related topic, the NY Times just started a new gadget blog.

no more PC Mag

2008-11-19T22:59:00.002-05:00

I just found out that PC Magazine is going to stop publishing their hard copy, and go "100% digital." I haven't picked up a copy of PC Mag in a while, but it's still sad to see it go. I had a subscription at one point a few years back, and it was one of the more useful magazines out there. Aside from continuing their web site, they will also continue to publish a digital version via Zinio. That's kind of disappointing, since I'm not a big fan of Zinio's reader. I'd really like to see them offer a Kindle version, but I haven't seen any indication that they might do that. Looking at the Kindle magazine list, there actually aren't any computer magazines in there at all. There are a bunch of computer-related blogs in the Kindle blog list, though. It is, of course, not hard to find tech news on the web, or on the Kindle, really, but it would be nice if even one general-audience computer magazine could survive in "dead tree" form.

good books

2008-11-18T22:05:00.002-05:00

Google Books is a good thing. I came across a reference to an anthology of poetry in a newspaper article today, and I wanted to track down the book. It's an old anthology, published in 1917 or thereabouts. It does look like I could get a used copy on Amazon, but it's old enough that I can download it in PDF format from Google. Their copy seems to have come from Harvard's library, and looks to be pretty well beat up, which is kind of cool. This book includes one of my favorite poems, "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."

financial stuff

2008-11-16T21:25:00.003-05:00

I decided to be Mr. Responsible today, and catch up on all my financial stuff. I entered my last three quarterly 401(k) statements into Quicken, along with my last eight monthly Merrill Lynch statements. It was pretty depressing, seeing how much value has been lost over the last few months. I just have to assume it'll bounce back before I retire.
I also opened a new CD with NJM Bank. They have pretty good rates, and they're a pretty stable company. I really don't know what the best place to put my money is right now, but a 12-month CD is a nice safe place to stash a few bucks, I guess.

Chance

2008-11-15T16:18:00.002-05:00

New Chance album came out this week. I haven't listened to Chance in about a year, but I'm pretty enthusiastic about the new album. I'm listening to his cover of "Milkshake" right now. Good stuff.

new hardware

2008-11-05T21:58:00.005-05:00

I just got the new hardware I ordered from Newegg a few days back. I got 2GB of Corsair RAM and an ASUS EAH3450/DI/256M Radeon HD 3450 video card. Both were on sale for $20 each, after rebates.

The RAM brings me up to 4GB total, of which only 3GB is usable, but that's still better than 2GB. There's a thread at Channel 9 about the whole 4GB thing that's pretty useful, if you can slog through it. I notice that the memory score in my Windows Experience Index went down, from 5.3 to 4.8, after I installed the new RAM. The original 2GB that I had in my machine was Corsair XMS, while the new memory is Corsair Value Select. I guess the cheap new stuff is a little slower than the fancy old stuff.

The new video card gets a 3.5 on the Aero score, and 3.9 on the gaming score. The old card got 4.1 for Aero and 3.7 for gaming. I'm a little confused on how this card can score lower than the old one on Aero, but I guess there's a reason. I'm going to update the drivers and see if that changes anything.

Overall, I don't really see any difference in the way the machine's running now compared to how it was before the new memory and video card. I'm assuming that the extra RAM will help me out in Virtual PC, but I haven't tried that yet. Ditto for SQL Server. I haven't really tried anything fancy with SQL on this machine yet, but it's always good to throw RAM at SQL Server.

election

2008-11-04T20:00:00.003-05:00

Talking Points Memo is a good place to follow the election. Lots of stuff going on at Twitter too. (Obviously, that depends on who you're following.) Oh, and the NY Times and the Washington Post are free on the Kindle today and tomorrow, per the Kindle Blog. I'm sure there will be plenty of detail on the results in those papers tomorrow.

gradual Vista upgrade

2008-11-03T21:08:00.002-05:00

I'm still slowly working on switching over to Vista on my home desktop machine. I just ordered a cheap new video card that should be a bit more Vista-compatible than my old one. I also ordered 2 gigs of RAM, so I can bring my machine up to 4 GB. (And, yes, I know 32-bit Vista won't be able to use all of it.) I think this will leave me with a reasonably fast machine, capable of handling anything I'm likely to do with it.

more SQL silliness

2008-10-31T21:53:00.003-04:00

Well, after thinking I had my SQL problem licked, it came back. I finally got a callback from a support guy at Microsoft, and he had me update statistics on all the tables involved. That fixed things, and everything has been working now for the last couple of days. I'm pretty sure I'd updated statistics on all these tables at least once since the original problem occurred, but maybe I didn't, or maybe I just needed to do it two or three times to get everything back to normal.

I've always had a maintenance plan that updates statistics on all my tables once a week, and I don't think I've ever had problems with statistics before.

I've been reading up on this whole statistics thing now, which I admit I hadn't paid much attention to, until this little debacle. Here's a blog entry by Kim Tripp that explains a few things about the auto-update mechanism, and another one by someone at Microsoft that explains a good bit about the way statistics work in SQL 2005.

WSJ.com - Ghost Tales

2008-10-28T23:19:00.002-04:00

There was a good little article on ghost stories in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Two of their recommendations -- Ghost Stories by M. R. James and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, are available at manybooks.net in Kindle format. I think I'm going to read some ghost stories for Halloween!

read more | digg story

SQL patching fun

2008-10-28T22:42:00.002-04:00

After all the patching I did over the weekend, it seemed like everything was fine on my main SQL server. However, on Monday, we discovered that a couple of oddball SELECT statements weren't working anymore, returning the error "Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan. For more information, contact Customer Support Services."

To make a very long story short, I eventually figured out that I could get these queries working again by deleting all of last year's data from one of our bigger tables. The table in question had about 32 million rows in it. I cut it down to 13 million after getting rid of the 2007 data. The moral of this story, apparently, is that you shouldn't try to store 30 million rows in a single SQL Server table. I say this with tongue in cheek, since, obviously, there are other people out there with very large tables in SQL Server. Apparently, I can't be one of them, though.

I put a call in the Microsoft support this morning, but they never called me back. Maybe tomorrow. If they do call back, and I get a support guy who seems to be a bit less clueless than usual, maybe I'll try to see if we can figure out why my server chokes on this table. If I get the usual clueless support dude, I guess I'll just tell him I figured it out on my own while I was waiting for a callback. I wonder if I get my support incident credited back if I solve my own problem while I'm waiting for the callback?

AC/DC Rock N Roll Train in Excel

2008-10-26T21:28:00.001-04:00

The world's first music video in an Excel spreadsheet. I'm not sure what possessed someone to do this, but it's pretty cool.

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random patching

2008-10-26T13:32:00.002-04:00

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that's cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven't had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn't turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn't started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn't have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can't buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that's hanging up on one of the updates. I'll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don't know what's wrong with it, and I'd like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don't have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There's a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven't figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There's certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I've been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple's been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There's an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: "I'll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have." I can't help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I'm probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven't written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I've got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I'm going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

Kindle 2

2008-10-04T12:21:00.003-04:00

It looks like someone has leaked some photos of the Kindle 2. I'm perfectly happy with my original Kindle, and, just from the photos, I don't think I'd necessarily want to trade it in for the new one. I have to admit I don't do much with the Kindle, aside from reading Newsweek and the NY Times. I've read one novel on it, and a handful of short stories. Since I joined Bookmooch, I've wound up with a fairly large backlog of "dead tree" books to read. I think I have about 20 novels stacked up right now.

DD-WRT

2008-09-22T21:01:00.002-04:00

I went ahead and installed DD-WRT on my router today. I want to give it a few days before I say this for certain, but I think it's solved all the problems I had with the Apple TV. I tried streaming stuff wirelessly from my MacBook to the Apple TV, and that worked. I watched a podcast and a couple of YouTube videos over the Internet, no problem. And I synced a few TV shows from my desktop PC down to the Apple TV without the sync getting interrupted and restarting every few minutes.

The install was fairly straightforward. For a v8 WRT54G like mine, it's detailed here. It turns out that the v8 WRT54G isn't the best router to user for DD-WRT (that would probably be a WRT54GL, as explained here), but it works with with the "micro" distribution of DD-WRT, which is all I really need.

The installation write-up doesn't bother to mention the default user name and password for DD-WRT. You can find them in the FAQ, but if you haven't looked that up and written it down before installing, you might have to do what I did, which was to call a friend and have him look it up for me.

Aside from the usual setup, I didn't have to mess with any of the parameters in DD-WRT to get things working well, except to turn off "filter multicast", which I had to do under the original firmware also. (That setting is under security / firewall in the DD-WRT config.)

Overall, DD-WRT is pretty cool. You can see a lot of stuff in the status screens that you can't see under the default firmware. And there's lot of stuff you can tweak, though I doubt I'll mess with it much, assuming it keeps working OK.

more Apple TV fun

2008-09-21T19:51:00.002-04:00

I'm still struggling with my Apple TV. I got an initial sync (with my desktop PC) done only by hooking up the Apple TV to my network with an Ethernet cable. I couldn't get it to work over wireless, no matter what I tried. I came across a good article on the way Apple TV tends to behave more like a computer (with all the usual problems) rather than a consumer electronics device. Good quote: "Whereas most CE A/V products just sit there and work, Apple TV is high-maintenance, demanding too much attention, updating, troubleshooting and overall spoon-feeding."

After the initial sync, I switched back to wireless, and I have been able to sync a few things down to it, though it hasn't been trouble-free. I've also been experimenting with streaming stuff from my MacBook to the Apple TV. I managed to watch an hour-long video podcast with no problems, but then I started experiencing problems with much smaller files. Weird. I played around today some more, and I've discovered that I can stream stuff from the MacBook fine, if it's connected to my network via Ethernet cable. (The Apple TV doesn't need to be wired, just the MacBook.) Again, kind of weird.

On the Apple discussion boards, I've seen three solutions to the Apple TV wireless problems that would probably work:
(1) Leave it hooked up via an Ethernet cable, and forget about using it wirelessly.
(2) Throw your WRT54G router away and get a new one.
(3) Load an alternate firmware on your router, such as DD-WRT.

I'm not real keen on any of those, though I wouldn't mind having an excuse to try out DD-WRT. I'm a little worried that I might brick my router if I do that, but it's only a $50 router, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if it happened. Maybe I'll be doing that later this week.

Apple TV

2008-09-15T22:29:00.002-04:00

I got an Apple TV today. I got it largely so I can watch Battlestar Galactica, season 4, in HD. And so I can watch Torchwood, season 2, which I downloaded back in July but haven't gotten around to watching yet.

It was relatively easy to set up, but I've hit a few snags. The biggest one involves syncing my videos from my PC to the Apple TV. I fully expected that an initial sync between the PC and the Apple TV would take a long time. However, I didn't expect that the sync would hit some kind of snag and abort after 5 minutes, every time I try to run it. Looking at the forums at Apple's web site, it seems like this is a fairly common problem. Reading through a few threads, it seems like the only foolproof way to do an initial sync is to use an Ethernet cable. Unfortunately, I don't have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from my router to my TV here in the apartment. I'll have to borrow one from work tomorrow. I think that this is a pretty big problem -- syncing with a PC is pretty fundamental to the operation of this thing, and it should really be able to do it wirelessly. I don't need it to happen fast, but it should *happen*. I can download pretty big files to my PS3 and my Tivo over the wireless network, no problem, so I know it's not a problem with my network.

iTunes playlists

2008-09-11T19:04:00.003-04:00

Okay, the Genius playlist thing is actually pretty fun. Here's a playlist I got from "Quiet As A Mouse" by Margot & The Nuclear So & So's. This one was off my MacBook rather than my PC.

iTunes 8, continued

2008-09-09T22:40:00.004-04:00

Well, my desktop Vista machine finally finished chugging through its "Genius" stuff. Just for yuks, I hit the Genius button on "Why Henry Drinks", by Drive-By Truckers, and iTunes gave me a pretty awesome playlist, which I'd like to paste here, but I'm having trouble exporting the playlist to a format that I can easily paste into Blogger's editor. The best I can do right now is a screenshot:

iTunes 8

2008-09-09T21:55:00.003-04:00

I've upgraded all of my home computers to iTunes 8 today. My desktop Vista machine is still running through the "Genius" setup, which apparently takes a long time when you run it on a large library. My one pet peeve with iTunes 8 is that there is no longer a preference pane setting to turn off the Genre column in the browser. It can still be turned off though, using this hint. That worked fine on the Mac, but I'm not sure how to translate that to the PC. It's probably a registry setting or something. I'll have to play around with it later.

Meanwhile, I can't seem to download app updates for my iPod Touch from iTunes right now. I'm hoping that's a temporary glitch related to the iTunes 8 rollout. I've got two apps that need to be updated. I'll have to take a look at that again tomorrow.

One more Apple-related note: I ordered a refurbished Apple TV unit today. I was motivated by the availability of Battlestar Galactica in HD on the iTunes store. I never got around to watching any of BSG season 4 off my Tivo, and now the first few episodes have disappeared. (Apparently, I ran out of room at some point, and they were dropped.) The quality on my Tivo Series 2 isn't great anyway. I don't mind paying $30 or so to get the whole season in HD, and without commercials or those annoying crawls for Ghost Hunters or whatever else SciFi is plugging. Oh, and with the Apple TV, I'll finally be able to watch Torchwood season 2 on my TV. I downloaded that from iTunes while I was in San Diego, and I watched the first episode on my laptop, but I haven't gotten around to watching any more of them.

Vista - Aero problems?

2008-09-09T21:21:00.002-04:00

I'm still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven't lost access to the network lately, so that's a good sign. However, I'm now getting occasional messages saying that the "desktop window manager has stopped working". This doesn't cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything's fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn't turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I've got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that's likelier to have good Vista drivers.

Vista - networking, development, etc.

2008-09-03T20:53:00.003-04:00

I didn't touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn't make any more progress on moving to Vista. I'm working on it now, though.

I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.

I've been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It's only happened a couple of times so far, so I'll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.

I'm trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I'm not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it's possible. I'm thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don't need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there's nothing wrong with SQL Express either.

Handsome Devil

2008-09-03T19:38:00.002-04:00

Handsome Devil
Originally uploaded by idoru45

For some reason, I really love this graphic.
Hello Kitty + Stormtrooper = awesome.

Vista: almost done

2008-08-27T21:29:00.004-04:00

I'm nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.

I'm installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven't used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don't think I'm going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don't really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.

I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It's probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I'll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.

I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I'll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don't see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn't seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.