I’ve got no doubt I’ll take some heat for going this route, but my solution to the build it or buy it dilemma was in fact to buy a new box. I decided to go for a machine from their business lineup, the Vostro 430 MT. This machine comes with a bunch of cores and an ample amount of RAM will allow this box to become the base for my home computing activities.

This machine’s primary duty will be to take over the day-to-day computing tasks from my Macbook freeing it up for mobile-only duties so that I’m not carrying around the primary copies of most of my data every time I leave the house.  In addition, I’ll be virtualizing the two desktop machines I have in the basement today, one of which has succumbed to old age in the past couple of months.  The VMs will provide some added flexibility as far as Operating Systems and some single-duty machines.

For now I’m evaluating a couple of virtualization options to use on the new box when it arrives, and I’m re-working the layout of the home network, splitting out VLANs for the servers to help isolate them a bit from the rest of the network. The main goal of some of this is to play around and learn the technologies, of course.

Some of the VM applications I’m considering include test machines for development, SSH tunnel/proxy for remote access, web server, Mozilla Weave server, secure machine for my office VPN and whatever else my dreams, or nightmares (or conversations with Knightwise) inspire.

The machine should arrive in the next week, unboxing and other additional posts will follow.

Google Docs today expanded the functionality of the service by offering 1GB of cloud storage for any type of file you want to upload. The only restrictions seem to be the 1GB cap on storage (you can buy more at $0.25 USD / GB) and the limit of 250MB per individual file.

Though it doesn’t quite match some of the other features we’ve become accustomed to seeing in cloud storage like an OS client with drag & drop functionality, it certainly provides a reliable place to store some of your larger files that won’t fit under the smaller 20MB cap that Google places on email. This is quite possibly the precursor to the much lauded and speculated about G-Drive cloud storage service.

via LifeHacker

A super fast way to create ISO images (or any kind of bit for bit copies) from the OS X (or linux, or unix) command line is to use the DD command. This isn’t without it’s risks since the DD command will duplicate byte for byte all data from one location to another, but once you’ve found the necessary information you can easily replicate data.

I needed to create a copy of my Windows XP installation CD to use for setting up new virtual machines. Since it’s quicker to install VMs from an ISO image rather than from the installation media I wanted an ISO of my CD. The built in OS X disk utility can make this work… in theory. My copy of disk utility (on Snow Leopard) didn’t want to recognize the CD. So I turned to my command line knowledge.

I should also note that before you can read the CD using DD, you will need to unmount it:

sudo umount /dev/disk1s0

You’ll be prompted for your administrator password, then you’re in business.

To create an image of a CD (or DVD or anything else…) use the following:

dd if=/dev/disk1s0 of=/Users/kdmurray/Desktop/WindowsXP.iso bs=64k

• if= input file, in this case our Windows XP CD
• of= output file, the actual ISO file you want created
• bs= block size, the size of chunks the tool will work with

I did a few speed tests at 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, 256k and 1M and found that the 64k seemed to be the ideal block size on my machine. This will vary by CPU, and possibly by hard drive controller, so do a few contolled tests first. To do a test, start the copy process, then stop it after 20-30s (ctrl-c). Whichever one copied the most in 30s is the one you should use.

That’s all she wrote, folks. Happy command-lining.

The time has finally come for me to pick up a new system. This is usually a very happy moment in a geek’s life; the time when you get to spec out a new system with some of the latest tech. Reading product reviews, selecting components… it’s fun!

One of the true marks of geekdom is the ability to build your own machines from the ground up. Everything from ordering the parts, to gingerly placing in the CPU and glopping on just the right amount of thermal-conductive paste right through to powering up the system for the first time then installing and pimping out the OS of your choice. I’ve been there, its a ton of fun when you finally get everything working just right. It’s also a fair bit of work.

The more pragmatic geek can also buy a system, spec’d to order from companies like Dell or Lenovo. These systems still have pretty much everything you want, professionally assembled and sent to your door. These usually take a few weeks to ship so you need to be a bit more patient but there’s a lot less work involved.

So, what about price? Most of the time the price is pretty comparable for a complete system. I priced out a system with the following basic requirements from both Dell and a local computer retailer:

• Intel Core i7 860
• 8GB of Memory
• Windows 7 Pro

The two systems came out less than $80 apart with some minor differences in specs, hard drive size, optical drive, video card etc. For the most part it was the same system, and essentially the same price.

So what does it come down to? Is one option truly better than any other? The best advice I can give is that you need to get yourself a system you can trust. If that means you want professionals to put the system together for you and certify it, then that’s the route you need to take. If, however, you’re the Richard Stallman of computer builds and you feel that you need to free each of the components and build a computer that’s independent of “the man” and that’s where you derive the most value, then that should be your choice.

Image courtesy Frigante on Flickr.

For the longest time I simply lived with the fact that my system clock didn’t behave properly in my Windows partition when I had BootCamp setup on the macbook. It didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to keep the clock properly synchronized.  The problem stems from how Apple decided to implement the system clock which is different from the way that most PC manufacturers do.

Apple’s hardware always returns time in UTC, most PCs update the system clock to local time and won’t require a conversion of that time so of course the default Windows settings aren’t really set up for BootCamp (though you’d think the BootCamp installer could correct this…)

The solution, as it turns out, is a simple registry key change to tell Windows that the system’s clock is using UTC time.  One value in one key, that’s all it takes:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

BootcampUtcClockFix.reg

Another solution that I found over at superuser.com is to modify OS X to change the time at startup and at shutdown. To me, this seems like more of a hack than the “unsupported” registry key. Windows 7 has been working well under this configuration and has even successfully interpreted the daylight saving time change.

It’s been a long time since I had an active presence on GeoCities (about 13 years by my count) but its still a site that holds a place in my heart. I got  started with website design, as did thousands of other people, by having a site on GeoCities many years ago. And within a few months of joining what was in some ways one of the earliest social networks of the web, I’d entered the “GeoCities Community Leader” program to help other people learn the technology, and learn to do more with the tools the free service provided.

Today Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities officially. For good. It’s been 15 years since the service got its start in 1994, and 10 years since Yahoo bought the company for over $3 Billion in stock near the peak of the tech bubble in late 1999. Yahoo was fairly patient with the service leaving accounts active in one form or another until today.  It is in many ways the end of an era.

Some sites are paying tribute to the venerable property. I can’t tell if xkcd is paying tribute, or reminding those of us who are a bit sentimental just what the web looked like when GeoCities was the major force behind free web space on the internet.  Either way, have a look at the xkcd homepage today, or if you’ve missed the boat on that one, click the image in the right for a look at their 1990’s inspired design.

RIP GeoCities.

I’ve been looking for a better way to do my Windows dev work at home for a while now.  I’ve explored a few different options including VMs and Mono, none of which suited the needs that I have.

I’m not someone who has to have the latest & greatest computers to get my stuff done. The things I use my computer for don’t require a whole lot of horsepower. Truth be told, the newest computer in the whole house is my three-year-old Macbook. So when it came to deciding which of the three machines in my house were going to get the Windows 7 treatment it wasn’t hard to decide.

Apple has said that they won’t be providing official support for Windows 7 on any of their machines for another few weeks, and when they do it’ll be on a limited subset of their Intel-based machines, and only for customers who’ve shelled out the extra $30 for Snow Leopard. Admittedly I’m not an expert in computer hardware, but I’ve been around the block enough times to know that “not officially supported” doesn’t mean “it won’t work”.

The first thing I tried to do was just clear some disk space and run the boot-camp wizard to set up a partition for Windows. Once again I ran into the problem of OS X not being able to reorganize the files on disk to create a contiguous partition. This doesn’t usually pose a problem with computers that have a disk defragmenting tool but of course OS X has some redimentary defrag technology built-in and thus the notion that “Mac’s don’t need to be defragged”. I call shenanigans.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that the only way I was getting back to the nirvana of dual booting was going to be to re-image the Macbook again, I backed up the system, procured a copy of Snow Leopard and got started with the process. Reinstalling OS X was about the same as with Leopard. A couple of new options but nothing earth shattering. The Windows 7 installation on the was also nothing special. Smooth and straightforward as we’d expect out of any modern OS, but it did move fairly quickly.

If you happen to be reading this before you do your installs there’s one useful piece of information in the 14 page document that Apple says you need to read before trying the scary installation of Windows on your Mac. That would be that the drivers for Windows are located on your Snow Leopard install disk. I spent about 3 hours trying to find drivers.

Even though Apple says Windows 7 isn’t supported, the included drivers on the Snow Leopard disk (intended for use with Vista) work just fine.  Windows also reports that some drivers fail to install properly, but in my case there’s nothing overtly wrong. Network, audio, video keyboards & mice are all working as expected with the exception of multitouch functionality on the trackpad. Since I’ll be using the Windows side of the machine most often when connected to a full desk setup (KVM) I’m not too worried about it.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve finally gotten around to playing with the (now not so new) ASP.NET MVC Framework. This, of course, is Microsoft’s take on the MVC architecture pattern which gives developers another well supported and well documented alternative to traditional WebForms projects.

The test machine that I’m running is Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Unlike more contemporary versions of IIS, it doesn’t support MVC out of the box and leads to the rather annoying problem of 404’s on every page.

The cause of this is that IIS 6.0 expects a physical file to be available every time a URL is called. When it can’t find the files that match the nice URL routes that the MVC framework uses by default it panics and throws the 404. Thankfully there’s a quick configuration change you can make to fix this issue: enabling ASP.NET to manage wildcard URLs.

Step-by-step Guide

1. Open up the IIS manager
2. Open the properties of the site you want to manage
3. Click on the Home Directory tab, then the Configuration button
4. Click on Insert
5. Browse to the ASP.NET ASAPI dll, by default located at: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll
6. Unckeck the box Verify that file exists
7. Click the myriad OK buttons and voilà!

Now, since that was so simple you may be wondering what the catch is.  Well the catch is this: the wildcard option has IIS process every request into the server, including static files.  Since ASP.NET doesn’t process the files as efficiently as IIS does natively it will cause the application to take a performance hit.  If your applications require really high performance, or have a large user base it might be worth considering upgrading to a newer version of Windows and IIS.

This technique was shamelessly paraphrased from the article on Steve Sanderson’s blog which goes into more detail on the hows and whys behind this structure in IIS.  Steve also offers a few other options which have their own pros and cons.  If you’re making these changes to a production environment I’d recommend you give his article a thorough read.

Enjoy.

Over the past several months I’ve mentioned occasionally that I’m working on a new software development focused podcast. The time has finally come for me to make a more official announcement about this new endeavour.

The new show called Short Order Code. The show will be a
series of audio podcasts and video screencasts focusing on a number of
areas of practical software development.

The first episode is out now, and the next few are in various stages of being produced while I put together the final bits and pieces and trying to sort out my process.  Once that’s done and the first few episodes have been put together
I’ll try to provide more information around long-term plans for the
show.

For those who may be wondering, this is not going to affect my
affiliation with the Aussie Geek Podcast (despite our . I love doing the show, and plan to continue in my co-hosting role for the foreseeable future as long as the AGP community is willing to have me. Time zone considerations will probably continue to make a mess of our schedule, but we’ll do our best to produce a great show for the community as often as we possibly can.

So keep your eyes peeled for more information, and head on over to the website at shortordercode.com and subscribe to the feed!

We were on vacation for a couple of months back staying with my wife’s family in the US.  I didn’t completely unplug during the trip, though I wasn’t checking work email, my personal accounts were down to a cursory glance once-per-day, and I’ve dialed back on the Twitter usage quite significantly.

In some of my relaxation time (while babysitting my sleeping 7-month old niece) I got the chance to do a bit of software development. My brother-in-law and I got to talking one night about a project he was hoping to get some help with. He had asked me as an adviser, and since the work was similar to things I’d done for work in the past I felt compelled to offer to help.

The project itself was simple enough: take this text file and put its contents into an Access database. The process has reminded me about why I like software development, and why I miss it.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks we went through a half-dozen iterations of the application, much in the same way that I would have worked with end-users inside our business unit at work.  It allowed me to work through a problem, understanding the true nature of the business problem that he was trying to solve, not necessarily just the problem as it was described in the initial requirements discussion.

I had the chance to pull out skills that I hadn’t exercised much in the past couple of years since my job role has changed, which was a great shift for me.  It’s given me the push I needed to get the podcast going, and to dive in to a few of my other projects with a bit more gusto.  Software is a craft, and its one that I need to continue to hone as time moves forward.  I could probably be considered little more than an apprentice right now, but with the entire Internet as my journeyman instructor I should be able to earn my ticket in the months to come.