A Collection of Links

Buttons by The Weeks Anna Begins by Counting Crows Everlong by Foo Fighters One new and 2 staples, although the staples tend to fluctuate between songs but the bands are pretty stable. The great thing about music and trips for me is to focus on an album for an entire trip. It has to be one that I am currently hooked on (so not an automatic for every trip). If I am able to have a single album for that trip then for years to come I have a teleporter to that trip. Pop the album in and and the trips feelings and emotions come right back to the surface.

My first post from within Win7 and I must say overall I have been very pleased.  My understanding is this version is more of an R2 of Vista than brand new everything and I think the early Beta stability represents that  (Disclaimer: I am a happy Vista user). The only issue I have had is the lack of a way to mount an iso except through third party plugins.  In this day and age where everything gets distributed via iso files it just seems crazy.  We are left to scrounge around in the free third party tools world to install apps that install device drivers deep in the heart of Windows.  All of this work to create a stable, secure, and reliable OS and the first thing I have to do before I can install Visual Studio is start loading unsupported device drivers which not surprisingly at all, suck.  So for 3 hours last night (until I could find and rip out the offending stuff) my explorer would not work, shutdown would not work and required a hard reset.  So ...

I must admit that while I have really enjoyed getting to know linq , it is not without it's frustrations. Sometimes things that seem like they should work, compile giving you that warm fuzzy, then in execute mode they turn out not to work. I understand that what this really means is that I don't yet intuitively grasp the internals of what is happening in the plumbing but perhaps one day I will. With that being said, today's example is about my first use of orderby for a linq to object query. Consider this linq statement: var needed = from a in myFCs where a.Status == Status.Needed orderby a.Priority, a.WeeksIncluded, a.QtyPlan select a; Looks ok, compiles ok, runs ok with the small issue that as you step through the collection the objects are not ordered as requested. My first thought was that I might need to modify my object class maybe add an additional interface or two. However a few minutes with google got me to here . On...

I'm starting to realize that the real reason the Republicans lost this election is their constant push to 'dumb down' the government finally bottomed out. The American people don't really worry about hiring your buddies and people that helped in your campaign until something really goes wrong. Then they look around and realize - 'You know, I don't want that guy who is in the back of my house fixing my toilet to actually be in charge of making important financial decisions that really impact my life and the direction of this country. I think I would prefer a super smart Harvard educated guy for that.' Pres. Bush's decline really kicked into gear when Katrina happened and we all realized that this dumb ass flunky Brownie had zero qualifications to deal with any significant natural disaster. The right wings inability to see this baffles me. The VP pick fits perfectly into this dumbing down mode. After all the spin what the Couric interview really sho...

Back coding in Visual Studio for awhile and today have slogged through two frustrating problems. Solutions are recorded to save me troubleshooting time in the future. Problem 1: When trying to view the settings of a project (References in this case) instead see the dreaded X in a circle with the error message: An error occurred trying to load the page. COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used. It turns out for me the answer was to uninstall the C# Source Code Analysis plugin. Found the answer on the msdn site . Having done this I could now move on to troubleshooting problem 2 (which was the original problem of the day) Problem 2: Changing a project created in .Net Framework 2 to 3.5 in order to use linq does not automatically add all the stuff needed to actually use linq. In my case linq to xml was what I was after and I had to make the following mods to get back to square 1. First (obviously) from the compile tab select Advanced Compile Options and ...

OK, so this is not the original first post I was going to make, however I just spent 3 hours for the second time in 6 months troubleshooting the exact same problem so I'm posting it here mainly for my benefit. Our setup is an IBM BladeCenter with a combination of HS21 and HS21XM blades connected to an IBM DS3400 Fiber Channel SAN. We purchase our blades without drives and boot from the SAN. This works great once in production but has proved tricky to get into production (if you are like us and only do this every once in a while). I will list the steps below, however the tricky part that bit me again today is this: Once you have created your luns on the SAN and assigned them to your Blade our DS3400 (quietly) assigns a controller owner and preferred path. That controller owner setting must sync up with which HBA controller you have defined as the boot device. On our DS3400 screen that setting is under Modify/Change Logical Drive Ownership/Preferred Path. Without that setting t...

OK, while I'm not at all optimistic that I will make regular contributions in this space I at least felt I should try. I suppose my primary reason for starting this (other than to help me get laid of course) is to try and balance my karma points for all the valuable info I've sucked in from other individuals. Now don't get too excited because you won't get bleeding edge or deep dive stuff here. What I hope you'll get is useful 'one step past the example' stuff. When I'm trying to incorporate all these fascinating next generation tools into my daily grunt programming life, I've found that the examples often serve to get me excited enough to want to incorporate it into my work, however the first chance I get to try and implement this new feature I find my case is always more complicated and the jump from point A to point B is not always intuitive. Of course I'm to blame for not understanding this new thing at a deep enough level, but I'm gu...