Friday, June 11, 2010

Want to know why you computer is slow to boot?

Ask Soluto!  Soluto is a brand new company and product that aims to take the guess work out of determining what is making Windows slow to boot.  We've all got moms, dads, brothers, and sisters who call us up on some Saturday and ask us to look at their computer and speed it up only to find it loaded to the gills with toolbars and "ink reminders".

Now with Soluto, they can just install the slick program, reboot their system, and let it do the work.  It uses a kernel-driver along with a database of applications and user experiences they have collected to determine what an application does and make recommendations to you.

I installed it but it found little it could do to speed up my system.  I have already trimmed almost all the fat from my rig.

Here's a shot of the UI.


You can hover over this timeline of your boot and it will explain each element, what it does, and give you a recommendation as to pausing (not starting) or delaying (start on-demand).  So the next time uncle Bob calls and wants you to speed up his computer, just send him to Soluto!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

XAMPP - Where have you been all my life?



I love Wordpress.  Really there isn't a better blogging platform on this platform.  It's that good.  And I've been using it to self-host my blog for the past year or so.  For awhile, I hosted it using II6 on WHS v1.  That was a real pain as it took several days to find a URL rewriting solution that worked with IIS6.  The past few months I've been hosting it on my Windows 7-based media center.  Since that runs IIS7, URL rewriting was easier using the standard URL rewrite module.

A few days ago I decided to test out WHS "Vail".  After installing it, I wanted to move my blog onto it so I downloaded the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.  It promptly let me know that it couldn't find any products in my selected language.  Huh?  This is what drives people crazy about Windows software.  Crap just doesn't make sense sometimes.

I googled and found several links describing how to manually setup Wordpress on Windows Server 2008 but each of them had about 30 steps.  Sheesh.  I was about to punt back to media center when I remembered trying out XAMPP a few months back.

Man, this thing is beautiful.  I downloaded the installer, double clicked it, and watched it dump Apache, MySQL, and a bunch of other stuff into c:\xampp.  It then brought up this nice UI where I could enable Apache and MySQL as a service and start them.




A simple file copy of my wordpress folder to the c:\xampp\htdocs, a copy of my wordpress mysql database to c:\xampp\mysql\data and create the proper username in mysql and I was set.  That only other thing I had to do was to open the appropriate holes in my Windows firewall.  Five minutes and I was done!  Windows may be pretty awesome but XAMPP is pretty awesome too.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

My month on OS/X is finished

Well, I've finished my month on OS/X.  It wasn't really a month but rather a couple of weeks here and there.  To be honest I didn't really hit too many situations where I felt like I needed Windows.  I didn't have good luck with Chicken-of-the-VNC and the Mac version of remote desktop is not nearly as good as on Windows.  That being said I love the fact that iCal and Contacts sync with Google.

I'm writing this under Windows 7 but I'm typing it into the web UI.  I'll likely hang out in OS/X a bit more as I have some video editing I need to do and iMovie just blows away any free products on Windows.

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.2 beta has been released

Sorry for this not getting out sooner.  Connector/Net 6.3.2 was released several days ago but somehow the release announcement was never made.


MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.2, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release and is intended to introduce you to the new features and enhancements we are planning. This

release should not be used in a production environment.  It is now available in source and binary form from

[http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.3.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later

or choose another download site.)


The new features or changes in this release are:



  • Visual Studio 2010 RTM support

  • New sql editor.  Create a new file with a .mysql extension to see it in action



What we know may be broken

Documentation is not updated yet and is not integrated into VS 2010


Please let us know what else we broke and how we can make it better!