Personal

big shout out to projectreviews.com

2 years ago
by reggie in ,

Just wanted to give a big shout out to this great site for projector info.  I’m in the market for a lower-end 1080p projector and want to this site for some guidance.  After doing tons of reading I had a few questions and popped off a quick email from their contacts page.  I didn’t expect an response but got an email back within 1 hour.  I exchanged a couple of emails with a gentleman from the site and he politely answered some of my questions.

I’m not sure who runs the site but I really appreciated the quick response and helpful info.  Keep up the good work!

The perfect Windows 7 notebook

3 years ago
by reggie in , ,

Well, the perfect Windows 7 notebook [that I own].  I’m sitting at one of my sons wrestling matches typing this into Windows Live Writer running on Windows 7 on a Penryn Macbook Pro.  And boy is it sweet.

I’ve had either Vista or Windows Server 2008 dual booting on this Mac since the day I bought it and was never really satisfied with it. I blogged how nice it was shortly after I got it but there seemed to be some nagging issues with it.   It always seemed to get too hot.  The other main issue was that it would frequently not got to sleep properly.  It was not uncommon for m to fully charge the battery, use it for a few minutes, close the lid, and then come back the next day to a dead machine.  Very frustrating.

As soon as Windows 7 beta hit the streets I had to give it a try and I am sure glad I did.  The sleep issues seem to have been fixed.  Windows 7 picked up the built-in wireless without needing to install the Boot Camp drivers (though I did install them later to get the keyboard and iSight working).  It also doesn’t seem to get hot any longer.  I’ve used it extensively on my lap both on and off power.  Only slightly warm.   Very nice.

Oh, and the battery life.  Under Vista I really would not get any more than 2 hours.  It definitely seems better.  I would say nearly 3 hours but I don’t have specific data on that. 

What do you get when you combine the sleekness and features of a MacBook Pro with the dual boot goodness of Windows 7 and OS/X?  Get one and find out!  You won’t be disappointed.

Straight from the WTF category

3 years ago
by reggie in , ,

So last night my family and I go to watch some scary movies that had been recorded and find out that our media center computer is not working.  So like a dutiful geekdad, I march into the office to see what is wrong.  I remote into the media center with no trouble but no matter what I try the 360 just won't connect to it.  Running the network tuner it reports poor network performance, way below the 'Acceptable for TV' line.  Hmm.  So I spend the next hour running wires from various ports around the house, switching ports on the switch in the media cabinet, everything I could think of.  Nothing.

I never really paid much attention to the activation prompt that it was giving me when I remoted into it.  Surely MS would not be that stupid.  Surely.

So this morning I tried to connect to a media center computer I had running in a virtual machine (yeah VirtualBox) and it worked without a hitch.  So I remote back into the non-working media center computer and run through the activation process.  Bingo.  360 now connects perfectly and the network tuning wizard shows the exact same network as maxed out on quality.

Lesson learned?  Instead of just disabling Media center functionality and just telling you that until you activate it won't work, MS apparently just cripples it so that it doesn't work but doesn't tell you what is wrong.  Absolutely ridiculous.

 

Whew!

3 years ago
by reggie in ,

I don’t know what the hell happened but I still have my blog posts.  Whew!  I recently moved my blog from a cheap GoDaddy account to my Windows Home Server.  I consider this entirely your fault, dear reader, as if I had more readers then I would feel compelled to host it externally with a fatter pipe.  But I digress…  :)

In any case, while was otherwise occupied (attending the Sun DBTG developers conference in Riga, Latvia) something happened to my server and I came home to my files not working.  They were there but any attempt to open them would give some obscure error about the system not being able to access it.  Clearly this had something to do  with the “special” load balancing driver that WHS uses.  In any case it appeared my music and blog was toast.

Earlier today I learned that WHS maintains another link to your shared folders.  I enabled viewing the protected folders and saw a folder named “DE” on c:.  Peeking there shows the same shared folder directory structure only these work!  Clearly these are sym links as c: is only as 20 gig partition but it was showing nearly 80 gig of data in this folder.  I quickly copied these off to a new machine and rebuilt my WHS server.  Blog restored!

Lesson learned?  Get a second hard drive in your WHS machine so the folder duplication junk can do its thing!

Slide.Show installed as my photo viewer

3 years ago
by reggie in ,

Finally got around to hacking in Slide.Show as my photo viewer.  Yup, you need Silverlight installed to see them but with the way that Silverlight is growing that shouldn’t be a problem.

Go check it out and let me know what you think!

Back in the game — with a new addition

4 years ago
by reggie in ,

Well I’ve been pretty quiet for the past few days and for a very good reason.  His name is Daniel Mitchell Burnett and at 9 lbs. 7 oz. and 21 ” long he is larger at birth than our other 3 children.  He was born at 11am on September 27.

So far it’s been a wonderful time, just like with my other children.  Elevated jaundice levels right after birth, lots of nursing, lots of dirty diapers, and lots and lots of fun and love.

Image 8C-138

Image 8C-142

It’s 9/25. Do you have your Halo 3?

4 years ago
by reggie in

I knew the Halo 3 launch date had arrived last night when I look over and see my 1 1/2 year old putting on the headset and grabbing the controller.  I had to take a a few quick snap.  (never mind his dirty shirt — he had just finished eating without a bib!)

2007-09-25 001 035

It lives! It lives!

4 years ago
by reggie in ,

My SMT 5600 died two week ago.  This is an awesome little phone.  Much better than the Cingular 2125, runs Windows Mobile, small and fast.  And two weeks ago mine had a lovely while LCD screen.  You could vaguely make out what was happening on screen which means the phone wasn’t entirely dead.  You could still make and take phone calls.  Just don’t try using the menus or looking up a contact.  And, yup, out of warranty.

So…..  off to eBay I go.  Picked up a non-working model on the hope that the LCD was still good.  Cost me $24 after shipping but turned out to be worth it.  I used these excellent directions for disassembling the phone and it took me all of about 30 minutes to swap out the screens.  Man was I happy to see color when I powered it on.

Blog Moved!

4 years ago
by reggie in ,

I have officially moved my blog from www.bytefx.com/blog to www.reggieburnett.com.  Please update your links, bookmarks, readers, etc.  I have attempted to preserve as many of the old dasBlog URLs as I can but I know of at least 3 URL types that are not working currently.  I’ll try to get those working over the weekend.  If you find any old URL that is not working, please drop me a line so I can fix it.

Thanks!

Oh yeah!

4 years ago
by reggie in ,

I had been thinking of moving my blog for some time now.  I started my blog back when I was self-employed and operating under the corporate name ByteFX.  I have been employed by MySQL now for more than 3 years and been blogging about all things .NET and MySQL at my ByteFX site.  While technically there is nothing wrong with this, it always felt wrong to me to blog about my efforts at my current employment under a different corporate website.  The domain name ‘reggieburnett.com’ was available so I jumped.

GoDaddy.com offers some very cheap Windows hosting so I decided to host my new site and blog there.  They offer a very professional setup and the only real hang up was that my site had to be medium trust compatible.  dasBlog, my current blog software of choice, is not.  So I made the move to Subtext, a BSD-licensed fork of .Text.  It’s simple, SQL-based (soon to support MySQL), includes a photo gallery, and works under medium trust.  Sold.  Now I need to move my current blog to Subtext.  Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

While Subtext can import BlogML data, dasBlog doesn’t support BlogML export.  After asking on the dasBlog mailing list, I found a blog post here that includes a BlogML import/export tool.  After a few tweaks, I managed to generate a fairly large BlogML file that imported cleanly into Subtext.  I also found this page that I basically followed the rest of the way home.

A few support calls to GoDaddy.com, a few code changes to the IHttpHandler included on the referenced page, and I had my old blog moved over and most old dasBlog links working.  I still don’t have CategoryView, month view, or default.aspx#{guid} style urls working but I’ll hack on those tomorrow.

I’ll send out a separate (and more brief) announcement but my blog has officially moved from www.bytefx.com/blog to www.reggieburnett.com.  Please update your bookmarks and reader subscriptions appropriately.  Thanks!

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