Posts from — February 2008

Press both shift keys at the same time.

I blog this because no matter how many times I accidentally enable sticky keys, I can never remember how to turn it off.

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of PC hardware.  After building a couple Windows Media Centers, and constantly upgrading them, I found myself with enough parts for a rather powerful home server:

·         Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86Mhz

·         4GB RAM

·         (3) SATA hard drives ranging in size from 120GB to 500GB

What I envisioned was a centralized server built to meet the following requirements:

·         Manage backups of my notebooks, and media centers

·         Act as a print server

·         Web/ftp server

·         SQL server

·         Domain controller

·         File server

It didn’t have to do all these things, but it would be nice.  First I looked at Windows Home Server.  I was a beta tester for this product and it was a nice all in one package that met my backup, fileserver, and print server needs.

However, I’m a geek and it didn’t seem powerful enough for me.   I then tried Ubuntu Server.  This could meet most of my needs, but for all its power sometimes it’s just nice to go with the familiar windows GUI.  Because with Linux I find myself searching forums for help far too often, and for things that should be simple (ie. Connecting to a network, installing video drivers, etc…)

Then as a user of VMware workstation, I thought to look into server virtualization.  Unlike the Workstation version, VMware offers a FREE server version (VMware Server).

Now with VMware Server I have a setup that looks like this:

·         Windows Server 2003 (Host OS) – File Server, FTP/IIS, Backup server

o   Windows 2003 (Guest OS) – Domain controller

o   Windows 2003 (Guest OS) – Development Server (i.e. Visual Studio, SQL, IIS, SharePoint Services)

o   Ubuntu Server (Guest OS) – Subversion server

In the end I have 4 servers on a single physical box and I couldn’t be more satisfied.

Just my luck!  Two months out of warranty and the thing stops booting.  I’ve tracked the problem down to the Intel 3945 wireless card.  If the wifi card is enabled in the BIOS, the notebook freezes while booting.  If it is disabled the notebook boots fine.  Initially I thought the problem was Windows Vista (because it’s so easy to blame Vista).  But I’ve tried XP and Ubuntu and the problem remains.  It always hangs during the OS loading progress bar, so I’m sure it’s hanging up when the OS tries to load the wifi card.

So now that I know the wireless card is the problem, the logical next step is to replace the card…right?  And while I’m at it, I might as well upgrade to the Intel 4965 card so that I can move to 802.11n. But after installing the new card the problem still remains. 

What to do…what to do?  Replace the motherboard? Buy a USB wifi adapter, or maybe an ExpressCard adapter (like the Linksys WEC600N)?

I’ve searched and searched and haven’t found anyone with the same problem.  I can’t be the only one, can I?

QuickFormatter

I don’t really know how best to describe this application, so I’ll just explain why I wrote it.  I tend to do a lot of work for marketing departments, and marketing tends to love Excel.  They give me spreadsheets containing email addresses, tradeshow leads, customer lists, etc… And then they want me to use these spreadsheets to pull data from a database, send an email newsletter, or do miracles.

For quick ad-hoc queries I found myself writing SQL with WHERE IN clauses, and using the data from a one of the columns in the spreadsheet.  So this application lets you copy a single column and paste it into the application window. Click a button and instantly the column is converted to being quoted and separated by commas for use in an IN clause.  You can also separate the fields by semi-colon or comma. See the screenshot below for a better idea of what it does.

I’m a lazy programmer. Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s a good thing. I believe it drives me to come up with innovative solutions for problems that I’m too lazy to deal with on a regular basis. This frees me up to work on the things that I enjoy, while spending less time on the tedious.

Lately I’ve turned to CMS systems like Kentico, Drupal, and Joomla when I’m creating websites, because I can spend more time on the design and layout and less time developing the backend.

Sometimes, I want more control than a CMS allows, and I want to write more code. In the past I’ve written my own data access layer, and in most cases that works just fine. However, i “need to spend more time with [my] friends, family, dog, bird, cat…” so I started looking for solutions…and I found several:

• SubSonic
• DbEntry.NET
• NHibernate
• Codus
• LLBLGen Pro

To be fair, I only tried the first three because they’re open source (free), and in the end, SubSonic met all my needs. It is easy to use. All you really need to do, it setup the database connection string in the app.config/web.config file, run a macro, and sit back and drink your coffee. In the end you’re presented with a couple classes for each table in your database.

Then creating a table record is as easy as:


user = new UserObject(1);
user.FirstName = "Adam";
user.LastName = "Conde";
user.EmailAddress = "myemail@something.com";
user.Save();


Querying is similarly easy.
Check it out for yourself: SubSonic: All Your Database Are Belong To Us