Chris Rathjen : Random Stuff

More than meets the eye...

CRathjen — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:05:00 GMT

Totally off topic: We just got back from watching Transformers. I'll write up a bigger review if there's interest. The short version: It was awesome. Great action movie, one of the few that actually does a decent job at also telling a story and connecting you with it. Good pacing, great special effects, good integration of the music with the scenes, etc. I imagine a few die-hards won't like some of the "liberties" taken with the franchise to make it into a single-shot movie, but the rest of us should appreciate it. More than a couple nitpicks in the reality/movie physics department, but nothing excessive.

Go see it :)

What I've done...I've faced myself

We have added his biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.

CRathjen — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:18:54 GMT

Becoming a full-time employee of Microsoft (or "MSFTie") is often jokingly referred to as "joining the collective" in public and even within our cybernetic halls.

I mentioned awhile back that we'd gotten some additional team-members on the Setup/Admin/Ops QA team, and (as James recently enlightened me), one of them just started blogging. Welcome to the land of the blogs, Abdelhamid! As he said in his first post, he started last fall, and he's done some truly wonderful work in the months since.

In fact, one of the first projects we tossed at him was creating a tool to automate the installation of Team Foundation Server. This includes installing pre-requisites, installing and then upgrading from Whidbey (TFS 2005), optionally installing and configuring SharePoint, and fully supporting our many configuration options (single- vs. dual-server, SQL named instances, remote WSS, etc.). This tool has really improved our effective bandwidth in testing setup, and we're even thinking about turning it into a ~~Power Toy~~ Power Tool - would people be interested in something like that?

Abdelhamid completed the 'official' training requirements for the job by now, but I haven't run him through all of our unofficial training courses yet:

Watch Office Space until you can recognize and/or quote memorable lines. IMHO, this is a must-have for any desk job.
Watch all six Star Wars movies and be able to correctly rank them in order from best to "suckiest". For bonus credit, explain why "Han Shot First" is so important to the movies and to culture at large.
Frag me in - well, anything, the standard typically being Halo 1/2/3 or Counter-Strike. Most team members have failed to complete (or even attempt) this course, but several other TFS (and ex-TFS) staff have no trouble with this one (namely Patrick from the Team Build team).

I'm pleased to say he has already completed one course with high marks - Bojangles Appreciation. Bojangles and I were born in the same year; coincidence? I think not.

Blowing with the wind of change...

Tagged!

CRathjen — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 02:08:00 GMT

James tagged me - I guess it was only a matter of time. Being the avid Snow Crash fan that I am, I feel like I'm propagating a virus...

gen(n-1) tag: James

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

In the same vein (no pun intended) as James', I was quite accident-prone as a child, such that it's somewhat miraculous that I survived this long. At least a half-dozen trips to the ER, at least 3 concussions; perhaps unsurprisingly, I have trouble remembering exactly how many head injuries I've suffered. Most of you don't know this, but those who learn frequently remark that "explains so much" about my personality - I really WAS dropped on my head a bunch as a kid. Sadly, it was mostly my own doing! :)
In 5th (or 6th? See #1) grade, I got separated from my school tour group while visiting Colonial Williamsburg. It was a defining moment for me - where previously I would have panicked, cried, and basically waited for someone to help me, I (somewhat spontaneously) decided I was going to get myself out of trouble this time. I explored virtually the whole area, asked for directions, even climbed a wall, got sunburnt, but finally found the group more or less on my own. While in hindsight, I would probably have "been found" sooner, the determination to act, rather than be victimized, has stuck with me ever since. Particularly in cases where I get myself into a jam - my single-minded fascination with a firearms display is what let the group leave at least 15 minutes before I noticed.
I can't decide what "mature" really means. When I was a teenager, I thought it was being independent. Since I've fallen in love and gotten in married, right now I think a big part of it is having things (people in particular, but perhaps causes as well) that you care about more than yourself; I wonder if the definition will continue to refine (I won't say change - I do still value my ability act independently when appropriate) over time, whether it's a natural function of age, or merely another of my (many) quirks.
I like being wrong more than being right. Many who know me will think I've just hit my head again, but it's true. I'd much rather advance an idea or belief about something and have it debated - even proved wrong - than blindly accepted as accurate/correct/gospel/etc. Why? Because I learn a lot from the debate, or the correction. Finding out I'm right about something is nice but not nearly as satisifying. I guess I'm saying that I love to learn.
My birthday is on (what is often) the shortest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) - December 21st. Again, upon learning this, many people find this to be entirely appropriate.

Now, whom shall I tag? I must admit my "blog circle" is rather limited - many of those I'd like to tag have already been tagged in previous generations.

gen(n+1) tags:

I'll pick Josh, Korby, Joel, Jason, and Hans of BugBash. I'm not sure if any of them will notice, but I've always liked reading what they have to say and it'd be nice to know a few things I don't know about them...

Vista RC1 goodness

CRathjen — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:26:00 GMT

Slightly off my normal topics, but I wanted to post a quick note about Vista. More of a "datapoint" than a general review.

On the downside, I'm discovering that 1GB of RAM just really isn't enough for what I do with a machine (professionally) these days - between muliple instances of VS, an IE with tons of open tabs, Outlook (and often some Word and Excel docs), somewhere between 2 and 10 command prompts, etc. all open at once, I'm hard pressed for RAM with *any* OS.

Vista does like to complain that I'm using up too much memory.

But, so far, it's just prompted me periodically. It hasn't stopped working, or gotten noticably slower, since the day I booted it. That was eighteen days ago - the day I installed it (this build is just a couple before the official RC1, but out of the RC1 branch). It has updated itself since then, but none of those have required a reboot. I had to restart once or twice the day I installed it (AV software, for example), but all in all, I'm very pleased and extremely satisfied with Vista's uptime performance.

Not that 18 days is a record (by any means), but given that it's reached that far without me even trying, or really paying attention, is noteworthy (IMHO). My goal for uptime is always "I only reboot when there's a reasonable need", and I think Vista will hit that. I'll restart if I change hardware, or if a critical update requires it (and maybe when I go on vacation), but it doesn't look like I'll ever need to otherwise. XPsp2 and 2k3sp1 have both (generally) held up to this standard (XP still tends to need reboots for updates a tad more often than I'd like), and it's good to know that Vista is already establishing the same high bar.

Team Foundation Server: Why are my files transferring so slowly?

CRathjen — Thu, 11 May 2006 21:59:00 GMT

I'm not sure if anyone "in the field" has run into this (yet), but it's happened to us a couple times internally now, and I figured other folks might be interested in the issue.

We've seen situations where larger files (in the latest case, 100 meg) take an inordinate amount of time to upload (checkin) or get.

After some poking and prodding, the devs tracked the problem to a configuration disparity - the AT's network interface was set to Auto-negotiate link speed and duplex, while the switch to which it was connected was "forced" to 100Mbps, Full-duplex (or maybe I have the server and switch reversed, but either way). Once these two settings were made to match, the problem went away. We've observed it a few times since in various test runs.

I'm not sure WHY this mismatch is a problem (since I'm assuming Auto is still negotiating to 100/Full), but this issue has a very distinct set of symptoms and the cause isn't apparent (unless you just happen to monitor your switch error rates for fun). I used to take a certain amount of pride in my knowledge of networking, but this one throws me every time. Maybe someone out there who admins a switch can enlighten me?

So, if you see file transfers that take way too long - but only for files above a certain size - check your network card settings and compare them to the switch. Hopefully, most of you out there would only have to worry about this setting at most once (per server, anyway).

Dust-busting for fun and profit: Your computer will thank you!

CRathjen — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:00:00 GMT

I was just reading Raymond's latest post, partially relating to computer heat (and how the symptoms it typically presents might not be heat-related after all).

I was going to comment with my own anecdote, but it's more of an aside, so I decided to post it here instead of spam Raymond's comment stream. Regardless, if you can't remember the last time you gave your computer an "air bath", this may help encourage you to give it some much-needed TLC.

My wife blasted a couple months' worth of accumulated dust out of her machine the other day - CPU temperature under load dropped six degrees, and case interior temperature by five (degrees Farenheit - sorry, I know, a number without units is a like a day without sunshine). Your results may not be this dramatic - it was so bad she had to remove the CPU fan to get all of the caked dust out of the heat sink - but if you have *any* pets, or (as Raymond said) you keep your computer in a less-than-ideal location, you should definitely pop the cover periodically and clean as necessary.

This stopped an intermittent application crash problem (if "EverQuest2.exe" counts as an application...), and let her turn the fans' RPMs down - the office sounds like an office (instead of a wind tunnel) again.

Now if someone would just get some foolproof water-cooling systems designed, we could seal (or at least more heavily filter) cases and really put this problem out to pasture...

It probably doesn't need to be said, but don't do this unless you know what you're doing (stick with compressed air, always hold the can upright, etc., and do not shake it first unless the can instructs you to do so).

Random XP tip: Scheduled disk defragmentation

CRathjen — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:25:00 GMT

It came to my attention that a lot of folks don't know about one of the very nice additions that came long with the rest of Windows XP: A command-line interface to the disk defragmenter. This means it's now easy to setup a scheduled task to defrag your hard disk(s), whereas with Windows 2000 it was rather difficult.

If you're already familiar with scheduled tasks, all you need to know is that the tool is located at %WinDir%\system32\defrag.exe, and takes the drive letter as an argument (e.g. "c:\winnt\defrag.exe c:".

If you've never created/managed a scheduled task before, don't worry - it's not very hard:

Bring up Control Panel
Double-click on "Scheduled Tasks"
Double-click on "Add Scheduled Task"
Click "Next", then click "Browse"
Type (or paste in) %windir%\system32\defrag.exe (then click Open)
Change the name of the task from "defrag" to "Defrag C" (note that you can't put a colon in the name of the task)
Select "Weekly" for the task interval (if you're really obsessed with performance, you can set it to daily), press "Next"
Change the start time - I usually use 04:00am. Select a day of the week. The only caveat here is to be sure to pick a time the machine is actually on (so if you turn your computer off every night, 4am is probably not the best choice); press Next
Enter an administrator user and password, press Next
Check the box for advanced properties, then click Finish.
When the advanced properties come up, add the drive letter to the end of the run box, you should see something like this afterwards (note the colon): C:\WINNT\system32\defrag.exe c:
You shouldn't need to change any of the other settings, but feel free to look them over

I assure you the fact that this was a 12-step process is entirely coincidental. If you have multiple hard drives, repeat steps 3-12 for each - be sure each task has a unique name.

When you're done, you should see something like this:

That's all there is to it! You may want to bring up scheduled tasks every so often and make sure they're working as expected (last result is 0x0). If you see 0x7, that means the disk has less than 15% free space and therefore defrag.exe won't run by default - you can add -f to the command if you want it to defrag anyway, but I generally advise freeing up some space instead. If you see 0x1, the password is probably wrong or out of date.

Resolved Work Item: Get Married

CRathjen — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:23:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, I was working extra-hard to help get our branch/merge features ready for the Release Candidate.

Last week was a change of pace - I was on the beautiful island of St. Lucia, getting married!

It was something of an open secret (hmm, they've been engaged for a few months now, and they're going to a tropical island for a week...I wonder what might happen?), but now that it's official, I just had to share.

You can read all about it on my personal blog, including a link to pictures of our casual, somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to wedding apparel. The other four or five couples we met who were tying the knot in St. Lucia were sticking to wedding dresses and fairly formal attire, but that's not really our style.

It's funny; if you'd asked me about 18 months ago, which would come first:

1) Team Foundation Server version 1 ships
2) Chris gets married

I would have said TFS, no contest. Funny how things change, isn't it?

Anyway, now that #2 has been taken care of, I should get back to making #1 a reality.

Crazy little thing called love...

Shameless Plug: Fog Creek Copilot

CRathjen — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:56:00 GMT

I had another opportunity to use Copilot last night, helping out a relative with a cranky printer. What is Copilot? I'll sum it up as "Remote Desktop for Dummies," but I mean that in the best possible way. Basically, it's a tool to let a geek get at a non-geek's computer quickly and easily, without having to deal with firewall hassles, etc.

The first time I used Copilot - not long after it came out - there were some decidedly rough edges. The Fog Creek folks were very receptive to my bug report, and made sure I was happy with the outcome of the bug finding/reporting process.

This time, the experience was much smoother -- partly due to the 'target' machine being newer, no doubt, but still a definite improvement. The visual performance/experience isn't up to what I'm used to with RD, but considering the nature of the solution (Copilot uses an intermediary server so neither end sees the traffic as "incoming" and thus firewalled), and given the trivial purchase and setup, it's well worth the tradeoff for the 'friends&family-tech-support' role.

I'm a big fan of software that "just works". Copilot wasn't there yet when I first tried it, but it may just be there now. I'll have to investigate this monthly plan they're offering now...

So close...yet so far...

CRathjen — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:38:00 GMT

There's a LOT to like in the 2.0 version of the Framework and Base Class Library.

But, I ran into something today that I feel is missing. Or at least, it'd be really cool of it was there.

I want to be able to override the ToString method on an enum.

I know, I know - on the surface, it sounds evil. Enums aren't reference types, you nit! They're value types (sort of). But, ever since enum got a ToString() method, I've been running into times I wanted to specialize the way it worked.

Today, the issue was that we want to future-proof some testcases. So, instead of using some strings directly, we want to enumerate their logical values, and use something to handle the logic of taking the logical value and intelligently produce the correct string (in this case, it was to deal with localization, but there's more to it than that).

The simplest thing that came to mind would be to override the enum's toString value. What we're doing instead is a "ConvertEnumToString(enum value)". It's sort of a hack, because an uninformed consumer of the enum won't know that he should use that method instead of calling enum.value.ToString() directly.

Anyone out there have suggestions on a better alternative? I toyed briefly with a static class with properties where we had enumerated values, but that's not viable - can't pass static types as parameters (we have code that wants an array of the enum, for example). A nonstatic class solves that problem but in cases where we just want to switch on the value, now we would have to pass around an instance where we could just look at the value before.

What am I missing?

Shine on, you crazy diamond...

Non-work blog

CRathjen — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:09:00 GMT

I decided to create an MSN Space blog to talk about non-work related stuff - mostly video games. I created under my online alter-ego: Xentax. The origin of that name ought to be the content of one of the first posts...

<-- Blogging n00b

CRathjen — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 20:16:00 GMT

Apparently, I'm more of a blogging neophyte than I thought. Or, I could blame the infrastructure, I suppose.

I set anonymous comments to 'moderate' instead of publish by default. Which is great, but apparently I don't get notified when there are unmoderated comments, so I didn't realize I wasn't seeing some non-spam comments on my blog posts. Bleh! When we were using .Text, we had a nice easy mechanism to notify you that there were unmoderated comments. Either we don't have that now, or there's some setup step I didn't (know to) follow.

So, look for additional comments and (hopefully) answers from me in some of my other relatively-recent posts, and I'll just turn all comments to publish by default, for now - we'll see how the spam/trackback spam goes for a bit.

And be a simple kind of man...
Chris

Computer Science != Software Engineering

CRathjen — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:51:00 GMT

I like to think the title of this blog post is common knowledge, but I still see places where the terms are used interchangeably all too often. As Dijkstra is often quoted, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Yet, at most universities, the closest thing you can get to formal training in Software Engineering is a degree in Computer Science.

My own college, NC State, was (and is) no exception. I still prefer the approach I took to others that come to mind (a different degree, or a technical school, or some kind of certification approach), but that doesn’t mean I don’t see an area for improvement. If you’re in college (or soon will be), wouldn’t it be nice to be able to focus on software engineering – basically, applied computer science, if that's your interest?

I’m curious what folks out there think we should do – or maybe what various schools out there ARE doing – to prepare the software engineers of the near and not-so-near future.

· Should schools provide a software engineering focus for Computer Science Degrees (there were semi-formal database, graphics, and AI foci available at NCSU when I was there)?

· Should Software Engineering become a formal degree in its own right? I imagine accreditation is the challenge here, but I don’t know.

· Is this something that should only be addressed at the postgraduate level (I don’t think so, but I would like to hear arguments for it if any come to mind)?

The gap between the ‘vanilla’ CSC program at NCSU – when I was there – and the skill training I would have liked (with 20/20 hindsight) would be a more in-depth look at these areas:

Software development lifecycles
Large-scale software projects
Software testing
(If you're feeling really motivated) A soc or psych class on work-life balance - this isn't really specific to software engineering, but I know 'programmers' are often the poster children for poor work-life balance.

There was a single required class that briefly touched the first two of those areas at NCSU; I tend to think each deserves at least a semester-long undergrad class in its own right. But of course, only if you want to either become a software engineer of some sort professionally, or want to study one or more of those areas academically – so making them all required in the standard Computer Science curriculum doesn’t necessarily make sense.

As always, I’m curious to hear other perspectives – what do other schools do (perhaps even what NCSU has done since)? How would you get more of the ‘professional groundwork’ into college coursework (or do you think it’s unnecessary)?

Rant: Cell phone drivers are a SOLVEABLE PROBLEM!

CRathjen — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:34:00 GMT

So, I got to watch some of the spectacular side effects of driving while cradling a cell phone on the way home yesterday. You know, the mile-long backup from a trivial accident, and the countless near misses behind it as drivers with cell phones change lanes without warning or signaling, don't maintain reasonable following distances, etc. You know, typical road-rage material.

And I decided that either I'm missing something, or it's a problem that just shouldn't exist anymore.

First, I don't think trying to ban cell phone usage while driving will work. It won't get enforced adequately, it won't get obeyed adequately, and it will just annoy a lot of people.

What I'd like to see is a basic effort from car makers, phone makers/carriers, or better yet BOTH to just fix it.

We've all seen these cheap, clunky solutions to hands-free cell phones - car/radio adapters that are awkward to mount, might require a battery, might not have great pick-up, etc. Why can't the car manufactures build this stuff in? GM already has On-Star - use the mic/speakersystem from that, if you don't want to pump it through the stereo system. You don't have to invent the countless adapters to plug into every phone's aux jack; just make some standard mini-stereo inputs, and let the phone/carrier/aftermarket accessory industry produce adapters. You already have a widely-accepted standard for DC power, why not mic/speakers as well?

I'm convinced that the problem is NOT people talking on their cell phones; rather, it's people holding a cell phone while trying to drive. Up to your ear, or even out in front of you, you're keeping at least one hand busy, and moving/turning your head less, etc. THOSE are the behaviors that are problematic (especially if, like me, you have a manual transmission).

I've tried one of those cheap radio hookups, and it just didn't cut it. I've tried a earbug/mic attachment, it didn't cut it either (bad pickup, short cord, etc.), and that's still technically illegal (if you didn't know, drivers cannot legally wear any sort of headphone in most states at least; playing your music as loud or louder from external speakers is just fine, of course!). But if you could talk and listen the same way you'd talk/listen to a passenger in the car, the problem would essentially go away. Dialing/answering is no worse than fiddling with the A/C or the radio (granted, there are countless accidents caused by these activities, but you don't generally see folks fighting to ban the use or adjustment of a radio in a moving car).

So, which is it? Am I missing some good reason why there isn't a broader effort to make cars cell-phone-friendly? Yeah it'll tack on a few dollars to the price of a new car, but cell phone usage is nearly ubiquitous now, which means it's something a very high percentage of new-car customers would likely be interested in.

I'm generally against government 'nannying', and it seems like a lot of the regulations with automobiles can stray into this territory. But if safety is such a big deal, and if things like Daytime Running Lights and tire-pressure sensors can become federally mandated, why not a standard 2-way audio interface for phones while you're at it? I'd bet the cost/benefit on that would compare favorably with either of the other required features I just mentioned...

I need a subtitle!

CRathjen — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 21:05:00 GMT

I'm going to borrow a page out of Korby's playbook. I talk about a somewhat scattered variety of topics - lots of areas within Hatteras, security (not a whole lot so far but more as I go, hopefully), and (rarely) my possibly compulsive level of familiarity with videogames, books, and movies.

I'd love to hear some ideas for a blog title. If I get a really cool one from a non-MSTF'ie that I pick, a Microsoft PC or XBox game of your choice is in the offering (it's not a free copy of Visual Studio, but hey, I give what I like to get!).