Dan's Blog : Off-topic

Vista Parental Controls Slows Down Zune Marketplace

dtjones — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:53:00 GMT

I’m a huge fan of my Zune and the Zune Marketplace. I have a Zune and my two daughters do as well. I’ve owned several iPods but I just love my Zune more; especially the subscription option for music. $15/month for all the music I want is fantastic. Yes, not everything is included in it and if I stop paying I lose the music but so what. It’s far cheaper in the long run and allows me to explore a lot more music that I otherwise would. I think this is a great way for artists to gain exposure. Anyway, this isn’t the point of the post.

Each of my daughters has their own login to Vista and I’ve setup Parental Controls on their login. This caused a severe performance slow down on the Zune marketplace. Searches and downloads were painfully slow. Running under a full admin account everything worked great. I found one potential solution where the person added 20-something URLs to the allow list. Yuck! That’s not a solution in my book. If one URL changes or another gets added in a software upgrade it’s back to the drawing board. I dug into the Parental Controls stuff in Vista and found a solution. There’s a list of programs that Parental Controls will completely ignore. I added zune.net to the list and viola everything works great. There’s no GUI for this in Vista so it requires editing the registry directly – this means do this at your own risk…

Using information from this site: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial139.html I added a new value for c:\program files\Zune\Zune.exe under the hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Parental Controls\HTTPExemptions. This worked like a charm. What this does is exclude zune.net from Parental Controls. I think this is the best option as I can still control browser access but not impact Zune marketplace performance. It's unfortunate that MSFT doesn't provide a GUI to control this list of programs.

As I said, I love my Zune and so do my girls. They’ve already downloaded a ton of music and exploring a whole new world!

Lost Network Connectivity on a Dell Precision 470 Running Vista

dtjones — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:26:22 GMT

I ran into an interesting situation on my older Dell Precision 470 running Vista. For some reason a few days after I installed Vista it wouldn’t maintain network connectivity. I’d get a little yellow triangle – the warning icon – stating that I’m not authenticated on the network. I tried installing the latest drivers, I tried bypassing the integrated network controller by placing a network card in the box. I even disabled the on-board controller in the bios. Nothing worked. It would connect for a little bit, drop, and then reconnect. incredibly frustrating.

I did some searches using all the keywords I could think of. I finally came across something that sounded similar. The reports had to do with connecting to small business server but the symptoms were the same. So I tried what they suggested and it worked. To get it working I had to disable IPv6 on the properties for the connection. Doing this solved all of my problems. This shouldn’t be a problem as I don’t believe we’re going to exclusive use of IPv6 anytime soon. There may be some other implications but those aren’t clear to me just yet. For now my connectivity is working as expected.

I don’t generally like to blog about these topics – at least not on this blog – but since I had such trouble finding a resolution I thought I should do a posting so that others might benefit from my experience.

Lenovo Thinkpad X301

dtjones — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 03:07:55 GMT

A few weeks ago I got a new laptop – a Lenovo x301. As is the case with all new machines it came loaded with a bunch of utilities and trial software. Most of the time I just nuke the machine right away and lay down a clean image of the OS. This time I decided to give the default configuration a chance. I lasted 3 days!

The main problem is there are duplicate and triplicate utilities – how many things do I need monitoring my wireless network, my battery and my display settings? Honestly one is enough. And the utilities seem to fight with one another. Then there’s the additional memory and processing power consumed. I really wish the default machine configuration would come with the barebones stuff needed. Upon the first boot it could prompt you to add stuff if you want – I would always say no but others may want to try out some of this stuff.

So as I normally do I reinstalled the OS (Vista Ultimate) from scratch and everything is running terrific. I let Windows Vista manage my network, battery and display settings. Although I did have to install a few Intel drivers which seem to also install additional value. Oh well I guess I can’t have it all. About two weeks have passed and everything is still running great. I get over three hours of battery life under normal usage. I have the second battery (which replaces the DVD drive) on order. With this addition I should get close to 5 hours of life – depending upon usage.

I had reservations about the smallness of the machine. I’m used to big laptops with lots of screen real estate and lots of processing power. I haven’t missed either of these. The display runs 1440 x 900 which is nice and dense. Click here to see the full specs on the X301. Mine is configured with the 128GB drive and 4 GB RAM.

I absolutely love the size and weight. I can’t wait to try it out on an airplane. It should fit well on the tray table and the low screen height should avoid crushage when the dude in front reclines at warp speed.

I almost forgot to mention the keyboard – it has a great feel and sound to it. Although it’s taking me a little while to get used to where the Delete key is (the upper right-hand corner) rather than lower right-hand corner (previous laptop). I’m also thankful Lenovo added the Windows key. The original ThinkPads didn’t have this key. yes, you could remap a key to play the role of the Windows key but it was just goofy it wasn’t support out of the box.

Other than needing to reimage the machine (which is par for all machines) I have no complaints. This could be the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I guess if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket price might be a complaint. But MS was nice enough to cover the cost of the laptop. It’s not a cheap laptop but it is a great laptop.

Note: This is my third off-topic post in a row. I need to get back to talking about SQL Server. Though I don’t have the topic yet, my next posting will be about SQL. In my defense, all postings have been related to technology. I’ve managed to avoid any mention of the election or the economy. And no, those don’t count as mentions…

Windows Live Writer Update

dtjones — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:50:58 GMT

Back in July 2007 I started using Windows Live Writer as my exclusive blog writing tool. I’m not a heavy blogger but I do need a tool that’s easy to use and still helps me write more complicated postings when needed. I still LOVE Live Writer. It’s simple and intuitive. It doesn’t have a bunch of stupid features that get in the way of doing the mainstream stuff. My fear when I started using it was the team would muck it up over time by adding a bunch of useless features. Well that hasn’t happened. I just downloaded the latest beta. It’s great! They’ve stayed true to the usability of the app and have improved the usability of a few features. For example, there’s now edit, preview and sources tabs which allow you to switch between different views of your posting. You could do this in the older version but it was a little more cumbersome – you had to go up to the menu bar to select a view.

If you blog I encourage you to give Windows Live Writer a test drive. I’m glad I did.

Windows Live Mesh

dtjones — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:09:00 GMT

I recently started using Windows Live Mesh to synchronize files between multiple machines. This software is so cool and so useful I just can’t say enough good things about it. In addition to sharing files with yourself you can setup folders to share files with others. Sharing files on the web has been around for a long time but this is the cleanest implementation I’ve seen where I don’t even have to launch a browser – once I’ve installed the client. I can do everything from within Windows (or Mac). But, if I’m away from my machine I can still access my files from any browser. It does require that everyone you want to share with have a Windows Live Id – no big deal. I found the installation a snap and within just a few minutes I was sharing and synchronizing files between two machines. It also has remote desktop capabilities although I haven’t tried those yet. There’s also a 5GB space limit. So far that’s no biggie either.

I have zero patience for complicated and crappy software. Live Mesh passes both tests. It was very simple to get up and running and what it does it does very well. Kudos to the team that built-it! I just wish I had this stuff when I was doing my under-grad and graduate degrees. It would have made group projects so much easier. Oh I almost forgot, you can also access it from your mobile. I still use a dumb phone but this just may be the reason I upgrade to a smart phone.

OT: Announcing Baby Jones 3.0

dtjones — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:19:03 GMT

Today (9/7/08) Lisa and I welcomed Elliott Edward Jones into the world. Elliott was born at 9:17 am at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, WA. He was 8 pounds 12 ounces and measured 20.5 inches long. A a result of a little fluid in his lungs he spent his first few hours in the NICU. About 1pm he found his way back to mom. His breathing is a little fast but so far this is nothing to worry about. This means I can report that both Lisa and Elliott are doing great! Lisa will be in the hospital until at least Tuesday.

You can find pictures of Elliott here.