#personal

After getting myself a new Dell XPS M1330 laptop, I thought it would be cool to have a Bluetooth mouse that could also serve as a presenter.

So I got the Microsoft Presenter Mouse 8000. After opening the control panel I was presented with the above display.

It's in German so I'll translate:

Current power source: Battery
Remaining Energy for: 1%.

Ok I just unboxed the whole thing, why I ended up with a 1% charge - I don't know. 

But, what really bugs me is: This UI is pretty meaningless to me. I mean, if my battery is low, why isn't anything red? Why in the hell doesn't the driver alert me that my battery is low? And, the top line has to be the most useless thing I've ever seen anywhere ever. This is a Bluetooth mouse that has only one way of getting power: battery. And they really tell me that it's running off battery?
And the image of the battery doesn't help either. Does gray mean full, or maybe empty? Is the color for full green? I would expect it, but it's not obvious.

Finally, the accuracy and reception really sucks right now. I hope this is for the low battery, but still I don't understand why the driver isn't alerting me that I need to replace my battery.

Still on the train from Vienna to Klagenfurt, I'm listening to RunAs radio (yeah, I'm running out of DNR episodes) and just listened to the talk about IPv6 and how the big address space can simplify networking by removing the need for subnetting as we know it today.

And, I'm really curious if this is a good thing from a simplicity perspective. I mean, ok maybe my ISP is giving me 4 bits of address space in the future so I don't need my own personal router and subnet, but that would also mean that every computer in my network is directly attached to the Internet making it a necessity to have all machines (ok, that should be standard anyway) run latest and best protection software, having all patches up and being just as secure as my DMZ servers would have been before.

And that's something I don't see happening any time soon. I trust myself to have my laptop and desktop patched and secure, but I simply don't want to waste the time to do so on my father's PC, my brothers etc..
I simply want to rely on that they are somewhat secured through simply not being publicly available through the Internet because my router isn't forwarding any ports to them that could be exploited.

So, although I really think the new network stack in Vista and 2008 is a huge step forward and network performance for me has increased with the use of v6. I still don't think that subnets should go away anytime soon.

Do you remember those times when you where reinstalling your OS every two weeks? Those dark Windows 98 times that have thankfully passed away?
I don't shed tears when remembering the days of old, but mainly because Windows doesn't need reinstallation every two weeks any more.

To be honest, back when I was using Windows XP: I was rarely using any restore options, because they hardly ever worked the way I wanted them.
Thankfully the system wasn't as easy to break as the 9x family (love NT for that), but still when something went terribly wrong I was pretty quick in digging up those XP cds and re-doing the system (guess that's what we were used to :)).

So, yesterday I unboxed my sweet new Dell XPS M1330 laptop and immediately started setting it up. Configuring Vista for the first time, getting Office, Windows Live and Visual Studio 2008 on the machine - all that stuff you don't want to be doing too often.
I also immediately downloaded .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS2008 SP1 (both beta), because I really liked some of the new IDE features.

Upon .NET 3.5 SP1 installation things went bad.. I mean, really bad.

Visual Studio didn't start up any more, .NET programs compiled against the 2.0 runtime refused to work any more (my pre-installed Dell Dock application).
I tried the obvious, uninstall SP1, repair 3.5.

Now, when even the setups don't start up any more, you usually flip out your OS Cds and think about reinstalling.

But, I thought, I could give Vista's recovery a try and searched for available recovery points.

And tada, there they where. Almost everything I installed added a recovery point to the system and I even had the luxury of choosing to what app I want to restore my system to - great!

10 Minutes after starting the recovery I was up and running again, having absolutely 0 problems! Perfect.
I even reinstalled Visual Studio 2008 and everything works just fine.

So I guess reinstalling Windows is completely out for now. When there are restore options available like this, I don't think I'll be ever reinstalling anything any more.

Oh, and I think I won't try the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta again, let's see when it gets to final. The new additions to the framework are pretty minor, but the updates to the IDE are definitely worth it.

I decided some time ago that I don't want to blog about non technical stuff any more.
But it's Sunday and I hope you'll excuse this one.

What happened? The-best-girlfriend-someone-can-imagine™ just returned from a 2 week study trip to Slovenia while I've been holding up here in Klagenfurt. Upon returning I imagined it would be cool to celebrate her return with romantic dinner at a Mexican restaurant here in Klagenfurt.

The restaurant I'm referring to is the Salud that usually serves truly great Mexican food. But while their food truly justifies the somewhat high price, their service is just ridiculous!

I've never seen service like this.
In short it's been a really really unpleasant experience, but what really stood out was that the waitress tried to take away my plate while I was still chewing my last bite!
And then she kept standing there for at last 5 seconds watching my girlfriend chew on her last bite too!

There is nothing I hate more than being interrupted while eating at a restaurant, except for being watched while eating.

So, just to compensate for the useless post, here a list of great places to eat (where I actually liked the service) in Klagenfurt:

• Chinesischer Garten
• Very good Chinese food, fast and very polite service. Very reasonable prices (with all you can eat etc)
• Da Pietro
• Not the cheapest Italian restaurant you'll find, but the food tastes great. And the waiters there are absolutely the best you'll find in Klagenfurt.
• Longhorn Saloon: Steakhouse
• I don't like steak, but most of my friends have agreed that this has to be one of the best places to eat steak in the center of Klagenfurt.

Something hit me today when I went into the "Team Synchronization Perspective" in Eclipse/Subclipse while trying to merge some changes a colleague made with my repository:

Visual Studio 2008 doesn't sport ANY source control of ANY kind that's for free!

If this isn't true I'm eager to hear about it.
But I only know about Visual Studio Team System, and that's not free:

Typically, customers purchase an MSDN Premium subscription when licensing the Team Editions and Team Suite, which provides Software Assurance that entitles users to product updates over the life of the subscription. This includes Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition, development licenses of many Microsoft Windows versions, Visual Foxpro 9, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office, development licenses of many server-side offerings, SDKs and DDKs, a large amount of documentation, and more. The Team Edition and Team Suite products can not be purchased without an MSDN Premium subscription.

Last time I checked, MSDN Premium costs $2,499 and additional $1,999 every following year.

I also used Visual Source Safe before (VSS 2005), and it was a huge pain in the ass trying to work with it due to the "one-guy-check-out" policy it enforces. So if you need some field/method in another class to continue working on your class, you'll be running circles through the office trying to get others to check the file back in (resulting in half-broken check-ins etc).

So I wonder, with all that commitment Microsoft has been showing to supporting and promoting open source (CodePlex, CodeGallery), why in the hell do they keep all the tools that would support open source development away from their users? I think that even Visual Studio Express edition should at least come with decent support for source control inside the IDE that is actually able to connect to CodePlex! (There is a SVN bridge, a command line client and the suggestion to get the team edition of VS.).
So, bottom line my CodePlex source control experience has been "lacking", while I'm getting more and more fond of subversion combined with subclipse.

While I'm seeing subversion becoming more and more "standard" among open source projects (if not THE standard), I wonder why Microsoft is making it intentionally hard to work with Visual Studio on shared projects.

So, as I already hinted at in my post about ASP.NET Wiki, Microsoft seriously needs to get more consistent in their efforts. Either support OSS and developer collaboration, or don't. But don't try to do so badly. The way they try right now isn't really going anywhere.

Update: Btw, Eclipse just released a new version called ganymede that really rocks!

Update2: Apparently I didn't find this info last time I used Codeplex, but it looks like there is a way to integrate a Team System client into VS called Team Explore 2008. I'll be looking at this tomorrow.

Update3: Mark Phippard just pointed me at AnkhSVN for Visual Studio that seems to be a pretty decent SVN client integrated into Visual Studio. Thanks for this link.

If you've ever ran a home network before you may have noticed that installing and running a printer over the network usually works great and pretty seamless.

Except for those rare conditions where your printer drivers sucks, the host where you connect your printers is old and slow, and the fastest way to your printout is copying the doc to the host computer to print it locally.

I've complained about that before, but I didn't need too much printing lately so I forgot. Until today when I found the wonderful Brother HL-2150 N printer that costs just 130€ and sports its own NIC.
So instead of bothering with network share and stuff like that I just had to plug in the printer to the LAN and run the driver install locally at my machine.

Everything was up and running in about 30 seconds and I'm relieved of the ever daring "is this stupid computer up or not" question (The status LEDs on the host aren't connected).

If you need a cheap black and white network printer, I'd definitely suggest this one here.

Due to the fact that most of university of klagenfurt's curriculum is biased towards Java sometimes makes it hard for a .NET developer to be able to go up to someone and say: "Hey, look what I did yesterday".
Either you just ran into one of those guys who just managed to get the last proprietary driver off his debian-unstable laptop and will chase you down some hallway by even saying the word Microsoft near his ears.
Or you will meet some insensible guy who's not into the study at all but decided that doing computer science after high-school is the right thing because he used to be playing computer a lot (people around here often use their studies as an excuse for not wanting to do real work).
Or there is that honest guy who just focuses on his studies and therefore is stuck in a world of Java :).

So, sometimes I read all those blogs out there from overseas about communities, ALT.NET, open spaces conferences and stuff, and start to feel a little lonely around here in carinthia.
I mean, there are plenty of people I really love to talk about tech, I even sometimes try bend my mind around to talk to some of the hardcore Linux guys around here. But there is nobody to whom I can talk about what I am up to lately (in .NET), nobody who is actually working with .NET (besides me) that I can call up to ask for advice on ... let's say WPF.

So today I decided to throw the words usergroup and Klagenfurt at my Google and I somehow ended up at ineta.org, short for International .NET Association.
After doing their usergroup search for Austria I found out that there ought to be two groups here around Klagenfurt university. Both of which seem to have disbanded (websites down etc).
Now what really struck me was that even the back of beyond (namely Vorarlberg) has a .NET user group, while Vienna and Graz having plenty of them.
Didn't they tell me when I signed up for my study that Klagenfurt is one of the major universities when it comes to computer science?
And now I'd like to know, if Klagenfurt is that good, why we can't have a .NET user group.

So is there an audience for a .NET user group in Klagenfurt? Or do I need to pony up the 60 euros per month for a bus ride and go to Graz if I want to meet like-minded people?
So it boils down to the initial question: Am I an .NET island?

I have been using feedburner for a pretty long time now, and one thing I thought is particularly handy is that you can let it incorporate your del.icio.us bookmarks into the feed as daily updates.
This removed the necessity of doing a blog post every week that boils down to a link-collection of the most interesting stuff I read across the web that week.

So the main thing is that due to the great Firefox3 Addon for del.icio.us I started to use del.icio.us more and more as a bookmark tool, so that I am "polluting" my feed with sometimes unnecessary stuff that you may or may not be interested in. This has led to the fact that sometimes there are 3-4 link flares from del.icio.us in between 2 of my blog posts.

So this is one question to my dear feed-subscribers: Should I remove my del.icio.us link splicer from my feed?

Ps: By the way, if you are using del.icio.us too and want to add me to your network feel free to do so through my profile, oh, and if you aren't already subscribed to the feed. You can find it easily to the right or through this link.

The weather has been pretty great the last days, and I used the last weekend for some relaxing and even some bathing in Wörthersee.
I also discovered my new favorite relax location (although it doesn't serve coffee) and I also managed to make some photos (click the image for the flickr photo gallery):

But after coming home today (chilled to the bone, Wörthersee is still way too cold for bathing!), I figured out I need to do an java assignment for university till Tuesday.

Needless to say that I thought I'd be done in 2 hours doing some simple hash table implementations.
What happened? They managed to throw 10 pages of mostly meaningless gibberish that specifies how my classes should behave and how the underlying algorithms work. While detailed instructions isn't something bad per se, omitting the UML diagram IS BAD! After going through the doc 2-3 times I still haven't identified all of the "added complexity" that should be teaching us OO-design and am searching the course forums for answers to questions that aren't answered by a 10 page long assignment paper :(.

So, yeah: I started at 21:00 and now it's 3 in the morning and my concentration has hit rock bottom so I am reading through specs and their explanation without being able to see the sense in it.

If you can't remember what word preceded the one you just read - go to bed.

And while we're at it. If you bother with Visual Paradigm: Get yourself a real-edition. Doing everything twice (in code and in UML) really sucks. Especially since code stubs can be exactly derived from UML and vice-versa it sucks doing it in a so terribly clumsy tool as Visual Paradigm for UML. (VP works great, it's just a lengthy process to create a damn operation (public void main(String args[]) is easier to type than to click 30 check boxes and drop downs!)

If you are following Jeff Atwood at CodeHorror.com you may have already read it. But the statement is so true I really need to repost this quote by Tim Bray:

So here's my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

Spaghetti-code is the main thing that always comes to my mind when I try to sit down and do a template for this website.