code-complete

The latest release of MS SQL Server has been released to manufacturing today and is available for download for Technet subscribers:
http://technet.microsoft.com/

Currently the download throughput is only around 80 Kbps, so it'll take about a full day to download.

This is the second year for the A List Apart survey of web development professionals, and it helps us all learn more about who we are and how we work. It only takes a few minutes and there's no personally identifying questions.



Hopefully next year there will be more questions around RIA development specifically and possibly something more around tech stacks and platforms.

We are in the final QA phase of our new website, and everything was looking great until yesterday. Then, I noticed that some important flash elements were sometimes loading and working correctly and sometimes not - they actually would load, but the area they loaded into was just gray. It was seemingly completely random when the elements would work and when they would not. So troubleshooting time.

We saved out the flash in downlevel versions all the way back to 6. No luck. We changed the way we embedded the SWF from using SWFobject.js to using Object/Embed tags directly. No Luck. I tried changing the flash plugin from 9.0.0.115 to 9.0.0.224 No luck. Tried the beta of the 10 plugin (wayyy too slow). We tried accessing the swf directly - same problem. Then we tried a swf that we pulled down from Adobe's website. WTF?!? Same problem. We tried serving the code from Apache and IIS. Nothing.

So I determined it had to be something client-side and reviewed my yum updates from the past few days. I noticed a package called nspluginwrapper, and I remembered having some problems installing it when it initially appeared in updates. So out with that package: rpm -e nsluginwrapper (it was version 1.1.0 release 4.fc9)

And voila. no more flash problems!

Just a quick note to warn folks of a bug in anaconda, the installer in fedora 9. Machines that sport a Samsung hardrive should not attempt to move to f9 from f8 as the installer will throw an error like this:

Invalid Object Path
'/org/freedesktop/hal/devices/storage=model_SAMSUNG_HD160JJ/' ends with '/' and is not just '/'


This is because the harddrive's identifier contains the '/' character, and HAL gets confused. This happens whether you are trying to install from DVD or via the preupgrade process.

This is a known bug: here.

I have verified that you can install on this hardware using the Live CD.

Since F9 has been out for a bit, I decided to upgrade my Lenovo y410 lappy yesterday. Following are suggestions to make the process a little smoother for anyone else who upgrades.

First of all, there are a few different ways to upgrade. It can be done via yum exclusively, from the dvd, or by using the new preupgrade program. I chose the latter, but I did have an F9 install DVD handy, and I'm glad I did - you'll find out why in a bit. So, on to it.

#1. make sure you're on a reliable high-speed network and run the preupgrade program following all the prompts. this will download a core set of F9 rpms into a /var/yum/cache/upgrade directory.

#2 after that completes, it asks you to reboot. once again, make sure you are on a reliable high-speed network because there's more to be downloaded. if the installer can't recognize your NIC and network connection, you may need to try a USB NIC. Once I got the installer online it downloaded something then began installing the fc9 packages into my system.

#3 I had over 1400 rpm packages that got upgraded to get to the new OS - that took about 2 hours. Once that was complete I got a creen that said "finishing the upgrade process, this may take a little while." Indeed it did: 45 Mins later I was ready to reboot.

#4 on reboot the system loaded up the 2.6.24.7-92 kernel and all the modules loaded except cups, which failed. Also, the gnome GUI was a little strange and some other minor issues were there, but overall, the system was working.

#5 time to get updates. The familiar add/remove programs link was no longer present in the Applications menu (that program has been deprecated) so I used yumex to see what was out there. Well, it turns out the upgrade process did not update my yum repositories, which were still pointed at fedora 8 for updates from fedora as well as livna. To fix this, you need to edit the yum repo config files under /etc/yum.repo.d I just edited my fedora.repo file and livna.repo file changing out refs to f8 to f9 and set the gpgcheck flag to 0.

#6 running yumex again showed a lot of legitimate updates. I decided to update the kernel packages first including development and headers becuase I could not recompile the vbox kernel module with what the upgrade had installed.

#7 Once the updaes were installed, I rebooted. Shit! The machine got as far as black screen with GRUB _ and a blinking cursor. Glad I had the DVD becuase I needed to boot from dvd, go into rescue mode and fix the boot loader which had gotten screwed by the kernel update. Once you are in a command shell the following commands worked to fix grub:

#chroot /mnt/sysimage
#grub-install /dev/sda


#8 reboot and all was good.

#9 still some funky things going on with the GUI so overnight I installed all the updates for f9 from the updates repository and today everything is working like a champ.

Get Some Here

After realizing I need to use Sun's JVM globally in order to get Flex Builder A3 working under my Fedora 8 install I decided to investigate further how to get it to be an option in the system-switch-java applet. That applet is tuned in to the update-alternatives command. by running the following commands as root, the system was able to switch between the 3 different JVMs I've got installed:

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/java" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javac" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javaws" 3

Now I can change JVMs globally using update-alternatives --config java command!

I am looking for anyone who is currently involved in the Solar Rebate program in Denver or Austin and is working with Earth Solar Group / Armadillo Solar.

Please contact me via this website.

My 6-year-old son has this digital camera that we got him when he was 5. He wasn't that into it, but recently has shown interest. It's a disney Pix "toy" camera that comes with specialized software from digitalblue that you need to install if you want to get the pictures off. When I first got the camera, I just plugged the camera's USB cable into my XP machine to see if it would come up in the file system. No luck, I had to install the software, then it worked.



After "upgrading" to vista, it no longer worked even after uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. This morning, he asked me to get pictures off the camera. I told him it wasn't likely because of the new computer. I was shocked when I plugged the USB cable into my Lenovo Y410 fedora 8 machine and a dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to import pictures!

Freaking awesome! Cheers to the Fedora community!

I have just gotten around to using the amazon ec2 tools to manage my amazon machine images from my linux laptop. I mentioned before that I am rolling with fedora 8 on a new laptop, and it's been sweet. But there are gotchas here and there and I ran into one today with the ec2 tools.

Turns out that fedora 8 comes with 2 JVMs: GCJ 1.5.0 and IcedTea 1.7.0 - those are installed via yum or selected during the install process. I have no problems with any java-based GUI apps that I have installed like Oxygen and dbvisualizer, but when running the ec2-describe-images command, I got the following error:


Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org.codehaus.xfire.aegis.type.xml.SourceType
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.8rh)

etc....


I had my JAVA_HOME set to what redhat and fedora lilke: /usr/lib/jvm/java, which is really a sym link pointing into the /etc/alternatives library of sym links. It's actually a great way to switch globally between JVMs, because you can use the system-switch-java applet to quicky change your JVM if you have multiple versions installed. So I did and switched from 1.7 over to GNU 1.5 and tried again. Same exception was thrown.

It turns out the the ec2 tools really only work with Sun's JVM, which I downloaded and installed via the RPM from sun.com. After installing, uninstalling, reinstalling a few times I determined that for whatever reason the 1.6 JVM from Sun was never going to appear as an option within the system-switch-java applet. So I changed my JAVA_HOME variable from /usr/lib/jvm/java to /usr/java/default, which is what Sun likes.

Now the ec2 command line tools work great!

Apparently SP1 for Vista has been made public, but if you've got Intel's 945G Express series chipset or Realtek for audio, better be careful and read this article on InfomationWeek first.

I have no firsthand knowledge of the problems since I switched to fedora 8 a couple months ago and I definitely won't be applying SP1 to my vbox vista install till some better news is out.

I have to admit that over the past couple of weeks transitioning to linux as my primary OS more than once I though to myself that for sure I'd be back on windows soon. I've been admining/using redhat distros since 1995, but always in a server environment. But as I get more and more comfortable with my configuration, I'm looking back less and less. At this point nearly everything is working with 2 exceptions:
1.) when plugging headphones in, sound still comes out the speakers
2.) I have been unable to get the PCCard reader to work (the machine does play well with MMC, MS, MSPro, SD, SDPro and xD cards, however.)

I have also found the following bits to be useful: While getting the webcam to work is outlined below, I found that most apps out there still would not work with the webcam. This is because most of the apps like camstream and gyachi work with Video4Linux and I needed to to use V4L2 with the built in webcam. The solution for this is to roll with Kopete for web camming and IMing. Works great!

I also had some issues getting an external VGA monitors set up and working correctly with spanning desktops. It wouldn't be quite so complicated if I didn't have different screen resolutions between my home monitor and work monitor. Basically, one needs to add some information to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that specifies you would like a virtual desktop. The video section in my config file looks like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "monitor-lvds" "lvds"
Option "monitor-vga" "vga"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "lvds"
Option "LeftOf" "vga"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1680x1050"
HorizSync 31.5 - 65.5
VertRefresh 56.0 - 65.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "vga"
Option "RightOf" "lvds"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1680x1050"
HorizSync 31.5 - 65.5
VertRefresh 56.0 - 65.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection


Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "lvds"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Virtual 2880 900
EndSubSection
EndSection


With this configuration, I can now use the xandr command to set up the different monitors. when leaving work I turn off the VGA by calling xrandr --output VGA --off from a quick launch icon, then when I plug in at home i do the same using xrandr --output VGA --auto --right-of LVDS and everything's great.

There is also a KDE applet called KRandRTray that will let you dynamically change screen resolutions.

Finally, because we use Office 2k7 native formats in the office because of the enhanced features I had to figure out what to do. Wine wasn't going to cut it, though I did get Fireworks and textpad running under wine. So I installed VirtualBox, created a VM and gave it 1.5 GB RAM (The box has 3GB) and 32MB Video memory. I was able to cleanly install Vista Home Premium from the recovery CD that came with the machine with no problems whatsoever. I spun up the virtual PC, installed the VirtBox client extensions along with OfficeUlimate 2k7 and TurboTax and Quicken. Everything works flawlessly!

Last piece of the configuration puzzle solved. To get the built in webcam, which has the following characteristics:

Bus 002 Device 005: ID 04f2:b008 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 239 Miscellaneous Device
bDeviceSubClass 2 ?
bDeviceProtocol 1 Interface Association
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x04f2 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
idProduct 0xb008
bcdDevice 3.25
iManufacturer 2 Sonix Technology Co., Ltd.
iProduct 1 USB 2.0 Camera
iSerial 3 SN0001
bNumConfigurations 1


one needs to modprobe the video for linux driver (v4l2-common), which came with the fedora install and modprobe uvcvideo, which is the usb video driver available here:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk


Once I modprobed these 2 drivers i was able to get video from the cam by running gstreamer-properties, selecting the video tab and under default input selecting the Video for Linux 2 Plugin, USB 2.0 Camera device and then selecting test.

So in my quest to be vista free in 08, I mentioned that I got a new laptop. So far I have installed Fedora 8. It didn't work out so well becuase I couldn't get wireless working (more on that later) and I had no sound. Looking for a quick fix to these problems, I decided to give another distro a quick try to see if it would work out of the box. I installed ubuntu 7.10 and while I was installing it noticed my Function F5 key. this key activates/deactivates wireless on the laptop. Too bad I didn't notice this before when I was focusing energy on the wireless on/off switch on the front of the machine.

So Ubuntu came up and wireless was all good, but still no sound. I looked around for info on drivers for my sound card, which is the 82801H ICH8 HD Audio Controller. There's a lot of info in the ubuntu forums regarding this card, and many, many suggestions on how to get it running. After trying all of them without success, I decided to go back to what I knew best, and that's Fedora.

So I reinstalled fedora from dvd - the wireless working this time out of the box since I had it turned on. But still no sound. After verifying the correct driver was being used (snd-hda-intel.ko), I updated the alsa-utils package to >=1.0.15, which from my ubuntu research I understood could support my card. The I added the following lines in /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=fujitsu


Reboot and run system-config-soundcard and audio was working. So I downloaded and installed frog, which provides quick and easy installs of multimedia codecs. After running the ncurses program it updates some package repositories, then says that "it is strongly recommended you allow fedora frog to update your installation now." mmkay, guess that'll do. My updater was telling me there were a couple hundred updates available so I figured I'd let frog do the updates. Very Bad Choice.

Because earlier I was looking for some software using the Add/Remove Software app I had checked the development repository so Frog updated everything on my Fedora 8 to the Fedora 9 alpha versions, INCLUDING my kernel. I was a bit concerned when I saw what was happening, but even more bunched up when I went to reboot and the kernel could not mount the LargeVolume001 or whatever.

Completed a reinstall and selected NO for frog updates.

Next up, I'm installing virtualbox and windowsXP - or I might try the vista cd that came with the laptop...

After Using Vista as my primary OS for just over a year I can say without a doubt that it has hindered my productivity and caused more heartache that any other OS I've ever used. I am running the 32-bit version of Vista Ultimate on a gateway laptop with Turion64 Processor and 2.5 gigs of RAM. The Vista I'm working with is the result of and upgrade install from XP Media Center 2005, which may be part of the problem, and it was probably stupid to do the upgrade rather than a clean install, but I was lazy and didn't want to have to reinstall all my progs.

I am going to enumerate all the problems:

• Slower launching all programs


• Initially, I could no longer use a cisco VPN client because their vista-compatible client was not vista upgrade compatible


• Now can use the cisco vpn client, but when it's installed on the system it breaks my wireless so I have to uninstall it after I use it to get wireless working


• Have to run many progs as admin for them to function - packet sniffers, SQL Server Manager, lots...


• Annoying UAC pop ups require more clicks to get things done (ended up disabling User Account Control)


• Cannot move files > 3GB to local machine over the network.... WTF?!?


• Moving files over the network is much slower than xp/linux/macOS (even after turning off Vista -TCP Auto Tuning)


• All MS product short cuts in quick launch and recent programs on the start menu stopped working


• My volume control mixer in the status bar area periodically disappears


• Intermittent crashes of windows explorer at least one or two times a week


• Outlook often hangs/crashes even with all mailbox maintenance performed


• TortoiseSVN status cache crashes daily


• Windows gets my monitors confused when switching between my home and work configuration about 50% of the time


• Acrobat reader 7 posts application warning before starting regarding compatibility issues

The list could probably go on, but just those issues have made me want to move on. So yesterday I bought a Lenovo 3000 Y410 dual core 2G RAM laptop (which will come loaded with Vista Home Premium) and a 250GB laptop sata drive both on fire sale from compusa. I will be pulling the OEM drive, dropping in the 250GB drive and loading up Fedora 8. This will become my primary work computer, and I'm going to see if I can get away with not running windows at all, but I think I'm probably going to have to run XP under VMware because we use a lot of features from Office 2007 and I do use Visual Studio to create dtsx packages pretty often. Then there's Mapforce and Motorola phone tools and probably a bunch of other stuff. Oh and I'll have to somehow get 10 years worth of emails into mbox format somehow. That'll be ugly.

Well, I've almost talked myself out of it - maybe SP1 will solve all my problems. Ohh the pain.