Netbook, desktop, laptop...can't decide

In my recent posts I have stated that I sold my ThinkPad and favored the Mac.  Well, as always with me my computer of choice is always changing.  I now only have a netbook and a desktop and I am itching to get a new laptop.  The problem is that I can't play videos very well on my netbook.  Even with an internet connection of 12 mbps the Flash video is sketchy at best.  So, I have reached another buying and selling point in my eternal struggle to make up my mind.  My netbook is currently for sale on eBay and I have an order in for a ThinkPad T410 with Nvidia switchable graphics.  The problem I am facing now is that I don't know whether the switchable graphics are worth it or not.  I thought at the time of ordering that I would love the switchable graphics aspect but now that I have been thinking about it I am not so sure. 

I am afraid that the switchable graphics is going to be more hassle than it is worth.  The Nvidia Optimus is the ideal candidate for people who want great graphics without killing their battery life.  I, however, don't know that it will benefit me that much.  I don't do anything graphics intensive other than watching back internet TV.  Which that is the main reason that the netbook is no good to me.  Even this weekend browsing websites that used Flash the computer kept freezing.  Although, I was using Adobe's Flash player beta so maybe that was the issue.  Overall I know I want a full sized laptop and I want another ThinkPad, however I am unsure whether or not the switchable graphics is for me.  Thoughts?

Disable Actiontec M1000's Router

If have a DSL subscription and are using the default settings on the Actiontec M1000 modem as well as another wireless router you aren't getting the most out of your internet connection.  Because the M1000 has the ability to add a wireless adapter and be a wireless router the M1000 acts like a router by default.  If you have another wireless router which you are actually connected to, your internet connected device is going over an additional hop to get to the internet.  Here is what you need to do:

Configure Your Modem to be a Transparent Bridge

First, you need your DSL subscription login name and password.  These will be what you used to set your modem up for the first time.  If you don't have them, you can call your provider and they should be able to give them to you.  Second,  you need to configure your modem to be a transparent bridge.  Go into the modem configuration page by typing 192.168.0.1 into a web browser.  Go to the Advanced Setup section.  Select WAN IP Address in the left-hand column.  Select the button next to the RFC 1483 Transparent Bridging and click Apply.     

Configure Your Router to Connect with PPPoE

This article is going to use a LINKSYS router for the configuration.  Go to 192.168.1.1 in your web browser and enable PPPoE.  You will have to use your DSL login name and password here. Once you have done that save your settings and wait for your internet connection to reconnect.  You have now removed one of the hops in your internet connection.

I didn't see any kind of performance increase in my internet after changing these settings but it doesn't make sense to use two routers either.  My hope is that this will help with using remote desktop when I build my new machine later today (more on that in a later post!).

How To Get the Most out of your Netbook

There are a lot of articles out there telling people how to get the most out of their netbook and some of the articles are pretty good but others are downright awful.  So this is going to be my list of suggestions and what I personally have done to my Lenovo S10-3 to get it to perform the way I need it to perform.

First off, if you are new to using netbooks you have to lower your expectations.  You are not going to be able to start-up and shutdown as fast as you can on a full size laptop or desktop.  You won't be able to play graphic intensive games.  Your netbook first and foremost is a portable internet browsing device.  It is a compromise between a smart phone and a laptop.  That being said, let's get on to the list!

1. Most other articles out there are going to tell you to remove the manufacturer's bloatware somehow.  Whether it be manually or with the assistance of a program like PC Decrapifier.   I am going to tell you that you will get the best performance out of your netbook by doing a clean install of Windows 7 all together.  Now if you don't have access to a copy of Windows 7, I don't suggest you go out and buy one.  Getting a little extra performance isn't worth spending an additional $130, but if you are like me and have access to Windows 7 downloads then you can't beat the performance boost that a clean install will give you.  There are plenty of ways to get a clean install of Windows 7 on your machine.  You can either burn the image file to a disc and install it with an external DVD drive or you can create a bootable flash drive with software like Microsoft's own bootable USB creator.  Regardless of the method you choose the end result will be the same.
2. The next best thing that you can do is upgrade your RAM from 1GB to 2GB.  Most, if not all netbooks are capable of using 2 GB of RAM and there is no reason you shouldn't do this simple upgrade.
3. The standard resolution on netbook screens is 1024x600.  That means that a lot more stuff fits on your screen from left to right than it does from top to bottom.  So why would you leave your task bar at the bottom of the screen?  Move the task bar to either the left or the right side of the screen.  Your other option is to automatically hide the task bar but when things disappear and reappear on their own on my screen it gets a little annoying and I opt to keep the task bar to the left edge of my screen.
4. Use an antivirus other than Norton!  I would opt for one of the freebies like Avira or Avast.  Antivirus software is one of the largest memory hogs your system is going to have so in order to minimize the impact I would go for something a little easier on the machine.  

There are certainly more ways that you can optimize your machine but the above four will get you started.  After upgrading to 2GBof RAM my machine consistently idles at about 30% of memory usage, leaving over 1.5GB for any other task I throw at it.  Please leave your thoughts and comments!

2011: Miscrosoft Software Developer's Conferences

Currently my company is looking for any good Microsoft developer's conferences coming up in 2011.  We would preferably like to find a BizTalk developer's conference but anything that comes close to that would be nice too.  Anything like .NET or C# would be good.  Does anyone have any recommendations for anything good coming up in 2011?

BizTalk 2009 Version Control

It seems that with as many intricacies that are included in the software combination of BizTalk 2009, Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2010 there would be a more straightforward way of version control for applications.  If there is, we certainly haven't found it yet.  With our Java systems we are used to the source code itself being version controlled i.e. 'DEV APPNAME 09-13-2010 1.0.1' being included in each version of the application that gets changed.  The closest thing we have found in TFS to do this is by using labels.  With labels we can give the label any name we want and include any files we would like.  However, with labels in TFS there is nothing stopping users from deleting or editing labels.  Also, the process of finding what labels exist in a solution or what labeled version of a file you have locally is also not user-friendly.  This hardly seems like the ideal solution.

Essentially what we would like to do is to have the version number incremented each time something is checked in or similar.  We would also like to increment the assembly versions but we had trouble with references when we tried to do this manually.  If there is another way to increment the assembly version without breaking references I would love to hear about it.  Please feel free to leave your thoughts, questions and comments.

Sold my ThinkPad...kept my Mac

I graduated from Drake University this spring and as a typical college graduate I received my share of presents.  The biggest by far was the gift from my parents who offered to pay for half of a MacBook Pro.  I was thrilled!  Going through four years of business school where using a Macintosh didn’t make much sense, I was ecstatic to finally get a chance to do "normal" people things on my computer that didn't require a PC.  Now, this isn't my first Mac and it probably won't be my last either.  I first entered the Mac world my sophomore year in college when I bought an iMac with OS X Tiger.  Then two MacBooks and three MacBook Pros later, I was without a Mac through my senior year in college.  I guess you could call me a bit indecisive when it comes to my personal preference between PC and Mac.  I always waffled back and forth between owning a PC or a Mac and sometimes both; both most recently.  That is until I listed my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 on eBay and made the decision to work solely on the Macintosh platform. 

Since I have made the switch to only using a Mac I haven’t run into any problems or times when I found myself wishing for my PC back.  I have found that when I need to use a PC for anything, usually work, that my handy little Citrix plug-in alongside my remote desktop for Mac by Microsoft does the trick.  I can easily remote into my work machine from anywhere and make a quick programming change or check email, etc.  It is just like I am sitting in front of my machine at work, minus the 22” wide-screen monitor!  With the ability to remote into my work environment I haven’t even found a need to use Boot Camp to dual-boot.

If you are living in a PC world and want to make the switch to Mac at home I highly recommend that you do.  I have had nothing but good experiences from my Macintosh exploits and I am just scratching the surface.  If you have PC/Mac related stories, please share and feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading!

Making the switch: HDD to SSD Follow-up

So, I have been testing an 80GB Intel solid state drive on both my MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad and I can't say I am impressed with the results.  I don't have any benchmarks or fancy graphs to show you the performance differences.  But I can tell you from an above-average user's point of view, there is very little noticeable difference.  The SSD does cause both machines to boot up a little faster, but nothing that would make it worth making the switch.  I would say to anybody looking to upgrade their HDD to something faster either bump up to 7,200 if you're not already there or try one of Seagate's 10,000 RPM drives.  You'll get a lot more storage capacity for your money and you will be happier in the long run.  I wouldn't have even bothered with a SSD but I got one from Intel for 50% for being a employee at Best Buy at the time.  Feel free to leave comments and questions! 

New Car

So, it was my 23rd birthday today and I have been wanting to get a new car for sometime now.  I really wanted a BMW and I was searching around and found the perfect car.  It was listed at 21,900 but they reduced the price to 18,900 so I jumped on it.  It's a 2006 BMW 325i with 41,000 miles on it.  I love it and couldn't be happier with it.  I especially like the butt warmers in the seats and the beeping that alerts me to when I am about to hit something when backing up.  I will try to post pics of it later.  It is getting late right now so I had better get to bed.  I have to be at work tomorrow at 8:00!!!

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009

Bear with me please, this is my first real blog post and I don't have a lot of technical experience. I am 22 years old and I have recently started using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009...before I get into anything technical, let me give you an idea of where my views are coming from. I graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, IA with a bachelor's degree in Information Systems this May (2010). I got my first real job this summer as a computer programmer working for an insurance company here in Des Moines. My title is Programmer I and the main software that I will be discussing in this post and more to come is Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009, Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2008.

My first impression of BizTalk is that it is a very intricate, complicated and frustrating product. Our first application just went into production last night and it's a relatively simple application. The application waits for an index file to appear in a folder, BizTalk uses the index file to import the documents listed in the index file and uploads them all to our electronic content manager. This is a fairly straight-forward application as I am sure many of you can attest to.

However, even as relatively simple as this application seems, BizTalk gave us countless headaches as we delt with the quarks that come along with it. Some of these include running into problems writing the .dll files during builds, not having a built-in component or method for archiving the files being uploaded, references dropping out of projects and a lack of a usable version control for all the builds and different versions of our source code.

We have tried using pre-build script to take care of the .dll issue and most of the time this worked. However, this is not the rule but seems to be the exception. The other times we have to manually rename the old .dll file with an extension such as .tst and then build. This takes care of that problem. We had a need to archive the files that were being uploaded in case we needed to run the application again or have a backup. There was no built-in archiving functionality that we could find anywhere and building a custom pipeline component didn't seem feasible. We took care of this by writing a .bat file that uses WinZip to archive the files. This seems to work just fine, however WinZip must be installed on the production server now.

Finally, the most frustrating of all the issues I have been facing is a very poor version control method built-in to the BizTalk, Visual Studio or TFS environment. The best method that we have come up with is to use source control and label points in time with version numbers so we have references to working applications if somebody makes a change that break the application. What we really want is something more like what my co-workers are used to in the Java development environment where versions of each source code appear along with the code all the time. We haven't found anything like this within the BizTalk environment.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave comments or questions you may have. The point of this blog is to help others and myself learn more about the world of BizTalk as the application looks to be a huge time/money saving investment for many companies!