Bill Morefield My thoughts, discoveries, and occasional rambiings.

Sorry the spam had gotten a little out of hand.  It should be cleaned up now.  I’ve been tied up with some changes at work involving adding a new area to the one I already managed and had neglected the blog a bit.  Also updated the blog software and made a few changes that I hope will keep things under control better in the future.

I bought a Kindle about six months ago.  I’m a big reader and the idea of having a large number of books available along with the convenience of instantly delivery appealed to me.  I live in a town with only one small bookstore and frankly they often don’t have a book that I may want so often I have to travel an hour to larger bookstores nearby to find things in stock or order online and wait days for delivery.  For a lot of books I’ve found that it’s not worth the hassle of either option so the books gets stuck onto a list to look at some later time.  With the Kindle, I can get the book right now and read immediately.  It’s like having a large bookstore right next to my house.

I’ve come to enjoy my Kindle more over time as I get more familiar with the convenience of having a large number of books I can take anywhere.  It’s surprising the downtime during the day where you have enough downtime to pull it out and start reading.  I still buy plenty of real books and don’t plan to stop as some books work better in paper, but I’m starting to move more of my purchases to the Kindle.

So tonight I looked for a book online and found the following pricing.  Note that the Kindle price is the highest of all the options on Amazon.  In fact the Kindle version (set by the publisher) is $8.87 more than the bargain price and $4.72 more than the standard hardcover price.  Apparently the paper for the printed book has a negative cost to produce.

I ran into an issue this evening and wanted to document it for my own future reference and anyone else who might run into the problem.  I had installed ASP.NET 4 onto a Windows 2003 64 bit server.  I uploaded a test version of an application that is a port of an existing application converted to take advantage of some of the new features of .NET 4.  After loading the application and setting it as an application I noticed that the ASP.NET tab where one would normally change the version wasn’t there.

After some false starts, I came across this blog post which describes much the same issue though my server was not running on VMWare, but another virtualization system.  The fix it suggests is:

1. Stop IIS
2. Edit the MetaBase.XML file in %WINDIR%system32inetsrv to remove a line reading Enable32BitAppOnWin64="TRUE"
3. Start IIS

I did this and the tab did appear, but the result caused more problems that it solved.  Several components on the web site refused to load under 64 bit only and as a result the server was useless.  After changing the settings back to where they had been to start I looked some more and found another blog post that gave an alternative solution to “manually” change the version on a directory using the aspnet_regiis tool.  To do this you use the –s or –sn options along with the path of the application.  The path is not the path to the application on disk, but a application path that goes something like W3SVC/[x]/ROOT/AppPath where [x] is the number of the web site (shown on the listing of all the web sites in the IIS Manager) and the AppPath is the path from the root of the site to the application you want to set.  The difference between the two options is that –s applies the change to the path you specify and any applications located below it while –sn only changes the settings of the application at the path and does not affect applications below it.

A good note is that an MVC 2 application no longer requires the wildcard mapping “hack” under IIS 6 with ASP.NET 4.  Also make sure to allow ASP.NET 4 in the Extensions for your new web application to work too.

Today I read some articles about the changes to the agreement for the iPhone SDK that basically seems designed to keep Flash off the iPhone at all costs.  I’m more annoyed that it might knock out MonoTouch, a product I was starting to look at with the idea of doing some iPhone/iPad development, though the company still seems optimistic.

If Adobe really decides to push it, here is an interesting thought.  Adobe’s new Creative Suite 5 debuts in on Monday.  What if Adobe was to decide that if Flash can’t go onto the iPhone, then Creative Suite won’t be released for the Mac?  It’s a nuclear option to be sure as it would get the Mac creative community up in arms, but I can’t think of a better weapon they have in their arsenal if they really wanted to push the fight.  It’s probably too late for CS5 even if they wanted to, but imagine if during the debut they mentioned that they were reevaluating their support for CS6 on the Mac platform given the current relationship with Apple.

I think it would be a bad idea in the long run for Adobe, but it’s an interesting thought.

I woke up this morning to a rather odd issue on my phone. I have a Windows Mobile phone and use it to check several email accounts. This morning one showed up on the list, but didn’t seem to have synchronized since late last night. So I went into Pocket Outlook and the account doesn’t even show up. I then go to Messaging and do not see the account. Thinking it one of those odd errors or that I’d accidently deleted it the night before while changing some settings, I started to add the account back in only for the phone to tell me it already existed.

So at lunch I began searching for the problem and most solutions said just hard reset the phone. That’s basically means erasing it and reinstalling everything. Right now I just don’t have that kind of time. So I looked a little more and found a link to a tool called MailAccountRepair at http://nicolasmauri.blogspot.com/2007/01/wm5-utility-recover-your-lost-mail.html. It was written for Windows Mobile 5 and isn’t supported in any way, but given the alternative was to reset the phone and spend a few hours reinstalling and reconfiguring it this evening, I decided to give it a try. It worked for me so it appears to at least fix the problem in some cases.

I found out tonight that my site has been down for much of the last week because of a server move by the host.  I made the mistake of believing them when they said all my settings should move over instead of checking myself.  I lost a post along the way that I’ll get back up tomorrow, but for now I think all is well again.

I purchased a HP Mediasmart Ex490 back in the fall and until late last week have loved it.  Then late last week I tried to remote into it and found the server ran glacially slow.  I then used Remote Desktop to directly connect  to the desktop (the Windows Home Server Console is really just a remote desktop than runs a single application.  When you remote desktop in normally a shortcut to that application is on the desktop) and saw the CPU was pegged to 100% and the guilty application was the Twonky Media server.  This software lets me stream the music and video files from my server out to other devices on the network.

Some research confirmed this was the culprit as a few other people were complaining about it.  It turns out a patch had installed the problem version of the application.  For the short term I just stopped the TwonkyMedia service (Start –> All Programs –> Administrative Tools –> Services).  This accomplishes the same thing as using the Stop Sharing button in the Media Server tab of the Console, but was much faster to bring up.  Once I did this the server load returned to normal.

I finally had a chance to come back to this tonight and found a way to get the server back to normal at http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/03/04/how-to-fix-twonky-issues-in-3-0-patch-2/.  The only thing I’d add to it is that stopping and starting Twonky through Services works to move the offending file and responds much faster than the Console does with the CPU pegged.

Now HP, how about getting a fix out soon?

I spent a few hours this week troubleshooting this and hopefully this will help anyone who comes across it

I built a new desktop machine between Christmas and New Year’s at the end of last month.  Earlier this week the Belkin USB hub that I’d had to RMA arrived back and I hooked it up only to find that it didn’t work.  I plugged it into my laptop and it came up with no problems so I knew it had to be something with the computer and not the device.  Since both machines were running Windows 7 64-bit edition, I felt it should be something fixable.

I tried Google and didn’t find anything so I had to put it off until this weekend when I had a chance to better look at the problem.  The first I place that I go anytime hardware doesn’t work is Device Manager.  There I saw something that caught my attention, a Bluetooth device that I didn’t remember being there before named “Bluetooth USB + EDR Adapter Class1 v2.1”.  It also had the little yellow triangle that means it’s not working.  To verify this was my hub, I right clicked on it, select Uninstall.  Then I disconnected the hub and then reconnected it.  Sure enough the device returned.  So now I knew my problem, the hub was not being recognized as a hub it appeared, but instead as a Bluetooth radio.

After searching both Google and Bing again using the incorrect device name I found some interesting articles saying a Windows Update might be the cause, but in my case apparently not as there are no updates on the laptop where it worked compared to the desktop where it does not.  The fixes in those articles didn’t work in any case.

So in the end I decided to try setting the driver to a generic USB hub to see if it would work.  To do this, I right-clicked on the device and chose Properties and then went to the driver tab and then the Update Driver button.  The key is not to let Windows do it, but pick the Browse my computer for driver software option which will let you choose the driver.

Now if this was some specialized device, I would then pick a directory where I’d extracted a driver from the manufacturer’s web site, but with a USB hub, I just need the generic USB driver so I use the Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.

With the show compatible hardware option selected to filter out the irrelevant drivers, I saw two options.  The first was the device that had wrongly been selected.  The next was Generic USB Hub which is exactly what I wanted.  So I select that and click Next.

Windows then installed the driver and the hub is working perfectly now.  In effect when Windows doesn’t recognize a device correctly, sometimes you just have to tell it what to do.

I had some issues with Verizon, mostly with the store where I set up service, but the network coverage is definitely much better.  I finally settled on the HTC Touch Pro 2.  I’ve used Windows phones for quite a while and I’ll definitely agree it has issues, I’ve got a large investment in software for the Windows Phone platform that it will take a big clear advantage to make me move.  I do admit that the Droid was tempting, but I just saw one deal breaker for me so I stayed on the Windows Mobile.  After I’ve had the phone a little longer, I’ll post some thoughts.

I’ve had my cell phone service with AT&T for so long, I can’t remember exactly when I signed up with them.  I do know it was still called BellSouth Mobility at the time.  In truth I’m a little sad at this, but I’ve had it with them and am moving to Verizon.

I still think AT&T has the best phones overall, but their network has serious issues.  I purchased a new phone late last year which was my first in several years.  My old phone didn’t support 3G and assumed that many of my problems were related to that.  I now know how most of the time I never even see 3G and at my house there are many places where I leave my phone and get little or no signal and I live less than two miles from the Interstate and just outside a small city.

So I’m currently I’m giving Verizon a try and will see how they do.