Bill Morefield My thoughts, discoveries, and occasional rambiings.

January 16, 2012

Six Months with a MacBook

Filed under: apple — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 10:58 pm

Back in July I started using a MacBook Pro as my laptop. A month later I’d become pleased enough with it to move over to it full time. Now that it’s nearly six month into the change I thought I’d add a few thoughts on the current state.

Not all was perfect. In fact I found that, as with most basic laptops, the included hardware didn’t last too long for my needs. Memory was my first problem and 4GB just wasn’t enough.  I’m surprised how much RAM the computer uses in just normal use with a few of my normal programs (Firefox, Outlook, etc.) running. I really wanted 16GB in the laptop, but the cost of that back in September was too prohibitive. I settled on upgrading to 8GB which works well most of the time. In fact even with 8GB I sometimes see the computer bog down when running a 3GB virtual Windows computer.  Memory prices on 8GB chips have finally dropped to the range I decided to buy that to put in.  The upgrade will be here in a few days so I’ll not later how it works.  That would also open up Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere among other apps I still have to rely on my desktop for.

I still need to run Windows applications on the go making VMware Fusion a necessity. I migrated my old laptop to a virtual machine which worked great, except that my old system was already slow and in desperate need of a reinstall. As always a virtual machine works slower than native hardware so the resulting VM was painful to use. I did a few test installations of Windows and finally found a decent sweet spot. It turns out a 3 GB VM running 32bit Windows 7 gave me enough to run Visual Studio 2011, my plugins, web servers, and other tools pretty snappily. I actually feel comfortable  

I also found hard drive space getting tight after a few months. So right before Christmas I took advantage of a good sale (especially surprising given the recent price increases) to upgrade to a 500GB drive. I chose one of the Seagate Momentus XT drives that includes a small amount of flash memory giving you a bit of a hybrid between the high speed SSD and high capacity storage. The speed jump is noticeable after a couple weeks usage. I would have liked to look at the larger (and faster) 750GB Momentus, but couldn’t justify the cost difference.

Overall I’m quite happy with the Mac hardware.  I’m still undecided if the price difference between it and a similarly configured PC is worth the change.  I still believe Windows 7 is  as good of an operating system as Mac OS.  The hardware is well designed and the upgrade of both the hard drive and memory were easier than in many PC laptops I’ve dealt with.  I also notice the reactions when you pull out a MacBook in a coffee shop are noticeably different than with a PC and mostly in a better way.  I’ve had people start a conversation with me about the MacBook while sitting and working.

One thing I’ve been less pleased about is the software situation on the Mac, but that’s another post.

December 30, 2011

Balancing Rest and Motion

Filed under: development — Tags: — Bill Morefield @ 1:15 pm

Saw a post on gapingvoid simply titled “Now What.”  I think it’s a good question to ask yourself every so often.  Something about the end of the year invites this type of reflection. You’re only one day older on January 1 than you were on December 31 just as you’re only one day older on your birthday than you were the day before. Though arbitrary, the change from one year to another feels significant. Maybe it’s the increased interactions with friends and family during the holiday season. Maybe it’s the shift back to normal life after the hectic rush of the rest of December.

I’ve heard, “this year has flown by,” so many times in the last couple months that I’ve lost count. I’ve normally nodded my head and agreed, but in truth this felt like a very long year for me. Not always in a bad way as I’ve had some wonderful and amazing experiences this year, but more than once challenges in my personal or professional life made me aware of every passing moment while waiting for a shoe that didn’t drop or didn’t land where I’d hoped. I’ve faced as much disappointment as joy this year, which has been a change for me.

Around this time last year I became aware of several things I did not like about my life. So like any good modern self-improvement minded person, I set about changing them. We all make resolutions that mostly fall by the wayside, but mine began quite well. I established new patterns in eating and exercise and for the first time I started winning the fight with my weight. With those early successes I began looking at other areas in my life and working to “fix” the problems I saw.

February and March both brought shocks to my life, one suspected and the other completely out of the blue. The first brought pain and the second brought happiness along with heartbreak.  As I moved into summer, I became fixated on the improvement. I wanted to fix everything in my life. I threw myself into everything that seemed wrong and worked on making it right.

It seemed a great idea at the time.

In truth there have been some wonderful results of this process. I’ve dropped my weight from peak near 300 pounds to nearer 240. I’m fitting into suits I bought for my interviews while a senior in college. I’m buying new clothes because I need something smaller for the first time in my life. I fully expect that by the time late spring rolls around I’ll be rather close to my “idea” weight probably for the first time since I was a freshman in college.

There are other things of course. I’ve rebuilt social ties and friendships I’d let lapse. I again found the joy in experimenting and trying new things. I developed a new good friendship. I’ve improved the skills in my photography hobby to the point I actually wrote an eBook on my niche. I’ve even sold a few copies.

The mistake came as I stopped enjoying where I was. I became so focused on the process of improving and where I wanted to go, I stopped enjoying where I was. Perhaps I’d been unhappy with my state for a while as the shift came subtly. I never noticed. I realized I was unhappy, but not why. Of course I was unhappy with some things that I wanted to change, but I stopped noticing the wonderful people and experiences in my life. I was like the driver so focused on getting to a meeting on time and complaining about the traffic, he misses the beautiful sunset.

By fall it had become obvious something was amiss. A Buddhist proverb reads something like, “When the student is ready, the master appears.” I didn’t find a single master to provide the answers. I got snippets here in and there, and then I had a wonderful, deep conversation with a good friend one October afternoon. She said the exact words that I needed to hear. It took a couple days to really sink in, but that was the “Aha!” moment. I found other things that provided direction. I particularly recommend The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom  which is a wonderful blend of religious thought, philosophy, and brain science.

It wasn’t an overnight change, and it took me a couple weeks to realize I’d turned that corner. Since that day I’ve enjoyed life more, maybe more than in several years. I’ve learned to live in the moment, savor the small moments in life, to enjoy the flow of my senses coming in. When I’m eating, I enjoy the flavor and texture of my food instead of throwing it down. When I’m with friends, I enjoy the conversation and belonging and don’t worry about what I’m going to say or what we’re going to do. When I’m doing other things, I enjoy them fully and completely.

I still make goals and plans. I still have things I want to pursue. For getting lost along the way, I did still reach many of my destinations. The change is that now while I still am heading somewhere, I’m enjoying the drive along the way.

Moving Web Servers

Filed under: aspnet,web — Tags: , , , , — Bill Morefield @ 9:08 am

A few notes from the recent move of about ten web sites from one server to another.

Plesk

Plesk is a nice tool for managing web sites, but I’ve found the migration tool to be so quirky as to be useless.  Last time I migrated servers I spent more time migrating than manually moving them would have taken.  This time, I spent about two hours fighting the migration tool before doing a simple backup/restore through Plesk.  Due to space limitations of old server I couldn’t migrate content through backup/restore, but a simple FTP took care of that.  Worked much more smoothly and I had everything done in about four hours total.

Migrating Databases

There needs to be an easier way to move a database from one site to another.  That took much of the time of the move and in the end I again found just moving the actual files to be the easiest method.

Logins also cause problems when you backup/restore or move the database file.  The login is server level, but the details reside in the database.  When you restore or attach, the two aren’t automatically connected.  You can either delete the user in the database and recreate (not always possible or desirable) or use the sp_change_users_login stored procedure to link the two.  I know that stored procedure is deprecated, but old habits die hard.  The replacement is the ALTER USER command, but the stored procedure still works in Microsoft SQL 2008.

Showing ASP Errors under Windows 2008

ASP still lives.  Two of the sites run, and work quite well, as ASP pages.  Out of the box Windows 2008 doesn’t provide much useful information for errors.  You can fix that using two steps of the web site:

  1. Set Site –> ASP –> Debugging –> Send Errors to Browser to True and click Apply
  2. Set Site –> Error Pages –> 500 –> Edit Feature Settings to Detailed Errors if you need to be able to troubleshoot from a remote connection.  The default only sends the detailed error to local connections.
  3. Change back if desired after the problems are resolved.

ASP Parent Paths under Windows 2008

A lot of ASP pages use parent paths and these are not turned on by default in Windows 2008.  This can be changed under the Virtual Application Settings –> Allow Parent Paths.

ASP.NET Migration

Always check the version of .NET the application is running under.  Most problems come back to this.  Next check any database connection string point to the correct server.  About 90% of errors after a move are one of those two items.

Update – SQL 2008 Issue

Found an issue I’d not encountered before when installing SQL 2008 Express R2.  It installed with dynamic ports by default.  Likely related to the fact I installed SQL using the web platform and not installing directly.  For info and changes to fix see http://serverfault.com/a/92288.

November 23, 2011

Why Social Networks Aren’t Yet

Filed under: social networks — Tags: , , , , — Bill Morefield @ 6:00 pm

I’ve been thinking about online social networks more than normal for the last few weeks. The truth is that I don’t do a lot on most general social networks right now. I generally read Facebook about once a day, but post maybe once a month. I read Twitter a few times a day, but post maybe once a week. Other social networks such as LinkedIn and Google+ to more specialized ones such as Instagram I visit irregularly at best.

In fact the social network I visit and use the most often is Model Mayhem, a site devoted to connecting people in photography. I think the reason I go there more often, other than the site is how I find most people I work with, is the focus of the site on a single set of relationships. I know intuitively how to use it and work with it. I go there for a purpose, interact as needed, and leave.

On LinkedIn a couple weeks ago I had a connection request from a model that I’ve worked with a couple times in photo projects. After accepting I noticed that my connections on LinkedIn consist of a mix of friends, photographic collaborators like her, vendors I’ve worked with on projects, and co-workers. They are a diverse group. The same thing is the case with Facebook adding friends and people I went to high school with to the previous list.

I think that’s the biggest problem with most social network sites. They really do a poor job of mapping to my real social network. In the last couple months I’ve served in the role of friend, lover, co-worker, manager, employee, consultant, photographer, and student along with others I’m sure I’m forgetting at different times. None of the sites really deal with these varied roles. The intricate multitude of human interactions do not easily map to simple terms like friend or follower or connection. This makes the interactions feel a bit more difficult than they should be. Most of my photography connections don’t really care that I’m with friends at a restaurant, but those that are also friends might want to join us. My co-workers probably wouldn’t care that I’d had a model cancel a shoot and need a replacement, but those photography connections would if available. Then there are the people whose thoughts I want to know either because they entertain or enlighten, but I have no interest in what they’re having for dinner tonight.

To me no site handles this well. I maintain two twitter accounts, one for “me” that covers most of my roles and a second that covers the photographer role. As mentioned my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are a mix of people I connect with in these diverse roles. I think one reason I post to these two less is that I’m often not sure if I want to “bother” all of these people with messages meant for only a subset of them.

In addition my roles overlap and shift even during the course of a day and more so over weeks and months. Someone I meet for a photo shoot last year is a friend today. A woman I met late this summer moved from friend to lover, back to friend, and then out of my life over a few months. The complexities of these relationships do not match well to simple terms like friend or follower on Facebook or Twitter. The concept of Circles on Google+ perhaps comes closer to acknowledging these differences but still feels a bit off. My true social network lies in none of these sites. It occurs face to face, in phone calls, text messages, and emails. Those are the ones that feel right, natural, and simple.

I think we’re at the point with social networks that we were in Internet search before Google arrived. The best and most popular search site then was AltaVista. Everyone used it and it provided the best results. We liked it because while it was inconsistent and buggy it did a job we wanted by helping us find what we wanted on the Internet most of the time. Sure you might not get the best result, but you got a good result more often than not. Suddenly Google arrived and you started getting the best results almost all the time and Altavista faded.

Right now I think Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the others are like those search engines before Google. They solve a real need we have, the basic human urge to connect and interact with others. Our desire to feel part of a group and Right now Facebook probably does it the best and is to social what Altavista was to search. Something is off though. In search the big idea was that the number of other sites that linked to a site told you something about how good a site was. I think in social it will be some way to almost transparently deal with the complexity of real relationships. I don’t know who will do it or how they will do it.  I think whoever does, whether an existing or new site, will finally be the social network I really use.

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving to all.

September 21, 2011

Code Never Dies

Filed under: Programming — Tags: , , — Bill Morefield @ 8:36 pm

I spent much of the afternoon working on a new VBScript script.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  Because more than seven years ago I’d written a VBScript that did everything I wanted except output the data in the correct format.

The original code was a simple connector module that took a feed out of one system and loaded the data into a database meant for another system.  It has been running for most of those seven years and hasn’t been updated since the source system changed about three years ago.  It works and honestly there is no need to rewrite the program in a newer language since it’s simple, works, and isn’t a high priority process.

So today I needed to take that same source and produce a text file with a small subset of the data.  I could have written and tested a new script in PowerShell or a program in C#, but in reality I just needed to change the output from a database to a CSV file.  It took about an hour to rewrite and another hour to test.  It would have taken at least twice as long to write from scratch.

The lessons are that so much old legacy cold stays around is that it works.  The original script has more than three years of successful runs behind it with real data.  Testing can give you confidence, but working in production is hard to beat.

It’s also nice not to reinvent the wheel.  This is a once a year process that has been done manually more often than not.  It took about four hours to manually handle last year so this year I spent two hours to automate it.  Next year it will run in a few minutes.  That’s a good savings in time and effort.

August 23, 2011

Life with MacBook

Filed under: apple — Bill Morefield @ 5:40 pm

It’s been a month now since I bought the MacBook Pro and I’m about to make it my primary portable computer.  It’s not any one thing and I’m not sold on the Mac is greatest and Windows stinks.  My Windows laptop still gets almost as much use as the Mac and my Windows desktop gets more use than both.  What I’ve found though is the combination of light weight and small size make it perfect as the “put in the bag and go” computer that I need.  If anything it may reduce my use of the iPad more than other computers.

I do plan to try moving my Windows development environment, my primary use for the Windows laptop, over the MacBook running as a virtual machine.  I’m not sure if that will stick both due to the memory in the computer and due to the smaller screen size.  I’ve gotten used to this for email and editing files, but not sure how it will look editing code.  Time will tell.

I can’t deny there is an element of sexiness to the MacBook.  Taking it out of the case just looks better than my PC.  Last Friday a friend came over to work on a project together.  She ran a little late and while waiting I went through email and when she arrived left the MacBook sitting on my couch.  She noticed it and commented on it.  Now she is a long time Mac user, but I know that a new PC would not have gotten the same reaction.

So a month into the MacBook it’s winning me over.  The next couple of weeks where I try to move my PC related tasks to it will tell much.

August 13, 2011

Now Running on WordPress

Filed under: blog — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 11:00 am

I’ve moved my personal website and blog over to WordPress.  I’ve done little work with WordPress until a few months ago, but recently used it for a new project and liked what I found.  I see a lot of places where I think it fits in very well, and I think my web site works as one of those places.  It’ll also give me the chance to become more familar with WordPress.

Previously I’d been using BlogEngine.NET for my blog.  The migration went pretty smoothly using the directions I found at http://www.craigbailey.net/migrating-from-blogengine-net-to-wordpress/.  The only significant change from his instructions I did was to download the BlogML import plugin from the WordPress site instead of the one linked from that article.  For the redirects from the old links to the new links for articles I used the Redirection plugin from http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/.

As part of the update I also revived a few blog posts that had vanished from the blog due to a bad setting.

July 17, 2011

I Own a MacBook

Filed under: apple — Bill Morefield @ 11:16 am

The iPad was a gateway drug.  Sure I found it useful and helpful, but I now see it was just the first step in Apple’s master plan.  October I got an iPad.  February I buy an iPhone.  Now I’m in the Apple world with two feet.  Five months later in mid July I am now the owner of a MacBook Pro.

I’ve been travelling a bit more than normal over the last month and I do love the iPad for mobility.  It works well if you just want to catch up on email and web while sitting in a coffee shop, but the Achilles heel of the iPad is content creation.  I did get a keyboard case that helps with this, but sometimes you need a litter bigger screen or the workhorse programs.  I’ve been thinking of getting a new laptop to travel with as my current HP workhorse laptop model is a bit bulky and getting a bit creaky.  I got the change to pick up a 13" Macbook Pro this weekend at a very good price and it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.

I’m planning to use it as my primary laptop for everything other than .NET development for a couple weeks to determine if I really will keep it or resell it.  I already see that my first software purchase will be either Parallels or VMWare Fusion to get access to my missing PC Apps.

May 21, 2011

There’s Going to be a Jailbreak

Filed under: apple,iPhone — Bill Morefield @ 1:43 pm

Updated this post in August 2011 with a few other jailbreak apps that I’ve installed since May

I did jailbreak my iPhone.  Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t admit that online.

In any case I’ve had a jailbroken phone for a few weeks and have found a few apps that I think improved the experience:

Action Menu Plus – Just handy that adds some extra options to the standard copy/cut/paste options

CameraLock – Puts a link to start the camera on the lock screen.  Pretty much taken from iOS 5

Five Icon Dock – Lets you keep an extra app in the dock

Five Icon Switcher – Adds extra icon to the switcher

Infinifolders – Probably my favorite app as I have way too many apps on my iPhone and this lets me organize them better

ManualCorrect Pro – Never again send an inappropriate text message to someone

MobileNotifier – Another one that probably becomes obsolete in iOS 5.  Makes notifications less of a pain

My3G – Let’s you convince the phone it’s on wireless when its not

PkgBackup – I just like knowing all the stuff on my phone is backed up.  Backed up to the cloud is even better.

QuickReply – Makes replying to text messages faster

April 16, 2011

My First Couple Months with an iPhone

Filed under: apple,iPhone,mobile technology — Bill Morefield @ 6:43 pm

A couple weeks after getting an iPhone in mid-February, I wrote up a few thoughts on the new phone.  I thought that I’d add a few thoughts now that I’ve had more time to get used to the phone and really integrate it into my life.

In short I love the iPhone more now than then.  I’ve used a smartphone since getting a Motorola MPx220 that ran Windows Mobile back around 2004.  The iPhone works better than any phone I’ve had for just about everything.  With every other smartphone I’ve owned I’ve restarted it at least every once a week.  I have probably restarted the iPhone a couple of times in four months.  Using the phone just feels natural.

I really think that apps do much to improve the experience.  Without apps, the iPhone would just be a nice phone and not as useful as it’s become.  Actually the apps are half the story and the other part would be data.  Before I just used data for email and web browsing.  Now I use data all the time for Twitter, maps, and really everything.

Most of the concerns that I mentioned in my first post still bother me.  I did figure out how to get the alerts the way that I wanted, but I still feel it could be more flexible.  Six years of having phones that managed being silent or making noise when appropriate spoiled me.  I still find myself forgetting to set the phone to vibrate or, more often, forgetting to turn sound back on after a meeting.  One feature my earlier phone had was the ability to set the phone to be silent for a set period of time when you could estimate how long you’d want quiet such as when going into a restaurant or movie and then it would turn sound back on automatically.  I’d like to see that option.

The texting interface has grown on me.  I’m using texting more now and I’m not sure if the iPhone has led to more texting or if my greater texting led to me getting more used to the iPhone interface.

I decided to Jailbreak my phone and will be looking at the Cydia store to round off some of the rough edges.  Will report on what I find then.

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