Personal

Late 2008 and all of 2009 has been a pretty crazy time for most people. Lots of job losses and uncertainty. As an experiment, if you are an employer or someone that has a job opening, feel free to e-mail me the details and I'll post them in one of the sidebars of this blog. No charge.

I know this site gets a decent amount of web hits from the Michigan area, so if I can help someone land a job or find the right person for your organization, all the better. No catch. No hidden agenda.

There is a lot of talk about "Local First", and if this helps out, great!

We live in the middle of a bunch of farms, by a lake, in the hard-to-describe and even more confusing to do taxes for, area of West Michigan that is almost in Muskegon county, almost in Kent county and in the far upper right hand corner of Ottawa county. We pay taxes to three different counties for various services. Anyway, that is supposed to give you a little background on the picture below. My 4 year old daughter is posing like a model, while I'm typing away on my computer. All the while, the chickens are walking around and pecking at things.

It is actually pretty relaxing. Cassandra, my wife, took the photo.

Overall, Hava v1.8.0.11 works great under Windows 7 x32 build 7000 and builds after 7000.

Unfortunately, when you first boot up and if you wait a few minutes before logging into the computer, havanet.sys will blue screen the system with a IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

I've performed a kernel debug crash dump on it, although unfortunately the symbols are not available for the build of Windows 7 I am running.

If I log into the computer in a hurry, the blue screen is avoided and the Hava works perfectly.

Also of note, it seems the Ulead SDK is a known 'problem app' with Windows 7 because it comes up as a 'potential blocker' when installing HAVA.

I never use the CD/DVD burning features of the Hava and uninstalling Ulead after the fact seems to work just fine. The bluescreens happen no matter if Ulead SDK is installed or not.

If you want to see the cut-and-paste of the crash dump and analysis, read my original post on the Hava forums here.

Next up, x64!

Elan Shudnow has been named a Microsoft MVP for his work in the Microsoft Community!

Elan has a blog at www.shudnow.net that covers Exchange and Office Communications Server topics. He has worked very hard over the last year to share topics of interest and step-by-step guides with the public. His blog has seen as many as 20,000 hits in one month, has numerous links to it from other highly reputable sources, and 400+ RSS subscribers.

Elan’s MVP profile can be found at this link. Please join me in congratulating Elan for his fine efforts!

Full disclosure: He is also a coworker of mine, but I'd be announcing this on here even if he wasn't. His step-by-step guides have been referred to by many clients and coworkers as top notch.

Bumped into this on the Something Awful forums:

Someone found the source code for the driver that's caused the problem in the Zune 30, from the Freescale website (http://pastie.org/349916)

[snip]
//Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
//Copyright (C) 2004-2007, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
//Module: rtc.c
//PQOAL Real-time clock (RTC) routines for the MC13783 PMIC RTC.
[/snip]

Bad code:


It goes into an infinite loop at boot because of an off by one error!

It looks like the original report of the driver source discovery, with more detailed information, can be found here.

This doesn't bode well for the rumored upcoming layoffs at Microsoft. It seems the Zune group has egg on their face due to a bug that handles leap years in the internal clock driver code path of the Zune 30. On a good note, as soon as it hits January 1st, 2009, the devices will work again.

You can read the gory details here.

A cut and paste of the interesting aspects of that post:

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

We know this has been a big inconvenience to our customers and we are sorry for that, and want to thank them for their patience.

Q: Why is this issue isolated to the Zune 30 device?
It is a bug in a driver for a part that is only used in the Zune 30 device.

Q: What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation?
This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q: What’s the timeline on a fix?
The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q: Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008?
There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

Q: What is Zune doing to fix this issue?
The issue should resolve itself.

Q: Are you sure that this won’t happen to all 80, 120 or other flash devices?
This issue is related to a part that is only used in Zune 30 devices.

Q: How many 30GB Zune devices are affected? How many Zune 30GB devices were sold?
All 30GB devices are potentially affected.

Shame on the firmware developers for letting something like this happen on the Zune 30. No fix yet. Thankfully our 4GB and 8GB Zune seem immune.

You can watch the story unfold on the Zune.net forums here. It is particularly unfortunate because music devices like this are popular for house mixes during New Years parties.

It has also hit CNN, which will only give it more bad press.

This is a first for her on Jones Soda bottles. Her sister has been on 6 or 7 bottles across the nation so far, so she needs to play catch up.
The actual picture was taken on the Coopersville train. She was in a crabby mood and was sticking her tongue out. Thankfully, it worked out to her advantage because it ended up becoming a cute picture.

If you bump into this bottle in the stores, please let me know. I might buy it off of you.

I always had a bit of a distorted reality of success and goals in my childhood, but that is to be expected, because you are a little kid.

The one that has lasted into my 30s, as a sign of 'making it', was a real Robotron 2048 cabinet. Strange, I admit. I never actually planned on owning one but it is always one of those little goals you setup for yourself to stay motivated. As time passed, less cabinets have survived in workable condition. MAME cabinets and emulators definitely fill a little bit of the void, but this game was always a bit of an oddball due to the dual joystick layout. It doesn't translate well to gamepads or keyboards.

Robotron has a long history with my family and our Rockford neighborhood back in the 80s. We'd typically play all day on a quarter or two in the downtown area. As with most early 80s video games, it focuses on game play instead fancy graphics. It is a little bit of a programming marvel because programming was started and completed over a weekend. Not many games that still hold up today have that kind of history.

By chance, I was watching a Woot off happen and I saw an item that I never even knew existed, the Midway 12 Game Tabletop Classic Arcade System. The price was much less than a real cabinet on EBay, so I took a chance on it.

Features:
14” full color CRT monitor with 12 Classic Arcade Hits built in
Accessible AV jacks allow you to plug in and play any of your other home video game systems
Dual Control Panel for Head-to-Head Play
No assembly required, plug and play

Built in Classic Arcade Games: Defender, Defender II, Bubbles, Splat, Sinistar, Rampage, Satans Hollow, Root Beer Tapper, Timber, Wizard of War, Joust, and Robotron.

It arrived this past Friday and much to my surprise, the kids have latched onto the cabinet like no other game system I've ever seen. They are literally fist fighting over who gets to play on the game system. The original Robotron only had about 18,000 upright cabinets produced and around 5000 sit-down versions produced. It looks like this product also had a limited run because our game is labeled "387 out of 486".

There still is a real Robotron cabinet at the GameWorks location in downtown Seattle, and every few months when I'm in the Redmond area, I try to make a quick stop over there to play on an original cabinet. I might not need to do that anymore with this at home. The trips to GameWorks have turned into a bit of a ritual, much like my trips for hot Thai food at Thai Ginger.

I mean, take a look at this snapshot of available sites that you can "digg/buzz/etc" a blog post.

This past month or two has been pretty insane with regards to illness around town.

For a few weeks, I had a killer cold/sinus/lung infection that robbed me of my voice for days at a time. I ended up going through 2 different antibiotics in an effort to kill off the secondary sinus infection for good. I don't smoke so I suspect I'd still be in a world of pain if I did. My lungs were working overtime to get the junk out. This finally cleared up midweek last week. This is also why everyone that gets prescribed antibiotics need to finish their prescription completely, even if they feel better, to prevent anti-biotic 'superbugs'. Amoxicillin wouldn't touch this infection.

Unfortunately, with two kids at public schools and a job that requires being when on site at healthcare sites/hospitals sometimes, you end up bringing home the "best" diseases.

Now, at the end of this week, Sabrina, my oldest daughter, started throwing up, after fighting off the original illness and now my wife started doing the same on Saturday. I've already had a flu shot, and I'm hoping they just have food poisoning but they haven't been eating the same things, so I suspect it isn't. So far, Juliana and I are the only healthy ones right now.

Update: As I was typing this, Sabrina just started throwing up again. The gift that keeps giving.

Why am I mentioning all of this? I'm not sure, but I try to post here a couple times per week and I haven't been able to. Family and work always comes first. I have some good OCS 2007 and Windows 7 posts almost ready, but this is why they haven't appeared yet.

We have seven chicks that have hatched from our initial batch of eggs. They are now outside in the coop. Being the technical fellow of the household, I set out to get the coop Internet-streamable last Friday night (11-07-2008).

In the coop, which has power, I have a Thinkpad 240 running Windows XP Pro with 192MB of RAM. I loaded up the LifeCam 2.04 software and created a Stickam account. I've been switching back and forth between the LifeCam VX-3000 and the VX-7000.

There is Cardbus ethernet card that connects to a dedicated access point that is setup as a bridged client to the home AP. From there, it goes out the house internet connection, which is EVDO Rev A. Hardly any wires are involved, even the internet connection.

The Thinkpad 240 has a mobile P2-300mhz CPU. It is tremendously slow launching IE 7 with Flash 10, but once loaded, the chicks stream pretty fast. It is a wonderful use of a laptop that has a failing LCD connection and an infamous IBM DeathStar hard drive.

You can see and hear our chickens, as they peck at the camera and each other. It is a good way to keep an eye on them from inside the house. We also installed a remote thermometer under the heating lamp so we know what the temperature is for the chicks out there.

You might wonder.. why all the technology? I say, why not. It is neat to see how people on the internet react to baby chickens chirping, playing and pecking at things. I doubt many coops have electrical power, internet access, a wireless access point, remote thermometers and door locks. Thankfully, I already had the spare wireless access point, semi-broken laptop, and a handful of webcams to choose from.

Eventual goal is to use Windows Home Server with mControl to be able to monitor temperatures, lights, and other aspects of the coop from anywhere in the world.

You can watch the live stream here. You can find more information of the hatching process on my wife's site here.

I've setup a dedicated section of my Facebook profile as a picture gallery of the first hatching here.

Go here, enter in your address, and it will show you where you need to go to vote. Thankfully mine is not too far from our house, but I already knew the location due to voting in 2004.

If you were like me and had a hard time finding the actual proposals as they will appear on the ballot next week, go to the actual Michigan government website here and read the proposals as they will appear next week.

If you are looking for general voting info for Michigan, go to the Election page of Michigan.gov, here.

As for who you vote for and what you vote for, I don't care! That's what makes this country great. Freedom of choice.

Kicking and screaming (not really), I've been adding Media Center-esque devices to our household over time - mostly from Woot auctions because I don't want to put a lot of money into stuff like this, for now. I can say though, is that I'm very impressed with how the newer firmware on the Hava interfaces with Windows Media Center and how the well the Pinnacle PCTV 800e works, on a Thinkpad T60.

When I'm at home, I "drive it like I stole it" on my Dell 2707WFP monitor, and the ATI X1400 really shouldn't be able to keep up with the amount of HD scaling it has to do, but it does it surprisingly well. I'm curious to see how well it will behave on the newer models like the Thinkpad T500.

Long story short, there is a new cumulative update for Media Center that came out in October 2008:

Fixes an issue in which you cannot seek through recorded TV shows on Windows Media Center systems that have digital cable tuners. Additionally, the recorded TV shows display the incorrect length.

Fixes an issue in which Windows Media Center Extenders cannot reconnect to a host computer after the host computer resumes from the suspend mode or the sleep mode.

Fixes an issue which is introduced by in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 950126. In this issue, a video that is paused may resume if you minimize or maximize the Windows Media Center window or if a screen saver starts.

Implements support for Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free copy for digital cable tuners that have the latest digital cable tuner BIOS versions that support DRM-free copy.

Expands the solution that was introduced in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 950126 to improve the experience of recording analog TV broadcasts to include set-top box scenarios. Previously, some analog TV broadcasts were blocked with the "protected content" message.

Note: This solution does not apply to configurations that use analog TV over digital cable tuners because the BIOS of the digital cable tuners provide content protection.

KB 955519 - you can read about it here and download the binaries here (x86/x64).