Windows 7 benchmarking

How unbelievably stupid is it to benchmark an unfinished OS?  I mean to say that W7 is a dead end OS because “I bench-marked it and it a huge resource hog.  I mean it’s basically lipstick on a pig.  It is Vista with a new coat of paint.” These statements are very frustrating and truly dumb.  W7 is still in alpha for crying out loud.  Not even Beta.  ALPHA!  Reputable journals are saying this trash, its unbelievable.

Look, I can understand people being frustrated with MS after the whole Vista debacle, but seriously just give them an opportunity with this new OS before you bash it in the ground too.  I’m not trying to defend MS. Truthfully I think they better pull out the big guns with this one, or they are in for a world of hurt, at least on the OS side of things.  But the fact is that all OS’s suck in their own special way.  You’ll never have an OS that does 100% of what you want 100% of the time, unless you are smart enough to start from scratch or may start with the Linux kernel and go from there, and that’s only like 0.0001% of the world’s population.  So, get over it.  Mac fanboys are just idiots and Windows diehards are equally as dumb.  The best OS for you is the one you know how to use.

I’m not sure how I jumped off into this subject but while I’m here let me go ahead and say my peace.  For me and my money I’ll buy a PC every time, simply because I can put Windows or Linux on it for a fraction of the price that Apple wants to charge me for the same thing with a shiny wrapper.  Don’t get me wrong I’ve used my fair share of Macs and it’s a darn good OS, for that matter so is Windows, but you are comparing two completely different things.  Like apples to oranges.  Both taste good, but if you bite into an apple expecting an orange then you are going to be disappointed.  (The first person to comment about rotten apples or sour oranges will be banned from the internets.)

Vista Media Center is a Disappointment

I’m so very disappointed this morning.  One, my home PC hard drive crashed last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to recover some data from it, but still no fun.  It used to be fun to fix a computer, but now I just want things to work.

That’s part of the reason I’m also disappointed with Vista Media Center.  I was really looking forward to DirecTV support using the HDPC-20.  (For those of you who don’t know what that is.)

But after reading this article I’m more than a little bummed.  I really wanted this to work, native support without third party software is very appealing to me.

After hacking away at hardware such as the Xbox, and trying to get a whole home audio visual system, for quite a while now, I’m simply tired of it.  I just wanted this “FIJI” update to be the holy grail of updates, and allow me to hook DirecTV into my PC and stream away to my Xbox360 media center extenders.

Backing Up Phone Slowness

I’ve read that people are having issues with the iPhone backing up when syncing.  That it is taking forever.  Well I have a simple solution that has been working for me, stop it from performing the backup.  I’m not saying that this won’t come back to bite you, so don’t get all upset if it it does.  I’m just saying that I’ve been doing it everytime i’ve synced and everything’s been working for me.  I let it backup for the first couple times and then got tired of waiting so I hit the little “x” and whoo-hoo, everything else kept synced right up.

WordPress app for iphone

Cool new wordpress app in iTunes store. Makes posting to wordpress blog easier than ever. Not that I think I’ll use it very much, typing on the iPhone is not as easy as on a PC. But pretty cool none the less.

iPhone 2.0 – the follow-up

Wow, Ok.  What a messy launch this weekend.  Apple really botched this one.

In my last post I described what I thought fixed my issue.  Turns out, my issue was fixed entirely on accident.  My phone was unable to communicate with the App Store to finish my update, I thought it was a problem with my iTunes installation.  Wrong.  Apparently I just got lucky.

But in any case, my new 2.0 software is installed, and working fine.

iPhone 2.0

Ok, I know there’s gonna be at least a hundred thousand reviews of the iPhone 2.0 software, so I’m not even going to review it.  I’m satisfied with it, there could be a few more features, MMS, but overall some very nice improvements.

I’m writing because of my installation issues.  I’m by no means an expert, but then again, you’ll never get through to apple support for the next week, so I thought I’d try to contribute.  By the way, I have a windows PC that I use for my phone, so if you have a mac I can’t help.  Then again if you have a mac you probably won’t run into this issue. 

Most of the install went fine, it was when it tried to verify at the end of the install that it hung.  My phone hung up when iTunes tried to connect to the App Store.  I don’t know why it needed to connect, but it wouldn’t move beyond this point. So my phone is stuck in this emergency only mode.

 Here is what I finally did to fix it.  I uninstalled everything apple: iTunes, Quicktime, bonjour, and Updater.  Then I downloaded the newest iTunes (7.7) and reinstalled.  When I reconnected my phone, after the drivers where recognized, it started right up and did a restore of my data.

Whoo-hoo.  Gooder than new.

iLoveControl

While doing some more reasearch for my home theatre system, which is still very much in the idea phase, I ran into this article: New iPhone Interface for Crestron Can be Configured Online.

I’m thinking that instead of doing a simple home theatre room that I’ll incorporate some home automation into the room as well.  Have the lights dim, curtians close, etc.  I don’t know if I’ll go this far at first, but I still thought it was pretty cool.

Dynamic LINQ Query

I’ve been thinking for a couple days now how to create a dynamic LINQ query.  There is a prety good sample in C# here: http://blog.bvsoftware.com/post/2008/02/How-to-create-a-Dynamic-LINQ-Query-Programmatically.aspx

I went a little further with this.  One because I’m writing in vb.net so I had to convert this anyway, and two, because I’m passing my search through a webservice.  I didn’t want to have to create a variable for every possible search criteria, but at the same time I wanted flexibility.

The slimmed down function in my webservice is as follows:
Public Function LidDataSet(ByVal Search As DataTable, ByVal bFullText As Boolean) As DataSet
Dim matches As IQueryable(Of Persons) = From p In dbA.Persons Select p
For i As Integer = 0 To Search.Rows().Count - 1
 Dim field As String = Search.Rows(i).Item("Field").ToString()
 Dim value As String = Search.Rows(i).Item("Value").ToString()
 If bFullText Then
  If field = "Name" Then _
   matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Name.Contains(value))
  If field = "Email" Then _
   matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Email.Contains(value))
 Else
  If field = "Name" Then
   If InStr(value, "%") Then
    If value.IndexOf("%") > 0 Then
     matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Name.StartsWith(value.Substring(0, value.IndexOf("%"))))
    Else
     matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Name.EndsWith(value.Substring(value.IndexOf("%") + 1, value.Length() - 1)))
    End If

   Else
    matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Name = value)
   End If
  End If
 If field = "RegEmail" Then
  If InStr(value, "%") Then
   If value.IndexOf("%") > 0 Then
    matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Email.StartsWith(value.Substring(0, value.IndexOf("%"))))
   Else
    matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Email.EndsWith(value.Substring(value.IndexOf("%") + 1, value.Length() - 1)))
   End If
  Else
   matches = matches.Where(Function(p As Persons) p.Email = value)
  End If
 End If
Next
Dim linqQuery = From li In matches Select li
Return dwTools.ConvertLinqToDataSet(linqQuery)
End Function
 
For more information on the ConvertLinqToDataSet(linqQuery) function see my previous post: http://helpmonkey.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/pass-back-a-da…inq-webservicepass-back-a-dataset-from-a-linq-webservice/

I think the code should do a better job explaining this than I can put into words, but basically you have to pass in a datatable of the fields and values you want to search.  Since I couldn’t figure out how to build a string to use in my linq query i put an if statement to decide what field to search.  The limitations of this are pretty obvious, but it suits my needs. 

One major limit of this approach that I feel that I should mention is that this is only building an “AND query.”  That’s probably not the technical term, but what I mean is that if you search for more than one term, you are searching with the AND term.  So if you search for field: Name, value: “john” and field:Email, value: “john%”  you will be building a query that will return matches on Name = “john” AND Email.startswith(“john%”).

UberGeek home Theatre

I’ve been thinking for some months now about a design/theme for my theatre room.  I took over one of the spare rooms in our new home to be my man cave, and have decided that it is going to become a media room.  but just hanging a movie poster on the wall and mounting my flat panel isn’t enough.  In the process of looking around the net for ideas, I ran across this: 10 stunning ultra-geeky home cinemas.

I now want a bat cave, although I probably won’t do that because we plan on moving in the next few years, and it would be a waste.  Plus i think that when we have kids my room will be the first to go. {sad}

The Reason for the Site

Well, I creating this blog site as a means for me to keep up with my random thoughts.  Also this will be a place to put random bits of code that I find useful, so I can remember and find them later.

If you happen across this blog, you’re welcome to peruse it to see if you can use any of the information that I’ve found useful.