John S Blackman

Windows 7 is really better!

John S Blackman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:09:30 GMT

Well I am back in Seattle again, and it's an especially nice place to be i nthe summer if I can get out of the office. Windows 7 is close to shipping and we've gone on a secound round of visiting OEMs to test their images for the new flagship OS. On naked machines the numbers are better across the board. The biggest problem now still remains bundled software which isn't a problem per se, but when you add more software to a machine, it has more to do, more to store, more to read so it is going to have a performance cost. The build in WDDM drivers are quite good too for most of the hardware I've seen. This will certainly improve as those drivers are replaced by hardware vendor specific ones. However I think it's really cool that you can take most shake and bake laptops or desktops, install Windows 7 on it and it just works.

As a mac fan, I am very happy to see Windows 7 look a lot better too. It's just shinier. The icons are bigger and higer resolution, and everything has a little candy sheen to it. I love using Mac's, but I always come back to Windows because Entourage is a pale shadow of Outlook, and Visual Studio is unparalleled by anything I've seen on the Mac. Their development tools are probably excellent if you are used to their SDK, but I'm such a .NET head now, that I can just do more faster with that SDK, so I keep coming back to it.

Windows 7 is better, really it is!

John S Blackman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:08:29 GMT

Windows 7 is better, really it is!

John S Blackman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:07:57 GMT

Windows 7 is really better!

John S Blackman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:09:52 GMT

Why you don't need to worry about swine flu... yet.

John S Blackman — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:13:15 GMT

Everyone seems to be rather fearful of this new H1N1 virus. Some of those fears are well founded, but a lot of them are just uneducated panic.

So far there have been a few hundred deaths in Mexico, and several more cases are showing up in countires all over the world. However, the death rates outside the original infection area have been very low. To date, approximately two weeks after this whole thing began, less than 1000 people have died from the H1N1 flu.

To give you some context, almost 500,000 people die from heart disease in the US annually. You can verify this on the CDC website. The actual number is around 430,000. That's approximately 1730 people per day, just in the US. I like to use this as my benchmark for panic from massive deaths, as it is the leading cause of death in the United States. So until we start loosing more than 1700 people a day from H1N1, I'm not going to start worrying too much.

Oh, and about 36,000 people a year (~100 per day) die from plain old non media hyped flu, just in the US. CDC Flu Fact Sheet

All of that being said, the scary part of a very virulant flu is its ability to pass from human to human and its lethality. Viruses can spread at a geometric rate and quickly pass our magic 1700/day rate if the infection doubles every day and kills more than 10% of its victims. However, we are not seeing anything near that with the H1N1 virus. So wash your hands, and don't live in fear.

PLINQ and parallelism

John S Blackman — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:03:25 GMT

I just came across a great quick synopsis of a feature coming in .NET 4.0 that will make some parallel computing in .NET much easier using PLINQ. Here's a really great blog post on it, and you can implement it in probably under 30 minutes.

Solar Panels

John S Blackman — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:23:18 GMT

So being the greenie that I am, I looked into the Austin Energy rebate program for solar power. They offer a compelling rebate of $13,500 a year for every solar system you install on your residence. The cool part is that their fiscal year ends September 31st, so you can apply for the 2008 and 2009 rebates within a 60 day time span and do 2 installs to get both rebates. I'm working with a vendor called Solar Community. They're local to Austin and have installed nearly 100 systems so far. The remaining balance for the install after rebate can be paid for by a 5 year loan who's payments are about equal to the energy savings provided each month by the solar panels. So it should pay for itself, and after the loan is gone, you're making money.

I will post images as the install occurs. They should start work on it in the second week of September.

Reading the Registry with Powershell

John S Blackman — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:26:11 GMT

This little bit of usefulness in powershell is also available in various guides and books, but I often find that technical documentation is written to be more complete than practical. I will scan a long document full of reference data to assemble what I need to do which can really be communicated in a simple example. So here's a few easy ways to check to see if a registry entry exists or to look up a value. These are really handy for testing and auto configuring machines on your network.

# The Test-Path cmdlet is handy for detecting
not only if files exist in the
file system, 
# but reg key entries as well
#
# $QuickLog will get a $true or
$false
#
$QuickLog=(Test-Path 'HKCU:\Software\JQL
- www.jql.co.uk\Quick Log')
 
# This returns an array of all the values at this key
$regObj = get-item 'HKCU:\Software\JQL
- www.jql.co.uk\Quick Log'
 
# This is a
path for using with
set-ItemProperty
$path = 'HKCU:\Software\JQL
- www.jql.co.uk\Quick Log'
 
# Notice we use the object here
$keys = $regObj.GetValueNames()
foreach($key in $keys)
{
    # Do what you will with your reg keys
    if($key.Contains("Hints"))
    {
        # Set the execution policy so we can write here
        set-itemproperty -Path $path -Name ExecutionPolicy -Value unrestricted
        
        # This assumes you have a String property
        # Notice that we use the path and not the object here
        set-itemproperty -path $path -name $key -value 0
    }
}

Google Ad Sense

John S Blackman — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:35:58 GMT

Oh this is hilarious. I'm playing with Google AdSense on my blog and it being a new generator, it has decided to place ads for black singles based on my last name. Now that's entertaining. I'm curious to see if they will hone in on something more appropriate, so bear with my experimentation here.

Creating Nested XML in Powershell

John S Blackman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:01:53 GMT

I've been looking all over trying to find a smart way to create nested XML in powershell, and after combining a few sources I have come up with something that works pretty well. Now I don't recommend actually doing it this way unless you have to. This is a fairly laborious process that I'm undertaking only because my particular situation requires that I do not use compiled code. A C# object model using the Linq XML serializer is far easier, consistent, and less prone to bugs than this. However sometime you just have to write a hack.

# Create the results file
$output = $args[0] + "\results.xml"
$outxml = New-Object "System.Xml.XmlDocument"
$outxml.LoadXml("<?xml
version=`"1.0`" encoding=`"utf-8`"?><Results
xmlns:xsi=`"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance`"
xmlns:xsd=`"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema`"></Results>")
 
# Tests
$elem = $outxml.CreateElement("Tests")
$outxml.get_ChildNodes().Item(1).AppendChild($elem)
 
# Test
$elem = $outxml.CreateElement("Test")
$elem.SetAttribute("xsi:type","MemoryTest")
$outxml.SelectSingleNode("Results/Tests").AppendChild($elem)
 
# Name
$elem = $outxml.CreateElement("Name")
$elem.PSBase.InnerText = "Video"
$nsMgr = New-Object System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager($outxml.get_NameTable())
$nsMgr.AddNamespace("type", "MemoryTest")
$outxml.SelectSingleNode("Results/Tests/Test",
$nsMgr).AppendChild($elem)

Notice the use of the XmlNamespaceManager. This allows you to have multiple Test nodes within Tests each with a different type. This makes sure you can add elements to the right trees.

Again, this is the grunt work of XML serialization that lots of programmers end up doing, but really shouldn't have to. Go use the Linq serializer.

Open Source Economics

John S Blackman — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:14:05 GMT

This is a nice and short talk on the emergence of open source information, not just software, and how it is reshaping economies. Even though everyone is pretty well used to the internet, at least in rich industrial nations, we are still in the very early stages of its development. It's only been commercially available for 15 years. There are some great ideas in this talk about where it might go and how it may impact industry.

Meta Efficient

John S Blackman — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:11:02 GMT

I just found this great new blog for efficient and power concious living. Check it out.

http://www.metaefficient.com/

Powershell CDATA XML GET

John S Blackman — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:20:06 GMT

So I've recently had the task of fetching some information out of system.nfo files to translate cryptic IDs numbers into human readable friendly names. This is the thing that XML is supposed to excel at right? Well you would think that task would be simple enough, and as it turns out it is. However searching for this solution online proved to be difficult, so I'm going to retell my experience here in hopes that it might help anyone else with this problem out.

I started with what I thought was a nice elegant powershell script that would query the XML like a SQL DB and return my value. Seems simple enough right?

$friendlyName = $sysinfo.MsInfo.Category.Category.Category.Data.DeviceName | where {$sysinfo.MsInfo.Category.Category.Category.Data.Device_ID
-eq $global:deviceName}

This would work with normal XML where your content is inside the XML tags. However the system.nfo file uses CDATA objects and many nests of categories so you have to go one step further. Since I don't know which Category sub-tree my offending device or data might be in, I ended up grabbing all of the data objects that met my criteria and doing a breadth first search. Sounds ugly compared to the one liner up there, but it actually works and don't take that long. The following code is in powershell. The key here is that handy get_innertext() method. Your standard .Value or .Text won't cut it with CDATA.

# Open the associated .nfo file
$sysinfo_file = $global:computer_name + ".nfo"
$sysinfo_path = $global:computer_name + "\"
+ $sysinfo_file

[xml]$sysinfo = get-content $sysinfo_path
 
$nodeList1 = @($sysinfo.GetElementsByTagName(">Device_Name"))

$nodeList2 = @($sysinfo.GetElementsByTagName(">Device_ID"))

$nodeList3 = @($sysinfo.GetElementsByTagName(">Manufacturer"))
 
$i = 0
foreach($node in $nodeList2)
{
    $deviceID = $nodeList2[$i].get_innertext()
    if($deviceID
-eq $global:device_name)
    {
        $friendlyName = $nodeList1[$i].get_innertext()
        $deviceManuf = $nodeList3[$i].get_innertext()
    }
    $i++
}

The purpose of this handy little script is to look up a cryptic device ID and return a friendly manufacturers name.