The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • Visual Studio on Vista

    As mentioned I installed Vista on my new desktop, since I have been running it on my laptop with Visual Studio for a month now without any real problems. Go figure, I ran into an issue that has been bugging me for the past couple days.

    The symptoms are as follows:

    • Every time I start VS, it prompts me for which initial environment I’d like to use (C#, C++, etc).
    • If I look at Tools..Options..Import/Export Settings, the settings file path doesn’t include a drive and root directory – it’s just Visual Studio 2005/Settings/CurrentSettings.vssettings.
    • If I go to that Import/Export Settings screen and then try to leave it without changing anything, it blows up regarding the messed up path.
    • Each time I exit and re-enter VS and view that setting, it has appended a new number to the filename. Sure enough, I can see lots of those files being created.

    The problem?

    It turns out that VS didn’t like the fact that I changed the Location of my Documents folder to point to a network share. Pretty odd behavior though, glad I remembered I made that change.

  • Computer Parts II

    As a follow up, my new computer is together and running.  We didn’t really run into any issues, other than Microsoft’s phone activation for XP being “down for maintenance” on Friday night.

    The plan was to use my new video card alongside a rather old one of mine (MX440) so I could continue using 3 monitors at home.  That hit a snag when Vista wouldn’t run on the old card – so I had to go buy another (albeit much cheaper) video card at Computer Deli in town.  So now I’m back up and running with 3 monitors – whew, crisis averted.

    I have run into an odd problem with Visual Studio, however.  Every single time I start it, it prompts me for what type of environment I’d like to start out with (configuration settings for c#, c++, etc.).  For some reason after it writes the settings file to disk, it has trouble reading it again so it asks.  Over and over and over.  I think I’ll uninstall, reinstall and see if that takes care of it.  I’ve been running vista on my laptop for a month now and never had this issue…

  • Computer parts

    Tonight I ordered the parts for my new desktop at home.  After using dual-core machines for development (my work pc, and my home laptop), I’ve grown tired of the slow desktop (2Ghz athlon).  So, with Jay’s assistance I’ve ended up with:

    • Intel Core 2 Duo (E6400)
    • 2GB RAM
    • 160GB SATA HD
    • GeForce 7900GS graphics card
    • ASUS SLI motherboard
    • 430W power supply

    Components to be reused from current machine:

    • 80GB drive for more storage
    • DVD Burner
    • Lightscribe DVD Burner
    • SoundBlaster Audigy 4
    • pci video card (for my third monitor)
    • case

    It’ll be running my second copy of Vista Business and should make for a hell of a development (and gaming for that matter) box.

  • Impala

    Those around me know that my car has been slowing breaking, bit by bit over the last year+.  It seemed that around the time for every oil change, something else would break on the car and end up costing 200-400 bucks.  The Check Engine light came on again a few weeks ago and during that repair it was discovered that a few more (rather expensive) repairs would be in line for the near future.

    Given that we didn’t want to keep throwing more money at a car that was falling apart, and that we don’t have a vehicle we’d trust for long trips (Ana’s has been more reliable but had some transmission issues last year), we decided it was time to ditch the Intrigue.

    We now have a silver 2006 Impala LTZ with 12,000 miles.  It’s in the same class (in my opinion) as the intrigue: handling, size, comfort; but has a few very nice additions that have spoiled me already.  Things like remote start, heated seats, 6-disc in-dash cd changer that plays mp3 cds, etc.  The heated seats are amazing, I swear they heat up in under a minute.  That combined with the remote start has kept us from sitting in a cold car, a welcome change 🙂

  • Snow, snow, snow

    As reported by a fellow Central Illinoisan, it’s snowing like crazy today. Ana and I both decided to go to work this morning, even though there was a blizzard warning in effect. We decided to just come home around noon though, as reports kept coming in on how bad the roads were continuing to get.

    On the way home, the roads were crappy as expected and we got stuck pulling into our driveway which had accumulated quite a load of snow in the few hours we were at work. After a little pushing and shoveling the car was back in the garage safe and sound. In the mean time, a neighbor couldn’t get into his driveway with his cargo van, so I donned my warm, carhart astronomy gear and helped push his van too. Before it was all said and done I helped another neighbor with their Trailblazer, a 4×4 nonetheless.

    So I’ve been inside all afternoon playing around on the computer and watching the wind whip around the snow the keeps falling. I think the weathermen were finally correct with their predictions of snow until midnight. They’re saying we may end up with 10-15 inches by the time its all done. That should make for another fun morning.

    It has been a long long time since it has snowed like this, but it has also been a long time since we’ve had a real winter here in Springfield so I guess it’s well overdue.

  • Payment Processors

    This evening I started to work on the registration process for Chef. There are so many ways to accept payments that it makes my head spin.  A couple months ago I signed up for a RegNow account and they even waived the $20 setup fee for me.  I’ve only recently started setting things up with them, and tonight ran through a Test payment.

    (more…)

  • Visual Studio followup

    Just a little follow-up regarding my issue with Visual Studio 2005 and Vista – I was able to make the problem go away by installing a hotfix for KB912019.

  • Vista and Visual Studio 2005

    I knew I was taking a slight risk installing Vista on my laptop, where I do quite a bit of my coding.  I’m having a big problem with the Chef solution in Vista – it compiles and runs just fine but in the Visual Studio IDE I cannot open the WinForm Designer for anything but the simple forms.  Scenarios I have that cause the designer to blow up:

    • System.Windows.Forms.Form derived form that references controls that reside in another, referenced assembly
    • UserControl that derives from another custom UserControl that resides in the same assembly, and which can be designed.

    I wonder how long this is going to take to get fixed.  I don’t see this issue on their “known issues” list, maybe I should dig around and find out how to submit it.

  • Windows Vista Business

    This is my first post under Vista!

    I  obtained a couple free copies by watching some online training videos, and they arrived last week in the mail. I was going to wait until HP was set to release drivers (so they said anyway) for my laptop on Wednesday but decided to give it a shot without them.

    The entire installation process for a clean install (wiped partition) took at most 45 minutes, and I have to say that was the smoothest Windows install I’ve ever done.  Everything has just worked, from the wireless network to the video.  In fact, it downloaded and installed the new nvidia driver without me telling it to on the first boot.

    I’m running Aero, and it seems pretty darn slick.  Way to go Microsoft, and thanks for my free copy.

  • LightScribe DVD Burner

    Ever heard of LightScribe? It’s a technology created by HP for “direct to disc” labeling, which means you can make labels on your CDs or DVDs. No cheesy paper labels, the laser is used to burn it in. Very cool idea.
    The laptop I purchased said it came with this capability. It wasn’t a selling point, but I thought it interesting and that I’d give it a shot some day. That day came last week when thought it’d be neat to make CDs of the offical Chef releases. Kinda dumb, I know. But a way to try out something new.

    I spent an hour or so trying to get the software on the laptop to recognize the drive and ended up on the HP website chatting with a support tech. They informed me that the drive in my laptop was not, in fact, LightScribe capable. I was a little mad because the box and label said it had it, otherwise I would have never known about the technology.

    That’s when Jay pointed me to a $30 drive that I ordered and was delivered tonight. I just got done burning my first label/disc (using the easy to use SureThing CD Labeler SE software) and I have to say that I’m very, very impressed and excited about this capability.

    Here’s my first disc (click to enlarge):

    First Lightscribe Disc

    You’ll notice the background is faded and the title logo isn’t very dark – that’s all because of the images I used.  The title is the red one located on http://www.ejichef.com and the background is a semi-transparent/faded image used on the Chef splash screen.  Pretty damn cool if you ask me.