Leaving poland, going to Germany

The last couple of days I have spent in Poland. Cold, wet weather, some snow, and a lot of work.
This afternoon I'll be flying back to Belgium, but I have to leave tomorrow morning again for Germany.
Long days that make me look out to the Christmas holiday even more than usual.
Still some work to do before we can start unwrapping those presents!

Sending postcards all over the world.

One of the sites mentioned in Click Online recently was Postcrossing.
I subscribed and sent 5 postcards to: The Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and two to the USA.
Now I can't wait before I start getting some myself.
How cool would it be to get one from the North Pole? (pun intended)

Countries I have visited

I stumbled by accident on a site where you can generate a worldmap of countries you have visited. Here's mine:



create your own visited countries map

Still some ground to cover.

Windows Media Center PC Hell

I've always wanted to have a Media Center PC in my home. Mostly so I can watch the television programmes I want when I want to.
It was time to upgrade my PC anyway, so I made a shopping list:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU (dual core 64 bit)
• 1 Gb RAM
• ASUS A8V AGP motherboard. (VIA K8T800)
• SATA 200 Gb HD.
• Supermicro case with redundant cooling and hot-plug SATA trays.
• Hauppauge WINTV PVR 500 MCE.
• I used the nVidia AGP video card I had in my 'old' PC. FX5600 GPU.

First thing I needed to do (after assembly) was to flash the BIOS so the CPU was properly recognised. (dual core AMD is only supported as of version 1.14)

So far so good, installed XP Media Center edition, using the SATA drivers supplied with the motherboard. System booted, so far so good.

But then the problems started. Every time I tried to access the TV tuners on the hauppauge card, the infamous BSOD appeared. (Machine_Check_Exception) Many, many google searches later I stumbled on a forum from hauppauge were someone had the same problem. Turns out that, just my combination of VIA chipset, AGP and PVR 500 does not work. Doh!

Off to the shop again, this time to get a PVR 150 MCE edition. Swapped the PVR card, rebooted.... Finally! TV!

Well, almost. Watching live TV is fine. Recording TV is fine, but watching TV while recording... not so fine. Picture freezes after about half a minute.

I've been tinkering with settings, drivers, and everything else I can get hold of. At this moment in time, the Simpsons are blue. Go figure.

I think next week I'll re-install the entire system again.

Unless someone has the golden tip of course. ;-)

A new PC for me ;-)

My visit to Poland a couple of weeks ago went excellent. I only got lost once.
People there were very friendly and helpful. They showed me around a bit and introduced me to typical Polish food.
Since then not much has happened. Mainly the daily routine.
Bad news is that I got stronger glasses. My age is catching up with me.
The good news is that I'm getting a new laptop. I hope I'll get it within the next 4 weeks, but we'll see.
I have now also booked my holiday, but there's another 2 months to wait for that. :-(
Life goes on.

On the road again

I'm off to Poland next week.
Again, it's job related but I hope I can still get a feel of the country.
I've worked quite a bit with Polish colleagues over time and I look forward to seeing some of them again.
I'll try and bring some pictures back as well.

An old time favourite

My age is catching up with me.
I used to have a friend when I was back in high school who was part English, and he introduced me to The Goon Show (originally from somewhere in the 60's). For the younger people among us, it starred Peter Sellers, Ned Seagoon?, and Spike Milligan. (among others)
I was very excited to discover an Internet radio channel dedicated to this classic show.
And no, I'm not THAT old, but he had some tape recordings from the original airings.
I've been addicted ever since.
If you liked Monty Python, I'm sure you'll love this. Way ahead of it's time!

It wasn't Winlogon.exe after all

A couple of posts ago I accused winlogon.exe of screwing up a server.
Turnes out the culprite was.... an ordinary network hub.
Believe it or not, even with approx. 1% of network load, the hub causes delays of up to 1.4 seconds in network traffic.
Problem solved by a simple cross-cable.
Lessons learned, question EVERYTHING!
Now i've seen it all, I hope ;-)

My first visit to the States

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time in the States. (Troy, Michigan).
Job related I'm afraid so very little time to be a tourist.
I now know that jet-lag can really wear you down. Took me about a week to get over it. ;-)

Winlogon.exe is giving me a headacke!

For several weeks now we are trying to solve a performance issue at one of our customers.
I'll skip the details and get right to the problem.
We have a Windows 2000 server running a critical application. Today we noticed that the winlogon.exe process is using a lot of CPU time. Even more than the sqlserver that is running on this machine. To give you an idea, the sqlserver process has used 2 hours and 45 minutes of CPU time up to now, winlogon has already used nearly 3 hours.
All I can find on the web are problems related to terminal services. But we don't use that.
The problem started after we installed service pack 4 on it.
If this sounds familiar, please please let me know.

Ingo Rammer is a great guy!

A word of recognition to Ingo Rammer is more than due I think.
As I have posted before, he was a speaker at the TechNet in Brussels a while ago, as he is at many other venues.
When I got seriously stuck with a technical issue, I decided to send him a mail, just in case.
This was one friday evening, late!
He had already sent me a reply the next morning (early!).
And a good one too. It works now.
Cudos to Ingo! And very much appreciated.

Long trip ahead

It's been a while since I have posted on my blog.
But the latest news is that I will be off to Detroit next week.
It's my first time over to the states, and I am really looking forward to it.
One thing I will miss though is Belgian beer ;-)
Check this blog for updates of my trip.

A very bad day

On a more peronsal note, today was a very bad day.
My dog died last night, after I had her (Dolly, a Syberian Husky) for almost 10 years.
It is incredibly difficult to see your dog die before your eyes and not be able to do anything about it. I try to comfort myself by the fact that she has had a good life, and is now finally out of her misery.
But still, at this moment, life sucks!

Developer & ITPro days 2005 Brussels Day 1

Today I was at the first day of the developer & IT-pro days in Brussels.
There I had the opportunity to attend the keynote speech by Bill Gates.
Nothing really new to report though.
Some interesting sessions on ASP.NET 2.0, best practices in .NET development and one about Service Oriented Architecture. (and of course the odd failing demo)
Tomorrow promises to be more up my street with .NET 2005.
I am especially looking forward to hearing Ingo Rammer, the .NET remoting guru.

Lightscribe, where is it?

Lightscribe is a technology that allows you to burn the label on the flip side of a CD (DVD?).
HP announced this what seems ages ago, but the mainstream PC market does not seem to adopt this.
If anyone has seen this, aside from HP products, please let me know!

Apple vs Microsoft

The never ending discussion. Who's best? (not mentioning Linux)
I am not biased towards either company, so I watched both the Apple world 2005 keynote by Steve Jobs and the keynote with Bill Gates at the international Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005. Maybe Linus Torvalds will do one some day.
You decide.

My favourite wallpaper

Today I stumbled on Xearth.
This (free) programme replaces your wallpaper with a view of the earth, shaded to match the actual time of day.
It also shows any earthquakes and their size.
This piece of software has been around for years, but now it seems more relevant than ever.

Two of my favourite sites

There are two sites that I visit daily.
To get the latest tech news I go to slashdot, but for the much needed 'tongue in cheek' look on the business world, there's no place like dilbert.
Life just wouldn't be the same without them. ;-)

Happy Newyear!

To however reads this blog, I wish you a very happy, healthy and interesting 2005.