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.

Object Role Modeling (ORM)

Recently, a colleague of mine and I started to experiment with ORM.
It seems to me that it is not very well known, but we found it to be a very powerfull tool.
We plan to use it a lot more!
Check out this MSDN .NET show broadcast for an introduction. It features Terry Halpin, a pioneer of ORM.
If you need more information, go to the official ORM site to find out more.

Gigabyte's Dual-GPU Graphics Card

Tom's Hardware has an article on a new dual-GPU graphics card. Is this rediculous or is it a sign of things to come?

Zoo tycoon 2 trial download

Download the trial version of Zoo Tycoon 2.
I tried it for an hour or so and most of my animals had escaped!

They looked happy though.

Hope you're better at it than I was. ;-)

How to create a strongly typed dataset from an existing dataset.

This is a little trick I used to convert any dataset to a strongly typed dataset so you can use the table and column names in intellisense.
(Examples in C#)

First we need to write the original dataset to an XML-file.

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.IO;

Create your dataset and fill it.

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof (DataSet));
XmlTextWriter wrt = new XmlTextWriter(@"filename.XML",null);
ser.Serialize (wrt, yourDataSet);

Run this code once to create an XML file of your dataset.
Then start the Visual Studio Command prompt.

Create the XSD schema file using the XSD.EXE tool.

xsd filename.xml

This creates the schema file filename.xsd.
Now use the same tool to create the class for the typed dataset;

xsd /d /l:CS filename.xsd

Add the created file filename.cs to your project.
Use this new class instead of the normal dataset.

Developer & ITPro days 2005 Brussels

The next Developer & ITPro days are coming in february 2005. Two days with a lot of interesting sessions.



Patrick Tisseghem (U2U) (mentioned before) will be delivering a couple of sessions. Mainly on Office Integration, Automation and Sharepoint Services.

Now if only my boss would let me go....

Hmm ;-)

Running out of disk space? Try this first.

When your hard drive is nearly full, before you run out to get a new one, try this first. (XP)
Right click on the 'My Computer' icon on your desktop, click on 'properties', then select the 'System Restore' tab.



Then select the 'Turn off System Restore' checkbox and click 'apply'.
When that has finished, unselect this checkbox and click 'apply' again.

This procedure will clean up all the system restore checkpoint data that is created every time you install/uninstall software.

You'll be amazed how much disk space you now(possibly)have... ;-)

However, only do this when your system has been running well for a while! You will only be able to restore to this point.

Thanks to Bart Neefs (EDS) for this tip

Microsoft video clips

Microsoft has put a lot of videoclips on only4gurus.com.
A lot of BS but some useful stuff there as well.
Thanks to Patrick Tisseghem (U2U) for pointing this out.