Monday, May 18, 2009
Over the past several months, I frequently found myself cursing the Internet slowness of my fully loaded multi-core computer. I cleaned, optimized, defragmented, flushed and did everything customary to resuscitate a lethargic machine. A blog entry described the woes of someone in a similar position. He speculated that the cause was Abobe's Flash plug-in for IE.
A Google search showed people with a similar problem and similar thoughts. I figured it would not hurt to just kill Flash ... kill it as in dead, dead, dead.
My first action was to remove Flash via Add/Remove programs. That action finished so fast that I figured that they just unregistered the plug-in and deleted it from the Control Panel. That was not dead enough for me.
Second, I brought out the big gun and ran the Adobe Flash uninstaller. The uninstaller reported all the files it deleted, even after the Control Panel uninstall. After a restart, I fired up IE8 and watched happily as web site after web site asked to install Flash.
Flash was dead.
I then went to the Adobe Flash web site and ran a fresh install. The install took a bit of time, but in the end it was successful. Back on the web, site after site snapped onto the screen. IE8 no longer paused while loading the page. Life was good. I can only speculate that the years of various Flash updates had gotten out of synch. The flush and restart was successful.
Now if I can only speed up Java loading so I see less of the cyclotron....
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Wow. Five years of posts. Of course, the last eight months have been pretty empty, but I am starting a new WPF project at work that looks to be very interesting. I hope to get back into the posting routine as the work evolves. We are working on the design right now. More to follow on that.
I may also be posting on management of a distributed software development team.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
My children's artwork adorns the walls of my house in several locations. It is regularly replaced with the most recent efforts, since the preschools seem to excel at a multitude of different craft projects. At home, we favor crayons and washable markers, but we keep close control of them.
This evening my three-year-old decided to climb up Daddy's chair and get onto my desk. A ball point pen beckoned from a pen holder placed far from a child-accessible edge. The canvas -- two 19-inch LCD screens. She seemed pleased with her art work when I came in, but I certainly was not.
I tried several cleaners unsuccessfully, but then had great success using full-strength isopropyl rubbing alcohol. I have been meaning to clean them for awhile. I just did not want to get around to it for this particular reason.
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Sunday, March 16, 2008
My wife and I were talking by phone while I was at a store when she mentioned that she wanted an MP3 player for use around the house. Easy in-car use was also a requirement. I went to the music player display case to see what was offered. A full 80% of the boxes were various flavors of iPods. The rest were Zunes with a couple of Samsung units.
Since I have a bad opinion of Apple DRM and iTunes lock-in, I bought her a 4GB pink Zune and brought it home. My wife loved opening the box and playing with all the bits. We both agreed that the out-of-the-box experience was great. She went off to do some grocery shopping while I handled the task of installing the software and getting the thing running.
The great hardware happiness died an ugly death during the software installation. The process was agonizingly slow. The software prepared the computer for installation three times. The Zune software appeared to get installed three or four times, although I knew those were small support programs, then ... reboot! What? What does a simple music player need to restart the entire computer for? While writing this blog post, the software also automatically ran Microsoft Update without my permission and contrary to my Microsoft Update system settings. Very rude!
The total length of the install seemed like I was installing Microsoft Office and Visual Studio at the same time. It took nearly a half an hour on a computer with nothing else running and no other load on the broadband modem. I can only assume the 33MB of dedicated files are supported by numerous other changes -- and all this on a fully updated Windows XP system. I actually ended up with multiple restarts for multiple updates. I was disappointed the install process was so miserable, but grateful it went forward with no errors.
Happily, my wife saw none of this and was soon listening to a few of our CDs I had ripped previously. She dutifully listened to the music that came with the player, then spent some time learning the Zune software deleting it all. She judged it all to be crap. The only artist she recognized of the bunch was Bare Naked Ladies and that was only because they sang a song for Disney's movie Chicken Little.
She loves the size, feel, and interface of the Zune. That part of the experience was great. The car kit just worked with no problems. She is happy, and that was a primary goal of the purchase.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
IE8 Beta 1 now available here.
My initial experience with this version was not good. As soon as I viewed my Favorites and started to mouse over the list, the browser crashed. Every time. After the fifth or sixth time, I uninstalled it and returned to IE7.
After downloading a new copy, I reinstalled. It still crashed. Then I started the browser without add-ons. (Right click the Desktop icon and choose "Start Without Add-ons.") No crashes when viewing Favorites.
Ah hah. I went in and pruned down the list of add-ons. I was surprised at how many things had crept into the list. A couple of companies got turned off entirely: InstallShield (2), Symantec (6), Groove Alliance (1). I also disabled a couple of duplicates and some strange things I never used. In the end, I had stuff from Adobe, Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and a few others. After restarting in normal mode, I had no more crashes.
I am not sure of the precise culprit, although Eric Law hints on the IE Blog that it may be the Sonic Solutions Drive Letter Access (part of the Roxio CD/DVD burning software which I got from Dell) and disabled in the browser. I wondered why InstallShield and Symantec needed such a browser presence. I will see what complains as I work and if things seem faster.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
... to everyone at GeeksWithBlogs and those elsewhere reading. Enjoy the season with your own traditions and religion, whether you celebrate the birth of Christ or not. Enjoy!
Sunday, December 23, 2007
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ChristmasAs I noted previously, I have now retired from military active duty. I am taking the Christmas season off to relax before going back to work for my new career out there in the Real World©®. That means I have gotten the opportunity to spend much more time with the wife and kids.
Thursday morning, while the girls were in school and the little one was napping, my wife and I took the time to open and assemble all the kids toys for Christmas. We did this early to avoid a late night on Christmas Eve, or the crisis rush on Christmas morning. It took us much longer than we anticipated due to the nature of this year's toy packaging adventures.
We intentionally avoided the infamous clamshell death plastic this year. The closest we came were with a pair of nicely packaged GE headsets
for use with our cordless phone system. They had a paperboard back that was easy to cut open -- no plastic cutting required. The toy boxes took much longer than anticipated to open since the manufacturers seem to have substituted complex folded cardboard secured with miles of cellophane tape to replace the hated plastic clamshells.
The full-view packaging designers win the raspberry award this year for their use of wire twist ties suitable for towing. These things were so thick that our Fiskars scissors, normally a match for any consumer packaging, failed miserably. I had to resort to my Craftsman wire cutters, though I wondered if I might need something bigger. The stiff, machine-tightened wires were impossible to undo by hand even when we had full access to them behind their nefariously complex packaging. Be ready with your own heavy-duty implements of destruction in the coming days.
We have been buying stuff over the last 6-8 months, as items became available. We have found many of the things we chose are now not available, or available on Amazon or EBay at astronomical markups over what we paid just months ago (a $40 toy was selling for $175).
Our son emerged from his nap and demanded to do some preliminary play testing of things his sisters would be getting. He gave a double thumbs up to a few items, but his clear favorite was Pat Pat Rocket. Since he is just on the verge of walking, we feel he will not spill the beans before Tuesday.
Post-Christmas Update
The Pat Pat Rocket was a hit with all the kids, but we found that little hands could not pry open the top to play with the figures inside. I remedied that with a sticky tape tab they could grip, but a better design would be appreciated by parents. It also falls into the category of toys which are too loud.
GeoTrax Rail and Road System Grand Central Station by Fisher-Price: Recommended; another big hit. We left this one in the box and assembled it on a bedroom floor while the girls were busy elsewhere. It is a big hit on available floor space, so we had to be careful where we put it. The assembly was pretty easy, but I see the engine will be chewing through lots of AAA batteries.
vtech ABC Food Fun: Not recommended. It is too loud, comes on randomly even after it is supposedly powered off automatically, the door is hard to open, it is too easy to accidentally hit a mode button, and the magnet pieces are hard for kids to align correctly to make it work. Other than that, it briefly held the attention of a three-year-old.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
As I come up on 26 years of active duty service in the Navy, I have been reliably informed by my wife that it is in fact time for me to complete my Navy service and transition to some other line of work. When the 5-star Admiral at home speaks, you listen. Next Veterans Day will likely be a good time for me to look back on my Navy career and reminisce. For this year, I join others who offer their thoughts to those in uniform who have risked and lost much more than I.