Stan Spotts

Obama - just who is he?

Stan Spotts — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:11:59 GMT

I'm fairly dissapointed with the Republican party, being a somewhat moderate Republican. I'm even more dissapointed with the news media and the one-sided coverage they're providing. It seems that everything I might possibly want to know about the personal lives of McCain and Palin, and their families, has been covered in excruciating detail, but I can't find any real info about Obama.

I constantly see a link with McCain and Bush, regardless of how real that is, yet the Obama team yells foul whenever an association with criminals, radicals, extremists, and terrorists is brought up. I mean, he really hasn't done much in his half-term of Senator, so what else do we have to look at?

He's a helluva speaker, although shows a real anger when questioned about things he doesn't want to talk about. He doesn't seem to have any solid details about how he'll actually change anything, just that he'll change things. I don't even see any evidence that he understands basic macroeconomics. This whole Fanny/Freddie mess is being blamed on the Bush administration, which hurts McCain by party allegience, yet Bush was working with a solid Democratic House and Senate. Heck, I heard someone on a talk show say that Obama not only got a mortgage through Freddie, he got some kind of sweetened deal. Yah, we'll see change all right.

I can't actually see where he's got ANY qualifications for assuming the Presidency. Except for one year in the Senate, the mayor of my small town is just as qualified. :)

I liked Hilary a lot more. While she's still more of a socialist than I like (hey, I earn my money, I want to keep it and spend it myself!), she didn't scare me like Obama. I'm actually frightened about what will happen if he wins this election. Frightened for myself, my family, and my country.

Understand that if there was a more capable Democrat running, I think McCain would be in a lot more trouble. I'm finding that a lot more people are worried than I expected, and a lot more are wondering what Obama is really all about.

I'm not posting any more about this, but I had to vent a little about the crappy media coverage.

In case anyone doesn't understand, this is my personal opinion and doesn't reflect anything at all from my employer or this blog site.

Posting again

Stan Spotts — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:52:44 GMT

Been a bit busy, including a job change that's had a lot of effect on me. I now work for SunGard Higher Education as a Lead Systems Architect, working on a new project using Microsoft tools and platforms. This has so far been all positive for me, and includes some really interesting work.

Also signed up for the PDC, so now I've got to see what (private) events I can get into ;).

Philadelphia IT Architect Regional Conference 9/23-24 call for speakers

Stan Spotts — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:05:43 GMT

The Philadelphia chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is pleased to announce the IT Architect Regional Conference, the largest event in the Philadelphia area to address the pressing needs of IT architects today. There are over 15 seminars and two tracks separated by specialty: Enterprise and Software Architecture. Architects of all levels can take their skills to the next level.

Enterprise Architecture Track:
Learn efficient strategies for linking your enterprise strategy to implementation, create and articulate sound ROI, prioritize your objectives, inspire employees to share your vision, dive in to governance concepts, and enhance your agile strategies.

Software Architecture Track:
Increase alignment between architecture, business and development, troubleshoot your software architecture, assess architecture and software maturity, drive architecture evolution by effectively selecting next generation technology through a rigorous evaluation process, integrate with dynamic management processes, governance for the successful software architect, and enhance design with realistic software architecture toolsets.

Call for Presentations
If you are in or near the Philadelphia area and would like to speak at our upcoming conference, please download the Presenter Form.

Would you believe, TiVo?

Stan Spotts — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:28:44 GMT

The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight.

Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready to cut off body parts. Twin 2 year old boys, no TV... not a pretty picture.

So I decided that the TV/DVR wasn't going to be a hobby any more, and bought a TiVo HD unit from Best Buy. I called Verizon to see if I could replace my two STB's with cablecards, which would also give me the high def capability the Dell box lacked (you can do the cablecard/HD configuration with the XPS 420, not 410). I have to say, the Verizon rep (working in Pittsburgh), was GREAT. I don't remember every having a better customer experience. While we were talking, he was reviewing my account - I have phone, internet, and TV service. After reviewing options, he was able to give me the same service - except for swapping the two STB's with two cablecards (they didn't have multi-cards, so I needed two to record two channels at once) - for $178 instead of the $252 I've been paying. Then the bad news - it would be about 2.5 weeks before a technician would be able to come with the cards and install them. Great, those body parts were history.

So the next day just before noon, the rep calls me on my cell phone. He made some calls that morning and a technician was scheduled to come the next day. Sure enough, around 2pm the tech came and an hour or so later got the cablecards installed and TiVo was all set.

The only real issue with the TiVo is that it's only got a 250Gb drive, whereas I had 1.2Tb in my Vista box. The only "approved" way to expand it is to get a 500Gb external drive from WD, called the My DVR something-or-other, and plug it into the eSATA port. It's about $199, so is an option when I need the space.

All is not lost on the XPS 410 box. Once I have the time to get it up and running, I'm going to add a few Gb of RAM and turn it into a video editing machine. I have an HD, 60Gb video recorder and my little laptop doesn't do well editing the movies from it.

New Philadelphia chapter of International Association of Software Architects (IASA)

Stan Spotts — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:38:45 GMT

Mitch Ruebush, Don Urbanic, Brian Mitchell and I met a few months ago to initiate a local chapter of the IASA. and the time has now come to have our first meeting. Our chapter president, Mitch Ruebush, will be moderating the first meeting. Here are the particulars from his invitation e-mail:

You are invited to IASA - Philadelphia's first meeting on February 6th, 2008 at the Microsoft Malvern office. We have set up an official IASA Web site at http://www.iasahome.org/web/Philadelphia/home to provide more information on IASA and the Philly chapter. Please use this site to keep up with the Philadelphia IASA community.

Agenda:
Refreshments & Network
Introductions
What do you want from an architecture professional group?
How do you want to help?

Topic:
What is Architecture?
Join us for a moderated discussion on the practicality of what IT architecture is. We will discuss what is the meaning of IT architecture, roles and responsibilities, approaches to IT architecture, common architecture processes and artifacts and what should be in the architecture toolkit.

Moderator:
Mitch Ruebush is the Architecture Team Leader at ING DIRECT, fsb. He is responsible for defining and coordinating the architecture for the applications and infrastructure at ING DIRECT. He has written a number of books and articles on .NET and enjoys spending his time as a father of two great kids, a hobbyist film maker, playing piano and saxophone and trying to write a video game.

Date: Feb. 6th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Location:
Microsoft Corporation
Great Valley Corporate Center
45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210
Malvern, PA 19355

IASA (International Association of Software Architects) is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices.

TDD Webinar this morning

Stan Spotts — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:09:07 GMT

The TDD webinar this morning had about 210 connections, so I'd say it went well. There were some people who didn't catch my e-mail address, so if you're one of them just post a reply here and I'll get back to you.

I believe that at some point the recording and the PowerPoint deck will be made available through the ITMPI web site.

Tech-Ed 2007: Monday

Stan Spotts — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:05:13 GMT

ARC201 – Ron Jacobs on the Architectural Landscape

Good to see Ron again, he's having a ball in his current role at Microsoft. After obligatory plugs for his ArcCast series, we got into three topics.

TDD concepts.

http://extremeprogramming.org was mentioned as a reference.

TDD Primer from Peter Provost was shown…. I like his statement that TDD is about creating a class that does what you want it to do and nothing more. Also made it clear that architectural design is still necessary. Most people I talk to about TDD start out thinking it's chaotic, which is far from the truth.

If you're not into TDD…

Add a test.
Run all tests and see them fail.
Write just enough code to make the test pass
Run all tests and see them pass
Refactor code

I got a kick out of this since I'm presenting a TDD webcast for ITMPI in October.

UI Patterns MVC (Model/View/Controller) and MVP (Model/View/Presenter)

NMock tool (www.nmock.org) shown to show implementing mocks, nice it was plugged. I like this tool a lot.

Spike results for TDD/MVP project.

Ron did a project over a couple of days to prove out MVP and TDD, and results looked positive. Some questions came up at the end about usefulness of TDD for front ends, and during the responses I mentioned that unit testing a complete UI is a bit out of context when you're talking TDD. That gets more into functional testing.

Old Home Week: Dwayne Robinson, Paul Bethany, Dave Armstrong, all ex-Microsoft from Malvern. It was wild seeing them in their different roles at Mondosoft, BinaryTree, and neudesic, respectively.

DAT201 – The next release of SQL Server: Overview

Started with a brief overview of the history of data processing. Pre-monolithic data processing (batch, computational), OLTP, into Connected Systems. Sort of fluffy filler since I got to live through all of, but decent setup to why "Katmai" (SQL Server 2008) is evolving into what it's looking to be.

Katmai has a lot of cool new features. Too many to review, but some things I wish we had now for sure – Performance data collection, System analysis, declarative management (policies). There was a demo by Dan Jones (MSFT Program Manager) on declarative management that showed a policy where a table could not be created under the dbo schema. Dan has a session on Wednesday where he goes into details, so I may check that out.

Support for non-relational data is really going to make for some interesting apps. Spatial/mapping information, binary data including video, sound, etc., is going to be huge.

Enterprise data warehouse updates for portioning, data compression, query optimizations, persistent lookups, change data capture, a new MERGE t-sql statement…

Reporting and BI improvements includes UI, since MS purchased technology from Dundas (some of the best charting/graphics tools for MS development), new cube design tools, ability to host SQL RS w/out IIS…

This is going to rock!

Keynote at Tech-Ed 2007

Stan Spotts — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:31:33 GMT

After the wonderful scrambled egg breakfast, we walked down the hall to the keynote. Bob Muglia will be presenting, so it should be interesting as Bob does a nice job. Wireless access is weak in Hall D, where the keynote is.

We survived the party with Polermo last night, which was a blast. Met up with Miguel Castro, Don Demsak, Joe Healy, Russ Faustino, and a slew of other notables. A few dozen of us wandered down to Hooters afterwards and eventually more wandered in, 'til we had the place completely geeked out. Naked 911 wings and a pitcher, what a way to end the day.

The "Back to the Future" parody was pretty funny, showing Microsoft picking on itself for all the "visions" throughout the years… Hailstorm, integrated storage, Microsoft Bob, Clippy, finally deciding that the keynote should be about real-world stuff. Complete with Delorean and Doc…

Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business is Bob's presentation title. Much about DSI, with a fair overview of what makes up business agility by Gartner.

Some demos of System Center, teasers with SQL Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, Silverlight,

Not one of the best Tech-Ed keynotes, but some of the virtualization demos were eye-opening.

The 2007 Software Best Practices Webinar Series

Stan Spotts — Wed, 02 May 2007 01:00:23 GMT

My company, Computer Aid, Inc., is the sponsor for The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI), and the ITMPI is hosting some interesting webinars during the course of the year. I'm going to be presenting in October on Test Driven Design, using VSTS and other tools to show examples of TDD cycles. This is going to be fun for me since I used to do many presentations and just started getting into webinars before leaving Microsoft at the end of 2005.

From the webinar info web site: The Software Best Practices Webinars Series is a not-for-profit educational program aimed at improving the practice and management of software development and maintenance worldwide.
Topics covered in 2007 will include:

Software Measurement
Software Project Estimation
Software Testing
Software Project Management
Software Benchmarking
Rapid Application Development

Legacy Systems Support
Agile Development
Software Six Sigma
IT Project Governance
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
Outsourcing Best Practices

Each webinar will feature an expert speaker who has extensively researched and successfully applied best practice principles to the development and maintenance of software.

These webinars are free, as is the newsletter that you can sign up for at the ITMPI web site.

This should get product of the year from every such award giver

Stan Spotts — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:49:07 GMT

I wish I knew about this the last time I bought a box from Dell. This has got to be nominated for product of the decade.

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

From their site:

So, you're the proud owner of a new PC. You anxiously open the box, dumping out the contents, casting the instructions aside. You feverishly push your old PC off the desk and get the new one set up. On the floor lies a pile of plastic wrap and twist ties. Your brand spanking new PC boots up only to greet you with a plethora of pop up advertisements pestering you to pay for anti-virus software or sign up for a music service. Your desktop is littered with website links for 'special offers.' The system tray is already full of programs that continuously use your internet connection to make sure that you're 'up to date.'

"When did I ask for this?" you ask. Well, you didn't and that's where the PC Decrapifier comes in. The PC Decrapifier attempts to remove all of the crap on your PC that you never asked for or wanted. To manually remove all of this stuff by hand can take at least an hour (depending on the severity of the infestation.) The PC Decrapifier will detect the 'crap' on your system, you choose what to uninstall, then sit back and let the PC Decrapifier work its magic.

Tech Ed 2007 - signed up!

Stan Spotts — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:50:00 GMT

Since my twins were born in 2005, I haven't done even one overnight trip. Tech Ed 2007 better be worth it :).

Beware reduced warranty on repaired XBox 360 consoles

Stan Spotts — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:04:00 GMT

The first time my XBox 360 died, it was the Red Ring of Death. That happened in July 2006, 10 months after the Mfr. Date on my console. So I had to send the box back and pay the $140 repair fee, and got my XBox back in August 2006. But then a check appeared in the mail a few months ago, refunding the $140 because Microsoft decided to do the right thing and make the warrenty for a year. Nice!

Now, about 6 months later, the DVD drive is dying. When I insert a game disc, I get a message in several languages telling me to insert the disc into an XBox 360. I have to admit that I usually yell at the console, in one language - but a very colorful one - that I am sticking the bloody disc into an XBox 360. That never works, but does offer some relief.

I should have enjoyed that modicum of relief, because relief is not what I got when I called XBox repairs. It turns out that when I had it repaired the first time I should have been offered an option to purchase a 1 or 3 year extended warrany, which I would have given the quality control issues on this beast. It also turned out that repaired XBoxes have only a 90 day warranty. So, XBox Repair gets my $140 back to fix this box again. They'd damned well better send me the warranty paperwork this time.

Vista MCE running FIOS-TV!

Stan Spotts — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:40:00 GMT

Okay, the Verizon installers came out and set things up today. They ran a short coax cable from the outside box (where my fiber terminates) into a splitter, then disconnected my DirecTV lines and connected the cables they used to get to the STB's. Kind of interesting - they had to use special splitters that actually have circuit boards. This is not simply a video signal, it's IPTV. Every connection got tested and retested, and the signal was so strong they had to put an inline widget to reduce it by 3db. Too strong a signal could give the STB's a meltdown.

We had a little issue getting the STB's going. Evidently, the "server" that they connect to had a failure, and the whole country was down. One server? Kind of scary, that.

After it was connected, I went ahead and set up my TV signal in Media Center, and selected Cable this time (used to be satellite). I saw two FIOS selections - one with (Digital) at the end, and one without. Digital gives you all the available stations, and not picking digital just gives you channels 1-49 (local stations). Except for some sound issues, everything went fine. It turned out that the moving around of the Vista box loosened a wire from the sound card, and after I shut down and opened the box I found it, fixed it, and restarted.

One cool thing I found was that all the scheduled recordings were reset to point to the correct channels. That was a nice surprise. So now I've got fiber for phone, TV, and Internet service, and I won't lose my TV signal every time we have a storm. Sweet.

Vista and Hauppauge PVR-500 issue solved

Stan Spotts — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 04:17:00 GMT

Hopefully this will help someone else who runs into the same thing. After I'd tracked down and installed several older drivers (last being dated 8/15/06), none of them working, I tried something on a whim.

I shut down the ehshell and the scheduling services (both of the running Media Center services), then opened Device Manager.

I then brought up the properties for tuner 1 and clicked on Update Driver, then let it pick the best one. It installed one from January '07, must be latest. Okayed that and repeated for tuner 2.

I restarted the two Media Center services, then started Media Center.

Now when I tried to Set Up TV, it worked! I went through and configured for DirecTV (FIOS TV gets installed tomorrow) and it all worked. I didn't see an option for a FIOS TV guide, but I wonder if it shows up if you pick Cable instead of Satellite. Hey, it's a fiber optic cable, right? ;)

Upgraded from WinXP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate, now tuners don't work

Stan Spotts — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:52:00 GMT

I have the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 dual tuner, and it's worked fine with WinXP MCE 2005 and DirecTV. However, Verizon is making available FIOS-TV (I already have FIOS internet service), and I'm switching.

So, I did some checking and found that you need Vista to work with FIOS TV. Okay, no problem, I've been meaning to upgrade my XP MCE box to Vista for a while now.

Sure, I had to do BIOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, and get new drivers for my video and sound cards. No biggie, used to that. Ran the tool to check compatibility, no real issues. Got rid of software that would not work, got upgrades for others.

Finally did the upgrade... and while the tuners on the PVR-500 work right, as reported by Device Manager, the Media Center application doesn't think I have tuners installed and won't let me set up TV!

I checked all over the place, on support forums, blogs, newsgroups, technet.microsoft.com, mskb, ... and no real answers. It looks like a number of tuner products are giving people headaches, not just the Hauppauge. A few responses from kind MVP's and others, but nothing from Microsoft.

So Verizon is coming to install tomorrow, and I'm still dead in the water. I won't be able to record a thing until this is fixed. :(

So be wary, and aware that you might get hosed. If I ever get it working, I'll be sure to post here and give kudo's to whomever comes through. It would be nice if it was a Microsoft response that fixed it, though...