October 2006 - Jayson's Blog

I've been avoiding all of the Vista CTP/Beta/RC releases like the plague (I've installed 2 CTPs over the past year, and they were very early on): A) I just don't have time to keep up with them all and B) I just really don't have time to keep up with them all.  However with the announcement from Microsoft that RC2 will be the last publicly available release before Vista goes gold I decided to break out a spare drive and give it a shot.

Two words (from an aesthetic standpoint at least): Simply amazing.

Getting it installed however was anything but amazing.  Doing a fresh install simply refused to complete...I ran through the steps about half a dozen times and it would lock up at various points, usually during the Extraction phase, so that was a good 2+ hours wasted.  In the end, the only way I could get the installation to complete was to first install Windows XP, upgrade that to SP2, and then run the upgrade routine from the Vista DVD; even then the upgrade itself took almost 2 hours (and 6 automatic reboots).  In comparison, the fresh copy of XP I installed first took just over 20 minutes, even though the spare drive I'm using is a 20 gig guy running at a paltry 5400 rpm's on an ATA 133 bus (compared to my main SATA drive spinning at 10,000 rpm's, it's like molasses).  Quite frustrating despite all the hype around Vista installing in under 20 minutes...perhaps the RTM will be faster.

I finally got it booted up, and wow...this ain't the Vista from 6+ months ago.  It's absolutely gorgeous...of course the fact that my Vista Experience score is a 4.8 certainly helps (well, that's the average of all the scores...surprisingly my processor (AMD Athlon 3500+ 64 bit) had the lowest score of the bunch at 4.2, though the graphics system clocks in at 5.9.  The HDD (as expected) is next lowest at 4.3, though the 10K RPM drive should boost that at least a full point.  Regardless, it's very polished from a visual standpoint...still a few annoying flickers here and there (usually related to the UAC dialog popping up), but the smooth fades in and out during various operations are soothing to the eyes, and of course glass looks fantastic.  I'm currently using the graphite theme, but with the color intensity backed down to just under half.  Perhaps my favorite feature eye-candy-wise is the sidebar, which many have mixed feelings about.  I have a couple gadgets installed, but with the opacity on them set at 60% which really helps the whole sidebar blend in to the rest of the desktop quite nicely so it's not so glaring and in your face. 

Overall system responsiveness is snappy, and memory consumption is well within an acceptable range (even with most of the Windows Components for IIS7 installed and running) averaging about half a gig with a handful of applications running.  I haven't done any real heavy lifting yet with IIS or Visual Studio or whatnot, that will be for a future post.  I am, however, strongly considering updating my main drive to RC2 in the very near future, so of course I'd love to get feedback from anyone who's already done this.  Most of my work is done in VS 2005 at this point, but I do have to use 2003 from time to time.  I don't run any "exotic" applications so I'm assuming most of what I do have will be compatible.

So overall (from a high level perspective) I'm impressed, and UAC isn't really getting on my nerves as much as I thought it would.  Everything is just so damn purdy!

One of those sleepless nights, and I realized I never did really sew up what happened with all the scam BS that happened a few months ago.  In short, nothing really happened.  My bank A) transferred most of the funds I had lost into my savings account and B) allowed me to cash it all out.  I appreciate the donations that came in (which in hindsite I realize was a pretty tacky thing to ask for, but hey...desperate times call for desperate measures) and have paid most of them back.  Outstanding invoices were paid and I was able to liquefy some other assets so all is well that ends well; this post closes my mini-series on this topic (thank god).

Needless to say I'm living cash only (i.e. no checking/savings) for the time being out of sheer paranoia, and when I do decide to reopen a bank account it will be with a different firm...my former bank has been nothing short of a total PITA throughout the whole ordeal.  PayPal has long since been canceled, as well as eBay (I will never ever ever use either of those again, they made my bank look like a bunch of saints), no less than 20+ passwords have been changed (or accounts canceled)...I did everything short of changing my SSN.  "Officially" speaking, the case is closed...I got some money back, the crooks got away with it...just another statistic to be filed away as caveat emptor.

The transition from home office back to corporate IT world hasn't been as smooth as I'd like...it's taking forever.  Apparently somewhere over the past couple of years outside of corporate IT I became "Sr. Developer" worthy (at least that's what the headhunting firms consider me...personally I despise titles) which entitles me to a better salary, but also limits the job options.  What's crazy is that a few of the firms won't even consider me for mid-level stuff which a month ago was fine, but at this point I just want to get back to work.  Headhunting firms are great, but in the end they want their slice of the pie as well...if they can market someone at a higher payrate, they make more money....business is business, and I get caught in the crossfire.  I'm also wary of taking long term contracts (or anything fulltime) as I've committed to MS should they offer me a position.  What's even crazier is that I've already had the rug pulled out from under me on one position because they read my blog and saw that I was screening with MS, something to the effect of "you should have told us where you were at in the process with other firms" though they didn't come out and say that they garnered that info from my blog (saying so would be illegal), however my log files indicate otherwise!  So the whole blog-as-a-resume thing can work both ways; can help you get noticed by firms, but being too candid can backfire.  Will that stop me from being candid?  Absolutely not, it's probably not a firm I would have wanted to do business with anyway.

This does however bring up an interesting conundrum: During my interview process with Microsoft I am somewhat unmarketable to other firms desiring a long term engagement, unless I willingly take an offer I know I might not be able to complete (Charlotte is small, and burning bridges is not advised as all these guys play golf together or whatnot).  Most firms ask upfront where you're at with other companies, and when they hear "interviewing with MS" they pretty much put you in a holding pattern.  Sad but true.  I also don't make a habit of lying.

So blah blah blah, the answer is simple enough: I'll take a part time gig somewhere to get off my idle ass, which will also leave me enough time to still put plenty of effort into getting reintegrated into IT'dom.  I even thought about taking on some more CS work, but dismissed it...I had my go at it, what's done is done.

It's been an interesting year, and it's one I'll be happy to see roll on into 2007 and fade into oblivion.  I think the worst is behind me...and it was just in time.

I arrived in Dallas Texas around 5:30PM CDT (GMT - 6) today...first off, it's freakin' COLD down here. I packed t-shirts and no jackets thinking that it would be 80+ in true Texas style. It was barely 70 when I got off the plane, and is getting close to the low 50's as I type this...very atypical for Dallas this time of year, and almost as cold as Charlotte.

Second off, everything really is indeed bigger in Texas. DFW airport is ginomornous (and the plane's pilot took us on an unexpected tour of the entire facility, i.e. they kept changing our arrival gate...we saw 3 of the 4 terminals from the windows on the plane before traffic control finally settled on one for us to park at), my rental car (err, SUV) is bigger than anything I've ever driven, and apparently for a road to be considered, well...a road down here, it has to be at least 6 lanes wide both ways with no turns; they all go in a straight line. My map does Dallas/Fort Worth no justice compared to just how expansive this area really is. Fortunately it's pretty easy to get around, unlike Charlotte where roads inexplicably change names/double back around and intersect themselves/etc (you'd have to live there to understand how maddening they are). The whole Texas hospitality thing is true though, everyone has been really nice and social.

I also got to meet up with Rich Mercer (currently a contractor for Telligent, and all around good guy) for a bite to eat. He's in town from his native England on a long business trip with Telligent. Fantastic fun guy, I hope to catch up with him on the other side of the pond when I head over there at some point. Unfortunately I was not able to catch up with any of the other Telligenti, but not for lack of trying ;-).

So tomorrow is do or die time with Microsoft...I think my brain has absorbed about as much information as it's going to. I have a full day of interviews, then I scramble back to DFW to catch a flight back to Charlotte, then I plan on having a relaxing weekend with virtually no computer time...I love the damn things but I'm going cross-eyed from staring into them.
 

So I made the first of my readiness upgrades for Vista today: I installed a second 1 gig DIMM of RAM in my machine...same brand and speed as the existing DIMM, lo and behold the memory test in Vista actually dropped 2/10ths of a point, from 4.2 to 4.0 (~5% decrease).  I wasn't expecting it to go up, but certainly wasn't expecting it to go down.  What gives?  Could the new stick have some faults in it?

[Update] MS is saying that this puppy will still need a gig of drive space.  Yes, drive space is cheap, but what the heck are they cramming into a gig of space for a CLI only version of Windows since according to the article there are minimal drivers and no .Net framework?  Hmmm. 

Everyone and their grandmother is no doubt aware that Vista RC2 was released earlier today (public download point is located here, and it probably won't be available for public consumption too much longer); what many may not know is that Microsoft is also starting to release news about a pared down version of Vista Server: Vista Core Server which is essentially a CLI only version of their server OS:

One of the most innovative features coming in Windows "Longhorn" Server isn't really a feature as much as a whole new version of Windows. It's called Server Core, and it will only take one-sixth of the disk space of a normal Longhorn installation. It's not expected to need anywhere near as many patches and hotfixes as Windows 2000. It's a version of Windows that does not, in fact, use windows. It's breaking Microsoft's long-standing reliance on graphical interfaces and shaking things up in several of Microsoft's product groups.

More interestingly from the "Managing The Beast" section of the article:

Forget about logging onto a Server Core console and managing it from there. Sure, you can do it. There's no GUI on the server, though, and there's no point making the trip to the datacenter or even firing up the Remote Desktop console. You can do everything you need remotely. Just use the Microsoft Management Console snap-ins you always have for administering DHCP, DNS or Active Directory.

So basically this will be Microsoft's first truly headless OS, and as mentioned in the article should be on par with what other server-centric OS's (Novell, *nix) have been doing for years.  And finally, what we as developers are asking is "what about the .Net framework?"  Nicely summed up by the following:

There's also no Microsoft .NET Framework. This means you can't run any managed code on Server Core. Mason says his development team wants to add the .NET Framework to Server Core, but they first need the Framework team to modularize the code so they can add just the essentials. The Framework's absence in Server Core is significant. For example, you can't run Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's vaunted new management shell, on Server Core. That doesn't mean you're out of remote management options, however.

So I guess how the framework will actually manifest itself on Core Server remains to be seen, but aside from that this looks like a very promising offering from MS.  I look forward to seeing what other "roles" they come up with as progression on this product takes place.