Ice cream makers

Note - bring ice cream maker and get ingredients this weekend.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1771112788833189/

The LA Times ice cream maker review has forced us all to ditch our computer terminals for a sunny porch and some old fashioned ice cream grinding. Though ice cream making never seemed very practical, several hours and a sore rotator cuff later, the results were always well worth it. They liked this 50 dollar Cuisinart ICE-20 series best, which being an automatic, requires no half-a-day cranking marathon. But if you need that workout to negate your ice-cream-eating guilt, then Cuisipro’s 50 dollar hand-cranked Donvier Ice Cream maker is a good bet.    

Related...

PSS and Memory Dumps

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/mfp2/archive/2004/06/22/162044.aspx  |  Comments

A whitepaper which describes memory dump files and their use by Product Support Services (PSS) has just been released to the web.  The paper was created in response to customers who have voiced frustration with requests to obtain multiple memory dump files to troubleshoot certain problems and wanted to understand the processes used by PSS to collect and analyze those files.  I remember working on all of the types of cases in PSS that required a memory dump to find root cause.  In many cases, it was difficult for a customer to schedule any down time because of SLA agreements, etc., so asking them to get dumps that could require up to 15+ minutes of down time was not always acceptable.  Hopefully this document will help explain the importance of capturing memory dumps and help everyone understand why PSS frequently requests them.

The paper discusses the following key areas:

• Definition of a memory dump file 
• Differences between full memory dump files and mini memory dump files
• An explanation of why it takes so long to create a memory dump file 
• An overview of tools that are used to capture memory dump files 
• A discussion of capturing hangs, performance problems and crashes with memory dump files
• An explanation of why engineers will need multiple memory dump files to diagnose certain problems 
• A chart that customers can view to set their expectations on the type of data PSS needs to begin troubleshooting certain conditions

Currently this document is found here: http://support.microsoft.com/support/exchange/content/whitepapers/MemoryDump.doc

Related...

OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped

download SP1 RTM and install.
Review features outlined in Chris' post.

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/06/25/165609.aspx  |  Comments

Today we had our ship party for OneNote 2003 SP1 down at Sammamish State Park (at the south end of Lake Sammamish in Issaquah for those who might know the greater Seattle area). Although we have signed off on the code, the process of building a patch, verifying it, and creating international versions continues so you won't see the final SP1 bits for a few more weeks.

Some highlights of SP1 for me (allow me to sing our own praises on this one day, please):

1. It is super rock solid stable. The original version of OneNote was pretty darn stable, but for SP1 we have had the chance to collect Watson data for the last 9 months or so and have been able to fix a large % of the crashes and hangs people have seen. We measure "mean time to failure" for OneNote and we are now averaging about 900 hours of execution time between crashes for the original version. That means if you add up all the time that we are running for all users and divide by the number of crashes logged, we get a pretty big number.  The numbers for SP1 are still coming in but they are way ahead of the original release for the same pre-ship period, so we should be able to beat 900hours no problem. We are pretty happy with how stable we are - people expect version 1 of an application to be weak in this area and we have not fallen victim to that - quite the opposite.
2. We were able to address most of the top user requests - as I have written before, we couldn't do everything, but we did a lot. It is fun to hear people who have not yet used the preview ask for improvements and be able to tell many of them that *everything* they have asked for is already in Sp1.
3. Breakthrough experiences, like real-time note sharing. If you're the only person you know who has OneNote, then this is not of much use to you, but if you work with others, such as in a team, it is very powerful. We do our status meetings using this. One of us invites the others to a shared session, then everyone joins and adds their status to the status page - all at the same time. It is freaky to watch, since the whole page is filled in after about 2 min, with text and diagrams appearing all over the place. Then the whole meeting is way faster because you can read the status and not wait for each person to say all of it. Once I had to be at home and had to miss the meeting, and decided to join a shared session that was going on at work. I could see everything everyone else could see who was actually in the room, and could even add comments and ask questions silently by typing them into the shared note surface. Wow - try doing that over just the phone.
4. Focus on end users, corporate team scenarios. We took the feedback we got from people not just on bugs but on how they wanted to use the product and tried to make their scenarios work. In particular, we worked with several corporate customers to help make OneNote work as a group collaboration tool, and it shows in the SP. Shared folders, SharePoint integration, real-time sharing, etc are all inspired by working with our “rapid adopter“ corporate customers. Some of these were questioning the value of OneNote to their organizations at first, but now they are enthusiasically embracing it thanks to SP1.
5. Big focus on reducing annoyances. Some things are hard to work with such as the “offline files” system in Windows. It is just flaky, and bites OneNote especially hard because we do our constant-save thing. SP1 has improved on this experience tremendously due to the extreme dedication of a few people on the team to tracking down issues and working hard to get clear reproducible steps so the bug can get resolved or a workaroudn devised. Although we couldn’t do a radical overhaul of our ink user experience, the same sort of attention to detail went into tracking down obscure and annoying bugs that users would occasionally report (such as ink jumbling on a page for no apparent reason). We think we’ve managed to exorcise these problems due to a lot of hard work by a couple of people. Similarly, our already solid anti-file corruption code has been tweaked and tuned to the point where we're starting to feel like the Maytag repairman...
6. FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES:

• Insert Document as Picture (Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Pictures)
• Shared Sessions – real-time peer-to-peer multi-user sessions (we had over 70 people once)
• Share With Others Pane – e-mail/SharePoint/file share/real-time
• Shared Folders for collaboration with others
• Much better performance with SharePoint
• Password Protection of sections
• Send to/Save as/Publish as Word
• New stationery pane – new stationery too!
• Insert Screen Clipping
• Insert Outlook Meeting Details
• Create Outlook Contact & Appointment
• Insert Date/Time (Ctrl-Shift-F)
• Change date/time on page header
• Names for subpages (they take the first text on the subpage)
• Resizable page tabs (drag page edge)
• Video Recording & linked notes
• Copy text/ink/voice notes from Pocket PC/SmartPhone
• Updated default notebook with out-of-the-box useful structure and "Helpful Tips" section
• Updated online and offline help with top requests (thanks for the on-line feedback!)
• You can specify scope of search before running it (drop-down next to green "go" button)
• Better default notebook structure
• Skip slow sections & folders during search
• 10x perf fixes for Navigation drop-down and clicking on section & folders tabs are all faster
• More note flags (25) and additional symbols
• Tablet improvements
  • Added support for scratch-out gesture
  • New erasers (including point erase, like a pencil would do)
  • Erasing a word in a sentence and rewriting it puts the new word in the right place after converting the sentence to text
  • Customizable pens (color, thickness, name, etc)
  • You can now double-space your notes without getting a lot of separate containers
  • Better ink performance and responsiveness
  • Selection tool allows you to grab individual strokes in ink drawings
• Can mark pictures as "background" for use in stationery
• Improved sync support for offline files/Intellimirror
• Can associate different default stationery with each section, create new pages from stationery using split new page button
• Drag/drop files onto OneNote page allows link/copy-and-link/insert as picture
• And loads more little tweaks and nasty things removed...

Now, on to the next version...

Related...

Microsoft Introduces Its New Command Shell

download and test on XP.

Does it run on Windows 2003?

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7419

Microsoft's latest episode of The .NET Show is la...

Related...

The Clutter Control Rules

The Clutter Control Rules

Wow - review with Barb and the girls.

Timex/Sinclair 1000 Emulator

Timex/Sinclair 1000 Emulator

Batch Image Processing - Home - Image Genius

Batch Image Processing - Home - Image Genius

download and test.
can't Adobe do batch processing?

The New York Times: Movies:

The New York Times: Movies:

Add this link to my portal.
Add google search to blogs
add stat link (check report) to blogs, re-register if necessary.

Geekzone, mobile forums

Geekzone, mobile forums: "main "

FixYourOwnPrinter.com

 

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/10.html#a1020

My decade-old LaserJet 4 recently developed a bad case of the dreaded "accordian paper jam" syndrome. It's been a workhorse. Maybe, I thought, I should just put it out to pasture. But I had a hunch that the process of getting it fixed would be interestingly different from the last time I had to do something like this. And sure enough, it was. I found several repair kits online, but zeroed in on FixYourOwnPrinter.com because their kit includes a video that illustrates the process.

Here's 45 seconds from my favorite scene¹, which demonstrates the right way to remove the clip from the end of a roller. I, of course, did it the wrong way. "Be careful not to lose these e-clips, they're easy to pop off," the guy said, just as my e-clip took the leap of faith. That was the only mishap, though. The printer's fixed, and I've joined the ranks of FixYourOwnPrinter.com's satisfied customers.

The video isn't going to win any production awards. It's handheld, and not always in focus. But it was plenty good enough to walk me through a complicated procedure that couldn't have been communicated as effectively in any other way. And because it didn't need to be better than that, it was doable for some folks whose business is printer repair, not video production.

---

¹ Courtesy of Blue Pacific's Turbine Video Encoder. I've been wanting to standardize on Flash as a universal no-hassle video playback format. Turbine, an encoder for Flash video, is a $39 product. And it offers a free version (which I've used here) that's unrestricted except for a subtle watermark. Looks like a nice solution.

Related...

Label Your Power Supplies

 

If I can be so bold, here's a tip for my fellow geeks to make your life easier: label your power supplies.

When you get a new toy that comes with a power cable that has a converter in (either in the middle or built into the plug) slap a label on it explaining exactly which one of your hundreds of devices this works with.

I have a "workshop" in my office. It's sort of a server room, sort of a place where all my geek crap can accumulate. I inherited a box of about 100 different power cables, convertors, and supplies. I can only tell you what about a third of them are actually for.

Last month, some of the guys wanted to stick a bunch of laptops in the conference room. Ignoring the wireless connection (and me, since it was late at night), they rummaged around the workshop, found a hub, and rummaged some more until they found a power supply with an end that would fit. Too bad it supplied twice the voltage that the hub needed — some sparks and noxious fumes later, I can scratch one hub.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had to dig through a pile of cables for 30 minutes to try and match up amps and volts between a device and a power supply. Now, whenever something new comes in the mail, the first thing I do is slap a label on the supply or the cable. It'll make your life easier, trust me.

Click here to comment on this entry

Related...

http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/06/11/LabelYourPowerSupplies.html

[Gadgetopia]

LinksysWrt54g - SeattleWireless

LinksysWrt54g - SeattleWireless

Hacking WRT54G

Furl - Your web page filing cabinet

Furl - Your web page filing cabinet

Add Furl to laptop

Notes from Danny O'Brien's NotCon Recap of Life Hacks

Interesting. Check out book references.

Bink.nu | Identity Management Resources - Getting Started

Bink.nu | Identity Management Resources - Getting Started

Need to research MIIS.
Is this Generally Useful for home network?
Interoperability with Solaris.