It’s hard to believe that the last blog posted was August 31st. I have been unbelievably busy. My work situation has changed significantly. I have been given the technical lead for one of our companies. The company is DRMNetworks. What we do is provide licensing and business management for multi-media owners. Our system is based on Microsoft’s Document Rights Management. It’s a great way for media owners to manage their product. The system architecture is Microsoft ASP, IIS, and SQL Server. However, I will be moving us to ASP.NET and C#. The majority of my time now is spent reviewing all the existing code and documenting the design.

I never did get Linux installed on the HP pavilion ze5468CL. Have tried several versions, all with the same result. The system hangs trying to load the video drivers. I even attempted to run Knoppix from the CD-Drive to no avail. The only solution was to run Linux within VMWare. I have purchased a license for their workstation 4 and now run Red Hat 9, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 enterprise server, and Windows 2003 enterprise server. I find the performance to be very good. In the case of the windows installations, just give it 512 MRAM and they run great. You can sent each up to get their own DHCP assigned addresses. Then each will look like just another box on your network. Have had no issues with Red Hat 9. Using VMWare seems to have eliminates all the hardware issues. Don’t even have to worry about duel boot. Networking is simple. Don’t think it can distinguish between the wireless card and ethernet card.

I have been following the adventures of Matt. Stumbled onto his blog while following some Java links. What caught my eye was his discussion about moving form a Powerbook to a PC Notebook. At the time I was in the process of making the same transition. It was interesting to read about his experiences. It seems he did return his PC and I believe is now back with a Powerbook. I have stuck it out with the PC, but miss my Powerbook badly. I am still having withdrawal pains. However, with my work situation I really must have a PC. As far as PC Notebooks go, this HP is the best. Others will disagree. I can only say that it has handled everything I have given it with out complaint.

Really need these three days away from work. Have no special plans. Will just kind of hang around the house and mess with the hp and maybe do some C#. We have tickets to see the Diamondbacks this Sunday. It’s the third game of a four game series with the Giants. They won the first and lost the second. It should be a good game. Besides the hotdogs and beer are always good so it’s got to be fun.

Friday I added a new sub-domain family.my-list.com. It’s a place for our family to add and display photo’s. To do all the work I found a product SPA (simple photo albun) that does the job. Will modify it down the road. But for now it was a quick and easy solution.

Need to rename this blog. I just don’t do Newton’s anymore.

Still have the hp pavilion 5468. Managed to work through the problems. With a Mac everything just works. With a PC everything has to be forced. Never did get Partition Commander to work. Sent them email. However, they never responded. The only difference between Partition Commander and a bandit is that the bandit doesn’t lie about his intentions. Looks like the $49.00 price for this product was wasted. I also emailed hp about the Linux installation. They never bothered to respond.

Did manage to get Red Hat 9 installed and running. This was accomplished with the aid of VMWare. Downloaded a 30-day trial version from their web site. Having used VirtualPC in a Mac environment for many years, it was an easy solution. Performance is not what it would be with a direct install, but is very usable. Also installed Windows 2000 Enterprise Server. The beauty of this product is that you can install multiple operating systems and test developed product. The only negative is performance. Things work well but just not fast. The other drawback is the price….it’s a cool $299 from VMWare.

Where I work we instituted SCRUM. There is a book titled “Agile Software Development with Scrum”, by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. They do a good job of detailing the process. Interestingly this is the very same process we independently developed three year ago while working for another company. We didn’t name the process. But I like SCRUM. This is a great process and really works because it addresses real life development issues. Would strongly recommend the addition of this book to your library. It’s a good read. Another good read is Alan Coopers’ “The Inmates are Running the Asylum.” I laughed till I cried as I read this book. He totally nailed real world development. Need to read this book again.

Sandy and I are sitting in the local Borders bookstore enjoying café-mochas. They have a T-Mobile hot spot, so thought it would be a good chance to test out the new hp laptop. Found that it worked well. Connected easily. In fact this post is from the bookstore. Have had an eventful weekend getting this system set up. Managed to upgrade from XP Home to Professional. Successfully installed Microsoft Office 2000, SQL Server, Visual Studio .NET, SourceEdit, Netscape, Palm desktop, and VMWare. Under VMWare installed Windows 2000 Enterprise Server and RedHat 9 in text mode only. Have made at least 6 attempts to install RedHat 9 with miserable results. VMWare seems to work well when you install various Microsoft products, but can’t handle Linux. Even tried to install Suse. Sent VMWare email which detailed my problems. Hope they respond. Would very much like to use this product to run Linux, BSD, etc. on this box.

Purchased an upgrade to Partition Commander and attempted to partition the hard drive. All it managed to do was screw up my MBR. Seems that when Partition Commander attempts to display its GUI after reboot it can’t render properly. Since I can’t read the screen, I can’t partition the hard drive. Had hoped that RedHat would install on an empty partition. Have also sent them email.

Yesterday the plan was to return this system on Monday and get a Powerbook G4. However, I really need this XP for an upcoming project. Its only a three month project, so have decided to make the switch then if I am still unhappy.

Still need to figure out how to get Linux to run on this system (hp pavilion ze5468CL).

Where does the time go? It just seems like yesterday that I wrote my last blog entry and now it’s one-week later. My plate is to full. Did clear off one item permanently. That item is a bug ridden Volkswagen New Beetle. I purchased this vehicle in 2001 and managed to accumulate 29705 miles on it. In that time, both of the headlights burned out, the AC failed twice, all taillights including the break lights failed, and the fuel system pump broke. This was a TDI (diesel engine) and a fuel system pump was warranted as part of the drive train. On top of these problems the dealers service center was poor. Each time they worked on the car it was returned with oil smudges. Work was never completed on time and there were always hassles about rental car payments. This was my last VW.

My efforts to learn Cocoa continue. Continue to work my way through “Learning Cocoa with Object-C”. The more I work with this language and Apples development environment the more I like it. Progress has been a little slow the past few weeks because of work. Spent the last few days coding Java classes to download report data in various formants. It all came together today. Our customers can now download any report information in cvs, xml, html, or xls formats. Have not used java for some time. It was nice to get reacquaint again. Our little development company landed a contract with a local doctor who has a medical transcription business. This business has reached its max capacity. It will be our task to provide new tools to improve productivity and allow new growth. The business is there, he just needs the ability to service it.

Have sold my Dual 1Ghz G4 Mac on eBay and now have my iBook up for auction. Originally planned on moving to the G5. However, with the increasing need to work away from home, now intend to purchase a PowerBook G4. The 17-inch powerbook is really nice but just to pricy. Suspect, I will settle for the 1Ghz 15-inch powerbook. Would like to purchase it on eBay. However, so many of the listing for powerbooks appears bogus. No way would these characters get my money. If I can find a legitimate seller, will just have to fork out the extra bucks to apple.

This little smile just makes my day….

Summer has come to Phoenix, AZ. This week we have experienced official temperatures of up to 116 F …. but it is a dry heat …. like an oven. Yesterday was one of those 116F dry heat days ….. and the air conditioner at work quite working. Found that once office temperatures hit 92F, one’s ability to concentrate on the intricacies of writing code nose dives to nothing. They did manage to get it up and running again just before we left for the day.

REALITY #1 – NO AIR CONDITIONING, NO PHOENIZ.

Progress continues on learning Cocoa. Have built a skeleton program that can load edit and save a Newton Notes plist. Now working on parsing the plist XML tags to transform the data to display content as it does on the Newton. Will post a link to the executable once the basic functionality is works. That is you can load a Notes plist and it displays as it does on your Newton.

I had to make an unexpected trip to Florida. Mom , the healthy one who had not seen a doctor in 8 years took ill and was in hospital. She actually spent a full week there before being released and returning to her home of the last 25 years. She is a very determined women…… Knowing that this trip would include long hours of waiting, I took a couple of books and an iBook with me. Had just recently sold my 600 Mhz iBook for lack of use. Purchased a new 900 Mhz machine just for this trip. Was really impressed with the performance boost the extra 300 Mhz gave. The books included Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” by Aaron Hillegass, and Cocoa with Objective-C” by James Duncan Davidson & Apple Computer, Inc. Both are excellent books. When learning a new language, I like to use two books written by different authors. Between the two they seem to answer most of the questions that rattle through my head as I learn. In the two weeks spent in Florida, I managed to get through close to three fourths of each book. In the process, discovered that I really like Cocoa. I found that the initial learning curve is quite steep. So many classes… Did find a reference to Cocoa Browser. It is a tool that organizes Cocoa documentation such that you can actually find needed class info. This is a must have resource.

I have two immediate needs for Cocoa. The first is to create an application that will provide an interface to the .plist Notes file downloaded from my Newton. The second is to create an application for the writing of my Journal. I know their are a number of Journal application out there. However, what I want is something that is as simple to use as a piece of paper and can import both Newton & Palm Notes.

Took a little time off during a recent trip to Florida to consult with the team. It was a very positive meeting. I am now highly motivated to return soon…