My Geek Notes

I can’t help but get really excited about XMBC getting a Linux port. I’ve got a modded XBox that I use to play a variety of media formats: XVID, DVD, MP3, MP4, etc. It’ll even act as a karaoke machine if you have CDG files to go along with MP3 files. The fact that it’s getting ported to Linux means that without a serious amount of effort (unlike most things with Linux) I can get a simple media PC setup that’ll run just about anything I want - at least, that’s the dream, right?

Recently, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control. Both my last job and my current job use it and as a Microsoft developer, and so, whether I like it or not, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future; but that’s really beside the point. Microsoft’s diff / merge tool simply isn’t adequate. It highlights the differing line just fine, but it’s not smart enough to tell me what’s different.

Years ago, I started looking around for a good solution and found KDiff. It’s an open source project hosted on Source Forge. It’s a wonderful piece of software that does exactly what you’d expect it to do. It even tells you if the only difference on a given line is just spacing (which typically has zero impact on code execution).

I wanted it to integrate with TFS nicely without having to work around it and found the necessary command-line paramters to feed to TFS:

Compare:
%1 %2

Merge:
%1 %2 -o %4

So to make them work with TFS, open Visual Studio, go to Tools -> Options and under the Source Control -> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server tree, click “Configure User Tools. . .”. That’s where the magic happens.

That’s pretty much it. It makes dealing with different files, concurrent checkouts, and other issues related to development and source control so much better.

1-10: I don’t care about top 10 lists.

It’s been a long time since I last posted, I’ve received hundreds of emails from fans concerned about my absence. Rest assured that I am back and here to stay.

My attention has been stolen from me by some rather old games, both single player and multiplayer. I talk of the Ultima Games, specifically ultima 6, 7, 8, 9, and ultima online. I have made it my intention to play through atleast one of these games, while building up a character on ultima online at the same time. I will of course tinker with all of them from time to time, as my attention span is incredibly small.

Some great tools to take a look at if you are interested in playing the classics are available to help run the games in current windows, mac, and linux environments (there are probably others, but i don’t care).

Dosbox is a classic dos environment emulator that works incredibly well at running your old games without having to put much effort into it. I recommend downloading a front end if you have alot of games to play that are DOS based.

Exult is a project to recreate Ultima 7 for modern operating systems, using the game’s original plot, data, and graphics files (thats directly from their site). This baby gives you plenty of options and lets you play the game in a window without ever entering a dos environment. A must have if you are going to play this one.

Pentagram, much like ultima 7’s exult is a project aiming to create an Ultima 8 engine for use on modern operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (another stolen quote). I played around with this one last night for a while, this one still has some bugs to be worked out, but for the most part the game is playable entirely in this new environment. Give a shot, it’s awesome to set the games resolution higher with a nice pixel scaler so that it looks more modern.

Anyways I better stop ranting on, there are tons of other projects available, just look them up on google and I’m sure you’ll find something that peeks your interest.

I’ve always been a big fan of paper. I learned to make a crane as a young lad sitting in church. (Hey, gotta have something to do while the adults are all talking).

So when my friend Vitamin K sent me a link to some really cool paper models, I was impressed.

So, I’ve been playing around with blogging lately as a way to make money.

On my personal blog the other day, I decided to write an article about eliminating client phone calls and trimming time out of the day. The article included a review of a book I’ve read recently. “4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris.

It’s a great book and I’ve had a ton of success applying its principles which I explain in detail on the post on my site.

As an expiriment, I signed up for an Amazon Associates account, and linked the image of the book and the title to the corresponding title page at Amazon.com. Embedded in the link was my associate id, so on the chance that someone clicked through and made a purchase, I’d get a small commission.

Well, the truth of the matter is that I didn’t expect to make a cent. My blog isn’t read by many people - it’s brand new and at the time only had three posts.

Imagine my surprise when, today, I logged into my Amazon account to create a new link for another product (”The Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde) and found out that I’d made some money.

It turned out that 32 different people had clicked through on the link I’d provided and a whopping 3 of them bought the dadgum book.

If I sell just 4 more books, my commission goes up from 4 to 6%, and, here’s the best part - I can choose to get paid in Amazon gift certificates!

Found this interesting map of Linux distributions today. I’m sure this doesn’t include them all, but it was interesting nonetheless.

I chopped out the funny part on this podcast where you can here the exercise ball exploding and Leo hitting the ground.

You can find the whole thing on The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now and laugh every time. Enjoy!

I recently decided to limit my time spent fixing others’ computers to mine and my wife’s immediate family; still quite the handful of people, but they do favors for me all the time so it seems an even exchange. The problem now lies in how to handle everyone else (mostly neighbors and associates) who would love for me to fix their computers for free. Even just giving advice can be terribly time consuming. The following are methods I’ve started to use to ensure I don’t end up fixing others’ computers for free, and still save face.

1. Leave the ball in their court
I just used this one the other night when stopped by a neighbor as I walked past her house. She needed some sort of HTML template for a site she submits to regularly. What she needed didn’t sound too hard, but I wasn’t willing to become the “project lead” by any means so I told her to get it all on paper and swing it by my house. I still haven’t heard from her. Making the requester take the initiative cancels out many would-be projects.

2. Delay them for another time
Most times when people have approached me, they want me to look at something right then or the same day. Similar to number one you can put the ball in their court by saying, “you know I don’t have time today (or this week) - give me a call next week and we’ll coordinate something.” This way they now have to take initiative a week from now and you’re not left getting back to them.

3. Stop volunteering advise or to help
Back when I was a young geek I used to want to fix everyone’s computer problems because I “knew it all”. Now I don’t even like to tell people what I do for a living for fear they’ll want me to do something for them. This method is a great one because it actually forces the requester to ask for your help when, after telling you their story, you haven’t volunteered a solution. It’s great practice for being a good listener and offering the occasional, “wow, that sucks.”

4. Refer someone else to fix the problem
I used this one the other night with the same lady in method #1. She said that her second computer was no longer seeing the printer over the network. Well come to find out, the original setup was done by another guy in the neighborhood, a friend of mine. “Well, he’s the man to fix that problem then”, I said. It’s such a great feeling to refer someone else who is more “skilled” at something than you are.

5. Quick list solution
This method usually starts off with, “Now here’s what you need to do …” and ends with a list of programs, tweaks, or hardware that will fix their problem. Best case scenario, they understand and fix the problem. Worst case, they come back 10 minutes later not remembering one of the steps or with a new problem because they did something wrong. Only use this one on the simple stuff because it will take you seconds/minutes to explain and won’t be too hard for them to do themselves … you hope.

6. Offer a “discounted” rate
I got this idea from my brother-in-law who uses it quite often. The neighbor approaches with the problem. You state your regular rate of $150/hour but say, “hey, your my neighbor so I’ll only charge you half that amount.” And there you go - either the neighbor pays you for your time or walks away thinking, “what a great guy to offer such a discount, although I can’t afford it”.

7. Offer to exchange services
Same as the previous one and also from the brother-in-law. This time you turn the tables and ask a favor in return playing on the requester’s strengths. I’d advise you use a different method if the requester doesn’t do something beneficial to you like mechanics, landscaping, or dentistry.

8. Refuse to troubleshoot over the phone
I really, really hate trying to figure out what’s wrong with someone’s computer over the phone especially when you’re at the question level of “is the computer on?” or they ask, “what’s a desktop?”. Say, “you know it’s really hard to do this over the phone” and then work in a #1 or #2 and cross your fingers that they never take initiative.

9. If you really don’t know, tell them
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to do research myself to figure out someone else’s problem and then fix it. Saying, “you know, I really don’t know how to fix that” may make you look a little week in the geekhood, but when you’re a seasoned (and weathered) geek, do you really care anymore? I know my time is more important to me now than how much others think I know.

10. I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time
The end all, the failsafe, the honest answer. The best way to approach this one is to make them understand that you really, really wish you could help them, but you just don’t have the time. This one reminds of the episode of Cheers where Norm has to fire people as part of his job and ends up sobbing every time. Those being fired end up comforting Norm. Great show.

Let me know of any you have. Anything to save my time and face.

Blizzard has given notice that they’re going to be making a big announcement this Saturday in Korea. If I had to choose I’d probably want it to be Diablo III, or some new world (very unlikely), but my money is on “World of Starcraft”. Starcraft is huge in South Korea, so right off the bat it seems unlikely to be a non-starcraft game (another RTS, i.e. Starcraft 2, would be the other possibility). Blizzard is in a class by itself, so I’ll definitely be picking it up whatever it is, and I personally know a hundred people just like me, so whatever it is, it should be a success. Recently they seem to be announcing closer to the actual release, so my other hope would be that whatever it is, it’s coming soon.

I’m not very good at waiting

Late Edit: Further research revealed that the countdown to “question mark” front back of Blizzard.com is mirrored on the site starcraft2.com. Too bad of all the possible game announcements that’s the one I’m the least excited about…

I was browsing around the other day and found that Thunderbird 2 had been released. I’ve been casually checking the mozilla site ever since I noticed that Thunderbird 2 was in beta. My current version of Thunderbird had not yet detected the upgrade but I thought what the heck I’ll give it a try.

Some of the new features like improved searching, custom message tagging, and advanced folder views, are really nice. Since on occasion TB on WinXP crashes, I was also hopping for an overall stability improvement, as well.

After I installed the new version, which was painless by the way, I noticed a rather annoying issue. All new messages in my Inbox were already marked read even though I had not opened the Inbox and had not read any messages. I started to look a little closer and the messages appeared to come in as un-read but then change almost immediately. After searching Google and the Thunderbird forums I found a few posts where others had the same issue. The forum posts had attributed it to the filtering rules.

After messing with the rules, turning them off etc. I still had the issue. Then I noticed that every time the message alert pops up the messages that appeared in the alert were getting marked read. One of the new features in the 2 version is that when a new message is received an alert pops up and tells you about the new message then disappears. The new pop alerts contain more message information, including a message preview, than they did the past versions. Yep you guessed it the message preview was marking the message as read when the alert was fired off.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple, don’t show message preview text in the alerts. To disable this setting open Thunderbird, Click on the Tools menu in the menu bar then click on Options under Tools. In the Options window, select the General Tab and click the Customize button next to the Show an alert checkbox. In the Customize New Mail Alert window, un-check the Message Preview Text checkbox and click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options window. That’s it, now you’ll still get the message alerts minus the preview and the message will not be marked read until you read it or mark it read yourself.