Pickabar Blog

I’ve been a big fan of memory since the first time I added another stick to one of my diy built pcs. Upgrading CPU’s always boosted my benchmark numbers, but it never made normal computer use feel much different. Maybe if I did more video editing, of PC gaming. Adding memory, on the other hand, always lead to a drastic improvement in the responsiveness of the system. Paging is slow.

Part of that dramatic impact is undoubtedly due to my work style. First off, I almost never turn my computer off. I also rarely close programs. What if I needed them again? As I write this blog post I have six or so IE windows open (w/ who knows how many tabs), Firefox, RSS Bandit, Windows Media Player, FL Studio, Outlook, OneNote…ugh, I’m tired just listing all of the running apps! Why create favorites when you can just leave the IE window open? I need RAM, and lots of it.

The official memory requirement for XP Pro is 128 MB, which is hard for me to believe. We’ve been running at 1GB. The Vista Premium Ready experience requires 1 GB, so I decided to bump our physical memory up to 2GB. 3GB is the limit on 32-bit Operating Systems, but I think 2 should meet our needs until we’re ready to upgrade to a 64-bit OS and a new motherboard.

I wasn’t sure exactly what type of RAM to purchase…DDR? DDR2? I wasn’t even exactly sure what type of motherboard we had, even after the assistance of SiSoft Sandra. Luckily, I had heard good things about Crucial.com. Their site includes a handy tool called the Crucial Memory Advisor. You enter the manufacturer and model of your pc, and they give you a list of compatible RAM sticks. A few clicks later and I was done.

Three days later the stick arrived, and about 45 mins later the upgrade was complete. Of course, 35 of those minutes were spent trying to remember how to open the annoying Compaq case. My old DIY boxes barely stayed closed!

It’s only been a day, but I’m already happy with the purchase. Fast-user switching definitely seems much faster, although it’s still not blazingly fast. WMP seems to open much more quickly, but I would have expected that to be more CPU bound then anything. It’s hard to judge the system overall, since we’ve only been on Vista for about three weeks, but thing seem much snappier.

Well, after reading about other foks having sucess with Vista on their main machines, and after running it for a while on my laptop, I decided to take the plunge. At this point we’ve been running Vista RC1 as an upgrade from XP SP2 for about two weeks. I have to admit, upgrading was a bit intimidating. Our XP box had been rock solid for more than a year, and we basically only rebooted when installing software.

Let me start by saying the upgrade took forever. Like five hours forever. That was really surprising since the fresh install on my Toshiba Tecra M4 laptop only took about 1:30 or so. Even more nerve wracking, there was a BSOD at one point in the upgrade process. Eventually, the upgrade completed, and I was staring at my shiny new OS.

Except:

• The internal Creative Soundblaster Soundcard didn’t work. I downloaded Creative’s beta drivers for Vista and I had sound!
• We can’t watch MPEGs in WMP 11. I haven’t figured out how to get it to see our MPEG decoder yet…the instructions I’ve found so far are for WinXP and I haven’t had the courage to try them.
• My external soundcard, a Tascam US-122 was installed, but wasn’t usable as a device for audio input or output. I haven’t found a workaround for this yet…which is not so surprising to me as the Tascam Gigastudio app bluescreened my box when it was still running XP. That really sucks, as it means I can’t record using my condenser mics.
• The new Aero glass special effects only worked with one user account. If I logged in first, and Sarah fast switched to her account, no glass. An install of the ATI Catalyst Beta Drivers for Vista solved that problem, and also smoothed out some glitchiness in the visual effects.
• My beloved Line 6 Guitarport didn’t work. I found a forum post on Line 6′s message boards that recommended the free upgrade to Gearbox and I was back in business…except for the metronome.
• I can’t seem to shutdown…the machine gets to the shutdown screen, but never makes it all the way to off. This is my #1 problem at this point.

There are still a few rough patches, but all in all I’m enjoying the adventure. My favorite things so far?

• I may never navigate three levels deep into the start menu again. I will also be seeing a lot less of Windows Explorer. Why? I hit the Windows key, type what I want, and 99% of the time I can just hit enter to run the program I want or to view the file I’m interested in. Even Device Manager! I think once people get used to that, it’s really going to be a huge boon for productivity.
• Flip 3D, which is a 3-D replacement for ALT-TAB using Windows-Tab.
• The glass effects really do make things feel futuristic.
• The new Resource Monitor rocks, especially the ability to see disk I/O and network traffic on a per app basis. It’s like Task Manager++.
• The little thumbnails you get when you hove over the Taskbar buttons is a small, but very useful feature.
• The fact that User Access Control keeps asking for permission whenever you try to change something on the system can be frustrating at first…but it makes me feel like I have much more insight into, and control over, what my PC is doing. I can also see it saving my butt one day when I click the wrong button or try changing the wrong setting.

I’ve you’ve clicked on a few of those links, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of them point to Supersite for Windows, which is the site I turned to first after getting my Vista install up and running on the home PC. Definitely a great site to check out.

Expect more posts as I’ve had more time to play with it!

[Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, and I was a Microsoft fanboy even before that. Feel free to take everything I say on Vista or any other Microsoft products with salt to taste!]

My main means of transportation until I graduated high school was a series of second hand bicycles. I grew up in the suburbs with no car in the family, and with public transportation that involved once an hour buses that stopped running at 6:30. I had plenty of opportunities to go on long bike rides. I rode my bike to work a town away, along highways to hang out with friends several towns away, and on practically every street in Brentwood, LI.

Then I moved to the city and discovered the wonders of useful public transportation and dangerous traffic. I don’t even remember bringing my bike to the city.

Well, after talking to my bike riding friends Jay and Lisa (and nearly killing myself on Jay’s bike in billyburg), I got excited. So last weekend Sarah and I headed over to the local Bicycle Renaissance and I bought myself a new two wheeler. The new pickabar bike? A Specialized Sirrus Sport.

I wound up spending a lot more than I’d intended to for a helmet, lights, locks, pins and other assorted jib jabs that sounded important. I think it’s worth the extra expenditure, since this is going to provide me with another opportunity to have healtyh fun, but it’s definitely a culture shock after having had only 50 dollar beaters my whole life.

I picked up the bike on Tuesday and had a fun, but slightly grueling ride around Central Park. Those hills heading to Harlem on the east side of the park are killer for a noob like yours truly!

Last night, I decided to check out Riverside Park, which is on the western edge of Manhattan. I rode along the bike path up to harlem, where the path would have required me to enter normal streets. Then I rode back down the path past Midtown, past downtown and chelsea…to Batter City and a beatiful view of lady liberty. That’s right, I rode my bike to the tip of Manhattan from the Upper West Side. Here’s my route on GMaps Pedometer…it seems like my route was a bit longer than 18 miles. Afterwards I came home, played guitar for a bit, scarfed down some grub and drifted off to the kind of peaceful sleep that only seems to happen in a crib.

Definitely a great purchase!

You’re just bad at math, And You can’t count worth a damn.

I’ve had those words in my head for about a month now. Eventually I started thinking, “hey, that might be a good idea for a song.” Was it a good idea for a good song? I’m not so sure. But after a lot of huffing and puffing it is a song.

…a really bad hip hop from bizarro world song, but a song none-the-less.

As I mentioned previously, my team needed a managed wrapper around the CAB APIs in order to extract and test the contents our InfoPath templates programmatically*. We found a great series of articles on the subject by Jim Mischel, downloaded the sample code, and set to building our automated testing tool. Unfortunately, we ran into a snag once we began trying to decompress multiple XSN files. Luckily Adam Nathan’s CLRSpy came to the rescue. Here’s how I debugged the problem.

When our app got to the point of processing the third or fourth CAB, an Exception was thrown:

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an obj
ect.
at CabDotNet.CabSdk.FdiDestroy(IntPtr hfdi)
at CabWrapper.CabDecompressor.Dispose(Boolean disposing)
at CabWrapper.CabDecompressor.Dispose()
at CreateTemplatesAndViewers.testfdi.ExtractFiles(String cabinetFullPath, Str
ing destinationDirectory) in d:\visual studio projects\utilities\createtemplates
andviewers\testfdi.cs:line 70

Not knowing what the problem was, I dug through the source code looking for obvious managed code problems. Nada. At that point I started to suspect the interop portion of the code, so I fired up CLRSPy and ran the app again. Bingo! I saw the following in the CLRSPy log:

Collected Delegate in XSNInjector.exe (PID 5976): Unmanaged callback to garbage collected delegate: CabDotNet.FdiFileReadDelegate

Aha! The managed delegates Jim was creating were being Garbage Collected before the umanaged CAB API tried to call them. But why? Looking at the CabSdk.FdiCreate wrapper function, I noticed the call to the actual unmanaged FdiCreate function:

hfdi = CabSdk.FdiCreate(
new FdiMemAllocDelegate(MemAlloc),
new FdiMemFreeDelegate(MemFree),
new FdiFileOpenDelegate(FileOpen),
new FdiFileReadDelegate(FileRead),
new FdiFileWriteDelegate(FileWrite),
new FdiFileCloseDelegate(FileClose),
new FdiFileSeekDelegate(FileSeek),
erf);

The delegates being created (“new FdiMemAllocDelegate(MemAlloc)”, etc.) weren’t being refered to at all in the managed code! The GC doesn’t track unmanaged references to managed objects, so it felt free to collect them once there was enough memory pressure. The fix was relatively simple, I just created member variables to hold references to the delegates and our app was able to process any number of CABs without any problems.

Jim has since posted an updated article and code:

After the third article was published, I began receiving reports of intermittent unexplained failures of the CabCompressor and CabDecompressor classes when compressing and decompressing cabinet files. After much investigation, reader Gerrard Lindsay sent me the solution.

Ah, teamwork!