In Valid Logic

Not sure what has been going on, but ever since yesterday afternoon, I have not been able to connect to MSN with Trillian anymore.  I haven’t the slightest clue why either.  I can connect with the actual MSN Messanger 7 Beta, but nothing with Trillian.

Trillian is set to connect to messenger.hotmail.com port 1863.  Messanger doesn’t seem to have any options for the MSN server to use, and I haven’t bothered listing the open network ports yet.  Don’t see why that would change though.

None the less, very annoying.  I was happy with my Trillian and I’m not about to give it up.

Last week, I got my Microsoft Action Pack subscription.  A part of it was an OEM copy of MCE 2005.  For a while, I’ve been planning on having a central media server when I move.  Have all TV viewing come from a central place, with pause/replay, recording, etc.

Currently, it has just been my computer connecting to a separate dedicated media server which does all of the recording.  I have been using Snapstream BeyondTV v3.0, but I am somewhat disappointed with it.  First of all, one of its major pluses was that I could connect to it from my PC, but it often had poor performance, such as 50% cpu usage on a 3.2ghz when watching live TV.  Second, it had no HD support, which was something I was really wanting.  And third, no pictures/videos/DVD support without buying their Beyond Media product as well.  Finally, in order to watch TV on an actual TV, I’d either have to build a mini media server and buy another BeyondTV Link license, or get the MediaMVP and use a kind of hack to change it to work with BeyondTV.

Obviously, an attraction to MCE was that it support HDTV.  From playing around with it in stores, I’d noticed that the interface was far more intuitive, sleeker, and faster.  Even things like overlays on videos were far cleaner and did not cause video stuttering.  Additionally, since it is Microsoft, there is bound to be more manufacturer adoptance, such as with the Media Extenders that easy viewing from TVs, and addins such as NPR, Reuters, ESPN, XM, etc.  It also has a nice, open SDK allowing me to write my own addins, if I ever find something to write and the time to write it.

After playing around with it for the past few days, I’ve got it running quite smoothly.  Had a view audio and mpeg decoder issues, but finally got all of those tweaked out and performing well.  Was getting this odd muting of the audio for a couple of seconds when using the SPD/IF out.  Finally found if I tweaked the decoder’s audio configuration to use the SPD/IF, it went away.  Finally, was having some issues playing HD streams.  The PowerDVD6 codec was frequently spiking the CPU to 100% and causing stuttering and slow system responses to remote/keyboard commands.  Then the nVidia codec was being picky about some channels and would oddly stop playing when watching LiveTV, as if it reached the end of a video.  The WinDVD6 decoder played everything flawlessly.  Audio stutters had gone away and HD played great with no CPU spikes.  Was also having some antenna issues with HD channels, but found the RF antennas were conflicting with UHF reception somehow.  Unscrewed them and all was golden.

My one annoyance is that you can’t watch live TV from another computer.  If the extenders can play live TV over the network, it is obviously capable of doing it, but there is no application to let you connect to MCE from a remote machine with the full interface, a sort of “Media Center Extender Lite”.  People say you can remote desktop into it, but what good is that to watch TV?  I can watch the recorded programs over a file share, but it is not live TV, and it is not the rich interface.

Aside from that, I am quite pleased.  It is incredibly easy to use (once configured), so Trish should have no problems using it.  Has nice, rich interface, plenty of plugins, and even more to come.

Today is the official launch of a new online DJ community: Crossfader

Crossfader is an online community for the global electronic artist.  We are building this tool to help you connect with people who share your love for creation, great music, technology and modern culture.

This is one of the first sites to be launched with Community Server being highly customized.  It has been one of my projects at Telligent for the past couple of months and has been a great experience in terms of doing new things and finding many new things to add/improve within Community Server.

Developing Crossfader led to a number of enhancements and fixes that made their way into the v1.0 release of Community Server, and in the future will lead to many more.  Mostly in terms of easily being able to extend and customize the beavior of the stock controls and components.

One of the obvious customizations on the site is the custom skinning, but that is only scratching the surface.  We’ve setup the blogs to be used as a content management system for the articles, using custom URL providers for generating different links in the blogs and forums, have two areas pulling in separate lists of forums, and much much more.  We’re also working on a calendaring system to be built into the site allowing users to have their own personal calendar, as well as a community calendar that users can make submissions to.

Crossfader is a great example of easy with which you can rework the core components of Community Server to do many different things, without a great deal of effort.  If you are in the DJ community, I definitely recommend you check it out.  They have some great things planned and a lot of effort has gone into making the site outstanding.  And if you aren’t into DJing, I still recommend you check it out so you can see the types of things that can be done with CS and get a glimpse of some of things that might make their way into CS itself.

Been up tonight, doing some planning and such.  Figured out my taxes and planning for buying some things for when we move in together (put the security deposit down on our new apartment last Sunday).

Then was thinking about the honeymoon and checked out the availability for the cruise we were planning to take.  They were down to 5 balcony suites left, so I decided to go ahead and book it.

One step closer to being a married man…

Read over here about a Lego Star Wars game coming out in April with a downloadable demo.  Getting it right now… should be good entertainment when I need a break at 2–3am this week¹.

¹: Final week of a project before delivery sucks.

Update: It won’t install on Windows 2003.  What’s up with that?  Hate it when companies do that.  Logitech was the same way with my keyboard software, but running it in compatibility mode fixed it.  Not this.  Grr.

I saw the Star Wars Ep3 trailer… how am I supposed to wait 2 months?!?  Arg, the agony is killing me already!  I need to go see Robots this weekend soley for the Ep3 trailer.  I went to see Monsters Inc. primarily for the Ep2 trailer (it was a good movie too).

Today is a day of new toys for me!

• Dell 3100cn Color Laser Printer: I finally got myself a decent color laser.  After years of ink jets, I am done.  I don’t print much, so often the ink would dry up or leak or get all used up the 1 time a year I print a photo.  Also, the ink cartridges often cost more than the printer is worth.  I’ve had printers break/die/make bad noises, soft often when I need new ink, I just get a new cheap printer (like the Lexmark Z605).  Last January, they had a 30% off coupon for the 3000cn, but I waited too long to order it and it expired.  So earlier this week, I found a 40% off for the 3100cn and hopped on it.  Talk about nice… thing is damn big though.  Should get a stand for it once I move.  Finally got nice big paper feed, manual try for the occassional other stuff, built-in network card for network printing… nice.
• Sealy Posturepedic Chair: Previously, I’ve always used basic, armless task chairs which are torturous on my neck/back.  They’ve never gone all the way up to the back of my head, and I’m always leaning back in them, which gradually bends them back, causing even worse back support.  Plus, I always wear through the padding and I’m down to feeling the bolts on my butt after about a year and a half to two years.  Working at home now, I am at my desk nearly all day, so I am merely accelerating that process, and causing more neck/back pain.  So I finally went out and got a nice chair that leans back, gives good support, and has arm rests (that alone caused most of my agony).
• Uniden 5.8ghz cordless phone: Living in an apartment, you are automatically in a major hotzone for a ton of 2.4ghz traffic.  On my laptop, it easily detects about half a dozen wireless basestations from my room.  All this was causing major annoyances when using my 2.4ghz phone at night.  During the day, it worked pretty good, since then most people are gone to work.  But at night, everyone is home and on the internet, and using the phone blows.  Finally got a 5.8ghz phone since far less people using 802.11a than b/g.  Now I just need to get past its 15–20 hour charge time.

Yay, so bunch of new toys.  Now to pick up all the boxes/packaging crap around my room and get back to work.

Site had some short downtime this afternoon.  Apparently, one of the other machines at the datacenter was trying to use my server’s IP address.  All taken care of, they’d just entered in the wrong one.  Sorry for any inconvenience with articles/downloads.

I was very disappointed this morning.  I was reading on weblogs.asp.net and came across this post.  I was like “ohh yeah, I know of Nerdbooks, they’re over in Roseville.”  Not any more!  Go to the website and see that now they’ve moved to Richardson, Texas!

Very sad indeed.  They were a great bookstore.  Obviously, haven’t been out there in a while (since they moved in July), but they had almost anything.  Used to go there for some of my college books (bookstore would be sold out or they’d have it cheaper).  Now where will I be able to get the hard to find tech books locally?

With the release of the nGallery to CS converter, we finally got people with good sized nGallery installs running on Community Server.  Prior to this, it was most myself and others running fair small, frequently rebuilt installations, or my own website, which only has a moderate amount of pictures.

So we instantly started getting people with thousands of pictures in their Gallery and some bad performance issues started showing up.  With some debugging, we tracked it down to the cs_PostCategories_Get procedure timing out, causing an exception, and breaking a bunch of things.

The cause of the problem?  The procedure was using some inefficient SQL in order to get the total number of posts and the most recent post date in it and a total of all of its subcategories.  Namely, it was using a couple of subqueries (meaning query within a query within a query), the IN clause, and a “select top 1 … order by postdate desc” in a few of the subqueries.  On one database with ~95 categories and ~4000 pictures, this command could take almost a minute to execute.

The solution?  We updated the sproc to use max(PostDate) instead of the top/order by.  This brought the execution time down to ~1 second.  We also changed all the subsubqueries and IN clauses to be inner joins.  Doing this brought the execution time down to <1 second.  On my own site, which has about 50 categories and around 900 pictures, execution time went from 4 seconds to <1 second.

To update the cs_PostCategories_Get procedure on your own site, run the following script:

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N’[dbo].[cs_PostCategories_Get]‘) and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N’IsProcedure’) = 1)
drop procedure [dbo].[cs_PostCategories_Get]
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.cs_PostCategories_Get
 @SectionID int=0,
 @ApplicationKey nvarchar(256)=null,
 @CategoryType smallint
AS

if @ApplicationKey Is Not Null
begin
 SELECT C.*,
  TotalThreads = (SELECT COUNT(PIC.PostID) FROM cs_Posts_InCategories PIC INNER JOIN cs_Posts jP ON (jP.PostID = PIC.PostID AND jP.PostID = jP.ParentID) WHERE PIC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID),
  TotalSubThreads = (SELECT COUNT(P.PostID) FROM cs_Posts P INNER JOIN cs_Post_Categories jC ON (jC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID OR jC.Path LIKE C.Path + convert(nvarchar, C.CategoryID) + ‘/%’) INNER JOIN cs_Posts_InCategories jPIC ON (jPIC.CategoryID = jC.CategoryID) WHERE P.PostID = P.ParentID AND P.PostID = jPIC.PostID),
  MostRecentPostDate = (SELECT MAX(PostDate) FROM cs_Posts_InCategories PIC INNER JOIN cs_Posts jP ON (jP.PostID = PIC.PostID AND jP.PostID = jP.ParentID) WHERE PIC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID),
  MostRecentSubPostDate = (SELECT MAX(PostDate) FROM cs_Posts P INNER JOIN cs_Post_Categories jC ON (jC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID OR jC.Path LIKE C.Path + convert(nvarchar, C.CategoryID) + ‘/%’) INNER JOIN cs_Posts_InCategories jPIC ON (jPIC.CategoryID = jC.CategoryID) WHERE P.PostID = P.ParentID AND P.PostID = jPIC.PostID)
 FROM cs_Post_Categories C
 LEFT JOIN cs_Sections F ON F.SectionID = C.SectionID
 WHERE F.ApplicationKey = @ApplicationKey
  AND C.CategoryType = @CategoryType
end
else
begin
 SELECT C.*,
  TotalThreads = (SELECT COUNT(PIC.PostID) FROM cs_Posts_InCategories PIC INNER JOIN cs_Posts jP ON (jP.PostID = PIC.PostID AND jP.PostID = jP.ParentID) WHERE PIC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID),
  TotalSubThreads = (SELECT COUNT(P.PostID) FROM cs_Posts P INNER JOIN cs_Post_Categories jC ON (jC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID OR jC.Path LIKE C.Path + convert(nvarchar, C.CategoryID) + ‘/%’) INNER JOIN cs_Posts_InCategories jPIC ON (jPIC.CategoryID = jC.CategoryID) WHERE P.PostID = P.ParentID AND P.PostID = jPIC.PostID),
  MostRecentPostDate = (SELECT MAX(PostDate) FROM cs_Posts_InCategories PIC INNER JOIN cs_Posts jP ON (jP.PostID = PIC.PostID AND jP.PostID = jP.ParentID) WHERE PIC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID),
  MostRecentSubPostDate = (SELECT MAX(PostDate) FROM cs_Posts P INNER JOIN cs_Post_Categories jC ON (jC.CategoryID = C.CategoryID OR jC.Path LIKE C.Path + convert(nvarchar, C.CategoryID) + ‘/%’) INNER JOIN cs_Posts_InCategories jPIC ON (jPIC.CategoryID = jC.CategoryID) WHERE P.PostID = P.ParentID AND P.PostID = jPIC.PostID)
 FROM cs_Post_Categories C
 WHERE C.SectionID = @SectionID
  AND C.CategoryType = @CategoryType
end

GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

GRANT  EXECUTE  ON [dbo].[cs_PostCategories_Get]  TO [public]
GO

I’d also recommend that if you are running the nGallery to CS::Gallery converter, that afterwards you rebuild the indexes on all of the CS tables.  You could do this by running the script on this site.