In Valid Logic

Don’t you hate it when you write out a nice long post, then go to do something you think is trivial, and then accidentially wipe out the entire thing? Yeah, me too. Perhaps I’ll write up my post later.

Anyone have any opinions on the best, current antivirus software that has the lowest memory/cpu utilization?

Back in the day, I used to use Panda Antivirus, but then I’d heard some mixed reviews about it not always catching things and decided to move on.

Since then, I’ve been using Symantec Antivirus 2004 Corporate and like it a lot. Seems to have pretty low memory and CPU usage for continual protection, but it is getting older.

Recently got McAfee Virus Scan Enterprise 8i and put it on my laptop and was bitterly disappointed. Was reinstalling some things like SourceGear Vault and was noticing it loading the installer and doing the installing rather slow, so I fired up Task Manager and saw McAfee eating up 40-50% of the CPU. Promptly uninstalled that.

So what is the best antivirus solution nowadays? I want good protection and I want to never know it is there… so barely any memory usage and hardly any CPU expense to continually process. If nothing else, I’ll just stick with Symantec 2004 for now.

After my attempt last week at figuring out the Windows Workflow Foundation, and chatting with James about his experiences, I revisited my previous attempts and this time came out much better.

First, I was dead on with one of my problems last time. I was using it to describe the functional workflow when I should have been using it at a higher level to control the overall logical flow. Once I adjusted that, things flew so much smoother. I actually got a full functioning workflow that actually does some useful stuff. Created a number of custom activities, used some eventing, and it all worked smoothly.

Once you get the basics down, it is actually a pleasure designing things as a workflow. You simply create these sandboxed activities that perform a certain task and then wire them all up. It allows you to program the pieces of a program without worrying about how they connect right up front. All to often, it is easy for code to get burried into a mess of if statements or functional calls. It is much easier when you simply have to think ok, I need something to poll for messages, I need something to process a message, I need something to send a response.

There are a few annoyances… like the bug where you can not use an InvokeWorkflow activity to call another workflow in the same assembly, it has to be in another assembly. That one is annoying. Another thing I am not fond of is that InvokeWorkflow triggers the workflow off asynchronously. I want it to be able to block until the workflow is completed. The only way to do this is to use a SequentialActivity, not a workflow. But for better pluggability, I think it would be nice for it to handle both activities and workflows as blocking or non-blocking. Surely, it is possible, so going to look at writing an activity to do just that.

Anybody interested in hosted Community Server which gives them access to using the NNTP Server, FTP Server, or Mail Gateway add-ons?

I have this pretty nice server that gets practically no use. I don’t want to get rid of it, since it is a nice server, and a good deal on the colocation, so trying to come up with something to utilize the server more and to maybe pay for my colocation costs in the process, or to pay for server upgrades.

So would people be interested in like 1gb storage, like 25gb monthly transfer, CS with access to the files (so can host your whole site), and able to use NNTP, FTP, or Mail Gateway for like $15-20/mo? None of these are set in stone or anything, do more storage or something. I wouldn’t want to do like major, tons of people hosting. Mainly just get the thing being utilized.

Anyone reading this think they’d be interested?

Every day in the summer, my office has been cursed by the fact that my window faces directly west and I cannot bear to be at my computer from about 3:30pm to around 6pm because the sun is shining directly into my eyes. All I could do if I wanted to get stuff done was to take my laptop into the living room.

Yesterday I finally had enough and decided to rotate my office 90 degrees. Today was kind of overcast and rainy, so didn’t get to see how the sun is, but I can tell that it is a lot better since now the sun is off my side instead of right in front of me. Still need to hook up the printer though, since I need to dig up a different extension cord and longer ethernet cable.

Before: [photo:1162] After: [photo:1540]

Also rotated my LCDs and I’m now using them in portrait mode. So far, I like it. Visual Studio is very nice being longer, IE/Firefox is nice, Money is nice, and getting used to Outlook. Main issue is parts of the screen seem to flicker or stutter. I’ve noticed the screen refreshes horizontally (when it is in normal mode), so moving windows arround quickly looks worse in portrait mode.

A couple of days ago, I decided to give Vongo a try. They are the service that lets you download and view your movies, instead of having to wait for them in the mail with services like Netflix.

Pretty much right after I signed up with Vongo, I was ready to cancel, but I paid $9.99, so I figured I’d have to download and watch a couple of movies just so I get my money’s worth.

Here are a couple of issues I have with Vongo:

• Horrible selection. It is not very big, and mostly older or unheard of movies.
• Movies show an expiration date, probably when they are licensed to show it until. I’d prefer to know I could get movies anytime, not only until 11/06 or something.
• Movies are formatted as if they’d be shown on TV. A little Starz logo pops in the corner from time to time. You do get widescreen (if available).
• No Dolby Digital or any kind of surround sound. Again, as if it was on the TV on a plain old cable channel.
• Interface pretty much sucks.

I signed up with Vongo thinking I’d get a nice Netflix replacement where I could just download any of the movies I want, when I want them. Sorry, not there yet. I like the idea, but Vongo just misses the mark. For me to ever reconsider, I’d at least need a much wider selection and the ability to get digital surround sound out of it.

Lately, I’ve been looking at using Windows Workflow Foundation. Figured it out soley based on webcasts and articles wasn’t getting me too far, so I picked up a copy of Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation and have started reading through it.

Overall, WWF looks very exciting. It makes it much easier to logically break up the functionality of a program and visually see how all the parts are connected. It is not suited for all types of programs, since there is a certain threshold of complexity where the cost of taking longer to develop (creating activities and wiring it up would take a little longer than straight code) would not be justified with a basic operation. More complex things can greatly benefit as it is more visual, easier to see how things separate, debug activities since they are more encapsulated. And on top of that, the workflows are dynamic so they can easily be changed to meet certain customers needs.

After reading through some of the book, I decided to take a stab at writing my own workflow and some of my own activities. One of the places I’m looking at using WWF is for Community Server :: Mail Gateway, so I thought I’d start off with a workflow to process messages. After almost 6 six hours last night, I finally had a workflow that would loop through the To/CC and find valid To addresses and a valid sender. All this for code that would have taken me about 10-15 mins to write. This amount of time in development is not realistic. Most of it was starting with something, realizing it wasn’t the best way, and then starting over. I wrote some of the activities probably half a dozen times as I was figuring out the best ways to do the processing and pass the data around.

So after the 6 hours, I had a workflow, with the activities, it all compiled without any issues, so I decided to fire it off. SPLAT. Crashes upon execution with a type invocation error (a common error I was having, not very explanatory, but I’d usually track it down, though before it was always a compiler error, not runtime). After that, I gave up and went to bed.

After thinking about it some, I think I’ve realized my problem. I was using the workflow to desribe the functionality of my program at too low of a level. IE, I created an activity that used while activity to loop through a collection and then fired off another custom activity to process each item. This is far more complex than it really needs to be, and not much is gained by it. Instead, I should use the workflow to describe a higher level of functionality. So I should create an activity that simply does the loop and processing all at once, in code, and then use the workflow to describe what operation it moves onto after that is done.

Additionally, I don’t think Windows Workflow Foundation is ready for me to be putting into an application that is already stable and in production. The release we are looking to use it for is still quite a ways off (Community Server v3.0), but I don’t want to take something that is fairly stable right now, and add in this beta library that is still changing as a core dependency. Already, I’ve found some example code in the book (which was written even before Beta1) that is no longer valid (current is Beta2). Also found a couple of issues with the designer where it would be testy on listing activities I’d written or some errors where all I could do is close Visual Studio, then re-open it and it would be fine.

In summary, would have to say that Windows Workflow Foundation could certainly become a powerful tool to help make complex operations more dynamic and logical. Workflows are best suited for complex operations and to describe them at a somewhat high level, as introducing workflow to these tasks adds a certain amount of additional complexity, but the advantage is that overall, it gains visual flow (more human unstandable), better separation/subdivision, and the ability to be dynamically changed.

Is going paperless realistic? In my eforts to get my finances, documents, and office nicely organized and maintained, I’ve been thinking about going completely paperless. In my opinion, there are two limitations: getting and staying organized, and minimal amount of effort.

For starters, I need to be able to get very organized so that I can quickly and easily find what I am looking for, and also be able to quickly and easily file away data that I acrue. For instance, if I scan in a cable bill, will want to store it away and be able to easily retrieve it by a couple means… maybe I search for Comcast and get all my cable bills. Maybe search for March 2006 and get all my bills for March 2006. I was thinking of scanning everything and loading them into OneNote, but I don’t think it would facilitate the kind of tagging I want. I do want something that can save the actual content, and not the files. IE, don’t want it to store a bunch of PDFs. I want it to store the content so I can easily view it, support some nice OCR or something, searchable, and tagable.

Secondly, I don’t want to exert much effort to load new data once it is all set up. Otherwise, stuff will pile up and I’ll never get it done. Then the amount of effort to get it all done builds and I’m even more detered. One way to help is a fast duplex scanner, but the other half is getting the data into the program. Something like the “Send to OneNote” virtual printer would be good… if I am using OneNote.

One thing I wouldn’t go paperless with is receipts for everyday things. I just get too many of those and it wouldn’t be worth while to scan all of them. I’d keep this to just bills and larger purchases. For small things like dinning out, groceries, and day-to-day things, I’d just continue doing what I’ve been doing… put them in a ziplock bag at the end of the month and store them in my file cabinet. Keeps them nice, compact, and organized by month.

Anyone else tried to go paperless? Any recommendations on applications to store and organize things and the process of loading things?

One of the new laptops I was waiting for, the Dell Latitude D620, is looking like it will be a disappointment. CoreDuoNews.com posted some leaked information from a review that was prematurely released (and cached by Google).

According to the article, it will have a 14.1″ screen (what I was looking for), but the upgraded screen is only going to offer 1440×900 resolution. What is it with the migration to widescreen displays on all of these laptops? Sorry, I don’t want a widescreen. Sorry, I don’t want less screen real estate. I like my square (or, mostly square) screen and I like 1400×1050.

/me shakes it head while walking away (yes, IRC reference… blogs need /me actions)

The Blue Angels were in town over the weekend at the California Capital Airshow at Mather Air Force Base. Below are a couple of the shots I took at the show:

[photo:1524] [photo:1523] [photo:1522] [photo:1521] [photo:1520]

Wish I had rented a super wide angle lens, like the Canon 10-22m, for the show since it would have been a lot easier to capture the entire plane with it. It is interesting to walk around and see other peoples cameras and be able to tell roughly what kind of lens they had (at least the people with Canons, saw only a few Nikons).

One wish for future shows (which will probably never come true) is that they fire off real artilary. They had 2 A-10 Warthogs there and flew one of them. I was so hoping they’d fire off a couple of shots from its cannon, but they just did the lame thing where it flies over pretending to drop something and then firing off some pyrotechnics on the ground. I want to see live fire! Would love to hear its 30mm gatling gun in person.

Sadly, one of the most memorable parts of the day was the traffic. This was the first time they’ve done an airshow there (at least in a very long time) and the traffic was very poorly handled. On the way there, it took 2 hours to go about 2.25 miles from the freeway exit (where we met some friends for breakfast) into the base. Then after the show, it took another 2 hours to get from the base to the freeway again. Hopefully, if they have the show again, they plan the traffic better. They had like 50,000 people leaving through one exit that was only two lanes.

Apparently, the crowd was even larger than they had expected, so hopefully the show comes back and they learn from the past on planning it.