Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder

I stumbled across another neat feature in Windows 7: the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR).

Run psr.exe from the command-line and you’ll see a utility window you can use to record your session:

Problem Steps Recorder

Click “Start Record” and then replicate the problem. Click “Stop Record” when you’re done and the tool will prompt you to save a zip file that has an HTML document in it containing screen shots and descriptions of the steps taken. Also cool is that the tool automatically highlights important areas of the screen:

PSR report

This is obviously targeted toward help desks and IT support professionals (without remote access to the machine) who need to solve problems like “I just clicked the thingy and shows it some error message and disappears!”, but I could see myself using this as a quick and easy way to generate user documentation (like how-tos) as well.

Tech Republic has a good, detailed article on the PSR. Check it out.

WIJFR: Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it’s better to be smart or happy. His crucible is a pencil up the nose for a possible “homebrew lobotomy.” To explain Art’s predicament, Doctorow flashes backward and slowly fills in the blanks.

My latest e-book read was Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe” (actually I finished his group of short stories, “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” a while back but I guess I forgot to post about it, oh well!).

“Eastern Standard Tribe” tells the story of Art, a UE (user experience) consultant and member of the EST tribe (meaning his loyalties are to those people living in the eastern standard time zone and he tries he schedules his life accordingly). One part of the story takes place in the “present” and is told in the first-person: this is Art currently in the mental institution. The other part of the story takes place in the “past” and is told in the third-person: this is Art and the series of events that culminate in his being placed into the asylum.

In this semi-futuristic world, some people are double agents pretending to be a member of a different tribe (say, GMT or PST) so they can slowly undermine the competiting tribe from the inside. In Art’s particular case, he is working for a client in London (GMT) and his proposal is not so off-target that the client won’t accept it, but off enough so that overall the project will fail and he can sell the better version to a different client back in his own EST tribe (trust me, Doctorow does a better job of laying this out than I do).

Each chapter alternates back and forth between the present Art in the nuthouse and the actions in the past that Art was involved in with his partner and girlfriend. Both storylines intertwine as we slowly put together the whole picture of Art’s fate. It was a good read.

Next up on my e-book list: Doctorow’s “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.”

The science of Folding at Home

I found this interesting article via slashdot that explains the science behind the Folding at Home project.

I folded my first workunit almost two years ago on June 19, 2007. Since then I’ve contributed about 580 additional WUs by running the F@H client on my various PCs and servers at home (you can see some of my stats at the bottom of my sidebar over to the right).

Back in the day I used to contribute my spare CPU cycles to the SETI@Home project, but I switched. Don’t get me wrong I still think finding alien life would be cool, but folding proteins seems like a nobler, more pressing cause for the time being.

Microsoft isn’t making Money anymore

Don’t worry, they’re making plenty of cash, but Microsoft announced this week that they will no longer be producing their personal finance software, Microsoft Money.

This makes me sad as I’ve been an MS Money user for about 13 years! I switched from CA Kiplinger’s  Simply Money to Microsoft Money 97 back in 1996 and have faithfully purchased upgrades every other year around tax time. I use it to download all of my bank, credit card, and brokerage statements, pay bills, balance the checkbook, generating spending reports, etc.

Microsoft says that more people are using their banks’ own websites and services nowadays so maintaining a standalone software package just isn’t worth it. That’s fine, and I do use my own bank’s or credit card provider’s web sites, but I like having everything consolidated in one place. When my current version of Money Plus expires in Feburary next year, I’m going to lose that convenience. Sure, the software will still work and I can manually enter transactions, but I won’t be able to use any of the online features. Instead, I’ll have to jump around to different web sites. On the bright side, if I move my finances into the cloud (scary though that is, from a security standpoint), I won’t have to deal with installing and activating Money on multiple PCs and then not having access to it when I’m on one of my Linux machines.

I’ve got 8 months to figure out my next step: maybe an online service line mint.com or switch to Quicken? Time to start researching alternatives. 🙁

DTV is finally here

A moment of silence for analog TV …

… ok, that’s enough. If you didn’t realize it, today was the official (finally!) switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting. If you’ll recall, the original February 17 deadline was delayed by Congress to give households more time to prepare. What’s strange is that back in early February, when the 17th was fast approaching, all of my local stations were running crawls and news stories reminding people of the upcoming transition. Then, after Congress delayed the switch, it fell out of the news. I don’t think I saw a single news story or crawl this week about today’s switchover. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it myself until the anchor on the morning news said “if you’re watching us right now you’ve successfully survived the switchover to digital television.”

From what I’ve read, about 6 million homes were unprepared for DTV back in February. Estimates are that 3 million homes are still unprepared today. I guess those people will figure it out pretty quick today when all they’re receiving over their rabbit ears is snow.

If you’re trying to sell me something …

… you really should know the product!

I just got cold-called at work by a gentleman with an Indian accent:

“Sir, I am calling on behalf of SAP because you are qualified to receive a free white paper about SAP and how …”

Since my primary focus is PeopleSoft system administration and development I am always getting calls like this, so that’s not unexpected. What prompted me to interrupt the guy earlier than I usually would was that he was pronouncing SAP (the company’s name) as the word “sap!” For those not in the industry, it’s pronounced S-A-P. You wouldn’t pronounce IBM as “eyebum” would you?

I’m sure SAP would be thrilled to know that their off-shored telemarketing firm is mispronouncing their name. 😮

Vizio VECO320L 32″ LCD HDTV

Vizio VECO32LWe’ve been transforming our guest bedroom into a combination guest bedroom/exercise/game room. The TV in that room was an old silver 13″ Magnavox tube that just wasn’t going to work for playing Rock Band 2 on the Wii, so I started shopping for a new flat screen television.

While I wasn’t specifically looking for a white display, once I found the Vizio VECO320L 32″ LCD HDTV it made perfect sense: it was a good size for the armoire and matched the white furniture in the room.

I couldn’t find the VECO320L locally in any store, so I ended up ordering it from target.com (with free shipping). It arrived earlier this week so I set it all up and then moved the Wii over from the family room. I don’t have a spare TiVo (yet?) to hook up to the new TV, but the built-in ATSC tuner is pulling in all the clear QAM HD channels over my Brighthouse cable service (and they look pretty good).

Vizio touts the VECO320L as an EnergyStar 3.0 compliant “green” display that uses 15% less energy. According to my Kill-a-Watt, the VECO320L uses about 65W while running (the manual states an 85W average). While I have no other 32″ LCD displays to compare that to, my Sony 23″ LCD uses 53 watts while powered on (110W max) and my Panasonic 42″ plasma gobbles a whopping 225W while running (with a listed max of 395W!). No surprise there, though, as plasmas are known to be power hogs. In standby mode the Panasonic uses 18W whereas the new Vizio uses 0.4W when “off” (which makes me wish the Panasonic had a true off mode).

It’s only been a few days, but so far I’m very happy with our new TV.

Mint-Eee fresh

How many more Eee puns can I come up with for my blog posts? 😀

The Windows 7 release candidate just wasn’t cutting it for me on my EeePC 900A. It looked nice, but Windows is just not meant to be crammed into 4gb of hard drive space. Even after vLite’ing the install I barely had 300mb free left on the SSD. Turning on drive compression (particularly for the WinSxS folder) just slowed everything down which really killed the whole netbook experience. So this weekend I decided to give Linux Mint a try.

Linux Mint 7 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 so it’s basically the same thing I am running on my other EeePC, just with a few differences. Like Ubuntu, Mint releases have version numbers and alphabetic code names. Whereas Ubuntu uses the adjective/noun alliterative combination (i.e., Jaunty Jackelope), Mint uses girls’ names that end in ‘a’ (hence the 7th version uses the 7th letter of the alphabet which gives us Gloria).

First, as always, I used the great eeebackup utility to make a backup image of the Windows 7 setup just in case I feel like going back at some point. I then used UNetbootin (the universal netboot installer) to “burn” the downloaded Mint ISO image onto a 2gb thumb drive and then booted my Eee from that to start the installation. The process was quick and painless and soon I was tweaking away (having gone through installs of Ubuntu Eee, Easy Peasy, Ubuntu NBR, and now Mint in the past six months, I am getting to be quite the expert at quickly configuring a Linux distro just the way I like it on my netbooks 🙂 ).

Just for fun, here’s a video I took of the 900A (white on left) booting Mint next to the 4G Surf (black on right) booting Ubuntu NBR. As expected, the 900A boots slightly faster due to its better Atom processor. Both are ready to go in just about 30 seconds though, which isn’t too bad.

WIJFR: The Bellmaker

Vicious Foxwolf, Urgan Nagru–a fox who long ago discovered the body of a wolf and skinned it to wear as his own–is holding the young Mariel and Dandin captive. The pair are at the mercy of the evil despot and have only one hope of survival. But can they really count on the legendary freedom fighter, Martin the Warrior, to come to their rescue?

On my flight to New York the other week I finished the next of Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels, “The Bellmaker.”

Mariel and Dandin, who were the central characters in “Mariel of Redwall,” along with Mariel’s father Joseph (the titular Bellmaker) make a re-appearance in this book, along with some other characters from that story. Whereas the previous book, “Martin the Warrior” took place in the farth north of Jacques’ world, most of this one takes place in a new area to the south known as Southsward.

Some seasons have passed since Mariel and Dandin left Redwall in search of adventure and Joseph is worried about what has become of them. In a dream, Martin the Warrior instructs Joseph (through the typical set of riddles) to leave the Abbey with a few companions and search them out to the south.

Meanwhile, Mariel and Dandin have become entangled in a siege of Castle Floret. Once ruled by the squirrel king Gael, it has been taken over by the foxwolf Urgan Nagru and his vermin horde (sound familiar?). Mariel, Dandin, and the usual cast of hares, shrews, mice, otters, moles, etc. etc. attempt to drive the horde from the castle … but will Joseph and his crew arrive in time to help them?

I have to admit now that I’m seven books deep into this series that it’s starting to get a little tiresome and repetitive. As mentioned in the wiki article on the Redwall series (which closely mirrors what I have said before):

Many reviewers have also criticized the Redwall series for repetition and predictability, citing “recycled” plot lines and Jacques’ tendency to follow a “pattern to the dot.” Of course, other reviewers note that such predictable “ingredients” may be what “makes the Redwall recipe so consistently popular.” Although the series does not continue to break new ground, it does provide satisfying adventures with “comforting, predictable conclusions for its fans.”

J.K. Rowling did the same thing with her Harry Potter books, but they were a lot more intriguing for some reason. I started reading the series with my daughter just over a year ago and continued reading it so we had something shared to do. We don’t read them together out loud anymore, and she hasn’t really waited for me to catch up any longer, so by the time I finish a book she’s already read a few more beyond it. It’s still fun to discuss them with her (and she still loves reading them over and over), but I’m feeling less of a desire to continue reading them myself (we’re not even halfway through the entire series!). I’ve already started “Outcast of Redwall” but I think that might be my last foray into the world of Redwall for a time.