I'm in Portland, OR right now doing a residency with our friends at Corillian in an effort to collaborate on the next release for Commerce's Online Banking product.  It's a three hour flight from Kansas City, and I've made the flight several times before.  I often find myself wondering where I am geographically when I stare at the patchwork quilt thousands of feet below the plane.

I recently picked up Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS Locator, and it's a fun and useful little gizmo.  On a lark, I pulled out my laptop on the plane, stuck the GPS module's suction cup to the window, and waited.  It took a few minutes, but eventually my GPS got a lock and began reporting my position.  Not that you can do much with it at 33,000 ft going 460 MPH, but it's a fun little diversion when you don't have anything better to do mid-flight.

Scott Hanselman has blogged about it more than once, but I never listened.  Now I've been converted.  Go download Slickrun and quit leaning on the Start button.  That's so...  Windows 95.  Magic Words is where it's at, baby!

One thing:  Scott says he's got his Slickrun bound to Windows-R, so I followed his procedure to implement this.  For some reason, it flakes out on me sometimes and displays the Windows Run dialog anyway.  Since it's an inconsistent behavior, I figure it's probably just best to assign it to something else and get in the habit of invoking it from there (hopefully not the default  Windows-Q, since that's pretty awkward).

Update:  I figured out what was causing the flakiness.  It seems that the difference is whether you use the left or right Windows key when performing Windows-R.  At least, that's how it works on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite at work.  (Side note: The Elite model sucks, but it's the only one our desktop support team will purchase.)

D&D and Star Trek are coming to PSP.  Now I'll never get any work done (presuming, of course, that these games don't suck).

Oblivion rocks my world.

I mean, wow.  Easily the most amazing RPG experience I've ever had.  Highly recommended.

Other than Oblivion, I've been getting in a lot of the Xbox 360 version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.  This is very good, but it does have some difficult moments.  And your AI squadmates are pretty dumb and do a great job of getting themselves blown up.  Considering, however, that the  Xbox version of GRAW is something less-than-stellar, the Xbox 360 version is great.

I picked up Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror for my PSP, and I've been playing that with some guys at work.  It reminds me a lot of Rainbow Six 3 for Xbox.  And the single player campaign is very good, too.  This game is very worthy of all the praise it received.

And then there's Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.  I actually have never been a fan of GTA, mostly on principle.  I don't have a problem with adult-themed games.  In fact, I relish them.  And the game itself is actually a lot of fun.  My problem with GTA is the adolescent testosterone-driven fanboys the games attract.  Yes, GTA lets you play as a person of rather questionably moral turpitude.  That doesn't automatically make it better.  It makes you immature for thinking a game can't be fun without hookers and gang violence.  That said, I'm having fun with GTA:LCS, which I rented from Gamefly.  Definitely worth a play if you're looking for something different on your PSP.

We have an internal web application at Commerce that makes extensive use of ActiveX controls.  The application is used primarily by our financial service reps and contact center operators.  Thanks to the Eolas judgment, the application in question was still mostly functional, but required users to manually click on the ActiveX controls before they could interact with them.  Not only were the programmers who maintain the application concerned that their non-technical users would be confused by the "Click here to activate this control" message, but this behavior actually broke a control we use to push client-side updates.  Our programmers took Microsoft's recommeded steps to correct the issue.

The problem is, Microsoft's solution didn't work on about half the machines we tried it on. After a while, we determined that the problem machines were all laptops, so we immediately suspected a difference in the images our desktop team uses on our workstation PCs versus our laptops.  After running through all the usual suspects, like OS patches, our laptop security software, IE build number, etc., we were at a loss and opened a ticket with MSDN developer support.

After a week's worth of research on the Microsoft side, the support analyst suggested I compare version numbers on jscript.dll.  Sure enough, the version on the laptops is outdated.  We downloaded the installer for the most recent version, and all is good again.

I had a site where I was wanting to store some configuration data in web.config, but the problem is that the data was a little more complex than standard name-value pairs.  As it turns out, this is a rather common problem, and is easily mitigated by building custom handlers to parse the sections.  Some examples are here.

What I ended up doing was writing a handler to just pass back the XmlSection.  Then it can be cast as an XmlNode, and you can use SelectNodes or any number of classes, like XPathNavigator or XmlTextReader, to parse it.

    public class XmlSectionHandler : IConfigurationSectionHandler
    {
        public XmlSectionHandler(){}

        public object Create(object parent, object configContext, System.Xml.XmlNode section)
        {
            return section;
        }
    }

It's not terribly unlike what this guy is doing, but he uses XmlSerializer to just deserialize the whole section so he doesn't even need to parse the XML.

Google has finally heard my prayers and responded with a calendar app in the same style as Gmail.  It's still pretty early in its maturity, but it's got all the basics covered, including Gmail integration and a nice web invitation feature.  Between this and Gmail, it's safe to say that my home/personal PIM environment (as opposed to work) is no longer hindered by a lack of Outlook .  Besides, for personal data, I prefer the web-based stuff anyway, since it's way more portable.  Leave the work stuff at work, but I want to be able to get to my personal stuff anywhere.

Some things I'd like to see:

1. A to-do list with reminder capability.
2. A desktop reminder agent (integration with Gmail Notifier, perhaps?)
3. Configurable notification addresses, so I could use email addresses outside of my Gmail account (although they DO provide SMS capability - that's a plus!)
   

Having gotten sick of the obnoxious Flash-based ads in MSN Messenger, as well as the unweildy tabs mechanism, I made an effort several months ago to deprecate Messenger in favor of the Windows port of Gaim. Unfortunately, I found myself turned off by Gaim's incompatibility with MSN's video conferencing (how I see my kid when I'm on the road) and the general "industrial" feel of the GTK+ library Gaim is built on.  On my last trip out of town, I found myself going back to MSN Messenger.

The thing is, the interface still bothers me.  The ads are annoying, as is the clutter from the tabs.  Here's my tips on creating a nice, minimalist MSN Messenger environment.

1. The built-in configuration options are your friend.  At a minimum, turn off the "Show MSN Today on Login" option.  If you're getting sick of your contacts' display pictures, by all means, disable those too.  You'll note the default soccer ball associated with my wife's entry in the screenshot.  I hate that.  Default images annoy me.
   
2. Kill the tabs.  There's an option to do it in the Security section of the options (on Messenger 7.5).  Find the checkbox that says "This is a shared computer so don't display my tabs" and check it.  If you don't have that option, there are alternatives.
   
3. The ads are a piece of cake to kill.  Using ZoneAlarm to block and log all outgoing connections from Messenger, I quickly deduced that the ads were being served from a web service on http://config.messenger.msn.com.  If you're using ZoneAlarm or another software-based program-oriented firewall, just block outbound HTTP from MSN Messenger to that address.  Alternatively, add an entry to your HOSTS file (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on Windows XP) that points config.messenger.msn.com back to 127.0.0.1.  That works just as well.
   

Holy cow, it's been a month since my last post.  Funny how time flies when you're boning up for MCP exams, huh?  On that note, I've completed two MCPs, I'm almost ready for a third (making me an MCAD) and then I'll be two tests from MCSD.  I'm hoping to have my MCSD by the end of April, at which time I'll start working on my upgrade exams to become an MCPD in Enterprise Applications.  Good times!

So Scott Hanselman posted again on something near and dear to my heart, Outlook Inbox organization.  He's apparently a big advocate of the Getting Things Done method, making use of a concept called Zero Email Bounce.  I freely admit, I don't know much about Getting Things Done, never having read it, but it sounds too focused to be something I'd make work.  I revel in a certain degree of chaos.  As I commented on Scott's blog, I actually drew some inspriration from Gmail in my Outlook Inbox handling routine.

As each message comes in, I make a decision: Action item or not an action item. If it's an action item, it (and its ensuing conversation thread, since I sort my Inbox by conversation rather than date) stays in the Inbox until complete.

If it is not an action item, then I have another decision to make: Is the message signal or noise? If it's noise, and of no possible future value, it gets deleted. If it's signal, then it gets moved into an "Archive" folder in my Exchange message store. I wrote an Outlook macro and assigned it to a toolbar button so I can archive the message with one click (again, ala Gmail). As action items are completed, they are assumed to be non-action signal items, and are archived.

Our organization has a ridiculously tight 85 MB mailbox limit, so I've got my auto-archive settings for the "Archive" folder set at a relatively short two weeks. If there is a "signal" item that I need to stay in my Exchange message store (so it's easily available on both my laptop in offline mode as well as my desktop), I drag it to a "Do Not Archive" folder until it can be moved to "Archive." An example of this is travel itineraries.

To keep my auto-archive file from consuming too much space on my tiny 40 GB workstation hard drive, I have it set to auto-delete after a year. I figure that's enough time for most items to lose relevance, and a year's worth of messages only consumes about 1.5 GB.

To find items, I use Windows Desktop Search (MSN Toolbar and Desktop Search without the toolbar). I really prefer Google Desktop, but it had trouble with my short auto-archive window, often expecting an item to be in my inbox when it was, in fact, in the auto-archive PST. Windows Desktop seems to handle that better.

For Christmas, my wife had me buy myself an MP3 player.  I ended up picking up the Sandisk Sansa m140.  Rather than go into the long, boring story of it all, let's just say I'm less than thrilled about its playlist limitation of 270 items and the totally clueless outsourced tech support who couldn't tell me why the playlists were limited to 270 items.  In fact, they didn't even know you could put playlists on the device via Windows Media Player.  I love it when I know more than the tech support drones.

While we're on the subject of less-than-stellar Media Player/Sandisk Sansa experiences, let's talk about syncing the device with Media Player.  Media Player actually copies new content to the device before it deletes old content.  That's right, it can't finish syncing up-to-date podcasts and random auto playlists because it runs out of space. Is this a Media Player thing? Can I expect the same thing to happen with any MTP (Plays for Sure) device?

I'm beginning to think I should have followed the crowd on this one - It looks like the iPod people have got it figured out.

Oh, and Scott Hanselman's podcast rocks.