My New Birthday Present

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Vinny

My brother is awesome and not only because he buys me the best geeky birthday present. For my birthday this year, he bought me a new DELL XPS desktop with the latest Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 is a quad-core processor with hyper-threading that appear as 8 separate processors to the operating system, giving the machine some serious processing horsepower.

My configuration is the Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz), 6GB of RAM (DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz), ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB video card and Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives for a total of 1.2 TB onboard. The machine also came with combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD reader and burner along with 64-bit Vista. Here are the complete tech specs for the geeks out there.

Qty	Item Number	Description
1	224-3607	Studio XPS 435MT
1	311-9770	Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz)
1	311-9800	6GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz
1	310-9731	Keyboard included in Dell Bluetooth Package
1	320-7771	ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB
1	341-8397	Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives
1	421-0084	Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium 64-Bit
1	310-1966	Mouse included with Keyboard purchase
1	430-3347	Integrated 10/1000 Ethernet
1	313-7184	Blu-Ray, DVD+R/RW, CD-RW Drive
1	313-7186	Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
1	310-5408	Free Recycling Kit
1	310-9562	Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
1	341-8296	Dell 19 in 1 Media Reader withBluetooth 2.0

Here are some screenshots from the computer with more geeky goodness 🙂

Windows Vista SP2 Beta – Initial impressions

Posted on December 7, 2008 by Vinny

So I just installed SP2 of Windows Vista which is out in beta on my computer yesterday – so it’s been about 24 hours and my computer is stable and all of the applications I’ve used so far have worked just fine. The only bizarre issue that I’ve noticed so far is the uninstall of .NET framework 3.5 SP1. I can’t really explain it and I’m not even sure if this was the SP2 beta install but Paint.NET stopped working with an error message that it needed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Paint.NET was working before the SP2 beta install and so I just reinstalled .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and everything worked. Not sure what happened there and as I said, could be completely unrelated but that’s the only strange thing that’s happened so far.

There is a list of new features and fixes at Microsoft and Mary-Jo’s blog. So far, the beta feels fairly solid and I hope this is a watershed release like Windows XP SP2 was for XP but I guess time will tell or Windows7 will be out and we won’t care about Vista. (Or we’ll be running Ubuntu or OS X and we won’t care about Windows 🙂 – Hope spring eternal!)

Here are some screen shots of Windows update on my machine doing the update for SP2.

If you want to try the beta yourself, Microsoft has a page on how to enable the download via Windows Update.

Upgraded my computer – Love the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card

Posted on October 12, 2008 by Vinny

I have a couple of computers at home but my primary machine is a DELL desktop running Vista. This is a dual-core machine with 4 GB of RAM but it ran sloooooooooooowwwwww. So I just upgraded the machine with a new 500w power supply and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is an amazing video card that’s SLI ready with 112 stream processors and a 256-bit framebuffer interface running at 900MHz, DirectX 10, PCI Express 2.0 and the second generation NVIDIA PureVideo engine with full acceleration and post processing for HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.

Here are the screenshots of the Performance Information and Tools screen with the before and after Windows Experience Index number. Guess I need to upgrade the processor next.

The power supply I chose was the PC Power and Cooling PPCS500D Silencer.

Daily del.icio.us for August 6th through August 11th

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Vinny

javagems – Gems for Java programmers; those code fragments copied again and again from one project to another – Java Gems are general purpose utilities for Java. Yes, Java Gems are those simple code snippets copied again and again from one project to another, often from your private project to several work projects, those small things you cannot find in java.util and its subpackages, but you cannot live without them.
PHP implemented in 100% Java « PHP::Impact ( [str Blog] ) – Quercus allows developers to incorporate Java code into PHP web applications and gives both Java and PHP developers a fast, safe, and powerful alternative to the standard PHP interpreter.
Electronista | Vista security gutted by new web exploit – IBM Information Security Systems' Mark Dowd and VMware's Alexander Sotirov have found a method that uses scripting systems such as Java and elements of the .NET framework in Windows-based web browsers to arbitrarily run code on Vista systems. Internet Explorer is particularly vulnerable due to its use of ActiveX.
The Deep End | Paul Venezia | InfoWorld | Some advice for Microsoft: Dump Windows | August 8, 2008 12:15 PM | Paul Venezia – In light of the new Windows flaws announced yesterday, I think it's time to reiterate a point I made a long time ago: It's time for Microsoft to dump Windows.
Apache News Online: 18 July 2008 – Apache POI 3.5.1 beta Now Available – The Apache POI team is pleased to announce the availability of Apache POI 3.5.1 beta 1, our first release including OOXML (Office Open XML) support. Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing OLE2 office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word. With POI 3.5, it also support the new OOXML formats introduced in Office 2007.
SpringSource Team Blog » Optimising and Tuning Apache Tomcat – On Wednesday I gave a webinar on Optimising and Tuning Apache Tomcat. A recording of the webinar and a copy of the slides can be obtained from the webinars section of the SpringSource website.
Tech IPOs Return With Rackspace – GigaOM – After a long dry spell, technology initial public offerings took a small step towards a comeback as Rackspace Hosting, a San Antonio, Texas-based company, announced its IPO
Alfresco opens up SharePoint to Java, Linux, Oracle, and more | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News.com – .Microsoft requires that you use SharePoint with a 100 percent Microsoft stack. Alfresco allows you to use SharePoint functionality on Java, MySQL, Oracle, BEA, Linux, etc. etc. etc.
Artima Developer Spotlight Forum – JetBrains Releases First Beta of IDEA 8 – IntelliJ's IDEA has been steadily adding support for working with languages other than Java. The latest release, a beta version of which was posted last week in the company's Early Access Program, is a result of a major refactoring of the IDE's internals
Google pushing software to low-cost Linux PCs | InfoWorld | News | 2008-08-06 | By Agam Shah, IDG News Service – With an eye for larger adoption of Linux, Google is actively working with open-source developers to integrate its applications in the OS, a Linux developer said on Tuesday.

Daily del.icio.us for July 20th through July 25th

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Vinny

Microsoft pledges love and money to open source | The Register – Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project.
Why India Will Beat China – An entrenched and vibrant democracy will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically
Rush Plays Rock Band Backstage at Colbert | Comedy Central Insider – The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans – So, when Rush was backstage at The Colbert Report last week, they played "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band and now there's video of it
gxp -Google XML Pages – GXP is a templating system used to generate XML/SGML markup (most often HTML). Support for multiple languages – currently Java
Ext JS – Ext GWT Grid, Grid Plugins, and EditableGrid – Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing
If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor | Register Hardware – It's Windows Vista's fault that solid-state storage isn't performing as well as its proponents predicted. So said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, but at least he didn't go as far as saying it's Microsoft's problem to fix.
VMware to offer low-footprint ESX hypervisor free | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-22 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service – VMware said Tuesday it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market.
InfoQ: Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS – In this interview from QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, the move towards open source at Adobe, how to integrate Flex with existing applications, and the challenges of integrating Rich Internet Applicatio
Copy your files faster with TeraCopy – TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine – A Java Champion since September 2005, Kirk Pepperdine is a primary contributor to javaperformancetuning.com, which is widely regarded as the premier site for Java performance tuning information, and is the coauthor of Ant Developer's Handbook.

Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 27th

Posted on June 27, 2008 by Vinny

vmcNetFlix – Official Site – vmcNetflix is an add-in for Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center which allows you to manage your NetFlix subscription, stream NetFlix "WatchNow" movies directly to the Media Center player, or download the movies for playback later from a "WatchLater" ga
The LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac – The post is titled LinkedIn Is Written in 99% Java, so to complete the picture I responded to the community with a message about how LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac.
Mercedes to Cut Petroleum Out of Lineup by 2015 | EcoGeek – In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency.
Jericho HTML Parser – Jericho HTML Parser is a powerful java library allowing analysis and manipulation of parts of an HTML document, including server-side tags, while reproducing verbatim any unrecognised or invalid HTML. It also provides high-level HTML form manipulation fun
Software Sensation Inc. – jWebApp Web Application Framework, Install&Update, MemSL – Memory Structures Library – jPersist is an extremely powerful object-relational persistence API that is based on the Active-Record and Data-Mapper patterns. jPersist wraps JDBC functionality and can work with any relational database, and any type of connection resource
Java Entrepreneur: We screwed up on open source, says Sun Chief Open Source Officer – Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite fra
InfoQ: Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team – Last month at JavaOne, Liferay, Inc. announced the release of the 5.0 version of their Liferay Portal product. The Liferay press release highlights a handful of the key tools and uses in the portal product:
How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days – Bill Gates – working for Microsoft – Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out.
Unit testing with JUnit and EasyMock – Michael Minella – I hope this gives you a more in depth view into JUnit and EasyMock. Unit testing is something that once you get used to it, makes you code better, provides you with a safety net for future refactoring and protects you from being burned by API changes
Unit Testing With TestNG and JMockit | Javalobby – TestNG is a testing framework for unit test development. JMockit is a framework for mock objects that provides mock object functionality using the java.lang.instrument package of jdk 1.5. Together, these frameworks can provide the tools to create very rob

Daily del.icio.us for May 29th through May 31st

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Vinny

A Look Inside JBoss Rules | Javalobby – JBoss Rules is the production release of the Drools project, an expert system for declarative programming based around the Rete algorithm. During this talk, Mark Proctor, the lead on JBoss Rules covered the Drools basics, as well as the new features in 4.
The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone – This is what makes a great rock & roll guitar sound: an irresistible riff; a solo or jam that takes you higher every time you hear it; the final power chord that pins you to the wall and makes you hit "play" again and again.
The Business Of IT: Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies – The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years
David Card – No Way to Build an Operating System – MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn "reset" in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.
My DebugBar | IETester / HomePage – IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
Oracle and BEA – Welcome, Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch Members – The Oracle Technology Network is happy to welcome members of the BEA Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch communities. The OTN team, which now includes some of the very same people behind those BEA communities, is hard at work merging the best of Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch
Ozzie: Open source is greatest threat to Microsoft | Tech news blog – CNET News.com – Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor…open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.
Ben Northrop – Does Programming to Interfaces Buy Us Anything? – In the end, I'm not saying that programming to interfaces and not implementations isn't a good thing, just that it's a good thing less often than we think – in other words, it can't just be dogmatically applied.
O’Reilly Media | Harnessing Hibernate – More than a reference, Harnessing Hibernate starts with basic configuration before moving on to demonstrate how to use Hibernate to accomplish practical goals. "If you follow along with the examples–which is easy–you'll have a working Hibernate-based pr
InfoQ: Top 5 Ways to Reduce Flex Application Startup Time – Jun Heider has an excellent piece on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA site discussing a number of the options for minimizing the startup time of Flex applications, in hopes of helping developers reduce the amount of time that users see the ugly "Loading" dialog.
Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report | CenterNetworks – Akamai is out today with their first "State of the Internet" report. The report is well worth a read as it covers a variety of topics including: security, connection speeds, geography, network access, and Internet penetration.

Daily del.icio.us for April 4th through April 6th

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Vinny

Visual SourceSafe to Subversion Migration – This migration script will take all live files in a VSS project and migrate them to Subversion. Additionally, for those live files, all file history will be preserved. Without this, it wouldn't be a migration, merely an import.
VisualSVN Server – All-in-one installer for Subversion and Apache – VisualSVN Server is a package that contains everything you need to install, configure and manage Subversion server for your team on Windows platform. It includes Subversion, Apache and a management console.
Coding Horror: Setting up Subversion on Windows – When it comes to readily available, free source control, I don't think you can do better than Subversion at the moment. Allow me to illustrate how straightforward it is to get a small Subversion server and client going on Windows. It'll take all of 30 min
JRuby 1.1 is out! – The Empty Way – The long awaited JRuby 1.1 is finally out. Working on it was fun, much more fun than I expected — so much to do, so many interesting things, so little time! It is a perfect mixture of Java and Ruby
Executive Pay: The Bottom Line for Those at the Top – The New York Times – Compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies that filed proxies for last year by March 28.
Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 – Or maybe that's just what I tell myself when I only have $1,000 bucks to spend. Either way, multi-core CPUs made powerful computers far more affordable. You can build a fine quad-core, 8-gig server within that budget
My Essential Twitter Tools – If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.
Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience
Windows Vista source code – Windows Vista source code 🙂
Forbes.com – Dial D for Disruption – With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
dangertree techblog » Blog Archive » Groovy vs. Google Collections: Round #1 – In my last post, Dan Lewis responded with some counter-code from Google’s collections package. Instead of attempting to snap back with some witty technical retort, I challenged Dan to a code-off. Groovy collections vs. Google collections (in Java)
Adam Bien’s Weblog : Huge discussion about JavaDoc …and no one cares about Fat Clients 🙂 – I really wondered about the discussion about JavaDoc – but actually no one complained about this statement "Therefore, a fat client with a local embedded database, such as Java DB, is the simplest possible solution — everything else is a workaround.".
IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Migrating to EJB 3 with IntelliJ IDEA is Easy – IntelliJ IDEA has the full-blown support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Supporting EJB specs from 1.x to 3.0 and leveraging it through all of its productivity-boosting features, from coding assistance to refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA stands for the weapon
Gartner: Open source will quietly take over – ZDNet.co.uk – "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form:
Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly – Ext JS Forums – I'm happy to announce the first release of my (first) Ext JS extension – Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly which allows you to easily build printer friendly layouts and grids for your Ext JS pages.

Daily del.icio.us for March 16th through March 19th

Posted on March 20, 2008 by Vinny

reForm: CSS Form Design Template for Any Layout (Part 2) | CSS Zone – formReForm is a methodology to style HTML forms without a huge amount of markup (or [gasp] a Table-based layout). Taking it one step further, this article discusses how to use the formReForm javascript library to create usable, accessible and beautiful us
Seifi.org » Blog Archive » Safari 3.1 Features Review – Apple claims that Safari 3.1 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 2
Google about to drop the other Enterprise shoe on Microsoft? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger – I’m hearing about a few things that Google is planning to do to newly compete with Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.
The long awaited HTC Shift is now coming to you from Sprint, 140+ hands-on photos | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com – I’ve been using an HTC Shift from Sprint for over a week now and as you can see in over 140 photos and screenshots found in my extensive image gallery I have had a chance to try out most all aspects of the device
Microsoft working with Eclipse on Vista, ID links – Yahoo! News – Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the Eclipse Foundation did not include joining the open-source tools foundation. But the two are working together to enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Vista.
James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Blog Archive » New Flex Screencast and VideoCoverFlow Component – For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component .
James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Video: Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour – In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam
Ajax World Conference – Day 1 « dambalah – Yakov believes that Flex is the better technology today, that Microsoft will catch up next year with Silverlight and that Sun still has some work to do before JavaFX becomes stable and competitive.
The Atlassian Blog – Launching JIRA Studio – After a couple of months in Beta, today JIRA Studio launches into production! JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible & Crowd, and then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-d
Web Developer 1.1.5 and User Agent Switcher 0.6.11 on Blog on chrispederick.com – New versions of the Web Developer and User Agent Switcher extensions have been released. These releases are mainly to add support for the upcoming Firefox 3, but also contain a few other bug fixes.
Adam Bien’s Weblog : EJB 3 and Memory Consumption Myths or Is it worth to use POJOs instead of EJB 3 in terms of memory? – I'm often asked about the usage Stateless Session Beans (EJB 3) regarding memory consumption and comparing them to POJOs. The nice Markus Kohler's comment for my recent post made me curious – and I started some evaluation.
Google Open Source Blog: “Look! Actual Code!” – We recently launched a new source code browsing tool as part of Google Code's project hosting feature. This new tool makes it easy to navigate through a project's SVN repository. Key features include: fast directory browsing tree, syntax highlighting, etc
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit – Welcome to the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. Here is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect:

Daily del.icio.us for February 10th through February 14th

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Vinny

Zimbra’s new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be.
Ext Road Map – Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a
The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus – We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created.
A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) – A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u
Andres Almiray’s Weblog : Weblog – JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog – The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov
Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog – The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.
Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin – MyNetflix (beta) – I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie
Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher – Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics – Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself.
Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing – Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: Vista