Monthly Archives: June 2008

Vista Continually Rebooting After Installing Update?

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Tonight I was tasked with the job of reinstalling Vista on my sister’s new Dell laptop. Why? Because for some odd reason, Dell doesn’t know how to install an operating system correctly and she was having constant problems. Anyways, after installing the OS (which took ~30 minutes, w00t), I ran Windows update. This, for the first time for me, decided to continually reboot the machine after it was “done” with the install.

Hmm. Well, I went into the extra options mode (F8 during Bios) and ran the Directory Services Restore / Repair Mode. This got me to a “Configuring updates” screen which was farther than before. After finishing the machine rebooted and kept restarting. So I did it again, and this time the updates were able to finish!

[b]Update (07/07/08):[/b] It started doing it again. After some tracking on the web I found out it has to do with an outdated driver that came with the Dell Vista install disc. Installing Vista SP1 did the trick, but to get there I had to put the drive into IDE mode (via the BIOS) so Windows could boot.

New Dell 2408 To Sit Alongside A 2405

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I was one of those early adopters, one of the lucky few to get a Dell 24″ LCD (the 2405) when they just started making them. Found a great deal and was able to get it for about 50% off (MSRP was around $1300). After being at my internship for a month, I decided it would be a nice present to get a 2408 to sit alongside the 2405. Man I am happy I decided that! The 2408 is such an amazing LCD. Perfect for what I need it for! The size is great, as expected, but the color and crispness is a bit overwhelming. Colors are almost too vibrant. My Xbox 360, connected via HDMI is not super gorgeous. I honestly didn’t think there would be a difference between HDTV and HDMI and maybe I am forgetting that the monitor is super crispy, but boy the 360 now looks amazing.

Here are my server (Dell XPS Gen3) and my desktop (Q6600, 4gb RAM).

And my two LCDs, 360, Wacom tablet (covered by shirt for dust reasons), some beer bottles, my speakers and other stuffs… And yes, that is Roseanne playing on the 2405. I love that show!

Sometimes I Wonder…

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What is Microsoft doing? SharePoint Designer is clearly FrontPage. It contains UI elements from both Office and some minor hints towards Visual Studio. But across Office, SPD and VS, the UI elements are horribly inconsistent and what is worse: the editors are too. But it doesn’t stop there because there is now Expression Web! All the Expression products from what I have seen are horribly different than any other Microsoft product out there. In some ways this is good, but in most cases it confuses me as to why certain functionality doesn’t exist.

At the end of the day, I really wish the window functionality (docking, hiding, etc) existed in all Microsoft products that contain even a small hint of that situation.

Hardware Instancing (Windows)

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This content may be moving. To prevent broken links, please update your bookmarks to http://vdir.us/go/windows-hardware-instancing.

Hardware Instancing is an interesting topic that has quite a few uses. The idea of instancing is to use the hardware to generate transformed vertices to reduce draw call overhead. Now I know that sounded like a bunch of senseless technical jargon, and it was. In plain English, sometimes it is faster to let the GPU do all the work for us so the CPU can go off and do other work; and this is what Hardware Instancing does. This article covers how to setup a simple program that uses instancing to render a few rotating squares.

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Parallel Extensions for .NET

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The Parallel Extensions for .NET was released yesterday. Parallel Extensions provides an easy way to develop software on multicore and multiple CPU hardware with a managed programming model.

We’re very excited to announce our 2nd Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 3.5. We released the Dec07 CTP on 11/29/2007, and from that we have received a lot of feedback from the community and customers. While you have been using our bits, participating in our forums, sharing your insights and experiences, and following along on our blog, we have been hard at work preparing this CTP, incorporating your feedback into it.