Category: Computers and Internet

Over the years I’ve built up a few PCs by researching and buying components then stitching them all together. I always strived for the highest performing computer I could buy without breaking the bank. Recently I discovered that the single best way of increasing my computers’ performance by changing a single component is by replacing the hard drives with solid state drives (SSD).

Solid state drives are essentially some kind of random access memory packaged into a box with hard drive data and power connections that can be used anywhere a normal hard drive could be used. There are a several different types of SSD drives, but the most common are the 2.5” Flash Memory based drives. The 2.5” means that they’re designed to fit in the standard space inside a laptop. The “flash” bit means that they retain their data even when there’s no power, as per a flash USB memory stick. There are other, faster, versions based on DRAM that require an on-board battery or a constant external power supply to retain data.

I upgraded my home PC with a Samsung 256 GB drive and my work laptop with an Intel X25-M 160 GB drive. These are both 2.5”. In order to install the Samsung drive in my home PC I needed to purchase a caddy, such as this Akasa Dual 2.5” mounting kit. It just pads out the space so that you can mount the drive in a standard PC 3.5” drive bay.

The capacity of the drives at the moment isn’t comparable to that of traditional drives (with 2 TB drives currently available for £135), so at home I keep all my photos, videos and music on traditional hard drives (2 x 400 GB, using RAID 1 to offer some level of data safety) and leave the SSD ones for applications.

If you follow the links to those drives on the Overclockers site, you’ll see that they’re not that cheap. However, the speed increase I’ve achieved on both systems is excellent. Application start up time is a fraction of what it used to be on the same machines. Search performance is noticeably faster in both Outlook and Windows in general. The whole system seems somewhat snappier. I had been thinking about building another PC from scratch with a faster CPU and more memory, but having made the SSD upgrade I doubt I’ll bother for another year or so.

It’s worth noting that if you’re upgrading to an SSD you’ll probably be wanting to install your operating system on that drive too. It’s a good time to upgrade to Windows 7, which is what I did. Great OS.

Thanks to Avanade UK’s “gadget allowance” for funding these purchases!

I’m trying out an application to provide multiple desktops on my PC with a 3D cube effect for navigating between them. It’s called DeskSpace and was introduced to me by Ben Taylor. Have a look at it in action.

It provides six virtual desktops, one for each side of the cube. A short cut key (for me, Windows+Alt) zooms out to see the cube view whereupon the arrow keys or mouse wheel can be used to rotate the cube. Translucency helps you work out which way to rotate to access your applications. You can also ‘throw’ applications through the edge of one desktop to move them over to another, or quickly navigate to a particular application via a system tray icon.

It’s not a new application. It’s been around for a couple of years, in fact, and possibly as a result it seems quite stable. It works with XP and Vista (plus Vista x64).

Ben and I were talking through how it works. It seems to freeze each desktop into a bitmap image at the point you switch desktops, so updates to another desktop are not visible in the cube (unlike Vista’s card deck Windows-Alt feature). There is also occasional task bar application shuffling when shifting to a new desktop, indicating that it might be selectively hiding applications rather than maintaining multiple desktops in the fashion of multi-monitor desktop extensions.

Not sure how much of a memory hog it is – 4GB of memory sort out most issues – but it is reporting a working set of 150MB (not 150K as I previously stated!)

There’s a 30 day trial and then the per-person (yet multi-machine) licence is currently $24.95 US.

I’ve installed Google Latitude on my HTC Touch HD, which came packaged as a new version of Google Maps, and can now see myself labeled on the map. Hoorah. Now all I need are a view friends with it installed.

One issue I can see, though, is that it does not seem to be updating my location in the background, if the blue dot on the map is anything to go by. I have to make Google Maps the foreground application for it to re-determine my location. Maybe the Android version works better.

ReSharper is a fantastic add-in to Visual Studio, and the latest revision of it is now available for download as a beta. There’s a 30 day free trial period available, and I really would encourage any C#, VB.NET or ASP.NET programmers to try it out. I could try and convince you with talk of code-time compilation warnings, super intelligent statement completion, refactoring an order of magnitude more featureful than Visual Studio, but in the end the best argument for why you’ll want to buy this product is based on how much more productive you’ll be when you use it.

This next version has the usual batch of new refactorings, but the major story is its support for C#3 and LINQ, with specific refactoring for these.

Here’s the link to the download for the beta: Link to The Most Intelligent Add-In To Visual Studio

If they’re operating the same model as for previous releases then you may well be able to download successive revisions to the tool and restart your 30 day trial each time. With version 1 of the tool I was going for a full three months without paying a thing. I did subsequently purchase it (out of Avanade’s gadget allowance) and I think it has been worth every penny. I reckon you’ll think the same.

ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS) is a web site providing storage of OLAP ‘report’ definitions and caching of the resulting reports. The ‘reports’ are organised by a hierarchy of libraries, briefing books and views. The metadata for all of this is stored in a database.

In order to copy these libraries, books and views between servers, ProClarity/Microsoft provide a feature in a tool called PAS Administration. There is a "Migrate Repository" button that leads to a wizard where a source and target database are specified. On the last page of this wizard is a "Migrate" button to begin the work.

Typically the migration should take under a minute. However, after performing the migration many times we were finding the migration took longer and longer – up to six hours in the end!

My colleague Dan Meacham ran profiler to check what it was up to. It turns out there’s a table called SecurityTimeStamp against which it issues a "Select *…". I’m not sure what causes insertions into this table, but on the various PAS servers we checked there were between 70,000 and 1,200,000 rows in this table!

A swift "TRUNCATE TABLE SecurityTimeStamp" on the source database brings the migration time back down to a few seconds again.

We’re using version 6.2. Version 6.3 exists and may fix the issue without resorting to dodgy database hacks. Nevertheless, I hope this saves other people a bit of time.

PowerPoint prints hidden slides by default.

Tell me, why am I preparing training material? Not quite in the job description of a developer…

"Groove" is an offering from Microsoft to enable teams to collaborate by sharing documents and other items between colleagues within a company and customers/partners outside of the company. It provides a ‘workspace’ in which files can be shared. In a simpler mode, one can choose a folder in Windows Explorer and select to share it through Groove.

When using a workspace, there is some integration with SharePoint in that documents can be checked in and out of an accompanying document library, but SharePoint is not a requirement for Groove. Documents are available offline, unlike just using SharePoint, and synchronized when on line.

Anyway, the point of this post was just to highlight to people that if, like me, you went to the trouble of installing the 64 bit version of Vista, the folder synchronisation tool does not work. This feature, arguably the feature that gives the product a purpose in life, does not work for 64 bit OS’s. I hope this gets rectified soon.

In the mean time I am back to using "FolderShare" for, well, sharing folders. It seems to just work, no matter whether it’s Vista x64 or 32 bit Win XP. Microsoft own this tool too!