Random Ramblings

I finally took the time to pick the parts for my Windows Home Server Machine. I picked everything up at NewEgg.com because they usually have the best prices and are great to work with.

I picked up a Gigabit Mother Board, Intel Chip Core2Duo, a Roswell Case (w fans), Cosair 2Gb x2 Memory Sticks, a Power Supply, a 720GB WD Hard Drive, and Windows Home Server.

My total bill is 650-45 in rebates = $605 shipped. I didn’t want to spend that much, but I ended up with a much better machine than I was planning ( 2 GBs more RAM, much better chip, and a bigger hard drive).

I needed a case that could fit multiple hard drives, and a mother board that had IDE in it, so I can hook up my 2 500GB Maxtor drives to it. So at start I will have the 750 GB drive as my primary drive, and to 500GB drives, bringing my initial WHS box to 1.75 TB of storage space. Unfortunately, I need to rip all my hard drives again. How ever now that I have my Zune, I can hook the zune up wirelessly to my WHS server to pull movies, sync songs, etc. As well as stream movies to my tv’s, backup my data, and share my 40GBs of music. I’m looking forward to it.

Now I just need to remember how to assemble a computer. Too bad I got all the supplies, except the box today, have to wait until Monday to get the box and hook it up.

I will post again when I have it up and running with any issues I run into… I plan to take parts from my old dell (DVD Drive to initally load machine, maybe memory, etc)

Back to playing with my Zune

Well for Christmas I got a 120GB Zune, in my initial playing around with the zune, I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. My family and I are going on a trip to visit friends in a few days, and I wanted to download some kids videos to my zune for my 2 year old daughter to watch. I found this great media converter site that does just that:

http://www.mediaconverter.org/index.php

and they have a good how to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v56ObchmTtg

Many formats to push to, simple to use. Just point it to the url, click next, set your options, and follow the wizard. Wait for it to convert (takes a bit of time) and save it to a zune video folder!

Great stuff.

But just came across an app that I think will come in very handy, and didn’t want to forget it. BeLarc

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

I was reformatting my drive, and needed some of my licenses, this software lists everything you could possibly need to know about your computer. Licenses, what size and types your monitors are, hard drive information, manufacturers, various updates that have been installed etc. I needed it to find my Microsoft Office License keys since I have no idea where my disks now are. I ran the software on a Vista machine and it worked flawlessly. I Highly recommend it!

Well, I have finally done something outside of work. Decided to rejoin seti@home, haven’t done it since it first came out in 1999/2000. Now I have 3 machines, and decided to use them when they are just sitting there. Maybe when my power bill shoots up from the machine constantly running, I won’t want to do it anymore :). Guess it’s not doing much, but there’s the what if aspect. I may decide to change to one of the many other grid computing systems that BOINC offers (Berkley’s grid computing project). If anyone has suggestions let me know. I was actually wanting to find on that maybe sequences cancer genes, and help with that, but didn’t stumble upon it during my searches. So went with SETI. It seems it may not be around much longer, funding is only through 2011, unless private donors help out. So maybe I’ll only be helping them for a couple years, and who knows maybe it will help, maybe it won’t.

Initially, I unknowingly had it set to use 100%, that is not conducive to using ruckus, remote server and VS.NET and SQL Server all at once…I think I heard my machine cry in pain. I since have changed the settings to only start when Ive been idle for 3 minutes. Seems to be working better.

Awesome app, that adds some very nice gui and adds some great functionality to GWT. I have been developing with GWT-Ext for the last couple of months, and it has improved the look of my app quickly, and improved functionality while saving me time. Unfortunately the author is stopping development because of changes to ExtJS license information. But, this is still a great app to check out. Especially if you enjoy writing client side applications in Java.

Check out the demo here: GWT-Ext Demo It uses some Swing terminology, but the borderlayout with collapsible panes is pretty cool, and really simple.

One thing I have found is that GWT panels containing GWT-EXT work inconsistently. It’s better to convert all your main GWT panels to GWT-Ext panels. Gwt-Ext panels can contain GWT panels a bit better.

Happy Coding

Well I’ve been looking into setting up my home media center. I’ve been playing around with Windows Home Server, and have liked it a lot. But it’s only the RC. I want to build a new machine that can hold my 2TB of IDE drives, plus be able to add SATA drives. I have 1.5 TB of my movies ripped, but I’ll probably start over. I’ve been trying to find something that would stream VOB files directly. The XBox 360 did not, so I returned it. Now I have been introduced to Popcorn Hour. Seems like a pretty cool little device. It will allow me to have a small component to stream movies, web content, and music from my WHS box in the basement, to my 42″ 1080P Vizio upstairs.

I’ve been investigating building my own box similar to Popcorn Hour, buying a Motherboard with HDMI and Digital Sound, and a small hard drive for the OS. There’s no way I could build it for 179, and have new updates, free, for the software that it uses.

I’m waiting for it to get some more reviews, but from what I’ve heard is it works as described. I have already run cat5e cable upstairs and have a Gigabit switch running my internal network, connected to my FIOS router which gives me 15mb download speeds.

Looks like it’s time for me to build my WHS. Since it will be in my storage room in the basement, I don’t need anything pretty. Just a box that can hold maybe 8 drives of either IDE or SATA. Looks like newegg.com has plenty of options there for inexpensive MB that would do this for me. I won’t need video, so the MB won’t need anything fancy there. I’ll probably put 4GBs ram in it, and then a gigabit eithernet card. Really don’t foresee much else that I’ll need in that box. Looks like 500GB SATA drives can be had for about $80 currently. I think total cost for a box designed for good growth can be had for about $300, and the WHS Os is 160 on newegg.

Popcorn Hour should be a good addition to the setup, but I’m curious to see how reviews are once they catch up to demand.

I recently had to visit some old code for windows Services using VB.NET. What I needed to be able to do was run multiple services at once. In case anyone else needs some help on this, here’s what you need to do.

Windows will not allow the same windows service to be installed at the same time. The solution is that you have to use your app.config file. Found this thanks to the CodeProject write up By Wil Peck a for this great post: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/MultipleInstNetWinService.aspx.

Using that article and sample code I was able to convert the c# code to VB.NET, one key thing is that you need to make sure to include System.Configuration in your project references. (ie. go to the project properties -> references and scroll down the list to system.configuration)

Some additional items you might want to do. We need our installed service to be able to run with a bit more access. I hated typing in the username and password everytime, as well as change the start type to automatic everytime I reinstalled the service. So in the function GetServiceProcessInstaller update the code to the following:


Private Function GetServiceProcessInstaller() As ServiceProcessInstaller
Dim installer As ServiceProcessInstaller = New ServiceProcessInstaller()
installer.Account = ServiceAccount.User
installer.Username = "usname"
installer.Password = "upass"
Return installer
End Function

To change the Starttype to automatic do the following:


Private Function GetServiceInstaller() As ServiceInstaller
Dim installer As ServiceInstaller = New ServiceInstaller()
installer.ServiceName = GetConfigurationValue("ServiceName")
installer.Description = GetConfigurationValue("ServiceDesc")
installer.StartType = ServiceStartMode.Automatic

Return installer
End Function

I had used a different way to implement the webservice, so I had to do some refactoring, but it all seems to be working. I have not noticed any issues as of yet. Post if you want the service code…

Happy Coding

Some cool features in firefox.

1) ctrl + t = new tab (IE as well)
2) ctrl + shift + t = reopen last tab (if you accidently close a tab, hit this combo and it will reopen the recently closed tab
3) To have multiple home pages open when you hit home, use pipes | under the main option for default homepage. Each pipe is a new tab with the specified web address
4) Double clicking on the “border” under the tabs opens a new tab
5) Ctrl + mouse wheel forward / backward changes font sizes (this is true in IE as well)
6) Holding ctrl when right clicking on image will open it in its own tab (middle click does this as well)
7) Using mouse wheel Click on tab closes that tab (if you try it might want to use step 2 afterwards Wheel click on back and forward buttons, puts the next history in a new tab
9) Wheel click on link, opens it in a new tab
10) ctrl + enter in address bar will surround the words in www and .com. So you can just type google ctrl+enter and you’ll be taken to http://www.google.com
Coolest add on

Firebug, great for developers to view source, find errors in html and javascript, see style sheets, etc.

Haven’t added anything for awhile, been too busy. But I did find a very nice color picker, as well as it’s recreation for use in GWT.

Javascript Friendly

GWT friendly (Just in case GWT cleans up old entries, http://auroris.googlecode.com/files/colorpicker.zip )

Very Easy to implement both versions. Make sure to make the image smaller as Aurura posted in GWT, because it causes the popup to take longer to implement. I actually took the ColorPickerSample.java and pulled out the dialog into it’s own class. Added a few setters for the colors, and called it directly from HTML objects to open the picker.

Here is a simple popup I use for some of my items that I create, so if a user clicks on something in my HTML I use a span that calls a native function, which then creates the popup with the text I would like displayed. I’ll write up the native code example that calls this some other time.

public class DisplayDetailsPopup extends PopupPanel
{
public DisplayDetailsPopup(String text2display)
{
super(true);
createDisplayLabel(text2display);
}

private void createDisplayLabel(String text)
{
HTML lbl = new HTML(text);
lbl.setStyleName(”Popup”);
lbl.setSize(”120″,”25″);
lbl.setWordWrap(true);
this.setWidget(lblDisplay);
}
}

Note: use a label instead of HTML if you don’t want to render HTML when the user clicks. I wanted to pass in HTML to make it all function. Also, the style I used was a blackbackground with slight changes in sides at the right and bottom to make it look slightly 3D. Just to give it a bit of an effect over top of the text.