Windows Vista CD/DVD bug.
Written on 13 December 2006 by Chris AustinOk this is lame.
If you accidently ‘open’ or ‘explore’ a empty CD or DVD drive in Windows Vista you are given this friendly dialog.
But, before you can cancel, the os opens/ejects the cd tray.
I won’t comment on the potential for damage to hardware as it is pretty obvious. What I don’t get is how on earth did this make it through a couple of betas and release candidates?
Apple Support
Written on 12 December 2006 by Chris AustinI am usually the first one to go off the deep end when it comes with dealing with poor support *cough* Linksys *cough*. But, in this case I’d thought I’d share a positive support moment that I had.
While I have not bought into the Macintosh religion I do like playing with operation systems. So, I purchased myself a mac mini last February. So far it’s been a nice little box. Nothing to change the world but, I love that it just sat there and ran almost absolutely silently. One day last week however, I installed an update and it wouldn’t post video.
So, I took it down to the local Apple Store hoping to drop it off with their technicians. But, to my dismay I actually had to have an appointment. I didn’t really dig this at first as I just wanted to drop it off and fill out some paperwork and be done until it was fixed. In the end I begrudgingly made an appointment and came back the next day.
To my surprise and relief the appointment wasn’t nearly as touchy feely as I dreaded it would be. The technician asked me what was wrong, plugged it in to verify the problem and promptly told me he would need to replace the main board (crappy Intel GPU).
While this isn’t mind-blowing or earth-shattering, it was beyond pleasant because he did exactly what was needed to take care of the customer. Far too often I’ve had to sit for minutes or hours dealing with stupid questions from under trained technicians on the phone that knew less about the hardware than I did.
For me, this is how tech support should be run. I don’t know how scalable the apple in-person model would be and I don’t honestly know that I buy into it. But, having a knowledgeable person who knows how to cut through the crap and handle the problem is essential.
To the Apple tech who helped me, thank you very much.
ReSharper issues on Windows Vista and VS2005
Written on 9 December 2006 by Chris AustinFor those of you who don’t know what ReSharper is, it is an Add-In for Visual Studio 2005 that vastly improves the poor refactoring support as well adds some useful functionality.
The First Problem:
I recently decided to take the Widows Vista plunge and installed it on a spare drive on one of my development workstations. In order to get it up to par with my needs I immediately installed VS2005 so that I can begin testing my existing applications as well as coding a few new ones. I’ve been using ReSharper since version 1 so it was the first thing I installed after getting VS2005 up and running.
Guess What? Things didn’t go quite as well as I would have hoped. Just as ReSharper was finishing installation, it erred out and rolled back the install.
I turns out that even though the install was running with elevated privileges it still was unable to update the os as it needed. This it turns out is not MS’s fault but rather the fault of the ReSharper installer. Apparently it doesn’t correctly assert which permissions it needs to execute successfully.
The Solution:
This is pretty simple but, it works. I just right-clicked on the installer an selected ‘Run as administrator’. At this point everything seemed perfect.
Another Problem:
At this point, I just wanted to verify the ReSharper install and get things configured to my liking. So, I fired up VS and I am greeted by a nice error from the ReSharper engine.
The Same Solution:
To get past this I had to do the same ‘Run as administrator’ trick. It works for now, but I am not sure how comfortable I am coding with elevated privileges; I have been preached at for the last 2 years not to.
I’ve submitted a bug report to the great folks over at JetBrains and hopefully this will get addressed in a future release.
Note: After closing VS2005 and later opening it without using the ‘Run as administrator’ option I did not get an error from ReSharper. Hopefully this part of the problem went magically into the night, but I highly doubt it.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – My quick thoughts
Written on 9 December 2006 by Chris AustinOkay, I guess I’ve been living under a rock but I just have to say this. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the most impressive games I’ve played. To be fair that list isn’t long 
I’ve never played the previous games in the Elder Scrolls series so the experience I’ve had so far with Oblivion is very new to me.
What really wows me about Oblivion is the extensive use of the Havok Newtonian Physics engine on many of the ordinary and boring objects in the game. While it doesn’t do a lot to push the story or the tone of the game it does add a subtle depth to the game.
Another thing that I like about the game is the cornucopia of patches, mods, and add-ins that are available. In my brief search I’ve found mods that improve the stock textures, add new content and, add additional items that you can use as a player in the game.
I don’t want this post to sound too much like a review as I just wanted to express my appreciation of the depth and polish of Oblivion. There may well be better games out there; I have just not stumbled across them yet.