Kate and Katie

We saw Katie (Kate's daughter that she gave up for adoption) for Christmas last weekend. It was awesome seeing those two together. I saw a bond between them ... the way that Katie looked at Kate and their body language.

The adoptive parents are awesome and they are doing an excellent job of raising Katie. She is so happy and vibrant.

Now that Kate and I are going to have our very own little girl, I feel like this visit gave me a small peek into the future.

Got A New Laptop

HP DV9000 Wide Screen Laptop

Here are some more pictures...

Cost: $1,400 from Best Buy

Product Spec Page










I've had it less than 24 hours so I really can't give a very good opinion of it yet. So far, though, I have been impressed with the speed and mostly by the display. The thing has a giant 17" WXGA+ High Definition BrightView Widescreen display. That translates to lots of desktop space and awesome looking movies.

It's their first to be released with the HD DVD drives. I don't have any movies to play on it yet but I'm going to have to check it out as soon as I can.

It also has a built in webcam, stereo microphones, and a TV tuner card that I've not even begun to play with yet.

I'll post more on it as I play....

Vista Update

Ok, so Vista is growing on me. I'm really impressed with the glassy and intuitive interface. It seems like, for the first time, Microsoft got almost everything right! I'm even impressed with the performance despite the fact that I'm not running with a hybrid hard drive and on a Laptop.

I've been listening to the podcasts from Leo and other reports saying that Vista is going to be slooow unless you run it with a Hybrid hard drive and a brand new computer. Bullshit. This is running on a year old AMD 64 Gateway laptop and it's fast as hell. It only has a Gig of RAM and a typical speed 100GB hard drive.

I will eventually get my hands on a hybrid drive and I'll let you know if I notice any difference but this is clearly as fast as XP running on the same system. Some things even run faster in Vista than in XP.

DHCP

I've resolved my DHCP issue. It appears that something in a DSL router was conflicting with the way that Vista handles DHCP and was causing all of these issues at work. We have a Cable and a DSL Internet feed into the building. The main one is the Cable line and if it goes down, everything fails over to the DSL and keeps humming.

A few months ago, I bridged a cable from the back of the DSL router into the main LAN switch so that I could sniff some traffic as a test for something that I was working on. Normally, the external routers are segmented from the normal network and this was an exception for a temporary purpose.

Well, that allowed the DSL router to be visible to the device discovery in Vista and that must have been conflicting with the DHCP resulting in this strange phenomenon where every IP address was appearing as 'in use' to Vista and the DHCP server.

I unplugged that wire and the problem went away. I still think that this is a design flaw in Vista but I don't feel like many people will be affected by it like I was because of the scenario that would need to be in place to reproduce it.

VNC

VNC is still not working correctly in Vista. I've done some research and I've tried hacking the system with the resulting knowledge but it's still a 'No Go'. It runs great if the end user runs the server manually but it will not work if you run it as a service.

This is because Vista has a new "feature" called 'Session 0 isolation'. To understand this, you have to understand how RDP and Terminal Services works. In all previous operating systems, the console always ran at Session 0. If you RDP'ed into XP, you simply gained access to session 0.

On a Windows Terminal Server, there is a session # for every concurrent user that logged into the server. For example, the 5th user to log into the system would be Session #5.

New to Vista, the logged in user is now using session 1 and all services are using session 0. The point of this is to separate services from the user who is currently logged in, preventing maleware from affecting the user session.

This prevents the VNC service from being able to see the console desktop because it only knows about session 0's desktop. It is, essentially, sandboxed. I put in a post here and I'm currently attempting to find a way out of this sandbox of hell.

There has to be a way to get this working. It's just a matter of developing the right hack for the job.