There's a really cuil set of photos showing the Large Hadron Collider being setup in Europe. Very high tech stuff.

Just a little bit down from the top of the photo stack is an image of someone way down the aisle in the server room. You get the idea that there are just racks and racks and racks of servers with a mind for effective use of power consumption, space utilization, heat and all the other green elements.

The person at the end of the aisle is working on a server. They're sitting at a workstation, typing on a keyboard... looking at a monitor. Not a slick flat screen, but a huge honking cathode ray tube monitor from 1994! Hah! That thing probably takes up the space of three or four servers and gives off as much heat!

The man has cleaned up, packed up and gone. Now, I have a brand spanking new 60 amp sub-panel in my basement. My basement was woefully lacking in power outlets. It's a 1925 house and the current panel has a sticker from 1962. I don't know if that's the date the panel was installed or when some dude came out in April of '62 to service it. Since I know precious little about things like amps, watts, hertz, ohms, and kelvins, I apologize for not being able to elaborate. So, enter photo montage!

I needed some power to run a few toys for "a few days":

Workstation, obviously

The wall mounted media center

Subwoofer - the point one of a 5.1 surround sound system

InFocus ceiling mounted projector

And dual tower speakers with a magnets big enough to make your tooth fillings ache - occupying slots #2 and #3 of a 5.1 surround sound system.

How could this be powered, you ask? Well, for a very short term...

The source of all pleasure...

leads to a ceiling mounted power strip,

which traverses to the next hop,

and makes an indiscriminate use of a rogue ceiling hook that finally leads up to the media center on the other side of the basement.

I'm really happy with the new power outlets that were ran every couple of feet with sturdy conduit. The guys from Coho Electric did a great job again on my humble abode. It was about $1,500 to drop in a new sub-panel and run the outlets to all corners of the basement. We pinched some pennies and made room in the budget to do this project. A worthwhile investment indeed!

Time to get back to work!

Last weekend, during the holiday break, The Wife turns to me and says, "What do you think of getting a GPS device and taking up geocaching?"

I was shocked. I had been secretly coveting the Garmin Nüvi ever since Scott Hanselman talked it up a while back. I was very subtle in my hints, but I finally got it across that I was only interested in the Nüvi.

Well, The Wife is a keen lady indeed on the Google search engine. She discovered that the Nüvi is not recommended for geocaching; its much more suited for use in the car or walking around a tourist town with its (relatively) large screen size and feature set.

There's another set of GPS devices that are better suited for geocaching. The GPSMAP 78CSx series has a better waterproof standard of IEC 529 IPX7, a built in compass, altimeter, celestial information, tide prediction and other things are just meant for folks out wandering around in nature. There are several other sets of GPS units such as marine and aviation. I think my brother has a Garmin in his plane and my other brother has one in his boat.

I was bummed, but glad that we were going to purchase the right device. I'm still keen on the Garmin Nüvi though. :)

My day job involves building websites for companies and giving them a fantastic place to promote their brand, product or service so perhaps my bar is a little higher than some, but the Garmin website blows. The site has a semi-decent Flash piece to promote one part of the site, but over all, its a typical 1998 experience. The user interface could do well with a little bit of polish and take advantage of some usability factors we (the web development community) have learned over the past few years.

With the holiday weekend and all, I did extensive checking online for retailers and let my fingers to the walking. There's a wide range of phone experiences; from appallingly bad all the way to very helpful. REI was one of the best phone experiences, plus they had one in stock!

The Wife and I bundle up for the rain and head out to the local REI to purchase our new GPS device. REI held it for us at the customer service desk, so I just walked up to them and they handed it over. They provide fantastic service and I highly recommend them for your outdoor and sporting needs. During checkout, they asked if we were members and The Wife recalled that we signed up when we lived in Chicago. I had no idea. That ended up saving us nearly $50 off the price! Booya!

We brought the device home and booted it up. It's very pretty and has a great layout of buttons and controls. Unfortunately the device didn't synch up with the satellites. We saw between 2 and 8 bars in varying heights, but they wouldn't fill in, which would indicate a successful initialization. We tried all sorts of things including a reinstallation of the software using the USB connection. We even drove out to the airport to assure ourselves of a wide open range. We got the most bars there, but again, they were not filled in. We left it outside in our backyard for about 90 minutes too, still nothing. I even drove up to Mt. Tabor and tried it there. Nada.

We bought it on Friday and now it was Sunday. I got in the car and headed back down to REI to exchange it for a new one. I went to the customer service desk and explained the situation. The nice fella gave me a store voucher, took the broken device and asked me to go to the GPS display and get another one (downstairs). I was filled with glee!

I bolted for the display. Too bad, they were out. I did have a quirky exchange with one REI staffer at the display though. I explain the problem to him and he retorts, "Did you initialize the device? Do you even know what initialization is?" I was a tad startled by his gruff questioning, plus I was really interested in getting the device to work. Perhaps I had forgotten something and I was merely a few minutes away from eternal bliss. Alas, no. Everything this jerk explained was something I had already tried. I've written him off though; I still really like REI.

At this point, I could either ask REI to order another device for me, or I could try my luck on the broken device. I decided to go back to the customer service desk, retrieve the broken device and try some more for the remainder of the Sunday. With no luck, I phoned Garmin during the week and explained the situation. The fella was awful nice on the phone and said, based on my description that the device was probably broken. Since the bars appeared at varying heights, the antenna was probably fine and it could "see" the satellites, but it was having problems reading packets from the satellites. He said to return it to REI and grab another. Ha!

The Wife and I went back to REI today and exchanged the device. Fortunately they received a shipment recently, so they had a device available for us immediately. Yay! Plus, they were super nice to us. The Wife was immediately skeptical, so we walked a few blocks down to Jameson Square to test it out. It just took two minutes and we were locked in! Yay!

REI also gave us a $20 gift certificate for an Introduction to GPS Navigation Class. The Wife and I are looking forward to taking that for starters. I've been reading Patrick Cauldwell's posts about geocaching too. This looks like a great hobby to dive into.

I recently upgraded my laptop to 2GB of memory. I've been really pleased with my new ability to leave Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharpReader and SQL Server open when I want to use Visual Studio.Net and write some code.

As a negative side affect, I noticed some problems when I put my laptop into stand by or hibernation mode.

Stand by mode is where the laptop is still technically "on" and its drawing a tiny little charge out of the battery. All of my programs are still in memory but the machine is in a reduced state which preserves the battery until I'm ready to turn it on again. This mode the fastest way to pack up when I need to run for the bus as well as power back up again when I reach my destination.

Hiberation mode is similar to stand by except the machine is actually turned off. The laptop persists everything in memory to disk so I can even swap batteries if I like; a great trick to making long plane trips go by quickly. When I power up again, the laptop restores the contents of the memory and the CPU comes back to life.

It takes a little longer to go into and come out of hibernation since there's more stuff to do than when using stand by mode. Hence, my preference was to use stand by unless I knew I would be swapping batteries. The other day on a podcast I heard either Carl Franklin or Scott Hanselman mention that stand by mode can behave poorly because applications have the option of supporting it. Hibernation doesn't suffer from that since the contents of memory are dumped to the disk. Everything supports hibernation, but some apps may choose not to support stand by and therefore, when you start up again, an app may run aground.

I might have seen that on my laptop, but it hasn't been painful enough for me to care too much; until the 2GB memory upgrade.

In the best scenario, I would start the stand by or hibernate process and it would immediately come back and tell me this message:

Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API

At first, I would smile and say to myself, "That's cause I got two gigs, baby!!" That wore off though. My harddrive is a paultry 40GB and I usually have somewhere between 8 and 0.5 GB free on any given day. So a few days ago, I deleted all of my Office and Battlestar Galactica episodes that I downloaded from iTunes and made sure I had enough room for the memory to dump to disk.

In the worst scenario, it would "take" for at least 2 minutes, enough for me to believe it worked, only to start up again inside my laptop bag. I would get to my destination and grab my laptop only to find it a little too warm. I'd frown. Sometimes, in the past, I would forget that it was on and chuck it in my bag only to find a hot laptop waiting for me later. The same frown occurs.

So this morning, I thought, what if there were some glorious place that existed where people would store and share their knowledge? I fired up my browser and did a Google query for "dell latitude cannot hibernate with 2GB ram". The first hit was this one:

http://translocator.ws/2005/11/06/hibernation-insufficient-system-resources

This page talks about my exact problem and an patch that is supposed to fix the problem. Only in his case, he has four computers that still exhibit the behavior after the patch was applied. There was a note on there that the latest patch of August 2006 was released. I suspected his problem was before this latest patch came out.

I downloaded the patch (WindowsXP-KB909095-x86-ENU.exe), installed it and lo-and-behold it worked! Well, I hibernated for at least two minutes. I'm excited to see if I get my stand by working again. I'll add a comment in a few days with the results.

This is the knowledge base article link and title for this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909095

The computer occasionally does not hibernate and you receive an "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" error message in Windows XP with Service Pack 2

As a treat to myself for the new office move, I strategically ordered 2GB of RAM for my laptop so it would arrive on the first day in the new office. My Dell Latitude D610 has been a nice work horse for a while, but the paultry 512KB RAM just had a hard time compiling large VS.Net solutions.

I eagerly printed out the memory install instructions and patiently waited for the DHL driver to show up with my package. By using the DHL online tracking tool, I could see the package arrived in Portland on Friday and the driver had it by 9:25AM on Monday. Around 4PM, I couldn't wait anymore and I was being to wear a path in the carpet past the front desk; so I called the DHL line. They had a very good call system in place. I typed in my tracking code and the live person on the phone answered my question quickly. Basically, they knew exactly where they were delivering the package and no problems were reported. Drat!

Then, my (new) phone rang! It was the front desk calling to inform me that my package had arrived at the front desk. Figures, as soon as I call, the dude walks off the elevator to the office. I should have called a noon!

So, as my first feat of strength, I fired up VS.Net and pointed it to a DotNetNuke v4.3.4 solution that we have in the works. With just 512KB of RAM in my laptop, it took several minutes to compile the entire source code comprised of many thousands of lines. Now, with 2GB of RAM, I slammed through those 33 projects in about two minutes. A marked improvement indeed!

At just a measely 2GHz, my CPU is the dog now; the image of my task manager window bears that out. This is the processor churning through all those lines of DotNetNuke code in VS.Net; at least its not pegged at 100%! 

The holidays are coming soon, perhaps I'll see a new laptop soon? :)