Just Another Day...

This is January 11, 2011, or 1/11/2011 in middle endian format.

Some in numerological circles claim that this day is one of opportunity, but not without hardship. Others interested in conspiracy theories feel intuitively that something "big" will happen this day.

Really, though, isn't it just another day??

The Gregorian calendar is today used by much of the civilized world to track and organize days. Remarkable as it is that the international community could agree upon using this convention to track the passage of time, it's nevertheless a tool, like the clock, even the chip in computers used to store the date and time.

That's not to say this day is meaningless. People will be born, die, get married, have a birthday, have sex for the first time, celebrate an anniversary, enjoy their first day of vacation, and countless other activities which will etch this date as meaningful to them or their loved ones for the rest of their lives. 

In the meantime, though, the world keeps turning, and we're just along for the ride. The earth continues to journey as part of the Milky Way galaxy from its point of origin in the distant past to wherever it's destined to go at a speed of around several hundred kilometers per second.

The day surely is meaningful, as we are living it here and now, experiencing it. It has value if for no other reason than that we're here to participate in and enjoy it. Nevertheless, it's just a convention. I seriously doubt the universe cares how we keep track of the time we occupy in life, since it's been here and will likely still be here far longer than we ever will.

Windows 7 to XP FIle Sharing Problems

Recently, I had serious issues with trying to enable file sharing between my newly-installed Windows 7 laptop and my Windows XP SP3 desktop.

Windows 7's Network and Sharing Center

I have a home wireless network, where my Windows 7 laptop, on wireless, normally shares files perfectly well with my Windows XP desktop. Inexplicably, one day the capability to share files via wireless ended; I couldn't even ping my XP desktop from my 7 laptop let alone browse its file shares, whether by computer name or IP address. And yet, over a wired connection, file sharing performed flawlessly!


Here's a list of what I tried:

• Updated drivers for network hardware.
• Disabled Windows Firewall on both machines.
• Verified internet connectivity from the laptop.
• Ensured both PCs share the same workgroup name.
• Verified connectivity over wireless, from the laptop to the router.
• Completely reinstalled the TCP/IP stack on the Windows XP computer.
• Deleted and recreated routes using the ROUTE command on both computers.
• Reinstalled the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) responder on the XP box. 
• Followed Microsoft's docs on enabling File and Printer Sharing under Windows 7.
• Verified that shared folders on both PCs had proper permissions.
• Removed remnants of Norton Internet Security with the Norton Removal Tool from the XP box, which I'd long since uninstalled but remnants of which still remained.
• Followed Microsoft's steps for sharing files among different Windows versions, including rerunning the network setup wizards for each respective operating system.

In spite of all these steps, I still couldn't even ping the XP box from the 7 laptop, and I couldn't see the XP box from the 7 laptop in the network, although I could see, but not access, the 7 laptop from the XP box.

The solution turned out to be unexpected.

A few years ago, I replaced the factory firmware of my venerable Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 wireless router with DD-WRT, a free, open-source, Linux-based firmware which can be applied as a drop-in replacement for the manufacturer firmware, and can expand the features of your router to boot.

The firmware, as with most anything in IT, is evolving, and it'd been some months since I'd last updated the version of DD-WRT; it was v24 SP1 from around August, 2010, whereas the newest version is v24 pre-SP2. Some other DD-WRT users had reported issues sharing files on their own networks. DD-WRT itself has an option under Wireless => Advanced Settings called AP Isolation, which allows you to prevent wirelessly networked devices from interacting with one another, and presumably with wired clients, via the router (in my case, this option has always been disabled).

At this point, my options were exhausted, so I took the plunge and updated the DD-WRT firmware. Even though the latest version is technically still in beta, it seemed worth a shot; I've never had trouble since first installing DD-WRT, and the fact that it allows you to preserve your existing settings without wiping the router's NVRAM made it even more appealing.

The result? It worked! Suddenly, rather than being met with the dreaded System Error 53 when attempting to map a network drive letter from the laptop to the desktop or trying to browse to a shared folder via Windows Explorer, I got a prompt asking me to authenticate to the XP box using my credentials, and finally regained access!

If you haven't updated your router's firmware in a while, it might be worth a shot, particularly if you use DD-WRT as I do and have perhaps encountered what might be a bug in your current version of the firmware. 

If you still have the factory firmware, I'd strongly suggest you consider replacing it with DD-WRT or another like Tomato, which can not only offer your router and network more stability and performance, but also unlock features that the manufacturer might not even offer in their own relatively anemic firmware. 

IE8 Process Priority in Windows 7

I wanted to bump up the process priority of Internet Explorer 8 under Windows 7.

There are at least a couple of ways to do this. If the app is already running, you can open Task Manager, right-click the app on the Applications tab and click Go To Process, then right-click the process name on the Processes tab and Set Priority to one of the levels above the default, Normal.


I chose a relatively quick-and-dirty method to create a batch file to boost the process priority of IE8, in conjunction with the START command, which can be tested via the Command Prompt.

Generally, the syntax is as follows:

     START /Priority ProgramName

Where /Priority is one of several values (Low, BelowNormal, Normal, AboveNormal, High, RealTime), and ProgramName is the name of a particular executable (EXE) whose priority you wish to boost.

I began with a simple batch file as a proof-of-concept to instantiate a High-priority instance of Notepad.

CLS

start /HIGH notepad

 


Success! Now I wanted to do something similar with Internet Explorer 8, and have it run with High process priority. The result wasn't quite what I wanted.

CLS

start /HIGH iexplore.exe

I'm running the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and have both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer 8 installed. Ideally I would've liked the 64-bit version to run, but it looks like by default the 32-bit one comes up via a command prompt if I omit the path (as I have lazily done here). That's no big deal, nor is the fact that there are two processes named iexplore.exe (see this article on Loosely-Coupled IE [LCIE] by Microsoft's Andy Zeigler regarding why IE8 creates two processes for itself instead of one). The problem is that neither iexplore.exe process has the desired High priority. I got around this by saving the batch file in the 64-bit version of IE's program directory, which by default lives here: 

     C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer

Now when I execute the batch file, START properly starts up one of the iexplore.exe processes at High priority.

But wait, why did it start only one process at High, and the other at Normal?? I'm not sure. I do notice, though, that unfortunately the process which appears to represent the default tab of IE8 that opens is the one set to Normal priority, which isn't exactly what I wanted. I can tell that this seems to be the case when I keep an eye on that process' CPU usage as I try browsing, as shown below.

Furthermore, as I opened additional tabs, which in turned spawned additional iexplore.exe processes in Task Manager, each of these too had only Normal process priority. Only the first process (note that the process with PID 87996 is High, while the second with PID 89476 is Normal).

The end result of this is that despite having set the priority of iexplore.exe to High via the START command in a shortcut, it seems to set this priority only for the "base" instance of iexplore.exe, not the instance which actually seems to be dedicated to browsing; not much help if your goal is to have browsing take precedence among the other activities of your applications. 

It looks like I may need to find some Windows settings specific to Internet Explorer or process priority elsewhere, whether by hacking the registry or some other means.


UPDATE 
1/4/2011

I stumbled upon a post on AskVG which links to a utility, Prio, which extends Task Manager to include among other things a Save Priority option, as shown below:

However, according to some of the comments in the article, some users of Windows 7 64-bit have reported problems getting their changes to process priorites to "stick" between reboots. 

I've installed the utility in a manner suggested by one of the commenters, woodburyadpost, who suggested the following installation steps:

1. Install. DO NOT REBOOT. 
2. Uninstall. DO NOT REBOOT. 
3. Reinstall (and, presumably, reboot).

Curiously, the very first time I installed the utility, I received no prompt asking me to reboot, whereas after following the above steps, the installer did suggest a reboot. Perhaps this indicates the installer is missing something the first time through whereby a component isn't getting copied or installed on the system properly?

At any rate, we'll see if this works, and if so, it'll be a handy utility to have!

Merry Christmas, Sauron!

Roamatherapy!

Ahh, Christmas, the time for presents, tasty food, and ruminating on the memories of days when Santa Claus really existed outside mere childhood imagination.

For the cheapskate who's always wanted to dabble in aromatherapy, and because "road aromatherapy" or "road rage smells like Christmas" didn't seem catchy enough, I present ROAMATHERAPY. 


TRY THIS

1. Go to your local live Christmas Tree seller. This might be your local supermarket with trees and wreaths out front, or some guy selling these out of a tent along the roadside.
   
   
2. Grab a discarded sprig of Douglas Fir. You also could ask nicely, but I doubt the seller would mind if it's already fallen away from the tree.
   
   
3. Using Duck™ tape, a chip clip, or a convenient crevice between the vent and the dash, secure the sprig so that hot air from the vents wafts across it.
   
   
4. Turn on your car's heater. Akin to the principles used by various aromatherapy diffusers, the pleasant aroma of the Douglas Fir is expressed from the plant material into your car's interior.

 
If your memories of Christmas are gloomy or nonexistent, hopefully this will bring you some of the Christmas cheer I associate with the holiday that is far more enjoyable than its rampant consumerism.

Merry Christmas!

 

String Concatenation and Implicit Conversions

I needed to modify a SQL function to strip some leading zeros in order to concatenate a string. Part of this process involved dealing with pluralization of the number of cents (I'm picky that way).

SELECT
 CASE
  WHEN CAST(CAST(CONVERT(decimal(18,6), 0.30) * 100 AS float) AS varchar(10)) = 1 THEN ''
  WHEN CAST(CAST(CONVERT(decimal(18,6), 0.30) * 100 AS float) AS varchar(10)) > 1 THEN 's' 
  ELSE ''
 END
 

The idea is that if the value (0.30 representing cents) translates into a number greater than 1, the resulting concatenated sentence will read something like "The discount is 30 cents." If the value equals 1, however, it would read "The discount is 1 cent."

When the above is executed, I get an error:

 Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
 Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '0.03' to data type int.


At first this baffled me. Data type int?? I wasn't trying to obtain an integer value, I was ultimately trying to obtain a varchar for this string I'm building.

Then it hit me, SQL is performing an implicit conversion when it is comparing the value resulting from the conversion first to decimal, then float, and finally to varchar, with 1.

Lesson learned, when attempting to compare two varchar with numeric values, make sure that if the value being tested is decimal, that the static value being used to compare it against is also decimal.

I made the following changes and now it works flawlessly.

SELECT
 CASE
  WHEN CAST(CAST(CONVERT(decimal(18,6), 0.30) * 100 AS float) AS varchar(10)) = 1.0 THEN ''
  WHEN CAST(CAST(CONVERT(decimal(18,6), 0.30) * 100 AS float) AS varchar(10)) > 1.0 THEN 's' 
  ELSE ''
 END
 

Pretty Formatting for XML or HTML

Sometimes it's helpful to pretty up XML or HTML in order to more easily analyze it. Many tools create machine-readable XML or HTML, which is well-suited to being parsed by computers, but whose formatting can be painful for a human to wade through. 

You might think, why do humans need to be able to work with machine-readable text, anyway? Well, if you happen to be the new guy on the job and get stuck with having to debug some code that spits out some XML or HTML you've never dealt with before for some complex data transformation processing, you can see why it might be necessary, particularly if something changes between the sender and receiver and the XML, as produced, no longer does the job.

In Notepad++, one of my favorite text editors, I can utilize the TextFX plugin to take a given chunk of XML or HTML and clean it up, neatly indenting the nodes and attributes for easier examination. I paste the text into the editor and select TextFX => TextFX HTML Tidy => TiDy clean document - wrap. Finally I select Language => XML or HTML to enable syntax highlighting.

Prior to discovering Notepad++, I had discovered the freeware MoreMotion XML Editor a few years ago when I was having to dissect some XML being output by a tool whose XML output I needed to clean up. Provided the XML was well-formed, I could very quickly pretty it up by clicking XML => Pretty Format, or even more easily with a quick key combo, Shift-Ctrl-P.

BEFORE: Messy, messy XML!

AFTER: Ahhh, clean, legible, structured XML.

Unfortunately, the original download URL for MoreMotion XML Editor appears to be defunct, leading to a parked page rather than the actual file. You can download MoreMotion's more comprehensive XML application suite here, but if you just need relatively simple XML editing provided by the older (and much smaller, around 1.3 MB) freeware tool, this working download link fits the bill. The ZIP file contains the EXE, which can be copied to a convenient folder and run.

A few caveats, however. MoreMotion seems to have a few editing issues with extremely long lines of text; you may notice keypresses on such lines may take a long time to register. Also, whereas Notepad++ will do its best to deal with poorly-formed XML or HTML and log any errors it encounters, MoreMotion will not allow you to proceed until the errors are resolved, and in my experience some of these errors can be difficult to pin down.

Nevertheless, for relatively small chunks of well-formed XML or HTML, MoreMotion XML Editor makes cleaning up XML or HTML just a few steps quicker than Notepad++.

Dell Latitude E6410 Sound Problems

The time came a few months back at my workplace to replace my venerable Dell Latitude D800 with something newer, better, faster. That replacement arrived in the form of the Dell Latitude E6410.

Featuring an Intel Core i5 64-bit CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Pro, I expected great things, and in many respects, I got them. Performance was leaps and bounds ahead of my old D800; tasks that my D800 plodded through like building and debugging an ASP.NET / C# website or searching through thousands of files in my local source repository proceeded many times more quickly. 

Unfortunately, I was dismayed to discover that the sound provided by the onboard IDT HD92xxx device, utilized by the NVIDIA NVS3100M video hardware, stuttered frequently. Whereas my old D800 never missed a beat, literally, even through the most challenging tasks, this brand-new, supposedly state-of-the-art machine couldn't play MP3 audio without hiccuping many times throughout any given track!

Apparently this is not an isolated issue. One thread on Dell's support forums described many users' similar issues with erratic sound. Various other posts online that I found blamed the IDT hardware, such as the first review listed for this related IDT product, followed by a couple of other reviews for same which immediately reminded me of good old Baghdad Bob...

"good, and very nice"

I decided to take a reverse shotgun approach, meaning rather than pump a few satisfying rounds of buckshot into my employer's laptop out of sheer aggravation, I'd run through a short list of steps based on research I'd done into the problem so far.

To visualize the problem, I downloaded and ran the DPC Latency Checker, which represented the stuttering issue in the form of the big, ugly red lines representing relatively huge latency leading to stuttering audio.

If I were typing the way the audio stutters, it miiiight look liiiike ttttthhhis.

Dell Latitude E6410 driver download page on Dell's support site was my first stop. I downloaded the latest available drivers and installed them, including those for audio, video, chipset, and even the touchpad. Following the experiences related by others in the Dell support forum, I also updated to the latest BIOS.

Updating the BIOS, as described in the Dell support forum thread, helped things somewhat, but the stutter was still recurring intermittently. I also completely uninstalled Dell ControlPoint System Manager, which I noticed made the stutter markedly worse when active.

I also tried using PowerMizer Manager, a free utility which lets you control and, if desired, prevent your video adapter from downshifting performance based on demand, which can cause undesired latency.

Most recently, though, after installing the latest drivers supporting the NVS 3100M from NVidia's driver download site, I've found that the stutter has improved significantly. Now, the DPC utility shows that latency is overall much improved, but still the stutter occasionally rears its ugly head.

Definitely better than before.

In summary, here are some suggestions if audio stutters on your Dell Latitude E6410:

• Visit the Dell Latitude E6410 driver download page and update video, audio, and BIOS.
  
  
• Completely uninstall Dell ControlPoint System Manager.
  
  
• Install and use PowerMizer Manager to disable the display hardware's power-saving but potentially latency-inducing feature.
   
• Install the latest drivers from NVidia's driver download site which support the E6410's audio and video hardware.