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The voting for the sessions at DDD5 is now open. Have a good read of the options and vote for what you would like to see sessions on. Of course I would not be suggesting you should vote for mine, but……………

Ayende Rahien and Roy Osherove have been having an interesting ping-pong about the merits and problems of TFS. Well worth a read….

Maybe it is just my background in network analysis, but I do feel any developer working with remote servers needs a protocol analyzer; in just the same way as you need the SQL profiler when working with a Microsoft SQL server, especially with auto generated code. Without tools like these how can you work out what is actually being sent on the wire? And if the data on the wire is wrong what hope is there for higher levels in the application| ...

I posted in the past about all the problems I had with my overheating Dell 5150, and with the problems trying to Vista Betas working on it. Well an update on both…. After putting new thermal grease on the CPU heatskin it never overheated again With the release version of Vista every bit of hardware (bar the modem which I quickly found a driver for) was detected and worked first time and I have seen no problems with the PC since. So I have a healthy, three year old laptop running Vista with the Aero interface (and the 5150 does have a nice high res. screen) perfectly adequately. ...

I had posted on problems with the nVidia Raid on our SunFire servers. Well I think I now have the root cause of the problems: not the Sun hardware, the nVidia RAID, or Windows 64 bit drivers. All the problems we had were when we used mirrored pairs of Western Digital 500Gb SATA drives that we had bought in a single batch of four drives. Identical drives bought on another day were fine, as were 500Gb drives from Maxtor and Hitachi. ...

I went to the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club last night, the meeting included an Extreme Hour. An interesting experience; the idea is that in an hour you go through a number of 10 minute XP iterations, doing ‘development’ by drawing the solution on a white board. Yesterday we had three separate groups of six; each with two customer, two developers (pair programming i.e. with one pen) and two QA/testers, and all had to design moon cheese harvesting solutions. ...

Today I rebuilt a PC with new drives and all seemed OK, but after 15 minutes or so it kept stopping (no nice shutdown), irrespective of what the PC was doing. I even swapped back the old disks all to no avail, hence I was stumped for a while. The problem turned out to be it was a somewhat full case and a wire was stopping the system fan turning, so the CPU was going into thermal shutdown and leaving no event log messages. Also the motherboard was not complaining as the am was still drawing current. ...

The photo I have added to my blog’s header is me at the Ripon Triathlon

When your try to remove the McAfee ProtectionPilot 1.5.0 agent using the command frminst /remove=agent you get an error “can’t stop service mcafeeframework” if you are using VirusScan 8.5. This is because VirusScan 8.5 has a new option under Access Protection that stops the McAfee services being stopped. So if you want to remove the agent you first have to go into the VirusScan Console and on the access protection properties page uncheck the Proect McAfee Services, then disable Access Protection for good measure. Then run the remove command andall should be OK ...

There seems to be a good deal of Microsoft stuff over the past few editions of Scientific American (SCIAM), and before you ask yes I do live in the UK, but I find Nature a bit too academic for me and New Scientist has too many job adverts. SCIAM is just ‘popular’ science enough to read over breakfast. The March edition has two such articles, but not on mainstream Microsoft products: One is on the Microsoft Theory Group of Microsoft Research and is called Graph Theory and Teatime. This looks at the team of top flight mathematicians choosing to work at Microsoft Research, as opposed to a more traditional career in academia, in much the same way as AT&T Bell labs operated in the past. The other on Digital Life, the current research and possibilities of using computers as external memory. It is written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell again of Microsoft Research who are working on the www.mylifebits.com research project. Raises some interesting issues of security and archiving. Both of these are every interesting and I think still available free on the web via the links above. I think they show a move by Microsoft to make their more academic and blue sky research known to the general public (or at least the ones who read pop science magazines!) ...