Phase 1 of the new Sigma Kappa website at K-State is complete. Kari and I have been working very hard to complete this site so we are very proud of how it looks right now. My favorite parts are:
The home page has a great layout and a really neat animated gif (thanks Ben).
The photo gallery is flash-based and looks great with all the pictures in it. Thanks to Ivan Dramaliev for creating the software that powers it.
Hopefully, the high standards will be maintained as it transfers from our control.
Phase 2, 3, and 4 will be completed over the coming months as we figure out how to do authentication in a way that matches the standards set by Sigma Kappa’s national office (who apparently don’t follow their own guidelines and who probably didn’t have anyone techno-savy help them draft the policy).
I should also say thanks to all those people that helped create it starting with the most important, Kari. She has worked very hard collecting, writing, organizing, evangelizing, fund-raising, and harrasing. I would also like to thank Ben and Ryan who initially helped get the style (and templates) laid out. We definitely didn’t pay you enough. And finally, I want to thank all those that donated so that we could pay Ryan and Ben. Those donations were very helpful in getting done (btw, Kari and I did not pay ourselves for all the work we put into it).
I was chatting with my dad recently and remembered a funny story that I thought I would share with the world (or the 3 people that read this blog). When Kari and I were still dating we made a trip up to Minnesota to visit my friend Matt and his girlfriend (now wife) Sara. On the way back we decided to stop and stay with my aunt and uncle, Bob and Ann Wallentine, in Fort Dodge, IA.
Now up until this point Kari had not met much of my family. But of the family that she met she was kind of put-off by them. The reason for this was that she was not what I would describe as a “huggie” person (meaning she wasn’t much for physical affection of the hugging kind) when it comes to relatives.
So as we are driving up to their house Kari was acting a little funny so I asked what was wrong. She said she was a little nervous about meeting them and them wanting hugs. I chuckled a little bit and re-assured her that of all my family, I couldn’t imagine Bob and Ann hugging her.
When we went to the door it opened and they welcomed us to their house … and gave Kari two big hugs.
I think back on that and it just makes me laugh. Poor Kari and her trials in meeting my family. Can’t believe she stuck with me, married me, and is still married to me after 7 years. What’s more, she actually likes me family now … who-wooda-thunk!
I have just put the final touches on the 2.0.20070814 release of Cadena. This includes lots of little upgrades, fixes, and enhancements. Most important is the initial release of the nesC source code editor.
The nesC source code editor is my first attempt at writing an enhanced text editor in Eclipse. It has syntax highlighting (fairly easy to get working), some auto-completion, and some auto-indenting. It also has a very simple outline view (that needs some serious help to make it usable). Overall, it is not ready for real developers but we wanted to release it to get some momentum started. We also needed to get something in the hands of the developers here at KSU so they could provide feedback and give us ideas on what else is necessary. So if you are used to using TinyDT, the TinyOS Plugin for Eclipse, or TinyOSIDE this will be a large step back. But when it is combined with Cadena and the eventual updates, I think this could turn into the best environment when building medium to large sensor networks and nesC applications. Especially if you are wanting to work on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOSX).
Besides spending my time implementing the source editor I also spent a significant amount of time writing documentation. Which is good since that is what I got my degree in … wait, I have that backwards. I learned nothing about writing good documentation during my BS and MS degrees. My greatest source of guidance on this has been Joel On Software. And I am nowhere near that good yet! But I am getting better. Take a look at the Cadena 2.0: nesC Tutorial to see my writing. I just added track 4 for this release to give nesC developers an idea of how to use Cadena to go from idea to finished nesC source (this doesn’t include the final steps of creating a good make file, compiling, and deploying to motes).
Wow, finally got that release out the door. Now the game starts again in hopes of getting another release out in 2 months that has significant improvements to the nesC environment as well as major changes to the core of Cadena (thanks to Georg this will take a significant amount of time and effort to make happen – but it will be worth it in the end since his ideas are correct, just not trivial to implement). Wish me luck!
Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.
One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.
As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.
He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”
The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”
“I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man.
To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”
Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “I made a difference to that one!”
Just a really good story that made my afternoon a little better. I hope others enjoy it.
When I started watching it I could only think that this is something Ben would do. Adam, don’t you agree?
Now that I think about it, this is a great way to build up a personal brand and do a little advertising. Original and certainly viral. I am sure this will help draw in clients and increase his influence.
Kari and I recently returned from the 2007 Wallentine Family reunion. This year it was held in Colorado Springs, CO with a great deal of the family attending. During the reunion, we also got to celebrate a couple of great anniversaries:
Bob and Ann Wallentine marked their 50th anniversary
Phylis and Loren Wibben marked their 40th anniversary
Over the coming months I will be creating the wallentine.com site (right now it is just a silly placeholder page). I hope to include a lot of the photos that were taken as well as gather suggestions on what else should go there.
I should also mention that several family members seem to be part of Facebook (Jake and Josh Wallentine as well as myself). So if your are family, feel free to add me as your friend. And I will certainly point you to the other family members on there.
And a final note about another website. I little while back I setup an account on Geni to see what it was all about. It turns out that it is quite the neat site for keeping track of geneology as well as some nice social networking features. So if you are interested, feel free to contact me about it and I will help you get setup. I will say a good portion of my family history is out there and it is slowly expanding as I invite family members to join.
What has 1 eagle, 9 birdies, and 8 pars? That’s right, the BA 21 champs!
The 21st annual BA golf tournament (BA 21) was held yesterday and I participated (thanks Adam for inviting me). I was teamed up with Adam, Scott Wallace, and Sean Weixelman. Unfortunately, Scott had to sit out … we placed him on IR. So Jim Colley took his place at the last minute (thanks Buck for giving us a great 4th).
It was a great day of golf and we ended up taking home the trophy … ok, there isn’t really a trophy, just some t-shirts that say “Champions” on it. It was even better since we all contributed in our own ways. Sean was clutch when we needed a good shot. Adam brought out his putter today and had some good shots as well. Jim made several birdie putts and almost made several more. I provided comedy and moral support … and a couple of good shots on the par 3 holes to put us in birdie range (#2, #7, and #14). We finished 11 under par (1 eagle on hole 10, 9 birdies, and 8 pars). We were a little disappointed since we missed a couple of reasonable birdies … but beggars (or hacks) can’t be choosers.
A big thanks to Mike Dillon and Mike Buchanan for putting on a great tournament. And thanks to all who helped them make it another great tournament. I am looking forward to defending the title next year. I just hope we don’t lose anyone to free agency.
Earlier this summer Kari and I had another fun vacation with her family (mother, father, brother, and sister-in-law). For the 2nd year in a row, we spent a few days at Kendall and Patty’s (brother and sister-in-law) lake house located on the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks near Camdenton, MO (Google Map location). This was a fantastic vacation filled with eating, drinking (soda), reading, relaxing, and some fun on the lake. Mostly just a good relaxing few days spent with family at a great location.
Thanks to Kendall and Patty for inviting us to their lake house and thanks to her parents (Gene and Deanna) for spending their hard-earned money so we can have such a great getaway.
Over the last couple of years I have come to expect really poor customer service (after dealings with the likes of Sprint, Cox Communications, Home Depot, Southwestern Bell/SBC/AT&T, Wal-Mart, HP, and Nebraska Furniture Mart). A couple of weeks ago, I experienced just the opposite when dealing with New Balance. To be perfectly honest, they impressed me with just a little bit of effort on their part.
The story starts two years ago when I purchased some New Balance 606 shoes online. Since then, they have been my primary shoes (I wear them almost every day … it is really nice to have a job where I can get away with t-shirts, shorts, and shoes like that!). A month or so ago, I had one of the laces break and I had to do a little “creative surgery” so I could continue using them. That day, I started looking around for replacement laces and came up dry (I could buy the standard white or black replacements laces if I wanted but they would not have looked good with the shoes).
At that point I was ready to give up but wanted to check with New Balance first. I was hoping their webiste would tell me where I could order them or pick them up here in town. What I found out was much better. It turns out that they have a page on their website for frequently asked questions (FAQ) that has just this question and answer. So I simply needed to use their online form and they would send me a set of replacement laces … for free.
Long story short, the laces arrived in 4 days. And while they weren’t an exact replacement, they sent me two pairs so I would have my choice. What a great experience. One that I will be telling everyone about (including my 2 blog readers). And this will certainly effect my next buying decision. Why can’t companies like Nebraska Furniture Mart, Wal-Mart, Sprint, AT&T, HP, and Home Depot do the same? I assume they have the money to invest into this type of support as well as the talent, or at least the ability to hire the talent. So do they just not care or is it really that hard?
I have been spending time over the last couple of weeks trying to get my new laptop setup so that I can transition to using it. Unfortunately, this has been quite a chore and is taking a non-trivial amount of time. So far, I have run into a bloated Vista install, a lack of documentation on how to reduce the bloat, and an inability to repartition the drive from within Vista.
I have already talked about the bloat but wanted to provide a little bit of a conclusion to the story. It turns out that you can remove the recovery partition and extend the Vista partition to include it. You simply need to create DVDs (or CDs) of the HP Recovery system, uninstall HP Backup and Recovery, remove the Recovery partition, and finally extend the Vista partition to take up this new free space. I am still trying to figure out how to remove the 3rd partition (OS_TOOLS) but can’t seem to find any clues as to what it is, if it is safe to remove it, and what procedure to follow to remove it (feel free to leave a comment or email me if you know how to do this).
At this point, I had quite a bit of space on the brand new system so that I could create the Linux partitions and setup my dual-boot laptop. This is where the trouble with Vista and HP Support started. To be specific, I had a working Vista system that was trimmed down to have about 80G of free space.
I found out that Vista has a built-in utility to manage partitions. So I tried to repartition by issuing the “Shrink Volume” command on that partition (hoping to free up 70G to install Linux on). It came back and said that it could only shrink the partition down by 6G. This seemed weird because there was so much free space so I asked the great google brain “Why can’t I shrink a volume more in a fresh install of Vista?” The response was no louder than crickets chirping (ok, there were quite a few hits for my query but nothing close to a real answer). After searching “Live Search” (Microsoft’s answer to Google), I found some details that said that the volume shrinkage might be limited because of the location of the pagefile, hibernation files, and other system files (shadow copies, whatever that is). With this information I thought I might try to use Disk Cleanup and the Disk Defrag tools in Vista and it might push all of these system files closer to the beginning of the disk and it would free up space in that partition. This was not the case and I still could not shrink more than 6G.
With my new found limitation and the lack of knowledge on the internet I decided it was time to consult the experts at HP. I contacted HP support using Active Chat and was greeted rather quickly with a real person (within about 5 minutes if I recall, pretty impressive). He read through my description of the problem and said he would have to research the issue and respond via email. I thought, great, this should be resolved within a couple of days and I will have my new laptop closer to being usable as my primary platform for everyday work.
This is where the story starts to frustrate me. The response that was sent to me via email was quick but didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t tried already (Disk Cleanup and Disk Defrag). So I went ahead and tried it again and it ran overnight (sidenote: why does defrag take so long?). When I got in the next morning I rebooted and tried to shrink again. No luck (surprise). So I connected to ActiveChat again. This time the tech support specialist tried to walk me through something but he didn’t know how to find pagefile.sys (I later learned a little something about folder options in Vista that will be useful in the future). So he said I would need to contact Microsoft for support.
This is where I got really angry. Why did I need to contact Microsoft for support when I have a 3 year warranty with HP and this is the OS that HP installed? Besides, Microsoft charges for support (and doesn’t recognize my product ID, probably because it is an OEM product ID and they assume you get support from your OEM – good assumption). So I argued a little bit and he gave me the standard “customer is upset and we won’t fix it” response. At that point, I just shut-up and disconnected.
With all my pent-up-anger I decided to take a break. After my break (and reducing my anger by about 50%) I decided to try another route. I would use HP’s email support and see if I get any better results (I know, not a good idea but I figured I might as well give it a try).
HP’s email support obviously didn’t read through the prior history detail in the Active Chat session so I got a little further with them. Unfortunately, they ran into issues and gave up as well and told me to contact Microsoft Support. Here is their final message:
Hello Todd,
Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard’s Commercial Solutions Center.
This is with reference to your e-mail regarding the HP Compaq nc8430 notebook.
Based on the information provided in your e-mail, we understand that you want to create a second partition on the Hard Drive of the notebook.
We understand your concern; we wish to inform you that it is a known issue in Vista and Microsoft has not yet released the patch to resolve the same.
However we suggest you using the below link of TechNet of Microsoft which provides the clear picture that the issue is known one. We suggest you that you will have to wait until Microsoft releases the patch to resolve the bug:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1319579&SiteID=17
Please do contact the Microsoft using the below link and they will help you in providing further assistance:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-us&x=10&y=12&prid=10299&gprid=436975
Please e-mail us in case of any further queries and we will be more than glad to assist you.
Once again, thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard’s Commercial Solutions Center.
Regards,
HP eServices
So I am left contacting Microsoft for support and a not-really-usable laptop (I cannot work in Vista since it is so slow and takes so long to boot besides the fact that I am much more efficient and effective in a Linux environment). I am left thinking several things:
HP doesn’t know how to support their customers and their technical knowledge is the same as using Google and Live Search.
HP doesn’t want my business.
HP does everything it can to avoid working hard to satisfy its customers.
HP outsources their support to an off-shore firm where the techs are non-native English speakers.
Microsoft Windows Vista is not ready to be released.
To all my loyal readers, don’t buy an HP. I think this was huge mistake and I should have just ordered a MacBook Pro or a Dell Inspiron instead.
Update: I just got an email from Thomas Netter who mentioned this article that might have fixed my problem. Unfortunately, it was too late for me to try since I have given up on Vista, completely removed it, and installed Linux instead. But others might find it useful. Good luck. And thanks Thomas!
