Being Mark Cohen

I just got back from a week-long break down at Wentworth Falls. We had initially booked into a place at Echo Point in Katoomba, but shortly after we arrived we found that the place did not match what we had understood the advert to be implying. After a very heated discussion with one of the owners, it was explained to me very pointedly and angrily that I was wrong and it must be because I hated the mountains. Quite the contrary, I love the mountains. And so we left it at that and with the help of the local tourist info office we booked and rented a house on a battle-axe lot in Wentworth Falls, about a block from the National Park.

We went on short walks (My younger son only has little legs), drives, enjoyed the views, and got to really relax. The house we rented has a log fireplace and was an all-round fantastic place to stay. In the afternoons we hung around in the garden playing soccer and running and taking turns to be the eagle or the rabbit in the new game called Eagle Hunting Rabbit that we made up. We also devised a novel way to retrieve our soccer ball when we kicked it into the neighbour’s garden. It involves lifting my two year old boy up, lowering him over the wooden fence, asking him to get the ball and then he’d stand at the fence with his arms in the air so I could lift him by his arms back to our side of the fence. He thought it was a game we made up just for him

If I could take a software production team away for a chunk of time, like a month or two, to work on a large and well-defined project I would look to rent a house in Wentworth Falls near the park. It would be possible to code for eight hours a day, plan / design / discuss / review / refactor for three or four, and still get a few hours hiking or going out into every day.

I have been window-shopping for a new mobile for a while now. Today I decided to buy the new LG U890 from Three. The phone itself is a nice design. I had unfortunately forgotten the LG UI is a bit clunky, but the speed of the calendar loading etc was good so I was happy to go with it. I got the lady at the Three shop to confirm with their tech support that this phone would sync with Outlook before I bought it.

It’s taken me about three hours to get the thing to sync. The desktop software is dodgy to say the least. There are a whole lot of forum messages all over the show about getting the LG software to work. The error message you see when it doesn’t work says "Failed to connect to the mobile handset. Please check the Com port and connect in idle screen"

"Please check the COM port and connect in idle screen" was not exactly helpful information. Anyway, after uninstalling and reinstalling the phone software and drivers more times than I could stomach, I found that the key piece of missing info on the forums is this:

Right-click on sync Manager, then click on "Configurations" then click on the tab labelled "Commnunications Setting" (sic). If your selected port is working then it should come up as USB, NOT COM. See screenshot:

To get the port to come up as USB, I went into computer management, into the device manager (right-click "my computer", choose "Manage" and then click on device manager. then go into modems and go into the properties of the LG Mobile USB Modem:

I went into the advanced tab, clicked the advanced port settings button and changed the port number to find one that would work. The system will warn you that other software is using the port assignment, I just said “OK” to the warning. My initial install was on port 10, I tried port 2 unsuccessfully and then port 14 worked. As soon as I changed the port and went back to LG Sync’s settings the USB port was in the list and everything worked.

IMHO the phone is one of the nicest 3G phones on the market in terms of it’s physical form factor so I am still happy with my buy, but next time I will stick with Nokia or get a Microsoft Smartphone. The UI on the LG is clunky and the sync software is junk.

I’ve set up Cruise Control on my shiny new dev server, it’s running fantastically now that I have figured our how to get Cruise Control to play nicely with multiple projects in subversion. I had to use the sourcecontrol type “multi” as follows:

I couldn’t get the sourcecontrol block to work with more than one project source. Whenever I forced a build it would work but it would not work otherwise. By changing over to the type="multi"It started working properly, immediately. We had our first totally automated day of continuous integration today. It rocks. Every 60 seconds the build server checks subversion, if there’s been a checkin it does an update and does a build. every 30 seconds the ccnet system tray app on the dev desktops checks the status of the build and alerts us immediately to a failure. We then go to the Cruise Control .net dashboard and check the report for the failed build. It tells us what files changed (and therefore triggered a build) as well as showing the comments provided by the developers with their commit.

Now the plan is to continue the refactoring slowly but surely, and to also grow the nUnit tests where we can.

MacRumors.com talks about Microsoft’s response to Apple’s release of Boot Camp

“Windows is a great operating system,” a Microsoft statement said. “We’re pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and that Apple is responding to meet the demand.”

Meanwhile, Apple explains that the release of Boot Camp addresses some requests from different users and is intended to encourage PC users to switch:
Boot Camp makes the Mac way more appealing to Windows users who are considering the switch by lowering the barrier to moving to Mac

The whole bootcamp thing is tops, what the commentators seem to miss is that this is hardware running the OS rather than virtualisation. That is a hugely significant difference.

The reason I keep reading on this is that I am planning on buying a new laptop soon and I love the Mac product design and finish but a non-Windows system is only a toy to me. I’d happily spend a little extra to get a MacBook Pro if I knew I could run Visual Studio on it and use it as a desktop replacement. The whole XP on a Mac thing just rocks as far as I am concerned because it means I can buy the BMW of notebooks and make it work like an 18 Wheeler rather than buying an 18 Wheeler Dell and being unhappy that it doesn’t feel like a BMW.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s gone the MacBook route or knows someone who has, and who is using it as a Windows machine. Until I hear how good it is, I reckon I’ll hold off

Update: Microsoft Watch has an interesting piece titled Windows on Mac: Who Wants It and Why?. Some really interesting (as well as the usual belligerent) sentiments are expressed.

USB is cool. Thumb drives are wicked. They have been getting so big so fast, it’s like moore’s law to the power of ten. I just saw on EverythingUSB that there is a new 64 GB Thumb drive from Kanguru retailing for a mere $2799.95. that;’s USD. Don’t panic, I’m sure it’ll be on the shelves at Harris Technology and cost a hundred bucks by next year.