Emmanuel's Blog

This weekend it was "Family Day" at the National Ignition Facility ("NIF") the amazing place where Janelle has been working for the last three years.

 
Inside the Target Bay at the NIF: where the magic happens

The NIF is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ("LLNL") a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 and today funded by the United States Department of Energy (for more information, click here).

Located right here in the San Francisco Bay Area and where over 10,000 people work (including Janelle!), the NIF funds many projects that will blow your mind.  Yesterday we were lucky enough to visit the building that hosts one of the fastest computers on earth and the NIF itself.

 
NIF's basic layout. The laser pulse is generated in the room just right of center, and is sent into the beamlines (blue) on either side. After several passes through the beamlines the light is sent into the "switchyard" (red) where it is aimed into the target chamber (silver). Three football fields could fit inside NIF.

The National Ignition Facility is a huge building the size of three football (or soccer) fields where we have the potential to create something magical - here's a description from the NT Times:

In theory, the facility’s 192 lasers — made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers — will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

This process if called "Fusion" - and when it happens we will for example be able to transform water into electricity.  This research has the potential to basically give us an unlimited supply of clean, carbon-free, energy.  Amazing stuff.

Commercial applications of Fusion: 35 liters (roughly 8 gallons) of heavy water will contain as much energy as an oil cargo ship.

This was another amazing weekend at the NIF - and we are all proud of Janelle for doing such a great job there.  Below I have additional links, videos, and articles with more information on the NIF.

Continue reading "National Ignition Facility: 192 lasers that may create a new source of energy for humanity" »

A few weeks ago I purchased a Kindle 2 - the electronic book reader from Amazon.com.  Janelle has had the Kindle 1 for over a year and she really loves it - I figured it was time for me to get one.

Sweet: the new Kindle 2 from Amazon
Update: I returned my Kindle 2 and ordered the Kindle DX

In addition to books, newspapers and magazines, you can also subscribe to your favorite blogs on your Kindle.  New articles from your favorite blogs (or newspapers/magazines) are automatically transferred to your Kindle wirelessly through "Whispernet", the EVDO/3G high-speed data network Sprint has setup for Amazon.  Most network connection fees are included in the price of the Kindle, in other words you don't pay anything to transfer.

That said, I found that Amazon charges a pretty high price for such subscriptions.  For example: I frequently check out www.politico.com for political news; Amazon charges $5.99/month to get content from Politico.com on my Kindle:

$5.99/month for something I can get for free online? Really Amazon?  

I looked for a better way to get my RSS feeds on my Kindle and fount it: www.kindlefeeder.com and "Kindle Feeds".  Daniel Choi (www.danielchoi.com), a talented developer has created kindlefeeder.com, a website that delivers your favorite feeds to your Kindle:

http://kindlefeeder.com/: free up to 12 RSS feeds, also lets you schedule automatic deliveries.

If you only need to have up to 12 RSS feeds/subscriptions delivered to your Kindle, just use www.kindlefeeder.com; there's also an unlimited service where for $5/month you can subscribe to an unlimited number of feeds. 

If you'd like more control or you're a technical geek who has fun doing this stuff, Daniel Choi also made available "Kindle Feeds", an application that runs on your computer:

http://danielchoi.com/software/kindle-feeds.html

Daniel has instructions on how to install and run Kindle Feeds on a Mac, so I thought I'd try to see if I could get it running on Windows.  I was successful, and below you can find instructions on how to download, install, configure and run Kindle Feeds on Windows.

Continue reading "Read your favorite RSS feeds on your Kindle - installing and running "Kindle Feeds" on Windows" »

A year ago our family rented a house in Kauai, Hawaii.  Since we “keep our remembers with us” (that’s an inside family joke) Janelle and I decided to create the two collages below.

Kauai Collage #1: click on picture for high-res version (1800x1200)

Kauai Collage #2: click on picture for high-res version (1800x1200)

For those interested in easily creating collages like these, check out this software from Microsoft Research:

 
AutoCollage v1.1 from Microsoft Research

There’s a cool demo video here and a 30 day free trial of AutoCollage, allowing you to create plenty of collages.

Authorities have found the Swine Flu "ground zero", where it all started:

The origin of the "Swine Flu" 

On a more serious note, here are some real resources on the Swine Flu:

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak (thanks Mom)
• Global Map of outbreaks: http://tinyurl.com/cosuzr
• USA Center for Disease Control (CDC): http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

That's a long title... but I already digress.

As a Systems Architect and Software Engineer, I use different a lot of technologies, mostly Microsoft Technologies.  I decided to create a word cloud of active Microsoft technologies, services, and products, including many that I'm currently using in my job:

 
Word Cloud: Software Development
Technologies, Patterns and Services (mostly Microsoft)

How many of the words above are you familiar with?  How many of these technologies are you an expert in?

The list includes active Microsoft technologies, services and products (and some general patterns) in the following categories:

• Architecture
• Cloud Computing
• Data Access
• Development
• Integration/Interoperability
• Rich Client (Desktop/Mobile)
• Security
• Server Products
• Web/RIA Technologies

Thanks to XX (I'm withholding the name just in case any bored lawyers decide to get involved) for being kind enough to send me the list.

I created the Word cloud using the Java based Wordle.net (I need to write a Wordle in Silverlight...  More word clouds and the full list of words used to create the clouds are found below.

Continue reading "Word Cloud: Software Development Technologies, Patterns and Services (mostly Microsoft)" »

Note: this post contains my notes on the video below - "How do I store data in Windows Azure tables?".  I thought these notes may be useful for any other Microsoft .NET architects or developers out there.  If you are not involved with software engineering, you'll find this really boring.

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) video:
How do I store data in Windows Azure tables?

A couple of days ago, I found the following video was published on MSDN:

How Do I: Store Data in Windows Azure Tables? (15 minutes, 37 seconds) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/dd483299.aspx

You can download the video in the page above, multiple formats are available.  You can also directly click here to download the 34.5 MB WMV video to your local machine (right-click and choose "Save As", Windows Media Player required).

The first few minutes of the video provide a lot of good information - here are some of the notes I took today while watching the video:

• From what I understand the current implementation of Windows Azure Storage occurs through an HTTP based REST style interface.
• That said, in the Windows Azure SDK Microsoft gives us another alternative: a managed set of classes that wrap the HTTP calls to Azure storage.  You'll find these in the 'Samples' directory of the Windows Azure SDK, add a reference to "StorageClient.dll" (you can then use Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient).  You also need a reference to System.Data.Storage.Client.
• In Windows Azure tables, the basic unit of storage is called an Entity, so for each type that you want to store in a table you create a class that derives from TableStorageEntity (present in Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient).
• TableStorageEntity provides two properties: PartitionKey and RowKey.  These are the only two properties that Azure storage requires for entities and the only two properties that it really cares about.
• PartitionKey is used by Azure Storage if it needs to distribute the table entities over multiple storage nodes.  For example, if you have a table of books, your PartitionKey could be the "author" property; this way books from the same author will be stored in the same Azure storage node, so our queries would be more efficient.  The video above mentions that another video will have more information on table partitions.
• RowKey represents the unique id of the entity within the partition it belongs to.  For the book table example, the rowkey was set to the book's title - so each book could be indetified by it's PartitionKey (author) and RowKey (title).
• When you deploy your application to Windows Azure, your data is ultimately stored in Azure Storage.  But you can create a local "Storage Table Class" to interact with programatically - for this you can create another wrapper class that derives from Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient.TableStorageDataServiceContext (in the example they call this class BookTable)
• Within TableStorageDataServiceContext there's a method to load the configuration (so you don't hard code values), StorageAccountInfo.GetDefaultTableStorageAccountFromConfiguration(). You need to add the configuration settings to a couple of services xml configuration files.
• AccountName, AccountSharedKey and TableStorageEndPoint are defined in the XML file ServiceDefintion.csdef
• The actual values for AccountName, AccountSharedKey and TableStorageEndPoint are defined in in the XML file ServiceConfiguration.cscfg
• While in development, you can use the local storage development account, so your TableStorageEndPointis something like "http://127.0.0.1:10002".
• There's a "Development Storage" desktop app that allows you to check if your local TableStorage is running (and start it if needed).
• Going back to our BookTable class (the one that derives from TableStorageDataServiceContext), we can now create a method to perform a query against our Azure table storage that returns all entities that match a given type.  In the example this was a "DataServiceQuery<Book> Books()"

There's a lot more info on the video, including a way to create the table in Azure storage on a first request, based on the classes discussed above.  In the video, they mention that this was written for ASP.NET users, since each HTTP call to an ASPX page generates an new instance of the page class.  But I found it interesting that there's a mechanism to create the storage tables in Azure based on our classes - and only once!

I copy below a thread I started on the .netTiers forums, requesting a Windows Azure layer for .netTiers and a possible solution to implement it.

Continue reading "How do I store data in Windows Azure tables?" »

A couple of weeks ago I got a new server at work for software development.  We were able to purchase a Dell Precision T3400 with Quad Core CPUs and 8 GB of RAM for under $1000!  For the hard drive, we originally purchased a Seagate Barracuda 500 GB which runs at the normal speed of 7,200 RPM.

Felipe Massa, the Brazilian Formula 1 Ferrari driver, is used to speed.
When using a computer he would enjoy a 10,000 RPM hard drive.

After doing a Google search on speeding up Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (the main development tool I currently use), I ran into a few articles that suggest a 10,000 RPM hard drive to improve system speed - for example:

You Want a 10,000 RPM Boot Drive, by Jeff Atwood
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html

Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and
Visual Studio Performance, by Scott Gu
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

We decided to buy a 300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor - it runs at 10,000 RPM instead of the standard 7,200 RPM.  We backed up the Windows Server 2008 system and all of my development tools (Visual Studio 2008, Blend, SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio, Office Professional 2007, etc...), replaced the 7,200 RPM with the new 10,000 RPM drive and restored everything.  When the system came back up, I could notice an amazing improvement in speed! 

The Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive comes in
a box with the picture above: a scary eye from a
VelociRaptor dinosaur is getting ready to hunt you down...

I click on a Quick Launch icon and literally in less than a second my applications start up - literally!  Any application!  It now takes me less than 10 seconds to compile my largest projects (it used to take minutes or hours in an older systems).  Visual Studio 2008 with Whole Tomato's Visual Assist X no longer freezes every once in a while.

Sequential Read: from 2 Mb/s in 2002, I now get an amazing 1641 Mb/s
with my new Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive - that's over 80,000% improvement in speed!

I placed the operating system, applications like Office and the Visual Studio suite, and all of my source code in the 10,000 RPM drive.  Data, such as pictures or MP3s, I just placed in a secondary 7,200 RPM drive. 

Although improvements in CPU speed, RAM, and Network speed have steadily occurred since I started using computers back in 1981, for the first time in years I feel a real difference in how Windows and my applications are running with the new 10,000 RPM hard drive - I highly recommend it. 

10,000 RPM hard drives are more expensive than your normal 7,200 RPM hard drives (if you look at the cost per GB).  But prices are coming down, for example, Best Buy current is running a special and dropped the price on a 300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor to $199:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8844717&st=velociraptor&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1208562592342

The listed price is $249, but when you add the hard drive to the cart, it will cost $199 (at least until this promotion ends).

Below I copy my notes and how I compared different hard drive speeds for development servers I've used since 2002.  The Velociraptor leaves all others behind, eating dirt.

Continue reading "Speed up your computer: get a 10,000 RPM hard drive now!" »

When you attempt to cancel your monthly membership on Audible.com, they offer you a $20 credit for "being a loyal customer" (or something similar).  If you accept it, not only they do not cancel your membership but they also remove the "Cancel Membership" link from your account page.

Here's a screenshot of my account details - I outline in red where the "Cancel Membership" link used to be present:

The "Cancel Membership" link mysteriously disappears from
the "My Account" page on Audible.com after you try to cancel

Since I can't speak with anyone from Audible.com on Sundays, I tried sending a message using their email form:

From: Emmanuel Huna
To: Audible.com Customer Service
Date: 2/8/2008

I have been a "AudibleListener Gold" member since May of 2007 after hearing about your services from Leo Laporte on TWIT. 

Unfortunately, I am currently very busy and I don't have time to listen to audiobooks regularly.  For this reason yesterday I logged in and tried to cancel my membership.

Under "Switch Membership" I did find a "Cancel Membership" button.  I clicked on it and after a couple of questions I was presented with an offer for a $20 credit. 

I accepted the offer and the cancellation process promptly ended.  Now the "Cancel Membership" link is gone and I see I'm still a "AudibleListener Gold" member.  There is NO WAY for me to cancel my membership.

Please cancel my membership NOW and do not charge my credit card again. 

I also find this policy you have of not allowing users to cancel their membership borderline illegal - I am CCing Leo Laporte and I will report you to the Better Business Bureau if you don't stop charging my credit on a monthly basis NOW.

Emmanuel Huna

And here's the immediate response I received:

Response to Question

Need to Cancel Your Audible Membership?

We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but the email option is no longer available.

We want to provide you with the best possible customer experience, even if you decide to cancel your membership.

You may either contact us via our toll-free number or cancel your membership online at Make Changes To My Membership ***.

Please contact us at: 888-283-5051
Hours: Monday-Friday 9AM-10PM EST, Saturday 10AM-7PM EST

The toll-free number would allow us to:

- Address any technical or usability issues that might be hindering your use of Audible
- Make sure you know about all of the entitlements of Audible
- Get your feedback, so that we can continuously improve the service

We appreciate your business and value you as a customer!

The Audible Team

***PLEASE NOTE:  If you have cancelled your account online or taken advantage of an online save offer in the past, you will not have the ability to cancel your account online.  Please call customer care at the above number. We appreciate your patience.

What a scam!  Be careful when signing up for Audible.com - they make it hard for you to cancel later.

I'm also sending this to Leo Laporte from Twit.tv.  I found a few threads on the same issue (for example here and here) so he probably knows this is happening.  Maybe if enough folks complain, he'll put some pressure on Audible.com or stop doing business with them completely.

Update 2/9/09: I called the 800 number listed above and after talking to someone at Audible.com, my monthly membership was canceled (Audible.com folks: it's spelled "canceled" not "cancelled").  Of course, Audible.com support offered to "place my account on hold", hoping that I'd forget about it so they could start charging my credit card again 2 or 3 months from now.  I refused.

Of course, this is just my opinion.  Below I have larger screenshots of the Audible.com pages.

Continue reading "Audible.com: scam when you try to cancel?" »

Last week I posted an article on my experiences installing Windows 7 on my new HP TouchSmart iQ804 (click here for the details).  One of my remarks was:

• Note: I haven’t yet found a way to re-install the HP Software that comes with the pre-installed Vista Home Premium on the HP TouchSmart. 

I started a thread on touchsmartcommunity.com asking if anyone had any tips on how to re-install the HP TouchSmart software that comes bundled with the iQ804 on a new installation of Vista or Windows 7 (click here for that thread).  This software was called at some point "SmartCenter". 

The HP TouchSmart Software - HP makes it hard
for you to install it if you install a new operating system

I didn't get any answers, but I did get a warning from GeekTieGuy (who I think is one of the developers of the HP TouchSmart software).  He told me in a friendly way that I should read the license agreement closely - HP and its lawyers may have policies I could violate if I re-installed this software.

One or more HP lawyers and/or business folks don't
want you to install the HP TouchSmart software you
bought on the same hardware you also paid for.  Makes sense?

I'd like to give food for thought for HP and its lawyers: if HP really has policies in place that don't allow me to re-install software I paid for on the same hardware I also paid for, it could open itself to a Class Action lawsuit. 

Here's a scenario: I need Windows 7 Ultimate for example to login into my Active Directory domain - but Windows Vista Home Premium (which came with the iQ804) does not support this feature.  So if I install my own purchased version of Windows Vista Ultimate on the same iQ804- all of a sudden I should no longer be allowed to use the HP TouchSmart Software that I paid for?  There are many other examples.

To keep the HP lawyers happy:  I have not done this, but I did find a theoretical solution on how to re-install the HP TouchSmart software on a new operating system - read below if you'd like the details. 

Continue reading "How to (theoretically) re-install the HP TouchSmart Software on a new installation of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7" »

I have just finished installing Windows 7 on my new desktop, the HP Touchsmart IQ804 – thanks to Janelle for her Xmas present, which allowed me to justify buying a new computer!

HP has a pretty good website showing
off the HP TouchSmart iQ804 and other models

I decided to install Windows 7 64 bits Ultimate in parallel to the Windows Vista Premium that came with the HP TouchSmart. 

A screenshot of my desktop – using Windows 7’s “Aero Peek”
feature as I hover over the TweetDeck icon on the new taskbar.

Not only there are a ton of cool features in Windows 7 (watch my screencast here), but it also supports “Multi Touch” (Vista only supports single touch).  This allows me for example to zoom in and out using two fingers, just like folks do on an iPhone. 

Update: There is now a Windows 7 Beta build that is available to the first 2.5 million people who download it - details are found on the Windows Team Blog.  There are also new online Windows 7 dedicated forums, managed by Microsoft.

If you have access to a build of Windows 7 and would like to install it on your HP TouchSmart, I wrote down a few notes and links you may find interesting - I copy them below.

Continue reading "Windows 7 running on HP TouchSmart iQ804 – sweet!" »