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I've been looking for a good OpenID implementation for a .Net website I am working on. I really like the idea of OpenID, but I'm not yet convinced of the implementation of it. It may not do as much as I need it to do. I am also looking at implementing CardSpace/Passport side by side. I would like to give the user the ability to port over from whatever service they use and link that information to their website account. There are lots of Open libaries available, but only one for .Net and it is lacking in support. They are working to port it over though.

On the first Autumn and I picked up a couple of Sprint Pocket Pc 6700 phones. So far I like it a lot more than the Axim 51xv that I had for a year and sold to get the money to buy the phone with. The high speed connectivity and functional (more or less) Bluetooth make up for the larger and higher resolution screen and the more memory of the Axim. I do wish I could have had both thoug in the phone. Maybe in a couple more years, I have been waiting for a replacement PDA ever since I stoped using the Apple Newton. Speaking of which, the Apple iPhone looks very nice. Though since I use .net at work, I have been able to pretty easily port some applications over to the 6700. I almost have a minimally functional implementation of BlackJack. Anyway, I love the BlueTooth headset combined with Audible. Now all I need is for my extra mini SD storage card to arrive.

I am starting on a new project at work that I am really looking forward to. We are still in the initial design stage and have just recently completed the Logical System Architecture. We have ordered new servers for the testing and staging environments and are setting up a Continuous Integration (CI) build system based on Cruise Control (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/) and MSBuild (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5.aspx) which is basically an improved port of ANT. It appears that Visual Studio 2005 project and solution files are all now in MSBuild format. Cruise Control will be automatically pulling the source from Visual Source Safe (ok, it isn't Subversion but we can deal), compiling it, and then running it through fxCop (http://www.gotdotnet.com/Team/FxCop/), nUnit (http://www.nunit.org/), nCover (http://ncover.org/site/), and last but not lease Simian (http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/). Cruise Control has a pretty good website interface for displaying all of the compiled results from the various tools and can even display code changes from one build to the next. It also keeps track of all builds in a build history. I'm looking forward to the test driven development and think that this type of approach combined with nUnit/nCover should give us a pretty good idea before we roll out changes that we haven't broken anything. There are also plans to incorporate some type of automated user interface testing once we are far enough along in the project. Depending on the tool, this should be just a matter of installing the tool on the build server and calling it from Cruise Control. Sweet.

Last week I purchased a new Dell 9300 laptop with all the bells and whistles. I ordered it through work, for work, and saved on tax plus got the 3 year all inclusive warranty at no extra charge. I must admit that I was partial to Dell since they have a distribution plant just up the road from my office. The price was only slightly higher than an HP I was looking at but the speed is significantly higher. I had considered the Dell XPS, but after looking at the detailed specifications betwen the XPS and 9300, I couldn't tell any difference other than looks and price, the XPS was several hundred dollars more!

Inspiron 9300,Pentium M 770 (2.13GHz/533MHz FSB);
17" UXGA; 1GB DDR2 @ 533MHz;
256MB NVIDIA 6800;
60GB Ultra ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive;
Built in Wireless & Bluetooth

I installed Skype today and have it up and running for the most part. I also installed the Miranda plugin for the chat. Seems to be working very well so far. Hope to be using it for voice chat while playing online games such as World of Warcraft. Feel free to contact me at fpdavis.

http://www.skype.com
http://www.miranda-im.com

I got my terabyte server up and running. Phil brought over his machine with 6 200GB drives, and I copied all my stuff over. It took several days. Then I installed the new card and wired up my 7 drives with 7 serialATA adapters. The provided SATA cables are too long for my case, so it still looks kind of like a wire nest. I noticed one of my 200GB drives is actually a slightly smaller capacity than the rest. I tried building the raid 5 array over all the drives from the cards bios utility. I tried twice (took over 5 hours each time, and then failed without any sort of diagnotic message). Finally I tried building the array from the raid management software after booting, and it worked, and was much faster. So now I have a 1.2TB partition. Incidentally, the driver provided did not work, but I was able to compile their "open build" driver after installing all over from the new Debian installer. The 2 servers are using a gigabit connection. The data copying is disappointingly slow. Initially it was barely managing 10MB/s, but after trying a couple of networking tweaks, it is up to a little over 20MB/s. Still not great, but OK for 32bit cards on an overloaded PCI bus (what with the drives and all)

My garage door opener decided not to open any more, so I had to get a new one of those. The new one uses screw drive rather than chain, and is a lot quieter. Installation wasn't too hard, but slightly complicated by my low garage ceilings.

Finally, I worked on my arcade machine a little for the first time in a while. I got a new hard drive for it, since mame is staring to get kind of big now, and it only had a 10G. I figured this would be a good time to try to make the computer install a little more permanent. I also snapped a few pictures: Arcade machine gallery

My utility server which does music and backup fileserving, DHCP, and WINS for my home network suffered a disk failure last Saturday. I was able to recover most of the data from the failing drive, but then needed to re-install the OS to get it running again. Unfortunately I had a hard time finding the installer that I needed. Debian is my usual choice of Linux distributions, but for some reason, www.debian.org was not resolving on Saturday. Basically I just needed a net installer that would get the machine running enough to boot, network, and mount the old disks. I found a list of various installers at linixmafia and downloaded several.

PGI looked nice, but didn't support ext3, which my 2 IDE drives were using. DFS was also ok, with a 2.6 kernel, but didn't seem to want to recognize my scsi drive which I wanted to boot from- doh. It seems like it could be made to work with some tweaking. A default netinstall iso of Debian sarge (testing) seemed to work well, except it wouldn't recognize IDE. I finally ended up finding the old Debian 3.0 bf2.4 netinstall that I had originally used on an unlabeled 3.5" cdrw. Now I am back up and running.
My next project will be to install my new raid card in my 1.2TB fileserver. I will be using 7x200G drives in RAID-5. I hope that goes more smoothly...

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