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I love Lego. Thanks for giving me a way to spend quality time with the people I love.

I’ve been complaining about how there are no girl Legos for a long time (on twitter @tooshel). I know about Bellville and have purchased every set but it’s not enough. I want a pink car.

Side note: Why don’t you team up with Barbie? Barbie minifigs would be awesome!

Okay, so I decide that Lego’s answer to “why haven’t you made this” is the DesignByMe Lego Designer app. I’ve seen it and finally decided to make my Pink Car dream come true. I also decide that it’s time to really design something instead of just building the models (I love the 3in1 because it’t 3x the fun for me!) I open up “LEGO Digital Designer” and start trying to make my pink car. After about 10 minutes I discover the “filter by color” and find there are on only 2 pink bricks!!! What the? I know there are way more pink bricks because I’ve seen them in the pink box set 5585.

Pink bricks in Lego Designer

Please add pink bricks to the designByMe program. I know it’ll cost more but it’s the right thing to do. Even better would be to have Astrid design one and get it to market soon!

Sheldon

Check out my task manager . . . everything is 32 bit! Am I missing the 64 bit version when I download stuff?

Okay, so I decided to install Windows 7. Even if it’s all marketing it can’t be as bad as Vista and 9 years is long enough for XP.

I went to the MS store in Scottsdale and bought a retail upgrade copy of Family Pack Home Premium. The install failed in 4 ways on computer #1 because there were no drivers for the SATA controller. On computer #2 the 64-bit version installed flawlessly. I did a fresh install to the same hard drive that had and existing install of 32-bit Windows XP. It was really cool that in the “Windows.OLD” folder had the original Windows folder as well as Documents and Settings and Program Files. It was nice that those were out of the way but not gone.

After trying a few things out #2 for a few days I decided to go ahead and install on my main computer. On this one I decide I’ll install to a separate hard drive. I figured during the setup I could point to the other hard drive to tell it where Windows was installed or maybe the installer would ask for the disk (which I have).

I struggled for an hour when the installer asked for the Product Key and told me simply “The product key is not valid”. After typing and retyping and waiting for my wife to check it to make sure I wasn’t going crazy I finally realized it was because it wasn’t an upgrade. I read online that you can skip the Product Key and finish the install so I blank out the key and finish the install.

Of course, I couldn’t activate and this time the error message tells me it’s because I got the upgrade version and it’s not supported for new installs. So, I could just reinstall and override my copy of XP but that made me nervous since someday I could see myself having to go though this in the future. So I decided to give Microsoft a call . . . .

Took a while to find a number online and then that was the wrong number (Activation) so I got a new number for technical support (1-800-936-5700 in case you are wondering). I had to convince the support guy that what I was doing was reasonable (I mean, what if my hard drive died . . . would I need to install XP on the old drive and then upgrade again? … what if I had an OEM machine and I didn’t have the disk and couldn’t get it from the manufacturer anymore?). After talking to that guy for about 30 minutes it seemed like I was going to have to install XP and upgrade from there. I held steady and kept talking and wouldn’t let him off the phone. Finally he created a technical support case and transferred me. I explained the situation to the new guy and he understood and said that install to a fresh hard drive is not allowed with an upgrade copy but the good news is there is a workaround! Awesome!

So here is the workaround and the reason I wrote this in the first place. Luckily no one reads this blog so I’m not worried about getting in trouble.

Steps:

1. Go to the registry to this key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE
2. Change: MediaBootInstall value to 0
3. Run this command from the command prompt (as administrator): cscript.exe slmgr.vbs -rearm

If you need more help that that you should probably just call Microsoft yourself!

Other notes:

• The technician on the phone was very careful about wanting to control my machine and asked over and over if it was okay.  He was careful to explain what was going to happen before he did anything.  I had to install “Microsoft Easy Assist” so he could control the computer and after the session ended Easy Assist asked if I wanted to uninstall . . . very thoughtful!  A nice touch indeed.
• I tired it on some older hardware (computer #1) and there were no drivers for the SATA controller and according to the Intel website, Intel has no plans to release drivers.  There WAS Vista drivers and those would probably work. Why not just let me try those out? I downloaded but it was an installer and it was just to replace drivers that came with Windows. So annoying! Nothing worked! I blame Intel for this problem, not Microsoft.
• If there was a family pack for Professional I would have gladly paid a little more. On one of the computers I plan on doing the “Anytime Upgrade” to the Pro version (so I can do XP mode) and I’ll write about that later.
• I later when to install iTunes and wanted to copy over the iTunes Library.XML file and it wasn’t anywhere in the Windows.OLD folder.  Had to go to my backup. Strange.

Sheldon

One hundred tweets.

Seems like nothing bit it’s a big deal because, well, I finally really understand the point of twitter . . . it’s a pretty cool way to communicate with people.  Replying and even reading your tweets is not mandatory and it’s even less of an interruption than email and you get a better feeling about the chances that what you write is being read by the intended reader.  Much better than say, commenting on a person’s blog or posting to a forum somewhere.  And the 140 limit really makes you think about what you are trying to say and forces conciseness . . . a skill I find I’m lacking and twitter is forcing me to get better.

Anyway, I’m late to the party and I kinda get the feeling that now that I get twitter all the cool people will be moving onto something else.   If it’s Google Wave, well, I’m already all over that and have been since it was announced so my guess is, Wave isn’t the next big thing!

Sheldon

A little background . . .

Joel Spolsky writes articles about software development and often times ends up saying that unit tests aren’t important because they don’t ship and take programmers away from writing more features or a new produce (well, that’s my less than 140 version of his stance on spending time doing unit tests).  Rob Conery, a former Microsoft employee that also write articles about software development wrote an article about how Joel is hurting the industry and needs to shut up.  Below is my response that I left in Rob’s blog.  Rob even responded!

I’m an apologist . . . I admire both of them.  As a debater I can take either side!

But Jim said something that stuck with me and that is we need people on the far left and the far right of issues so that we can pull the reasonable people toward the middle and reach a consensus.  If there are no crazy people on the left then you end up with solutions that lean right!

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I read “duct tape programmers” and came away thinking Joel was putting down programmers who used the duct tape method of getting things done even though that’s exactly the opposite of what was there.  Maybe that’s because I’ve read all these articles from him about how important the craft is and how writing maintainable code is so important and blah blah blah.  And now Zawinski is a hero for not caring about any of that?!?

I think the point of the article is that a) anyone who cares about what they do wants to do things the “right” way and b) doing it the right way gets in the way of shipping.  Strive for the golden mean!

Oh yeah, lets not forget about the secret that the “right” way isn’t defined and never will be because things change so much and once we figure out the right way someone is going to come along with something cooler, faster, easier.  Damn you Ruby!  Damn you Python!  And of course, damn you C# . . . you are so much safer than C but C is the right way . . . it’s the only way . . . and Joel said if I don’t know C I am useless!

Sheldon

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Yesterday I checked the status of my House Party application for the Windows 7 Launch Party I was hyping up with several friends and was *sorely* disappointed to see a red dot and something about how it wasn’t going to happen and how there were lot of applicants and they were sorry blah blah blah.  I had been thinking about my funny retort and how MS dropped the ball once again!  I was going to use the following key phrases:

• LAN Party
• Carne Asada (thin sliced marinated beef for the people not from AZ)
• XBOX 360 Halo with 4 players!  I have 4 controllers already.
• Try to convince a friend to bring his flat screen and XBox 360 for 8 player action!
• At least 3 of my computers set up with Windows 7 (for demos and maybe we can play Halo or some other game with the XBox people) and a few others set up for some AoE action late in the night!
• I already have a Kegerator with Kiltlifter and it’s more than 50% full!

It was going to be an epic post!  But then look what happened:

I’m an “Active Applicant”!  Don’t let me down Microsoft!

Sheldon

P.S.  I know MS has no control over getting me a party invite but I’m going to blame them anyway if I don’t get in.

My sister and I are both using LoseIt for the iPhone to track our calories.  You tell it what you eat,  it tells you how many calories you have left.   We’ve decided to spot-check each other to stay honest, and I found this exchange particularly amusing.

A humorous exchange w/ my sister about dieting.

Gmail changed my life and I have no right to complain . . . but this is driving me crazy!

I try to block people (using the chat interface there on the left) and it doesn’t work . . . they still show up and can see I’m online and then when I go back to check they are not blocked.   Plus, people that have more than one email address show up on the chat list several times I guess once for every email address.  That’s annoying but I can deal with it.

It all happened around the time that Google Contacts came out (even before the cool, easy to remember URL).  I wish I could submit a bug report or something.

UPDATE:  I just tried to block again to verify it wasn’t working and now it looks like it *IS* working.  We’ll see though.  Now I just need to figure out who is blocked and who isn’t.

Sheldon

Jim and I occasionally talk about programming by email where I’ll ask a question or describe a situation and he’ll tell me I’m wrong.  And sometimes he’ll email me asking about some old programming language and I’ll rattle off some stuff and he’ll gleam enough to remember the right answer.  It works great because later on when he needs help with his sprinkler system or some problem with his toilet or a ceiling fan I’m right there with the magic fix!

Anyway, today I had a question about “constraints” in c# and his answer was awesome! So I told him we should post it to stackoverflow.com but that we should reformat the question so it doesn’t look like I’m a dumb ass.

Jim proposed that he post my question and that I post his answer . . .  so that’s what we did. I hope my boy Jeff doesn’t get mad and take it down!  I need the rep Jeff!

I wish I could post the original email because it’s pretty funny but I’d have to cut though the inside jokes that are funny to us but probably offensive to outsiders. I’m sure Google will make it public and search-able someday!

Sheldon

P.S.  No, I don’t know Jeff Atwood (used full name so that his ego search will find this) but he replied to my email once so now we are best friends.

Google Checkout is evil.  No, seriously.  Bad newz!

Whenever I see a site where I can buy something with Google Checkout I know it’s going to be easy and I won’t have to enter my billing address and my shipping address and my cc number and one more password for a site that I’ll never go to again.  It’s too easy.  I know PayPal provides about the same service but for some reason I never ran into Paypal very often.

So just now I just spent $15 at some online retailer and it was too easy . . . if I would have had to sign up for some new account and entered all my data I would have thought twice and never spent that $15.  Damn you Google Checkout!

Sheldon