Drevlan’s Blog

Using the Internet at the Rosen Centre Hotel is proving very challenging. I keep on getting interruptions in my connection to the point where I have to reset my network card unplug and replug the cable to get back onto the Internet. The web experience once I am connected isn’t much better, for example movies from sites like YouTube and Microsoft Videos are jumpy and remoting into my box at home feels like I’m on a 33.6kbps modem (remember those days? I do) yet when I run a speedtest I see these fantastic results

as a test I also just downloaded Windows Vista Service Pack 1 a 434MB download in 3 minutes and 15 seconds at 2.22 MB/sec. So what the hell? These are decent speeds out to the web and yet the experience for the most part is just horrible.

It looks like they have decent back-end equipment too, I was able to determine that the gateway I use to the Internet is a Cisco 7301 ISG which is a decent router afaik so it’s not like they’re spending lots of money on a Internet connection with piss poor back-end equipment.

Oh well I’m only here another 6 days and the Internet has been complimentary during my 3 week stay here so I suppose I cannot complain to much. I just wish the Internet at hotels were much better. When you’re spending hundreds of dollars a day on a room and then charged $10-$15 for Internet you should expect great service right?

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Late last night out in front of my house just off the sidewalk was this guy

It looks like your typical Northwestern Garter Snake but I could be wrong. He wasn’t very active and just sat there against the curb for a good half hour or so before he slithered away down the street. Personally I would have rather been in the grass but I guess he didn’t mind the rocky terrain :)

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A few months ago I was running the network in the Microsoft booth and tents at CES 2008. Channel 10’s Nic Fillingham was doing some behind the scenes footage of the booth and happened to interview me! You can check out the 10 minute video here, my moment of fame comes at the 6 minute mark just after he gets done interviewing a co-worker of mine Eric Schaar.

I think it could have went a lot better but it wasn’t horrible and while I can’t remember the whole thing it looks like they cut some of the discussion out, probably with good reason. It’s a pretty uncomfortable position to be put in on the spot and the light on the camera I think dubs as a mind numbing device :) but nonetheless I’m glad Nic found the tape and posted the video!

Direct Video Link

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By default, Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Windows Server 2008 systems use a KMS (Key Management Service) server to activate against if you did not provide a product key during the setup phase (i.e. you just clicked Next when prompted to input a key). However, say you have a few systems that are currently configured with MAKs (Multiple Activation Key) and now you want those systems to activate against your KMS server instead. Or you’re creating unattended deployments for any of the Vista and Server 2008 SKUs and don’t want to have to input a product key during the deployment. How do you accomplish this?

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Currently my favorite utility is VMware Workstation which is a powerful desktop virtualization application geared toward developers, testers and IT professionals that need to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on single machine. Two of the features that I like the most are the snapshot and teaming features.

With the snapshot feature you’re able to create frozen states within the environment that you’re working on and then make some changes like install a service pack or some application you want to try out. Then if your changes destroy your environment or you need to test doing those changes a different way you’re able to revert back to the snapshot that you took earlier.

With the team feature you’re able to create environments where a group of virtual pcs (VPC) can interact with each other over their own isolated LAN segmented networks, which you’re able to throttle so you can emulate a dial-up link between them or a DS3 or whatever. You’re also able to do things like turn on all of the VPCs in that team on at the same time or have delays put in so they startup staggered. A very cool feature with a lot of possibilities.

VMware is now working on Workstation 6.5 which will have another great feature called Unity which will allow you to integrate guest applications with your host OS which I think is going to do a lot for backwards compatibility in running older applications. ChipLog has a couple great write-ups about this new feature check it out here and here.

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I use Windows Media Player for playing most of my media files because for the most part it works flawlessly with the limited amount of media files I do have to play with. I used to use WinAMP until Nullsoft was bought out and AOL destroyed it, and I have VLC installed but I have a lot of interlace issues with it that I don’t see with WMP and it’s determined to run on my primary monitor instead of one of my secondary monitors.

So while WMP works well for me it isn’t without it’s quirks and one of those that has been really annoying me of late is that when you tell it to quit the GUI disappears but what you were listening or watching continues to blast through your speakers. Under further investigation you’ll notice that the wmplayer.exe is still running in the background and you’ll have to use the task manager to end the process.

Looking on the web I’ve come up short of finding a solution but more speculation and one of those being an issue with a installed codec. I’m wondering if anyone else has been troubled by this and found a solution? If so please do share :)

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Back when Microsoft first released the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 I went and purchased one so I could enjoy movies in HD on my 65″ RPTV. I couldn’t be happier with the drive which also works as a portable HD-DVD player for my laptop or one of my desktops and the movies, like the Matrix trilogy, couldn’t look and sound better. If it were up to me I would have stayed with HD-DVD with its cheaper manufacturing, superb picture and audio quality and a format that was already finalized and not still being developed like the Blu-Ray counterpart. However, for whatever reason the rest of my consumer pals thought Blu-Ray was a better choice and HD-DVD lost the format war and we’re now stuck paying a premium on Blu-Ray movies now.

Because of this loss and Best Buy’s commitment to giving their customers the right technology they’ve decided to send all of their customers who purchased an HD-DVD player a $50 gift card. They’re also offering to allow you to trade-in your HD-DVD player and movies for more gift card money. While I’ll be keeping my players and movies I think the $50 gift card they sent me was well above and beyond the call of the duty. When I originally received the automated phone call that I was getting some kind of gift card for purchasing an HD-DVD player I was taken a bit by surprise but figured it would be some $5 or $10 gift card but a $50 gift card is really something.

This bit of customer appreciation goes a long way and is one of the main reasons I’ll continue to shop at Best Buy. I’ve never been treated wrongly there and of the tech stores that I shop they have some of the best service and protection plans I’ve seen. My only complaint is the constant “Do you need assistance?” from their sales floor staff, if they could fix that nagging and carry a bit more high-end tech stuff they’d have one hell of a store.

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I’m in Orlando for work and they put me up in the Rosen Centre Hotel which just so happens to be one of my least favorite hotels that I’ve stayed at. The rooms here is just terrible. I stayed here back in ‘05 when I came down for work and when I heard that we were going back to this hotel this year I cringed. There was hope that maybe they remodeled or cleaned up the place a bit but all of that was shot down when I opened the door to my room. Continue Reading »

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At work I’m asked a lot about what Drevlan means and where it comes it from and to be honest I don’t know. I came up with the name a number of years ago when I was in middle school or early high school while playing FieryMUD a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) with my Dad and Brother.

I used to go with the name Baxter on this game which I got off these boxes my Mom would bring home to help house my loose computer components like floppy diskettes and things. However, my Baxter character file got corrupt and they had to generate a new character for me and so I had to come up with a new name. I used a character name generator for MUDs and one of the hundreds of names it generated was Drevlan. At the the time I thought it was a decent name and it hadn’t been used on the Internet much which makes it easy to carry the name with me through different services, now it’s almost like a second name for me kind of like Neo was to Thomas A. Anderson in the movie The Matrix.

Anyway so that’s it, that’s how I ended up with Drevlan.

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You can now get the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) for free as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) which is a package of tools and documentation designed to help IT professionals customize and deploy Windows, much like the OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK) helps OEMs customize and deploy Windows to new PCs.

WinPE used to only be available through the OPK which had a controlled distribution from Microsoft and so to feel the need of bringing WinPE functionality to the masses Bart Lagerweij created BartPE. However, now that WinPE is available from Microsoft to the masses you don’t really need BartPE unless you’re looking to run one of the many awesome plugins for the project. Continue Reading »

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