Brian Kohrs’ Blog

For some bizarre reason, Microsoft came up with this new idea on how to better use the function keys on their keyboards. Since most users never use them, why not make them have special meanings. F2 should undo, F3 should redo, F5 should open, etc. I am sure that there is at least one user out there that actually likes this behavior, but for those of us who use the function keys all the time, it is really annoying. I can’t count the number of times that I have pressed a function key, and suddenly I am staring at an open dialog instead of my browser refreshing. Fixing it is as simple as pressing the F-Lock key, but unfortunately this setting does not survive a reboot, or even a log out.

A couple of months ago, I looked around to see if I could find a way to disable the F-Lock key, but the only thing I found was a registry file that was supposed reverse the state of the F-Lock key so that it would be off by default. Installing that registry key caused my function keys to stop working entirely, so no luck there.

Today, I googled around a bit and found a much better workaround. There is an xml configuration file that contains information about what to do when a function key is pressed, simply cleaning out that file will remove the F-Lock feature, fixing your function keys for good. One thing worth noting is that it requires at least a log out before this fix will work.

No wonder they were on clearance.

This creature of legend is rumored to inhabit the great plains of North America. This rabbit is a close relative to the Rabbit with Big Pointy Teeth that inhabits the cave of Caerbannog. While very few of these rabbits have been spotted, they are rumored to have a taste for the wiring of Chevy Impalas. Stalking its prey for days on end, it strikes soon after the owner leaves the vehicle, but while the engine is still warm. It then enters the engine to strike at the heart of the Impala. After chewing on the wires for hours, it finally kills its prey, rendering it useless to its owner.

This creature has only been spotted a couple of times, but was never photographed until recently when one lucky individual was able to capture a grainy picture of it.

Not giving up its prize easily, the rabbit battled with the owner before finally realizing that even though it could take down a mighty Impala, it could not defeat this mighty human warrior. It escaped underneath the remains of its prey, and has not been sighted again.

At work they were selling a bunch of the old PC’s, and since my dad was wanting a laptop, I picked one up for him. One of reasons that they are selling the machines is that they have no networking capability (another long story). My dad picked up a Linksys PCMCIA card, and asked me to install it so he could connect to the network. This should be easy to do, right?

So, I stick in the cd to install the drivers, and get a prompt that you need IE 5.5 or greater to install their software. So I go up to the Microsoft site on another computer that has networking ability and download the IE 6 setup program. After copying it to the laptop, I fire up the install, and it says that it will need to download 13.9MB of files in order to install. That is not going to work with no internet access.

Being a technically savvy individual, I take a peek at the cd. There is a folder with the drivers in it, so I stick the network card in and install the driver. Now Windows detects the card, but there is way to select a network to connect to. Looking at the cd, there is also a utility folder with a setup.exe in it. Launch the setup program and now had the Linksys software installed. I fire up the software, and it says that it is searching for a network, but it never finds anything. This is not going very well so far.

Since my manual installation fails, I uninstall everything and start looking at trying to get an installation of IE 6 that does not require any downloading on the install computer. After a bit of googling I found this site. It seems that if you pass super special parameters to the installation, it will allow you to download all of the files that are needed. After copying all of these to the laptop, I install IE 6 successfully. I then run the official Linksys setup program, and everything works just fine.

We have had a performance issue floating around at work where one operation was taking about 15-25 times longer than it did on previous versions. Obviously an issue that needed to be addressed. A couple of months ago, when we first identified the slowdown, we wrote a story card to find out how to speed it up.

Pair #1 picked up the card, and identified a way to speed it up some, and implemented their idea. Well, it was a little faster, but it broke a bunch of tests. They go back in and make a couple more changes. Now only a few tests fail. Since we had already spent more time than we should have trying to fix the tests, we decide to back out the changes, and have another pair take a look at it.

Pair #2 makes similar changes, but this time they don’t break the tests. It speeds up the operation a bit, but it is still far slower than it should be. At this point we write up a card to see if there are any other ways that we can speed it up.

Pair #3 finds that the we are not accessing the database in the most efficient way, and implement changes to reduce the inefficiency. The operation is faster, but still not fast enough.

Then comes this week when we have Don Roberts in as a consultant. We figured that since this is why we bring in highly paid consultants, we should let him take a look at it. Sam and Don picked up the card and ran a profile to see where the slowdown was. Initially, looking at the profile generated no new ideas. Digging a little deeper, we found that it was updating around 1/3rd of the records in a table, much more than we would have expected. Bringing in our resident expert Kim, we find out that most of the values it was saving were values that we calculate anyway. So we change it to only save the values that we need to be able to calculate the others, and about 99% of the updates disappear. Now the operation is much closer, and in some cases faster than it was in previous versions.

This one issue is really a testament to the value of pair programming and the agile process. If we all programmed in our own little cubes, we probably would have eventually found the issue, but it would have taken so much more time.

I have to admit that Apple is really good at innovation and creating gadgets that just beg to be purchased. I have been able to resist them for the most part, but when the Nano came out, it was just to hard to restrain myself. The Nano was definitely worth the money, and it’s size is just awesome. The only drawback is its susceptibility to scratching. The front still looks great and you can only see the scratches if you are really looking for them. However, the scratches on the back are quite noticeable. Hopefully Apple will fix this with future Nano versions.

Well, my blog has been up just over two weeks, and now if I Google for my name, my blog is numero uno. Obviously Google is the better search engine, since neither Yahoo or MSN can find my blog yet.

About a month ago, I looked at using the music sharing feature of iTunes, but wasn’t able to get it to work. If I turned on sharing, I could then access the shared music once, the first time I opened iTunes on another computer. If I closed and re-opened, the music would no longer show up, but if I turned sharing off on my Mac, and then on again, the music would show up again. Very weird. My experience with Apple has been that most everything just works, so this seemed like really strange behavior to me.

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded to Tiger, and now sharing works flawlessly. Again, very weird. I don’t have any idea why it didn’t work before, or why upgrading fixed it, but it works now.

I finally bought Tiger and got it installed last night. No doubt that it was worth the money. I didn’t buy it right away because of the performance concerns with my mini, but that is not an issue at all. The upgrade went very smoothly, but I had to wonder why it needed to install all 14 some language packs, especially after it asks what language to install.

I got Safari to crash within five minutes, but after installing all of the software updates, I have had no problems. It is so much easier to install one update patch than it was when I re-installed XP on my PC a couple of months ago. One update patch as opposed to 17 patches so that I could install SP2, and then another 22 patches after that. Needless to say, Microsoft could learn a few things from Apple.

Some of the hightlights:

• Spotlight: Haven’t used it too much yet, but initial impressions are that it is superior to any other desktop search engines that I have used.
• Dashboard: One of the coolest features of Tiger, and since I waited a few months before getting it, there are already lots of cool widgets available.
• Finder: The new smart folders show a lot of promise.
• Mail: Love the new style. I never really did like the old layout, and the new interface seems a lot cleaner.

Ever since he started his blog last year, Joe has telling me that I needed to set up my own blog. I have always thought that I wouldn’t have very much to blog about, but several times in the last couple of weeks I have thought “if I only had a blog, I would write about this.” So here I am, entering into the world of blogging.