Earlier this week, I turned on XM Radio in the car and was greeted with a "No Signal" warning -- and dead air. This had happened once or twice before in the last four years and fixing it involved a call to XM's Customer Support line, waiting on hold for far too long, and then dealing with some of the worst support staff I've ever experienced.

Both times, they "sent a signal to reset" the radio and it was fine within 10 minutes or so. But it took phone calls of 20-30 minutes to get there.

So I was dreading making that phone call once I got to work and decided I'd use Google to see if it's possible to request this "reset" online. No dice, but in searching I found that the entire XM system was down. That saved me a phone call, I suppose.

A day or two later, I got an email explaining that they had "resumed normal levels of service" and apologizing for the inconvenience. Apparently, some software update in a satellite went bad and it took hours to get the problem resolved. "Sorry, our bad."

The truth is, I didn't really miss it. Sure, I enjoy the programming when I have it... but the truth is that I find myself listening to my iPod far more often than I listen to XM. Many of the channels I listen to on XM are NOT commercial free (news/talk channels from other organizations) and the channels that are (XM's own music channels) increasingly have too much DJ chatter and advertisements for programming on other channels. And their exclusive content (such as Major League Baseball, Oprah, and until recently, the Opie and Anthony show) has never interested me much at all.

On the other hand, I still dig listening to podcasts on the iPod and there's no shortage of new ones coming out all the time. I've also been using the "Smart Playlists" feature of iTunes more often, which helps get me playlists that are very focused on the things I most enjoy listening to. Plus, I can use the iPod in places that my XM SkyFi currently doesn't work, such as while exercising, in planes, and so on.

Their handling of this outage is further making me re-think my subscription to the service. Not only was their never a notice on their web site (the logical place for many people to turn when they have problems with their radio -- if only to get the support phone number), but they're apparently offering a pittance of a refund. Engadget reports that they'll refund about $.87 to customers due to the system outage -- but only if you call in and request it.

Yeah... my experience with XM wait times is such that sitting on hold to ask for $.87 is a money-losing proposition. On an hourly basis, I'd make more money sewing clothes for Kathy Lee Gifford. To say nothing of the incompetent staff on the other end of the phone. The right thing to do here is to just automatically deduct the $.87 from next month's charge for anyone who was affected by the outage (XM implies it wasn't everyone by saying it affected an "undisclosed number of customers").

I like (not love... not need... just like) XM Radio... but their competition extends far beyond potential-merger-mate Sirius Radio. Their competition is with iPods and every other MP3 player. It's with PSPs, laptops, home media centers, Tivo, game consoles, and every other way in which media can be delivered to me.

At $12.95 a month, it may just be losing that competition for my money. I'll definitely be paying attention to how much XM-specific content I listen to over the next few weeks.

  Technorati: xm radio, satellite radio, customer service, podcasting, portable audio

I've used Firefox for a couple of years now... but with its rich support for extensions and themes, it's the browser that never stops evolving.

This weekend, I happened upon a very cool bit of functionality that's actually built right into the browser's search bar - no extension required. To check it out, click in the default search box (or use CTRL+K to put your cursor there) and make sure that Google is your current search engine (CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN will cycle through your installed search engines).

Now try typing some of these, without hitting enter:

• 54^3
• 100 cm in inches
• sqrt 4096

Because of the auto-fill capability in that search box (which suggests searches as you type), these expressions and conversions get calculated and returned on the fly. Given that most people have a web browser window open all the time, you can't get much more convenient than this.

Here's a blog post that provides some other Google tips that you may not be aware of. I've used most of these for a while, and not all work on the fly like the expressions above, but checking time in foreign cities and getting quick movie showtimes were cool new ones for me.

On a related note, here are some of the must-have extensions that I install with any new Firefox setup:

del.icio.us Extension -- The new 1.5 version replaces the built-in Firefox bookmark capability by adding a sidebar with dynamic tags and swapping the built-in bookmark keyboard shortcuts. Note that your standard bookmarks aren't touched and are always available.

Flashblock -- Blocks Flash objects from appearing in any web page. Instead, you get a little Flash logo that you can click if you decide you want to see the Flash app. Makes the web a LOT less "blinky."

Google Toolbar for Firefox -- Provides one-click access to all sorts of Google searches and properties. Turn on the Suggest feature and you get the same "suggest" functionality described above.

IE Tab -- Some sites just don't behave well in Firefox. This extension lets you open a site in a new tab that hosts Internet Explorer right inside the tab. No need for a separate IE window!

Send Tab URLs -- When I'm researching something, I will sometimes have a LOT of tabs open. This extension creates an email message with the title and URL for all current open tabs. Very useful when you want to send some research to others or when you want to send some links to the office or home.

Tab Mix Plus -- Lets you control all sorts of settings around tabbed browsing and managing tab sessions.

Tabs Menu -- Couldn't be simpler. Adds a "Tabs" menu to the menu bar, with a dynamic list of current tabs under the menu. Very useful when you're trying to navigate a ton of tabs.

  Technorati: firefox, search, web search, extensions

I'm testing the latest FeedDemon 2.5 beta build and ran across a problem where an empty <STRONG> block in the middle of a post caused the Newspaper view to get out of whack. This post will have a similar empty block, so I'm hoping that the issue (which is described here) will re-appear.

This post from Phil Haack points to Charles Petzold's concern that "prose is dead" in technical books. The concern was based on Jeff Atwood's comparison of two different WPF development books. Wow, how's that for name dropping? Three names in two sentences. I ought to point out that I have a great deal of respect for Charles, Jeff, and Phil and all three write blogs that are in my must-read list.

As shown in Jeff's comparison, one book (Petzold's) has large blocks of uninterrupted text and appears to be entirely monochrome, while the other book (by Adam Nathan) has smaller blocks of text and makes liberal use of color and visuals.

I agree with Phil's commentary about "visual learning," and his pointer to the excellent "Head First" books is spot-on, but I actually think there's an even more important thing to consider here. That's the subject matter... in this case, the topic of both books is the new Windows Presentation Foundation API that's a part of the .NET 3.0 release. I find Petzold's statements that "Powerpoint has won" and the "battle for the future of written communication is over" to be a bit unfair. It implies that readers are looking for visuals alone or that well-written communication is no longer important.

Anyone who has seen a WPF sample application knows that this is not the same ol' Win32 GUI toolset. In the hands of a talented designer, it's shiny. It's pretty. It glows. It makes you want to look at it... is it unreasonable to prefer a book that conveys the same feeling?

It's also worth noting that the bar for information presentation has been raised over the past few years. As computer users become more familiar with different types of data visualization, and as flashy UIs like Vista's Aero take hold, expectations for UI are higher. Even in a typical "line of business" application, it may not be enough any more to use the same old Windows UI toolkit. You could certainly argue that it's possible to build an efficient, intuitive, and fast application using the same Windows UI tools we've used for nearly 15 years. No question. But few applications compete only in their specific market or product area. Most are competing for attention with other applications on the user's machine. Or with a massive web designed, in many cases, by some very talented designers. If you want customers to enjoy using your application, as opposed to feeling like it's drudgery, spending some time (and money) on its appearance and visualization is critical.

Now replace "using your application" with "reading your book". 

I've not read either book yet (though I plan to do so shortly, thanks to the O'Reilly Safari Library subscription -- highly recommended), but I don't think it's unreasonable that Jeff (or anyone else) prefers the book that has more visuals. A book whose purpose is to introduce a "Presentation" framework probably ought to have the presentation of its content made a higher priority than would a book discussing some "under the hood" technology (say, the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF). In a book that covers UI controls, gradients, and different layout options, I'd probably like to see... UI controls, gradients, and different layout options.

That's NOT to say that the communication of ideas and information aren't the highest priority. No amount of visual flash will makes up for poorly-written, poorly-edited, or poorly-communicated content (and that's the true evil of Powerpoint). And few are as well-regarded as Petzold when it comes to communicating difficult technical content in a way that's easy to understand and put into practice. An entire generation of Windows programmers, including myself, was "raised" on his Programming Windows titles. I'm certain that I'll find his book well-written and that it'll provide useful information on WPF.

But it's not hard to see why some would prefer a book that presents a presentation framework in a presentable way... is it?

  Technorati: infoporn, data visualization, wpf, user interface, technical books, publishing

Last night, I mentioned that I was mostly happy with the Vista upgrade. One thing, however, that is standing out for me as a major annoyance is its insistence on treating ZIP files as folders in Window Explorer.

In the left pane where folders appear, ZIP files are treated as if they were subfolders of the folder in which they appear. I can see why some people might prefer this behavior -- you can, after all, just click on the ZIP file as if it were a folder and the right pane will display the files within the ZIP archive.

The problem for me is that I have some folders that contain a hundred or more ZIP files. When I navigate to those folders in Explorer, the folders pane on the left suddenly becomes very long and unwieldy. When there are just a few ZIP files in a folder (as in the screenshot above), then it's not a problem... but when the entire folder pane gets taken over by ZIP files, it sucks. Navigation becomes very inefficient.

Under XP, this could be taken care of by unregistering a DLL at the command line:

regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll

Under Vista, you'll get barked at if you try this:

The module "zipfldr.dll" was loaded but the entry-point DllUnregisterServer was not found. Make sure that "zipfldr.dll" is a valid DLL or OCX file and then try again.

I've Googled around quite a bit and perused the Vista-related newsgroups, but have yet to come across an answer... though there appears to be no shortage of people asking the same question. I've got both WinRAR and WinZIP 11 on the machine (yes, both are licensed and paid for) and associating either of those with ZIP files doesn't make the view-as-folders thing go away. It just changes which app opens them when you double-click a ZIP and which icon is used to identify them (WinZIP in the above screenshot.

Note: It does seem that there are lots of people who have broken Vista's built-in handling of ZIP files and need to get those files re-associated with the Vista handler. This appears to be resolved by opening a command window as an administrator and running this command:

assoc .zip=CompressedFolder

Any advice on getting this resolved?

  Technorati: Windows Vista, ZIP, Explorer

I've been meaning to re-pave my home machine for a couple of months now. It had a ton of stuff installed, uninstalled, updated, and so on... plus, as I mentioned previously, I'd been toying with the idea of pushing it up to Vista Ultimate. Well, after getting those hardware problems taken care of, I went for it.

It's actually been a pretty smooth process, though it seems like a re-pave takes longer each time I do it. And it's not just getting all those apps installed... it's also all the little settings, utilities, checkboxes, and customizations. It really does take a while to get a new rebuild to feel "comfortable".

One thing I've done for the last few years that does make this process a LOT easier is to organize my hard drives into multiple partitions. I've typically done this with Partition Magic, though there are are other alternatives that seem to get high praise. I keep all the stuff that I don't want lost in a rebuild on that second partition (seen as a D: drive). Under WinXP, I'd move the "My Documents" location with TweakUI (Vista has this capability built-in), I make sure to put SQL Server's data location over there, and obviously any development projects. It makes it a lot easier knowing that C: can be wiped clean and rebuilt without losing the stuff I care about.

I just wish there was a way to also back up all those little settings and customizations that get made over time (e.g., my preferred layout/view for file Explorer, various registry hacks, and customized views in Outlook).

Anyway, I had this drive partitioned already from the initial XP setup... so moving to Vista was pretty easy. I'd actually like to make my C: partition a little larger (D: has lots of free space) and I was excited to learn that Vista has partition resizing/moving built-in. It's under the Computer Management MMC plugin through Control Panel->Admin Tools. It turns out, though, that Vista doesn't let you extend a bootable partition (e.g., my C: drive) -- only shrink it. I'm sure there's legacy some reason for this, but given that it's a basic capability in 3rd party tools like Partition Magic and others, it seems silly that Vista won't let me. To make matters worse, I hear stories of people using Partition Magic to create NTFS partitions and then Vista can't read them. Not cool... but space isn't that big an issue, so I'm looking at those other options.

All in all, the process went smoothly and nearly all of my hardware had drivers installed automatically. The one exception was the built-in SD card reader on this laptop. The cool thing, though, was that Vista saw the problem and notified me of a solution -- updated drivers were available through Dell's site. Everything else installed and has been working well and performance is great -- the machine definitely feels snappier than it did under WinXP.

As a reference for the scores above, the machine is a dual core Inspiron (T2500 processor at 2GHz) with 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 (using Microsoft's WDDM driver at 1920x1200), and a 7200rpm Seagate Momentus drive. The display performance, in particular, has been great and Aero looks gorgeous with the bright TrueLife (glossy) widescreen display.

Vista's got a ton of UI tweaks, so maneuvering around has taken a little getting used to... and I have to admit to turning off UAC. Maybe I'll turn it back on now that most everything is installed and settled, but how many "Yes, I'm sure" buttons does a guy need to click? I'm still trying to get used to the newer Explorer UI and I wish I could get the Sidebar and its gadgets to Auto-Hide (the way the Task bar can)... but I really dig the ability to quickly search the Start menu.

Overall, I still feel like I'm settling in... but all my apps and tools are installed and things seem well. Now I'm going to go watch some fancy window animations for a while.

  Technorati: Windows Vista, Microsoft, Setup, Installation, Dell, Inspiron

So my home/personal machine decided to take a nose dive a few weeks ago and I'm just now getting to the point that it feels "whole" again.

It's a Dell Inspiron E1705 (same as the 9400) and I'd been running WinXP Pro on it since I bought it last summer. I'd been meaning to update it to Vista at some point, so I started making some backups and taking notes on various app/driver compatibilities. All seemed well, but during that process it began to spontaneously reboot. No warning, no nothing -- just a sudden, blank screen and then the Dell boot-up sequence.

The first time it happened, I figured it was a fluke-ish thing. Then it happened again a few days later and then twice in one day. Finally, it got to the point that booting into Safe Mode only worked intermittently and I began to get a BSOD that talked about hardware malfunctions. Not good.

So I call Dell and they decide that it's a CPU problem. According to the tech, it seemed that the CPU was overheating and after doing it once or twice it would just get flakier and less stable. The machine does run hot, but I'm always careful to run it with the vents and fan outlets unblocked.

Anyway, he says they'll ship one out and have a technician come over to replace it. I bought the machine with "Next Day, On-Site" service. Turns out that they mean "the next day after the part you need arrives in the hands of your local technician." Pretty lame, but I could live without the machine for a day or three.

Once the tech came out and installed the new CPU, I burned the machine in for quite a while to see how it would behave. All seemed well, so I went for it... popped in the Vista install disc and went to town.

Two weeks of heavy use since then and still no real problems. Do I trust it? Still not sure... but that warranty coverage is in place for a few more years so even the worst case scenario doesn't have to be all bad.

One nice upside is that the Dell support tech that I got (late on a Sunday night, no less) was great. He was based in Salt Lake City and didn't go through the usual "First, let's reboot" script once he realized that I'd spent some time troubleshooting. He even gave me direct contact info later "so if you need to call back, you don't get routed through India." Nice!

  Technorati: Dell, Inspiron, BSOD, Tech Support

Just over a week ago, I came across this posting on the 37Signals blog that discusses some of the resources they used to populate testing databases for their new product, Highrise. Given that this product is a contact manager, they wanted contact names with details... and lots of 'em. In the comments to that post, "Jes" mentioned yet another resource -- the "Fake Name Generator" web site. He mentioned that you get full contact details for a fake identity and that you could get up to 20,000 for free. Hmm.

This interested me because I always like getting hold of useful data to tinker with on side projects. One of my passions in development is for data visualization, or "infoporn," so the more data to look at, the better. I've downloaded data that includes the Netflix Prize data set, the Enron internal emails released by FERC, and geo-coded zipcode lists. You never know what might be useful, right?

But now you're thinking... "if those contacts are fake, then why would they be interesting?"

The reason is that the person/people behind the Fake Name Generator have gone out of their way to make it credible-looking fake data. For example,

• The cities match the states.
• The zip codes match the cities.
• The area codes (mostly) match the zip codes (I found a Bakersfield area code with an LA zip code).
• The names are more than just random letters and resemble names you'd find in any US-based list of contacts.

Having a set of data like this greatly improves the testing of code that works with contact details. Who among us developers hasn't created fake records for "Donald Duck", "John Smith", and "Joe Blow"?

My understanding is that the data is created from various legitimate sources, but the values across columns are randomized -- so that someone's real first name is used with someone else's last name, someone else's address, someone else's city, and so on. A few searches turn up other discussions of this data, including a set of contacts uploaded to Swivel.

The data is provided free for up to 20,000 fake identities, provided that you're willing to wait up to a week to download your data. If you need it sooner, you pay $10US to expedite the process.

A few other cool things about this service:

• You can specify which columns you'd like in your data, including credit card numbers (fake - but numerically valid), SSN/National ID numbers (also fake - but numerically valid), and gender.
• Email addresses use domains from various temporary email services (mailinator.com, mytrashmail.com, etc). Again, they validate but aren't useful as anything other than test data.
• You can get the data in various formats, including HTML, Excel XLS, SQL script, or delimited text files.
• You can specify the countries and name types for your data... so if you need some data that includes Swiss addresses and Hispanic name sets, you could request it.

I also found the data to be reasonably well distributed, at least in the US-centric set of data I received. For example, across 20,000 contacts, I found:

• The bulk of addresses were in California, Texas, and New York. The fewest were in Wyoming, Delaware, and New Hampshire. I had one record whose state was 'NN' -- ??
• Most surnames started with the letters M, S, and B. The letters with fewest surnames were X, Q, and U.
• The zipcode with the largest set of contacts was 90017 (Los Angeles), but the Area Code with the most contacts was 703 (Virginia). As I dug in further, it seemed somewhat logical because the LA area has numerous area codes spread across it.
• Social security numbers had starting numbers that were evenly distributed from 0 to 6 (2500-3500 each), with just 700 of them beginning with the number 7. There were none that started with the number 8 or 9. I learned on this CodeProject article that SSNs beginning with 9 are reserved for special government use (Witness Protection, I'm sure... hah!), but I'm not sure why there were none starting with an 8.

Anyway, I've been impressed. It's an interesting service and seems worth bookmarking/tagging the site for later... you never know when you'll need a bunch of bogus (but real looking!) data.

Note: I've got no affiliation with this site whatsoever, aside from requesting a set of 20K fake identities and getting an email with download details a week later.

Technorati tags: data, identity, development, infoporn