Mmmm...Tasty New Computer

For a project I’m working on, I’ve had to convert my laptop and my desktop/server to Windows 2003 Enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that video performance completely sucks under W2K3. For example, I haven’t been able to get Direct3D hardware acceleration working at all on my laptop. This has been making it painful to write my Direct3D tutorial series, as I can get at best three frames per second. On top of that, I want to do a little digital music work, and because Creative sucks when it comes to drivers, none of the advanced features of my Live! Platinum 5.1 work under Windows 2003, either. None of which was a problem with Windows XP on the same hardware.

I downloaded the trial of VMWare, but it didn’t help – 3D performance was still pitiful even running Windows XP, and the Creative XP drivers won’t install on a virtual machine. “Oh well,” I thought, “Time to get another computer – they’re cheap these days.” With the kind help of Brad Wilson, I was able to figure out what I wanted. A little poking around on the ‘net, and pretty soon I had found a winner:

INTEL, D865GBFL Motherboard Kit (Starts w/ INTEL P4 2.4 GHz)

 * INTEL, D865GBFL, Socket 478, Intel 865G, , DDR-400, HT, Lan. Audio, Retail
 * INTEL, Pentium 4 2.4B GHz, Socket 478, 512K, 533MHz, Retail
 * GENERIC, None Selected ( Fan is included if purchasing Retail CPU!)
 * MICRON, 512MB PC3200 DDR, 400MHz, Non-ECC
 * WESTERN DIGITAL, 80.0GB Caviar Ultra DMA/100 7200rpm, 8MB Cache, oem
 * ANTEC, Full Tower, Alluminum Deluxe, Black, 400 Watt PS, ATX 

All for only $600 including shipping, assembly, and testing, and this machine is twice as fast as anything I currently own, from Alvio. Intel motherboard, (and therefore Intel chipset), Intel CPU, so it’s quality parts.

Ordered Monday, arrived on Thursday. I don’t think I’ll ever buy a desktop from Dell again. I am a very pleased customer.

I also picked up a GeForce Ti 4200 for about $100. That has yet to arrive, but in the meantime the new machine has onboard video so I can get on with installing the OS.

ASP.NET Apps Without Web Projects

VS.NET Web Projects suck. If you’ve used them, you know this. Fritz has written up a little article that talks about how to create ASP.NET web pages and web services without using VS.NET web projects.  

Basically, he shows you how to enable the “Add Web Form” and “Add Web Service” wizards in a regular Library Project. That along with a few other small tweaks, and you’re ready to go.  

WordML to HTML XSLT

So I’d finally got my writing infrastructure in place, having slaved away over an XSLT to turn the new Word “Save as XML” XML into HTML (with help from Don), when I see this WordML to HTML XSLT. Nice. I’ll have to incorporate what bits I can when I get a chance to go back to it. It looks far more comprehensive than the one I wrote, though.  

A word of caution: this XSLT will not work if you’ve applied the Beta 2 Refresh. I’m not sure what all the changes are, but at the very least they’ve altered a few namespace URIs – that may be all, or it might be more.

Clemens Weighs in on AOP

I was out at The Daily Grind today (ego surfing my referrers log, of course) when I noticed this link to Clemens Vasters’ blog. In it, he discusses his experiences over the last year with his COM+-based aspect-like framework. A lot of it is about the guts of what he did, but towards the end he has some very interesting things to say about how hard it is to compose what are non-orthogonal services in an orthogonal manner. Sound familiar? J

"I told you so" implications aside, I have to say I find it very interesting to hear Clemens' viewpoint, since he's been hammering so hard on this problem for a year. I think his ideas around providing rollback semantics for aspects sounds like COM+ all over again, but he's been spending a lot of time in this space, so I'll be curious to see what he comes up with. Good luck Clemens!

Sign then Encrypt or Encrypt then Sign?

I was doing some research online at work today, trying to optimize
some of the security infrastructure I’ve been working on for my client. I ran
across this article in
my search to remember whether, when both signing and encrypting a message, one is
supposed to sign first or encrypt first. I knew that doing it one way was bad, but
couldn’t remember which was which.

The article goes on at length about the many issues around signature
and encryption, but I mostly want to point out the first part, where it talks about
why you should always sign first, then encrypt second.

I started a new book today

 Don has started a new book. His first sentence is a good one.
I have some idea what he’s writing about (but I’ll let him reveal that
in his own time), and I think it has the potential to shake up the way a lot of people
think. I’m looking forward to reading it!

Here's the first sentence:

 

Software lives at the boundary between objective
and subjective reality.

 

More to follow.

[Don
Box's Spoutlet]

Escaping and Learning

 The discussion over on Sam’s
Wiki about the future of RSS continues. I wish I had the cycles to follow this
more closely, but Tim Bray has this writeup about one of the interesting issues being
discussed:

This entry is specifically about a particular
technical issue in the next-gen syndication-format design
exercise, but more generally about the wonderful experience of getting a better
understanding of complicated things. The lesson continues... update #1 (skip to end)....

[ongoing]