Infinite State

After running smoothly for about 2 years my homegrown Quiet PC desktop died. At first I thought it was a power supply problem, but swapping a new one in showed the same failure: it would shut down after running for less than a minute. Sometimes it wouldn’t start up. I gave serious thought to just buying the cheapest thing Dell sells but found a close match for the motherboard and ordered it. For $150 I got a 2.4GHz Celeron on a Gigabyte mobo that would take my old RAM. The trick, of course, was to get my install of Windows XP Pro to accept the transplant without having to re-install…

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I used to think programming was about abstraction, and then I got into architecture, and I realized it was upstream from that. The deeper I go into requirements, the more I see that architecture is down from these abstractions we elicit from an organization.

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I wish I’d heard about this one earlier. For those who don’t already know, Alt-PrtScn captures just the active window, whereas Ctl-PrtScn grabs the whole desktop. Of course, the OneNote snipping tool with SP1 is even more flexible…

I had to send back my second Jabra FreeSpeak. The battery life on the first one was incredibly short and worsened rapidly. The second one seemed a bit better but deteriorated even more quickly. Worse, when the power runs down, the headset just slows down, distorts sound, leaves you dangling. This time, the Jabra support person didn’t seem very surprised to hear from me and announced they were sending out a different model — I guess they have replaced the old model with something a bit more…powerful? I hope so. Clearly, I am an optimist where information technology is concerned.

I have heard good things about the Motorola unit, but there’s no way I’m buying another cell product from them.

I took the dive and tried XP SP2 for my Tablet PC (main computer) and desktop PC. Both came through fine, with no compatibility issues. The improvements for the Tablet PC are significant, with a much-improved text-entry UI and I’d swear the recognition is improved as well.

Obviously, YMMV but it’s been solid for me so far. The SP1 for OneNote is also excellent as it seems to have fixed some bugs and added a built-in clipping tool. This one only seems to do rectangular clips (unlike the earlier Snipping Tool power toy) but you can also record video directly into notes and it is synched with your text as audio was before.

Clearly those OneNote folks are having a good time with their Tablets.