Hardware updates and thoughts on ATI drivers

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:58:00 -0700

As some of you know, I've been plagued with hardware issues for the last several weeks. It started with innocent enough issues -- old gear finally starting to show its wear. What started as me just trying to keep my office up and running, quickly turned into a much more involved (and more expensive) project than I initially intended. But now it appears to be done. *knocks on wood* Dell sent a WORKING computer on Monday (the first one arrived DOA), and though the initial phone rep I spoke to had bad information (FYI: Inspirons do NOT ship with built-in DVI video -- it's VGA only), I was eventually up and running....albeit after more trips to Frys than I ever thought imaginable in a 3 week period! :) Speaking of Frys, I just returned with the last of the upgrades -- 2 sticks of RAM and an ATI video card (the NVidia GeForce had some issue with my mobo and would cause the screen to go black for a few seconds). Both RAM and the ATI card installed on the first try with no issues. So far so good, now to install the ATI video drivers... Oh my GAWD! When did flippin' video drivers become such mammoth creatures!?!? I put the CD in the drive, clicked through the initial screens, and it began spinning. That's when I noticed all the piles and piles of things getting installed to my machine. First, a box popped up saying "installing .NET 2.0". Really? We need the entire .NET framework just for a video driver?! That means the driver was probably written in C# or VB. What happened to the days of drivers being C or Assembly? Don't they HAVE to be low-level code? I mean, it's a driver! Then a box appeared saying "installing localization...FR, EN, SP, IT..." and probably 10 other languages. By DEFAULT! So with no prompting from me, ATI decided I needed drivers for 10+ languages installed to the box? That seems like an odd choice to me, and I would have been happy to pick my "preferred language" from a drop-down instead. Also during the installation, not one, but TWO messages appeared letting me know that the driver has not passed the Windows Certification tests, and I'm prompted with the "do you want to continue anyway, or stop the installation" message. It was around this time that I noticed the version number of said driver going on to my computer included the phrase "RC2", as in "release candidate 2". Did I get a beta driver in the box? Seems kind of fishy, but maybe that's just my old-school style showing through. Alas, so far it seems to be working, which is more than the NVidia card did. After hooking up the printer, I should be back to 100% and able to actually, ya know, work again. :) /ranting -n

.NET useful for something? egads!

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:22:00 -0700

Well I'll be damned, I actually found .NET useful for something today... At my "day job", I needed to generate a basic "site map" of the company intranet. While I prefer to spec these out in Visio so they are more aesthetically pleasing, this particular site is way too big for that to be an option. After determining that all I really needed was a recursive directory search, with some HTML formatting to make the output readable, I fired up Visual Studio 2005¹. Including quickly spec'ing out my design, it took between 2 and 3 hours to whip out a solution. I try not to be totally bias toward or against programming languages; I'm a big believer in "pick the right tool for the right job". That being said, it is not often that I find .NET is actually the best solution for my tasks (almost always for web development, I get the most bang for my buck via ColdFusion). However in this case, the 100 lines of C# code worked quite nicely, and didn't take too much time (or pain) to implement. :)

Actually I started doing this in ColdFusion, and would have continued (requiring about the same amount of effort for my end result), however this particular shop is phasing out their ColdFusion usage (boo) and going to .NET. So in the interest of following the shop standard, I switched to the aforementioned .NET idea

Tales From The Trenches - .NET

Hardware updates and thoughts on ATI drivers

.NET useful for something? egads!