My daughter's Dell Inspiron 1150 fell victim once again to bargain basement laptop design and ended up
flat lined on my desk this weekend with its guts completely removed.

The Patient

The culprit was a week power receptacle that popped off the mother board and needed to be resoldered for a second time. 

The culprit

Unfortunately when my daughter has the laptop on her lap, the power cable sometimes gets upward pressure applied from her legs bumping the power cord.  With only weak solder holding the receptacle on the main board its no wonder this thing has popped off twice now.  My IBM Thinkpad would never have this problem, the receptacle on it is firmly attached to not only the mother board, like this Dell, but also the case - freaking brilliant!

Laptop Completely Disassembled

This time was going to be different.  This time I dremiled the case to make a bit more room for a new metal reinforcement piece on the top of the receptacle to provide support for the receptacle from upward forces popping it off the mother board.

Reinstalled Receptacle With New Reinforcement

If you look really closely you can see a tiny piece of shiny metal sticking out above the power receptacle, this is the new reinforcement piece I soldered to the top of the receptacle.

I have a version of NAntRunner working in Visual Studio 2005.  I was questioning whether there was a real need for NAntRunner in Visual Studio 2005 considering we now have MSBuild, but NAnt is just plain better and I've just gotten too used to running Ant builds from Eclipse.

Unfortunately the conversion from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005 is not exactly just a registry edit since you must recompile the plugin in Visual Studio 2005 to reference EnvDTE80 and remove the Office.dll dependency (see this MSDN article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165634(VS.80).aspx).  The one nice thing about VS 2005 is that the add-in facilities are easier to work with so I was able to eliminate several of the C++ based hosting projects/dlls.  It seems to work just fine, but I still need to get the configuration loading/saving working.  I also need to fix the installer project to reflect the xcopy based VS 2005 add-in deployment model.

I've been catching up on my DVR'd 24 episodes, and I came across a part where pair programming would have helped them out tremendously at CTU.  Kind of funny that was the first thing that popped in my head.

About a year ago, when .NET 2.0 first came out, I was toying with the idea of using the WWF for an internal ASP.NET application at work.  I finally decided against it last spring once it was decided .NET 3.0 would be required for WWF; .NET 3.0 wouldn't RTM for several months after the end of the project.  I haven't thought about WWF since then, that is until this weekend.  I've spent most of my free time this weekend immersed in WWF, and I must say that so far I'm really liking the technology much better.  I can finally see it being really useful in cases, especially in cases of long running workflow.

Originally I couldn't find much information on the WWF, I only had the Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation book, which I found not all that useful.  It was more of an overview rather than how to really implement anything - but it was better than nothing.  However I have found some articles recently posted by Scott Allen that are absolutely fantastic.

It's been several years since I've used Doxygen, but Ayende reminded me of its existance today.  I spent 2 minutes downloading it, setting it up, and then finally running it.  I forgot how fast Doxygen is, and the quality of the output is now very good on C#.  I will definately start using Doxygen again, its just so darned fast and simple.

I couldn't resist any longer, I needed to update my home PC's peripherals to the 21st century.  It’s so hard for me to stop being cheap at times, but I convinced myself this was an investment in the future; a way to entice myself to work on some personal programming projects to enhance my skill set.

The biggest change was the new 22" Acer LCD wide screen which replaced both my 20" Dell CRT and 21" Sony CRT.  I was a little worried about going back to a single monitor, but the shear size of the new display makes up for it.  This new screen is very bright, clear, and inviting - best money I've ever spent on a display device.  My ATI Radeon X850 just needed a driver update, and I was off and running in 1680x1050.

My second favorite upgrade is the new keyboard and mouse.  I replaced my old Logitech keyboard and mouse with a wireless Microsoft Natural keyboard/mouse combo.  I really like the wireless freedom for the mouse, and the new natural keyboard feels absolutely great.  I can finally type without making way too many typos - I can only really type on natural keyboards anymore (my last one broke so I was stuck with the regular old school Logitech one for a while).

I also replaced my old Logitech 4.1 speaker system that had a broken front left channel with a new Logitech 2.1 system.  I found that the two rear speakers were hard to position, so I opted to just drop them on my new speaker system.

And to further reinforce the newness/change in my home PC system, I turned my desk 90degrees and doubled the amount of RAM in my PC.  My desk now has lots of room on it mainly from removing the two hulking 20th century CRTs.  Maybe next summer I'll get a new dual or quad core system with Windows Vista, which since I actually have decent peripherals will be that much better.  Man, I love this keyboard.

Argh!  I just spent the last hour trying to figure out why I can't configure a Mule UMO (mule-descriptor) using Spring.  I ran into a couple of issues, firstly if you specify a container-context for your bean the life cycle interfaces (like Startable) are ignored.  Next I tried using a mixed Mule-Spring config file, putting the property injection declarations directly in the mule XML file, but I kept getting the following SAX error:

The content of element type "mule-descriptor" must match "(inbound-router?,outbound-router?,response-router?,interceptor*,threading-profile?, pooling-profile?,queue-profile?,exception-strategy?,properties?,bean*)".

Not being that familair with DTDs, what I didn't realize is that the comma between element declarations (as in the error message) means that the sub elements must be declared in the XML file in that order.

Big, fat, DOH!

A conversation in a not so distant universe...

Golly, why would anyone follow the Law of Demeter and produce an orthogonal system design?  There's a reason I can call select * from table directly from my aspx page.  It's far less code and my wizard completely supports it.  TDD just slows you down, and is only for developers who write a lot of buggy code; so much code they need a computer to test their app.

What do you mean the 3rd party database has changed to a new schema that now uses a web service?  We'll luckily I can crank out an entirely new application using my wizards in a month or two, we'll just have to line of some resources to test it after I deploy it to production.