AlexHopmann.com

I wanted to post some first impressions playing with the new Microsoft Mesh. Unfortunately I’ve barely been able to use it. Many of my friends I’m sure will complain about the lack of Mac support so far, but for me the lack of Windows support is worse.

It doesn’t work on my Vista machines- for some reason at this point it requires User Account Control (UAC) to be “on” (but of course won’t run on an account that doesn’t have admin privileges. I’m not going to rant too much about this yet since I’m hoping its just because its an early release. But this one is really confusing unless its something some wacko did to try to push UAC (EVIL!) on people. There is really nothing you can do with UAC on that won’t work with it off. Again, I’m hoping this is just one of those wacky bugs that got punted at the last minute for this early release…

It also doesn’t work on Server. So one of the more useful machines for me to sync to- the server box that I keep all my important data on, can’t play. This isn’t a normal “home” scenario, except that Microsoft is trying to push Home Server (I’m not running Home Server, but the install error pertty clearly said XP SP2 and Vista only). Again, I’m hoping this is just early release stuff.

Then one of my XP machines has Firefox as its default browser. The Mesh client bits keep poping URLs, but since Firefox can’t run the ActiveX associated with them, it fails. Here I feel some sympathy with Microsoft. The ideal solution would be if your UI requires Internet Explorer, launch IE directly instead of the machines configured “default browser”. However given the wacky government regulation of Microsoft they would likely get in trouble for doing this sensible thing, and so its yet another aspect that doesn’t really run correctly for me.

So, someday I hope to report on Mesh itself, but its not going to happen yet.

A good programmer’s editor is probably one of the most important tools you can have. I’ve been working with PHP and Javascript a bunch lately and the fact that I mostly use Visual Studio is really quite sad. It doesn’t know anything about PHP and so far I’ve not been that impressed by editing JavaScript in it either (its ok for debugging Javascript).

So I got mail today that the Antechnius JavaScript editor is out with version 10. The big deal in the new version is that they merged the PHP and JavaScript editors. I have played with both before but never stuck with them at all, mostly because it sucked that there were two different ones. The notion of one environment for both sounds great.

First of all, it doesn’t appear to have a “find in files” function. I use this all day long in VS. Find everywhere that calls foo(). Find this variable somewhere in the code-base. Especially when tackling a code-base that you aren’t familiar with yet this is crucial. The editor has a notion of a “project” but it seems limited to providing a file browser and uploading things via FTP.

It does have a handy thing that picks out all the functions in the current file, but again, it doesn’t know anything beyond the current file. So no help to find where foo() is declared.

It doesn’t really support mixing HTML and Javascript. So debugging Javascript in stand-alone JS files is fine, but if you put it in your HTML file you can only execute a little bit at a time by selecting it and saying “execute”. Its also not clear when you do that (or otherwise try out your Javascript) how it deals with bringing in includes and libraries and what-not.

It does let you run PHP stuff and do a syntax check, but its not really integrated. Its just running PHP.exe to do that, and displaying the results in a text window. You can’t even click on errors to go to the right line and they do nothing to help with the poor error messages in the PHP engine (two examples- you can be missing a close parenthesis but it tells you unexpected ‘{’, or forget to close a string and you get unexpected T_STRING, both referencing the wrong line. And yes, I know why the compiler gives the errors there, but its not user friendly and not really 2008-state-of-the-art).

I’ll play with it for a few more days but it feels like its still in the “not quite enough to be useful” category.

There is this fairly recent notion about making “transparent Javascript”. The idea is that you don’t complicate your markup with Javascript and keep it all in include .js files. The JS files identify various spots in your pages via IDs or classes and attach event handlers at some point on page load time.

So far I’m not a fan. I might warm up to it later, but I’ve been working with it so far and its really hard for me to tell where the code is for anything. I’ve got some piece of HTML, but finding out what it actually does or how to fix it when it stops doing what its supposed to is a pain. Just too “transparent”.

Its similar to various MVC patterns. Good factoring of code can be a really good thing. It can be crucial to build big projects that you can maintain. And I really do like the concept of keeping the HTML clean so that designers can work it it more easily without messing with script all over the place. But abstractions can go too far. I’m also not a fan of the purist MVC models- I’d rather have something that doesn’t abstract so much that its hard to trace the actual code execution.

I had this “bright” idea to use RAID1 for my boot disk on my new workstation. In theory its all handled by the Intel chipset, should be high performance. As RAID1 writes aren’t any faster, but reads should be twice as fast, so running Windows, my page file, and other key stuff on there should help give me great performance. Plus I figured my time is very valuable, and not having to worry about rebuilding my whole machine if I have a drive failure sounds like a great idea, right?

It was a TERRIBLE IDEA. It was terrible. A complete mistake.

The catch is that for your boot drive, RAID1 makes it way less reliable. Partly because its controlled by all these BIOS settings, and I’ve had times when it reset and then the machine started up with the drives not in RAID mode. Which was fine until I tried to put it back into RAID mode. Then it wouldn’t boot and I couldn’t get the Windows repair utilities to touch it. Faced with the possibility of having to reinstall Windows I switched RAID mode off and now I just have a normal system disk.

The other thing I didn’t realize is that as a RAID disk, if anything happens to the system like a crash or whatnot, it is going to have to rebuild it. Of course rebuilding the disk when you are trying to boot from it is a bad thing, and as far as I can tell the controller can’t really do a rebuild until the system is done rebooting.

Plus it needs special drivers that aren’t built into Vista (or most other operating systems) so anytime you are trying to install/do system maintenance you are back to installing these extra drivers, which is just a mess.

So the RAID is gone. I’ll probably just use the 2nd disk for my page file and maybe move my VM data over there…

I’ve been using VMWare workstation to run some virtual machines lately. Its very helpful to be able to have a WinXP IE6 box, WinXP IE7, Vista, Linux, etc, all at once, not to mention other nice uses of VMWare.

So yesterday I’m doing some big file copies and noticing that my network transfer performance on my gigabit Ethernet is running a solid 6%. Not a blip over or under, as if something were hard-limiting it. I also notice there are these two extra network adapters that VMWare has installed which each think they are 100mbps connections.

So I try disabling them (since with a little poking around I find out they are only necessary if you are doing on-machine NAT or internal networks) and like magic my network transfers hop up to 9.5%. These get installed by default but for most people you will never need them, so get rid of them.

Now to figure out what the next bottleneck is. The machines involved have plenty of CPU, I was testing on multiple disks so disk IO should not have been limiting, and I’m pretty sure everything is hooked up with nice high quality cables on my gigabit switch.

For some reason when I install Windows components on my new workstation there is an app called TrustedInstaller.exe that runs incredibly slow. It takes 30+ minutes of (one core) CPU time per component to install- language packs, the .NET Framework 3.5, etc.

This seems like its an obvious bug and I haven’t seen it on any of my other Vista machines. I wonder if its some interaction with some Penryn feature where Windows is trying to do some wacko-fancy “trusted” thing that doesn’t actually gain anything real.