Tonight I installed Windows Vista Business Edition on my HP Compaq TC1000. I was surprised at how good the install went; it didn't really take that much time at all (45 minutes or so). The only difficult part of the whole process was getting the FinePoint digitizer drivers installed. And the performance isn't that good (although it has been getting better in the last few hours).
Update 2007-02-23: It looks like this isn't really a permanent way to get the digitizer working, since there's been a report of the procedure not working for someone else, and it appears that even when it does work, it breaks after a few reboots.
So, to get the digitizer to work: 1) I can only seem to get it to work with the Standard VGA Driver. 2) I have no idea if this works as a long term solution (for example, changing display drivers seems to break it).
- Download the FinePoint generic FPI2004 driver for Windows Vista (available from Gateway as the driver for the digitizer in the CX210's).
- Extract the install files (the Gateway driver was a self extracting zip file that took care of this).
- Start up Device Manager and identify the FinePoint digitizer. For me the PNP device ID was "ACPI\FPI2002".
- Force the generic driver for the newer digitizer to install, then reboot.
- At this point the digitizer should be all screwed up. Download the digitizer driver from HP.
- Try and run the HP driver setup program. For me it failed, but got the drivers extracted. Using the Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode should help.
- After it fails, find the extracted files (should be C:\Compaq\FinePoint by default). Run the setup.exe program that's there in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode.
- Press the install button that comes up. After a bit, that should fail with a "Service could not start" error.
- Reboot, and the digitizer should now work. It probably really needs to be calibrated though.
The buttons were easier: I just grabbed the TC1100 button driver, extracted that, then manually installed the drivers using Device Manager. I've heard there are problems using the wireless, but for me that wasn't an issue because I've replaced the original wireless with an Intel 2200BG card (built-in drivers! Yay!). The last thing I need to get working is Rotation support, but everything I've tried either doesn't work or breaks the digitizer hack L.
Read it and weep! #1 for "The Best Weather" in Channel9! W00T!
Plus, I managed to get back to being a Left-Leaning College State by banning business. And I've given up trying to get the tax rate under control…excellence in two out of three categories will have to be enough. 100% Income Tax, here we come!
Gah! I've become Inoffensive! That's the LAST time I vote to lower taxes.
(yeah, it's not just a web site anymore, it's a fictional country! Supplying all this site's political power since December 2006. Check it out at www.nationstates.net/ntldr.)
See, the inoffensive thing came up because I had been ranked as a "Left-wing College State" (rather appropriately, I might add, considering I'm a student at Purdue University!) for over a month, and then it changed just because I thought trying to cut a 60% tax rate would be a good idea…
I think I've begun to overuse it though... Today I ran into the problem of "how do you spell that name again?" while trying to write an email. The obvious things of "use the address book" and "remember it you idiot!" failed, and the outlook for successful addressing of the message was bleak. But then I remembered my trusty PSH! It was so simple!
get-adusers | where-object {$_.sn -match ".*jack.*"} | select-object givenName,distinguishedName
Gotta love PSH... (of course, it helped that I had the get-adusers function, which I wrote a while ago and have stashed in my profile).
Oh, and for those that are interested, the here's get-adusers (along with a few other AD functions that are very similar):
function global:get-adusers
{
param( [string] $domain = (get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(&(objectClass=user)(!(objectClass=computer)))')
}
function global:get-adcomputers
{
param( [string] $domain = $((get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain) )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(objectClass=computer)')
}
function global:get-adprinters
{
param( [string] $domain = $((get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain) )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(objectClass=printQueue)')
}
function global:get-adobject
{
param(
[string] $domain = (get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain,
[string] $filter = ''
)
$local:directory = new-object -TypeName 'System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher' -ArgumentList $domain
$directory.PageSize = 500
$directory.Filter = $filter
$matches = $directory.FindAll()
$local:d = new-object -TypeName 'System.Collections.ArrayList'
foreach($m in $matches)
{
$d.Add($m.GetDirectoryEntry()) | out-null
}
return $d.ToArray()
}
Well, it's finally "really" snowed here in West Lafayette. Yes, the snow actually stuck to the ground this time, unlike when it snowed back in the fall where the flakes melted before reaching the ground. And yes, the roads were slick last night when not everything had been salted, plowed, & melted. So naturally I used my excuse of having to mail stuff to go out and drive in it in my car. It's really not that bad; just accept that you don't have complete control and keep your head about you, and it's not that big of a problem. In fact, I think it's actually fun.
But I don't imagine that the people in this video think snow is that fun. But I did enjoy it.
(video seen at http://kindel.com/blogs/charlie/2007/01/16/3741.aspx)
It's ~1:40AM (local), and I'm sitting in the basement of the new CS building (LWSN B160) waiting for a battery to charge so that I can capture images of it moving from the webcam that's watching the room so I can have a backup for during the presentation's demo portion tomorrow. 'Cause I'm pretty sure that there is no way in hell that its going to actually WORK tomorrow when the room is crowded with people, I don't have adequite time to set up, and I don't have good sensor/robot positions.
I've gone through 3 9V batteries tonight, 1 robot battery, still have to overhaul half my slides, then theme them, and at some point it'd be nice to sleep & practice.
But right now I'm bored, tired, and fed up with working on PowerPointalism. So making a rambling, pointless blog post seemed like a decent waste of time (and look, I've wasted 5 minutes!).
I had been planning on writing up a big summary of my CS307 Software Engineering project. But after thinking about it for a bit, I'm not really sure what would be achieved by doing so. It would probably have just come off as complaining and whining, which is certainly not my intention. I loved the class, and thought it was incredibly valuable. In fact, I think it should be required of everyone who isn't going to grad school & planning on becoming a professor (and maybe even they should take it).
So, about the project. First, a bit of background: it was a client & two-tier server system, in this case for medical records. I was on Team A, the largest team (we ended up with 9 people). We divided into three sub-teams of 3 each: Client, Communications, Data. I volunteered to be the sub-team lead for Data. We also had a team leader, documentation manager, and development environment expert.
Now, as I see the project, it was a failure. We failed to complete the Regional Server (the second server tier) portion, and so we failed to meet the requirements. This failure was a result of the people involved in the project. As a team, I do not think that we were motivated to work on the project. And we never seemed to find that motivation. Consequently, we didn't work hard enough to try and get everything done. Furthermore, the problem was not one of which we were unaware. It was blatantly obvious that some members were not contributing their share. We were just unable to come up with a successful resolution to that problem.
The other big problem with the project was a lack of testing. The majority of the team was unfamiliar with developing using the platform and tools that we picked, and just didn't have any experience working on this type of problem. This let do a lot of bugs appearing, which testing could have uncovered earlier. But we didn't test early, and even at the end we did not test thoroughly. Hence the GUI crashing during our demonstration because of an invalid entry of a date, and hence the server responding with failures because the Event Log had filled up. We were using unit tests and regular builds, but having good process techniques is not enough if there are only 20 test cases (for a program that was in development for 10 weeks!), and those test cases don't test anything.
In the end, it didn't really matter. The project wasn't worth any of the grade; the paperwork, documentation, and presentation were the grade. So 5/9 people (including me) pulled off A's in the class without any problems. On the presentation day, we were awarded all the website awards (Best Organized, Best Aesthetics, Best Updated – Go SharePoint!) and the team awards (Best Conference Calls, Best Work Sharing – yes, it's a good idea to PAY ATTENTION TO PREVIOUS CALLS and address issues raised during the next calls). The Work Sharing award kind of left me scratching my head, because that was an area I felt we could have done better on. I guess we did a good job of dividing it up, and people did a good job of reporting about it – whether a task really got done or not. It also makes me wonder about who did what on the other teams…
Finally, I had some individual accomplishments. During the awards granting, my justification of our platform choices during the presentation was singled out and applauded for being, well, the only justification of platform choices from any group. On my team, I was voted the MVP (all other teams had pairs of people as their MVP's). And I got the A for the class (only the 3rd A for me in a CS class!).
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About the author
Jeffrey Stults is a software developer currently in Portland, Oregon. He is contactable at:
stultsj@ntldr.net
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
my employer's view in any way.
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2012
Jeffrey Stults, Jr.
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