Eric Fleischman's WebLog : !Windows but still technical

The ribbon

efleis — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:01:00 GMT

I know different people feel differently about the ribbon (for those not familiar, check out Office 2007) but I must admit I’m a fan. I have liked it since the first minute I used it. I definitely feel like my productivity is up as a result.

I used to have funky issues in Outlook 2003 where it did not always remember where my toolbars were sitting. The ribbon has resolved all of this. I also find myself digging in the menus far less than I used to.

Little tips about the ribbon I’d share that I like….

- Make sure to double click an element in the ribbon or right click it and try “minimize the ribbon”. This is the mode I run in. I like that it is easy to bring back (a single click) but gets you all of that screen real estate again.

- I like in Outlook how it remembers my ribbon minimize setting on a per tool basis. That is to say, I keep it minimized in email viewing but visible in appointment viewing. It remembers this.

The DCR I have spotted that I'd like (so far ;)) is that I wish, when I am in minimize mode, simply hovering over the menu items would bring it back, and following my hovering over neighboring items (like from message to insert) also respected the hover. I have to click. Not the end of the world, but if someone in Office could make this an option you'd have at least one appreciative user.

ArrayList and Synchronized()...the misleading method

efleis — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:45:00 GMT

I recently found myself wondering about synchronization when using an ArrayList in managed code. I was building up an ArrayList and iterating through it. Both insertion into and iteration over the list are being done by many threads simultaneously. Naturally, I wanted to ensure my code was thread safe.

I started out by looking at the ArrayList class definition and immediately noticed the Synchronized() method. Great! This must be what I’m looking for.

So, I carried on with my programming…..

ArrayList foo = new ArrayList();

ArrayList fooSync = ArrayList.Synchronized(foo);

Then in other threads I am doing:

fooSync.Add(someObject);

And finally, there is another set of threads taking something off of the front of the list as illustrated below:

if (fooSync.Count>0)

{

Object bar = fooSync[0];

fooSync.Remove(0);

// Do something with bar

}

(This is of course a trivial version of the algorithm, but it illustrates the point)

And viola! We have misused Synchronized().

ArrayList does not guarantee that your code is thread safe, even when you have a Synchronized() version of your ArrayList. Rather, it only guarantees that the internal data structures are. This of course is logical, but that’s really what this code is assuming. Said differently, a Synchronized ArrayList guarantees that doing things like Add() and Remove() do not corrupt the list. However, anything you do above and beyond that is not protected.

In this example, we have a block of code where I am checking if there is anyone in the list, and if so doing something with the first element, then removing it. This is not thread safe. Imagine there is one element in the list and two threads. Thread1 goes in and sees that Count>0, so it starts going through the loop. Before it gets to Remove(0), it gets preempted, and Thread2 starts. Thread2 also sees that something is in the list…namely the element that Thread1 is already operating over! It too starts doing something with object bar. And well, who knows what happens from here. Maybe this is bad enough in your app (doing the action on bar twice).

(It might sound bad that this could AV, but just think of an even worse scenario. Imagine this instead….another thread has, while they are doing their thing, done an insertion in to the list, and that one is now getting removed before it is even being operated on! Now the app will continue but silently lose an object that was not operated on at all.)

Of course, this makes perfect sense. The ArrayList developers could write a version of their class which protects their data structures, but how could they possibly make this scenario work? Short of some sort of language-level contract around where atomicity might be preserved (I’m not a language guy, but I can’t see how that would work, though I don’t deny it might be possible), they can’t possibly solve this problem. How do they know where atomicity is assumed in my code?

Moral of the story: Always make sure you understand your class & method contracts.

Start.com released

efleis — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 20:19:00 GMT

Looks like it's out there. http://www.start.com
The start.com team blogged about this earlier today.

A variety of things.....

efleis — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:26:00 GMT

So much going on.....

Had a week and a half of vacation which was nice. It was nice to get back to see the family, go to a friend's wedding, and just generally relax.
I'm very much on board with this change to the CLR (I guess it's touching a lot of VS). While I'm still new to managed code, this is something I had thought about once before, but never gave it much thought, figured there was a good reason. :) Glad to see the team responded to customer feedback.
Scoble blogged about RSS for MCE. I haven't tried this yet, but looks interesting. I'm still an RSS Bandit user, not sure I'm going to change that, but who knows.
I loved this post. Amen Raymond! People ask for security holes as features all the time in my world too.

I've realized how much I don't know about Exchange

efleis — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 02:03:00 GMT

Lately I’ve been working on some Exchange 2003 related issues here in the EEC (mostly in the performance tuning area). It’s really taught me how much I don’t know about Exchange.

I pretend to know a little something about ESE. The reality is, I probably know more than the average teddy bear, but I hardly know much. It’s a complicated beast. I know little.

Some of the issues I’ve been looking at take me down from ESE in to the I/O stack, drivers, and SAN related things. I think I know even less about that layer than I do about ESE.

The net is that working on an issue that crosses between ESE and the lower layer stuff means I am really even more lost than normal in either area. :)

But I’m happily learning, and having some fun.

Eek, I'm late!

efleis — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:17:00 GMT

Interested in an AD/MIIS/ADFS talk? There's an exec chat about to start (SO sorry for the late notice, I meant to post this earlier, but Sunday turned to Tuesday MUCH faster than I thought it would).
I have a funny story about how I got this info I'll post in a little bit, just have to write it up.

A snip of info I was given on this:
Executive Chat - Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft Identity Integration Server
Stuart Kwan is the Director of Program Management for Identity and Access technologies, including Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services, and Microsoft Integration Identity Server. As the executive in charge of identity at Microsoft, get all your identity questions answered from Stuart and his team.

May 17, 2005
10:00 - 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time

Enter Chat Room -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/chatroom.aspx

Just when I got my Xbox the next one is announced

efleis — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:08:00 GMT

That’s right, I just ordered an Xbox the other day. I’ve not had one to date, and can say I’ve probably played about a dozen times total.

I actually ordered it for the media center extender stuff. I’m not against Xbox, I just don’t play video games. Just not my thing I guess you could say.

Now as my friends like to point out, this does not mean I haven’t purchased Xbox gear. Rather, I buy quite a bit of it. Where does it go? That’s right, my brother. I buy Xbox stuff for him regularly, so from that perspective, I'm a very good Xbox customers. I get the “pay for it” part, just not the play part. Quite the bargain. ;)

As luck would have it, only hours after I ordered mine did I learn of the next one coming. I suppose I live in a hole because I hadn't heard anything other than "it's coming." I should probably pop my head out and look around more often.

I suspect this next one I might actually get earlier on in the lifecycle. The stuff looks really cool. And there is already talk of some of the games. For me, I'm a whole lot more excited by media center related things than I am the gaming, but hey, I'm not a gamer. Larry Hyrb is blogging about it, hopefully more info coming over the weeks/months to come.

Sometimes all it takes is an hour in the airport to rethink things

efleis — Mon, 09 May 2005 05:56:00 GMT

On Friday I traveled from Seattle to the other coast for my brother’s college graduation. While in another aiport along the way (stupid layovers ;)) I heard a conversation that made the whole stop worthwhile.

Our flight was late, and it was one of those little puddle jumpers. Most of the travelers were traveling for business (it’s always quite obvious now isn’t it) and were pretty annoyed that they would be late to dinners and such that were planned. The guy next to me wasn’t annoyed so much as concerned that he had something to do for work. He and I were chatting some and he said he had a document to send off, and was annoyed that it would not be sent until too late to be of interest.

So standing next to me he proceeds to make a phone call. I usually stand in airports and either read or do work, but for some reason I was just spacing out that day, just looking out the window and enjoying the sunshine. I overheard bits and pieces of what he said, and I just had to share what I heard.
Of course, I only heard one half of the conversation, but here’s what I heard (making up a name, since I have no idea what his real name is):
“Hi, it’s Bob. I’m stuck in the airport….yes I know, frustrating. So I need to send a document out, would you mind doing it for me?”
“Great, go in to my office, you should have the key. Let me know when you’re there.”
“Ok great. So please go to my computer, and log on. My username is XXXXX and my password is YYYYY. Working?”
“Ah great. So in my documents, find <doc name I didn't pay attention to>. Ok, so let’s open Outlook. Go ahead and open a new email, and attach the document to it”

From there, I ran to a seat to type this up before I forgot the details. :)

So long as people do that with their username/password, there’s nothing we can do in the security world to protect people. Perhaps we need to spend more time helping users deploy systems in a way that lets them get what they need done, and not in a way that protects them in ways that encourage them to share their usernames/passwords.

Nope, sorry, not today.....

efleis — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 01:59:00 GMT

Today Dell commented on the rumors around shipping with an AMD chip. In a word, no.
Not shocking, but good to hear the yea/nea from the horses mouth rather than the rumor mill.

Me? I still don’t mind either way. I like Intel and AMD chips, or anyone that is fast really. I love 64bit, no matter who delivers it. :)

SDL here, there and everywhere

efleis — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:12:00 GMT

I've read quite a bit re: the SDL as of late in the universe.
First, we put out this doc which talks about what the SDL is, and how it works.
Then, RHensing tells us what his new gig is, and how it involves the SDL.
And I've since seen a few mentions of it on the blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com homepages.

While I am not knowledgeable enough in such spaces to have opinions worth listening to, the results (like those in the article above re: 2k vs. 2k3) seem encouraging to the casual observer.

Dell shipping with an AMD chip?

efleis — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 02:49:00 GMT

Who knows, but Slashdot mentioned that it just might happen, according to this article on The Inquirer, who quoted this article on ComputerWorld.com.

I’m often asked about x64, and whether I recommend Intel vs. AMD chips in the space. The reality is, I don’t have enough knowledge to recommend one over the other. I couldn’t defend a position either way on this one. I know I love the memory capabilities of x64, no matter what chip you’re using in your DCs. :)

Is Server 2003 x64 media on the shelves yet? I haven’t heard either way. If you have a link please let me know, I haven’t seen one for sale yet.

Flight Simulator 2004 rocks (part 1)

efleis — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 01:55:00 GMT

I suspect I’ll post on FS 2004 multiple times, hence the "part 1" in the title. It really deserves attention, this thing is cool. And that’s coming from a guy who owned zero video games a couple of days ago (I have played them in the past, but haven’t purchased one in quite some time).

I spent a few hours today playing with FS 2004 (with the latest update from the web). As the saying goes, As real as it gets. It really is.

Things that jumped out at me as amazingly cool:

Others (most notably Scoble) have commented on the clouds, but I’ll say it again: amazing. The level of detail is truly incredible. What also struck me was that as planes flew behind the clouds, it was a very realistic transition from full view to partial (parts of the plane being covered) to totally covered, and back. And even the red wording that you see next to the plane with info about it (like distance) was partially then fully covered.
I love hearing other talk on the radio and like having some to dodge, so I turned up traffic to the max. I found that turning it up really does mean you see tons of places. On the ground, in the air…..they are all over. Real flight patterns, talking to air traffic control…just amazing.
My experiences with air traffic control were great. It gave me both accurate directions and it was easy to use. I was on board from the get-go (har har har).
Multiplayer just worked. No tinkering required. I love when things just work.
The controls were very smooth and easy to use. I got comfortable quickly, and after a flight or two felt good enough to turn up the realism some (although not yet a lot, I'm working on it).
Ok so I’m running on fast hardware at home (P4 3.2 HT with 2gb of ram, a 250GB SATA hard drive and an ATI Radeon X800 SE with 128MB of memory) but I’ve still gotta say that the performance was amazing. I cranked up the realism & traffic, and it was still lightning fast. No hesitation at any point, period.

Some items for me to investigate:

I need to play more with multiple monitor support. It wasn’t comfortable, yet. I suspect that I was the failure here though, not the software. I’ll report back on this.
When playing with a friend over the ‘net, we had a lot of trouble flying together. We were both looking for a radar of sorts that helps us find one another (maybe moving dots on the GPS screen would be best?). Perhaps it exists? I don’t know, need to look around.
I heard there’s an SDK. I need to play with that. :)

Help on those 3 items welcomed, I'm still new in the Flight Simulator space.

Random thoughts on a Friday

efleis — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 01:02:00 GMT

Random thoughts on a Friday.

Last night I ordered a new computer on which I will be running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center 2005. I’ve never owned any sort of personal digital video recorder, so I’m pretty excited. And I’m ready to play MS Flight Simulator 2004 on it too. :)

(I heard the update to FS 2004 is pretty cool, but haven’t seen it myself yet)

There’s been lots of talk about reboots on PCs automatically after pulling down an updates. Comments from different ‘folks have been abundant, such as Scoble and Matt Mullenweg (who commented on Scoble’s blog). If you’ve hit this we would like to hear about it, this should not be happening.

RSS is spreading. MSNBC now has an RSS feed. Actually, a bit more than a dozen of them. I love when news sites get RSS feeds, it’s just so convenient.

Michael Howard posted on IIS6 vs. Apache2 security defects figures. It’s interesting to see people looking at the numbers like this. I’m not very involved in that part of the world, but I like to peak in.

It was a really busy week. I’m ready to get some sleep this weekend. I’ll post some longer stuff over the weekend time permitting.

Gotta love when that book you've been waiting for arrives

efleis — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 00:33:00 GMT

I just got my very own copy of Introduction To Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees and Hypercubes (F. Thomson Leighton). I don’t know what everyone else around here is in to, but I’ve been waiting several weeks for this one. It took some looking around, but I finally found a copy to call my own.

If you’ve read it, I’m interested in feedback on what I should expect. I suspect this text will take me several months to fully digest.