Allow me to leave the realm of technology and offer up my thoughts on the election, just like every other blogger out there.

In an effort to be up front, I will state that I voted for McCain, although this will be the last year that I vote for someone strictly because they are a republican. I think it’s time to start seriously looking at independent candidates, although I feel that the republicans will be re-energized in 4 years.

I am grateful that the election is over and I can listen to Pandora without having a giant picture of Obama smiling at me (not that McCain would have been any better, maybe Palin would have been ;) ). The Pandora add illustrates the type of campaign that Obama was running, and other candidates should have taken notes.

I feel that this election was too much about race, and I cringe when I hear people talk about the first black president, and how this shows what America is really about. Yes, in fact it does show what America is about, and that is, that for all our talk, race STILL IS an issue, otherwise no one would be mentioning it now! I will celebrate the day when a candidate can win (be they white, black, man, women, etc) without playing the race/gender card (and yes, white males can play that card as well). I also think it will be a more momentous occasion when an independent candidate is elected President, as Democrats and Republicans are more alike then they are different.

Scott Hanselman has been blogging a bit about the race, as well as the outcome last night. Scott is someone who I can identify with because we share a similar passion about technology. Scott made this comment in his post, “My boys will grow up in a country that values people of all kinds, including ones that look like them.” and I’m a little disappointed, as are a few of the people who left comments. To think that I or anyone else valued his children less because they have a darker skin complexion is something I wholeheartedly disagree with. Furthermore, to think that the election of a President with a darker skin complexion, who played the race card, illustrates a flaw in our society that must be overcome before I start celebrating. To be honest, I think Scott’s family shows a more positive image about America, with respect to the race issue, then the election of Obama.

In the end, I just get the feeling that the Republicans knew they were going to loose no matter what. I don’t think they threw in the towel, but maybe they felt it better to conserve their resources to fight another day. While I hope for a dramatic turn around in the economy, history has shown that it follows a different set of rules. There is a tough road ahead for the Democrats, and they have 2 years to fix everything, or we’ll have a repeat of 94 when the republicans took control of congress.

I don’t know about your experiences with server manager, but mine are less then positive from a resource usage point of view. On decent hardware I’ve seen this peg the CPU to 100% for a good minute. Even on a multi-core system this can be a problem where you have business processes running.

Server Manager, by default starts up whenever you log into Windows Server 2008. While there is a check box that allows you to disable the auto-launch of server manager, it’s a per user setting, and you have to do it on every server you log into. Thankfully there is a solution. This article lists two registry settings that you can change that disable the auto-launch. Couple this with group policy and you no longer have to worry.

I prefer to put a shortcut to Administrative tools on my desktop, and from there I can access only the functionality I need.

Recently there has been some talk about a bunch of us getting iPhones thru work. Even though I have vowed to never own an Apple product, I figured I wouldn’t be too much of a hypocrite if work paid for it. Well that deal kind of fell thru, but it did get me looking into an upgrade for my Mogul, as it appears I have a $150 new phone credit available to me thru Sprint.

I did do some research into the iPhone to see if I would even be able to “use” it, should work have provided one. For the most part it seems like a decent phone, however there are a couple of things that made me go out and look to see what new WinMo phones were available.

First, my 1 year old after market car stereo which has iPod support, does not have iPhone support (as confirmed by numerous posts on various forums). This isn’t so much a knock against either the iPhone or my car stereo, it just would have been a nice to eliminate the separate MP3 player I have now. Newer model head units are reported to have no problems with the iPhone, but I don’t want to buy a new head unit right now.

Second, I have grown very used to my slide out physical keyboard on my mogul. I have heard mixed reviews about the touch keyboard on the iPhone, with one of the most negative criticisms being that the keyboard/mail program will not rotate to landscape mode. There are several hacks and work around's available, but as most people point out, this is something that should have been fixed in the 2.0 firmware.

Finally, there seems to be a real need to install iTunes, and that’s probably the #1 issue I have against the iPhone. I’ve heard way too many horror stories about iTunes, the extra stuff it tries to install, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to hate on the iPhone, I just don’t think it’s for me. So, what is the phone for me? After some research, I’ve narrowed my search to the HTC Touch Pro.

Specs:

• 528Mhz Processor
• 228 MB of Ram, 512MB of ROM
• 2.8 VGA touch screen
• GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR (including stereo A2DP)
• Opera 9.5 built in
• MicroSD expansion slot

The reviews so far have been very positive. The TouchFlo3D interface developed by HTC looks very polished, but as people are quick to point out, the TouchFlo3D UI only works with certain applications. However, for 90% of my usage, I’d be using TochFlo3D applications, including E-Mail, and the Web Browser.

The Touch Pro is supposed to have the option to connect via USB as a Mass Storage Device like the Touch Diamond (already released on Sprint), which is a huge selling point for me. I have no need for Active Sync or Windows Mobility Center since I use exchange for syncing. As a Mass Storage Device, I can just drag and drop files, and most media players support syncing. What’s even more important is that my car stereo does support Mass Storage Devices, which is how my current MP3 player connects.

There are also plenty of free applications available for Windows Mobile, and as a developer myself, it is very easy for me to write applications for it should the need arise (which I must admit it hasn’t yet). I was working on a really cool Windows CE project that got canceled earlier this year, so I haven’t been into the mobile development as much. I have a couple of ideas for a proof of concept at work that having a WinMo phone would help.

The phone should be released sometime soon, but in the meantime I need to pull my custom ROM off my Mogul and take it in for some service. The battery seems to be going, and my beloved slide out keyboard doesn’t close all the way (which I guess is a con of the slide out keyboard, the mechanism is susceptible to wear and tear).

A recent post by Scott had me look into how our IIS 7 servers were configured. Turns out we were not using dynamic compression (Ok, I already knew that as I’m the one who set them up), so I decided to go about installing the dynamic compression module (you can always un-enable it).

If you already have IIS 7 installed, you can go into the Role Manager and add a role service. The dynamic compression is under the performance section. Once installed, you will need to enable it via the IIS 7 management tool, or use the following command line option:

appcmd set config -section:urlCompression /doDynamicCompression:true 

The appcmd command line tool lives in C:\windows\system32\inetsrv, which is not included in PATH. You will want to review the httpCompression section in C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\Config\applicationHost.config to view what Mime types are compressed. By default, when you install dynamic compression, you get the following settings:

<dynamicTypes>
     <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
     <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
     <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />
     <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
</dynamicTypes>

I couldn’t find a page that specifically listed mimeTypes in the context of IIS 7, but here is the full list of MimeTypes itself which should give you an idea of how you can configure compression.

As Scott points out in his article, you should make an attempt to justify your change, which I did by performing a simple test using a large web page (1.3 MB) we serve up, and noting the response size and time using Fiddler.

The 1.3 MB web page originally took 30 seconds to receive (I know, there is something funny going on with the network connection somewhere, but it does easily illustrate the savings compression gives). Enabling compression shrunk the response to 130KB, taking only 6 seconds.

For some additional information on compression in IIS 7 check out this blog entry by Kanwalijeet Singla.

Scott just blogged about T4, the Text Template Transformation Toolkit. It’s a full blown template driven code generation tool that uses the same syntax as Asp.Net. It’s lacking things such as syntax highlighting and intellisense, but it’s free, and part of Visual Studio.

I feel with the recent press this tool is getting, it will become even more popular, and some of the missing features added by the community. Scott has a whole list of links on his post that provide good samples, as well as a link to a company that provides a free and pay version of a plug-in to add some of the “missing” functionality.

Yesterday I attempted my first bike to run activity. I started out with a 10.5 mile bike ride (which I wasn’t too happy with in terms of performance), followed by a 5 mile run. I had about 10 minutes of rest in-between, because even though I had “planned” this, things just didn’t work out for a quick transition.

While the bike ride was a sub-par performance, and my quads were really tight, I actually completed the 5 mile run in about 42 minutes, or about 2 to 2.5 minutes off my best 5 mile time (without riding the bike). The 42 minute time made me feel pretty good, and gives me something to shoot for in terms of improvement.

I am working on resolving two issues with my legs. The first is an IT band condition around my right knee, the second is medial tibial stress problems (shins) on both legs. Surprisingly running isn’t all that bad on the shins, and is only painful during the exercises at Monkey Bar’s (I guess that is a little unfortunate). Like I said, I’m working to get these issues resolved with the goal of being able to run 15-20 miles per week pain free by the end of January.

After establishing a good base for running, I will be working to ramp up for the Madison Marathon, as well as train for running at least one Olympic Distance triathlon in 2009. Speaking of triathlon’s, I really want to trade my bike in for a Cervelo P2C ;)

We setup all of our virtual machines in our new data center to run with a single virtual processor. The thought behind this was to start with the minimum and add additional resources as needed after observing our VM’s under load.

Well the time has come to add a second virtual processor to three of our VM’s, all of which are running Server 2008 data center edition. In the past, adding a second processor (or even enabling hyper threading) could cause issues due to an incorrect HAL (hardware abstraction layer) being chosen when you first install the OS. I thought I had read that this is not an issue under Vista and Server 2008, but couldn’t find anything to confirm (other then the lack of people reporting problems).

Since we are using virtual machines (VMWare ESX Server), it’s easy enough to take a snapshot and revert if something goes terribly wrong. However, the snapshots were NOT needed, as the servers booted up without issue after adding the second virtual processor.

Something I might want to consider next time would be to disable ESX’s dynamic resource allocation routine before shutting down three VM’s.

Rob Conery, creator of SubSonic, and the ASP.Net MVC Store Front video series has released an early prototype of a Visual Studio 2008 add-in called the SubSonic MVC Scaffold Addin. Let me point out right away that there is no dependency on SubSonic itself, rather this add-in uses Linq2Sql, although Rob says a SubSonic plug-in is on the drawing board.

Not to rehash his announcement, but basically this add-in takes a Linq2Sql class, and generates some views (view, edit, list), and a controller based on the class. This is meant as a quick start kind of thing, not a full fledged commercial web site generator.

I encourage you to visit his blog post and watch the video he has prepared, it does an excellent job of showing you what the Scaffold does. Here are some of my take-away's:

• Uses pre-existing Linq2Sql generated classes
• Creates wrapper objects around Linq2Sql classes
• Creates MVC views (you can create your own template to use in this process)
• Creates MVC controller
• If you re-run the scaffold on a class you previously generated, no files are updated (overwritten). You can delete individual files, and scaffold will generate them again.
• Not everything works perfectly, you will/may need to go in and change some code. This is to get you started with something quickly.
• RESTful style URL

While in search of the Windows Live Hotmail for Outlook Connector (future blog post in the works), I found a small add-on that enables the ability to save office documents as PDF (or XPS). The add-in adds a new option under “Save As”, and worked well in my limited testing. This works different from other PDF utilities, in that it does NOT install a virtual printer driver.

The add-in is limited to the following programs, and sadly, outlook is not one of them, but all the other major office applications are:

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Remember, you access this add-in by going to “Save As”, not Print, like you may be used to for other PDF utilities. OneNote adds a new option under File, other applications may differ as well.

Info and Download:

• Main Microsoft Downloads page (requires Genuine Software check)
• Direct download link

I’ve decided to add a new non-technology related category to my blog, simple titled Fitness. I plan on blogging about various fitness activities I do, such as running, biking, swimming, general workouts at Monkey Bars, Ju-Jitsu, and race training. I should have started this in the spring, as I’m not sure how much interesting stuff I will do over the winter, but I have to start sometime.

Today I did my second 40+ mile bike ride, basically to set a baseline for next season. Like last week, I did one time around the Ironman Wisconsin loop (Verona –> Mt. Horeb –> Cross Plains –> Verona). You can view this route on MapMyRide by clicking on this link.

Today’s Status:

Time: 2:25:07
Miles: 42.8
Avg Pace: 3:23 min/mi
Avg Speed: 17.7: mi/hr
Avg HR: 139 bpm
Approx Calories Burned: 2072

This weeks ride went allot better, although it’s hard to say why. It was about 10 degrees cooler, and cloudy this week, I’m two weeks past the head cold I had instead of one, and of course I have the experience and training effort from the previous week. I didn’t ride the early hills as aggressive in an effort to save the legs, and I think it paid off.

Last week I could barely make it back to my car, and was extremely sore, this week, I feel like I could have made it around a second time, albeit slower. I think this will provide a good baseline for when I start up again next season.

I also ordered a RoadId for me and the wife. While I bring my drivers license with me, I can’t really attach it to me like the RoadId, so I have a lot better chance of it staying with me in a really bad crash or accident (knock on wood). One thing I really took away from being an Eagle Scout was “Always Be Prepared”, and for $19.99, this was just something I couldn’t pass up on.