CodeThinked

I am sitting here writing this blog post on my fresh new Vista x64 SP1 install, which was a debacle that took only 2 days to complete. I know you probably do not wish to be regaled with yet another tale of Vista install issues, but this is one that does an excellent job of construing the complexity that is modern technology and showing you that the old adage "the simplest explanation is the correct one" may not always be correct.

It all started a few months back when I purchased a new Dell M1530 laptop. I bought it with a tiny 5200rpm drive and 1GB of ram (which actually isn't even an option anymore) and I installed a nice 200GB 7200rpm drive (with a 16MB cache) and 4GB of RAM. By the way, before you start screaming "Mr. Moneybags" the RAM was about 80 bucks and the harddrive was about 170 dollars. This stuff is so cheap these days it is embarrassing. I loved the laptop, it is quite fast (and I have had several people comment on how fast it is), but I always had one problem... the freakin' thing ran as hot as the fires of Hades. The shell on it is all metal though, so I thought it was just acting like a giant heatsink. The key word here being "thought".

Everything ran fine though, I had no other complaints or problems at all. So, yesterday Vista SP1 finally popped up on my Windows Updates list and so I decided to install. The install started running and went through its usually paces until it restarted and drops to a black screen where it starts copying files. The files were counting up higher and higher until I suddenly get an error that looked something like "!! 0x00000c2 !!" with the name of the file that it stopped on "ExplorerFrame.dll". Great, I thought, SP1 hosed my system. I tried to reboot and it started through the process again, but it locked up again. By this time, with all of the file copying and hard drive activity my laptop was getting quite hot. I decided to go online and see if I could find anyone else having this issue. Well, I found quite a few people that were experiencing this problem. But the only solution was to do a restore back to the restore point that Vista SP1 creates.

So, I restarted my machine and went into the BIOS to configure it to boot from the DVD drive, and my laptop suddenly shut off. What? I rebooted and went back to the BIOS, this time successfully and then I popped in the Vista x64 DVD, booted up the computer and it started loading. But as soon as it finished loading and was supposed to pop into the Vista repair screen, my laptop turned off. What?

Yep, it just powered down. So I hit the power button to turn it back on and popped in the DVD and the same thing happened again. By this time though, the laptop was getting extremely hot. Why was it getting so hot? It wasn't any more hot than I had ever felt before, but I thought that maybe inside Windows there is more cooling management features that run to keep the CPU from running too hot? (I don't know, is there?) So, I decided to give my laptop a rest.

I let it rest for about an hour and I came back and booted the restore DVD and it worked. I got to the restore prompt, began running the restore and it locked up about 10 minutes into it. I let it run for about 30 minutes and suddenly the laptop cut off. How was I going to get my laptop restored? And these shutoffs looked exactly like it was an overheating issue, but I had never had any problems before. Well, I decided to go ahead and go the nuclear route first, and just restore from my backups (yes, I run Acronis TrueImage regularly. I am a paranoid person and it has *always* paid off). But I bet you can guess what happened next. First I had to install the latest version of TrueImage on another machine, since my laptop was the only one running version 11, so that I could create the restore media. Then I had to burn a cd and boot from it on my laptop. I completed this cycle only to have my laptop cut off on me right in the middle of my restore.

Okay, so now I had a totally hosed hard drive since it was half restored. I was now starting to worry a bit, but I decided that my laptop was just getting too freaking hot and it didn't look to me like the fan was coming on at all. So I went ahead and flipped my laptop over and do some surgery. (If you are from Dell, you can stop reading now) I popped off the cover where the RAM is, since that also exposes the CPU, Graphics card, and heatsink fan. I followed the wire from the heatsink and it went down the side of the fan casing and followed a copper tube that went from the CPU over to the GPU (or it could be the motherboard chipset). There were three different chips that this copped tube went over.

I followed the wires and I couldn't really see where they went, but then I saw what looked like a tiny fan connector with nothing plugged into it. I poked around under the copper tube and out popped a fan connected. Wow. The fan on my CPU had never been plugged in. I guess that is a testament to the heat management that is put into laptops these days, but I was a bit pissed off, because I'm sure that this has now shortened the life of my laptop. The only thing I can guess is that while running in windows that the CPU is slowed down or something to compensate for the heat. Not to mention the fact that I rarely use my laptop for periods of longer than a few hours. But I had seriously been running this thing with absolutely no active cooling for several months now, unbelievable.

I plugged the fan in and turned my laptop back on. I started up the Acronis recovery (which took about an hour) and halfway through the difference was stark. My laptop had been doing continuous file copying and processing for 30 minutes and it was barely warm (I could also now hear the very low hum of the fan). Well, I completed my restore, and I thought that maybe the Vista SP1 upgrade had failed because the laptop had overheated, so I decided to go ahead and run it again. I did a full backup first though, just to be safe.

Of course that wasn't my problem, it locked up again. So I went ahead and recovered my hard drive again. What was I going to do? I am not going to have Vista reminding me every 4 hours that I have updates which I am unable to install. That would drive me insane. But at the same time I don't want to set the updates to be ignored, because after a service pack is released I believe that updates for pre service pack installs stop. Not to mention that there are some important updates in SP1 that I want!

My next thought was that maybe something was screwed up on my hard drive. I had after all been running my laptop for several months under conditions that simulated the bottom of an active volcano. It wasn't out of the realm of reality that my hard drive had begun to fail. So I ran chkdsk and amazingly it found an error in the NTFS indexes on the exact file that my SP1 install was locking up on! So, I ran "chkdsk /F",  rebooted and let it try to fix all my problems.

I then rebooted one last time into Windows, crossed my fingers, and ran the SP1 update one last time. And, as we both know, it succeeded. Otherwise you would not be getting this post right now and my wife would be getting a migraine. So, let this be a lesson to all those out there, before you start blaming Vista, OS-X, Linux, or whatever for your problems...it may not be quite that simple.

Oh, and Microsoft, why don't you just force a chkdsk run *before* you install a service pack? The SP already takes forever to install, what is an additional 20 minutes?

I am giving a talk at the Richmond Code Camp 2008 tomorrow, and I am really excited/nervous. Oh, and other people are giving some presentations as well. My friend Kevin Hazzard is giving two presentations. One on calling WCF services with no proxy (called "Look Ma! No Proxy!") and a Silverlight 101 presentation. I will definitely be attending the "No Proxy" session, but I'm going to have to skip the Silverlight session for Amanda Laucher's F# session. Sorry Kevin! I am extremely interested in F#, but I have not had a chance to dig my teeth in.

So, I have to admit that this is the first presentation that I have ever given. So, if you are in my session, please go easy on me. I don't get too nervous in front of people, but it is easy for me to say this right now. I am giving my presentation on DI (Dependency Injection) and I decided to give my examples in Spring.net and Ninject. I must give a shout out to Nate Kohari, who has helped walked me through Ninject (his brain-child) and who did an amazing job creating it.

So, if you have wondered at all what happened to my blog posts, then if you are near Richmond you can come tomorrow and see the fruits of my post-less-ness. And if you aren't able to attend tomorrow, you can bet that I will turn my presentation into a series considering the insane amount of time that I have put into it. Well, I hope you can attend, and if not, then I hope you enjoy the future blog posts!

I came across this today on my work computer, and it made me chuckle...

If you don't get it, only IE saves things to the download folder, Firefox does not (until version 3).

Just as a reminder to everyone out there, the first Richmond Meet and Code Dinner is this Wednesday March 26th at 6:30 pm. You can go here for more details and to sign up. If you haven't already heard about it, we are planning to have an open format event where people can bring their laptops and enjoy some free food. There will be discussion of any number of development related topics and people are also free to give any sort of impromptu presentations on any topic that they feel like. I personally write most of my code on the Microsoft .net platform, but we certainly will not limit discussion to any particular technology or platform. So please come out and join us. Also, if you are planning to attend, please go to the page linked above and sign up so we can get some kind of idea about how much food to get. Hope to see you there!

Do you submit a cover letter with a resume? There was a conversation on twitter today talking about someone who throws out resumes that don’t have cover letters. Well, quite frankly, that really surprised me. Why? Well, because I had always been told that no one expects a cover letter anymore. Cover letters to me are like college entrance essays, someone somewhere sometime said “If we force people to write a paragraph telling us why they want to get accepted, and beg us to do so then we will really get a feeling for those people who deserve to be here.” But what they are really getting is either a) applicants who have a good story (this is what they want, it is all about PR), b) applicants who can make up a good story, or c) applicants whose spouse/brother/sister/friend can make up a good story. In the end though, for most of us, the decision really only comes down to your high school grades and SAT/ACT scores.

I think that cover letters are a formality that needs to go the way of the work suit. At one point, most every office worker wore a suit to work. Why? Well, probably because you were seen as being rude if you didn’t. Apparently you didn’t respect other people if you didn’t dress nicely every single day. For certain professions this is still the case, but for other professions this just seems crazy. Cover letters are very similar to this, some people obviously think that a candidate is disrespectful or rude if they don’t submit a cover letter. Why? Because they didn’t waste your time with some story about how they work 50 hours a day and never go on vacation? People will spew just as much B.S. on their cover letter as they will in their resume. In fact, I think that the resume B.S. factor is way more important than anything. How many times have you seen this:

Professional Experience:

Intern at Company XYZ 01/2007 – 08/2007

1) Independently wrote software that propelled America into new age of peace and prosperity.

2) Responsible for launching of space shuttle and subsequent reentry.

3) Turned iron into gold.

Seriously? I know that there are a few oddball things on some people’s resumes, but for the most part if you are an intern, new developer, etc… you should not have anything on your resume anywhere claiming that you did anything involving space, time-travel, or independent work. And if you do, well, you better be able to back that up. If you have to downplay things a little bit to make it seem more believable, then please do so. For instance, at my first job I was at a very small (think three people) company and after I had been there for a while they couldn’t really afford to pay me more money so they ended up giving me a VP title. Seriously. I guess my boss thought that it would make me feel important or something, but all it really did was make me laugh. I really appreciated the effort (when you are a small business owner, you do what you have to), but honestly, I was about as much of a VP as Carrot Top is funny. So, on my resume I don’t say “Vice President”, I say “Software Developer”. Because it would be kinda odd to have to explain my first job was as a VP and anyone who saw that on my resume would say "WTF"?

So, anyways, back to the cover letter… Lets say we wanted to write a cover letter, what would you put in a cover letter? You will tell them how much you can’t wait to work at the company, and how you feel like you would be a perfect fit for the job, and how every moment of your life has culminated up to this one point? But what can you really say

So, my suggestion is to look at someone’s resume and ask yourself if they look qualified for the job based on their past experience and skill-set. Then give them a quick 10 minute phone interview. It doesn’t have to even be technical, but it’ll tell you way more about the person than any cover letter will.

What are your thoughts/feelings on this? I hope that a lot of you disagree with me on this because I would be interested to hear the other side of this argument.

So, by the way, here is what is going to be on my next cover letter (just to see if anyone reads these things):

Dear Hiring Managers,

I saw your ad for a “Software Engineer” in the back of my “Beanie Baby Monthly” magazine and I couldn’t help but respond. The font and color choices were absolutely amazing, and I felt that your placement of the ad in a Beanie Baby magazine was absolutely genius. Clearly you are obviously hoping that no one will see it so you can just hire an H1-B candidate. I for one think that your tactics are ruthless and cunning, and I want to work for someone like that who knows how to get things done.

I will be moving back to the United States soon, and so I felt that the timing for this was just amazing. For so long I have felt that there was this hole in my heart, as if something just wasn’t there. I feel now that your company will complete me. I also feel that my many years experience scouring the African plains hunting the white rhino will serve me well in this new position. I don’t actually have much practical experience in writing software, but my keen aim and determination will certainly propel me far within your company.

I have attached my resume for you to look over. I would very much like to meet you in person and share with you many pictures of my travels.

Sincerely,

Justin