[Cross posted to A Salem Blog.]

Seen in the Learning Snacks for Windows 7.  What’s Pac-Man got to do with PowerShell?!

For the record, 28 years ago I wrote a Pac-Man port for RSTS/E Basic Plus for my high school’s PDP-11/60.  No I don’t have the code.  I wish, though, since one can get a PDP-11 emulator and the same RSTS/E OS I used!   I believe one could write a console mode Pac-Man in PowerShell, though.

Rubik’s Cube, another child of the 1980’s as well:

Doesn’t Rubik get royalties every time people use his cube as a trope for “hard problems solved”?

A monkey (George?!) is wrapped up in his book outside Cornerstone Books, Salem.

A few months ago, Microsoft offered a beta exam for SBS 2008 configuration, 70-653;  many of us, like Phil Elder, who were in the SBS 2008 beta took advantage of our experience and sat for the exam.

I had heard from others who sat for the exam before me that it was straightforward to anyone who had worked with the beta and tried a few migrations.  Judging by my exam report from Prometric, that seemed to be true in my case;  I passed!

The exam didn’t seem as “hard” to me as my Internals exam;   my strongest area was Migration while my weakest questions involved Windows Mobile integration, which I have no experience with (I don’t have a WM phone.)

But, it’s done.

Mark Russinovich has another excellent post, Mark’s Blog : The Case of the Random IE and WMP Crashes.  He had a problem with Windows Media Player frequently falling down and going boom.

Now, WER (Windows Error Reporting) does take dumps and sends them to Microsoft, but it hasn’t been possible to get a copy of the dump to analyze with Debugging Tools for Windows.  Mark sort of cheated to get his dump;  he grabbed the dump from the temp directory while the WER dialog was waiting for him to close it.  It’s the kind of thing I’ve done.

Vista SP1–and by extension Server 2008–has a registry key setting that will save local dumps:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps

This will make WER save all dumps in %LOCALAPPDATA% (Powershell:  $Env:localappdata), which is usually c:\users\<user>\AppData\Local.

I don’t often analyze bluescreens–they just don’t happen for me that often either at home or at SATV–but I do get a lot of apps in testing that just go boom for whatever reason.  This should help.

Normally, I don’t post personal notes;  I keep those for my Salem blog.  However, I have to pay tribute to a woman without which I would not be in IT:

Jeannette and one of her foster children.

I’ve written more about Jeannette, her life as a foster mother and as an advocate for the disabled on my other blog.  While I love IT and love to work hard in my field, I must always remember the person who most helped me get here.  Jeannette was a great woman, a dear friend, and intensely proud of me and my choice of field. 

WSUS 3.0 SP1 is now out.  You might get an error 0x80040e14 immediately on starting setup.

Check the WSUS database directory;  this will be C:/WSUS or D:/WSUS.  If you previously updated from WSUS 2, there may be a file in the directory, SUSDB.BAK.  WSUS 3 SP1 setup backs up the database and will not run if this file is left over from a previous update.

Delete SUSDB.BAK and rerun setup.  If that fails, check your permissions for \WSUS and make sure there is access for the account you use to run setup.

For several years I’ve owned a Palm PDA, a Tungsten E.  I’ve loved it.  It had an excellent display and was the first PDA my poor eyesight could handle.  The OS was only at the level of Windows 3.1, but the sync functionality was unrivaled in its intuitiveness and reliability for a long time.

I kept my calendar on it, I read books on it when my eye surgery kept me from doing anything else.  Even though the battery life of the Tungsten E’s weren’t great, and there was still no WiFi for it, again, I loved my Palm.

But where has Palm gone these past few years? 

This blog post gives a clue: RIP LifeDrive – Post I.T. – A Technology Blog From The Washington Post.

And Dave Edelman:  Ten Tech Companies That Blew It in the Past Two Decades.

Palm has gone in all directions.  Shortly after my Tungsten E was introduced in 2003, PalmSource (the OS division of Palm at the time, now .) was rumored to be working on PalmOS 6.  A year later, nothing.  Usually, when software is delivered and nothing is heard from afterwards, it’s DOA (like WinFS);  it was rumored that PalmOS 6 was non-functional out of the gate or at least it didn’t meet requirements.  Short of being a fly on the wall at PalmSource, we won’t ever know.

Then PalmSource announced it would port PalmOS to Linux (presumably running some kind of PalmOS compatibilty layer on top of the kernel.)  PalmSource was at last spring’s Linux World in Boston.  They had handouts.  Not demos.  Not prototypes, nor even videos.  Just handouts.  And a cute plushie Tux:

That was it.  I like Tux, but if they couldn’t show anything, they shouldn’tve been there.

Now Palm is focusing on its Treo phones which have caught fire–figuratively!  They’re a mishmash of PalmOS based models, Windows Mobile/Palm and Windows Mobile.  They’re great for cell carriers and very popular.

Palm had a booth at the recent Boston Vista launch.  All Treos, only Treos.  They’ve left their Tungsten models to rot, even though the E was a very good seller for them, it probably pales against the money they can make with the carriers.

Right now, with carriers locking the mobile phone market to themselves, I don’t want a mobile phone/PDA combo.  I don’t want to have to negotiate technical problems with Palm, my OS vendor and my carrier-of-the-week.  I don’t want the ongoing fees I would be responsible for above my regular cell service.  And I don’t want to be stuck with either a carrier’s inferior locked product or a carrier’s bad customer service (future iPhone customers note!)

Many of the small vendors and hobbyist developers on the Palm platform have disappeared.  I use Plucker, the excellent HTML offline page reader and book reader.  Their web site hasn’t had an update since 2004; though someone is paying the hosting, I believe Plucker has effectively ceased development.

That’s happened to a lot of apps.  DataViz, the excellent document conversion and interoperability company for PDA’s, is still around with current product, the only company I know of still left in the Palm space. 

(It didn’t help when Sony dropped its Clie PDAs, making PalmSource effectively a captive company to Palm.)

In some ways, Palm is much like Apple:  They both had the "cool" product of the day.  They both had products that weren’t as technically advanced as others but which were beloved by their users.  But the opposite of evolution in computer systems is death.  Apple eventually got this and got it right with OS X.

Will Palm?

UPDATE:  Rob Pegoraro in the Washington Post thinks the same way.

Take care,

Dave

PowerShell 1.0 is gold, but only for Windows XP and 2003.  There is a new version of PowerShell for Vista but only RC2. 

Get Windows PowerShell 1.0

The latest drop of PowerShell is out.  Main differences in the new release are improved support for IMF, and the documentation is included with PowerShell rather than being a separate download.

Admins will find the documentation easier to follow since it’s based on common administration scripts you might have seen in VBScript.  What’s missing in action, though, is a true reference manual for PowerShell.

Get PowerShell at Microsoft.

Take care,

Dave