Surface Pro review

My son stuck in the Surface Pro

It's been 2 weeks now since I got the Surface Pro in the mail. Packaging was nice, pulling tapes that has tabs at the end before getting the mother lode out of the box.

Using the Surface Pro, you can be an coder, writer, artist, tv addict, video caller, and a gamer. My prior laptop with SSD, Core Duo, even with a new battery gave me 2, maybe 1.5 hours.

As a writer, you may have a choice of plethora of keyboards that you can connect via USB or Bluetooth if for some reason you don't like the limiting factor of the Touch/Type covers that hooks to the base of the Surface Pro. The Type cover that I bought separately is awesome, and very responsive.

I find myself coding in Visual Studio 2012 and throughout that time with Mail and Internet Explorer, I can get 4+ hours of battery time. I think the Surface Pro could be a little thicker to accommodate extra battery storage, after all everyone knows it's a shoehorned-in PC. Of course, when I stream videos, battery life goes down dramatically, but that's to be expected. The screen is really tiny even if you're used to even a 13.3" 4:3 screen. Really seems to be on the small side and it feels like one of those kids toy laptops, however you can see more of the display, more than my older 800px (height) laptop, thanks to the 1080px height.

The pen input garble

As an artist, the Surface Pro tablet and pen comes from Wacom technology, the same technology that one of my friend uses for his comic strips. Granted, he's a Mac person and I won't push it on him, but its amazing that the technology is incorporated onto a tablet and not as a separate device that you hook up with USB. I can open a Windows Metro Reader app, and start using the pen on it, annotating it, add some scribbles and boom it's saved. However, when I save it, I see a whole bunch of garbles. I checked online and other people reported the same problem. THIS definitely has to be fixed but the concept shows great promise!

I don't watch TV enough since I'm always busy with family and work (family comes first, but I seem to work more unfortunately). I do have some favorites I watch tho', but all that probably total 2-4 hours a week of TV time. (Sorry advertisers!) Streamed Hulu, YouTube, and Vimeo on it -- all I can say is -- whoa, the picture is crisp, crisper than any of my LCD screens in the house! And with the 16:9 footprint, the whole screen is used to watch the video and we won't see the annoying black bars across the top and bottom. It's an OMG top-notch experience!

What video relay interpreters see...

Because I'm deaf, I primarily use video to communicate with the world. Most of my readers may be reluctant to be in front of the video camera, but not I, nor most of, if not all, the Deaf community. I enjoy seeing the people I talk to and even the ever-friendly video relay interpreters! Installed ConvoDesktop... it works flawlessly with the camera and with the kickstand in its proper position. No need to adjust the angle or sitting up higher or lower than where the camera is pointing to. Except when I stand on the kitchen counter, I need to back away from the Surface Pro a bit so the video interpreter can see the top o' my head.

The awesome -- I can use touch gestures with Silverlight and Flash. Touch gestures makes all your business apps have a new lease on life. Pretty nice to be able to use touch with an interactive media interface. A 6-year old WinForm app I developed for a client works great using touch. I can see app developers making navigation items and buttons bigger to accommodate touch now and in the future if the users demands it.

Now let's cover the bad which will be scrutinized even more the the positives above. It's like some of us rubbernecking pass some accidents on the road, where it's not always good to obsess about, while you need to keep your eyes on the ball and think of the future.

As an old-tymer Luddite Netflix DVD subscriber due to the fact that streaming isn't all captioned and we as a family still borrow DVDs from the library. I'm thinking of setting aside an old server as our media server and then get streams out of there. That's another story-- WMC, XMBC, or whatever... haven't decided yet. Again, the Windows 8 Reader (pdf) needs work on saving annotations made with the Surface Pro Pen - that's probably my most disappointed aspect of it. It's hot as all Intel computers are and understandably so, but thankfully it isn't hot to the touch. We'll see how much of a beating the computer goes through with daily use, especially with the heat factor. Would I get scalded like a boiling frog?

Another bad, the Surface Pro font's are TINY when you have display settings at 100% or 125%. However, it has a small footprint, so there has to be some give in order to get a take.

An emphatic thumbs up!

A funny story -- when I was playing with OneNote with the pen input and started writing things down, I made a mistake and wanted to undo, instinctively I reached for Ctrl + Z, and that didn't undo the mistake all the way. Humph. Then my 8-year old son said "Give me the pen!" -- He took the pen from me, then turned it around to the opposite side, and started wiping my mistake away on the screen. Turns out the "eraser" worked! Nice touch to the pen operation. I asked him "How'd you know that?", he said "I don't know." Wow, kids.

Hope you find this review beneficial and helps in making a decision on whether you buy a Surface Pro or not.

A CreateRiaClientFilesTask gotcha

Got a Silverlight project that builds fine on my computer, however, on a co-worker's kept failing with CreateRiaClientFilesTask cannot load asssembly or what-not. The gotcha -- I had set the web.config to impersonate a system account and that system account should have at least Modify access for the 'Temporary ASP.NET Files' folder.

Son of 8-track inventor launches visionary online meeting software

Inventor Samuel H. Auld Jr. who held 26 patents on the 8-track stereo system would have liked to see his son, James Auld Sr., 45, launch his visionary virtual headquarters software today. Auld’s company is Universal Online Magic—and I have to say I understand the magic here.

“My father applied his inventiveness to electronic circuitry, motors, magnetic tape, and capstan rollers. I feel a real bond with him, inheriting his inventive and visionary nature. The only difference is my tools are pixels, live video streams, and hundreds of thousands of lines of .NET software code.

“The 8-track was the dominant music delivery medium for 17 years and was a major contribution to the music industry. I can still hear that familiar ‘ker-thunk’ sound it made when switching to the next track.”

Ok I get the nostalgia, I really do, but back to the 21st century. I got a chance to hang out in one of Auld’s virtual headquarters this week, and I have to say I was shocked at how my brain perceived the place to be real.

The truth is I was online in browser-based software that used super high-res 2-D graphics, sound effects, music, and group webcam connections. But the resulting perception was that I was in a real place with live people, moving from the reception area, to meeting rooms, to private offices. And it wasn’t game-like, it was professional and elegant.

I felt as if I was actually inside a headquarters, and the communication was much better for it. I still don’t know exactly why—it just was.

As Auld put it, “there’s a sort of magic that happens when you combine these simple elements in an artful way. This isn’t bleeding-edge and can run on a company’s legacy PCs and Macs, but the end result just ‘feels’ orders of magnitude more satisfying than using say WebEx or GotoMeeting. I liken it to how Disney revolutionized theme parks and sparked a magic in the rich environments he created. My ultimate goal is to make online communications feel like a Disneyland ride.”

It’ll be a few years before it’s as good as a Disney ride, but I like it just the same. The software does much, but not all, of what the traditional meeting solutions do, with a real focus on giving the hosts the ability to run slick media-centric presentations. And the live video and audio streams were stable, clear, and in-synch.

But I gotta say, in the end it’s that magic that really sold me. Also I’m partial to being able to hop into Auld’s own headquarters and ask him a question when the need arises. I know this kind of accessibility to the founder won’t last long as the company grows, but for now I’m a happy customer.

VisualHQ.com is where it’s at.

disclaimer: I worked on the underlying tech in the past, but its been radically revamped since I last worked on it. (for the better of course)

Deploying WCF RIA Services Redux

Installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Silverlight WCF RIA Services v1.0 SP1, but when I deployed it on the server, was getting the following error:

Operation named '[complex method here]' does not conform to the required signature. Parameter types must be an entity or complex type, a collection of complex types, or one of the predefined serializable types.

Was doing a bin deployment where we don't have to worry about what's on the server.

Looked in:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/12/10/tips-to-deploy-ria-services-troubleshoot.aspx [old]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saurabh/archive/2010/03/16/ria-services-application-deployment.aspx [newer]

But there's another DLL Saurabh missed that I found to have worked when deploying it after an umpeeth time:

System.ServiceModel

These are rest of the DLLs I deployed:

Hope that seeing this helps anyone else!

Creating a dynamic ORDERBY in T-SQL

I'm in the midst of converting a Crystal Report into an Excel file output... While there is an increased benefit of more control over the output, however, I lose many features that Crystal has to offer. After weighting options, let's just say its much easier to create an Excel file for this particular report.

Anyway, in Crystal Reports, I had the luxury of dynamically sorting by various datatypes. Based on the sort type the user selected, it could be a combination of DateTimeStamp, ID, and UserName... in this case, we're talking about three different datatypes: datetime, int, and varchar respectfully. We may create a ORDER BY clause with DateTimeStamp ASC, ID DESC, UserName ASC or in whatever combination you want.

This is the minimum requirement of the sort options from the client application (all in ascending):

• DateTimeStamp, UserName
• UserName, ID, DateTimeStamp
• ID, DateTimeStamp

"No problem," I said, "Piece of cake." I can pass the @OrderBy parameter to a SQL stored procedure from the client and then we'll have the sorted data back to the client app as an Excel spreadsheet.

DECLARE @OrderBy int
SET @OrderBy = 1
SELECT 
    DateTimeStamp, ID, UserName 
FROM 
    [Table1]
ORDER BY
    CASE @OrderBy 
        WHEN 0 THEN DateTimeStamp ASC, UserName ASC 
        WHEN 1 THEN UserName ASC, ID ASC, UserName ASC 
        WHEN 2 THEN DateTimeStamp ASC, ID ASC 
    END

But the sort isn't perfect, something's always off, you know how "2" is always after "10" in Windows/SQL Server... something like that. Converts characters the same datatype as the first column, even tried convert(varchar(20), datetimestamp, 110), etc. It became clear that we cannot dynamically order columns with various datatypes like this! Yeap, it's always the little things. *sigh*

Looked it up online thinking there's a quick solution, and saw some people had suggestions here and there. So tried various queries like the ones in http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5942 and none of them worked for me. T-SQL whines about having bad datatypes... Either of those solutions don't work (for me anyway) or they're wrong and not amply tested.

So here's how I was able to do it the neat and harmonious (read zen) way:

select
    datetimestamp, id, username
from 
    table1
order by 
    case @OrderBy 
        when 0 then datetimestamp ASC
        when 1 then username ASC
        when 2 then id
    end,
    case @OrderBy 
        when 0 then username
        when 1 then id
        when 2 then datetimestamp ASC
    end,
    case @OrderBy 
        when 1 then datetimestamp ASC
    end

Hope it is as enlightening for you as it was for me.

Want a great looking XML editor?

Use SQL Server Management Studio 2008!  That tool has an awesome XSL generator and has a button to nicely reformat mangled XML with indents and all.  Oh yeah, Visual Studio-style code coloring.

Satellite tugs

From http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090218-dawn-asteroid-mars.html
But there is a downside to Dawn's swing past Mars. Just as the probe nabbed a speed boost from the planet, the encounter slowed Mars by a tiny fraction, mission managers said.  "The flyby will cause Mars to slow in its orbit enough that after one year, its position will be off by about the width of an atom. If you add that up, it will take about 180 million years for Mars to be out of position by one inch (2.5 cm)," Rayman said. "We appreciate Mars making that sacrifice so Dawn can conduct its exciting mission of discovery in the asteroid belt."

If one measley probe can tug at Mars, what about all those satellites around earth??  If earth's orbit shifts, the tides man, oh, the tides...