For quite a while now, I've tolerated this issue on both a Windows 2000 Professional and an XP machine...whenever I select and 'delete' files, it can take up to two minutes to complete the action.  Those machines weren't always like that, but over time the delete process just seemed to slow way down. 

Worse, the whole system is pretty well locked up while we wait for the files to go away. 

Brian Cryer has a neat little article with an obvious solution...empty your damn Recycle Bin once or twice a year!  It worked for me...I only had about 1.2GB of crap in there...go figure.  Thanks Brian (for pointing out what probably should have been obvious)!

We spent two days last week at the Great Wolf Lodge in Traverse City...what a blast!  We played most of the first day, checked in, stayed overnight, then played until lunch time the second day (that's plenty of pool time, I think). 

The hotel is really nice, and the water park is awesome.  The only complaint I have is that we were told (during the telephone reservation process) that our room would be ready at 1pm...we couldn't get in it until after 4:30pm.  That's pretty poor, because the kids needed someplace to go before then...otherwise, a very good time. 

Two days after learning how to ride a bike, Johnny earned 8 stitches above his eye...he hit a rock in the road and went down hard...road rash and all. 

This afternoon, Johnny rode a two-wheeled bike for the first time!  His training wheels are all mangled from dropping the bike on it's side (to be fair, they were messed up even when we bought the bike), so I took them off and told him he was going to ride without them. 

It took about 15 minutes (~10 laps around the cul-de-sac), and he was off!  I was going through the whole “pretend to hold onto the seat” thing, thinking he would worry if I let go.  I had Steph take some laps with him, and she just jogged alongside him...he didn't care at all. 

So far, only one significant crash, but it didn't slow him down much.  Now he wants to practice "taking off" by himself, so he can be totally independent. 

I'm not sure what started it, but one day I fired up my trusty old Windows 2000 Professional box and instead of hopping on the Internet after it's usual 4 minute boot, I got the following error:

“Mobile Devices Properties, The TCP/IP Network Transport is not installed.” 

Surprisingly, I didn't find many Internet sources that could help.  The best one was at TechExams.net (http://www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=17654), as it seemed to have many of the same issues...Windows 2000 Pro, High speed connection via DSL/LAN, McAfee VirusScan, and synchronization with a Windows CE Palm-Size device. 

After many attempts, here's the sequence that (I think) fixed it:

• In Control Panel>Network and Dial-Up connections, open the 'Local Area Connection' Properties dialog and uninstall all of it's components (including TCP/IP), but don't reboot. 
• In Control Panel>Add/Remove Hardware, remove/uninstall the network card
• Now, reboot.
• When it comes back up, reinstall the drivers for the network card (Windows recognized the NIC as 'new' hardare and asked for the drivers.
• Go back into the 'Local Area Network' properties and install the TCP/IP protocol. 
• Reboot and cross your fingers

When I was a kid, I really believed for a while that a little man lived in the refrigerator and turned the light on and off for you...why wouldn't I believe it?  My parents told me that's how it was. 

One fun thing about having kids yourself is you get to mess with their minds the way your parents messed with yours.  This weekend, just before my wife took the whole crew out for the day, I pulled our 4 year old aside and convinced him that no matter what anyone says or asks him during the day, he should respond “I'm Batman.” 

He did it.  To my wife, and to the (surprised) guy running the bumper boats at the local fun park. 

I know you already know, but if you haven't done it already (unless you're WAY brighter than me), you too will someday spend an hour troubleshooting a stylesheet before you realize you've got a friggin' capital letter where you shouldn't. 

Like many owners of private domain names, all email sent to any addresses at bowenweb.com are eventually forwarded to my email account (except those that fall victim to spam filters and filtering rules).  I was a little surprised to see the following text in a message this afternoon, though: 

[/edit]

I have used a number of digital cameras, but they've never come even close to the quality of a decent 35mm camera.  I recently have tested a Canon EOS Digital Rebel, and can tell you honestly that times are changing. 

The EOS Digital Rebel takes fast pictures (as fast as 4-shot bursts), in quality levels that easily rival those of 35mm shots.  It has all the manual settings you would expect form a good 35mm (aperture priority, shutter priority, bulb setting, etc.), and is the size and shape of a 'real' camera.  The Lithium Ion battery didn't move from 'full-charge' through the whole weekend of testing, and a 512MB card looks like it will hold about 220 of the 2+ MB images (I didn't even get into shooting in 'raw' mode with 6MB images.  Frankly, I don't see a need). 

The camera I tested was paired with a Canon CP-100 dye-sub printer (out of production...replaced by the CP-200) which produces 4x6” prints in about a minute (each).  You can connect the printer to a computer first, or print directly from the camera. 

Offloading images from the camera is a breeze with the wizard that installs with the Canon driver...pick which images you want copied by selecting their thumbnails, and the wizard does the rest. 

By the way, the printer supplies can be purchased on Amazon.com for about $14(US) for 36 prints.  The quality is good enough that we're using this camera for fingerprint comparisons (under magnification).  Honestly, you can't look at the resulting prints and tell that they aren't from the photo lab. 

I know there are hundreds (thousands?) of them out there, but I found this 'Webmaster's color picker' from VisiBone.com pretty handy. 

Effective, quick, and free.

John Mandia threw down a cool challenge idea...how to make Google search multiple sites at one time for a specific term.  I messed around with it for a while, and came up with this: 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=bowen+john+%7Bsite%3Agobowen.com+OR+rainbowportal.net%7D

Basically, from the Google interface, use the following format:

bowen john {site:gobowen.com OR rainbowportal.net}

...Where 'bowen' and 'john' are the terms to search for, and 'gobowen.com' and 'rainbowportal.net' are the two sites I want searched.  Neato! (though admittedly, this example is a bit conceited)

[edit]After posting this, I went back and read the comment from Clint S. on John's site - it looks like the curly brackets aren't needed for single-term searches, but for multiple terms, you have to have them[/edit]

[edit2]6/27/2004 - Wrong again...Clint S. had the right answer from the start.  Still a cool trick, though.[/edit2]

In helping to convert a three-ring-bound procedure manual to something better, I’ve noticed that even though the Internet has been around for years, people struggle with parts of its concept

Background
The manual I’m talking about here is a very technical document.  It details procedures for fingerprint examiners to follow in all aspects of their jobs.  It’s existed in a three-ring binder for many, many years, and is critical to the job for reasons that aren’t important in this context.

Problem
The problem is that the document is ‘ordered’.  Like most ‘normal’ documents, it has a table of contents, with chapters that group similar content together.  Unfortunately, no one reads it that way.  When you need it, you need a specific part of it, but no one reads the whole thing (or even a whole chapter) in the normal course of business.  It’s a reference for those times when you can’t remember a very specific item or task. 

Observation
There probably are some neat terms out there that describe this concept better, but I’m calling them ‘Ordered documents’ and ‘Unordered documents’ (and hereby claiming the rights to all profits that my ‘new’ terms generate<evil laugh/>).  An ordered document is like a novel...you read chapter 1 in order to understand chapter 2, then on to chapter 3, etc. You don't (usually) skip around the book and read just certain parts of it unless your bookmark falls out. 

An unordered document is more like our manuals (probably like most technical documents). We might go directly to the recipe for a Ninhydrin solution, then click from there over to safety protocols, then to standards and procedures, etc. We don't read through anything start to finish (well, most people don't anyway).

The web works like this…it’s littered with links in places that will take you abruptly to somewhere else. Many people intuitively understand this concept when they see it.  But when writing documents, we struggle because the only way most of us know how to write documents is in 'order'. Putting a 'link' in the middle of a paragraph is still uncomfortable to many people.  Worse yet is converting a document that has been ‘ordered’ for its whole life. 

Solution
Yeah, right.  There are a number of solutions out there, probably many I’ve never even heard of; for this case, I’m pushing DocBook (not Dita…sorry Jes!).  I’ve spent a ton of time all over Bob Stayton’s site and have managed to squeeze out some good proofs of concept

I was recently dealing with a badly damaged installation of Windows XP Home...it wouldn't recognize its modem or CD ROM drive, wouldn't run System Restore (couldn't even get the window open to try it), and generally had suffered a lot of loss due to the 318 virus instances I had removed from it. 

I decided to start clean.  I ran the Files and Settings Transfer wizard, moving all the files I needed to a safe place...then dropped the partition, reformatted, and reinstalled XP. 

With that done, I re-ran the F&S Transfer wizard to bring back the needed files...but found that that backup was only partial.  I was missing some 490+ jpg files (family photos) from it!

Now, to the point (thanks for hanging on this long).  After a bit of sweating, crying, and pounding of fists, I found RecoverMyFiles.com, which claims it will recover lost files even after a re-partition and reformat.  Let me tell you that it does exactly that!  I was able to recover all of those family photos in a couple of hours (the scan required after reformatting is a bit slow) without a problem. 

I'm not usually big on endorsements, but I highly recommend RecoverMyFiles.com.  It saved the day for me. 

I was trying to map a network drive on PC A to PC B on a small network...with poor results.  The Map Network Drive wizard kept complaining that it couldn't find the share I had set up on B...even though I'd used that share successfully dozens of times before with other machines. 

I made sure that both machines were in the same workgroup, but that didn't do it.  I finally disabled the Window XP Internet Connection Firewall on PC A and that did the trick.  I thought that firewall was supposed to prevent traffic in only one direction (in), but apparently it prevents network activity in the out direction too. 

I've never been so pleased to see Rainbow's CVS download broken!  As strange as it may seem, it just reminds me how much work is getting done on the project, as developers from all over the place are squashing bugs at an incredible rate. 

I suspect the CVS package will stabilize in the not-so-distant future, and Rainbow will be stronger and more stable than ever.

This weekend, my 4-year old and I were in the garage when he suddenly started crying out in pain.  I went over to him, and he held out a spray can of “Deep Woods Off” insect repellant while screaming "I sprayed this in my eyes!" 

We rushed him into the house, rinsed his eyes with water, then dried him off.  After a few minutes, the tears stopped falling, he looked up and said calmly to my wife and I, "Remind me not to do that again."

With Rainbow installations, occasionally I'll end up with some (or all) objects in the database being owned by my local ASPNET account (computername\ASPNET).  This results from building the database with a trustedconnection, and while I know this, I always forget and do it anyway. 

The problem is that when I try to upload the existing database to a 'live' one somewhere, now that local ASPNET account owns everything and things go very sideways. 

Anyway, I found this SQL script a while ago that (in two steps) changes the ownership of all the objects in a database to 'dbo'.  I didn't write it, and it's been so long now, I don't even know where I got it...if it was yours, thank you very much.  If not, here it is:

SELECT 'EXEC(''sp_changeobjectowner @objname = '''''+   ltrim(u.name) + '.' + ltrim(s.name) + ''''''   + ', @newowner = dbo'')'
FROM  sysobjects s,       sysusers u
WHERE s.uid = u.uid
AND   u.name <> 'dbo'
AND   xtype in ('V', 'P', 'U')
AND   u.name not like 'INFORMATION%'
order by s.name

Run this in Query Analyzer (with 'Results to Text' option set), then copy those results into a new QA window and run them.