Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

Ever wanted to ask what really goes on at Microsoft to a softie? Want to know about some random bytes of code inside Windows? Want to know who really killed Microsoft Bob? Well, here’s your chance!

Ask him about anything from life at Microsoft to questions on their product and business strategies. As he puts it, he will try to answer them without getting fired :P

I worked on Vista and Windows 7, and will also be working on Windows 8. Ask me anything you want about the company, culture, lifestyle, seattle, products, etc. and I’ll answer the best I can without getting fired.

He has put up some info for students looking at becoming Interns at Redmond. Most of it is the same stuff you’d read around the internet but here’s something I read for the first time and I must say, I agree with especially since this was how I got my trip to Redmond ;)

Also, there is one other way you can consider to try to get an internship. The Imagine Cup is a competition that Microsoft hosts for students. In the past, top ranked students from each region have been flown out for interviews at Redmond, skipping the whole screening process. I can’t promise that they will continue to do this, but if I ever saw a student who placed well in the imagine cup, I would definitely see it as being very positive.

I must say, the guy is brave. I think its a good move. There are a lot of misconceptions about Microsoft as a company. It isn’t (all) evil :P I wish I knew he was. I’d certainly like to meet him and have a chat :) If DrinkingKoolAid ever reads this (chances are surely slim), get in touch with me. The first round’s on me!

I noticed that Dell had finally released updates for some of their drivers on their support site for a Dell Studio XPS 1640 on Windows 7 x64. I immediately started downloading them and after a reboot noticed that the update for IDT sound driver causes a freeze in any application trying to do anything related to sound. No updates on their track pad drivers it is so we continue to use Windows Vista drivers.

Speaking of IDT drivers causing serious woes, I would suggest to every Dell Studio XPS 1640 user planning to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 manually (ie. not using a ghost image provided by Dell) that you kindly DO NOT DO SO. Drivers such as the ones for IDT consume 40-50 CPU constantly for doing nothing of essence in the background. A simple “remove driver” wouldn’t work either. If Dell plans on shipping drivers like the current one, I would not even go to Dell for an upgrade to Windows 7.

Dell better come up with a fix quickly. I think I’ll call up Dell’s premium tech support just to tell them about this issue and hope its fixed quickly. On a side note, for some reason, side scroll on the track pad doesn’t work on Windows 7 in the current version of Firefox :( It works fine for every other software. Weird.

Update: Just talked to tech support. Seems I’m the only one who has issues. Weirdly enough, a reinstall of the driver seems to have fixed the issue. ¬¬ Some odd quirk I guess.

The first question in your head would be “Why the world do I need a Home Server?”

Good question. I’d like to ask you a couple of things. Do you have multiple machines in your house? Do you ever feel like you should have centralized storage in your house? Do you have old hardware simply lying around the house waiting to be tinkered with? Do you like playing with your machines?

If you said yes to (most) of the above questions, having a Home Server could help you :) It can handle not only centralized storage of media and documents but also backups. Have you ever needed a file from computer x in your house and found it was shut down after being used by a family member? Well, you wouldn’t have this issue if you had a central server. People could go around switching off their machines all they want as long as you have the file you want on your Storage Server.

Lets get into it then. From now, I’ll walk you through how to make your old machine into a Network Attached Server (NAS).

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