I recently recieved my new Lenovo Thinkpad W510 and despite liking many things about the laptop I am growing more and more frustrated with the blue screen of death issue relating to the GOBI 2000 wireless card when used with an AT&T sim card.  The behavior is installing an AT&T sim card causes a bluescreen.  Without the card everything functions just fine.  You can boot and operate with a blue screen with the SIM installed if Access Connections are installed; that poses a few problems though.  First, I like Access Connections, second, how do you use the 3g card then!

Some reports are blaming it on a wireless adapter problem.  Yet others say downgra... [More]

I just completed the setup of BugTracker.NET at The Bureau.  Patrick had found it and though it lacks UI candy, it looked like a very good tool / resource.  It is a web based bug tracking tool for software development teams.  It is free and simple to use.  At first glance, it looks a bit ugly, there is definately room for a lot of enhancement to the user interface.  That being said it very elagantly accomplishes what is necessary to track bugs, issues, feature opportunities, etc. within the application development process.

I took a few minutes last night and figured out the admin management / edit page and data storage for a widget.  In the end, very easy.  Blogengine stores the data in either the database or xml based on your provider settings for your site.  Everything I am doing is with an MSSQL database backend so in my case blogengine store that data to the be_DataStoreSettings table.  It very simply stores all of the settings for a widget in that table identifying the id of the widget and the settings for the widget in seperate fields.  In the settings field, all settings for the widget are stored as xml.  In the end the datastore table only has one record per widget.&nbs... [More]

Greetings.  The password generator has been working well and a number of folks have found it.  I just recently added a checkbox for making a password mixed case.  Next I am going to write the admin edit page for the widget.  From that page the site admin will be able to constrain the character list for each type of password.  Once I complete that page I will provide a packaged widget available to anyone interested in how it works with some of my notes.  I have been very impressed by how simple the process is to develop a BlogEngine widget.

I have just added my first Blogengine widget.  It is not a hard thing to do at all.  For those of you using the previous password generator page on my wordpress site, sorry it took me a while to get this back up on the new site.  I hope you will find this widget as good.  I realize I did not add the checkbox for "mixed case" which I will add soon.

Ultimately adding a custom widget is easy.  Pretty much all you have to do is create a user control and identify it as a widget.  In an upcoming post I will go into more detail, but for now the Password Generator is back.

Wow, I am in the home strecth of a clean install on my W500 Thinkpad and it sure has been a headache.  I have never experienced this much of a pain.  I did a 64bit Vista installation (not provided by Lenovo).  The operating system install went as expected, but then it became fun.  Getting the drivers collected was a pain in the ass.  Once you download everything you think you are going to need, you need to run an installer to extract the files.

Would it be too much trouble for Lenovo to append the file names with the device they are for?  I am sorry, but I just don't know what 7vrv17ww.exe is for!  Would 7vrv17ww-IntelProLanAdapter.exe be too muc... [More]

I recently found a game I remember foundly.  Gazillionare from LavaMind.  I admit, it is a simple and mindless game, but it can suck you in.  Though I don't remember when I originally found it or began playing it, I know it was a long time ago.  Today I discovered that they have been continuing development of the game (though probably minamally).  It has been re-compiled to work on Vista and they have added some additional planets, ships and characters.  I encourage you to give it a try.  Not a bad way to kill a little time.