Airport Extreme to the Extreme

The only Apple products I owned were my two iPods (Nano and Shuffle). I've found that the the experience with these products have been so fluid and easy. Can Apple do the same with something as boring as a router?

For the past few months, I've been fighting with my wireless network. I've been switching between a D-Link WBR 1310 and a Linksys WRT55AG but both give me random issues. I have a desktop, my laptop and my fiancee's laptop all wireless connected meaning that the simple of act web browsing was becoming a hassle.

After messing with firmware updates and different settings, I gave up and decided to give the Apple Airport Extreme a try - I figured if Apple can make my music listening experience so easy and simple, maybe they can do the same for my wireless connection experience.

Ironically they did. Here is what I did to get the new router working:

1) Hooked up the Airport to my cable modem and then hooked up my USB printer (yes, it has a USB port - more on that later).

2) Installed the Airport Utility on my laptop.

3) Ran the Airport Utility (WIRELESSLY!).

It quickly located my Airport and asked me to give it a name and set the WPA password (WEP is also supported). That was it ... I was able to point all my machines to the Airport. Nice...

The best part - Much better signal strength throughout the condo and so far not one drop out!

On top of that, I can share my USB printer with all the computers connected to the network, via the Bonjour protocol because of the available USB port behind the router. Very cool. The router also supports 801.11n (although I have no devices that support this yet).

There have been some issues. Print jobs are not always successful (mainly from my Vista machine). After some experimentation, I've found turning off the spooler fixes the issue - sucky. Also, my Xbox 360 can't see the Airport (although I've read on newsgroups that this goes away if I turn off wireless security). I have yet to try my Wii. I'm going to get around the Xbox issue by hooking up my Linksys and using it as 802.11a access point (while the Airport supports 802.11a, it can't do both 802.11b/g/n and 802.11a at the same time). Hopefully a firmware update to either the Xbox or Airport will correct this issue - however, it's not too big of a deal to me.

What's awesome, is that I don't own an Mac - yet this still works nicely. I can only imagine that Airport configuration is only more smooth via a Mac.

So to answer my question: Yes, setting up a quality router can be as easy as using an iPod. And only Apple can make a router look so sexy.


Update: Apple has released this router, now with full gigabit speeds.

My Visual Studio Text Editor

At work, I find myself spending most of my time using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I realized that a long time ago, that I was incredibly bored of the default text editor settings:

Now I've gotten used to changing three text editor settings after each time I install Visual Studio:

1) I change the text editor font. I hate the default Courier New font - it's so boring and tires my eyes. I change it to something a little more to my taste, such as Consolas (which looks really good with ClearType turned on). You can change the font under Tools->Options...->Environment->Fonts and Colors.

2) I then turn on line numbers. I personally think this should be on by default. You can turn this on by going to Tools->Options...->Text Editor->C#->General. (this obviously also works with other source code types such as C++).

3) The last thing I do is set a line guide in the text editor. The feature for some reason isn't available via the Visual Studio interface and requires you to add this in the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"=RGB(0,128,0)60

This will draw a line in your text editor the color of the RGB value specified (in my case green) and the last number is the column number you want the line at. Mine is at 60 for the screenshot below:

COM interop assemblies and versioning

At work today, I was assigned a bug because of a COM interop assembly I had created. To create it, our build environment was using tlbimp.exe. It needed to be able to take a resource file that contained the version information, however tlbimp doesn't allow you to do this (only allows you to statically specify). I found a way around this thanks to IanWho. Basically, you need to follow the following steps.

1) Create your COM interop assembly with tlbimp.exe.
2) Compile your resource file.
3) Disassemble the interop assembly with ildasm.exe. This breaks it down to its simple proteins (the IL code).
4) Reassemble the interop assembly with ilasm.exe, using the /res switch to have it include your compiled resource file.

This worked for me and after I was done it reminded me of the movie "The Fly".

ellboy.com 2.0

I almost came to the point of forgetting that I had my own domain name called ellboy.com. After typing it into my web browser, I forgot that I had a Blogger account. After looking through the blog, I realized how useless it is. I almost - keyword ALMOST - deleted it. But I have to have a blog - I can't be a geek without one. Maybe this time it won't be so sucky.