Don't want to get anyones hopes up, but this Eminem video is very very cool.

I'm definitely feeling something in the air as November 2nd rolls around. I don't think the polls are really as close as the pollsters say they are. Consider this:

There is a massive effort to get out the young vote (18-24). This hasn't happened in a generation, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if young voters turn out in record numbers. And pollsters do not get to talk to young voters.

More and more people don't talk to telemarketers. Just this morning, I hang up on one. Was it a pollster calling to ask my opinion on something? Pollsters don't talk to people who use technology (even call display) to block the calls.

More and more people don't have a regular phone. Something like 5% of people only use a cell phone for all their calls. Pollsters don't talk to those people.

More and more people are out of the house from between 8am and 9pm - at work, out with friends, at dinner... Pollsters don't call outside those hours, and so pollsters don't get to talk to those people.

I have American citizen friends living in Canada. Him and his wife are definitely going to vote in the election from here. How many ex-patriate Americans are going to make the extra effort to vote this time around? Pollsters don't talk to those people.

So the question is, if you were able to ask young people, people with 2-3 jobs who are never home to answer the phone, and ex-patriates who they are going to vote for... who are they going to say? How many votes is that anyway? Several million more than 4 years ago, that's for sure.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is not that close on election day. I think both the Democrats and Republicans want you to think their candidate might lose, just to get out all the possible voters. But in the end, it might not be that close.

When I say Checkmate, I mean that Eminem video is very well done. The song itself is catchy. The video has amazing, never-before seen graphics and imagrey.  This could play on MTV, VH1 , whatever... all week next week. It'll be the hottest download on Kazaa. This video could influence the election.

(Maybe...)

This just in... Static Control Corp (SCC) has essentially won its appeal against Lexmark. Lexmark was attempting to use the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to claim that Static was overriding its “digital locks” which prevented printer users from using printer ink cartridges from other manufacturers.

One court had issues an injunction against SCC, but the appeals court dropped the injunction, finding that it is not clear that Lexmark will win its case. If you read the appeals court ruling, you'll see that 2 of the 3 judges came out pretty strongly against what Lexmark was claiming and the 3rd judge agreed but for different reasons...

As the kids say, w00t!

You'll recall a few days ago I was complaining about this printer ink cartridge scam:

And what about this anti-competitive technology? Inkjet cartridges these days have little computer chips, and the printers have little chip readers. The cartridge keeps track of ink levels, and is hard-coded to go down, never up. The printer will stop working when it thinks the ink is too low - even if there is still ink left in the container. And try using a no-name or third-party ink cartridge, and your printer will not work at all.

He he... I'm feeling a little better. The law does (sometimes) step in and protect the little guy from being bullied by the big guys. Sometimes.

Update: Oooooh. SCC is counter-suing Lexmark under the Antitrust law. You know, the price of ink jet printers may rise by a few dollars after this, but the cost of ink jet cartridges will fall drastically.

Long-time readers will recall that I often post here how much I love .NET. You can go back in the posting archives of this site and see how it thrills me when things that I want to do are made simpler with .NET (compared with other programming environments I am used to).

Today was not a good day in that regard.

Where do I begin? Well, first of all, I was writing a simple Windows Forms program to call a stored procedure and write the dataset returned out to a text file. Should be simple to do.

Well, I tried to be a bit fancy right off the bat. I don't know why I did it, but I lost a couple of hours of productivity and I still don't understand what the big deal is.

Here's what I tried to do: I wanted execution time to be displayed on screen as the program ran. You know, every second the text will update to say “1 second”, “2 seconds”, “3 seconds”, etc. Easy right? I just add a timer component to the form and have the Tick event update the text in a label.

Well, I tried to run the program in debug mode, by stepping through it line by line. When I happened upon my SqlConnection.Open() statement, the debugger froze. “There is no source code for the current location.” Hmm. I was using Step Over, not Step Into, so it should not be trying to go into the SqlConnection object code. Is my SQL connection setup OK? Check my connection string. Database is running. Add a generic exception handler to the catch statement. Tried commenting a bunch of stuff out. Moved things around. Nothing worked. The program always froze on the SqlConnection.Open() statement.

I called a friend over, and showed the problem to him. We both spent 20 minutes trying different ways of doing the same thing, to no avail.

Finally, I checked Google. It led me right away to this MSDN Knowledge base article. Ah, you cannot access the SqlConnection from inside a timer event in Debug mode. But the article suggested a work around. Instead of using a Timer component, I could use the System.Timers.Timer class.

So I reworked my code to use that class instead. The method and property names are slightly different, so it wasn't just one-line change. Ran it again.

This time it worked. But... the program continued to act strangely in Debug mode. When I tried to read the dataset using a SystemDataReader.Read() call, it froze again.

So finally, I pulled out all the timer events. Not the best solution, but it worked fine after that.

Anyways, .NET's flakiness with Timer events cost me a couple of hours today. While most of the time it is fun to be a programmer in this tool, today it was not fun.

What if I told you there was an industry that sold 10 cents worth of product for $50 at retail stores? And that consumers were usually forced to buy it every few months at those inflated prices?

And they intentiionally made each version of their product incompatible with previous versions to make life more difficult for both consumers and competitors? And they came out with new versions of their product almost every month?

And that they developed technology so that their product would stop working when a competitor's product was used with it?

Some of you may have already guessed what industry I am talking about. Others may think I am dealing with something only Tony Soprano and the mafia could dream up -- a racket to ensure you make tons of money and everyone else gets screwed, especially the consumer.

Well, the industry is computer printers. The scam is that they sell the printer to you for $89 or so. And that printer comes with very little ink - the minimum required by law. Then they got you to the tune of $100 every few months as you replace your ink cartridges ($40 for black, and $20 each for three color modules). But what's so special about their ink? A cartridge of ink costs only a few cents. Even with all the fancy packaging, it's only $1 or so. Why do they jack up the price to $20-$40 per cartridge?

And what about this anti-competitive technology? Inkjet cartridges these days have little computer chips, and the printers have little chip readers. The cartridge keeps track of ink levels, and is hard-coded to go down, never up. The printer will stop working when it thinks the ink is too low - even if there is still ink left in the container. And try using a no-name or third-party ink cartridge, and your printer will not work at all.

The other thing that kills me is that there are, like, 100 different models of inkjet printers by each company. And each printer takes a different size and model of ink cartridge. That is why the computer stores contain aisles and aisles of inkjet cartridges. There is NO GOOD REASON why each printer requires a different model cartridge besides to make life more difficult for competitors and by extension consumers. If Epson makes 100 different inkjet models, then anyone who wants to make a cheaper ink cartridge needs to make 100 as well, which raises costs.

It's a big scam. Governments should step in. If the Department of Justice wants to stop anti-competitive behavior, this is a PRIME EXAMPLE. Do you think companies can get by with having two or three model printers, and keep selling them for a year or two? Do you think companies can get together and settle on a standard inkjet cartridge size? Yes. Of course they could. But then, they would be forced to compete, and that would be bad for business.

Tonight I didn't break any laws, but was made to feel like I did. I refilled my own inkjet cartridge. After a few minutes trying to get it to work, it did. I don't feel so bad though - these companies have been ripping me off for years.

This series of blog entries is running 2 or 3 longer than I had expected at the start. I'm sorry if this saga is getting old from the reader's perspective. How do you think I feel, trying to install this thing 10 times at least?

Finally, I have some good news to report.

I reinstalled the database and application servers from scratch. Reinstalled Windows Server 2003, and did everything in the proper order. I made sure the TFSIdentity user had admin permissions on the database, and did a few tests to ensure the permissions were properly set. And I hit the install button again...

And it failed. Again.

So, I deleted the databases that were created. I noticed it was the C:\VSTS folder that was not created this time, so I tried something different when installing the second time. I hit the install button...

And it succeeded. Yay!

What did I do differently between the two attempts? Well, during the install it asks you for four things:

• database server name
• TFS domain user name
• TFS domain
• TFS domain user password

During my first attempt, I used “vsts.x4.ca” as my domain name. Because that is the domain I created on the application server. The second attempt, I only used “vsts” as the domain name. And voila!

I really wish the install program would be smart enough to tell me “vsts.x4.ca” is not in the proper format. That would have saved me a TON of time. Heck, if they just had an example there (or in the documentation) that showed what a valid domain looked like, I would have known what to use and some of this mess would have been avoided.

Lessons learned:

* Follow the directions from the start. Once you've discovered you've skipped a step (by not installing all the options at the database tier, or by having disjointed domain server names), realize that you might have to start over. Try the install first, but be prepared to start over.

* This domain name requirement is a pain in the neck. If you understand Active Directory and domains, no problems for you I guess. But if you're like me and don't, be prepared to learn some new things.

* The install instructions may not be enough. Find someone who has installed it already and written about it on their blog. Blogs make good adjuncts to the official documentation.

Whew! You should see the relief on my face today.

That's it. I'm starting over.

I could not convince the application server install to finish completely. Add to this the fact that I was now getting an error when trying to shutdown the database server, and an error when starting the application server. Time to start over.

This time, I am following the install instructions to the letter right from the start. That was my big mistake last time. I was forced to install certain things out of order. It possible that since I installed SQL Server 2005 before installing IIS, something just wasn't right.

So, I've now reinstalled the database server. Windows Server 2003, IIS, all critical Windows Updates, and SQL Server 2005. Easy as punch.

I am in the process of reinstalling the application server. I'll get the domain controller thing right from the start this time, so that might go a lot smoother.