As many other people have posted today (congratulations to all of them!), Microsoft MVP awards for the October cycle came out today. As a result, I’ve been awarded this year as a BizTalk Server MVP once more. Thanks everyone!

I went shopping around yesterday, and ended up getting 4GB of additional memory for my desktop machine, so now it has 8GB of RAM (the maximum this motherboard supports). This should help a lot, as I’ve been starting to run a couple of Virtual Machines at the same time more often now.

For example, I recently needed to test that some stuff was working correctly on a 64-bit Linux system, so with the added memory running an Ubuntu 64-bit image and a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows VM at the same time becomes a lot easier.

Of course, I use Virtual Box for this, since Virtual PC doesn’t support 64-bit at all, and running multiple VMs at the same time with a decent amount of memory each is just not possible with it, either. The recent v2.2.2 release seems to have made things a bit more stable for me; particularly using VHD disk images. I was also pleasantly surprised with the great performance of my 64-bit Ubuntu image on VBox: Even with full desktop effects on the guest enabled, the UI was very smooth and responsive. I never turn those anyway, but it was an interesting test to see how it performed.

With the new memory, I’ve turned off paging files on the host OS (Windows Server 2008 x64), which should help a little bit with performance in some cases. Other than that, the only downside is that with so much memory, using hibernation is really no longer an option; using it with 4GB of RAM was already stretching things…

Yesterday on my post about mice, I mentioned that I was still seeing a little problem with my new mouse:

For some strange reason I haven't been able to figure out, however, I'm still seeing moments where the mouse will stop responding (stop moving) for short periods of time.

It now appears that I found the cause of the problem: I had the wireless receiver of the mouse connected to one of the USB ports on my Dell UltraSharp 2208WFP monitor.

As soon as I plugged the receiver directly into one of the USB on my latop, the problem went away. It's not all that surprising, since I had already noticed problems before when I tried Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 connected to the monitor: keys would randomly repeat in very inconvenient ways!

It would appear then that either the USB ports on my monitor have some issues that cause devices to function incorrectly (possibly a timing problem?), but not sure if it's a general problem with this monitor line or if it's a problem with my unit specifically.

The two previous mice I've using lately are my trusty Microsoft Trackball Explorer, which, though a bit old, still works flawlessly, and a Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000.

I just recently gave up on the Trackball explorer for a simple reason: Pain. I'm not a very heavy gamer, and most of the games I own are fairly old ones, but the problem with the Trackball Explorer is that I end up doing too much effort with my thumb, causing a nasty pain in the thumb muscle.

The Notebook Presenter Mouse is great in idea: Bluetooth, has 5 buttons and the control/presentation buttons on the lower side are great for controlling your media player. I don't even have much of a problem with its small size. However, the mouse has several really annoying features:

• The wheel is too soft and has almost no feel to it, which makes it hard to actually control scrolling.
• The position of the buttons 3 and 4 is, well, just useless. Pressing them requires twisting your hand in extremely unnatural positions.
• The mouse isn't very precise. In fact, I strongly suspect mine is possessed or something becomes it sometimes goes wherever it wants instead of where I'm trying to move it to.
• It would occasionally stop responding for 1-2 seconds, which was extremely annoying. This might be a problem with my laptop's bluetooth radio, though, so it's hard to say.

I just got a new Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 (who comes up with these names?!?), and I'm trying to get used to it, but to be honest, I still don't know if I really like it.

The mouse has a different feel to it because of it's shape. It's a lot taller, almost like a ball, in a way, which forces your hand into a different position than the previous mice I owned.

Basically, instead of your hand being more or less parallel to the table, it's in a more natural position inclined to one side. It feels reasonably comfortable for the fingers and the arm, but I've already discovered something I don't enjoy about it: I have a really crappy way of using the mouse and I've always tended to drag the lower part of my hand and rest it behind the mouse.

I know I shouldn't do this (mostly) but it's an habit that's hard to break, and hasn't really caused me much trouble in the past. With the Laser Mouse, however, it has now become a problem.

The reason is that with the new position, it means that if I rest the lower side of the hand on the pad, the hand doesn't rest on one side only, which puts all its weight right on the bone, where I don't have much muscle to cushion it. So it's now a bit painful. I'm now going to try and find a mouse pad with some wrist protection and I'm hoping it will significantly improve this.

There are some things I did like quite a bit:

1. The mouse wheel feeling is a lot better than on the Notebook Presenter and even than the previous Laser Mouse 6000. However, I still hold the opinion that the mouse wheel was a whole lot better on the old Microsoft mice when it "clicked" and presented certain resistance to scrolling. I just haven't been able to really like the "soft" wheel movement in the several latest incarnations.
2. The weight: The new mouse is a bit heavier than previous MS mice I had. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to cause any problems for moving it, and feels more "solid".
3. The overall feel of the mouse is pretty good. Like the other Microsoft laser mice I've used, it is a bit too sensitive for my taste, but it's not bad.

For some strange reason I haven't been able to figure out, however, I'm still seeing moments where the mouse will stop responding (stop moving) for short periods of time. It's not the surface I'm using, of that I'm sure, so I'm starting to suspect it is something in my Vista installation that's causing the trouble or interference of some kind. If anyone happens to have any idea as to what it may be, it would sure be appreciated.

Provided the American Airlines problems from this week get sorted out, I'll be attending the MVP Summit again this year. I'll be arriving Sunday pretty late but will be staying until Friday.

If anyone wants to meet, chat, or just say Hi, send me an email (tomas at winterdom.com) or ping me via twitter.

Here's some music I've recently gotten my hands on:

• Dokken: From Conception - Live 1981. Dokken playing live at its best. It's also my second Dokken live album, as I already owned their Live from the Sun album.
• Edguy: Hellfire Club. Edguy's always a fun band; several good tracks in this one like "We don't need a Hero", "King of fools" and my favorite, "Navigator".
• Kamelot: Ghost Opera. A solid album, as most of previous Kamelot works.
• Diabolique: Black Sun Collection. This is a double album combining their Wedding the Grotesque and The Black Flower albums, though the second one is far more polished and a lot better overall (I particularly liked songs like "Dark Rivers of the Heart", "Yesmine" and "Play in the dark". I also own their Butterflies album which is one of my favorites around.
• Freedom Call: Eternity. It's an ok album, but clearly not their best.
• Iron Maiden: No Prayer for the Dying. I had a copy of this album many many years ago and lost it, and ran into it a couple of weeks ago at Tower Records and got it. The only reason they're carrying this stuff is because Iron Maiden is giving a concert in Bogota soon, though I won't be attending :-(.
• Winger: IV. Didn't really expect to get this one, given that I was never really a Winger fan, but it actually has a few really good songs, like "Four Leaf Clover".
• David Shankle Group: Ashes to Ashes. Interesting album, though somewhat of a mixed bag. So far I'm liking "The Widow's Peak" the best.

There's a thread going on at reddit regarding an old FYI RFC about computer naming conventions. This made me think a bit about how I name my machines, and realize I don't really have a convention at all. Or, rather, I've had several over the years ranging from places/characters from books (from the traditional Lord of the Rings lore to science fiction) to famous scientists.

The machines I'm currently using are named like this:

• My main Windows laptop is currently named arcano.
• My other laptop running ubuntu is named isengard.
• My main development virtual machine, running WinServer2k3, is named newton (after Sir Isaac Newton, of course).

Some other names I've used previously include kepler (in honor of Johannes Kepler), caladan (from Frank Herbert's dune), copernico (the Spanish spelling for Nicolaus Copernicus), radiant, arrakis (again, a dune reference), lothlorien, and colossus (a reference to the computer, not the comic superhero). There are probably plenty others I've forgotten over the years :-).

Another common choice seems to be using letters from the Greek alphabet. That was the convention at my college. I still remember our first account used to be in delta, which turned out to be an old Sun workstation hosting email, web and shell access to the CS department (and later decomissioned).

What do you name your computers?

A few months ago I signed up again for emusic. The plans are not as good as they used to be, but they are still fairly cheap, and there was tons of new music I wanted to try out. Also helped that finding good music here, particularly if you like Metal, is no easy task.

Here are some of the albums I've recently bought:

• Amorphis: Eclipse
• Axel Rudy Pell: Nasty Reputation
• Iron Savior: Megatropolis
• Metal Church: A Light in the Dark
• Russell Allen / Jorn Lande: The Battle
• Serenity: Worlds Untold & Dreams Unlived
• Sonata Arctica: Unia
• Sunterra: Graceful Tunes
• Therion: Gothic Kabala
• Thought Chamber: Angular Perceptions
• Throes of Dawn: Quicksilver Clouds
• Tiesto: Parade of the Athletes
• TNT: Transistor

A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, that is, the black one with the split keys, and I'm loving it! I'm using it with my laptop, which I've now got on my desk in a simple stand so that the screen is raised at eye level and it works very nicely.

Before this, I used to use one of the older original Microsoft Natural Keyboards (the split one with the cursor keys in the right position) and I really liked it. It was working perfectly still after several years,  but it was a lot dirtier and the keys made a lot of noise. The new keyboard makes a lot less noise, except for the space key which is usually pretty noisy anyway.

Jeff Atwood posted a review of this keyboard a couple of years ago, so I won't repeat it here; he does a better job of it.

I did use the IntelliType software to change the behavior of a few of the special keys:

• Changed the Web/home key to open Firefox instead of IE.
• I was missing the Suspend key in the old natural keyboard, so I changed the Calculator key to run the following command: "rundll32" powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState. I found this trick somewhere, but I can't seem to remember where now! Unfortunately, it causes my machine to go into hibernate instead of sleep, but I don't mind it too much.
• Remapped the Back and Forward keys to Previous/Next Track instead of controlling the browser.

One thing I did found pretty useless on the keyboard is the zoom thingie. Seems like it only really does something useful with the zoom capabilities in IE7, but since I rarely use IE it's not very useful. Also, it seems to work on most other programs by simulating the some Ctrl+Key combo, which is extremely annoying if you have the "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key" option enabled in the mouse settings, like I do.