Thinking of buying a 3D Printer? Let’s give that thought a quick reality-check… I was ready for a somewhat hobbyist experience but it took way longer than expected to have the printer assembled and printing acceptably.

Mine is a $549 Printrbot Kit. Interestingly perusing forums of the current generation $2,200 MakerBot Replicator 2 showed their owners experience similar issues to what I’ve gone through.

Assembly of the kit took five to six hours. Until it printed reliably using PLA was probably a further forty hours but I did fabricate a new platform and adjustable bed. If time permits I’ll follow this post up with common issues + solutions so maybe you’ll be up and running in under twenty hours. Either way, expect to become a 3D Printer technician and be sure to have an abundance of patience handy.

The image below sums up the experience nicely. See the tools? Notice the spool holder made from DIY parts? Surprised to see DIY screws, power drill etc nearby? Well… forums and blog posts are littered with people who purchased a 3D printer and abandoned it before making good prints. Surf some forums and you’ll notice virtually everyone showing off their prints has their printer in some kind of hobbyist workshop; typically they’ll have loads of tools around and are veterans of past fabrication/ advanced DIY projects.

But apparently a child can build one? Yes, some manufacturers are suggesting you buy one for your eight year old and he’ll have it assembled and printing in no time… Not a chance! I did see one blog post where a young boy had assembled the kit but “so far they were having trouble printing”. Younger than twelve I’d say to totally forget it and buy him/her a Lego Mindstorms or similar. High school age is probably more appropriate; even then a tinkerer Father on hand is almost a necessity.

Should I spend $550 or $2,500?

Now my $549 Printerbot is dialed-in and has had a few modifications its prints are excellent. Given the explosion in 3D Printer popularity, anything built in 2013 is going to look like a Dinosaur in a few years. Unless you need to print very large objects now I recommend buying a lower priced printer today and upgrading in a couple of years when mass production techniques should bring costs way down and take quality/ ease of use way up. I purchased Make: Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing for $6 as they reviewed about fifteen current generation printers.

Should I buy a Kit or Fully Assembled?

Assembly is typically only ~$100 extra, but the experience [frustration!] of building your first printer is invaluable. I was too young to build my first home computer in 1981 so was bought an assembled one. I did not make that mistake this time; the kit came with poor/incorrect instructions, but it was the correct route to take for both experience and bragging rights in twenty years time.

What to expect from a Kit?

Until the last couple of years most 3D Printers were built from open source online designs. Hobbyists sourced components themselves and spent unbelievable amounts of time tweaking. My PrintrBot is a well priced kit building on these many years of open sourced achievements. I doubt there is much profit margin for PrintrBot. Also, you will have noticed a lot of plywood on my printer; that’s laser cut plywood. It has issues but is an inexpensive way of producing the parts – once a laser printer is purchased the cost of chassis etc is next to nothing for the smaller scale manufacturers compared to the materia/hours required to 3D Print parts as was common in the early days.

A kit gets to you to where these serious hobbyists were far quicker for a reasonable price.

Take a look at these pictures for an impression of what to expect:

Their website says it takes two hours to build. Perhaps once I’d built a few that would be true. In reality it takes about five hours. Documentation is poor and was incorrect in several places as incremental design changes have occurred since the videos/ online help were created.

How long to Print after Assembly?

Do you feel lucky? Well do you? Likely some owners obtain a decent print on their first attempt; most do not – actually possibly most never do before putting it in a closet or on eBay! Expect several hours to several before anything reasonable is printed.

ABS filament emits fumes which made my eyes sting, but is much easier for a beginner to use than PLA filament. Since my workshop is small and unventilated I have moved exclusively to PLA, ensure your printer is in a well ventilated area and start with ABS.

Hopefully time permits me to write a separate post on getting started, but main tips are:

• Level the bed
• Ensure z-home is set correctly (distance from extruded nozzle to the bed)
• Ensure the printer extrudes at the correct rate (pretty easy for ABS)
• Figure out the slicing and printing software
• Use calipers to roughly calibrate movement along the x, y and z-axis (fine tune when printing ok)

A common beginner issue is the clog up the hobbed bolt with filament (tension springs set incorrectly will do this).  I’ve had mine out for cleaning at least twenty times, but it’s been fine for a good while since I figured out the correct spring tension for PLA (springs compressed to ~13.5mm). The following image shows a clogged hobbed bolt being cleaned with a needle (I lost one needle so now store it using a strong magnet to fix it to a drywall screw):

What kind of quality can I expect?

Really great in my opinion. I’ve printed several printer upgrades and the precision is incredible; hex bolts drop right in where they should etc.

It will take a while and likely much frustration to get the printer dialed in. After about sixty hours I seem to have the basics down and when an issue occurs now know what to tweak. Take a look at the next photos to  see my progression with PLA:

The final print shown is a case for a Raspberry Pi. It fits perfectly, and this was printed before I added most printer upgrades!

Tools required?

Hmm… this is a tricky one. As a long time DIY type I have access to a vast array of tools. The Drill Press and cross vice shown below has been particularly useful but these are not beginner tools.

At a minimum you need:

• Precision Calipers (only about $20 on Amazon)
• Quality screwdriver set (one with lots of quality bits is fine)
• Jewelers precision screwdrivers
• Small wire cutters and pliers
• Tweezers (to tease strands of stray extruded filament away from the nozzle and lift prints)
• Very sharp craft knife

These are almost essential:

• Quality precision pliers, angled pliers and wire cutters (Xuron or similar)
• Quality oil/ grease
• Circlip pliers
• Telescopic Magnetic Tool to hold awkward nuts in place during assembly

Ensuring bolts thread perpendicularly:

Final Words

Have a spare fifty+ hours, $550 and buckets of patience? You should buy one now!

Remember this is not Software Engineering; interacting with the real world is a whole different ball game. Fellow classmates and I discovered this during our postgrad Robotics Degree . Software is predictable and repeatable. The real world often not so much. In many ways 3D printing is similar to robotics – some software is involved but there is a lot of trial and error + tinkering.

A friend just asked me what .Net groups are good these days. Atlanta is the Software Capital of the South which means we have many great groups in town and I watch them all for interesting topics, but these are the three I personally attend most often:

http://www.meetup.com/AtlAltDotNet/  this is great for new ideas and decent technical depth. It is a fairly new group still finding its feet

http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta  Atlanta’s IASA chapter – always has super-smart people in attendance. Most meetings end up being a discussion (or argument!) with few punches pulled. The best part? BS artists are shot down very quickly and most never come back

http://www.atldotnet.org this is the ‘main’ .Net User Group in town and excellent at delivering high level introductions to topics. Networking is very good here too as local MVPs etc are at most meetings

Other .Net focused groups are www.atlantamspros.com (now defunct) and  http://ggmug.com.

Hopefully that helps a few people looking to learn more and network

TeamCity is great, I had it up and running with Automated Tests in just minutes. But.. attempting to make a Release Build generated the following error. Googling shows many people have the same error and I only found ugly solutions that required manual registry editing, copying of files etc:

c:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv3.5Microsoft.Common.targets(2015, 9): error MSB3091: Task failed because “sgen.exe” was not found, or the correct Microsoft Windows SDK is not installed. The task is looking for “sgen.exe” in the “bin” subdirectory beneath the location specified in the InstallationFolder value of the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0A. You may be able to solve the problem by doing one of the following: 1) Install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. 2) Install Visual Studio 2008. 3) Manually set the above registry key to the correct location. 4) Pass the correct location into the “ToolPath” parameter of the task.

The first thing I did was use msbuild from the command line; sure enough Debug Builds were fine and Release Builds had the same error. This ruled out Team City. Obviously installing VS2008 on our build box would solve the issue, but I assumed the build tools must available elsewhere without need all of VS2008. They are:

The solution is: Download the Windows SDK and install .Net Development Tools (it says 2008 Server but I did this on XP SP3):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e6e1c3df-a74f-4207-8586-711ebe331cdc

Google has never linked me directly to this information, just theories. One day time permitted me to run careful tests so I am sure these techniques are correct/ efficient:

Simple tricks to reduce size VM’s Disk Needs:
These will wipe GBs from your vmdk/ vdi.

• Disable Windows hibernation (hiberfil.sys is the size of installed memory, you don’t need it)
• Disable the memory paging file (paging file in a VM makes little sense to me)

Compact a VMDK (VMWare including VMWare Player):

• Launch the VM
• Inside the VM defragment its disk (defraggler works great, Windows degfrag is ok)
• Inside the VM run “sdelete.exe -z” from DOS (as admin). This zeros out the free space and is an essential step
• Shut down the VM
• From VMPlayer: Edit Machine Settings -> Hard Disk -> Utilities -> Defragment (optional step, sometimes helps – official documentation is poor)
• From VMPlayer: Edit Machine Settings -> Hard Disk -> Utilities -> Compact

At the final step you should see a huge reduction VMDK size.

Below is a screenshot showing the features in VMPlayer. Remember this is next to useless unless you run Mark Russinovich’s ”sdelete.exe -z” to mark free space with zeros. Compacting VMs has been this way for years, it’s April 2013 now and surely soon ‘detect and zero free space’ functionality will be built into their compact options.

The image above shows a VM that reached 20Gb once, before being compacted back down to 10.7GB. These are typical results. Once compressed my two work VMs zipped down to ~4GB each; fine for archiving working databases, dev environments etc. One customer’s backup procedures left me concerned so weekly the VMs were AES encrypted and copied to a USB key chain flash drive.

Compact a VDI (VirtualBox):

Until very recently I have used VirtualBox since about 2008. Here are the steps to compact it.

• Launch the VM; inside the VM defragment its disk (defraggler works great, Windows degfrag is ok)
• Inside the VM run “sdelete.exe -z“. This zeros out the free space and is an essential step
• Shut down the VM
• From DOS (as admin):
  • cd <location of your VDI>
  • “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage” modifyhd –compact <your disk’s name>.vdi

Hope this helps folks. Any issues/errors please post in the comments and I’ll update the post.

As promised here are the slides from that talk. Glad to hear people enjoyed it!

Using DOS and Windows since the mid 80′s it was time for a change. Vista was never reliable on any of the three machines I tried, Microsoft fanboys were killing creditability in the user group scene – heck it got to the point where saying ‘Google’ was not permitted. It would immediately be corrected to ‘Bing’,  sometimes by a chorus of fanboys! This anti-Google sentiment has to stop. Fanboys may go “Rah-Rah, Bing-Bing-Bing”, but how many of them command respect from peers? Many competent people stopped attending Microsoft events.

So how did OS X work out? Well it’s certainly a good operating system, does most things I need but obviously is not going to run Visual Studio anytime soon. Lack of open source software was a major gripe; 7Zip, KDiif3 and many other great open source projects just don’t exist  for the Mac.

Snow Leopard was a total flop, costing me hours in lost time as it broke our HTPC which was running Hulu and XBMC. Initially Mac fanboys jumped all over  me for criticizing it the day after it was released, but over time the general consensus is that Apple needs public beta testing before releasing an OS upgrade. A few service releases later Snow Leopord works fine but lacks the snappiness of Win7.

Apple hardware is fantastic. Developing on a MacMini is heaven thanks to virtual silence. The tiny form factor helps reconfigure workstations, keep a clearer desk etc. Using a MacMini as a HTPC is a little expensive but totally worth it, low power means low heat and they’ll happily live in a cupboard. New Minis also support two digital monitors, IR remote, bluetooth, latest WiFi, GigaBit internet and have a stack of USB ports. The 13″ MacBook Pro cost $1200, plus the cost of after market 4GB RAM and an Intel SSD. With the SSD and Win7 it’s plenty fast even for a demanding developer. The quality keyboard and touches like back-lit keys, multi-touch trackpad etc make it easily worth the extra cash. Oh and using OS X battery life is nine hours for the latest model – I see over five hours with WiFi and Bluetooth on a 2009 model.

So why the move to Win7? “It just works” scream most Mac users when you ask them “Why a Mac”. True for basic users, but not people like us. Hours can be wasted with simple tasks like trying to format a non Apple external hard-disk. This where the experience breaks down. Problem with Windows are generally solved with a quick Google search. Certainly not the case for OS X, with the hard disk users were berated online for not buying a Apple branded hard disk. I have Bluetooth problems with a Microsoft mouse and have never been able to resolve it other than rebooting. Do you use two monitors? Fine, that works… oh you have one in portrait mode (like I do)? Ain’t gunna happen in OS X yet sorry. HTPC? What you did not buy an Apple TV unit? The Mac Mini work well as a HTPC but does not support font scaling like Win7. I found a hack which works in some cases not other. Of course almost those cool HTPC open source tools don’t exist for the Mac, ironically XBMC is one that does and it’s almost as stable as for Windows.

Conclusion:
Hopefully this posts helps you consider if  OS X is for you. It’s a good OS, but Win7 is so much better in so many ways. If you want something that “just works” for simple tasks I highly recommend an iPad. That device is so simple I bought another for my Parents. They grasped it quickly and are having few problems. Also the design of the iPad apps means it’ll be very hard for bad guys to devise a virus for them. Macs don’t get PC viruses they get Mac viruses, I would wager the iPad will be virtually virus free.

Over the years I’ve Googled and Googled for a solution to this. Heck I even tried Bing! Finally time + an urgent need permitted figuring out a simple solution. To filter down to one thread using Notepad++:

• Copy the angle brackets and thread number to clipboard. E.g. “[12]”
• Menu -> TextFX Viz -> Hide Lines without (Clipboard) text
• Press Ctrl-A (Select all text)
• Menu -> TextFX Viz -> Delete Invisible Selection
• Press Ctrl-A (Select all text)
• Menu -> TextFX Edit -> Delete Blank Lines
• That’s it! You are now viewing one logging from only one Thread

This works very quickly even with 70,000+ line 10MByte log files. IMO it avoids the need for xml log4net logging and Chainsaw (or similar).Simpler is always better.

Demo: Two threads counting to 100:

Copy the angle brackets and thread number to clipboard. E.g. “[12]”

Menu -> TextFX Viz -> Hide Lines without (Clipboard) text

Press Ctrl-A (Select all text)

Menu -> TextFX Viz -> Delete Invisible Selection

Press Ctrl-A (Select all text)

Menu -> TextFX Edit -> Delete Blank Lines

That’s it! You are now viewing one logging from only one Thread

Virtually all software developers eventually experience neck and/or back pain. Mine gradually increased from light neck pains in 1995/6 to being unable to work one day in 2001. Doctor’s advice: “stop doing what makes it hurt”. Useful…  Earlier today Martin Fowler posted “Back pain is a common issue, but everyone’s pain (and treatment) is different”. Indeed it is, but he also posted a photo that invoked a “Fingernails dragged down a blackboard” response from me. It’s a photo of programmers at work; many IMO asking for neck/back problems in later life.

Let me share the research that has kept me pain free for ten years. I am not qualified in this area, these are just the findings of a long term computer programmer (done little but code from 1981 to 2010, and hope to keep it up until The Singularity makes us obsolete) :

• Move your screen(s) up to eye level

• Every time you exercise do neck stretches

• Read a book on back pain and/ or neck pain.These cover common issues that work for many people; Read the many glowing reviews on Amazon

Screen at Eye Level:

This should be common sense. I work looking forward not down. Peering down compresses neck vertebrae – probably not good for extended periods of time. Commons sense says “mix-it-up if you can”, don’t sit in the same position all day. Personally I alternate between a regular sitting workstation, standing workstation, laptop on a box (or whatever’s handy at the time) and casual surfing using an iPad like a book (not looking down at a laptop). Combined with regular exercise and stretching I still spend almost all waking hours in front of a computer. Of course from time to time I become lazy, and stop stretching after running/cycling; the pain starts creeping back. Returning to regular stretching always cured it (so far, touch wood!)

Sitting workstation:

I use an ergonomic Zody Chair using vesa arm mounts. Yes, I have hauled these to client sites. We just moved house and I don’t have a photo handy

Standing Workstation:

These can be cobbled together very cheaply. Skip those expensive stand/sit combo workstations and build another work area in your home office. The following photo shows a $100 Ikea kit. Notice the two mice? I used to have pain in my mouse button fingers. Learning to use a mouse left handed and swapping between them cured that too. Props to Paul Swan for the mouse tip – he’s a total Genius from my undergrad CompSci degree, now working on the Windows Server team.

Laptop on a box:

The title of this post.  Being in my late thirties peers are starting get aches and pains. Many on Facebook complain of sore necks from laptops. If you listen to only one piece of my advice, Put Your Laptop on a Raised Surface when using it. Oh, and and wear sunscreen Notice I use a real keyboard and wireless mouse than can be used in either hand – these cost peanuts compared to a Doctor’s visit. This is a great setup for short term client engagements – they always have something to stand a laptop on.

Can a $10 Book from Amazon really help?

The books I purchased in 2001 were an incredible help. I am not suggesting these as an alternative to a Doctor’s advice, just worth considering if your Doctor has been of no help.

Hopefully this posts allows some to extend their coding careers. Please take this advice as just that, general common sense advice.

This was a dream bike build for me and lots of readers share the dream, so here goes:

Build or buy?
Building means you specify all the components. Even $5K bikes often come with pretty lame wheels, crank sets, cassette etc and you will not get to choose tires, seat, shifters, calipers, bars etc. It was a no-brainier to build, and I am happier with this ~$2,500 build up than most (all!) $4K stock bikes. Why the cost difference? I could hunt down discounted parts. E.g the shocks, wheels, and frame are not 2009 models.

If you are returning to mountain biking look in the ~$700 range for an off-the-shelf bike with front shocks and disc brakes, any less and you’ll not enjoy the sport. Getting semi-serious means $2K+ on a full suspension bike. Regulars I see again and again at local  mountain bikes trails are mostly riding $2,000-$3,500 machines with maybe 10-20% spending even more. The sticker shock takes a few weeks to get over. If you do buy off-the-shelf look at the specs to see if any parts are ‘custom’ . Custom generally means it is a non standard size, and replacement/ re-use on another bike will be hard or impossible. Another good reason to build. At the end of the day this sport is more about the rider, but go too cheap and parts will soon break costing you more in the long run.

Tools needed?
Quite lot of tools are needed, probably at least $400 worth. In rough priority order:
. Allen key set (~$10)
. Allen key sockets (~$15)
. Torque wrench (~$50)
. Cable/ Housing cutters (~$20)
. Bottom bracket tools (~$30)
. Cassette whip/ remover (~$20)
. Decent work stand (~$200)
. Headset press ($50->120)
. Crown race setter (I use a $3 tube from a DIY store)
. Star nut setter (~$10)
. Pipe cutter (~$20)
. Chain link splitter (~$10)
. White lithium grease (~$3)
. Several misc DIY tools you should already have

Where to start
Stripping and rebuilding your old bike is a great learning experience; it should you take a day or two. You’ll be annoyed how expensive new cables/ housings are, but will have a slicker bike at the end of it.  I bought an $89 Sette 16″ frame and rebuilt an old bike into one the correct size for my wife, it came in at ~22.5lbs which is amazing for an $89 frame and $300 shocks.

Hunting down the Dream Bike
Boy, this took me many hours online - scouring reviews, price trade-offs, forum postings etc. The most useful resource is the mtbr reviews forum – for each part I looked at the bad reviews, and also got a good idea of what everyone was buying for that component. This way I found some parts that I am really happy with, e.g. Odi Ruffian removable grips and the Thompson Elite seat post.

Search lots of bike sites as prices often differ widely, for each high value part use comparison shopping sites like Froogle – this found me XT cranks at over $100 off when everywhere else wanted MSRP.

Below I will try to discuss the trickier choices made; in general I tried to distinguish between parts I may upgrade and parts I should never need to replace on this bike. E.g. ‘cheap’ mechanical BB7 disc brakes vs the Thompson seat post. In some areas you probably want to check out lower-end parts before splashing out, I put an Manitou R7 fork on my wife’s bike and rode it for a while before justifying $800 Fox forks.

Parts Arrive
This bike comprised of eight or nine boxes of parts from five different suppliers. As I said there can be HUGE price differences between retailers, so the extra shipping costs are more than worth it.

BMC Trailfox 2.0 Frame under wraps
This is a unsold 2007 found for $499, MSRP for a 2009 model is $2,149

If this does not excite you then you are dead.

Avid BB7:My first disc brakes and they rock. No longer am I locking up/ skidding after being airborne + doing endos etc is very controllable. Be sure to use Avid speed dial levers so you can adjust the lever pressure required
Fox Talas 140 RLC: When downhilling it was immediately obvious that these work better than my Manitou R7 MRD and I loved the Manitou. The 100-120-140 adjustability is great, I run 120mm for XC and 140mm for DH/ light FR. 100mm feels plain weird on the BMC frame so stays unused. With hindsight the 150mm Talas model would have been a better choice, but these things were expensive as-is. If buying a Fox fork be aware that adjustable compression is only on the RLC models which adds a lot more to the base price. Add the QR15 option and you are close to $1000 for shocks alone!
Thomson Elite Seatpost: Brilliant! It has machined groves which stop the post slipping and must be about as light as the carbon EC70 post that slipped so often on my old bike

Mavic Crossmax ST:Good wheels are must, try finding these stock on anything less than $5K. These can run tubeless tires but as with hydraulic brakes they seemed an unnecessary complexity I did not want to deal with. Perhaps a future upgrade?

The Build Begins

Rule one: never clamp anything but the seat post, tubing on modern higher-end frames can be crushed otherwise. Install the seat post and mount in your stand.
Rule two: Weigh everything before it goes on the bike. You will want this info when shopping for upgrades.

Pressing in a headset: This BMC came with one pre-pressed but this is the tool you should use – a headset press. Almost all headsets these days are thread-less and press in, instead of screwing in like they used to. This is a much better system as headsets coming loose was too common in the 80s and 90s

Attach the cassette- needs a lot of torque and the special tool is called a cassette remover. This is a 9 speed cassette I had laying around, it will be a PG990 soon.

Attaching brake discs to wheels- use a torque wrench if possible. These are my first disc brakes so BB7 mechanicals were ideal; $46 each for 2009 models is a bargain. Rotor size was copied from a Sepcialized Enduro at 203mmF, 185mmR. With hindsight this is total overkill and they will soon be swapped for 160mm front and rear. Unless you weigh 250lbs and shuttle ski runs I cannot see 160mms overheating.

Pressing the crown race into place. That is a $3 piece of plastic piping which almost everyone uses – no other special tools are required

The other headset parts. This can be confusing for a beginner so make you download the relevant pdf. These are sealed bearings, don’t bother saving a few pennies on the old bearings-in-a-cage variety. Note: I missed the compression ring form this photo

Mouting the wheels getting ready to size the steerer; use something to prop it up. Put the headset parts, stem and spacers (max 30mm) in place.  Measure twice, cut once. Do not cut a steerer too short as the repair will be expensive.

Cutting the steerer- the pipe cutter is just a plumbers tool. Debur using the tool’s deburrer and then smooth off with a metal file

A star nut setter: Star fangled nuts are easy to bash it in with a hammer and I have done that before, but not on an $800 fork. The setter tool is only ~$10 so why not use one?

Depth of start nut varies on who you ask, from 4mm to 20mm. I set this one to 10mm. It should not matter since the star nut is only used to preload the headset bearings, the stem bolts are what holds the bike together.

Leave a gap from the top of the spacer to the stem since you are going to preload the bearings in a minute. The star nut bolt does not need to be very tight, just enough to stop play in the headset. I put the bike on the floor and tighten the steerer nut until steering becomes tight, then back off a little. At this point you should tighten the stem bolts

Disc brakes and Hollowtech cranks are next. Both being new to me it is time for lunch.  There is no point rushing and I want a clear head especially for that expensive crankset

Putting a caliper in place- very simple but you will need a mouting bracket that matches your frame and the rotor size. There are three different standards out there so do some homework on this or expect a trip to the local bike shop to find the correct mounting hardware. Avid brakes come with a cool auto-alignment system  (CPS) that works much like the curved washers from v-brakes. This saves having to face the brake mounts.

Hollowtech cranks:The scariest component. MSRP is $305 but all affordable cranksets semed to have bad reviews. Hollowtech means outboard sealed bearings and very few parts + look bulletproof. The black spacers are for use with a 68mm shell like I had – another plus, this a one-size-fits-all deal

Of course they needed a new tool. A torque wrech cannot be used with this tool so I used the torque wrench on my car’s wheelnuts to verify what 50Nm feels like. You do not want to strip BB threads!

This side requires very little torque and simply preloads the bearings. Tightening the crank on is done with two allen bolts at 90 degrees to the crank – they come with a stack of warnings so I doubt you’ll get it wrong

Derailleur Alignment Tool: I am not sure how accurate the tool is, but all three bikes I used it on had misaligned hangers. Misaligned in different ways so I assume the tool is correct. Use the tool to check Up, Down, Left and Right – lightly bending the hanger until it is within 4mm on any measurement. I have to say that my shifts are pretty smooth and maybe this helped?

The spoils of XTR components. The front mech comes with a helpful guide to set the correct distance from the chainrings. If you are buying XTR you can probably eyeball this measurement.

New SRAM chain. Note the removable link which means the chain can easily be removed in the future. The other tool is a chain link splitter which is only needed to remove links from the chain if it is too large.

Put the chain around both large cogs and allow for two extra links. I have ran with zero links before and had no isues – actually I might do the same on this bike to reduce chainslap on rutted downhills. With a tight chain running the extremes of gear combinations is the only issue, but that is a no-no anyway.

It is looking like a real bike now

Cables: … ugh, not hard but it takes a while. You must use a specific cable cutter or expect frayed cables. Housing and cables are different for both brakes and gears, also these days we run continuous housing from the levers to brakes – use tiny zip ties or special clips to attach the brake housing to the frame. Zip ties are my preference

Intially I am using an old set of bars/ levers but wanted to dump the old grips. Push a WD40 tube as far as you can, spray in oil and twist. These came off totally intact with little bother

I had never used these bars and they were incredibly wide. It was cool to see preset cut-down points. Again a few twists of a plumbers pipe cutter and deburring is all that is required

Removable grips:What an awsome idea for people that love swapping out components. My hands grip really, really well with these too – possibly the best part on the whole bike!

Six hours later it is complete (cables were tuned the next morning). It came in at 27lbs 8oz which for a ~$2,500 5″ travel all mountain bike is not bad at all. It should drop about a pound when replacing the old bars, shifters and oversized brake discs. Those tires are 2.6lbs too, yeah, yeah weight weenie.

The Results?

Time and money very well spent. The brakes in particular are changing my riding style, locking up is now almost a thing of the past, especially when scrubbing off speed after time in the air – you know when a corner is coming up immediately after landing. Having full suspension makes rides so much less fatiguing and landing misjudged takeoffs is much safer.

For a brand that is almost unknown in the US it attracts a lot of attention and questions – everyone so far seems to approve.

We have all seen the 80040154 COM error. Normally the solution is to run regsvr32 on the com dll so it is registered on the machine.

“System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0×80040154): Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {D1CB0D81-7D2B-4064-9AC7-D0D88DEC3D16} failed due to the following error: 80040154.”

Of course regsvr32 was the first thing I did, but the error still happened in the ASP.Net MVC project on IIS7/ Server 2008. Using regedit.exe verified the dll was registered, so I ran the NUnit tests… same error! The solution is to permit the IIS7 App Pool to run 32 bit code as shown below:

IIS7 COM Gotcha

TurboTax has been wonderful over the years but the 2008 price totally made me baulk. An eye popping $229.80 this year for my needs:

$49.95 Premier inc Rental Properties + $34.95 Per State
$109.95 Business including S Corporations

H&R Block Home & Business 2008 promises the same functionality for $67.96 (Google for a discount coupon code). This was enough of a saving to try it, worst case I waste a few hours and buy TurboTax.

Since the IRS have not finalized rules for 2008 a few areas are not yet available including what seemed to be almost all the s-corp filing. Still I entered our W2s, a dummy 1099 and all the details on my rental properties with no issue. Everything was as easy as it was with TurboTax. There are still all the detailed sections to ensure you are aware of what can be deducted without reading 17,000 pages of IRS publications or trying to get a comptent accountant to talk to you. As for problems so far,  non are worth mentioning being just very minor niggles. Before buying I read online that H&R does not even let one print PDFs – well I just saved my 2008 draft with no problem (File -> Save As PDF…).

Here are a few samples screens, please don’t laugh at the repairs on the rental – it has barely an issue for five years and last year seemingly everything broke:

Looks a lot like TurboTax right? Go ahead save the money, you’ll feel amost right at home

As with Turbo Tax this Rental screen  maps straight to the tax form field – ah this is soo simple

This was so easy I felt obliged to blog it. Under our house rule ‘not used it in a year, so it has to go’, our old P4 laptop is being donated. It held old tax records, Microsoft Money files etc which had to be deleted first.

One free and simple technique is Boot and Nuke. I download the small ISO and used this free ISO burning tool to burn a CD.

The laptop then booted from the CD into a Linux program which looks similar to below once running. I choose the default and it took about two hours to delete a 70GB 7400 rpm hard disk with a DOD Short (three pass) technique:

Finally another 30 minutes using Averatec’s media recovery discs and it is now ready for someone else to enjoy.

>> Click here to download the slides/ demos <<

Thanks to all who came and apologies to those who came and found standing room only – I intend to record these demos and host them soon, watch this space.

The demos are fully RC2 compatible now, that day was a close call to a non-working demo.

Update: The Release Candidate has been released. The demo below works fine with it too.

>> Click here to download the slides and second demo. <<

Wow! We had a fantastic turn-out last night, interest in MVC must high!  Not having presented for almost a year  I tried not to publicize the the talk; but still instead of the expected twenty to thirty people there must have been close to a hundred and we had to expand the room! Couple this with the Microsoft building now almost impossible to find with that road closure flummoxing us coming from the south-side – who knows how many found Old Roswell gone and went back home at that point. For those that missed last night this talk will be repeated at all local code camps that happen in the next few months, the Atlanta one is in March and 2009 details will soon appear at http://www.atlantacodecamp.com/.

Obviously that presentation covered only some of the very basics and there is a lot more to working with MVC. Watch this space for more MVC tips and if people request it, I’ll put together a deeper presentation for Code Camps etc.

Also, I was not kidding about the free presentation/ training at your company. Totally free, no creepy sales people will call afterwards either – it will keep my hand in while taking a few months out from real work and with luck one of them might lead to my next gig (which will use MVC).  So if you have at three or more devs drop me a line via the ‘Email Me’ page on this blog – don’t worry if you are a small or large shop, I just want to spread the word and try to ensure there are a selection of MVC Contracts out there when I get bored of goofing off

This is a plea to anyone who blogs, writes or talks about ASP.Net MVC. This stuff is pretty simple, let’s not scare people away.

In the last four weeks of learning MVC I have:

• Read the book ASP.Net MVC in Action (Work in Progress via MEAP)
• Attended Microsoft’s Firestarter in NYC
• Read a raft of blog posts
• Used the Northwind and other code samples

All are guilty of requiring niche knowledge in some or all of:

• Domain Drive Design
• The Repository Pattern
• JSON, REST etc
• Automated Developer Testing
• Mocking Frameworks
• Active Record, NHibernate, LINQ to SQL - insert any other non mainstream data access technique here
• Differences between MVC, MVP, Front Controller etc
• Lamda expressions

Apparently every educator is trying to showcase their knowledge in a manner that is inaccessible to 95% of developers.  The presenters I saw at NYC are great guys, but almost all the faces in the audience soon were blank as decks became PhD thesis material. We soon dwindled down to ~50% attendance. I chatted with several ‘regular guys’ over lunch and they were pretty annoyed - what they need to see are simple samples.

Missing Samples: Hopefully the Manning book will improve before publication - the first chapter got me going with the framework, but the rest was almost useless to me. People who care about DDD, MVC details etc already know about them. What we need to see is samples of Grid controls, binding data to controls, how we get data back from a postback etc. At work we soon had screens working with jQuery and ext; perhaps because we do not worry about DDD, strict patterns etc?

Of course there is the argument that MVC is not targeted to all developers and only super-intelligent ones will understand MVC. Poppycock, RoR has been a huge success due to its simplicity - how many RoR developers know they are using Active Record? Not many I would gamble; most RoR people just want to build something quick and don’t have a CS background. MVC is not that hard, let’s present it clearly and simply guys.
Oh yes, and I do think the ASP.Net Framework is heading in the right direction. There again I love NUnit and wrote my own MVC framework for WebForms back in 2003 as I did not know how else to test my ASP.Net screens.

So you have a Partial in a div and would like to flip out the html contents with new results from just the partial… To para-phrase Obi-Wan ‘this is the JavaScript you are looking for’:

function Save() {
  var data = $(‘#PartialData’).serialize();
  $.post(‘SavePartial’, data, function(result) {
    if (result == “success”) {
    $(“#DivFlipThis”).load(“ProductUserControl”);
    }
    else {
      alert(result);
    }
  });
}

It uses jQuery to serialize form data, then an Ajax post sends the data to a controller action which auto-binds it to the model. All in all there are very few lines of code. If anyone needs to see the controller actions they can be found in this tiny sample project DivFlipExample.zip (click to download). It runs stand-alone and needs no database so is MVC noob safe :)

For the projects that pay my salary (high traffic public facing websites) we have a more sophisticated technique using JSON to read a .Net class graph of errors, success message etc passed from actions to the JavaScript. The JavaScript then does a divflip, redirect to next action, shows success or error messages as applicable. It is very simple too.

So, to the MVC experts out there: Am I missing something? RoR does this kind of thing auto-magically (so our RoR team says). For hours I searched Google on how to refresh an MVC partial without doing a whole page refresh. There were many people asking the same question and lots of people like my friend Rusty Zarse becoming very frustrated, but no-one had an answer that helped us. All the demos I used to learn MVC (MVCNorthwind, MVC Commerce, MvcMembership, Suteki, MVC Storefront) need full post-backs for anything semi-significant.

Chrome is out, download it here: http://www.google.com/chrome. I know the title post was a little obvious, a quick web-search shows a stack of hits for it already :(

Chrome is built on webkit and has worked fine for me on all my favorite sites so far, interesting tid-bits:

• Task Manger shows each tab is a separate process - for better stability one assumes
• Love my new desktop shortcuts to gmail, hotmail etc :)
• The new tab option shows screenshots of favorite pages - cool
• Starts-up fast, renders fast :)
• Username/ passwords were sucked out of Firefix - creepy
• It evilly dropped a shortcut into my quick launch bar, grrr

So it looks like us web-devs will soon have three mainstream browsers to test for :) All the more reason for everyone to start using JQuery etc.