Confused MS Visual Studio 2008 Environment

Since this morning, I had hard time loading a specific Visual Studio solution that I was able to load since last night.

So, whats changed??

Well, that took most of all my morning today.

I started this morning, with tweaking my Visual Studio setting to "not" load Start page when it loads.

After I did this, I restarted my Visual studio and tried to load my solution.

Visual studio crashes everytime when it reaches finishing all the projects in Visual studio.

That did not make sense.

I was able to load other solution.

After many unsuccessful attempts, I thought this could be the problem and it seems the problem.

When you close any visual studio solution, it remembers which files were open last time you used this solution and opens them when you load the solution. "Start Page" might be considered as open file when a visual studio is loaded.

Now, hence I disabled opening that Start Page, when solution is being loaded, Visual studio might get confused with a missing Start Page and it crashes since it could not find it.

Luckily, I was able to close all the open files in that solution even when a Program not responding error came. I saved solution file after that. Closed it. Reloaded again.

yey.. it works..

Just sharing this, in case if someone else is having hard time with such a stupid glitch.

Vista Installation

ASUS sent me Windows Vista Business upgrade DVD with their drivers for my laptop last Friday. So, as my nature is, couldn't stop myself upgrading my laptop.

Installation went alright. Laptop took all the drivers and everything for my laptop without any trouble. I was told that Vista has some quirks. And I found a very silly quirk that I had to do to setup my wireless internet.

I am having a Airport Extreme wireless router. It was setup for wireless internet on Channel 13. What I didn't realize until I spent my whole Saturday night figuring out this, my laptop was looking for wireless internet on Channel 11. Soon I realized that somehow I couldn't look for wireless network on Channel 13 on my laptop. So I reset channel to 11 in my router and voila.. Its all good now.

However, its painful installing huge Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server on my laptop as it also needs to download service packs for it.

Adaptive music player

When working on computer, how about listening to some music. Sounds good!
I just type the command '$music on' , and it starts playing tracks from my music library. The selection of my music to play is automatically generated by program depending upon the music that I've been listening so far from my collection. But then, wonders how the music list be generated initially. Ofcourse, I don't want to initialize. It should follow the algorithm like this:

1. Select randomly music tracks to play
2. If don't like track -> user gives command for next track before this track finishes.
3. Music player updates the track info with the timing classified into three slots stating when user don't like particular track to listen.. say in 'Morning/Afternoon/Evening or Night'.
4. If user do like track -> update the track info with the play time information associated with it in library.
5. When user starts music, it should select tracks from the tracks with play time info and according to the time the music has been started. It should also select randomly the tracks which don't have such track info and update their info accordingly.

Although, seems that the Music player that I described is available with a bit of different interface like Windows Media Player. But wouldn't it be nice, not to have the extra window for music player on Desktop while working though it can be invoked with certian command anyway.

Suitable linux flavour????

I've been looking for a linux flavour which is suitable for my laptop since I bought it. I've got HP nx6125 AMD Turion machine. So far I've tried Fedora 32 bit and 64 bit. But I'm not satisfied with any of them. In 32 bit, I had to look for drivers for sound and wireless which I didn't want to. Also, having a 64 bit machine on hand, I tried to install 64 bit Fedora; but it is very slow in installation it self and I didn't install that one. I googled about it and certainly Fedora 64bit is very slow with standard installation on my model. It requires bit of tweaking which I didn't want to.

I finally found Gentoo linux which I read works just fine with this machine. But its installation is very different from Fedora and I am bit scared to install it on my machine as I have Windows running fine. I just don't want to do anything that troubles my Windows. It consumes almost 2 days to reconfigure everything and make it running for normal use.

Anyway, if anyone of you come across any good linux flavour , do let me know.

Welcome to USuthar Labs

Welcome to this newly created blog. This blog is a place where I will be sharing my ideas about technical products and evolution.