Mike's Life, Work, and Everything Inbetween

Lemmings iPhone Wallpaper

2010-10-07T18:59:00.000-07:00

Look at me... I get a little free time and what do I do? I created a Lemmings wallpaper/background for the iPhone. I was inspired by the Pacman wallpaper I saw the other day and the lemmings sprite sheet made it all possible. A whole bunch of copy and pasting and a little resizing/flipping magic and presto, a fun retro wallpaper. Enjoy!

From Mike's Life, Work, and Everything Inbetween

NetBIOS Strikes Again

2010-05-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

After two weeks of not being able to connect to my Windows Home Server from my Windows 7 laptop I think I finally tracked down the problem. I'm hoping I can save someone else a few hours (ok, days) trying to fix this issue.

First, the symptoms. At some point, seemingly randomly, my Windows 7 laptop could no longer connect to the Home Server using the machine name. So \\homestorage wouldn't work. Strangely, the IP address, or \\192.168.150.5 would work. Unfortunately, all my drive mappings and the windows home server console itself relied on the hostname. When trying to connect to \\homestorage, I would get a non-helpful error 0x80004005.

I had another Windows 7 machine on the network and it was still able to see the Home Server so I was pretty convinced that this wasn't a network issue or a Home Server issue but something specific to my laptop. To debug it, I checked that all the important services were running: Computer Browser, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, RPC, etc. I installed and uninstalled various network protocols including Client for MS Networks. I uninstalled any virtual NICs including VirtualBox. I stopped and started firewalls and virus software. I installed and watched MS NetMon. Finally I learned the wonders of nbtstat.

Using nbtstat -r, I saw that all the values were 0. Nothing was ever resolved by my machine and nothing ever registered. This seemed really strange and I could confirm with the other Win7 machine that it was resolving and registering with the same command. I also found that I could run nbtstat -a 192.168.150.5 and Win7 would find and cache the Home Server name. Using nbtstat -c, I could see the HOMESTORAGE machine name show up with a 600 second countdown. While the name was in cache, I could access the host without error; however once it dropped from the cache, I was back to square one.

Finally, after much comparing between the two Win7 machines, I noticed that the Node Type, listed with ipconfig /all was Hybrid on the working machine but Peer-Peer on my laptop. A little research and I determined that Peer-Peer didn't make sense because I don't have a WINS server on my home network. A little more research and I found out how to change it here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781175%28WS.10%29.aspx

I edited the registry and set DhcpNodeType to a value of 8 (Hybrid), rebooted, and presto! Now nbtstat -r lists successful resolutions and registrations. I have no idea how the network stack got switched into peer-peer, but thankfully things seem to be working now.

Good luck!

My First Adobe AIR Application

2009-05-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

I just finished up my first Adobe AIR application which is a port of a previous Line Counting application I wrote in C#. I have to say that I'm really impressed with AIR so far. I've been doing some Flex work at my job and AIR brings these skills to the desktop. At this point, I'm not sure why anyone would even try Java on the desktop anymore.

You can checkout a screenshot of Line Counter or just download it here. I don't have the fancy AIR badge installer setup yet so you'll need to make sure you have Adobe AIR installed first.

Moving to Blogger

2009-05-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

After neglecting my home page for a long time now I'm trying to move things over to Blogger. I'm hoping that an easy to use interface will encourage me to post more and keep things up to date. Here's hoping.