My goals in purchasing a new backpack were:

1. Reduce the number of zippers and pockets in my backpack to a manageable number. My current REI bag has too many pockets and I’m always forgetting where I’ve put things in the bag.
2. Bag should Made in the USA.
3. Be somewhat unique and not like every other bag.
4. Have room for: 13” Laptop, DSLR with attached lens, magazines, kindle, assorted cables, external portable hard drive, travel meds, pens, markers, pocket digital camera, mouse, adapters, and a full sized computer book.
5. Works well on vacation, but would also serve me well as an everyday bag.
6. Fit under a typical airline seat.
7. Easy access to contents, and easy to put things into bag.
8. Be waterproof as much as possible.
9. Be reasonably priced, but be willing to spend more to get a better product.

Non goals:

1. Last a “life-time.” I want high quality, but I get bored with things like this and am likely to replace it in 3-4 years anyway. But, if it’s a good bag, I’ll buy a new bag from the same place.
2. Stand-up on it’s own. I’ve owned those types of bags and although handy, it adds too much weight for my needs for little goal.

The Smart Alec seemed to cover my goals quite well.

So, why did I return it? Because looks and customer reviews can be deceiving.

The ordering process and receipt of the bag were quite painless. The staff responded to e-mails when I asked about the right sized storage for my laptop (after a bit of prodding and tweeting).

The bag itself is put together extremely well and it’s obviously assembled with a very watchful eye. I definitely appreciated that. From the zippers to the fabric, it’s made of really nice materials and constructed well. I was very impressed.

First off, the bag could easily hold all of my gear. However, and this is what really irked me the most, is the fact that the main (and only real) compartment has an extremely inadequate opening for accessing the claimed 26L (1600 cu. in.) of available space within the bag. With the custom sized Vertical brain cell (an extra $60) designed to hold my 13” laptop clipped into the bag, the opening that may have been reasonable without the laptop bag became far too tight.

The bag has a few external and internal pockets. One side has a pocket intended for pens and the like. I think it held about 3 pens (unfortunately, I always carry more than that). There was another space in the same pocket for some other random stuff, but nothing felt overly secure and it all bounced around and jingled when carrying the bag. Since it was on the outside of the bag I wasn’t willing to put in my portable mouse or any electronic gear for fear of damage. I really wasn’t sure what was intended for this outside pocket. On the opposite side of the bag there is another pocket, that is intended for a water bottle. Although I didn’t test it, I saw no reason it wouldn’t perform adequately.

The side pocket did have a handy clip for things such as a keychain, which is a nice touch.

Below is a photo of the bag opened fully with the laptop carrying case inside.

And here you can see how the opening relates compared to a Nikon D300 with a 18-200mm lens attached.

Inside the main opening flag on the front of the bag is a zippered pocket which at first I thought was perfect. That is, until I realized this too wasn’t protected from external strikes and drops that could easily happen in a busy day (maybe putting it in the car, or riding the bus, etc.). So, some of the common things, like my ZuneHD and my pocket-sized camera would have to be stored elsewhere (things I use frequently). It would work fine for a pair of in-the-ear headphones and any gear like that (non-breakables). Unfortunately, I never found a location for those types of things to which I want quick access.

In the photo below, I’d stored my headphones and a portable mouse, but didn’t really like putting it there. Although I would have easy access to my laptop, the accessories for the laptop, such as the power adapter and my mouse would be difficult to access. There was a side pocket on the Vertical Brain Cell which did fit my power adapter. However, if the bag was reasonably full, I wouldn’t have been able to gain easy access to the pocket and the power adapter. 

For my wires and cables and portable hard drives, I went to Target and bought a $10 make-up case (although it just contained a few travel containers inside). Tom Bihn sells a product called the “Snake Charmer” for $30, but that seemed too expensive to me for what it is. Target had men’s shaving cases and such, but they were two to three times as expensive, and I really liked the clear bag idea (rather than the traditional “black bag”). This went into the bag. Here’s where the second big problem with this bag comes into play if you’re intending to use it frequently. Since the opening to the main compartment is quite limited, you’ll be forced to pull out the things on the top to access items lower in the bag. That was a big deal for me. I couldn’t imagine being on a plane, with my DSLR packed, and then need something at the bottom of the bag. I’d end up needing to hand things to my seat neighbors to hold while I dug through the bag!

The bottom of the Smart Alec does have a bit of padding, which is somewhat inconsistent with the manufacture of the rest of the bag (with so many pockets and such not having any protection).

In the photo on the left, it’s probably difficult to see that there’s another pocket deep in the bag (3/4 of the way down the inside of the bag). I didn’t know what to put there, as it would be completely inaccessible if the bag was even slightly full. There was no zipper either, so if the bag wasn’t full, the contents would have slid out if the bag was tilted beyond 90 degrees.

The photos on the Tom Bihn web site show a fully packed bag. I can’t imagine how much careful layering and work it would take to properly organize and fill the bag like that, and how much time it would take to unpack/repack. Again, a larger opening for this bag would help dramatically, especially if using one of the Vertical Brain cells.

If your needs are similar to mine, I wouldn’t buy the Tom Bihn Smart Alec.

The total price, with the Vertical Brain Cell was $190 US.

Not recommended.

I’ve got Personal certificates installed in my user profile, and my employer’s Trusted Root Certification Authorities certificate is installed. Neither have expired.

The first symptom is that I now get prompted for credentials when connecting to the wifi access point:

We discovered that just hitting OK here without providing any credentials was OK. It should have been automatically using the certificate I have installed.

After a few moments, this confusing dialog is displayed:

“The credentials provided by the server could not be validated. We recommend that you terminate the connection and contact your administrator with the information provided in the details. You may still connect but doing so exposes you to the security risk by a possible rogue server.

The server XYZ presented a valid certificate issued by Company Name Certificate Authority but Company Name Certificate Authority is not configured as a valid trust anchor for this profile.”

Clicking the Connect button then seems to work. So for now, we agreed that it was OK – but, we have no idea what’s going on. If I learn more, I’ll post more details here. But in the meantime – if anyone else has an idea about this – I’d appreciate hearing about it! 

Fast forward several days later and I’m sitting at work again – still having troubles, even after having reinstalled everything! I brought in a second laptop and it too was having the problem. OK. It’s not my laptop. ARRRRGH!

After some significant time spent with a guy from our IT department, we decided to ignore some of the scary warnings that were being presented to me – and forge ahead and successfully connected to the 802.1x network configuration. (“No valid trust anchor for this profile?”)

I decided rather than continuing to restore all of the software, etc. that I had setup prior to doing the fresh installation of Windows 7, I’d use the restore feature of my Windows Home Server.

I downloaded the latest Restore CD from Microsoft and proceeded to follow the instructions. I was reading through some of the technical details of how it all works while waiting for the download and read that there was even a way to get drivers for the laptop if the default drivers available on the restore CD weren’t sufficient. Cool.

I booted from the Restore CD, followed a few steps and a dialog showed up that suggested that it couldn’t find drivers for my network card. OK. I know there’s a work around. I grabbed the files which are stored with the backup of my laptop, and copied them to a USB stick and tried the option to scan for the files. Nothing. Recopied. Nothing. Try different port. Nothing. What the heck??!? I won’t be able to use the backup if I can’t get the network connected.

I keep getting the error, “No Drivers were found for your hardware.” But, THEY ARE THERE! I SWEAR THEY ARE!

I grabbed the memory stick and stomped it into a million pieces.

OK, actually I decided to reformat the stick just to see if there was something odd about it.

I brought up the format dialog and it was suggesting I reformat the USB stick as exFat. Oh drat. That’s what it was formatted with. I reformatted the USB stick as FAT32, copied the files and now my restoration is off and running with an estimated 1 hour and 44 minutes to go over my gigabit network.

However, they got some good advice on how to optimize your RDP experience with Visual Studio.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jgoldb/archive/2010/02/27/optimizing-visual-studio-2010-and-wpf-applications-for-remote-desktop.aspx

Slow connections:

1. On slow connections, change remote desktop connection settings to use 16-bit color.
2. If running on high latency connections, select a “high latency” connection speed in RDC options:
   
3. On XP/Vista, grab the new remote desktop client, version 7.0.
4. Disable all check boxes except Persistent bitmap caching.
5. Also recommended is using a smaller window size (but that may be the most difficult to do).

WPF Application Optimization for Remote Desktop

In addition to the performance tips for Visual Studio, there’s a very nice set of best practices to follow for how to optimize any WPF application for use over remote desktop. Until the long-ago Longhorn promise of truly remoted-WPF applications support is added to the platform, we’ll need to optimize your WPF applications if they may be used over remote desktop.

The worst offender that I’ve encountered in the past is that animations, even hidden behind an opaque element, still cause that area of your application to be sent for each frame of the animation! (You might need to think about how silly that seems).

http://upshot.gogoinflight.com/

You can also be awarded a 25% or 50% discount. You just pick which item will be the first to arrive, and a silly view-only game plays ……

(The dumb thing was that the thing wouldn’t take my wiredprairie.us e-mail address!)

Read and ponder.

Sympathy for the Devil

It uses Adobe Flash, but really to good effect. There’s a voice over for each recipe.

“Number 7… it’s not for the guy who makes spreadsheets for a living.”

“Limburger, I once fought off three hungry bears to protect my Limburger. True story.”

There are interesting cheese facts:

Famous for its pungent tendencies, this brave and bold Belgian cheese does nothing but intensify with age. Limburger was created to complement the highly flavored meats commonly eaten in Belgium and Germany. Today, a single cheese plant in Monroe, Wisconsin produces all the surface-ripened Limburger made in the United States.

(Monroe, Wisconsin is relatively close to the WiredPrairie homestead.)

My application, once simplified down to it’s most basic element, consisted of:

Window, Grid, ProgressBar

On my Windows 7 x64 machine, running the application uses around 29MB (private working set).

Removing the animation only from the visual template drops the private working set to 19MB.

So, it appears that the animation alone causes an extra 10MB of private working set to be needed. Sorry, but that’s crazy (especially for my application)!

If anyone has any specific theories – speak up! Here’s the basic starting Window I created:

<Window
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="PerfProgressBar.Window1"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <ProgressBar x:Name="progressBar1" Value="100" />
    </Grid>
</Window>

I’m not going to post the entire ProgressBar template, but if you want to reproduce the problem (and see how the animation impacts the memory requirements, just comment out the “Animation” rectangle in the control template (and in the trigger as well):

<Rectangle x:Name="Animation" Fill="{TemplateBinding Foreground}" Grid.ColumnSpan="3" Grid.RowSpan="2">
    <Rectangle.OpacityMask>
        <MultiBinding>
            <MultiBinding.Converter>
                <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ProgressBarHighlightConverter/>
            </MultiBinding.Converter>
            <Binding Source="{StaticResource ProgressBarIndicatorAnimatedFill}"/>
            <Binding Path="ActualWidth" ElementName="Background"/>
            <Binding Path="ActualHeight" ElementName="Background"/>
        </MultiBinding>
    </Rectangle.OpacityMask>
</Rectangle>

<Trigger Property="IsIndeterminate" Value="false">
    <Setter Property="Fill" TargetName="Animation" Value="#80B5FFA9"/>
</Trigger>

Apparently, the ProgressBarHighlightConverter is intense (a little double checking in Reflector confirms!).

(All animations have some price of course – as an experiment I rotated the progressbar in a storyboard and that used about 7MB).

The moral of the story here really is to make sure you do some sanity checks against your [fill-in-the-blank] technology so that you understand how it uses system resources such as memory, CPU, etc, as it may have an impact on the success or failure of your application. I’ll leave out the gratuitous animations in my application so it doesn’t use memory unnecessarily.

<script src="Scripts/MicrosoftAjax/Start.debug.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

    var ajaxPath = "";

    Sys.activateDom = false;

All you must do is set Sys.activateDom to false as shown above (make sure this is set after the new Start.js JavaScript file loads, otherwise your code will crash when you try to set the Sys object before it has been properly constructed).

Then, to begin the attach process, just call Sys.activateElements:

Sys.activateElements(document.documentElement);

In the code line above, though I’ve specified that I want the entire HTML document activated, you could provide any element you want as a starting point (for example to optimize the use of the library and prevent unnecessary DOM searching for example).

I’m adding the delay in some JavaScript code because I wanted to set up a few variables in advance of the attach occurring. I tend to write my JavaScript code in an object oriented fashion these days (using the prototype pattern), including code that is interacting with the DOM. In this case, I’ll create a class that represents the logic of the page rather than following the typical purely functional model that is done on many JavaScript pages. But, when using the “eval” syntax of the Microsoft Ajax library “{{ code }}”, occasionally, I’ll need to delay the eval or the page will crash.

From my recent post on making a simple command extension to the Microsoft Ajax library, I wanted to make that more object oriented by referring to an instance of my class, rather than pointing directly to a function:

<body sys:attach="wpc"
    wpc:onbubbleevent="{{$view.onCommand}}"
    xmlns:sys="javascript:Sys" xmlns:wpc="javascript:WiredPrairie.Commanding">

$view represents the instance of my page’s behavior. However, if the attach were to occur too early, this variable is not yet set. I’m using the slick script loading functionality of the ajax library, specifying the various JavaScript libraries and their dependencies, including my page’s behavior. It’s not until that JavaScript code is loaded that the code can create an instance – and that could be AFTER the page has already done the attach logic. The attach happens before Sys.onReady for example. (Sys.onDomReady happens before onReady, but not all JavaScript files may have been downloaded).

Sys.onReady(function() {
    $view = new WiredPrairie.MainView();

    Sys.activateElements(document.documentElement);

When using the sys:attach attribute, note that the attach and instantiation process happens before any code you’ve specified in onReady is executed (Microsoft currently uses the same method for determining when everything is ready by adding a function call to onReady – but their call is first in the queue).