Glenn's Life

Hi all,

I’ve been wanting a laptop for a while and I finally purchased one.  This is actually the first computer I’ve ever purchased for myself; all others I’ve had I assembled.

It’s an HP Pavilion with the following specs:

• Windows 7 Professional
• 17.3″ LCD LED display
• Intel Core i7 (quad core) processor
• 4 GB RAM
• 1GB NVidia graphics
• integrated HD TV tuner
• wireless N with Bluetooth

The sound quality from the build-in speakers is not great, but then I didn’t expect it to be.  Using headphones it sounds quite good.

Overall I’m very impressed with it.  Visual Studio runs quite a bit faster, which is the most important thing for me.  Here are a couple photos:

-Glenn

I’ve been looking around for a data storage system that fits my needs.  I looked at putting together an NAS, Windows Home Server solution and Drobo.  In the end, I went with Drobo.

I like having redundant storage without having to deal with RAID. Drobo is small, quiet and easy to upgrade when the need comes.  The only real downside is the slow transfer rate.  I’m connected through Firewire 800, but it still seems rather slow.  However, since I’m really only using this for storage, speed is not an issue.

I shoved two 1TB Western Digital Green drives into it, so I should be set for a while.  I’ve backup all my data and it’s only taking about 30% of the space.

Overall, I’m very satisfied but then I’ve only had it for 2 days.

-Glenn

Edit:

I have come to realize that my system is not using the full speed of Firewire 800 and it’s being treated as Firewire 400.  I’m sure once I have drivers for 800 the Drobo speed will be better.

I’ve had my XBOX for 11 months and today had to send it off to be repaired.  Out of nowhere it started to lock up in games or while browsing the dashboard.  Hopefully it won’t take too long to get it back.

I’m not much of a gamer, but I already miss it.  I’m really looking forward to Assassin’s Creed 2.

-Glenn

You may or may not know that I developed an application named Inspector Twain a couple years ago.  The purpose of this software is to see if TWAIN drivers were following the specification, and this caught the attention of a lot of driver developers as well as the TWAIN Working Group.

Thanks to my efforts with Inspector Twain and DotTwain, our .NET Scanning SDK, Atalasoft is now a board member of the TWAIN Working Group and the TWG is using Inspector Twain 3.0 as a certification tool for TWAIN drivers.  Currently it’s only available to members of TWG, but will be released as a public beta soon.   The beta is expected to last 6 months to allow driver developers to fully test it, provide any feedback and report any bugs.

My hope is that in a couple years most TWAIN drivers will be more stable and compatible with TWAIN compliant applications.

-Glenn