Actually, the software and tech conference season goes on all year in the Southern part of the United States.  Even big events like CES are popular in the Winter in places like Las Vegas.  If you include local or regional conferences, the weather is starting to provide opportunities farther North.  March brings lots of conferences around here, from Georgia and Alabama to Ohio.

There are two notable conferences in Tennessee coming up, taking advantage of our generally moderate Summer weather.  The Knoxville CodeStock conference is a real winner, held June 26-27 at Pellissippi State College.  This is an inexpensive high quality event with some great speakers.  If you are a great speaker and haven’t signed up yet, you need to get signed up this week!  Attendees like me can sign up at a more leisurely pace.  The next big event is the DevLink conference, held in Nashville on August 13 through the 15.  This is another great event at a cheap cost.  Registration opens April 1.

In the Microsoft arena, this is definitely the year for conferences.  Developers and design professionals just enjoyed MIX09 at Las Vegas.  Next up for developers and IT folks is Microsoft’s Tech*Ed conference in Los Angeles, May 11-15.  Then developers and IT folks will get to enjoy Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference,November 17-20 in Los Angeles (website doesn’t have much detail on 2009 yet).

I try to attend at least one software conference a year, mainly to keep up with specialized areas.  I really like the inexpensive Tennessee events, which are a lot more enjoyable than the Microsoft mega-events and just as educational.  Since Microsoft has begun providing great videos of their sessions a few days after their conferences (at least the developer events), I can get more info by staying home and spending a few hours downloading session videos for review.  This is even less cost than ordering the conference DVDs (which is mostly the same thing).

Amid all the conference opportunities of this year, I am concerned about future restrictions on the future bounty of conference events (and free session videos).  The economy has a significant effect on sponsorship and attendance, which will likely impact things rather badly next year.  My advice is to take advantage of all the opportunities you can while it lasts!

-- Walter Lounsbery, 3-24-2009

Over the years, I gain more and more appreciation for packaged computer workstations.  You know, the kind you can get from major manufacturers like HP or Dell.  My last workstation was purchased from iBuypower nearly two years ago.  The “Blue Monster” or “Blue Magoo” (depending on how it behaves) was a bargain custom-configured four core machine with a decent GeForce 7300 video card.  I avoided having to deal with a lot of the changes since I last built a system, although adding hard disk meant finding SATA cables in Knoxville (nobody had them, I had to order online), plus an adapter for the new HD power plugs.

I got a bargain 24 inch monitor for my system.  That was a really great upgrade.  At a resolution of 1920 by 1200, I could see a lot more code on the screen or open multiple applications and see them all.  The multi-pane view in Visual Studio became very useful.  I added a spare 17 inch monitor and experienced a large measure of pain setting up dual monitors.  That required upgrading to the latest stable Vista video card driver, and that was tough to find.  NVIDEA was coming out with new versions as I was working through that problem.

Then last week, after forgetting the pain of setting up dual monitors the first time, I got another 24 inch monitor on sale.  Finally something to match the first 24 inch monitor!  After it arrived there was some more pain.  After changing up settings to get the video card and monitors working together, I realized that one 512MB video card couldn’t drive two 24 inch monitors at full resolution.  I actually searched the Internet to confirm this bit of hard won learning, and couldn’t discover a simple, factual statement about this limit.  The video card manufacturers of dual head cards never disclose that fact in a straightforward way.  So here it is: if you have one monitor at 1920 by 1200 resolution, about the best you can get out of the second is 1600 by 1200.  I should disclose that my new (refurb) monitor has to be set at a custom resolution at 1900 by 1200.  It refuses to display anything at 1920 by 1200 (even though it’s spec says it can).

The cure for the video card limitations are to get one video card for each monitor.  However, your computer motherboard needs to support two video cards.  In earlier times you would need an AGP and a PCI video card (doing mysterious things to overall computer performance).  Now you can get motherboards set up for dual PCIe that provide for linked video cards through SLI.  I’m sure the newer compact machines would not support two video cards.  My computer’s motherboard is set up for SLI and it also supports non-linked video cards.  I just had to find out how to reconfigure a large jumper on the board.

Having set up the hardware properly, I always expect things to “just work.”  But that would be way too easy!  I’m a software developer, but when I work with computer hardware I neglect to make the proper sacrifices to the operating system and drivers.  Well, they get their pound of flesh no matter what you do.  Once again the displays did weird things.  It is very difficult to see Vista’s warnings about video driver problems when the screen is blank most of the time!  The driver that came with my new GeForce 9500 GT video card was very, very bad.  And it is tricky to download updates as the screen takes a vacation every few seconds.

After the video driver upgrade ordeal, the new driver didn’t improve the situation very much.  The display on the 9500 had color streaks.  The display on the original 7300 card narrowed to about 70% of the display.  Every time I closed an application, both screens went blank, sometimes for 20-30 seconds.

I thought things were completely, royally messed up.  A complete waste of time and money.

Then ten minutes later a miracle happened.  The displays cleared up and behaved right.  It’s been solid for over 24 hours now.

Next time I’m looking for a computer packaged with dual monitors, all checked out at the factory and ready to go.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 3-19-2009