Category: Rants

Google’s Latest

~ rbonini

Without resorting to the Doubleclick acquisition that has been  analysed  ad nauseam around the  blogoshere these past few days, there are two things to point out that Google has also done.

The first comes to me via Andy Beal (which comes to me via Scoble).

Google Acquires Video Conferencing Company

There’s just no stopping Google. Seriously, if you’ve bought into the idea that Google is not a threat to your business, it’s time to re-evaluate that position.

Why so? Google has just announced their acquisition of Marratech, a video conferencing and collaboration company, which will now see them compete with the likes of WebEx.

Forgive me, but, how many services does Google have now? Just kidding, but you get my point. Google is diversifying beyond its core business of search. Why is Google doing this? Same reason why Microsoft is poring Billions in to its Home Entertainment Division – Defense In Depth. In addition to that the more diverse the company is the better able it is to survive, kind of like the  Greek Myth of the Hydra .

At the same time, its also returning to its core business of search though this acquisition. Confused? Read this:

Here’s how it works…

  • Works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • Runs on existing PC’s and Laptops – no additional capital expenditure.
  • Have a private ‘one-to-one’ conversation with any participant
  • Share any application and hand control to another user.
  • All participants can record and playback the entire net meeting including voice, video and whiteboard.
  • It’s easy to include office group meetings or video conferences in a Marratech video net e-meeting.
  • Call remote people into the video net meeting even if they are away from a computer.
  • It does all this over highspeed broadband internet without the need to use a telephone.
  • End-to-end encryption ensures security for your entire net meeting including voice, video and documents .
  • You can present or ‘broadcast’ to an unlimited audience.
  • Marratech’s licensed Manager works on Mac, Linux, Windows and Solaris servers.
  • Marratech Manager offers quick installation, upgrades and administration features for fast and easy configuration.

Let me just repeat that: All participants can record and playback the entire net meeting including voice, video and whiteboard.

Ahh, its clearer now. Google will have a killer algorithm for searching said recordings. Perhaps Google will provide contextual ads to help the meeting along.  So if you are, say, a construction company looking for a new timber supplier, the appropriate ads show up on the side of the screen.

I must admit, Google is good.

The other bit comes to me via Rex Hammrock ( also via Scoble).

He takes a look at Google Web History (formerly codenamed “Search History” 🙂 ).

The newly renamed service goes beyond chronicling merely what I’ve “searched” for via Google, but now maintains a history of every site I visit — complete with a time-stamp of when I visited. And, perhaps the most significant feature of all — if it truly exists — is speculated by Gary Price: that Google is caching a version of the page you visited, so that when you search across your history, you can find the site as it was when you visited. Yes, that is truly amazing, if it works, and is a feature that could make one overlook all of the creepiness of being shown the reality of everything Google knows about you when you use one service for searching, mapping, comparing products, sending email, and then, embed a tool of theirs in your web browser.

This now takes what we say and do on the web to a new level. What ever we write, will still be there in 100 years time – erasing it is not possible. Now what we do is in the same category.

Now you could argue that there are legitimate applications for this – i.e. policing employee behavior, in investigative police work and so on. But on the whole, its worrying. I can can also see parents demanding that this be turned on for their kids.

I would find it helpful to hear from some of the folks associated with AttentionTrust.org, as this type of data — and the belief that we, as users, “own” this data — is their focus. While I can see how to activate, pause, edit or delete the data stored in my “Web History,” I haven’t seen yet if I can “export” the information. If a user can export such data, it becomes more than a “feature,” it becomes the basis of an economy where I can exchange such data about myself for something of tangible value beyond the transaction I have engaged in with Google by exchanging my attention for the value I derive from the efficiency and productivity they provide me through such a service. If I can export that attention data, not only will Google be rewarded for knowing exactly what type of car I am shopping for at the moment, I will also be able to benefit from it in the marketplace.

Something about all of this makes me think of a song by Police.

Every move you make
Every breath you take
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you

If you’re interested, SearchEngineLand.com has a nice writeup of Web History

Anil Dash  (also via Scoble) has this to say:

From a technical standpoint, Google Web History is one of those tools that’s so well-executed it seems simple, or even obvious, the first time you see it. There’s a basic timeline of your search history, with the ability to drill into specific search result histories for Google properties like web search, image search, news, Froogle (now renamed Google Product Search, though the UI for Web History shows the old name), Video, and Maps. There’s even, astoundingly, a history of which AdSense Ads you’ve clicked on.

So Google, not content with merely searching the web, now enables us to search our own online lives.

All ideas in this post Copyright (C) 2007 Roberto Bonini All Rights Reserved

Windows Home Server and SQL Server

~ rbonini

I tried again today to install SQL Server 2005 on WHS. All the other components installed except for the actual Server, the Native Client and the Vss Writer ( what ever its actually called). To get this far you need to work around the SSL issue on WHS, which hopefully will be solved by the time it ships.

This KB article helped alot, even though its for SQL 2000.

To install SQL Server 2000 successfully, export the certificates to a file, and then delete the certificates from the Certificate MMC snap-in. After you successfully install SQL Server 2000:

1.Stop the SQL Server service.

2.Reinstall your certificates.

3.Start the SQL Server service.

There’s a KB article on exporting and installing certificates here.

With just a small caveat. WHS will automatically repopulate the Certificates in Personal/Certificates folder. You need to make sure that the imported certificate is the only one in there, which means you delete the new one. if you don’t do this the Remote Website will not work. I’ve no idea why.

So I’m going to hunt for the SQL Install log and see if I can find a workaround for what ever went wrong.

Using Windows Home Server, part 2

~ rbonini

I did say the last time that I’d download and install a Virtual Server image of  Exchange 2007. I did. And it was way too slow for comfort. So I went ahead and downloaded the normal install package for Evaluation (Microsoft give you amonth to try out the package) . I’m installing it now. By the way, Virtual Server works flawlessly on WHS, even with an image mounted and running – its just that my server didn’t have the Gigaherz to do the job.

WHS took an age and a half to get round to running the install. And is presently unzipping the files.

On to other stuff. I think that WHS really needs something akin to a scheduler for backups – even as an option. I say this because the times that it takes a back up are totally random. Sometimes its at the very beginning of the backup window on one pc, but it waits and backups the the pc 3 hours later. It can be totally erratic. It might be the fact that my backup window is 12 hours long.  I’m going to try cutting that to 3 hours over lunch ( I prefer all my to turn all my PCs off at night, including the server) and see if it makes any difference.

I think that the major gripe, if you could call it that, is that WHS spends most of its time doing nothing. And I’m talking about the time it dosn’t spend serving files and music. A stripped down version of Exchange in order to keep users emails in one central store is one idea. Someone suggested a central upgrade server for windows update on the forums. 

But all of the above are Microsoft add-ons.The big thing is that WHS will have an SDK. Imagine that. Need somthing? Build it. The question is how wide ranging the SDK will be in the first place.  The limits that are placed on using the server programatically will dictate in a big way how we can levegae the SDK in development ( i.e will we be able to access the backup engine? The Folder Duplication engine? will we be able to remote into client PC’s and perform tasks?). I can think of a few things I’d like the Server to do in its down time – like programatically checking that the server has actually backed up a client PC, or generating a XML representation of the Music Library and making sure all libraries are on the same page. Lots you can do.

As far as my Exchange 2007 Standard Evaluation install went, it didin’t go anywhere.  It resulted in a ton of errors when it carried out a bunch of tests and I’d ratehr deal with them when iIm not so busy. In any case at $699 a license, I’d rather spend the money on hard drives.

I was just poking around Outlook and came across Data File Management under the Files menu. It allows you to change the location of your .pst files. I’m wondering if I could copy them to WHS? That is, into a file the user has permissions to.And acess them from there. That means that, in theory, whatever changes you make are instantly replicated to your Outlook install that are configured to use that pst file. This raises all sorts of deconfliction and versioning issues – essentially hell. Or, there’s a Outlook add-on i downloaded some time ago ( don’t ask from where, please, but I think it was Microsoft) that backs up the files to a location that you choose. Thats another option.  

My adventures with WHS continue….

Net Neutrality

~ rbonini

Just read this post on Doc Searls about this.

Basically, the net should be a base service along with telephony and cable ( or, given the rise of VOIP and You Tube, as a service on which telephony and TV/cable runs) .

But that is not always the case simply becuase the wide variety of different companies who own different line networks each  work to keep the others off thier network. Confused? I sympathise. Thst may be the case in the US. Here in the Uk, the issue is slightly simpler, though no less touchy.

Till about 15 years ago, the whole telephone network was nationalised under British Telecommunications ( most other services such as gas and electricity were also nationalised). So today all the physical network  cables are owned by BT. But there is a huge number of companies that offer phone and broadband services. They do this by “buying” x thousand lines from BT every month that they ,in turn, sell to their customers. However, to get things done (i.e. installing an extra phone line or  a braodband line) thoise companies still have to work though BT. So even though the lines are guarenteed to thes carriers by law, BT discourages people from switching by dragging its feet when it comes to sending engineers out.

I know this becuase we just moved house two months ago. BT told us it would take them 3 days max to have our broadband line connected if we went with them. We went with another carrier and it took 6 weeks . In fact the reason why I had no broadband for 6 months was becuase BT dragged its feel replacing the Broadband line.

So, although the little guy might not see this as much of a big deal, business cannot rely on such service and are forced to go with BT in order to guarentee a phone and broadband line.

Doc Searls:

First, the Net is a vast set of connections on which countless services can be deployed. Telephony and television are just two. Because telephone and cable companies offer Internet connections as a secondary “service” on top of their primary businesses, we tend to think of the Net in the same terms. This is a mistake. The Internet will in the long run become a base-level utility, and we will come to regard telephony and television as two among many categories of data supported by that utility.

Second, the end-to-end nature of the Net puts everybody on it in a position to both produce and consume. It is not just about consumption. It is at least as much about production. In the U.S., telephone and cable companies have deployed Net services in asymmetrical and crippled forms from the beginning. While this crippling is easily rationalized (typical usage is asymmetrical, and turning off outbound mail and web service ports discourages spamming), it also serves to discourage countless small and home businesses. Worse, “business-grade service” (symmetrical with no port blockages) is so expensive in most cases that it is essentially prohibited.

Third, most customers in the U.S. face a choice of one or two Internet carriers: their local phone and cable companies. Other providers can only sell services that run on those carriers. (Since the Brand X decision in 2005, phone and cable companies can keep any of these other providers off their lines if they want to.) In many areas (such as mine), only one company provides “high speed” Net access. There is no choice, and there is no competition.

Windows Home Server Install, Part 3

~ rbonini

WHS is, I believe an inspired idea. Totally beyond any other product yet released by Microsoft. I believe that this is one of the very few releases that targets a nearly untouched market. And that’s why believe that Microsoft will do very, very well out of this.

So, in thinking of WHS I did the obvious and did a Google Blog Search. I found some facinating reviews here and here.

Paul Thurrott says:

While individual WHS features like full household backup are exciting, the overall direction this product is taking is, perhaps, even more interesting. I hope you’re getting the notion that simplicity is Job One with the WHS team. Well, this mantra extends to every possible facet of the system. For example, WHS servers are headless, and you couldn’t connect a keyboard, mouse, or display to one if you wanted to. Instead, there are only two ports on a WHS server–for the power cord and Ethernet–and a single power switch. (That’s right, it’s wired only. You are expected to connect the WHS box to your home network’s router, and PC clients can be wired or wireless.)

A simple install CD, places in a networked PC, gets WHS up and running. There are few questions to answer during setup, involving passwords, recovery questions, and the standard questions about Windows Updates. From there, you can access the WHS console, where you setup the home server, the users who can access it, and the shared folders you’d like to create. There are no domains–though that was experimented with back in the Quattro days, Microsoft quickly dropped that notion in a nod towards simplicity. Besides, how many users will you need in a typical household?

That’s it: simplicity. How much more complicated can you get? You could try Norton Ghost which, compared to WHS, is as userfreindly as a chainsaw ( and that’s without even using WHS). In any case using Ghost gave me multiple 10-15 Gig files ( 50% compression rate, roughly) for each PC. I have neither the space to store all of that or the time to manually delete old backups ( I’ve tried more than once to get Ghost to do this, without success). WHS meanwhile:

In WHS, Microsoft moves the unit of backup from the PC to the household. WHS provides a single solution for backing everything up in your home, every night, without having to push buttons. This includes a new form of image-based PC backup–similar to Complete PC Backup in Vista, but based on new patent-pending Microsoft Research technologies–as well as drag and drop access to individually backed files, from different points in time. On the server, Microsoft is using its Single Instance Store (SIS) technologies from Windows Server 2003 to keep the backup size as small as possible, and it’s doing so across PCs. (How good is this technology? Headrick said that they’re seeing 15-19 TB of data stored in 300 GB or less of backup space.) So if you have an identical version of foo.dll on five different PCs, only one version of that file will be backed up on the server, dramatically lowering the storage requirements. (This works with PCs based on Windows XP and Vista.) Smart.

15TB into 300GB???????? Yeeeshhhh 🙂 . More space for my hardware buck, eh? Sounds like a winner. The best thing is that Ihave do do absolutely Zero. More than that,t he connector handles all the addressing ( Iwont have to worry about IP address changes every time  my PC’s log on to the network in a different order and get different address from DHCP).

Simplicity is key here.

In retrospect,  this is part of the same reason that Microsoft released so many different versions of Vista. Why over complicate people with features/capabilities they arn’t going to use?

All things considered, its worth it to buy a new Dell Poweredge 2.8Ghz 160GB (  will go up to 240Gb). I’ll be ordering tomorrow ( no use ordering before I’m ready- they’ll only deliver next week wether I order today or tomorrow).

Until it arrives…..

 

Windows Home Server Install, Part 2

~ rbonini

Now to say things are upside down is a bit of an understatement to make. The install went like clockwork and had most things set up autmatically, except for the device driver for the ethernet port (preversely preventing me activating and updating to get the driver).  The only small problem was that the harddrive was not pugged into the machine I was intending to use as a server, but rather my faster 3.06 Ghz machine so I could use the DVD drive to install. After switching harddrives, the thing simply will not boot. I’ve no idea why. I suppose that it could be lack of memory ( I have 384MB DDR RAM installed on it – minimum is 256Mb), orlack of processor power ( Pentium 3 700Mhz – minimum 1 GHz).

I even tried plugging the DVD drive directly into the Pc and booting from the install disk – and it still fails to boot.

The first  problem is easily solved, As is the third ( albiet from more costly). But the second is impossible.

These are not problems with the software, its the hardware I chose to run it on. I could use WHS using the only PC I have that boots from that harddrive, but that Pc happens to be my main PC.

So I now have th4e following options to consider:

  1. Buy that new Dell Poweredge Server
  2. Install Linux
  3. Install Solaris
  4. Do nothing

The Poweredge server may just have to wait a few weeks, but I’m seriously considering it.

Installing Solaris is nearly out as I couldn’t make head or tail of it a few times I used it. Suse Linux recognises NTFS partitions and might be a possiblity.

Or I could do nothing and restore the Windows XP Home Install and use it very little (I suppose that I could simply share the entire harddrive over the LAN).

So until I figuire it out, WHS is not going be running.

I might try do some tests between my laptop and the WHS Harddrive to see how it performs, but it’ll have to be in the dead of the night when theres no actual work to get done.

Windows Home Server Install, Part 1

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

I actually havent started the install. But my rage is now building up. The reasons are

  1. that the 300Gb hardrive I wanted to use and that caome preinstalled with my PC physically can’t come out – I can’t reach the screws since only one side of the case opens.
  2. i can’t use the Xp recovery console as its password protected my the manufacturer ( I was trying to fix the MBR for when Vista Beta 2  expires, so no luck there)

So my plan for a 380 GB Home server stopped before it started.  I’ll have to settle for 2x 80Gb drives. Given the fact that i have at least 30GB worth of downloads and 10GB of music (all legal), It only gives me 180 GB to back up 2 PC’s. Not ideal. Then you have to factor in room for growth.

if worst somes to worst, I have my eye on a nice Dell Poweredge server that will do nicely. But I’d rather use the hardware collecting round my feet before it gets too ancient.

Now if Microsoft could just make a handly MBR restorer…..

And the name of the infernal manufacturer that built my PC with the 300Gb harddrive? You’d never guess: Pc World.