Category: Web

Windows Vista- Day 4 On the Alien Planet

~ rbonini

I have to say, now that most things are working, my opinion of Vista has improved loads.

Its the little details that I appreciate now. How taskbar items light up when you hover over them, for example

Windows Live installed perfectly on its fifth try, so I’m using Writer to type this.

Norton LiveUpdate works like a charm.

Windows update works well. I like the fact that Update is integrated within Vista instead of having a website to get all the optional stuff from.

My Gmail Notifier works like a charm.

The Windows Home Server Console does not work ( can’t log me in).

The SageTv Client works fine as well.

The Console itself installed fine ( I installed it before installing anything else, including updates), but can’t open my shares. Backup, strangely, works fine.

And accessing my shares is a pain. I have to use the IP address instead of the Computer Name. Which means I have to change the IP address on my media library every time it changes. At least till I get the DHCP Add-In working again( last time I tried, my PC’s refused to connect to the Internet).

So. how did I get this far after my frustrating first 2 days with Vista?

I tried everything to get the laptop networking working again. Scott Hanselman had a post a few week back entitled: The Nuclear Option: Resetting The Crap Out Of Your Network Adapters in Vista

This is for when “Diagnose and Repair” isn’t cutting it. Thanks to JohnP for his help.

  • Go to the Start Menu, type cmd and right click, and select “Run As Administrator”
  • Type the following commands, each followed by pressing enter.
    • ipconfig /flushdns
    • nbtstat -R
    • nbtstat -RR
    • netsh int reset all
    • netsh int ip reset
    • netsh winsock reset

Now, reboot and pray. Possibly not in that order.

I tried this in vain, twice. Clearly something was wrong since none of the above list of applications were able to access the Internet or local network.

So I went one better: I re-installed Vista from scratch. Now granted, it might seem like overkill to sort out a few networking issues, but those very networking issues prevented me from using my laptop to its full potential. This is because the use the network is such that we might as well not have the computer/network-enabled-device if we can’t use the network to its full.

The install was surprisingly quick and easy. And everything ran like a swizz car from there.

The one thing to note is that my Console and Shares( via the WHS Connector)  were working fine before any updates were installed. In other words, I could type in \\SERVER and my shares would come up. Currently I have to type in the IP address. So I’m pretty sure that an update is the culprit. though I have neither the time nor the patience to rollback each one to find out which it is.

All that aside, the Dell Inspiron 6400 is a very nice machine. It keeps up with everything quite well. And it has up to 7 hours of battery time ( if you select the power saver plan). It has media keys  on the edge that left you control Windows Media Player from  the keyboard, which is nifty. The really good thing is that its not ablaze with advertising stickers like some laptops I’ve seen lately.

In the final analysis, I’m really starting to like Vista after spending several hours with it reading 1000+ RSS items this afternoon(Google Reader subscribers will know what I mean).

So its back to writing software and salvaging erratic ship dates.

WHS RTM

~ rbonini

its been a busy week around here. first my RTM copy arrives on Monday, then my laptop arrives on Tuesday – so you can imagine the chaos of re-installing both a laptop and a server – Whew!!!

So far so good.

Thought I just tried to re-install the DHCP Add-In. the install when fine, but for some reason my PC’s couldn’t connect to  the Internet. Some troubleshooting to be done there.

The connector disc appears to have an old copy of the connector since its been screaming of an upgrade from the server.

The install completed fine, after about 8 hours or so!!! The good thing is that my back-ups appear to have been preserved( I thought that was impossible – any one else see this???).

I did get SageTv installed and that appears to be working fine ( I’ve yet to configure my clients to connect to it).

Its been a wee bit of an anti climax, buts its nice to have the RTM version to play with.

Facebook and Microsoft

~ rbonini

I was tempted to tell everyone who thought 15 big b’s for Facebook was excessive to look at Google’s $100 Billion valuation at IPO.

But then, it struck me, rather forcefully I might add, that Google and Facebook are completely unrelated in terms of price. Google, despite being mostly a search page, actually gets stuff done. Look at Google Earth, Product Search, Their Wifi  work both in San Francisco and with the FCC with regards to buying that spectrum, Desktop Search, Google Co-Op, Reader, Analytics, and, much, much more. The GooglePlex is a daily gathering of the brightest dev’s on the planet.

Google, in other words, has  plenty of reasons to justify its price tag.

What, pray, has Facebook done?

The question stands, but Kara Swisher beat me to the observation already (albeit from a slightly different angle):

Facebook is not Google: Although many in the tech sector make the comparison to the search giant, it is simply incorrect.

Is Facebook like Yahoo a bit? Certainly. A newfangled version of AOL? Absolutely! A very well done media play with all sorts of interactive bells and whistles hanging off of it? Yes, ma’am.

Indeed, it is growing its media business nicely, with $30 million in profits on $150 million in revenue.

But in comparative terms to the search giant, Facebook is a lemonade stand. Google brought in $3.9 billion in revenue in just the second quarter alone and, um, is increasing its dominance over the search sector in a mighty scary way.

Facebook, on the other hand, gets half its annual revenue right now from a sweetheart guaranteed revenue deal with, drum roll, Microsoft. No matter what either Facebook or Microsoft says, it is a money-losing deal for Microsoft so far.

How do I know this? According to many sources, Google is struggling to make ends meet in its own sweetheart guaranteed ad deal with Facebook rival MySpace, which is much larger, and Google has the best monetization engine out there.

FeedHub

~ rbonini

I might as well jump in here with the rest of the crowd.

Scoble blogged about it. He says:

TechMeme actually works great. Tracks thousands of news feeds and every few minutes it remeasures which ones are most important. Problem is that TechMeme only covers tech news. Its sister sites cover gossip, or regular news/politics, or baseball.

But what about 800 custom feeds that you hand picked?

Well, that’s what FeedHub is aimed at.

You put your feeds into it and FeedHub will pick the best stuff to show you out of those feeds.

Sounds good. And I do need help with my feeds ( I never manage to read everything). So I’m trying it out.

So far I’ve only revived 5 posts from all my feeds that FeedHub picked. They’ve not been the ones I would jump at, but it is supposed to learn your reading habits.

Read/WriteWeb also seems to be positive about the service, albeit with the following clarification:

My problem with such services in the past has been that the output, a single feed, is not very well integrated into a user’s daily RSS reading experience. Ideally I’d like a service like FeedHub to be integrated into Bloglines or Google Reader itself (or whatever RSS Reader you use). In other words, a user ideally should be able to filter their feeds within their RSS Reader of choice. Perhaps we’ll see that happen in the near future.

I agree with them 100%. In fact I’d go as far as to say that Google should by the company NOW. Although Google Reader is out of preschool  ( 🙂 ) beta, Google need something to blow the competition out of the water, like they’ve done with search.

RWW elaborates on how FeedHub works:

Feedhub is built on mSpoke’s “mPower Adaptive Personalization Engine”, which the company has a patent pending on. The key to training a Feedhub feed is the concept of a ‘meme’ – popularized in the tech blogging world by news aggregator Techmeme. FeedHub will discover new memes for you and learn “meme weights” by noticing which posts you click on and interact with

As usual, there’s more at RRW about FeedHub (I was about to leech the entire post, but thought he better of it)

So I’m trying it out. I’m going to see how it compares with my linkblog over time. naturally, there wont be a perfect match, but I’m looking at how good the personalization engine is.

iPhone Price Cut – Economics at Work

~ rbonini

I just stumbled upon this article in Reason Magazine ( be sure to read the rest of the article):

Sure, it’s good economics—even if it’s bad PR, Apple did manage to sell 1 million iPhones in 74 days-but is it fair? Is it just? To find out, we need look no farther than question posed by rubber bracelets everywhere: WWJD? Not What Would Jobs Do?, of course, since we already know: he’d give in to the whiners and offer $100 credits good for Apple products in the future.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the Bible’s final word on this point, and takes a much harder line than Steve Jobs. Jesus tells the story of a group of workers looking for employment. A few are hired in the morning for one denarius. As the day drags on, more and more workers were hired, with the last batch brought to the field only at the eleventh hour. Then it comes time to cash out:

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

“But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

As one writer put it: “if you’re still upset about ‘paying too much’ for your iPhone, take it up with the man upstairs.”

Or maybe this is all just an extraordinarily elaborate PR strategy after all. Consider a customer we’ll call “Katherine.” She would never wait in line for a gadget. She’s just not quite geeky/status-seeky enough. And she doesn’t track consumer electronics prices, nor does she browse in Best Buy or the Apple store for fun. But thanks to the hullabaloo about the price drop, she now knows that Apple phones are “cheap.” Hard to imagine the fact would have penetrated her consciousness so quickly or so thoroughly as it has without a controversy to reinforce the message.

Perhaps Steve Jobs did have the parable of the workers in the vineyard in mind after all. After all, the tale wraps up with that famous phrase, certainly applicable to iPhone prices today: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

A Word about Link Blogs

~ rbonini

Scoble, in his latest post, reflects on what a resource his link blog has become as a database of all things technological.

It has almost no noise, just much of the best blogging that’s been done over the past year in the technology field. But, whenever I think about moving feeds to a new reader I start thinking of that database and start thinking about the value it has to me as a way to search back on what caught my eye over the past year.

 

Then it struck me that since I’ve subscribed to said link blog over the past year, and since I use Google Reader, I can access that same database as well. The addition of search by the Reader team just makes it better. It has some invaluable stuff in it. I share stuff in it more than in all my other feeds. I find plenty of bloggable materiel in there as well.

Which brings me to the question: What is a link blog?

I know, it sounds idiotic, like something web 1.0 guys would ask.  But think of it. Do you a use a link blog to share posts with others? Do you use a link blog as reference for yourself, to point to things that catch your eye? Do you use it a reference, but don’t mind if others share it?

The way we see the utility of a link blog determines what we will use a link blog for, which in turn determines the quality of our link blogs.

On the one hand if we take it seriously and only add stuff that is truly worthy of being shared, not just stuff loosely related to what we blog about. In other words:Are you in the business of simply observing the world go by, or is the welfare of your blog and link blog taken seriously? Do we/you intend for our/your link blog to be a resource – personal or public?

On the other hand, Scoble can be easy on his link blog – he’s posted cat photo’s there more than once. Do we fill it with stuff that’s not really useful ( and I am definitely a cat person)? Do we linkblog just for the sake of it.

Lets take a look at the old school link blogers I have in my reading list.

Larkware News: They put their links in blog posts. They’re up to 1227 posts today. lets see what yesterdays post post looks like:

Software

Information

Community

 

Simple. Clean and neat. The three categories are particularly useful allowing you to skip right to the meat of the post. The RSS Feed is here.

Christopher Steen. Same deal. His latest Link Listing:

  • LINQ to SQL (Part 9 – Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the control) [Via: ScottGu ]
  • Obscure ASP.NET Problem – AJAX Control Toolkit, CollapsiblePanelExtender, Image controls pages loading more than once…….

    • RSS feed here.

    Kent Newsome posts “Evening Reading”. its not so much a link listing as a running commentary of the stuff he’s read. An excerpt from his latest:

    Larry Borsato talks about a recent focus group in which college students said MySpace is over, Facebook might not last much longer, and their best source for information is word of mouth.  Paul Stamatiou is one college guy who has chilled on Facebook.  Thank goodness there’s all those grown-up bloggers to keep the hype going.

    He posts this in the middle of his other stuff in stead of a completely separate feed. I tend to give it is quick scan and see if there is anything interesting, or else ignore it completely.

    RSS feed here.

    Sam Gentile often posts his “New and Notable”. He’s up to number 180.

    SOA/ESB

    WF

    The great thing here is that they’re grouped by subject matter. You can skip right to what you’re interested in. RSS feed here.

    After that review, I still much prefer Google Reader’s Shared items. All they need next is a taging for your shared items. ( I think someone’s already suggested that somewhere in Scoble’s link blog 🙂 ).

    But one thing is sure – link blogs are invaluable tools to finding information because  the information has already been used and promoted as useful.

    There ain’t nothing like an oft used piece of information.

    So. My link blog has a new lease on life. (RSS feed here)

    PS Scoble says TechCrunch aren’t happy about linkblogs. I think this a first for a content producer to complain about link blogs.

    Multi- Gigabyte File Copy Operations

    ~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

    Copying more than one gigabyte in one operation is tedious, frustrating and agonizingly slow. Not that there is all that much you can do.

    Scott Allen was having a little bit of difficulty so I’ thought I’d help a little.

    Scott Hansellman has a post on 3 utilities you can use to copy files without using the windows explorer.

    First, Robocopy. If you have XP or Windows Server you can easily get this in the Resource Kits. If you have Vista, it’s already in your path. That’s always nice. It’s Robust, indeed (hence, Robocopy) but it’s legendarily unforgiving

    …

    Second, for repeatable jobs, I love SyncBackSE. It’s $30, but there is a free version with less features available. SyncBack is option-ful and literally moves nearly every important piece of data in my house around weekly.

    …

    Last, but certainly not least, XXCOPY. It’s huge. Epic even. It’s even got a nice windows progress bar that pops out of the DOS Box. The Technical Reference is comprehensive to say the least. Here’s a summary of the features. It’ll sync directories, maintain short names, qualify by date/time, copy security info.

    I’ve used Robocopy. The GUI frontend is next to useless (either that, or I’m doing something wrong).

    I’ve yet to try the other two.

    Hope this helps someone.

    Cheering up the Original iPhone Owners

    ~ rbonini

    Fake Steve Jobs made me laugh out loud:

    Well, we’ve got a plan to restore some of that magic you felt on Day One. No, not a $200 rebate. And no, we’re not going to let you return the phone or cancel your plan with AT&T. But here’s what we’re going to do. It’s a sticker. Bring in your receipt to any Apple store or AT&T store and show that you paid full price for your iPhone, and we’ll give you a sticker that says, “Original iPhone.” Very small, very classy, black on black, made of super high quality plastic with a glossy finish. Something you’ll be proud to put on your iPhone so everyone will know that you’re not just any iPhone user; you’re one of the super smart, super cool early adopters who paid full price. You see? We’ve got you covered. I know what you want to tell me. What can I say? You’re welcome. I love you too. And you are special. I mean it.

    One problem. They’re not buying it. They’re stalking el Jobso:

    Damn. Last night they were out there holding a candlelight vigil and singing “We Shall Overcome.” To hell with it. I’m calling the police.