Trigger Finger

As always after a move of the site and a redesign I have been paying a little more attention to the stats than usual, as it’s pretty funny to see some of the stuff in there.

To give an idea of scale the site gets about 2500 visitors per day and so is by no means some great revelation in terms of user habits, but still some interesting stuff. continue reading »

Low power consumption doesn't mean low performance

So Windows Home Server is a chunk of code I have been very impressed with for a long time, even in Beta I trusted it completely and it has filled several needs in our house without a single hiccup. But the time came when I needed to run it on some decent and well considered hardware. continue reading »

That lovely, big, cuddly, megacorp Microsoft is getting on my nerves recently. I am not one of those moron’s that hates Microsoft because I think it’s cool (though I could probably register high on many other moron measurements). I like a lot of Microsoft products, I have defended them in the past and I have praised them in the past. But these days they seem to have lost all coherence in some of their divisions.

I have bitched sometime long ago about the lack of content for all those poor people who have payed through the nose for a copy of Vista Ultimate (especially if they paid retail price… ouch!). For all those extra pennies paid for the ‘Ultimate’ version, what have they got in terms of value? A couple of very crappy games, video desktops, sound themes and disk encryption that about 0.0001% of the world might actually use.

But their latest loss of interest focuses it seems on Windows Home Server, which, as you might know I am in the process of resurrecting at home. Don’t get me wrong, the core product is superb. It runs on just about any old hardware thrown together, its backup and restore features cannot be beaten by any product on the market, and the remote RDP stuff is great.

But what could have been its crowning glory is the add-ins feature. They make it sound so simple! Drop in community written add-ins for extra functionality! Simply download to the \Software\add-ins directory and its ready to install in the WHS console. Yeah…. not so much!

I am yet to come across a useful add-in that doesn’t require some seriously hackery to install. For example, the add-in that probably 90% of users look for as soon as they get WHS is a torrent add-in. The most popular (in fact pretty much the ‘only’) is the uTorrent add-in. Let me give a brief synopsis of the installation procedure for that.

- Create a new admin account
- Download utorrent add-in
- Download Windows Resource Kit
- Download anyservice installer
- Download uTorrent
- Download uTorrent web gui
- Log on as your new admin account
- Install WRK
- Install uTorrent
- Configure uTorrent to use only ‘real’ paths instead of network WHS shares
- Extract and install the webgui
- Using a combination of WRK and the anyservice installer, create a custom service that runs uTorrent
- Configure service to run as the new admin user
- Registry hack for the service to run the correct .exe
- NOW you can drop your add-in into the folder and install it
- Finally spend several hours fixing permission issues and the like for the whole thing to actually work

This is actually one of the least technical installs! There are power saving add-ins that should be inbuilt functionality which require a combination of registry hacks and sysinternals to stop core processes from loading for christ’s sake!

The product has been out for a long time now and there are no ‘offical’ add-ins, the SDK is cursory at best. The problem here is that the product is SBS2003 with the appropriate apps hacked onto the top. But as I have said the apps hacked onto the top do a good job. The problem is that the add-ins are crippled by the fact this is SBS2003 with hacks, as there is absolutley no thought given to the under-the-hood framework needed to make this extendable. The apparent user friendliness (Microsoft’s supposed forte) of the WHS console is completely isolated to that part of the OS alone. Developers of add-ins are forced to hack their way through a mountain of unneccesary limitations and ’should-have-been-removed’ remnants of the business product to get anything to work through an add-in.

Just look at that routine for installing the uTorrent add-in… how many steps would your parents or grandparents get through before throwing the thing out of the window?

Adobe Lightoom is the premium Digital Darkroom for photographers. It combines a multitude of library features and combines them with some very powerful editing and processing tools in the package. Having got my first DSLR camera almost one month ago, I became quickly aware of how much I needed something to keep track of all my pictures, and something that I could use to process them, especially when shooting in RAW format. I looked at many options, Picasa2 from google, Expression Media from Microsoft, Windows Live Gallery which is part of their Live packages, CaptureNX which is Nikon’s own software, GIMP combined with ufraw, and so on.

But I found every package lacked something. Here is a very very quick overview of the four better packages I tried and my ratings on the things that were important to me.

continue reading »

Update Feb 18th 2009 – Letter sent to Major Nelson.. as yet no response

I am sure lots of people are aware, but to those who aren’t please read on (those who are, bear with me while I have a rant!).

I moved from the UK to Sweden about 8 months ago and obviously took my Xbox 360 with me. Afterall, I am not moving to Mars, in fact I am within Europe still and we europeans generally share a territory with most things. We all use PAL, we all like football, many share the same currency, and we all love the french (ahem).

So generally the first few months everything went swimmingly until December when my Xbox Live Gold account expired. So wanting to renew my account I tried, but no matter what I did the damn Live system refused to accept payment using a Swedish card. For some reason best known to Microsoft they don’t want my money because a Swedish VISA card is obviously different from an English one…. right? continue reading »

Whilst waiting for the Ultimate Extras to install, I checked the gadgets site to see if anything was released and was shocked to see a brand new and nice looking new site for the Sidebar gadgets!

Yes that’s right the Vista launch is underway. Having just checked Windows Update 2 of the 3 promised ultimate extras are available (notably no DreamScene yet) plus a ton of other updates and language packs. Just run Windows Update and enjoy the new toys!