Almost Free?
Having placed my order for a new 2009 Mac Pro, I have set myself (and my wife) a goal of making it pay for itself in 12 months.
For someone who has 40 hours a week to work on such a thing, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. But I have a full time job and a 10 month old son, so the most I will be able to give to such a project is at best a couple of hours a day! But I have a few angles to attack this on.
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?
Taken from gameinformer.com
"While Microsoft was quite quiet about Live for Windows Vista, today during a press event prior to the Game Developers Conference the company revealed to Game Informer Online the exact pricing structure for the service. Live for Windows Vista will actually be the same exact price for Vista as it is for the Xbox 360. Just like with the Xbox 360 there will be a free Silver package as well as a Gold package which retails for $49.99 for a year subscription, $7.99 for one month, and $19.99 for three months. Good news for gamers who already have an Xbox Live Gold Membership – you’ve already subscribed. Your Live membership works on the Xbox, Xbox 360, and Live for Windows. Your gamer tag and achievements will be used across both Xbox and Vista PCs. Upcoming Vista games like Halo 2 and some exclusive Vista casual games will include achievements and will be able to add to your gamer score. We’ll have more on this as it becomes available."
Indeed great news for those who have an Xbox Live gold account already, but I wonder how much interest there will really be amongst non-xbox gamers?
With the full retail release of Microsoft Windows Vista just around the corner, one of the major things a new user of Windows Vista will immediately notice is the sidebar.
It’s a feature that appeared, dissapeared and the re-appeared thankfully in the later and final version of Windows Vista. I say thankfully as it’s possibly my favourite feature! If you have a widescreen monitor like mine, then you don’t feel like you have lost any screen real-estate and have a whole host of accessibility and information options available to you. One bit of advice would be to use the ‘Always on top’ option for the sidebar to keep it visible whilst other applications are open (doesn’t apply to games of course!).
Anyway here is my top 10 gadgets with links, quick description and images. Please feel free to let us know of better ones in the comments section below!
Great and handy gadget to combine with a minimised itunes. Load up your favourite playlist and navigate without the alt-tabbing! Displays Song, artist, track length, and artwork!
9. My Public IP
Displays your public IP address. Very useful if you are on DSL and have a provider that gives you a dynamic IP instead of a static one.
8. App Launcher
A godsend for those that used to like the MS Office toolbar for a little patch of shortcuts to common apps. I fill one iteration with my games shortcuts, then a second iteration with those little apps like calc, mspaint and Filezilla that I need constant access to all the time.
7. XBox Live Gamercard by Nazul
Absolutely useless but I like having it up there to remind of how great (or not) I am and that I should be playing games right now rather than working!
6. Net Monitor
Monitor the up and down load speed of any interface. I have lost the link to this one but will put it up as soon as I find it again!
5. Presto’s Hard Drive Monitor
Monitor the disk space of up to 4 hard disks (or mapped network shares)
4. Multi Meter
Monitors CPU usage (and versions available for dual/quad cores to monitor each core) and total RAM usage
Listen to any of a multitude of BBC radio stations straight from the sidebar! A godsend for this ex-pat stuck up in the north of Sweden when I want some home news and ENGLISH language 
Stations include Radio 1,2,3, and 4, World Service and 5 Live
2. Outlook Info
All in one gadget that monitors Outlook even when the program itself is closed. Shows Read/unread message counts, Calendar events (number configurable) and Tasks (again configurable). Having those little reminders at the side of the screen is great for those with a short attention span (like me).
1. Weather Gadget
Yes the one that is included as standard on Vista. Its perfect in that it has a huge selection of towns (taken from MSN Weather) and even a tiny town as obscure as the one we live has a station within 5 km. It not only shows current weather on the sidebar, but if you detach it and make it floating it expands to show a 3 day forecast. Crucial if you live in a place like this when you want to know how many feet of snow to expect and whether it will only be -5 tomorrw…. or -30!
Finally a screenshot of my desktop with many of these gadgets in action!
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