January 2007 - Posts
Dan Fernandez is the lead product manager for Visual Studio Express. He just blogged about developing tools and applications for Windows Home Server using Visual Studio.
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As I mentioned in my Channel9 video I'm super excited that WHS is going to enable geeks, makers, hobbyists, or whatever you want to call them to build fun and exciting things for their homes. Of course, WHS will also allow “professionals” to build products that extend the platform, but Dan is absolutely right in saying that there is complete overlap in the definition of the “Sam” persona we defined as we built Windows Home Server and the target market for Visual Studio Express.
As he mentions this is another example of the Hobbyist Renaissance at Microsoft.
http://www.nikonimglib.com/nefcodec/
This is very cool! We have both a Nikon D-50 and a D-80 and I've never bothered with RAW images because of the fact that only the Nikon tools work. And I've never really liked the Nikon tools, instead preferring Microsoft Digital Image Suite and Windows Explorer.
It looks like the new support in Windows Vista for “Windows Imaging Components” which are add-ins that 3rd parties can create now fixes this! I'm excited to try it out.
I just noticed that
Matt Pietrek has been blogging about his experience playing with
Windows Home Server. Matt is one of the many MS employees who have been
Dogfooding the product for a while.
I've been working at Microsoft a long time. Almost 17 years. My family and I have made huge sacrifices in our personal lives for Microsoft. For the most part, I've been financially rewarded for those sacrifices. Financially, it's been a good deal.
However, when people ask me “Why? Why do you still work at Microsoft?” the answer is out of my mouth before they can even finish asking the question:
“I can't imagine anywhere else where I would have a greater chance of changing the world.”
I look back on my career and I'm pretty darned proud of the things I've worked on. There are 4 or 5 things where I know I can watch anyone using a personal computer and say “they are able to do that because of something *I* did“. I can hardly believe it...me...the geekly little brother of four older sisters actually did something that had an impact!
And the cool thing is that it's still happening! I have the opportunity to keep doing it.
I love this company. And I love the Blue Monster and how it illustrates what we've done, what we're doing, and what we're going to do. Nicely done Hugh.
I've created a Flickr group for collecting pictures of people's home servers and other related images
http://www.flickr.com/groups/homeservers
Inspired by the Media Center group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/mediacenter
Those of you paying attention will remember Cheesburger Brown. He's an insanely talented sci-fi author and artist who, two years ago, penned Simon of Space as well as Darth Vader's blog. Simon of Space was originaly written in the form of a daily serial where each chapter was posted as blog entry every day. When he was posting it, checking for new chapters was a seriously important part of my daily routine. It has since been picked up and published as a true novel. Read it online or buy the book; just do it.
And go read The Darth Side too.
Any-hoo, I got distracted and lost track of Cheeseburger Brown (not his real name), until the other day. Turns out he's been as prolific in his writing as always. I am playing catch up by reading his current sci-fi novella The Bikes of New York. Every few days he posts a new chapter. Since it's in blog format you can subscribe with an RSS reader.
On his Free Stories page I'm shocked to find all the material he's churned out since the last time I checked. I've put them all in my RSS reader so when I need a distraction I can read something other than Engadget :-).
I recently finished John Scalzi's Andoid's Dream. I've said it before, but I've always been a huge fan of Robert Heinlein and John's writing reminds me of his. This book is John's 3rd sci-fi novel and his maturity over time as a writer is obvious. I think Old Man's War is my favorite Scalzi book so far (although Ghost Brigades rocked too), but this is a fun, interesting book. It has great childish humor (passing gas is a common Scalzi theme) like Agent To the Stars, but is more traditional (but still very creative) in topic and plot.
Now on to River of Gods by Ian McDonald. Never read any of his stuff before...
Over on the discussion thread for my Channel9 video I just posted answers to some of the questions people have been asking about Windows Home Server...
I have not watched the 3rd and 4th hours of 24 that were on last night. Just didn't have the time.
But I did watch the first two hours on Sunday nght. All day yesterday the vampire scene kept popping into my head. Each time I burst out laughing.
He bit him! He killed him like a vampire. The writers of 24 are brilliant.
This is my WHS box at home. It started out in a different case (an Antec), but I retired my wife's old computer and it used this Lian Lai case (which I've always liked). So I used this as an opportunity to put in a bigger power supply (4 750GB SATA drives are just on the edge of what a 350W supply can do) and a 4 drive SATA hot-swap carrier.
The mobo is an Asus A8N-VM CSM with 512MB RAM and an AMD Sempron 3400.
At work I have an early engineering sample of HP's MediaSmart server (which has very similar hw specs).
After keeping the secret for so long, I'm probaby over doing it by constantly searching live.com (and google, sigh) for “windows home server” and seeing what people are saying. However, I keep finding jewels. Here are some of my recent favorites that I'm now watching:
http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/category/windows/server/home-server/
http://www.blogpulse.com/rss?query=%22home+server%22
http://www.techmeme.com/070108/p30#a070108p30
Dennis Bounds of King5 News (Seattle) interviewed BillG in the CES booth over the week. I posted a still I took during the interview on Monday.
I finally got a chance to watch the interview (it is posted on the King5 website).
We loaded the demo home server boxes in the booth up with personal photos. A bunch of them were photos that I had on my camera from my Christmas vacation in Colorado with my extended family. It turns out that this has resulted in my wife, son, daughter, and nephew all becoming famous (if you consider being in the background of a BillG interview on a local news station famous).
The shot at 1:36 in is my nephew Graham.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server
I made a few edits correcting some inaccuracies... Whoever did it got most of it right. Nice job.
Someone just forwarded me the following quote. This really resonates with me. I have been working on trying to get a home server product built at Microsoft for over 8 years...
"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done. Then they begin to hope it can be done. Then they see it can be done. Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. "
-- Frances Hodgson Burnett
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