February 2007 - Posts
We're finally back from our amazing trip to East Africa. I thought I'd be able to jack in during our lay over at the Amsterdam airport and start to catch up on mail and start organizing photos. Almost 4000 of them. But it didn't happen.
I took my GPS with me and created track logs of everywhere we went. I'm really excited about geotagging all of my photos with GPS coordinates and then creating a mash-up showing where we were whent the pictures were taken. But from what I can see so far the tools for making this happen are all pretty primitive and not very automated...it'll probably take me a while to piece it all together.
I did have a chance to
post a few to my Flickr account and will continue to post the best of the best as I get a chance. But catching up on email is my top priority.
I got through some of my RSS feeds and see that the Windows Home Server Beta 2 rollout is proceeding nicely. It is fun seeing all the reports of people getting their kits and getting things set up!
This particular picture was taken on our first day...less than 15 minutes after we landed at an airstrip in the center of the Serengeti (Seronera) we came across this lion couple engaged in a little hanky panky. Pretty amazing start...
The "tent camp" we are staying at here in the Sergengeti has a PC with satellite "broadband" access. I was able to sequester it long enough to upload this image and type this post.
So far, the sights have been pretty unbelievable. Lions, giraffes, hyeaneas, birds, cape buffalo, elephants, gizelles, ...
Over 1600 photos between the four of us so far and we've only had 2 days in the brush. Hehe.
Great weather too. I'll try to post some more if I get a chance.
Terry over at We Got Served posted a nice run through of what the setup for Windows Home Server beta 2 is like. He took pictures along the way and if you are curious to see what it looks like before you get your beta kit take a gander.
We Got Served
Note this is probably the last post I'll make for a while; I'm off to Africa for vacation. We are going to the Serengeti!
There are few things cooler than this. Ever.
I want one of these. Wow.
http://jet-man.com/playervideo.swf?video=jetman2007.flv
FYI: I just posted a lengthy post titled “
Why Doesn't Windows Home Server do Foo?” over on the Windows Home Server Team Blog.
From the comments I see that some people missed the announcement that we have opened up registration for Beta 2. See the Windows Home Server Team Blog for more info.
Until OEMs ship Windows Home Server hardware the only way to run Windows Home Server is on a machine you provide. The hardware requirements are pretty meager:
- An x86 CPU with roughly the same horsepower as a 1GHz Pentium III. It will actually run on less (I had it running on an old 550MHz Pentium III for a while), but for a reasonable experience you want something in this range. My current box at home is running an AMD Sempron 3500+.
- At least 512MB of RAM. Memory is cheap, so you might as well go with 1GB if you can swing it.
- Some sort of cheapo GPU. Once your server is setup you won't need to have a keyboard, mouse, or monitor plugged in, but setup requires one. Be aware that many onboard GPUs use system memory and if you only have 512MB of RAM you might need to change the BIOS settings to use the minimum amount of system memory.
- An internal or external DVD ROM reader. The Windows Home Server instalation media is a DVD and that is the only supported way of setting up a server. You need to make sure your motherboard/BIOS supports booting from DVDs. Many older machines cannot boot from DVDs!
- An Ethernet adapter. It's hard to find a mainboard these days with anything other than Gigabit Ethernet onboard, but if all you have is 100baseT it will work fine.
- For hard disks our miniumum requirement is a single 80GB or larger disk. In reality you will want the largest disks you can find and multiple of them (in order to get redundancy). I won't go into the details of why here, but you should make sure that your first disk (disk 0) is NOT your smallest disk. For example if you have 3 120GB disks and an 80GB disk lying around, DO NO put the 80GB disk as the first disk.
- EDIT: Make sure your system supports USB 2.0, 1394, or eSATA for external hard disk expansion. USB 1.1 is waaaay to slow and expanding your home server's storage using USB 1.1 will really suck.
I'm seeing people start to post their experiences and suggestions. Over at We Got Served is a great set of posts putting together your Windows Home Server machine. And last week Ars Technica posted a useful article that is not specific to Windows Home Server but mostly applies.
One word of caution: Machines thrown together from parts lying around are known as frankenmachines. I personally enjoy building frankenmachines. It's an interesting challenge. But it's a challenge because many times there are problems. Mismatched or faulty RAM. Cables with nicks in them. BIOS that are way out of date. Hard disks that make scary noises. And so on.
Do not build a frankenmachime if your goal is to save time and money. More likely than not, the amount of time you spend getting everything working won't be worth it. Go online (I like newegg.com) or down to Fry's and buy new components instead.
So far I think they all suck.
What am I talking about? RSS Aggrigators. I've been bouncing back and forth between RSS Bandit, Google Reader, Outlook 2007, and several others for the last few months and none of them make me happy. A critical requirement for me is to be able to access my feedlist, with updated read counts, from any of 3 or 4 computers.
RSS Bandit allows uploading and downloading the feedlist to a WebDAV server, and I set that up. It works pretty well, but I have to remember to manually invoke the upload/download action. The UI in RSS Bandit is pretty good, but a bit clunky.
Outlook 2007 works well across computers because the feeds are stored in my Exchange profile. But it's pretty much half-baked as an RSS reader.
Google Reader is a product of the evil enemy :-). But as of right now it is my reader of choice. The feature that sealed the deal for me is the shared items feed. I am encountering tons of articles on Windows Home Server and I want to share them with others. You can subscribe to my shared items feed (also called a link blog) here.
Rick has posted several more parts of his ongoing series on Windows Home Server based on his discussions with me. He's up to “Part 4“ as of today:
Part 1 - Security of Data, User Privacy
Part 2 - User Management
Part 3 - Business/Marketing
Part 4 - Technology
Enjoy...
First, I think the idea of having a conversation via blogs is funny. In his post today Robert says
“I hope to interview Charlie Kindel (he runs the Home Server group) when I visit Seattle later this month...“
Since he didn't send me email with a request to meet, I guess I'm suppposed to reply via my blog as well. So here goes:
Hi, Robert. I'd love to chat with you when you are up in this area. I'm going to be on vacation (Tanzania; I can't wait) the15th through the 25th so hopefully you'll stick around over the weekend and we can meet on Monday the 26th. I'll be watching your blog for a reponse.
Now, back on topic.
I was suprised that Robert thinks the buzz around Windows Home Server is lacking (“Already mentions of it have totally died off”). He seems to base his opinion on his searches for “Microsoft Home Server” on both Live and Google that didn't turn up the right hits. At first I figured he raising a good point: I generally have assumed that everyone knows that we've named the product Windows Home Server and wouldn't try to query for Microsoft Home Server. Perhaps I needed ask our marketing team if we “had a problem“.
It turns out, however, there is no problem at all: As of right now searching for “microsoft home server“ on either engine return precisely the results I would expect:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?mkt=en-us&q=microsoft+home+server
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+home+server
Who knows why Robert's queries didn't turn up relevant results. Perhaps he had a typo in his queries? Both engines have updated their indexes since he posted? Things that make you go...Hmmm?
Whew! I finally finished River of Gods by Ian McDonald this weekend.
I categorize River of Gods as a “Great story but a PITA to read book”.
Here's the deal: I shouldn't have to work to read a science fiction novel. To me “a great read” just flows...I start reading the first chapter and 17 hours later I close the book and say “wow”. The books I love to read don't make me tired. I literally can stay up for days reading them. But not River of Gods. The damn book made me work and I could only read a few chapters at a time! Heinlein never made me work. Neither did Clarke, Asimov, Card. Ludlum, Clancy, or le Carré. I think I like Scalzi and Cheeseburger Brown for the same reason.
Usually when this happens (like with William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive) I just give up and put them back on the shelf. But I decided to power through...and in the end, I'm glad I did. River of Gods is a good book! It has a great story, interesting plot lines, cool characters, and is on a topic that fascinates me.
The premise of the book is based on Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. Namely within the next 50 years (2047 to be exact) the rate of technological change will continue to accelerate at such a rate that man & machine will merge. Of course I wasn't able to get any sort of clear picture of this until about 75% through the book. McDonald puts together a fascinating set of twists on the topic which I won't spoil here...
The environment and characters McDonald paints result in something that feels a lot like Blade Runner, Neromancer, Diamond Age, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and Contact all mixed together in India. Not a bad mixture in my opinion. Well done.
So what's my beef with this book? Because most of the book takes place in India (in 2047) McDonald decided to obfuscate the beginning of each chapter (and the beginning of the book in general) behind a huge amount of Indian language and cultural references. As I read each chapter I had to guess and infer what was going on. McDonald actually succeeded in enabling the key points to come out as I read on, but I really tired of having to go through this routine every chapter.
I suppose if I would have noticed the GLOSSARY before I FINISHED THE BOOK it might have helped. But (a) I am not in the habit of looking for glossaries in science fiction novels and (b) even if I had seen it, it still would have been a pain to keep referring there as I read.
In the end I enjoyed the book. I learned a bit about India. But it was kind of like running on a treadmill at the Pro Club: worthwhile, but painful.
Way back in January 2005 a blogger named Rick Hallihan wrote a post titled Windows Server, Home Edition. I freaked out.
I was worried that someone had leaked the details of “Q” (our internal codename for Windows Home Server) to this guy! He was obviously speculating, but it sure seemed like he had real information. We tried to find out who he was and how he knew what he knew but it quickly became apparent that he was just a smart guy with good ideas (that just happened to be the same as ours ).
He continued to blog on home server topics and I continued to subscribe to his feed.
After we announced at CES I contacted him to congratulate him on his prescience and to offer to answer any lingering questions he had. He took me up on the offer and has posted some of what we talked about today on his blog...One Man Shouting. We talked about alot more than what he's posted today so I hope he continues to post on the topic... now he's not only smart, but has real information. He, He.
My team (the Windows Home Server team) now has a blog. Here's the abstract for this new blog.
This blog is managed by the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft. Our goal with the blog is to educate and inform families with multiple PCs about how Windows Home Server will help them easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. We hope you enjoy the blog and find it a good source of news, insights, tips, tricks....and maybe a few laughs. Let us know how we can improve it!
Over time members of the team, including devs, testers, program managers, user experience designers, usability experts, and user education folks will post all sorts of information about the product.
Read the blog here.
Subscribe to the RSS feed here.
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