Paul Hammond's Blog

…the taste of it’s cherry chapstick (Thanks Katy Perry - song reference here).  Sadly though, after a month of use, I have reverted back to my Windows Mobile phone.

My wife bought a first generation iPhone and then upgraded to the iPhone 3G when it was released.  This left her first generation handset sitting on my desk, nothing more than a tastefully designed paperweight.  My mobile account is with another provider, so at first I couldn’t use the phone with my SIM card.  A short session with my Mac Mini and the Pwnage tool soon had my phone unlocked for use on my own network and running the iPhone 2.1 software.  All in the name of research you understand…

Anyway, on the whole I like the whole iPhone experience.  The handset itself looks and feels great, with a nice “solid” build quality, and a satisfying weight when held in the hand.  The touchscreen is bright and responsive, and again the firm feel of “finger on glass” has a more solid feel than the stylus on my Windows Mobile PDA.  Some of the applications available from the App Store are pretty nice too.  I was particularly impressed with the MLB At Bat software, the Apple Remote software that can control iTunes over a wireless network, and the dual spirit level was fun and actually useful (who knew that the accelerometers in the iPhone were so sensitive!?).

So why did I switch back?  There were a number of reasons.  Some things were just small niggles, other things downright frustrating, and all combined to make my old phone a better option right now.  A few of them are below:

• No ability to cut and paste text.  There are plenty of comments around the web on this.  Only qualifying as “mildly annoying” for the most part, but it was definitely something I missed.
• General instability of applications.  More often than I would have liked, an application would stop responding (hanging the whole phone while it did) and after some timeout period it would crash you back to the home screen.  The most annoying times this happened was after typing some lengthy email replies but before getting a chance to send them.  I lost quite a few emails this way.  Grrr.
• I actually found some of the applications very slow.  Opening my SMS inbox would display a blank screen for a good few seconds before displaying my text messages.  Ditto for the messaging inboxes.  Going back to my Windows Mobile phone seemed positively lightning quick in contrast.
• No “true” multi-tasking for applications.  In Windows Mobile, I can load IE and start a page downloading, then switch to my inbox, or some other application, and switch back and forth happily.  Some iPhone applications appear to remember where you were, but do seem to load afresh each time you enter them from the home screen.  For example, the At Bat software would reset to the home screen of the app (instead of just redisplaying the page I was on when I flipped over to my inbox). This didn’t suit my need for truly doing more than one thing at once.
• A question mark over my Exchange Calendar entries.  After syncing with my iPhone, I have been getting some odd behaviour with Calendar entries.  Deleting an occurrence of a recurring meeting now doesn’t work correctly (it leaves the meeting in my Calendar, but with the time marked as Free).  I’ve done nothing else to my Calendar in this time so I am suspecting iPhone-Exchange functionality, but I cannot confirm this.

My Windows Mobile phone is a couple of years old now, running Windows Mobile 6.  Even so, it still does as good a job as the iPhone for most things I need, and in many ways it is better.

I will be watching future iPhone software and hardware revisions closely, as I feel like it could eventually become my phone of choice.  Not right now though.

I have but one regret - if only my HTC looked more like the iPhone instead of a brick, I could retain at least some street credibility…

I have a question for you all.

I am in the HAVE LOST bucket.  The few times I have lost data in the past have certainly contributed to my current backup strategy.  More recently though, the shear amount of important data I have has shaped my backup strategy even more.

I have a single 500Gb disk that holds my entire "My Documents" directory.  When I look at it in detail, the drive contains:

• 23,665 photos, stretching over 9 years; this includes ALL the photos and videos of my kids first 8 years of life (75.4Gb).
• 2,090 video files from my DV camera and my HD camera, also going back 9 years (172Gb).
• 15,062 MP3 and M4A audio files from my iTunes catalog (65.7Gb).
• Many MIDI and Audio files from my music composition and production.
• Documents, Financial files etc.

As you can see, "My Documents" = "Almost My Entire Digital Life".  Losing any of this data would have been depressing.  Losing all of it would be completely heart-breaking.

While I was away on business, at some point this data drive died.  Completely.  No hope of connecting it to copy off whatever I could salvage.  It was simply unreadable.  Dead.

At this point, think about how you would feel, given the above data.  Would you be a little sad?  Sobbing?  Suicidal?  Or mildly annoyed?  Thankfully, I was simply "mildly annoyed".

Restoring My Data

Twenty four hours after arriving home, I am now back up and running with very little pain (apart from the cost of a new drive to replace the dead one).  My attention to a backup strategy completely saved my backside on this occasion.  However, this failure has also made me aware of another round of tweaking that I need to do to ensure total and flawless recovery the next time this happens.  AND REST ASSURED, IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

So, what is my current approach?  I have a single drive that holds all of my data, as you have seen.  You could have multiple drives, this works just the same.

• I use the online backup service Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/) to backup most of my data.  This guarantees that I have off-site copies of my files.  An alternative service I have also used in the past is Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/).  Both have good features, and are reasonably priced.
• I use FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com/) to create multiple copies of my most important files, or files that I use daily on my multiple home and work machines.
• I have a nightly backup that runs, which copies all of the files from the system and data drives to an external 1Tb drive.  I use a product called Retrospect that came with one of my external drives.  There is a great alternative called SyncBack that is either freeware (v3) or a very cheap option (v4).

In this particular case, it was from the 1Tb backup drive that I was able to salvage my data.  If that had failed, I would have resorted to a combination of Mozy.com data and FolderShare'd data on my other machines.  I attached both my 1Tb backup drive and the new drive to my laptop, and copied the data back to the new drive to create an identical version of what was there before.  Then I reattached the drive back to my desktop and booted up.  Once logged in, I simply reset the ownership and permissions of the "My Documents" directories to the correct settings.

Potential Flaws

There are a couple of possible issues with the above that I have been considering since the failure occurred.  Luckily they didn't occur this time, but I will be altering my approach to cater for these.

1. When the drive died, it disappeared from Windows.  The Mozy client then decided the files had been deleted, and proceeded to remove them from the current online backup set.  Luckily I can go back to older backup sets, but "deleted" files are only kept for 30 days.  If I had been away for a longer period of time, they may have been purged.
2. My nightly backup currently does a "mirror" of my filesystems, with no history.  Files that are added are added to the backup, and files that are deleted are removed.  Luckily, in this case, the software recognized that the drive was missing and skipped the backup.  If it had seen the drive and decided the files were no longer there (as Mozy did), it would have proceeded to wipe the data off the backup too.  I need to look at the options I have for my backup software to keep historical versions of files.

I mitigated the possible issues above by simply powering down the machine remotely to ensure no further damage could occur until I could be back at home there to figure things out!

Side Note 1: Windows Home Server

This incident has also made me think more seriously about buying a Windows Home Server.  One of the great features about this solution is the backup software.  It can backup complete machines, and has historical backups so you can get at older versions of your files if you need to.  Scott Hanselman did a review of Home Server that you can find here: Review - HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server

Side Note 2: FolderShare and Off-Site Backups For Family

One other thing I use FolderShare for is to backup data from various family machines.  I set FolderShare up on their machines and then invited my own FolderShare account to share their key folders.  The files get copied to my machine here.  That way, they benefit from having an off-site backup as well as duplicate data via my nightly backup.

Go And Do It.  Now.

Let me finish by saying this.  WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOU DO WITH YOUR COMPUTER, WHATEVER FILES YOU HAVE, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP STRATEGY THAT SAFEGUARDS *ALL* OF YOUR DATA.  Do it now.  Turn the TV off, and get working.  Don't stop until you have everything backed up, preferably in more than one place.  Your data drive could fail tonight.  It won't give you any helpful warnings before it does.  Make data loss an event of "mild annoyance", not complete despair.

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM) on Monday just gone.  Here is a link to the main Visual Studio 2008 Developer Center.

Scott Guthrie has a blog posting about the VS2008 release here.

More importantly, he has a posting about uninstalling Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 here. 

I think I will still probably rebuild my laptop instead of risking the uninstall process.  In the past I have always ended up with random Beta bits hanging around and it just makes everything unstable.  That is the price of early-adoption I guess.

Microsoft's development tools and technologies go from strength to strength and I am proud to be part of this company.  Congratulations to all on the VS team!

An update to my favourite Outlook add-in has been released today - check out the ClearContext press release here, and then run (don't walk) to download ClearContext here.

A very quick one - late last year I posted about my mail provider FastMail.  I now have a URL you can click that will credit me as the referrer!  So, click here if you want to sign up for FastMail... 

A while ago I came across a blog post on the Live Search blog called "Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box".  You can basically set up a fully featured site search using and simply include it in your page.  You can select what "zones" to search (for example just your site, or your site and the web, multiple sites etc), and there is a choice between a really nice dynamic HTML version, and a plain vanilla HTML version.

I have added the feature to the top right hand side of my blog.  Simply type a query and press the button.  Since my site has been pretty well indexed by Windows Live Search, the results are very good.  I will be removing the other search box soon in favour of this one.

One thing I would like to see is a revenue share for the paid ads that appear in the search results (a la Google AdSense).

Follow the link above to read about how you can add the feature to your own site or blog, or go straight to the Windows Live Search Site Owner page to get started.

I suspect I am not a "normal" consumer of mail services.  I have many domains that I send mail from (due to the sites I host).  I want to check email from different places - home, work, hotels around the world, relatives houses, internet cafes etc - and as a result use many different computers and internet connection providers.

The problem with traveling is that you cannot just use your own ISP's outgoing SMTP server to send mail.  That works while you are connected to their network, but when you are in a hotel in Shanghai it doesn't.  Even if you could figure out their SMTP server address, changing your settings in each location is a pain.

The solution to my problem is authenticated SMTP services.  A service where I can login to the SMTP server and tell it who I am regardless of how I connected to the internet.  Surprisingly there are very few ISPs or service providers that offer this.

Enter FastMail.  I stumbled across these guys a few years ago, and their service has been fantastic.  I get the authenticated SMTP connection I mentioned above, which allows me to send email from any email address/domain I choose; this lets my communications always look professional when dealing with my many domains.  On top of that they have a great WebMail solution as well as supporting IMAP connectivity.  IMAP allows me to use multiple clients on multiple machines without having to worry about downloading mails more than once as I would with POP3.  I just get a "view" onto my mailbox, much like I do with Exchange at work.

I pay annually (because my mailbox is large) but for ages the one-time payment of $14.95 was totally sufficient.  Even now it is only $19.95 a year.

If you have more complex than average mail requirements, I highly recommend these guys.

Oh, if you want to sign up, click here to email me and I'll tell you what to use as the referrer... 

When I first started putting photographs online, I spent ages looking for an album creation tool that would give me some control but would automate a lot of the creation.  I eventually settled on JAlbum - a nice tool written in Java that has many downloadable skins to choose from.  You can see an album that uses JAlbum here.

More recently however I discovered two Flash based image viewers both from Airtight Interactive - AutoViewer and SimpleViewer.

AutoViewer allows you to create a line of images spreading from left to right.  It will show the images as a slide show, or allow the user to click through them one by one.  The images are shown at full size, unless the browser window is too small at which point the Flash viewer does a great job at scaling them down.  Example AutoViewer album.

SimpleViewer creates a thumbnail matrix for your images, and allows you to view full size versions by clicking the thumbnails.  Again, the images scales if necessary.  Example SimpleViewer album.

One nice feature is that the images are intelligently cached when the page loads.  This minimizes wait time for the end user and it is a great user experience too if you click on images that are not yet downloaded and cached.

Both are controlled by a single XML file that includes all of the options for the album as well as the image list.

I spent a little time writing a very crude application to allow me to create AutoViewer XML files very easily.  For SimpleViewer, I actually used to use a JAlbum skin, but this only supports version 1.7.1.  The current version is 1.8 and the XML format has changed a little.  I just copy and paste an old album file and fix it up by hand right now.  I hope to extend my "crude application" to cover SimpleViewer very soon!

I am a little bit late on this one!

I have posted about the Outlook addin called ClearContext a couple of times before; I think it is a fantastic tool for helping you to organize your inbox.  GTDers, it can really help you guys too.  So far I think I have helped a dozen or more people unchain themselves from the labour of their inbox by switching over to using ClearContext.

Anyway, ClearContext v3 was released a couple of weeks ago, and adds some great new features, as well as native Office 2007 support (i.e. full integration into the ribbon), and it works great with Vista.

Check it out.  It continues to rock. 

My good gamer-friend Darren just sent me this link to Game System Wars - it is a round up of various sales statistics for the 3 games systems, with the data pulled from Amazon.  Right now, Xbox 360 leads the way in all categories (as you would probably expect, since it has been out for longer).  It will definitely be interesting to see how things change in the coming weeks and months.

I went to Best Buy and Circuit City here in Redding last night.  Best Buy had about 15 tents in a line, and Circuit City had a couple, waiting for the PS3 launch today.  One of the Best Buy employees said the tents arrived on Tuesday.  I read in the paper there are PS3's on Ebay for upwards of $2500.  People really do love their game systems...

On a slightly unrelated note, Circuit City had a ton of Microsoft Zune players available for sale.  I had a quick play with one - the screen is really bright, and the UI is nice.  When they do one with more hard disk space, I could possibly be tempted over from the dark side.

Microsoft released the beta of Windows Live Writer a couple of days ago.  I thought I would do the "corporate thing" and give it a go.  It looks really nice.

I have used a few different tools in the past to post to my blog.  BlogJet is an excellent tool, and let me do just what I wanted.  Windows Live Writer does look a little bit like BlogJet in places (particularly in the Category selector), but it has some great value-add features that I am enjoying.

My favourite one so far is the true WYSIWYG editing.  When you set up your account in the tool, it goes off and downloads the CSS and HTML for the blog to use at edit time.  Right now, I am writing this entry and the heading and fonts all look exactly right.  Even better, press Shift-F11 and it will preview your posting IN PLACE in a downloaded version of your real blog.  Nice.

It has some good photo publishing features, and a feature to insert a Live Local map inline in your blog entry.  Just like this one, showing where I am writing this posting!

 I set it up to work with both Spaces and dasBlog with very little effort, so it gets top marks there.

There is also an SDK available so that developers can add capabilities to publish additional content types.

A big thumbs up rating from me - give it a try!

ClearContext have posted their annual Email Usage survey.  The results of last year's survey are here, and make for interesting reading. 

As an avid ClearContext user, I feel obliged to pass on the link to this years survey – ClearContext 2006 Email Usage Survey.

Microsoft has made the Consolas font available for download.  Consolas is one of the 6 new fonts previously only available in Window Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina, Corbel).  It is a fixed-width font which makes it a great replacement for all text editors, including Visual Studio.

Be aware that it is a ClearType font, so you need to have ClearType enabled to get the best out of it.

I have been using Consolas for a while, and I really like it.  Check it out…

Download the Consolas font here.

A while ago, I signed up to take part in the beta of riya.com; I had forgotten about it until last week when I got an invite mail to try out the service.

In a nutshell, riya.com is a facial recognition service for uploaded photos.  It allows you to submit your photos to a website, and it will then start picking out portions of those photos that “might be faces”.  It then asks you to spend a little time identifying the people in the pictures - training it if you will.  After you have told it a few times which people are which, it can then start “auto-recognising” people from any new photos you upload.  It seems to be able to pick out words too (so, maybe road signs or shop names etc) which might allow you to better identify your pictures.

Much like other photo sites, it offers the ability to tag pictures.  It auto creates a number of tags from your Exif data, and allows creation of your own tags.  You can search your photos by person name, location, date range, album (it auto-creates albums based on your uploaded file structure), or tags.  You can also mark pictures and albums as “private”, or for sharing.

One nice feature is that you can link up with other people in your contacts list, and use their recognition data to help feed your recognitions.  When you train the software, you tell it both a name and an email address, so I presume it uses this data to cross reference my recognition data with others.  This could be a pretty powerful feature if enough of your friends and family begin to use the service.

Some comments I have on the service so far:

• Firstly, it requires you to install an uploader (written as a Java application) to upload your pictures.  This can run in your tasktray, and you can set it to monitor a folder so it uploads and auto-recognises your pictures as you add them.  It will also auto-start on when you start Windows.  I was a little unsure about installing yet another tasktray application, but it doesn’t seem too bad on resources, and it does make uploading to Riya.com easy.
• The website itself is very well put together.  It uses a lot of “Windows-like” funtionality (such as drag-and-drop and mutliple selection using the CTRL key) and talks to the Riya.com services via some sort of AJAX funtionality.  The whole user experience seemed to work well for me once I was actually inside of a specific task.
• That said, there are a number of ways to get into the differing “training modes” and it took me a little while to figure out what was going on.  Not being one to read manuals, there is probably an FAQ that tells me all I need to know, but you know how it is…
• It doesn’t work in IE7 (yet), although with the level of interaction I think they can be forgiven for now.  Works great in FireFox.

I have uploaded maybe 500 photos, and it seems to have gotten pretty good at recognising those people who have 10 or more “sample pictures” that you trained it with.  All in all, it seems to do what it says on the tin really quite well.

However, now I have checked it out for the geek factor, my interest has waned a little.  I have about 20,000 photos (so far), and I use Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite to manage them.  This gives me similar features (such as tagging etc) so that I can organize everything, and it is all done on my own machine using full resolution photos.  If I do want them online, I currently share a subsection of them with friends and family via my own website.  Uploading that many pictures *just* so I can search them seems a bit much.

Now, if you could build this sort of functionality into my desktop application so that I can have an extra level of classification, then I would be very happy.  Right now, I tend to flag pictures by hand with the people who are in them, think how much time would be saved auto-tagging my pictures with names.  Of course, this doesn’t necessarily take advantage of the collaboration aspect of using your contacts’ recognition data, but to be honest I am not sure how much cross-over my photos have with theirs anyway. 

Anyway, photographers and AJAX developers out there, check it out – http://www.riya.com.  For a good overview, the tour is a great place to start – http://www.riya.com/learnMore

The ex-architect from my group here at MSN has now released a beta for v1 of his new venture – SnapTune.  To quote the website – “Snaptune One downloads songs, talk shows, interviews and live sessions directly from an FM radio to your computer automatically.  Snaptune records what you want to hear to your hard drive – just the music with no repeats!  It shows you a list of the songs playing on the radio as it finds them.  Sort, play, write, burn*, or transfer to your iPod* or other media player.”

Basically, you can hook up either a USB FM receiver, or plug the audio out of your FM radio into your line-in on your soundcare.  SnapTune will then “listen” to the radio stations you choose, and pick out the individual songs to save to your local machine.  The software will then show you a bunch of information about each song it has saved, including Amazon reviews etc.

I love the idea, but I haven’t managed to try it yet (I don’t have a radio near my computer that I can plug in), but hope to give it a go soon.  Leave me a comment if you try it, let me know what you think!

After I posted last night, Brad from ClearContext left me a comment to say that version 2 is now out of beta, and released as Release Candidate 1.

One great new feature for this version is that the ClearContext toolbars now work when composing emails if you are using Word as your editor; this wasn’t the case in the betas.  I live for AutoCorrect so I made the choice of continuing to use Word and missing out on some of the ClearContext functionality, so this is great news for me! 

Well, it has been a little while since the last post.  It isn’t that I haven’t had anything to say, I just haven’t been able to find any time to write it down!  So, let’s see, some snippets:

IE7

I installed IE7 beta 2 Preview – is working nicely so far.  The tabs work really well, and the “tab preview” is great when you have a lot open.  One setting I always used to have turned off in IE6 should be turned on for IE7 though.  The “Reuse windows for launching shortcuts” option on the Advanced tab of Tools | Internet Options.

Previously in IE6, having this set to true meant typing a new URL in “Start | Run” would reuse an existing IE window - I hate this as it invariably uses a window I care about, and to be safe I always want a new window.  In IE7, if you set this option, then going to a new URL opens in a new tab.  Perfect.

Level 42

I bought tickets to Level 42 at the Royal Albert Hall in October.  A new album is due, so it should make for a good mix of new and old songs in the set list.    Check out http://www.level42.com/ for the rest of the tour dates in the UK.

Hanselminutes

I have really enjoyed Scott Hanselman’s blog for a while now.  Recently he started PodCasting over at Hanselminutes.  It is a weekly show, about a half hour long, and is full of interesting stuff about all kinds of technology.  I am not much for PodCasts, but this one is great – check it out.

ClearContext

I am particularly loving the ClearContext addin for Outlook – get the beta of version 2.  It has completely changed the way I manage my inbox.  What impresses me even more is the excellent customer focus the company has – they have listened to my comments and opinions, and have taken some on board.  They also seem to really care a lot about creating a great product.  Great stuff!

http://www.waterfall2006.com/

I’ll see you there…!

Ever taken what you thought was that perfect “family photo” only to develop it (or download it to your computer) to find Granny is grimacing, Uncle Joe looks like he has indigestion, baby Alice is looking the other way, your sister looks asleep or your mum looks wild eyed on some hallucinogenic drug?

For me, the idea behind the family group shot is almost always spoiled by the physical effect produced.  You want to capture that happy moment for all to treasure, to try and relay to the viewer the joy of the occasion.  Instead you get one (or maybe more!) scenes of sleeping, farting, spaced out grimacing.

Maybe you take 5 or 8 shots; surely Granny is getting close to a smile in ONE of them.  Baby Alice decides to grace you with her smile on a couple of pictures, but not the same ones as when Granny found her grin.  Mum and sister both sort their eyes out for the last picture, but fail on the rest.

That leaves you with EIGHT shots that all fail dismally to convey the core atmosphere you were trying to capture in the first place – a glorious record of the happy occasion.

Enter Microsoft Research’s “Group Shot”.

This software lets you take a number of “similar” photo’s, and later on select the best parts of each to merge into that single perfect shot.  You can highlight Granny’s smile, baby’s face, Mum and sister’s eyes, all in different versions of the shot.  Then the software will pull together a great faimly portrait you can be proud of.

Obviously I am only listing the one obvious use for this software, I am sure there are many more scenarios where this would be pretty useful.

I tried out an earlier internal copy of this and was quite impressed.  In a later post I will try and pull out some of my own photo’s and give an example of the results this software will produce.

A while ago, some of the guys in one of the UK Developer and Platform group here at Microsoft started putting together “MSDN Nuggets” – short videos (under 10 minutes) that demonstrate some new feature or technology.  This is a great idea, and is a very convenient way of getting an overview of technologies, especially when finding time for in depth research and reading is limited.  There is nothing like a hands-on demo to really aid learning.

Sadly, I fell behind with my watching – it was hard to figure out what I had seen and what was new etc, and I had to remember to download the videos locally so I could watch on the train.

However, I just stumbled across a post from Mike Taulty about the MSDN Nugget Viewer he has written (Mike is one of the guys who presents the nuggets).  This is very cool; it allows for both online and offline viewing, and keeps a track of what you have watched.  Highly recommended.  It is also written in .Net 2.0 and uses ClickOnce installation… 

There is also an MSDN Nuggets gadget for Windows Live which is nice.

Dare just posted the following: Posting to your blog on MSN Spaces using Blogjet.  I have been using BlogJet for managing my blog on this domain for a while and it is a really nice piece of software.  It has built in settings for many different blog sites and engines, and now you can get it to talk to MSN Spaces using the MetaWebLog API.

Cool. 

UPDATE: As Dmitry states in his comment, he has added native support for MSN Spaces in a new version of the tool – get it here: http://www.blogjet.com/blog/2005/12/13/blogjet-161-released/.  Nice job Dmitry! 

I am in Seattle on business at the moment.  In fact, in the last couple of months, I have been travelling for either work or pleasure quite a lot.  One thing that has always frustrated me a little is the lack of good wireless facilities in the hotels where I stay.  Sure there is almost always an excellent wired broadband offering, but I always feel it would be great to be able to work wherever I felt comfortable.  In the one hotel I stayed at that did have wireless, I got a lousy connection that barely stayed alive long enough to read an email…

Anyway, I am on business right now with my friend John.  For a while now, his laptop has been slowly dying.  Yesterday morning at 5am local time the inevitable jetlag had him awake and trying to get some work done.  However, his network card had finally given up, and he was not able to get a connection to the internet, which in our business is not great news.  Finally I got a text from him at about 6.45 saying “can we leave yet, I am bored”, and we duly headed off for an enormous IHOP breakfast. 

On the drive over the 520 bridge, John started talking about “some Apple thing that might do wireless” that we eventually decided was an AirPort product.  On arrival at the office, we checked out the Apple site and sure enough, the AirPort Express seemed to be the gadget to solve his problems.  It essentially plugs into the wall, you plug in an ethernet cable, and it creates a mini wireless network.  It also allows streaming of audio from a machine running iTunes somewhere else in the vicinity.  It sounded good, but the price was a little steep – $129.

Once work was done for the day, we took an executive decision and drove to Fry’s Electronics in Renton.  This is a Geek Superstore, selling everything from PC components and games machines to TVs and in-car audio – the average geek could spend hours in there.  The average geek with a credit card could spend thousands in there.

The plan was to buy some sort of cheap PCMCIA wired network card so that his connectivity issues were solved at least, and then take a look at the AirPort.  Sure enough, it still looked like a nugget of well-designed and useful Apple goodness.  However, we stumbled across something else that was even better; something that you would have sworn had a market, but that I had surprisingly never seen before.  A Wireless Travel Router.

The NetGear WGR101 54mpbs Wireless Travel Router to be precise.  The box says:

• Pocket-sized – ideal for taking with you when you travel.
• Dual use – external switch for selecting between individual and group use.
• “Creates a wireless network from an internet connection in a hotel room or conference room”.

The deal-maker was the price – $49.90.  Way less than half the price of the AirPort.  John and I both bought one!!

And this thing rocks.  It is completely configurable, so you can set up the SSID the network uses, includes security (WEP and WPA, as well as MAC address filtering), NAT routing, and an SPI firewall.  You can even turn off SSID broadcast so that others cannot even see it.  I tweaked my settings with the included network cable, plugged in the hotel broadband cable and I was off and running – simple as that.  And it really is pocket sized – just tiny! – and it comes with a small case to keep it protected in transit.

If you travel a lot, or perhaps even arrange conferences and need multiple connectivity from a single internet source, this thing is a “must have” gadget.  If you are travelling with colleagues and your rooms are fairly close, you can share one internet connection and save yourself $9.95 per night on the broadband charges.

[Post written wirelessly whilst tucked up in bed…  ]

UPDATE: I just found out that this thing costs £49.99 on Amazon.co.uk!  That makes it a cool gadget AND a bargain at $49.90…

I have posted a couple of times before about FolderShare, and it’s recent purchase by Microsoft.  I just wanted to add two comments:

1) it is now totally free.  I will be refunded a pro-rated amount for the remainder of my subscription year.  This is excellent news, and if you didn’t sign up already, then you no longer have an excuse not to do so.

2) they removed one of the best features – differential analysis of files prior to transfer.  Before the MSFT purchase, FolderShare would be very intelligent about how it transferred files, often only transferring the changed parts of the file to save download time.  As someone who has a number of 25Mb plus files and only a 512kbps DSL line at home, i have now gone back to “multiple minutes” of download time for each change to one of those files, instead of a couple of seconds.  Microsoft, please add this feature back in!

Mike Torres was asking how to integrate the Windows Desktop Search / MSN Search toolbar with the search on the new Windows Live homepage –  http://www.live.com/.

Well, I can help with that…

First, open up the Desktop Search options dialog (you can do this by right clicking the little magnifying glass tray icon and selecting Desktop Search Options).  On the General tab, there are options for the “Web search service”.  You need to switch your option from “MSN Search” to “Other search service” and then enter the URL http://www.live.com/?q=$w.

And you’re all set.

I have been using FolderShare for a while, and I love it.  I love it enough to shell out $99 a year for the premium service.  Turns out that Microsoft purchased FolderShare today.

This is great news in many respects – and as a Microsoft employee I hope I get to use the service for free now!    I hope also that partners such as Iomega can continue to support the FolderShare service natively in their hardware – being able to have “hot” backups of all of your files on a drive you can simply unplug and take with you if you need to is awesome. 

If you haven’t looked at FolderShare yet, you should.  It functions excellently as a way of backing up your data between many machines, as well as a really convenient way of just having your “stuff” ready to be used on whichever machine you happen to be working on.

The IE Developer Toolbar has been refreshed with some new features and bug fixes.

The details from the download page state:

This version of the Developer Toolbar is an updated version of Beta 1; it was updated on October 31, 2005. Several issues are resolved and some feedback has been incorporated.
-- Element bounding box calculations are more accurate.
-- Outlining of elements is now significantly faster.
-- The image report no longer crashes.
-- Installation no longer requires a reboot. (Beta 1 users will still be prompted to reboot because the current installer invokes the original uninstaller).
-- The minimize and maximize buttons now refresh after the "Resize" command.
-- The "Select element by click" bounding box is now more visible on pages with blue backgrounds.
-- The attributes editor (middle pane) now has variable width fields (for example, you can type beyond the width of the box).
-- Fixes for some pages that do not trigger OnDocumentComplete events.
-- Fixed the continuity of using "element" rather than "tag" in the menus.
-- The ruler is easier to use and to scroll.
-- Enabling/disabling images no longer restarts Internet Explorer.
-- The Resize menu now contains more resolutions.
-- Editing a property is now much less likely to let keystrokes "leak" back to IE and navigate without the user expecting it.
-- Trying to use the ruler while IE is in "folder mode" should no longer crash the browser.

New features and functionality have also been added.
-- Default styles (in the third pane) now appear in gray, separating them from explicit styles.
-- The ruler dialog is always populated with the ruler information if there is just one ruler.
-- The ruler dialog now describes advanced features.
-- "Undo all" reverts the page to the initial state.
-- You can now remove all outlines.

Enjoy!

Just found out from the IEBlog that Microsoft have released a beta of the IE Developer Toolbar.

It has some pretty nice features - you can view the HTML DOM of the current page, update attributes and styles of items on the page, toggle various useful pieces of info (such as image size, image path etc), and outline various types of element on the page.  You can also do single click validation of the page etc.

Most web developers will probably find something useful in there. 

Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an agreement to connect their messenger products together.  This will mean that users will be able to include buddies from both the MSN and Yahoo! services in whichever of the two clients they prefer.

Check out the press release here.

Numark have released the iDJ mixing console for the iPod.  Just plug two iPods into the docking slots, and mix away.

What will the iPod lovers think of next?!

Russian scientists at Art Lebedev have created a very cool Optimus keyboard. Each key is a tiny 32x32 pixel display that uses OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) to show full colour buttons.  The keyboard layout can change depending on the language or application you are using.  Check out the info and pictures for the Optimus; they show the keyboard in "English-mode", "Russian-mode", "Photoshop-mode" and "Quake-mode".

Ananova mention it will be on the market in the UK in 2006 and cost around £200.  A bit pricey maybe?  Or is it worth it for the "ice-cool factor".

In a world where software is becoming more and more bloated and complex, Bernard Belanger brings us NaDa Software.  Inspirational.

A few weeks ago, my friend Jon turned me on to a cool service called FolderShare.  This service allows you to transparently share files across multiple computers, so that you always have access to your important files.

It works very simply.  Install a small proxy application that sits patiently with your tray icons on each computer you want to share with.  This application watches the files you care about, and when they change it sends a notification message to the other machines in your sharing network.  Then, the application manages the copying of the changed files to all of the relevant destinations.  They offer 3 levels of service; the basic service is free to use/trial, and the two "paid for" services are $49.95 and $99.95 per year respectively.  The free service only allows 2 shared folders to be set up, with a maximum of 500 files.  The middle service allows a lot more folders/files, and the most costly service allows many more folders and files, as well as compression for transfers, file splitting and other efficiency measures.  No files are ever sent via the FolderShare servers - only notifications - so your transfers are secure.  You can turn on encrypted transfers if you wish.

So far I have been running this successfully on machines with all sorts of different connections - NAT connections, direct, proxied and firewalled etc.  It has done a great job with all of them.

One other great feature is the ability to access any of your machines from the FolderShare website.  Once you are logged in to your account, you can drill through your hard drive and download files as you wish (albeit unencrypted).  This means you can potentially access your important files whenever and whereever you wish.

Omar posted about a new addition to the service - the support of MSN Desktop Search in FolderShare.  As Omer says "Log on to FolderShare from any computer on the planet. Enter text in the search box, and watch as you get back results from anything that is indexed on your machine running MSN Desktop Search."

Wow!  So now, not only can you get to all your files from anywhere in the world, you can actually find the ones you only vaguely recall using the power of MSN Desktop Search.

I am currently only a "free" subscriber, but this service is becoming so useful, I may just have to upgrade to the pro version!

My team at Microsoft put 3 new msn.com international homepages live last week that embrace AJAX technologies for page rendering.  These homepages (found at http://malaysia.msn.com and http://ch.msn.com) load their contents asynchronously, and allow real-time interaction with certain modules on the page.  Adding new weather cities and RSS feeds no longer requires a page reload, instead loading the data straight into the page.

The sites are in pilot mode right now, but we will be rolling out many more international version starting September.

Anyone with a Tablet PC who doesn't reboot it too often will have come across the memory leak in the Tablet Input Panel (tabtip.exe) and TCServer.exe.  There are various workarounds - anything from rebooting often to using a BAT file to kill and restart the processes every couple of hours!

Thankfully, Microsoft have released a fix for this issue.  KB895953 - Memory Leak in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

One of my sibling teams at MSN has just released the third version of their incubation project - start.com.  It looks really slick, has some great features, and from a technical perspective is very cool.  Everything is AJAX-ed, with most of the data being fetched at runtime by the client.  In fact, my team is working on something using the core Javascript framework that Scott and Steve (among others) authored, and it really has made our client-side interactivity very easy to pull together.

Anyway, check it out here - http://www.start.com/3.  There are a couple of questions to answer to get in, but it is worth it!

This looks very cool if you are doing any significant client-side DHTML development for Internet Explorer.

Drip: IE Leak Detector

Microsoft is going to be adding RAW support to Windows in a few different ways.  This is very cool for those of us that have Digital SLRs that support the RAW format.

• They are adding RAW support into Longhorn, which is a great move IMHO.  However, this is not greatly exciting "now". 
• Better news is that they are soon going to release a free download for Windows XP that will allow viewing and previewing of RAW files within Windows Explorer (specifically Canon and Nikon format RAW files).  This will be invaluable.
• Additionally, the new version of Digital Image Suite will support RAW in both the library and editor applications.

Check out this article for more details.