Back in January i said I’d get back to writing this Windows Home Server Add-In.

Its now June, 6 months later.  For 3 of those months my camera was back at Nikon being repaired. So I took exactly zero pictures during that time. Its now back and I’m bracing myself for the flood of pictures. I carry 26Gb’s worth of memory cards with me, so I nearly always end up over doing it.

Which brings me to the Add-In. I’ve set up a Codeplex page here. And I’ve made a few check-ins. This is not even pre-alpha code. Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, I asked, via Twitter,  Omar Shahine if I could use his Smugmug Uploader code. now I’m a great fan of the Uploader. I’ve used it for every single uploaded to SmugMug.

So Omar kindly emailed me his code.

So what you will find in the Check-ins, should you be brave enough to take look is Omar’s back-end code sans any UI as part of a WCF service. The WCF service is hosted by a Windows Service (imaginatively called “UploadService”). My plan ( cunning or not) is to have the UI in the Console communicate with the uploader process via WCF. There are other methods, but WCF gives me incredible latitude when it comes to moving data back and forth.

So the Home Server Console tab will simply be a UI for uploading stuff. Instead of Remoting in and using Omar’s uploader. This is an intermediate goal.

My ultimate goal is actually to have a “Smugmug” folder and under it a folder for every Smugmug Album in your account. the above mentioned service will monitor those folders for changes and replicate those changes to Smugmug.

So I’m building now with such a convoluted architecture with a view to where i want to get this Add-in to.

So hopefully I can get the Add-in working soon.

I’m a pretty good test case for this, but I will need testers for it.

Watch my twitter account or my FriendFeed account for updates

PS If you’re asking why I’ve not moved blogs yet, I’m waiting for the next Oxite Release first.

So i got me an Apple Tv last week, more on impulse than as part of any rational thought, as such things go.  i was planning on getting one, but only later this summer.

But such is life….

So its sitting there on my Tv cupboard, replacing the DVD player that does not work any way…. surrounded by my impressive collection of DVDs. Which do me no good sitting on the shelf instead of on my Apple Tv hard drive….

The solution to this is, of course to back up your DVDs to disk. I use DVDShrink 3.2 (the last version ever released), or DVD Decryptor. both of which leave you with a folder full of .vob files ( usually  a VIDEO_TS folder).  This will strip copy protection from the files.

These files do us no good. Apple Tv will not take .vob files. But, and I must admit my irritation here, Windows Media Center does ( serves me right for being a turncoat ).

So the next step is to use Handbrake ( for Mac and Windows) to take your backed up files and turn them into Apple Tv readable m4v or mp4 files. These files can be read across iTunes, Apple Tv, and your video capable iPods and iPhones.

Now this conversion process is eyewateringly long. I’ve resurrected an old laptop ( Intel Celeron M 1.4 ghz, 256Mb RAM). The average time is about 10 hours – at 4.3 frames per second. My 3ghz Pentium 4 with 2Gb RAM is actually only slightly faster, confusingly enough. in any case, i need the desktop and no the laptop, so the old and busted laptop is doing the conversions.

The 10 hours conversion does not bother me much. I set it up to go in the morning, and its usually almost done my the time I’m back home in the evening.

All this media is being stored on my Windows Home Server, with a normal install of iTunes being the server. I’m not sure if Firefly Media Server will work with Apple TV, but if it is, I’ll install that instead.

Finally, I use MetaX 1.0 for Windows (theres a Mac version, too) to add in metadata – pic, sypnosis, direcots, actor, etc…. This is amazingly useful and saved me loads of time….

Now my music library is full of duplicates (my fault for leaving the “Copy to iTunes library” option on when i import stuff), So I’m slowly going through it and deleting the duplicates (and saving space at the same time).

My Photos are spread across a hundred folders, so i have to get some sort of organisation going so i can sync them to Apple Tv and show them off on my Tv .

I have SageTv running on the same server. Their conversion process for Apple Tv takes just as long and won’t work – sigh. If I could just get Sage to save the files in m4v format, i could sync my recorded tv directly to my apple Tv without any (hours long) conversion in between.

If i could, i’d have uploaded everything to EC2 for encoding

Thanks to the guys over on Friendfeed for help with this.

Dvd backup software thread: here.

Metadata thread: here.

So I’m designing a new blog, as per my previous post.

I’m NOT a graphic designer. But I am a photographer.  And I get the fact that the design of the blog has got be linked to the content.  My point being that a landscape or a nature scène looks out of place when you’re discussing the finer points of programming languages or social networks.

On the other hand, you can’t always predict what you’re going to blog about ( at least in my case), so you want to be general in some way.

If you’re following me on Twitter or Friendfeed, you’ll see that I’ve been posting alot of the stuff I’ve found on web design in general.

So, brimming with inspiration, I’ve gone off and trawled through my photo archives for something relevant.

So here are a few that I’m thinking of using in a big way,  as the header, footer, or both (i.e. cutting the picture in half):

Engineering:

Nasa:

Bright Spark:

All the images you see here are on Smugmug.

Let me know what you think.

This is funny enough for me to share, but too long for a tweet.

Wil Wheaton is playing Adventure on Atari:

Nolan: "You realize you’ve gone into that dead end five times, right?"

"Quiet you. This is how we did it back in the 80s."

Nolan: "You ran into the same dead end over and over again?"

"Yes, it was part of Reganomics.

See the rest here.

Blogs still have a very important place in the on going conversation. There is no medium quite like it, not even Friendfeed. Like books, blogs are the long form, the canvas on which we write our longer thoughts. Whether we use it for venting or ranting, commenting or telling or just plain writing, blogs are the corner stone of the online presence.

The one blogging tip I’ve consistently found is the “stick to it” rule: find your subject and stick to it. Which, in all honesty is not something I’ve done very well with this blog. There is so much to talk about and comment on and just plain only chat about that it can be easy to lose your focus .

This is partly due to the fact that I only joined Twitter and Friendfeed recently, both of which are better for the kind of wide ranging discussion i enjoy.

And its also to do with the fact that, originally, this blog was set up at the drop of a hat, without any thought as to where it would go and what I would be doing online. It was almost an experiment with this newfangled thing that had come along. The whole idea was to witness the internet from the driving seat, rather than from the RSS feeds. This was at the dawn the of the social networking age, before Twitter and Facebook. Before a lot of stuff.

But I digress.

So what is my focus?? All things technology related. But as you can see, everyone else covers this far better than I ever could. Politics is too much of a heated subject for me blog about. Photography, one of my new passions in life, and programming (the passion), and music (the classical kind) and books (I joined Goodreads the other day).

My online presence at the moment is spread throughout Twitter, Freindfeed, Delicious and Smugmug. I’m seeing more and more people moving to bring these strands together in one site. This is perfectly logical and its the right thing to do.

A new site, a new blog, a new platform seems to be what I need. Sometimes I think setting up a WordPress blog is a little too easy. When you put the time and effort into the creation of something, you regard it totally differently.

So that what I’m going to do – set up a new site, part of which will include my blog.  And it’ll be me on the web, a personal presence tying together all of these desperate strands. Kind of like Austin’s Jet:

So I’m on the lookout for a new platform on which to run it. .Net is the preferred option, mainly because I can code it. I’ve looked at Oxite closely and the more I play with it the more I like it.

Why the effort?? You see, I enjoy writing. I really do. I don’t have English teachers after me for essays, or books to write. So writing a blog is the next best thing (maybe THE best). There really isn’t any other medium like it.

Now this particular blog will remain. No doubt I will find some use for it, but all that info is staying on line

I will continue posting here till things are sorted out, its probably some time away in any case.

Here they are. Hope you like them.

shanselman RT @carlosfigueroa: #MIX09 MVC actually stands for Model-View-ChuckNorris. Controller is just one of his nicknames. about 16 hours ago from TweetDeck

shanselman RT @blowdart: #mix09 List<ScottGu> throws an exception – there is only one ScottGu. about 18 hours ago from TwitterFon

yuvipanda RT @codinghorror (Twitter): "Klingon programs don’t do accountancy. For that, you need a Ferengi programmer." about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

wilw Things I didn’t expect to see when I woke up today: 4714 people have looked at a picture of my socks. 51000 people are reading this. Um. 5:13 PM Feb 2nd from twitterrific

loic No, I won’t publish any seesmic videos of Bill Gates in #davos bathrooms, I promise 11:04 AM Jan 30th from TwitterBerry

ScottBourne RT from @guykawasaki – If you have money and power, you choose Macintosh If you’re oppressed, you use Windows. 11:16 PM Jan 28th from web

Mona I think Napolean Dynamite smells like bacon. 7:54 PM Jan 26th from web

BrentSpiner Ah, home again. Phoenix was very nice. Gee, Wil Wheaton. What a nice young man. What was I thinking…heh,heh,heh. 6:12 PM Jan 26th from web

davewiner Facing facts: I am one of the most hated people on the Internet. 7:31 PM Jan 24th from web

OdeToCode 5 minutes of blinding snow followed by 5 minutes of blinding sunlight. I feel like I’m in mother nature’s test suite. 3:17 PM Jan 24th from Witty

There you are.  Some are funny. Some are true. It just my sense of humor.

One question: is it the bees knees??? Yes it is.

At this point every other review is going wax philosophic about how great Windows 7 is, how its what Vista was supposed to be. And then go on to debate whether it should be a Service Pack instead.

I’m going to try avoid all those issues. But I will say this. Microsoft think that it should stand alone as it own OS, and that’s how I’m going to review it.

Its running on a Dell Inspiron 6400, 1.72Ghz dual Core with 1gb RAM.

First off. the problems I’ve had with it have been few and far between.

Now, every time a close the lid and then re-open it, the screen refuses to display the screen again. Its really annoying and requires a restart. The fix is simple – change the power options to do nothing when I close the lid. And it works like a charm now.

Second, IE8 RC wont install here. Don’t ask. But and earlier version of IE8 is installed. No solution as far as I know and I use Firefox anyway.

Third, iTunes runs quite well. Its faster. but not much else. however, it hangs on exit when its saving the iTunes library. And there’s not much choice here but to kill it with task manager.

You can get around this problem, perversely, by running iTunes as an Administrator. I suspect that the UAC tweaks are  the culprit here.

Fourth, every now and again 7 will hang at the shutdown screen (when it says “Shutting down”). This is annoying because you’re not quite sure what’s going on.

Finally, and i don’t know why this happens, the Adobe Bridge Photo Downloader no longer has the “Convert to DNG” option.

Before everyone leaves comment, I have installed all the updates delivered to me. And Adobe Bridge tells me its version 2.1.1.9. Since I convert everything to DNG on import, this is really a disaster.

Most programs, actually run in Windows 7 quite well. I did have a problem with Windows Live and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 but hey, all installed eventually.

The Taskbar

7 is done right in a number of ways. The taskbar is particularly important as its the primary focus of any interaction with the OS.

On first use, telling the difference between pinned and active icons can be difficult. Its a very subtle UI cue there.

The Icons and notifications are better and never become too cluttered. Handling overflow is done particularly well.

At the bottom right of the taskbar, a little area sits on its own, separated from the rest of the taskbar. Clicking on this shows the desktop. However its not immediately obvious what this is for.

The taskbar itself stays transparent even when viewing a maximised window. I’m not sure about this. There is an argument to keeping the Vista behaviour of a solid taskbar when working with a maximised window.

The Start Menu

The Start Menu isn’t visually different from Vista’s. There are subtle UI cues however, that give away further functionality.

Programs that have been used have arrows next to them. Clicking on this arrow give the documents recently used by this program. the time saving nature of this cannot be over stated.

The search box now says “Search programs and files” instead of start search. Its more obvious about the function of the search box, and encourages users to use it more. This is one of my favourite features of the Vista-esque UI ( i.e since Vista)

The Shutdown button is quite blunt as to what it does, differing from Vista’s Off icon. It is possible to change the functionality of these buttons in the power settings and this always confused me. text makes it so much easier to distinguish  what’s going on.

Paint and Wordpad

Both Paint and Wordpad have the new Ribbon toolbar. this makes them much better as applications.

I tend to use paint quite a lot for situations when its not worth firing up Photoshop or Illustrator. Even in the few times I’ve used it, the Ribbon toolbar makes it so much better to use. and its not crappy old paint anymore either.

A few nice additions include the ability to Zoom right out ( right click to zoom out). This jumped out at me as being new.

Edit: Jordan Hofker pointed out on Freindfeed that its Wordpad not note pad. Many Thanks.

Personalization

The changing backgrounds have been around for ages in third party programs or as part of the Power Toys stuff. however this time its baked right into the OS.

The themes feature is very powerful. Of course I can still remember how Microsoft offered Plus for windows 95. I was too much of a cheapskate to get it, but the idea of a theme has been around for a while.

This marks the first time (that i can remember, anyway) that themes are actually files you can share rather than an amorphous collection of settings.

Whereas before (pre-vista, anyway) settings and dialogs had to be navigated with a map ( literally), important dialogs such as for the mouse pointers, screen resolutions, screen saver and sounds are literally a click away. This will encourage people to get more out of their computers (even the not so computer literate ones).

More later this week as i continue exploring Windows 7.

This weeks round up of  my favourite tweets:

r Night has fallen on DC, but inauguration parade route is being lit by Joe Biden’s teeth. 10:57 PM Jan 20th from twhirl

shanselman RT @SeanAlex: http://www.whitehouse.gov has relaunched, the executive branch has been rebooted. 5:41 PM Jan 20th from TwitterFon

Rafe My son the train nut: "Obama and Mama and Dada and me are all going to ride in the caboose!" 3:35 PM Jan 20th from twhirl

Wossy @rickwray Just got text back from Thom – " No sir I don’t twitter." 12:46 PM Jan 20th from web in reply to rickwray

(Classic British stiff upper lip, no??)

eclipse115 David Bowie is kicking muppets. Ahhhh life is good 10:35 PM Jan 19th from digsby

benjaminspector Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh just attacked the Democratic Party as the party of immigrants. I wonder what Indian Tribe they come from. 7:40 PM Jan 19th from web

MarsRovers Miles: "You are big gamblers. You risk a whole career on a 6 minute plunge in the atmosphere. That’s ALL IN baby." 11:54 PM Jan 15th from twhirl

codinghorror you haven’t truly lived until you’ve plugged 24 GB of memory into a server. I got chills. And this will be *peanuts* in 3 years. 11:42 PM Jan 14th from web

Scobleizer Hah, yeah @Carnage4Life my yogurt guy wasn’t right. I was wrong to get involved in Steve Jobs’ private life by reporting that. 10:39 PM Jan 14th from web

davewiner steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs 9:56 PM Jan 14th from web

shanselman RT @mhumphrey: Had to stop following Hanselman. Great guy, but blabs like a woman 8:56 PM Jan 14th from TweetDeck

Remember I’m http://twitter.com/rbonini

So its all over the internet. Its covered both my FriendFeed and Twiter streams. Scoble already has a post out.

TechCrunch is on it.

Engadget is on it.

Dave Winer said it for all of us:

davewiner steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs 29 minutes ago from web

Steve Jobs is stepping down. Albeit for 5 months.

On the one hand since something changed between the time he issued THAT press release, it is a course for concern. Especially worrying is that according to the BBC, his health issues are more serious than first imagined.

On the other hand, my non-tech-savvy mother got an iPhone today. How is that related? Apple does not stop making money, selling iPhone, Macs or Apple Tv’s.Apple is more than Steve Jobs. Just because Steve Jobs is not at the helm, does NOT mean anything will interrupt apples string of successes. Since Jobs took Apple over, he has imbued it with his vison, his persona, his drive, his ambition. It has worked for Apple and will continue working.

Work is the largest obstacle to recovery. I know that for experience. So i applaud Steve for taking the time off to recover fully and completely. I send him and his family my good wishes.

Hopefully, the Apple faithful will see him once again in June.

The second such post in an infinite series, hopefully:

codinghorror Another Wednesday, another day without telekinetic abilities. Sigh. 26 minutes ago from web

wilw Retweeting @levarburton for truth: "I come FTW or not at all." 8:56 PM Jan 12th from twitterrific

loic OMG can someone find something serious to do for @scobleizer? He is so bored he writes nonsense how to get followed http://is.gd/flyJ 7:22 AM Jan 12th from twhirl

gapingvoid Why are the called "Companies"? Latin: "Cum" + "Pagnia"… "With + Bread" i.e. "Breaking bread together". 5:05 PM Jan 11th from web

davewiner Funny thing happened on the way to writing a standard, today — found one already existed, by Digg. Didn’t reinvent. http://bit.ly/lvQi 5:32 AM Jan 10th from web

yuvipanda RT @karthiksn: ok college politics is hard to navigate when you are in the most hated department. (Am yet to determine the hatedness of CS) 2:55 PM Jan 9th from TweetDeck

timbray W000t! I have wrestled Android to the mat and crushed its feeble but subtle resistance. Mind you, now I have to refactor everything. 11:52 PM Jan 7th from twitterrific

steveisaacs If Twitter were a giant room, and you threw a rock, it would hit around 11 or 12 thousand "Social Media Experts" before hitting the floor. 10:14 PM Jan 7th from web

codinghorror somehow, we ended up with a table where the IsLocked field means Closed and IsClosed field means Locked. PROJECT MANAGEMENT GOLD, PEOPLE!! 10:10 AM Jan 7th from web

codinghorror uservoice item: "improve fascist voting system". HEIL! 11:54 PM Jan 6th from web

codinghorror actual comment left on Stack Overflow question: "You can’t just say something like ‘Fix this for me my peasant slaves’." LOL 10:50 AM Jan 2nd from web

Hope you enjoyed these as much as I did.

Remember I’m http://twitter.com/rbonini