A couple weeks ago, I set up Windows Home Server in the house, opting to go the DIY route rather than with an out-of-the-box solution like the HP MediaSmart. I saved a bit of money in the process, though it wasn't without some issues getting started.

For a machine, I turned to the Dell Outlet site, which I've used in the past and haven't had much trouble with. I've purchased a bunch of machines via the Outlet over the years and only one has ever had issues (blogged about last year). Odds are that it would happen at some point with a non-Outlet machine at some point, so I wasn't worried about ordering another box that way.

The machine is an Inspiron 531 desktop, with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB drive in it. It also has a DVD burner, mid-sized tower case, and the standard integrated network and video (the latter isn't needed by WHS). It was $249. Dell had sent me a coupon the week I was watching the Outlet, which basically took care of the shipping and tax. I spent another $150 or so at NewEgg to add a 750GB -- Roughly $400 total for that machine with 1TB of storage. (Note: looks like the only option now is to get a 530 rather than a 531. The difference is that the 530 uses an Intel CPU while the 531 has an AMD processor).

The setup started off fine, but I ran into issues later when I had to put drivers on the machine (after installing WHS). The Inspiron had shipped with Vista Home Premium, which I didn't need, but WHS is based on Windows Server 2003. The drivers that came with the machine (and available via Dell Support) were Vista drivers and didn't fly with WHS. Some Googling and experimentation led to trying the Windows XP drivers, which seem to be working just fine. The main holdup here was the network card's driver... with no network, I had to use sneakernet to get the drivers on to the WHS box.

So I saved money over going with an off-the-shelf Home Server... but paid a DIY tax with an hour or two of setup time and tinkering around with drivers. I'm happy with that.

Once set up, the experience has been awesome. The machine is running "headless" at this point, but the client software is on a few different machines now and works great for managing the server. In a pinch, I've used Remote Desktop a couple times to look at the server's control panel.

The features I like the most:

• Access to the file shares on the server just plain works. There's no futzing with ACLs, Windows firewall, or anything else. Each user account on the server has its own private share, there's a public share for general use, and dedicated shares for music, photos, videos, and software. An admin account can control access to those in simple fashion -- each user account gets no access, read-only, or read-write. From the client perspective, it's just \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME and you're good to go.
• Backup is solid and runs seamlessly... it takes a while when you initially run it (go wired for that first backup!), but after that, the incremental updates aren't really noticeable.
• There's a Tivo add-in that hooks write into your music, photos, and videos. That adds access to our Tivo Series 2 (Home Media Option), along with the Xbox 360 Media access that just works out of the box with WHS. I don't need to publish photos and music from a spare desktop machine any more. As an added bonus, the machine's faster than that spare was so scrolling through images and music is way fast.
• Related note... remotely installing an add-in is dead simple. Copy an MSI into a share on the server, run the remote management client, and tell it to run the MSI for the add-in. Removing an add-in later looks just as easy.
• Remote access to the server over the internet is very cool. The WHS setup process gets you a subdomain under the homeserver.com domain and you can log into the server from any web browser to get at the files stored there. That's already proven handy when I wanted to show someone in the office a photo that we were talking about.

A few things I'd like to see improve or change:

• I still think that Microsoft needs to make WHS available via MSDN. I've got a few different ideas for add-ins I'd like to develop, but I'm not interested in doing development and debugging on the home server that's actually in "real world" use at the house. Unless they change this decision, it'll mean I need to purchase a separate WHS license if I want to get serious about add-in development. Incidentally, they've received a LOT of feedback on the issue, but currently say it's not available on MSDN due to some "valid logistical issues"... who knows?
• It doesn't seem like there's a real great solution yet for managing our music via an iTunes library. Aside from WHS add-ins, installing software on a WHS machine is discouraged... so iTunes has to be on a separate machine. But honestly, the only time iTunes gets used is for syncing our iPods (and related playlist management). Playback in the house is done via the Tivo or Xbox 360. So all the music is in two places now -- WHS and that spare desktop machine (with iTunes) that we plug the iPods into. I think (but am not certain) that I could have the iTunes library on that machine simply reference the files on the WHS box -- but haven't tried that route yet (mostly for fear of hosing up the iTunes metadata and "device awareness" for our iPods). Need to do more research here.
• Obviously a big issue that MUST get addressed soon is the widely-reported corruption problem. Thankfully, we're not editing files directly on the server shares (and won't anytime soon). The editing/manipulation tends to happen on our client machines, with the results being backed-up or simply stored for shared-access on the server.

I suspect that corruption issue is THE top priority for the WHS team in Redmond... once it's resolved, my next hurdle will be to figure out the best way to set up Lightroom catalog(s?) for the 7+ years of photos we have stored. Currently, I use fairly "transient" catalogs with Lightroom since all the photo files (both RAW shots, XMP sidecars, and JPG images) are being stored up on the server. But in doing that, I miss out on many features of having everything in a catalog.

All in all, I'm very happy with the WHS experience thus far. If you can live without the option to remotely edit files (to avoid the corruption problem), I'd recommend it.

Technorati Tags: windows home server , whs , msdn , dell , inspiron , tivo

Via the Infosthetics blog, I learned of the "Human Brain Cloud" - a massively multiplayer "word association game". It's pretty addictive in a "what will it do next" kind of way.

The idea is that you're shown words or short phrases on the screen and you want to quickly type in the first word that comes to mind - a typical word association. It showed "chess" and I typed "checkers". It showed "never cease" and I typed "to amaze". You get the idea... but be forewarned: once you start blazing through some words, it makes you want to keep going to see what it displays next.

The coolest part of the site is actually on the next tab: View the Cloud.

Here, you see a set of balls, each with a word on it, and as you type in a word the balls begin to disappear - revealing only the balls that match what you've typed. Having narrowed down to one or more manageable balls in the display, you can click on one of them to expand it into a network diagram. The ball you click then "explodes" into a set of balls that match words people typed in during the the word association process. The thicker the line connecting the two, the more common the association between the two balls (i.e., between the words on the connected balls).

In the image to the right, I typed "sql" - which narrowed down to just one ball - and then clicked on it to expand the associated words. The thickest lines are to "database" and "query", followed by "my" and "server". Slick. You can follow the word association visually by clicking on any associated ball to reveal its associations... and so on. To make the display manageable, balls begin to shrink and fade out over time as you drill down into other associated words.

Aside form being a bit addictive, it's also an entertaining visualization. Pure infoporn.

It comes from "2D Boy", a two-man indie game studio whose "swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day."

Their blog has a great entry with some funny stats and insights from the word associations people have entered (at this point, about a half million words with over 6 millions connections).

They're working on a game called "World of Goo" that (from a preview video) also looks like it'll be pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: 2d boy , word games , visualization , infoporn , infosthetics

Five months it's taken to get to this point... but it looks like I can finally say that the Xbox 360 DRM issues I've complained about in the past are currently resolved. First, a brief summary.

• In August, my Xbox 360 died and needed to be sent in for repair.
• In October, I got a replacement console (different serial number), which Microsoft sent in lieu of having me wait for my original console to be repaired. Plug the hard drive in and it looked like we were good to go.
• In early November, we realized that other profiles on the console (for my wife and older daughter) couldn't play the Xbox Live Arcade games we purchased. They were stuck in trial mode... further, my profile (with which the games were originally purchased) could only play them when logged in. I called the 800 support number and was told that they needed to "re-associate" my console's serial number with the licenses for those games -- and that it would take 2 to 4 weeks. I was (and still am) stunned that it wasn't a quick, 10-minute fix but didn't have any choice. So I waited.
• Around the holidays in December, it still hadn't been fixed so I called again. This time, I was told that it would be fixed but that there was NO timeframe at all provided. "Hopefully soon" was all the support person would tell me... that is, until he hung up on me. This was the low point, as the Xbox Live service was offline a LOT over the holidays, which meant that NOBODY in the house could access those games.
• In January, I emailed Major Nelson about it (as he requested people do in a thread on the Xbox forums). No response. Oh, and to apologize for all that downtime over the holidays, Microsoft gave away a free Xbox Live Arcade game. Ironic, huh?

A few days ago, I checked back in on a MASSIVE thread over in the Xbox forums. As of this post, the thread's up to 150 pages - PAGES! There were posts that kept track of who had been hosed by this issue for the longest period of time. Lots of people were in the same boat as I am, waiting several months. But over a period of a few days, some of those people were reporting that they had suddenly been able to access their Xbox Live content. They simply had to re-download it to their console (which re-fetches the license info), after which it worked as it finally works as it should have all along. That re-download step is something I've done just about every week since August - it's what the support techs said "should" resolve the issue. Until this week, it didn't.

As of Thursday, though.... it looks like it's working as it should. And an 8-year old little girl can FINALLY get back to her quest for Marble Blast Ultra achievements. A hardworking housewife can wind down in the evening with a little Bejeweled.

Throughout this saga, it became clear that this was a big problem for a LOT of people. If the failure rate for the 360 is truly 16%, then that's nearly 3 million consoles that have failed (based on Wikipedia's figure of 17.7 consoles sold). Even if you assume that just a third of those has ever been used to purchase Xbox Live content (Arcade games, TV shows, movies, etc), then that's almost A MILLION people who could be affected by this problem. Clearly, this is a major failure on the part of Microsoft.

How SHOULD it be handled? Ideally, the content wouldn't be DRM'd at all. My opinion is that DRM punishes the people who want to do the right thing, while the IP thieves are always going to find some workaround.

But if being DRM-free isn't an option, then it should be handled the way it's handled on my iPod. I can choose to "De-Authorize" my iTunes music on my computer and my iPod. If I get a new computer or iPod, I simply Deauthorize the DRM'd content on the old device and that frees it up to be played on the new one. If a hard drive on a computer fails, or an iPod simply dies, and you don't have the ability to Deauthorize that device in advance -- well, a quick email/call to Apple resolves it IN MINUTES as they re-set the authorized playback devices for you.

Ideally, that should have been done right away when Microsoft sent me a replacement console. By the time it showed up in October, my content should already have been associated with the new ID. Worst case, it should have been handled quickly when I noticed it and called in November. Apple can do it... and they're not even a database company.

Jeff Atwood wrote about the issue earlier this month, when he realized that the DRM content he'd purchased on an Xbox 360 at his office couldn't be used on the Xbox 360 that he bought at home. To get access to the content he'd already paid for, Jeff opted to purchase it again -- to the tune of $140 worth of content. I disagree with his solution, as I think it punishes someone who's simply trying to do the right thing... but a guy with a Rock Band addiction might be forgiven for overpaying to get his fix.

The "Official Xbox Magazine" site named this issue the Number One thing for Microsoft to address in its 2008 New Years resolutions. Couldn't agree more.

Consumer advocate site "The Consumerist" posted an item on it this month as well, detailing the story of "Kevin." This guy has apparently been told by an escalation tech at Microsoft that he can "hopefully" expect it to be resolved "some time in 2008"! Unreal.

And there are no shortage of individual blogs detailing similar stories.

Understand - I'm pretty much a Microsoft guy. A fairly happy Windows user. A very happy Windows Home Server user (gotta blog that experience still). A .NET developer. A development manager using Microsoft tools (by choice). I know there are lots of horror stories out there and no shortage of anti-MS vitriol, but most of the time, I'm pretty happy with things.

It's unbelievable to me that this issue has allowed to get so big... and that the frontline support technicians aren't able to resolve the problem during a quick phone call.

Now that it's fixed, let's hope the replacement console isn't in the 1-in-6 that will fail the way my first one was. In the meantime, if you need someone to beat up on in Guitar Hero III, my gamertag is OneLeftyFoot.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , xbox live , drm , oxm , codinghorror , major nelson , consumerist , customer service , itunes

According to the New York Times (via Consumerist.com), the president of Salesgenie.com has apologized for his company's Super Bowl commercials. The animated ads depicted panda bears speaking in Chinese accents and a main character (named Ramesh) who spoke in an Indian accent.

The thing I find really funny is that the company president, Vinod Gupta, apparently developed and wrote the commercials himself. It's funny to me for a couple of reasons -- first is that the guy spent more than $2 million for EACH 30-second ad, but couldn't be bothered to get professional ad people involved (the animation was done by an outside firm, but not the writing/development). The second reason I find it funny is that the Monday commercial wrap-ups across the web universally panned the commercials as lame, ineffective, and offensive. It's one thing to go your own way and not bring in professionals... it's another thing to fall on your face in the meantime.

Salesgenie is actually a part of InfoUSA and Mr. Gupta is the Chairman and CEO of InfoUSA. He wrote the company's ad spots that run in last year's Super Bowl as well. That's right, the chairman of a company whose market cap is nearly $500 million decided to write his own commercials, two years in a row. So he did. Poorly.

The commercial for Salesgenie during the Super Bowl last year was poorly received, but in that instance the complaints were about what viewers perceived as low production values and a hard-sell style.

The Salesgenie commercials were poorly regarded in many surveys, polls and reviews of this year’s 54 Super Bowl ads.

 

For instance, in the 20th USA Today Ad Meter survey, the pandas spot finished 44th and the salesman spot finished 49th.

 

In a survey of blog posts about Super Bowl spots by Collective Intellect, the Salesgenie commercials drew the most negative discussion.

 

Personally, I think Mr. Gupta should apologize to the viewers who have had to watch his commercials. They're horrible.

They are spending some big-time money, though, as one of the Fox pre-game shows was sponsored by Salesgenie and there have been print ads running recently in various national business magazines. And while the stock market's been fairly volatile across the board the last couple of weeks, it doesn't look like Wall Street was too hip on the ads either. Here's the financial equivalent of some Monday-morning quarterbacking earlier this week:

The whole premise of their ads is "100 free leads for your sales peoples." And, for some reason, that just cracks me up... I know the InfoUSA model is to have giant databases of people and businesses, with attributes assigned to that data so they can slice it and dice it based on demographics.

Nonetheless, the idea that a sales group would get value out of some generic "leads" database makes me wonder... doesn't the value of those leads depend on what I'm selling? Suppose my niche is high-end lizard-care products for exotic reptiles? Software aimed at meteorologists who monitor currents in the North Atlantic? USB sushi flash drives? The InfoUSA business has obviously done well, and I'm certainly no salesperson... so maybe it's just me that finds the whole "100 free leads" thing kinda funny.

Or maybe it's funny because it reminds me of Glengarry Glen Ross and the complaining the sales guys did about "the leads". They didn't have "the good leads"... 'cause Mitch and Murray sent them the crap leads! Man, it's time to watch this movie again.

Technorati Tags: super bowl , commercials , glengarry glen ross , sales genie , marketing

An item on TechCrunch this morning pointed me at the official Google blog, where David Drummond (Google Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer) commented on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. I think it's fair to say that a Google corporate officer blogging on a Google property (Blogger) constitutes their "official" response.

For an official response, it's pretty idiotic. For starters, Drummond twice refers to the letter sent to Yahoo's board by Steve Ballmer as a "hostile bid". Hmm. Is this a hostile bid? A hostile takeover? Let's look at that.

The president of one company sends an open letter to the board of another company, offering to buy that company at a significant mark-up over its current share price. Doesn't seem terribly hostile to me. But I'm no lawyer, so let's go see how others define "hostile" bids for acquisition...

Had Drummond used his own company's search engine's "Define: " syntax, he'd have found this:

Note the key element in there: without the approval of the target corporation's board. What was Ballmer's letter to Yahoo, if not a proposal for the board to consider? Had he searched Wikipedia, he'd have seen this:

A takeover which goes against the wishes of the target company's management and board of directors. opposite of friendly takeover.

... but that topic (Hostile Takeover) links to the "Takeover" topic. A key portion of that (from the Friendly and Hostile Takeovers section within the topic) is [my emphasis]:

When a bidder makes an offer for another company, it will usually inform the board of the target beforehand. If the board feels that the offer is such that the shareholders will be best served by accepting, it will recommend the offer be accepted by the shareholders. A takeover would be considered "hostile" if (1) the board rejects the offer, but the bidder continues to pursue it, or (2) if the bidder makes the offer without informing the board beforehand.

Seems to me that neither of those conditions were met. On (2), the bidder (Ballmer on behalf of Microsoft) did inform the board beforehand. And until/unless Yahoo's board rejects the offer and Microsoft continues to pursue, then condition (1) won't be met either.

Drummond's not totally alone, though... it seems that some in the media are also joining the bandwagon. ABC News has a story that refers to the bid as "hostile" several times... and quotes Kara Swisher as saying "Yahoo had been rebuffing Microsoft's overtures for the past year"... and "You don't tend to try to do a hostile takeover in the Internet space because people just leave," Swisher said. "So it's very unusual Microsoft is attacking Yahoo in this way." "Attacking"? Hyperbole much?

However, Swisher's perspective on the matter is hardly without bias. Just three weeks ago, she was writing that there was no way that Microsoft would acquire Yahoo. She called rumors of Microsoft looking at Yahoo "a tad ridiculous" and, when referring to discussions between former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel and Steve Ballmer, she has this to say [my emphasis]:

It never happened then and will not now.

So how do you get from "it never happened then and won't now" to "they've been rebuffing overtures for the past year"? Then again, I suppose telling ABC News that she frankly doesn't know and was completely off the mark just three short weeks ago isn't the shortest route to a juicy soundbite.

For their part, Yahoo makes it clear in their own official response (published late Friday) that they're reviewing the "unsolicited" bid. Not much else they can see for now, I suppose.

Earlier today, Brad Smith, Microsoft's chief counsel, posted a response to Google's statement. It's a fairly short statement, with the investment relations boilerplate being longer than the statement itself, but these numbers are worth noting:

According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

It would be nice to know which "published reports" he refers to, but certainly Google's domination in search query share can't be argued. They're a verb at this point (and for good reason... Google's search does rock!).

So now it'll turn into a war of the words... cue the rhetoric and grab your popcorn. Should be an interesting ride.

Technorati Tags: google , microsoft , yahoo , acquisition , techcrunch

I have to be honest... When Twitter was first released and the hype was deafening, I was among the skeptics who questioned the point of the service -- why would I want to constantly update the world on 'my thoughts'? Where I am? What I'm doing, eating, thinking, saying, wondering... or worse? Who would want to read that? And why would I want to read those types of updates from others?

The fact that there was so much emphasis on using SMS/text messages for everything only added to my skepticism. I'm getting these updates on my phone? I only have 140 characters to use?

So I stayed away and chalked it up as one of those "silly web 2.0 fads" that gets announced, hyped, and then drops off the radar while still in perma-beta mode.

Recently, though, a few different things got me to take a look and (finally) create an account:

• A few services I'm using have Twitter "Bots" that I can use to communicate with the service. "Remember the Milk," for example, lets me use Twitter to add things to my task list. The "I Want Sandy" service lets me use Twitter to set reminders for some point in the future. This type of service automation has been around via IM for a while, but the user experience through Twitter seems better to me.
  
• The authors of several blogs I subscribe to have begun putting links to their Twitter streams in their blog templates and sidebars. Maybe they've been there for a while and I'm just now noticing them? In any case, I see subscribing to a blogger's Twitter stream in the same way as subscribing to their del.icio.us bookmarks. If I enjoy reading their blog posts, it stands to reason that I might enjoy their "smaller" thoughts (via Twitter) and the bookmarks they're creating (via del.icio.us). The benefits here are more passive -- I can drop in, read what I like, and then move on -- but they're benefits nonetheless.
  
• My team at work is distributed between Colorado and Tennessee. In addition, we have a fairly flexible environment that allows for telecommuting when necessary (snow days, waiting for the cable guy, and general "life happens" stuff). We use IM and email pretty heavily, but have found that those don't always work well for certain scenarios. Specifically, there are times when we'd like to have some ad hoc group communication. People thinking out loud, asking general questions of the group, or even coordinating around things like issue tracking items, builds, and more. In these cases, IM is a bit too "point to point" because those conversations often turn into "let's email the group and get some more input". Email isn't great because of the latency between arrival, reading, replying, and sending... during which people start to reply on top of one another. It's great for many things... but sometimes you just need a "chat room" for the in-between stuff that happens all day.
  
  So I thought Twitter might be useful for this and created an account... it's easy to use and that ad hoc "one-to-many" style of communicating updates and status is its strong suit. I discovered later that the downside of this is that there's a lot of other noise going on as well -- so unless I subscribe ONLY to my team members' Twitter streams, I'm sifting through other people's updates to get the ones that are work-related. For now, we're going with Campfire from 37Signals and it seems to be working well. Kinda like "private Twitter with file attachments"...

So with these thoughts in mind, I've been giving it a shot and posting occasional status updates. I'm not yet totally convinced - but neither am I as skeptical as I once was. And while the value's not there for work-related team communications (the original point of the exercise), I definitely think the "bot" services are useful and I've enjoyed seeing the updates from others whose blogs I follow...

In using it for a week or two now, I've been "following" (in Twitter's parlance) a few streams that are really worthwhile. One of those is Merlin Mann, the guy behind the 43 Folders productivity site... his Twitter stream seems to be used for stream-of-consciousness thoughts he has throughout the day. And they're usually hilarious... You know how most people have that filter that stops them from saying all the hilarious/cynical/disturbing/obscure things that come to mind throughout the day? I think Merlin just piped his filter to his Twitter stream. One example, recently posted as I type this on Super Bowl Sunday, demonstrates his ability to turn a phrase [say it in the voice of an NFL player]:

"I'm just so humbled that my freakish physique and tolerance for head trauma can be leveraged to sell lite beer. I also wanna thank 'God.'"

In addition to bloggers, I've found other types of streams to be worthwhile - including New York Times (which streams headlines throughout the day as news articles are posted), Woot (which publishes the daily Woot bargain), and TechMeme (which tracks hot topics in tech news).

There's a pretty good "fan wiki" going that provides some other ideas for using the service, including collections of Twitter mashups, "Non Human" streams, organizations, weather for various cities, and even airport status (e.g., Chicago O'Hare)!

So... for now I'm sticking it out to see how it goes. Time will tell whether the value I'm getting now lasts or if it's just short-term novelty.

Who knows... maybe in another 12-18 months, I'll look into this whole Facebook thing.

Technorati Tags: twitter , social networks , im