www.nickhodge.com

A post­ing on Microsoft Watch by Joe Wil­cox: “10 Ways Microsoft Can Make Win­dows 7 Lucky” provides intriguing 10 things Microsoft can do to make the next ver­sion of Windows.

I per­son­ally know very little of what is going on in the Win­dows world, so it’s tough to com­ment on whether Joe is on the mark, or not.

How­ever, one point hit home for me:

8. Win­dows 7 must give much, through sync. Syn­chron­iz­a­tion is the other killer UI, and it’s essen­tial to ful­filling Ozzie’s mesh vis­ion. Win­dows 7 needs a syn­chron­iz­a­tion engine bound to the IP stack. This sync plat­form would become the hub for data exchange regard­less of format or ser­vice. It’s a tough chal­lenge and maybe even bey­ond Microsoft resources for Win­dows 7.

As the num­ber of devices grow: from iPhones to Intel Atom-based mini PCs, to laptops to multiple-core desktops: the concept of where our data lives needs to change. Roll on Data­port­ab­il­ity, Mesh­ing and Clouding.

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot:

It’s nearly a week since I upgraded my iPod from a gen­er­a­tion 3 to one of the cool, uber-geek iPod Touch devices. As a 99.5% Win­dows Vista user, I am impressed.

The iPod Touch works on our home wifi. In the morn­ing I check emails and other overnight hap­pen­ings from the com­fort of my bed in Safari.  The syn­chron­isa­tion between my Inter­net Explorer (Vista) and Safari (iPod Touch) browsers works well.

It beeps at me when I have an appoint­ment. My con­tacts are in there.

All it needs is a mini email applic­a­tion. A slightly less finiky onscreen key­board. A cam­era and a VoIP. Oh, that’s right — that’s an iPhone!

Do you have an old PC lying around in your house?

Do you have a swarm of laptops need­ing to be backed up?

Do you have a col­lec­tion of pho­tos, videos that need to be stored centrally?

Like me, it’s is time to install a server on your home network.

Last year, I trans­formed an old Dell 8200 PC into our home server. This year, I am going to upgrade to Win­dows Home Server. Now avail­able: for example: Eyo in Aus­tralia have it on their web site for AU$230.00

What is an Geek? Is Geek a pejor­at­ive term?

In the UK, being a train­spot­ter or anorak is def­in­itely pejor­at­ive for those out­side the craze.  Duncan Riley uses the mar­ket­ing term Prosumer (pro­fes­sional consumer).

If any­one comes up to me and calls me a Geek, I am proud. Hav­ing spent the last year break­ing off the shackles of “sales and mar­ket­ing droid”, being a geek is refresh­ing. And hav­ing suc­cess­fully passed on my geek genes to Liam — I am even prouder.

Self-proclaiming myself as a geek with the title Pro­fes­sional Geek still gets side­ways glances — even at Microsoft — which has spent the last many years suc­cess­fully becom­ing the enter­prise soft­ware com­pany. Thank­fully, Microsoft’s heart still beats with a geek tune.

So what is the size of the geek vir­tual nation? This is a nation not divided by 19thC lim­its of Empire; nor sep­ar­ated by age, gender, lan­guage. A geek has a under­stand­ing over the last 250 years, tech­no­logy has pro­pelled humans at a rapid rate. The inform­a­tion age we live in may be seen as a dif­fer­ent time to the indus­trial age — who can pre­dict future historian’s categorizations?

There are two recent meas­ure­ments of the size of the geek vir­tual nation as it exists today:

• Apple PR: Down­loads of Apple’s Safari 3 beta for Win­dows 2000, XP and Vista: 1,000,000
  Who else apart from geeks, inde­pend­ent of plat­form reli­gion, would down­load a beta of yet another browser?
• Piper Jaf­fray estim­ates 500,000 iPhones sold on the week­end.
  Most estim­ates put the US at 50% of the world’s IT eco­nomy. 2 x 500,000 = 1,000,000

Whilst both num­bers are Apple-centric, it is still an inter­est­ing num­ber to pon­der. How many bor­der­less, hyper-online geeks are there in the world?

Col­league in crime, and fel­low Aus­sie (well, at least he’s nat­ur­al­ised now), Dave Glover has a post that crosses some old ter­rit­or­ies of mine.

Using Power­shell, .Net, OpenXML and some code that I barely under­stand because it’s not Python; he’s been able to gen­er­ate 60 to 70 doc­u­ments per second.

Link­ing it here as it inter­sects the Adobe / Microsoft world.

Hey, Jeffa The Geek Stor­ies has the scoop, before The New Invent­ors: watch the inter­view with the Alive Tec CEO Bruce Satch­well — that blue device attached to the patient is made on the Gold Coast!

Email­ing Bruce last night, apart from com­ple­ment­ing me on my sharp eyes and good memory — he also broke the news that Alive’s Web Developer, Tim Hil­liard, is wear­ing the mon­itor for the run­ning of the bulls in Pamplona in a couple of weeks.

Alive  have made a very crude map of the bull run route using Win­dows Live maps.

Map view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=42.81795~-1.642793&style=r&lvl=17&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

Bird­seye view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=r42pyngvwrkz&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

You­tube video of the run in 2006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTHHgxFOD_g

I hope this doesn’t end in tears.

First flight to Bris­bane, Sydney Air­port 17^th June 2007. Up at 4.30am, at the air­port at 5.45am. Up so early, even the cats were sur­prised. Actu­ally one of the cats didn’t even bother to come out and visit as it was so early. Motor into Windor to present to 25–30 mem­bers of the Bris­bug User Group.

There were some unanswered ques­tions, which I will tackle here:

Office Pub­lisher 2007, break­ing links. Break For­ward Link: this is the pro­cess of remov­ing the link­age from the cur­rent Text Box to the next, and retain­ing the text. From my quick research, Pub­lisher 2007 does not change the func­tion­al­ity com­pared to pre­vi­ous versions.

Chan­ging the selection/highlight col­our in Word/Excel. This is rel­at­ively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well writ­ten Win­dows pro­grams, respect the set­ting “Selec­ted Item” col­our in the Dis­play Con­trol Panel. This allows you to change the back­ground col­our that shows high­lighted items, includ­ing text. Also note that Word 2007 has a zoom to make it easier to see text on screen.

OEM Win­dows XP Ser­vice Pack 2, Media Cen­ter. Install issue related to CDs with poor word­ing for insert CD (near bot­tom of chat tran­script from May 2006). Seems like its an issue that is related to the word­ing of the install screen, not an error with the installer.

Links: Office 2007 file open­ing with pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Office: If you have a mix­ture of Office 2007 and older ver­sions on your home net­work, this http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&DisplayLang=en is the link to the plugin.

Update: 28^th June 2007: Office 2003 vs. 2007 menus: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/06/27/office-2007-what-ever-happened-to-that-menu-option.aspx

Excel Fin­ance func­tion changes. The fin­an­cial func­tions in Excel, apart from Nett Present Value and Com­pound­ing Interest, have sort of baffled me. From the help file:

Easy for­mula writing

The fol­low­ing improve­ments make for­mula writ­ing much easier in Office Excel 2007.

Res­iz­able for­mula bar   The for­mula bar auto­mat­ic­ally res­izes to accom­mod­ate long, com­plex for­mu­las, which pre­vents the for­mu­las from cov­er­ing other data in your work­sheet. You can also write longer for­mu­las with more levels of nest­ing than you could in earlier ver­sions of Excel.

Func­tion Auto­Com­plete   With Func­tion Auto­Com­plete, you can quickly write the proper for­mula syn­tax. From eas­ily detect­ing the func­tions that you want to use to get­ting help com­plet­ing the for­mula argu­ments, you will be able to get for­mu­las right the first time and every time.

Auto­com­plete assists with the writ­ing of a for­mula. The most linked ref­er­ence on the web for Fin­an­cial func­tion (now the how, more the why) is from here.

I’ve been dog-fooding (that is, intern­ally test­ing) Win­dows Live­Writer — for cre­at­ing edit­ing and post­ing to my three Blogs. Install, and it just works.

Tim Heuer’s Flickr4Writer plu­gin is a must-have. A major time saver.

There are many pos­it­ive stor­ies about Live­Writer, this how­ever James Clarke’s takes the cake: Jet­Fuel: Sil­ver­light plu­gin for Live­Writer.  Some­thing else to play with!

Microsoft Sur­face Com­put­ing. More than just Windows.