“Chilli!!!! Will you come here NOW!”

“FFS Dog!, that’s it, you stay here, I’m going home, suit yourself”

“Pant, pant pant, will you stop??!!! Come here now……”

These were the common screams and actions circa 1996-2000 whilst I was living in Surrey just by Epsom Downs Race course.

Chilli was a young enthusiastic Irish Setter who would run and run (and run). I swear I saw every blade of grass on the Downs between these years. I literally spent hours and hours trying to chase and catch that crazy dog at the weekends. A quick 30 minute ‘walk’ would regularly turn into a 3 hour marathon whilst trying to catch him.

Amazingly, he never grew tired of it and it wasn’t until we finally took him to obedience training and *some* of it actually sunk in that he started to listen to what we were saying (at least sometimes).

So you may all be noticing the past tense in this post. Chilli made his final visit to the vets yesterday as he had simply become too old and frail. At over 13 years old, he was a seriously old Setter as on average, 8-9 yrs is great, with 12 being rare. I can only be thankful that for almost the entirety of his life, he still thought he was a puppy (and acted as such). It’s only in the last eight months or so that he truly started to show his age.

I would regularly ‘fight’ with him on the floor as well as accept his constant attempts to sit on my lap whilst we were watching TV. Chilli was a *large* setter and seeing him and his 40Kg bulk try and sit onto my lap was both hilarious and painful.

To be honest, there are too numerous times to describe when Chilli had us sighing with desperation or laughing out loud because of something he had done.

Some classic very fond memories though include: -

1. His attempts right up to the end of trying to ‘sneak’ up to the dinner table to steal your dinner avoiding eye contact at all times, obviously thinking “I can’t see him, he can’t see me…”
2. The time in Connemara after a long drive from the UK when we let him out for a toilet break. Three hours later after he had chased practically every sheep on the mountain we managed to catch him, but only because a lone sheep who he’d managed to corner actually turned round and faced him off. He came running back to us with his tail between his legs…we laughed…a lot
3. His normal sleeping position surely couldn’t have been *that* comfortable could it?
4. His ability to discreetly, if he was sitting on the sofa with you, to try and kick you off. He’d put all four of his legs against an arm of the chair and push…REALLY hard until you were crushed. And believe me, he was strong.
5. The way he’d make you feel guilty if you were sitting in the play room on the sofa (in our present house). This also acted as his bed and he would make it well known he was seriously put out to whoever was sitting on it. I would commonly come into the room to find the children sitting on the hard wood floor because Chilli had ‘bullied’ them off of the sofa…
6. The time when we did actually leave him at the Common just up near our old house in Surrey because he refused to come back. My wife came back 10 mins later to find someone putting him into a car to take him to the vets as a lost pet…
7. Or when he decided to go for a walk himself and ended up a real lost pet after finding himself almost at Rosscarbery (8 miles away). A frantic call out to the Gardai and local vets the following morning found him living the life of riley, at what would eventually become our local vets, after everyone utterly feel in love with him.

I could go on and on as the amount of memories we have of this crazy dog are limitless. Throughout the last 13 years of our family’s life, he’s been a very firm fundamental part of it and somehow I’m not sure how long it’s going to take us to get over the quite large hole he’s just left.

Rest in peace my old friend

With my corporate laptop dying on me again last week, I needed a reimage. This was then duly performed by IT Support at work. The first thing on my to do list when I booted it at home was to add it to my WHS for backup purposes.

However this didn’t quite work as expected. At the end of the Connector install, I got an error stating I already had 10 computers connected to my WHS and that to add this one, I’d need to remove one. Unfortunately removing a computer from WHS also removes ALL previous backup images of said computer as well.

Now I don’t have 10 computers in the house (more like 5) however the other computers are old images of reimaged computers (my vista x64 image of my desktop now running Windows 7 for example). The problem is I *do* was to keep these at least short to mid term just in case there’s files/resources that I’ve not yet needed or restored from them.

And anyways, I was adding the SAME machine twice, with the same computer name, the same licence key etc. Why was it looking to add it as a totally new machine?

Well the answer and solution is relatively simple thankfully. Scouring the forums, there was a general annoyance at this ‘feature’ as it was causing a lot of inconvenience to everyone, especially to people who like me, prefers to reimage their machine periodically to ensure optimal performance.

Luckily the fix is simply a registry tweak: -

From the looks of it, the first time the WHS Connector software is attempted to be installed onto a desktop it creates a registry key in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server

Within this newly created key it assigns a GUID to this machine (in the “value” called GUID ironically enough).

On the WHS, each computer is tracked by its GUID. These are again listed and managed by a registry key: -

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Transport\clients

Within this section there is a number of registry key entries, one for each of the computers managed by the WHS. If you then look at each of the keys, you’ll see the values against it show full details of each of your computers (the computer name, the Model etc).

So the fix is simple. Locate the entry under ‘Clients’ that represents the computer you’ve recently reimaged. Head back onto the computer you’re trying to add and replace the GUID registry value with this value from the WHS and reinstall the WHS Connector software.

This will then simply merge this new computer back into the existing computer account it has on the WHS as opposed to attempting to create a new one.

I’ve tried many a time to describe and show how Twitter works but a lot of my friends and family just don’t get the attraction.  In fact I’d even go as far as to say I’m regularly mocked over my twitter usage (and I’m not *that* heavy a user either!).

One example on the Saturday just gone through just demonstrates the differences between the likes of Facebook and Twitter and why it will always be viewed as an essential tool/means of communication for me. It also clearly demonstrates one particular use of Twitter that I adore.

Now, I love Facebook and I use it to keep in contact with a lot of old friends and a lot of family throughout the world who I would otherwise never really get to correspond with frequently. Twitter is truly different though in the immediacy of responses and this aspect is what clearly puts it above the other social networks with respect to interacting with your peers.

So, here I was Saturday morning, waking up in a Limerick hotel with a relatively bad hang-over. It had been a good idea at the time; A great night out on the town saying goodbye to a lot of colleagues who have recently left or would be the following week due to redundancies.

What I needed was a decent breakfast but not really living in Limerick, where could I find a great ‘greasy spoon’ in the centre of the city to have a decent fry?

A number of options were open to me:

1. Have the Hotel’s breakfast (inevitably overpriced for a buffet and probably luke-warm by the time I’d come down)
2. Ask someone in the street for a recommendation
3. Pot Luck
4. Ask my 207 followers (a number of whom would know Limerick far better than I) where a decent greasy spoon was?

I opted initially for the last one to see what I’d get back, so at 0934 Saturday morning, as I was about to check out, I tweeted “Anyone recommend a good greasy spoon in the centre of limerick??” .

Two things then happened very quickly (all within 10 minutes): -

Within 4 minutes Damien Mulley, a large presence in the blogging community here in Ireland, “ReTweeted” my question to all of his followers (all 939 of them)

5 minutes later, Alexia Golez suggested The Wild Onion on High Street. 3 minutes later Tommy Collison also recommended The Wild Onion and even supplied me with the phone number so I could ring ahead. Also two other people I don’t follow (from Damien’s follower’s) also recommended the Wild Onion.

So with four recommendations, it was sold to me. So off I went in search of The Wild Onion on the High Street.

This is a very typical use of Twitter and very often this type of interaction and usefulness of such as immediate Social Network isn’t clearly apparent. It’s in one way, a live search engine. You ask a question, and real people will answer your question or pass it onto people who will know the answer.

Suffice to say, I found The Wild Onion (which by the way I would NEVER have found had it been down to pot luck, it’s tucked away and you’d never know about it if you didn’t know about it beforehand). The food was bloody fabulous and I happily walked back to by car feeling far more human for the long drive to West Cork.

So I’ve advocated just how great Windows Home Server is many times. It’s also saved my bacon, from a backup perspective on more than one occasion.

One of the great aspects of a WHS is the ability to develop add-ins for the WHS Console. I have a number installed which extend the functionality of WHS signifcantly (the integration into Amazon’s S3 service via the Jungle Disk WHS Add-in for automatic offline storage is one for example that I rely upon greatly).

A new add-in has just been released that allows your Home Server to ‘tweet’ its Health status via Twitter. By following my WHS’s Twitter account, I can now monitor the home Server and network health irrespective of where I am.

Such a great idea and given that the alerts themselves are totally extendable, this means, add-ins, when coded correctly can alert their users of almost any issue irrespective of where they are.

My home server’s twitter account is RedDogWHS if anyone’s interested in knowing how healthy my current server and network is (although I have protected them).

You can download the WHSTweet add-in from the Home Server hacks page.

I came into my Home Office this morning to find my corporate laptop totally and utterly dead.

It was working on Friday, powered it up this morning and nothing. So this, given I’m planned on a lot this morning, was a real curve ball. However all wasn’t lost *too* much.

With the power of WHS, I had a full image of my data so could easily open my image from Friday and access the files I needed.

Email was again not too much of challenge as I have my Blackberry and WebMail.

What this did mean though was I’d need to use my newly built Windows 7 desktop for work this morning as opposed to my Vista desktop.

Overall, actually having to use it ‘properly’ for day to day work has been a pleasure. I also did discover some other fun bits whilst moving open windows around that I wasn’t fully aware of.

Windows Gestures

As Windows 7 is designed for Touch screens as well, there are a number of built in Gestures to assist users when using a touch screen interface. these also work with the Mouse (Click and then perform the gesture).

“Cut out the Clutter”
Ever had a whole heap of windows open and just wanted to clean everything up and only have the one window left showing that you're working on?

Click and ‘shake’ the title bar of the window you want left open. All others will be minimized. ‘Shake’ it again to restore your desktop to the previous (cluttered) state. Kinda cool and I think actually will become more useful that it first sounds.

I had accidentally done this a number of times and thought “What?! What did I do there, where have my windows gone?”. Now that I know it, I may well use it more often.

Jump Lists
Jump lists can also be initiated by a ‘drag’ of the Application icon on the taskbar(as opposed to a right click). Purely for touch user’s I’d say as right click is quicker (but a right click doesn’t fade in like it does with a ‘drag’).

There are a large amount of others as well, some I find I’ll use, some I won’t. Tim Sneath has a great post for Windows 7 that shows a lot of the secrets of the new UI. Check it out here.

I’m also trying out Tip 22 (The Widescreen Tip), by having my taskbar now vertical. Tim’s right, the whole design does now suit a vertical toolbar.

So I’ve always been a fan of Media Centre and although I’ve never really used it to its full potential (never had Live TV through it) I have used it sporadically on both my old Vista machine and via my 360 acting as an extender. What's stopped me from really moving to it full time, from a media playback perspective, was it’s lack of support of other 3rd party codecs (DivX, XVid etc).

However, whilst playing with Windows 7 over the last few days, I noticed something that didn’t really hit me until now.

Windows 7 out of the box now seems to support DivX and XVid formats (amongst others). All content I have on my WHS was fully playable in Windows 7 without installing ANY codecs. These formats are now able to also be able to played back in Media Centre (as opposed to Media Player).

Tonight, I’ve finally got a little time to connect my 360 to Windows 7 as a Media Extender and amazingly, all codecs can now also be played back via the Extender. I don’t believe this was ever possible prior to connecting to a Win 7 Media Centre and in addition the UI of the extender now reflects the Windows 7 UI (so I suspect the recent NXE update to the 360 also enabled it to also receive updates to the Media Centre Extender client).

All good news and another step towards me having a fully integrated Media solution at home. All I need now is for the next version of Windows Home Server (which will be based on the Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 architecture) to also include Media Centre so I don’t need to keep two machines on constantly to serve media.

As I’m sure no one in the IT industry will have missed, Microsoft released their Release Candidate of Windows 7 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers a few days ago.

Well, I couldn’t resist. Having played with the beta on my old Dell Dimension a few months back and being very surprised at just how stable and complete it was, the appearance of the RC really meant it was time now to give it a proper appraisal.

So over the last few days, I decided to say goodbye to my incredibly stable and astoundingly quick Vista x64 build on my Vostro. Having ensured all aspects of the system was backed up onto my Windows Home Server, I popped the DVD in and rebooted.

Now, I’m an advocate for clean installs of O/S’s as I know a lot of people are. Upgrading O/S’s, although convenient, forces you to bring along with you all the crap you’ve installed and hoarded since the last time you installed an O/S. “No” I said to myself. Even though I’d kept my x64 install of vista relatively clean (and I was sorely tempted just before of the work involved in reinstalling and restoring all your data), it was still time for a clean out, no upgrade for me…so I formatted the 500Gb hard drive and clicked install.

Ten minutes later I was staring at my new Windows 7 desktop. Yes you read that right. TEN minutes. That’s all it took from the second I clicked ‘format’ to seeing Windows 7 boot up. I tweeted just after I’d clicked the ‘Format’ option, and then again once I was staring at a Win 7 Desktop.

NO matter what anyone says, Microsoft have to be commended for having an OS that installs so darn fast.

There are a number of sites that detail the changes of Win 7 far better than I ever could, so I’m not going to attempt to. Paul Thurrott’s WinSuperSite has a huge amount of content on Win 7. Instead I’m going to concentrate on my impressions to the changes as well as my overall experience.

Installation

Absolutely flawless. My experience is getting Vista x64 to initially recognise my Vostro’s hardware was a real struggle back in March of last year. With Windows 7, not one unknown device and everything works as you’d expect. Wireless keyboards, mice, onboard sound, networks all worked right from the go.

On my older Dell Dimension 4500 (P4, 2.4Ghz and 1Gb RAM), again installation was very quick (~15 mins), and everything worked (except sound) from the go. As soon as I logged in, Windows Update immediately started to download drivers for my sound card and sound became available (with no restart I may add).

Application Compatibility

There was one issue though when I booted up. The 32 bit version of IE 8 kept crashing the instant I opened it (64 bit IE8 was fine strangely enough). As I only needed to get to Google to download Chrome (still my preferred browser), this sufficed. However for completeness, I wanted to make sure the 32 bit version of IE8 worked. Turning on and off the InPrivate filter seemed to fix it which was rather strange. However I had also installed Office 2007 inbetween attempts to run it so I’m not sure which of these steps actually fixed it.

Chrome also had issues with the default install. However this is a known issue with a 64 bit O/S and 32 bit Chrome (although I never got it with Vista x64 it has to be said). A lot of people reported that Win 7 RC didn’t have this issue, but mine did. To fix, you simply need to change the Shortcut parameters to have the parameter “-in-process-plugins” like so: -

C:\…\chrome.exe -in-process-plugins

This resolves any startup issues with Chrome. Apart from the two issues, I’ve found no issues whatsoever so far in the applications that I run day to day.

Performance

Now this is a hard one to compare on this machine. My experience with Vista x64 has been nothing but exemplary on this system and I sometimes think if only Vista worked like this for everyone I know it wouldn’t have such a stigma attached to it. Blindingly quick and never a crash, my 64 bit install far exceeds my vista 32 bit experiences (sometimes painfully slow, error prone and to be truthful, sometimes an absolute bloody mystery as to why the hell the hard drive was spinning at a gazillion rpm’s when the machine was doing ‘nothing’). Vista really hasn’t help itself in this regard it has to be said.

My WEI has actually increased by quite an amount as well between Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 (4.8 to 5.3). The bottleneck in Vista seemed to be my memory (4Gb of 667Mhz). In Windows 7, my memory performance is a far healthier 5.4. This clearly seems to indicate memory management in Windows 7 has had a major overhaul.

My bottleneck is now my ATI HD2600 XT 256Mb video card for gaming. As gaming is mainly done on an Xbox 360, this doesn’t concern me too much.

Unable to really compare on my Vostro, it’s a lot easier with my older Dimension 4500. Performance has increased from Vista significantly. Everything runs a lot lot quicker, even with the system’s modest specs.

The TaskBar

A lot has been said of the taskbar and I was a little cynical at first. It’s a total overhaul to the traditional task bar that has served all Windows O/S’s since Windows 95 and this is a real sea-change. Now that I’ve grown accustomed to it, it’s a serious improvement.

Now saying that, it does takes some getting used to, especially in the default settings it gets installed with (which I do prefer if I’m truthful). Once the way it works is known, it truly is a evolutionary step compared to what was there before it. How this will be changed and tweaked in future versions of Windows will be interesting.

The best way to describe it is a combination of the quick launch bar and standard windows task bar.

Below is my current taskbar (in the default behaviour at installation) and you’ll see both the applications that are ‘pinned’ to it as well as the applications that I have running.

Another mode of the task bar allows it to perform more like the current Windows Task Bar and only combine the icons when the task bar is full (as well as displaying labels): -

However I just don’t like the hybrid mode and much prefer the fully combined icon only view. I could probably write posts and posts about the Taskbar and its new behaviours. But the real great improvements are: -

• Jump Lists
• Much Improved Preview
• Aero Peek

Summary

Windows 7 is a serious improvement on Vista in almost every way. I use Vista day to day within my corporate environment and have grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies and pitfalls. However I can see Vista getting very old very quickly now I’ve seen the improvements to the usability that has come about with the redesign in Windows 7.

Well a few weeks back, my Xbox 360 died (again for the 5th time). I blogged last year that Microsoft had finally created a licence migration tool to allow you to transfer all of your purchased content to another console. this was particularly important as once purchased and downloaded, it’s locked to that console ID.

If you want to play it on another XBox (including a fixed one prior to the release of this tool) you needed to sign into XBox Live to prove it’s you. Unfortunately the newly created migration process only allows you to run it once every 12 months. And as I accurately predicted back in May of last year, I knew my now dead fourth XBox wasn’t going to be my last.

So a few weeks back, the same courier picked up my console for repair and whisked it off to Germany for repair. 2.5 weeks later and it’s back all repaired.

However everything wasn’t rosy. They had indicated that to drive customer satisfaction, they had given me a brand new XBox instead of a repairing my old one (more on this later). Now, on the Migration tools FAQ it clearly states that if your XBox is sent back for repair, any licences are automatically transferred if required to the new console. And in fact, if you try and do it again (inside the 12 month period), you’re taken straight to the ‘congrats’ page indicating success: -

My licenses were not automatically transferred this time and was easily proved by signing in using my son’s Live account and only seeing trial versions of the all of the arcade games I’d bought. Re-Downloading the content didn’t work either as the underlying license was still firmly attached to my old console, now presumably sitting somewhere in a warehouse in Germany.

So I contacted support to raise this as an issue. All was relatively painless thankfully. It was immediately flagged as an issue and escalated to the relevant teams with a promise they’d ring me back in < 24 hours. And they did, 15 hours later, on the following day, the escalation team rang me to resolve the issue. A few details were confirmed (XBox ID, my gamer tag etc) and I was told, “all’s done. The licences will be migrated automatically to your new console and we apologise this wasn’t done at replacement time. The licences should be transferred automatically within 30 days”.

Wait, 30 days?! Apparently instructions have to be sent to the billing and accounts department who then transfer the licences. This is likely due to financial reasons and revenue recognition, and I suppose if I think about it in this light, I can see why they don’t offer an open ended ability to transfer your licenses to other consoles. So until then, my children will have to have the inconvenience of signing in as me prior to themselves for starting the games. Luckily though, this is now a transparent process so I won’t need to download any content again (which is cool as I have a LOT of downloaded content).

So some interesting things with respect to this experience: -

• My console didn’t RROD, the DVD Drive simply started to fail to recognise a disk was in the drive. In my eyes, this is likely a DVD Drive failure as opposed to something more nasty. However, it looks like it’s now simply easier (and cheaper) to simply send out a new XBox as opposed to breaking it down, repairing the console and re-packaging it back up again. The rework costs here are likely quite expensive compared to simply shipping a new one out.
• I’ve now got over 3 months of free XBox Live Gold membership due to failing XBox’s. You’re automatically given a one month coupon whenever your console is repaired.
• Absolute cudos and credit to Microsoft’s Larry Hryb (Major Nelson). I had tweeted a question to him with respect to this issue and what I should do and he responded within 10 minutes that I contact support right away and they’d sort it. Given, I’m sure, how busy his twitter feed is, I’m incredibly impressed at the response time of Microsoft’s main voice for Xbox online.