Contriving

Why Windows Home Server is awesome…

I forget I even have it.

I don’t think there can be any better recommendation for a backup solution.  My computers are all backed up daily, and I don’t even know it happens.

On top of that, there’s so much more that can be done with WHS.  A list of some things I use my WHS for:

• Storage. I keep smallish hard drives in my PC’s (most of them are around 250GB) and then put big honkin hard drives in my WHS.  Each of the indicated places in the screen shot on the right (take from Explorer in Windows 7) points to storage on my server.
• Reliability.  You can selectively enable folders on the WHS to be “duplicated”.  What this means is that every file in that folder is stored two times…on seperate hard drives.  This is done transparently to the end user so you don’t have to worry about knowing which copy is the newest.  The benefit is that if a hard drive dies (it will), your important data is not lost.
• Reliability, Part Deux. In addition to the safety of data stored on the server, the safety of each of my computers is important as well.  If your hard drive in one of your PCs dies, or you royally screw up your system messing around, or some sort of malware just totally infests you, WHS makes it easy to restore your system.  You just pop in the restore cd and reboot your computer.  As long as your BIOS is set to boot from CD (if not, it’s an easy thing to turn on), the restore cd will take over and let you pick a backup from your WHS to restore.  By default, WHS keeps one backup for each of the previous 3 days, one for each of the previous 3 weeks, and one for each of the previous 3 months.  I set it to keep a just-fresh-from-a-new-OS-install backup so it’s easy to go back to that point.
• Development. I do a bit of hobbyist programming.  Because many of the things I write depend upon a MySQL database, I installed MySQL on my WHS.  This allows me to test my scripts on my local LAN.

I don’t get Facebook.

What is the point of having a the feed when you click the “Home” link being a different thing from the feed in your Profile?

Why do I have to click multiple places to see all these different messages? How am I supposed to know when a friend posts something new to their profile feed? Why don’t their new posts in that area appear in my feed on my Home page?

Basically, Facebook is confusingly inconsistent. Especially for new uers.

On a side note, I want an application that posts my Twitter updates to the feed on my Facebook Home page. Or I want someone to tell me why that’s a dumb idea.

Three events do not an “issue” make.

Referring to a few stories they’ve done about violence associated with gadgets, in this item on Gizmodo, Sean Fallon asks:

In the last few months we have seen a runaway teenager die after having his Xbox 360 taken away, a teenager kill his parents over Halo 3 and 30-year old brothers stab each other over a PS2 controller. Naturally, this begs the question—what the hell is going on here? Is this a parenting issue, a social issue, or a scary psychological disorder that needs to be taken more seriously?

This paragraph seems to imply there’s some sort of pattern to analyze here.  Three examples don’t show a pattern.  Especially given the hundreds of millions of gadgets out there.

User Account Control

I’ve really been enjoying the Engineering Windows 7 blog. The latest post is by Ben Fathi, the VP of core OS development for Microsoft. He talks about all the reasons the much-maligned User Account Control of Vista is the way it is, and what they’ve taken away from the tons of feedback they’ve gotten on it.

In the first several months after Vista was available for use, people were experiencing a UAC prompt in 50% of their “sessions” – a session is everything that happens from logon to logoff or within 24 hours. Furthermore, there were 775,312 unique applications (note: this shows the volume of unique software that Windows supports!) producing prompts (note that installers and the application itself are not counted as the same program.) This seems large, and it is since much of the software ecosystem unnecessarily required admin privileges to run. As the ecosystem has updated their software, far fewer applications are requiring admin privileges. Customer Experience Improvement Program data from August 2008 indicates the number of applications and tasks generating a prompt has declined from 775,312 to 168,149.