Rants Tagged with “Technology”
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I finally decided to dive in with an online backup of my files. I have two systems that need backups so I decided to use MozyPro as their prices are good and if Hanselman uses them, they can't be that bad. My big pain point with online backup is my behemouth .pst files. I have two of them...my working .pst and an archive .pst. Totaling about 2 GB total, I need a solution that can back up these files without re-uploading the entire file everytime. Mozy promises this...after the first backup.
So I installed it locally and setup the directories and files I wanted backed-up. All seemed good until I started getting a "the C-Drive is out of space" errors. It seems that Mozy compesses everything locally and will do so without regard to remaining drive space. I had to stop the backup and reboot my machine as Vista was down to 5 Meg free. I didn't like how it was going about the backup, but I figured i'd live with it. So I opened the configuration to find out where to tell it to create temporary files...nothing...I wrote support and eventually found a listing where it showed me how to change the registry to make this happen. Huh? Shouldn't that be a setting in their long-winded configuration? Ok, not very professional but I'll do it. Restarted the services and went about backing up again...
After a second reboot (for un-related reasons), I couldn't log on my system. It was complaining that the User Profile couldn't be loaded. Wierd sure, but after rebooting a second time I could finally get into my system....but all my settings in my profile were gone. I did some searching and apparently I am not the first one to see this happen after using Mozy.
That was it...I uninstalled Mozy and cancelled my account. It shouldn't be this hard.
For those of you who do get this "User Profiles Cannot Be Loaded" error, this post on Cherry Byte's blog did the trick:
http://cherrybyte.blogspot.com/2007/07/fixing-user-profiles-in-vista.html
I waffle back and forth between whether Mary Jo is helping the IT world with her insights or is just IT's version of the gossip column. I honestly don't know which. But in a blog entry today she said something that was spot on. The quote is:
In terms of delivery schedules, Microsoft has made a conscious move from being transparent to “translucent” with its future Windows release plans — including its plans for service packs (Emphasis added)
While she was referring to the Windows release plans, I think this is somewhat true across the board. I would guess that this is a product of the XBox's success on the rest of the company. XBox has been able to pull off very ambitious and high-profile projects without having to announce them all to the public. I think this is mostly because the projects that did not pan out were never announced. As much as I'd like to know where they are going, I think this is a better approach for Microsoft.
I am sure inside of Apple and Google that there are many projects that start and die without ever being blogged...so the perception in the marketplace (with ordinary people, not just IT guys) is that most of what they deliver is a success (Apple TV notwithstanding). I think its time that Microsoft take this tact and I think Mary Jo's description of Translucent instead of Transparent is a perfect description.
What do you think?
In case you never noticed I am a huge Atlanta Braves fan. I was reading this Braves fan site recently after the Braves player's record tying ten straight hits (tied a National League record), I wanted to find out more about this Matt Diaz. When I noticed that during spring training, the Braves checked Matt Diaz eyes and found out he had almost no depth perception. A major league hitter without depth perception...wow.
Evidently you can fix this with contacts (though I am not sure how that works). No big surprise that he has hit like a monster this year. Now the crazy part:
The Royals and the Devil Rays (he previous teams) never had his eyes checked. Someone got fired over that I bet.
While I can't recommending buying it through eBay because of my recent problems with them, this is somewhat irresistable. A real Enigma machine...
FoxIt is a FREE alternative to Adobe's Acrobat Reader (yeah, I know its free too). And I have to say...fast...fast...fast...as well as not annoying and trying to install bunch of other junk:
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3000-2079_4-10365812.html
Happy Thanksgiving (or Happy Thursday if you are outside the US)...
Two weeks ago I used IE 6's new "Manage Addins..." to disable the Flash plugin. I was worried about some of the content I'd miss. After two weeks, my experience has been that I have not missed much. Here is a short list of what I've noticed without Flash:
- The Good:
- Stopped getting annoying Flash-based ads that were hijacking my web-browsing experience
- SlashDot is working again. I was getting flash-based ads that were forwarding me to other sites.
- The Bad (sorta):
- Several sites interactive stuff isn't available to me, including:
Overall I am happy. The good certainly outweighs the bad IMHO . What's your experience?
I was looking for an update to convert my VPC image to a VMWare image (I think it handles networking better) when I saw a Beta of the 5.5 version that will use a VPC image without having to convert. It also support conversion like 5.x does, but being able to launch VPC images directly will save me a lot of time. For those users, it will also open Norton Ghost files natively too.
As many of you might not know, I am not at the PDC, but am interestingly watching to see what comes out from it. Usually at the event times, everyone blogs too much about what they like and don't like. Everyone wants to be the first out the door with some news from a keynote. So I am layng low and letting all that happen without me. On the plus side, I can now talk about some things that I've had the opportunity to play with for some time (now that they are public knowledge and I am not hurting any NDA's):
- I've been playing with the WinFX PDC bits for a couple of weeks now and I think it is coming together nicely.
- The Expression designer is cool, though still a bit wonky for extended use.
- I like the ideas behind LINQ and C# 3.0, but like the C# 2.0, I think it will change a lot between what we see now and what will be used in production.
I installed the new version of iTunes recently and its amazing how many running services and background tasks Apple is installing:
- Bonjour Service: a new network stack, not even marked as Apple
- iPodService: I don't have an iPod, so don't make me run it?
- iTunesHelper: Why do I need a helper when iTunes isn't running?
- QuickTime: Huh? I thought it was a music player...maybe music in the MTV view of music.
- qttask: Luckily my Annoying Process Killer is doing its job and killing this.
Please make it stop. Guess I could just uninstall iTunes...I only use it to buy music, never to listen to it (I think its a crap player). If only MSN would get a library their size. I haven't tried with Vista yet, but I do hope that I get asked if an installer is installing anything into Run, RunOnce or into the SCM! This is ridiculous...I can only imagine how many tasks are running on my mother's system!
