Author Archives: tig

Dilbert’s Home Server

October 5, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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According to the press release, “…Dilbert’s Ultimate House”(DUH). DUH is a virtual web-based home that the famous icon of the workplace Dilbert, his fans, tech geeks, the environmentally conscious, and those who just plain love the comfort of a good sofa, will covet.”He’s got a pretty clean looking wiring closet, but what kind of home server is that? And why does he still have all those magnetic tapes (or are they CD’s…not that it matters)? If he …Continue reading →

Time to RAID PVRs, says Silicon Image

October 5, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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In Time to RAID PVRs, says Silicon Image The Register reports that Silicon Image has a new RAID chip that they think they can sell to PVR vendors. Not sure how this differs from their existing SATA/IDE RAID chips. But they seem to agree with me that those hard drives are fragile and redundancy schemes are a Good thing.

Helmet Home Server

October 5, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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news.com reports on a new PC form factor: Helmet PC aims to score with football fans. This thing would make a fantastic home server (see my mini-ITX post)…as long as you used a Seattle Seahawks helmet and not a nasty Raiders helmet.

Ichiro’s 262 Hits

October 4, 2004
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When I was in Japan in June I had a free day and decided to do some sightseeing. I decided to take a train somewhere that would have tourist attractions outside of Tokyo. The concierge at my hotel suggested Hase and Kamakura. So off I went. I love trains, and I love train stations, but I don’t speak or read a stitch of Japanese. While stainding in front of the ticket machine a the train …Continue reading →

Windows Server is listening…

October 4, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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Billie Jo Murray, who runs the Windows Server Customer Experience Group, is now blogging. If you have feedback about Windows Server’s documentation and customer programs head over to her blog and let her know.

mini-ITX Windows Server 2003 Home Server

October 3, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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I recently built a really small and quiet home server that ran Windows Server 2003 based on a mini-ITX motherboard. It turns out you can build a great system in a very small package. The only down-side is that the really nice cases are pretty expensive compared to larger cases driving the total cost up. The system I bought was a Casetronic C134 based system from LOGIC SUPPLY. With no OS, a 20gb hard drive and 512MB …Continue reading →

Storage at Home – How to store that precious data – Part 1

October 3, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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Many, many enthusiast/geeks like myself have huge storage needs. I currently have the following data on my home network: 200GB of WMA 9 Lossless music (“backups“ of my CD collection). 30GB of WMA 9 128kpbs music (re-encoded of above for access by my portable players). 1TB of home video captured from Hi8 tape to DV format (still trying to find a reliable way of batch encoding this to WMV 9; should be able to get …Continue reading →

Storage at Home – How to store that precious data – Part 2

October 3, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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Use High Quality Drives “Enterprise” class drives, typically with SCSI or Fibre channel interfaces, are tested more thoroughly at the factory (and have longer warranties to prove it). The problem is these drives are significantly more expensive than consumer drives, use interfaces most home users don’t have (SCSI or FC), and typically have much lower capacities (I don’t think anyone even makes an enterprise class drive greater than 160GB). Better enclosures, with built-in fans are …Continue reading →

Great article on Personal Storage

September 29, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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ExtremeTech has a great new article titled New Strategies for Personal Mass Storage. I’ve been working on a longish post/article on personal storage that I hope to have done in a week or so. This ExtremeTech article is great background material. While you’re waiting for me to post my diatribe on storage consider this: Some time after our daughter was born I accidentally recorded over two (yes, I made the mistake twice!) VHS tapes that …Continue reading →

Tipping cows

September 29, 2004
Uncategorized
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I heard a silly discussion on the radio (Ken Schram…sigh) this morning about a bunch of poeple in the blogsphere up in arms about tipping baristas at Starbucks.  Inane. While I was listening to this I was buying my latte at Jitters (I hate Starbucks; their coffee is too boring; they are the McDonalds of coffee) I had to laugh. The tip cup had a little sign on it: Tipping: Good for us, bad for the …Continue reading →

IainMc is blogging

September 28, 2004
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One of the most feared (ha!) people in the Windows organization is now blogging. Check out Iain’s blog. Iain is one of the main reasons Windows 2000 and XP got out the door. Not to mention Exchange. 

Is your Exchange 2003 server generating spam?

August 20, 2004
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Ouch. I was up until 3:30am last night because I noticed my Exchange 2003 server was sending a ton of messages. I noticed this because I was trying to diagnose another, unrelated, problem and happened to look in the outbound Queue in Exchange System Manager. My SMTP connector showed several hundred queued outgoing messages. Given that I have about 6 users on my Exchange server and none of them send more than 2 or 3 …Continue reading →

SBS 2003 Rocks!

August 12, 2004
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Yankee Group says 86% of midsize and smaller companies use Small Business Server. Microsoft’s Small Business Server is a remarkable hit, said a research firm Monday as it released the results of a survey that claimed an astounding 86% of small and midsize businesses either use the server bundle or are planning to deploy it. “Who knew this was going to be such as huge hit?” says Laura DiDio, the Yankee Group senior analyst who …Continue reading →

CodeView: Another Blast from the Past

August 12, 2004
Books, Uncategorized
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A post on the Windows Off Topic mailing list today on multi-monitor reminded me of the fun we had debugging Windows 3.0 applications. In the early DOS and Windows days (I did this with Windows/386 and up) you could have both a EGA, CGA, or VGA adapter and a Hercules monochrome adapter in your system. The CodeView debugger could be configured to run on the monochrome monitor freeing the Windows GUI from the debugger. You could …Continue reading →

Stargazing: Astronomy software is just amazing

August 11, 2004
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When I married my wife Julie I inherited some close family friends of hers: the Bisque family. A big family with so many names that I’ll just focus on the 4 brothers who I have deep respect for: Steve, Tom, Dan, and Matt. In 1991 when I first met the guys at Software Bisque, they had two products: A DOS based astronomy packaged called The_Sky and some funky financial modelling package they had built for my …Continue reading →

Building a new desktop

August 11, 2004
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Like many enthusiasts, I tend to build my own PCs rather than purchase them from OEMs. A few times in the past I’ve gone the other way and bought a DELL, HP, or other brand-name PC, but in the end I always regretted it. Invariably I would crack open the case right away anyway to change something…the video card, a hard disk or two, whatever. Then I’d want to upgrade the CPU or memory only …Continue reading →

MCE Controller doc ommission

August 10, 2004
Coding, Smart Home, Uncategorized
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I forgot to mention a key (pun intended) command that MCE Controller supports in the 1.0.3 documentation. The “key:” command allows you to simulate any alphanumeric keyboard key press. For example “key:3” is the same thing as pressing the 3 key on the keyboard. This command is implemented internally in MCE Controller rather than via the MCEControl.commands configuration file; which is why I forgot to document it. I will update the readme file next time …Continue reading →

My contributions to the evolution of mascara in Windows UI

July 29, 2004
Coding
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Raymond has a fun story about “The evolution of mascara in Windows UI“. Reminded me of my early days of Windows programming. Before I was at Microsoft (and for a bit after) I developed a few (mildly successful) shareware applications for Windows. I think I was one of the very first people to apply 3D effects to controls in Windows applications! In 1989 I developed at DLL that I used in all of my applications …Continue reading →

New MCE Controller sample available

July 29, 2004
Coding, Smart Home, Uncategorized
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Multiple people have asked me for a sample that illustrates how to talk to MCE Controller from Crestron using SIMPL Windows. Ask no more: On the MCE Controller site, I’ve added a SIMPL Windows sample program that illustrates using MCE Controller with a Crestron processor. This sample illustrates using MCE Controller in client mode with a CP2E processor (which is the way that I use it).

Live Security Camera Feeds with Windows Media Services 9

July 27, 2004
Smart Home, Uncategorized
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When I built my house a few years ago I installed several video cameras for security monitoring. Until recently I was only capturing still images from these. I archived the still images and published the most recent via a URL on my website allowing me to see “the latest” while away from home. I’ve been using a very nice shareware program to accomplish all of this called SupervisionCam by Peter Kirst. I originally used SupervisionCam …Continue reading →