First Windows 7 Experience

Posted on January 13, 2009 by halberenson

(Note: This is all personal experience at home…it isn’t related to my employment.)

I downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Beta on my decommissioned SBS machine.  I’d intended to put a real graphics board in it, but hadn’t gotten around to that.  Win7 installed quickly and I was up and running well before I expected.  My only complaint isn’t about Win7 at all, it is about my hardware.  This was a Dell server configuration, and the integrated graphics for it is really the bare minimum.  So, no Aero and just a horrible look overall.  But that aside the experience has been great.

One good hardware thing.  This box had always caused me problems on software installation.  For example, W2K3 (and SBS 2003) did not come with a driver for the integrated network chip.  I would have to install the OS, then go download a Vista version of the driver using another machine and move it over via CD in order to get on the network.  Win 7 came with the driver, and so far all of the hardware on the system is working (although there are some limitations in power management as I’ll show in the next posting).

I installed the Windows Live Essentials, and this is coming to you from Live Writer running on Windows 7.

I was happy to see that there was a choice of three anti-virus programs available already, and I installed a trial edition of AVG, which seems to be running fine.  Now this is a complex area that has me a little worried.  There is no totally free during beta anti-virus, so after 30 days I’m either going to have to try another one or buy AVG.  Given that my favored anti-virus, OneCare, isn’t available (and that it may never be available) I’d at least like something free for the entire beta period.  Perhaps Avast! will come through with a Windows 7 compatible version soon.

I then tried one of my tests.  I like to use Spybot S&D as a “backup” to Windows Defender, but it traditionally hasn’t worked on new OS versions in a very timely fashion.  Well, I installed the standard 1.6.0 version without problem and so far it seems to be working.  That’s a pretty good indicator for Win7 being highly compatible with Vista.

Overall Windows 7 performance is great.  Most operations seem noticeably faster.  Indeed, faster on this system than Vista is on my newer and better spec’d desktop.

I haven’t done anything scientific, but with the default settings UAC now seems to be at about the right balance.  I’ve barely noticed it, yet realize that I have been asked for confirmation at the appropriate times.  I’m sure someone coming from XP will notice it more than I, but hopefully it is now at a level where they’ll welcome the added safety rather than bemoan how it has destroyed the user experience.

I haven’t really gotten around to using new features yet, but my first impression of Win 7 is that the team did put the right level of focus on the basics.  The “abilities” as we refer to them in the server world.  If my initial impression holds, this is an OS I’ll be rushing to put on my family’s PCs.  Both those running Vista and those still running XP.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | Comments Off on First Windows 7 Experience

Can infrastructure get rusty after just 6 years?

Posted on January 12, 2009 by halberenson

Well, the answer is yes.  I finished ripping all my CDs, which was painful but now that it’s done IT’S DONE.  Then I ripped out the damn Escient Fireball and associated Sony CD Jukebox.  But now I realize I can’t hook my Media Center PC up to my infrastructure!  My 6 year old Yamaha AV Receiver doesn’t take an HDMI input, only analog video inputs!  My Dell Studio Slim 540S only outputs HDMI or DVI.  For video purposes I’m kind of screwed.  For audio purposes, which was my #1 goal, I can get a DVI to Component Video adapter cable (which may or may not actually work) just so I can use the TV as a monitor for the Dell.  But to get high enough quality to use the 540S for video (e.g., it has a Blu-Ray drive) I’ll need to buy a new home theater receiver!  On top of that, I’d hoped to be able to pipe the 540S’ video through the RF infrastructure of the house so that you could view the media center output from any TV (the fireball output both component video and RF at the same time).  That, along with the house-wide IR repeater system would allow control of the MC from any room in the house (as was done with the Fireball).  And as an added bonus, it would have allowed for slide shows or lower quality viewing of video from the MC on any TV.  It really looks like I’m going to have to upgrade just about the entire house, with the exception of the audio distribution system.  I can still use that to pump audio from the MC to any room.

This reminds me of how my friends and I used to joke about our audio equipment.  You could never replace just one component since the system would become unbalanced and you’d start to crave additional upgrades.  Purchase a better receiver and you’d soon want new speakers, and so on.  I’d certainly hoped to avoid that.  But I know I can’t.  For example, once I get Blu-Ray working I know we’ll have to upgrade at least one TV to support 1080P.  Sigh, some things never change.

Posted in Home Entertainment | 5 Comments

Ripping CDs

Posted on December 20, 2008 by halberenson

The most painful part of redoing my home entertainment setup is re-ripping all our CDs.  When we built the house 5 years ago (and made decisions even before that) we went with a then state-of-the-art Escient Fireball as our music server.  The Fireball was connected to a Sony CD jukebox, and while you could rip all the CDs to its hard drive space was a consideration so generally we just played music off the jukebox until we wanted to rip a particular CD to put it on an iPod.  Well, this never really did work well.  Beyond that the Fireball just didn’t work all that well.  Tell it to rip a range of CDs in the jukebox and you never knew what you’d get.  Sometimes it would hang part way through.  Often it would corrupt a song or two.  It’s UI was just painful.  So for a couple of years I’ve been planning to replace the Fireball, but it is a rather large investment to just throw away.  So I waited…until the hard drive failed.  Now my Fireball is a boat anchor.  YES!  The only bad thing is that we don’t have a complete, error-free, copy of our music library anywhere.  So I’m re-ripping the entire CD collection so I can keep the entire library on our Windows Home Server.  I’m glad I’ll be taking a lot of time off over the next two weeks!

Posted in Home Entertainment | Comments Off on Ripping CDs

Pandora Internet Radio

Posted on December 20, 2008 by halberenson

I’d heard about Pandora some time ago but never gave it a try.  The other day during a discussion about how I was going to start redoing my home media setup over the holidays my friend Mark mentioned how great Pandora was.  I just gave it a try, entering one artist I like (Billy Joel).  In the hour since I started it has only picked songs I like.  Hmmm.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Pandora Internet Radio

Mobile Developer

Posted on December 19, 2008 by halberenson

Several months ago I decided it was time to get back into a product role and after considering several options recently joined the Mobile Developer effort in Microsoft’s Developer Division.  The Mobile Developer team is responsible for the development technologies for Windows Mobile such as the .NET Compact Framework, Visual Studio for Devices, and Silverlight Mobile (which also targets Nokia phones, see http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2008/03/04/announcing-silverlight-support-for-nokia-devices-including-s60.aspx) .  While this may seem like an odd place for someone so closely associated with enterprise server software to have landed, mobile devices have become my passion over the last few years. 

So I’m busy learning Silverlight, learning Windows Mobile, and coming up to speed on all the related activities inside Microsoft.  Yup, it is very much the “drinking from a fire hose” analogy.

Posted in Home Entertainment | Comments Off on Mobile Developer

Moving to Software As A Service

Posted on December 6, 2008 by halberenson

Prior to returning to Microsoft I’d co-founded a SaaS startup, PredictableIT, that included hosted Exchange in it’s offering.  I moved the email for my old consulting business (which I re-started between PredictableIT and rejoining Microsoft) to the PredictableIT server.  And when my wife and I started our horse boarding business we used PredictableIT for both Exchange and Web hosting.  After PredictableIT’s demise I set up a Windows Small Business Server 2003 at home to run both the web site and our emails.  This was fun at first, but over time has become a support burden.  So a few months ago I moved the business website to Office Live, but had a problem on the email front.  We make use of Exchange Activesync to keep our mobile phones in sync, so moving to Hotmail or a POP3 service was out of the question.  Exchange hosters are pretty common, but their pricing is almost always aimed at larger businesses such as those with 5 or 10+ mailboxes per domain.  We have two domains, one with a single mailbox and the other with two mailboxes.  Rather than pay for perhaps 7 extra mailboxes I continued to run Exchange in-house.

Fortunately, Microsoft is dogfooding its own Exchange hosting (for "Friends and Family") via Exchange Labs.  I moved my old consulting mailbox over a week ago, and having had no problems moved our boarding business over today.  The move was quite smooth and the system is easy to understand and manage.  Setting up POP3 or IMAP clients is a little more complicated in that Exchange Labs uses non-standard ports and specific security settings, but that isn’t unique to this service.  Still, that added only about 5 minutes to my setup time.

I’ve turned off the SBS 2003 machine.  I’ll keep it around for a week or two to make sure that Exchange Labs works as expected, then it’s off to buy a real video board so I can turn this box into a box for testing Windows 7 and other betas!

Posted in Computer and Internet | Comments Off on Moving to Software As A Service

Map-Reduce

Posted on September 10, 2008 by halberenson

I make it a habit to stay away from databases these days, but I tripped over this (slightly) old blog entry from Dave DeWitt and Mike Stonebraker on Map-Reduce.  I like Dave and Mike’s thinking, but then I guess I’m a database gray-beard as well.  I do have one quibble with their analogy.  If Codasyl database programming was assembly language (and I have plenty of experience with both) then MapReduce is closer to microcode.

It’s not that I don’t think MapReduce is useful, it’s that I see it as a failure of the database community to deliver what we keep promising.  We can talk about Teradata and a few other "grid" offerings, but for the most part we’ve done a terrible job of productizing grid/cluster/parallel database technologies.  Yes, we’ve certainly known how to do it since the 80s.  But today’s mainstream products either don’t offer it or offer it in very limited, and indeed very high priced, forms.  With most technology we would have had the specialized high-priced offerings in the 80s and by now it would have ridden the learning curve to the point where the technology was super-cheap and ubiquitous.  I know why we haven’t gone anywhere on this, but that’s the topic of another post.

Posted in Computer and Internet | 1 Comment

I’m Back!

Posted on September 10, 2008 by halberenson

I’ve ignored this blog for too long, but I’m back

Posted in Housekeeping | Comments Off on I’m Back!

GM and Hybrids

Posted on May 22, 2008 by halberenson

Ok, I don’t get it.  The new Malibu Hybrid gets less than 10% MPG improvement over the non-Hybrid version in both city and highway mileage.  The Toyota Camry Hybrid shows a 57% improvement on city and just under 10% on highway mpg versus that non-Hybrid version.  The Honda Accord Hybrid shows a 25% improvement on city and 13% improvement on highway versus the non-Hybrid.  In absolute terms, the Camry Hybrid gets the best city mileage and the Accord Hybrid the best highway mileage.  Even if the price increment over the base engine for the GM system is lower than for either Toyota or Honda, the long term hassles (complexity related reliability issues, increased maintenance costs) as well as the price premium on the vehicle don’t make it worth the tiny fuel efficiency improvement.  If I buy a hybrid it will be to gain a significant improvement in fuel economy, not because I want to make a social statement.  On a similarly weird note, one of the ways GM improved mileage in the hybrid versions of the Tahoe and Yukon SUVs was to shave a few hundred pounds from the base vehicle (which offset the weight of the hybrid system).  Put those weight reductions back into the base vehicle and (a) you’ll do more to improve fleet MPG than you’ll get from trying to sell the hybrid and (b) the fuel economy difference between the non-Hybrid and then Hybrid will once again be trivial.

Posted in Energy | 2 Comments

Rural America is adapting to rising fuel prices

Posted on May 22, 2008 by halberenson

Three years ago, with gas prices on the rise, one of my friends got tired of pouring $ into her F250 for going to/from work, shopping, etc.  She absolutely needed the F250 to pull her horse trailer, but it was paid off.  So she put it in her garage for the occasions when it was really needed and bought a Mazda 3 for most of her driving.  You can imagine the reduction in her annual gasoline consumption.  Likewise, we have a Chevy Suburban for hauling our horse trailer.  Three years ago I was also using it about 90 miles a day to commute to work.  I didn’t make as dramatic a switch as my friend, but I replaced my main ride a few months after she did and now get about 50% better fuel mileage than I did with the Suburban.  My wife made a more subtle move recently, as she switched within the same category, resulting in a 20% mpg improvement.  And I just learned our horse trainer relegated her F250 to limited duty in favor of a Subaru.

Rural America is adapting.  The most interesting trend is that those of us who need a large SUV or truck aren’t going to get rid of them.  But we are going to find ways stop using them for our daily travel.  There are lots of implications from this.  For one, actual fuel economy in the U.S. may grow much faster than predicted (or that appears in the official numbers) because although the fleet still contains many inefficient vehicles they aren’t driven much.   On the good side (for the consumer), these trucks will last us a lot longer than planned.  I certainly would have replaced our 2001 Suburban already if it were still being used on a daily basis.  Now it is very likely we won’t replace it until 2011 or beyond.  That’s bad for auto manufacturers.  But there is something even worse.  I purchased the 2001 Suburban fully loaded.  When I replace it, since I know I won’t be using it very much, I’m likely to go for a more stripped-down vehicle.  There goes a major reason that big SUVs and trucks have been so profitable for the manufacturers.

On a sadder note, I’d love to use Biodiesel in the two tractors we have on our ranch.  It wouldn’t save a lot of oil in absolute terms, but it would be a pretty painless change at a time when every gallon counts.  Unfortunately, the nearest source of Biodiesel is so far away (and out of the way) that we’d burn up the savings in the extra fuel required to acquire the biodiesel!  It’s become quite easy to find E-85 where I live, although I have no vehicles capable of using it.  But B5, B20, or B100?  No way.

Posted in Energy | Comments Off on Rural America is adapting to rising fuel prices