Category: Tech

Categories
Net Travel

Getting logged into Hotel Internet with Vista & IE 7

When Paula and I were trying to get logged into Courtyard’s Internet connection on Saturday we couldn’t get connected, the browser just spun it’s wheels then gave us a “page cannot be displayed” message.  The behavior was the same on both my laptop and Paula’s. 

The typical experience signing onto a commercial network is turn on your computer, open a web browser, request a page and you are magically redirected to a sign-in/sign-up page.  The redirect works in some cases (the Westin most recently) and not in others (Marriott).  For some reason some implementations work with Vista and some don’t.  I asked the hotel tech support to log me on from their end but then played with Paula’s computer to try to get hers logged in.

The solution ended up being fairly simple, I turned off protected mode in IE, logged into the hotel Internet, then turned protected mode back on again.

I suppose if you’re stuck in a hotel right now unable to log onto the hotel network you can’t read this.  Ah, the irony.

Categories
Hotmail Microsoft

The beta tag comes off Windows Live Hotmail

It was a long road, lots of research, lots of development, a private beta and two years of public beta… and now Windows Live Hotmail is officially out of beta.  I want to give a huge congrats to the team and I must say I kind of wish I could have been there.  I must admit, after having been there for the first two years of the process (and for six years total), I felt kind of sad seeing all the great pictures of the team posted on today’s blog entry. 

Though I’m sad I missed the end run, I don’t regret my move to Ireland one bit. Congratulations guys on a fantastic release!

Categories
Tech

Turning on AutoComplete to make IE’s history useful

For ages I’ve been annoyed by the IE history drop down which appears when you start typing an address. Here’s the thing, most of the work we do is stored on our SharePoint server at work. This means that if I start to type the URL of the server I’ll get a massive autocomplete list pop down in IE. This makes the recent history that drops down completely useless for me.

Now, however, thanks to Sean (via Omar) I have been shown the light. I followed the simple steps and my life is now better.

Quote

My Favorite (hidden) IE feature

Whenever I install Windows on a new PC (which in my daily work happens far more frequently than I care to admit), there’s one* setting that I always tweak before doing anything else:

Internet Options, Advanced tab, "Use inline AutoComplete"

What this does is enables autocomplete of URLs (and other commands) in the address bar, instead of just as a drop-down.

Here is an example. Let’s say I visit both the IEblog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie) and the RSS team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam) regularly.

The next time I go to the address bar, I type "blo". IE shows me this:

Then I hit the right arrow (essentially to accept the text it’s given me), and I type "r":

Press enter, and I’m at my favorite blog!

Bonus feature: this works in every address bar: explorer, the run dialog, and system-supplied open/save dialogs, and any app that uses the system edit control (and enables URL autocomplete).
Double bonus: this works in IE6 as well (but upgrade to IE7 now!).

Downside, you probably should be a touch typist before turning this on. If you’re not paying attention to the screen while you type, you may inadvertently navigate to something you didn’t want to. Windows developer guru and part-time Windows historian has blogged about this, so I don’t have to (note: you should read the comments to see the correction to how he describes the feature — it doesn’t change the basic point, however).

* Truth in advertising: there were two settings I always changed. The second was to turn off "reuse windows for launching shortcuts" — a highly annoying feature of IE6 that picked one of my open windows and changed the page being viewed whenever I clicked on a link in Outlook or elsewhere. It was designed to help users keep the number of windows being opened under control. But IE7’s tabs make that unnecessary, because now the default is to open a new tab in the same window. Both problems solved!

Categories
Blog

Blogging for the MTV generation

Web pages are complicated.  People want to share their life stories and pictures, but learning HTML is hard (ask Trina).  So the world of blogging was born. 

Blog software has made it very easy to set up and maintain your content, whether it be a running account of how all your cat’s hairballs look like past presidents, or something much, much less significant.  Blogs do, however, have the problem that they often get abandoned for great lengths of time (Dick’s blog comes to mind :D).

So, what’s today’s generation of zero-attention-span kids to do?  Sign up for twitter, of course.

follow Reeves at http://twitter.com

Twitter is, Don MacAskill appropriately called it, a service for microblogging.  It’s optimized for very short, simple posts.  It will even prompt you periodically via SMS or IM to find out what you’re doing.  After a quick setup you can add your mobile phone number and Twitter will send you an SMS every 24 hours if you haven’t updated (a reply to the SMS will post right to your twitter log).  You can also add twitter as an IM buddy if you’re using the right service.

It’s a fascinating little toy, with all the needed components to make it entertaining for all of about a week (friends lists, ease of use and cool little widgets to add to your other web pages).  For me, however, the signal to noise ratio is way too high to be useful.  There is a public timeline which is sure to get crowded with legitimate and illegitimate spam (when I checked there were two posts within minutes from BBC sports) and switching to a private timeline will require a set of friends as exhibitionistic as yourself.

Still… entertaining enough to play with for a while… though I won’t be able to afford to have the SMS notifications turned on (the closest local text is the UK).

Categories
Net

Feeling a lot less congested today

Speed test two

I spoke to BT today and they had me re-run the speed test.  It’s way better than it was a little over two weeks ago (2543 kb/s vs. 649 kb/s).  I still have no idea if it was contention, line noise or what. I suppose I now know who to call if the issue comes back (and that they’re responsive).

Categories
Design Net

Web 2.0 illustrated and explained

Web 2.0 isn’t a technology, it’s a concept: enhance the software (programs) with wetware (humans). WikiPedia, YouTube, Flickr and the like are thriving because the users are part of the equation; creating, editing, organizing and managing the content.

Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at KSU created a fantastic video which artfully illustrates Web 2.0.  It’s a fantastic romp through today’s digital landscape… but I’ll warn today’s TV generation… some reading is required.

 Via information aesthetics

Categories
Hardware Life

NOOOOO!!!! What?!?!?!? NOOOOO!!!!!

Okay… what have I learned today?

cutting drive wires

  1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
  2. Ignoring rule number 1 should only be proceeded by backing up your crap.
  3. For those who are too lazy or too confident to pay attention to either of the first two rules, this advice: don’t dick around with it… dummy.
  4. Don’t be a cheap bastard and use RAID striping instead of buying a full sized disk (unless you’re dealing with data that is totally expendable).
  5. It takes a really long time to rip 870+ CDs… you don’t want to imagine having to do it twice. 
  6. The perceived time it takes for Windows to start up increases in  logarithmic proportion to the amount of data you think you have just lost.
  7. System restore can save your butt.
  8. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (that deserves mentioning twice)

Okay, what ruined my day you ask?  This morning, before going into work, I did a quickie web search to see if there were Vista-compatible drivers for my RAID card.  This weekend I plan on installing Vista on my home machine and I realized I needed to lay some groundwork first… like making sure there were drivers for the various bits of hardware I have.  So, there are Vista drivers, Yay! 

So, genius boy here decides to download and install the new driver at 7:30 in the morning before going to work.  Heck, it’s for the card I have, no need to worry about something going wrong (sure, it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time).  A quick install and reboot later and my 500 gig music drive is suddenly two 250 gig, unreadable drives.  I almost cried.

Knowing I had to go to work and didn’t have time to futz with the damn thing I just shut down, kicked myself, packed up to go to work, then kicked myself again.

The worst part of it all was that as soon as I wasn’t focused on a task at work my mind would wander and …

“CRAP!!!! I SO SCREWED MYSELF!!!!”

If I had only bought two 500 gig drives instead four 250 gig drives the failure would have been no big deal… I’d have had two identical copies of my data (see rule number four above).  Given my RAID array wasn’t fully bullet-proof (and running just fine, thank you very much) I really shouldn’t have even played with it in the first place (see rule’s number one and three).  And so on…

All day I kept re-living my idiocy.  As soon as I could reasonably leave work I came straight home (panicking again every time my mind would wander at a stop light), dropped my coat just inside the front door and ran straight upstairs to sit down in front of my computer… the machine which I had so unceremoniously raped this morning.

I tried a couple of things, each requiring what seemed a stupendously long reboot time.  It’s amazing how painful it is to watch what usually seems a reasonably quick boot time when you’re imagining your entire CD collection going through a digital paper shredder.

In the end I did what I should have done first thing this morning, I used system restore to put my machine back in the state it was before I installed the drivers this morning.  Well, actually, what I should have done first thing this morning was poke myself in the eye with a pencil, and then kick myself for even considering updating the drivers for my RAID card when there was nothing wrong with it’s operation to begin with, followed by poking myself in the other eye to ensure I was unable to see well enough to screw myself. 

Honestly, sometimes I have the common sense of a small soap dish.

Categories
Net

I’m doing the math… and I think I’m getting short-changed

My DSL speed seems like it’s been going downhill, so I ran a speed test.

The rate I should be getting? 3072 kbp/s download, 384 kbp/s upload.  Now I have to sit on hold.  What a great way to spend the weekend.

Before you ask, I tried multiple tests on servers in Ireland, England and the US.  Reported download speed ranged from 175 kbps to 972 kpbs (upload was consistently around 300 kbps). 

“All of our agents are currently on calls.  Please hold and your call will be answered in rotation.”  GAH!

Categories
Microsoft Software

My new favorite Vista feature

I suppose I should start by telling you what my old favorite feature was… I’m not sure what it’s called but it allows you to navigate up and down folders much more quickly.  It’s great for going from one folder to another at the same level (e.g. from one folder of pictures to another).

Quick navigation in Vista

My NEW favorite feature comes courtesy of Omar’s blog: the shadow copy. Here’s the MS description of the feature:

Windows Vista now includes shadow copy functionality built in, which enables users to access previous versions of their documents, even when they are stored locally on their computer instead of on the network. Accessing the previous versions of a file you’re working with is easy.

What happened is I was bit by a bug which removed all the date taken information from the pictures I took over Christmas time.  Big deal?  Not to people who simply print their pictures… but for me it meant all the pictures were in random order on our web site.  I searched high and low for a tool to copy the date information from another part of the file and then remembered Omar’s post.  The process of restoring files was pretty straight-forward… and really made me happy work provides us with Windows Ultimate (unfortunately for home users, it’s not available on the consumer version).

For the curious, I made some screenshots of the process:

Shadow copy restore Shadow copy restore Shadow copy restore Shadow copy restore Shadow copy restore

Oh, also cool: if you get a Windows Home Server your backups on the server will show up there too.  Sweet!  Dang I want that cool round one! See the Digital Amnesia site for more info (presented in an entertaining fashion) or for a great demo, watch CJ’s video interview on 10.

Thanks Vista for the save (and thanks Omar for the pointer :)).

Categories
Microsoft

So… what does Reeves do?

I’ve moved to Ireland… Hotmail is in Mountain View, California.  The observant reader may put 2 & 2 together and think: “Hotmail has moved to Ireland!” Fortunately most people who read this blog are observant and  intelligent (you do read this blog, after all 😉 ). 

While my original plan was to bring some development resources with me to Ireland, I ended up instead joining up with a growing team here which is building components for a new web analytics project code named “Gatineau”.

Gatineau will be Microsoft’s entry in the the web analytics market.  While the nuts and bolts of the operation are in Redmond, here in Ireland we’re building some cool, extra bits to pile into the mix.  I wish I could provide some more detail as I’m really excited about what we’re doing (both here and in Redmond) but for now, things are under wraps.

One of our new planners, Ian, has provided a quick run down of what’s going on, it’s not a tell-all by any stretch, but it does give a bit more information.