FIOS ordered!
They’re supposed to be sending someone over to install Verizon FIOS service at my place next Wednesday Friday. 15mbps up, 15mbps down. Just the way the internet was meant to be. And hopefully, without the Torrent-stifling connection-dropping level of service that Comcast has been supplying for a while now.
If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista, or a 64-bit version of WDS 3.x on Windows XP/2003, you may notice that the new Office 2007 document formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc) don’t show up when you search using the “Documents” filter in the search UI, or the kind:document Advanced Query Syntax.
This is a known issue with the 64-bit property system, and happens because the 64-bit shell only looks in the 64-bit section of the registry for a set of keys that map file extensions to various “kinds” for filetypes that don’t emit their own “kind” information. Because Office 2007 is a 32-bit application, it registers its kinds in the 32-bit section of the registry, where the shell never sees it.
In a future release, the shell / search engine will be updated to better handle this situation. For now, I have uploaded a .reg file which will fix the KindMap for Office 2007 documents on 64-bit machines.
Disclaimer Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall your operating system. I cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.
A poor SP1 comparison (updated)
As I read up on the latest TechMeme news this morning I saw a headline that didn’t seem quite right, “Vista SP1 a Performance Dud” it said. Intrigued, I clicked on the link and discovered an entire blog devoted to rather poor performance testing and entirely unhelpful rants.
The author of the SP1 comparison claims to have run the SP1 “RC1 Preview” build on a virtual machine to compare its performance in various tasks against that of an unpatched RTM system. I assume by “unpatched” he means no updates at all – as there are several “pre-SP1” hotfixes out there that will undoubtedly make it more difficult to quantify the degree of difference between Vista and Vista SP1.
So what were the various tasks he compared? Apparently, he used two scripted productivity benchmarks I’ve never heard of. One drives Office 2007 through various tasks, and the other is supposed to measure multitasking performance by exercising “ADO, MAPI, and WMP.”
The author then notices a 1-2% performance improvement, and goes on to say that Vista SP1 is a “performance dud.”
The problems
Virtualization. Running performance tests in a virtual machine is good for one thing: Measuring performance of the virtual machine. It is far from an accurate representation of what users will encounter on real hardware.- Coverage. The most substantial performance gains in SP1 affect the areas most hindered under Vista RTM: games, file operations (copy / move / delete), standby/resume, and citizenship of background services. It appears that none of these were tested in this comparison.
- Perceived Performance. While measured performance of file operations in Vista SP1 is significantly improved, even further gains exist in “perceived performance.” This is mainly due to improvements to Vista’s file transfer dialogs, which now begin reporting data about transfer rate and time much sooner and more accurately.
- Advertising. The comparison includes advertising for the benchmark tool used. Apparently it is developed by the same company publishing these results, and they want to rope you into signing up for some kind of membership. This increases my skepticism level slightly.
- Ranting. The entire blog seems devoted to ranting about Microsoft, complaining about Vista and Office, and making sweeping conclusions from insufficient data.
It is my hope that we’ll see more accurate comparisons start to spring up that clearly demonstrate the sometimes substantial performance gains included in SP1. Of course, SP1 isn’t going to turn a slow computer into a fast one. But if you’re facing compatibility issues that are affecting your system’s performance – it very well may help. In some areas, like gaming or copying/moving files via Explorer, everyone will notice the improvements.
Update: Apparently, virtualization wasn’t used in this comparison, only the post the compared Vista to XP. Still, results from that virtualized test are used as the basis for some of the conclusions of this article.
Catching up.
There’s been plenty to write about lately… the most obvious probably being WSUS accidentally installing WDS on unsuspecting machines and Google’s launch of OpenSocial. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now, so today I’m going to try and catch up a bit.
I hope that the WSUS issue has already been addressed for everybody affected by it. But for the record, here’s the post I made in a couple of forums the day it happened:
Here is my understanding of what happened. No one on the WDS product team knew about this until this morning (I was the first to know, because of an extremely impolite e-mail sent to my personal e-mail account).
- It was a screw-up, and everyone involved is deeply sorry about the trouble this has caused
- It ONLY affects WSUS systems where admins had approved an earlier WDS Update package
- The previous packages only updated existing WDS installations, and wouldn’t install it on new systems
- It was intentional to offer a package that would install WDS on machines without it
- It was NOT intentional for the approval of the previous update to be “inherited” by this package. This was a mistake in the publishing of this package to WSUS.
They have suspended deployment of the WDS package via WSUS while they fix the problem, and provided instructions for how admins can most easily disable and remove the WDS software.Believe me, Microsoft and the WDS team did not intend for this behavior. There was never any secret plan to force WDS onto unsuspecting machines. It was simply an error in the WSUS publishing process, which everyone deeply regrets.
As someone who used to work in IT, I feel the pain of these admins. This is also pretty embarassing for our team even though it could have happened to any group at Microsoft, as the WSUS publishing process is completely out of our control. That said, please don’t think that anyone here is taking this mistake lightly.
Even though our official responses may have appeared slow throughout the day, you can be sure that today was a non-stop fire drill for all involved. Once we identified and understood the problem, it took time to coordinate an official response and go through all the necessary approval processes. Unfortunate as that is, it’s the reality of a business this size, and our guys did their best to push through it and get this handled as best as we could after figuring out what happened.
For any further details, I refer you to the WSUS Blog.
I’m confused. Dave Winer seems to be complaining about Facebook for not letting him take his address book out of Facebook and onto his computer or mobile device.
Does he know anything about Facebook? Maybe the fact that you can take your address book information anywhere using their API? For instance, there’s a handy tool for sync’ing Facebook with Outlook. There are also other cool tools and plug-ins like one that syncs with iPhoto, maintaining all your photo metadata.
I don’t see why you couldn’t use the same API to export your address book data to just about anywhere. Strange that Winer wouldn’t mention this, though. Hey Dave – care to clarify what you’re on about?
UPDATE: As a couple of my co-workers and others pointed out, there is a major limitation in the Facebook API that I was unaware of. I assumed that the Outlook tool actually imported all of your contacts’ data, when in fact it cannot export e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or street addresses (just city, state, and zip code).
Obviously that’s a pretty big limitation, and reaffirms what Winer was saying (though I do think he should have been more clear and included these details in his post). I hope Facebook reconsiders that decision. If they’re just waiting until their platform is more proven to prevent security + privacy issues, that’s cool with me. But if they’re doing it to lock you into their service, I’d very much prefer they not. I don’t think they need to lock up your contact information to keep you hooked into Facebook, as they have plenty of other ways in which users become invested in their service and platform.
One of my favorite bands, Radiohead, is now being joined by Oasis, Jamiroquai, and others who are all choosing to circumvent the established record industry and actually give away their albums on their own websites, free of charge.
Could this be the beginning of the end for the obsolete conglomorate known as the RIAA? At the very least, I think it’s going to redefine their purpose in a way that won’t make those sue-happy dinosaurs happy. Good riddance, I say. They had their chance to get a clue and give users what they want. Instead they treated their customers like the enemy and have tried to squeeze every last penny out of something that costs them nothing via extortion and price fixing. Now this organization has outlived its usefulness, and bands are realizing it.
Seattle drivers take bad to a new level
Check it out at Seattle PI: Seattle drivers take bad to a new level.
Of course, I’ve known this since I moved here. And you probably know it if you read this blog. But it’s nice to more public acknowledgement of the problem.
Home
Last night I returned to Seattle after nearly 20 hours of straight flying (less than an hour layover in London, spent in a security line and then running through the terminal). That was from Nairobi, Kenya – despite the fact that my trip home began at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda.
After leaving Entebbe Thursday morning, our plane encountered a problem en route, and we had to turn back. After circling Entebbe for two hours to burn fuel so that we could land, we diverted to Nairobi as apparently they were better prepared to handle 200 some odd hungry, tired, and somewhat frustrated passengers. The British Airways crew on the plane did an admirable job handling the problem. The ground people in Nairobi were slightly less efficient / communicative, but they got us all put up in hotels and I got on a plane to London first thing the next morning (though to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a full day to look around Nairobi, having never been to Kenya before).
So I got in at about 7:15 last night, and I think it was 8ish when I made it through customs. Despite all that travelling, I was quite restless, and after a nice shower and change of clothes – I went out and met a couple friends in Seattle.
Being home is strange.
I’m happy to be back, and the nice cool weather in Seattle is certainly appeciated. I’m enjoying fairly everyday things a great deal (especially food – from a Panera sandwich I had for lunch, to the latte I’m sipping at Kahili right now). The comforts of my bed, shower, laundry machines, and the lack of mosquitos and other bothersome insects are all… well, wonderful.
On the other hand, I find my mind continually drifting back to Africa. And in strange ways. Sometimes it’s expected… seeing my car in the garage didn’t necessarily inspire something I’d call guilt, but did invite thoughts about how many villages could be fed for how long off of its value. The same thing happened earlier today when I bought a sandwich and iced tea for about $8 or so. That’s roughly two months rent for some of the widows I met around Mafubira. Two months rent. For my chicken caesar sandwich. It’s just weird.
Then there are thoughts I didn’t really expect. I haven’t really decided what I think of these thoughts… but I continually find myself seeing or doing something and thinking, “What would Pastor Nelson think of this?” (or John Mark, Irene, little Richard, Kitembo, etc). What would they think of the cars on the street, the clothes people wear, the houses, the shops, the food, the phones, or the art (and the “art”) on Kahili’s walls.
One thing that struck me very quickly upon entering Uganda was that life, in so many fundamental ways, really isn’t all that different. As comfortable as we are here in the US with our nice houses, cars, computers, etc – they don’t change how life is basically lived. We still sleep at night, eat a few times each day, wear clothes to keep us warm, put roofs over our heads to keep us dry. Kids still play games with their friends and run around outside. People still greet each other, talk about the weather, drop-in for tea or host guests for dinner. Life is pretty much life wherever you go.
Poverty, it seems, is not.
What I mean to say is that I don’t feel bad for those living in Uganda or any part of Africa who are healthy and earn enough money to take care of their families. I don’t think they’d want me to. Maybe their house is small, they don’t own a car or computer, and they do their laundry by hand. In the US that might seem like a tough place to be. But they’re doing okay, they’re able to live and be happy, and hopefully give their children the opportunity to grow up to be happy as well.
What breaks my heart is that even in a place where $8 buys two months rent, there are so few people who can even manage that. There are children living without even a proper a latrine, who have to walk a mile just to fetch water (that isn’t even clean) to bring to their house made of sticks and mud. I met a widow who couldn’t walk, suffering from Polio, obviously unable to afford proper vaccination.
Then there are the things in Uganda that seem so out of place in all this. The unending plethora of Coca Cola advertising being the first example I noticed. Something about it just felt wrong to me.
I should probably gather my thoughts more before I keep ranting… I’m not even sure at the moment what my point is. I think I have a few of them to make, it’s just going to take some time I guess. Anyway, I meant to be working on getting some pictures and videos from the trip up on the blog or Tusubira site, so I’m going to go do that for a bit. More later for sure.
In Uganda!
I meant to post something here before I left… oops! Anyway, we all made it here safe and sound and so far things are going great. Uganda is beautiful, the people are amazing, and the team I’m with is just great. I was a little nervous about being the only non-religious team member, but it hasn’t been a problem at all and I don’t think it will be. Anyway, that’s a topic for another time… I just wanted to post something here to refer you over to the team blog:
We’re trying to have someone update it every day (we were thwarted last night by a database problem, but BlueHost took care of it quickly). If you want to track our experiences, or learn more about the trip, go read up there!
I’ll be home on September 7th. Until then…
iPhone apps in your Start menu!
Today comes the first Start++ update since May. Long overdue, perhaps – but I hope worth the wait 🙂 As I teased earlier, a major new feature available in 0.7 is the ability to turn many iPhone web apps into Start Gadgets. There are more examples on the Start++ home page. But here’s another:
Just like previous Start++ customizations, these can be exported and shared on BrandonTools.com – in fact, I’ve already created a place to share them with others (and you can subscribe via RSS to see when new ones are added!). Setting one up isn’t too difficult if you’re familiar with how these kinds of web apps work. Below is what the gadget building UI looks like:
(Click to enlarge)
Note that Start++ is still in beta, and that the capabilities of Start++ Start Gadgets will continue to grow.
So what are you waiting for? Go grab the download.