After finishing some laundry and cracking open The Four Steps to the Epiphany, I decided to add two, 2GB DIMMs to my wife’s Windows 7 desktop.  After inserting the memory, Windows 7 booted and proceeded to fry the hard drive (corrupting at least the boot record, likely more).  I removed the memory and spent the rest of the day attempting to perform a bare-metal restore from our newly purchased HP EX490 Windows Home Server.  Thank goodness for backups!

The Good News: Successfully restored Pokin’s machine from the WHS backup (Time Machine-like, pretty slick).

The Bad News: Getting the restore started took about 10 hours.

In no particular order, here’s everything I learned.  If there’s anything missing, please leave a comment below.  Hope this helps!

Creating a WHS Restore CD or USB Key

Restoring Windows from a Windows Home Server is done using the Windows Home Server Computer Restore CD (download from Microsoft).

Alternatively, you can extract the ISO to USB key if the machine doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive (e.g. netbooks) or you prefer the speed of a fast key.  I would suggest using a USB key since it will likely take a few attempts to get your network drivers right during the restore wizard and you don’t want to have to deal with re-burning CDs.  Plus, most keys have activity lights on them so you can see the key is getting used during those looong pauses while the WHS restore does who-knows-what.

For some, creating a CD/USB key and booting is all you need to do.  The WHS restore wizard kicks in (it takes a very long time to process, be patient) and you can stop reading here.  If that doesn’t work, read on…

WHS kindly backs up your critical drivers if you have automated backup turned on.  These files are stored with your backup on the WHS, so using another PC you can extract the drivers on to your bootable CD/USB key and the WHS restore wizard will find them during restore.  Unfortunately, there is a problem here – the WHS restore CD is 32-bit.  If you are restoring a 64-bit flavor of Windows, the drivers that WHS stores with your backup are… not that useful.  Microsoft mentions this caveat in their Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore.  You mean you haven’t read it? :)

Even if the WHS finds your drivers, that means almost nothing.  It reportedly found the drivers for my “Atheros AR8121 PCI-E Ethernet Controller” and did not properly install or configure them.  How’s this as a backdoor?  Click on help during the restore wizard, right-click “View source” on a help page which opens Notepad.  In Notepad go to File->Open, find your driver’s setup.exe, right click “open”.  Yes, this was the only way I could get my NIC drivers loaded.  Credit goes to someone in the MS support forums, which I can’t find (sorry!).

The big takeaway is that you really should prepare (and test!) the WHS restore CD or USB key in advance.  Boot the CD and get to the point where your network is up and you can see the WHS.  You don’t want to be going through this while freaking out about your crashed drives!

General Restore Tips

• Be sure your Windows PCs are doing full backups every night.  That saved us.  The prospect of losing a day’s worth of work isn’t much to be concerned with, especially on a home PC.  I suppose that excludes things like term papers the day before ;)  Once you get past a day, it’s difficult to reason about what exactly you’re missing.  We’re backing up from 3am to 6am nightly.
• If you’re going to be doing a bare-metal restore from the WHS, buy a 100′ cable ($25 at Fry’s) and plug your computer into your wireless access point, assuming the WHS is wired up as well.  Technically, restores are not supported over wireless and besides – they’re terribly slow.  My wife’s restore was ~250GB and it took so long we left it on overnight (this was wired too!).
• Wireless security is not supported during a restore.  You won’t have a wireless network UI to configure wireless security, and it needs to be on the same subnet as the WHS.  Yet another reason to go wired!
• During restore, the WHS does not like other backups or restores happening and (I think) this includes Time Machine.

- Councillor Hamann to Neo

For the uninitiated, Netflix takes a guess at whether or not you’ll like a movie and indicates that guess by the number of red stars present below a movie (yellow stars represent your ratings, none of which appear in the image that follows).

Here’s an example (note: I have no idea what these movies are, or what they’re about).

Let’s imagine Netflix as a helpful assistant, and how that conversation would go.

Rob: “I have a few hours to kill for a layover and free wifi.  Computer, I’ve told you what I think of 1,004 movies and I’m not sure what’s been recently released.  Can you suggest some?”
Assistant: “Sure Rob, I’d be happy to.  Here are 5 movies.”
Rob: “Thank you computer.  Actually after looking at these movies, I’m not sure I’d like to watch any of them.  Gallipoli isn’t quite the war movie I enjoy.  The others aren’t even close to the types of movies I would be interested in.”
Assistant: “That’s what I suspected before I showed them to  you.”

An awkward interaction.

Rather than display 5 movies it thinks I’ll rate “Hated It” or “Didn’t Like It”, is there another alternative?

According to Wikipedia, in November 2008 there were over 17,000 titles in the Netflix Instant catalog.  Netflix is certainly willing to show me older movies that have just become available instantly (e.g. 1981’s Gallipoli).  How about continuing backwards in reverse chronological order until it finds things five items (to fill one page width) it thinks I’d rate at least three stars?

Put another way, I’d like to say “Computer, when you think I’ll rate something one or two stars you’ve been correct so often I wish you wouldn’t second guess yourself.  I’ve already hired you and put in the effort to tell you over 1000 of my preferences.  That’s a vote of confidence that in your ability to recommend movies.  Have the courage of your convictions to avoid showing me movies I won’t enjoy.”

I’ve taken the time to rate over 1000 movies.  If I didn’t at least somewhat find the Netflix recommendation system helpful, I wouldn’t have done that.  I’d like Netflix to respect that time by choosing to avoid showing me movies it guesses I will either “Hate” or “Not Like”.

Back to Valparaiso and the Hampton Inn: one thing every hotel guest does is figure out how to take a shower or bath with a specific set of controls they likely haven’t used before.  Here’s a picture of the faucet from our room.

Would you think that the shower is dispensing hot or cold?  I say “cold” as the larger hand closer to me is pointing towards the blue notches on the dial with the blue “C” prominently displayed.

Let’s take another look at the dial, this time head on:

From this angle, the dial forms an arrow with the tip narrowing towards the red “H”.  Looking at the dial head on, I would have correctly guessed that hot water was on tap.

When you turn on the shower, do you stare straight at the faucet?  If so, you are also the kind of person who likes to be sprayed in the face with ice cold water.  You probably aren’t that kind of person :-)

Why do we have faucets whose behaviour is not predictable from both in and outside the shower stall?

What’s strange is that I doubt faucet designers haven’t bathed before.  Is it possible that our own experiences as designers aren’t sufficient for the task of design?

In the meantime, my Hong Kong, May 2009 set!

Off to Toronto for the Labor Day weekend!

Whatever the exact dates, the computer industry is so anxious to see what Apple introduces that it has held off on competing designs until Apple CEO Steve Jobs gives the device his final blessing. “It’s close enough now to a final design that in Asia, there’s no other product in the waiting room or in the bullpen,” said the analyst. “There are dozens of ODMs [original device makers] making products for Lenovo and other PC makers that are all waiting to see what the Apple product is.”

Granted this is only a rumor, it seems as though manufacturers are clearing the pipeline so they can quickly ramp up knock-off production.  With all of Apple’s success, I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to them that making desirable hardware is only part of what Apple does so well.  If you can’t compete on design and desirability throughout the entire product ecosystem (hardware, software, packaging, experience), then don’t.  If your company isn’t design-driven, creating a well-engineered object won’t get you much – ask Motorola about the RAZR!  Consider competing where you have an advantage – cost, for example.

First unfold the Metadata panel in the Library module, with the Default metadata set.

Second, locate the Capture Time (it’s about halfway down) and click the Edit Capture Time button.  The capture time is shown as <mixed> because I have multiple images selected.

The Edit Capture Time window appears:

Select the second option and select the appropriate time zone modifier.

If you’re traveling to the family reunion in Ohio, it’s a straightforward conversion from Pacific to Eastern (Eastern is 3 hours ahead).  When you’re traveling halfway around the world, it’s not quite as obvious.

So how did I arrive at +16?  To get from PST to HKT, you need to fast-forward 16 hours.

• Pacific Standard Time (PST) is UTC-8. 
• Hong Kong Time (HKT) is UTC+8.
• -8 + ? = +8.
• ? = 16.

I realize this dialog is doing double or triple duty, allowing you to modify the time in various ways although I don’t understand the inflection.  How many times do you want to modify the capture time to a specific time, especially in batch selection?

If you’re selecting the “Time Zone Adjust” option, where are the time zones?  Or even better, a map like when you choose your time zone in the Windows or OS X date/time settings?  Really, that’s what time zone selection is – a poor man’s “Where I am” and “Where I was”.

It’s probably safe to assume the original time was captured in the (incorrect) Lightroom time zone.  We have to make this assumption because the EXIF capture time is ambiguous, as it does not allow recording of the time zone.  There is no reasonable default for the corrected time.

Fixing time zone offset is one of those things I do rarely although when I need to do it, it’s VERY important to me.  Forcing me to do time zone math seems out of place in a streamlined environment like Lightroom.