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What Microsoft needs to do to with phones

Jonathan Puddle — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:17:44 +0000

Ars Technica has a fantastic write-up on why Microsoft is irrelevant in the phone market, and what they need to do to fix that.

…if the company wants to achieve any relevance in this market, it needs to stop acting like a software company, and start acting like a consumer electronics company. It learned that lesson with Zune. It knew it was the only option with Xbox. It needs to do the same for phones.

The forest makes you healthy

Jonathan Puddle — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:38:05 +0000

Since moving to Finland, where our city is nestled amongst pine and birch forests, we’ve found ourselves feeling healthier and more energetic than ever before (Maija being pregnant, notwithstanding). Turns out… the forest is the one making us healthy! http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/07/0115240/Forest-Bathing-Considered-Healthful

I love that people are studying this stuff.

Twitter Updates for 2010-07-03

Jonathan Puddle — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:58:00 +0000

playing xbox with james #

New options for tablets and e-readers

Jonathan Puddle — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:54:48 +0000

Matt Mitchell shared this fantastic link with me, from Wired. Hahaha, check it out.

There was a time when your choice of book told people who you were, or at least who you wanted to be. Or, barring that, who you wanted people to think you wanted to be. Having an e-reader doesn’t say anything but “I read books and have power outlets in my home.” (Both admirable qualities, to be sure.)

Luckily for venture capitalists, I have ideas. It’s time for the world of e-readers to diversify so people can make a statement with their choice of electronic word-delivery device.

Twitter Updates for 2010-06-29

Jonathan Puddle — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:58:00 +0000

I uploaded a YouTube video — Ruuben Levi Eelis http://youtu.be/5CYjuvXqs4M?a #
I uploaded a YouTube video — Ruuben Levi Eelis – 2 http://youtu.be/oae9TQfc4Dc?a #

Ruuben Levi Eelis

Jonathan Puddle — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:35:31 +0000

Was born on Monday! What an awesome little dude he is. Maija has written a story about it already, though she’s still in the hospital.

Read it here.

Help me Obiwan Kenobi, you’re my only hope

Jonathan Puddle — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:24:21 +0000

Remember the 3D holograms that Star Wars popularized… and no one has been able to make work in real life yet? Well, it’s getting closer. Prepare to have your mind thoroughly blown, thanks to some researchers at the University of Southern California.

Flipping awesome.

A hunger to write

Jonathan Puddle — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:44:56 +0000

Over the last few months I’ve been developing a hunger to write again. Having a young family hugely impacts the time you have available for hobbies and personal fulfillment, so I’ve been trying (and generally failing) to make wise choices with the time I do have. God has provided for us in 3 awesome ways with a specific project that is consuming almost all of our evenings, at present.

The back story, is that our good friend Dave was approached to have his master’s thesis published as a book. A thesis and a book are two different things, and significant editing of the original would be required to make it more approachable, and slightly shorter. Having just moved to a recently earthquake ravaged country, he asked Maija and I if we would consider taking on the editing of his thesis. We were very honoured to be asked, and graciously accepted. We’re now a couple of days away from completion, so I’m taking a moment of repose.

Here are the 3 ways that God has blessed us through this:

We had recently been impressed by some friends who lent their personal expertise to some other friends for a project. Maija and I agreed that we wanted to be the same kind of people, and asked God for an opportunity. He provided!
I’ve been itching to write, and this provides me with an excellent opportunity. In the division of work, Maija tackles the high level concepts and ensures that we’re tossing out and keeping the right things. She’s the Masters student who studied discourse analysis, so this is exactly her speciality. That then leaves the rewording and paraphrasing to me, which is exactly what I want. God is good.
This is a paid gig, so it provides a nice little bonus for our work. We would honestly have done it without pay, due to the above 2 factors, but I’m not going to deny that this is a blessing also.

Once this project is done I really want to start a new writing project myself. I feel there is some momentum behind me… and I really don’t want that to die. Editing existing material is really a great way to get going though… a blank slate can be a terrifying thing. If anyone else has some interesting in collaboration writing, let’s do something!

Also… I’m reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s great!

New website design

Jonathan Puddle — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:55:52 +0000

I’ve been meaning to update my site design for a while, but haven’t found the chance or the right templates. I was installing the new WordPress 3 at work this week, and it reminded me that I needed to refresh my site. So thanks to the wonders of WordPress, here it is. This is roughly 1 hour of work by me, but lots of hard work by the wonderful people who created this theme and the plugins. Cheers!

Apple: The future is ours

Jonathan Puddle — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:49:08 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Apple (for the record, I’m not a fan of apples, either). I’ve used their products, I own their products, and I’ll be the first to agree that they make FANTASTIC products… but I still don’t like Apple. For those fanboys out there…I also don’t like Microsoft… though I like their products more than Apple’s. Here’s the thing though… I truly believe, all hating aside, that more people need to start seriously considering whether their computing future is one they are happy for Apple to control, or not. Because make no mistake… control is exactly what Apple stands for.

To get your application running on the iPhone or iPad computing platforms, you must go through Apple’s App Store… which is the most genius invention Apple have come up with, to date. How does Apple ensure quality of their products? They control the variables. Until recently those variables have been predominantly hardware elements, but not any longer. Apple now has the ability to control what software you run on your devices, and you have to through Apple to get it, so they know what you’re using. If Apple decides they don’t want a third party product that competes with one of their own titles to even be available on their platform… it’s gone. Which means you only have the illusion of choice, when choosing what software to run on your device.

Some years ago, Microsoft got itself into trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with it’s operating system, thereby making it the de-facto method of browsing the web. Apple, naturally, does exactly the same thing, 0nly they usually don’t get the flack for it that Microsoft does. This has always puzzled me… but I suppose with Apple owning such a relatively small market share of desktop computers, regulators haven’t really noticed that Apple will have 90 million mobile devices in use by years end, and up to 200 million iTunes dependent devices by end of 2011. That’s enough market share to do whatever the hell they want… because so many people are so completely sunk into the Apple ecosystem. They could launch a broadcasting network, for example. Naturally as the owners of the network, they wouldn’t broadcast anything they didn’t like. Though of course, once you’ve subscribed to your plans and programs… the rules might change a little.

Apple, once the revolutionary, once the kid sticking it to the man… is very swiftly becoming Big Brother. Their market value is now more than that of Microsoft. Do you really want anyone, be it Apple, Google, or your government, controlling your speech, your artistic freedom, or what you do with the tools you purchase? This is not me being a conspiracy theorist… I hate conspiracy theories… but when Apple says that Flash is dead for their platform… then anyone working in a creative industry should be concerned.

Most people don’t care, because the computers, phones, media players and so on that they rely on today are just so gorgeous, and work so well. But I care. I don’t own an iPhone, not because I don’t want one, but because I don’t need to be online at all hours of the day and night. My wife and my kid don’t need me to be on my work email at 3am, and they don’t need me to be updating Twitter when I’m on the toilet. I don’t own an iPad because I don’t need one… and buying something you don’t need seems irresponsible to me.

But for the rest of the consumer public… who are oh so happy with the latest anything… Apple will own the future. If that’s fine with you… great, but I’d rather not be the one paying the piper.

IIS quirks in Windows Server 2008 R2

Jonathan Puddle — Wed, 05 May 2010 11:06:09 +0000

We’ve been testing our first install of Server 2008 R2 this month, it will be replacing an aging webserver running Server 2003. IIS 7.5 brings with it a few new things, the most notable is a new interface. Less noticeable at first, is the lack of an SMTP server. Sometimes you need a quick and dirty SMTP server for delivering email from websites, and the Windows SMTP server is great for this. Coupled with the use of a smarthost for relaying, it can cover a lot of basic needs very well. Server 2008 R2 DOES actually include an SMTP server, but to access it you must install the SMTP components in the Server Manager, and then open up the IIS 6 manager (old school style), which allows you to manage the SMTP server.

Now, strangely, the first few times I tried to access the IIS 6 manager, it wouldn’t open. I received an error stating the wait operation had timed out. I checked everything I could, there was nothing useful in the event log… so eventually I removed IIS completely and then slowely re-added it piece by piece. Now everything works fine… though this morning I found the entire SMTP configuration had reset to default, so there may be something still a little wonky here.

I ran across another odd quirk, which seems to be default behaviour in IIS since 5.1, but I’m surprised that I’ve never encountered it before. The problem arose when we found Windows Authentication just wasn’t working when we set a hostname. Without a hostname it would work, but with a hostname we just kept getting prompted for authentication over and over again. The event log revealed a login failure with the status code 0xC000006D. A quick Google search turned up this document which explains it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

So we disabled the DNS check, and now the sites all work fine. Strange things… but this is why you test.

Who owns these basic words?

Jonathan Puddle — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:54:46 +0000

I was bored today and had some time on my hands… I spent that time finding out what sites were at interesting places like “yes.com” or “no.com” for example. You may enjoy the fruits of my research… but likely you won’t. My favourite pick is “down.com” for showing just a touch of character.

blue.com – news aggregator
red.com – Digital cinema company and community
yellow.com – yellowpages
black.com – Africa focussed news aggregator
white.com – domain squatter

off.com – Off! bug repellent
on.com – chat site like chatroullete

hot.com – Obama site?
cold.com – domain squatter

good.com – Technology firm
bad.com – domain squatter

yes.com – internet user radio and chat, like chatroullete meets last.fm
no.com – norwegian search engine using Google

up.com – Union Pacific railroad company
down.com – dictionary definitions for the word “down”

left.com – Left Field Productions video game company
right.com – Manpower and management services company
wrong.com – domain squatter

in.com – Yahoo style news and views
out.com – Out Magazine for gay culture

smart.com – Smart brand cars
dumb.com – popular games, jokes, sites and news

empty.com – coming soon…
full.com – domain squatter

cute.com – domain squatter
ugly.com – Comedy Central site for Ugly Americans
pretty.com – domain squatter
beautiful.com – Redirects to pg.com (Proctor and Gamble)

thin.com – domain squatter
thick.com – domain squatter

safe.com – Software company who make CAD/spatial design software
dangerous.com – Coming soon, site for extreme lifestyles including extreme sports, MMA, tattoos and piercings, clothing, etc.
safety.com – “the official safety site of the internet”, general safety tips
danger.com – Subsidiary of Microsoft, makes mobile communications devices

funny.com – “your destination for anything funny”, videos, pictures, jokes site
sad.com – domain squatter

Using terminal services with MS NBL in VMWare virtual machines

Jonathan Puddle — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:09:33 +0000

While in Toronto recently, we rebuilt our terminal server cluster taking advantage of a new VMWare host server. We had 2 physical servers for our TS cluster before, linked up with Microsoft’s NLB (Network Load Balancing). We provisioned 3 new VMs (we’ve got lots of headroom, so we can pass that to our users), and went about setting up the NLB service to cluster them. We quickly ran into some odd behaviour, so I’m going to list a couple of things to be aware of.

NLB can run in unicast or multicast mode. Each method has drawbacks and benefits, but if you’re running VMs then you’ll essentially HAVE to use multicast. This is due to the way unicast load balancing works, by establishing virtual MAC addresses for the adapters. When all of these adapters are virtual, your switches can get freaked out and won’t resolve traffic properly. Using multicast lets you get around this problem.
Changing between unicast and multicast can cause all manner of problems. If you’ve had your cluster set up for unicast, and you want to change it to multicast, make sure to remove the host IP (the one IP that all members of the cluster have in common) from the IP address mappings, BEFORE you change to multicast mode. Otherwise you’ll get IP conflicts and your network adapters will disable themselves.
When using multicast, you may run into problems getting your terminal services cluster onto the internet. Not all firewalls can handle the routing of multicast packets; we use pfsense, and it does not handle multicast traffic. Clients who try to connect from outside the LAN to the terminal server cluster behind the firewall don’t get anywhere, the connection just times out. This is because the firewall is dropping the multicast packets that are used to communicate with the TS cluster. To get around this, we just configured the firewall to send non-LAN clients to one specific member of the cluster; it’s not ideal, but it does the trick until pfsense bakes in the support for multicast traffic.

Settling into 2010

Jonathan Puddle — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:57:02 +0000

We’ve just got back from a 2 month trip to Toronto, where we had a lovely time with family and friends. But we are glad to be home, 2 months is a long time to be away… staying in other people’s homes, etc. Now we’re starting to feel like we can actually begin this year, which is a good feeling. We’ve got a few plans and goals for the year, which are exciting us now.

Such as:

- buying a car (looking for something used and cheap)
- saving for a trip to NZ for Christmas
- Maija finishing her thesis before the next baby comes
- welcoming another baby to the family
- starting to look for a new place to live (we will outgrow our current home in 12 months)

Fun times ahead!

New mix: Goodbye 2009

Jonathan Puddle — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:15:13 +0000

I was a bit behind schedule this year in getting my New Years’ mix down. My apologies to all… being a Dad is busy work sometimes. But the mix is ready for your listening pleasure! I chose to feature this mix on the Tastyfresh Homegrown podcast (which I am the host of), so it’s available exclusively from there. There was sooooo much good music this year, it just doesn’t stop!

Here’s the download link: http://www.tastyfresh.com/rokdownloads/podcasts/homegrown_ep10.mp3

Tracklist:
Calvin Harris – Flashback (Eric Prydz remix)
BT – Rose of Jericho (Sultan and Ned Shepard remix)
DBN ft. Madita – Asteroidz (Sultan and Ned Shepard remix)
Calvin Harris – I’m Not Alone (Deadmau5 remix)
Morgan Page – Fight For You (Beltek remix)
Jerome Isma-Ae – Hold that Sucker Down
Ferry Corsten feat Novastar – Because (Original Extended remix)
Chris Lake, Marco Lys – Violins
Neelix – Round One
Boom Jinx & Andrew Bayer – To The Six (Matt Lange Remix)
Super8 & Tab – Irufushi
Gareth Emery – Metropolis
Menno de Jong & Leon Bollier – Last Light Tonight (Extended mix)
Be: Gold – Starstruck (Jochen Miller remix)
Sunny Lax – Miss Grey (Adam Nickey remix)
Adam Szabo – Falcon
Josh Gabriel presents Winter Kills – Deep Down (alex morph remix)
Breakfast – Remember