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Monkeys

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there, another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have a C monkey please.”

The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He fitted a collar and leash, handed to the customer,saying, “That’ll be $5,000.”

The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled,the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said,“That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred pounds. Why did it cost so much? ”

The shopkeeper answered, “Ah,that monkey can program in C – very fast,tight code,no bugs,well worth the money.”

The tourist looked at a monkey in another cage. “Hey,that one’s even more expensive! $10,000! What does it do?”

“Oh,that one’s a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming,Visual C++, even some Java All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper. The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000.The tourist gasped to the shopkeeper, “That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?”

The shopkeeper replied, “Well, I haven’t actually seen it do anything, but it says it’s a project manager”.

– From “Clean, Funny Jokes” ( mariosalexandrou.com)

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Sometimes ‘good enough’ is good enough

Sometimes ‘good enough’ is good enough

My dad has a small number of themes he likes to dwell on, and his pontification on these items is at times epic.  One of these themes, the concept of ‘good enough’, has always seemed a bit disengenuine to me, as the term itself has a wide margin for interpretation – What’s good enough to me may not be good enough for you. This article from wired.com does a good job of explaining the current trend in ‘good enough’ thinking and mirrors alot of what my dad has had to say over the last many years.  My favorite part of the article however, is that, even as the RIAA continues to huff and puff in all directions, the writer refers to the problem of MP3s and declining CD sales as though it were merely a matter of history…

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Protect your data from yourself

Protect your data from yourself

Schneier talks about dealing with customs computer searches by encrypting your data with a random key.  It occurs to me that having Windows Home Server provides an easy alternative : don’t take your data with you in the first place.  Bring a throwaway netbook instead, and connect back home over the SSL VPN that is WHS remote connect, to get your data.  Save your data back over the VPN and if the Netbook gets impounded, just buy another one.

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Windows 7 : Capturing Analog Video

I’ve installed Windows 7 and now it’s time to get down to using it. Unfortunately, for all teh promises of ease of use, somethings are way harder than they need to be. Since one of the things that makes it hard is lack of real documentation, I thought I’d help by sharing a somewhat simple task that has been obfuscated in the pursuit of making things simpler.

Firstly, before we do anything, you have to download Windows Live Suite from the windows live site. Windows 7 doesn’t actually come with any of this software. I’m sure you can thank the US anti trust courts and their crownies for forcing this amazing decision on all of us. MS has made it a bit easier for us that get stuck with Big Brother making decisions on our behalf, by linking to the DL site directly from the Start menu when you first startup your new install. (Thanks for that Bill, or whoever you left in charge)

Once you’ve got the software, to capture video in Windows 7 from a direct connect video source, you must use Photo Gallery, not Movie Maker. Yes, I agree : this is counter intuitive. From Microsoft’s point of view however, movie maker is an aggregator of source materials and Photo Gallery is the storage and catalog of source materials. You put it into the catalogue before you use it. I will digress for just a moment to share a recommendation – change the name of Photo Gallery to Media gallery, or put a link to the Video Acquire Wizard from Movie Maker – or (wild idea here) do both!

With your Camera already plugged in and showing up in Printers and Devices, from Photo Gallery, click File -> ‘Import from a Camera or Scanner’ to start the wizard. You will be given a list of connected devices to choose from. Choose your camera and click Import. Now, in the Import dialog, give your clip a name and choose how you’d like to import video. For my purposes, I chose “Select Parts of your Video to Import” Your default location for video footage will be your My Videos folder. If you have redirected this folder to your WHS Users directory as I have, you will have to click More Options and set a new directory on the local hard drive. Once you’ve got your settings done, click next.

Ok now for the tricky part. For my setup I am using a Canon ZR65 Mini DV camcorder. The benefit of this setup is that it has a AV input and DV pass through capabilities make it a convenient Analog Video firewire capture device. Unfortunately, Windows Acquire Video Wizard, in a bid to be extra helpful will try to control the tape playback of the Canon or any firewire connected deivce for you. This is great if you’ve read this far and only have Mini DV to capture from – congrats – you can stop reading. For this rest of us though, this will cut off the analog video playback. There is however a simple solution.

Eject the Mini DV Tape

This disables Windows wanting to be helpful, as it detects no tape in the device, however the signal is still active and thus you can playback the analog video source plugged into the camera. Simply hit play, then click import and Windows will begin recording. Once your all done importing clips (Cataloging video) you can then go to Movie Maker to assemble the clips. I’ll leave that one for another day…

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Can’t see Windows Home Server from Client PC

Interesting issues today, reconfiguring some new machines on my network.  Encountered a situation where the client PC could see all other machines on the network through network neighborhood, and could see the UPnP services being offered by the WHS but couldn’t browse the fileserver.  UNC from command line worked fine, as did the shortcut installed by the connector software.  In applications where you can’t specify the name however (like iTunes “Add Folder” dialog) the server simply didn’t show up.

The solution was simple, though not easily explained.  I disabled IPv6 on the wireless connection used to connect to my network.  Perhaps, as WHS is based on Server2003, the interaction of IPV6 is preventing the fileserver from showing up, or perhaps IPV6 is disabled but dedtected by the client machine on that interface.  These are just guesses, but disabling IPV6 on the client corrected the issue immediately.