Michael Specht

Microsoft’s Home Invasion

Yesterday at CES Bill Gates announced the launch Windows Home Server designed as a headless server to server content across your home network, stream media to Media Centre Extenders, including my favourite the XBox 360 and provide automated backups. Cool!

Based on the buzz going around it seems that you will be able to connect terabytes of data as a single virtual drive, even connect to your server from elsewhere on the internet, checks the security status of the different computers on your home network (I assume it will alert you if something is wrong and I hope it downloads patches once and distributes them across the network saving on bandwidth.

The server will run on Intel and AMD with HP being the first supplier confirmed to be shipping a product in the second half of 2007.

For some more good information check out All about Microsoft, Charlie Kindel from the Windows Home Server team, and Inside Microsoft.

For someone in the process of digitising all of our content and with the XBox 360 quickly replacing the need for much else in the living room I am interested. I wonder where is the catch? I guess I will need to wait until either a beta version or the general release later this year. Although I suspect the catch will be that I will need one PC with Vista Ultimate according to Nathan Weinberg from Inside Microsoft.

Looking for a hosting provider

Hi readers!

A quick question, if you can help, I am looking at my hosting provider and if I should change. Why just because I have had them since Sept 2005 so time just to review and make sure there is nothing better out there.

I need:-

Ability to host WordPress MU
At least 10 MySQL Databases
5 Parked Domains
4 Add on Domains
4 GB Disk
about 10 GB bandwidth

Thanks in advance and let me know if you have any thoughts?

An organiser to keep the family organised

Last year while at a market or school fete I picked up a flyer for Schoolwise an filing/organisation system for families. What struck me was how simple the product was and how practical it looked. An offline product it is structured around the 5 sections (almost contexts) Calendar, School, Activities, Phone Lists and Personal. Within each section are different forms and plastic folders to help organise the constant flow of paperwork that is generated around kids, their school and activities.

The school section for example has forms for Child Care, Kindergarten, Primary School Details, teacher contacts, space for Absentee forms.

My first thought was how could this be put online! Of course some of the simplicity and usability would be reduced. For example the Business Card Holder, or Christmas Present List which is designed for you to have a plastic folder behind it to store the receipts in case something needs returning. But a prepackaged online tool linked with a calendar, contact list and to do’s would be very nice. You could probably build one with JotSpot.

The Jobster weight loss program

What a crappy way to start the year, without a job! Well that’s what 60 people over at Seattle based Jobster are now facing. Obviously when a high profiled company in the recruitment business cuts jobs it is going to be newsworthy to many people. And while many knew it was coming it is never an easy experience for all concerned on both sides of the table.

I am not going to go into any details on what I think about the whole thing today, maybe later. But the Recruiting Animal over at Recruiting Bloggers is offering to post profiles of any ex-Jobsters who are now looking for work. Great idea! So in the interest of reuse, sharing, and remix I have thrown my hat into the ring to host post as well.

Any ex-Jobster out there who needs a free place to post a profile drop me a line.

eStarling WiFi Photo frame

Yesterday I received my new eStarling WiFi Photo frame from ThinkGeek and opened it up with much excitement, only to be dismayed when I could not get it working on our office WiFi network, you need a connection to configure or so I thought.

Then last night I tried again at home without any luck. The documentation being shipped with the product was very poor with not a lot more on their web site. So I did couple of Google searches only to turn up people having similar problems. First thought I have been duped! I knew there was some sort of power supply issue that ThinkGeek had emailed me about during the Christmas break.

Anyway before shooting off blog post I thought let me give them the benefit of the doubt. So I emailed their support team. Crossed my fingers and hoped I had not wasted US$250.

Yesterday morning I had an email asking a question about my question, I replied and got an answer within 30 minutes. It seems some of the frames had had their internal memory erased during shipping, a quick re-format and I was on my way!

Now to go through the final setup steps when I get some more time!

Update: I had a spare couple of minutes after I posted so I turned the frame back on. After waiting for a while with a message “Enabling Media” some photos from my Flickr account started to roll in!

Interesting blog statistics (well to me at least)

Having a very slow day, we had a bit of a late night, so I thought I would review some statistics on my blog for the last year.

Total posts 234, down from 310 last year.
The most commented on post How not to recruit Jeremy Zawodny, or anyone else for that matter, 20 comments, which is also the highest number of comments on the blog overall.
The average number of comments is 1.8 per post.
The highest viewed post (not including my views) was the post on More windsurfing with 1515 views in the last couple of weeks. Which is weird but hey I’m not one to doubt the numbers.
The highest number of views ever is the post on The keys to your data with 5494 which was posted back in Sept 2005. Strangely enough no one has commented on this post.
The average number of views 569 per post.

The top 10 commented on posts for 2006 were:-

The top 10 viewed posts for 2006 were:-

I wonder what 2007 will hold for the blog?

Welcome to 2007

Just going through the 100 odd photos we took from last night most are very average, our son took lots of the boat parade down Sydney Harbour. He discovered if you move the camera the lights from the boats turn into wiggly lines, so he then took about 20 trying to get the best shapes.

Here are a couple of the 9pm fireworks and one of the boats.

5 things about me

Des Paroz has tagged me, so it is time to join in on the latest meme going around. Here are five things you might not know about me.

Born in Sydney to English parents.
Lived in Pupa New Guinea when I was a little tacker while my father worked on one of his archaeological digs.
Don’t really like lollies (candy for our international readers), chocolates and deserts, unless it it Sticky Date Pudding, Lemon Morang Pie or dark chocolate at least 70% coco!
I wear reading glasses and hope as time goes on this doesn’t turn into all-time wearing of glasses.
I was a Queen’s Scout and built a 5 minute HyperCard multimedia presentation using a Mac SE30 as part of my final activities.

Now time to tag for five other bloggers Double Dubs, Jason Davis, Mark Evans, Richard Giles, Kim Cameron.

Election Campaigns and Enterprise 2.0

Overnight John Edwards used YouTube as one of the means to announce his candidacy for the US Presidential elections. John Edwards has been using the internet and social/new media (podcasts, videocasts) for a while now so this is no surprise. For me this indicates a “tipping point” in the acceptance of “new media” and I predict we will see an even bigger take up of these tools in 2007 than we did in 2006.

I have been following a number of conversations in the closing days of 2006 on Enterprise 2.0 and the New Presence both of which will have profound impact on our organisations, similar to the social changes that have been taking place in the last couple of years in the consumer space.

However I also feel that 2007 is going to be a year of consolidation for the consumer facing tools and services, many will be absorbed and some will go out of business. How many social networking tools do we really need, and why won’t they use the standards in place to help us transport our data between services? How many blogs can support job boards effectively? Will Google supplant all other vertical search engines finally? (I have been hoping for this one for 2 years now.)
All I can only hope that the vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space learn and try to jump over some of the same hurdles and not run straight into them.

You’ll find physician jobs on The Recruiter.com.

The post Christmas relax

I am sitting here at my mother’s in Sydney, unlimited WiFi, the cricket on, and generally catching up on things. Been reading my feeds. Catching up on some books. Researching a new digital camera as a little present for the grown ups in the house. It is great to relax after a busy few days catching up with the family for Christmas.
The weather is very nice and makes we kind of wish I had my windsurfer and could get out to work off a few Christmas pounds. In the meantime I will have to do with some pictures and videos from Winsurfing The East End and The Peconic Puffin.