Data centres to off-centre opinion

General Shortcuts 

Taskbar Shortcuts

Windows Explorer

Obviously these are based on the beta build and may (albeit unlikely) be cut/change for the RTM.

With the explosion of blogs and social networking sites over the last few years, its apparent (at least to me) that whoever creates a compelling aggregation service will be onto a winner. Facebook is getting there, you can already integrate it with Twitter, but what about all the other information sources we each use?

I consider aggregation from two perspectives; the publisher (me as an individual and my internet persona) and reader (me seeing everything my freinds & colleagues are up to).

Why do I need a publisher?

• I have several blogs each focused on a particular theme
• I have Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and numerous other online profiles
• I publish photos on my Flickr account, in my Facebook profile and in my Windows Live Photo Gallery
• I scroble music on Last.FM and I have a Zune profile

Few of these are connected, and many now offer competing services. Should I be uploading photos to my Facebook profile, my Flickr account or my Windows Live gallery? For me, the answer is all of them because each offer somthing unique. Flickr is great for “just sharing photos”, Facebook is great for sharing photos relating to some event and Windows Live is just plain easy with the local client (Windows Live Photo Gallery) and I tend to use it for my climbing photos. I want all these connected so anyone can see all my photos, nicely organised irrespective of the service they’re hosted on. The same applies for blogs, tweets etc; it makes it easy for you to see what I’m doing or thinking about. The converse of this is my desire to see everything my friends are up to, in one place. Aka, the reader aspect.

Whoever is able to pull together a social graph/aggregator like this, whilst still allowing the uniqueness of each service to be exposed (i.e. not attempting to replace each service, just provide a launch pad) will be onto a winner. They may even be one of the first to make money from social networking.

After writing this blog entry and searching for a suitable image, I found that Google are ahead of me and already have an API which could help a would-be developer build a social aggregator.

Spotify, the new on-demand music streaming service is an interesting (and in my opinion, innevitable) evolution of internet radio. Its idea is simple, install the client, create an account, type the name of an atrist, enjoy. Unlike Last.FM, you’re not forced to listen to your chosen artist interspersed with others, its U2 all the way (or whoever you chose).

From a technology standpoint, they’ve done nothing clever: iTunes and Zune basically do the same thing, only they deliver you an MP3/WMA/AAC rather than stream. Oh, and you have to pay for tracks you download from iTunes and Zune Marketplace.

What makes Spotify interesting is their business model; either listen to the odd add or pay a monthly subscription for ad-free listening. No doubt most users (me included) will be opting for the ad-funded version, it will be interesting to see how many tracks per ad Spotify settle on to make money. In other words, Spotify is to Music what Google is to search from a business perspective.

Now the clever part; if they’re able to profile their users, they will be able to target us with more relevant ads, which turns into revenue for them. If I were them, I’d be partnering with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to obtain user profile information. Which leads me to think they’ll be bought pretty soon. It may not be one of those three, I could see a media company picking them up, but rest assured, if they’re able to prove the business model works they’ll be bought, and soon.

Can Last.FM evolve to compete? Will MySpace, iTunes or Zune offer something similar? I don’t know, but I’m sure they’re watching, very closely.

I’ve known about Twittervision for a while; basically it plots twits on a map of the world in near real-time. Its fun to sit and watch for a minute or so, but I can’t help but think it needs some filtering and aggregation to make it truely useful.

For example, a filter/search box allowing you to enter a term would show you the relevant twits relating to that subject from around the world. Watching this for a few minutes (or even better, some ability to record and see a timeline) would show you what different parts of the world thought about the subject.

 I installed Windows 7 build 7000 about a month back and was impressed from day 1. OK, so I work for the company so I’m going to be a bit biased however Win7 is fast, the preview when you hover over a window on the taskbar is really intuitive and getting to network settings is a lot quicker. I miss the sidebar, and find the default Windows Key+E has change to display Library which is annoying. My Tosh Tecra M4 ran Vista like complete dog but Win7 is completely usable with no annoying pauses, it boots fast and sleeps quickly. The only bug I’ve experienced is when resuming from sleep the machine claims it cannot contact the default gateway on the Wifi network. The Troubleshoot Network wizard fixes this (basically by releasing and renewing the IP address lease), lets hope its gone in the final build.

Even running Windows 7 in a VM (Virtual PC or Hyper-V) is fast and totally usable, so it looks like all the optimisation and removal of some Vista features has paid dividens. Of course, Windows 7 benefits from all the Vista drivers that have been released over the last two years, something which Vista struggled with early on. I’ve even installed Win7 on my Media Centre and like the updated UI and greater configuration options which are available.

Whilst I have a LinkedIn profile, I’m not an addict. I’m not the sort of person who upon meeting someone new immediately sends them a LinkedIn invite. This makes expanding my network a long-term process, however I just stumbled on Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki. Even though most of the ten are relatviely obvious, its well worth a read. I immediately adopted a few of his recommendations.

From the 10th to 16th November, I was working in Silicon Valley with a global IT company based in San Jose. I’d been quite excited about the visit for a few weeks, both because I’d get to visit one of my favourite cities (San Francisco) and because it was my first visit to the valley and Microsofs Silicon Valley Campus.

Despite its high-tech reputation, I’d heard Silicon Valley was basically a huge trading estate. I’d say it was more like a mixture of small businesses, light industry and massive corporate HQs. It felt far smaller than I’d expected with many companies on the list below within a 10 mile area.

Driving around, I mentally ticked off the companies I’d seen;

• Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale
• Marvell HQ, Santa Clara
• Atheros HQ, Santa Clara
• Citrix, Santa Clara
• NetApp HQ, Sunnyvale
• Cisco HQ, San Jose
• Juniper HQ, Sunnyvale
• Motorola, Sunnyvale
• Intel HQ, Santa Clara
• McAfee HQ, Santa Clara
• Broadcom, Sunnyvale
• Oracle HQ, Redwood
• LinkedIn HQ, Mountain View
• Google HQ, Mountain View
• HP HQ, Palo Alto
• Apple HQ, Cupertino
• Xerox PARC, Palo Alto

The most impressive HQs were Google and Oracle (seen from US101 rather than up close), the least impressive being Apple; for such a blue-chip company I’d expected a more open campus rather than a few multi-story office blocks.

I really liked Palo Alto and driving round PARC, it had a nice rural feel to it compared with the rest of the valley. It would be a great experience to live and work in Silicon Valley for a few years.

Its been years in development, and even internally information was scarce until Microsoft publicly announced the release of Windows Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in LA this week.

Codenamed RedDog, Windows Azure is a platform for developers to build applications which run inside Microsofts datacentres. This is in contrast to Amazon Web Services (AWS) which provide a computing platform. For example, using AWS you’ll need to build a virtual machine image and then upload this into AWS. Azure takes care of any virtual machines, letting the developer focus on the application and less on the plumbing.

There are quite a few posts providing details on Azure, I’d suggest you looking at this post from Mary-Jo Foley, the long-time Microsoft watcher whom I met last week.

Today, Azure is running in Microsoft’s Quincy facility, which I had the chance to visit in December last year despite winter storms, road closures and avalanches resulting in a 120mile journey taking around 7 hours. Mike Manos, the man at the top of Microsofts datacentre management tree allowed the BBC to film inside recently, the video can be seen here.

A few colleagues just shared a utility they use to automatically change thewir desktop background image at preset intervals, its called John’s Background Switcher (JBS). I’ve seen literally dozens of these type of utilities over the years and have not been impressed with any of them. Eitehr because their user interface was terrible or I didn’t trust the software not to by spyware. What I like about JBS is the number of sources you can configure for photos – it supports your photos in the the Piuctures folder of your computer plus a load of internet photo sharing sites, including Flickr. What more, you can tell it to use tags, so I’ve set it up on my laptop to display photos tagged with “mountains” it finds on Flickr.

Lets see if I keep this running on my laptop for long, or get annoyed with the number of average photos it finds…

I picked up my replacement laptop on Wednesday and yesterday used Windows Easy Transfer to move my settings and data across from the temporary Windows XP laptop. The process was really simple and I was impressed with how quickly it moved my 5.25Gb of data and settings (less than 45 minutes).

The only things which failed were a 2Gb Outlook PST file which seemed to get corrupted during the transfer (I just used a USB memory stick to copy this over again) and network printers (which I needed to delete and re-install). End to end, it took me about an hour to move off my old laptop onto the new one – complete with all my IE favourites, email, address book, documents and files, desktop settings etc etc etc. I used an Easy Transfer cable which connects the two computers via USB, but you could just as easily use the network or CD/DVD/External HD/USB memory stick.

So, next time you buy a new PC don’t go and waste money paying PC World to transfer files, and don’t fall for the salesman selling you some additional software – just use Windows Easy Transfer which is part of Vista and a free download for XP.