marypcbuk

While himself is writing away (write like the wind! so we can go out in the sun!), I decided to set up Live Mesh. I'd followed the link they handed out at Web 2.0 but I knew from the Mesh team that those invites had all been used up (my guess: Microsoft provisioned for all the folk at the show but it wasn't a hard URL to guess even if you didn't find it in a blog). My signup was pending, but once you're in you can invite people and they get to join the Mesh straight away, so Simon invited me and shared his writing folder.

He sent it to the Live ID I use for my main email address, which for reasons of complexity is set to US locale and for reasons of me being a bear of little brain I can't remember the password for. I don't normally need to remember it because I have it linked to the Live ID I use all the time, which is my Hotmail address. After a couple of guesses I thought, 'let's see how smart Mesh is' and signed in with the main Live ID instead. Mesh accepted it. I could install the software (tiny) and see Simon's folder - but not his devices, so good separation. I added a folder that I don't have set up with SyncToy to replicate back to the server because the path isn't straightforward and as it has conference presentations it's useful for Simon on the road. But I didn't want to share it back to his Gmail account because I couldn't remember the email. He was in the process of linking his Live ID 's so I invited his main email account. And when he accepted the invitation while he was logged in with his other Live ID (still with me at the back?), it worked - all the linked Live ID 's have access to the Mesh they're supposed to have access to.

Now we have folders we can see and choose to sync from each other's machines. They sync quickly - and with placeholders for any files that haven't synced yet. Files are replicated into the cloud (up to 5GB) but if there's a direct path from my PC to Simon's the connection goes that way for speed and you can sync files over 5GB to another Mesh endpoint as long as it has the disk space.

If I don't want to sync the files to my PC because I don't need to have them, I just need to have access to them - I can see them online, through the Live Desktop - a browser window that shows me files and folders. I can open a file onto my PC or save it onto my PC or upload a file myself. This is the most idiot-proof syncing and sharing system I've ever seen and I speak as a bona fide idiot before my first cup of coffee.

I can think of so many ways to use this - and this is just the demonstration app. What matters is that underlying synchronisation layer. I want Flickr to be a Mesh endpoint so I never explicitly use an uploader again; I just mark a folder for sync and every image with a 5-star rating goes up (or maybe every image goes up but the rated ones go in a set). I want this to sync OneNote notes to my phone (Windows Mobile and Nokia clients are on the way). I'd quite like it as a way of doing posts from my mobile to LiveJournal - it would leave me an archive that could also be synced to the Semagic archive folder for local backup. It will mean that when Simon downloads videos he doesn't have to move them onto the NAS by hand. A universal list of the widgets I like and what basic settings I want them to have for every new widget platform to snarf up instead of me saying 'Weather: London, San Jose, Seattle, Christchurch' by hand every time.

Yep. There may be heartbreak and throwing of china in my future (What do you mean you don't like mapped drives? Mapped drives are very important to me!) but for now, Live Mesh is my new shiny.

Hey - I like it enough not to save all this until I get paid to write about it!

Because we were playing a mediascape; it's a virtual real world GPS treasure hunt with added Whack a Mole. It was part of the latest London Girl Geek Dinner and it's huge fun. For full details with more pictures, see Mole at hole 2! No, hole 2!

I now have some of these on a GPS iPAQ including one where you help prisoners escape from the Tower of London and it would be a fun thing to do with a bunch of people. Whack a Mole is like rounders without a bat or ball and UXB is Battleship, Boggle and Mastermind with added beeping. On a serious note I think place-coded gaming will be a big thing and place-coded information will be a big thing, but I'd quite like to just play Whack a Mole again!

I don't shut down my PC; I hibernate it. I already opened my applications and documents and files and logged in to email and IM and Websites and the rest; why would I want to do it again every day? I don't put away everything on my desk every night and get it all out again. I do reboot for installs and updates - just when I choose to.

First I'm going to rant and then I'm going to give you the Group Policy instructions. Scroll down now to skip the rant ;-)

Vista is much better than XP for this. If I forget to turn off automatic reboots that happen in the daylight, I get a popup that lets me postpone for as long as I want, not just ten minutes at a time - and I can't accidentally type something in another window that triggers the reboot. And so far, updates haven't reset the setting - though downloads like the Office 2007 search gizmo still reset the setting.

If you've had unexpected overnight reboots that killed a flickr upload or an MSDN download or just closed your open apps when you thought you'd told XP not to install updates without asking, check the Automatic Update settings (even if you already changed them) because some downloads from the Microsoft site change the settings for you. Let me say this to Microsoft one more time: this is a stupid idea. It changes the state of my machine without my knowledge or permission and could lose data. I don't care how much you think an automatic 3am reboot is good policy; while you give me the option to choose something else, you have to respect that and not use downloads to reset things so updates are installed automatically and get to reboot me. BAD MICROSOFT! NO BISCUIT!

The good news: you can use Group Policy to stop downloads making the change. I know this works for XP and I expect it to work for Vista as well; I'll be testing that out by rebooting tonight after installing the UNC search add-on (and let me say to the Microsoft search person who thought searching network shares shouldn't be built into Windows Desktop Search: you are way behind your users and the Home Server team. Never mind all those business users and block your ears to the SharePoint team saying network shares are a thing of the past; they're a wrong as the Exchange folk trying to kill public folders. A third of your Windows Server SBS sales are to HOME USERS. WiFi is huge. SyncToy is enormously popular. People have files on DIFFERENT MACHINES. Wake up! And yeah, NO BISCUIT!). Right, back to Group Policy.

If you don't already use this, GPEDIT.MSC is your friend. If you have XP Home, you have to do this in the registry, by hand. If you have a system admin at work you should talk to them instead; I'm describing local GPO editing which is a horse of a different colour from AD GPO. Obligatory warning; messing with policies and the registries can stuff your machine. Take a backup of the registry and if you don't know how to do that or how to find/change/create keys you probably shouldn't try this. This process isn't difficult, but you need to do it right.

1 Open the Group Policy Editor (GPEDIT.MSC), expand Computer Configuration, right-click Administrative Templates and choose Add/Remove Templates. If you don't see Wuau.adm, click Add and find the file in the WINDOWS\INF folder (in Vista I found you don't need this step; Vista users go to #2).

2 Look in Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. Configure Automatic Updates is the important policy; select it, view the properties, choose Enable and you see the same settings as in the Automatic Update tab of System Properties (the Windows Update > Change Settings control panel in Vista). Pick the one you want; option 3, downloading updates automatically but getting the option of when to install them is what I recommend.

3 Vista users are done because the default are what you want; I wouldn't change anything else. For XP users there are several other useful policies here. To get rid of the restart prompt if the updates setting is changed again enable No auto-restart; change how long you get before the first prompt and between subsequent reminders by enabling Delay Restart and Re-prompt for restart. You can also stop Install Updates and Shut Down being made the default when you want to hibernate or restart instead.


3 XP Home users have to fire up the registry editor. Microsoft has a master list of the registry keys corresponding to Group Policy objects at http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/3/aa32239c-3a23-46ef-ba8b-da786e167e5e/PolicySettings.xls
The Configure Automatic Updates policy is equivalent to the registry key HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\AUOptions - if it's not there create AUOptions as a DWORD and set it to 3.

The other keys listed in the spreadsheet are left as an exercise for the reader...

How about 22 inches?
Viewsonic has 19" and 22" LCD monitors with a built-in iPod dock, speakers, subwoofer, USB ports and memory card slots. Not only can you charge, sync and show off your iPod front and centre; you can play music, games, videos and photos on a real screen. One of these could sit in the living room to be an iPod media centre. This might be the best iPod accessory yet...

If you're in the US and you use some species of Microsoft IM client and you don't mind it being Windows Live Messenger, your IMs could raise money for charities like Unicef, the Sierra Club, stopglobalwarming.org and six others. Microsoft is donating money from the ads on IM conversations, with a minimum $100,000 guaranteed donation to each of the nine organizations during the first year of the program. It's kind of viral charity marketing: instead of taking out ads, they're hoping that people will want to do some good and be won over by WLM enough to stick with it. Interesting model...

To get your IMs to count, click the link above or the button below to go to the site, tell them where you live and install WLM. Then choose Tools > Options and after putting your name in for My Display Name add one of these text codes to choose which organisation you want to get a share of the money from the ads you see.

*red+u	American Red Cross
*bgca	Boys & Girls Club
*naf	National AIDS Fund
*mssoc	National Multiple Sclerosis Society
*9mil	ninemillion.org
*sierra	Sierra Club
*help	StopGlobalWarming.org
*komen	Susan G. Komen for the Cure
*unicef	The US fund for UNICEF

<a href="http://im.live.com/?source=WLM80x15"><img src="http://global.msads.net/ads/pronws/WLM.80x15.gif"><img src="http://microsoftwlmessengermkt.112.2o7.net/b/ss/mswlmmktdreamcom/1/H.9--NS/1?ns=microsoftwlmessengermkt&pageName=Module&c3=Module%20WLM80x15" width="0" height="0" border="0"/></a>

in the section of the carriage I can see, not counting me...

three BlackBerries
four paid for papers
five free papers
one book

I'm driving sbisson round the bend ranting about CSS (I want to be able to use an externally defined style inside a section that's using inline style links so I can use my preferred formatting for an element inside a badge supplied by a site without writing another definition and I can't find what I consider to be a clean way of doing this that doesn't multply at least one entity in a way I consider unnecessary). I'm so annoyed with CSS I'm even starting to prefer JavaScript, which is saying something. I want point and click, documented mashup tools that don't require someone who wants neat things on their website to become a programmer; that's what I'd call Web 2.0.

Admidst all the ranting I have found some useful tools, especially Feed2JS which interactively writes JavaScript for embedding an RSS feed on a Web page, letting you pick and choose the obvious settings, and then helps you interactively style it. Don't like the style? It not only documents the CSS classes it creates, it also shows you what the CSS classes look like laid out on the page so you can see where to change borders, margins, padding etc. You can choose spoon feeding or a recipe or the tools for writing your own recipe; that's what I call interactive.

I don't want my whole LiveJournal on my website; I want to use tags to generate multiple feeds and pull in a feed of posts about my writing, a feed of posts about my travels and so on. Rummaging in lj_nifty produced this service for producing an RSS feed for one of your LJ tags which does almost exactly what I want. (It would be very nice if the service went into the LJ code proper, because kind as it is of avatraxiom to host it, LJ will have better availability long term.) The LJ RSS only delivers recent posts and if there aren't any posts with your tag in the most recent batch you won't get any posts for that tag. RSS isn't all about what's new and shiny, LJ!

After Steve Ballmer's health scare, I heard rumours that he and Bill Gates can be found reading email on exercise bikes at the gym. Now they could switch to dancing through the messages. Imagine jumping on mail from your boss or kicking spam out of the way.

The StepMail application uses an off-the-shelf "dance pad"to let a user carry out commands in e-mail - such as scroll, open, close, delete, flag and place messages in folders - by tapping a set of six buttons on the floor. Another prototype application, StepPhoto, allows foot-controlled scrolling and sorting through digital photographs.

“Many information workers spend a majority of their time trapped at their desk dealing with e-mail. We wanted to provide them with an alternative,” said Brian Meyers, a member of the Step User Interface Project Group involved in the prototype. “By allowing information workers to stand and continue to read, delete and flag e-mail messages, StepMail gives them a break from the keyboard and mouse, which reduces the risk of repetitive stress injury in their hands and wrists and engages more of their bodies’ muscles.”

It also reminds me of a set of tech support war stories published by, I think, Compaq, where someone phoned up because the 'foot pedal' on their notebook wasn't very responsive. The foot pedal on my sewing machine gives me acceleration and deceleration as well as on and off. I've been playing Tux Racing on a THinkPad X41 using the accelerometer in the hard drive to detect how I wave the notebook around in mid-air. I love controlling the PlayStation through the EyeToy camera. One the one hand there's the sense of wonder you used to get from controlling a computer at all; on the other, it's a more intimate connection because you don't need to only use your fingers and your eyes. The MS researchers behind this are in the VIBE team (Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment)  who do a lot of cool things. I interviewed the Senior Researcher, Mary Czerwinski, a couple of years ago for a piece on how our brains adjust to using two screens side by side (you very quickly tune out the bezel of the screen in the middle and perceive the split screen as one information source).

Researching a piece on InfoCard, the identity metasystem and the laws of identity and catching up on Kim Cameron's IdentityBlog, I spotted a familiar name; there are some people I keep coming across in the industry and Sam Sethi is one of them. Tracking him down led me to another calendar site, www.eventful.com. Again it's metadata slice and dice, with an emphasis on venues as much as events, so I can see what's on at the Mountain View Computer History Museum. Interesting, but unsatisfying. The search does better on CA than California - I think they should be a synonym. I'd like to see more grouping within results. It comes up with 4330 events in California for March; I'd like to be able to explore those by week or day or geographical region or event type or other finer grain information rather than just sorting them and paging through them a dozen at a time. There's a good mix of events though it's rather flooded with recurring events at Borders & Barnes and Noble. The tag cloud on the front of the site makes it look teen-oriented, I'm not sure what criteria the 'Sort by relevance' uses and my impression is 'interesting information, not enough tools '. When I'm browsing rather than searching, I still need to be able to narrow things down. I can't quite find the kind of events I want; the tag cloud is a mix of high level and low level and I suppose the fact that it doesn't make it easy to find the broad groupings of events I'm after may mean that the site doesn't have events of the kind I'm after (neat, mainly technology-oriented things to do in California in the first half of March).