Getting Organised

Well it isn’t even close to being Spring, but it was time to do some hard drive cleanup, so I’ve spent the past few days sorting through the hard drives of my in-home server, backups and the machine I use for photo editing and video processing. As I wrote here last year,  I have been using the Amazon S3 service as an off-site place to store my photos and I use Bucket Explorer as the front end/user interface. The combination works incredibly well, and so when my brother-in-law John was asking about what off-site storage option he should consider for his several thousands of photos, I had no trouble recommending it to him as an option to explore.

John is the same fellow whom I convinced to by an iMac, as he really wanted to just use a computer rather than have to figure out how it worked, and he has been very pleased with it. I am still running Microsoft’s XP for photo work only because I’ve invested time learning Microsoft Digital Image 10 suite for processing my photos, which is similar to iPhoto on the Mac, and I am comfortable using it. Sadly, Digital Image Pro 10 has been dropped as a standalone product by Microsoft, although some of its elements have since been merged into Vista. While I suppose I could change out XP for Vista, (and I actually do have a couple of copies of Vista sitting in boxes unopened)  based on my experience while working on the pilot to deploy Vista in Shell, it would frankly seem more like a down grade from XP rather than an improvement.  I suppose I’ll either have to wait for Vista’s replacement called Windows 7 to be released  and look at it then (actually not till after at least its first service pack is released of course), or perhaps move fully over to Ubuntu’s version of Linux which is what I have running on most of my other machines – or just buy a Mac and not have to mess around as much as you do with Windows products. We’ll see what happens.   

As I started into the disc cleanup, it became quickly obvious that I needed something that would allow me to easily check folders and files for duplications and differences in file size, content, etc. I wanted to be able to ensure the photos were sorted, and at the same time be certain that none of the versions of the photos were lost or possibly over written due to having the same file name and yet be different in some way (colour corrected copies, cropped or scaled copies etc).  There are quite a few utilities available to help you manage these sorts of issues, and it is disappointing that something isn’t built into the MSWindows OS as it is a fairly basic requirement. After doing some checking around, I decided to try  a freeware product called WinMerge, and I have to admit I really like it. It sort of reminds me of another utility I used many years ago called F31, although it is much more sophisticated. You can do light weight comparisons based on just date and size, or more extensive binary file comparisons to determine differences in files sharing the same name, and then synchronising the contents of the directories is a snap. Quite useful.

As I type this, I’m just waiting for my updated photo library uploads into Amazon’s S3 environment to complete, then I’ll refresh the copy that I keep on a removable hard drive which I keep stored in our safety deposit box after which I’ll be ready to start on my next little project – scanning and storing my slides, negatives, family films and also a few audio cassette tapes that my grandparents made for us as children.  As they are long gone these many years, it is nice to still be able to listen to them once and a while – and ideally I’ll get the tapes converted before it becomes impossible to find a way to play them !  

I expect this will keep me busy for a little while …….

Pirate Free ?

I’ve been taking a look around the anti-piracy site Microsoft set up to honour their Global Anti-Piracy Day, which they chose to observe October 21. It includes quite in interesting map outlining what they are currently doing about their perceived problem, as well as thankful feedback from customers who have switched over to legal copies. Microsoft have always officially at least been quite indignant, not to mention litigious on the piracy topic and I understand why that needs to be their public stance, however methinks possibly they protest too much ! Putting aside the legalities for a moment, together with Romanian President Traian Basescu, I personally wonder whether consumer software piracy of at least the operating system is not actually a very good thing for them as it does a few things:

• builds mind share – the vast number of people right wrong or otherwise associate ‘personal computing’ with Microsoft as evidenced for example by the return rate of non-Windows based netbooks (four times higher than for XP based ones for one manufacturer)
• in the longer term it educates and influences the next generation of developers – cheap (free pirated copies) access to the OS actually sustains the pace of innovation of the Microsoft ecosystem
• dependencies – these encompass device architecture, peripherals and applications which work to extend the reach and continued lock-in of the consumer and business to the Microsoft ecosystem 

As others have suggested – perhaps what they should do is just give a version of the OS away for free to consumers and focus on services and applications.

Getting back to the Microsoft web site and the detailed list of actions being taken – one thing that I found amusing is the apparent lack of Russian Microsoft pirates, although China and 47 other countries are specifically mentioned – does that mean they think Russia is pirate free ?

Hmmmmmmm.

Does This Cloud Compute ?

Well – I see Microsoft this morning re-branded their cloud compute effort as ‘Azure’ which was previously described as being “Windows in a cloud” – hopefully one won’t accidentally open and allow someone to fall through, as the landing could be a bit rough !

Looking at the what is being presented, I would have said it looks like the typical combination of aspiration (vapour ware) and concept software (beta version) that is often presented by software companies. Microsoft has a history of of presenting ‘me too’ products to their corporate accounts and to the press, which often as much are really just an attempt to inject enough of what Gartner calls ‘FUD’ (fear, uncertainty and doubt) into the marketplace to keep clients from moving to a different non-Microsoft solution.  

The leader in the cloud compute space currently would seem to be Amazon with their EC2/EC3 and S3 Web Services offerings, and while many companies are using these, I have yet to see to any really large companies do so – the length of time it takes to make a decision in a large company typically means that whatever is being looked at is already obsolete long before a deployment is possible. A case in point would be my former employer where, with a bit of luck, Microsoft Vista will finally start to be deployed next year (they are still running Windows 2000) just in time for it to be superseded by Windows 7.

At any rate – there will be lots about this in the press over the next hours, days and weeks so it will be worth keeping an eye on. I personally tend to view cloud computing as a total package – as exemplified by the emergence of net devices (think of the eee PC, and the Android mobile phone) accessing web based document creation, email and media services (like Google Apps which Microsoft is also promising to offer in its next iteration of Office), as well as backend services such as storage, backups, financial applications etc. (as can be sourced on Amazon servers – or XCalibre, or Flexiscale, or Q-Layer, etc. servers) over the air via the internet. After a number of false starts and tentative small steps over the past several years, there does now finally seem to be some industry momentum building.

Putting aside the observation that Microsoft’s key objective is to maintain user lock-in to their product slate by building tight dependancies to other Microsoft technologies, having Microsoft come to the table with their ‘me too’ presentation today is a good thing in the long run for two reasons:

• the competition keeps the industry sharp – this is a rapidly evolving area with winners and losers yet to be decided
• their entry at this juncture adds validity to cloud compute technology putting it squarely on the radar of the larger corporate clients who are already Microsoft shops.

This could start to get quite interesting !

I’ve Moved In !

After some discussion and no end of frustration, I have followed my son’s advice and moved my BLOG here ! I found it amazing that the folks at Microsoft just could not figure out how to fix the glitch in my account, but after two weeks of debating the point I decided to give up and look for a place that was more customer focused. I’m still getting settled in, but its starting to feel like home already.

Fun With Microsoft

Well, it has been a fun filled few days !! My son keeps telling me to switch over to another BLOG space provider, but till now I really haven’t had an issue with the Microsoft Live spaces offering, other than not really caring for the advertisements. I was looking through the settings section, and lo and behold I noticed in the small print that if I just pay a few $$ and upgrade the account the adverts can be blocked !! Sounds great eh ? Not quite so easy – for the past few days I’ve been bounced back and forth between Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Customer Service, Microsoft Billing and then back to Microsoft Tech Support – bottom line is they have a bug in their data base and I’ve been told that I have to fix it myself because they either won’t or can’t ! It’s amazing, and quite sad really. The Xbox person I spoke to actually refused to delete the data causing the problem (!!) so here I am two days later still stuck.

I will say that with the exception of the Xbox person, they have been unfailingly polite – I got an email from the Customer Support folks – someone by the name of Salie (no idea if this is a real person or just a computer auto-emailer pseudo) who sent me a note saying “Ian, please accept my sincerest apologies for not being able to assist you fully. You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service”. And the Billing guy I just got off the phone with actually said the same thing almost word for word, so I’d say Microsoft at least has managed to give them all the same training and script to read from. Frankly I’d almost be happy to deal with a rude person if they would just fix the problem. The only consistent piece in this story is the general lack of competence, together with some really odd views about customer support from the Xbox clown.

Oh – and the suggestion to allow me to fix it myself ? Create a brand new account ! As a result, I am considering following my son’s advice.