Microsoft opening up the Outlook email database (PST files) file format

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/26/microsoft-opens-up-the-pst-format.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/archive/2009/10/26/roadmap-for-outlook-personal-folders-pst-documentation.aspx

If I remember correctly, up until now you couldn’t do much with a PST no matter what API you used, unless Outlook was actually installed. Now you will be able to, which is great. I have many Gigs of email going back to 1995, all in PST format. I’d love to have or create some better (more targeted) tools to work with those archives, which usually comes down to looking for some old email for record purposes, like a needle in a hay stack.

This is not to say that there weren’t some very useful APIs already open for MAPI and accessing MAPI data using database APIs.

I remember reading somewhere that the PST format was based on MS Access. I assume the change on 2002-2003 to the format was to move it to something like the personal SQL Server db to beat the 2Gig filesize limit.

Clean install with Windows 7 Upgrade

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/23/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-the-answer.aspx

Honestly the jury is still out on whether you can use the win7 upgrade media to do a clean install on a blank hard drive. It appears that we can at least say “don’t count on it”. Some people say they can, other say they can’t. Paul provides an arcane, but fast, workaround.

Fix the Zune Software

…“In IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connection tab. Click the LAN settings button and then uncheck "Automatically detect settings."…

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/20/tip-of-the-week-speed-up-zune-marketplace-searches.aspx

This is amazing! Searches of the online Zune content from the Zune software are instantly fixed. And what an amazing difference. I’m surprised I never thought of this because I have seen this setting fix other similar problems.

If you have any cases where there is a initial hesitation by some piece of software that connects to the internet somehow, then try unchecking this setting. The reason is that because IE is the browser that comes with Windows, and the IE proxy settings are exposed via several APIs, they have become the de-facto global proxy settings, and many Windows applications check them before any internet communications. And this particuar setting says “go look around on your local filesystem and network to see if anybody has ever put one of the standard proxy config files in". There’s some long default timeout that will hurt you every time this is examined.

So even if you don’t run Zune software, and don’t use Internet Explorer, you should still go turn this off right now. Very cool!

Twit on Roku!!!

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/10/03/the-model-of-the-new-media-model/

Leo Laporte gives a great talk, including the bombshell that Twit (a channel of all his podcasts) is going to be on the Roku player (famous for Netflix and MLB streaming). Plugs into your TV, 99$. Not just the live shows, but access to the archives as well!

What's a 'puter?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/rackspace-launches-nomoreservers-com-to-tout-computing-as-a-service

This article/news item describes something that sounds a little desperate to me, though I like what I have heard about Rackspace, their values and how they do business. If I were trying to illustrate this, I'd have a a geeky kid standing by a rocket ship waiting to launch, trying to get someone to go with him, while a bunch of cool kids on motorcycles with cheerleaders on the back laughed at him. Is a rocketship a much better way to get to the moon? You bet. But not to get you to the dance on Saturday night, which is where the cool kids want to go. Will everybody be using rocketships in the future to commute home from moonwork? Again yes, but it's going to be a few years before they come with leather heated seats.

What's the parallel? I think that Rackspace is finding that the future may not be as close as they were lead to believe. Yes the web-two-oh crowd is fine with chucking the servers and moving into the cloud condo. But the enterprise folks are digging in their heels on giving up their datacenters just yet. Are they coming along eventually? Certainly. But they've just barely begun the move to VMs. They're in no hurry to take on the sea change that is cloud-computing. How did you miss the square footage of big iron (mainframes) still churning away? If they haven't gotten rid of that yet what makes you think they'd dump it's replacement, the midrange machine?

One characterization here I think is telling, and which explains my title, is their catchphrase "NoMoreServers". This is absolutely visionary. If the Internet is the computer, then there's certainly no more need for us to have racks full of boxes at work, right? I'll go them one leap better... "NoMoreComputers"! Cloud-computing is certainly just as much for Joe Everyman as it is for the Fortune 500. I'd love to keep the power of ubiquitious Internet while getting rid of the heat and noise, support problems, and loss of surface space in my home that personal computers represent. So Rackspace the enterprise isn't quite ready to climb in your rocketship. But how about little ol' me?

Friendfeed

To my mind there were three parts to Friendfeed. (I’m using past tense because of the sale, as the site/application is still runny happy as a clam.) I should say first that I am writing this as a big fan of Friendfeed.

Piece 1 was “content aggregator”. This part worked wonderfully. It met a big need, that being we create content in many different places on the web, and we need a way to pull all that content together. Friendfeed did that. If the Friendfeed site goes away, we’ll need another solution. Yes you can post announcements about content in various places on Twitter, but that feels awkward, plus the auto-aggregation tools are not built-in like with Friendfeed. Yes you can link to all your other content from your blog, but that’s ugly. Friendfeed was easy to use, and homogenized the different sources somewhat, so that it became a package.

Piece 2 was “comment aggregator”. Unfortunately this was a tough nut to crack. The problem statement is simple enough – it’s very hard to have a conversation around a say a piece of content on my blog when part of the conversation takes place in my blog comments, part of it takes place in response blog posts from others, and perhaps part of it takes place in comments on watering holes like Digg. My rough understanding was that Friendfeed was hoping everybody would just comment on Friendfeed instead, which didn’t work out. Some people did, which just added to the fragmentation.

Piece 3 was “social network”. This part I have to confess I never got. I followed people, and it was great to get all the content in one package for the people I cared about, their blog posts, Twitter updates, Google Reader (RSS) shared items, etc., all in one place. But there was this expectation that the whole thing would sew itself together into something like Facebook, where you can just keep track of your whole social network by watching your “feed”. In Friendfeed the big feed with all the comments, and all the content from people you hadn’t subscribed to (friends of friends) was not useful. Too much to follow, and not what I was interested in. And I can’t even describe what “rooms” were supposed to do, as I never understood them.

So despite panning the last two sides of Friendfeed, I feel so strongly satisfied with the content aggregator aspect, that I hope that it sticks around for a long time, or that somebody can create something even better at doing that job, by building on it’s legacy.

iTunes HD – the skinny

I was wondering about snagging TV and Movie video from iTunes, and how it would look on my TV, especially if it went through my iPhone first..

Gizmodo, a year ago, spelled it out pretty clear:

http://gizmodo.com/5048025

As for iPhones/iPods – it looks like you get a standard def file with the higher def download, which goes to the iPhone.

Windows on Netbooks a big win for Microsoft over Linux

Not enough has been made of the fact that Linux has not triumphed on the netbook, even at a lower price and pre-installed. The fact that people fully expect Windows, even just to browse Facebook and pick up their email, is absolutely telling in terms of the chance Linux has on any desktop any time soon, if ever. Doesn’t bode well for Apple or ChromeOS for that matter either. This is not about which is better. It’s about momentum, here known as installed userbase. And that is a huge advantage for Microsoft, and netbooks are the undisputable proof of it.

Snow Leopard clean install for the Windows guy

I wound up with an Apple computer by accident. That is I got an iPhone, and thought it was so great that I decided to write some programs for it, and it turns out you can only do that on Apple computers.

So I bought the cheapest one they had, a Mac Mini. It’s been an ok computer hardware-wise, but getting used to the MAC OS has been a bear. Perhaps in another post I will describe my trials.

This post is about my Snow Leopard (from regular Leopard) upgrade experience though. I didn’t know what to expect. I put the cd in while the machine was already running. There was a button to click to start the upgrade. So I ran the upgrade. That all seemed to work ok, though it took quite awhile. But when it came back up, while successful, it was clear that a clean install was not done. I still had programs and preferences.

So I went a-googling and found that the clean install options had been slightly hidden in this version, and I needed to boot the disk, which I did, and then wiped the drive, followed by the install. That also went well, but took a long time.

When the computer came back up, it was once again clear that something was wrong. The GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto applications my Mini had come with were gone.

It turns out they aren’t part of Snow Leopard (nor are they part of Leopard). They are part of a software suite from Apple called iLife, and they came free with my computer. So I was wondering if I was going to have to reinstall whatever cd/dvds the computer came with, and then reinstall Snow Leopard. But when I dug out the disks, I found that there was one for Leopard and one for other software. Guess what that other software is? iLife. I am happy to report that it installed ok right on top of Snow Leopard, and as far as I can tell, I am good to go.

iPhone – the ebook reader

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000301301

I am ashamed to admit I only read about 1 book a year. This down from 4-5 a day when I was a teenager. I'm just too busy with actual responsibilities to find the time for entertainment like that anymore. But I miss it. I am gratified that most of my family are readers nonetheless.

I had been hearing a lot about Peter F Hamilton (a SciFi writer) on Leo LaPorte's Audible commercials for his podcast family. So I checked out the price of the trilogy they were always talking about (The Night's Dawn Trilogy) for the Amazon Kindle. It was roughly 8$, which is a steal compared to paperback. Not to mention hardcover, with some editions going for thousands of dollars.

So I snagged it for "this year's read". Now the Kindle can be hard to get a hold of in our house due to it's popularity. So I read 99% of the book on the free iPhone Kindle Reader.

The book (trilogy) turned out to be a lot longer than I had imagined. I purchased it on July 16th, and I think it was at least a week before I started it, say July 23rd. I just finished it August 25th, reading only for several hours a night to the detriment of many a good night's sleep. I read pretty fast still, finishing most books in one sitting, so working on this for a month was quite an experience.

So I finally went on the Internet after I finished, to get an idea of how many pages it would work out to in a physical book. Wikipedia informed me that the British paperbacks (the only thing they listed) totaled 3,782 pages. Well that explains the month I guess.

However what I really wanted to highlight here, is that I read almost 4000 pages on the iPhone, and read for several hours daily on the iPhone for roughly a month. And that with poor vision, glasses with a less-than optimum prescription, lack of sleep, and no ambient light most of the time. I report that I had no headaches. To my mind at least, the iPhone with the Kindle software has been field-proven to be a great ebook reader!