Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

While I'm sticking with Google for search, Microsoft's Bing home page has some of the coolest imagery around.

It's good enough to want to use as a desktop background. I could just do the old "right click, save as desktop" thing in my browser, but that would mean visiting the site regularly (and remembering to do so). So what's the alternative for the lazy user?

It turns out that I actually have lots of options. I first tried a piece of software called ZapBing, but that wasn't a great success (mainly as it managed to violate many of the Windows security features added post-Windows XP). The answer to that problem was a nifty tool called John's Background Switcher.

JBS is one of those tools that does just what you want - and then some. Need to create backdrops on the fly from your photos? From Facebook? From Picasa? From Flickr? From any RSS image feed? It's all in there.

The RSS feed tools are what saves the day here. All you need is the feed from the Bing Image Archive, pushed out by Feedburner [RSS feed link]. You can then set the feed as a source in JBS, and, well, Bob's your proverbial...

[For the more technical of you, if you're running Windows 7, you can actually build a RSS-powered desktop theme following these instructions.]

And yes, that does all mean you can get a desktop feed from I Can Haz Cheezeburger.

Seeing as I've just upgraded the server, I decided it was about time I upgraded my desktop PC. After all, I'm still using a five year old Pentium IV machine that I bought when I first went freelance. It works, but it's showing its age. Some of the USB ports don't work any more, and its fans get really quite noisy when the office gets warm (and then the office gets warmer!)...

After a bit of research I decided on this reasonably priced machine from my usual component supplier up in Watford. It should be with me on Friday.

Then of course comes the joy of migrating applications and tools to a new machine. I suspect I should make a list of what I use regularly, and use that as a place to start...

Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House? is a real book. We've got two copies to prove it.

It turns out that you can actually buy it from Amazon, for a relatively meagre $5.95. Which also means that there are reviews on the site, and a handful suggest other titles that you might find interesting.

My kids loved this book so much that they insisted that I buy them others in the same series including "Rover the dog says "SYN/ACK!", "How to be the Best at Firewall Configuration (The Boy's Book)", "Big, Bad Bill And The Blue Screen of Death" and their all time favorite "Everybody Poops".

This brings to mind other beloved children's IT favorites, such as:

The Little Server that Occasionally Couldn't
Grim Server Tales
The Pokey Little Server
Blue Screen and Spam
1000100111001010100101 and Other Favorites
How the Hacker Disrupted Online Christmas Shopping
Oh, The Porn Sites You'll Visit!

Just not up to the usual quality of the entire series! Whatever happened to "Sydney Sims Likes to Run Bob Desktop" and "When FlightSim Does Not Work"? They are classics!

Now, which of those shall I buy?

A couple of useful Tablet PC links for the day, along with one for Firefox.

First, if you've switched to using OneNote as your default note taking tool (and if you're using Windows and Office, why aren't you using it?), and have lots of old Journal files around, here's a simple and quick way of converting them to OneNote entries.

Second, here's an interesting looking application out of Microsoft Research. InkSeine is a pen-oriented note taking application that's being used as a UI test bed. I rather like the radial menu concept - I suspect it's one that will translate well into touch interfaces as well as working with pens.

Finally, one of my favourite Firefox extensions has just made it to the Mozilla Recommended Add-ins page. Congratulations to sethop and the rest of the folks at Interclue. A truly useful piece of code from one of my favourite places.

Buy wins with a technical knockout in round 1.

I was planning on building a new 64-bit server for the house, as I've got a spare mother board and an Intel CoreDuo processor to hand, along with the appropriate server OS licenses. We're planning on upgrading from our current little AMD-powered server to something with a bit more poke, and also want to use eSATA for a backup drive. As a result I've been pricing up cases, power supplies, and memory.

The bits I needed were going to come in at around £200 or so. Not too bad for a server, I thought. Then I found an advert in PC Pro, for a company advertising an OS-less HP server for less than 180 quid including VAT. If I look at the cost to me of my time, and the cost of the bits I need to finish my box, the decision turns out to be something of a no-brainer. There's no way I can build a box for that price.

We've ordered the machine (which also turns out to be a dual core Xeon), and sprung for an additional pile of memory via Crucial (the HP prices for memory were rather silly).

Free delivery too, even if I do have to wait a week...

I think that motherboard will now end up as my next desktop PC.

I've just finished reading John Scalzi's entertaining diplomatic picaresque The Android's Dream (which starts with an extended fart joke, and goes on from there...).

Earth is well down the pecking order in a galaxy full of intelligent beings, and a plot to push the human worlds up the ladder looks set to start a war with one of humanities' oldest allies. Amusingly the leader of this race is the fehen - the name I've been using for my one-man consulting band for some time now.

I'm not sure where Scalzi got the name from, but the history of my choice of it as a company name is well documented. It all goes back to my Oliver Postgate computer naming scheme and my first Powerbook, "The Iron Chicken". When I set up my original dial up Internet account with Demon, users were limited to an 8-character node name. Iron Chicken quickly became Fe Hen, and thence Fehen. When I needed to set up a company for some consulting work shortly after being laid off one too many times, it was the obvious choice of a company name.

And The Android's Dream? It's a rather fun, quick, read, definitely in the Heinlein-lite mode. Recommended for a cold winter day.

I'm also amused to note that the codename for the Powerbook 140 was the Tim Leary. An apt name for a rather delightful little machine.

One of the cool things about my job is getting to meet interesting people and talking about fascinating technologies.

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that one of my favourite technologies of the moment is Adobe's Apollo (read my hefty pieces on it in upcoming issues of Web Designer and PC Plus), and today I spent some time talking to Adobe's Mike Downey about what's happening with Apollo and where Adobe sees it going (his blog is available as adobe_mdowney).

One of the things we talked about was San Dimas*, eBay's Apollo-based client application. It's a cracking piece of code, and you can now sign up to get onto the public beta when it rolls out over the next month or so. I had a play with it, and I have to say it's the most intuitive way of working with eBay I've found. It makes it easy to both sell and bid - and you can even use it with a web cam to quickly upload pictures of an item.

I'm firmly convinced that cross platform development tools like Apollo are the future of desktop applications - especially when you can convert a Flex-based server application into Apollo in less than two days (quicker for pure HTML/AJAX applications), and developers don't need to work with separate installers, windowing solutions and file systems for each OS they work with. Apollo means one code base will work on the web, on OS X, on Windows and on Linux. That's a huge saving in time and money for any development team.

When the Flash and Dreamweaver Apollo plug-ins come out later this year, things are going to get even easier - especially as you'll be able to go straight from a Photoshop illustration to an Apollo application...

Microsoft is going to have to get the .NET Micro Framework into Silverlight sharpish to even start to compete here.

*Are marypcb and I the only people to spot the Bill and Ted reference in the name?

The hard drive on my tablet PC has been throwing up bad block errors and making strange clicking noises for a while. Those aren't good signs...

It all meant one thing: time for a new drive.

Notebook hard drives have been both notoriously hard to fit and notoriously expensive. That's a set of myths I'm happy to blow away. Not only did a 100GB Seagate drive (with all the anti-shock features you want in a laptop) cost around £50 with postage, it slotted into the notebook with ease. One crew to undo the drive bay, another four for the carrier. One thing to note - it pays to shop around a bit for drives. Some of the usual suspects have limited (and expensive) stock. I ended up at an old favourite, RL Supplies, who got me the drive in just over 24 hours from placing the order.

I didn't bother imaging the old disk. For one thing, I use my notebook as a local cache of files I keep on the server, and for another, Toshiba had just come out with a set of Vista drivers for my machine. That meant there was no need to hack together a system using Toshiba's drivers for the related M400, and no more downloading hacked versions of the Nvidia video drivers.

So I just went for a completely fresh install. I plugged in the portable DVD drive, and pulled out my MSDN disks. Everything went on in a couple of hours, including Office, and the machine has just finished happily snarfling data off the server.

Next, I need to install some of my usual applications. Firefox first, then Semagic and the Flickr Uploadr. And that should just be about it. I can't think of anything else that I really need on the road. Well, apart from Geometry Wars...

The CGSociety's annual competition took a different form this year: producing CGI trailers and concept art for a hypothetical film of Greg Bear's Eon.



There's some really fantastic stuff there, like the image I've linked to, and this mix of CGI and live action. Greg Bear was one of the judges, and comments on the images.

What if the inside of your computer was an anthropomorphic Brio train set?



As blogged elsewhere, but now found on YouTube.