I did it; I finally put the bullet in it. Windows Home Server is dead and buried, and Ubuntu is back running as my server.

Little did I know....

I turned on my file server the other day to retrieve the software I had stored there; letting it run for some 5 odd hours or so. When I returned to it in the late afternoon it smelled as if I was cooking circuit boards in my office, and the case to my server was very warm to the touch. Thus, my mind was made for me, and I grabbed my Linux ISO disc and reinstalled the OS over Windows Home Server. I had read about some folks actually having equipment fail and become irreperably damaged due to WHS running at 100% CPU utilization, an experience, of which I am quite certain I was on the verge of.

I was able to retrieve all of the data I needed from my server disk, and then promptly gave it a rest.

Kubuntu or Ubuntu?

Hearing some intarweb scampering about which UI is better; Gnome or KDE, I decided to give kubuntu a whirl this time around. Since I already downloaded both of the latest Feisty iso files, kubuntu won the toss and away I went. After messing about for several hours within kubuntu, I decided that I didn't like it as well - and switched back to Ubuntu. I admit, I didn't give it much of a chance, but here's the deal: it's already a somewhat foreign OS to me, and adding the differences in KDE over gnome, it was enough to send me whimpering back to ubuntu - and I couldn't be more happy.

The result was as before I decided to try WHS; it took me very little time to get my files server up and serving files again. Even less this time than the first, so like maybe 2 hours total. I'm happy. My server's CPU is happy. Everyone's happy. Well, maybe not Microsoft since they lose out this time.

What made me switch?

There are a lot of reasons really, but I will lay them out:

• Ubuntu is free
• All of the apps I need to run it as a server are free
• Linux requires fewer system resources to run - and the machine performs better
• I have experienced no issues/conflicts with hardware drivers during installation
• The OS itself has a smaller footprint, and takes up less space than WHS
• I was easily able to download the needed files

I tried on 3 separate occasions to download the latest version of WHS beta, and I kept losing connection with the less than helpful Microsoft Download Manager. The first day I tried it wouldn't even load the prompt to install the Download Manager. After that I couldn't even get 1% of the 1.4 gb of files needed. Plus, the damned thing doesn't even work a little bit in FireFox. So, if MS can't get the shite right in IE or FireFox - what the hell do I even need it for? This last part is petty but come on! How hard is it to make link so someone can download a damn file?

I must say I liked the little client application that made quick access to the shared folders, and easy backups of the client's files. The automatic pseudo-raid was nice too - but I can go to online and get a 160 gb drive for 60 bucks if I need more space. The pros simply didn't give the cons the smack-down.

I will finish this up a bit later with the 3 parter for Windows Home Server, and post it with the rest (part 1, part 2) in a few days.

Remember about a year or so ago, the whole uproar over the Microsoft EOLAS lawsuit and how Microsoft broke the web? Well, the web is still here, and as far as I am concerned it's a better place because of it - and we should give Billy and the crew a big thanks. Why thank him you ask? Didn't that one decision make thousands if not hundreds of thousands of websites add yet another blockade to the user viewing dynamic and interactive content? Yes it did, but it also forced the development community as a whole to start looking at existing technologies and alternatives to the <embed> tag problem that has existed since its inception.

SWFObject

Enter SWFObject, the best solution on the web for displaying Flash content within a page. You can argue this if you like, but it will be a one person argument with yourself - since you would be wrong to disagree with me. I've written about using SWF Object to maintain the integrity of your site, especially since the SWF may wind up in the search results being linked do directly, but this isn't about that. It's about the venerable SEO. Yes, an acronym! Search engine optimization is an important part of building any site, regardless if it find its roots in Flash or not, so why not get the most out of your site?

We all know by now that search engines can get inside your swf file and see the text, and that it's a good idea to give that text a good face to be read - so what you want to convey gets conveyed, not gotoAndPlay(this.fatch). SWFObject performs the task of creating an environment where you can have the best of both worlds - a arse kickin awesome Flash site chock full of animated interactive goodness, and the best laid path of keywords, links and alternative text that a brain can produce; and the best part is that it's super easy to do.

Lay it out

First, simply create your Flash file and the page it sits in, the place the SWFObject  code within the page:

The easy part is the fact that any code or images you place inside the<div> with the flashUI id will be overwritten when so.write fires, which happens after the spiders have crawled your content. If you want to see it in action, take a look at the Zippo 75th Anniversary Microsite. Every bit of information that you have access to from within the Flash site is accessible with flash not being detected or installed. As long as the viewer has JavaScript enabled, SWFObject will fire and work flawlessly. There are nearly 200 lines of code within the index file, but when you visit the page and the Flash file is written, it's really only processing the 64 lines without all of the standard data within that <div>, and it does it fast! You can easily add variables to pass to the Flash file, as well as adjust the standard parameter set by using so.addVariable and so.addParam. This also makes it really easy to pass cookie information directly to the Flash file with very little mucking around.

No reason not too

It's so simple and reliable to get this done, there's no reason not to. In fact you're doing you site and users a disfavor by not using this code to implement your Flash sites. So change it. Now! There are plenty of examples on how to use SWFObject various ways on deconcept, so there isn't much of a learning curve to it, and if you're in San Francisco - give Geoff a warm welcome when he gets there....

Oh yeah, and thanks again to Microsoft for getting their arse handed to them in a hat - it makes us all very happy.....

When you're working on a project and in need of some help, where do you turn? Do you Prairie Dog and say hey dude, could you give me a hand? Or do you fire up FireFox and bounce a question or two off The Google? The majority of work that I do is still Flash based and or related; in fact almost all of it is - in some way or another. This means I can focus what I look at quite a bit. Here's what I do....

• Search Google for Flash info
• Flip in my various books, mostly Essential ActionScript, ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, and ActionScript Cookbook.
• Check the Forums at Were-Here.com
• Check the Archives at ChattyFig - FlashCoders

And if that doesn't work, then I make something up and hope it works.

Who's on your list?

If I had to make a list of folks that I would like to pick their brains, it would be quite simple actually. Right off the top:

• Colin Moock
• Joey Lott
• Grant Skinner
• Stefan Sagmeister
• David Carson
• Robert Penner
• Joshua Davis
• Aral Balkan
• Phillip Kerman

Just to name a few - that would keep me busy for a while. I had the opportunity to actually meet David Carson and talk with him in a small seminar in Toronto in 2005, it was an awesome experience. The last  FITC I attended, featured a session by Stefan Sagmeister as well, and that guy is flat out amazing. Actually, quite a few folks on that list were there, or at the FlashForward I went to in NYC in 2004. If you ever get the opportunity to attend Flash in the Can... go to Toronto, you will not be disappointed.

Even if I think I know what the hell I am going to do, I poke around a wee bit and see how others would do the same thing. You see, I work in a vacuum. Almost literally. It's great working for an in-house firm - but out here in the mountains of Eastern PA it can get a little developer barren - if you get my drift. I routinely check what, and how I am planning to create the site or interactive piece with how others have or might create a similar project. Some times I proceed with my original design path, other times I find a simpler or better way to accomplish that task - and I even find other ways that change things both programmatically and from a design perspective. I have tried to get this step entrenched into my Development Process for a number of reasons. The most important being that I don't get stagnant and pigeonholed into creating everything the same way - so I can remain flexible... dare I say agile?

Anyway, that's my list; what's yours?

So I decided I would upgrade my work machine to Office 2007 today. Boy, that was a great idea. First off, I should have known not to upgrade, but to perform a clean install.

Right off the bat upon launching Outlook I started having problems. It would crash if I closed it. It would crash if I tried to view my calendar. Crash, crash, crash... crash! These are the exact same type of errors I had when I tried to use the Outlook 2007 beta, although all of the other apps worked fine without error (Word, Excel, etc...).

Naturally, I tried to uninstall it, then remove all of the old garbage and give it another go. That's when everything started to go really bad. I could not get the uninstaller to complete. I received:

error:1402 Cannot open registry key UNKNOWN/.pps/persitantHandler. Verify that you have sufficient access rights to the registry....

Hmm, not sure how that would be since I am an administrator on the box. So I pop open regedit and take a look - sure enough, the Administrator has lost permission to modify that registry entry, so I change it to full control and start again. Oops. Now I get:

error:1402 Cannot open registry key UNKNOWN/.rtf/persitantHandler. Verify that you have sufficient access rights to the registry....

Great. So rather than mess around with whether or not there are more of these keys floating about, I simply changed the entire HKEY category to give the administrator full control over it. I'm not sure yet whether or not that will turn out to be a good move...

Tools that help

I was looking around for other folks that had the same experience and there were a few, and I also ran across a blog entry by Scott Hanselman, and his OOBE with Office 2007. Knowing that Scott is a very smart dude, I read it and came up with a couple of very helpful tools to assist me in my quest. First I grabbed myUnist so I could take a look and see what else was installed that MS wasn't telling me in the Control Panel. It listed quite a few more things than what I had been shown previously, including some of the beta bits that had been installed from the Office beta I was using.

I also looked for a tool to get at the registry and clean up temp files, etc... And what I came up with is CCleaner. This is a cool, small little app, and it found something like 700mb worth of junk to get rid off, this included temp files, log files, etc... With running CCleaner I also noticed references to both Office XP and Office 2003 on my machine. WTF?! I have never even had Office XP on this machine. It has been rebuilt within the last year, so unless XP installs office bits by default - I am unsure how this stuff even got there.

With that knowledge, I figured I better see if there is a better way to get rid of old Office data, and I found the Office 2003 Resource Kit. So I ran OFFCLEN.exe under Tools\Removal Wizard in the ORK directory. It found a couple hundred remnants, and it only added up 58 mg of stuff, but I removed it all, by selecting the Completely remove all my previous version of Microsoft Office Applications. It even found some left overs from when I installed Visual Studio; yeah, I nuked those too.

I did look about for a 2007 Resource Kit, but all I found was a bunch of articles and resources; no tools.

My juggernaut continues....

After running through all of these steps, I run the uninstall wizard on Office 2007 one more time. HUZZAHH! It uninstalls, I never thought I would be so happy to get a program to uninstall itself as I am right now.

Just to be safe, I run the office cleanup tool one more time, as well as CCleaner, to make sure I got it all.

Both Programs found a bit of junk, and I removed it, albeit it wasn't much. Now, back to the disc to reinstall it. Let's keep our fingers crossed eh? If all else fails, I will be upgrading to the latest Adobe Suite (CS3) when it arrives, so I may just rebuild my whole damned machine then. We will see. Maybe I will even go to Vista....

The install completes fine, and I toddle off to Microsoft Update to get the latest fix for their brand new application set. Wow! What a surprise, there are updates, one update for the Office System, and another for the Junk Mail filter. I slate it for download, and off I go.

And... none of that helps, Outlook still crashes like it's cool.... gah! It crashes If I do anything but leave it in mail view, click on calendar, notes, tasks, my face; whatever - it crashes. I can send and receive email though. I may just say bag it and go back to outlook 2003....

Other Stuff

I also did find some notes about specific add-ins that can give Outlook 2007 some fits, and Acrobat 6 is one of them. I'm not surprised considering it's a few  years of now, and Acrobat 8 is available with CS3 - so I will disable that for the time being. There are others, but as I have never selected an add-in to install on purpose (without it being bundles with an application), I'm not bothering to go to deep into that unless I have to.

Here is a list of the published Known Issues with the Office system.

I'm not sure where else to go with this, and I am finding more questions than answers.

For the past week or so I have been grappling with Windows Home Server and the general errors that have been occurring, and cropping up. Now the standoff is over; and I'm not sure who won....

Here's the short story:

• high CPU utilizing (near 100% - effectively crippling the machine)
• problems with adding and removing external USB drives
• PCs not connecting with the server
• backups not running
• passwords/user names not being recognized
• issues getting IIS to run correctly for multiple sites

I have decided to turn off the server for now, as well as uninstalling the connection client from the PCs on the network. I have found several threads of the high CPU utilization, and it is a problem that Microsoft is fixing for the next release of the beta, but for now it's just too much to deal with. I may reinstall the OS after the next update, but for now the system is down.

I am in no way making a decision about the product, and I still believe it will be a solid product once the bugs are cleared up - but since there were a couple of connections made by testers between the CPU utilization and CPU burnout - I decided to pull the plug (taps playing in the background), and err on the side of a not-dead CPU.

To be fair, the internal drive that I couldn't get to work with the cluster was an ancient relic I had laying around (only 2.5gb), so it's no real shocker that it didn't recognize it - but I think it should have. The OS found it, and it worked fine - but it was not picked up by WHS apps, nor was it included in the available drive space. I would like to think that if I bought a newer, larger drive it would pop in no problem, but I am not about to go drop some coin on a new drive just to play with a server beta. I could use the space, but only if I run the backups associated with WHS, other wise, 100 plus gb is plenty for my needs right now.

Working with IIS on the server  is most likely way out of the realm of a typical consumer who would be purchasing this product - I mean, I do this stuff for a living so I will need to do a bit more than simply act as a file server. If that's all I need, I will just get a NAS solution, even then I can get one with a built in web server.

I must say though, that I am very tempted just to say to heck with it and go back to Ubuntu or give Kubuntu a whirl. It's easy, free, stable and I don't have to worry about what I will do with my data when the beta license dies out. Most likely, I will stick with WHS for a while longer so I can finish out my testing run with it and see how it performs long term. I will have to get another drive to add to it, but maybe I can get one from a buddy for cheap, or I may just go get another 120 gb drive for 60 bucks online. Who knows.

But for now, my office is a lot quieter without the other box running.

I just couldn't help myself, I had to make another Spiderman 3 wallpaper. Why? Because Spidey is my man crush. Spiderman is awesome, and  I am so happy that I get to see the new Spidey on my birthday! Happy birthday to me....

So here is the 1600 x 1200 version on my wallpapers page. I also made one (for me really) to fit wide screen monitors, since I have a 20" Dell that goes to 1680 x 1050 resolution.

There are a ton more images to download from the Spiderman 3 website on Sony, in fact they have done a massive amount of work on the site in general since my last visit. The new preloader animation timer is cool. I know it looks like the one on OS X, but it starts out dim and gets brighter as it gets closer to 100% - that's something new and I like it; definitely a nice touch. The site now is worthy of high praise, I mean it was cool before, but with all of the content that is available on the site now, it is a rare treat to behold. A complete website from the movie industry, and more than a couple of weeks before the movie releases.

There is a pretty sweet little clip on how they make the webbing on the suit - and naturally it is very labor intensive, and probably makes each suit worth; oh... I don't know... 10k? Who knows - more than I can afford. Not that anyone really wants to see me squeeze my 34 year old arse into a spandex body suit.

Bruce Campbell talks a bit too about how important his characters are to the movies, and you know what? He's right! He has to be, he's Bruce Campbell!