Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.

Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects.

There has been a lot of news blogged from this conference over the last few days.

I have summarised and provided links for the main things from my perspective as it affects me, our business and our clients. Some of this stuff wont impact our clients for several years, but its nice to be able to see glimpses of the future.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh shifted from Tech Preview to Beta in the last few days as we indicated a few days ago it would. However there was lots of good stuff talked about the mesh platform at PDC. Some of these links are about the new features in Beta and some are blogs from PDC.

From Sarah Perez:

I have just read the Technical Brief for Windows Home Server Drive Extender.

Update: that file link seems to be broken - I have attached the original PDF File

Here are some of the important points to note when using Windows Home Server:

• Hard drives are formatted before they are added to server storage. Make sure that you back up any important files that are on the hard drive before you add it to server storage. Formatting a hard drive deletes all files on the hard drive.
• Do not use USB 1.1. USB 1.1 is much slower than USB 2.0. The home server performs slowly if you connect hard drives to a USB 1.1 port. If you are using external hard drives, ensure that they are connected through USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 (for example, FireWire). USB 2.0 works best with one drive per controller. Performance suffers if multiple hard drives are connected to a single USB 2.0 controller. Using hubs to connect multiple USB drives to a single controller has a negative impact on system performance and is not recommended.
• If you unplug an external hard drive prior to using the Windows Home Server Console to remove it, the drive will be listed as Missing. In this case, you should immediately plug the hard drive back into your home server, and then follow the instructions in the Remove a Hard Drive Wizard to safely remove it.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office