A lot has been written about how Windows Vista Ultimate was a major disappointment. First it was billed as the version that would “keep on giving” in the form of Ultimate Extras – cool new features that would be exclusive to Ultimate customers. When those extras finally materialized most people were underwhelmed. The extras were mostly Language Packs, DreamScene (with a few content packs) and a game or two. And for that, people paid a hefty premium over the Home Premium edition.

Now Microsoft has published special early upgrade pricing to entice people to rush out and get Windows 7 “while supplies last”. And they’re at it again. Guess what the upgrade price for Windows 7 Ultimate is:

Yup.

$219.99!

Sorry to shout there. At least this time there’s no promise of “Extras”. Only BitLocker and Language Packs (in addition to the Professional features). Not sure that’s worth $120 over the Professional Upgrade or $170 over Home Premium (even considering XP mode.)

Oh, and you can’t do an edition “downgrade” from Vista to 7. You can buy the upgrade package, but you’ll have to use it to do a “custom install” (i.e. clean install) and then reinstall all your programs and data. Despite that inconvenience, I’ll go for the Home Premium upgrade, thank you very much. I’m done being an Ultimate customer. Or is that Ultimate fool?

(And just for the record, Windows 7 is a fantastic product in my opinion. I hope Paul Thurrott is right when he says it may be the next Windows NT. Unfortunately he also seems to be right about how Microsoft can mess things up with their pricing)

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Categories: Microsoft, Software development, Windows 7
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In case you’re wondering why this blog has been unavailable the last couple of days: My domain seems to get hit excessively by a couple of IP addresses belonging to Microsoft (mainly). I don’t know why or how, but my host (Dreamhost) has decided that I now have to pay for private hosting (their DreamhostPS product).

I’m trying to block the IP address range that has been causing this, but I have no idea when my host will unilaterally decide to shut my domain down again (I suppose it isn’t nice of me to turn it back on without telling them, but they didn’t tell me they would shut it down either.) Apparently it is my responsibility to monitor the access logs and detect excessive activity and deal with it. I’m not aware of any tools they provide that help me do so, nor do they provide any kind of alerts that would help me be more responsible (if you can call finding yourself in a situation that you didn’t cause and dealing with it being “more responsible”.)

Of course, they’re in the clear, because the terms of service state that they can do whatever they want if my site causes problems for other customers on the shared web server box.

I’ve contacted Microsoft’s abuse email address and sent them access log “greps” that prove the problem. I’ve also tried to find access logs for other addresses the host claims have caused issues, but those logs seem to have been deleted by now. So now I’ve embarrassed myself with an abuse email to an ISP without having the ability to back up my claim. Nice.

Anyone have any advice on what else I can do?

Categories: Personal
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This one cost me a lot of wasted time recently. I was authoring an MSI package using the otherwise excellent open source WiX package from Microsoft and kept getting 1721 errors when a custom action was supposed to run. If you get this problem, let me attempt to save you a bit of time.

If you author a type 50 custom action that runs an exe on the system, based on a registry app search in combination with a type 51 action for example, make sure you don’t put quotes around the property that defines the exe path in the type 51 custom action. In other words, don’t author it as “EXEPROPERTY”, but just EXEPROPERTY.

You may think you need the quotes if your exe path has a space in it somewhere, but you don’t.

Now, if your type 50 action uses an ExeCommand and part of that has spaces in it, that usually needs to be quoted.

Looks inconsistent to me, but I guess the ways of the Windows Installer are inscrutable and mystical at times.

My type 50 action actually ended up as 1138 or something because of deferred execution and no impersonation, but basically the same idea applies.

Categories: Software development
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Categories: HP TouchSmart
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How much water do you use?

Check out how you can help make sure that our dwindling water reserves last longer:

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/web/trans0309walkthisway.html

http://www.good.is/?p=16356

Check out Good’s post on the topic as well (some provoking videos in there).

Categories: Environment, Sustainability
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Categories: Personal, Pictures
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A recent neighborhood sunset. Points for anyone who can guess where this was taken. Looks different when posted using Windows Live Writer. Wonder why that is?

Categories: Personal, Pictures
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This is more of a tweet than anything, but since Seth Godin only seems to allow trackbacks, I need to comment on my own blog in regards to his post Is marketing evil? It’s not about marketing. It’s about advertising. Advertisers use psychological tricks to market stuff. Watch the PBS program The Presuaders if you have any doubts about this. Advertisers have an unfair advantage over the masses. Average people don’t realize they’re being manipulated by ads, especially TV ads. That’s why it should be imperative to teach media literacy in schools. People need to be equipped to see through the tricks so that they can judge any “marketing” message that may be obscured by the manipulation in the ad.

Categories: Opinion
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If you haven’t heard the two NPR stories on the current economic crisis yet, it’s worth going out to listen at www.thislife.org: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy (or read through the two transcripts). After listening to the first one, I was inspired to try to illustrate the whole thing and sketched this down in about 45 minutes or so:

Part of the meltdown was the ARM mortgage reset:

At the beginning, the income covers the payment. At the reset, the payment becomes bigger (unfortunately), the income is the same and doesn’t cover the payment. Because of higher home value, a loan can be taken out to cover the gap in payment. Over time that loan becomes pure debt. When there is no more of the loan left, the only way out is selling the house. At that point, the value of the house has dropped and is below the amount of the mortgage. In addition there’s now another pile of debt to pay off. The result: great Pain.

I’ve since then learned that someone did a much better job of visualizing the story, using animation and wonderful design. That someone is Jonathan Jarvis, and the illustration is at www.crisisofcredit.com. Worth seeing.

The one thing that I don’t think anybody is shining a light on, however, is this part of my own drawing:

If indeed the whole thing starts with the Global Pool of Money doubling in about six years, and that money was “looking” for a safe return of three to five percent, then isn’t the crisis just as much to blame on what caused the doubling of the Pool? According to the NPR show transcript (PDF)

How’s the world get twice as much money to invest?  Lots of
things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of
rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. Made a lot
of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central
bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses-real math
geniuses-looking for a place to invest it.  And the world was not ready for all this
money. There’s twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not
twice as many good investments.

The keywords here are “making TVs and selling us oil”. TVs of course stand for everything that no longer is made in the U.S.: toys, computers, radios, cars, you name it. So not only did the “highly inventive” American banking system contribute to the collapse, regular consumers actually kicked the whole thing off, in a way, with an enormous appetite for cheap consumer goods. Food for thought, I would say.

I’d like NPR to do a story on that doubling of the global Pool of Money. Would go right with my little bent for “voluntary simplicity”, which I haven’t really written about in a long time. If we all weren’t chasing the dream of bigger – faster – more, maybe we wouldn’t be hurting so much right now. Maybe we’ll learn about the value of “enough”. Check out the links in the sidebar for plenty of reading on the subject of “enough” and “voluntary simplicity”. It’s something I struggle with every day.

Categories: Opinion
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The HP TouchSmart “shell” version 2.5 is now posted at the HP Support site. It lists only one enhancement, the resolution of a 1618 installer error. But there are plenty of other things in there. For one, this version of the shell (2.5) is part of the Spring 2009 update mentioned at http://www.touchsmartcommunity.com. It is the version that comes preinstalled on IQ52x and IQ82x TouchSmart PCs.

I thought I would give a few more details on this update, mostly for developers and other technically minded people.

• The shell is now DPI/screen resolution independent, in other words it should display correctly no matter what DPI and resolution the computer uses.
• Memory usage has been reduced by eliminating two previously needed processes.
• The minimize command line argument now also minimizes a hosted application in large layout.
• In Personalize, an option is now available to pick a background image.

This version reports itself as 2.5.3238.28760 and as version 2.5.312 in Add/Remove Programs.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software
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