Vista

I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I've found Mozy. I've had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it's better to lose $80.00 than all your data.

Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that's where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.

One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept - I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don't really throttle your bandwidth after you've uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn't seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.

Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.

So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.

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This is something I have been meaning to do for many years now but I finally took advantage of the Christmas break to put my Linksys Wireless Router (WRT54G) on steroids. Since I was upgrading my Windows machine from XP to Vista and my Linux machine from Dapper to Edgy (Ubuntu), I figured why not break - I mean upgrade everything.

First a little background - Linksys had used Linux as the OS of its network products including the ubiquitous WRT54G router. When Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003, they were forced to open source all of the Linksys code because of the GPL. This led to people to create updated versions of the code for these Linksys routers and soon people started adding features to the $60.00 router there were available in network devices costing a lot more than $60.00. Linksys (and Cisco) continued to make these Linux routers for a while and then switched to another real-time UNIX variant, VxWorks which removed the requirement for Cisco to release their software into the open-source community.

So I've been thinking about upgrading my existing Linksys router to another with Gigabit ports and so upgrading and potentially turning it into a brick didn't seem that big a deal. In fact, a part of me was hoping the upgrade wouldn't work so that I would have the excuse to replace a perfectly working router with another with additional goodies. There are a lot of different software packages out there for your Linksys router but I decided to use DD-WRT because of the features. I wanted to add WPA/WPA2, QOS and the ability to boost the radio transmission power. The default Xmit is set to 28mw and I bumped up mine to 70mw as the Xmit site suggested and I noticed a HUGE improvement in my wireless performance. Before the upgrade, the wireless was really weak in the other end of our house but know I get perfect connection that really awesome throughput. In fact, the strength of the signal was so high, I had to switch to another channel to let me neighbor's wireless routers and phones work. The enhanced security was also a nice bonus - The other features like the ability to run a wireless business don't interest me but the ability to VPN in really does. I haven't had a chance to use that yet as I typically use a SSH tunnel to setup a proxy to securely access resources when I am using a public network but it's a nice feature to have if you need security or as just paranoid of open/free/public networks. (As you should be)

To me, the coolest thing was the ability to SSH into my wireless router and browses the directory structure. The DD-WRT upgrade turned my router into an SSH server and so I can SSH into it to check out the configuration or even SSH out from the router itself.

Here are some screenshots taken from the interface - Before you decide to upgrade your router, please remember that there are no warranties and you could end up with a $60 brick.

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I've been using Carbonite in addition to my local backups to external drives and Carbonite really works great. Carbonite is basically Windows backup software tied to an online automatic backup service that uploads and backups your data over your broadband connection. Your data is encrypted and stored in their remote data center and can be restored using the same broadband connection.

The nice thing about Carbonite is the set-it-and-forget-it nature of the software. Once you decide what items you want to backup, you just forget about Carbonite and it backs up your data. You can back up unlimited amounts of data for $5.00 per month or buy a yearly subscription for $49.00. I purchased a 2 year subscription and just finished up backing over 90 GB to the Carbonite servers. Carbonite typically backs up about 2 GB a day and then slows down to .5GB per day once you have backed up 50GB of data.

The only issue I've seen so far with Carbonite is the lack of Windows Vista support. While Carbonite was backing up my system, I upgraded my box to Windows Vista and Carbonite continued to work. But I am not sure I am going to be able to restore things correctly and it's not Carbonite's fault. It's another stupid thing Microsoft did in Vista where all of the user settings documents were moved from "C:\Documents and settings" to C:\users to make it look more like MAC OSX. My Documents become Documents and My Music became Music. Why – No one knows? I am working with Carbonite support and they hope to have an update to their software for Vista and I hope they have a fix for this issue.

If you are interested in trying Carbonite free for 15 days, click this [link deleted].

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As I've blogged before, the whole idea of User Account Control or UAC has been driving me crazy. Annoying dialog boxes that keep popping up asking for your permission before doing anything is NOT security. I'm sure Microsoft will certify and validate more applications and actions so that these annoying popup dialog boxes will soon go away but I've finally had enough and turned them off. This is exactly what I was afraid of - Annoy users with STUPID dialogs and they will disable the security features of your OS. Security should be transparent to the user and NOT in your face, asking users questions that they are not likely to understand.

To disable UAC, navigate to Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> Users Accounts and then select 'Turn User Account Control on or off'. I've turned mine OFF - You should make your own choice.

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My Vista woes continue as I try and fail to pgrade my Office 2003 installation to Microsoft Office 2007. I tried installing the Enterprise edition of Microsoft Office 2007 and the install fails about 20% into it with the following message:

Error 1310. Error writing to c:\config.msi\4f8d86e.rbf. Verify that you have access to that directory.

Here are two screen shots of the error that I get every time - For the record, I am the administrator on the box that I am installing this software. I'm really disappointed with this bug as I've really enjoyed using the latest version of Office. My other computer is running Office 2007 beta2 with Windows XP and it really works great. I checked the 2007 Office known issues page and I don't see this bug there and so I'm out of luck for now. My next move is to try uninstalling the previous version of Office and then trying a clean install to see if that makes a difference.

I've gotten a few emails about my earlier Vista upgrade and iTunes is still broken for me. I am not able to play any purchased music from iTunes or Audible even after I validate my username/password combination. I was a little paranoid about this upgrade and so I have several good and complete backups of my XP installation including all my stuff on S3 via JungleDisk, Carbonite and 2 USB drives locally.

I am getting a new computer this week and so I may try a clean and fresh install of Vista to see if the same problems exists or if they are just because I upgraded from XP to Vista.

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My brother was visiting this past weekend and so instead of us spending quality time together, I decided to upgrade my computer from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Here are some of my initial thoughts that I'll try to break down in the good, the bad and the ugly. And boy there is still some ugliness that I hope Microsoft (and partners) solves soon. (Full disclosure - My brother works for Microsoft). Going back to my brother for a second, we are both true geeks at heart and so quality time for us is being locked up in my office with lots of coffee, 4 computers and 8 USB external drives humming away.

The install of Windows Vista RTM was on my new DELL dual-core 3.2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM and 256MB PCI Express ATI Radeon X600 video card. (Full specs on the hardware). Instead of choosing a clean and fresh install, I decided to opt for the 'in place upgrade' which replaces the Windows XP system/core files while retaining your existing applications, personal files and settings. I should also note that I installed the Ultimate version of Windows Vista.

The Good

There are a lot of really good things about Vista - The first and most striking difference between XP and Vista is Aero and the translucent effect of Aero Glass. Aero Glass is the eye-candy in Vista that fades in/out windows with smooth animation and does create a really nice visual effect. I'm sure the Mac OSX folks will jump in and say that OSX does this already and I think OSX does do this today and has done this for many years already. My brother is very impressed with the sidebar that allows you to drop in widgets or gadgets in Microsoft speak on your desktop. Having used Yahoo Widgets for a while now, this is nothing new to me and didn't get me excited. I like the idea that Windows will now have a widget engine and this will hopefully allow people to create some interesting applications. I see a huge potential for this on the Enterprise side where a widget or gadget sitting on a user's desktop could ping out and get the latest news, updates, prices, promotions, alerts, etc.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is that installation process. With the exception of McAfee virus scan which I'll describe in detail in the 'bad' section, the installation was very smooth. Once the install was off and running, it churned for about 80-90 minutes to get Vista installed and this included a couple of reboots.

I should also mention that the application that I really cared about worked just fine. It will probably take me days to make sure all or most of my applications are working correctly under Vista but the apps I use the most are Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA, FeedDemon, Putty, Java, WebLogic, Tomcat, Glassfish and UltraEdit and they all worked. The only app that I've had major problems with is iTunes and more on that later.

Another cool and I think innovate feature of Vista is the idea of ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps make your PCs more responsive by using flash memory devices (like USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards) to boost performance instead of swapping to disk. Hopefully new PC will start shipping with the new hybrid hard disks that have integrated flash memory to help improve performance, reliability, and battery-life in case of an laptop. The idea of using flash memory instead of swapping to disk is really cool and I hope other OS's take this feature from Windows and implement it themselves.

The last item on the good-list is the Windows Media Center application. The Windows XP Media Center was slow and ugly but did the job and the new Media Center app is significantly faster than the old XP version and seems to perform a lot better. It's still interesting to see how CPU intensive Media Center still is where the dual-core as at 70-80% utilization pretty much all the time while I am watching Live TV.

The Bad

While it's only been about 2 days since I've had the RTM version of Vista on my computer, there are quite a few things I don't like about Vista. I know Joel talked about the shutdown button and so I won't bother with that but there are a lot of really annoying things about Vista. I know - A lot of you are probably shaking your heads thinking I'm probably one of those guys that doesn't like change. Quite the contrary - I love change, but only if it's for the better. For example, the latest version of Office will have the new 'ribbon' interface and I absolutely love that interface. It took me a couple of hours to feel comfortable with the ribbon and find the things that I actually needed to do but I commend Microsoft for taking this bold move and creating a really sensible and usable user interface. There are a lot of things that I wouldn't have changed with Vista and maybe I'll learn to love them with time but I just hate the new start menu. While it's nice that I can search for 'word' to have it bring up Microsoft Word, I would like to be able to just see the menu and sort/arrange in a way that makes sense to me.

Another thing that I also completely hate is the new Windows Explorer and the Navigation Pane. What happened to My Documents and My Pictures and My Videos? I don't know what genius made this decision but instead of storing user profile information under 'C:\Documents and Settings\', Microsoft decided to move that to C:\Users. Why the hell would you do that? What about applications that are using the 'C:\Documents and Settings\' structure and now that whole directory is gone and now applications that rely on that or use hard coded paths will certainly break. Case in point - iTunes. I have about 50 GB of music under iTunes with a majority of it being music that I've personally ripped as MP3 over the last many years and probably 300-400 songs that I've purchased from iTunes. I had all my music under 'C:\Documents and settings\login\My Documents\My Music' and so the iTunes database had that path internally. Hopefully applications would use the registry and so the soft reference to 'My Music' would travel to the new location but apparently iTunes doesn't do that and all of my purchased music wouldn't play. So I reauthorized my computer and it still wouldn't work. I've been playing with it for a couple of hours and I've made the problem worse as I've managed to create 2 copies of every song in my library. Thank god for backups.

The Ugly

I guess I am careful when it comes to my computer and so I have the McAfee suite of products and I typically only use the VirusScan and Firewall features of the suite. But the Vista installer wouldn't run till I uninstalled McAfee. Now I've been reading a lot of new kernel security in Vista and the new PatchGuard technology built into 64-bit Vista that will not allow any third-party tool from making Windows API calls in order to modify their behavior or do something malicious. So I had to uninstall McAfee to even install Vista and that doesn't give me a good feeling. I don't like running with a memory resident virus scan program running at all times - Having a good virus scan gives me the license to download any piece of crap I see on the Internet and installing it. The installer didn't give me any help by pointing out a list of other supported virus scan programs that are approved to work with Vista. After the install, I was able to go to McAfee's site and download a new version of the software that worked under Vista.

I have a major problem with the idea of User Account Control and the false sense of security people are going to get from consenting to actions that require additional access. In the first two hours, I had 15 of these popup asking me things like can the firewall run and block something and unblock something. I paid attention for a while but then was tempted to turn off the feature or just click ok. So how is someone like my dad who loves his computer he is not computer savvy enough to understand the question he is being asked or the function he is consenting to by clicking ok. I know this is a tough problem to solve instead of just locking out the user while allowing them to install software, control the computer but other OS's have this figured out.

The last item that fell in the ugly-section was Vista Office. After Vista was installed and working. I decided to install the latest version of Office. Much to my disappointment, the Office installer was not able to upgrade my copy of Office 2003 because of some file permission issue. I re-ran the installer a few times to no avail - I know uninstall/reinstall is cleaner and better than upgrade but upgrade should work and I could not get Office to install of my Vista PC. Go figure.

In conclusion, Vista does have quite a few compelling features that will make this a required upgrade for pretty much everyone. But I wonder if Microsoft would have been better by taking the BSD or Linux core and adding their UI on top of a working UNIX kernel? Mac's have certainly gotten that to work and Microsoft could have done that instead of writing the whole OS from scratch or borrowing some of the XP code, which came from Windows 2000, which probably came from NT which probably came from Dave Culter and Digital. Yikes

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