I know that Microsoft doesn’t need anyone defending them, but I think that the series of events surrounding Vista were certainly not ideal. I’ve highly anticipated every new release of Windows, and Vista was no exception.

Watching the progress of Vista, I couldn’t help being disappointed. Vista was supposed to change the world. There would be an amazing new file system, a cutting edge graphics system, and .NET driving many of the core functionality. But one by one, the features got neutered or disappeared completely.

When it was released, the bad hype had already nearly killed it for me. Then I installed it in a virtual machine and learned what a pile of crap it really was. It took minutes to boot, and the UI was barely usable. Every few seconds I would get security prompts. I was done with this OS for a long time.

Fast forward to Windows 2008. I started reading great things about how this OS made a great desktop OS. At the core, it’s Vista SP1, but with much of the crap removed. I tried it out, and loved it. I had a few issues with incompatible drivers, but that’s expected when using a just-released 64-bit OS.

Then, Vista SP1 was released, and most of the cynics said it was "decent". Time had helped fix the driver issues, and SP1 addressed specific pain points. Eventually I got around to installing Vista SP1 (64 bit) over Windows 2008. I was amazed. Nearly all of the drivers were already included. It was fast, and some of the new features, while not life changers, were a boost to my productivity none-the-less.

Recently, I purchased a new laptop. It’s shocking what you can get for a mere $650. It’s a 14.1" HP (dv2910us) with 3GB RAM, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 250GB hard drive, 802.11n, DVD burner, and even a built-in removable remote control. Of course it included a license for Vista. HP includes a shocking amount of crapware, so I reinstalled Vista from my MSDN media. One major improvement over XP is that your OEM key works with MSDN media. That means I can actually use the key that was on the sticker of the laptop! Thank you Microsoft (and it’s about time)!

It runs great on my laptop, and I’ve had no complaints whatsoever. In fact, I think I’ve had less issues than if I was running XP. Much to my surprise, a few days ago I get a prompt to install updates. The update in the list was SP1. Yes, that’s right, I wasn’t even using SP1. Maybe Vista was bad when it came out, but I think the horsepower of modern computers combined with finally decent driver support erases the bad history.

I’ll sum up what I love about Vista over XP in one paragraph. Integrated search from the start menu rocks, and I use it constantly. I also love the new copy dialog, which tells me the actual speed of file transfers. As far as 64-bit support, I’ve been very impressed. It’s very possible to run the 64-bit version and have a decent change of all of your devices working as expected. This is a must since typical new high-end computers are going to start going over 4GB RAM soon (if they haven’t already). There are even hard to find features that are very nice. When you copy a folder over another folder, it actually gives you a reasonable set of options, as well as enough information to make a decision about merging, overwriting, or even renaming them.

Now what about UAC? You know, the feature that pops up an annoying dialog every 5 seconds? Well, if you run your computer as a local administrator (like you did in XP), you’ll rarely see them. I actually appreciate them because it does make your computer safer.

Conclusion

Make up your own opinion about Vista and give it a try. It’s mature enough that I recommend it to my tech friends. I was just as apprehensive as everyone else, but I’m glad I made the switch. In case you’re wondering, no Microsoft hasn’t paid me, but it sure would be nice :-).

I’ve settled on a new backup solution. I’m going to be using Amazon’s persistent storage solution called S3. Amazon provides a virtually infinite, scalable storage cloud that allows you to store files indefinitely. You pay a small fee to get the data there ($.10/gig), a fee to store the data ($.15/gig/month), and a fee to retrieve the data ($.17/gig).

Features I was looking for:

Price

To automate my backups, I’m using a product called JungleDisk. You can purchase it for $20, and you get free upgrades for life. I love products that have free upgrades for life, since I don’t have to worry about when buy it. They also allow you to use it on unlimited computers, which I definitely need.

JungleDisk by default talks directly with S3, so they don’t need to run any servers. You’re counting 100% on the reliable storage provided by S3.

Organization

Amazon stores your files in "buckets", which you can think of as a single level folder/directory structure. JungleDisk can easily connect to multiple buckets at the same time. You configure each bucket independently. JungleDisk can automatically detect all of your buckets, and you can easily create new ones.

I highly recommend creating buckets for each logical group of files you want to back up. Try to avoid sharing a bucket between computers when possible. If you tell JungleDisk that a bucket is only used on one computer, it doesn’t have to query S3 to determine what needs to be synchronized. The default is set to multiple computers. This setting is under the "Bucket Settings" for each bucket.

Each bucket also lets you choose what to back up. Of course there are extensive options for backing up subfolders, excluding files, etc.

You can even set up how your local folders get mapped to the remote folders. This lets you do multiple folders in one bucket. On my laptop, I have a couple of folders that get backed up to a single bucket, but are organized into different folders so that I could easily restore them independently.

Scheduling

Setting up a schedule is very easy. For example, on my laptop, I have it set to synchronize my files every hour. It uses the timestamp’s of the files to determine if there are any new, changed, or deleted files. Since I’m not sharing this particular bucket between machines, it can instantly determine if anything needs backed up.

Security

JungleDisk has all the security options you would expect. You can communicate with Amazon over port 80 unencrypted, or use SSL. I actually turn off the SSL option, because I use the JungleDisk encryption. I don’t see a reason to do double encryption.

When you create the bucket, you can specify a custom key that encrypts your data. I like this option because I am the only one that has access to the data. Even Amazon can’t tell what I’m storing on there.

Performance

Since Amazon is providing the storage, they’re able to scale indefinitely. You can be confident that they can handle whatever you throw at them. They had no problem letting me upload at over 56,000 kbits/sec from my dedicated host. I backed up 4 gigs in about 10 minutes.

Other Features

This post is going to explain the importance of your product reaching critical mass. When I say “product”, I mean an actual product you’re selling, or simply a website or blog. When I’m talking about critical mass, I’m describing the point at which your product becomes viral, sometimes known as the network effect. This should be a lesson to anyone thinking of creating their own product or service.

Above, you’ll see the typical technology adoption bell curve. What you need to realize is that you’re starting on the left, and you’re trying to get up the hill. Do you think it’s easy? Well, judging by Youtube, twitter, milliondollarhomepage, Digg, or myspace, it must be easy!

The truth is, you should have a path to success. Here are just a couple of paths that have worked for other products:

Hopefully I’m making the situation look difficult. I couldn’t find any concrete numbers, but you can be sure that more than half of online businesses fail within the first couple of years. That includes well-funded businesses. If you expect to start the next Fog Creek Software while working part time in the evenings, you need to have a plan.

The best advice I can give you is to do whatever it takes to get your product into the hands of as many people as possible. It might mean making partnerships with someone of influence, or it might mean creating a viral marketing campaign. It might also mean that you’ll have to give your product away for free, build up your army of followers, and then invent another great product. If you already have a product with a good user base, you’re probably already in good shape. If you are just starting out, don’t think that people will magically find you, unless you’re counting on the “lucky” path I described.

I just received this email from DreamHost:

Admittedly, the primary reason I chose them was because they’re a great backup solution. I didn’t realize that it was against their terms of service, in fact, there is a ton of information out there about using rsync to backup your files to them. I’ve been doing it for well over a year now, and I’ve been recommending the service to others.

I had heard many bad things about DreamHost, but they were working great for backups. Now you can’t use them for that, what do they have going for them? I can’t imagine many users have 400GB+ websites that their hosting. If they are, I have a hard time believing they’re using cheap shared hosting!

Now I’m looking into other backup solutions, and it’s looking pretty grim. Since my server and laptop both run Windows 2008, there aren’t many solutions available. For example, Mozy requires you to use their business version, which is ridiculously expensive.

Another option is JungleDisk, which uses Amazon’s S3 service. I would be looking at paying $30/month to backup around 200GB.

Does anyone have other ideas? The solution has to be automatic, so that I don’t have to count on remembering to do it. It also has to be off-site, because I don’t want to lose all of our photos of our house burns down.

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror had an interesting post about sites that ask for your email password to lookup contacts in their system. He suggests that they stop doing that immediately, and long-term, find a more secure solution.

I can understand where he’s coming from. He doesn’t want to hand over the keys to all of his information.

I see things a little differently, because I’ve been on the other side of the fence. Imagine that you’re writing a site and your #1 goal is to make it easy to use. Jeff himself is a huge advocate of usability. The problem is that developers don’t have an unlimited amount of time. The quickest way to make something easy to use at this point is to simply ask for the information, grab the addresses, and be done with it.

I agree that if the major email providers provide a more secure way to access the data, it’s certainly worth investigating.

The second point I’d like to make is that Yelp probably doesn’t care that Jeff won’t give his personal information. It’s an optional step to save him time, and even if he doesn’t use the service, he probably represents only 1% of the users that use the service.

I’m very paranoid when it comes to passwords. I have automatically generated random passwords for every site that I use. I still have been trusting enough to give sites like Facebook my Gmail credentials to go check my address book. I should be changing my email password on a regular basis anyway.

The fact is that 99% of users will happily give over any information that you ask for.

When I do computer work on the side (which I’m trying to avoid these days), I’ll ask for a certain password and strangers will happily give me all of their personal information. Bank account passwords, email passwords, work passwords, etc. I try to tell them they shouldn’t do that, but you’re not going to change everyone’s attitude overnight.

Remember, more than 70% of people would reveal their password in exchange for a bar of chocolate!

I’m sure those services in question would like to have a better solution for accessing the data, but it’s probably at the end of a long list of potential features. The only way that’s going to change is if they start losing a significant number of customers over it.