September 2006 - Posts
Edward Tutfe's Sparklines are a simple but effective way to convey information. Compare just the text "glucose 128" with a small diagram showing historic trends, normal bands and comparison between other factors.
It seems a number of companies also like the idea, with
Bissantz producing SparkFonts and SparkMaker,
BonaVista Systems with MicroCharts and also the free
PHP Sparkline library.
Another lightweight data visualization technique is doing
'in-cell' graphing in Excel.
In the forecoming Excel 2007, we have
databars and iconsets, and we'll most likely see
ProClarity features (recently bought by Microsoft) move into a combination of Excel,
Sql Server Analysis Services/Business Intelligence and
SharePoint via PerformancePoint in the coming product releases.
My Dad came across this issue the other day - connecting to the Internet via a cable modem worked fine but connecting via a wireless router certain websites didn't work including www.microsoft.com.
The usual software problems on the PC could be ruled out, eg. spyware, invalid HOSTS file, firewall, etc. because switching back to the cable modem and all the sites worked fine.
Turns out it is was an issue with the Belkin router settings, the ISP and the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) - changing this on the router solved the problem. I've heard of MTU before where people
'tweak' network registry settings to try and achieve better throughput similar to hardware overclockers.
I'm guessing the issue must be quite common because Microsoft Support have a
How to Troubleshooting Black Hold Router Issues article that goes into detail how and why it happens and also steps to fix the problem.
Processes tend to run under secured accounts and most companies enforce password policies with the aim that only a small number of trusted people will know the textual passwords which tend to be changed at regular intervals.
All is well, until one day your scheduled job process starts to fail - well one common problem is password has expired.
If you see this error when checking if the account/password still works using RunAs from the command prompt:
1327: Logon failure: user account restriction. Possible reasons are blank passwords not allowed, logon hour restrictions, or a policy restriction has been enforced.
Then grab these two scripts to check if the password has expired:
Can you ever have too fast networks?
As more homes in the UK have broadband, we are starting to see more advanced remote synchronization techniques coming to the forefront as people want to share and consume data over more devices.
Unfortunately Microsoft is still unclear on it's synchronization platforms, whether it is
SyncToy for Windows XP,
FolderShare or the
(slimmed-down) Sync Center in Vista.
However in Vista and Longhorn server some new APIs around
Remote Differential Compression (RDC) are available:
Remote Differential Compression (RDC) allows data to be synchronized with a remote source using compression techniques to minimize the amount of data sent across the network.
RDC is different from patching-oriented differencing mechanisms, such as Binary Delta Compression (BDC), that are designed to operate only on known versions of a single file. BDC requires the server to have copies of all versions of the file, and differences between each pair of versions are precomputed so that they can be distributed efficiently from a server to multiple clients.
RDC makes no assumptions about file similarity or versioning. Because differences between files are computed on the fly, RDC is ideally suited for synchronizing files that are different or have been updated independently.
It would be good if someone took the Windows Base sample,
Copying a file over the network using Remote Differential Compression to reduce required bandwidth, and put a managed .Net wrapper over it.
Quite a few commerical products aim to push a combination of differencing and compression, a similar idea to
iOra's Epsilon Technology which they use in a number of their products including network accelerator for SharePoint across WANs.
This is becoming a more inportant technology space in the coming years, if you are still interested read more about
algorithms for delta compression and remote file synchronization (PDF).
Now as
predicted Microsoft are attempting to create a shareware/hobbyist platform along the lines of Xbox Live Arcade via the
Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (beta).
Support for retail Xbox 360 game development isn't there yet, but for a limited payment you can swap games with other developers. Some people are predicting a
YouTube style community around simple games developed without huge budgets.
Really interesting write-up on
how much money can your Xbox 360 Live Arcade game make looking at Marble Blast Ultra.
But there is the
darker side of piracy on the Xbox 360 in China where Microsoft tries to trace duplication devices from indicators on the piracted discs. An interesting book on the hardware protection side of the original Xbox is
Hacking the Xbox which talks through listening on the north-bridge and melting the cover of chips to determine their circuitry - not legal or encouraged, but interesting to see the hardware side for a change.
Also as Xboxes and Media Centers start to become more common in the living room I think we'll see more applications being built specifically for this area, like
Big Screen Business for watching financial markets.
Off topic post, you often hear of special edition films with digitally enhanced pictures and sound, but it isn't till you see them side-by-side that you really notice the differences.
So I thought it was interesting when
Paul Thurrott of
Winsupersite pointed to the 151 changes made by Lucasfilm in
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back.
