In Valid Logic

A while ago, I remember someone blogging about a remote desktop style tool that was very easy for people to use.  It was where you went to a website, got a key, and then someone else went to the site and entered in the key.  Then you cold get onto their system.

Trying to find the site, since my sister has been having some spyware problems and she isn’t tech savvy, so walking her through it over the phone is painful.  And I won’t be seeing her again until late October, so hoping to get some sort of easy remote desktop going so I could take a look at it.

In light of my post yesterday regarding Smugmug, thought I would post a follow up.

First, I am impressed that the CEO of Smugmug, Don MacAskill, commented on my post yesterday, mentioning that they were having issues.  Hey, issues do happen, and Flickr is just as guilty, since I was having problems with them yesterday, and I remember back in like July when they were down for nearly a full day.  Smugmug’s issues yesterday weren’t as bad as I’ve seen with Flickr, it just didn’t make for a great first impression.

I am going to continue to check out Smugmug though, since I had been meaning to write a Smugmug Lightbox module for CS to accompany my Flickr Lightbox module.  Hopefully their web service API is prettier than Flickr’s (haven’t looked at their yet, but Flickr’s is too big).  That piece aside, I am impressed with some of the customizations and theming you can do with Smugmug.  Don’t get anything but the stock layout on Flickr.  They also seem to have a very active community, though in a different way than Flickr.  Flickr is mostly a photo community, where Smugmug has an accompanied forums site.

The biggest thing that impresses me is that Don found my post and took the time to comment on it.  That right there could convince me to switch.  Why?  I like companies that are in touch with their userbase.  Brad, the CEO of ClearContext, had commented when I’ve mentioned them.  The person who wrote YNAB got back to me when I posted about their product on another blog (what, I have more than one blog?  yes).  The CEO of Flickr or anyone there hasn’t posted on my blog before.  As a user, it is always nice to know your opinions (good and bad) are heard, so it is nice to see companies that keep their finger on the pulse of the community.

On a side note, the name Don MacAskill sounded familiar when I saw the comment.  With a quick Google search, I saw that he goes by “onethumb” which rang a bell.  I remembered that name from back in ’96-97, because he worked at Best Internet Communication, my old old old ISP.  Best had a pretty active set of community newsgroups, and I remember him as one of the administrators.  Then I remember running across his name for working with the guys at iD Software back around Doom 2 / Quake, and then again at Ritual Entertainment for SiN.  Damn, that was a long time ago.  That was when I used to use the screenname ‘SeaDawg’… wow.

For something that I thought would be as simple as taking a screenshot and posting it, it sure can be an ordeal.

Was trying to simply take a screenshot with SnagIt and upload it to Flickr, but apparent Flickr is a little picky on file formats and won’t accept any of my files.

I’ve tried uploading it as a JPG and a PNG, and it simply won’t take it.  What gives!  I already knew that Flickr’s “Windows Uploadr” (which is a perpetual beta) was picky on file formats, since it wouldn’t accept images that I’d edited and converted, but this is just plain ridiculous.

Then, in my frustration, I decided to sign up for a trial of Smugmug and see if they would accept the file.  They did, but the photos didn’t show up right away.  Ohh no!  Instead, they have this process queue.  So I got a little image in the gallery saying “Processing Image” and when I look at the Upload Log to see what the heck is going on, it shows that they got it, but under wait time and process time, it just shows “n/a”.

Finally, the two photos I uploaded show up, after a wait time of 773-778 seconds and a process time of 10-22 seconds.  What gives?  I need to wait nearly 15 minutes for the photos to be posted?  This is worse than the cache delay in web apps like CS, since at least you can adjust that, or work on getting cache invalidation better, but come on!  Is Smugmug “Web 2.0″?

Update:  Think Flickr was having some problems, since now it is accepting the images.  Yay!  As for Smugmug, another image I’d uploaded another image that had a wait time of 918 minutes (now over 15 mins).  Bleh.

Some people have emailed me about having trouble with Windows Live Writer detecting the style of their CS site, some of them thinking it was because they were using my ExtendedUrlMapper. I’d run into the issue with it detecting my site’s style as well, so this morning, as I was messing around with some stuff, I decided to take a look into it…

The cause is actually quite simple.

Cache!

The time when you are going to have the problem mostly is when you first add the blog to WLW.  This is because it will hit the front page of your blog to check for RSD support.  So even if the front page data wasn’t cached, it will be now.  Then it will try to detect the style by making a post, refreshing the page, and then removing the post.  The problem is that the old post listing will still be there.  So the key is to make it so that when it gets the front page of the site, the post data should not be in the cache already.  Here is what to do:

1. Add the Community Server site to Windows Live Writer (if you haven’t done already) and let it fail to detect the settings.
2. Force your site to restart, by recycling the application pool, running iisreset, or simply touch the site’s web.config.
3. Hit a page on your site that is not the front page (!).  This will force the application to start again, and keep WLW from eating up the delay.
4. In WLW, go to the View menu and select Update Weblog Style.

Once that is done, you will be able to view your post using your blog’s style!  Simply select View and then Web Preview.

Hopefully with the final release they fix some of its CSS url handling.  For me, none of the style images show up (such as my header) because the CSS for the image is a relative path rather than the absolute URL.

My apologizes for being so quiet this past week… will have some more soon.

Last weekend, I got my hands on the Vista RC1 download (which also came available on MSDN), but ended up not installing it right away.

Finally, tonight I decided to take the plunge and install it.  And then about an hour later, I was restoring my old install.  My RC1 experience went like this:

• Installed Vista (no problem)
• Downloaded Nvidia and Audigy drivers
• Installed the two drivers and rebooted
• Vista came up and my mouse no longer worked
• Used keyboard to get the system to reboot again, figuring maybe a fluke.
• Vista came back up, and the mouse was working again.  Logged in, and then got some memory management BSOD and it rebooted for me.
• Came back up again, and the mouse wasn’t work once more.

After that, was back to restore my old set up.  Now, this guy may have been right that geeks love to dig in and fix problems, which I usually do, but not when it comes to beta testing and operating system.  There are some things I need to just work.  My operating system is one of them.  Without it, I can’t code.  I can’t code, I can’t work.

Overall, I don’t think Vista was the cause of my problems.  If I had to put my finger on anything, I’d have to say it was the Audigy drivers.  They haven’t had a specific RC1 release of the drivers, and I’ve heard of the drivers being a little problematic.  I’m not a big Creative fan, and likely won’t get another one of their cards.

Though before I installed the drivers, I did poke around to see what drivers I was missing.  It looks like I will definitely need to be doing some hardware upgrades before I get Vista.  First, I may want to continue avoiding Creative’s Vista drivers.  Second, my video card is grossly outdated (I don’t play games on my computer, it scored a 2.0 on the Windows Experience Index).  And third, there doesn’t seem to be Vista drivers for my RAID card.  I’m using a slightly older Intel SATA PCI-X RAID card that works in 32-bit mode.  It is older and not really meant for desktops, so I wouldn’t expect them to jump on driver support for Vista.  Perhaps I could just switch to using onboard RAID, since I am doing just RAID1 (had originally planned on doing RAID5, but never got the needed third drive).

So I knew I was going to have to do some upgrades, and that I would need a new laptop (had Beta2 on my laptop, it was slow and painful).  I guess now I know I’ll need my desktop first, since I use it far more for my daily work than my laptop.