EC2 is Amazon’s “computing in the cloud” infrastructure. Curious, I found this Getting Started page that documents how to bring up a machine in the cloud. It’s a bit like rocket science. Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure, their own cloud computing infrastructure. I expect Microsoft will nail the tooling part and make it dead simple [...]
Microsoft has come out with their first ad response to the Get a Mac ad campaign by Apple. I don’t get it. It’s fun and whimsical, but it seems like one of those videos you show at the start of a company meeting, not something you use with mass media to try to improve your [...]
Okay, it’s probably not WHS’s fault, but an hour or so ago WHS told me that it needed to repair the system drive. No problem, I told it to go ahead. That’s the last I heard from WHS. I went downstairs to check, and found a black screen telling me that c:\windows\system32\config\system is corrupt. Sigh. [...]
Last month I blogged about a problem I’d been having where my Vista machine kept waking up for no apparent reason. I think I’ve found out what was happening. The computer in question was my old Windows Media Center box, now decomissioned. I deleted the user accounts and created new ones, but I didn’t wipe [...]
I have a fairly decent old system that I am repurposing to use as a main floor computer, something that will be used occasionally for playing a video for my son or maybe playing music. The computer I’m using used to be my Media Center, and so never needed to go to sleep. But in [...]
Microsoft released a tool that lets you move your content licenses from one console to another. This is a great thing for me because my 5 previous repairs (between Christmas 2005 and Christmas 2007) left me with content licensed to a mish mash of consoles, and a lot of content I purchased not tied to [...]
Ars Technica is posting a series on Cocoa (the Mac UI framework) and part of it is a comparative look at the .NET Framework. And in my opinion, it’s not very fair. Here’s a quote: The .NET library does work. It more or less has all the main pieces you need, but it’s full of [...]
Oh look, another Google search result that leads to an MSDN page that’s gone missing (the 2nd link on the results page, at least as of right now). This happens far too often. There’s really no excuse for Microsoft not realizing by now that search engines index their site, and that users use search engines [...]
I use Windows Media Center as my PVR, and for the most part, like it a lot. It’s a huge step up from the PVR capability built into the cable box that Rogers supplies, although it can’t do HD. Something simple like “record every new episode of a show” is not possible with the Scientific [...]
It’s cool that Microsoft has announced that IE8 passes the Acid2 test (in “IE8 Standards Mode” – I sure hope that mode is enabled by default. But what I found interesting is how they announced it: By showing the check-in mail that signified the committing of the code that implemented the fix into the main [...]