Listen...You Smell Something?

Do I Want a Windows Home Server?

Ever since I first heard about Windows Home Server (WHS) I've been intrigued. After reading reviews like this one at Ars Technica I've decided that I need to try this server out. The review does a good job of describing what WHS is and is not. I'm going to document my thoughts and processes for putting a WHS server on my home network.

First, a description of the current setup. In the house I have 2 main desktops (1 for me, 1 for my wife), 3 laptops (1 for me, 2 are my wife's), and 2 servers (1 is basic file, web, print server and the other is essentially NAS for backups). What I want WHS to do is replace the 2 servers with 1 box. The main server provides these functions for me:

• Basic web sites. Mostly Picasa exports for photos.
• NT authentication protected Andromeda script for everywhere access to my music.
• Storage for my music collection.
• Runs SlimServer for the Squeezebox in the living room.
• File shares for Music, software, common documents, scratch area, etc.
• 2 connected printers that are shared for the workstations.
• Custom service to update my DNS entry when my IP address changes.
• Scheduled SyncBack SE job to copy files to the backup server

The backup server has a couple of jobs itself:

• Network shares so machines can copy files to it to back them up.
• Always has a user signed in and FolderShare up. This requires a little explanation. I use FolderShare to keep several directories sync'd between my laptop and desktop. The problem is that the 2 are seldom powered on at the same time. Enter the always on backup server to provide the link.

The question is: Will WHS fulfill all those services and add something compelling to make me change?

The answer: Yes, but probably with several unsupported "features". I'll elaborate in my next post.

Finding New Music

I like to listen to music while I do most things. The problem is that I don't always like listening to the same songs over and over (that eliminates most radio). I also don't think I'm the only one who has this problem either (I know, going out on a limb making that declaration. Whew.). So how do you find new music that you'll like? I've found a couple of ways that work for me but first a little background.

In the past I've purchased a lot of CD's. I still purchase the occasional CD but not so much anymore. I no longer crave the latest fad artist like I did in college. Maybe I've actually matured (everyone who knows me just fell on the floor laughing). So I've gone through the normal routine of trying out the online distribution services to find one I like. iTunes is ok but I hate the DRM (and iTunes itself but that's just me). I've never tried Rhapsody because I don't like the idea that all of my music goes away as soon as I stop paying the monthly fee. I ended up settlig with eMusic.

I actually started with eMusic way back in the day when it was unlimited downloads of DRM free MP3 files for your monthly fee. Granted, the catalog was a little limited but I still managed to find plenty of music that I could enjoy. When they changed to a set number of tracks each month I quit. At the time my habit was to only download full albums (I still only do that) and I would grab them in spurts. One week I would grab 5-6 and then nothing for weeks as I digested the new stuff. The unlimited downloads worked great for this mode but the limited downloads that didn't carry over didn't work so well. Some months I wouldn't use any downloads and others i was way short of what I wanted. So I left for a coupleof years. Now I'm back with eMusic and have managed to adjust to the new model. The expanded catalog helps too. I've found a lot of stuff I like. How to find it though?

I find most of my music one of 4 ways: from friends, from recomendations on eMusic, from the radio when I drive into work, and from Live Plasma. I won't explain the from friends since that should be self explanatory.

The recomendations from eMusic takes on several forms. None are perfect but they've all yielded new music for me. When you search for an artist on eMusic along the right side of the screen they have a couple of sections to note if you are looking for something new. My favorite is the Similar Artisits section. This has found me several new artists and is about what you would expect. They also have Influences, Followers, and Formal Connections. I'm really not sure how these get populated but they work pretty well. They also have a section called Member Lists. These are lists of albums that eMusic members have put together and shared that contain the album you are currently viewing. This is your standard hit or miss fare but is worth a couple of minutes to look through. eMusic also has what they call the eMusic dozen. These are lists of albums put together by one of the editors for a specific genre. I've been disappointed with most of these. I guess my music tastes don't run similar to music critics. Which is odd because you can browse artists and albums on the site and certain albums have earned an Editors Pick designation. I've been pretty happy browsing a genre and looking through the editors picks to find new albums I like. Weird.

I'm not ahuge fan of the radio since so much of it is repeating the same few songs over and over but I like one local station and listen to it in the car. I've heard some songs I like and have even found some of them on eMusic. This is an ok source for new music.

My favorite way to find new music is by using the Live Plasma (formerly Music Plasma) web site. This is one of the few Flash based sites I actually like. Enter an artist name and it will draw a map with the selected artist in the center and simial artists around it. The larger the circle the more popular the artist. It will also load the albums(with covers) and list them in the dialog. It's hard to describe. Go play with it. I'm not as impressed with the new movie version as the music but it is newer so maybe it'll get better over time.

Tree Size and WinDirStat

I had a comment on my post Where Has All My Hard Drive Space Gone? from cgoren that recommended an alternative to WinDirStat called Tree Size (I'm only looking at the free version of Tree Size. There is a Pro version that has more functionality).

If you love the concept, but find that app overkill, check out TreeSize free edition at http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml#treesize.
Its a nice, simple UI and, importantly, it installs itself in Explorer's context menu so you can right click on a subdirectory within explorer e.g. c:\documents and settings, and TreeSize launches and runs from that as its root directory.

I went and checked out Tree Size and just don't agree with the comment that WinDirStat is overkill and Tree Size is better (ok, it doesn't exactly say that Tree Size is better but it implies it (at least the way I read it)). The only thing that Tree Size might have going for it over WinDirStat is the installer will add Tree Size to your Explorer folder context menu (it does give you the option to not install it there as well which is a good thing). In fact, I think the only reason Tree Size has an installer is to create the shortcuts and context menu entries. Personally I'd rather not have an installer (although WinDirStat has one if you want it. You can also just get the binaries or even the source code). It only takes a few seconds to create a shortcut to the program under your SendTo menu and you have nearly the same functionality. With no installer the app can live in my Utils directory and migrates seamlessly to other machines via a simple copy. I often copy my entire Utils directory to new machines and I have all of my install-less (is that a word?(it is now)) utilities on the new machine.

What about the functionality? Tree Size only offers one of the three views of your drive that WinDirStat does. While this allows a smaller window to work with it greatly reduces the usefulness. The visual representation (and even broken down by file type) view is just too useful to not have. Scan a directory and point out the abnormally large files with Tree Size. Hard to do since Tree Size will show the size of the files in the directory, but not the individual files. Here is the Tree Size view of my Downloads directory:

Notice that the VMWare Workstation directory shows that it is 268 MB in size. What is does not show (and I can't figure how to get it to show) is that there are 3 separate files in that directory. Take a look at the WinDirStat view of the same directory:

Notice that it shows all 3 of the files in the tree and highlights them in white in the graph. I can probably delete the 2 old versions and free up 170 MB. I can't get Tree View to show me this level of detail.

How about performance? Tree Size scanned my C: drive in 63 seconds, WinDirStat did it in 56 seconds. Close enough to be even. While Tree Size is ok, I'll stick with the better WinDirStat.

Just for grins I put together a .reg file to show WinDirStat under Explorer context menu. Note: messing your registry can seriously muck up your computer. I've only tested this on one machine and present it as is and take no responsibility for it messing up your machine.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat\command]
@="\"C:\\Utils\\WinDirStat\\WinDirStat.exe\" \"%1\""

I'm sure there are some registry gurus who read this that can present a better version. I'd love to see it.

Where Has All My Hard Drive Space Gone?

Every once in a while I realize that I'm running low on hard drive space on one of my machines. When that happens (like it recently did when I copied files from my backup to a fresh install of Vista on my laptop and it took for freaking ever) I turn to a little utility I found a while back called WinDirStat. This handy (and free open source) utility will scan your whole hard disk once and then show you the results in 3 different views. It has a tree view that is sorted in descending order based on size of the directory and all subdirectories. Second it has a list of file extensions and how much space they take up. Again, it is sorted in descending drive space order. Third it has a cool graphical view of the entire drive where each box is a file proportional to the size it is on the hard disk. The larger the file, the larger the corresponding box in the graph.

The graphical view is what really grabbed me when I first stated using WinDirStat. It is very easy to spot those huge files that eat all of the hard disk space. To find out what the file is, just click on it in the graph and the tree view will adjust, expanding down to where the file is located and select it. In the screenshot at the bottom there are 2 large files in green. Those are my page file and hibernation file.

When I first ran WinDirStat it took about 10 seconds (after the initial scan which took about a minute) to spot 3 .iso images I still had on my hard drive that I had used and forgotten about. That's an easy way to free up a few GB of space.

I used the program a few times before I really started to pay any attention to the extension list. The more I use WinDirStat the more I like that section. As you can see from the screenshot, I have 4.5 GB of mp3 files on my machine (wow, those eMusic files add up fast, but that is another post).

The final thing that I really like about this program is that you can download the binaries, put them in a directory and run them. No install is necessary. I love utilities like this.

I Love Monitors

I’ve always been a hound for more resolution in my monitors. It goes all the way back to when I was first running Windows 3.0 and I had a monitor capable of 800x600 resolution. Everyone I worked with thought that I was nuts looking at the tiny text on the 800x600 resolution. 640x480 was just fine with them. Then I switched to 1024x768. What a dream that was. Look at all the space on the 14” screen. Everyone I worked with was till using 800x600 (a couple insisted on 640x480). Fast Forward a few years and I was using a single monitor at 1280x1024 and thought it was the greatest. Then came this operating system called NT and I heard that you could put 2 video cards in it and have 2 monitors at the same time. I ran out to the nearest store and bought a video card to put in my work machine. It took a little while to work out the quirks but then I had a 2 monitor setup. I was hooked. Since that time I’ve been preaching about how developers need more than one monitor. I’ve convinced many a person to try 2 monitor setups and almost all have loved it (there’s always one or two who insist they like 1 monitor better. I usually call them grandparents.).

My system right now is using a 2 monitor setup with a Dell 2405FPW 24” widescreen (1920x1200) as main main monitor and a Dell 2001FP 20” (1600x1200) as my second monitor. They actually match very well together. The screen height is fairly close and more importantly the resolution height (1200) matches for both monitors. This means I have an effective resolution of 3520x1200 or almost 4.25 million pixels. I love it. The mismatched resolutions does have some interesting side effects but the excellent UltraMon (don’t run multi monitor without it) handles things nicely.

The thing that prompted this post was an announcement from Dell at CES today. They announced a new 22” widescreen (E228WFP, 1680x1050) monitor. The shocking thing is the MSRP of only $329. Right now on the Dell Home & Small Office site it is selling for only $296. To put this price in perspective, when I bought the Dell 2001FP about 2.5 years ago I was waiting for it to come down to under $700 to my door (I got it to my door for something like $699.75). I’ve had the 2405FPW for about 6 months and it was around $800 (it’s current about $675). That means that 2 of the new monitors can be had for less than what I paid for the single 20” 2.5 years ago or the 24” 6 months ago. Doing the math, that’s over 3.5 million pixels for less than the cost of one of my monitors. I think I need to start prompting(bullying) more people to switch to big, dual, widescreens.

There is an excellent comparison of resolution standards in Wikipedia here.

Now playing: Collide - Vortex - The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum

Support Your Favorite Small Vendor Day

Coding Horror has a post declaring today “Support Your Favorite Small Vendor Day” by finding one of the awesome programs you use and making a donation to the programmer/company that wrote it. I’ve got lots of software that I use that is given away free that I have not done my part to support (I’ve also got a fair amount that I have paid for and registered). I’ve decided to pick the excellent TaskSwitchXP that I’ve been enjoying for over a year now. $20 bucks headed your way ntwind software from a happy user. Thank you.

Go out there and support the programs you use.

Virtual PC 2004 vs VMWare Workstation 5.5

In the past I’ve mentioned that I’m a virtual machine junkie and that I consider VMware Workstation 5.5 to be a better product than Virtual PC 2004. I thought I should explain that position a little bit and decided to compare the two programs. I sat down and made out a list of attributes that the 2 programs have. It looks like this (this is by no means comprehensive, just what I pulled off the top of my head in about 5 minutes):

Both application allow the user to create many VMs and run more than one at one time but the way they each handle window management is very different.

Window Management

Virtual PC allows the user to run VMs each in their own window or full screen. It has another window that runs the main application that controls which VMs are running, settings etc. This window minimizes to the task tray. Virtual PC 2004 uses SDI for window management. Nothing wrong with that.

VMware Workstation also allows the user to run VMs each in their own window (launch multiple instances of VMware Workstation) or full screen. It also adds the ability to run multiple VMs in one window with each VM on it’s own tab (this is the default). Actually it has 2 versions of this, one with a normal window that can be resized, maximized etc. The second is what they call Quick Switch. It is a cross between full screen and having the main window maximized. The VM runs at full screen except for the tabs along the top for the other VMs. The menu bar is set to auto hide and will drop down when you move the mouse to the top of the screen. What I’ve found is that I can run the VM nearly full screen and still retain easy access to the host OS. All I do is click on an empty space in the tab bar and my alt-tab now goes to the host OS instead of the guest OS. Works well for me.

Network Management

Virtual PC allows the users to have up to 4 network cards that can be bound directly to a host network (bridged), use NAT for sharing the hosts connection (the host acts as a router), set to local only network (only accessible from other VMs and maybe the host) or not connected. These options will meet the needs of most VMs nicely. NAT is my standard since I generally don’t want to try and connect to the VM from anywhere other than VMs but still want internet access.

VMware Workstation adds a few more options into the mix. It only allows a maximum of 3 ethernet adapters but has some different options for connecting them. It allows Bridged, NAT, Host only (private network shared with the host), or custom. The custom is where all the fun begins. You can select from one of 10 virtual switches. 3 of the 10 are set by default to Bridged, NAT and Host only. The rest can each have their own subnet and have bridging, NAT, or DHCP enabled for each. There is actually a separate tool that is installed at the same time as VMware Workstation called the Virtual Network Editor that allows you to configure all of the virtual networks. What this means is that you can setup some very complicated networks entirely within VMware Workstation. The manual has a nice diagram of setting up 4 virtual machines to establish a classic network of Internet<->Firewall<->Web Server<->Firewall<->Internal PC.

Undo Management

The ability to run a VM, make changes, install software, etc. and then revert back to the original state without any of the changes is one of the main reasons I use VMs so extensively. Virtual PC provides this using undo disks. In the settings of the virtual machine you can turn on undo disks and then when you close the VM you have 3 options: commit the changes, delete the changes, save the changes. Commit the changes merges the changes into the virtual disk files and you can no longer go back. Delete the changes reverts the VM to where it was at the last commit. Save the changes keeps the changes separate from the main virtual disk and you will pick up right where you left off. If you delete sometime in the future it will drop not only changes since the save, but all the way back to the previous commit. Basically, there is 1 level of undo.

VMware Workstation also has undo disks but they call them snapshots and they are a little different. The way it works is if the VM has snapshots enabled then you can take a snapshot of the machine state at any time (I prefer while not running but you can do it while the VM is operating). This marks a point that you can go back to. If you go back to a previous snapshot that has snapshots after it you will create a branch in the snapshots. This simply provides many levels of undo. You can adjust the settings so that when you power a VM off you can have it automatically take a snapshot, revert to a previous snapshot, ask or do nothing. VMware provides a snapshot manager that lets you take snapshots, label snapshots, add descriptions, delete snapshots and even clone the VM (more on that later). It also gives a graphical view of the snapshots for the VM (see image below for example). Snapshots are THE killer feature for me with VMware Workstation over Virtual PC.

Virtual Machine Creation

Virtual PC has a nice wizard that will walk you through creating a new VM. You can specify name, location, guest OS, memory size, create a new virtual hard drive or use an existing one, etc. That is easy enough but what if you want to create a new VM based on a old VM? I don’t like to install from scratch every time I want to run an OS so I keep basic “clean” installs of OS’s I use frequently. When I want to create a new VM with one of these OS’s I create a new VM based on the “clean” one. In Virtual PC this generally means going to the file system and copying the virtual hard drive file to a new location and running through the wizard to create a new VM. The other option is to create a new differencing virtual hard drive and create the new VM based on that. A differencing virtual hard drive is similar to an undo disk. When you create it you point it to the original and then any changes that are made are saved in the differencing drive and not the original. The catch is that the original can’t be changed or the differencing disk is invalid.

VMware Workstation has a better model for creating new VM based on existing ones. They call it cloning. You simply open the original VM and click on Clone this virtual machine. This brings up a wizard that will guide you through the cloning process. You can clone from the current state or any existing snapshot (hence the clone option in Snapshot Manager I mentioned earlier). You can also create a linked clone or a full clone. The linked clone is similar to the differencing disks of Virtual PC except that the original can still be modified. A new snapshot is created and locked in the original. This means that you can’t delete the snapshot but can still revert back to it (or earlier) like normal. The full clone makes a full copy of the VM and is then completely independent of the original. No going out to the file system and manually copying files or worrying that you might change the original and make the linked VM no longer work.

Other Points of Interest

• Pre-made Virtual Machines
• Microsoft has slowly been releasing some of their betas and CTPs on pre-made Virtual PC images.
• VMware has a TON of pre-made images that you can freely download and try out. You don’t even need VMware Workstation, you can use the free VMware Player.
• 64 bit OS support
• Virtual PC has no 64 bit support
• VMware Workstation supports both the host and the guest as 64 bit OS. The guest can only be 64 bit if the host is also 64 bit.
• Virtual Machine Groups (Teams)
• Virtual PC has no team support
• VMware Workstation allows you to group VMs into teams that can then be controlled together and have their own private network available. You can do things like set a startup order for the machines, etc. This allows you to setup some of those complex networks and have the machines come up in the order they need to without having to do it manually. You can setup a multi-tier environment. There are plenty of uses for this, use your imagination.

Conclusion

I stated in the first sentence of this entry that I think VMware Workstation 5.5 is a better product than Virtual PC 2004. Hopefully if you’ve read this far you can start to understand why. In just about every area VMware Workstation can do everything Virtual PC can and then adds more flexibility and functionality on top. I keep thinking of more things to talk about (like changing the hardware simulated, using USB devices, etc) but this has gone on long enough. The only place where Virtual PC has VMware Workstation beat is price: $free vs $200. When I bought my copy it was $100 vs $200 and the difference was worth it. I still think the difference is worth it but you’ll have to decide that for yourself. If you use VMs do yourself a favor and at least try VMware Workstation.

Now playing: Tool - 10,000 Days - 10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)

Adventures With Vista

A few weeks ago Microsoft released Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and I got a little excited. I've been telling myself that Vista was not worth the trouble until it hits RC. There have been too many other things to spend my time on than struggling with a Beta OS (no matter how fun that can be). This is my (ongoing) story of setting up and exploring this new piece of software.

First up, Where to Install

I'm pretty much a virtual machine junkie but I don't want to install Vista in a VM. I've read enough about it to know that it has some hefty hardware requirements to get all of the cool new effects and I've got a fairly beefy machine (Details on my machine are here) but VM performance is still not optimal. I think I'll install it on a separate hard drive on my main machine (I'm not ready to have it completely replace my WinXP install yet. It has to prove ready first). I wonder if it will install on an external USB drive? I'll have to find out. All right, lets install this sucker. Uh oh.

Really First up, Get the Software

Told you I was excited. So excited I forgot to get the images. A looong download and some DVD burning later I've got 2 DVD's of Vista RC1 (build 5600). One for x86 and one for x64. Lets get to installin'

The Install (First try)

Flip a mental coin and I decide to try and install the x86 version first. I reboot the machine with the DVD in the drive and make sure I boot from it. I get a nice screen with a progress bar that says Windows is loading and after a few seconds that screen goes away and a bright greenish colored background image shows up. Hard disk and DVD are still showing activity and a few seconds later a mouse cursor appears in the middle of the screen. I can move the cursor around with the mouse, cool. Wait a minute or so, nothing. Hard drive and DVD are quiet. Wait another minute or so, still nothing. OK, maybe the DVD burn was bad (it has happened before) so I'll try again. Burn another DVD image and follow the steps above to the exact same point. Background on the screen with a moveable mouse cursor and nothing else. x86 is obviously giving me some problems, lets try the x64 and see how it goes. Reboot with the x64 DVD in the drive and I get the same thing as the x86 version. This is getting frustrating. After a few more attempts I got lucky and somebody knocked on my front door while the x86 version was loading. I was gone for about 15 minutes and when I came back I had a dialog that let me proceed with the installation. It takes me about 4 minutes to go from the mouse cursor appearing to having a dialog on the screen. I guess I'm just impatient.

The installation is nice and graphical and will not let me install on an external USB drive. I'll skip my swearing and the part where I ordered an external SATA drive which it will install to. What I ended up doing was disconnecting my internal drives and just connecting the external SATA drive. The install routine lets you create and delete partitions and decide where to install. I split the drive into 2 partitions, one for x86 and one for x64. The install proceeds without error and is pretty zippy.

Once the install is done it will ask you for a few things like a user name, time zone etc. and then it will proceed to measure the performance of your computer. This is the first place I ran into problems with the x86 version. A short while after starting the performace measurements I briefly saw a blue screen of death that had some sort of memory error and then the system reboots. Vista starts again and asks you the same questions as before: user name (have to pick a different one than before since that one already exists), time zone, etc. Luckily this time it skips the performance check and I can log in. Wow, this OS is kind of pretty. Oh, so that is the sidebar I've been reading about. Let's look at the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH with some memory error and a reboot. Yup, it appears that Vista x86 just refuses to work on my main machine for more than a few seconds at a time.

The Install (Second Try)

Well, x86 isn't working I wonder if x64 will work? I put the x64 install disk in and reboot (remembering to boot from the DVD of course) and run through the install with x64. Exact same install with the exact same annoying 4 minute wait. This time I enter a user name, time zone, etc and it starts to do a performance check on my machine. It keeps doing a performance check on my machine longer than the x86 did. Wait, it just finished! Yippee! I can now log in to a working copy of Vista.

Excellent, they just released build 5728. Maybe they fixed my problem with x86 and BSOD. Tune in next time to find out.

Red Gate Gets the Price Wrong with SQL Prompt

A couple of months ago I blogged about a tool that I like called SQL Prompt. I praised Red Gate Software (the new owners) for releasing a free version of the tool while they worked on the next version. This is all good. Then I saw this entry Open Letter to the SQL Server Community about SQL Prompt from the joint CEO of Red Gate Software. In it he talks about how the tool was fundamentally flawed so they are writing it from scratch the Red Gate way. Again, this is fine (applaudable even). Near the end the pricing for the upcoming version (3.0) of SQL Prompt is revealed to be $99 pre-order and $195 list price. This is where Red Gate is stumbling. One of the reasons that PromptSQL (the name before it was purchased by Red Gate) was so popular was the $25 price tag. This made it a no brainer purchase for most developers. At $25 a lot of developers won’t even bother trying to get the company to pay for the tool but buy it themselves (I did). At $200 (ok,ok $195)  this doesn’t happen. Not even close. For most developers a $200 expense can require anything from a simple explanation to an understanding manager to a 3 page justification for the expense. The tool is providing auto-completion and basic snippet functionality for SQL. That’s it. Price it at $50 and it is still a no brainer to me. Price it at $100 and I probably won’t buy it. Price it at $200 and it’s not even close.

Virtual Machine Price Wars

There is an ongoing price and market share war between VMware and Microsoft in the virtual machine software area.

December 12, 2005 – VMware releases free VMware Player

February 6, 2006 – VMware Introduces Free VMware Server

April 3, 2006 – Microsoft releases Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition for free

July 12, 2006 – Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 is now free

I prefer VMware Workstation 5.5 to Virtual PC 2004 but that was when it was $200 vs $130. Now that it is $200 vs Free it gets a little murkier. VMware Workstation 5.5 is a better product (I’ll elaborate in another post) but is it $200 better? Hmm.  Will VMware reduce the price on VMware Workstation to free? Time will tell.

Open DNS

When I got home from work today and checked my email I found one that captured my interest. It was from David Ulevitch announcing that OpenDNS had launched. Now this captured my interest because DNS is one of those things that everyone uses and takes for granted. Until it is not working anyways.

Side story: A while back the performance of everything I did on the internet from my home network went to h-e-double hockey sticks. I finally figured out that my DNS queries were taking an extremely long time. I double checked my DNS server entries and they matched what my ISP had given me so I kept looking. I finally called my ISP and found out that they had changed the DNS servers I was supposed to be using and neglected to tell me. After I changed to the new servers everything was just fine again. That little incident drove home just how important DNS queries are for everything I do.

What is OpenDNS? OpenDNS is an alternative DNS that you can use instead of the one your ISP or whomever gave you to use. They claim to be Safer, Faster and Smarter. Let’s look at each of those claims:

Safer: It looks like they are using blacklists to stop you from hitting known phishing sites. They don’t say where the list comes from or how ofter it is updated. Still, as long as there are no false posititives something is better than nothing. They have an example at InternetBadGuys. If you are using their DNS then you will see something like this:

Faster: OpenDNS claims to have huge caches and servers located close to you. Right now they have servers on each coast of the US. Locations in Chicago, London and Hong Kong coming soom. Does this mean faster? Well, my test is still running so I’ll get back to this.

Smarter: OpenDNS takes what it thinks are spelling mistakes and corrects them. The example they give is www.craigslist.og becomes www.craigslist.org . This is fine as long as it doesn’t get too aggressive. I’m ok with simple things like .cmo changing to .com but not much else. Fortunately it looks like this is about all it does.

The Catch: How are they going to make money when they offer this service for free? Ads. Remember Verisign “service” called Site Finder? Basically what happens is when you enter an address that doesn’t exist you get directed to a search page that has suggestions and ads for you to look at. I entered the address www.geekinf.com and got  the page to the right.

The big difference between this and the Verisign Site Finder is that users are opting into this one. I’m still not sure I like it though. When I first tried it I received a blank page instead of any sort of search or error page. I’ll chalk it up to opening day blues but it highlights a point: If the search service is down or malfunctioning what happens? Right now I can customize what happens with my browser but when the search wasn’t there I was receiving a valid (but blank) html page. Personally, I’d rather get the domain not found error.

Back to Faster: Well, I ran some quick tests on the PC Mag top 101 web sites using my ISP given DNS and OpenDNS. The good news is that I didn’t see any significant difference between the two. OpenDNS had a slightly better average and more results < 50 ms but also had more > 400 ms. I also tried doing a full refresh in my RSS aggregator with both DNS services. This is not measurable but they were both quick enough that I would use them.

Is it worth changing? I like the idea of correcting my typos but don’t like the auto direct to search and ad page. Hopefully I won’t need either of those very often. That brings up the phishing site blocking. I like to think that I can spot these before I ever navigate to them but a little extra protection is always nice. I think I’ll leave my laptop using OpenDNS for a while and see if I notice anything wrong. If I do, it goes away and the server addresses live in a file on my machine for that emergency case when my ISP DNS is down or too slow. If I don’t notice anything then I’ll probably switch over the home network as well. Time will tell.

Now playing: Louden Swain - Overachiever - Overachiever

Venkman Blogroll #1 - Coding Horror

I’ve been away from the blog for a while and one of the things I’ve done is take a 3 week vacation that was (almost) completely unwired and disconected. It was rather weird (and refreshing (which is the whole point of a vacation)) not being on the internets all time. Before I left I did myself a favor and set all of my RSS feeds to Mark All as Read. Complete reset on all feeds. When I returned I kept an eye on the feeds that I read all the way through and caught up with and those I just let slide. This gave me a pretty good indication of what feeds I needed to keep and the ones I could get rid of. One of the feeds that I completely read is todays blogroll entry – Coding Horror (You might recognize the name and logo. They are taken (with permission (or so Jeff says)) from the book Code Complete by Steve McConnell)

The entries at Coding Horror are usually entertaining and insightful. A couple examples:

How Good an Estimator Are You?

When Object-Oriented Rendering is Too Much Code

Scoot on over to Coding Horror and enjoy some reading.

My second blogroll entry, filed under Venkman – Coding Horror

Now playing: Dire Straits - On Every Street - You and Your Friend

PromptSQL becomes SQL Prompt - Now Free

I’ve been using PromptSQL since shortly after it was first released. It took me less than an hour of using it to realize that $25 for the softeware was a bargain. I’ve been happily upgrading with each realease and watched a good program get better. Then suddenly when I went to the web site I saw that Red-Gate Software had purchased PromptSQL. I fully expected a new version and significant price increase (the software really was a bargain at $25). I just noticed today that Red-Gate has surprised me and released a new version (2.0) of the now renamed SQL Prompt and are offering it free until September. Way to go Red-Gate!

If you are not familiar with PromptSQL (now SQL Prompt) it is foremost intellisense like autocompletion within SQL. One of the features that really sets it apart from competitors is that the single program works in Query Analyzer, SQL Server Management Studio, VS2003, VS2005,  Enterprise Manager, UltraEdit and EditPlus 2. Since I use several of those tools I now get the same autocompletion in all of them. Totally awesome.

It’s free so you have no excuse. Go download it now and try it out.

Now playing: Various Artists - Language Symbolique - Thievery Corporation

Virtual Machine Junkie

I'm a virtual machine junkie. I am always starting, stopping, creating, restoring, deleting, moving ,copying, and any other actions you can take with virtual machines (though they are difficult to throw out the window since they are virtual and all). Most of this activity happens because I like to play with Beta (or even CTP) software. Why would I install Beta software on a production machine when I can install it on a virtual one? In the past I used to re-pave (format, reinstall OS and all apps) my machines about once every 3 or 4 months. Part of this was necessary because I was running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, etc. but most of it was because I was constantly installing and removing software. I guess it's not even Beta software most of the time. I enjoy installing and playing with new software of all types. A couple of years ago I discovered the joy of virtual machines (I think it was a Citrix product that later became Virtual PC). Now I re-pave my machines once a year or less. Any apps usually have to get tested on a virtual machine before they make it onto the real deal. It really helps for all of the applications that I'm just curious about.

Before I really start gushing about virtual machines (too late) and the software to use them I feel I should take a moment and explain my take on what a virtual machine is and some of the terms that I'll be using. A virtual machine is an isolated environment on your PC that behaves as if it were it's own physical PC. The virtual machine thinks it has its own processor, memory, hard disk, video card, etc. The hardware is all simulated by the program running the virtual machine. It's that simple (I'm sure this is an awesome bit of engineering and software development under the covers but I like to leave that under the covers so I feel it is simple). I'll use terms like virtual machine or VM for the virtual machine. Host or Host OS for the physical machine and the operating system running on it. Guest or Guest OS for a virtual machine and the operating system running on it. You can have multiple guests running on one host.

Most of my VM's have been done with Microsoft's Virtual PC. Virtual PC is a very nice product that can do a lot and does not have a huge learning curve. It allows you to easily setup a new virtual machine with one or more virtual hard disks (files on the host machine) and network connectivity. You can turn on what they call Undo Disks and when you shut the machine off you can either commit changes to the virtual hard disk, delete changes and essentially act like you never did anything on the machine since changes were last committed, or just leave things as they are with the changes still there but uncommitted. This allows you to take a VM and install software on it (or do anything else you like), try it out and then discard changes and the VM never knows that you tried to install anything. Sweet!

As I mentioned, Virtual PC is a Microsoft product. This means that it officially only supports Microsoft operating systems as the host and the guest(s). This is just the official support. While I do believe that the host has to be a Microsoft OS, the guest can be many other things with Linux being the most popular (I think).

Before you create a new VM and install a guest OS it helps to take a peek around the menus and options available in Virtual PC. One of the more important ones to note is the Performance options (File->Options->Performance). This tells Virtual PC how to allocate the finite time of the real processor between the host and guest OS. I've known several people who have setup a VM and started a long install process (usually a hour or so) and gone to bed. They wake up in the morning to find the install still running. The culprit is one of the performance settings that says when the VM is running in the background then processes on the host have priority. What you want (especially when installing) is the option that says to run the VM at maximum speed. This can slow down your host processes but I find that when I'm working with a VM I am not doing much of anything on the host anyways.

This is running a little long and I've just given a basic introduction to using virtual machines. I have tons more to say on this topic (as anyone who knows me can tell you) so I'll create further posts. I definitely want to talk about VMWare Workstation as a better alternative (and more expensive) to Virtual PC.

Egon Blogroll #1 - ArsTechnica

ArsTechnica is a news site that usually sticks to tech news and the like. They’ve got a great group of writers and every once in a while they have an article that stands out. They’ve got one today called Civil liberties vs. national security: a panel report. This is a good thought provoking look at an issue that all of us will deal with becuase it is changing our very society. I don’t agree with everything that is said but it makes me think and that is good. Go read the article and do yourself a favor and subscribe to the feed for the site.

My first blogroll entry, filed under Egon – ArsTechnica.