Tech for Lunch!

When Microsoft released Windows Vista, everyone expected to upgrade and be happy about it. But moving from one operating system to another is never an easy task and many users have held back to see how it would go before trying it for themselves. This may have proven to be a good idea, but mostly for businesses and users who tend to get out of the ordinary with their computing habits. Most users who simply use their computer for standard stuff like surfing the web, reading emails and a few office applications, will have very little or no problems at all migrating and using the operating system.

Gamers and Businesses are the ones with the most problems, as it was expected. Gamers always need specific drivers, versions of DirectX, and businesses always have some weird legacy applications or badly coded applications that require ridiculous rights on the machine to work properly.

The problem is that Windows Vista is getting closer and closer to being the only choice when you purchase a new system and less drivers are being developed for Windows XP on new systems. What this means is that after a certain point, we won’t be able to buy a system and rebuild it with Windows XP if we want to, simply because there will be no drivers to support them anymore.

Luckily, a lot of the problems and kinks that were in the original releases of Windows Vista have been or are being worked out and with the coming of Service Pack 1, Microsoft has announced significant price cuts for the operating system. Windows Vista Ultimate, the most expensive edition, and, naturally, the one that contains all the bells & whistles, will go down to 319$us from it’s original 399$us. All the other flavors will also go down accordingly and the upgrades as well.

So, if you are planning on going to Windows Vista without buying a new system, you may want to wait for that Service Pack release. Windows XP is slated to be removed from availability in June 2008.

Google is very well known as a search engine, but avid fans also know that there is a lot more to Google than searching. One of the most interesting trends in the past year or so is certainly the migration of desktop applications to online versions of the same applications. Google released their web version of the familiar Office suite, including a word processor and spreadsheet, but completely web-based, meaning that it never needs to be installed on your computer. Everything runs in your web browser.

The most recent release in this series, is the the new Google Sites. Seen as a clear competitor to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Google Sites offers its users a team website publishing service. You can create an intranet portal, team project management page, calendar, share all kinds of documents to name only a few. A”team” does not need to be for work; it could be a school, a classroom or anything that represents a group of people needing to share some common information and communicate through a central location.

Every other Google service, such as Youtube, searching and calendars, is integrated as well so you can use any previous information you entered and can add relevant content more quickly and easily.

The great advantage of a service like this one over a product like Sharepoint is the ease of use and installation. No need for dedicated hardware and no need for a system administrator to manage everything. The users have complete control over what is displayed in your portal and no HTML or coding is required. You can use permissions to determine who has access to what and maintain a certain control.

Depending on the type of solution or portal you need, this may be quite an excellent way to go.

I have had the opportunity to try restoring a machine image on completely different hardware recently and I thought this could be very useful to many of you out there. Here is the situation: My client has a few servers and one of those is a Windows Small Business Server that was running on a pretty old machine. They wanted to move everything from that machine to a brand new server that they purchased.

Because they are running a Windows Server 2003 for small business edition, that machine has all the domain/active directory information. The biggest problem with migrating this type of installation is that two small business servers cannot co-exist in the same domain. Of course, there are many ways to do this:

• Use Microsoft’s method and install a second server, then migrate everything manually. This method is limited to 7 days because after that, unless the new server is promoted and the old one demoted, somethings will stop working. You may end up with a new domain name in this case as well.
• Use SBSmigration.com’s packages for migration. This is probably the best way to go according to the community, but I have not tried it yet. It seems to be the method to provide the best migration experience to the users with no down-time.
• Use some kind of imaging software that will allow you to recover to different hardware. This is a great option if you can manage the down-time for the imaging portion because everything is maintained as it was: same machineID, same domain name, same configuration, everything.

In my case, I chose to go with the imaging because of time restrictions for the migration and because of the fact that they needed to maintain everything in it’s place for some legacy applications. I used Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 9.1 with Universal Restore to migrate their server. I was very happily surprised that the process was so smooth, even with the VERY different hardware I had to move to/from. Different CPU, different brand motherboards, chipsets, video cards, Raid controllers, everything!

You take the source image as you normally would with any other system. Then, when comes time to restore, you must have the Acronis Universal Restore option installed(or licensed on a bootable CD) and begin the process just like any other restore. But once Acronis sees that you are restoring to different hardware, it will simply ask you for the path to the necessary drivers for that new hardware.

In my case the restore went according to plan and the only snag was a Blue Screen on the first boot, and that one was due to different sizes in memory and swap files. This is definitely an option to consider when you need to move an operating system from one machine to the other, if you want to save some time.

In the midst of a Microsoft/Yahoo! battle about the software giant’s wish to takeover, Yahoo! is still moving along as planned on many projects. One of these projects is the new Yahoo! Buzz, which is currently in a testing phase.

“Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more. Stories with the highest Buzz Score may be displayed on the Yahoo! homepage.“

The idea behind Yahoo! Buzz is nothing new, but combined with the power of one of the most visited sites on the internet, this could be extremely beneficial for users and advertisers alike. Just like Techorati or Digg, Buzz is user-driven and uses visitors opinions, search terms and reviews to judge on the importance and relevance of content. Once an item such as a blog post or a news article has become reviewed as interesting to a majority, it is promoted to the front page for everyone to see.

As you can imagine, this is a very powerful way of finding relevant content quickly and gives users the possibility to make any kind of article, video or blog become top rated. Yahoo! says that this is one of many moves that can be expected to open up the Yahoo! search results and the site for third-party developers. This makes all the Yahoo! search results and it’s affiliated sites more social and relevant for their users.

The other very interesting facet to this type of sites is for advertisers. This makes targeted advertising a lot more interesting and much more reliable because they can see near real-time what it being searched for or voted on the most. I will take a look at Yahoo’s innovations in advertising in a later post.

Yahoo! Buzz is already available online even though it is in testing. You can take a look on Yahoo! Buzz.

This is perhaps more of interest for the developers out there, but it can be a very nice thing to know about if you are looking for a framework to build a new application. Version 2 was already fairly mature, but this new version removes many bugs and kinks to make for an excellent development platform.

“Adobe Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.”

So what this means in english is that you can build an application with Flex, which generates a Flash output. Flash always looks the same from one platform to the other, so you only need to build your application once, no need to re-code or port. The great difference between simply using Flash to build your application is that Flex already contains all the standard “Windows-like” controls we are all used to. Your application, which will run in any browser that supports Flash, can contain windows, data grids, buttons, input boxes, sliders, color pickers, etc… You can take a look at many of the available components here.

Adobe Flex Builder 3 comes in two versions: Standard and Professional. The standard edition includes many new features such as the integrated CSS styling, improved skinning and generates smaller SWF files than before. The professional edition adds the memory and performance profilers and other components like charting and the advanced datagrid.

The Adobe website is the best place to start looking into this product and you can see many sample applications to better understand the possibilities and power of this development platform. There are already a number of big players using Flex on the web and you will be able to see a growing list of these applications on the adobe website.

Adobe Air has also become available during the same launch event. Flex applications can run on any platform whether it’s Windows, Mac or Unix, but still require a Flash capable browser. This is where Adobe Air comes in. With the very same code that you created in Flex, Adobe Air can convert that application to run as a standard desktop application. Your application will not need a browser to run and will have it’s very own window. This extends the reach and usability of applications because they can be taken offline, on the road to keep working. You may need to change a few things to make sure your data gets synchronized when the application comes back online, but that’s a small price to pay to have your application available at startup with all the other ones. Your users would not need to go online to use your application anymore!

The Adobe Flex SDK is free to download and use so you could build complete applications for free, but it’s just so much easier with the Builder!

Most children will be introduced to a computer before age 3 which can be a very good thing. Many games offer important developmental skills such as listening, sequencing, visual memory and more! Some games encourage children to learn colours, shapes, counting, differences, letters, numbers, music/songs, patterns and sequences, phonics and vocabulary. Obviously the help of an adult is required. These types of games are available both in French and English. I have 3 girls under the age of 4 and they very much enjoy playing on the computer, whether it be to color or learn.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Jump Ahead Preschool
• Kea Coloring Book (which is free)
• Caillou: Four Seasons of Fun
• The “Lapin Malin” series
• And there are many more out there worth checking out.

Try them out with your children and let me know what you think and if you see an improvment with your child’s development. It will certainly give you an opportunity to sit down with your kids and have fun playing on the computer at the same time.

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