WeaponsGradeCode

So after installing, uninstalling, and being forced to re-install Windows Desktop Search 3.01, I now find out that it doesn’t work.

I need to find a file in a folder, so I right click the folder and click search. Holy Cow, Windows Desktop Search comes up now instead of the terrible, but functional Search Companion.

I give it a shot and enter the file I’m looking for and get no hits:

Luckily, they gave be a button to load the Search Companion, I click it and search again. Low and behold, the files are there after all:

So it appears that the purpose of Windows Destop Search 3.01 is NOT to provide a functional search tool:

…rather, it’s to keep Google’s product off the desktop:

Comments(0)

Back through the ’90s, I didn’t understand why Microsoft was sued for coming up with competing products and distributing them with Windows. I thought they were being good capitalists and competing in an open market.

Today, I now fully understand the pain the virus scanning, tools, browsers, and media player companies felt back then and why they had a case.

Google saw a new market in a desktop search product, developed it, and paid a bounty fee for each installation. This may have cost several hundred million dollars to bring a new, quality product to market.

After proving and developing the market, Microsoft comes along with its own cut rate product and distributes it for free using their Windows monopoly and Window update mechanism.

Microsoft’s distribution of its Windows Desktop Search 3.01 product costs Microsoft nothing, there is no install bounty, no opt in, there is no ‘Terms of Use’ to accept, there is no ‘Privacy Policy,’ nothing.

This is what Google must present to earn an install of the Google Desktop Search product:

Microsoft get’s to step in and over-night own a market that costed other companies perhaps billions to create.

The icing on the cake is that you’re not allowed to uninstall Windows Desktop Search 3.01. After installing via Windows Update, I uninstalled, rebooted as it asked me to, the the first thing to appear is this:

Yes, even though I uninstalled it, Microsoft is insisting that I re-install.

Something must be done to this company.

Comments(0)

Comments(0)

Our home media server has four 400GB drives configured in a RAID5 array using an Adaptec 2400A adapter giving us 1.2TB of RAID5 storage. This media server’s filled with our pictures, songs, movies, and TV shows accessed via MythTV.

As is usually the case, MythTV is very good a illustrating how little space 1.2TB really is, and we filled it up fast. Soon I was deleting shows and files that I wanted to keep but needed to make room for the next ‘Days’ episode.

Of course, the Adaptec has only four ports, all filled, and this was plugged into a circa 2003 Xeon server with only PCI slots. Generally, they’re only building PCIe & SATA RAID cards so upgrade was out of the question unless I bought a whole new server. Further more, the system has an extended ATX motherboard in a case supporting only four internal drives. What a disaster.

Eventually I’ll get a new server but until then, the best, fastest solution was to simply hang a new 750GB drive off a cheapo PCI to SATA drive in a cheapo SATA enclosure.

Enter the Vantec UGT-ST200 PCI to SATA adapter and Vantec eSATA case. The adapter came in at ~$29 and the case at ~$49 at Frys.

Packaging for both products was great. This stuff is all straight forward so I didn’t even look at the manuals.

The external eSATA case was really nice. The finish was perfect to the point that you didn’t want to touch it which is not something you want to do as its aluminum case _really_ disipates the heat generated by the 7200 RPM drive well. It came with a power adapter, USB, and eSATA cables. I installed a Seagate 750GB drive, plugged it into the USB port on my Dell e1705 with XP and transfered 350GB of data without a hitch.

The adapter has one internal and one exteral SATA port and the nice suprise was the included internal SATA to external eSATA adapter allowing you to connect two eSATA devices if desired. Physical installation was typical and Fedora Core 6 (fc6) found the adapter and drive the first time. I think the 150MB/s SATA drive is actually faster than the RAID array.

Now that I have an additional 750GBs in the server, I transferred all the things that I had backups for or didn’t care if I lost to it, leaving the ‘valuable’ stuff on the array.

Generally, the experience was positive and would not hesitate to buy both products again.

Comments(0)

About three times a year, a bunch of different concepts come together in my head at the same time forming a complete and compelling whole. A system who’s value is greater than the sum of its parts.

The more concepts in the party the better. Best yet when those concepts could make money. One of those complete thoughts was:

http://garage-sale-tips-maps.com
…a site that gathered garage sale data and splatted it onto a google map.

I thought/hoped I’d be the first with the idea and implementation, but, as is the case in this competitive economy, there are almost always people smarter than you with the same idea…

No worries though, I had a lot of fun building the site and look forward to growing it.

The point of the site is primarily to allow its users to quickly discern the number and quality of garage sales around their area. That’s done easily by simply entering your address and clicking ‘Get Garage Sale Map.’ You’ll be presented with a map of your area with all the garage sales marked with little red markers.

Hover your mouse over a marker to see its location. Click on it to see the title of the garage sale. Click ‘website’ to see that garage sale’s web site. Finally, double click the garage sale to queue it up into a list of garage sales you’d like to visit. After queuing up a couple garage sales, click ‘Get Directions’ at the top of the page to generate a list of driving directions.

That’s pretty much it. While simple, it’s quite powerful and fun.

Comments(0)

So I’ve set up my first set of forums on http://www.garage-sale-tips-maps.com using PHPBB2. Everything starts out OK with some pretty liberal settings. It doesn’t take long before the spammers and link scammers discover the site and start creating dozens of accounts with pr0n and mortgage related links in their user profile and posting garbage in the forums.

The wife and I delete the spam as fast as we can and I install/use the great PHPBB2 toolkit to delete the garbage accounts.

We back the registration process back to email verification. No help there. The rate of new bad accounts increases.

I regrettably back the registration off to the admin (me) confirming new members. OK, now you can’t see the spammers and they’re not adding garbage to the site. But now I get 20 new accounts to delete a day. (Hah! three just came in now :)) This is turning into real work…

Restricting accounts with email from mail.ru and a couple other domains helped a bit.

The next step is to continue loitering around the phpbb forums looking for help.

The really sad thing about this episode is that open source is clearly open to attack. This because the spammers have access to the source and craft exploits that circumvent the site’s spam controls and user interface to create spam accounts. Of course, the flip side is that I can create obstacles that block the bots, which I’ll likely have to do.

Comments(0)

I just re-built my wife’s site at http://www.bizzymom.us in of course, Wordpress. Hopefully she’ll update it a little more regularly now, especially after I remove the comment tails from all the images sometime this week.

Comments(0)