Over two weeks ago I bought a new HP Z552 media center system and a Linksys WMCE54AG Media Center Extender. I had such high hopes. I was going to be able to record my favorite shows for playback on my own schedule. I was going to centralize my digital photos and videos. I was looking forward to being able to play back any of this either on my main TV (rear-projection unit), or on my bedroom TV. I figured that by paying a premium price for the OEM'd system (over $1800 for both MCE and the extender), I would ensure a positive and hassle-free experience with MCE.

Today I am dismantling the whole thing and taking it back.

Here's why:

• The "IR Blaster" sucks with changing channels on my cable set-top box. Half the time it does not work at all, and often attempting to change the channel will trigger the set-top box to enter "program guide" mode, where it is impossible to change channels (without pressing the "exit" button on the original cable remote). This is certainly a nuisance when watching TV in the main room, but it is downright unacceptable when it happens while using the Extender (I have to walk down to my TV room in the basement to press that "exit" button before regaining control).
• Wireless is Useless. The Extender unit has integrated wireless, as does the MCE system itself. Installation manual recommends against connecting both to a WiFi access point (due to double hops). However, the Extender simply would not associate with the MCE if I attach the Extender to my access point while the MCE is directly attached via wired Ethernet. The only way to get the Extender functioning is to enable "access point mode" on the MCE system itself, so that Over-The-Air traffic goes directly from MCE to Extender. The catch here is that while the wireless connection is in Access Point Mode, the wired ethernet connection fails to operate, preventing access to/from any other networked computers including the internet (so the program schedule etc will not download).
• The tuner configuration is a nightmare. I have Comcast cable with a Motorola set-top box that is used rather widespread among their customers. Yet the MCE tuner configuration could not recognize it. My only two options were to guess the model number (it's not printed anywheres on the set-top box) from a list of about 20 Motorola devices, or to "train" the MCE to understand the IR codes used by that remote. It takes forever to get this configured correctly, and setting up more than one tuner is incrementally more difficult.
• The MCE system is nowhere near silent. HP chose to not use silent fans in the housing, and they also chose to not provide sufficient dampening on the hard drive.
• The MCE system is rather slow. I expected more performance out of a machine with these specs. It's really not much faster than my 3 year old laptop. I suspect the hard drive is a very cheap unit, and this impacts performance the most.
• The Extender is not very stable. While the video quality is good most of the time, it encounters "network congestion" often enough to be annoying (once an hour or so). There is nothing else attached to the network that connects the MCE to the Extender, so this must be related to some other issue. The Extender also has a habit of freezing up for as long as a minute at a time for no apparent reason... which is especially annoying if you are attempting to channel surf.
• Which brings up another problem - channel surfing is nearly impossible with the instability of the IR Blaster link. Changing channels quickly (quicker than once every 15 seconds) is a sure way to get the cable box to go into that dreaded guide mode.

Basically, the MCE platform has a lot of promise, that's for sure. I will almost definately try to return to it once these issues are addressed in future versions, but for now I just do not have the patience for these kinds of problems. Perhaps if the hardware did not cost me nearly $2000 I would be a little more forgiving - but for now I am going back to a primitive non-digital entertainment architecture.

And to be fair, my experience is due moreso to the abysmally poor products from Linksys and HP than to the core MCE operating system. But in order to achieve an adequate "wife acceptance factor" in my home, the MCE unit MUST look like it belongs next to a television... and very few vendors offer a system in that form factor (as opposed to the standard tower/desktop PC form factor). So for now, as far as I am concerned, this hardware is fairly representative of all MCE systems, since it's the only one I would accept in my living room.

Summary:

BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed is a deep exploration into Microsoft's flagship orchestration and integration product.

This book covers a lot of ground. In 680 pages it covers everything from the basics of building schemas and maps all the way up to Business Activity Services and Human Workflow Services. In between, it spends time on Pipelines, Orchestrations, Adapters, the Business Rule Engine, and even Single Sign-On. For the developer, it goes into detail on debugging as well as the creation of all BizTalk elements. For the Architect, it outlines the various messaging and orchestration patterns, and how they are normally handled in a BizTalk implementation. For the Administrator, it explains deployment as well as ongoing monitoring, instrumentation and management. It takes an especially deep look at scaling up/out of BizTalk deployments at all four tiers of the product's architecture.

In all, this book does a good job of dealing with the details of BizTalk development and administration. It caters to those who already have a grasp of the product, definately not a beginner's book. In fact, even for those familiar with BizTalk, the chapters on HWS, BAS, and BAM might be a little too difficult. One thing the book does an outstanding job of is describing the scale-out strategies available in large deployment situations.

This book is most useful to:

• Messaging Architects
• Messaging Developers
• Messaging Administrators

Recommendation:

4 out of 5 stars

I am holding back on a 5-star rating on this one. While it does a great job at handling the details, and leaves no stone unturned in many areas, the treatment of the advanced services such as BAS, BAM, HWS, and HAT is a bit too dry - even for a reader like myself who normally can make it through such material. Unless you are actually using these features in your day-to-day work, these chapters will likely not make much sense. They come off more as a "user manual" than as a reference-class book. In other words, lots of "how" and "when", but rarely does it answer the more important question of "why".

The remainder (and bulk) of the book however is top-notch. And since it is effectively the only book available today for BizTalk 2004, it would not be right to give this one any less than a 4 out of 5.

Fantastic!

Microsoft finally remembered that the majority of their MSDN subscribers are not huge enterprise customers, but rather the smaller one to five developer teams that permeate the industry.

In response to heavy feedback, they are introducing a five-seat version of Team Foundation Server with the version of MSDN that replaces Universal.

In less than 24 hours the festivities will begin.

Towards the end of the day, my presentation will be a deep look into asynchronous programming, with particular emphasis on multithreading. This is more or less the same presentation I gave a few months ago to the C# User Group, but with information about the new Semaphore support in 2.0 (with a corresponding example project).

The other major difference is that with the C# UG version of this presentation, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to cover it... moving through it all very quickly. However at Code Camp, we are limited to under an hour! More slides, more demos, and less time to do it!

I am also posting the Slide Deck and Sample Code here, for anyone who misses the presentation or that just wants to see what the session is covering before deciding which one they want to attend.

Picture this:

Scenario 1 - You are a consultant. You write software for various clients, often remotely. Your clients pay you a lot of money, and you keep them very happy with the exceptional work you perform for them. Because you are a meticulous developer, and understand the value of versioning, you have been using Visual Sourcesafe for 6 years to store every code revision you have ever made for your clients. You also keep every one of your important emails for the last 10 years. Your Outlook .pst file contains every significant conversation you have ever had with your clients - and it also contains personal knowledge such as your complete contacts list and website registration confirmations for dozens of sites, including your 401K portfolio on Ameritrade.

Scenario 2 - You know nothing about code. You drive trucks for a living. However, you DO like to have gadgets and gizmos, and you really love your new Media Center Edition machine. In fact - it's so great that you have digitized ALL of your CD collection and even bought a portable media center for while out on the road. At this point you have over 5 gigs of music digitized, as well as the last season of stargate and family guy to watch as you have time. You never use your CDs anymore, and honestly have no clue where many of them are - since many have been "loaned" or misplaced.

Both of these fictional situations is missing something extremely important. Even though your digitized data is extremely valuable to you, and difficult if not impossible to recreate, you have no backup and recovery strategy!

How to correct this oversight?

There are several options. You could always purchase a simple external drive or tape system and perform regular backups. This is fairly easy, but is really only slightly better than having no backup at all... your backups are still in the same location as the protected systems. A house fire (not as uncommon as you might think) would wipe you out. If you are a consultant supporting a client with deep pockets (who would be forced to sue for negligence if you lost their source code), you cannot afford such a risk.

A better solution is off-site backup services. With off-site services, your valuable data is stored in a remote facility (usually encrypted). For a monthly fee, you can configure your systems to regulary upload changes. Fees tend to be quite small - especially for the individual consumer who often only needs a few Gig of storage. Setup and maintenance also tend to be fairly simple - about on par with traditional tape or disk based backup systems.

I have recently been evaluating two vendors in this space: NetCentric Solutions and Storage Guardian. NetCentric's offering is very easy to install and configure, but has fewer features and a slightly higher price tag. Storage Guardian's offering on the other hand is more difficult to install and configure (due to being more complex) but is much more flexible in deployment.

NetCentric supports File-system backups only, and is quite simple to get running. They also have a nice feature that allows you to access your backup sets from any internet location, essentially using your backup set as a file-sharing mechanism. The NetCentric product costs about $40 a month for up to 5G of compressed data.

Storage Guardian is a more "network aware" product. Rather than a simple single-install program like NetCentric, this product follows a client/server design, with a server process that performs the actual backups (oddly called "ds-client") and a client program that performs set management and inspection (called "ds-user"). This product has the ability to perform direct backups of SQL Server and Exchange databases, as well as NT/2K/XP/2K3 System State, permissions and registries. The installation is slightly complicated, and it is recommended that the installation guide actually be read carefully prior to attempted install. The Storage Guardian product costs about $30 a month for up to 10G of compressed data.

I ended up going with the Storage Guardian product for my personal needs. I really liked the ability to directly back up my Exchange and SQL databases. If you don't need those two things however, the NetCentric solution may be a better fit - since it's considerably easier to configure. My current volume needs are about 5G, so the Storage Guardian solution also allows me a little more room to grow.

In the end, $30 a month for peace of mind is a great bargain.

Summary:

Speed Reading is a no-nonsense educational trip that sets out to teach the reader how to vastly improve their reading speed and comprehension.

I normally would not pick up a book of this nature. I always thought my reading speed was adequate, and the claims made by the author seemed pretty far-fetched. However, I have been having trouble keeping up with the level of reading I feel is necessary to keep ahead in my industry (about 2 major IT books a month seems about what is needed). I figured it couldn't hurt, so I gave this one a shot.

While I was extremely skeptical of the author's claims, I must say that I am now a true believer. In the second chapter, you go through a "baseline" test to establish your starting speed. I came in right at 300 words per minute, which is actually slightly above the average person's speed of 250 WPM. The author's first claim was that your speed will increase by 50% by simply incorporating the first set of reading techniques that he presents. This first set of techniques is referred to as "linear subvocal", a method of reading that overall tops out at 900 WPM or so. After being introduced to these first techniques, my speed jumped instantly to 550 WPM!! That was with absolutely NO practice... a dead-on 50% improvement.... amazing.

But it gets even better. After introducing the linear subvocal techniques, the author then moves on to explain the more advanced "layering" methods. These are essentially a way to better organize your reading time, and then apply a turbocharged reading pattern where your mind is actually able to comprehend groups of words at once - instead of relying on the steady verbalized stream that most of us are used to.

After learning the faster layering techniques, and then applying them to the remainder of the book (which covers note-taking, test-taking, and essay-writing skills), I went back and revisited the original test where I scored 300 WPM. I was quite amazed to find that this time my reading speed was right at 1400 WPM. Wow.

The remainder of the book is focused on the high school or college student, so it was not of much use to me, except as practicing fodder for my newfound skills. The note-taking techniques could come in handy though during heavy instructor-led training, or while pulling together research for presentations.

This book is most useful to:

• Anyone who is having a tough time keeping up with the reading they would like to be doing
• Students
• Educators

Recommendation:

5 out of 5 stars

This book delivers on it's promises of a minimal 50% improvement in reading speed along with greater comprehension through increased mental focus. The book is also very short - only 200 pages in total. But don't be fooled, those 200 pages are packed solid with incredibly useful techniques and tips.

Another huge plus - this book is phenomenally cheap. I paid only $3.00 from the "used and new" alternate sellers on BN.Com. The shipping costed more than the book.

The only downside to these methods is that they do not translate all too well to online reading. Well - I suppose it could be done - but there will be an awful lot of finger smudges on the screen afterwards!