It seems like only yesterday when Corner Edge asked me to create a web site design for one of their closest partners, GSSdb Solutions. It was 2005 and I was a freelance design consultant for Corner Edge, I designed the website pictured below based on the existing GSS logo and the business owners awe of the Hubble images. The banner image was a Flash animation of multiple space images fading in and out. Unfortunately the site never saw the light of web.
The original design for GSSdb site, New design coming soon!
Now it’s 2009 and I’m approaching my two year anniversary as a Corner Edge staff member, and, YeeHaa, the GSS site is back on the to do list. The new design will more prominently feature the bold Hubble images in a dynamic Flash interface.
Another site to look for coming up, CornerEducation.com. A site highlighting the Corner Edge development team’s versatility in the design and development of educational software and applications geared towards CME, sales force training and tutorial based education.
Truly Home Grown is an exciting new start up with sturdy roots… literally! Their mission is to provide sustainable, organic vegetable gardening services, from concept to harvest. No matter how much (or little) space you may have for a garden, they can transform it into a vibrant, healthy garden. Truly Home Grown, located in Somerset NJ, has contracted Corner Edge Solutions to design and develop their public identity and assist with marketing initiatives. In addition to logo design and web site design Corner Edge is providing IT and Data Management services. The trulyhomegrown.com web site was designed and developed in a very short time to serve as a springboard to launch the start up into the future and to quickly provide a professional web presence for visitors and prospective clients to learn more about Truly Home Grown and their services.
Ok, I posted about how impressed I was about the windows 7 upgrade process here
And the main reason I was so impressed is that I did the upgrade to my workstation with the following specs:
- Easily 10 different USB devices & 2 different hubs plugged in at all times
- Firewire used for video editing
- close to 100 applications installed from all over the place.
- VMWARE workstation installed running test machines & extra virtual network devices
- 12 gigs of ram
- two different RAID Configs for two sets of hard drives etc…
bottom line, its NOT a simple computer to upgrade. I work the crap out of this machine daily, and it upgraded fine initially.
And that’s where I’m starting to struggle. Just today:
I lost the nice Windows Aero feature. Seems pretty hard to get back, which doesn’t make any sense. The troubleshooter can tell me that my desktop manager services aren’t running, but I can’t turn them back on. WHY so complicated? Running this OS without the Aero is dull, I feel like I’m being punished and thrown back to a retro windows 2000 look now. Let me switch it on if I want!! I guess I’ll have to troubleshoot it for hours now to fix it.
I lost audio randomly, but after 5 minutes of waiting for the “troubleshooter” if fixed the service that wasn’t running.. how did it get turned off? But wait my youtube videos don’t play sound now??
I’ve had a few programs crash/not work… a crystal reports runtime issue mainly for now…older programs, but still….
Backup – I have a buffalo terastation, an incredibly simple network storage device that I use for backup on my network. The new Microsoft BACKUP program will NOT allow me to send a backup to a device without Network authentication of some unknown kind, so I can’t do a backup of files to my incredibly simple network storage unit. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!! I have to setup a Microsoft machine on my network for backups??? COME ON!! I literally tried basic auth with a user name and password I was able to config and test, Microsoft backup won’t use it. sweet! I know, I’ll use an incredibly simple file replication tool instead. Just use Karen’s Replicator if you need to run a backup. It actually works over the network.
SO, hang in there, and don’t upgrade yet. Microsoft has some patching to do and I’m stuck grumpy in windows 2000 land with crap I have to fix.
Google has an amazing array of data sucking free services out there. Web search, Gmail email, Gphone, picasa, YouTube, web entry pages, etc… and finally they have released a way for you to get a taste of what they know about you.
Go to this site to see what google knows about you:
Its hard not to be scared of the total amount of information they track. NOTHING is free folks, they are tracking EVERYTHING. The data goes FAR beyond search. For this reason I will NOT use their phone service. They already know enough.
I encourage you to review the privacy policies and settings to make sure you are clear about how and what is being tracked.
PS – you can bet BING and Facebook know & track this information too…
I’ve been a loyal Kavoom user for years now. I have two monitors on my primary desktop and often place my laptop next to those monitors. The KM software allowed me to use my laptop from the desktop keyboard, essentially providing me with 3 screens & 2 computers available to me on my desk all accessible from a single keyboard and mouse seamlessly. Really a beautiful thing for productivity.
When I upgraded my workstation to windows 7 earlier last week, I found that Kavoom! is not compatible with windows7. (Or at least that’s what windows told me. I honestly didn’t try re-installing, I couldn’t find the original download) I went to check the Kavoom website for an update, and NOTHING?! The site has been down for the last two weeks… so it forced me to look into a new solution.
Of course I easily found Synergy+ – a free tool that does the same thing. Not as smooth of a setup process, but it seems to work fine.
So Kavoom is gone, but we are not lost… and perhaps the free option explains why they are gone. Its a shame when a fair product that sells for $30 goes out of business due to a free solution. Go open source, but its not fun to be a developer who owns an eliminated product… which is better?
UPDATE: Synergy also works with MAC and Linux… so yes, its cooler than Kavoom… its so nice to have my mac working also… 4 screens!
Over the weekend I took the plung and upgraded my main workstation from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Initial impression:
I’m extremely impressed by Microsoft. They did an AWESOME job with the upgrade. Everything works, my machine is faster, it boots faster, etc. Adobe Premiere CS4 works including all the special codecs I installed before. All my user settings like saved passwords, outlook, firefox, IE etc… all migrated seamlessly.
This is by far the easiest “upgrade” of an OS I’ve ever done. I’ll post more after I’ve used the machine for a while.
In our testing at Corneredge Windows 7 has performed well. I’ve already loaded it on two machines that could not even run Vista and they are running great.
SO, I’m tempted planning to upgrade my workstation. Microsoft seems to have really done their homework with the upgrade this time, and I’m looking forward to the features in windows 7.
If you are thinking the same way, download this tool to get a nice checklist of what you need to do before installing windows 7.
While working through some DNS lookup inconsistency today, I was reminded of this tip that allows you to trace an entire DNS lookup. Normally I just do an NSlookup, but I wanted more information. DIG is a command that’s built into Linux (and therefore MAC) So I hopped on my Mac and ran the command like this:
>Dig +trace www.yourdomain.com
results look like this:
————————————————————————–
; <> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <> +trace www.yourdomain.com
;; global options: printcmd
. 505277 IN NS A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
. 505277 IN NS M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
;; Received 372 bytes from 172.18.33.1#53(172.18.33.1) in 1 ms
com. 172800 IN NS I.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS H.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS B.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS G.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS D.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS E.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS J.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS C.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com. 172800 IN NS L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
;; Received 511 bytes from 192.33.4.12#53(C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) in 333 ms
www.yourdomain.com 172800 IN NS ns1.wordpress.com.
www.yourdomain.com 172800 IN NS ns2.wordpress.com.
www.yourdomain.com 172800 IN NS ns3.wordpress.com.
;; Received 141 bytes from 192.5.6.30#53(A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET) in 931 ms
www.yourdomain.com 300 IN CNAME www.yourdomain.com edgekey.net.
www.yourdomain.com. 14400 IN NS NS1.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com. 14400 IN NS NS2.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com 14400 IN NS NS3.yourdomain.com
;; Received 180 bytes from 123.456.234.123#53(ns1.yourdomain.com) in 1021 ms
As developers and systems engineers we use an immense amount of software tools and applications. Transfering to using a new computer seems like it can take months before you have “all you need” for our daily tasks.
When I took delivery of my new laptop in January I struggled with this issue. My old machine had been in place for 3 years and now I was faced with starting fresh. 64-bit Vista on my laptop also presented a challenge for old applications I used. Not to mention that old PCanywhere, old VPN connections, etc…
SO, I decided to virtualize my old laptop. I can litterally run that computer in VMware faster than I could before, and I don’t have to worry about old applications or old VPN configurations for customers, they all just work!
So how do you do it? Simply install the free Vmware converter on the machine you want to virtualize and point it to your nearest VMWare workstaion or server. I highly recommend this, it was a truely painless process.
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