Bluffing for startup money

A CNET News article from last week, High-stakes start-ups, paints an unusual picture of one of my favorite software companies:

Sitting at his desk in a small, stuffy office in a gritty corner of San Francisco’s South of Market district, [Brad] Meador is nonchalant about the win. It’s just another Wednesday morning at ClearContext, a software start-up that’s keeping the lights on and the servers running with the aid of its founders’ online poker winnings.

Meador, who is head of operations at ClearContext, and Deva Hazarika, the chief executive officer, have been playing poker in lieu of collecting paychecks for the past year while working to get their three-person company off the ground. After logging 50 or more hours a week at the office, each one spends another 10 to 15 hours, usually on weekends and evenings, at their favorite poker sites…

The point of the article, apparently, is that the go-go 1990’s are long gone, and startups have to be more frugal and creative. But I really wonder about the wisdom of allowing your company to be profiled this way. If ClearContext wants to make it to the next level, they’re going to need more capital at some point. Do you think any outside investor will give a seven-figure check to a group of people who choose to spend 15 hours a week playing poker online? Most VCs do background checks on their partners-to-be and will disqualify someone who appears to have a gambling habit, because they don’t want their partners dipping into the seed money when they hit a losing streak at the tables.

I’m not being a moralist or a fuddy-duddy. I used to play the horses. A lot. I was very good at it and could probably have supported a small start-up on my winnings. I still enjoy a day at the races, although I don’t get to go more than once or twice a year anymore. I also know a couple of professional poker players, the kind who were traveling the country playing in local tournaments long before the current poker obsession got started.

But let’s not kid ourselves. I went to the track because I liked to play the ponies, and I worked hard at being better than the competition. It took many hours of study and preparation to become an expert at that game, and I filled a lot of notebooks and databases with information, back in those pre-Internet days. My poker-playing buddies play because they enjoy the rush of winning, and they’ll be the first to tell you that consistently winning at poker is hard work. The guys at ClearContext are playing poker because they like the rush. If they’re routinely winning, it’s because they’re beating up on chumps and rubes, and they could be in for a rude shock if some real pros ever show up at their virtual table.

Media Center update due in August?

A report by Tom Warren in Neowin says Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Due In August. Details, which appear (based on their geek-speak quotient) to have been snipped from a developer’s checklist, include:

Native digital cable
Content Protection
Improve burning (DRM, network, Hi-def, DVD-RAM)
MCX on WinCE clients (Babylon, TV2 as stretch goal)
Playback reliability
Running 3rd party apps out of proc
Address top usability issues
Platform Security
Additional languages and locales

According to the unverified reports, the update will be released to manufacturing in August for English, French, German, Korean and Japanese versions. Dutch, Italian and Simplified Chinese versions are expected to follow 2 weeks later. That should have this update on new PCs for the holiday season.

Native digital cable support? I’ll have a follow-up post exploring what that might mean later today.

Update: It took a little longer than I thought, but you can read the follow-up post here: When will HDTV over cable come to Media Center? The short answer is, maybe a lot sooner than you think.

Tip of the day: Delete a file permanently

When you delete a file, it hangs around longer than you think, and that can be bad news if your goal is to get rid of truly sensitive information.

When you press the Delete key, Windows normally moves the deleted file to the Recycle Bin. You no longer see the file in an Explorer window, but it’s still there and you can recover it with a quick visit to the Recycle Bin.

After you empty the Recycle Bin, is the file gone? Nope. Deleting a file actually gets rid of only the file’s directory entry; the data that was in that file remains intact until another file uses its space. To prevent your files from being viewed by someone with file-recovery tools, you need a file-wiping utility. There are plenty of so-called file shredding utilities designed to handle this task, but you can do simple deletions with a command-line utility that’s built into Windows XP Professional (it’s in Windows 2000 Professional as well, as long as you’ve installed Service Pack 2 or later). If you use Windows XP Home Edition, you’re out of luck

The primary function of the Cipher.exe command is to manage encrypted files, but it also does a great job of scrubbing disk areas clean. Used with the /w switch, it overwrites all the unused areas of a drive with zeros, then fills all unused bits with ones, and finally overwrites all unused areas with random numbers. After you’ve deleted all sensitive information and emptied the Recycle Bin, follow these steps to wipe the deleted data clean:

Click Start, Run. In the Open box, type cmd and press Enter. This opens a Command Prompt window.
At the command prompt, type cipher /w:directory, where directory is the name of a folder — any folder — on the drive you want to wipe.

To scrub the current drive clean, type cipher /w:. (a period is command-line shorthand for the current folder).
To wipe a different drive, include the drive letter in the command – (to wipe your E: drive, for example, type cipher /w:e:\).

Press Enter to begin deleting and overwriting data. The command window displays the progress of the job.

Leave the Command Prompt window open while the Cipher utility performs its work. (You can do other tasks while it’s working.) When the job is complete, you can close the Command Prompt window.

MSN replies on tabbed browsing

Denise Ho, a Microsoft product manager working on the MSN Search Toolbar, has this update on tabs:

Our goal in delivering this feature was to give IE users a tabbed browsing solution to enhance overall online search and browse experiences prior to the official release of IE7 without them having to install a completely new browser.

Many of you have reported a flicker when you switch tabs. We understand that this is bothersome and are actively working on improvements to reduce the tab flicker. There have also been reports of issues associated with tabs and using F11 in IE to get to full screen mode. We are also looking into a fix for this.

Give MSN credit for linking to at least five posts criticizing the performance and implementation of the tabbed browsing feature in the latest MSN Desktop Search toolbar (including mine, but not this one, to no one’s surprise). An improved version of the toolbar should be available soon, they promise.

Tip of the day: Listen to a podcast at warp speed

Windows Media Player has a well-hidden advanced playback control that allows you to vary the speed at which a media clip is played back. This feature, it turns out, is ideal for listening to broadcasts that emphasize the spoken word, such as podcasts and vlogs. This feature does much more than simply rewind or fast-forward a media clip; it performs time compression and expansion, speeding up or slowing down the pace of playback but maintaining audio and video fidelity—keeping a narrator or host’s voice from sounding like a cartoon character when the audio or video clip is played at faster than normal speed.

Use this feature to “speed read” an instructional video or a podcast, for example, viewing or listening to the full program in a fraction of its normal running time while still being able to understand the audio.

To adjust playback speed, click Now Playing in the Features taskbar and then choose View, Enhancements, Play Speed Settings. (If this option doesn’t seem to work, choose View, Enhancements, and then click to add a check mark to the left of Show Enhancements.) The main Play Speed Settings control, shown here, is a slider that you can drag along a wide range. Drag to the right to speed up playback, to the left to slow things down. (Choosing a negative number causes a video clip to play backwards.)

Play_speed_settings

You can also use two presets above the slider controls at the bottom of the Windows Media Player window. (The Fast Play control is shown here.)

Play_speed_persets

Clicking the Rewind and Fast Play controls once causes the player to work at half-speed and 1.4 times normal speed, respectively. Keep clicking to step through four presets. For podcasts, the first click on the Fast Play control will give best results. In my experiments, I was able to play back a 10-minute podcast in just over 7 minutes. The audio has a slightly clipped quality to it, but voices sound perfectly natural.

[Note: This tip is adapted from Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition.]

Another comment spam update

Last March I provided a progress report on the effectiveness of MT-Blacklist, an add-in to the Movable Type software that runs this blog. In the first 75 days after I installed it, it blocked just under 10,000 comment and trackback spams. In the 105 days since that report, spammers have gotten more persistent but haven’t succeeded in breaking through.

Comment_spam_stats_0616

Since March 1, MT-Blacklist has blocked 267 spam attempts a day, more than 95% of them automatically. That’s up from 146 per day in the first quarter. The higher number is probably attributable to the increased popularity of this site. Still, as I said in March, I honestly don’t know what I would do without this add-in. And I’m also not sure what I would do if I ever met a comment spammer face to face.

Rupert Murdoch vs. Wal-Mart

It sounds like a bad horror movie, doesn’t it? According to Edward Jay Epstein in Slate, Rupert Murdoch has a plan to give away 20 million DVRs to DirecTV subscribers. The satellite-based service would download HDTV-quality movies, in encrypted format, onto subscribers’ hard drives in the middle of the night. The HDTV movies would be higher quality than DVDs, and you wouldn’t have to hassle with returning the physical product to the store, thus making DVD-rental services onsolete. The problem, apparently, is that Wal-Mart, the biggest seller of DVDs in the world, has negotiated a 45-day window of exclusivity with all the major movie studios. During that period, no movie can be delivered electronically.

It’s an intriguing story, well worth reading (as is this commentary on PVRBlog). But one sentence caught my eye:

One idea now under consideration at DirecTV is to provide these DVRs with an enormous 160-gigabyte recording capacity. The subscriber would only be told about 80 gigabytes, with the remaining 80 gigabytes reserved for encrypted movies.

Um, 160 GB is “enormous”? Tell that to a PVR fanatic and you’ll get uncontrollable laughter. The 160 GB drive in my Scientific Atlanta 8300HD holds about 25 hours of content, which isn’t all that much. Cut it in half (by hiding half the drive) and you’re giving me a PVR that can only hold 12 hours of the content I choose. I added a 300GB drive to the 8300HD and that’s about right.

As for the battle between Murdoch and Wal-Mart, well, I feel about the same with this one as I did watching Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster. Let them pummel each other into the ground, and the world will be a better place.

Anyone know how to make your own tiny/short URLs?

One of the most frustrating aspects of writing a computer book is providing pointers to useful information on the Web. We have a lot of URLs in this book, and most are long and random – expecting the reader to type in one of these URLs from the printed edition isn’t all that realistic.

Not only that, but URLs decay over time. I’m in the final stages of updating Windows Security Inside Out (delayed a few months from the original publication date and now scheduled for release in September/October). Many of the Web pages we pointed to in 2002, when we wrote the first edition of this book, have changed. A few Webmasters provide redirects, but most don’t.

One possible solution for this dilemma is to provide URLs that redirect to the actual page. Third-party sites like tinyurl.com and snipurl.com already do this. The advantage is that those long, impossible-to-type addresses get cut down to manageable size.

I’d like to do something similar, but without having to rely on a third party. My vision is a Web page where I can maintain a simple database consisting of a page name, description, original URL, and short URL (the short URL would be a simple four- or five-character code, which would be tacked on to the end of my domain name). I would create this list as I work on a book, so that the URLs published in the book would point to the short URL and redirect to the proper page.

If a page gets moved, I can change the redirect code so that it points to the new location. If a page disappears, I can point to a cached copy of the original or to an alternate source that contains the same information. I can publish the master list of resources on a page that’s available to anyone.

Anyone know of an off-the-shelf package that does something like this? If not, any suggestions on the best way to build this kind of application? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Tip of the day: Put favorite programs (and more) on the Start menu

In Windows XP, the Start menu is divided into two columns. The left column, by default, contains links to your default browser and e-mail program. You can add shortcuts to this menu as well, giving you easy access to your favorite programs, file folders, drives, documents, and Web pages.

To add a new item to the Start menu, use either of the following techniques:

Right-click any shortcut on the All Programs menu and then click Pin to Start Menu. (This menu choice is only available for shortcuts to executable programs.)
Drag a shortcut from the desktop or from Windows Explorer and drop it on the Start button. You can also drag the icon for a program or a document and drop it here, in which case Windows will create a shortcut for you.

The new shortcut appears below any existing shortcuts. Drag shortcuts up or down to rearrange them in the list. (To remove an item from the list

The default setting for the Start menu uses large icons. That makes this menu easy to read, but it also limits the number of shortcuts you can add here. If your list of Start menu shortcuts is bumping up against the top of the screen, switch to small icons, using these steps:

Right-click the Start button and click Properties.
On the Start Menu tab of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box, click the Customize button to the right of the Start menu option.
In the Customize Start Menu dialog box, click Small Icons under the Select an icon size for programs heading.

Start_menu_small_icons

Click OK twice to close both dialog boxes and go back to the Start menu, where you’ll now find much more room.

New TiVo features on the way

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog has pics from a TiVo meetup in Las Vegas that apparently shows off some cool new features, including movie downloads (from Yahoo! and Best Buy and TiVo itself) and the ability to upload home video to a TiVo. All rumors and speculation, of course, but competition and innovation are good.

Update: The PVRBlog article hints at a Netflix-to-TiVo service, but over at TiVo Community they’re saying it ain’t so. Specifically, “what is being implied in the linked article couldn’t be more incorrect.”