My head is aching and my throat is raw, thanks to CES flawlessly executing its mission to be a premier global vector of cold, flu, and general crud. So I feel like crap, and I want music to make me feel better. Over the years, I’ve invested a fair amount of effort into rating the music in my collection. It’s times like this I get to filter out the crap and just listen to stuff I’m sure I’ll like.

Play along if you feel like sharing. I first shared the original rules of the game (Your Jukebox, Uncensored) back in 2004 and figure it’s probably about time to repeat:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Turn on the “shuffle” option.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty.
5. Write it up in your blog or journal [or in the comments here] and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
6. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurrences. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten songs with five artists, you can if you’d like.

For this edition I chose only tracks I’ve rated at five stars, which means I’m unlikely to embarrass myself too much or make myself feel worse by listening to something I hate. It also means you’re likely to hear something I like as opposed to something I happen to own. If you’ve rated enough tracks in your collection for this to work for you, then I encourage you to try it.

1. Tribute to Peador O’Donnell, Jerry Douglas, Transatlantic Sessions
2. Johnny Too Bad, Steve Earle, Sidetracks
3. Goodbye Blue Sky (Pink Floyd cover), Yonder Mountain String Band, Mountain Tracks, Vol. 2
4. Weak One Now, Vigilantes of Love, Jugular
5. Useless Desires, Patty Griffin, Impossible Dream
6. If I Were You, Kasey Chambers, Live at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, 2003
7. O Valencia!, The Decembrists, The Crane Wife
8. Heard It On The X, Los Super Seven, Heard It On The X
9. Medicine Hat, Son Volt, Live on NPR 2005
10. John Saw That Number, Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

And a special bonus track in hopes of exorcising this miserable virus:

11. Saint James Infirmary, Van Morrison, What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Mike Torres has some excellent thoughts on photo organization. Well worth reading.

Just to be clear, I don’t recommend that everyone do photos just like Mike. (I don’t.) The point is to get into the habit of organizing photos and find/create/adapt a system that works for you. If you have a large collection, be prepared for some tedium while you get caught up. If you build cropping, tagging, and intelligent file naming into your workflow going forward, it’s very easy, and the payoff is profound.

Oh, and if you use Windows XP or Vista and haven’t updated to Windows Live Photo Gallery, go do that before you do anything else. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Long Zheng gently and hilariously smacks down the Windows Vista Ultimate team, who have been characteristically inactive for 81 days and counting.

The ASCII art is an especially nice touch. So is the cc list.

I’m in Las Vegas this week covering CES. For last night’s keynote by Bill Gates I chose to skip the long lines and maddening crowds and popped into the Podtech Bloghaus (a high-falutin’ name for the Seagate/Scoble suite at the Bellagio), where the video was being streamed on a 47-inch TV.

The video? Hilarious. Seriously, you have to see this look at Bill’s last day as a full-time Microsoft employee. (I can’t find a direct link, but you can watch the whole keynote here. The video is near the beginning. The direct link is here.) And BillG has a self-deprecating side, at least when paired with the rich and famous and powerful.

The keynote itself? Eh. It wasn’t death by PowerPoint, but the demos were flat and uninspiring. Note to Microsoft: Take some chances, will ya? That demo of Windows Live Spaces, for instance, would have been awesome if a 10-year-old girl had been at the podium. But having a product manager dressed in pink with a pink-themed Live Spaces site do it was, frankly, weak.

And the Bloghaus? Double-eh. I found myself frustrated by the unbalanced sound and the noisy crowd that made it impossible to hear what was being said, and judging by the reaction of the folks around me, I wasn’t alone. I finally left in frustration about two-third of the way through the speech. So if it got better at the end, I missed it.

My back-in-the-day PC Computing colleague John Montgomery, now in charge of Microsoft’s Popfly [*][**], has a list of 10 (yes, I know … please see #8) delightfully ironic predictions for 2008. I especially liked this one:

I predict that software will continue to have bugs. Further, I predict that periodically A-list bloggers and reporters will rise up in outrage about said bugs and will somehow lay the blame at the feet of Microsoft regardless of who wrote the OS or software in question.

I’ll add one of my own:

Speculators will begin snapping up shrink-wrapped copies of Windows XP around June 30, when Microsoft officially stops selling OEM copies. Prices will briefly spike at $399 per copy and then the bubble will burst when people realize, “Hey, it’s freakin’ Windows XP.”

Who else wants to make some predictions?

[*] Ironically, the Popfly link above goes to another of John’s top 10 lists, proving that to a magazine editor (even one who has been out of the biz since well before the turn of the century) anything can be turned into a top 10 list. In the early 1990s, when computer magazines routinely hit 500 pages, there was a brief era of list inflation that peaked with PC Computing’s 201 Windows Tips. I believe the current record-holder is the best-selling travel book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

[**] And just in case you haven’t had your minimum daily requirement of irony, I note that PC World magazine, where I used to work before PC Computing, just picked Popfly as as one of the 25 Most Innovative Products of 2007. I learned this by reading a post on John’s blog.

Microsoft’s Charlie Owen convinced photo-blogger extraordinaire Thomas Hawk to try Windows Vista. Now, Thomas has been a particularly vocal Mac switcher in the past year or thereabouts, so it was interesting to see this portion of his initial report on Taking the Vista Plunge:

Why am I upgrading to Vista you might ask? Well, most significantly I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to search for photos by keywords with Vista. I tried searching by keywords from my MacBook over the network … but my Mac kept choking on the search queries. I think this is because my digital library [close to 100,000 digital image files] is too large for the Mac to search it over the network.

[…]

Ok, tag search works brilliantly. My first tag search for “neon” pulled up almost 1,000 photos of mine that I’ve keyworded neon using Adobe’s Bridge. EXCELLENT! I’ll have much more to write about the OS later, but the fact that I can now do keyword searches for my photos in Vista adds a lot of value for me.

Glad to see Thomas recognize this. His skills as a photographer are legendary and he truly lives a digital lifestyle when it comes to media.

I pointed out something similar last year, on the day that Vista was released, calling out Vista’s Photo Gallery as one of its three killer features:

What most reviewers miss is Photo Gallery’s support for the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), developed by Adobe and used in a variety of professional-strength photo-editing applications. When you tag a JPEG or TIFF photo with keywords in Windows Vista, those tags are stored directly in the file as metadata, which you can use to search, sort, and filter images in Photo Gallery. That’s a great leap forward from Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, both of which store metadata in sidecar files rather than in the image itself.

The integration between metadata in media files and the integrated desktop search is something I appreciate even a year later. And Thomas calls out Adobe Bridge for praise. It’s a part of just about every professional-strength Adobe product and uses the exact same tagging format as Windows Vista.

By the way, the comments to Thomas’s post are worth reading too.

It’s been about eight months since the last time I took a careful look at browser stats. So how’s the IE-versus-Firefox slugfest going? If you’re expecting any excitement, prepare to be disappointed, as we’re about to enter year three with stats that are virtually unchanged.

Here’s the latest report from this site, courtesy of SiteMeter:

[The breakdown of Firefox users is in error, although the total is correct. See the updated figures at the end of this post.]

Browser shares are statistically unchanged in the past year. The Firefox/Mozilla share is at 36%, up less than a point from its 35.2% share in April 2006.

IE is still hovering around the same level as it has for the past two years. It’s worth noting, though, that the 59.6% total is the first time that IE’s share on this site has dropped below the 60% level. Statistically, though, it’s hard to make too much of a 0.4% decline in nearly two years.

Opera is still at less than 2% and hasn’t made any inroads. I doubt whether an antitrust complaint is going to do them any good.

Even worse for Opera is the fact that more visitors to this Windows-focused site use Safari, which continues to hover around the 2% level (that’s still less than the previous high of 2.11%, back in August 2005). Wonder how many of those are using iPhones?

Trend-watchers can look at all previous editions by following these links:

April 2007

September 2006

April 2006

August 2005

October 2004

Update 5-Jan-2008: I contacted SiteMeter support to ask why so many Firefox 1.x users were being reported. They replied: “We found an issue regarding how different versions of Firefox were being displayed within the browser share report. This issue has now been corrected.” And indeed it has. Here is the current report:

For those keeping score, that’s IE 61%, Firefox/Mozilla 35.1%, with as many people using the FF3 beta as there are using FF 1.x.

DHL dropped off my Linksys DMA2100 Media Center Extender yesterday, and I had it completely set up within 30 minutes.

My first impression was, “Wow, this is small.” The v1 extenders were the size of large pizza boxes, and an Xbox 360 has a certain chunkiness to it. I didn’t appreciate how small this device was till I unboxed it:

It’s a nearly perfect square, less than 7 inches from front to back and side to side, and about 1-1/2 inches tall. For contrast, that black Vista remote, which is included with the extender, is an inch longer than the box is deep.

The backside has most of the connectors you’d expect: HDMI, component, composite, and S-Video. It has stereo audio outputs (two RCA jacks) and a digital audio output. My Xbox had been connected using a digital optical (TOSLink) cable, but the DMA2100 only has an RCA-style digital output. (The manuals say the DMA2200, which includes a DVD player, has an optical connector.)

Although I could use HDMI and pass it through my receiver, I chose component video instead to connect to my 50-inch 1080i set and found a high-quality RCA cable for the digital audio. When I powered up the unit, I had to adjust a few system settings to let it know I was using a surround sound system and wanted output at 1080i. I also configured it to go straight to the Media Center interface

I’ve set up Media Center Extenders many times before, and this setup was typically simple. I did have to install an extender update on the Media Center box before I could complete the connection, but after that small detour everything worked perfectly.

I noticed right away that there was none of the glitching I had been seeing when using the Xbox 360 as an extender. That glitching was only on one or two channels (NBC HD programming was especially noticeable); the symptoms were a very slight jerkiness in fast-motion scenes. That effect is completely gone now. I’m not sure whether it was the extender update or the hardware that did the trick, but I’m glad to see it.

Performance on menus is fast, very fast. It takes about 10-12 seconds to go from a cold start to the Media Center interface. By contrast, the Xbox 360 had to first load its own interface, then log me in, and then finally connect to the remote system, a process that could easily take a minute or more. In operation, the system is faster as well. I’m using a Logitech Harmony remote to control the extender, and response to each button press is instantaneous. That wasn’t always the case with the Xbox 360.

And it’s gloriously quiet, unlike the Xbox. The Spousal Acceptance Factor for this unit is an 11, compared to maybe a 3 for the noisy Xbox 360.

The price should drop over time, but I’m thrilled with the performance and consider this unit worth every penny of its $250 price tag.

Update: Scott Williams asks what kind of network connection I’m using with it. I knew I forgot to mention something! I have a wired connection that goes through three switches to get to the living room. The extender has Wireless N capability built in, but I don’t need it (and don’t have an N-capable router/access point anyway).

And one more unboxing picture, to show which cables are included, from top to bottom, counterclockwise: RCA stereo, component video, composite video, Ethernet. No HDMI cable, no digital audio cable (although any decent RCA cable should do fine).

 

I’m happy to answer questions in the comments section and will continue updating this post as needed.

Well, here’s a nice Christmas surprise from Dell:

This is the $250 model, sans DVD player. The $300 DMA 2200, with DVD, is listed as shipping in 1-2 weeks. I just placed my order and got a confirmation that the unit will ship on December 27. We’ll see. If all goes well it will be here sometime next week

I checked a few other suppliers and found that Computers4Sure claims to have the DMA 2100 in stock as well, at the same price and also with free shipping.

ExtremeTech has a fairly ho-hum article on how to build a Windows Home Server. (They basically propose using off-the-shelf PC parts and claim they’ve duplicated the functionality of an HP MediaSmart Server. Well, except that it’s twice as big. And it needs a monitor and keyboard, unlike the headless HP box. And it doesn’t have the slide-in-slide-out hot-swappable drive bays or the useful front-panel status lights. Ahem.)

But this line had me shaking my head:

Windows Home Server (WHS), released this fall as an OEM product—which you can buy at NewEgg and other sites as long as you buy one other minor hardware item—addresses the need to “open up” our home networks. [emphasis added]

They have a variation on this statement one page later:

You can buy the OEM version of Windows Home Server at sites like NewEgg.com, as long as you buy one other piece of hardware. [emphasis added]

You’d think a site that publishes build-your-own-PC articles every month would know the rules of OEM software by now, but apparently they don’t. I read this same mistake at other sites that should know better at least once a month. The trouble is, this hasn’t been true for more than two years!

I’ve written this before but I guess it needs repeating occasionally: Microsoft changed the rules for its System Builder OEM program in 2005, eliminating the requirement to purchase a piece of hardware and specifically allowing end users who are building or refurbishing a PC to purchase a single copy of an OEM license.

And yes, you can legally purchase an OEM copy if you intend to build a single PC or server (including Windows Home Server), for yourself or for someone else. I first wrote about this on August 30, 2005, in which I quoted from the official Microsoft OEM agreement:

OEM system builder software packs are intended for PC and server manufacturers or assemblers ONLY. They are not intended for distribution to end users. Unless the end user is actually assembling his/her own PC, in which case, that end user is considered a system builder as well.

So can we please stop spreading the myth that you have to buy a 99-cent cable with your $200 copy of Windows? It’s not true.