So, we’re here in Lucca, in Northern Tuscany. The hotel we’re staying at, a lovely place, advertised that it offers free high-speed Internet access. Apparently someone forgot to explain to the staff how to make it work. (Update: And that “free” part? Gone, apparently.)

We checked in yesterday and I had a comical series of sessions with three different employees, last night, this morning, and this afternoon, all of whom tried their best and were unfailingly polite but couldn’t figure out the new system that was just installed in the past few weeks, replacing what had apparently been your basic router in the back office with free access to patrons.

It’s a pay-as-you-go system, at a fairly reasonable 1-euro-per-hour rate. I was able to get a nice strong connection, and I was able to brush up on my Italian by reading the many error pages and sign-up forms, none of which are in English. Eventually, I figured out what the hotel staff couldn’t, which is that I needed to walk a few blocks away, buy a prepaid Internet access card, and type the 16–digit serial number in the Ricaricati (recharge) page.

The larger lesson is that trying to turn Internet access into a paying business with lots of resellers has the unfortunate side effect of forcing some very nontechnical people into mastering (or not, as in this case) some arcane technologies, like encrypted wireless access points.

Apparently the Sofitel in Rome has wireless access. We’ll see whether it’s free or even available when we arrive there on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Lucca is a charming place, a fascinating old town in a walled city that is still in Tuscany but might as well be a million miles from the Siena-Cortona-Montepulciano region we’ve been in for the past week. Great food and wine, too.

Still on vacation. We’ve spent the last week in Central Italy, and we’re off to Lucca (northern Tuscany) for four nights tomorrow. We then go to Rome for a couple nights and fly home from there a week from today.

Regular posting will resume sometime after May 27. Meanwhile, if anyone has any questions about Italy, ask them in the comments.

Score one for editorial independence:

In a surprise reversal, IDG management removed Colin Crawford as PC World’s CEO and reinstated Harry McCracken as Editor in Chief…

An excellent outcome to an otherwise ugly story.

And props to my old PC Computing compadre Dylan Tweney, who is now editing the Epicenter blog at Wired News and doing a first-rate job of it. They’ve been out front on this story from Day One.

I’m on vacation for the next three weeks. I might share a picture or two, but expect very light posting.

I’ve been running the beta of Longhorn Server here for some time, and just this week I updated to the newly released Beta 3. I also downloaded Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition, which was released earlier this month.

But after installing the Virtual Server code, I encountered a frustrating error message when I tried to open the administration website. Instead of the famililar VS2005 web page, a dialog box appeared, telling me that it was trying to download VSWebApp.exe and asking me what program I wanted to use to run it.

It took me a while to discover the secret, which is that the default Longhorn installation didn’t install CGI support. Virtual Server’s administration tools rely on CGI extensively, as it turns out, so this is a serious omission. The fix is simple: Open Server Manager, expand the list of Roles in the left-hand tree pane, and select Web Server (IIS). Click Add Role Services, and then choose CGI under the Application development heading.

Finish installing this component and presto! You can now access the VS2005 web-based administration tools while logged on to the server.

If you want access to the admin website from a remote machine, you’ll need to tweak Windows Firewall on the server to open TCP port 1024 for incoming connections.

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just posted a review of Windows Home Server, which is now in beta. Here’s a snippet:

Microsoft hits a home run with Windows Home Server

Almost without exception, the first reaction when people hear that Microsoft is working on Windows Home Server is, “Why would I want that?” After they see it, the first reaction is much simpler: “I want that.”

So set aside that first skeptical reaction and take a close look at the image gallery I’ve assembled showing the most recent beta release of Windows Home Server in action. The April 2007 Community Technical Preview (CTP) was released to the public last week. I’ve been running it and its previous beta release for more than two months now. In this post, I’ll provide a high-level overview of why this new product has such potential for home Windows users who are drowning in digital media and typically unprepared for sudden data loss.

Go read the rest, and don’t miss the accompanying image gallery, which lets you see why I’m so excited about this product.

I’ll be on the road today and in Redmond for meetings Wednesday and Thursday, coming back on Friday. So expect light posting until the weekend.

If you’re at Microsoft and you want to show me something new or cool, I still have some openings in my schedule on Thursday. Send me an e-mail (ed-blog [AT] edbott [DOT] com) or leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you.

I just stumbled across the Intel Capabilities Forum for the first time. Some really nice stuff there if you’re interested in performance testing of PCs. I like their test scripts and input files to evaluate PC platforms using real-world applications, and thought their post on best practices for benchmarking Windows Vista had lots of good ideas in it.

The forums are awfully quiet, though.

How many people are stupid enough to publish their Windows XP Professional product key to the web? You know, the unique ID that allows them to activate their software?

As of this afternoon, the number is at least 103. [Update: Less than a year later, on March 21, 2008, that search pulls up more than 28,000 pages. Even granting some of those pages are like this one, warning people not to do this, the majority still appear to be product keys that people published to the web. Damn, that’s a lot of stupid.]

If you use the Belarc Advisor tool, you might want to do some judicious editing before you actually post its raw results to your website. And it appears that more recent versions of the advisor don’t include the actual key, just the product ID that it generates (and which can’t be reverse-engineered to produce the key). Do no, you won’t be able to find any Windows Vista keys this way.

I’m kinda guessing that not a single one of these keys will actually activate for anyone except the original owner, given that close to 5000 people have flagged this story on Digg already.

Still, dumb doesn’t even begin to describe it.

(via David Berlind)

Tags: product+key, Windows+XP

This Nigerian scam spam, which I received in the overnight mail, takes first prize in the chutzpah Olympics:

ATTN: Sir/Madam,

SCAMMED VICTIM BENEFICIARIES.
REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654

This is to bring to your notice that I delegated from the United Nations to Central bank Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $100.000USD each,You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the scammed victims,get Back to us as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $100.000USD compensations funds.

[snip]

You can receive your compensations payments via any of the both options you Choose, DRAFT PAYMENTS or WIRE TRANSFERS, I shall feed you with further modalities As soon as I hear from you.

Send a copy of your response to official email:
[redacted] @ yahoo.co.uk

Yours faithfully,
IYAMAH SYLVANIUS.
SCAMMED VICTIM/REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654

Who falls for this stuff?