Category: Technology

If you blog, you need to use Windows Live Writer.  I wrote about Writer once before, but didn’t do a full review.  This time, I am so hooked, I have to write more.

I recently switched over to WordPress from Movable Type, and with my first few posts I sincerely tried to use the WordPress AJAX, web-based editor.  But, the web-based editor is so primitive compared to writer that I had to switch back. 

There are a few problems with the web-editors.  First, you really do have to know HTML.  Although WordPress tries to be WYSIWYG, it has lots of bugs, and I often had to switch to HTML mode to make my posts look right.  Worse, sometimes I simply could not get the editor to format posts the way I wanted.  Everything was difficult and I was constantly fighting with the editor rather than writing my post.  Finally, the WordPress and Movable Type editors give you a tiny little window to compose your post.  It is functional, but it hardly lets you see your post as it will be shown in your final blog.

Writer solves all of these problems and goes way beyond.  The editor really is WYSIWYG.  It even uses the templates from your blog so that as you type you see exactly how your entry will work.  Native controls a-la word are a button-press away to make your posts look great.

But the biggest feature for me is the way Writer seamlessly integrates image handling.  WordPress does okay, but both WordPress and Movable Type force you to do a lot of work to insert an image.  Movable Type even makes you go through a special upload process not too dissimilar from using FTP.

With Writer, images are incredibly easy.  First, you can just drag-and-drop content from the web into your post.   I prefer to insert from a file because you have more options with manipulating the image afterward.  Here are the 3 panes of options provided by writer (click to see larger image):

Imaging features include:

• One button positioning to Left/Right/Center in your content
• Add Drop Shadow or PhotoPaper backgrounds to the image
• Automatically add margins to the image
• Have the image link to itself in a bigger form
• Add watermarks to images
• Add effects to images (black/white, emboss, blur, sepia, etc)

Outside of imaging and basic editing, Writer knocks out all the basic features too.  It can manage multiple blogs for you so that you can post to many sources from one simple app.  This is far better than having to navigate to multiple web-based admin screens.  Further, you can edit offline, perfect for composing those posts while you are on the plane or away from the net.  Writer even bundles a spell checker.

Finding drafts, prior posts, creating new posts is all a snap.  There is also a plugin API which I haven’t toyed with, but if you’ve got content, you may want to check it out so that other bloggers can more easily write about you.

All in all, it’s so much easier to work with Writer than it is to work with the Movable Type or WordPress web-based editors.  You’ll save a lot of time and everything will look a lot nicer too.

In the movies, you’ll watch the hero covertly enter someone else’s office, quickly hack into and navigate the computer system, drop a cd into the drive, and wait impatiently for 5-10 seconds while all of the data copies.

In reality, I fumble with the disks, can’t even get the DVD drive to open (keeps closing automatically, almost as if it knows its toying with me), discover my Windows 2003 server doesn’t software for doing a backup to DVD even if I want to, go through 2 or 3 reboots, have to figure out the obtuse software, write the first disk and fail, do it over, and finally, about 2 hours later, I have a simple backup.

If only life emulated art…..

Over the last few days I’ve been talking to a few folks about the Dual Core chips and how much power they can draw. High end systems are drawing 150-200Watts each. That’s pretty staggering, and the dual core processors are drawing less than the previous generation of Pentium chips.

Today, the NYTimes writes about a Google whitepaper being presented by Google today for improving PC energy efficiency. It may not matter much for a PC or two at home, but for a server farm, which can use 10,000 or more computers, it’s a really big deal. Further, while your home PC is usually idle, the goal of a server machine is to actually have it under fair load 24×7. And more load invariably means more power draw.

To put it into perspective, if you had a datacenter with 10,000 CPUs (and no overhead equipment), and you paid $0.1 per KWh, you’d be facing an electric bill of about $108,000 per month. Again, according to the NYTimes, Google has around 450,000 machines. If they used these expensive chips, they’d be churning through $4.8M per month just for electricity. No wonder they wrote this whitepaper. No wonder they are moving out of California.

Just wait until the Tesla and other electric vehicles appear. We’re worried about oil prices now, but electricity demand is on the brink of massive increases.

See also: eWeek article, cNet “Power could cost more than servers”

MSN has it’s own YouTube clone coming out called Soapbox. I haven’t been able to try it myself, but I thought that B2Day had a great comment about these types of services,

Microsoft will build the technology. But it will be a struggle for technology alone to overcome the social phenomenon of YouTube.

I hear a lot of people complain that Microsoft isn’t innovative. When you try to point out innovations that Microsoft has made, they claim that all the “good innovation” is via acquisition. Even if that were true, does it matter?

The nemesis of any startup is getting good distribution. It’s incredibly expensive and difficult to build great distribution channels. Microsoft, by contrast, has distribution like no other. If Microsoft buys a great product and gives it distribution, why is it that Microsoft shouldn’t get credit for innovation? The fact is that the startup couldn’t get the distribution on their own. Microsoft provided it by buying the company and using it’s distribution. Isn’t that a form of innovation in it’s own right?
Microsoft deserves full credit.

Marc Orchant compares Office 2007 to driving a new rental car. I think it’s got some truth to it. I think the analogy can be extended in that you only rent a car when you don’t already have a car (e.g. Office 2003). 🙂

I actually mostly like the new UI. It looks clean, and it is not hard to use. But a UI doesn’t compel me to upgrade. I don’t really need prettier menus. I don’t even think I need updates to word or excel or even powerpoint. (Perhaps I lack vision on those products!)

What I do need is better email. Why is it that when I add a conference room to a meeting invite in Outlook, I have to manually mark it as a “resource”, or it won’t actually book the conference room? (So many people have experienced this – it could easily be comedy material for the Office Space sequel). Or, if I send someone my phone number, why doesn’t it automatically add my phone to the contact info? Or what about automatically showing me map locations for addresses? Or adding appointments to calendar automatically? Why can’t my wife schedule time on my calendar at work?

Lastly, the .docx filetypes make Word 2007 cumbersome to use for collaboration. Sure, it is an open xml format, which is a great step forward from proprietary formats. So, it is with some reservation that I complain about this. But, if you have Word 2007, and your colleague has Word 2003, I guarantee you’ll accidentally send a .docx file which he won’t be able to read. To solve this, he can install a .docx reader for his older version of Office, but more likely you’ll end up resending the file after manually converting to a .doc file for him. It doesn’t seem right that the default course of action is that you send a document that someone else can’t read. Why doesn’t Outlook figure that out before you send? After all, you probably sent email to this colleague before, and Outlook puts its version number into every mail header, so your Outlook can know what version of Office your colleague has. Outlook could tell you, before you send it, that you are sending a Word-2007 specific file to a user that probably only has Word 2003, and automatically convert it. Now that would be pretty smart! I guess I wish the default were to save .doc, and not .docx. There’s probably an option in there for that somewhere. But the ribbon has so many buttons on it, I’m not sure quite where to look!

On the good news front, Office 2007 does successfully tackle my #1 pet peeve with Outlook: fast email search. That is the best reason to upgrade.

I registered a new domain name recently, and finally brought it online. Not much to see yet, but you can find it here: http://www.sendcarefully.com/

I stumbled across Dapper today, a pretty phenominal UI & utility that can create sophisticated screen scrapes from any website.  I have two reactions:

1) WOW!  These guys did a great job of making it easy to scrape!  Fantastic interface, boiled down to very simple tasks!

2) Jesus Christ!  Who in their right mind would try to build anything off an unknown screen scraper?

The latter is really where I finished thinking about it.  It seems that in our Web-2.0 world, people think that somehow hacks can sustain.  Hacks can’t.  Hacks are hacks.  And fundamentally, screen scraping is a hack.  One small div-hierarchy change and the whole thing breaks.  One slight UI one-off, and the data provided is bogus.  I usually try to avoid being a purist, but screen scraping is just one approach I can’t support.

Conclusion: Dapper represents a lot of very nice work behind what is ultimately a futile effort.