Say I am using twitter and some @replies me about a Tweet from four hours ago, I might reply to them “Good Point.” Now no one else following me stream has any idea about the context of that reply. They could probably piece it together, but it not worth the effort.

Facebook is meant to be much more closed off, although they are trying hard to get our personal information out there weather we like it or not. Facebook is much better at maintaining the contexts of comments by maintaining a comment thread. But the comments are not valued nearly as much as the original post. It can be hard to see if new comments have been added etc because posts are not bumped up when a new comment is made.

Google Buzz is like a hybrid of both Twitter and Facebook, it allows for completely public posting and followers, but at the same time you can do private posts to a group of people you designate at Friends, Coworkers, etc.

For me however the biggest difference is the way Google Buzz handles replies to Buzz’s. When a person replies or comments to a Buzz that buzz is bumped up in all the followers feeds. This effectively makes peoples comments as powerful as the original posters, and behaves much more like a traditional forum.

The way Buzz works right now is still a little un-wielding and I find it hard to follow public figures using Buzz just because the many people commenting keep all the “popular” buzz right at the top and drowns out everything else. This can be fixed with UI changes etc.

Buzz as a framework though is has some very powerful applications in integrating other services together, and I think might be a stepping stone to get people ready for the idea of using products like Wave.

Overall I am still using Twitter to keep track of things, and Facebook to stay in contact with Friends. But I hope that Google can make Buzz good enough that I can replace both of them.

WARNING: Backup all data before flashing your drive, or trying anything even remotely like this

However, the Crucial drive I have (CT128M225), like all the other SSD’s out there, require the drives controller to be flashed to support the new TRIM command. So I downloaded the iso and booted into the flash utility, but no drive showed up!

So it seems there is a little hiccup with the flash utility from Crucial, it does not have RAID drivers for the Intel P55 Express chipset on my motherboard. So I had to do a little trickery, basically you simply boot into the BIOS configuration and change your drive settings from RAID to IDE. This basically disables the RAID functionality and makes all your hard drives look like IDE drives.

IMPORTANT: do not let Windows boot with this setting changed, Windows will figure you removed the RAID, mess with drivers, re-assign driver letters and who knows what else.

After turning off RAID I rebooted using the Flash CD, flashed my Crucial drive, removed the CD and rebooted back into the BIOS. After changing back to RAID the system booted as normal all the RAID volumes were found again (I have my Crucial drive as the main, and two 750GB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for protected data drives).

Windows 7 required a restart again, I assume it updated drivers for TRIM? and now everything is running great.

You will not see a performance increase, but this will help keep your system fast while you use it in the future, and the firmware had some other bug fixes and features.

The first problem I had was that the Acrobat 8 PDF Print driver would not install or work correctly on Vista or 7. Thankfully (after nearly a year) Adobe decided to fix the problem and fixed the driver.

The second problem is a little more insidious though. It has to do with Window redrawing in Acrobat 8. The problem I kept having was that if I resized the main Acrobat window the content window (containing the PDF) would not resize to match the main window. So if I made the main window smaller I would cut off the scroll bars and the content of the PDF, if I enlarged the main window then I would get a gray box in the new space.

This was extremely annoying, especially in Windows 7 with it’s new windows snapping and other management tools. However now I think I have finally found a work around that should allow me to move to 64bit without worries for now.

A great forum post about another product pointed me in the right direction. It seems the there is a very low level bug in the Windows 64bit GUI API that does not always send enough redraw messages to programs. This is exactly the problem I was having, and they seemed to be able to fix it. So I had hope.

It seems that if a Window frame is nested too many times then Windows 64 bits a loop counter (of 19! which seems ridiculously low) and will not send the redraw message to any more frames.

Of course Adobe pretty much abandons all software after one version, so I could not hope for a fix from them. But then I found a post on Adobe’s site from another user about the same problem. Apparently when he disabled Sitepoint from Logitech the problem went away. I checked for Sitepoint but did not have it installed, but then I remembered I had Display Fusion installed.

It seems that having programs that might interact with other Windows on the desktop might use up some of redraw counts you have for each window. So when Sitepoint or Display Fusion is running on my system Acrobat does not update the Window.

Very strange bug, and I am sad that this bug has persisted from XP 64bit, thru Vista, and is still in the Windows 7 RC. Maybe it will be fixed in the RTM version I will get on Monday, but at least now I have an idea of the problem and a work around.

Defensio was the solution I chose on Drupal so when I installed WordPress I decided to go with it for my WordPress blog too. It turned out to be a very easy install, you basically just sign up for an account with them, then install the WordPress plug-in. Once that is done Defensio reviews all your comments and gives them a “spammy” value.

What I like about Defensio is that it is an adaptive filter that learns what is spam based on input from you, or other content administrators on your site. The more input your give it the better it becomes. Even on a small blog like mine where I have only had a few comments I still get nearly one hundred spam comments a week, and so far Defensio has caught all of them with zero false positives.

For a site with heavier usage I would guess that solution would workout even better, because the more input you give Defensio the better it can identify what is spam and what is a valid comment.

It is still early days, I have only been using it for a couple of months, but so far I am quite impressed with it.

Defensio uses a pretty simple API and seems to have plug-ins for many blogs and forum packages.

For a site as small as mine it’s more of a point of interest than a vital tool, but it has recently helped me find a problem. After looking at the stats for a few weeks now I saw that one page (node/36) from my old site was getting hit pretty heavily, and going to 404 error. I knew this would happen because I did not map my old Drupal urls to the new Wordpress posts. But it seems that an old Wallpaper I made for Ubuntu got a pretty high Google ranking in image search for some keywords. So I was getting some decent traffic from that, but most of the people Bounced off the site as soon as they hit the 404. I got all this info from Google Analytics.

So after learning this I added a Redirection Plugin and setup a 301 Redirect for node/36 to the new post I made about the wallpaper. Now eventually Google should pick up the redirection and update it’s index, and hopefully people will find what they are looking for.

Google Analytics an extremely useful tool, even for personal sites like this one. It should be in any Webmasters toolkit.

Home Office 2009: Overview Shot

The overall effect is quite dramatic, I forgot to take a before shot, but you can trust me it looks better. Even though it was never really bad, I was starting to get gadget clutter with my 5.1 Speakers, external hard drives, USB hubs and the new set of cables coming out for my Macbook Pro. All those things have been removed or streamlined making everything much easier to use.

Home Office 2009: Macbook Pro 13.3

As you may have read in my previous posts I have recently added a Macbook Pro 13″ Laptop which I am very happy with. It fits in well with the PC desktop system and what started out a luxury purchase for me has become a pretty important part of my everyday computer workflow. I use it for everything form Media Player to Skype Caller to Website Editor.

Home Office 2009: The Stand

The most recent addition was the M-Audio AV40 Speakers, which are amazing. I replaced a 5.1 system which had three speakers on my desk (left, center and right) and a large sub under my desk. These two speakers (which as not small but not huge either) produce much better all around sound and really good bass. The bass does not shake the floor like the old system, but that is a good thing. Because when the bass shakes the floor the sound is distorted and you can not hear anything anyway. The highs and mids are really nice too, I hear details in my favorite songs that I have never heard before. For under $200 I think they are well worth it.

Home Office 2009: The Two Towers

The smaller tower is a recently re-conditioned AMD machine I am using as a Ubuntu test bed. It is a headless server I use to host test websites and generally play with PHP scripts and databases. A must have sort of system for anyone who wants to get into web development more advanced than plain HTML and CSS design.

Home Office 2009: Behind the Monitor

Finally I am using as Rolls MX28 stereo mixer to take the outputs from my Mac, and PCs and mix them together so they all get output to my speakers. This allows for a much more versatile setup. For example, I often have Front Row running on the MBP playing audio over the speakers and I still get all my audio notifications from the Windows Machine. If I get a Skype call on one system I can simply lower the level of the other system, and the master volume and just use my headset to hear the call. The MX28 is nor really designed for this, I had to buy a bunch of 1/4″ to RCA adapters to make it work, but after that it works great.

Just thought I would share, after several hours of cleaning and organizing I thought the least I could get would be a blog post out of it.

Here’s a link to the Flickr Photoset.

Performance
On paper the Macbook Pro 13″ is a good system, and should have more than enough power to do everything I wanted. But after getting it home I noticed that Firefox was sluggish, especially when trying to play flash video. When opening lots of tabs (like I do very day when I start up my browser) there would often be hiccups for a couple of seconds when the computer thought about opening them. I gave Apple the benifit of the doubt because my desktop system sometimes has some problems with Firefox and Flash video too.

After doing a clean install of Snow Leopard everything is faster, and I was especially happy and a little surprised that Firefox and Flash are a lot faster too. On top of that all apps and general system usage seem to be noticeably snappier.

Printer Support
I am running a Windows Home Server as a file and print server and have had a lot of problems getting everything to play together. For some reason my Brother Laser printer would never even show up in the Leopard print setup dialog. After installing Snow Leopard I went to install the printer again and had my samba address and printer name ready. To my surprise the server was already listed, so I just clicked it and went all the way to the Brother Printer. I was then prompted to select the printer from a very long list of printers. The driver was then installed and it work right away.

Heat and Power
Another thing I did not like in Leopard was the heat and power usage. I had decent power usage, but I noticed that after being off power for just a half hour the meter said I only had three hours left. With Snow Leopard I have been using my system for over an hour and a half and it says I still have five and a half hours left. Now I am not sure if this is an actual change in battery drain, or if they just tweaked the battery meter code. But either way it makes me feel much better about my battery.

In Leopard I also noticed that the fan would come on quite a bit when the computer was idle and would get quite hot from time to time. Now I have not heard the fan get loud enough to hear one, and the weather here is hotter than ever. The system feels a little cooler too.

My Thoughts
As you can tell from my comments so far I am happy with Snow Leopard so far. Personally I only paid $10 for shipping so I have been looking forward to it for a while. But to be honest I would have been happy if I had paid $30. Maybe because I have programming experience I appreciate smaller more efficient code just as much as shiny features.

A few caveats though, I do not have a large library of Apple software I use all the time. Everything I use is pretty common and frequently updated. Also the Macbook Pro 13″ is very new, so it was unlikely it would have any compatibility problems. So after doing a clean install I had no issues with compatibility or stability.

If you have a lot of legacy software or hardware devices it would be a good idea to research support for your stuff before wiping your system. But when you are pretty sure all your stuff will work Snow Leopard is well worth the $30.

Everything they did in Snow Leopard seems help both the desktop but mostly the tablet. For example:

• Smaller Footprint: A new Tablet will most likely sport an SSD so the few extra gigabytes we scoffed at on the desktop become more relevant on a tablet.
• Faster: Faster code means they streamlined and made their code run more efficiently. This means much better performance for us on laptops and desktops, but would also mean that the full OS will run better on smaller devices. A tablet will most likely have a lower powered embedded CPU, like a Atom. So efficiency would be important.
• Software Support: A tablet would probably not like running emulation software like Rosetta. So this clean break mentality of Snow Leopard will help force developers to update their applications to the latest Snow Leopard API’s, and get rid of as much legacy apps and drivers as possible. Then when the tablet launches it will have as much software support as possible

These are just thoughts about where this could be leading. Even it a tablet is not coming I think optimizing code is a great thing, especially when the results are so noticeable. Personally I am not even all that excited about a tablet unless it costs around $300, which I am pretty sure it will not. My Macbook Pro and PC serve me well.

So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.

So now I am back to designing/coding/using Wordpress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.

The recent news that they will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard is just another sign, but it has been going on for a long time. For me the first time I noticed it was when I tried to upgrade to Windows Vista 64. Back then CS3 was the newest release and people running Photoshop are the most likely to want more than 4GB’s of RAM that a 64bit OS provides. However first off Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 would not even install without several error messages and trips to the message boards. Once it was installed the PDF printer would not work at all. It took several months for them to release a fix, and to this day CS3 still has some more minor visual bugs that stopped me moving to 64bit Vista.

Now they are going one step further and just saying if you move to Snow Leopard you are on your own. So the software I spent nearly $1,500 on (more than the total cost of my main computer) just over a year ago is now unsupported on OS I might want to use it on. I have heard some people say that CS3 runs on Snow Leopard, but that is not the point. CS3 is so large there are many features that may not work properly, and even more situations we can not predict. That’s why rely on Adobe to release patches and fixes when these bugs crop up. With this announcement they are basically saying screw you to all the more cutting edge people trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but can not afford the several hundred dollars “UPGRADE” cost to move to CS4 from CS3.

Adobe is creating a lot of bad will by trying to force people to pay $500 dollars a year to get a few features each year. Which is pretty much what you have to do if you want to get updates to your software and keep the thing working.

What scared me more was when I looked around at my alternatives they are really thin. There is no option with the amount of integration Adobe CS provides between applications and bridge. There are a bunch of separate apps that provide some of the functionality. I do not like where this is leading at all.