Inner Drive Software

A member of the Windows Vista team explains (via Joel Spolsky):

I worked on the "Windows Mobile PC User Experience" team. This team was part of Longhorn from a feature standpoint but was organizationally part of the Tablet PC group. To find a common manager to other people I needed to work with required walking 6 or 7 steps up the org chart from me.

So after 12 years, you still have to go to the Start menu to stop the computer.

We're still thrashing through the abandoned application, in which we found this gem.

The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why; here's the "before:"

And the "after:"

(The new camera is so good, if you open the bottom image in its own window you can read half my programming library.)

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Alas, the new camera and I had a disagreement initially. It's a Logitech QuickCam Orbit that I'm running through Sascha Keller's VisionGS Webcam software. I had to reduce the thread priority of VisionGS to get it to play nicely with my computer. And I have Microsoft Index Service turned off until I shut down the Webcam, because it was taking every available processor cycle. The Index service sometimes repopulates its database after an unexpected reboot, and There were also several reboots involved. I also disturbed poor Parker's sleep a few times commenting *ahem* on the installation process.

</Geek Stuff>

It's working now. And if Parker moves we'll see if the face- (puppy-) tracking feature works.

The great infrastructure project is nearly complete. Everything is now done, except for upgrading the last old server to Windows 2003. It even looks better.

My previous post brings up, tangentially, our naming scheme. For years I bought only Gateway computers, and for no reason I can remember, named all of them something to do with cows—but in German.

We are now rebuilding the next-to-last server in our great infra-restructure project. Since the first step in blowing away a server is to restart the server, I got the Windows 2003 "why are you doing this to me?" dialog box. Now, the comment I wrote has ceased to exist due to reformatting the system partition; so what was the purpose of this comment?

Rebuilding an entire set of servers is tedious. I'm now in the phase of trying to determine the least security required to run all my web applications. This involves testing a feature, finding out that Windows Server 2003 R2 has blocked it, looking at the event log, loosening the security setting the tiniest bit to fix it, rinse and repeat.

So, this isn't a real post. It's just a test of the blog engine. Or...maybe it's both...

We've now got our new application server running, and we're moving all of our Web applications over. The new server uses Windows Server 2003 R2, which has tighter security than the previous version, and that has slowed us down a little bit.