Charlie Kindel has been an idol of mine since the COM days. As an MS employee, he set the standard of openness towards externals long before it was in vogue. Recently, he’s been posting on a topic near and dear to my heart: in home servers and storage.

Right now, I’ve got two: a file server and a media server (or, what I hope to become a media server when Media Center Extender boxes are available). Alone these lines, two recent posts are of particular interest:

• mini-ITX Windows Server 2003 Home Server
• Storage at Home - How to store that precious data - Part 1

While my backup system works, it’s not nearly as robust as I would like it to be and due to size constraints, I don’t even back up my audio or video media (although I do back up the images), so I’m very much looking forward to Charlie’s further writings on this topic.

Subscribed.

P.S. While I don’t believe that this attitude has anything to do with Charlie Kindel, if there had been a 3rd Sells Brother, he would’ve been named Charlie. Likewise, I’ve always hated my girlie name and sometimes think about changing it. To what, you ask? You guessed it: Charlie. : )

For the last few months, I’ve been doing some really cool work with a group of folks whose only task is to build apps that exercise the WinFX technologies so that we can make sure stuff works the way we want it to and give feedback to the product teams when it doesn’t. Because we’re still in preview technology land, various features that we want to test are in various builds of each part of WinFX, so we’re constantly fooling around with new combinations of the bits, which we bring together in VPC HD images and that I then have to download. Since I’m downloading the 7+ GB images from my house over VNC and since the internal VNC connection software isn’t quite as robust as the VNC software we ship to the rest of the world, that means that I’m constantly being kicked off of my connection and reconnecting, sometimes 2 or 3 dozen times over the 2 days it takes me to download the image. I just finished downloading another build today.

Unfortunately, when setting the Administrator password, I managed to enter the wrong thing twice, which meant that I had no way to log into my new VPC image after 2 days of hard labor getting it to my house. So, instead of re-downloading it again, I googled for a utility to reset the Administrator password. The first link was a knowledge base article from MS that didn’t help me because I hadn’t yet logged in to make myself a password reset diskette (which, frankly, I never do anyway). The second link was a list of completely unsupported, possibly illegal, tools to reset the Administrator password. The first one on that list worked like a charm in several orders of magnitude less time than downloading a new VPC image.

So, now I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m happy that I didn’t have to go through all that trouble again, but on the other, I doesn’t seem very useful to set my Administrator password to anything useful if I anyone with physical access can just reset it so easily. Of course, Keith Brown and other security experts have been saying that physical security is paramount for any other kind of security to be affective, but it was kind of unsettling to have the point driven home so starkly.

Well, to be fair, Don leaves some details out, but he wanted to see if he could explain Indigo in 5 minutes or less. Worth the read.

Brian Pepin, Development Lead on the Windows Forms team, has some interesting observations about Avalon and what it means to developers. I particularly like his take on Avalon vs. Windows Forms for control developers and users:

“[Avalon is] needed by control developers everywhere so they can create controls with great usability without hiring an army of Win32 experts. It’s needed by end users because they deserve to have great usability in all their applications, not just the ones that Microsoft threw a bazillion dollars at.”

I also like what he has to say about Avalon vs. Windows Forms for application developers:

“It’s also important to realize that from an application developer’s perspective, there is little difference between Avalon and Windows Forms. For years there will be interesting controls built from both technologies.”

In other words, Avalon is the necessary next step to build more powerful controls so that users get the most out of their applications without requiring a giant change in development methodology for application developers.

[via Chris Anderson]

I'm not going to move, but I couldn't help printing out the test...

I have a BankOne Visa card that I use for Sells Brothers, Inc. as a charge card for expenses like computer equipment, technical book purchases and strip clubs (you know -- business expenses : ). Apparently somebody got a hold of the number and started making charges with it today. A $19 charge was approved, but the $331 charge swung the BankOne AI software into action and the charge was declined. They called right away to confirm the activity and when I didn't recognize it, they credited me the $19, canceled the card, put a new one in the mail, sent all three major credit card agencies a notice so that my credit rating wouldn't be affected and put an affidavit in the mail so that I could swear that the $19 charge wasn't mine. All of this defense against identity theft cost me 5 minutes on the phone, a few days wait while I receive my new card, a signature and $0. Amazing.

The kind of testimonial from real folks trying to build and maintain real systems that eWeek’s Peter Galli sites in his article is pretty compelling. I wonder if we’ve reached the saturation point of folks that have the know-how to maintain the OS as well as their apps?

Selling the books and comics you’ll never read again:	$1479
Conducting *2* garage sales and selling the play structure the boys don’t frequent anymore:	$2552
Finding your wife’s 6-month old pay check in a pile of papers:	$1640
Regaining the use of more than the front 2″ of every drawer and cabinet in the house:	priceless

Today at Casa de Sells we completed a 9-month long whole-house Clean Sweep, literally touching everything we own and deciding whether to keep it, sell it or trash it. We didn’t actually remodel anything while our stuff was on the lawn, but the whole place seems much bigger since emptying the things we no longer used out of the house and completely filling a 2-car garage before hauling the stuff off to Powell’s book store (they buy as well as sell) and conducting not one but two giant garage sales in two separate neighborhoods. The $5671 we earned along the way was just found money (especially Melissa’s paycheck… : ).