In a move which is hopefully slightly more interesting than my outrageously poor opening line, I figured it would be fun to expand out and showcase how I actually use some of this technology in my day job and my home life because I enjoy reading about the interesting things others have done, so perhaps others out there will appreciate this!

Highlights

Before I can kick-off any mini series style articles, let’s set the foundations:

• Gigabit Ethernet cabled throughout
• Netgear GS605 Gigabit Switch
• Connectix Home Network Cabinet
• Connectix Home Network Patch Panel (8 RJ45 + 4 telecoms)
• HP ProLiant N36L MicroServer (4TB storage)

Infrastructure

Our apartment is cabled using gigabit ethernet, with at least two outlets in each bedroom plus four in my home office, and four in the living room behind the TV. This all terminates back to a Conectix Home Network Patch Panel which provides 8 termination points for each of the sockets, plus 4 telecoms connections which can be used to route the BT line to any of the RJ45 outlets scattered around. The network sockets all terminate back to a Netgear GS605 Unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet Switch, which sits inside my Connectix Home Network Cabinet.

I really like having the flexibility to swap-out any active hardware or install new stuff without any hassle, plus having the freedom to route connectivity about as I need it is pretty neat.

Network Cabinet Setup

Energy Metering

Within the network cabinet is a Current Cost Envi and Current Cost Bridge, although I have to say that I am not overly impressed with the bridge’s capabilities since it connects only to the my.currentcost.com web site, which although powered by Pachube, locks all your data away.

In the coming months, I will hopefully be announcing my revised ‘Arduinometer’ project, which is now based on the new Netduino Plus. This open-source platform will be capable of reading simultaneously from different energy meters, including gas, electricity and water.

Connectivity

Right now, I’m using BT as my broadband provider. Until their Infinity service is available in my area (September 2011 is the ETA – yikes!), I’m using their Total Broadband package. As you can see, I get relatively decent connectivity, but I’d obviously like to improve on that and I have high hopes for the BT Infinity Service (when it becomes available):

What matters most to me is reliability: as I work from home, I need a robust connection that’s there when I need it.

Servers & Storage

At the heart of my home network is a new HP ProLiant MicroServer N36L with 4TB of storage capacity. It runs the newest Windows Home Server 2011 operating system. All my client PCs (including my main development station) are backed-up daily by the server. That makes for a total of 4 PCs and 1 laptop being regularly backed up by the server, quietly and transparently.

As an added bonus, after a clean build of my development station, I took a full backup of it and that should allow me to do a complete rebuild simply by restoring the backup (which is actually an image of my machine) to go back to my ‘ideal state’ at any point in time.

Development rig

My main development machine is an Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz. It has 8GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM and runs Windows 7 Ultimate. I’ve fitted out the very lovely  Antec P90 case with a Corsair sealed liquid-cooling unit for keeping the processor nice and cool. Having a nice big radiator and 12cm fan means the RPMs can be kept low and that in turn reduces noise from the case.

Storage wise, I’m running a 120GB OCZ Colossus SSD as my primary drive with a 600GB Western Digital Green Caviar for storing most of the data. I also have a secondary 60GB Corsair SSD which has holds code I’m working on with Visual Studio 2010 (which, by the way, is installed on my primary SSD).

Driven by the NVidia GeForce GTX 275 primary graphics card are two 24″ LCD monitors, but I have aspirations to update those this year to a couple of IIyama 27″ panels. I also have a cheaper standard graphics card driving a 3rd 21″ CTX LCD monitor on which Twitter sits (yes, it is an addiction – live with it).

Navibot's self-charging dock

“But we need one, darling!”

Naturally, the first thing you have to do after any impulse purchase is convince other people that you had a good reason for doing so, and that what you’ve bought will actually be suitable. At least, someone with my reputation for buying just about anything that has a plug on it has to anyway!

Hoovering isn’t a particularly fun chore, and with two cats and hardwood flooring everywhere, this is a task we have to repeat fairly often. The Samsung Navibot SR8855 comes with an on-board scheduling feature which means you can program it to wake up daily and go to work. Potentially, this could save us 20 minutes per day and over a full week, that’s over two hours - a full five days a year!

So, does it work?

Having just spent the morning assembling IKEA flat-pack furniture, the floors were covered with sawdust and other general packaging mess. Plus, a few days’ worth of cat fluff. It was time to put the Navibot to work.

After charging for 90 minutes (the unit is supplied at an almost empty charge), you simply press the “auto” button on the Navibot and it undocks itself and starts mapping your room. I chose the Navibot, rather than it’s main competitor the ‘Roomba’ from iRobot, because it appears to follow a much more logical pattern when cleaning your rooms than the Roomba does, which seems to do most of its navigation by bumping into things.

The Navibot has an upward-facing cameara which continuously takes pictures of your ceiling to determine the layout of your room, in connection with some distance ranging and kinetic sensors mounted on the first 180 degrees of the unit.

In just a minute or two it appeared to have figured out exactly where it was, and started linearly moving backward and forward around the room picking up cat fluff and sawdust neatly over every section it covered.

Carpets

As I mentioned above, we don’t have carpet, and I imagine the Navibot wouldn’t perform very well at all on those. Being very quiet, it clearly doesn’t have a lot of power and relies mainly on the two counter-rotating triple-brush ‘arms’ at the front of the unit to guide surface dust and fluff into the main brushes at the rear of the unit, rather than using vast amounts of suction.

In our front room, however, there is a fairly thick rug. It seems to navigate over it just fine initially, but it is a bit too thick for the unit to comfortably turn and it makes all manner of struggling sounds as it tries to desperately back away to firmer ground.

My verdict would be to avoid this if you have a carpeted house as it’ll only really pick up loose surface fluff and small debris. If you have hard flooring though, this thing is awesome!

Results

It cleaned our entire apartment, minus bathrooms, in approximately 20 minutes. The dust container was pretty full of all the usual things, indicating that it’d done quite a good job. In ‘auto’ mode, Navibot is apparently ‘afraid’ of walls, so it leaves about a 5cm margin around each wall where it doesn’t clean very effectively, relying instead on the exterior brushes to try to reach corner dust. It does, however, have an ‘edge’ mode, which you can run a few times per week if you want.

I suspect with a few uses it will get slightly more efficient at navigation, particularly since I couldn’t help myself from tinkering with its ‘manual mode’ occasionally, which lets you take control using the remote.

Once in manual mode, however, the unit stops remembering the route back to the charging dock, so you have to manually steer it back (if you ask it to return to dock on its own, it will fail miserably). On full auto though, it navigates back just fine.

Overall, I am pleased to say that this is one household gadget I’ve purchased that is actually pretty good at its job. Plus, my better half is also happy with the purchase, too – so it’s win/win. Having been programmed to wake up every morning at 6am and go to work, by the end of the week we should still have a cat-fluff and dust free floor area throughout our apartment. And neither of us will have lifted a finger.

~

No doubt I’ll be tweeting updates on the #navibot so follow me for the latest!

What you will need

• 1 x Mini PCI U.FL to RP-SMA Pigtail Cable (~£1.50 each, I bought mine off eBay from this seller).
• Set of needle-nose pliers
• Set of mini Philips screwdrivers
• … The external antenna you want to use! (I purchased this one for £13.99 from Maplin as it has a magnetic base, useful in my particular installation).

Step by step

1. Disconnect the power to your router, and unplug the power adapter from the mains supply.

2. Flip your router over, and remove the four plastic feet/pads from each of the four corners of the router.

3. Underneath the feet are four screws (one underneath each of the pads). Unscrew each one.

4. Lift the router off the table and gently give the base a tap – the grey top section should fall off. That’s the ‘lid’. If it doesn’t come off easily, gently prise it off with a flat head screwdriver; the operative word being gently. It’s not glued or wedged, it just might be a little tight.

5. Turn the unit over so you can see the main board.

Taking special care not to touch any of the solder points or components (especially any capacitors), ground yourself and then remove the antenna wire which is connected to the main board (connector circle below):

You might find a pair of needle nose pliers may help – but the clip is not particular tight or difficult to remove so just be wary of applying excessive force.

6. Now, unclip the existing ‘non-replaceable’ antenna by pinching the inside of the clip with pliers, while pulling the antenna. This will release the antenna and it should pull-out through the exterior of the case as follows:

7. Now, thread your new antenna pigtail cable through the case (where the old antenna used to go) so that the tiny clip is on the inside and the antenna connector (the larger connector) is on the outside. Connect the small end to the main board of the router in the same place you disconnected the old one from.

8. Pop the lid back in to place, turn the unit over and put the screws back in, followed by the sticky feet.

9. Now connect up your external antenna, and you’re all set.

My goal: FTP to Azure blobs, many users: one blob storage account with ‘home directories’

I wanted a solution to enable multiple users to access the same storage account, but to have their own unique portion of it – thereby mimicking an actual FTP server. A bit like giving authenticated user’s their own ‘home folder’ on your Azure Blob storage account.

This would ultimately give your Azure application the ability to accept incoming FTP connections and store files directly into blob storage via any popular FTP client – mimicking a file and folder structure and permitting access only to regions of the blob storage account you determine. There are many potential uses for this kind of implementation, especially when you consider that blob storage can feed into the Microsoft CDN…

Features

• Deploy within a worker-role
• Support for most common FTP commands
• Custom authentication API: because you determine the authentication and authorisation APIs, you control who has access to what, quickly and easily
• Written in C#

How it works

In my implementation, I wanted the ability to literally ‘fake’ a proper FTP server to any popular FTP client: the server component to be running on Windows Azure. I wanted to have some external web service do my authentication (you could host yours on Windows Azure, too) and then only allow each user access to their own tiny portion of my Azure Blob Storage account.

It turns out, Azure’s containers did exactly what I wanted, more or less. All I had to do was to come up with a way of authenticating clients via FTP and returning which container they have access to (the easy bit), and write an FTP to Azure ‘bridge’ (adapting and extending a project by Mohammed Habeeb to run in Azure as a worker role).

Here’s how my first implementation works:

A quick note on authentication

When an FTP client authenticates, I grab the username and password sent by the client, pass that into my web service for authentication, and if successful, I return a container name specific to that customer. In this way, the remote user can only work with blobs within that container. In essence, it is their own ‘home directory’ on my master Azure Blob Storage account.

The FTP server code will deny authentication for any user who does not have a container name associated with them, so just return null to the login procedure if you’re not going to give them access (I’m assuming you don’t want to return a different error code for ‘bad password’ vs. ‘bad username’ – which is a good thing).

Your authentication API could easily be adapted to permit access to the same container by multiple users, too.

Simulating a regular file system from blob storage

Azure Blob Storage doesn’t work like a traditional disk-based system in that it doesn’t actually have a hierarchical directory structure – but the FTP service simulates one so that FTP clients can work in the traditional way. Mohammed’s initial C# FTP server code was superb: he wrote it so that the file system could be replaced back in 2007 – to my knowledge, before Azure existed, but it’s like he meant for it to be used this way (that is to say, it was so painless to adapt it one could be forgiven for thinking this. Mohammed, thanks!).

Now I have my FTP server, modified and adapted to work for Azure, there are many ways in which this project can be expanded…

Over to you (and the rest of the open source community)

It’s my first open source project and I actively encourage you to help me improve it. When I started out, most of this was ‘proof of concept’ for a similar idea I was working on. As I look back over the past few weekends of work, there are many things I’d change but I figured there’s enough here to make a start.

If you decide to use it “as is” (something I don’t advise at this stage), do remember that it’s not going to be perfect and you’ll need to do a little leg work – it’s a work in progress and it wasn’t written (at least initially) to be an open-source project. Drop me a note to let me know how you’re using it though, it’s always fun to see where these things end up once you’ve released them into the wild.

Where to get it

Head on over to the FTP to Azure Blob Storage Bridge project on CodePlex.

It’s free for you to use however you want. It carries all the usual caveats and warnings as other ‘free open-source’ software: use it at your own risk.

If you do use it and it works well for you, drop me an email and it’ll make me happy.

I’ll provide more details about the PC’s specification soon, but I wanted to share some information about the various ways in which SSDs can be configured and how they affect performance. There are plenty of articles out there regarding SSD design, from a technical point of view, but I haven’t found any that have compared AHCI to IDE so that I could figure out which might give my Colossus the best chance of performing well. So, I decided to run my own basic test.  

Motherboard  

For this test, I am using the Intel DP55KG motherboard running BIOS version KGIBX10J.86A (17th Feb 2010). The DP55KG has 8 on-board SATA ports, six of which are powered via the board’s PCH, and two via an integrated Marvell 88E6145 chip (check out this post for an excellent review of the DP55KG).  

The SSD  

The drive under scrutiny here will be the OCZ Colossus 120GB. On paper, according to OCZ, the drive supports read and write speeds up to 260MB/sec, with sustained write around 140MB/s. This was the best drive I could find of this capacity in the price bracket.  

The 3.5" 'Colossus' SSD by OCZ

The test  

I wanted to know, “Which performs better, AHCI or IDE?” followed by “will IDE mode on the Marvell chip out perform IDE mode on the Intel PCH controller?”. To find out, I will use Passmark Performancetest 7.0 from Passmark. It provides a simple, standardised means of testing my SSD’s.  

• To test the Intel PCH:
  • Configure the controller in IDE  mode
  • Install Windows 7 Ultimate
  • Install the latest Intel Chipset drivers
  • Restart
  • Install Passmark PerformanceTest 7.0
  • Run tests
  • Repeat these steps, but next time configure the controller in AHCI mode.
• To test the Marvell Chip:
  • Connect the OCZ Colossus to port 0 on the board
  • Verify controller is in IDE mode (AHCI is not supported by the Marvell chip)
  • Install Windows 7 Ultimate
  • Install the latest Intel Chipset drivers
  • Restart
  • Install Passmark PerformanceTest 7.0
  • Run tests

Results  

Here are the raw test results. Note that the figures quoted are in MB/s.: 

Here’s the corresponding bar chart (click to enlarge):  

Intel DP55KG PCH IDE vs AHCI, vs Marvell IDE

In this article, I cover:

• Introducing Windows Media Centre
• How To: Set up Windows Media Centre
• How To: Connect your Xbox 360 to Windows Media Centre
• Windows Home Server and your digital media

Feel free to skip to the section that interests you most.

An impulse purchase that changed the way we consume media in our household

At the weekend, something happened that rocked my world. It didn’t happen accidentally, either. I was out shopping and I just happened to walk past Maplin (RadioShack, to you US folks) who had a special offer in their window: a KWorld PlusTV DVB-T Dual Freeview HD Tuner for the princely sum of just £24.99. That’s a small USB stick with an antenna connection on it that contains not one, but TWO HD Freeview TV tuners, giving the ability to watch one programme while recording another: for £24.99.

In the UK, Freeview gives access to about 100 digital channels, and, although they don’t broadcast in HD yet, in early 2010 the HD rollout begins.

Right now, the only way to get free HD TV over the air is to get Freesat HD or Sky+ HD, both of which require a satellite dish to be installed and cost a fair amount in set up and subscription fees.

At the time, like many geeks, I didn’t know why I wanted this particular gadget, but I the little voice inside of me compelled me to buy it. I figured, “hey, even if I don’t know what to do with it, perhaps Windows 7 will”. And that is where the fun began.

Introducing Windows Media Centre

With the recent release of Windows 7, millions of people globally have been busy remarking how much simpler the ‘simple’ things become when you install Windows 7.

Unlike Apple (for whom I shall now depart momentarily to direct a slight dig) who only have to worry about a limited number of devices on a limited platform of hardware, Microsoft have to build software that is actually compatible with hundreds of thousands of different devices and at least twice as many combinations. That is by no means an easy thing to accomplish, but Windows 7 seems to do it with dare I say it a certain degree of sentience: plug and play has actually come to life. Everything… every single USB gadget I own was detected first time, without me first needing to supply a driver CD. If Windows didn’t have the drivers, it ‘magicked’ them off the internet for me. Marvellous.

This includes the £24.99 TV Tuner from some anonymous company I’ve never heard of before. I plugged it in, and up popped the “Driver Installation” window and it downloaded the relevant drivers for me (I’m so glad it did as well – I don’t like installing drivers and software from anonymous small name companies).

A few minutes later, everything was successfully installed with zero effort on my part. In fact, the most strenuous part of this entire exercise was trying to open the box the device came in – which was apparently designed to survive a small tactical strike.

And this is where Windows Media Centre comes onto the scene – an incredible suite of technologies that’s designed with simplicity in mind. Shipped with Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate editions, Media Centre has – at its core – the ability to act as a centralised hub for all your digital media: music, videos, recorded and live TV. For anyone who’s seen TiVO or Sky+, Windows Media Centre does exactly what those two services do, but better, faster and subscription free.

Setting-up Media Centre

Launching “Windows Media Centre” from your Start Menu brings up a little animated Window:

Having detected that I had now installed a USB TV Tuner, Windows Media Centre asked me if I wanted to configure it. Allow it to complete the setup process, which – including the time it takes Media Centre to scan the TV frequencies in your country for available channels – took me about 10 minutes.

When the process is completed, Windows Media Centre is able to give you a TV guide showing weeks’ worth of programming schedules. The guide alone is worth ditching Sky+ for:

• Beats Sky’s “Series Link” function by adding numerous extra functions giving greater control over what is recorded and when
• Search for TV programmes by keyword in the title, or by cast members
• Create wish lists: specify your favourite actors and actresses, and the guide records any programmes it finds with those stars as cast members
• Manage potential recording conflicts before they arise and set priorities for your favourite shows

The list does actually go on. Have a look at some of the guide screenshots below:

The trouble is right now – this is TV on my PC. My PC is in my office – not my front room. We need to break out of here and I’ll be damned if I’m going to run a VGA cable from here to my 42” LCD TV in the front room. Nay – I want an easier way!

Xbox 360

Those of us with an Xbox 360 (or three) laying about the house know that we’re supposed to be living in some futuristic media-utopia where our TV’s can access all our music, videos and photos. Even TV (alright, that’s slightly pointless but you get the picture). But, even with Vista, this wasn’t particularly easy to set up. So I never bothered with it. It just didn’t quite work as expected.

Turn on your Xbox 360 while your Windows 7 PC is on, and you’ll receive a polite little notification that “Windows has discovered a Media Centre Extender”. Discovery – what an appropriate word. It popped up, and I thought to myself …. “Please, continue”. And so Windows did. After being informed a few seconds later that everything was installed correctly, I wanted my Xbox 360 to be able to access the juicy goodness of Windows Media Centre.

Follow these steps:

• Go to “System”
• Go to “Computers”
• Go to “Windows Media Centre”
• If you’ve already set up (or tried to set up) a Windows Media Centre connection before, you’ll first want to choose “Disconnect”. If you’ve not tried that before, that option won’t be available to you.
• Now, choose “Connect”.
• Your Xbox 360 will search your network for available Windows Media Centre computers. After a few moments, your Windows 7 Media Centre should be discovered, and your Xbox 360 will display a two-part eight digit code on your screen.
• Note that code down, and fire up the Windows Media Centre application on your PC.
• Go to “Tasks”, then “Add Extender” to bring up this screen:

  

• Type in the eight digit code you were given by your Xbox 360, and press “Next”.
• You’ll then see a screen similar to this:

  

• This process might take a little while to complete while your Media Libraries are constructed.
• Once complete, you’ll see a screen like this:

  

• By this time, your Xbox 360’s display will have changed and will be displaying a very similar (if not completely identical) display to the Windows Media Centre application on your PC.

And that’s it, you’re done – your Xbox 360 is now connected to your Windows 7 Media Centre.

What about Windows Home Server?

Ah, the “server in the home”. Got one? I have. If you haven’t, you should.

It takes care of backing up all your PCs, laptops and personal devices and my HP MediaSmart Home Server even automatically backs up my iTunes Libraries and streams them over the network. In fact, they’re so good I’d recommend them even for small businesses. Just plug them in, install the software on your PCs and laptops and you’re safe from day one (you can even do a bare-metal rebuild if you are running Windows 7 – that rocks).

Even cooler is that with the PowerPack 3 Beta recently released by Microsoft you can now install a connector for Windows Media Centre that allows it to take full advantage of the awesome storage capacity of your Windows Home Server.

The Windows Home Server Media Centre Connector (desperately in need of a shorter name, though it is hard to imagine one more descriptive) adds a little tab to your Windows Media Centre menu that, in a nutshell, allows Media Centre to archive your recorded television programs off to your Home Server automatically. It also adds some other nifty functionality to allow you to view most of the information contained on your Home Server Console on your TV, too.

In summary

It starts with the purchase of a TV tuner ‘dongle’. With Windows 7, in literally just a few minutes you can pretty much overhaul the way you access your digital content in the home. Chuck an Xbox 360 into the mix, and you’ve got the capability to stream HD content to your TV, listen to your music and browse all your photos right from the comfort of your armchair. I’d also recommend getting your hands on a great media remote (this one from Logitech is awesome) because you’ll quickly get bored using the Xbox 360 controller. The Logitech remote can also control many other devices so you can ditch the collection of remotes you’ve probably already got.

With Windows Home Server chugging away too, you’ll never lose any of your digital recordings again and since storage is so cheap these days, you’ll have a very easy mechanism for expanding your storage on demand.

BizSpark has already helped hundreds (thousands, now, perhaps?) of startups to succeed, and Websitespark looks set to do the same for smaller teams of web professionals. With no up-front costs and no long-term commitments (just a $100 exit fee at the end of the programme period) , what more could you ask for?

Full information is online and available at http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

This, it would seem, is another victory for the European Commission and it’s competition rules. Microsoft has previously fallen foul of these in early 2008 when it was fined £765m by the European Commission for ‘anti-competitive behavior’: including Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer with Windows. Understandably then, it has decided to avoid that kind of financial pain again by bowing to the pressure.

Why?

Why does it matter what Microsoft choose to ship with Windows? It’s not like I have to pay for Internet Explorer, or any other browser by any other vendor, for that matter. So I, the consumer, am not losing out by it’s inclusion in the operating system.

Internet Explorer, like Windows Media Player, are features designed to make the operating system better, easier to use and increase the overall value of the product. Browsers should be features of every operating system.

Every major consumer-targeted operating system has it’s own browser included. Let’s take Apple’s Mac OS, for example: that ships with the Safari browser. Safari and IE browsers do essentially the same thing, and they are distributed to the consumer in exactly the same fashion: automatic inclusion by the vendor on to the newly purchased computer. Yet, Apple aren’t the target (so far as I know) of the EC competition rulings because they aren’t the market leader.

To impose this type of ruling on Microsoft because they are the market leader seems very similar to saying that Microsoft are the market leader because of Internet Explorer, which isn’t true at all. So surely, if you’re going to impose this type of rule on any vendor then surely you must apply it to all of them: that’s really the only way to give consumers a free, fair choice, right?

What’s the difference?

I assume that the EC are interested so much in Microsoft’s activities because it holds the majority market share. So too, then, I would assume it to be equally interested in Nokia, who according to this article, held 40.43% of the Mobile Device market share in Q12009, making them the market leader. Are Nokia the subject of an EC competition rules enquiry for bundling their own software with their device?

I can’t see much practical difference either, between companies like Dell and HP, who pre-bundle their own proprietary software programs and utilities onto the PC’s they ship, and this, either. Perhaps the EC will go after these companies under their ‘anti-competition’ rules, too.

Ultimately, it comes down to education

Eight or 9 times in 10, most users don’t care what browser they’re using: at least in my experience. Most consumers just want something that works. They don’t care what it is, why should they? I certainly don’t get all shirty when my new car comes with Michelin tyres, or Goodyear, or – who cares… they do the job.

But my point is, if I do want something different, I’m free to change those tyres. Perhaps I’ll read that Pirelli tyres are better than my Goodyears, and I’ll change them. Just as I can change my browser, any time I want to. And I don’t need the EC to make that happen for me because Microsoft haven’t prevented me from using Firefox, or any other browser, for that matter. And that’s the point: this is about education. Those who know enough to understand why they might want another browser, and can make a comparative choice, are completely free to do so, and (if I do say so myself) it is ridiculously easy to swap to an alternative.

I can’t say the same about the tyres on my car though (the ones I’ll have to pay a hefty cost to change). Thankfully, swapping my browser is free and easy. And that’s another reason why these confusing rules make me, well, confused.

It’s all down hill from here…

Now, when Windows 7 ships in Europe, what on earth will the majority of consumers do? What will Microsoft do, in order to help users make the choice that’s right for them? Will consumers see a choice of browsers pop up on their screen? How will they choose? Why should they have to choose? Does Mr And Mrs Average really care? Please comment!

#CompetitionCommissionFail?

“Splendid,” I thought. I’ve wanted to try Writer out, and I needed to write a new blog post as I haven’t been as faithful to my blog the past month as I’d have liked to have been. Also, as much as I like the web-based revolution, I don’t particularly find WordPress.com’s online article editor very good for much else other than writing plain-text. Inserting and uploading media is a bit of a chore, but as I found out, Writer makes that rather easy.

Without further ado, I’ll run you through the setup process here, and comment on my experiences as I go. For added authenticity, I’ll actually be writing this blog post using Live Writer. So, fingers crossed – the proof (should be) in the pudding.

Installation

Installation is straightforward, simple and easy. The Windows Live downloader includes the option to include other products within the Live suite too, including Windows Live Messenger and Movie Maker Beta.

Setup

When you run the program for the firs time, you’re asked which blogging service you use:

You then need to fill out a few other details:

And, that really is about all you need to do. Once you’ve done this, Live Writer connects to your blog, configures itself (correctly) and even downloads your blog’s CSS styles and gives you a live preview as you type.  So far, so good.

The Editor

As soon as you startup after configuring your blog account, you’ll see the new editor window. It’s blank, waiting for you to write your next masterpiece:

Of particular interest here are the “Insert” links on the right-hand side of the screen:

I’ve always found the WordPress.com web editor a bit, well, clumsy. It’s clear (for sure), it’s just fiddly if you want to do anything that write text. Uploading pictures is a bit of a pain. Using Writer, I’ve simply been taking screenshots and pasting directly in to the editor window.

Rich Media Integration

Writer boasts the ability to publish your videos directly to the MSN Soapbox service, or to YouTube and then embed those videos directly into your blog. This is a really nice feature, and to test if it works, I’m going to insert a sample video here:

EDIT: As you can see, WordPress.com doesn’t seem to like the player code generated via Windows Live Writer. I’ll write to them, and ask why – and if I get a response, I’ll post it here. Shame!

Clicking on the “Video” link under “Insert” menu:

I chose “Soapbox” (as this is a service I have never used). Thankfully, there’s no registration forms to fill out. I just enter my Windows Live ID and create a ‘nickname’ for my Soapbox account:

… And that’s it. You’re then returned to the Live Writer editor and you can see your video uploading right in-place on your blog. Quite handy actually, because it meant I could carry on writing my article while the upload took place in the background.

After about 15 minutes, my video had uploaded and Soapbox had finished processing my video. The “uploading video” screen above is now replaced with:

Absolutely fantastic, so far then. So, let’s recap:

• I’ve uploaded a video to a service I’ve never used
• I didn’t have to prepare my video, I just found one and selected it
• I could carry on writing my article while uploading in the background, with the video placeholder in-line
• The video was uploaded and transcoded in around 15 minutes.

Very impressive. All I need now is some hyperlinks.

Hyperlinking

Ok, I’ve been building web pages since I was about 12. Hyperlinks are easy, right? Of course they are. But tell that to the WordPress.com editor. Linking to my previous posts has always been a pain because it doesn’t let me browse through them and pick them when creating a new link. I have to get my previous article URL and then cut and paste (somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong here – I really hope I’ve just missed this feature). Live Writer, though, does a great job:

Choosing “Previous post” then pops up the following:

Another awesome little helper-feature. Job done. Hyperlinks inserted. And I’m still in my nice WYSIWYG editor.

Summary

So, to finish up then, how would I summarise my experience using Windows Live Writer?

In a word, “brilliant”. In four words: “you should use it”.

It’s free, it’s very well built (as you’d expect), and it has a very polished interface. Microsoft have done a fantastic job here.

Symptoms

• Apparently random ‘frezzing’ of applications and system processes
• Thousands of “Hard Faults” showing under the Memory section in Reliability and Performance Monitor

Cause

Enlisting the help of a friend, upon popping open the case, we found amongst the 4GB of RAM were two very cheap and nasty looking 1GB memory sticks mixed with two awesome-looking Crucial Memory sticks. The two sticks from each manufacturer had two different speeds – so on a whim we hoicked out the dodgy-looking brand, leaving only the 2GB from Crucial Memory.

A little surprisingly, this meant that the PC now boots in < 40 seconds (vs. ~120 seconds before) and Hard Faults per minute are right down:

So far, so good. My Vista Ultimate system is now running on 2GB RAM at approximately twice the speed of the previous 4GB installation. Depending on how the system operates over the next few days, I’ll purchase 2 x 1GB replacement sticks identical to the current Crucial sticks as a replacement to the dodgy-looking sticks.

Fingers-crossed!