Part of that is because I’ve left behind the sun-drenched beaches of Los Angeles for the slightly chillier climate of the Bay Area – San Francisco to be precise. Despite dropping about 10 degrees in temperature (5.5 degrees, Celsius readers) I’m very much enjoying the change. It’s nice being back in a city where walking and public transport are a part of everyday life, definitely an improvement over the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Also I’m living in the North Beach district which means I have a huuge number of bars, restaurants and shops just a few blocks away, which is fantastic for those summer weekends and evenings

And with a change of city comes a change of job! About a month ago I started at LucasArts and so far it’s been brilliant. I’m part of a team working on something that’s fantastically exciting, but also highly highly confidential and several years away. I’ve always avoided talking about work here other than in the abstract and that’ll continue, but I do look forward to the day when I can say more

This of course means that I’m no longer at Seven, something that has mixed emotions for me. On one hand there’s some great people I’ll really miss working with, but on the other the last twelve months were pretty grim with layoffs, salary cuts, and the public lawsuit around our game, Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.

I think all of us at Seven felt that Scratch had the potential to be pretty special so having it taken away was hard, and not helped by then seeing our former publisher hawk the game at E3 or various parties. Or butcher our original concept art into a pretty horrific website. But hey, it’s their game now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever manage to release it, but if they do hopefully they’ll stay true to the game and it won’t be just another button-pressing music game.

Being bought by Activision, even with the loss of Scratch, is definitely the best thing that could have happened to Seven. I wish all those guys the best of luck and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

On a totally different note, now that life should be a little less hectic I’m going to hopefully have a lot more time to devote to personal projects. On the Whiist side there’s a few things in progress that I really need to finalize so I can release a new version. I also have a new plugin for Windows Home Server that was part of Whiist but made more sense as a standalone item.

And then there’s the iPhone… Some of the changes in 3.0 while not outright breaking Photo Speed Dial have definitely made it less useful (such as the OS now prompting before initiating calls from 3rd party apps, urghh!). This weekend will be dedicated to deciding if and how I’ll try to work around these issues. I have a number of changes for Better Christmas List that I’m grouping together into a bigger release for later this year. It might just be me, but I tend not to think about Christmas shopping until at least September I also have a couple of ideas/prototypes for new apps that I’ve been working on,  hopefully things that will stand out in some way from the gazillion apps that are now to be found on the app store!

Anyway, I’m off to play the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition that we just released

The Power Pack 1 issue was due to the use of an undocumented (oops!) interface that was removed in PP1. Thanks to Brendan for pointing that out to me.

The HP Media Smart Server issue was caused by Whiist not preserving some HP-specific markup stored in the XML file which controls the list of website links of the public / private homepages.

The HP fix has been tested by several volunteers for a few weeks now without any sign of problems. I’ve removed the warning relating to the MSS from the Whiist homepage, however please note that Whiist still remains beta software.

Aside from these two changes, and some minor bug fixes, this release is identical to the previous 0.80 release. I know it’s been a while, but stay tuned for a proper new release soon

As my plan was to dual boot Vista/OSX I used GParted to shrink my main partition and create a little 20GB one for OSX. Then during the OSX install I selected this partition and formatted it with the Mac’s HFS+ filesystem.

At least that was the plan.

Somehow (and I blame the cat for distracting me) I managed to format both partitions and as a result blitzed my main Vista install. Document, settings, music, Whiist, (and most critically of all, my Counterstrike config file) all gone in the blink of an eye*. Yikes!

So, for the first time ever I found myself breaking out the Windows Home Server restore CD, placing it in my PC and rebooting with crossed fingers. And it worked, flawlessly and amazingly well. I clicked through the wizard, selected the backup from the night before, and a few hours later my PC was back in the same condition prior to my little faux pas.

Having been a Windows Home Server user since the early betas I’m well aware of its features and functions, but this is the first time I’ve ever needed it to save my bacon and it passed with flying colors. 

* Ok, I confess. I have multiple backups of these that should handle most combinations of disaster. Some of them lag by a week or so though and reinstalling and restoring everything would have been extremely tedious. And my Counterstrike file with my lovingly crafted bindings really would have been gone forever!

If you’ve tried to do this yourself you’ve probably found it isn’t very easy. You need to login via Remote Desktop, find the correct file, and then use an image editing program to paste your new image into the correct place, then resave the file.

Yeah, I never found the time to change mine either

Anyway, one of the goals of Whiist is to make managing all of the websites on your Windows Home Server a great deal easier, and to this end the latest version of Whiist (0.8) now includes a simple editor that lets you change this image.

Go to the Whiist options page using the settings button on the menu bar and you will find the option to customize your home page, along with a preview of how the page will look. In the editor select an image and use the mouse to position/zoom as desired. When you click ‘Apply’ Whiist will generate a new image for your Windows Home Server page and save it in the appropriate place.

I’m still working one a couple of “bigger” features for Whiist that I hope to have ready in the new year. I’m not quite ready to say what these are yet, but if you like blogging and photo galleries I think you’ll be happy

Merry Christmas!

Once person has claimed that Whiist overwrites settings required by the HP MSS – I can assure you that this is absolutely false! I very much believe that Whiist behaves as a “good citizen” in respect to Home Server;

Unless you choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist does nothing.

When you DO choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist only changes the item in question.

Whenever Whiist does create/modify/remove a website it does so via the IIS interface built into Windows Server. Whenever it changes a website link, it does so according to the specs in the Home Server SDK.

If you WERE to edit or remove a website that has been created by the HP software then I can completely see that this may cause problems. Within the next few days I’ll be releasing a version of Whiist that hides the HP entries from view so they cannot be accidentally removed or altered.

Clearly there IS a problem and for that reason I would recommend that if you are a HP Media Smart Server you proceed with caution if installing Whiist – and I would certainly recommend that you do not modify/remove any websites or links you have not created yourself.

If you have installed Whiist and are experiencing problems then I deeply apologize. please follow this link and provide as much detail as possible and I’ll endeavor to help you out;

Andrew

So here’s how it went down;

Early on the Tuesday morning Liz and I flew to Seattle. Microsoft had paid for my flight so we cashed in some airmiles for Liz and then upgraded to first class – I felt it would help me get into a better state of mind for the competition  

After we checked into our hotel (complete with a packed welcome basket and card from the Windows Home Sever team) we headed into downtown Seattle and spent the day exploring and eating too much seafood. I’d never visited Seattle but it’s a really great place, definitely different to LA and mostly in a good way.

On Wednesday morning a limo picked us up at the crack of dawn. This was the first time I met the other finalists, Prakash Gautam the author of the excellent Community Feeds Add-in and David Wright, the author of Jungle Disk. I was a little nervous as both of their entries were polished products that had been in development for a long time, whereas Whiist was something I’d knocked up from scratch in a couple of weeks. I thought the fact that Whiist had been developed specifically for WHS might help me but I wasn’t feeling especially confident.

When we got to the Microsoft Campus they had breakfast ready and a tech crew to help us setup. There was a little scare as I hadn’t realized we were expected to take our own server to demo on, but thankfully Joel from the Home Server team managed to get me access to a server in another building which I could demo on via Remote Desktop.

The five judges were the respected technology bloggers Ed Bott, Paul Thurott and Rob Enderle, Steve VanRoekel from the Windows Server division and Charlie Kindel who began the Windows Home Server movement several years ago. We each presented in turn (with the other finalists remaining in a green-room for fairness) and then had a Q&A with the judges. Although we’d been told they weren’t familiar with our Add-Ins they asked a lot of good questions about Whiist and where it would go from here.

After the presentations there was a mini-break while the judges conferred, then we went backstage to wait before being called onstage to collect our prizes. When Prakash was given third place I had this feeling I was going to get second. I was 100% certain, so when they called the next name I actually started moving towards the stage before I realized they’d called David. Wait.. I won!??.. I WON!! Wow!

We were all presented with oversized checks and goodie bags (including a full copy of Windows Home server) before having a lot of picture taken with the judges and some of the team. We also got to checkout some of the OEM home server designs and the famous “Hockey Puck” concept model. Aside from the hockey puck the HP Media Smart Server was definitely my favorite, they really need to put an apple next to it in pictures or something because it’s unbelievable small.

After lunch we had the chance to spend time with some of the developers from the Windows Home Server team. It was great to meet the people behind the actual product and they were quick to ask us a lot of questions about how the SDK could be improved and what we’d like to see in the future. Two of the nicest compliments I had were from Todd and Chris who both told me they’d been using Whiist since it was released and were big fans. They also gave me a couple of good ideas about ways to improve Whiist based on things they’d run into and had to solve for the full product.

Before we left Dileep and Sasha from the WHS team took us to the ultra-cheap Microsoft Store where I took the chance to grab a two copies of Vista to update some home PCs and a copy of Office 2007. This was the day after Halo 3 was released and the store was full of a) boxes of Halo 3 and b) people buying Halo 3 – although I did notice two people buying copies of Windows Home Server

So in a nutshell that was Seattle and the Code2Fame finals. Big big thanks to Microsoft for arranging the competition, Charlie, Todd and the team for creating Windows Home Server, Dileep and Sasha for sponsoring our trip to the Microsoft Store, and Joel for saving my bacon before the event even started

And yes, I took the fake check home

Speaking of which, I thought I’d post the video I put together for my Code2Fame entry. I had to cut out a lot to fit into the required five minutes, so when I get time I’m planning make a couple of “How To” videos from the footage.

Because this version features a lot of changes I’m going to wait a few days until I’m sure there are no obvious bugs lurking before I update the main page. I’m pretty sure this version is already good to go, but Whiist now has a lot of users so I figure I should be a little cautious before unleashing anything too drastic

The change log is here, but the biggest addition is the ability to create private websites that are only accessible to users of your Home Server.

From the property page of a website you can use the new security tab to set the site to private and then select which users from your Windows Home Server are allowed access. When visiting the site users will prompted for a password and must enter their Windows Home Server username/password before being allowed access.

Aside from the security features a lot of the work in this version was behind the scenes to either support upcoming features or improve existing functionality. While there probably won’t be much new here to Wow you, hopefully everything that’s there is now a little nicer. (although don’t worry Judge, I still plan to redo much of the way that Links are managed!).

If anyone needs me I’ll be desperately trying to record videos and fill in the forms before the Code2Fame deadline on Friday