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WinExtra

aka Steve Hodson - a cranky old fart wandering the internet causing mayhem as he goes


How to tell PR jerks don’t have a clue who you areToday

red-shoes-cat-stupid Okay … all you readers of WinExtra out there (ya I know there’s a couple of ya) I want you to do me a favour. First off all of you who know that I have never had or will likely have an iPhone please raise your hand.

Good .. all of you.

That wasn’t hard was it.

After all I have written before about what I think of the iPhone and it even came up as a subject on a podcast or two. So please explain to me then why a PR firm wouldn’t be able to figure out that the iPhone or any applications for it are not a big subject of discussion here.

Case in point – this morning I’m checking my emails from overnight and I see one with the nice big title of ICOON: New iPhone Application. My first reaction was .. ya so. My next thought was you guys really don’t have a friggin clue do you.

If anyone from the PR firm had taken even a few minutes to do even the simplest search of the blog they would have seen that it wouldn’t be worth sending me anything to do with the iPhone. So here’s a hint you morons – if you want to be effective for your clients it might behove you to make sure your m

Disqus, FriendFeed, FF2Disqus – the problems they show usYesterday

cat-birdcage The other day I wrote up a post about an interesting new service called FF2Disqus which was intended to let bloggers pull in FriendFeed comments about a post in to their Disqus comments on their blog (as log as they use Disqus that is). In turn it was also meant to let Disqus comments be pulled into FriendFeed in the correct place under the post announcement in FriendFeed.

Confused?

Ya it’s easy to get that way; and really the only ones that will care about that explanation are the bloggers who use both FriendFeed and Disqus. For the rest of you the simple explanation is that your comments on posts show up on both the blog and FriendFeed regardless of where you made them. Except for one thing – it didn’t work. In fact it created what many people using FriendFeed were afraid would happen – a looping of comments.

Now I explained in my original post why I thought it was a good idea

Could we see a summer release of Windows 7?Yesterday

windows-xp-hibernate-ceiling-cat Well it’s that time folks – Windows 7 has been released as an open beta for all to enjoy. That is if you happen to have a TechNet or MSDN subscription (I don’t), or happen to have pull in Microsoft (I don’t) the rest of us will have to wait until January 9th and hope to hell we make it in under the 2.5 million limit of downloads allowed (fingers crossed).

Already the pundits are waxing long on what is what with the new operating system from Microsoft while the rest of us just want to get our hands on the damn thing. Here’s the interesting thing though. This is only a beta release and as with all major beta releases from Microsoft it is a time bombed beta.

This means that at some point the beta will no longer work and you will need to actually install the real thing. Now according to what I read on Steve Clayton’s blog this morning the Windows 7 beta is only good until August 1st 2009. So by that date you will need to either revert to Vista or XP, or you will need to install/upgrade to the RTM version. Now given that ther

This is what Social Media is really aboutJanuary 7

daniella Much is made about the power that is available to social media because of the incredible number of people that can be mobilized around a thought, an idea, a mission or a cause. Through a plethora of tools available to us we find ourselves becoming involved with people we would otherwise in all likelihood never meet. We become involved, we laugh, we cry and every once in awhile we find we can be a part of making a change for some person.

This is what social media is about. It isn’t about the tools like Twitter or Facebook or Friendfeed. They only make it easier to be a part of something that is larger than ourselves. It gives us a window to a world we might have never seen, whether that window is halfway around the world or just down the road.

I might sometimes rail against this thing we call social media but that is only because of the way I see it being used; or misused. It also bothers me that an incredibly powerful movement is being sidetracked and sullied by things like who has the most followers or who has the

Hey Windows developers please save my data to the cloudJanuary 7

sometimes-the-mail-gets-you There’s a lot of talk going on about the cloud and how it’s going to change how we use our applications and save our data. Well I’ve got an open request to any Windows developer who want to play around with Azure and Windows Live – I’ll even be the guinea pig for you. Come up with a way for me to save my critical data to the cloud and have it happen seamlessly, constant and in the background.

I got thinking about this when I started up Windows Live Mail this morning and the fact that in the past I have probably lost more mail data from either hard drive failure or upgrades that got borked. I’m fed up with it and while there are commercial options for things like Outlook there is nothing that I know of for the newer versions of the Windows default email client.

Here’s the scenario of what I would ideally like. Install the app. Point it to where ever on the cloud it has to go (my SkyDrive, Mesh .. where ever). Hit the Do Your Thing button and have it disappear. What it would do then is automatically sync my data with the cloud as it changes – simple as that.

Then when I need to restore that data for whatever reason click o