Doug Welzel

I was thrilled to see the preview of Live Mesh launch the other day.  I have been watching this group from a distance within Microsoft and couldn't wait to get my hands on their bits.  The day has finally come.

The press has been mixed, which seems to be true of just about any Microsoft product.  I'm not going to get into the debate of whether or not this is resolving the grand synchronization problem or if this is Groove 2.0.  I don't care.  All I know is that it solved some key scenarios for me.

Every day I need to update 2 documents sitting on my home machine: a workout log and a weight log.  (yes, the weight log is nuts.. I still haven't been able to ditch that habit since I stopped competing).  I usually go to work and then remote desktop back to my home machine (via Home Server) in order to update the documents.  If my wife is using the home machine, I'm out of luck.  If there is a network hiccup, I'm out of luck.  Because of the effort involved, I tended to skip or forget updates.

With Live Mesh this process is trivial.  All of my home documents are synced to all of my machines.  So when I get to work, I open up a local file and make the updates.  It is dead simple.  I never miss an update anymore.

I also keep a One Note diary for my son.  Remember diaries?  They are kind of like blogs, only without the global read bit set.  Again, with the One Note document sitting at home, I rarely updated it from work, which meant it didn't get updated nearly enough.  Live Mesh to the rescue.  Now it is trivial to open up the file from wherever I am, write a few thoughts and get on with my day.

Again, these are simple scenarios, but they make all the difference to me.  I'm sure this is just the beginning of the great things we will see enabled by Live Mesh.

I knew this moment was coming, I just knew.  Something about the situation wasn't right, and then last weekend it happened, my home computer went belly up.  It wasn't a hardware failure.  Vista got to the point where it was just so hosed that there was no coming back.  I think it could have been a virus based on something I saw in OneCare, but I'm not exactly sure. 

It started Saturday morning when I couldn't log in due to errors with the user profile service.  I tried safe mode, reverting to the last known good configuration and a few other things.  In the end my machine ended up in a reboot loop.

Whether or not it was a virus, I was asking for this.  I upgraded to Vista (rather than doing a clean install) and been installing and removing all sorts of junk for years.  The machine was never quite right after the upgrade and I always had this nagging feeling that I should do a clean install.  Now was my chance.

I have an elaborate backup strategy, but in times like this I get nervous.  Backup systems aren't exercised much and I always worry that they won't perform when their times comes.  It is kind of like all that cool code you write to handle an error condition that fails miserably when it is actually run. 

Given the state of my system, I decided to start with a clean install of Vista and then bring key files back from Home Server.  The great thing about Home Server is that you can browse backups as if they were a filesystem and copy out the files you need.  This proved to be an invaluable feature. 

To be extra paranoid, I spent about a day copying key files from home server to an external hard drive.  This was yet another form of backup in case Home Server decided to die in the middle of my recovery process.

Once I had a safe copy of my files, I turned to reimaging my system.  My system drive is a RAID 1 setup running off of an Adaptec card.  Unfortunately, you have to supply Vista with the right drivers during the OS install phase for it to recognize the array.  No matter what I did, I couldn't get the drivers to work.  I'm actually not knocking Vista here.  Adaptec's tools and website were absolute garbage.  It gave me no confidence that I would get the support I needed in a time of crisis.

I realized something else about the situation.  Sitting on those 2 drives, I had two more copies of my data, which I couldn't access.  Because the drives were part of a RAID array, I couldn't even put them into another machine.  Given this and all of the driver issues, I decided to give up on the RAID system.  The cons outweighed the pros.

So I took out the RAID card and drives, tossed in a new system drive (only a geek like me has a spare 750 gig drive sitting around) and started a fresh install of Vista, followed by SP1 and every other update imaginable.  It wasn't long before I was copying files back into place from Home Server to make the system fully functional. 

It may not have been obvious, but Home Server made this process significantly easier.  Sitting on another machine I had multiple snapshots of my data and I could either perform a full restore or grab just the file I need.  And it just worked.  It was dead simple, which is exactly what you want in a situation like this.

As I've mentioned previously, I use Windows Media Center as my PVR.  The box is sitting in my office and doubles as the family computer.  Until recently I've been using a powerline network to move bits between it and an XBox 360 attached to the family TV. 

The powerline network works great, until you try to push HD content over it.  Even though it has a claimed throughput of 200Mbps, I have never observed that in reality.  However, with some tweaking I was able to make it work in most cases. 

Recently HD shows started to stutter and pause again.  There's only so many times my wife wants to hear "hold on honey, the drier must be running and causing electrical interference, I'll be right back" before one eyebrow raises and I get the look.

I was fed up with things as well, so I started to look around for a better option.  I figured I would just end up running cable through the wall, but I decided to revisit an 802.11n solution.  I ruled this out before because the available solutions were based on early drafts of the 802.11n.  Based on the reviews I read, I'm guessing the draft spec was probably written on the back of a napkin.  The currently class of wireless N products are still based on draft specs, but looked more promising.  I didn't feel like punching holes in drywall so I decided to give it a go.

I decided to go with a Linksys WRT330N gigabit gaming router.  This allowed me to replace my router, switch and wireless access point with a single box.  I loved being able to remove some boxes and clean up wires, but the engineer in me likes the idea of discrete components that can be individually changed as needed.  Oh well, I'll live.  :)

On the XBox side of the system, I used a WGA600N gaming adapter.  This acts as a wireless bridge which connects to your wireless network and provides ethernet out the other side.  This is the only way to attach an XBox 360 to an 802.11n network.  At this time, there are no 802.11n adapters for the 360.

So how does it work?  Fantastic.  I couldn't be happier.  Setup was simple and I had everything running in about 20 minutes.  It took longer to move furniture and tidy up the cables.  HD content streams virtually hiccup free.  I also enjoyed a noticeable improvement when using my laptop, which also has a wireless-N adapter.

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‘Family Ties’ 20 years later


Feb. 7: The creator and the cast of the hit ’80s TV show talk about their seven seasons with the Keatons.

Yep, my 15 minutes are starting.  Sarcastic Gamer recently visited the Surface team and I managed to get in the team shot he posted.  Seriously, that's me in the back row... just to the left.. no right.. behind the guy the with the...  trust me, I'm in there.

http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/2008/01/just-scratching-the-surface.html