Hi Everyone!
Just a quick post to let you know that my new virtual home is up and runnning for more than a month now!
Relevant content from this site will be migrated to my new home before this site will cease to exist (27/1/2010). After that, this site will start redirecting to http://alexve.com.
Your Call to Action
Please update your RSS readers to point to the following feed url:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/alexve
Thanks and I hope to see you soon at http://alexve.com!
My new website Alexve.com is shaping up nicely. The site is part of a bigger ‘personal branding’ strategy to support my work as an independent professional. I am looking forward to launch it very soon!
In true fashion of a innovation addict, it will be fully loaded with new social media features, twitter integration, a lifestream, a blog, etc.
For the design, I have been working with designer Stijn Kooij and the feedback we received so far tells us we have created a very clean look and feel. You will see some similarity with the Team vNext site which is great as I will be working under this label.
The actual development started the second week of March and Baris Efe is taking care of that. I am responsible for managing the project, writing content, technical requirements, testing and making sure we have a top quality first release.
In case you are interested to get a better idea of where the site is headed, check out my custom Twitter background.
Want to know when we launch? Then subscribe to this blog feed or follow me on Twitter, the site should go live in the beginning of April!
Ever wondered what human characteristics your cell phone or cell phone accessory would have? Then check out this video from College Humor called "Cell Phone Reunion".
When Bluetooth, Car Phone and BlackBerry team up, iPhone gets what he deserves. See for yourself after the break ;-).
Since CNN published their Photosynth website of ‘The Moment’ when Obama takes the presidential oath, the synth techology has captured the hearts of many. It is overwhelming and inspiring to see the enormous amount of people that came together on this historic day. (Check the 2nd synth and you will know what I mean).
The cool thing about it, is that the synths have been created by using more than 1000 different pictures from people who attended the event. People can still send their pictures to themoment@cnn.com.
Interested in seeing the result?
Goto http://cnn.com/themoment
P.S. Try the view in fullscreen!
My Windows Home Server crashed last week, big-time. It was running smoothly until it started to randomly freeze, blue screen and give me NTFS errors...At some point, it would not even start at all. I was not amused…this was not why I got myself a WHS. Don’t get me wrong: WHS is a great product and the root cause turned out to be a failing memory module. It also would have taken me far less time to recover if I had enabled a nice feature that came with WHS Power Pack 1...
No reinstall server option?
Since the server would not start anymore, I decided to do a reinstall. In the meantime, I started to get worried a little bit whether my data was still intact, especially since the event log had been mentioning data corruption events. After doing some research on the web, I realized that using the ‘Reinstall Server’ option of the Windows Home Server Setup was the best way forward. This would allow me to do a reinstall of the machine, while WHS setup used the configuration from the previous install and (more important) recover the data from the three disks in the storage pool. Unfortunately, things didn’t go that smooth…The server crashed again before the setup could finish. The side effect of this was that the ‘reinstall server’ option was gone for the following installations…
Recovering data, the long way
At this point, I realized that I had to manually recovery data from the storage pool and had to figure out what was really wrong with my server. For the recovery part, I bought an external HD cradle (SATA) so I could copy data of each of the disks to my laptop. The actual data is stored in a hidden folder called ‘DE’ on each drive (don’t forget to enable ‘view hidden files and folders’ in your windows explorer). When viewing the drives, you will see similar folder structures in the DE folder on each of them. This is due to the nature of WHS folder duplication system that spreads data across all storage pool drives. I recommend you copy every folder into a new (main) location to be sure you have all your data. The good news of recovering 1,2 TB over USB 2.0, was that I now had plenty of time to start diagnosing what was really wrong with my server.
Diagnosing hardware failure
I suspected the problem to be hardware related as I have not seen random reboots and blue screens related to software in a very long time. After some digging on the Net, I came across a nice little tool called ‘The Ultimate Boot CD’ (UBCD). It is a bootable utility CD that includes several tools for diagnosing and testing your mainboard, harddisks, memory, etc. It is available as an ISO download for free at http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/.
After using the tool MemTest86 from UBCD to test the memory on the machine, it became clear that the strange behavior of my server was caused by fault memory (the tool was logging a lot of errors and tests where showing up in red). By eliminating the DIMMs on by one and running the test again, I was fortunate to find the DIMM that was actually broken.
Biggest lesson learned
WHS takes care of all the machines in your network by backing them up every night nicely, but who takes care of the data on your server? Well, one of the featured I wish I had known of before this crash and the biggest lesson learned, is a feature that was introduced in WHS Power Pack 1: the ability to backup your shared folders onto an external drive automatically. Please note that right now, WHS does not support automated backups of the ‘backup database’ (where the computer backups are stored). However, you can still do this manually. For more information, please refer to the Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore.
Last thoughts,
Although my server now ‘only’ has 3GB of RAM, it is running just fine again. And the good news is, that I managed to keep my data. The only thing that I really lost, are the backups of my laptops that were made using the previous WHS install. Fortunately, both my laptops will be backed up after installing the WHS Connector software. Right now, the server is also configured to make regular copies of the most important files (of my shared folders) onto an external drive. So I won’t have to go through the pain of manually copying the data of all storage pool disks in case of another hardware failure. I am thinking of cloning the system partition so I do not have to go through the setup of WHS and configuring it but I am not sure if this is a tested solution. I would love to hear people’s experiences with that, feel free to leave a comment or use the contact page.
Have fun with your WHS!
In the upcoming months, I am planning to merge this site into a more personal branded site that should provide some more insight on my professional (work) life as well. I have been gathering requirements for this new release in my spare time since November so it's about time to really start the project. Part of this migration includes a blog platform change to WordPress as I have come to realize that the community support for that platform is absolutely fantastic (e.g. plug-ins, updates, books, etc). I have also registered some shorter domain names (alexve.*) that are easier to remember by a global audience. Currently, I am creating some mood boards a designer can use for creating a new theme/layout, so still plenty work to do...
Language switch
As part of this upcoming update, I also decided that I will change my main writing language to English. Why? It is simple: recently, someone from Tokyo started following me on Twitter. I realized that he would probably not understand a word I was saying when I tweeted in Dutch and that the same applies to my blog. Essentially, the web has enabled us to communicate with the whole world so why just limit my blog postings to those who are able to read Dutch?
Anyway, I will keep you posted on the development of the new release/site. My goal is to finish it before the end of this quarter. In the meantime I will keep blogging on this site however, I’m switching the main writing language to English to brush up my writing skills!
Ik wens jullie allemaal een fantastisch 2009 met veel plezier, succes en geluk toe!
Was je in 2004 űbercool met een eigen een blog, ben je anno 2008 helemaal niks zonder een lifestream ;). Een lifestream is letterlijk een log van je online en offline activiteiten, gedachten, etc om te laten zien waar je mee bezig bent, wat je denkt, boeit, leest, etc. Het in korte tijd populair geworden
Twitter is een goed voorbeeld van een lifestream enabler. Andere voorbeelden zijn je friendsfeed, je ustream, je flickr photostream, je shared delicious favorites, etc. Waar dit naar toe leidt vraag ik me regelmatig af... nog even en we 'broadcasten' ons leven 24 uur/dag het internet op...er zullen vast lifeads ontstaan, zgn. advertenties die je letterlijk op het lijf geschreven zijn. Ondertussen ben ik bezig met het voorbereiden van een upgrade van deze site, want als tech geek doe ik gezellig mee aan het fenomeen lifestreaming...Zo kan je me ook volgen op
twitter.com/alexvermeule.
Om de lifestream manie toch een beetje het hoofd te bieden en te relativeren, probeer ik regelmatig naar onderstaande videos te kijken ;). Ze komen uit de top 5 van
Amber Mac. Happy streaming, LOL!
#1 You're No One If You're Not on Twitter
In korte tijd ben ik een grote fan geworden van de podcasts van Geekbrief.tv.
Een Geekbrief duurt tussen de 3 en 8 minuten en is altijd jampacked met het laatste nieuws over gadgets, websites en andere geekstuff. De manier waarop de presentatrice, Cali Lewis, dit alles presenteert is snel, enthousiast en to the point zodat je snel je shot ‘tech’ weer binnen hebt (niet te vergelijken met de ‘time consuming chitchat’ op de shows van bijvoorbeeld tekzilla.com).
Adam Curry met zijn Mevio is overigens de executive producer van Geekbrief.tv.
Heb je een Ipod of Zune?
Check dan deze podcast via http://www.geekbrief.tv/feeds
Uiteraard zijn de shows ook via de Geekbrief.tv website te bekijken.
Have fun!
Erg grappig fimpje wat de verkiezingen in amerika briljant op de hak neemt.
Een echte vrijdagmiddag posting ;)
Mocht je realtime willen zien wat anderen vinden over de gehele 'election', check dan de election microblog op http://election.twitter.com/