*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I was eating lunch today and listening to music via my favorite new music listening means, Pandora.Com.  For those that don’t know about Pandora it plays music that you like and allows you to build stations that play music you like by looking at difference characteristics of music based on how you have rated previous music.

A Random Problem

Today I was eating lunch and decided to switch my station on Pandora.  After I switched my station I pressed the CTRL-T key to open a new tab to go somewhere.  I pressed the key numerous times and it wouldn’t go anywhere.  I had to press another tab to open a tab.  Weird.  I decided to Twitter about my problem.  Here is my tweet.

An Unexpected Response To Problem

About an hour later I received an email that someone had commented on my tweet.  Low and behold it was someone from Pandora.  How cool.

Does your company provide this type of support via Twitter or other social networking sites?  If not, it should.  And quick before the competition one ups you.  I know for example we do with Deep Fried Bytes.  We watch feedback from Twitter, blogs, Facebook and other means.  If someone wants to contact us to provide feedback we are easily within reach and able to carry on a two way conversation or move it to a more immediate communication channel if needed. 

How To Join In

I’ve heard stories of Comcast having a presence on Twitter and fixing solutions as well as other companies.  If you own a large company the best thing you can do to really find out what people think about your product or services is get into the social networking game.  Take Twitter alone.  It is really easy to figure out what people are saying about your product or service.  Twitter recently acquired Summize which was a search engine built on top of Twitter.  Today it is known as http://search.twitter.com.  It is really simple, almost Googlish.

Once you go to the site, enter a word and press search.  A result is then displayed in chronological order.  Of course you may not want to stare at the results and wait from someone to post.  No problem, just subscribe to your query via an RSS feed and get alerted when new items come in.

For example today there was a lot of news surrounding the MobileMe launch and how it was handled poorly (the replacement for .Mac).  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out there is a problem with MobileMe, just watch the feedback.  You’ll notice comments like:

In today’s “duh-duh” statement, Steve Jobs admits in a memo that MobileMe wasn’t ready for prime time.

Why does Mobileme keep popping up saying my account has expired when i have 40 more days left on my account?

MobileMe support guy suggests using email form for escalation, but form doesn’t exist. He’s not sure of what email to sent to either.

It isn’t hard to see something is really wrong.  It is just one of many examples of how fast companies can connect with their customers today.  Instead of being reactive they can be proactive.  I love proactive support and this could be just the tip of the iceberg.  Imagine a day when systems are smart enough to detect you are having a problem with something.  Maybe the BluRay player can detect you hit the play button 5 times in a row but the movie still isn’t playing.  It could then generate an alert to customer support who then is able to pop up on your screen and ask you to press 1 if you need support.  This is the type of thing we need to move towards.  I think we are seeing just the beginning.  I want to see more companies offer proactive support and feed off the pulse of the social paradigm.  It will be a win win for everyone.

I’ve been running Server 2008 as my main workstation for a few weeks now and so far so good.  The only thing I haven’t found a solution for yet running the x64 version of Server 2008 is Windows Live Photo Gallery.  I have Live Writer and Messenger working, but cannot find a version of Windows Live Photo Gallery.  Live photo gallery has a really nice import feature that allows the timeframe to be adjusted when importing pictures as well as integration with Flickr.  Two very important features that make it a really nice app.  Beyond that I find the occasional thing I have to work around.  Tonight it was UPnP that wasn’t working. 

I was setting up Windows Home Server this evening and noticed two different views when viewing the network.  From my wife’s computer running Vista Ultimate it looked like this:

As you can see from above the devices that support UPnP show up nicely.  Specifically the home server for windows media and the router.

In Server 2008 it looked like this:

Yuck!  Definitely not as nice and it doesn’t help managing UPnP devices either.  I started digging around and knew there was a service was that wasn’t running but which one?  It turns out the one that needed to be enabled was the SSDP Discovery service.  To start this service press the windows key and type “services.msc”.  Right click and run as administrator and start the service.  After the service is started refresh the network and the UPnP devices will show up.

I have an article that outlines how to setup Server 2008 for VMWare and basically I apply the same setup to configure 2008 as a workstation.  This is just another tip if you are going down this route.

I was in the sporting goods store the other day and came across this.  Had to take a picture.

Apparently someone named Elder makes socks.  Who knew.

In episode #4 we recorded a show with Joe Stump from Digg.Com.  In that show we talked about how a site like Digg.Com scales using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  I thought it would be cool to do the same kind of show but look at it from the standpoint of using Microsoft technology.  What better place to get the scoop on something like that than Microsoft itself!?  Thus we sat down with Brad and Jim from MSCOM which run the IT department at Microsoft that is in charge of Microsoft.Com.  Here are some interesting facts we learned:

• They use all Microsoft technology.  Have been for years.
• Do not run a firewall.
• Have 80-120 servers that power Microsoft.com across two data centers.
• Support over 350 applications.
• 35,000 concurrent sessions
• 15,000 requests / second
• 5Gb/s to 500Gb/s of throughput
• 260 Million unique visitors per month visit the site world wide.  55 million from the United States.
• Microsoft.Com was once run from one computer under someone’s desk.
• They take availability seriously and use products before they launch to put them under stress before customers get them.

Listen to the show

Ways To Listen To The Show

There are several ways to listen to Deep Fried Bytes.

1. Directly From The Web Site (or click the link above)

When you visit the site look for this:

Clicking the triangle will launch the Yahoo! media player and automatically start playing the show for you. As long as you leave the browser window open the player will stay open. Clicking off the page WILL stop the player!

2. Subscribe via iTunes and Zune

If you have iTunes or Zune installed on your computer you can subscribe to our show. In iTunes open the Music Store and search for “Deep Fried Bytes”. In the Zune software, go to the MarketPlace select Podcast and search for “Deep Fried Bytes” to subscribe to the show. You can also click either of the two icons below to automatically subscribe to the show if you have iTunes or Zune installed.

3. Subscribe to RSS Feed

To stay current and up to date with the show, subscribe to the site’s RSS Feed. If you don’t know about RSS feeds you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

If you already have an RSS reader installed and setup, click the feed icon below to grab our news feed.

The first meeting for Hub City NUG will be held on August 26th on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi at the Liberal Arts Building Room 205 starting at 7:00 PM with refreshments starting at 6:30 PM.  The topic for this month is “Visual Studio Tips and Tricks”!  Our presenter, Sara Ford, is famous for her series of tips and tricks for Visual Studio and has produced literally hundreds of them.  Things you probably never knew about!  This is going to be a great talk for people new to the .Net platform as well as the veterans.

We are fortunate to have Sara Ford from Microsoft in the area who will kick off this first meeting and it is a great topic to get things started.  If you are a student in the area and have always wondered what life is like at Microsoft, Sara will be glad to fill you in.  These days she spends most of her time promoting open source software within Microsoft, and they still let her keep her job!

Special Thanks

A special thanks to the Office of Professional Development and Educational Outreach for working with us to provide a location for Hub City NUG.  We are excited about this great partnership to be able to work with an organization that is committed to building community and growing technology in Hattiesburg.

Free Swag

Those that attend the meeting will be able to pickup some free goodies.  I have been in touch with O’Reilly, Wrox, Apress and Microsoft (in no particular order) who are sending free books and other things.  I am contacting other vendors as well so who knows what we’ll wind up with!  With free refreshments, free swag and a free presentation there is no reason to not show up.

About The Presenter

A native of Waveland, MS, Sara Ford is the Program Manager for CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Prior to joining CodePlex, she worked 6 years on the Visual Studio Core Team. Her roles on the Visual Studio Core Team included running the Power Toys for Visual Studio as open source projects on CodePlex, testing the Visual Studio environment, and driving the effort to make Visual Studio 2005 accessible to developers who are blind or have low-vision. She continues to run the Visual Studio Tip of the Day on her blog.

Blog/Website:  http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford