There have also been a few minor bugfixes and some changes to the documentation. Nothing too earth shattering, really, but the command line support was really high on the list of requests.

You can download version 1.1.0.0 from its page or directly by clicking here.

We met up for drinks the other day at BJ’s across from the Apple HQ in Cupertino. And no, nobody needs to worry about that. Non-Apple users are welcome in Cupertino and there aren’t hordes of fans that scope out unsuspecting PC users.

You can blame Sallie Goetsch, practicing with her new Nikon, for the picture.

Last night we had a great time at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco where we were to see Pearl & Scott Ian and members of the Rollins Band perform some great kick-ass rock. It was an amazing performance and it was great to meet with Pearl and husband Scott Ian. Or, as Sallie put it, “she’s such a sweet girl”, and I happen to agree. One that rocks the wood panels off any stage, that is. This is not the first time Pearl gets two thumbs up from me, though. It’s been great to see her go from the “Broken Thorny Crown” album to the improved debut album, “Little Immaculate White Fox”. But instead of writing up a lengthy blog post I’m going to let you decide for yourself instead.

The guys at the Red Devil Lounge were also very accommodating. If you ever find yourself going there and want a guaranteed table, great seats, or bottle service, please do inquire about their VIP upgrades. Trust me, you really should.

Here are a few more videos made by the guy who has his tripod right Kim B’s sweetie who was near our table from the vantage point in the above video; Nobody, Mama, Nutbush, Checkout Charlie.

• 17 inch wide-screen WUXGA 1920×1200 LCD screen
• nVidia Geforce 280M-GTX with 1GB DDR3 RAM
• Intel Core i7 975 Extreme 3,33GHz, 8MB Cache
• 12GB Tripple Channel 1066MHz DDR3 memory
• 3 x 500GB 7200rpm SATA Harddisks (RAID0, 1, or 5)
• 8-speed DVD±R/RW LightScribe writer
• Intel WiFi 802.11b+g+n Wireless LAN
• Bluetooth
• 10/100/1000Mbps Fast Ethernet
• 12 cel Smart Li-ION Battery
• 2M-pixel Webcam built into the screen
• 7-in-1 Card Reader
• 4 x USB, FW, DVI, HDMI, etc.
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of all these models is Clevo, a company with a long history in creating some of the most powerful and amazing laptops you’ll ever see. They come with a somewhat high pricetag (almost 4200 Euros / US$5900 for the above configuration) and considerable weight and bulk but you certainly get a laptop that can compete with many a desktop and workstation. Especially considering that these laptop use the Intel i7 desktop processors and will support up to 3 harddisks (or SSD’s) and up to 12GB of RAM!

Does it work as I expected it would? It certainly seems so! It has the full performance of the Intel Core i7 975 Extreme and the benefit of 12GB of RAM should be evident. In addition to several bootable VHD’s I use on this system it is a real pleasure to have a laptop that is actually able to run VM’s (using VMware Workstation) fluently. Granted it is not nearly as great in performance as my real workstations it certainly works better than any other laptop I’ve ever owned (which at the time I bought them were all high-end mobile workstations from either Sony or HP).

The only downside, apart from the size of the laptop is its weight. Yes, 11 lbs, about 5.5kg. But a Kensington Contour Roller laptop bag  should take care of transporting it without it becoming a real chore. You certainly get a very solid and sturdy laptop with a Clevo D900F or ones of its various models. A lot of the weight is probably also because of the heatpipe and cooling system used in these (which does indeed perform very well in keeping the i7 975 Extreme cooler than you’d think is possible in a case this small).

For some images of this ultimate mobile workstation, check out the large images over at notebookreview.com and xoticpcforums.com.

The battery? Oh, yeah, you should not think of it as a battery to run the laptop on for a while, instead you should consider the battery as a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) with an average running time of about an hour. You definitely need the power brick to keep this baby powered. It’s not called a power brick without a reason, though. It’s about the size of a brick and close to its weight as well. The power supply alone makes any netbook look like a slice of bread.

I travel with an extra replacement 7200rpm 500GB SATA harddrive (a Seagate Momentus)  just in case one of the 3 inside the system breaks down. They’re disks, they always break and when they do it’s usually the most inconvenient time imaginable. Since I am using the system in RAID0, for performance reasons, I always keep a current image backup of the system on two external 500GB Western Digital Passport drives (those small 2.5″ USB powered ones). Performing a repair and a restore should be a breeze. What I would really like to see and test, and use, is this system with 3 x 512GB SSD’s in RAID0 but with the current price of those it wasn’t worth it to me at this time to get four of those (one as a replacement in case of failure and 3 in the system). But I do suspect the performance would be amazing in this system.

Of course, if you really want to you could do what this guy has done; triple boot Mac OSX, Windows, and Ubunto from your D900F. Most of the reviews and tests of the Clevo D900F appear to be very favorable towards it, describing it as the world’s fastest laptop, and after having had some time to install and play with mine I can say that I defintely agree. However, instead of me copying all the great statements and nice words about the D900F I’m just going to link to several other reviews that I support and endorse. These full reviews can be found at:

• gophn.com
• notebookreview.com
• another one on notebookreview.com
• our-picks.com
• engadget.com
• cnet.com (video review)
• anandtech.com
• thei7.com
• maximumpc.com

Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM technology will help Autodesk automate the process of creating visualizations for projects made with AutoCAD Civil 3D software. Dynamite VSP offers simple and efficient ways to bring AutoCAD Civil 3D software data into Autodesk 3ds Max Design software.

“We believe that every design has a story to tell. This acquisition will greatly simplify the process of visualizing complex AutoCAD Civil 3D projects with 3ds Max Design,” explained Jay Bhatt, Autodesk senior vice president, Architecture, Engineering and Construction. “It will help civil engineers tell their story in the most compelling way possible – validating their designs in context and showcasing projects for public consultation and approval.”

“With Autodesk’s research and development investment capabilities, this acquisition is expected to benefit our existing users as our technology is taken to the next level,” said Bruce Harfield, director of 3AM Solutions. “We look forward to working with Autodesk to further integrate the technology into the company’s existing software and advance Autodesk’s visualization offerings for civil engineers.”

“This acquisition will help empower users to more rapidly produce high-quality visualizations of civil engineering projects – even those without detailed knowledge of 3ds Max Design,” added Bhatt.

Read the full press release at 3am-solutions.com and autodesk.com.

Unzip the DLL to a location of your choice and you can use netload and load the Civil.RBC.dll (or if you want the functions available, hook it up in the acad2010.lsp file like this…

(command "netload" "C:/Your/Path/Civil.RBC.dll")

The commands supported are:

• RebuildAllCorridors (to rebuild all corridors)
• RebuildOODCorridors (to rebuild all out of date corridors)

If you wish to hook these up as macros use the RebuildAllCorridorsMacro or RebuildOODCorridorsMacro.

Download Civil.RBC.zip (3571 bytes)

There are many crucial aspects to the new version 4, the biggest of which is no doubt the full support for 64-bit (the virtual display drivers installed by MaxiVista 4 are digitally signed) and WDDM graphics cards. One of the things that the previous version had to battle with were the restrictions in Vista and the requirement to use XPDM drivers instead of WDDM. Well, those days are over with version 4.

Of course, all this also applies to Windows 7, not just Vista. So I will be looking forward to running an upgraded layout using Windows 7 once I get to the point of being done with that. Expect to see a more in-depth description and review of MaxiVista v4 in the next weeks. In the meantime, don’t take my word for it, try out MaxiVista yourself.

However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features). Also, if I were to overhaul the way my virtual machines are managed and stored throughout my network, and if I wanted to create a single cluster of systems to run that, StarWind would certainly get an even closer look.

So what is StarWind Server, you might ask. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the concept of a SAN, the short version of the story is that StarWind Server is a software product that turns a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server into a fully capable iSCSI SAN system.

Read the rest of this story over at Sallie’s blog.

You will need:

• A Windows 7 or Windows 2008 Server installation DVD
• The WIM2VHD script
• The Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7 (WAIK)

Preparation:

Extract or copy the installation DVD somewhere (e.g. S:\W7INS).

Put imagex.exe and bcdboot.exe (from the WAIK) and the WIM2VHD.WSF in the same location (e.g. S:\AIK). Also put bcdedit.exe in the same location (it can be found in C:\Windows\System32).

The reason for putting bcdboot.exe in the same directory is because I have had one system where the WIM2VHD script failed when it had to call bcdboot.exe which certainly was present in C:\Windows\System32 but not found by the script.

Create the VHD and install the Windows 7 image:

cscript WIM2VHD.WSF /wim:S:\W7INS\sources\install.wim /sku:ultimate
/vhd:S:\MyDisk.vhd /size:50000 /disktype:Fixed

Note that the above should be one single line. I broke it up for page layout reasons. Make sure you keep a space between “ultimate” and “/vhd:” up there.

The VHD will be created as a 50GB fixed size file as S:\MyDisk.vhd. If you wish to use a dynamic VHD you can specify Dynamic instead of Fixed for the disktype, or simply not specify the disktype (and have it default to dynamic). Also, if you do not have to specify the size a 40GB dynamic VHD will be created by default. Check the documentation on WIM2VHD for more information. After a few minutes your VHD will be ready and should contain a nearly completed pre-installation of Windows 7. But now you still need to make it bootable.

Making the VHD bootable:

First we need to get a new GUID for the boot option:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "My New VHD Installation"

Copy the GUID that is shown and use it as a replacement for {guid} below to create the boot entry. Note that the [brackets] around the drive letter SHOULD BE there!

bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[S:]\MyDisk.vhd
bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[S:]\MyDisk.vhd
bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on

After doing all the above you should now have a bootable VHD that you can boot into for final configuration and setup. If you want to check what the boot list looks like, just use bcdedit /v on the command line. If at any time you need to remove the bootable VHD you can simply do the following. First check the boot entries using:

bcdedit /v

Look for the VHD file in the output and copy the GUID that is shown for it. Use it as a replacement for {guid} below:

bcdedit /delete {guid} /cleanup

The quick start outlined above should get your started with VHD’s. But it doesn’t end there. For advanced use you can use VHD differencing disks, mount VHD’s locally on the system, and basically have yourself an abstraction of your storage, the use of which will vary depending on your requirements.

For quick testing and discardable VHD’s I tend to go with the default 40GB dynamic disks but for performance and sustained VHD’s that I use as a more manageable alternative to multi-boot scenarios I tend to use a fixed size VHD, usually something in the range of 35GB to 120GB, depending on my purpose.

Instead of creating disk images for backup and emergency restore purposes I tend to just keep a copy of the VHD’s around and save myself the hassle of having to restore an actual image when all I need to do is copy a VHD back to its original location, if needed by overwriting the existing copy if it has been banged up badly duing some extreme development activities.

One of the benefits of native VHD support is that you can mount a VHD to a drive letter on your system and conduct maintenance and repair without having to boot into the OS on the VHD. I have found this to also be very helpful in testing various critical doomsday scenarios where an OS gets corrupted from the outside. I also use VHD’s as bootable systems on my workstations to deal with beta software that I would not allow to run free on the native system itself and would otherwise not perform too well inside a VM. Since many of these beta things in my case revolve around graphically and computationally intensive software you can understand why I would like to use the full resources of the host system, in particular graphics drivers and all the CPU’s and cores available in the system.

I can hear you thinking, why would I copy entire 100GB VHD files around while at the same time assuming that is why I have so much storage in the home office. Sometimes I do, if I want to be really quick about it. But the way I keep and store copies of VHD’s that were created with a fixed size is by converting the VHD file to a dynamically growing VHD file using Starwind’s free V2V utility. I select the VHD I wish to convert, I select what I want to convert it to, wait around for not too long, and that generates the VHD that I will “shelve” on the server or backup to long term backup storage, ready to be used and taken off the virtual shelf whenever I need it. Likewise, when I take a dynamic VHD off the virtual shelf I will use V2V to expand the VHD to a pre-allocated fixed size, again, to gain the maximum performance.

Starwind V2V is an extremely useful tool for anyone who frequently shares disk images between VMware and Windows 7 or Windows 2008 Server, Virtual PC, or the 2008 Hyper-V. It can convert VMDK (VMware) images to VHD and vice-versa, either as pre-allocated fixed size files or dynamically growing files, including support for VMware ESX Server and Starwind’s own IMG format that is used by their Starwind Server and Enterprise Server SAN solutions (but more about those next week, in another place).

Another thing that V2V will not help you with, but that should go without saying (even though I’ll make a note of it here anyway) is to share installed operating systems between VMware and Virtual-PC and/or Hyper-V. If you wish to share operating system virtual disks you should go the full route and use sysprep and properly administer the deployment process. This, however, goes a little beyond the scope of what I was writing about here.

If you want the short version of this post I’ll summarize; Input Director does most of what Synergy does, and a lot more. I’ve run both side by side for a while and have completely switched over to Input Director now. Synergy has been a faithful utility that I couldn’t have done without and thanks goes out to Chris for creating it in the first place.

One of the features of Input Director that I really like is that the layout of the screens and systems can be changed on the fly in the Master Configuration panel. With Synergy I often had to switch to a pre-configured file since I change layouts quite a lot when I’m working on different things at different times. By simply dragging around the visual location of the screens in the configuration panel I can make changes much faster and without any hassle. And I haven’t experienced any of the problems with Windows 7 either, which is, of course, a huge plus for Input Director.

In addition to that, slaves can be configured so they allow themselves to be taken over by any system or by system name, or IP and subnet. Because my “master” system is interchangeable it comes as no surprise that this is something I’m quite happy with. No more fiddling with, or swapping out, configuration files on the master and using a network based script control that stops/starts Synergy remotely while making changes to the registry of the remote systems to update the name of the master system they should listen to.

Another great advantage is that Input Director will run as a Windows Service on Vista and Windows 7 (with Synergy you’d have to use the “start at login” instead of “start at startup”) and slaves are immediately available at the logon screen.

One of the other things I had gotten annoyed about with Synergy is that it doesn’t play nice with my Wacom Intuos 4 tablet. When using it in absolute mode and hitting the top edge of a screen it would try and take control over the remote system at that edge and unfortunately would lock up the mouse cursor on the remote system. Again, this required me to use a different pre-configured file for the Synergy master system. With Input Director there’s an option to temporarily turn off transitions. You can get to it from the tray icon menu or assign hotkeys. That’s the way I like it!

There are some more complex configuration options for setting screen edge percentages in Synergy that aren’t supported by Input Director (at this time) which I did use to ensure that transitions would not occur along certain portions of the edges of screens but after having moved to Input Director and its option to not allow transitions near the corners I found that it didn’t take me long to get used to this. I no longer miss this particular configuration feature that Synergy has.

I recommend you have a look at Input Director and check out the plethora of other useful features it offers. I could go on and on about it but I figure that if it works for me and my elaborate multi monitor setup then it should work for almost everyone else as well. Shane Richards, the developer of Input Director, has done an amazing job.

Oh, I may have forgotten to mention, it’s free. So what are you waiting for?

You can download it from the bottom of this page. There is some basic documentation included in the download but if you wish to check the docs prior to downloading you can check the Windows Layout Manager online documentation.

Warning: The documentation is not what I would consider worthy of being called that. I wrote it up in half an evening and in no way reflects what proper documentation should look like.

By 1850, the Sazerac Cocktail, made with Sazerac French brandy and Peychaud’s Bitters, was immensely popular, and became the first “branded” cocktail. In 1873, the recipe for the Sazerac Cocktail was altered to replace the French brandy with American Rye whiskey, and a dash of absinthe was added.

In 1933, the Sazerac Cocktail was bottled and marketed by the Sazerac Company of New Orleans. That same year, “Herbsaint,” a pastis, was made according to a French recipe; “Herbsaint” was so named for the New Orleans term for wormwood – “Herb Sainte.” In 1940, the Official Sazerac Cocktail recipe was modified to use Herbsaint as the absinthe. Finally, in 2000, the Official Sazerac Cocktail recipe was modified to use Sazerac Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey.

In 2009 I had to change a few things because it was impossible to get hold of a bottle of 18yr old Sazerac Rye Whiskey. Instead I substituted Rittenhouse Rhy andOld Overholt Rye. While not as smooth as the Sazerac Rye it gets the job done and done well! If you need bar supplies and some of the finest ingredients and liquors you could find, you definitely have to try Cask in San Francisco. Also, view the video by Robert Hess on the creation of a classic Sazerac.

My slightly altered version is:

• 2 Glasses, 1 chilled with ice, 1 empty
• 1 sugar cube
• Place sugar cube over strainer and add 3 dashes of Peychaud Bitters.
• Drop sugar cube in glass
• Add 3 oz of Rhy Whiskey to the mix
• Add a few ice cubes and stir.
• Take chilled glass with ice and discard ice.
• Add a dash of absinthe and lace the glass.
• Discard excess absinthe from it.
• Pour the mix from the first glass into the second with the absinthe.
• Do not include the ice cubes!
• Take a lemon peel, twist, press, and drop into the mix.
• And ready you are!

Those of you that know of my past week’s hunt for a suitable transport solution will wonder what I settled on. It’s the Lowe Pro Rolling Computrekker AW Plus. Gee, isn’t that a mouthfull for a product name, eh! The previous Slingshot 200 was just too small and my other Computrekker AW backpack managed to barely fit everything and as a result it was just too much to carry around on my back (especially with airports and scanners and also traveling with a laptop bag with the HP8710w and assorted other bits in there). The Rolling version, which is also larger and has a bit more space is definitely the better solution. Still heavy but I don’t have to lug it around on my back.

Of course I still can’t get all my stuff in there but on my current trips I’m going to bring mostly the professional lenses for a change so I’m leaving various others at home (like the Nikon 18-200mm, Nikon 70-300 VR, Sigma ‘Bigma’ 50-500mm, etc.) and instead I’m going to rely on a two camera solution with, mostly, the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 and 70-200mm f2.8.

For reference (and others googling around for this camera bag and what it can hold) the bag contains:

Nikon D200 + MB-D200 Battery Grip + Optech Strap
Nikon D300 + Optech Strap
Nikon MB-D10 Battery Grip (in the zipped compartment)
Nikon 24-70mm f2.8
Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VR
Nikon 50mm f1.4D
Sigma 30mm f1.4 DC HSM
Sigma 10-20mm f4.0-5.6 EX DC HSM
Expodisc 77mm (White Balance)
Nikon SB-600 Flash + Diffuser, Stand
Nikon SB-800 Flash + Diffuser, Stand, SJ-800 Filters, 5th Battery Addon
Nikon SB-900 Flash + Diffuser, Stand, SJ-3 Filters + Filter Holder
2 x Nikon EN-EL3e batteries in the MB-D200
1 x Nikon EN-EL3e battery in the D300
1 x Nikon EN-EL4a battery in the MB-D10
2 x Nikon lens and body caps (zipped compartment on top)
2 x Nikon EN-EL3e extra batteries
1 x Nikon EN-EL4a extra battery
2 x Nikon MH-18a (EN-EL3) chargers
1 x Nikon MH-21 (EN-EL4a) charger
4 x Sandisk Extreme III 4GB CF cards
2 x Sandisk Extreme III 8GB CF cards
2 x Sandisk Extreme IV 16GB CF cards
3 x Power cables (for the chargers)
2 x USB Camera cables
2 x Microfiber Lens cleaning cloths
12 x Visible Dust DHAP Sensor Cleaning Swabs
1 x Visible Dust Vdust Plus fluid
1 x Visible Dust Smear Away fluid
1 x Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly Brush

After getting all that through airports and security I don’t plan on taking the rolling bag along at all. For actual shooting I’ll rely on my trustworthy Think Tank modular belt solution. I can mix and match the modules based on what I want to bring along and only take those things along that I need or think I’ll need. Sling two cameras over the shoulders and the Pixel Racing Harness will take care of most of the weight. For simple situations I also have one of those Digital Holster 50’s around in case I’m expecting bad weather.

What you see here is a grab of the “contact us” page of this organization which I assume now can confirm must be is some kind of scam. Why else would a real organization use a picture of MY office on their “contact us” page, implying it’s their “head office”? The address listed for Transworld International Youth Organization (TIYO?) is Brunham Road, FT. Smith, Arkansas, United States of America.

There is very little you can find about this organization but if you search for the name of their secretary, supposedly a person going by the name of Professor William Kim Higgins, you will find this particular e-mail (from 2003) where the person posting the e-mail asks whether this is a scam or not.

What strikes me as really funny, and is perhaps related to someone not paying attention. The www.stefandidak.com URL is part of the office photo because it links directly to one of the images on my site. If you’ve come to my site with questions about Transworld International Youth Organization or Prof. William Kim Higgins because you saw my URL in what they claim is their “head office” picture then I’m afraid I can’t help you. I have no idea who that is or what that organization is trying to do but I can tell you, it isn’t anything good and you are likely to lose information or money to this organization and the scam they are running. Needless to say, I have absolutely nothing to do with these crooks.

Looking at the rest of the website it just looks like a total scam revolving around global relief re-construction and some kind of vague conference. Note that the main site also has an alternate main page that’s linked from elsewhere in the site. I don’t know what kind of fraud ring this organization or the (probably fake) Prof. William Kim Higgins is running but it sure looks like it’s nothing good and the website does not inspire me with confidence. In fact, the text and content on the site just seems to scream “this is a total scam” as far as I can tell.

If you know more about this, please let me know of leave a comment here.

Addition: Some additional information can also be found here. This link features a warning about a scam called International Youth Org. Saying that an e-mail from one Secretary General, Madam Cynthia Brady is floating around. This particular Transworld Youth Organization uses the address of No 157 West 47th Street, New York, NY 10036.

Another addition: A website called Fraud Watchers also has some info on this scam. It appears the scam attempts to get your name, date of birth, place of birth, passport numbers, country code number, etc. information from you. For what is likely to be nefarious purposes.

Update April 4th, 2009: The scammers have killed their site. After exposing them in my post and updating an image on their site it only took them a week to discover the game was over. They had not just taken one of my office images, they linked directly to it. I modified that image so everyone visiting the website of these scammers showed THIS image. I expected they’d notice that sooner or later and take the image off. Instead, they just deleted their entire site (which was hosted by FreeServers).

And while you’re at it, why not check out the Panedia website too.

Update: Not a moment too soon! About 3 hours after most of the DNS servers started pointing to the new location a new wave of visitors came along to check out the Home Office Setup. I’ve been monitoring the server for the past 3 hours to see how it holds up. And it holds up just fine! Much better than Dreamhost, where with traffic like this it would render the site almost unreachable, would time out, or would simply crash. The first 3 log parts (per hour) from the server are 21MB, 26MB, and 27MB respectively. A closer look at the performance over the past 3 hours show close to 8000 visitors/sessions and 300.000 hits. And all throughout this the server remained very responsive and behaving perfectly.

Nearly 8000 visitors in the first three hours. No site slowness or messages from the host!

The first four hours. Averaging 100.000 hits per hour just fine.

5 hours, over half a million hits, still doing fine. Dreamhost eat your heart out!

6 hours, over 15K visitors, 600K hits, nearing 25GB bandwidth, still going strong.

]]> http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/13/bye-bye-dreamhost-hello-media-temple/feed/ 6 http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/04/window-layout-manager-manage-many-windows-on-many-screens/ http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/04/window-layout-manager-manage-many-windows-on-many-screens/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:12:22 +0000 Stefan Didak http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/?p=57 Over the past year I’ve received quite a few questions from people wondering how I manage all the windows that must be all over the place on all the various screens and systems. The standard answer is that “I’ve got my own little tool that I developed for managing window layouts” (on single as well as multiple systems simultaneously). However, that standard answer seems to result in even more questions as to how it works and what it does. Since I’m a firm proponent of code re-usability I’m also a firm believer in not wasting too much time answering the same questions over and over again so I’ve decided to answer the question in detail, once and for all.

What I’m using for my windows and layout management is the Window Layout Manager, or WiLMA for short (hey, as developers we’re allowed to invent a dozen new acronyms each day and we like that little perk!). For all the details you can visit the Window Layout Manager page I’ve added to the site or just click the image below if you want a larger click target.

Andre Alves has attempted to misuse (abuse) the DMCA in order to get my story of his fraudulent actions removed from the internet. In order to attempt that this little Aware Bear sent a DMCA complaint to a domain registrar where stefandidak.com, my domain, is registered. Unfortunately it once again shows that Andre Leite Alves has no clue about the law, in any way shape or form, and had no legal assistance in the process of writing that DMCA complaint (the plethora of errors and missing words in there is very similar to his hasted reply after I first confronted him with a demand he immediately stops using my material for his personal gains and business activities). It is starting to be clear that Andre Leite Alves is an amateur in every respect.

What Andre Alves also hadn’t realised is that I have dealt with DMCA situations in the past and am even on record in a policy report by the Brennan Center for Justice of the NYU School of Law, regarding a very similar case with a professional con-artist I had exposed. That con-artist also attempted to abuse the DMCA for what it was never intended for as you can read in the report.

I believe that Andre Alves of Aware Bear Computers is not too happy with me showing the derivative work he illegally and without authorization created from my copyrighted work. And again it becomes clear that Alves has no legal assistance because they would have informed him that it was his mistake that caused the circulation and that now it allows me to use it under the fair use clause of the copyright act. Of course, we all know that Andre Alves doesn’t care about the image and copyrights, if he cared about copyrights he would not have done what he did and would not have spent the past days removing OTHER material from his site and replacing it with generic images instead. All Andre Alves cares about is not getting exposed. Well, bud, it’s a little too darn late for that.

Notice how Andre Alves also commits perjury in his DMCA complaint by stating that my website is operated an on anonymous basis. Funny he can find the contact details of the domain host but not my contact details that are right there alongside it. Contact details he already had in the first place as is already on record from our previous communications. Again, it shows typical low-life behavior of a petty amateur because he believed he could get away with filing a DMCA that way. What Andre Alves should do, if he feels strongly about copyright infringement and believes that the fair use clause does not apply, is file suit against me and leave it up to the courts (he already knows where to find me to file suit and even if he didn’t it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out with a simple lookup). I would welcome him trying that. For one, if he makes a personal appearance in court (very unlikely since he’s running and hiding from being served with my case that’s now hanging as a thundercloud above his head) we can serve him easily. Notice how he failed to provide a valid address on the DMCA (a requirement)

Anyone who can provide me with the whereabouts of Mr. Andre Leite Alves at a specific point in time can expect a generous reward once we can serve him his summons.

Anyway, for your enjoyment and education I present to you the DMCA complaint as it was sent to the domain registrar. Needless to say, all the errors and mistakes are verbatim and by Andre Alves. I wonder if he will attempt to claim copyright on his DMCA complaint too now.

Andre Leite Alves
Rochester, NY 14618
(585)473-7035, (585) 738-2583
(585)473-7035 FAX

November 12, 2008
“Take Down Notice” Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 17 USC ? 512
[name of domain registrar]

Dear Sir or Ma’am:

This letter is formal notice to you under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 USC ? 512. that you are maintaining materials on your servers that infringe on the copyrights of my personal work. Accordingly, we hereby request that you take down or remove this infringing content from your servers.

1. Identity Of The Copyrighted Work That Has Been Infringed. My own the copyright personal photograph, which have appeared and have been published over the years in, among other places, web sites owned by me and in literary and marketing materials in several types of media distributed to the public. Below are just a few examples of the items of content that have been copied and pasted into this website.

2. Identity of the Material That Is Infringing My Copyrighted Work. The website StefanDidak.com currently contains pages infringing content. The search queries, and the search results containing web pages that infringe on my own rights, are attached as Exhibit B. We can provide a digital copy of this Exhibit B if it would be helpful to you.

3. Contact Information for Andre Leite Alves. Please send all correspondence on this matter to:

Andre Leite Alves
Rochester, NY 14618
(585) 473-7035, (585) 738-2583
(585) 473-7035 Fax
solutions@awarebear.com

4. Contact Information for Owner/Administrator of the Web Site Containing Infringing Material. The individuals who operate the website www.stefandidak.com do an anonymous basis. The email that they provide on their website is: stefan@stefandidak.com.

5. Good Faith Statement & Affidavit. Please see the affidavit attached as Exhibit A.

If you have any questions about this notice, please contact me at (585) 473-7035or at solutions@awarebear.com

Thank you,
ANDRE LEITE ALVES

Exhibit A
AFFIDAVIT

I, Andre Leite Alves, declare the following:

1. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described in the attached letter, that appear on the allegedly infringing web pages as described in the attached letter, is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

2. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the, owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of New York that the foregoing is true, and correct.

Exhibit B
Link1
Link2

I would like to thank Andre Alves for providing this DMCA complaint under penalty of perjury because he has now incriminated himself even further than he had already done. Thanks Andre! You have just declared that you have used the stolen material that “appeared and have been published over the years in, among other places, web sites owned by me and in literary and marketing materials in several types of media distributed to the public”. So it’s been used even more than we already can prove with the hardcopies of the brochures, judging from his words. You’re going to not be too happy in court but please do continue to incriminate yourself and declaring so under penalty of perjury. Maybe, Andre, it is time you get an actual attorney instead of trying to play one yourself. You end up making a clown out of yourself this way.

What Andre Leite Alves also hadn’t grasped is that by not having proper legal counsel it can become a very painful situation that backfires (which, once again, it has for him). For example, he has not understood the DMCA at all (then again, there does not seem to be much he understands other than that he needs to hide and run from a legal suit that is likely to impact his life in a very negative way), and as a result has not understood section (f) of the DMCA in which it states that it makes the sender of an invalid claim liable for the costs involved, including legal fees.

Of course, I can’t complain because his clowning around works in my legal advantage.

I operate my website on an anoymous basis? Gosh, this Andre Alves must be a certified moron if he thinks anyone with half a braincell believes that. A 2-year old can easily prove that is not the case. It is, of course, entirely within the realm of possibilities that I overestimated Andre’s IQ. With the US credit crisis going on, perhaps that IQ is also a negative number.

For reference, there are now new and updated pages:

• The new office (current) page.
• The updated FAQ page.
• The special ‘making of’ section with many more pictures as things progressed.
• The old office (archive) page.

And a note of warning for the less than honest (a.k.a. thieving wannabe’s), all the pictures on my site(s) are Copyright (C) 2008 and all rights are reserved. Use these images for commercial purposes and I will take legal action and then some! As recently this lame individual (Andre/Arthur Leite Alves) and his company (Aware Bear) have discovered.

The person you see Photoshopped (pasted) into the photograph of my home office is NOT ME. Why it isn’t me will become obvious when you read the following story regarding a case of blatantly pathetic commercial copyright infringement committed by AwareBear Computers (Pittsford Rochester New York, owned by Andre Leite Alves).

The company, “Aware Bear” (home theater solutions, apple repair, pc repair, web design, and wedding photography), owned and run by Mr. Andre Leite Alves (not “Arthur Leite” which was used as the name to sign previous communications in a miserable attempt to ensure a court summons would be drawn up for the wrong name) claims to have been in business since 1993, has over 15 years of computer experience, and is serving the area of Rochester, NY (New York) and Pittsford, NY. Evidently, they haven’t learned much about legal matters and copyrights during that time.

AwareBear has created, printed, and distributed brochures using the above image (an unauthorized derivative work of my copyrighted material, as the actual owner of the property pictured as well as me being the photographer of the image). In addition a PDF version was available online at AA Computers USA (a former, rumored to have failed company that involved Mr. Andre Leite Alves and where a different website for Aware Bear is hosted, not to be confused with other businesses by that name for which actual business licenses could be found). After AwareBear was contacted regarding their blatant violation of copyright they removed the PDF from the website BUT claimed that the brochure “never went to print”. This response was signed “Arthur Leite”.

In my initial letter to AwareBear (at the time I decided not to involve lawyers yet other than the general consulting call) I advised them to consult with an attorney. The response stated that they did and was clearly written in great haste; “I am deeply upset thus I have already have spoken with my lawyer” (verbatim, errors aren’t mine). I wonder if the attorney advised their client to LIE, not knowing such a lie could end up being devastating evidence in court. I doubt that a remotely competent attorney would allow their client make irresponsible statements in writing, statements that can be held against you in court and would completely wipe out any defense a lawyer could spin with a dose of imagination.

The mistake that “Arthur” Leite made was not only the copyright infringement for commercial purposes but also made the stupid mistake of assuming that I and my attorneys wouldn’t know any better and only had knowledge of the online PDF. Unfortunately for AwareBear, we did know better because those who contacted me regarding this unauthorized use had in their possession the very printed hardcopies of these brochures.

AwareBear was certainly AWARE that they had printed and distributed these flyers, for example at a job fair for students at Monroe Community College. Once you start distributing flyers you no longer have control over where they might end up and what consequential damages and confusion that may cause. In this case it also causes major embarrassment for AwareBear and its owner Andre Leite Alves, especially considering that I am now publically explaining the situation to my readers and visitors. And from what I can tell, my website has some level of popularity in many tech circles. Then again, I am also known for making understatements.

In the initial response I got from AwareBear claimed that the image was created by a “university student graphic designer” and that they were “not aware of its copyright”. Legally speaking, not being aware does not absolve one from the legal implications of copyright infringement and any subsequent damages, financial or otherwise, that occur from taking such action. I have dealt with legal cases before where copyrighted material of mine was used in print for commercial purposes and the law was quite clear on that. Crystal clear. If you use material you can’t properly identify you take a risk and sometimes that can be a very dangerous risk that leaves you and your company liable for any and all damages that come forth out of those actions.

Because “Arthur” of Aware Bear already lied to me about the brochure never having been printed I certainly can’t accept anything else that they claim to be honest and truthful. Maybe a student did not create that image and it was only said in order to hopefully defer their own responsibility and liability in this matter. Either way, if a student did create the image and committed the actual theft, AwareBear did not have a contract with said student that includes an indemnification clause and still accepted the results, thereby taking a legal risk of their own free will. This to me indicates that AwareBear conducts their business in a highly unprofessional way.

It is unclear what the purpose of using that image in their brochure was all about, though. On the one hand it implied that AwareBear runs their on-site services through the setup seen in the image. On the other hand it also directly implied that there is an association between me, my business(es), and Aware Bear. And that is most certainly NOT the case. There never was such an association and certainly never will be. Given that the brochure mentions their services like on-site computer maintenance like removing viruses and backing up your data, it implies that I am not capable of doing that myself and need Aware Bear to do that for me.

Ha, they wish. I wouldn’t let them near my data. The nearest they got to my data was by taking it off my website and pasting that guy in there to create a completely falsified and fraudulent reflection of the actual facts. Next to the image they have the words “All Service Done On-Site” and directly underneath the image is a quote that reads “We are dedicated to helping you, facilitating your use of technology and making a difference one customer at a time”. Yeah, well, that customer does NOT include me in any way and very likely in the future they will perhaps only retain ONE customer, at ANY time.

I will keep you all updated on the legal proceedings and further developments of this story. In the meantime, I will gladly share with you what the associates at my attorney’s office have uncovered in an attempt to assess the person and company that acted in this extremely careless way and I will explain why it is seriously foolish to lie in response to legal inquiries that are made.

AwareBear, and its owner Andre Leite Alves, claim to have been in business since 1993. The company AA Computers USA (dot com) has one site for AwareBear while the actual site is yet again different. Nothing wrong with that, except that on one of the two sites the company also claims to provide business web design services.

Would you want your business site to be designed by a company that goes around being careless and unprofessional when it comes to the content they use? What guarantee do you, as a client, have that they will not ‘accidentally’ include stock graphics or material that has not been properly identified, cleared, and/or authorized for use? Would you like to take a chance at being liable for any carelessness on the part of Aware Bear? I wouldn’t.

What’s even more sad is that Andre (”Arthur”) Leite Alves also moonlights as a wedding photographer (according to our information for around $800 for a 12-hour day). A “professional wedding photographer”, as Andre Leite Alves calls himself, with a B.S. (does that stand for bullshit?) degree from RIT in 2001 (and former classes in Brazil) should not be as unprofessional as to steal the photographs of another photographer. That level of theft, also known as copyright infringement, indicates a high level of being unprofessional. Not clearing images created by third parties, if you are the client, is likewise unprofessional and careless. Any photographer worth a dime knows better than that.

Another interesting discovery was that AwareBear has been using so many mailing addresses and locations that it means that Mr. Alves either relocates his home a lot or has other reasons to move around a lot. Maybe Mr. Andre Leite Alves will soon relocate again and adopt the name “Arthur Leite” in an attempt to avoid getting served a court summons. In case he does, feel free to contact me to let me know where he could be found.

It’s maybe also part of the reason why AwareBear never mentions any addresses other than e-mail and their phone number. According to sources, AwareBear doesn’t have an office to speak of and dispatches students to customers to perform their activities on-site, or will have your equipment collected and returned (e.g. they bring it to some other place where someone works on it from their home).

And just to share something else that’s fishy but funny with you all, if you look at previous versions of the AwareBear related websites, you will find that some of their testimonials use the same words like “are part of my success story” but are attributed to completely different individuals and businesses over a different period of time. It sure makes me wonder if those aren’t ALSO IMAGINARY.

What is also made up and very clear, is another bad photo editing job that was done on a picture of a car in the brochure. It has the text/logo of AwareBear on the side of the car but a 2-year old can tell it’s pasted on there after the fact and way too obvious. Perhaps this is the level of quality that is acceptable to AwareBear which would say a lot about the level of quality the company might represent to anyone else. The brochure also claims “Our team is standing by to support you with friendly and honest service you deserve”. I think they might need to consider dropping the word honest in there. Perhaps edit it to reflect the word DISHONEST instead.

That might explain why AwareBear decided to use, print, and distribute the image of my office with a different individual pasted in there. Clearly a deceptive practice that matches the overall sense that this entire company is unprofessional and, I strongly suspect, not to be trusted. I usually have a sharp sense about business matters and everything about this company and its owner screams to me that it’s an inherently untrustworthy operation. Very amateurish, I would say.

I suspect that if a business represents no value, has no value, and is operated in a highly questionable way, the only way to impress potential customers is by using things you falsify and the deception you create in order to misrepresent yourself and your business. Perception is reality, except that the reality of AwareBear does not present much of a good perception at all.

It’s a good thing I’ve got a background in computer graphics since the mid 80’s. It allowed me to instantly notice the badly done “Photoshop” work, otherwise I might have felt compelled to file charges of trespassing and burglary! As a business associate of mine said, “I wouldn’t hire them to do Photoshopping”. I fully agree on that.

I don’t want to create a whole bunch of blog categories on my site for AwareBear but if I were to do that it would probably include tags for; untrustworthy, liars, thieves, unprofessional, irresponsible, amateurs, unreliable, deceptive, dishonest, inexperienced, reputation, and a whole range of other words along the same lines. Then again, maybe those words are intended to serve as the kind of “juice” that most real professional web designers will understand what it means.

Take Care, Be Aware and Beware of the Unaware Aware Bear!

P.S. Maybe I should consider starting a contest where people get to paste themselves into images of my office and then publish those online on my site as a ‘tribute’ to this AwareBear fool who did so with commercial intentions and total lack of any clues as to why this is a bad idea to do with POPULAR IMAGES. Your ideas on the subject are welcome.

Update 10th November 2008, Information recently received from a reader. The link specified was already taken down shortly after we received this information on Andre Leite Alves.

This guy copied the D&C peoples choice awards page and penciled himself in under best computer store and created another category for himself. To make dumbo even dumber, he placed in his multiple Frontier Yellow Page ads 3 certificates that he was the People’s Choice Awards winner for 2006, 2007, and 2008. Hey Andre, the 2008 awards haven’t even been made yet. The D&C has been notified and isn’t very happy about the stolen graphics and copyrighted content he used, along with his blatant plagerism and false advertising. Based on his character I expect him to go under, switch names, and get out of paying for his Yellow page Ads, then link to them under a different name and get free advertising out of them. You can see this guy coming a mile away. Only the beginning Andre, run and hide.

Please do contact me with further information! Thanks!

Update 12th November 2008, read how Andre Alves attempted to abuse the DMCA for what it wasn’t intended for. He’s providing quite some entertainment to the masses. Thanks Andre.

Trackback to Lorelle

I’m still waiting for new computer equipment to arrive at my dealer and decided to wait until the new office setup reflects the actual working conditions before I start shooting proper pictures and updating the site. In the meantime, here are a few shots of the new layout with the new extreme multi-monitor configuration. And before you say it… yes, it still looks like a mess.

These pictures are part of the “making of” page that I plan to add to the website when I get some time to do so, hopefully along with the new photographs of the entire office in full operation.

While you are waiting for me to produce some real functional pictures, check out Dennis Klein’s site. He’s been doing an office overhaul at the same time I was.

The first two days were spent clearing everything out and moving the most essential services running on servers from the living room. Then another day to give everything a paint job. The past two days have been cable hell. Laying out all the cables at the right lenghts, using lots of Velcro to bind it all together, and of course installing the new Ergotron arms for four of the new screens. Whoever said that working with computers isn’t physical labor is so very wrong about that! Ha!

The new workstations aren’t ready yet so those will have to wait and I’m considering delaying the udpate of the site until everything is as it should be so it reflects my actual working conditions. In the meantime, here’s some shots of the current state of the Home Office 6.0 (beta, I guess you could say).

My dealer doesn’t have all the new equipment ready yet but did get me the imporant stuff I need to start, namely the new monitors. However, the various three and five meter DVI cables that were sent to them were white instead of black so we’re waiting for the arrival of the correct black cables. Without the cables there’s not much point in clearing out the office. The RAID backplanes have also not arrived yet but adding new workstations is not a requirement for starting this overhaul so that can wait. The cables are definitely more important.

In the meantime the house is turning into a warehouse of hardware with lots of new stuff still in the boxes. Below is a shot showing the four boxes with the HP LP2475w 24″ S-IPS monitors, two Eizo FlexScan S2431WE-BK (black 24″ screens with the EZ-UP base), and four boxes with Ergotron LX monitor arms. The other stuff in the middle there are unassembled bookshelves (I agree, much less interesting than the hardware).

Alas, Sallie and I were on vacation and spending about as little time with computers as possible and instead spent most of the time going to both a lot of favorite and new restaurants (I’ll save you the review of the spectacularly weird Bacon-Infused Caramel Sauce at Town Hall in San Francisco), taking pictures, etc. You can see most of the picks on my Flickr page where there are several new sets including a lot of pictures from our trip to Chicago, IL and Occidental, CA and some more from Tiburon, CA, and a few new ones from San Francisco, CA, and Santa Cruz where we hung out with friends and their cats as well as a set from Alcatraz.

Now that I’m back there’s a lot of work to be done and in the midst of all that there will be some major overhaul of The Home Office. I’m not going to spoil any surprises with details on what will change except to say that one of the main changes will be that most of the screens are going to be replaced, for other details you will just have to keep an eye on this site over the next weeks. Once I’m done I hope to put up new images and maybe a separate page with pictures of the office going from empty to its new configuration and archiving the current page to show the previous evolutionary stage of the office.

Hello,

I am sorry but I had to disable your stefandidak.com as it was again causing tremendous server load:
server: 08:09 AM# uptime
08:09:23 up 40 min,  9 users,  load average: 378.70, 317.88, 241.52

causing other customers to complain. Sure enough once I disabled it the load began to return to normal:
server: 08:19 AM# uptime
08:21:55 up 52 min,  9 users,  load average: 6.25, 39.37, 118.26

I did check for any abusive IPs or specific scripts I could disable but there was nothing that would allow me to avoid disabling the entire site. I apologize but we had to take action (at almost 400 load the server was going to crash and then nobody’s sites including your others would be accessible). If you have any questions or concerns let me know:

So, if you want to host a site that gets, or at some point might get, a bunch of visitors in a short period, you might think about where you’d like to host it. I’m contemplating whether to find myself a host that doesn’t buckle under the pressure (of what I don’t believe to be excessive traffic) and would be able to cap the requests-per-second instead of just DISABLING AN ENTIRE SITE!

Since this is just my personal site I’m not too concerned right this minute but I would have to conclude that hosting a website for your BUSINESS at Dreamhost is probably a VERY BAD idea. I’m open to suggestions for reliable hosting companies that do not have to resort to disabling entire sites when there are a mere 14.800 visitors in the span of 8 hours!

At the time of writing this (but not posting it because, guess what, I couldn’t of course reach my own site) it had been 6 hours that my site has been disabled by Dreamhost. I’ve inquired about how long, exactly, they think they need to do this and what, exactly, the limitations are for the numbers of hits and visitors their average shared server can handle (since this is not listed in the terms of service or plan details). I’ll let y’all know once the site is back up again and I can post this to the blog.

So, whatever you do, whatever site you’ve got, if you’ve got it at Dreamhost you’d better hope you don’t get linked on reddit.com or digg.com because chances are, you’re not going to get any visitors and your site will simply be made inaccessible. In the meantime, here are some other people, mostly former customers, of Dreamhost:

• Experiences with Downtime, Dreamhost, Googlebot and SSH
• Nightmare Host
• Trash Dreamhost Here
• Dreamhost is REALLY STARTING TO SUCK
• Boo Dreamhost
• Scoberlizer: Dreamhost getting sucky PR out on blogs
• Dreamhost, kindly respond to Andy!
• Dreamhost Hosting Sucks Big Time
• UpstartBlogger: Why Dreamhost Sucks
• Neville Hobson: Call me crazy about dreamhost

Prologue:

The site was back up again when Sallie and I got home around 11pm that day. There was some more communication with Dreamhost on this subject but it’s like talking to an inanimate object that doesn’t seem to have much understanding since they kept claiming my site was still generating quite a heavy load. Dreamhost insists they have had sites that did hold up to the ‘digg effect’ but I have strong suspicion those might have been simple HTML sites with just a few KB worth of data. I’m now hosting the pictures and graphics on my site on a different server (one that doesn’t have any problems with a lot of visitors) and will be contemplating something more suitable as a long term solution.

Everyone from a certain age group and have been involved with computers from the early days will no doubt know of, have heard of, or has experienced, the phenomena known as the OS zealot. You know, those people who consider the brand they like to be similar to how certain other individuals find themselves immersed in various forms of religious fundamentalism.

Back in the day there were the PC zealots, a common creature often found bashing and insulting hardware by manufacturers who believed in proprietary hardware designs. And of course there were the Amiga and Atari fanatics that represented two other groups where certain sections of these different groups were always at each other’s throats about who had the better hardware. And, let’s not forget the Apple zealots. Most of these fundamentalist fanatics died out and faded into the background during the late 80’s and early 90’s as their religious sacraments that came in the form of material objects found their way into obsoleteness (or a museum, in many cases). And who can forget about Linux zealots, though that is a group that is still very much alive and out there, sometimes a bit TOO FAR OUT there.

You might understand my surprise that I recently discovered a real live one. An Apple fundamentalist. You know, Apple, the company that didn’t bring you the Lisa but did give us the Macintosh, the iPod and iPhone, and of course people who prefer to work with computers that do not require a full understanding of everything inside and outside the box. Out of the blue I received this funny e-mail from Terry C Mele. Or, Terry Cillian Mele a.k.a. “ovomac” which said;

Wow, that’s a shame. I don’t see an Apple logo.
Thus, your computer is nothing fascinating.

Not that I ever considered any of my fleet of computers to be fascinating, even though many other do, but of course, because the religious fundamentalists with a preference for any particular hardware or operating system had died out so long ago it could only be either someone with a sense of humor or someone very ignorant. I figured I’d check it out first and responded by saying the only logical thing (well, logical to those who have the power of critical thinking, considering I don’t develop for Apple’s OS) there was to say;

I’m quite pleased there are no Apple logos around here.
I wouldn’t be able to do my job if they did!

The response I got to that really says it all. Though, after a quick check it seems Terry Cillian Mele is not joking about his fanaticism that leads to such subsequent behavior. Especially considering that his response to my obvious remark was this;

Well then your job must not consist of anything very fascinating.
No high-end graphics, no music editing, no video production.

All of that is not possible on your Machine.
Can’t be done correctly. Just get a Mac, and get a brain.
Quit embarrassing yourself. That computer is just a big calculator.
Nothing to be proud of.
It does, however, make a wonderful Solitaire opponent.

It’s amazing to see that so many years after the various zealot groups have faded into the void that you can still run into a real live one. It boggles the mind. Then again, I don’t have any Apples to unboggle it so maybe Terry Mele has a point. It might be very difficult for these misguided fundamentalists to understand that in the normal day to day world, people of different technical backgrounds and product/system preferences get along just fine. Then again, that would be the real world, not the Matrix in which zealots have an alternative perception based on a personal blinding rage of having to feel in some sense superior.

But what’s absolutely fascinating is that the same quick check shows that Terry Mele is just a kid. Now, normally zealots who haven’t shaken their bad behavior and habits are in an age range that is normally twice the age of Terry. Maybe these things have a tendency to “run in the family”, I don’t know. Are there any technological anthropologists out there who studied this? Is this what schools teach kids these days or is this just some random permutation that occurred due to an excessive combination of butterfly effects? Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be overly pervasive.

All in all, I think we should all take a moment to remember the zealots of yesteryears, the arguments on Usenet back when it was still a discussion platform, bitnet, relaynet, IRC, and what not. Back when tech savages and scientists went toe to toe. For all those zealots that have faded or discovered that their sense of ideology and behavior was unfitting. Others notice too (see comments).

Then again, seeing in Terry’s own words, “I can often be found at the bar, getting drunk”, I might be led to believe that poor Terry should perhaps not try interacting with others who do not share the same fundamentalist feelings, especially if Terry is intoxicated. I can only hope for Terry Cillian Mele’s sake he too will grow up and realize the foolishness of his embarrassing behavior. Especially since we all know how employers these days search the net to check up on their job applicants.

An Apple a day keeps… well, just what does it keep away?

Two days later the second of these small APC backup UPC devices, an identical model, decided that the battery needed to be replaced (what, not even 3 years after initially installing them?). Except this UPS decided it wasn’t just unhappy but extremely pissed at me because instead of just sounding the beeping alarm and flashing the error lights it decided to temporarily, for about 5 seconds, pull the power from the server it was providing with current (it wasn’t running on batteries but on pass-through current). Needless to say I’m not amused by devices that misbehave like that and considered it an attempt at intentional sabotage. I consider the act of pulling the current from my server and sending it into a straight reboot without a proper shutdown to be an act of war.

Since I had decided I wanted to start using a different machine as the main server it was a good time to get a completely new, different, and bigger UPS so I ended up ordering the APC SC1500i model (1500VA, 865 Watts) which arrived at my dealer within a few days. At close to 22kg in weight this was not the kind of device you just carry back home. Let that be a lesson to misbehaving devices, misbehave and you’re out! Replaced! Too bad we can’t do that so easily and in a matter of days when it comes to politicians who complain too much about the citizens they’re supposed to be working for.

So right now the battery in the SC1500i is charging and tomorrow I’ll hook it up properly in its temporary new position. Temporary because later this year, around September or October (2008) I’m going to be conducting an overhaul of the Home Office. And yes, I will be uploading new pictures of it but I’m not yet going to tell what the changes are… other than that if you think it’s insane now, wait until I’ve completed the next upgrade cycle. The overhaul that includes a complete replacement of power cables and distribution will also include some changes to the mega multi-monitor configuration. Large changes. Size changes. Number changes. Ergotron changes. Oops, I might be writing too much now! But you’ll just have to check back here when I’m done to see those results.

Sallie said I should write blog posts describing the planned overhaul and what it involves because there’s all sorts of issues to deal with regarding space, metrics, ergonomics, power requirements, power distribution, monitor placement and cabling, etc. but I’m afraid that doing so would possibly fry the minds of some people and I don’t have a legal disclaimer for any physical or mental affliction caused by exposure to the planning details in my mind. I will, however, take pictures during the overhaul process for a little “making of” page in which the details of constructing the whole configuration will be described. For those who dare be exposed to the guts and gore details of utter Home Office Madness.

I started out with some of Tomas Restrepo’s color schemes and made various alterations to fit my personal preference and style. Because a dark background allows for a better distribution of color, and choices for color, it was worth it to see if I could be pursuaded to join the dark side.

The result is that I am finding it very annoying and painful on the eyes. But not so much the color schemes using a dark background themselves, but rather the practical implications when using it while doing actual work. The dark background allows for better highlighting of code, no doubt about that, but in a practical situation I often have other applications running on the screens which include things like help files, CHM’s and PDF’s with developer documentation and API docs, Outlook, OneNote, Visio, and many other development tools, etc. and almost all of these applications will use a light or white background as a basis.

The eyestrain starts to set in after working for a few hours whereby you read through a CHM, move back to your code on the dark background, and repeatedly move back and forth between the various windows. The extremely frequent and rapid movement and changes between dark and light ends up feeling very bad on the eyes and as a result I feel tired after only a few hours of doing this.

It’s back to my custom color scheme that uses a near white (250,250,250) background instead. It was fun while it lasted, though!

A few resources to help you on your way, as they did help me:

• A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell by Ryan Paul
• The PowerScripting Podcast by Jonathan Walz
• The Windows PowerShell Team Blog
• The Wikipedia page on PowerShell (with more resources)
• The online PowerShell Owners Manual
• The PowerShell Guy (Marc van Orsouw)

The best part is when SniperX writes about his reason for posting images of my office, in his own words “people did not believe me when i told them my make and model of machine, so i posted it”.

OK, that’s enough entertainment for me today.

Anyone who feels the need to check out what I like to do and see when I’m not working in my home office, feel free to browse my photo collections at Flickr via my pictures page or through the following links: Collections | Sets | Profile | Main Album

Two days ago a friend of mine alerted me to a video he saw on a web portal of an ISP that had started a video service for its customers that is similar to YouTube and Google Video. One of the videos there, uploaded by a user that goes by the name of “bmhelli” (according to this and his website, Bernard Marius Hellinga a.k.a. Bernard Helli. from a town called Ermelo in The Netherlands) contained two TV commercials that were appended together. One introducing some kind of big hamburger, the other commercial being of a topless woman acting out stereotypical male behavior.

While the commercials were funny, the creator that appended them decided to also append a few pictures at the end with a scrolling text (in Dutch, “Onze Werkplek”) which means “Our Workplace” or “Our Office”. Those images, as you can see here and probably would have guessed since I’m writing about it, were of course not of “their workspace” but rather, mine!

In a way it’s amusing that someone would take some seemingly popular (if I judge it by the numbers of visitors to my site and the e-mails I receive about it) images from the internet and label them as “our workplace”. But it’s also not a very clever thing to do. Photographers usually don’t like their pictures being used by others that would take credit for it and are certainly less amused when the person or company doing so claims or implies that it is theirs or claims to be the author or copyright holder. The latter is also the case with Bernard Hellinga aka “bmhelli” since the upload details he entered were “Autheursrecht: BMH” (that’s “Copyright: BMH”). It is unclear what Bernard M. tried to accomplish with this. Either to pretend that my home office was his workspace or whether he wanted to imply that those commercials preceeding the images were those of the producer of these commercials (which, I certainly am not even though I did produce several TV commercials back in the 80’s and 90’s).

The ISP that owns and runs that video website had recently come up with their own version of “the DMCA” (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which is a system for receiving and handling Take Down and Cease and Desist notices. A system I would strongly encourage for all ISP’s in order to distance themselves from any claims or association with copyright infringement by their customers. Needless to say, that new system deserved a closer look and a bit of a test. Within two days I received notice from the ISP that the user had taken down the infringing content. A good example of how an ISP can deal with these things without having to defend themselves over the actions of a customer. Very nice, and my compliments go out to XS4ALL for being a progressive ISP.

The same goes for Microsoft. When I was notified that Mr. Hellinga had also used the same photographs on his livespaces site/blog a DMCA Take Down C&D (Cease and Desist) went out. It took two days but the photographs were removed. This shows that a proper DMCA complaint will be handled in a proper and timely fashion.

Now the really funny thing is that this was the SECOND time my friend found something that infringed on a copyright that I held. Back in 1996 (it might have been 1997) he came by after picking up a book called “The 3D Studio MAX Design Guide”, published by Coriolis, Inc. Since I used to work on 3ds max I flipped through the book and within seconds my eyes fell on a chapter entitled “Battlemech”. To my surprise the 3D model used for that chapter was a 3D model I had created back in 1993, which was copyrighted (and clearly mentioned in the enclosed text file), and where one of the authors of the chapter claimed they had designed and created the model. On top of that the model itself was provided on the CD-ROM included with the book.

That level of commercial use of course required a slightly different approach and after getting in touch with Coriolis and having my attorney stand by to file a temporary injunction to halt all sales of the book we got to discuss the issue. I’ll save you the long story but in the end Coriolis admitted their “mistake” and we settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Several months later I was contacted by Don Simpson, a cartoonist, who also had his material used in the very same book. In 1997, Ron Every wrote about this situation in the magazine he wrote for. You can find the article here (sorry about the quality, it’s an old PDF).

The bottom line, of course, is, that if you use material from any site on the internet that has copyright notices and details such as “without prior written permission” and “all rights reserved” you should never use the material without permission unless you wish to open yourself up to the less amusing side effects it can result in. If the material is not labeled and just found, stumbled upon, or provided in any random fashion and it is not clear who the author or copyright holder is and you are therefore unable to obtain permission, it is sensible to not use the material because you could end up being liable for using it. Regarding the “Fair Use” clause in copyright laws, claiming copyright without permission is never allowed under the “Fair Use” clause.

Note: This was written when I was using the old setup, not the new setup, so details now vary but the general idea of the content here is still the same and as applicable as it was before.

Screen configuration details:

• Helium: bottom center two monitors, input A.
• Oxygen: bottom center two monitors, input B.
• Halon: top center two monitors, input A.
• Argon: top center two monitors, input B.
• Isis: left-most top monitor.
• Osiris: right top monitor (4th from the left).
• Radon: right-most top monitor, input A.
• Hydrogen: right-most top monitor, input B.
• Others: No monitors, remote access only.

MaxiVista configuration details (typical):

The following configurations are the typical ones that I switch between frequently. The switching is performed by popping up a PowerPro custom menu and selecting with a single click which screen configuration I want. This will trigger commands to be sent to all required systems (via a custom written Windows Service process that runs in the background of all systems and VM’s) which will automate the otherwise manual process of configuration.

• Helium extends three additional monitors on Halon and Osiris in order to provide Helium with a 5 monitor desktop.
• Radon extends three additional monitors on Halon and Osiris in order to provide a 4 monitor desktop.
• Hydrogen extends similar to Radon.
• Argon extends two additional monitors on Helium.

Monitor and general details:

Isis and Osiris are the two main internet gateways and base servers in the network (mail, DNS, monitoring, etc.) and generally contain my Skype, a web monitor, a remote server/web monitor app, Magic Mail (a really lightweight mail checker that checks several of my key accounts for mail, had to adapt it a little by modifying the source to fit my purpose and display style), and are usually used to pop up a web browser in case the other monitors are cluttered with windows. Osiris acts as a video conferencing gateway as well as the primary backup server in case Isis needs some maintenance or a failover on the connections are in effect.

Helium and Halon are the primary systems used for every day work. Both can boot to either 32-bit or 64-bit and provide a bit of redundancy in case either of the dual boot systems gets hosed for some reason. Normally Helium runs 64-bit by default and Halon runs 32-bit, giving me direct access to both flavors without having to reboot anything.

Argon runs most of the core VM’s that extend the network to a full service ‘development center’ while Oxygen and Hydrogen will take over certain of those virtual processes and machines when there’s more specific work to be done. The other systems are used for a variety of things depending on the actual work I’m doing so it varies a lot.

Usage Scenario #1 (General)

Helium will be running the development tools (VS, etc.) and my editor(s) as well as the e-mail client, etc. The development environment and editor along with all associated windows (class views, etc.) and one or more command line windows usually take up at least the two monitors hooked up to Helium and extends to the above described MaxiVista configuration if more space is needed.

Halon will typically run MSDN documentation, other internal API and development related documentation, specs, designs, applications under test, one or two VM’s used in direct development (mostly to run some shielded processes) so that the center four monitors form a complete overview of what I’m doing at the time.

When important e-mail arrives that requires me to temporarily drop what I’m doing to look into a certain issue, problem, or piece of code on a different project I can switch to the other inputs on the monitors and using Synergy directly control any other system where I can start up a development environment for whatever specific details I need to access and look into things. This while not having to abandon the work I was doing prior to getting a message that has me re-prioritize something.

Switching between the dual inputs and systems, and thus switching between tasks that I’m doing means that I lose very little time in closing down one project in order to focus on another. Of course this doesn’t happen a dozen times a day, some days it never does, so the mental switching between projects is usually limited to situations where more than one project finds itself in crunch-time. Digitally speaking this is somewhat similar to having two or three individual offices with individually configured systems and walking in and out in order to perform different tasks.

Starting up the development environment is also a matter of a few clicks on a custom PowerPro pop-up menu which will take care of starting up everything I require, and also to position the windows exactly where I prefer them to be. Various components or parts of projects have their own configuration that will trigger the startup of the tools required for the job. If I startup a debug session it will automatically start up the output logger on one system at a specific location on any of the screens.

I’ve often received comments of people asking me whether I know of the existence of ALT-TAB. Yes, I do. But it’s darned inconvenient to use that when a system is cluttered with 20 or more windows. It ends up being something more like alt-tabtabtabtabtab rubbadubdub. It is far more efficient for me to have all the information for any given task clearly in front of me instead of burried under a flurry of windows.

When I perform a full build run of a large project involving a lot of source code, components, automatic generation and integration of API documentation, resource compilation, etc. it usually spawns two full screens with windows related to my custom tools that run the entire building process from checking out source from the server, running unit tests, right upto building a usable release. Often a build process breaks or fails and being able to catch that in time and when needed debug the process itself takes up twice the screen space I already have. Normally I just continue work on Halon while Helium takes care of the full build management that is spawned and performed by a dozen VM’s running on the network (usually on Argon but not exclusively so).

Because I don’t just write code but also need to take care of architecting and always keeping an eye on the bigger picture of a project it really helps to have a lot of information available at any given time, clearly visible and easy to spot the little things that can easily slip by and be forgotten.

Usage Scenario #2 (Specific)

For a more specific scenario I’ll use the example of something I did a while ago which involved the reverse engineering of a Bentley MX model file binary format.

In order to figure out all the bytes and chunks of data (which were stored in an appended and linked form not unlike how a harddisk stores fragments of files all over it and using pointers to the location of the next fragment) I wrote an application specific to help me with this. The application itself used Docking Windows and Views like Visual Studio and allowed me to “paint” color markers all over the hexadecimal data, decode streams of bytes and entire chunks, and also allowed me to add routines to the application that would assist in automatically decoding entire portions of the data.

This application would be running on Helium, full screen. Next to it on the second screen would be the visual representations of the data files used as targets for decoding, along with notes and documentation that are made throughout this process.

The source code of this specific application which I called “mXposed” (the small screenshot below) would be running on Halon in its full development environment so that I could keep adding to the code, compile and build, and immediately run the updated build on Helium.

In this situation the amount of information really does require 4 screens, or 3 with a much higher resolution, in order to be moderately efficient. Switching windows while looking at code and routines and correlating that back to the visual representation of the data and the data views offered by “mXposed” would have been a royal pain in the beeeeehind.

Any web surfing and e-mail that transpired during various stages of this process, like requesting different sample files with specific content in it, would be running on Osiris on its screen. So a 5 screen configuration was certainly very helpful in doing all this within record breaking time (without the configuration I used and the approach I took it would have easily required 20-30% more time on a process that already took several weeks in itself).

The most valued tool in all this, as always, was Syngery, the network TCP/IP based “KVM switch”. This is the reason why hardware VKM switches have never worked out well for me. I need to be able to seamlessly control several machines at onces without having to perform a manual action that is required with hardware KVM switches, even if it’s just hitting a set of hotkeys to move control over. The “M” in the KVM switch would be of no use at all to me anyway.

Besides the high definition video, make sure you check out some of the visual effects wizardry performed by Ruairi by checking out the before and after shots. And while you’re at it, check out the humorous FAQ that is featured on his website. A little word of warning… graphic detail not suitable for children and strong language will be found anywhere in the vicinity of anything remotely related to Ruairi. But that’s the way we know and like Ruairi and we hope he never changes that edge.

So, Ruairi, you f*&$#$*#!, I see you *&*^#&^@ still haven’t learned s&^#* at all and you still haven’t adjusted your *&@**#&# and *&@*(%#. Here I thought that you might have drank yourself to death in the past years. Keep up the fun work!

There are, of course, other people who fell for the Russian joke and actually do think that this is Mr. Ballmer’s office. Unfortunately (for Steve!), he probably wouldn’t feel very much at home in my office… there are computers here that run Linux, you see. That might be too much to handle and cope with.

Another cool site, chipchick.com, a site about technology and gadgets from a girl’s perspective, also points out the difference in office styles. Well, girls, the main difference is that I prefer screens and Steve prefers Windows. That and I have to use my office to work for a living, he doesn’t have to.

Update 19th Jan 2010: The actual debut album, “Little Immaculate White Fox” is out now. You can check it out at the iTunes store or on amazon.com.

• The future of 3D is .NET?
• 3ds max to Softimage XSI Transition Tips

Cafe Maddalena, located in Dunsmuir’s historic district, was a very pleasant surprise while we were staying in Dunsmuir. We arrived early in the evening and went hunting for a place to eat and just by sheer chance ended up in front of where one of the locals passed by us and said the place was “always very good”. Personally I consider that an understatement because it was more than good. It was GREAT! The food was excellent and the staff was extremely kind and helpful. I’m not surprised that some food critics have said that Cafe Maddalena was one of the best restaurants in Northern California. I would definitely agree with that and that’s why they get the #2 spot on my personal favorites list. The presentation of the food had a lot going for it but the deserts were real works of art that tasted even better than they looked and I can tell you, they look amazing! I’m not a big fan of fish but the way that Cafe Maddalena did their grilled swordfish almost turned me into a fish lover, instantly.

The Beef Somehow was simple but very tasty (and since I wanted it Medium Well David automatically made sure the beef of the Half Moon Wraps were also done Medium Well). For desert I ordered the Taro Root Cake which were pie slices of Taro Root with coconut milk and vanilla, which came with a salsa that, in combination with the coconut and vanilla flavors, really made me feel very full and happy. I never had anything even remotely like it, nor encountered it anywhere, but I can recommend it to everyone. I think David has a really good thing going in the midst of many other restaurants. I hope the place will continue to thrive… if only so I can return to it again. If David finds this listing online; In the midst of various posh big restaurants on my recommended and favorites list you have made it straight into it… and it isn’t easy to get on my recommended list so whatever you did with the food, keep doing it! You can find Davids Kitchen at 1713 Taraval Street in San Francisco.

The Hydro Grill is a Bar and Grill place that doesn’t fuss and serves good food and decent wine in a simple but efficient location. There isn’t anything particularly memorable about the place but the food is good enough that you’d want to go back there regularly (at least when in the area of Calistoga). Their burgers will easily contend for the “best burgers ever” spot with Barney’s (and THAT is saying something!). For dinner on Sunday’s and Wednesdays they have live music as well to provide a more memorable ambiance. You can find the Hydro Grill at 1403 Lincoln Avenue, Calistoga, CA.