Wictor Wilen

The incredible Jensen Harris gives you all the details on how to use Fitt’s Law to improve the user interface of your application in the post Giving You Fitts. The article gives you a good insight on how to create a great interface using a mathematical approach instead of just lettting a art/creative director making the job. It explains why the northwest corner (as Jensen told us it should be named) has changed so dramatically.

This is a follow up post to my last about optimizing the Microsoft Virtual Server hard disks. If you use dynamically expanding disks, don’t forget to once in a while compact them using the built-in tools or schedule a script that does it for you. Check out Microsoft TechNet Script Center and these scripts and the rest is up to you :-) Turn of a virtual machine Compact a virtual hard disk Start a virtual machine John Howard, program manager of Windows Virtualization, have a post on how to reduce the size of a VHD: VHD Size Reduction that is worth checking out.

Microsoft has release Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003. The Service Pack contains a number of hotfixes as well as some improvements, read the release notes for more information. I successfully installed the Service Pack, which is not the case for everyone.

Scott Dart (Program Manager) has a good blog post on Metadata and the Windows Vista Photo Gallery. An interesting article on how Windows Vista Photo Gallery reads and handles the metadata in photos. Since I am a Media Center freak with a lots of digital photos I really hope that Media Center uses the most of this metadata, as I wrote in previous posts; here and here.

Here is a tip and some help for you out there who are using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for optimizing the hard disk of the virtual machines. First of all make sure that you hard disks are fixed size, that means that they don’t have to expand during runtime. Then take advantage of the Virtual SCSI adapters, when the Virtual Machine Add-Ons are installed on the virtual server you will have a significant performance increase of up to 20 %.

I found this post about Windows Live Writer at MSTechToday. Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Read more about it and download it at the Writer Zone. The installation program also installs Windows Live Toolbar. It’s worth checking out…

Google has introduced a new Video Search which can be reached from the menu at the Google web site, read about it in the Google Blog. This is a nice new feature in which you can upload and share your videos but this post is not about that feature it is about that the Video link has replaced the nice Groups search link!! When stumbling upon a problem or whenever I try to find help on something I Google for it, and browse throught the first ten hits - then I just click on the Groups link to make the same search in the news groups, where most of your questions are answered. Now I have to click the more link and then select Groups which gives me one click more.

Yesterday I wrote about our new server which is now up and running nicely hosting a number of Virtual Server, this morning none of them was up and a few sites and applications was down. This was due to that the server had Windows Update set to Automatic which is recommended by the OS - which had led to that the server rebooted. I’ve seen it before so this time I found the resolution quick, but the last time it caused me a headache!

Ok, this may not be new to a lot of you or you have never even thought about it - me neither until a few days ago when I was happily unpacking our brand new Dell PowerEdge 2950. I assemled it fast and inserted the Dell OpenManage Server Assistant CD and followed the instructions to install it, this is usually the fastest method and involves so little interaction, everything went fine and it started configuring the RAID and copying files. But after an hour or so I checked it and it was complete at 42%, and I thought lets eat lunch and give it some more time. When I got back it was still stuck at 42%. I rebooted and took the same procedure - and it stalled at 42 again.