Every month or so I go through a day or two of the blahs. Where I just feel...down. That's where I am now. That feeling of hopelessness. It always passes. I'll exercise or find something to keep me busy.  Though ironically, our main skin library hard drive died yesterday at WinCustomize.com and that has definitely not helped matters. Trying to restore all that data is going to be a pain. Luckily, I work with really smart, talented and hard working people who are taking care of that stuff. But it's still just incredibly frustrating to see these kinds of obstacles present themselves. It's the "if it's not one thing it's another" type of situation.

 

Having grown up poor I don't have a lot of sympathy for people on welfare. By and large, they seem to have been people who aren't able or willing to be responsible with their own lives and essentially rely on everyone else to support them.

Often times, it seems, that it's just a matter that they don't think ahead. They don't think through their actions. Statistically, most welfare recipients are young females with 2 or more children and are under 25. Sure, you can bring up cases that don't fit that. But the fast track to welfare is having multiple children before you can realistically afford them. And it gets worse, most (over half) of these people have never been married. That is, they've had >1 child yet never been married.

Apparently the common sense gene just doesn't get activated in all people.

One way to help people on welfare is to try to keep them from slipping further into dependency. More to the point, keep them from having more children. My solution: Forced contraception.  Today we have the ability to implant contraception that will keep someone from getting pregnant for months at a time. In order to receive public assistance, the recipient would have to agree to have the contraception implanted. The contraception would stay implanted as long as the individual was on public assistance. The same would be true of males, btw when possible. If you're a male on welfare, no making babies.

While some would argue that this is a violation of the welfare recipient's freedom, I would argue that the rest of us who are forced to work 4 to 5 months per year for the government suffer a greater loss of freedom.

 

Use news://news.stardock.com if you need Stardock on-line support.

WinCustomize is a skin site. It's not a software support site.

The skin library file server over at WinCustomize took a hit today when the primary library hard drive died. Luckily, we do regular backups so it's not a total loss but very likely will lose a few files in the process. How many remains to be seen.

Most of our stuff uses RAID in redundancy mode but unfortunately, because of the sheer size of the library, it's not really practical (on a budget) to do that. But boy I wish we had that set up tonight. I guess it's better tonight than say Thursday. What a pain in the rear.

Good thing we don't run all the Stardock.net servers off one machine or we'd be really hosed (JoeUser isn't affected other than blogs that link to images on that machine).

One of the things that has made me so excited about DesktopX is just how easy it is for "regular users" to be able to make interesting stuff.  Normally, desktop enhancements require a high degree of sophistication.  As a result, customizing Windows was pretty much divided into two types of people: Users and Creators. Creators were the tiny elite group of people who had mastered the arcane way of making a skin or a theme or whatever.  And users were everyone else who just downloaded what the creators had made.

With DesktopX 2, now more users can master their own desktop destiny.

Last week I made my own animated wallpaper.

And speaking of animated wallpapers, you wouldn't believe how easy those are to do. I did one where snow falls on your screen. All I did was make a little snow flake picture. Then I wrote 3 lines if VB Script into the object (1. Create a timer, 2. Have the object move down by 3 pixels when the timer is called and 3. have the snowflake go back to the top of the screen when it reached the bottom).

 

So let me give you a guided tour on using the performance monitoring features of DesktopX. People love to keep an eye on what's happening on their computer and this is a way to do just that.

For my example, I'm going to make a 3 state light. Green, Yellow Red. This will check my Drive C disk space and let me know the status. My first step is to draw my lights.

I'm using Corel Draw but this might as well be MS Paint. I put my 3 states in a "strip" like this. This is called a bitstrip. As long as each item in the strip is equal size it can then be divided up equally.

Then I save as PNG. This is important (for me anyway) because PNG files will automatically handle the "alpha channel" which is techie talk for taking care of the parts you want transparent.

So now I go over to DesktopX's little tray icon and choose "new object" by right clicking on it.

Now once I do that, it will bring up the properties of that object. Down by additional abilities, choose ADD. Pick "Performance Meters 2". For the Performance Meters.

Then when you configure this, you will want to switch to BIT STRIP since that's what we picked. Also, it has only 3 frames so make sure you pick that too.

On the next tab, make sure you've chosen Drive C.  What's really cool though is that if you wanted, you could pick any number of things to monitor. I can, for instance, monitor the CPU use of a remote machine on the network. Or have it display the number of GDI objects that are in use on a local or network machine. It's really complete.

At this point I'm done. But I'm going to add one more thing. I want the light to also have a text component that will display the percentage used.

So I have to go and create a second object and then I go to the summary page to give it a name.

Then go to appearance and turn it into a TEXT object (it defaults to image).

Then go back to your street light ball here and have that object set the text of your new object. I also added header and footer stuff there to make it make more sense.

End result. Now this is obviously very simple stuff. But think of what you could do with this kind of thing. You could have them be animated or be spinners. You don't have to use bitstrips, you could have it be a bar graph or a historgraph.

And that's just if you want to do some sort of performance monitoring. I'll create more tutorials soon.

Have fun!

DesktopX is a free download at http://www.desktopx.net

 

Want to get your blog more popular? First, visit this article that has some good tips:

http://www.rightwingnews.com/category.php?ent=1027

Next, link to other like minded blogs. This is important. Get them to exchange links with you. What's nice about JoeUser is that referrals are tracked so you can actually see who your best referrals are. Look at the bottom right in the lighter gray area. That's where links to your blog are coming from.

Now, to add links to your personal blog click on  "My Account" over on the right. Then click on "Manage my Custom Links".  Linking to blogs you enjoy is a good idea anyway as often times people will link back just by seeing who is referring them to you.

Have fun!

As shocking as this may be to hear, I have detractors.  No really, there are actually people out there that don't like me. Actually, there are people out there that hate me. The reasons are many fold and this article will only talk about a particular group since it would take a lot of time to cover all the different types of people who find me reprehensible.

The type of detractor I'm talking about for the purposes of this article are the people who dislike me and my employer Stardock largely because of our on-line "marketing" presence. And admittedly we are unusual in how we interact with customers. Here are the 3 primary things I do that tick these people off:

1) I (and our company) create desktop enhancement software that isn't free.

2) I (and other people in our company) interact extensively in on-line communities. When someone says "How would I add a roll-up button to my Windows title bar?" one of us is usually nearby to say "You can do it with WindowBlinds. Download it at http://www.windowblinds.net."

3) When someone criticizes our software or our company, one of us (usually me) will vigorously defend ourselves or our company. And because we do it so often and have done so for such a long time, we're pretty good at it.  Usually, people who criticize us or our software don't know what they're talking about. "Beware, using DesktopX will fry your LCD monitor."  We won't let that kind of thing pass. We also won't let the "I don't like WindowBlinds, it's a pig" when we know for a fact that WindowBlinds is significantly (i.e. not just in benchmarks but visually on screen on any reasonable graphics card) faster than using the built in Windows XP styles.

You add those 3 things together, over time, and you will create detractors. It's bad enough we're charging money for software that "should be" free. I've never found the master guide that determines which software it's okay to charge for and which software "should be" free but apparently some people have access to this mythical guide of software value.  And it sure doesn't help things that we're all over forums "plugging" our software at every opportune. But if you make even the mildest criticism and we're all over the poor guy asking him to back up his assertions.

Because of my statistical...obsession, I've logged the people who are the most vocal detractors.  There are two broad categories for them:

1. Superficial Detractors. These are people who just pop in from time to time to rip on us in some way. But are just as likely to say, in their next post that "Coca Cola sucks!" Superficial detractors rarely go beyond the "X sucks" comments.
2. Dedicated Detractors. These are the people who consider it their personal mission to educate the world on our evil and more specifically my evil in particular. Their focus is on the above 3 issues.

It's these dedicated detractors I find interesting because there is a huge geographic bent to them -- out of the two dozen or so that I've looked into over the years, about two thirds of them are from Europe.  I've known this for a long time and have thought about it from time to time. Why it is that the 3 issues I mentioned above affect Europeans negatively so much more so than Americans?

I have a theory, for what it's worth:

First, I think that Europeans are, as a whole, generally more hostile towards capitalism and in particular entrepreneurs.  While the word, entrepreneur, is French, it seems to me, based on what I've seen, that it is Americans that have really embraced it. There seems to be an open distaste for "merchants".  I have read of a few European leaders refer to Americans as either a nation of "merchants" or a nation of "cowboys". Both terms, ironically, are ones Americans will happily agree with but not see it as a epithet.

Secondly, I think Europeans are more likely to feel discomfort if not open hostility to seeing commercially interested parties challenging private persons over their views. In Germany, for example, it is apparently illegal to run comparison ads. In the United States, this is standard procedure.  Americans are used to no holds barred debating. We take our freedom of speech seriously and to the full extent - we believe you can say whatever you want, but you better be ready to back it up when challenged.  Americans seem more interested in being right than being polite. I think some Europeans find this off-putting. That it is somehow, distasteful, for people who are making money on the very topic they're talking about to be openly challenging their critics.

Whereas an American would love to see Bill Gates in the trenches on some forum hashing it out with hits critics, I think many Europeans would find such a thing distasteful and sensational. Bad enough that these merchants are selling their wares, now they're invading our private forums, intruding on our right to talk about their wares in peace.

It's just a theory, mind you, but I cannot think of another reason why, statistically, so many of the people who are openly hostile to our company (and me) are from Europe when it comes to issues that relate to my day job.

"What happened to our right to have an opinion?" says the angry European. "You have a right to your own opinion," responds the American merchant. "You just don't have a right to your own facts."

Obviously not all Europeans feel this way. Not even a majority of them feel this way I suspect. We're talking a relatively small fraction overall.  But it does seem to show a cultural divide on feeling towards capitalism and free speech.

Remember PC Week (before it was eWeek) and InfoWorld? They used to be THE goto publications for getting the latest news on the tech industry.

Now look at them. What the heck happened? Anyone who gets them will notice that they are very thin and contain very niche stuff ("Enterprise IT solutions round-up!"). Why?

To put it in perspective, WinCustomize has a higher Alexa.com (web traffic) ranking than eWeek and InfoWorld. How did this happen?

This article at JoeUser takes a look.

Did it just happen one day? That the editors of InfoWorld and PC Week (before it became eWeek), got together and decided that instead of having interesting magazines that they would instead focus on covering only the dullest stuff out there? Was it their goal to transform their magazines from thick, content rich material to being largely pamphlets that resemble more of a specialty Miller Freeman type publication that only a tiny select group would find interesting or useful?

Look through the pages of the technology trade magazines these days, if you can remain awake, and you'll find that most of the articles are canned corporate IT "success stories". Or stories that focus exclusively on "The Enterprise" (not the star ship btw). Or maybe, some little missive on Linux servers on the backend.

Let's take a sampling, just for fun, shall we?

From the top stories at Infoworld:

• Interwoven constructs Content Networks vision
• Number portability may be a boon for enterprises
• J2EE 1.4 spec certified
• Voice enablement, apps testing boosted
• Novell’s exteNd still a work in progress

As someone who has been reading InfoWorld for over 10 years my only response to these "headlines" is, in my best Krusty the Clown voice, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

Who comes up with a headline the uses the terms "Content Networks vision"?  Gone is Cringely, or at least in any form we'd recognize him. For awhile they had someone else doing the Cringely article that was incredibly light on meat and very heavy in ham.

Meanwhile, over at "eWeek", the magazine that should just rename itself as "Network security updater", the trade pub has slowly changed from being about things that are informative to a broad audience to something that seems to focus purely on IT Managers.  From there we get:

• Debian: Attack Didn't Harm Source Code
• Apple Plugs Vulnerabilities in Panther, Jaguar
• SBC Expands VPN and VOIP Services
• Polycom to Acquire Audio-Conferencing Provider

Remember Spencer F. Katt? Kind of a less interesting version of Cringely? This is what passes for "inside" information now:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1394352,00.asp

Apparently there's nothing interesting happening in technology. At least that's what you would get if these were your two main sources of technology information. And for millions of people, these two trade publications were the primary sources of information for the rest of us nerdlings. Nowadays, we have to rely on web sources like OSNews.com or ExtremeTech. And if you want scoops, you have to turn to websites not run by paid professionals but part-time volunteers who are having a blast beating the so-called pros on a day to day basis like Neowin.net.  How did this happen? It's easy to just blame the web but there has to be more to it.  If I want to hear some good dirt, I have to visit a UK tech magazine (The Register). For crying out loud, both eWeek and Infoworld are based in San Fran. You don't get any closer to the alleged action than that.

Technology used to be fun to read about in these two classic pubs. You could tell that the people working there had fun.  You had Nicholas Petreley at InfoWorld blasting Microsoft about something.  Now he's over at VarLinux giving the Windows world hell.  Even Cringely fled to PBS.  PBS! You know your publication has gone down hill when PBS can take your top writers. I still get both InfoWorld and eWeek. But as I read them, I can't help but feel like most of the articles are written by people who don't seem to be having very much fun. Peter Galli seems to still be having a good time but the rest seem to focus on things that would only be interesting to a 55 year old IT manager who is counting the days until his next vacation.

The sad thing is, there really really are interesting things still going on.  It's the same interesting things that PC Week and InfoWorld used to cover.

 

 

• Releases of major new commercial software packages.  Now, they might get a little paragraph.  New version of Word Perfect? No version of Corel Draw? Eh. No one cares about that right? People really want to hear more about this $35,000 Enterprise network monitoring application that tests for security holes on an AIX. Oh yea...I'm aroused.
   
• There are still other operating systems out there other than Windows. No really I'm not kidding. There really are. While OS/2 may be dead (PC Week in particular worked hard to convince the world OS/2 was dead and IMO helped wreck its own future by reporting OS/2's demise decades before it became fact thus ensuring fewer large advertisers), there are still interesting things happening there with eComstation. Interesting things are happening on Linux, especially on the desktop these days. They're getting closer. Not that you'd know that from the typical issue of InfoWorld.
   
• The columnists at these two magazines used to put out some really interesting things each week. Some of which was, my goodness, focused on what we call "the horizontal market". Dvorak-style columns would spread the word on misdeeds of companies towards their customers. About 10 years ago, Peter Coffee slammed our first business product, "OS/2 Essentials". This week's article (try and guess what it is about, you are probably right): "Comdex Promises Renewed Focus On Enterprise IT" Oh yea baby. Thank goodness that eWeek is covering that barely mentioned topic of Enterprise IT. You can tell by the big size of eWeek these days that focusing half the articles on Corporate IT is a real winner.
   
• These guys still have clout. Let's hear some real editorializing on the direction of the technology industry as a whole. Software solutions that need to be made. Thoughts on where things are now. Hardware that isn't well known but might be useful. Sneak peeks at things yet to come. They used to do this. I got the low-down on the Pentium from PC Week.  No I go to Tom's Hardware because nowadays, the coverage these two give of these things is extremely superficial. Press releases regurgitated as news.

I am not poking fun at eWeek and InfoWorld because I dislike them. I'm making fun of them because I want them to be what they could be again. These publications don't have to shrug and say "Let the web take over." They don't have to cover everything that a Neowin or Register or OSNews or Toms Hardware would cover. Just cover the key issues but cover them very very well.  These two publications were the ones I would scoop up and take with me on vacation. I'd be up north with a pile of InfoWorlds and PC Weeks catching up on the latest news and being well rounded in my knowledge when I was done.

Today, by contrast, reading InfoWorld and eWeek put me in touch with my inner-55 year old corporate IT manager.  It's a big tech world out there. They need to get back up on the horse and get to it.

 

JoeUser.com is a free blog site. You can create your own site there and write about whatever you'd like.

And, it uses Stardock.net accounts which means if you have an account here on WinCustomize.com you already have an account on JoeUser.com. Just type in your same logon info and you'll be logged on. From there, you can create your own blog which will have its own domain such as <myname>.joueser.com.

Check it out!