Some Random Dude has decided to reward good comments in his blog by contributing a certain amount for every good comment in response to one of his posts.

He calls it "Comment Love". I call it a great idea.

He blogs on a topic I find interesting - design in a fairly general sense - and while I don't always agree with his views he normally manages to spark a pretty good conversation in response to his posts.

I don't know if it's the comment love or just the general tone but it makes a good read, and there's that little karmic glow every time you make a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.

I'm all in favor of bloggers making a living but I love it when they find a way to give back as well. Maybe I should take off the ads (but they do pay for the hosting!)

BTW: Fred Wilson (who I linked to as an example of bloggers making a living) does actually donate his ad revenue to charity as well.

Thanks to the folks at Netcraft I've just found out that Microsoft.com is putting it's webpages where our mouth is and running on Beta3 of Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 (and appears to have been doing so for most of June).

Now that "the server formerly known as Longhorn" has a Go Live licence you could join the 2500+ sites who are already trying this out for real.

Obviously before making the switch from Linux/Apache or an earlier version of IIS you'll be keen to find out what the new platform offers... well, a good place to start is the IIS.NET article on what's new in Longhorn Server Beta 3 ... as an extra goodie that page has links to a number of providers offering free hosting so you can try it out and see how your current applications work and how performance compares...

On one of my discussions on performance I mentioned in passing the topic of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) but as a couple of people have emailed me to point out that while they're great at taking the heavy lifting (especially for static pages) they can be rather expensive....

Well, that doesn't always have to be the case...

A few years ago I came across a free experimental Peer-to-peer CDN called Coral running on top of the Planet Lab infrastructure. By the beginning of 2006 their 260 servers scattered worldwide were supporting 25 million requests per day from more than 1 million unique clients and it's still going strong.

What makes Coral so interesting is that while a publisher can choose to use it (simply by appending .nyud.net:8080 to the hostname of the URL they want handled by the network) but if a site is going slow a user can choose to view that site through Coral simply by altering the URL they reference.

So, you could access this site at http://blog.offbeatmammal.com.nyud.net:8080/blogs/obm/default.aspx and automatically get the content delivered via Coral or I could choose to hardcode (say) all my images to be served from that URL in order to reduce the load on my server.

That flexibility makes it very easy to turn on and off as you need to. You can even use an Apache mod_rewrite or similar for IIS to turn it on and off for you (for instance at times of high load off-load all images and static pages to the CDN by activating the URL rewriter) though make sure you check the examples for the re-write rules to make sure you don't get stuck in an endless loop of redirection!

You can use Coral for any sort of content - html pages, images or mp3 files (for instance as Mangatune are doing) - you can get a benefit from fairly frequently changing pages (as long there is value in caching content for at least a few hours) but very dynamic pages are going to need to come back to the server to remain 'fresh'.

Coral is free to use but if you can it would be great to help out on one of their sister projects - Illuminati - by embedding a small code fragment in any pages on your site to help them map the internet. You can help with the illuminati project even if you're not using Coral for content - every site hosting their fragment helps improve the quantity and quality of their data.

Eventually they plan to open up a a true p2p platform so anyone can offer bandwidth and cache space but for now it's supported as a research project.

Luckily for me Mario has built Twitterfeed and it just keeps on getting better.

Now however a clever little robot can update my twitter feed when I blog about stuff... so at least it's got something topical on it (rather than "Waiting for bus. Not raining" sitting there for 6 days after I caught the bus I was waiting for).

Now if only I could get my WLM status to update on Twitter as well.... everyone what know what great music I listen to ;)

As someone who's always taken a fairly chaotic approach to life on the general assumption that my subconscious does a fairly good job of keeping track of stuff I'm having to get to grips with some side effects of aging, yet another country move, a job that features more metal juggling as the focus is broader and a growing family (so I want to spend less time on work).

The logical solution would be that there must be a technological solution to all this right?

Intelligent Messenger plug ins that I can fire off pithy instructions, Outlook rules that can triage my email and respond to my boss appropriately, a subsystem to make sure bills get paid on time and we always have dogfood and milk in the house.

Well, for better or worse HAL doesn't yet exist in a form where it can make my life easier so I needed to find a better solution.

My Dad had a simple rule. He would decide what to do with it when it came in - process there and then; file for follow-up (either on a specific date or within a period of time; file for reference or throw away.

Over the last few years I've peeked at the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology (I first encountered it thanks to a neat utility called ActiveWords which sadly doesn't really do what it used to back then anymore) but while GTD seems to be very empowering it also takes time and practice (some folks say a year) to get fluid, and seemed to require yet more tools to learn. Which if they integrate perfectly with Outlook and Windows Mobile suits me fine, but most of them don't (or work with old versions of the software that I no longer use).

The neat thing is that I've been meaning to try to get to grips with OneNote for a while, and there's a GTD with OneNote approach so maybe I can combine the two...

Failing that... I guess I'll have to train my dog as my PA ;)

Every day millions of people probably look at this image on the right. It's one of the more restful options supplied as part of the default Windows installation.

How many people have been soothed by the restful colors without ever really thinking more deeply about the source of the image.

Who was the photographer?

Where did they take it?

Was it really Autumn or was it a photoshop job on a carefully staged scene?

Was it taken in the US, or England, Japan or Russia?

Well, I like a million other people never really thought more about this image or where it came from or the story behind it... luckily for us Nick Tosches at Vanity Fair did get a bee in his bonnet and started on the long and sometimes tortuous task of finding the origins of this much loved but at the same time overlooked picture.

I somehow feel better knowing the story... but now I'm wondering about some of the others...

Update: for some background images check out this collection (pure coincidence that the photographer in question is my boss!)

Like any other operating system Vista performs pretty nicely if you've got enough RAM, but sometimes you're just on the edge. Sometimes not enough, but not often enough to justify going from 1GB to 2GB or beyond.

So, apart from the smart stuff like stopping services you don't need and making sure you're machine is tuned up is there anything you can do?

If you have a high performance flash memory device (USB Memory Key, SD Card etc) then the answer is yes.... and it's called ReadyBoost.

Setting up a ReadyBoost device is simple (just follow the instructions here) and it's pretty much a set and forget process with Vista taking advantage of the extra memory to avoid paging to the much slower hard disc.

Of course once you've got ReadyBoost helping out it's nice to know how much help it's providing. If you're happy to dig into the vast array of performance monitors that Vista provides then check out these instructions but, if like me, you like your information pretty, simple and bite sized then check out this sidebar gadget to give you the information.

Of course running lots of performance monitors or an extra service and the sidebar itself to monitor the benefit may well defeat the benefit - thought that's starting to get into Schrödinger's cat territory!

I now leave a USB Memory Key stuck into my docking station for my Laptop. Most of the time when I'm on the road I don't need the boost (though the larger USB key I carry with me can double for that) but when I'm desk bound it's nice to take advantage of the extra USB ports and a smaller (2GB as opposed to 8GB) ReadyBoost certified device.

Most docking stations for laptops are proprietary and only useful with a certain brand (and in too many cases certain model) which puts a lot of people off getting them.

Until now most generic dock extenders have supported basic functions like network and USB expansion but you still had to connect the video cable to the laptop directly and they didn't really offer much goodness.

Well, for road warriors looking for a longer term solution at home (or reasonably sized enough to sling into their suitcase) both Targus and Toshiba have solutions worth taking a look at.

The DynaDock from Toshiba (pictured above) connects to your laptop with a single USB 2.0 connection and draws power from a mains adapter. From that connection it replicates (or provides) speaker and microphone connections, a 10/100 network port and (with the addition of a video device driver to your computer) connection to an external display. Currently Vista is only supported in basic Mirror mode but WinXP suppors all video modes. Enhanced support for Vista and Windows 2000 is rolling out over the rest of 2007. The DynaDock comes in VGA and DVI versions (personally I'd get the DVI unit and a VGA dongle if I needed... adds to the longevity of the unit). There is an option with the DynaDock to keep a couple of the USB ports powered at all times - handy for charging cellphones, Zunes or other devices.

Similar to the DynaDock is the (less snappily named) Universal Docking Station with Video from Targus. The specs are pretty much identical to the DynaDock with the exception that the Targus unit provides full Vista video support now (but it's VGA not DVI only), and is designed for you to rest the laptop on to provide extra cooling (something the vertical design of the Toshiba unit precludes).

Because both of these units connect via USB 2.0 although throughput should be good I can imagine if you're using the docking station to display at a high resolution, downloading a large file and storing it on a USB attached external device all via the hub it would put a bit of strain on performance.

Luckily Targus have the answer to that problem, for users with an ExpressCard connector at least. The (even worse named) ExpressCard Notebook Docking Station with Digital Video and Audio (phew) connects 5 times faster than USB 2.0 so will be able to maintain performance under even quite high loads.

The specs on this unit are a step above the others with networking supported at 10/100 and 1000 Base-T and video supported via both VGA and DVI connectors. Like the others it supports surround sound and microphone input but also adds an S/PDIF Toslink optical connection.

It'll be interesting to see if either of these lets you go as far as three monitors - the one on the notebook, an external one connected to the laptop itself and then a third off the docking station. But I guess that's just silly!

For the moment all of these solutions require that you make two connections to your laptop - power and either the USB or ExpressCard connection to the hub. The one thing most of the OEM docking solutions excel at is the no connection drop-in setup but for sheer convenience (and portability) these devices are the way to go....

Thanks to Doug for introducing me to another neat trick you can accomplish thanks to the magic of Office Open XML (the file format underlying Office 2007) is programmatically adding effects to a Powerpoint presentation.

In a web scenario this could be used to fine tune a customized presentation before delivering it to the end user as a download.

To start with you'd need to create your basic presentation and save it as a .pptx file.

Create a PPTX and save it. In the same way we did for a .docx or a .xlsx in earlier examples rename the file to a .ZIP extension, and drag one of the slides in ppt\slides to the desktop.  Edit that XML, and add a transition element as the last child of the <p:sld> element.  For example, you might put the following markup between </p:clrMapOvr> and </p:sld> ...

<p:transition>
  <p:newsflash/>
</p:transition>

Now you have a transition effect on entering that slide.  Try fade instead of newsflash if you'd prefer something more subtle or see a more complex example.

At school I took stats and advanced maths modules so had to draw a lot of graphs and represent data in a lot of ways.

As time passed I actually ended up drawing lots of graphs - mainly for budgets and project plans. It was never that amusing.

Thanks to a new Twitter friend I discovered Crappy Graphs - a great way of representing the real world through simple drawings...

There's something subversively true about most of these. They remind me of the Blue Monster in how they say just enough to make you think.