Thanks to an upgrade hiccup on Community Server I've decided to switch blogging platform a little earlier than intended.

I was going to wait until BlogEngine.net included a BlogML importer so I could bring all the old posts in, but that's not quite prime-time yet so it'll be a few days before we're back and running properly.

Luckily the new platform works great with Windows Live Writer so I should be back up to speed pretty quickly and hopefully able to find time to suck in the old posts and fix everything up properly. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

When you idly scroll over the globe in Virtual Earth have you ever wondered what other people are looking at?

No? Well luckily a Microsoft Researcher has put together a very cool mash-up in case you were ever curious.

It overlays a heat map on top of Virtual Earth with color coded intensity showing who is looking where.

Check out the introduction, or dive right into the maps...

Every time I get all excited and add another computer to the setup at home I get in trouble.

It means more cables (the Media Center is a big culprit there) or another remote control (Media Center and Xbox360 are in the bad books there), something new to learn (that happened when we went to Vista and Office 2007 as well) or (my personal favorite gripe) yet more flashing blue lights.

Luckily our newest addition to the family isn't going to cause those sorts of upsets for a couple of reasons.

First of all because the server is designed to be headless it's going to live in a cupboard (just as soon as we drill a hole in the floor to drop the Cat5 cable down to the crawlspace) and because it's pretty transparent in operation no-one will really know it's there until it saves the day.

So what the heck is Windows Home Server? That was the question I asked when I first had a look at what was at the time called "Q". I couldn't see what was so special about a headless box that I could back stuff onto - after all I had a Maxtor NAS that could do it already didn't I?

But because I can't help myself when there's something shiny to play with I grabbed my spare desktop machine, flattened it and installed the first of several betas. After a pretty painless configuration process I had a box sitting happily on the network with the router configured to its liking and both the house PCs, the Media Center and my laptop running the Connector client. Everyone had access to the shared storage for personal data, music, pictures and movies and backups were running happily.

We slowly moved a lot of the video content for the Media Center off the various external USB drives that I used because we'd run out of space on the internal drives to the box upstairs.

A few weeks went by and we didn't really think about it. It was great having all the media in one place again and we moved the SlimServer software from Storms machine to the WHS box and no-one noticed any different (apart from Storm who got a few more responsive machine and better web browsing because she wasn't sharing her WiFi now the SlimServer was on the wired segment).

Then my work laptop had a bit of a moment and had to go for surgery. Now I'll admit that I'm not the king of backups - in fact I've not actually done anything apart from random files here and there since we got to the US - so I expected life was going to be painful. Not so. Grabbed my old laptop, installed the connector, connected to the Windows Home Server, mapped the backup and drag'n'dropped the files I needed.

An insiders perspective on development of Windows Home Server can be found on the WHS blog on TechNet and a glossy overview on the Microsoft site. If you want some more in-depth documentation check out the various Getting Started and SDK guides.

Yes, there is an SDK and folks can develop add-ins to extend the capabilities of the WHS configuration. I'm using WHIIST but check out the list at WeGotServed for more great add-ins. They're also keeping a list of OEMs who will be shipping units you can buy and put in your own cupboard later this year... meantime you can discuss the possibilities and future directions at the WHS Forum.

We still need to drill that hole so we can hide the wiring but Windows Home Server is staying.... and I'm looking forward to what v2 will bring ;)

Windows Live Messenger is all about improving communications, but the folks at Microsoft Research don't think it has to be serious all the time.

The folks from the Visual Computing team have just released a demonstration of their Digital Video Effects for MSN Messenger project which showcases ideas based on several core technologies developed in the past few years by the team: face detection, face alignment, face segmentation, and 3D face pose tracking.

This release includes some fun features:

• Background Blur: blurs the background to protect the privacy of the user.
• Magic Lens: morphing of facial features, such as enlarging the nose (I'm sure folks with find uses for that feature!).
• Flying Text: let text flying out of the user’s mouth as the user types any text in the edit control.
• 3D face mask: attach 3D virtual objects or masks on user’s face. It's almost Halloween!

Of course this is very much an alpha so it may have unexpected results. If you have problems it's a simple uninstall from Add/Remove Programs (WinXP) or Programs and Features (Vista).

I'm off to plug my video camera back in....

... she'll be wanting to borrow the car next !

and Bryn found it all very tiring

It had to happen.

Singing LOLCats.

Is nothing sacred?

It's hard to describe so check out Kittahcore, the home of FeetFirstFalling with their first single "Killin' yr d00dz".

I'm not sure if it's going to change the face of popular culture as we know it today but it's a great use of "found" footage, original content (I assume the rendered cat is original content) and some pretty wicked beats...

It's LOLtastic ;)

Over the last few years I've worked on a number of projects where a pretty important deliverable was streaming video. Lots and lots of streaming video. Some of it edited on-demand clips but a fairly significant portion of it has been live content.

Luckily using Windows Media Server as a platform it's not that difficult to deliver, manage and report on either type of content. The on-demand stuff just needs a big enough server to cater for the variety of demands placed on it and the live content needs a very reliable head end encoder to feed the distribution platform.

Even content protection and billing mechanisms, while sometimes complex and often annoying, are not that difficult to do right.

The big pain point for a lot of the projects has been the bandwidth costs. Shifting terrabytes of data every month incurs a fairly hefty data center bill that's pretty hard to avoid (hence the need for advertising, sponsorship and subscription access to content).

Ironically too late to help me be a hero on any of the projects I used to work on (but hopefully it'll prove to be a suitable platform to help out the folks now running them) a Microsoft partner called Skinkers have developed a very clever new platform that addresses the pain point square on.

LiveStation (currently in Beta test) is a live streaming client designed to facilitate delivery of live TV to users PCs. LiveStation makes use of Silverlight as the display technology (so can utilize the streaming optimized codecs specifically engineered for that platform) and a peer-to-peer engine developed in conjunction with Microsoft Research which shifts the bandwidth demands from the publisher to a shared support mode where the more consumers there are of the content the more robust and responsive the delivery network becomes - instead of the opposite in a traditional internet broadcast model.

The concept is similar to what is behind Joost, Veoh and the Democracy (soon to be Miro) Player except where they are designed for on-demand, non time critical content (most of them need a buffering time) LiveStation has the added challenge that as a live content platform every frame is time critical.

I've been running the beta for a while (as well as Joost and a number of other next generation TV solutions) and it's not just because Skinkers are giving me a taste of home during the trial... I think it's the best player of the lot. They (in conjunction with Splendid) have done a great job designing a functional, elegant interface on top of a very powerful platform.

Don't take my word for it. Check out the interview that Steve Clayton (from MS UK) did with Matteo Berlucchi from Skinkers which explains the background as well as shows it in action.

Yesterday I was 39. Today I'm 40.

Still seemed like a good idea to fall asleep in the garden with Bryn :)

Hot on the heels of the Windows Line OneCare 1.6 update comes the public beta of OneCare 2.0.

As well as beefing up the security features of the engine this new version offers a bunch of cool new features that make keeping your home PCs secure and performing well a little bit easier

• Multi PC management - designate a hub PC and then add additional PCs to your OneCare circle using a common Windows Live ID. You can then see the status of the other PCs within the group.
• Printer Sharing - share your printer with all the PCs in your OneCare circle
• OneCare Online Photo Backup - paid storage will be available online for photo backups (currently not in the beta)
• Securing wireless networks - if your router is supported OneCare 2.0 will allow you to secure your wireless network
• Startup tuneup
• x64 support

One thing that I really like about this version is that the backup feature is aware of Windows Home Server functionality so if you're using that as your network backup solution then it won't panic because your data isn't safe.

If you have an existing OneCare subscription then you won't be able to activate the beta using that existing account, but you can enable the multi-pc feature if you sign in (but not activate - you need a product key for that) with a Live ID.

You can sign up for the beta here, discuss it in the OneCare support forums, and follow the news on the OneCare blog.

One thing I used to like with Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) was being able to use TweakUI to set up Auto login for the password protected user on the machine.... bypassed the login screen and let the machine start up in Media Center straight away.

With Vista I couldn't find an equivalent utility when I first upgraded the Media Center (from MCE to VMC) so had to leave a keyboard plugged in... a bit sub-optimal!

Luckily thanks to the Windows Core folks who blog at Shell:Revealed I discovered their Autologon utility. No messing around with the registry or anything complicated, and it even stores your password securely.

One extra nice feature is you can set it to only perform the auto login a certain number of times so if you want the machine to become secure after (say) a guest has used it the second restart will demand the password again.