After many years of searching for that elusive gold at the end of the rainbow, I've found it. Wasn't quite what I was expecting...

Here's a little tip to remember when scheduling tasks on a PC. If you setup a scheduled task to run as a specific user other than yourself (maybe in the case of a server maintenance job) you'll have to give that user some specific permissions so that the task will run unattended. The typical symptom of not having permissions setup correctly is the status "Could not start". A quick fix is to make the user a member of the Administrator's group. You don't want to do that, but it will tell you that the problem is likely permissions if the task runs as an admin. Once you determine it's a permissions problem, here are several things to verify:

1. Make sure the user has Read + Executable permission on the file being executed.
2. Make sure the user has proper permissions to access any resources being read or modified as part of the task's operation. If it's writing a log file to disk, it should have Write permission to the folder and file it's writing to.
3. Make sure the user has permission to execute C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
4. Make sure the user is listed in the "Log on as a batch job" in the computer's local policies. (And not specifically listed in the "Deny log on as batch job" policy).

It's been several months since I've posted (not that anyone has noticed) because we at Mission Research have been heads down putting out a great upgrade to GiftWorks. The GiftWorks 2008 release has three major milestones and we've currently just finished up the second and are on to the third. We'll be done sometime in June if all goes well. The project started in the fall and got off to a slow start, but we're up to speed now and I'm very happy with the progress. Check out my company blog to see details of the release.

Here's a funny cartoon that I found while looking through some of my old files.  Not sure where it's from, but it always make me laugh.

Ran across this short demo video from a Microsoft employee blog. This is really cool and is supposed to be using some prototype hardware, software and services being developed by Microsoft. The OS's on the different devices are barely recognizable. Check it out.

In keeping with my postings about biggest dogs, here is one that is very well done, but very fake. The Internet postings read...

Hercules was recently awarded the honorable distinction of Worlds Biggest Dog by Guinness World Records. Hercules is an English Mastiff And has a 38 inch neck and weighs 282 pounds.

With "paws the size of softballs" (reports the Boston Herald), the Three-year-old monster is far larger and heavier than his breed's Standard 200lb. Limit. Hercules owner Mr. Flynn says that Hercules Weight is natural and not induced by a bizarre diet:

"I fed him  normal food and he just grew".... And grew. And grew. And grew.

The truth is that Hercules, the massive English Mastiff, was real but his time in the limelight was in 2001 when he was the Guinness world record for the World's Largest Dog.  For some reason the story began circulating widely on the Internet in March, 2007, and was accompanied by a picture of an enormous dog being walked near a horse.  That picture is not of Hercules because it's a Neapolitan mastiff and Hercules is an English mastiff.  The picture is definitely fabricated, but very well done.  The dog is about half the size of the horse and an average horse is around 1,000 pounds.

Here's a unique take on video tutorials used to explain some tougher topics. This video in particular explains Wikis. Produced by CommonCraft. Can't get any simpler than this and to me it does a great job explaining the subject.

Take advantage of those big monitors you have sitting on your desk. Check out this website for some cool looking digital 3D scenes. I don't now how people make these, they have to be really creative and have a lot of time on their hands.

It is crazy the amount of page views Steve and I get from our "biggest dog" pictures on our sites. They make up 95% of all our page views. He has found what is supposed to be the worlds biggest *dog* (trying to one up my Worlds Biggest Bulldog). Here's his find.

You can also see the Worlds Smallest Bulldog which gets a lot of traffic too. Most of the traffic is from Google Image search.

My primary workstation has dual 19" Samsung flatscreens. They are not widescreen. I really like that setup, especially in conjunction with RDC (remote desktop). They have really thin bezels all around and they work great butted up against each other. I primarily use the right screen for one or more, fullscreen RDC windows for other computers. Most of my work is done in the left screen. I rarely stretch a window across monitors (maybe because the separation of the screens makes that awkward). My taskbar is attached to the right side of my left screen which puts it right in the middle of my workspace. I like it vertical because I can see so much more on it than when it's horizontally across the bottom.

I really like and am really used to my setup. That is until I ran across this blog post by Scott Hanselman, which shows the use of 3 huge monitors to make a single workspace. I'm jealous!

He says they run the center, 30" widescreen at 2560x1600 pixels with the 22" widescreens on the sides running at 1050 pixels wide. That's a total of 4660 pixels across the screens. It would be cool to see a shot of this with actual programs running.

As some may know, my dad and brother own and operate HR Weaver Building Systems in Annville, PA. They sell and build anything from wood-frame, residential garages to huge, steel-frame commercial buildings to custom homes. Last year they were a Parade of Homes Winner for a couple homes they built.

Last night I attended an awards banquet where their company was awarded the 2006 Builder of the Year for the Northeast Region. Their company is a dealership for Butler Manufacturing who presented the award. Congratulations!

Excuse the crappy cellphone picture.

Here is an interesting idea I read on a recent web site. This is a tip for anyone owning a cell phone and have locked their keys in their car.

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

See more Cell Phone Secrets Revealed

Not to be outdone by the World's Largest Bulldog, I've had an actual sighting of the World's Smallest Bulldog. I could barely get him to stand still much less pose beside a free-standing Duracell battery. This is one of those rare, one-in-a-million, chance of a lifetime photos. 

Actually this is just a stupid little experiment to see if I could draw as much attention as I did with my World's Largest Bulldog post. I had just posted that one from an email my wife forwarded me. Turns out that it is responsible for over half the traffic for my website. So we'll see if my traffic doubles again with this photo.

I use a Cingular 8125 Pocket PC as my cell phone. I run an Exchange server at home that I connect to for email, appointments, etc. The connections to that Exchange server run over SSL to keep communications secure. I use the cheap SSL certificates from GoDaddy.com. The problem with these certificates is that they aren't recognized by default on my Pocket PC. This meant that I was not able to sync my email with my phone -- the horror (my wife is rolling her eyes right now)! What I needed to do was install the GoDaddy Root Certificate on my phone.

I thought it was pretty simple, i could view the certificate in my browser and export the root of the certificate chain as a *.cer file and run it on my phone. The Pocket PC recognizes files of that type, but when I ran it the cert wouldn't import.

Fortunately I found a blog post about installing certs in a cabfile. By following those steps I was able to get the GoDaddy root cert installed andCheck out the Windows Mobile Blog for the step-by-step instructions.

A co-worker of mine sent out this amazing PowerPoint slideshow. Not sure where it's from or when it was done, but the pictures are crazy. The inset picture shows someone standing by their car which was buried by the snowfall.

I complain about shovelling when we get a few inches around here (eventhough my neighbors always help out with their snow blowers anyhow). This snow appears to be several feet deep. Forget your snow blowers with that much.

There are a couple pictures from the inside of a house in the slideshow. It shows the snow covering their windows. A different set of pictures shows the result of a heavy ice storm. 

Ran across a very nice collection of 1900x1200 wallpapers on Hamad Darwish's personal web site. Apparently he is the Flickr photographer commissioned to shoot Windows Vista wallpapers. Anyways check out the wallpaper. I got the link from another very-Vista web site, istartedsomething.com.

If you're into wallpapers, checkout a previous post of mine.

Yesterday Steve was telling me about something that happened to him at the local Ruby Tuesday. He was saying his wife ordered a grilled chicken salad and the waiter accidentally brought a fried chicken salad instead. To Steve and his wife, it was no big deal. It was a big deal to the restaurant's manager. He came over immediately, explained how quality and customer satisfaction is important to the restaurant. He assured them that the new meal was on it's way out and insisted that the meal be removed from the bill. Steve would kill me if I didn't explain that he wasn't looking for any kind of reimbursement or even an apology, but the manager made it happen anyways. Steve was impressed and passed the news on to at least three other people and will probably tell even more.

I read an article this morning from Joel on Software that talks about the same things and in fact explains a similar situation with his company and Lands' End. Check out the article, it's relevant to any software company (or any company that supports customers for that matter).

I recently read an article by Mary Jo Foley (the ZDNet Microsoft reporter) about Microsoft testing a monthly subscription model for Office. As you might expect, their readers were not too keen on the idea of paying $15/month to use Office. I'm pretty sure if I had to pay for using Office (my company provides my software currently) that I would be looking for cheaper alternatives, but I can't dismiss paying monthly or annual fees for software altogether.

I spent some time working for Sun Microsystems who, at the time (and may still be doing it), charged companies an annual fee based on the number of employees they had when they filed with the feds. They charged what seemed to be very little. I think they charged something like $50/employee/year for unlimited use of any one of their server products or $150/employee/year for unlimited use of their entire server product suite (like 5 or 6 products in the suite). This included all technical support needed by the company. For example, a 100 employee company would have to pay $5000/year to use their messaging server software that includes online e-mail, contact management and calendaring. Now I'm not saying that Sun is the right software or that the price was right, but the model seems attractive to me as a business owner. Paying a low, yearly fee for all use of the software and support makes things very predictable and the price scales up with the size of the company. I forgot to mention that as part of the package Sun would deliver quarterly updates and upgrades to these customers.

So if my company could license MS Office for $100/year/employee and this included phone support and got my company out of the MS upgrade cycle (meaning my company could always be on the latest Office using Microsoft Update and without having to do a huge upgrade migration every couple years) I would probably do it. Maybe the $100 is still too high, but at some price ($10?) it becomes attractive.

I still question the downstream affects that model would have on the software company. Are the benefits of having a recurring revenue stream strong enough to cover the lower prices? Does the motivation for the product team change when they don't have big upgrades to sell? Do costs go down if they can count on every customer being on the latest version of the software? How do they go about making a huge shift in the way the product works like they did with Office 2007?

I got a very funny email from a coworker's wife the other day. The email pointed me to the Elf Yourself website which allows you to insert someone's face into a dancing elf (in this case it was Steve's face). Very funny and I went on and forwarded it to several other people.  

A few days later I was talking with Steve about it and how very viral the idea was, however we were both referring to it as the Staple's website. It turns out that it's an Office Max marketing campaign. Nice.

I ran across a website the other day at http://www.stopdigitalamnesia.com/ which at first glance seemed real. Looking closer it says the site is made up and after checking a little further it appears to be a viral marketing attempt by Microsoft.

The site is talking about loss of data, or loss of access to data. Microsoft is planning to announce something at CES on January 7th. Long Zheng of istartedsomething thinks it may be an announcement for a Home Server codenamed Quattro or the Windows Live Drive. Either way it looks to be a big deal.

It's been about 4 years since Charlie, Chris and I started Mission Research. We've had great support from family and friends. Their investment has kept us alive and is very much appreciated. A couple weeks ago we were able to close our first round of venture investment which should help us move to the next level (that and a tremendous amount of work by everyone involved). Some articles about the event...

Lancaster software firm lands venture investment

Software firm attracts $1.5m

My daughter just loves cats. We actually don't have any at our house, but our neighbor has 4 kittens that spend a lot of time with us. She's almost 4 and loses all ability to think rationally when the kittens are around. My wife forwarded me this picture the other day. We can both totally see our daughter doing this. It would also take a lot to convince her to not keep them or bring them into our house.

Click on the picture to see a larger view

I received an email recently with this bulldog picture attached. That's a seriously big bulldog! I don't know if it's a hoax or not. Maybe you know. The email reads...

Answers to the name of Dolly.
FREE to approved home, will eat anything, excellent guard
dog. Loves other small-dog breeds.
Owner cannot afford to feed him anymore, and there are no
more thieves, murderers, rapists or molesters left in the neighborhood.
Your help will be appreciated....

Look's pretty real to me.

UPDATE: We now have photos of the World's Smallest Bulldog.

The latest release of Windows Vista has been released and I ran across a nice collection of screen shots that shows some of the new apps and the Vista look-and-feel. Microsoft has it packed full of eye-candy, but unfortunately I haven't found a big reason to trade up when it's released, especially if I have to pay for it. In fact, I'm actually kind of dreading it because it means more work for our product team to support an additional operating system.

I ran across a comical little write-up describing the The Website Development Process. The story makes the process look almost fun. I'm not sure if it was intended to be serious or not, but it's well worth just checking out the pictures. Seems like they took a lot of time and creativity.

I've seen some pretty impressive digital rendering before, but I had know idea it was this close to being mainstream. Microsoft will be releasing DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. DX 10 is a total re-write. I think gaming is going to jump to the next level. I also think it's a good idea for Microsoft to only make DX 10 available on Vista. It gives the gaming community and home users good incentive to move to that platform, even if business users have no motivation. Then again maybe it's not a marketing tactic since the article says "The new display driver or graphics model in Windows Vista, WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model), is the main reason for DirectX10’s exclusivity to the operating system".

Part of finishing up a product cycle involves a postmortem. It's a chance to reflect back and identify the positive and negative things that contributed to the success of a product release. Hopefully identifying the positive and negatives will help us improve the quality of our software and increase our efficiency in building products.

We have just finished up a particularly long and grueling cycle for GiftWorks Volunteers. While I'm sure the actual product will surpass the expectations of our customers, the process of getting there was not a model of efficiency. We had several slipped deadlines. I've spent a lot of time tracing the steps along the way, trying to come up with a short list of points to carry forward to the next project. One point that keeps coming up is time estimation. Our company and our competition work on "Internet time". Release early, release often. It is critical for us to deliver our products as fast (if not faster) than our competition. Our customers demand it. But our customers also demand quality, and that is the challenge.

Time estimation comes up at several places during a product cycle. When a product idea is formed there are always rough estimates made as to how long it would take to release. There are time estimates for coming up with product specifications, time estimates for doing the development and testing, time estimates for beta releases. There are even time estimates for coming up with time estimates. These estimates allow us to plan ahead and are necessary. From the very beginning, "do you think we can get this done for a fall launch?", "can testing begin next month?", "how long will it take to get feedback from customers?". Time estimates also have a major impact on the overall product, and I think that impact can easily be underestimated (no pun intended).

Early, "back-of-the-napkin" time estimates are sometimes used to set deadlines for a product release. I'll call these "artificial" deadlines. They are deadlines that are set based on information other than the project schedule created after a functional specification has been reviewed and all teams have had a chance to provide time estimates. The artificial deadlines may be marketing driven, competition driven or come from somewhere else. They are not wrong, but do add a degree of risk to the product cycle.

There are several variables that can be used to represent a product cycle. Here is how I picture the formula in my mind: Resources + Time is proportional to Functionality x Level Of Quality. Where the Level Of Quality is a constant, or at least I think it should be. Generally, the more resources or time you add to a project, the more functionality you'll end up with. For example, assuming constant resources and level of quality, a four month product cycle will yield more functionality than a two month product cycle. This may sound obvious to some. Typically a balance of resources, time and functionality is reached through an iterative process. With an artificial deadline, a fixed time variable, product managers adjust the number of features in proportion to the resources and the deadline.

In a company like ours, resources are generally fixed for a project. This means the only two variables we have to play with are time and functionality. Given this condition, artificial deadlines impose an artificial limitation on the level of functionality for a project. Not only is functionality fixed, it is also fixed before specifications are drafted. This could put you in the position of not having enough functionality to meet customer expectations when the project is done. And worse, you are likely to only come to this realization late in the product cycle. Not a good situation, especially with artificial deadlines which are there usually because there are external dependencies on a date. Now, not only is the project in bad shape, so are the external dependencies. 

There is another side-effect of artificial deadlines. There is very little margin for error. If there is slippage in one part of the project, everything that depends on it will have less time to get done. This usually has a direct effect on the quality of the product because internal testing and customer testing happens at the end of the project.

So what's my point here? My intent was to examine how time estimates affected our latest project. In particular, time estimates used to guide artificial deadlines. My thoughts are to avoid artificial deadlines altogether. But sometimes they are necessary and this is where time estimates are especially critical. When early, rough estimates are used to guide artificial deadlines, you have to be very careful to assess the accuracy of those estimates and adjust those deadlines accordingly. I think this is one area that contributed to the slips we endured in our latest product cycle. In each case we underestimated the work involved in getting to where we wanted to go. Luckily our external dependencies were not too rigid. Moving forward we need to identify when a deadline is artificial and make sure that it is the right thing to do. If we decide to continue using an artificial deadline (which may be appropriate) then we had better be sure about our confidence in the accuracy of our estimations, or account for that risk in our plans.

Here is a cartoon I ran across in some old email. It's from back in the "dot.com" days. Mission Research is the third startup company I've co-founded and it will hopefully be my last. While they can be very rewarding, they take every ounce of your focus and energy. Anyways, this cartoon always brings back memories of the early Chili!Soft days.

Seems like our CEO, Charlie Crystle has stirred up quite a buzz around the recent SalesForce outage (Silicon.com, CNet, ComputerWorld). You know it's made its rounds when you read it on Scoble's blog. There really is a point to be made here. I'm not necessarily convinced that SalesForce is bad just cause it has some occasional problems with it's uptime. They do need to make some improvements if they want to keep their customers though. The "outage" happened to be large enough to get the press on it, but we experience regular down times with SalesForce that hamper our sales process.

Back to the point... People and businesses are becoming more and more reliant on web services. This is great. There are a lot of benefits to them and they are mostly reliable. In my opinion, the fact that SalesForce can provide an uptime approaching 99% is incredible. But they are not perfect, and businesses relying on them without proper secondary systems in place are going to run into problems at one point or another. Take a natural disaster or large-scale power outage or even some technical problems at the local ISP level. I think there needs to be an offline option available for these times -- and if the web service provider doesn't offer them, then the customer needs to account for that in some way.

Even on a personal level, these outages can be a pain if you're not prepared. Recently the popular del.icio.us service was down for a bit. I use it on a daily basis to track my bookmarks. Not for those few days I didn't. I knew their website offers a way to store my bookmarks offline, but never took the few minutes to get them. In this case, maybe my business benefited from the outage :)

Something to consider... An approach we are taking for our software (GiftWorks) is a desktop client that works in both online and offline mode. In our case, the desktop client is fairly heavy but it doesn't have to be. The software uses online services when they are available and needed, but most of the work is done on the desktop. If the customer can't go online for any reason, they can't use our online services, but they can still do something. This is definitely not a new approach. Most email clients work the same way.

Ok. Here is an amusing site. The Web 2.0 Validator. Enter a URL and click the button to see how it rates in the Web 2.0 realm. I really got a lot of work to do for my site :) I'm only 3 out of 38. It's sad to say, but I'm actually falling behind my friend Steve. This cannot be.

(I think I just improved my rating with this post -- Dave Legg, Flickr, VC, Nitro, cool, Ruby, Rocketboom, del.icio.us, 30 Second Rule, public beta, mash-ups, startup -- 18 out of 38)

I ran across this article which talks about using a backdoor into Windows XP for changing passwords. The article says it was present up to and including SP1 versions of XP. It involves a special keystroke during the repair process that allows you to run commands as administrator. I can't imagine this would still be there in SP2. Has anyone tried this other than the author?

Now here is a very cool site if you're into music. Try Pandora from the guys that started the Music Genome Project. It's a clever little website that helps you discover new music.

I spent some time at a Barnes & Noble bookstore today (mostly passing some time with my daughter in the great children's section). I made a quick pass through the computer books section and realized that I haven't bought a computer book in almost 4 years. Back in my ChiliSoft days (1997-2001) I probably bought a computer book every month. With the amount of information available on the internet plus the fact that it takes very little time to publish it, I see no need lately to buy a book on the topics I'm interested in. The same goes for magazines. What is the future of computer-related books at bookstores? Oh -- does anyone want to buy some outdated computer books?

I ran across an MSDN blog the other day by Mike Swanson. Besides having some interesting posts on WinFX, he has a nice collection of nature backgrounds for your desktop. Check them out.

Here is a cool video about Windows Media Center and XBox 360 integration (The Hive). The 360 is a much better extender than previous Media Center Extenders. Steve, if you thought you wanted one yesterday, watch this video! Also shows a new My DVDs feature when an MC is connected to a DVD changer. Too bad they are a little pricey.