So this time, I wanted three monitors. As I wanted to avoid two graphics cards (always gets crowded inside the PC, also as my graphics card needs to be good enough for high-end-gaming I didn't want to run 2 different cards, but also not buy 2 $400+ cards...), I ended up buying a ATI Radeon 5870 which has 2 DVI, 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort connector and can drive 3 screens at a time. Well, in theory. I'm going to make another posting, but basically one of the three monitors has to be DisplayPort, 2x DVI and 1xHDMI will not work, and neither will the cheap Adapters - I'm currently waiting for my $100 DP->DVI Adapter to be delivered as I already have 3 Monitors.

But anyway, the problem with 3 big monitors is that they take up an insane amount of space on the desk. I bought a big desk, but still it's too much. I remembered a posting from Jeff Atwood about monitor arms and thought I'd give them a try. I bought an Ergotron LX Dual Side-by-Side Arm (45-218-194) which holds two monitors, as long as they are max. 20 lbs/9.1 kg each (basically everything up to and including 24" - if you weigh, remember to remove the foot before). The two monitors I've connected currently are Acer B233HUbmidhz - 23", 16:9, 2048x1152.

The Ergotron arms are solid metal and certainly make a very sturdy impression. The users manual on the other side is IKEA-quality, that is barely understandable pictures instead of good explanations. Definitely take some time when you install them, it took me a bit more than an hour. The nice thing about the Ergotron arms is that you can either drill through your table or mount it using a clamp - no drilling! But make sure you have some space under your desk - I thought I had enough, but I underestimated the size of the clamp...

Luckily it still fit well enough to hold the screens, phew! It takes a little time adjusting them properly, because of the two parts of the arm (one can be removed) - prepare to move the clamp. As said, take your time. Oh, and another hint: There are two plastic caps that you put on the holder after installation to make it look nice. These caps are hard to remove, so installing them should be the very last thing you do, after mounting the monitors and adjusting them completely. Also, another important hint: You can (and need) adjust the strength of the spring that holds the monitor. Do not wonder if you just mounted your monitor and it's weight drags the arm down - do not write an angry review on Amazon that makes you look bad, but look at the (as said, horrible) manual again (Step 7a) and tighten the screw. Last hint: Make sure your cables are long enough.

I'm definitely happy with it, removing the feet of the monitors makes the desk much more tidy in my opinion. For my third Monitor, I'm looking at the normal LX Arm.

During the 1980s, he put up advertisements in newspapers, posing as 15 year old Tanja Nolte-Berndel and asking to "share" software, only to sue responders for breach of copyright laws. In later years, he was active in some controversial lawsuits regarding brand copyrights for brands like "Explorer" (suing Microsoft and some newspapers for using the brand, even though to this day it's not entirely clear if the claim was ever valid, the German patent office even deleted the entry for Explorer). Recently, he was found guilty of Fraud and sentenced to 14 months jail, which were supposed to start this month.

Needless to say, he was not a very popular figure, and that is as nice as I can say it.

But still, he made a name for himself and to this day, "Tanja" and "Gravenreuth" remain an insider under C-64 (and other 80's computer) users. It is part of computer history in Germany now, so when I heard the news, my first thought was "Whoa". It's weird seeing something or someone who just seemed to be always there go away. Maybe it's just a sign that I'm getting old (even though I'm only 26), maybe it's just a sign that the 1980s and my childhood are really over.

While I can't say that I'm crying, I'm also not cheering. I can't say much good about him, except that he was part of the culture I grew up in and as such made an impact, and so there is a certain emptiness now. That and suicide is always a horrible way to make things end.

Goodbye, 1980's.

A few weeks back I ranted about TV manufacturers unable to properly list their Inputs/Outputs in the specs and how I have to read the user manual to find out if I really am able to use it. Weirdly, some companies are unable to provide a shot from the back and a user manual.

My current reason to rant is the Acer B233HU monitor. I bought it more or less blindly because it has a resolution of 2048x1152 and because it has an HDMI input that supports that resolution (my graphics card can drive 3 monitors, but only has 2 DVI Ports, so I needed a HDMI or Display Port Monitor). Now I'm realizing how much space my monitors take up on my desk, so I remembered Jeff Atwood posting about Monitor Arms some time ago.

Now, to buy a Monitor Arm, I need to know the proper measurements for VESA Mounts. There is 75x75mm, 100x100mm and some other sizes. For my Philips 240BW that's no problem: Go to Philips website, look at specs, see that it's 100x100mm. But my Acer Monitor? No information. I can guess or measure myself that it's also 100x100mm (it is), but really, that belongs in the specs or the manual!

I think it's astounding that they list stuff like what the pins of the DVI Port do (As it's important for me to know that Pin 24 is DDC TMDS Clock-) but not what measurements their VESA Mount it.

Seriously, why is it so hard for companies to determine which specs are important and list them? Yes, I know that I belong to the minority of people who look at the specs and buy stuff that fits a need rather than just buying stuff because of bling-bling and advertising, but do you really need to constantly remind me of that fact? Can't you just - at least sometimes - pretend that us engineers are still valued customers?

While checking what took so much space, I found quite a few things, but one caught my attention, the Hibernate file:

I have 8 Gigabytes of RAM in my machine, so I have to live with a large Page File (no, I'm not disabling it. If even Mark Russinovich advises against disabling it, that counts more), but I certainly do not need the Hibernate file as this is a Desktop PC that's either running or off.

Weirdly, I couldn't find any option in Windows 7 to do so.Not sure if it's me or if there really is none, but it can easily be done on the command line. Run an elevated command prompt (cmd.exe, Run As Administrator) and type in

powercfg /hibernate off

The Hiberfil.sys should now be gone and the disk space should be free again.

Fast forward to the present day. VMs are a staple in the toolset of every developer now. Need to test your app on Windows XP, Vista and 7? Need to test deployment on both Server 2003 and 2008? Need a legacy Internet Explorer 6 machine? Or want to give Linux a spin? Great, just create a VM. Virtualization products are available for free now, thanks to Microsoft giving away VirtualPC and VMWare giving away their VMWare Server.

Now, VirtualPC is rather useless sadly, as it can not run 64-Bit Guests. Yup, surprised me as well. On the other hand, VMWare Server isn't really well suited for Desktops - it goes "too deep" into the system and it's whole interface is more aimed at remote usage (you can't select an .iso file on your hard drive unless you previously added it to a list of known locations...). There was a different free VMWare product though, VMWare Player.

The first versions could only run, but not create Virtual machines. They were great to run Live Systems/Appliances, for example Mono. Needless to say, soon sites like EasyVMX emerged to allow creating new Virtual Machines, so that Player was a full VM solution. So yesterday I installed the newest VMWare Player 3, already prepared to head to EasyVMX to create my VM. But then I was pleasantly surprised - Player now creates VMs!

And VMWare really went all out here. At least for Windows, they automatically detect your Operating System and offer Easy Install:

Easy Install means that it will do an unattended installation - you only have to enter your Product Key and maybe a password, then you can lean back and wait until it presents you with the Login Screen of a fresh Windows installation.

This, my dear friends, is awesome! I don't have much use for the advanced features of VMWare Workstation, so Player is my solution of choice - and Player 3 is a significant update!

Well done, VMWare! I wonder if Microsoft will ever catch up? XP Mode in Windows 7 is kinda nice, but I'd rather setup an XP VM in Player than installing a 32-Bit-only Virtual PC.

Luckily, there is a way to remove that function - thanks to Peter Çoopèr for pointing that out! In your Dashboard, go to Appearance => Editor and edit your functions.php to include these two lines before the closing ?>:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');

Voilá, quotes are quotes again! This works with newer WordPress versions, I'm using it at 2.9.1 at the time of writing.

I'm starting to get fed up with this. Storing Passwords in Clear Text is an absolute no-no policy, with no excuse whatsoever. If this policy were a car, it would be an Edsel. If this policy were a computer game, it would be Big Rigs or Rapelay. If this policy were a crime, it would be bioterrorism. It's not some "small oversight" or a "configuration mistake". It's a sign of complete and utter incompetence to run a web site. In my opinion, someone who stores passwords in clear text should be prohibited from using the Internet.

As said, this happens to reputable companies as well, so it's not a small issue that eventually may go away. Therefore, I would love to see the privacy laws of most country changed to force websites to disclose how they store their passwords. We do already have privacy laws in the EU and US that force companies to disclose how they use any information collected. Can't we expand it to force companies to disclose how they store this information as well?

It's bad enough that Third-Party Websites ask for your data, but sadly again this is done by reputable websites. Okay, it can be questioned how reputable a website like LinkedIn is if they ask you for your E-Mail account, but the reality is that a) it happens and b) millions and millions of users use it. I don't think we can get that genie back in the bottle, and I don't think we'll get comprehensive coverage of technologies like OAuth to prevent abuse like that.

In an ideal world, I could go to a website, check its privacy policy and see something like

All passwords are salted and hashed with SHA-512. Passwords are not persisted in clear text.

I would even go so far to ask for clear-text storage declared illegal and punished as a federal offense, unless a) it's required for implementation and b) that implementation is clearly stated.

All Facebook Passwords are persisted in clear text, as we couldn't figure out how to use the Facebook API and instead rely on HTML scraping.

I know that such a disclosure means nothing to the average John Doe, but it allows tech-savvy people to avoid such incompetent companies and whistleblowers to warn other people about these scams.

Remember: Reputation means nothing when it comes to data storage. Companies and Governments lose your private data every day and while you can't really avoid it without missing out on a large part of what makes the Web so great, you should still think twice before giving any website the login details of any other website.

Really, why is that? I was looking at a TV, and I want to know if I can connect my equipment and I needed one with RCA Audio Outputs to go into my stereo amplifier. I'm not a big fan of digging through walls of text (often incomplete) describing the in- and outputs, often using different terminology. I want two things. First, I want this:

This is a picture of the connectors on the Sharp LC-52LE700UN, the TV I have on my wish-list now. From this picture, I can see it has everything I want. So the second thing I want is a link to the PDF of the User Manual so that I can double check that there are no caveats.

There are dozens of companies trying to sell their stuff. Amazon listed over 100 TVs when I searched for my criteria. How am I supposed to find the one which has what I need? By looking at the connectors! By simply looking at this, I can already remove many candidates from the list. For the remaining ones, I can then read the User's Manual to see which suits me best.

Yes, I realize that style is a big sales factor, and I'm not saying that pictures from the front/sides are unimportant. But on the other hand: As a geek, I get more excited when I see a battery of connections. Seriously, leave that shiny black high-gloss coating to the ladies and instead show me RCA sockets!

The same goes for audio equipment, and here even more as some amplifiers have shared inputs or a separate phono input. I was looking for a cheap Stereo Amplifier as I still had speakers but no Amp, and I ended up with the Sony STR-DH100 primarily because of the clear back shot and available user manual, and only then I started reading the reviews.

Remember companies: There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of products available in a category, and as a customer I want to be able to remove all but 5 or 6 of them ASAP, so that I can take a real in-depth look at those remaining. So do me a favor and show me your backs.

Love, Michael.

So at some point I decided that I need a new one again. I wanted something mainly for writing using Celtx, but also for some lightweight Visual Studio development. Asus introduced the eeePC line two years ago, and I thought that Netbooks were generally long running and dirt cheap. Boy, I was so wrong. When looking around, I saw that the usual Battery Life is about 3 hours on the Intel Atom-powered machines. Also, I saw that the prices are more around the 400 to 500 € range now. Seriously, who on earth is so stupid to buy a 500 € Netbook that only runs 3 hours? I can get a proper Laptop for that price already, with the same run time, but that's about 4 times faster... After bitching about the sad state of Netbooks on Twitter, Jameel Haffejee (@stalkerh) mentioned the Lenovo Ideapad S10, which looked like a clear winner. The price was a bit over my budget (I wanted to pay 249 € maximum, but this one was at least 289 €), but getting a long battery run time under 300 € seems impossible. So I went to my local shopping mall to look at their offers (I hate ordering computer parts online, I prefer to pick them up somewhere) and they indeed had an S10. I was impressed by its build quality. Seriously, this is a true Lenovo Notebook and you can clearly see it's IBM Thinkpad heritage. It's sturdy and just "feels" right. Okay, only 2 USB Ports vs. 3 on most other models, but it even has an Express Card Slot (34mm). The only problem: It was only the 3-cell Model, which means that the battery life is not good. Hunting a bit more, it seems that the 6-cell model is not easy to get in Europe, and certainly not in my area. So what to do? I decided to look around at the other offers. The salesman shows me some Acer Aspire with 6 cell battery, but I'm not going to buy any Acer Notebooks anymore due to poor support. Also, I found that the manufacturing quality was low - it just did not feel good.

Finally, I stopped at the ASUS eeePC 1000HE. Priced at 349 €, it was way over Budget. But first, I liked the build quality (not as good as the Lenovo S10 which is a class of its own, but still very sturdy) and the fact that the battery is properly integrated into the case - the laptop was really built around the battery, so it's a consistent and nice design. Also, the battery run time is really high. Asus advertises 9.5 hours, which is unlikely but may be possible by turning everything off and brightness to minimum. But even when working normally, 6 hours are easily achievable. It also comes with the Atom N280 instead of the usual N270 processor, although the speed increase is marginal (reviews say ~4 %). Sadly, it still has the 945GSE instead of the new GN40 chipset. It also comes with Bluetooth and WLAN, which is always nice to have.

So, what is my impression of it? Let me first start with some negative points: It's Heavy. Yes, Heavy with a capital H. The data sheet says it's 1.6 Kilograms, and it certainly feels like it. Nothing that you would hold in one hand while standing and working on it with the other hand. Then, 1024x600 is not a nice resolution to work with. That's an issue almost all Netbooks have, ones with higher resolutions are only just coming and too expensive. I mean, the resolution is fine to browse the web without too much scrolling and it's even possible to use Visual Studio by setting all bars to Auto-Hide, but it's still clearly only a second PC. Then, the Atom is slow. Well, not really so. See, the Netbook comes with Windows XP, an operating system first released in 2001. I remember running Windows XP on a Pentium III 800 MHz with 256 MB RAM, and it worked fine. The Atom is generally thought to be about as fast as a Pentium-M between 800 and 1000 MHz, so XP is a good fit. But even with Hyper Threading, it's still a considerable speed difference even to my Late-2004 1.6 GHz AMD Sempron.

But all of this is expected off a Netbook. It is not there to replace my PC, it's there to be a companion on the road. And on the road, the 1000HE shines. As said, the battery running time leaves nothing to be desired. Running WinXP, SQL Server 2008 Express and Visual Studio, 6 or 7 hours are certainly possible. Then, the keyboard is (mostly) great. The chiclet keyboard comes with mostly normal size keys (I think Asus says it's 92% size), but they also feel really good as they give proper feedback. The only thing I still have to get used to is the right-hand Shift and the Down/Right Cursor. See, the shift key is not the right-most key, as that is a second Fn-Key - adding a second Fn-Key is a great idea, but naturally I aim for the right-most key when I want to press shift. Also, I find myself pressing the right instead of the down cursor most of the times, but that's because the cursor keys are actually bigger on the 1000HE than on most real laptops I've used. Another thing that Asus got right is that the power supply is reasonably small. It's still a brick, but a very small one, so you don't need an extra suitcase to transport it. It even fits the free carry bag that comes with the Netbook.

Overall, I am very happy with this purchase. It fills a niche that I'm trying to fill ever since I replaced my old iBook. It's not meant to replace my PC, but it finally gives me the ability to work on stuff while not at home and not near a power source. It does run Visual Studio 2008, although if you use ReSharper (who doesn't?), you may want to tweak some settings. It does not run World of Warcraft, but some older games work. I was not too impressed with Windows 7 on it, but that could be because I left it at 1 GB RAM.

You're in a Marketplace, competing against others

Okay, this may come as a surprise to some CEOs, maybe it will even shatter their view of the world: Your company and your products are not alone in the world. There are other companies and other products, which target the same audience. The sooner you start realizing that you're not alone, the sooner you can evaluate whether your sales force is competetive.

During the initial research of my current task, I ended up with around 20 different product names. I want to cut down that list as fast as possible. I don't have time to do a thorough evaluation of each of these 20 solutions. So I'm naturally interested in cutting down that list to maybe 3 or 4 products which then get a full, deep evaluation. If you want to be one of the 16 companies that get cut without any evaluation, here is what you have to do:

Do not list any prices on your Website

Ah, I get it: You're providing enterprise solutions for enterprise customers. So no need to list prices, just "Contact Sales to get a Quote". Yeah, right. There are exactly two outcomes of this: 1. You look at who we are, and then rip us off or 2. You're too expensive anyway.

Price is a big part of the evaluation. I want to know how much it will cost, and I want to extrapolate the costs for future growth. If I have to contact sales and then have to wait a day or more for an answer because you're busy or in a different time zone, then that creates a high barrier. Also, it does not help to build trust, because I always have to keep in mind that you're likely trying to rip us off.

If we are talking about implementing some Six-Figure software that requires people from your company to come over and implement your solution (say, SAP), then I agree that a dedicated contract is perfectly fine. But if you're just selling a piece of software that is a) priced below 10000 $ and b) will be implemented completely by us anyway, then not having a price listed on the website is almost a guaranteed way to get cut off my list.

Do not list any technical details about the product

So you have this really shiny product brochure, showing how the product looks for the end user, promising that it can do anything? That's great, I'll need this brochure when I present it to the people who sign the cheques. But first I need to know if your solution really fits my needs. I want the deep technical details, the abbreviations, the ugly stuff. Your software aggregates data? Great! Where from? Does it still rely on ODBC? Or does it use ADO.net? Can it get data from the Business Data Catalog? When your solution integrates with e-Mail, does it work with IMAP? Can I modify the Output that your solution generates? If yes, how? Do you use XSLT? Or some templating language you've invented? If yes, how does it work?

Make sure that I can download the installation, administration and end user manuals. If my task is to aggregate data from Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL and BDC, transform it into a specific format and then e-Mail, I need to know if your solution can actually do that and what technology it involves.

Shiny product brochures are good to get the cheques signed, but technical documentation is what makes me write the cheque in the first place.

Require registration to download a trial/demo version or manual

Okay, so your solution is priced nicely and the technical documentation looks great, so I'll decide to give it a try by downloading the 30-day trial version (you have a trial version of all your products, do you?). But then I get this nice little message saying "Before you may enter our holy halls and download our sacred software, you must first kneel down before us and tell us who you are". Well, actually the message is usually saying "Please register to download".

Let me clarify the roles for a moment: You want something from me. My money. I may want something from you, but I can as well live without. Imagine a shopping mall where you have to give your passport to the owner of each store before you are allowed to do some window shopping or take a closer look at a product on a shelf. Unbelievable? Indeed, but that's how some companies try to run their business on the internet.

I usually take one of two ways: a) I move you to the bottom of the list or b) I register under a fake name and e-Mail address. Unlike the real world passport, I can easily set up a fake identity on the internet. Tonight I'm Hermann Li, working for the British Government. Tomorrow I am Tom Selleck, working for Paramount Pictures. And maybe next week I am Goan Farkyu from a small Asian company specializing in underwater golf courses.

You say that you would like to know who downloads your solutions, so that you know which markets you need to target? You say that you are just providing better service by being able to contact interested customers in a personalized way? I say: You fail. I add trash to the contact databases of crappy companies every week, and so do others. I don't work for the government, I don't work for Paramount, and I certainly do not work on underwater golf courses. But your contact databases say something different now. So while you are planning to increase your marketing in Asia, I am already feeding trash into another contact database, this time I am a Prince from Nigeria.

Also, you should apply a rule that was created in Hollywood: Don't call us, we call you. If I download a trial version, that does not mean that I am interested in any follow-up call from you. I don't want your newsletter, I don't want a call from sales, I don't want to take a product evaluation survey. We will contact you if we have questions, not the other way round.

Random observation: If you're working for Pixar, companies seem to be very eager to contact you as fast as they can. As a Pixar Employee, I get contacted usually twice as fast as a Microsoft employee.

Store your passwords in cleartext

Ha, got you. This point seems out of place here, but it fits with the previous point. The first thing that I do after registering with a fake identity: I use the "I forgot my password" feature and see what happens. If you send me back my original password, you're almost certainly out because you don't care about your customers. There is no excuse to storing passwords in cleartext. You say "We want to make it more convenient for the user"? I say "Goodbye, not doing business with you". There are exactly two ways to store passwords: 1. Salted and Hashed or 2. Not at all (i.e. use OpenID instead of implementing your own authentication mechanism). Clear-Text and Non-Salted Hash is completely and absolutely out of question, no exceptions.

I am a programmer, doing a technical evaluation. I know about the stuff I am looking for and working with. If I get the impression that you don't know about the stuff you're working with, then we're not doing business.

In the end, it's all about mutual respect

At the end of the day, both of us want to create a Win-Win situation. I want to solve my business problem, you want to make a good sale. But if any side is not being treated with respect or feels like getting cheated, that will complicate business relations, or make them impossible.

I don't know what "the usual" way of corporate business application evaluation is, but I do know what I am looking for. I want to do window shopping and no-friction evaluation. Thus, you have to make the first step: By allowing me to easily get the information I need, you are showing respect and trust. And if I like what I see, I will make a step forward as well and contact you. On the other hand, if you expect me to do the first step towards you, then chances are high that I look at the competition first.

Well, I think that Randy Pausch is right: Your Inbox is not your To-Do List. Paul Derham described the Inbox as an airport: "mail arrives and departs from there, it doesn’t hang around all day". And perhaps the best essay about Inbox management is Michael Mann's Inbox Zero, which is available as a Video as well.

Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 does not make it easy to manage e-Mails effectively. For example, the most common action that you can take on e-Mail is deleting it. That is easy, but in a corporate environment you may want to keep e-Mail and just move them into a vault. Outlook has the Auto Archive feature that puts old e-Mail into a separate archive. Unfortunately, this only works on old e-Mail. There is no built in way to take a recent e-Mail and archive it. Sure, Drag/Drop works, but if you have a big folder structure, that quickly becomes annoying.

The Interaction between your Inbox and the Task List is somewhat poor. Sure, I can put a flag on my e-Mail, but that does not remove it from my Inbox. Wouldn't it be nice to convert a Mail into a Task somehow? Or link in an external Task Tracker, like FogBugz?

I started writing some addins for Outlook 2007 to remedy some of these shortcomings. The project is available on CodePlex, and I've called it Inbox Zero Outlook 2007 Addins. At the moment, it is only one AddIn - AutoArchive Now!:

This is adding a new Entry to the context menu of e-Mails that will move a mail into the Archive folder, creating any subfolders that may be needed to mirror the tree structure.

It's officially still a Beta Version because there are some slight quirks, but it has already saved me a lot of time. The next topic I look into is whether or not Covey's four-quadrant TODO (at around 21 minutes) can be incorporated somehow, and I'd like to connect my Outlook to FogBugz somehow. As said: My Inbox is not my To Do List, so I'll look into ways to get mail out of the Inbox as fast as possible.

The only problem is that this super high level of customization leads to unclear and confusing terminology – how is someone supposed to know what a Morph does, how a Magnet works and which requirements there are actually. So after spending 3 days to dig through the whole topic, I've decided to make a little posting describing what this actually is. Keep in mind that I am not an expert and that this is to the best of my knowledge, but I claim the right to be slightly wrong in some places.

There are many vendors, but I've decided to stay with DAZ 3D to begin with. I just want to point out that I am not affiliated with DAZ 3D or any other vendor that I am linking here to. All the links are for explanatory reasons, I don't get anything if you buy stuff through these links.

The starting Point: A Figure

Okay, the first thing that you need is a Figure. This is essentially a 3D Model of a Person (or animal) that has everything set up for Animation. Essentially, you load a Figure and then you can take i.e. the Arm and move it, which will automatically adjust the shoulder, chest, hip etc. If you look at the various online stores, it may look like there are hundreds of figures, but in reality there is only a handful – most "Figures" are really just addons to an existing Figure (more on that later).

In the Example of DAZ 3D, Figures would be Victoria 4.2 (or V4 or V4.2 for short), Michael 4 or Stephanie Petite 3.0. In the case of DAZ 3D, you may wonder what the weird Version numbers mean, and if you browse the store, you may see that there is also a Victoria 3.0 and wonder how they relate. Well, the second question is easy: They are not related at all. They are completely different figures. DAZ 3D created Victoria years and years ago, and as time moved on, they decided that they needed a better 3D Model (PCs got faster, so they could do more). So they took Victoria and created a more Modern Version of it. When it came to naming, they decided to just call her Victoria 2.0, because of the popularity that the Brand achieved. Then came Victoria 3.0, Victoria 4.0 and two updates to 4.1 and 4.2. Other companies decided instead to rename their figures with every generation, and there is a small Overview of the various Poser Figures on Wikipedia.

To summarize:

• There are relatively few Figures, and you need one to start with
• Figures are usually incompatible with each other, so when you buy addons like clothing or skin textures, make sure that it's compatible with your figure
• Try to find out if there is a common abbreviation for your Figure. In the Case of Victoria 4.0, it's usually V4. That helps to decipher stuff like "HighBoots2 For A4 V4 V4Elite"

Customizing the shape of a Figure: Morphs

If you clicked the link to Victoria 4.2 in the previous paragraph, you may have seen that this is called "Victoria 4.2 Base" and is available for free. When you install it into Poser or DAZ Studio, you may understand why: The Base Figure is not very customizable. First off, it only has a relatively low-res texture, no hair and you cannot easily change her body shape, i.e. to turn her into a body builder or into an obese person. You can customize the expression in her face a bit, but that's it.

Customizations to the Body shape are called "Morphs". Essentially a Morph hooks into the Figure and changes the underlying 3D Model. Morphs are essential to create different people from the same Figure. So when you browse the store, you may see Morphs for sale that allow you to fine-tune a certain part of the figure. For Victoria, there is an essential product called Victoria 4.2 Morphs++ which allows you to manipulate almost any part of the figure easily. In the full list you can see that there are options to manipulate the full body, i.e. "BodyBuilder" or "PearFigure". But there are also a lot of fine tune options, like NeckThickness or FeetArch.

There are more morph packages available, but just keep in mind that a) Morphs change the underlying 3D Model and are thus very essential to create variety and b) Morphs are usually sold separately but c) The base character usually contains at least some morphs already.

Pre-Made Customizations: Character Presets

As said, there are only relatively few Figures, but many different characters. Now that you know that a Figure is the 3D Model and that Morphs are manipulations to them, you can possibly imagine how those Character presets work: They are fine-tuned packages of Morph Settings for the body and face. Usually they contain a lot of other Add-Ons, but the main feature is really that they customize Victoria through morphs. Take a look at Aiko 4.0, which is a character for Victoria 4.2. Aiko is really a character with her own personality and style, yet it's not a figure because she builds on top of Victoria.

Make sure to check the Requirements of a Character Preset! Aiko only requires Victoria 4.2 Base, but for example ZhangXi requires Aiko 4 Base, the Morphs++ Package for Victoria 4.2, and then even another pack of Morphs, the Elite Body Shapes. So if you buy the ZhangXi character, you may see that she is not usable because you need to purchase another product as well. And again, let me remember you that figures are not compatible, so a Character Preset for Victoria 3.0 will not work on Victoria 4.x (well, actually I think there is some way to make them at least somewhat compatible, but that is more like a pro topic).

Character Presets include more than just Morph Presets though, they may include any or all of the features listed next.

Skin Textures and Makeup

When you load Victoria, you may see that her skin does not look really detailed. After all, the base only comes with a low-res texture pack. This is where Texture Packs come into play. Texture packs are Skin Textures that can be applied to the model, and nowadays you usually get high res textures (4000x4000 Pixels, although 2000x2000 and 3500x3500 are also common) that also include bump and specular maps to have realistic lights and shadows. Skin Textures are extremely important, because they make your Figure look realistic, or cartoony, or whatever you want. They also add the variation – for example, there is Maya, an Asian skin texture, or there is a special Wet Texture if you want to create pool scenes.

Skin Maps (that's the official name) are usually not sold separately, they usually come with the Character Presets. For example, if you look at the Bianca preset, you can look in the "What's Included & Features" Section to see which Textures are delivered.

There is a special addition, and that's makeup. Usually, the Skin Textures are completely natural, to offer the best base for customizations. Sometimes, Skin Maps and Character Presets come with Make Up Options, which are essentially just another set of skin maps, but with makeup applied. You can of course also grab your favorite graphic program, load in the skin map of your choice and apply makeup yourself (hence many users prefer to have a completely natural base skin map), but Make Up skin maps already did the work for you.

Skin Maps are usually compatible to morphing and should always stay in a proper shape (that is: If you change the size of the navel, the texture of the navel usually gets resized properly as well), but there are times when skin map creators decided to violate the boundaries to create more interesting skin textures, but they may look weird when morphing. That's a rare case though.

Hair and Clothing

Okay, so Victoria 4.2 Base is essentially a bald girl in a Bikini. Enough to start with, but you won't get very far. Unless you want to do love stories that is, but that's another subject. Anyway, you now need hair and clothing. They work essentially the same, and it's important to differentiate between a base product and an extension.

Let's start with Hair. Hair is usually a 3D Model, some Hair-Morphs to control things like length and number of Hair, and some Textures. For example, the Natsumy Hair for V4 comes with Morphs to control the position of the two bangs, and there is several colors delivered with it. When buying Hair, make sure that you are actually buying the actual Hair Model. For example, there is also an add on called Real Hair Textures for Natsumy Hair, which are just textures – a nice addition, but if you don't have the Natsumy Hair to start with, they are useless.

Clothes work the same way. For example, there is the Tiffany Dress which is the 3D Model and some Textures, and then there are some extra textures available for purchase, for example the Breakfast for Tiffany Dress. For Clothing, it is very common to sometimes have 3 or 4 additional Texture sets available for the more popular ones.

There are two Gotchas with Clothing and to a lesser extent with Hair. The first one is that the "Requirements" in the Daz Shop are sometimes showing too many items. For example, the Verona Hair lists Aiko 3, Aiko 4, Victoria 3.0 and Victoria 4.0 under Requirements. This does not mean that you have to have all 4 figures. It merely means that the Hair is compatible to those Figures. If you only have Victoria 4.2 you are obviously not able to use the version of the hairstyle for Aiko 3, but there will be a style for Victoria 4.2. In doubt, check the What's Included and Features panel.

The second point is a bit of a bigger problems: Clothing is not automatically compatible with all Morphs! What this means is that when you Morph the Character, the clothing may not fit anymore and the skin of the Character will poke out. This is one of the biggest and most common problems. Usually, you can check if the Clothing contains Morphs. For example, on the Tiffany dress, you can see a list of Morphs (FBM or PBM, which is short for Full/Partial Body Morph). For example, there is a Morph called FBMPearFigure, which means that the dress will still fit if you decide to change the Pear Figure Morph on Victoria. Sometimes, there are morphs for clothing to make them compatible with other Morphs. For example, there is an Elite Upgrade which makes the Dress compatible with the Elite Body Shapes Morph, or there is an upgrade to make it compatible with the Aiko 4 character (Remember: Aiko 4 is just a Character Preset on top of Victoria V4.2).

You don't have to buy additional Morphs – you can usually finetune the clothing to make them look good even on a non-supported morph. Just keep in mind that a) this usually only works on still images since you may have to cut some corners to have the dress look good from the given camera angles and b) that this is very tedious if you have to do it more than once.

Magnets – not only to fit clothing

As said before, Clothing may not always work with a morphed figure. Changing the rotation and scale may work often, but is not always the best choice. There is another feature, called Magnets. I can't say too much about them because they are an advanced topic and I do not have much experience with them, so I will just link to the Fitting clothes with Magnets tutorial and then to the Using Magnet Sets for Clothing fits one. Magnets essentially something to be attached to something else, i.e. a piece of clothing to a figure. If you have a set of Magnets, you are theoretically able to fit any type of incompatible clothes. There are Magnet Sets available, i.e. for Victoria 4, but as said, that is an advanced topic that I have no experience with.

To me, it seems like Magnets are the cheap way if you don't want to buy an upgrade or if there is no upgrade available, and they seem to be quite labor-intensive, but they give you all the flexibility to customize any piece of clothing.

Poses

The other big topic are Poses. When you load a figure, it will stand with the arms extended and look a bit like the vitruvian man painting of Da Vinci. You can now grab the Arms and twist and bend the Figure to bring it into the Pose that you like. When you do that, you will notice that it's actually quite a bit of work to get the character exactly into the desired pose, without anything looking awkward (and believe me, you will eventually discover more about the human body than you ever wanted when you try to find out how the stomach should bend when you try to jump or one other complicated poses).

Poses are presets than can just be applied to a figure. You twist the figure like you want, save it as a pose, and when you need it next time, you just apply the pose and you are done. Needless to say, there are pre-made poses for sale, for example the Yard and Pool Poses, and sometimes character presets come with poses.

Conclusion

Okay, let's just summarize:

• A Figure is the base 3D Object
• A Morph is something that allows you to easily manipulate the 3D Object through settings
• Character Presets are Add-Ons for Figures which contain pre-made settings and accessories
• A Skin Map is a Texture that applies to the Figure's skin. This gives you various ethnicities, tattoos, make up etc.
• Hair and Clothing allow you to render more than just nude, bald figures, but may not be compatible to all morphs
• Magnets can be used to fit clothes to incompatible morphs
• Poses save you from having to twist the limbs of the character manually every time

So if you look at the Victoria 4.2 base again and then at one of the Bundles (i.e. Victoria 4.2 Complete), you should be able to understand what the differences are, and why the free Base package is not really that free, because there is no clothing, no hair, and only a low res skin texture. The huge third party market allow you to get anything you may want or need, but of course, it can get very expensive very fast. If you want a recommendation, I'll recommend starting with the Victoria 4.2 Complete or Pro Bundles, the free DAZ Studio, and then just ignoring any other offers and start modeling until you get a feel for how the parts and components interact. That allows you to make better estimates on what you can and cannot do, and which additional products you may want to buy.

But quality-wise, I am seriously impressed with what is possible nowadays, the textures became really photo-realistic and with proper lights and a good background, you can build so much more than just 3d erotica.

So at the end of 2008, I decided to get an HP MediaSmart EX470. This model is about to be replaced with a newer one, which means that the 470 is available as remaining stock relatively cheap in some places. Essentially, it's a small PC running Windows Home Server. What makes it so special (apart from the nice and small design) is the way Windows Home Server works. First of all, the machine takes 4 internal hard drives, with one 500 GB already built in and three free slots. There are also 4 USB Ports and one eSATA Port for extension.

From all your hard drives, it creates some sort of "Software RAID 0", but without some of the disadvantages. In essence, it will combine all hard drives into one big hard drive. You can mix and match any sizes. In my example, I have added three additional hard drives, all of which are different. Unlike a RAID 0, if one hard drive dies, you still can access the data on the other three hard drives. Here is where Windows Home Server really shines. As you see, it combined the 4 drives to one logical volume of 3.64 TB.

Sorry, it's in French, but the legend below the diagram says: "Shared Folders: 1.4 TB, Duplication: 11 Gb, PC Backups: 261 GB, System: 21 GB, Free Space: 1.9 TB". Let me start talking about Duplication. As this is a server, you access it through Network Shares, i.e. \\server\Music or \\server\FilthyPumpkin. When you copy files to these shares, there are stored on one of the hard drives. I do not exactly know how this is determined, but that is not so important anyway. What is important is that if one hard drive dies, you lose all data on that drive, while still being able to access the data that is on the other drives. However, some folders are more important than others, for example my e-Mails or Photos. What you can do is to turn on duplication for a share. This means that every file stored on a network share is not only stored on one, but on two hard drives. So should one hard drive die, you are still able to recover the duplicated data. Of course, this also means that data on these shares take up twice as much space since they have to be stored twice.

Okay, so it's a nice file server with a smart file storage. What else? It automatically makes backups of your PCs. You install a little tool on your PC which connects it to the server and from now on, it will back up all your files every day. Yes, including Windows System files and other stuff. There are two functions that make it great: First, it keeps a multiple backups. It will only back up changed files once, so it is a very space-efficient. Second, restoration is really nice. If your Hard Drive dies, you put in a new one and boot from a Rescue CD. This CD connects to the Server and presents you with a list of backups. Simply select any date, and your system will be restored. And I mean completely restored, including Windows etc. You you can completely re-set your PC without having to install Windows first. That being said, it will not allow you to restore the backup to a different PC. If your PC completely dies and has to be replaced, you have to start from scratch, but you can get files off that backup. You can also exclude some drives from being backed up, in case you do not want to waste space by backing up that 500 GB Scratch Drive in your PC which only holds unimportant and temporary files anyway.

Windows Home Server is essentially a modified Windows 2003 server, but it does not have any Domain-compatibility. You can neither make it a Domain Controller, nor can you join a domain with it. You can install some software on it though through remote desktop, but keep in mind that the EX470 only has 512 MB, which limits it a bit. I am running SyncBackSE on it to make a copy of my Homepage every day, and this works great.

I also talked about off-site backups yesterday. Sadly, there is a little problem with WHS: Since it's essentially Windows 2003, some of the consumer oriented backup services do not run on it. For example, Mozy Home only supports Win2000, XP and Vista. They do have a Mozy Pro Version that supports Windows 2003, but that is more expensive. Carbonite also only states Windows XP and Vista, with no mention of Windows 2003 (I have not tried if it works in WHS). One service that works really nice is JungleDisk, which works together with Amazon S3. The problem with S3 is that it is essentially a content-delivery system, which makes it quite expensive for backing up more than a few Gigabytes. There are many more providers, but to tell you the truth, I have a problem trusting any other than those three for now. After all, backing up to a provider means that I am essentially giving my sensitive data over the internet to some other company, so I want to be sure that the data is properly encrypted and secured, and unfortunately some providers do not have a proper security in place. So no off-site backup for now, but I will continue to look at suggestions for this, also because I really want my important shares to be properly backed up.

So yeah, a good backup strategy can sometimes be a little bit tricky, but still my advice stands: Getting a local backup of your data is easy and inexpensive and I can only recommend to everyone to do back ups.

Now, it's easy to point fingers at them and laugh or insult them, but I'm not going to do that since it would be hypocrisy. Why? Because I made the same mistake as well, years ago. On my old company, we sold a server with two hard drives, running RAID-1. We also ordered a Tape backup drive, but that was not available at the time and due to be delivered 2 weeks later. But hey, with two hard drives running RAID-1, what should happen? Unfortunately, the two Hard Drives happened to be IBM Deskstar DTLA-307045. When the first drive failed one morning, we thought "Oh well, we're going to replace it during the afternoon". When the second drive failed 2 hours later, the day became very unpleasant...

The worst thing in those cases: We did not lose our data - we lost the data of a customer. And JournalSpace also did not lose their data, but they lost your data - the data of their users. That just got me thinking again about backups and data security. And I want to ask a question: What do you do to backup your data?

Many people do not make backups of the data on their hard drive, and even fewer make backups of the stuff they have on the web. After all, my provider makes backups, why bother? Because it is your data, not theirs. You are the one in charge of keeping backups, not them.

Hard Drives are unreliable. Years ago, it was the IBM Deathstar, then the Fujitsu PB16 drives, now it's the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, and tomorrow it may be some other drive. But even if you manage to have hard drives that never fail, you still have the issue of a Virus, accidential rm -rf /, software bugs or anything else that can "soft-destroy" your data. I have lost important data in the past already, so last month I decided that I finally need to get a proper backup.

My first issue was the amount of data. I have a bit more than 1 Terabyte of data to back up, which includes 10 years of software source code, all my music, videos from my video camera and Adobe Premiere projects, my e-mail, countless photos and documents etc. etc. etc. So the first question was: Which data is imporant and cannot be re-created? If I lose all my music, that's bad, but I can just rip all the CDs again. So no need to back up music. For the Videos, I do not need to back up the ones that I copied from my DVDs since I can also just copy them again. So it essentially boils down to the stuff that it impossible to regain: E-Mails, Self-Made Photos, Videos and Documents.

I decided to go with a three-stage backup strategy. First, I daily back up the data to an external hard drive. No, not RAID-1, but a scheduled synchronization (I use SyncBack SE for that, but robocopy also does an excellent job). That way, if my drives fails or is corrupted, I have a backup of yesterday. This is the first stage. External Hard Drives are available incredibly cheap nowadays, and I strongly encourage everyone to get one for backup purposes.

For data that needs to be archived but does not change and is infrequently accessed, I also burn them on DVDs and CDs. This is stage two and includes Photos and Source Videos. Just keep in mind that CDs and DVDs are not made for the eternity, you should burn a new set every year. Storing them in paper sleeves or a spindle is an absolute no go - they belong in a jewel or amaray case.

The third stage is off-site backups. Now, I know what you're thinking: Off-Site backups are expensive and only needed for big companies. I mean, how likely is it that a fire will destroy all my stuff? My answer: Maybe unlikely, but after all my stuff is destroyed, It woule be great to be able to get back on my feet again. Also, Off-Site backups are really affordable now, thanks to broadband internet. There are some services that allow you to back up unlimited data. I recommend Mozy. Why? Because they actually took the time to implement security properly, which assures me that they actually care about their business.

Here is a little diagram:

Okay, so that covers the data on my PC. What about my WebSites? If you run your own WebSite, you can usually just back it up via FTP. SyncBackSE does that, and so do other tools. Essentially, they just download the whole site every day. If you run WordPress, look at the database backup plugin. I have configured it to send me an e-Mail with a database dump of the blog every week, so I can always restore it and lose a maximum of a week (although archive.org and Google Cache may even save my ass here). If you do not run your own WebSite but are using a Hosted Blog, get familiar with the backup utilities of that platform. If your Blog Provider does not allow you to easily back up your data, change. I'm serious - there are so many blog hosting providers out there that offer an easy way to make backups, there is really no reason to waste your time with a company that does not care about your data.

The above strategy served me well at first, but I wanted some more. Tomorrow I will be posting about my current strategy, but let me just close with emphasizing again that no one else but you is eventually responsible for making backups, otherwise you may land really hard one day.

Let me start by the usual disclaimer: This is highly subjective and based on my habits.

So yeah, Firefox' URL bar. I regularly browse some web pages, for example The Wikipedia, both in English and German. Their urls are en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org. Also, I am a regular visitor of stackoverflow.com, where I was part of the private beta when the URL still was beta.stackoverflow.com. Also, I regular visit some German news sites like Spiegel.de or Heise.de.

So, what happens if I want to visit the German Wikipedia? I usually type in "de", press down once since de.wikipedia.org is the first result and hit Enter. Not so with Firefox 3.0: The first result is Heise.de or Spiegel.de, since they END in .de.

When I start to type in "sta" to go to stackoverflow, the first result is... beta.stackoverflow.com, because I visited that site a lot, but that link is now obsolete since MONTHS. And no, I am not going to clear out my cache or history or whatever, just because the browser is too stupid to learn that beta.stackoverflow.com is not being used since 2 or 3 months now...

Oh yeah, and that new download manager... it is as useless as it ever was as a download manager (hint: A good download manager works essentially like "wget -c ", not like "I may just leave that temp file behind, or maybe not, maybe I'll even resume if the download is interrupted, but... meh, let's just start from 0 again), but now they even removed that "Saving to: (Folder)" Button that allowed to quickly open the download folder. That change was a really useless change between Firefox 2 and 3, because it removed convenience without adding any value.

Don't get me wrong: I think that the Firefox guys have done an important and excellent Job. They had success where other failed: In offering a stable and viable alternative to Microsofts Internet Explorer, which is still a very inconvenient browser in Version 7.

But changing core behaviour between releases (and the URL Bar is part of the core of a browser) is something that should be carefully considered, and at least there should be an option. Maybe not in the GUI, but at least about:config should allow me to change behaviour. (You can change some behaviour, but you cannot get the Firefox 2 behaviour back)

I believe I heard that Firefox 3.1 is supposed to change this now, but since there are now viable alternatives, Firefox just got thrown off my hard drive. Ironically, I am now running Chrome, a Browser that I avoided at first. Google recently changed it's policy, and the default settings are a lot more sane now. I do not know if I am going to keep it, but for now, this is my replacement. Chromes download manager is even worse though, but at least the URL Bar is properly working. And at the end of the day, there is still Opera.

Good luck with Firefox 3.1 and 3.2, maybe we'll see us again in the future.