Scott Hanselman

I did a "Greatest Hits" blog post in 2008, and since this year is winding down I though it was time for another. Here's what I think were my best blog posts this year.

Personal

• Updated for 2011 - McDonald's WiFi Guide with updates for Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7 - This sill cracks me up, and I wrote it!
• Link-bait Hacker Slash News Dot Considered Cancerous Request For Call To Action - This took me 10 minutes to write and is the most popular thing I've written this year. It's also got comments that are WAY better than the post. I hope it lives forever.
• Just please comb their hair and wipe their noses - My month as a single dad - The wife was gone for a month. No fingers or toes were lost in the ensuing chaos.
• I'm a phony. Are you? - Turns out we all feel this way.
• Brain, Bytes, Back, Buns - The Programmer's Priorities - Your tush is worth the money.

Punditry

• Good UX in the Wild: Dropbox's attention to detail on their download page - Discussion about how much effort Dropbox put into getting users to download and install their software.
• Your images are a virus. They are EVERYWHERE on the Internet - How a silly bit of SmartArt spread through the internet.
• Profanity doesn't work - A number of folks didn't agree, but the discussion was worth it.
• 410 Gone - Thoughts on Mark "diveintomark" Pilgrim's and _why's infosuicides - Mark Pilgrim quit the internet and took his stuff with him.
• There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe - Yep, pretty much just the one.
• Welcome to the Cloud - "Your Apple ID has been disabled." - When my Apple ID was compromised. Later I proposed a better workflow experience for Apple.
• Hackers can kill Diabetics with Insulin Pumps from a half mile away - Um, no. Facts vs. Journalistic Fear mongering - I throw stones at the way the media tries to scare us.
• Why the #AskObama Tweet was Garbled on Screen: Know your UTF-8, Unicode, ASCII and ANSI Decoding Mr. President - Unicode is hard.
• JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Sematic Markup is Dead! Clean vs. Machine-coded HTML - I make a declarative statement, comments ensue. Later the experts weigh in.
• Should I use HTML5 or Silverlight? One man's opinion. - When should you use a plugin and when should you use HTML5?
• New Interview Questions for Senior Software Engineers - No, I don't have the answers to send you.
• Reading more than ever: An analysis of four lazy years with an Amazon Kindle and no dead trees - My Kindle has made my reading life richer.
• I know apps - My new resume.

Technology

• Your users don't care if you use Web Sockets - How choosing to support a super-new technology might make your app better or it might cut your prospective audience in half.
• Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web - I'm getting tired of Apps, AppStores and Updating Apps.
• Solving the Shakespeare Million Monkeys Problem in Real-time with Parallelism and SignalR - Paul and I had such fun with this. How many monkeys does it take to write Shakespeare? And how will it scale?
• CSI: My Computer - What is netsession_win.exe from Akamai and how did it get on my system? - I love a good mystery.
• Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) - Want to try Windows 8 in a risk-free way? Boot to VHD! It's fabulous.
• A basic non-cloud-based personal backup strategy - Back it up, any way you can.
• NerdDinner being updated to MVC3 with Razor, HTML5, GeoLocation, EF CodeFirst, jQuery Mobile, YepNope and Modernizr and a fixed Mobile Device Capabilities ViewEngine - Longest title ever? Maybe, but we did a lot of work!
• Learning about Progressive Enhancement - Supporting Mobile Browsers with CSS3 Media Queries - I'm in love with CSS3 Media Queries.
• Installing and Running node.js applications within IIS on Windows - Are you mad? - Freak out your friends by running node under IIS.
• Hire and Pay a Designer and Be Happy - Designers are worth the money.
• Making awesome Wedding documents using OpenType Ligatures and Stylistic Sets in Microsoft Word 2010 and Gabriola - The wedding menus were greatly appreciated.
• Spring 2011 Fiction Reading List - Young Adult eBooks Will Save Science Fiction - I've been enjoying this last few years crop of Young Adult sci-fi.

Tutorials and Lessons

• A Social Media Brand Primer: Managing your (personal) brand with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• The Guide to Creating Quality Technical Screencasts - A checklist for screencasting
• Taking Proper Screenshots in Windows for Blogs or Tutorials - Nothing like a lousy screenshot to ruin a tutorial or blog post.
• Using Code Signing Certificates to sign downloaded MSIs and build reputation with IE9 SmartScreen - More people should sign their publically downloadable applications.
• Productivity and Continuous Improvement - Measurement (and RescueTime) makes it happen, both Personally and at Work - If you measure your time, you can use it more effectively.
• How to add Tweets to your blog and debugging basic JavaScript: Why did Twitter.com/JavaScript/Blogger JSONP Widget stop working? - Add a nice feature to your blog and learn some Javascript at the same time.
• NuGet for the Enterprise: NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System - NuGet is making waves in the Enterprise. Big thanks to TeamCity and JetBrains.
• Adding a Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDR3700 to an existing FIOS Wireless AP for improved wireless coverage - Funny how general IT posts like this catch fire.

Tools

• Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows -Yes, it came late, but it did arrive eventually. The tools list. I'll try to do even better next year.
• Five Absolutely Essential Utilities that make Windows better - The five I can't live without.
• Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 7 - These 120gig SSDs are too small. Or are they?
• The Technical Friend's Essential Maintenance Checklist for Non-Technical Friend's Windows Computer - Be nice to Non-Technical Friend.
• Console2 - A Better Windows Command Prompt - Make your Console better.

Speaking

• VIDEO: The Art of Speaking - with Scott Hanselman - Rob Conery and I made a video to help teach people about how to give an effective technical presentation. There's lots more information about this video at http://speakinghacks.com
• Developer Stand up Comedy - Coding 4 Fun - I'm  happy with how this evening of storytelling went.
• Check out videos of all my recent speaking engagements in the Speaking section of my blog.

See you next year!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Sure, I work for The Man in my day job, but I have an iPhone, a few iPod Touches, and two iPads in my personal mobile life. I have great respect for the Windows Phone 7 UX and I have a Samsung Focus that runs Mango that I swap my SIM into every few months to check out, but I'm invested in the iOS app store enough now that switching doesn't make sense for me. I'm teased by some co-workers and community folks who think I should blindly use only Microsoft products. That's fine. I use what works for me and I encourage you to do the same.

I am, however, a Microsoft Office fan and use OneNote (I switched from Evernote recently when Cloud sync via Skydrive for OneNote become available. I also use Lync (formerly Office Communicator) extensively at work as I'm remote.

Recently Microsoft released Lync for iPhone and iPad (as well as Google Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone). The addition of Lync to my iPhone and iPad was effectively the last link in the chain for me as far as making sure my iPhone was connected to work.

I thought I'd take stock of the Microsoft apps that I'm using on my iOS devices, how they work and how I use them.

Microsoft Lync for iOS

I love Lync. Truly. It's corporate instant messaging, sure, but it's also VOIP, presence information, a company directory and it's integrated nicely with Office 365 and Outlook.

I've got a work phone number in the 425 area code that will simultaneously ring at my 503 mobile phone. Lync on the iPhone will also let me make calls from my 425 number by starting the call from Redmond then calling me immediately. Lync gives me iPhone-style access to my Voice Mail. It's a lot like the Google Voice app, except for Corporate VOIP.

It supports notifications as well and I've sorted it to the top in my iOS5 notification center. It'll keep you signed in for 36 hours and send you notifications as long as you've enabled push notify. If not, it'll run in the background for an hour. There's no reason not to turn on notifications on iOS5 as far as I can see, so 36 hours is fine as I'll be launching it more often than that and keep it alive. Even better, it'll notify you to sign in (relaunch) if you don't go back in within 36 hours. Because the notifications are server-side, there's no battery hit.

There's a complete matrix of what mobile platforms support what in Lync over on TechNet.

Bing for iPhone

It's funny, I mostly Google for Web Pages but after my "give Bing a month" challenge, I use Bing for Movies, Weather, Travel and stuff that isn't web page searching. In fact, right now my home page is actually three tabs: DuckDuckGo, Bing and Google. Then I use the one that will give me the best results.

On the iPhone, Bing is a great app with a lot of depth. On the iPad it's AMAZING. If you have an iPad, no joke, check out the Bing App. You'll be impressed, especially when you realize how long ago it was released. It's innovative UI on the iPad predates the Twitter iPad release.

Bing has a great image search, but it's also got three nice features that use the iPhone camera. It'll search tags and QR Codes, it'll search books and CDs using just cover art, and it'll look at text and auto-OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text then let you search on it.

Frankly, the real crime here is that Microsoft does tell enough people about these features. Rather than trying to uncomfortably fit "let me Bing that" into popular TV shows, why not just have a main character USE the application for a real world problem and not make it so in your face? The Bing iOS app shines when you just use it.

Here I've pointed it at a book cover and it's found the book then linked me to shopping. In the other screenshot I've pointed it at some text, it recognized it, then I can click the words I want to use to search with. Nice for translating signs or searching for ingredients on menus.

Microsoft OneNote for iPhone and iPad

I recently switched away from Evernote in favor of OneNote because I find OneNote's "freeform" notes more flexible over EverNote's more constrained "bullets and lists." OneNote also integrates nicely with Outlook and Office.

When OneNote added cloud syncing with Windows Live SkyDrive, that was nice as I could use OneNote on multiple machines. Then OneNote for iPhone and iPad came out and I was sold.

OneNote supports up to 500 notes for free and then they charge. I use it a LOT and I'm still only at 180 notes.

They could still stand to improve it on the iPad with ink support but generally, having OneNote and Lync together on my iPhone or iPad along with my mail makes me a pretty good little corporate tool when I'm hanging at the Holiday Inn Omaha.

Xbox for iOS

There's even an Xbox app for iPhone. Madness. You can keep track of Achievements, answer messages, set beacons, but also watch videos and game trailers.

You can even change your avatar's look. Jazz hands!

By the way, there's even a Halo Waypoint app for iPhone.

Other Microsoft apps on iPhone

There's a bunch of other apps from Microsoft on iOS, including:

• Microsoft SkyDrive for iPhone - Exactly that. It's a drive in the Sky. They give you 25 gigs for free. I keep my OneNote files up there for syncing but you can put anything there like photos, documents, etc.
• Kintectimals - A nice tie-in with the actual Xbox game for kids with Kinect. It's really cute on the iPad and actually lets you unlock 5 new cubs from the iOS device that your kids can then use on their Xbox directly.
• Photosynth - This app has been downloaded 4.4 MILLION teams on the iPhone. You kinda have to see it to believe it, but it's kind of a 360 degree panorama on steroids.
• Windows Live Messenger - If this is your IM of choice, they've got that also.

I'm pretty stoked about Microsoft's (apparently) new focus on services being available everywhere, rather than sweating whether someone is using those services on a Microsoft piece of hardware.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My buddy Jeff Handley tweeted this nugget of brilliance recently.

Every year I give the grandparents DVDs with all of our digital pictures from the year. To them it's a gift. To me it's off-site backup.

— Jeff Handley (@JeffHandley) December 18, 2011

Exactly. I've talked about backup strategies before. You just can't have too many backups. I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage...a fancy name for a black box in the closet we back up to) but I also have two external drives that are labeled A and B that I rotate between the safe at the bank.

My rules of thumb are:

• Use an imaging tool like Acronis True Image to create images of the machines you REALLY care about.
  • You can also use the System Image tool built into Windows, but I prefer the additional options from Acronis.
• Encrypt your external drives.
• Backup files (and disk images) to two external drives
• Keep one external drive off-site
• Test your backups by practicing a restore. The rule of thumb is that backups ALWAYS succeed. It's restores that fail!

Jeff's idea is brilliant. Burn the extended family a nice DVD, perhaps with Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery and wrap it up as a gift!

Related Links

• A basic non-cloud-based personal backup strategy
• On Losing Data and a Family Backup Strategy
• BACKUP YOUR CRAP: Missing Operating System, Backups, Disk Images, Home Servers, BootRec, BootMgr, RebuildBCD, FixBoot and Problems, Plural

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm still using the Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 that I built last year. THE most important aspect of that build was not the super-fast processor or the fancy video cards. It was, and continues to be, the SSD. There is no other single thing that you can do to your computer that will make it feel faster than getting an SSD. If you need terabytes of storage, get an external drive, or a SAN like I did. But if you want to waste less time compiling, get an SSD. I know you want a terabyte, but get 160gigs or 256gigs if you can afford it.

Here's some compilation results from last year where I put the Ultimate Developer PC up against a now 4 year old laptop with an SSD.

In this case I'm building NHibernate 3.0 from the command line. The older laptop is the far level and the new PC is the far right. Yes, the new PC is twice as fast, but if you look at the number of seconds spent building, the laptop does OK and that's directly due to the SSD upgrade.

I love my SSDs so much that I haven't done any upgrades to my machines other than SSDs. The argument is usually "SSDs cost too much." That WAS true. You can get a REALLY nice middle of the road Intel SSD for under $200 now. I've got two Crucial RealSSD C300's that are 256 gigs in two different machines and they are now under $400. They are so worth it, more than any other upgrade.

UPDATE: I'm told by Damian Guard that the newer Crucial M4's are even better, both Crucial M4 128gig and Crucial M4 256gig.

When I upgraded my laptop's HD to an SSD it went from about 68 megs a second read to 110 megs a second. At that point I was limited by the SATA bus on that older laptop.

On a desktop machine with a newer SATA bus I get 230 megs a second (that's megabytes not megabits) and that's not even what the max on the drive can get. If I put it on a 6Gb/s SATA bus it's not impossible to see 300 megs a second or more. Of course, it all depends on what kinds of writes you're doing, sequential vs. random, plus block sizes, but since I'm not Anand, I'll leave that detail to him.

Point is this. Do yourself a favor and breathe new life into your computer with an SSD. You deserve it.

Here's the way to think of it. A $400 SSD will cost you just over a dollar a day if it lasts a single year. It will likely last at least 3 to 5 years, but still, if it lasts a YEAR. That's a dollar a day for hours of daily unmitigated joy. What other upgrade in your life could you do for $400 that would totally change your computer life AND give you time back? Well, a few, but I hope you see the point.

Drink one less coffee a day and get an SSD instead and you'll be as productive as two cups of coffee! ;)

There's only one downside to SSDs in my experience. When they do die, and all things do, there is no warning. SSDs don't make noise, or cough or make head sounds. SSDs don't give you warning, they just die. Instantly. So, always have complete image backups of your systems. If a drive dies, you should be able to get back up in a few hours.

Do it. It's the holidays.

Sponsor: This week's ComputerZen feed was kindly sponsored by DevExpress. Do check out their new stuff like DXv2 and perhaps check out a free trial of their complete suite of Developer Tools. I've personally been a huge CodeRush fan for years.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Considered Harmful

Declarative statement opening blog statement. Back away from declarative statement slightly, pivot then double down with even more controversial declarative statement. Insult beloved programming language and assert newer language's idiomatic aesthetic as superior. Including backing statistics with missing Y-axis labels to prop up weak link-bait including declarative statement. Reference Linus, invoke Dijkstra. Oh, everything looks bad if you remember it.

Biased Benchmarks

Supporting albeit equivocating statement. Weak marginally equivocating statement because I want to be on TechCrunch. Farmville.

if 1 then A
  else if 2 then B
  else if 3 then C
  else/otherwise D

Supporting K&R C quote inducing page references with non sequitur reference to Mythical man month.

Use the right tool for the right job. Grep harder. Appeal to authority. Fowler invocation asserting Turing completeness. That's not NP complete. Try to grok harder.

UR doing it wrong

I suggest you try it again. This time, let go your conscious self and act on instinct. Finding a needle in a haystack isn't hard when every straw is computerized. Spare me your space age technobabble, Attila the Hun! Soothe us with sweet lies.

There's a cat in that computer. It's running a custom Mint Distro. That's a meme!

Use the right tool for the right job. SRSLY. Down-voted into oblivion. Obscure Spolsky link justifying contrarian position.. It's a Atwoodian tautology.

Accusations of intellectual dishonesty

Off-handed reference to FizzBuzz, dreamy reminiscence of Programming Pearls, reference to my first Altair and frustration at the current state of affairs.

CmdrTaco name drop, dig at Digg, Y-Combinator sour grapes. I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks *and* blows. Yes, if you make it look like an electrical fire. It's a go-cart, powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction.

Reference to pointless diagram and misplaced frustration at Large Company. Comment directed at patent trolls combined with acerbic witty statement with regards to Lessig and software patents pointlessness.

Random bolded concluding sentence.

Follow me. Read my blog. I have opinions.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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