September 02, 2005

Give to the Red Cross and I'll send you a book

There will be plenty of time to talk about computers later. Right now this country is in a crisis that is getting worse daily. If I worked for a company that were being managed as poorly as the relief effort in New Orleans, I'd quit in disgust. Sadly, we can't quit, and we can only hope that someone competent appears on the scene. Soon.

Meanwhile, I'm donating the check that Google just sent me to the American Red Cross, along with an amount equal to the check I'll get in a few weeks for this month's ad revenue. That's a total of $350. If you've been waiting to make a donation, I hope you'll give as well.

If you want a reason to give more, I have an offer for the first 30 people who would like one of my books. Make a donation to the Red Cross or any legitimate charity that is working in New Orleans. Give as much as you can afford. Then send me an e-mail (ed-blog AT bott DOT com) with the details, including your address, and I'll send you one of my books, signed. Tell me which one you want. I've got lots of copies of the standard edition of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP and Ed Bott's Your New PC. I'll pick up the postage and handling. All you have to do is donate to the relief efforts.

More Bloglines issues

According to an announcement on the Bloglines News page, one of their crawler machines crashed yesterday, causing an outage that lasted until very late in the day. They say everything should be fixed by now.

But what's really curious is that two announcements have been scrubbed from the News page. One was the August 9 notice that read, in full:

Bloglines Update

Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue -- we've simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn't put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.

That notice appeared after I criticized Bloglines in a series of posts and exchanged some e-mail messages and comment threads with a Bloglines spokesperson. It was there yesterday, when I pointed out that Russell Beattie had noticed problems at Bloglines as well.

In yesterday's post, I asked Bloglines to post an update on the status of the server move. And today the August 9 announcement is gone. Down the memory hole.

I have an e-mail in to another contact at Ask Jeeves, the new parent company of Bloglines, requesting an explanation. I'll pass along their response.

Update: The Ask Jeeves flack who got back to me says "the announcement was removed accidentily and we are still in the process of the move."

What? This so-called server relocation has now taken a full month, with no end in site. This is bullshit. Here's my follow-up e-mail to the Bloglines spokesperson:

Thanks for the update. I’ve asked this question several times and can’t understand why no one has answered it yet. Maybe you can help.

When is the server move scheduled to be completed? I have honestly never heard of a move of this sort that takes more than a week, much less drag on for a month.

Your very large and very loyal customer base has a right to ask that question, don’t you think?

I look forward to your reply.

But I certainly won't be holding my breath. My most recent post has been up on my site for more than five hours, but my 359 subscribers who use Bloglines still haven't seen it. That's pitiful. Mark Fletcher, maybe you need to make a few phone calls and find out what your people are actually doing. They seem to have taken the summer off.

September 01, 2005

I'm not the only one who is noticing problems at Bloglines

Russ Beattie, who gets more traffic in an hour than I get in a week, says he's about ready to give up on Bloglines:

Lots of Bloglines folk have pinged me about the fact that my site isn’t updating. Not much I can do. I’ve emailed them several times to fix their “jsession” bug (where they include Java Server Sessions as part of the URL) or to just delete every feed of mine except for the index.rss main feed. But that doesn’t seem to happen. I’ve done redirects on old feed URLs so it should work. I think Bloglines is starting to get crufty - there’s lots and lots of things that aren’t working, and the site is starting to bog down like crazy. I was really hoping that the move to Ask Jeeves would accelerate updates and improvements, not stall them.

As part of a promised commitment to be more transparent in providing information to their large customer base, Bloglines posted exactly one lame update back on Auguust 9. "Everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete," that update said.

Apparently the Bloglines staff is making the change to their hosting service using sneakernet. That would explain why they keep ignoring my e-mail messages.

Freeze Dry for Windows Vista

Looks like Windows Vista will have a cool new feature with a cool name. The word comes from ZDNet Australia:

Windows Vista will include a new technology known as Freeze Dry designed to maintain application states and unsaved documents even when patches are automatically applied and PCs are rebooted.

Speaking at the Australian Tech Ed conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland this week, senior product manager Amy Stephan offered a preview of the Freeze Dry technology.

Many IT managers plan to automatically install patches and updates on machines during periods when they are inactive, such as overnight or on weekends. However, as some patches require machines to reboot, users who leave documents open and unsaved run the risk of losing that data if the machine is automatically updated.

Freeze Dry eliminates that problem by automatically saving application state and documents and then restoring them once the system restarts, Stephan said.

This is one of the biggest complaints people have about Automatic Updates as implemented in Windows XP. If you forget to save a file and leave it open overnight when your machine gets an update, you might find that file gone in the morning. It'll be interesting to see how well this works.

Tip of the day: Get to know your power button

It used to be so simple: A power button was an on/off switch, period. But on modern personal computers, things are more complicated.

Most PCs built in the 21st Century use a combination of motherboards and power switches designed to cooperate with the operating system. Typically, pressing the power button puts the PC into one of several standby modes (or wakes it up from this "sleep" state). If Windows is running, pressing the power button might activate the Windows Shut Down function.

What happens if your computer is misbehaving and you want to shut off the power and restart? This one stumps many people, who press the power button repeatedly and conclude that it's broken when it doesn't seem to work. The secret? Press the power button and hold it down for three to five seconds. This shortcut overrides the normal action of the power button and turns the power off. (If this doesn't work, you may have a loose wire in the connection from the power switch to the motherboard and power supply.)

In tomorrow's tip, I'll explain how to configure the operation of the power button (and a few other, related settings) in Windows.