Now from home

If you are a software developer and you are planning to build a product or service, take a look at the Microsoft BizSpark program. If you qualify, the program will give you access to all the Microsoft software, professional support and visibility. It’s similar to an MSDN Premium subscription plus hosting solutions.

I personally think this is a great move from Microsoft. There’s no question that the future of Windows, and therefore Microsoft, depends on software developers betting on their platform.

This program is more convenient for startups than the Empower program. The reason is that you don’t have to commit to certify your application or become a Microsoft Partner at the end (I’ll talk about this in another post).

The sign up process is very easy, however you’ll need a Network Partner. I personally contacted Bob Walsh from 47 Hats, because I’ve been following him for a long time. He is by the way one of the most active BizSpark Network Partners.

This program is a no-brainer for any startup.

This week I’ve been doing some improvements in my business infrastructure. Basically I’ve been upgrading to Windows 7, moving to Gmail and trying to get rid of my old general purpose server.

I’m very happy with all the changes.

First of all Windows 7 rocks! It works like a charm.

Second, my move to Gmail has been painless. Now I can handle all my email from one just place and one account. I’m no longer using Outlook, so one app less to install and configure. Besides this I can access my email from anywhere and by the way, the offline feature is working great too. This move is going to pay off in my next trip to Germany on September.

Finally I had an old P4 running Windows 2003 server. It was used as a file server, print server, FTP server, subversion server and it run a couple of VM). I setup this machine years ago and it has serve me well. But now that I have a WHS is kind of redundant. Not to mention is always on and it makes a lot of noise.

So I’ve been moving away each of its responsibilities one for one.

The file server is now my WHS. Nothing to change here except some network mappings.

I connected the printer to the WHS and install the drivers. No problems.

My code repositories are now hosted on the WHS machine. This was a little trickier but I managed to install the SVNSERVE service directly.

When I need to enable FTP connections I’ll do it on my machine. And the VM runs on my Quad-proc machine nicely when needed, especially now that I have 8 GB of RAM.

I’ve had to disable the Skype add-on because pages with javascript were loading painfully slow. It took me a while to discover that the culprit was Skype, so I hope this post saves you some time.

Firefox v. 3.5.2

Skype Add-on v. 3.3.0.3789

Skype v. 4.1.0.141

A few weeks ago, I posted my intention to move to Gmail all my email accounts. However, there was a problem when sending emails from a non-Gmail domain. Some email clients, like Outlook, add the “on behalf of’” string to those emails.

Fortunately, the Gmail dev team have added the possibility to send those emails using their own SMTP server, so the problem is gone now.

So today I’m moving all my email to Gmail. The process is really simple:

• Sign up into Google Apps for your domain
• Create your email addresses in Google Apps
• Change the MX records for email (Dreamhost even has a button to update them for you)

Because I plan to not use Outlook at all, I need to upload all my existing email messages to Gmail. Google has a tool called Google Email Uploader to do so. It can take a while to upload the email.

Also note that emails bigger than 16 MB are not uploaded.

Everything is going just fine so far.

(This post is in Spanish because it is related with a local issue, however feel free to use the Translator widget in the sidebar to get a translation)

Hace poco decidí sucumbir a la tentación y adquirir un iPhone de los nuevos. Eso a pesar de tener que abandonar el operador Yoigo, con el que he estado muy satisfecho durante 3 años, y pasarme a Movistar de la que ya sé a priori que me va a dar dolores de cabeza.

Pues bien, una semana después de tomar la decisión y 1 mes después de que se lanzara el nuevo iPhone 3Gs ya puedo ver las primeras maniobras extrañas de este operador: Están restringiendo la distribución de los nuevos iPhones o directamente no se están distribuyendo.

¿Cómo es posible que no haya iPhones en ninguna tienda de Valencia? Por lo que he podido leer ocurre igual en otras ciudades españolas. Al preguntar en tiendas cómo es que no tienen este modelo las respuestas son variadas, pero hay una que creo da con el verdadero motivo:

• Hay mucha demanda y no hay stock, si quieres te apunto en una lista de espera
• Se ha roto el stock, no van a haber hasta después del verano
• Movistar está intentando vender todos los iPhone 3G posibles y depende de ellos abrir el grifo de los nuevos
• Nosotros ni lo hemos visto, pero oye, aquí tengo el 3G que lo puedes actualizar a “3Gs” y te va a hacer lo mismo pero más barato
• Me han llegado sólo 3 y estoy esperando que me entren más

¿Podría ser que Apple realmente no tuviera suficientes iPhones 1 mes después de su lanzamiento? No creo, pero aún así llamé a Apple para que me diera su versión la respuesta fué más o menos así:

Apple no tiene ningún problema de stock con los nuevos iPhones y se suministran sin retrasos conforme se van solicitando. Si en tu tienda no hay prueba en otra o que te lo pidan, en un par de días deberías tenerlo.

Obviamente podrían estar mintiendo pero… ¿a quién creemos? Yo lo tengo claro.

Además, buscando en Internet no es difícil ver que casualmente a la distribución del iPhone 3G le pasó exactamente lo mismo. Da que pensar ¿no?

Por mi parte, cada día que pasa es un día más que tengo para replantearme el tema del iPhone y Movistar. Tengo ganas de tener un iPhone, pero hacerle el juego a Movistar va en contra de mis principios… veremos qué pasa.

In Windows 7 (and probably on Windows Vista too), all the drivers must be signed. If not, the OS will refuse to install them. I think this is a good feature and it probably gets rid of 90% of the stability problems of Windows.

However, today I need to install an unsigned driver. I sometimes use com0com to test the serial communications code of one of my applications. This tool allows you to create virtual COM ports that are connected. Very useful.

However, installing the new ports requires to use their own unsigned drivers, and Windows 7 doesn’t allow that. In order to bypass this limitation, you’ll need to reboot your computer and press F8 to get to the Advanced Boot Options menu. There’s a boot option at the bottom to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. This will allow you to install the ports just fine.

Microsoft Research has released an application under the name of Project Tuva. It’s aimed to release inspiring scientific videos and content. They couldn’t choose any better than Richard Feynman to start with.

I get hooked to Richard Feynman not too long ago. But since I saw some of his videos, I can help but try to read and see all the material available. He has its own way to explain things, very approachable and fun. If I had too choose two adjectives to describe his talks I’d said inspiring and motivating.

And what about Project Tuva? Well, it looks really nice. They have built a cool interface using Silverlight. It has lots a useful features like captions, timelines, interactive content and a lot more.

Highly recommended. +1 to Microsoft for this!

By the way, it doesn’t seem to work with Firefox 3.5 (at least not for me), it hangs on Preparing content. No problems using Internet Explorer 8.

I’m not a heavy mobile phone user. I only make between 30 – 60 calls/month from my mobile phone which means roughly 3 hours of talking time. Since 2006 I use Yoigo as my cell provider and I couldn’t be happier. They have a simple contract, great network (not a single outage in all this time) and the best prices in Spain, just 8 cent/min. plus 15 cent per connection call. Also if you use your phone to browse Internet or as a modem, you can be sure that the maximum price you’re going to pay is 1,20 € per day. It has one limitation though, you cannot make video calls, but… who cares?

I want to be clear, I strongly recommend Yoigo to anyone. It is by far, the best provider in Spain.

Well that said, I want an iPhone. Unfortunately, Apple strategy of making exclusive deals with just one provider per country forces me to move from Yoigo to Movistar (Telefónica). I have lots of moral issues about this. Not only Movistar have considerably higher prices, but their Internet plans suck big time. I also think that they try to fool people creating multiple contract types, which you have to carefully study to not end up paying a lot more or committing yourself with them for life.

All in all, like I said, I want an iPhone. I still remember when I saw the 2007 keynote where Steve Jobs presented for the very first time the IPhone (jaw-dropping), Apple got me then. I decided to resist and wait a few generations and now the iPhone 3GS looks great.

I’m not going to list all the goodies the iPhone has, instead I’ll just say that is one of the geekiest devices of our time.

I must also add that I have medium WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), which is totally unexpected.

So, if I finally sell my soul Movistar which, unless someone shots me a common sense injection, is going to happen, I’ll have an iPhone very soon. I’ll post about it (and I’m afraid I’ll be posting rants about Movistar too).

Update: iPhone 3GS shortage in my city. Already in a waiting list. Bummer!

Because I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as possible, I’ve thought that maybe it’s time to finally leave Outlook behind and move to Gmail. I’m not totally convinced as there are many features in Outlook that I use extensively. All of them exists on the “Google online only” world but I want to be sure that they will fit perfectly in my workflow before doing a definitive move.

For example, there’s an issue when sending emails from different (not Google) accounts in Gmail.

Gmail allows you to receive emails from multiple POP3 accounts and you can also select from which account you send emails; but there’s a gotcha. When someone receives an email sent by Gmail using a different account, not the Gmail one, they receive something like this in the sender field:

account@gmail.com; on behalf of; Jose [jose@otherdomain.com]

This of course is not what I expect. Google is aware of this situation and they’re trying to fix the issue by sending the email through the original SMTP server instead of using their own. It seems that if they use their SMTP server using an email address from another domain, most emails will end up on the spam folders.

I know it’s annoying, and we’re working to fix this "On Behalf Of"

behavior as soon as we can. As we’ve mentioned in our Help Center [1],

the reason we include your address in the headers at all is to help

prevent your mail from being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email

services. For those who want the technical details, we use the

‘Sender’ field to be consistent with DomainKeys [2], a commonly used

email authentication mechanism. If we didn’t do this, your messages

may get sent to your recipients’ spam folders, which would be worse

than the annoyance the current implementation is causing.

The ideal (but non-trivial) fix is to enable you to send mail through

your own ISP, while still allowing you to use the Gmail user

interface. This is the feature I mentioned above, and the one we’re

working on now.

I’m looking forward to see this problem fixed. I’d really love to manage all my email accounts from a single “online” place.

There’s no upgrade option if you want to upgrade from Vista 32bit to Windows 7 64bit, so I’ll need to do a clean install. These are the apps and tools I’ll need to install:

• Visual Studio 2008
  • ReSharper
  • ViEmu
  • TestDriven.NET
  • Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight 3
    • Silverlight Toolkit
  • ASP.NET MVC 1.0
  • Xceed Components
  • Report Sharp Shooter
• SQL Server
  • SQL Server 2008
  • SQL Server 2005 Express
• Virtual PC 2007 (I have to check if I can use the Windows 7 Virtual PC)
• Subversion / TortoiseSVN
• Office 2007
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (or maybe version 3.0 or wait to 3.5.1)
• DBDesc
• Picassa 3
• Skype
• SlimTimer
• HP MediaSmart Connector
• TweetDeck
• vim
• Spotify
• Putty
• 7-Zip
• Windows Live Writer
• Paint.NET
• FoxIt Reader
• UltaVNC

On top of this I need to add the appropriate licenses and configure the apps. I’m afraid I’ll have to wait until the weekend…