Microsoft’s not dead, just selling Kinects

Last week, John Dvorak had a column entitled Microsoft is dead money for investors
Commentary: Software giant is too conservative and late to the game

Dvorak’s opinion is based on comments that Microsoft won’t have a tablet product out until next year…

The company looks like it has an ingrained fear of failure, resulting in an incredibly cautious approach to everything. You’d think this would result in a mistake-free corporate environment, but the opposite seems true.

Generally speaking, the high-tech sector is a lot like football. Playing not to lose results in a preoccupation with losing, and eventually losing.

Microsoft is in perpetual defense: When it has the ball, the company does not want to take any risks, so runs up the middle for no yardage.

Apparently Dvorak is just looking at the wrong products. To extend his football analogy, Microsoft just ran a gadget play for a score. The Microsoft Kinects just set a Guiness World Record for the fastest selling consumer electronic device of ALL TIME.

The news comes from Xbox LIVE’s Major Nelson who made the announcement via Twitter by saying, “News: 10 Million Kinect Sensors and more than 10 Million Kinect Games Sold to Date.”

This makes the Kinect the fastest selling consumer electronics device according to Guiness.

So while everyone else is fiddling with smartphones and pads, which I’m sure have zip for margins because of the competition, Microsoft has made the hottest gaming console add on ever. Not sure that makes them dead money

Update:
Looks like tablets are a bubble and might not be the best product to be producing right now…

Why I hate Joomla!

Attempted to update a Joomla! install on a client’s site this morning. The install apparently failed, immediately displaying:

Fatal error: Cannot make non static method JApplication::getRouter() static in class JSite in /home/frppro5/public_html/includes/application.php on line 616

Nothing on the Joomla! forums or any answers as near as I can tell. Wish they wouldn’t put in an automatic update feature if it’s not going to at least fail more gracefully than this did. Guess I’m just spoiled with WordPress…

Removing Timestamp from Photos

Timestamps on photos are great when you want to know when a picture was taken, but when adding the image to your website the numbers don’t look so great. All too often clients send me pictures that have an orange or yellow timestamp in the bottom left corner.

Fortunately, there is a great plugin for gimp that helps remove the timestamp from photos. Just download and install this plugin and you will be able to remove the timestamp from individual photos, or use the batch mode to clean up a whole directory of images. It works great and has saved me a ton of time.

Extend your desktop and share your mouse with Synergy

How many of you work on multiple machines? Personally, I have a desktop and two laptops. The downside of multiple machines is the need for multiple mouses (mice?) and keyboards. In fact it’s not so much the space that’s required for the input devices as it is the constant need to switch between them. I have known software developers that find even having to reach for a mouse has a negative impact on their productivity, how much worse is it to have to reach for two different mice?

So, I was explaining this to a friend and he suggested I google it (what a novel idea). So I did, and I found an excellent solution to my problem. The Synergy Project is open source software that allows you to move your mouse between screens and use your keyboard to input to multiple machines.

I downloaded and set it up on my two Windows 7 laptops, and I’m glad to report that after a few small network and firewall issues, mostly stemming from my wireless router’s AP setting, it seems to work extremely well. The setup, configuration and troubleshooting/error reporting is not as slick and as I’ve come to expect from the current crop of commercial apps, but it wasn’t bad either and I’m certainly not complaining.

If you want to extend your Windows, Mac and Linux desktops across multiple machines I would recommend giving Synergy a try.

Enable Telnet in Windows 7

From time to time I still like to use telnet. It can be nice for troubleshooting and if you want to see if an service is running on a specific port. So, recently, I was annoyed to find out that Windows 7 (and Windows Vista) doesn’t include telnet by default.

So, here’s how to enable it.

1. Start
2. Control Panel
3. Programs And Features
4. Turn Windows features on or off
5. Check Telnet Client
6. Hit OK