A Leslie Wong Blog

I must be playing Gears of War too much. Everytime I see our propane tanks, I want to shoot them.

At the Village Gate, I think it was at a celebration of Dizzy‘s birthday, I saw Max Roach just playing the hihat, solo. He was a genius.

International Left-Handers Day was yesterday, August 13th, so I missed my day. Here’s an interesting list of famous left handers compiled by Dr. M.K. Holder, Director Handedness Research Institute, Hillcrest Psychology Research Center at Indiana University.

What’s new in this release:
- Direct3D support on top of WGL instead of GLX for better portability.
- Many DirectSound fixes.
- Still more gdiplus functions.
- Many crypt32 improvements.
- Lots of bug fixes.

read more | digg story

Kevin Rose over at Digg writes, “Feast your eyes on the greatest pizza ever created! Forget cheese being the only ingredient in a stuffed-crust pizza, Pizza Hut’s new Double Roll sticks hot dog sausages in there too“

read more | digg story

On Digg, 1KrazyKorean writes, “When smells turn a room sour, it may be time for an intervention. Try these gentle home remedies for the most off-putting odors.”

I thought I remembered ice cubes in the garbage disposal worked for odors.

read more | digg story

I signed up on Microsoft Connect to beta test Windows Home Server RC1 (WHS). For what it does, it’s a great piece of software. It’s based on Windows Server 2003 but with a very simple user interface for home users. Each PC (Vista or XP SP2) on the network gets the Windows Home Server Connector installed. The software finds the server and automates the backup of each PC.

The front-end on each client is Windows Home Server Console. It displays the computers on the network and their backup status, User Accounts, Shared Folders, Server Storage and Network Status.

During installation, WHS destructively formats all the disks used on the server and creates network shares, e.g., video, photos and music, that are all available to each client. Each user account has their own personal folder and basic permissions – Full, Read and None can be set on each folder. With at least two hard disks in the server, the ability to have redundancy for shared folders is available.

WHS also has the ability to share stored media with an Xbox 360, and does this very well also.

Remote access via the web is also available, and the WHS software will automatically configure PNP 2.0 routers.

The one application that’s missing in WHS that would make it a killer home app is Windows Media Center. The media hub software is built into Vista Home Premium and Ultimate Editions and XP Media Center Edition (MCE) but not in WHS. I have the WHS PC hooked up to our Sony KV-36FV1, so I want to use it as a Media Center. Unfortunately that means I can’t use Windows Home Server.