Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • Saved by a digital washing machine

    Want to know one of the pitfalls of a car with “keyless drive” — the amazingly cool technology that lets you simply walk up to the car, open it, climb in, start it and drive away? You are certain to completely forget about the remote, leaving it in the clothes you last wore or in…

  • Why MOOC has me deeply excited

    My last role at Lotus, ending in 2000 (so long ago!), was in distance learning. Having lost the leadership of the growing messaging and collaboration market as a result of a withering competitive battle against Microsoft that lasted most of the 90s, we were seeking ways to leverage the Notes/Domino application platform in areas where…

  • Still recovering from Drupal: one year later

    It’s time to build and write another website — something I do about once a year, it seems. After my last (self-inflicted) debacle with Drupal (here and here), there was no question that I’d use WordPress for the new website I am developing for Zixi. And when I decided today to write (yet another) love…

  • Got snow?

    Well, it’s over — over that is except for the backache I gave myself digging us out. Here in Southborough, the Blizzard of 2013 was a whopper. A TV station said we had 25.5 inches, but I am quite certain we got more than that. Tricia was scheduled to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She…

  • A PowerPoint 2013 mea culpa on wrapping text

    Every now and then, a human touch comes through in a software product that is otherwise devoid of any human touch. And it’s always a little bit of a surprise because we don’t think of software in the same terms as we do things that claim to be “handicraft” or “hand-made.” Software seems somehow divorced…

  • How to improve Office 2013 performance in a virtual machine

    Increase performance in Windows virtual machines

  • Riddle me this: why is it so freakin’ hard to nail a visual metaphor?

    Today at work, I was trying to describe something in words that I could clearly see in my mind to an artist we have engaged to develop an animation for our product. And, not for the first time in the recent past, words failed the normally loquacious Alex. No matter what analogies I drew, no matter…

  • Stone-cold file backup: Amazon Glacier, Cloudberry and FastGlacier

    Recently, I’ve blogged about full-disk image backup of Windows using Clonezilla. I’ve also blogged about the excellent “trust no one” (thanks, Steve Gibson, for this term) CloudBerry file-oriented backup utility. These things help you create a backup. But where should you store the backup? How secure is that backup if you store it in the…

  • The FCC kowtows to the cable industry (yet again)

    These days, I am fortunate to be working in a company that serves the broadcast, cable and entertainment markets. This unites my long interest in these industries with my love of deep-geek technology. (My company, Zixi, makes a video transport platform that allows these companies to develop new applications for high-quality streaming video.) Since I…

  • Apple better look out: Microsoft Windows 8 and Office 2013 are fantastic

    [Looking for info on Office 2013 performance in a virtual machine? Check out this post.] It’s been about a week since I upgraded my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 and MacBook Air (mid-2011) to Windows 8 and Office 2013. (On the MBA, I run Office 2013 in Parallels virtual machines under both Windows 7 and Windows 8,…

  • Robots, Clonezilla and upgrading to Windows 8 (strike that, it’s now Windows 10)

    Once, many years ago, I gave a marketing manager who worked for me in Taipei grief for packaging the localized version of Lotus Notes in a box with a “friendly robot” theme and name. Apparently, Transformer-like images go over well with Taiwanese buyers. I was wrong; he was right and I learned an important lesson…

  • Go ahead, ignore this post

    In all the blog posts I’ve written, I’ve never written one to be ignored. ‘Cept for this one. A WordPress plugin that I very much like — Twitter Tools — has been re-written to require another plugin called Social. The plugin authors are WordPress mavens, so I trust them. Unlike many plugins, Social and Twitter…