WheelieTech

Tech news and comments from Justin Wheelhouse

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Twitter – The microblogging website – has had something of an explosion in recent months. If you’re a twitter user you may be finding it hard to cope with the number of tweets, particularly if you follow a lot of people or follow people that tweet alot.

Introducing TweetDeck
One of the popular Twitter applications is TweetDeck, an Adobe(R) AIR application that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV has produced a short overview of the software which I suggest you view here.

Now Cali covers the main features of TweetDeck but there are some additional hints and tips:

Talk too much?
Twitter limits you to 140 characters and sometimes it’s very hard to fit what you are trying to say into that small number. TweetDeck will let you know when you go over the limit by turning the Tweet box:

Sometimes, no matter how much you try, it can be impossible to get the character limit down. TweetDeck has a link to a useful service called TweetShrink. If you’re over the limit why not try pressing the TweetShrink button and your tweet will be whisked away to the TweetShrink service and come back a little shorter.

TweetShrink replaces words and phrases with abbreviations for example You=U and Here=Hre. Hopefully it will bring your tweet within the 140 characters.

If you liked this follow me on twitter: twitter.com/jwheelhouse. Got a TweetDeck tip to share then Post it below!

I’ve said previously that I wanted to know how well Windows 7 performed in a domain environment – well I got hold of a Product Key and downloaded the beta as soon as the Microsoft servers recovered from the massive demand.

I have a HP Compaq 6820s that Dual boots Win XP and Win 7. I installed Win 7 in standalone mode to start off with and I found the interface difficult to grasp at first. After an hour or so the difficulties were gone and I was away (very similar to my Office 2003 – Office 2007 switch.)  If you are used to using Vista then the general feel of the OS is very similar with one noticeable difference – it’s much faster than vista is on the same hardware.

Several days later I decided to take the plunge and join the machine to the domain. I expected it to do exactly the same as Vista and slow down to a point that made it unusable. I was pleasantly surprised, there was a small slow down but not even as bad as the impact joining XP to a domain has on a machine and certainly nowhere near the crawl of Vista.

I’ve been using the machine on a domain for a couple of weeks now and have only had one BSOD which was caused by the Cisco VPN Client. I was a little disappointed that the Windows repair tool did not fix the problem which was easily rectified by the “Last known good configuration” option.

It’s still early days yet but as with most things in Windows 7 – Microsoft have done a good job with the use of the system on a domain. I certainly feel that this is a way my organisation will move forward from XP.

Share your experiences with Windows 7 below.

I’m still here, trying to work on the site – get the layout complete and get posting.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Web 2.0, technological innovation and the UK. A lot of it is due to my sudden twitter fascination (follow me @ twitter.com/jwheelhouse), really getting into Revision3 shows such as Diggnation, Tekzilla and Systm, and not forgetting the first podcast that really got me hooked – GeekBrief.tv.

All of these Web 2.0 services originate from the US. That got me thinking and I thought I would do a little digging to see if I could find some UK originating web 2.0 services. Now it would appear that Last.fm is the biggest success followed by ShoZu. There of course be many more that I am missing or I am simply unaware of their origins – if you know of any please post a comment.

Don’t get me wrong, its not that I don’t enjoy using US based services – I wouldn’t use them if I didn’t! But I have to ask why Web 2.0 start-ups don’t come from the UK, in fact can you imagine a company like Revision3 even making it off the ground? Is is our broadband infrastructure, our fear of trying something new or simply a case of being beaten to it?

Any thoughts? Do you run a UK Based Web 2.0 Service? Answers on a postcard, or failing that in the comments below

OK so its not new news as such but there have been a few announcements / launches recently that have caught my attention, and besides this site didn’t exist when they we’re announced anyway!

T-Mobile G1

The T-Mobile G1 has now gone on sale here in the UK. The platform itself has so much potential and I can see that the platform will really begin to develop now there is a device out there on the market. There was some speculation that due to the open source nature of the platform it wouldn’t be possible to lock it to a particular provider like the networks would like -in fact it is reported that T-Mobile will allow you to unlock the device after 90 days provided your account is in good order.

Of course somebody has already found a way of unlocking the phone. What is of interest is that while the software platform is open source it appears that the hardware is not. The HTC handset will only accept signed firmware – giving T-Mobile/HTC control over the operating system of thiindos handset. Being a bit pessimistic I could see there being a program released allowing users to unlock the phone and then T-Mobile finding a way to block that via a firmware update – much in the same way that Apple does with the iPhone. I guess only time will tell on that.

Still I expect that in the next 6 months to a year there will be quite a few developments on the android front…

Windows 7
Microsoft have given us the first view of the new Windows 7 – many people are expecting the release date to be brought forward which would effectively send the signal that Microsoft are giving up on vista. Others are saying that it will be to Vista what Windows 98 was to Windows 95. They’ve taken some ideas from other sources – such as turning the task bar into a kind of OS X type doc and multi-touch functionality. But what I really want to know is does it perform better than Vista does in a domain environment?

Many people I know that have evaluated Vista for use in a domain have given up and gone back to XP, for some reason in our environments it seems to run incredibly slow which given the fact that we expect many users to be able to log on to any PC for a defined amount of time is a real deal breaker. Still if the performance improvements make it through to the final build we could be using Windows 7 in the future – after all somethings got to take over from XP!

Well that’s the end of my first post, any thoughts, comments or suggestions please leave them below!

Well it’s here, at long last. I’ve blogged before, but mainly for the purposes of a degree course. This time round I’m going to post my ramblings about the things that I am interested in – Technology mainly. Please bear in mind that this is a work in progress and is currently in its very early stages.

People may read it, people may not – if you would like to participate feel free to use the comments facility.