One of my pet peeves with sites is moving ads. Anything that distracts me from your content is not good design. I understand that the revenue model for this site is based on ads but I think there has to be a better use of them. I decided to document this with video to truly see the horror.
This evening I decided to setup a few pieces of a build server on a windows 7 installation and found out Windows 7 does not come with SMTP Server. Now that being said I don’t thing Windows Vista did either. This is actually a good thing for home users as having an SMTP server can running on a machine can end up sending spam if malware gets on your machine. In my case I need it for some development tools I’m using. After a little research I cam across the solution.
Download and install hMailServer.
Here are the steps to get it up and running.
That is it. You have a mail server now on Windows 7. This software has a lot of options including having multiple domains. Remember to secure it the best you can so you don’t become a spam haven. Happy SMTP Mailing.
The reason for my setup was to have a mail server for Team City. I will Add additional information on how to setup Team City in the coming weeks.
Recently I’ve been very very …very quiet in the Blogosphere. I am in the middle of doing some prototyping. I cannot necessarily give to much information at this time. One thing I can state is that I’m working on a project that I am very passionate about.
I highly recommend working on a project that you are passionate about. The other item I would add is work on something that you also believe will help the world. Not always does everything have to be about making billions of dollars. Quite literally I believe money will come as long as you apply yourself to the proper efforts. I have been through ups and downs in my career. When you take ownership of your work, the work does not feel so much like work, and good things come your way. Call it karma or whatever you wish. There is something to say about positive thoughts and actions causing positive results.
I will be starting to blog a bit more often now as I’m officially scheduling time to blog. I also have a set of pre-recorded sessions on a few technologies that I just have to post edit. These will show up on a section called Screenies (Screencasts) on my site in the up and coming weeks.
One last topic before I close this post. There are a few events in WI happening in the coming weeks. This weekend is Bar Camp Milwaukee 4. I would highly recommend if you are in the area to visit it. Also there is another event coming in Madison Called MadCamp. This is a Microsoft Technology Camp.
Stay tuned as some great things are to come from Insomniac Development LLC in the coming months.
I ran across an email from Infragistics to day regarding a project they have released the source code to called AQUA. This is an application built with Azure, WPF, MVVM, ADO.NET Data Services and LiveID. I will personally be taking a look at this over the weekend and see how much I can learn about their implementation and will follow up with a blog entry and possibly a Screenie (Screencast) going over their architecture. From the screenshots I’ve seen and some of the articles on it this may be a great example for developers investigating using WPF for Line of Business. I personally believe all of my windows applications native to windows will be developed using WPF so this is very important to me that more companies put time and effort into proving the technologies. Props to Infragistics for giving back to the community.
More to come…
Today Steve Evans a friend of mine hit me up asking what version of Fluent I was using because he was running into issues with the current version of Fluent and NHibernate. I started to investigate and ran into the same problem. Basically it was causing an error due to a new dependency that was not with the binary or source versions of Fluent.
The reason there is issues with NHibernate currently is because there was a change in NHibernate 2.1. In the past there was a hard coded dependency on Castle’s DynamicProxy2. This has been changed now to allow freedom of choice. Currently you can choose LinFu or Castle.
If you currently download Build (#535) you are going to have to do some massaging. Here are the steps I did to get Fluent working in my current project with Castle Proxy.
I have also created a zip of just the DLLs which you could also use: Download My Copy of the DLLs.
I don’t think I’ve ever ran across this before. An error message stating it was embarrassed?
Just thought I would share this little gem.
This evening I was watching the Nascar Coca Cola Zero 400 on TNT. This is the first time I have watched a race on TNT this season. Their coverage for this race they called “wide open”. As I was watching the race I was getting very irritated by how much of the screen was taken up by the lower third even when there was no additional information being displayed.
Figure 1: Original Layout
In Figure 1 the race was displayed in the section labelled Video. The Ad section was usually a static version of some sponsor. The Leader board was displayed on the top section. The lower portion of the lower 3rd was used on occassion for additional information. When it was not used it was just gray and wasted space. This lower section could have been designed better by just allowing it to collapse when there was no additional information.
The other issue I had with the coverage was these popup commercials throughout the presentation.
Figure 2: Video Ads
I personally think this is very distractive from what I am trying to watch. I actually would rather prefer to have it on the side not overlapping my viewing area so if I wanted to ignore it I could, but with where it is located it just covers the track up.
Here is a possible better layout in my opinion.
These issues happen constantly in applications today, especially the web. The more moving content there is and overlap of content you take away from the User Experience. It is important that you ensure the information the user wants to see is clear and in focus. Overlapping content causes distractions and makes the interface seem cluttered. In today’s society we already have information overload with all of the different sources we have for information, why do we have to make the information even harder to follow.
When you are designing interfaces please keep them clear and concise.
NOTE: I did take pictures of the interface that TNT used but decided based on their statement at the end of the broadcast it would not be proper to use them in this way either based on their verbiage.
This is a test of Screentoaster. I'm also experimentally converting it to flash.
Live Mesh is a service currently in Beta from Microsoft. I have been using it for quite a while. I realized that I keep running into issues with sharing OneNote Notebooks between machines. Live Mesh is the perfect solution for me.
OneNote allows you to do this but only on a local file share or a SharePoint Server.
To work around this I save it just to the default location and then add the directory to live mesh on my first machine.
To do this go to the location normally located at c:\Users\username\Document\OneNote Notebooks\. If you right click on the “OneNote Notebooks” directory you will see an option to “Add folder to Live Mesh”.
On a second, third, forth, etc machine you can add a mesh folder already on mesh and sync it to your local store of OneNote Notebooks. From your systray you can access the synced folders.
By clicking on OneNote Notebooks Mesh will allow you to select where you want to store it.
Mesh will ask you if want merge your current files if you have any local on the new machine.
Mesh can be used to synchronize other items as well but for the mobile warrior OneNote is a brilliant tool and I need it on all of my 6 laptops.