I attended the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies last evening and it was definitely a chance of a life time experience. Here are photos of all, or rather, most of the teams that are participating in the 2010 Winter Olympics. I may have missed photographing a few teams during the march-in as I was also busy enjoying the moment. In accordance with Olympic tradition, Greece entered first and Canada being the host country, marched in last. It was quite amazing seeing all the participating teams in their unique uniforms enter the stadium. Enjoy!

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Did you get a new computer and now want to sync all your iTunes and iPhone data to the new computer? For anyone going through this process, take comfort in knowing that there is a simple way to seamlessly transfer all music, photos, data and iPhone apps to the new machine. There are quite a few articles discussing this but having to wade through all the technical data is daunting. In short, here is a simple process that worked for me. Note, I installed Windows 7 on a new harddrive so I still had all my old data after the new install. If you are doing an upgrade, be sure to backup all your data for the move and you will still be able to use this migration method.

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There was a time when a personal computer would just do what it was supposed to. I am referring to the tried and true Windows XP operating system. Over the last two years, newer computers came loaded with its successor Windows Vista. I have to admit, I liked the new user interface and some of the powerful tools that came bundled with Vista. In fact, the install disc contained a tool that fixed one machine (twice) when Vista just refused to boot. I can remember both times thinking to myself how cool it was that a corrupted OS can self heal. Thinking back now, if Vista did not break itself, I would have had to use that boot-up disc at all! Enough about Vista. The following is a recap of my own experiences upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 and why I feel ripped off by Microsoft. It is not what you may think.

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While you may finally be able to achieve fast LAN transfers under Windows Vista, the high speed you managed to have gained may not last. The annoying symptom of moving large files over a LAN in Windows Vista’s is that network performance may simply slow down before the file is fully transferred. The problem was not easy to detect since it was not an issue when transferring smaller-sized files. No need to pull out any more hair, here is the solution.

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Recently, something very odd has happened to Wordpress that powers this blog. Front facing pages load fast but the back end Wordpress admin pages are extremely slow to load. So slow that at times, when I save a draft, the new content would not even take. Nothing times out but many admin pages are just extremely slow to load. It turned out to be one of the plugins. Luckily I don’t have many plugins on this blog and just systematically deactivated each. The culprit was an older Google Sitemap plugin. Simply made a quick update to a new one and admin sluggishness was gone! Can’t believe how fast Wordpress can be when it’s working right. If you are also experiencing Wordpress admin pages loading slowly, try deactivating your plugins.

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Last year, I setup a Windows Home Server (WHS) to run as a file and backup server. During the time, I connected with some of the industry leaders in the WHS realm. This was when I met a WHS expert by the name of Alexander Kent. Alex had developed a powerful Add-In for WHS called Grid Junction. Simply put, Grid Junction is a “must-have” Add-In for anyone who powers their WHS with an uninterrupted power supply (battery backup). During a lengthy power outage, Grid Junction can be scheduled to safely power down your Windows Home Server and networked PC’s to prevent data loss or Windows corruption. Through the tweaking of Grid Junction, I got to know Alex via instant messaging and email. I learned that Grid Junction won the Best Windows Home Server Add-in of 2008 Award and that Alex had received Microsoft’s Prestigious MVP Award for his contribution to the Microsoft Home Server. In short, this guy knows his way around Windows Home Server. Recently, Alex held a contest at HomeServerLand.com to give away copies of Windows Home Server and I am happy to report that I am a recipient of one of these! In fact, the above image shows what actually arrived in the mail; a copy of Windows Home Server, a paperback copy of “Mommy, Why is there a Server in the House?”, a paperback copy of “Server Feng Shui”, a WHS Pen with stickers to match! So a big thank you goes out to Alex for not only sending some cool items but for all your help in tweaking my Windows Home Server.

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Throughout the years, I have worked with some really good partners. Whether it is being very responsive, super proactive or just plain easy to work with, every so often, a particular partner would stand out from the rest. Today, I wanted to give a quick shout out to one particular partner that is all of the above… and more! That partner is Doclix’s AdSide Network.

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of participating on an AdTech San Francisco / AdSpace panel with Leora Blumberg, VP of Business Development from Doclix. To make a long story short, Leora and I immediately connected and we are now partnered with AdSide (Doclix’s advertising network) to delivery their ads. Not only was it a pleasure to meet Leora this year, but I also began working with AdSide’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Yael Yekutie. I only need to say that both of these ladies are simply fantastic people! Period.

It was definitely great to have built another good business relationship this year, but the icing on the cake actually came last week. To my surprise and delight, AdSide sent us a holiday care package. Here are the goodies from Harry and David that arrived in the mail a few days ago. There were actually some delicious mint chocolate cookies as well but they did not make it to the photo shoot. I had eaten them already.

It’s nice enough to be able to work with great people in the advertising industry but it gave me extra warm and fuzzies this Christmas when a great business partner cared enough to send a nice gesture. So a giant thank you goes out to the AdSide team. Not just for the yummy goodies but as a partner, you guys & girls completely rock! Know that the goodies will be thoroughly enjoyed over many movies throughout the holidays.

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Recently, a client contacted me to share that their web server’s firewall was busy banning IP addresses from port scanners. Sure enough, a quick peek at the server logs show that there were indeed multiple IP bans lately. Most of these were temporary bans as the firewall did not deem these infractions critical enough to be permanent bans. When looking at the notifications, a particular domain in the ban list caught my eye. It was a microsoft.com domain along with an IP address. A WHOIS lookup shows that this IP does indeed belong to the software giant Microsoft Corp, manufacturer of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The reason for permanently banning this IP was that the IP itself had too been temporarily banned too many times in a certain time frame. So after a few warnings, the server’s firewall permanently banned this Microsoft IP from hitting the client’s web server again.

131.107.0.114 (US/United States/tide544.microsoft.com)

After some more digging around and research, could this be a case where it is a false positive result for port scanning? Since we do not want to hinder any of MSN’s servers, whether it’s Bing.com or MSN search, from crawling our web sites the more important question is actually should I unban this IP address? Anyone else also experience your firewall banning Microsoft IP addresses for port scanning? What would you do?

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Twitter’s search actually does a pretty good job at locating tweets for a particular geographical region. Just enter the city name in Twitter search and it will find all results containing this city. Recently, there has been an increase in Twitter robot accounts taking advantage of adding a city name to their auto-posting of classified ads. When I search for the term Vancouver, I now also see a list of annoying classified posts from various “for sale” bots. I was so annoyed by this that I even tried Twitter’s LEAVE and BLOCK commands but apparently, the spam classifieds still show up in Twitter search results. Luckily, there is a solution to remove spam from your Twitter searches.

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Twitter is a fun and productive tool that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates. This free social networking service has grown so exponentially that, unfortunately, it is often times plagued with bugs and server time outs – frustrating to say the least. The latest bug that is tormenting Twitter users worldwide is the inability to upload a background image. A Twitter background has to be 800 kilobytes in file size and must be in a JPG, GIF or PNG format. But even if you abide by these rules, many users are still getting the dreaded “There was a problem with your picture. Was it an animated gif? We don’t support those!” error. No Twitter, I was trying to upload a JPG that was 700 kilobytes in file size. Seems like Twitter already knows about this bug but there has not been a fix yet… until now that is.

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Yesterday, I had the privilege of listening to John Tsang, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary, speak about business opportunities for Canadians in Hong Kong. The full day forum took place at the new Vancouver Convention Center. One memorable remark was that in 2008, Mr. Tsang removed the alcohol import tax in Hong Kong. This lead to a 400% increase in Canadian wines being exported to the now alcohol import tax free country. That is definitely great news for businesses, Canadian or otherwise, that export alcohol to this part of Asia. To the right is a photo of John Tsang speaking at the HKCBA (Hong Kong-Canada Business Association) luncheon.

Thanks to Shirley Wong from Invest Hong Kong for the invite! It gave me the chance to meet some very interesting contacts like:

• Jeremy Godfrey – Hong Kong’s Chief Information Officer
• Lee Kane – Canada’s Trade Commissioner, North Asia Commercial Relations
• Tatsuya Nakagawa – President & CEO of Atomica Creative
• Kenneth Wong – BCIT’s Major Gifts Officer

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