So if someone told you there was a way to claw back some of those treats that eat into your disposable income, you would probably jump at the chance. Well, actually there is a way, and it is older than money itself.

It used to be called barter – exchanging your goods and services for someone else’s – but today it is more commonly known as ’swapping’.

… allow people to build up credits by doing favours for others and then cashing in those credits at a later date.

Swapping and bartering allows everyone to get goods and services without spending any money.

I just can’t get over the dumb ass-ness (my new word of the day) of this story – the journalist and their editor should be ashamed.

So you ‘barter‘ your goods and time to others in exchange for something called ‘credits‘. You can then ’swap’ other goods and services for those ‘credits’

or re-writing that sentance

you ‘sell‘ your goods and time to others in exchange for something called ‘money‘. You can then ‘buy’ other goods and services for that ‘money’

Yes thats right – MONEY is just a convenient way of keeping track of CREDITS. Cash has no value in itself – its value is that you can SWAP it for other things.

We used to use beads and sea-shells instead of cash, but they don’t fit in your wallet very well and tend to jam up ATM’s.

I figure its been long enough now for the serious kinks to be worked out and I’ve been putting it off long enough. Its not the installation itself that is hard – mostly its a simple as bunging in a DVD, selecting a few options and waiting 30 mins – but installing all the pograms I use and tweaking everyting so its just so will take about a day. I know that you can do an ‘upgrade’ install but long experience has taught me that anything but a ‘clean install’ is a recipie for anger, suffering and hate…

Anyway – a list of programs I use, as much as a note for myself for when Window 8 comes around.

A quick tip fist though – when doing this sort of ting you will invaribably forget to copy off some data that you need or there will be a program that you can’t get working right or maybe something that you use once per year that you really can’t be bothered installing again. I use the free VMWare Converter to convert the physical macine to a virtual machine and store the VHD on a USB drive – if I ever need to get/run someting from this old machine I just boot it up using the free VMWare Server – a nice saftey net.

General Programs

Most of these are opensource, free or donationware but do be careul and check the options so you don’t inadvertantly install crapware like Yahoo toolbar, registry cleaners or that oh so helpful desktop shortcut to eBay (however would you find it otherwise?)

Google Chrome browser – most day to day browsing, so much faster than IE/Firefox and working with downloaded files that doesn’t suck (yes Firefox, looking at you!)

Dropbox – The easiest way to sync files between computers and people, just works.

LogMeIn - Free and easy remote access, just works but they have recently started push the paid upgrades a little harder.

FoxIt Free PDF reader - because Adobe Acrobat reader is so bad it both sucks and blows.

Paint.NET – free basic image editing tool.

Snagit – easy screen capture – yes you can use CTRL+PRINT SCREEN and Paint.NET but this just makes it a little easier.

VLC Media Player – fast lightweight media player that works with just about everything. No computer I own will ever be subjected to running Quicktime or god forbid Realplayer.

Defraggler – seems to do a much better job of defragmening that Windows built in tool especally if you work with large and/or hevily framented files (VHD’s for example)

IZArc – great freeware zipping tool

UltraMon - If you have a desk that looks like mission control.

Virtual Clone Drive – make a virtual drive from an .ISO image so you dont have to muck around burning stuff to DVD just to install it (if you even have a DVD drive in your laptop any more). This really really should be built into Windows.

WinDirStat – figure out what the hell is using up that enourmous 500GB hard drive you thought would last forever.

PasswordSafe – you don’t use the same password for everything, do you?

And of course your office tools of choice – for me its Microsoft Office.

Any killer tools i’ve missed? Next up its developer focused tools.

Empower or Bizspark? Action Pack or Certified? Which specialisation – ISV,Small Buisness, Custom Development . How to get points? What bout the bonus points? which points categories are exclusive? etc. etc. etc.

The partner program site has long been regarded (even by Microsofties) as a a little impenetrable – but today something happened that had me banging my head in disbelief. I am not going trying to scrore cheap points by bashing Microsoft here – after all its just like any company, they do some things well, and some things badly. I am just venting with a little bit of hope that someone in Microsoft will read this who knows who to contact that can get someone to get permission to someone else to authorize somebody to make a small change…

So the story :-

To get to the Certified Partner level the most appropriate path for an ISV is the “ISV/Software Solutions Competency” – marvellously straight forward so far and a handy guide to boot!

Part of that process is to get your software certified. There are different options but the most appropriate for many is the “Platform” Tests for ISV/Software Solutions and Hosted Solutions Competencies. In my case the two relevant parts of this test are Windows Server Component & Managed Code.

Now keep with me here – the “Windows Server Component” test is actually the “Works with Windows 2008″ test.

So you think that passing this you can use the nice “Works with Winodows 2008″  logos, right? Well no.

Now the Platform Test for ISV doesn’t automatically let you use the logos, its a separate process for that.

“ISVs that select the Windows Server foundation component of the Platform Test for ISVs and pass without any waivers, are eligible to participate in the Works With Windows Server Logo program and receive the “Works With Windows Server Logo”

So you have to submit it twice, a bit daft but no biggie. (I defy anyone without prior knowledge to figure this lot out first visit.. or maybe I am dumb?)

The process for the “Works With Windows Test” is itself actually very well done – you load the testing tool on a server, it verifies all sorts of requirements such as UAC enabled and looks for many common problems in MSI files. You install your software, run it and then unintstall it. It then verifies you’ve not borked anything on the OS and cleaned up after yourself. All the things that customers worry about. Finally it creates a submission package to send to Veritest or Wipro for further tests and validation. All in all pretty neat and the testing is much more comprehensive than previous versions of the Works With program.

So here’s the rub though

A) For “Windows Server Component” part of the ISV Platform test you set test Windows 2008 system and test your app. Run the test and submit for verification. (At least until Dec 31st 2009)

B) For “Works With Windows” test you must after July 15th use Windows 2008 R2 RC and repeat the exact same test as A and submit again for verification.

Yup that’s right – during the strage period of July 15th to Dec 31st 2009 you have to do EXACTLY the same test on two different operating system for absolutely no reason I could fathom. Why can’t the changeover dates between 2008 and 2008 R2 be the same for both testing programs?

Confusing? Yes. Totally unnecessary? As far as I can tell. Frustrating? Oh yes!

P.S. Thanks for Julia, Padraig and Yu at Veritest and Paul on Microsoft’s Windows Server Logo Program team for your help and putting up with my whining.

The two things I miss the most are being able use tables and to set styles such a “Quotation”, “Note Callout” in the same way that you do in something like Microsoft Word so you can keep the look consistent across the whole blog.

(Note you should use existing markup like Paragraph, Heading 1…2..3, Quote etc when suitable as it helps with SEO)

Choosing a style in Microsoft Word

This is all quite easy to do using CSS and classes – but you have to start editing the HTML manually and I want to make it easy for non-technical users when editing a post.

TIP – Keep your sanity and NEVER paste documents from Word into Wordpress (even using the Paste from Word cleaning tools) . If you look at the HTML generated it will be full of useless cruft that will make trying to apply a consistent look a nightmare.

The editor WordPress uses is called TinyMCE, but it hides some features from view for simplicity. You can use other editors such as CKEditor (see FCKEditor wordpress plugin) but for this article I am going to use the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin to allow you to use the full feaures of the TinyMCE editor.

The rest of this post will walk through installing the TinyMCE Advanced plugin so if you are fimiliar with this then feel free to skip to Better Formatting with Wordpress Part II where I will cover how to setup your own styles and give some examples that you can use.

Installing the TinyMCE Advanced plugin to your WordPress blog

Note this is for WordPress v2.8, other versions may be a little different Plugins > Add New Serach for TinyMCE Advanced Click Install (right had side) Then confirm with Install Now Click Activate Plugin

Now choose which extra features we want in the editor by selecting Settings > TinyMCE AdvancedYou can add controls you want by dragging them to the menu bars and remove ones you won’t need. Its tempting to add everything, but you probably won’t need a lot of these and it will just make it harder to find the important stuff. Buttons I removed Smilies (come on this is a blog not an IM session!) Undo and Redo (I tend to always use the hotkeys) More Tag & Split Page – this is not a printed page, if a user wants to see more they scroll down. Style (This lets users edit CSS inline styles – the whole point of putting this editor in place was to sop this happening and keep a consistent look) XHTML Attributes – if you get to the stage of needing this (e.g. adding click events) then most people will be better of in the HTML view. Insert Image (we’ve got WordPress’s Add An Image button for that) Superscript and Subscript Print - this is the 21st century, give the trees a break already!

Buttons I added

• Visual Aid
• Table Tools
• Styles
• Quote

One final note – don’t select Import the current theme CSS classes in the CSS classes in most themes are not designed to be used for your editing. Doing so will just fill up the Styles dropdown with lots of useless entries.

Now onto Better Formatting with Wordpress Part II where we learn how to define our own styles and go through some examples.

The real ace up their sleeve though is quite revolutionary – they actually employ people that know what they are doing. I mean really know what they are doing.

I’ve contacted them twice with questions (both non-urgent and my own setup problems as I am not a linux guy) and it was sorted out with one email in minutes, literally. Better yet the reply were helpful; detailed, contained helpful links and talked me through what they had done to troubleshoot, find and correct the problem – I really learnt something.

To reiterate, these were not problems with the service they provide, they were down to my lack of Linux/Apache knowledge – they would have been well within their rights to say that it was outside the scope of their support or charge me extra.

The fact that I was astound by this level of support says nearly as much about some of the poor hosting companies out there as it does about Rimu.

Full disclaimer – if you click on this link I get a $15 referral discount, but if you click on this one I don’t.

Compared to the zero friction process required to sign up to use his Twiddla service (just click new meeting) StackOverflow comes in at a frustrating 14 steps or so.

And he’s right of course, you want as close as zero friction to use your site as possible and despite being a certified ‘good idea’ OpenID is too just too complex a procedure for the average Joe to bother with.

However, in the case of StackOverlow the determining factor for its success or failure is going to be its ability to keep the signal to noise ratio high and one way of doing this might just be to make the barrier to entry a little higher that it could be and help encourage the unwashed masses to bugger off back to YouTube to spew drivel.

I don’t know if this was a deliberate decision or not – indeed in the StackOverflow podcasts you get an indication of the disagreements between Joel, Jeff and other team members about the use of OpenID – but they do recognise that some barrier to entry could be a good thing for their site.

Me – I’ve got high hopes for the StupidFilter project – OMG, LoL !!!!!