I did some searching and found that Windows Media Player couldn’t read the meta data from these files.  There was a great piece of freeware called WMP Tag Plus that takes care of that: http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/wmptagplus/index.htm

If you install that, but still can’t play those files you should install the following:

1. This DirectShow filter: http://www.xiph.org/dshow/
2. Haali Media Splitter: http://haali.su/mkv/
3. DirectShow filter: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDshow.htm
4. WavPack: http://www.wavpack.com/downloads.html

A more complete REG hack is listed below (with credit due to http://weinioli.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/xbox360-vista-media-player-11-mp4-video-streaming/):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

If you are interested here are the old items, and here are the new.

You see, I love O’Reilly books and have recently started to really enjoy using oreilly.com.  It’s quickly becoming my preferred book seller for a number of reasons:

1. No DRM – I want to take my books where I want them, on as many devices as I own, and I don’t want to worry about locking myself in to any one vendor.
2. Ownership Specials – Do you own the paper back and want the e-book?  $4.99
3. Upgrade Specials – Do you own an old version of the book and want the newest release?  50% off if you order the ebook
4. Daily Deal – Want to subscribe to a RSS feed with a daily book for only $9.99?
   http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday
5. Lifetime Access – This is a draw between Amazon and O’Reilly.  Both will let you re-download purchased items as many times as needed.

However, there is no Whispernet syncing when you buy your books elsewhere.  That leads me to my recommendation..  Allow consumers to use cloud based storage for as much content as we want (at a cost per gb) and you simply provide the logic to sync books, the last read page, notes, highlights, and so on.  If you truly believe in competition let us pick between Dropbox, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, or even a simple FTP/SCP location.  I want to have my content available where ever I go, and whenever I want.  If there were open standards for this type of thing this wouldn’t be an issue.  When I click the Buy button at any e-book sellers website I should be able to send that file to my preferred storage provider and have it instantly appear on my device.

Businesses should be thinking about long term profits.  Long term open standards win and consumers will get what they want.  If you fail to deliver pieces of the puzzle than a competitor eventually will fill that want.  It’s not hard to understand…  Some day Amazon will get it, drop the DRM, and add some of these missing features.  If they don’t someone else will step on their market share and do it for them.

During that time there was nothing worse then receiving that 2 a.m. page that a customer’s server was down, and they couldn’t reach a critical web page.  The frantic SSH session that failed to connect lead to using an APC MasterSwitch to reboot that outlet and to hope it brought the server back so you could work on it remotely.  Once in a blue moon you were so lucky, but all to often you’d have to leave your house to go work on the server.  Even worse you may be on vacation and stuck paying $150+ hr for remote hands and eyes to read back what they see so you can advise them how to fix it.  Incidents like those quickly convince you to pay for the Remote KVM over IP’s that cost thousands and to start buying built in HP ILO (Integrated Lights Out) and Dell DRAC (Dell Remote Access Card) cards, regardless of cost.  If the server had hardware problems it could take even longer to get parts on site to fix the server..

Thankfully that’s starting to become the distant memory as we now have Amazon EC2, RackSpace Cloud Servers, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and oh so many other players emphasizing redundant virtual servers and cloud servers.  Being the technology geek that I am I’ve signed up for all of the above solutions above and evaluated them.  There are different niches in the market for different needs, but as a general “cloud server” provider RackSpace does a great job.

With RackSpace I got started back when I signed up with SliceHost.com in 2008.  They were bought out by RackSpace and provided the technology to power RackSpace’s cloud solutions.  Admiring RackSpace’s reputation in the industry for solid customer service I quickly signed up for a cloud server when they introduced them.  During that time I’ve tested their functionality to grow and shrink servers, setup automated backups, perform restores, used their iPhone application to remotely manage the server, and their web based console has saved me a few times.  These are all standard features that haven’t cost me a dime extra, but have been incredibly convenient to have.

I’ve been using 3rd party monitoring and have experienced excellent performance and uptime for the last couple of years.  My first real issue came up on July 4, 2010 at 3:16 AM CST (8:16 UTC).  The cloud server went down, and at 3:25 AM CST RackSpace contacted me to inform me of the issue.  They were quick to tell me that a chassis swap was necessary and that was completed by 4:14 AM.  At which point they immediately notified me that the work was complete.  In this case they dealt with a hardware failure while I was sleeping and I never had to leave the house to resolve it.

I think it goes without saying that their service was superb during this issue.  Although this is a very pro-RackSpace story it might as well be a very pro “cloud” review.  If your servers and solutions are architected well up front you’ll save yourself a lot of time and grief later on.  Virtualized servers in the cloud aren’t the right fit for everything, but when the fit is right they can be a life saver.  This is just one example of that fact, I could have just as well posted about the ease of scaling up, quickly handling large deployments, providing redundancy throughout the world, and so on.  The cloud isn’t the next big thing; the cloud continues to be the current big thing.  Its just time for the rest of the marketplace to catch on.

1. Tethering – I can easily tether from my laptop to my cell phone using 3G and surf to my hearts content, but I can’t from the iPad.  It has built in bluetooth, but the Apple powers that be didn’t want to support that feature.  I have no desire to pay more for the 3G edition and pay monthly for it when I already have a data plan that covers it on my BlackBerry Bold.
2. Front Facing Camera – It just seems like they rushed the iPad out the door to capture as much market as they could.  The next gen will surely have this feature, and it’ll work great with Facetime.
3. Evernote – Being in IT I read a lot, and take a ton of notes.  Evernote is phenomenal for this (and many other things), but the iPad edition is missing one big thing.  If I have a PDF that’s a few hundreds pages I probably won’t finish that in one sitting.  I’d like to be able to close Evernote, come back, and have it remember exactly where I’m at.  This may have changed, but when I tested it last this functionality wasn’t there.  I have no desire to migrate all my Microsoft Press books, VMware best practices, and other misc. PDF’s to another less powerful solution.  I enjoy my sync’d everywhere Evernote solution, and it’d take a lot for me to move elsewhere.

Instead of buying an iPad I went in the other direction and picked up an Amazon Kindle for $89.  On July 1st Amazon cut it’s pricing of the Kindle (3G – world data connectivity) to $189.  I also remembered that Audible.com was running a promotion to get $100 off select devices that could play back their audiobooks.  Being owned by Amazon.com one of those devices is a Kindle (sorry, the iPad isn’t on the list).  I love audiobooks for when I’m on the road and when I’m at work so joining Audible.com seemed like a great idea, and this pushed me to finally do it.

If you want to take advantage of the same deal you should join Audible.com’s Gold program here:
http://www.audible.com/deviceoffer/

It’s $14.95 a month, but you get one free audiobook each month.  It also comes with the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal, which is nice.  That more than justifies the membership price for me, but it it doesn’t for you then you may want to pass on this deal.

Next browse over to Amazon and pick up the Kindle with world wide connectivity here: Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G

Make sure you enter the $100 off code that Audible.com gives you when you check out and bam, you have a new Kindle for $89 with free two day shipping.  If you’re like me and have Bing Cashback laying around you can get it for even less  by choosing to receive that with Amazon Payments.  Hopefully there are other audio book lovers out there that will appreciate this post.  It seems like the $100 off promotion is hidden away..  Most podcasts will encourage you to join Audible.com, but with their code.  This blows their other promotions out of the water from my perspective.

Enjoy!

Interestingly enough if you have an ESPN The Magazine subscription you get free access to all those insider pages. I purchased that subscription on Amazon for $5 for a year. Meaning you could either pay $6.95 a month through them, decide to pay for a year at their 52% discount of $39.96, or pay a one time fee of $5 and get a whole year. Hmmm.. I wonder what price you guys prefer? Kidding aside enjoy your 94%+ discount, basically free magazine, and ESPN Insider subscription for a flat $5 (or less).

If you don’t want the magazine send it to your closest hospital or doctors office and I’m sure a patient there will appreciate the donated subscription. As of today (6/11/2010) Amazon wrapped up their promotion, but other magazine sites are still offering great deals (even better than the $5 I paid):

“ESPN Magazine is on sale through Saturday for $3.75 per year when you use the code WKLYSPEC at checkout from Best Deal Magazines.”
http://www.bestdealmagazines.com/title.asp?title=ESPN

Even without that coupon code it’s still cheaper than the $5 I paid. My point is to run a quick Google search, buy the magazine, and save yourself some money:
Click to check Google

Now if only I had a work around to when the eBook in the Kindle store costs the same (or even more) than the paperback version at Amazon…

VUM Cmdlets from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

VMware View on the iPhone