Ron's Space

Or how I came to love Live Mesh

This weekend I started playing with a new technology from Microsoft that's been dubbed "Live Mesh." This is a platform that enables syncing sets of data across multiple devices, while also making that data available in "the cloud" (there's that term of the moment that I'll be using a lot).

Here the scenario that I'm playing with right now: I have four computers that include a personal laptop, a work laptop, a Media Center and a little netbook (that's a really small laptop). I have a fair amount of ripped and Amazon/Zune DRM-free music that I'd like to play on all of these systems...about 10GB worth. With the Media Center as my primary repository for music, it became a very manual process to make sure I always copied any music I bought on one system to the other. There are a number of tools to do this, but I didn't want to pay for something that I could do by hand (or even scheduled, i.e., SyncToy). There's also that sticky issues of not always being connected to my home LAN. Enter Live Mesh. Any time I update my "Music Mesh" folder on any one of those four system, Live Mesh will push it out to the other systems. This P2P sync is pretty fast, and will use your local LAN if two or more systems are connected. All of the meta data associated with the sync is stored in the cloud.

The second scenario is have access to data in the cloud from any system. Today you are allotted only 5GB of space; with this space you can set up sync "to the cloud" as well. That means from my browser, on any system, I can access my Live Desktop and can see all of my synced folders and the data in those folders. Pretty cool.

There are some drawbacks. The sync if file based, not changes based, so any update, such as a rename, requires the whole file to get re-synchronized to the other systems. The sync can also take a while for large data sets; I've noticed it starts and stops and an occasional reboot is required to get things moving again. This is beta, so hiccups are expected.

I'll make one comment about Apple's MobileMe. There have been a ton of problems with that service so far. I'm not surprised. After listening to some of the Channel 9 video's about Live Mesh, you really begin to understand how this "simple" concept is extremely complex. I wish Apple some luck in getting things humming.

Check things out at http://www.mesh.com and see if it makes sense for you. Mobile phone and Mac support is on the horizon.

Well, I've added a new motorcycle to the stable. A vivid black 2008 Ultra Classic Electra Glide. The first test comes this weekend when I head down to the Crossroads of America motorcycle rally in Hutchinson, KS.

As many of you know, KU finally secured it's third National Title on Monday night. In addition to an incredible game, we had a crazy time downtown. I was a freshman at KU in 1988, so 20 year later I get to share the fun with my son. Kinda weird, kinda cool.

Yea, that's my big head at the bottom, just wanted to prove that it was actually me in the thick of it.

I returned Sunday from NO after 3 days of fun, food and drink. A couple of pretty interesting sights, as you can imagine. My two favorite were a little tame, but I get a laugh out of signs like these...

What's up with Mr. Chubby? Is he really an orange, gelatinous blob distantly related to Jabba the Hut?

So it's been an long time since I've updated and I owed a shout out to Matt A. Matt, this update's for you. Keep the RSS tubes warmed up.

When we bought our house, we were fortunate to have a builder that hired someone to run the right cable. CAT5 for telco/data, RG6 for video, etc., all home run back to the mechanical room in the basement. There were a few bad decisions here and there, but mostly it was done right. I insisted on doing the finish work myself, and about 3 years ago, this is what I installed...

A basic wall mount rack, a punch panel for the CAT5 wiring and some F-Connectors to patch video. Of course, most of the video lines went direct to the DirecTV switch, so there wasn't really any "patching" going on. Fast forward to this December, the addition of a new server and the need to patch in some new data jacks quickly, and I decided to revamp the rack.

This is what I ended up with...

I can highly recommend Parts Express (http://www.partsexpress.com) and Cable to Go (http://www.cablestogo.com) for all your household networking and video distribution needs. Now I sit back and wait for my endorsement check to come.