I faced this problem and was looking to use a HP MediaSmart Home Server, but unfortunately they are not sold in New Zealand. The good news is that the Acer Aspire easyStore AH340-UA230N is available in NZ and I can only rave about it now we have one!

It has four hot-swappable hard drive bays, a bundled 1TB hard drive (with Windows Home Server pre-installed), 2GB of RAM, one external Serial ATA port, four USB ports, and Gigabit Ethernet. Basically, you’re not going to outgrow it anytime soon!

Note: Most online retailer advertisements seem to all say that it comes with 1Gb of RAM, but I think this is some sort of transcription error as it definitely has 2Gb!

So what’s so good about it? Apart from the price (< $1,000 NZD), you get a very able server. It can be setup to automatically wake-up your computers and do a full system backup every night (and then put them to sleep again of course). If a machine dies or you need to do a full system restore, you get a recovery disk that you can use to get back and running using the backups held on the server. With more disk drives added (USB or in the hot-swap drives) you can setup simple mirroring of the data to protect against a hard-drive failure on the server - if one drive fails, the other drive(s) will still have a copy.

They are some of the features of the Windows Home Server software, but what I like about the Acer is that it is very quiet and quick! It’s only light-weight hardware really (similar technology to a Netbook), but so far at least, it has run everything thrown at it without clocking up more than 40% on the CPU.

If you’re interested (and in NZ) Global PC, Ascent and other online retailers have stock.

Apart from the tools we’re used to, here a couple new ones:

• Javascript debugging works! There is also the console window (which the likes of FireFox has had for a while), allowing you to print trace information from your javascript code. This is much better than using alert boxes!
• There is now a Profiler as well, allowing you to see function call times as well as examine the call tree. Very useful for building AJAX based sites.
• You can test Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) compatibility. The tool allow you to change the Browser Mode and Document Mode between IE7, 8 and Quirks mode, so no need to have a VM just to work with IE7. For final QA testing however, I’d recommend using a real IE7 version.

Every year the World Bank releases a report detailing the results of its survey and for 2010, the Doing Business 2010 Survey showed that New Zealand held its No. 2 spot for another year:

1. Singapore
2. New Zealand
3. Hong Kong, China
4. United States
5. United Kingdom
6. Denmark
7. Ireland
8. Canada
9. Australia
10. Norway 

The survey deals with a few key indicators, the important ones being ease of starting a business, employing workers, getting credit, paying taxes, enforcing contracts and protecting investors. According to Minister for Small Business Clayton Cosgrove it takes an average of 13.4 days to setup a new business, yet in New Zealand, it is one hour! That is ridiculously quick!

It is no wonder that New Zealand has so many small businesses. If you have the idea for a product or service, then there really isn’t a better place to do it.

So what’s to be prepared about? IE8 is more  ‘standards compliant’ than previous versions, meaning that your website may not look or even work exactly as you intend in the new browser! To update a web-site’s design to be standards compliant can be time consuming, especially seen as you may have only just got through updating to support IE7!!

Microsoft thought about this and so offers the ability to select a version of internet explorer that your site supports.

By default, the browser will be in “Internet Explorer 8 Standards” mode. For non-compatible sites, users will see a broken page icon in the address bar. Clicking on this will allow them to change the compatibility to Internet Explorer 7, for example. You don’t want your site visitors to have to do this, so as a site owner, you can specify what you support.

This is done with a meta tag, in the head of your web pages. The following will set a page to render in IE8, the same as it would in IE7:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″>

That’s it!

Full details on other possible document compatibility values can be found at MSDN – Defining Document Compatibility

The Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit also highlights other features to be aware of as a developer. It makes interesting reading.

Redirects for feed readers should happen automatically, but just in case, you should update your settings.

Working on paper is a great way to prototype screen layouts, controls, etc. With paper prototyping,you can get a feel for how the finished product will work without having to write code! You can ‘run’ the paper prototype by showing potential users what happens when they ‘click’ a button: “If you click there, you’ll get this <place next paper mock-up in front of them> dialog box”. You’ll quickly see what works and what doesn’t; what’s important to the user; what user tasks take too long or too many ‘clicks’ (interactions) to do. Because the sketches are simple, your test users will not be distracted by graphical design, and instead concentrate on the task at hand.

For initial ideas, pencil and paper is great, but when it comes to ‘running the prototype’, hand drawn sketches are too time-consuming to make alterations to or to make presentable enough to be effective. Balsamiqis a cost-effective tool ($79USD) to solve this problem. Balsamiq produces screen mock-ups that have the same feel as hand-drawn sketches, which is important for keeping the essence of paper prototyping. Other software tools create realistic looking mock-ups, which actually ends up being distracting in the same way as fancy graphics; the mock-ups look ‘finished’ and real and so the feedback you get from test users is often not on the interaction.

Balsamiq comes with around 60 ‘controls’to help build your mock-ups. If a control is not there that fits your needs, you cannot (currently at least) create your own. However, at the end of the day, if you can express 90% of your design with the tool, then that’s still a huge saving in time and effort! 

 It may take a while, but I will try and get the old posts moved over, but no promises

“All the cash, all the marketing, all the people in the world can’t buy the agility you get from being small.”

The book is available online here. You can also pay US$19 to get a copy in pdf or US$29 for a paperpack copy. The online content is exactly the same as the printed version, which I’m actually contemplating purchasing … I always find it easier to make my notes directly in the book

“Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.”