I have recently gone through a series of critical hardware failures affecting nearly all my personal hardware devices.

Now in my career I have been a Network Administrator so maintaining regular backups of all relevant data has been at the forefront of my choice of hardware, but sometimes this has slipped. So let me take you through the failures and their effect:

Failure 1: Mac Book G4. 

Problem: Fan increases in speed and makes a grinding noise, software locks up, computer is inoperable. This computer held all personal digital photos, from 2005 to 2008.

Outcome: I managed to backup up these photos to an external hard disk with the help of a friend who attached my Mac to his and booted my Mac as an external hard disk. Not happy that the most expensive computer I have ever bought failed and the fix would cost me £400. This computer has been recycled and I won't be making this mistake again. This Mac has been replaced by a second hand IBM Laptop and I have also got an Iomega external hard disk. I have uploaded 10GB of photos and videos to an online account http://home.live.com, which allows for 25GB of data storage for free, including photos as part of the Skydrive app.

Failure 2: Xbox 360.

Problem: I had the RRoD which seems to happen to almost every Xbox.

Outcome: One call to Xbox support and I am issued with a freepost packing slip, a delivery man comes to my house and picks up my Xbox. 5 days later it is returned. No loss of data as everything is stored on my Xbox hard disk, I also get an additional 3 years guarantee on the machine. In a word - happy!

Failure 3: PC Hard Disk.

Problem: My Western Digital hard disk fails within 1 month of the 3 year guarantee. This is a first!

Outcome: Complete loss of data - everything, potential for recovery - zero! After getting a new Western Digital hard disk and rebuilding the OS I change the way I store files - now everything will be duplicated online. By using a combination opf Windows Live, Live Sync and Live Mesh, anything I do on this computer is replicated either on another computer or online. Sure I am limited to 25GB, but bear in mind thats free and by carefully choosing which LiveID you store your relevant data against, you can easily maintain 75GB of data online! If you've read this far - then take my word for it and get to know these three apps, any future loss of hard disk will only cause me the minor issue of rebuilding the OS.

Failure 4: Mobile phone.

Problem: My Sony Ericsson K850i fails to start after locking up.

Outcome: Sending the phone to a repair centre results in my phone being returned in full working order within 5 days. However, I was not backing up my contacts to my sim card, resulting in the loss of all recently added contacts. Inconvenient, BUT I should of selected the option to automatically save contacts to the sim card. Additionally all existing sim card contacts got messed up when using a temporary Sony Ericsson phone.

The positives to come out of these issues is that all data is now backed up online and when buying hardware in future I will establish the manufaturers guarantee. Though completely happy with the Sony Ericsson and Xbox outcomes, if I had of backed up everything prior to the failures then undoubtedly I would only have suffered minor issues instead of the anxieties that I experienced.

Backup NOW!

Like most useful software, I discovered Windows Live Labs Listas due to a problem I was having whilst browsing the internet. My problem was a fairly simple one - I had a few snippets of various web pages I wanted to keep and share with friends/family. I didn't want to use notepad as storing several instances of notepad text files takes some organising plus this wouldn't be kept online. Sure I could of emailed them, but that would of meant an extensive email with several lengthy explanations. Simply - I wanted to keep the snippets, the source of the snippets and a simple way of retrieving those snippets.

Well in fact this isn't so simple, I could find no way of doing this in the browser. Adding to favourites or storing the links in social bookmarking like Delicious or Microsoft Community Bookmarks didn't do it for me as I only wanted a snippet and not the whole page. I was using IE8 on the computer at the time, so I looked at the IE8 addons website and there wasn't anything there, Firefox has a similar addon website but I wasn't going to install a new browser and then search for an addon that may or may not exist.

I read about a new accelerator for IE8 called webslices, but this is push technology so didn't tick the box (the website owner has to enable webslices - I can't request one).

I was about to give up and open Notepad when I came accross Listas which is exactly what I was looking for. Signing in using my LiveID, my account is created automatically. I can then add the snippet to any list that I create on my Listas account, which also helpfully saves the URL and provides a link back. Admittedly Listas works better if you have installed the toolbar (which does not require a restart of the browser). The outstanding feature here is that you can then export the list or lists as an RSS feed. Also the lists are very manageable. All in all an very useful site, it's in Beta so care must be taken about how much you depend on it, because it could just get dropped. But I am using this extensively right now!

Of course Mac users will be laughing, as they have stickies, which probably would of done the trick. But my Mac is broken and I am not happy about it!

I went to a Virtual Earth developer day at TVP the other day and one of the big releases that they demonstrated is the new Virtual Earth Silverlight control

Currently in a Community Technology Preview status, the control builds on the fluidity of DeepZoom to provide mapping over a really slick looking canvas.  Being that it's silverlight based, the canvas is really responsive compared to the AJAX implementation that is the current fashionable flavour

The controls can be downloaded from the Microsrof Connect website.  This MSDN blog really isn't lying when it says you only need to type 2 lines of code to get a basic looking map out of it :  http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2009/03/18/introducing-the-virtual-earth-silverlight-map-control.aspx

Just add the references and make a simple Map Tag and you're away.  Making overlays is really simple and this guy has plotted the course and speec of the top 4 marathon runners in the New York Marathon, however i can only see 3 points : http://conceptdevelopment.net/Silverlight/VEMap01/default.html

He's actually plotted a few of the recent marathons in a few cities around the world.  The map pans to follow the runners

I have a demo that i created to highlight how easy it is to implement.  The app took around 10 minutes to create, including downloading the control from Microsoft Connect!!  http://silverlight.creative-jar.com/maps/default.html

Recently  websites designed and built at Creative Jar have been featured in Smashing Magazine for their outstanding design and UI. We keep a close eye on Smashing Magazine as it is an industry leader in these fields, and also highlights other awesome website designs and features that have recently been released.

I picked up on an article on Smashing Magazine over the extended easter weekend, showing that it's not only Creative Jar that keeps their eye on this, in fact it has about 4 million users. Without blowing our trumpet, this highlights what a great team we have here at Creative Jar and that our work is so highly regarded

On April fools dat, Google unveiled the hardware behind it's website and data. Not only are their servers homemade, but also that there are hundreds of thousands of them. They pack them into ship containers - 1,160 per container, and the Google Chief electronic Engineer took two and half years of working 14 hour days to build some of them! Now thats a job.

Whether or not this is an April fools joke, the point will still remain - if you want to run a website, not only does it have to be coded efficiently, but there is only so much you can do with a small hosting solution. If you want to engage with as many users as possible, you'll either need lots of cheap simple servers or you'll need a beast of a machine!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

I read this interesting explanation (and sort of roadmap) for ASP.NET. It's definately a technical read, but does give an overview of what ASP.NET is.

So if you want to find out more about ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data and Silverlight; go here: http://weblogs.asp.net/paullitwin/archive/2009/03/30/the-four-pillars-of-asp-net.aspx