I have been meaning for a while to write a post on some of the nice features I have come across in using J River’s Media Center 13 (JRMC) for the past month or so, but I was pushed to write today after reading the Why I Hate iTunes article on AppScout.com. The problems that the author has with iTunes as it relates to media files are all handled much better by JRMC.

Although JRMC 13 has a host of new features, here are some that I have used and enjoyed personally:

• Significant improvements in speed. For a while I have known of no other app that handles large libraries (in my case about 30,000 audio, video and photo files) as well. The new version adds to JRMC’s advantage in this area.
• The ability to save “views.” JRMC has always done a great job of being letting you view and organize your files however you want. Version 13 now lets you both (i) save these views (e.g. what tag information to display, whether to display thumbnails, what hierarchy to use in the tree in the left hand pane) so they can be used in other contexts, and (ii) associate different views with different nodes of the tree that you happen to be viewing (e.g. when looking through audio files, the view at the album level (maybe a thumbnail of the cover) may be different from the view of the files within the album (maybe a list detailed data on each track).
• JRMC 13 is great for photo tagging. I recently processed about 1800 photos in space of about 4 hours. That processing included deleting bad shots and shots that were not the best among multiples, as well as adding information about the location each shot was taken and who was in it. I used a view that showed thumbnails to select photos for deletion (helped by the fact that mousing over photo quickly (even though the photos are multi-megabyte files on a separate server) displays a blowup of the photo). I used a similar view with a PEOPLE pane at the top to select multiple photos containing the same person and then click a line in the People pane with that person’s initials to tag them as being photos with that person in them. I use a details view making in-place edits to tags that aren’t as dependent on the contents of the individual photo, e.g. tagging an entire group of photos as being associated with the Event “Christmas 2008”.

JRMC has three other capabilities that, although not new, are worth calling out:

• The ability to move files into a folder structure based on their metadata. After tagging photos, I can use the “Rename, Move and Copy Files” function to put all my new files into a new structure of subdirectories based on the metadata associated with the file in my JRMC library.
• The ability to parse filenames to populate metadata associated with each file. To allow our home video files to be replayed in Vista Media Center, I transcode them all to MPEG2. Because MPEG2 does not have a very robust (if any) spec for dealing with embedded metadata like the date a video was shot I put the date into each filename itself. I am then able to use JRMC’s “Fill Properties from Filename” function to put that date information into my JRMC library.
• The ability to populate XML Keywords in photos from JRMC library data. All you have to do is create an “expression” using JRMC’s powerful expression processor that creates a comma delimited “Keyword” field based on the contents of other JRMC fields. This XML Keyword field allows me to manipulate data in different fields in JRMC and then convert it into a form readable by other third party photo applications—Vista Media Center for me.

One reason I write about these useful features is that although the functionality of JRMC is great, it does not seem that great at exposing that functionality. The help files are now Wiki based and have not kept up with all the new features that have been added, finding a feature you are looking for is not always intuitive and often a feature will exist, but the user will be unaware of it. I don’t mind this, but others may balk at it.

Is this what Mr. Thompson looks like?

Casey Mulligan concludes today in his blog and in the New York Times that "a credit crunch is not a fundamental cause of this recession." This seems right to me.

Is there good reason to reject the obvious hypothesis that the fundamental cause of the recession is the housing bubble? If, in round numbers, the US housing stock was worth $20 trillion at its peak and has lost 25% of its value, then that represents a huge hit to the economy. $5,000,000,000,000 to be precise but not accurate.

The negative wealth effects have caused people consume less as they discover they are not as rich as they thought they were. Productive resources (people and capital) formerly used to build housing and to supply items to formerly wealthier people are now lying (relatively) fallow until they find other productive uses. Doesn’t this simple explanation fit with most of what we have seen over the past year or so?

Aside from the freezeup in the fall as financial institutions suddenly focused on counterparty risk, there does not seem to be much to suggest that losses in the financial sector are anything more than the realization of losses from the housing sector. Financial institutions were residual owners of a fair amount of housing and have ended up taking a hit when it declined by 25%. The leverage of many of those institutions meant that equity holders and some tranches of debt holders have been wiped out, but no productive capacity seems to have been destroyed in the process. The decline in size of the financial sector seems like a logical to a decline in the demand for financial transactions, absent evidence the profitable opportunities aren’t able to find funding.

I am sure this simple analysis overlooks many nuances (which is inevitable), but is it fundamentally flawed or inaccurate or does it miss an important part of the story?

As part of our home’s preparations for our transition from Small Business Server 2003 to Small Business Server 2008, last night I reintroduced a our old DLink DI-634 router as a network gateway and disabled the second network interface card in our server running Small Business Server 2003.

So far there have been fewer hiccups than I feared, but there were a few:

• After completing the Connect to the Internet Wizard in the SBS 2003 Management Console, I had no internet access. The culprit: I forgot that I needed to power cycle the DLink router to get it to grab an IP address from our cable modem.
• At first the UPnP configuration of the router failed, but seemed to have succeeded on the second try.
• I discovered 24 hours later that Exchange had not picked up any new email. I suspect that by not reconfiguring our email settings as part of the Connect to the Internet Wizard, it failed to configure the router for use with Exchange. I adding some ports to the Virtual Server page of the DLink router per a handy page of instructions. We will see if this solves the problem.

I have had the kind of weekend that makes me question whether having our home’s level of technology is really worth it. To wit:

• Our Small Business 2003 PowerEdge server has developed two nasty habits: refusing to reliably turn on again after being fully powered down and an intolerance for USB devices being plugged in and unplugged. These made the backups this weekend of all of our home media files on to USB hard drives (normally kept off site) a somewhat harrowing experience
• An HP PhotoSmart 4650 wireless networked printer has a tendancy to lock up every 48 hours or so. Because it has no on/off switch (and the plug is behind a desk) this has been really annoying. So after 3 hours on the phone with HP, they thought the issue had been addressed by a two “resets.”
• The three hours on the phone with HP resulted in HP changing registry settings and installing new drivers. Unfortunately when I went to use the PC to which HP had made all these changes, it would have a blue screen crash whenever I attempted to “Switch User.” I am now reformatting the hard drive of that PC and preparing for a clean install.
• In preparation for our move to Windows Small Business Server 2008 (and a new box to replace the increasingly unreliable PowerEdge 430SC that is running SBS 2003), we will have to change our network topography so that our server no longer connects directly to our cable modem, but instead an ordinary router connects to the cable modem. This should make for a better home experience whenever the server needs to be restarted (because PCs around the house won’t lose their internet connection). But it means that I need to first, replace our current router (being used as a wireless access point) and second, move our existing router into the network as a real router (an reconfigure SBS 2003 appropriately). Step one was been completed tonight. Time probably won’t permit step two to be completed today.

A problem this weekend between our Drobo and the Small Business Server 2003 machine to which it is connected has me contemplating a replacement for this PC, which is almost 3 1/2 years old. The problem resulted in the loss of access to all the media files on the Drobo over the weekend and seems to be USB-related. Unfortunately it isn’t clear that the problem has been solved.

I estimate that were I to buy a new machine to run Small Business Server 2008, it would cost an extra $1000 (apart from the cost of the server software itself, which I acquired in December when a really good deal appeared on Ebay).

Here are what I take to be the relative advantages of each platform:

Windows Home Server: relative simplicity; a good backup solution for all of the PCs attached to it on the network; and access to the growing market for add-ins.

Small Business Server 2008: Exchange (with all the collaboration tools that go with it); remote Outlook access; a customizable security model for files; a common logon for each PC in our home; the possibility of using Sharepoint later; Windows Server Update Services (WSUS); the ability to share networked printers; spam filtering; and the ability to run many server applications (such as J River Media Center).

When I last considered this I reluctantly decided that Windows Home Server would not be sufficient, but now I am wondering whether Windows 7’s Homegroup in combination with gMail might get me most of what I really want.

I suspect, however, that if I went with Windows Home Server I would be buying (A) simpler central administration at the cost of (B) (i) comparatively kludgy implementations of features I want (e.g. Windows Home Server evidently cannot join a Homegroup and won’t be able to until the next version arrives in 2010) and (ii) more work dealing with individual workstations.

Macroeconomist Robert Barro says “You know, attacking Iran is a shovel-ready project. But I wouldn't recommend it.”

I have thought for a while that it would be nice to share interesting items on web (mostly blog entries) as part of my Facebook feed. I believe this is now possible by importing an URL of the RSS feed of your dugg items to the Notes section of Facebook.

Previously I had looked into Facebook applications to do this, but based on user reviews they seemed klugy, complication and unreliable.

This approach relies on well supported capabilities in Facebook and Digg:

• Identify your Digg RSS feed, which is http://digg.com/users/username.
• On your own Facebook profile page add the Notes tab.
• Start writing a new Note. Discard the Note. You will then see the option to import an RSS feed .or Edit Import Settings. Use this to import from the URL of your Digg RSS feed. (The option to import a feed only seems to appear after selecting the option to write Note, but there may be a more direct way to access it of which I am unaware.)

This only seems to work for one RSS feed, but your should be able to use RSSMix.com to aggregate RSS feeds if you want.