I discovered www.tweetlater.com last night, luckily just in time. As a result of some other tweet activity I was being swamped with new followers and it was cumbersome going through emails to see who was following, then going to the profile and deciding whether to follow or not.

It is made worse because I’m also running two other twitter accounts, one for me and another for a client. tweetlater will monitor my new followers and then email me at intervals to prompt me and then let me go through a single page that show all the new ones, for all the Twitter accounts I manage- letting me accept, ignore or block. Sweet and easy.

In addition tweetlater lets me schedule tweets in advance. Yeah Twitter is good for spur of the moment posts, but I think that sending out 3 tweets one after another dilutes the impact. So maybe I send one out, and queue the other two, let them sit and go out in their own time and get back to work without having to worry about tweeting later.

tweetlater has other good stuff that I will check out later, both free and paid service available.

I found this site yesterday ifollowback.com/ that helps to increase the number of Twitter followers. The idea seems good - since I’m now trying to see what Twitter really can do, both for me and for a client. Sign up with them and you start getting followers. Great idea. But for me, at this point in my Twitter life - it’s truned out to be too much, too fast.

Within an hour I started getting followers, I was spending a lot of time going through my email and checking each follower profile to see if I should add them. Most had, in my opinion, no match to my profile, but the terms of service require that I follow 90% of them. This seems totally overwhelming - I would be faced with a mass of clutter on my in box that would interfere with seeing the people I really want to follow. This reminds me of SEO a few years ago, when the idea was to cram web sites being promoted into pile of spam directories and also of reciprocal linking of sites.

Perhaps I’m too new to Twitter, but this reciprocal follow exchange seems wrong - so within a couple of hours I’d opted out.

As of this morning I had at least 50 new followers within less than 12 hours. So if that is what you want, maybe this service is good for you.

I’ve been using Twitter for months and have no idea what its good for, all I do know is that from my occasional random tweets there are a significant number of followers and I still have no idea why. However, I need to get a better grasp and I’m now helping to manage a Twitter account for someone else.

The first change is to choose a new front end interface. I have been using Twhirl - mostly because it also handled updates to Pownce - but Pownce is now dead/dormant.

For the moment I’m going with TweetDeck - it has a big footprint, you either have to be able to deal with overlapping windows or, like me, have a second monitor that it can sit on. Right now it takes the full width and 75% of the height, if I have IM up also, IM gets hidden. So far I kind of like it, but it is not ideal. It has a way of grouping those you are following, but the grouping requires tagging all the ones that are to be in the group - these probably being the ones you mainly want to follow. What I really need is a way to remove certain busy twitterers from the main list, and put them in a second group - the ones that are twittering a bit too much and hiding the ones I really want to follow.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/MacLeanDesign

A week ago I, on impulse, purchased PC Pitstop’s Optimize2 (one year subscription). I know my drive is sluggish with lots of old unused files. So, yes it works, cleans up files and does some internet tweaking. The file clean seemed ok, the internet tweaking may have given trivial increase, I think I might be getting 3600 instead of 3500.

However a week later, while doing some program debugging it was suggested I get a free copy of CCleaner. (Ok, I admit I forgot about it and had posted an entry here a long time ago) Running it was a major surprise, it deleted a lot of files, for example installation and log files going back 3 years. It has somewhat aggressive default settings - it ended up deleting some cookies that lost my automatic logins on some sites - so I had to log in again. Next time I changed the defaults.

Running Optimize after CCleaner does not find any additional files to delete. Of course it is possible that the first time I ran Optimize it found and fixed things that CCleaner would not have fixed, but at this point, I think I wasted my money.

Optimize does do one thing - it does registry cleanup - but it does not seem to be significant enough to pay for that feature

While trying to create a new logical drive using windows XP, the drive got corrupted and one logical drive got lost.

Until now, I have always used Partition Magic to create new drives and partitions, but with the current set of problems with WHS, I no longer trust it to create NTFS drive. Normally, Partition Magic would have created a large secondary partition, and allow me to create logical drives within that. However, since the latest drive was set up with Acronis, I now have a secondary partition only big enough to hold the existing logical drives.

Windows XP Computer Management will not let me change the size of that partition, so I have no place for it to create a new drive.

I can however, use Acronis to create a couple of new drives and it will then extend the secondary partition size, then I can delete the drives, leaving space so that I can then use XP Computer Management to create and format logical drives there (because this week I fell much safer having XP create and format). However, today, I used XP to delete the logical drives with an intent to recreate them. Something went really bad, and it ended up deleting the second drive in the partition and then the whole physical drive disappeared. Some of it seemed to be accessable from My Computer. Rebooted and used Acronis to try and recover the lost drive, no luck, but not a serious problem right now, since that drive was just part of the WHS rebuild process. But the fact that it happened is disconcerting.

In the middle of all this weeks chaos, it’s nice to see something work correctly. After repartioning drives, and rebooting, Carbonite realizes something serious has happened and goes into recovery mode. This means that automatic backups will not start overwriting existing offsite backups and gives you a chance to fetch restorable copies before letting the automatic process restart.

I asked for deletion of some existing backups by tagging them to delete at next cleanup and then tried to start the Backup Cleanup process, but it only give me the option to cancel. But the bottom info bar does not show that that any process is running.

So I chose Cancel cleanups and then started them and it now starts and shows in the bottom bar.

It would seem this is a minor bug.

While trying to test a backup from Windows Home Server. A logical drive was backed up using Acronis True Image into an empty logical drive on a different physical drive and created a single .tlb file. Then this file was restored into another empty logical drive a. The restored copy was compared against the original and around 100 files were missing, although the rest compared ok.

The strange thing is that the missing files are all in second level sub-directories of the same sub-directory and there some kind of pattern to the missing files. However, it makes no sense in that most of these files are stable and have not changed for some time, nothing was accessing them during the backups and testing a couple of them shows that the original files are readable.

Just to be sure, erased the .tlb and the restored files and did the process again, same results, same missing files.

And one final precaution, ran a chkdsk against the original logical drive and it’s fine.

(Added - this may not be an Acronis problem - but may show an underlying problem with the directory or structures - to be continued….)

Setting up the HP Media Server is the simplest server install I have ever done. Brings back memories of NT server installs which might take hours, or even worse early Netware installs, which might take a day just to format the drive.

Basic install took about 10 minutes, and another 5 minutes to set up the workstation and start backing up.

The only thing that bothers me is that it seems I cannot customize the backup time for different machines. This is kind of limiting, since different machines are used at different times and it’s better to have the backup running when the workstation is not in use.

I walked in to BestBuy today just getting some odds and ends, and surprise, they have one in stock, hidden on a top shelf. No one seems to know anything about it, and it probably only just arrived. Grabbed it while it’s there and I will have to restrain myself from installing it, since I have some priority customer support issues.