Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Luca Filigheddu is a guy who knows his customer.  When Andy Abramson complained last week that he was getting too much SPIT over his Sitofono, and suggested that Luca look into implementing the iotum Relevance Engine on Sitofono, Luca responded "Sitofono is not a personal tool for bloggers… it's a marketing tool that our customers use to be contacted from prospects through their website…".  In other words, thank you for the feedback and for continuing to use Sitofono, Andy, but you're not our typical customer.

On email, I proposed to Luca that we just implement the Relevance Engine on Sitofono.  After all, we have talked about it in the past, it's probably not hard to do it, and I'd love to do some business with his company Abbeynet.  Luca's response? "Sitofono points to a PSTN number, owned by our customer. Basically, our customers are always willing to receive calls, they don't want to miss any call! Some customers buy more than one line, not to risk that someone could find the line busy."

Good on you Luca.  That's segmentation.  That's knowing your customer.  And that's how long lasting businesses get built.

The changes to the start and end of daylight savings time have been anything but smooth here. Of course I applied all the patches provided by the various manufacturers.  As expected, basics like getting clocks to move ahead at various times worked pretty well.  However, synchronizing calendars has been anything but a picnic, and I'm not the only one who experienced problems either.

• For the past week, my BlackBerry calendar has been one hour out of synch with my Outlook calendar.  Add a meeting to the PC, and it would appear one hour earlier on the BlackBerry.  Add one to the berry, and it would appear one hour later on the PC.  On Saturday, despite the fact that the berry was synchronized to carrier network time, the clock was one hour off the whole day.
• Thursday night I chatted with Andy Abramson, who was griping that calendar entries made in Entourage were synching one hour out of step with Google Calendar's shared calendar.  It had caused all kinds of problems scheduling meetings with clients and press people for him.

Yesterday morning, when the old DST change would have kicked in, my BlackBerry problems went away.  Hooray.  Now everyone has six months to fix the problems before the time changes again.

I was over at Staples yesterday, picking up a new hard disk and some other goodies, when I walked by a bin full of 1G USB keys for $29 each.  $29 for a 1G key is a good price, so I grabbed one. 

For some time, Microsoft has been promoting a new technology in Windows Vista called ReadyBoost.  ReadyBoost caches the pagefile, extending the virtual memory cache onto USB memory, if available, rather than using the hard disk. Since flash memory is 10x faster than disk, theoretically it should be a significant performance improvement. 

Sounds cool! Moreover, using ReadyBoost is trivial.  It's just an option that appears anytime you plug in a USB connected device.

So how well does it work in practice? The performance boost was immediate and obvious.  Applications load faster, the hard disk pages less often, and the machine generally feels much more responsive. That 1G key now has a permanent home in one of the rear USB ports on my PC.  It's the best $29 I've spent on performance in a long time!