Madd0's Tech Blog

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

No, we won't be doing any necromancy; it's just a title...

But hasn't it happened to you that you want to visit a web site and it's down? It can be for any reason: the web site was recently taken down, the servers are overloaded, your hosting provider didn't backup your database like it should've ("personal experience" you say?)

Anyway, so what can you do?

You can always visit the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has been archiving web pages since 1996, but you'll probably not get the recent content you are looking for.

An alternative is the Coral Content Distribution Network. They keep a distributed cache that's easily accessible by appending .nyud.net or .nyud.net:8090 to the host you are trying to visit, for example:

If http://blog.madd0.com/default.aspx is down, you can always try http://blog.madd0.com.nyud.net/default.aspx or http://blog.madd0.com.nyud.net:8090/default.aspx (I find the latter to be faster most of the time). It's that simple!

Now, if you're anything like me, you'll probably forget what the text to append is, as short as it might be. So, you can do what I did: create a button for your browser's links toolbar that will do it for you! Need help? Just add the following links to your bookmarks:

Coral Cache

Coral Cache (8090)

You will have to right-click on the links (I use the second one, personally) and select "Add to Favorites..." on IE or "Bookmark This Link..." on Firefox (if you're using another browser, you're probably smart enough to figure this out on your own). Then select the "Links" folder on IE or the "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder on Firefox.

It's not always fast. It doesn't always work. But it has worked for me plenty of times. So I put this here in the hope that it might work for you too.

Photo valrico.runner

I’ve got plenty of invites for Joost and, this will sound weird, I don’t have enough friends to give them to. So, since Joost is encouraging me to give them away however I want, the first 999 people to request one, will get it. Use the comments.

Here you have their promotion video:

Joost is a way to watch TV on the Internet. Their software is pretty good, unfortunately their content is not. But I hope it will get better as service matures.