Updated 7/1/2011 with information about ISM’s “Photostitial Units”, ads that appear automatically and hide the first image a user sees.

Image Space Media has an interesting idea: overlay images with advertisements that appear only when users hover their cursor over the image. Try it out by hovering your cursor over the larger images on this site. They’re currently calling it beta, so there’s every opportunity they’ll improve over time.

It already seems to work well, though. Hover your cursor over an image (such as my picture of the New York City Skyline at night), and an advertisement rises up from the bottom, covering about one-quarter of the image, as shown here (scaled down to fit this page).

There’s also a sharing icon in the upper-left corner that you can turn off. If the user clicks it, a full-page overlay appears that provides links to sharing on Facebook , Twitter, and e-mail. Several ads appear on the page, too, and it shows you popular and recent images. This picture shows a scaled-down version of the sharing page, however, since I’m currently using ISM on this site, you can experience it for yourself by hovering your cursor over it.

Once you’re hovering, you can click the advertisement or just move your mouse away. Once you move your mouse, the advertisement shrinks back down to one line. You have to reload the page if you want the ad to completely disappear.

It’s smart enough to ignore small images, such as those you might use in menus. Occasionally, the advertisement wasn’t flush with the bottom of the image, but I’m sure they’ll work that problem at.

I run one of the Web’s largest photo albums and use Google AdSense to make a few bucks on it. I’d be thrilled if I could make a few more, and these ads are actually less intrusive than Google AdSense because they don’t take up any screen space and don’t even appear by default. It took about 12 hours for me to be approved, and only about 10 minutes to add the necessary JavaScript to my sites.

Two weeks later, my experience with ISM has been mixed. They start slow–very slow. In fact, due to what I imagine is a bug in the reporting, they show you as not making any money in your current day–I’m betting they only calculate earnings after midnight.

Here’s the last couple of weeks of earnings. You can ignore that dip on 3/22, as I removed the ads to determine whether they had an impact on site performance and page views per visitor:

The most important thing to notice is the gradual increase in earnings. Actual page views stayed relatively constant throughout this time period, but the earnings per ad (eCPM) gradually increased from $0.05 to $0.45. Their site warns you that it takes a while to get to know what works on your site, and that does seem to be the case. I’m now averaging $0.44 eCPM for my indie stock photo site and $0.39 for my technology blog. That’s nowhere in the ballpark of Google AdSense, but it’s a nice bonus on top of AdSense.

Update 2/6/2012: eCPM dropped dramatically in September to about $0.02. I’ve removed them from the site.

Back to ISM‘s impact on page views per visitor. For this blog, it was negligible. For full-page pictures on my photo album (such as this photo of the New York City Skyline), it was also negligible. However, for pictures that act as links, such as these Toucan Pictures, adding ISM to the thumbnails reduced the pages views per visitor by about 25%. Basically, some people who would browse my site by clicking the thumbnails of pictures gave up sooner because the ISM ads floated over the thumbnails–either because it confused them, annoyed them, or they clicked the ad (intentionally or not). By reducing the number of pages people viewed, ISM also decreased my AdSense earnings. AdSense or not, I’d like people to enjoy my photo album as long as possible, so I chose to remove the ISM ads from the thumbnail pictures. Unfortunately, this reduced by ISM earnings by 85%.

In that chart, notice how today, 3/30/2011, shows no earnings. That’s the bug I was referencing earlier. Their reporting system always shows that you have made no money in the current day. This is a serious bug because it caused me to remove the ads from my site the first day when they seemed to be making zero money–patience paid off for me, though.

ISM is still young, but there are many important improvements they need to make:

• Ability to turn off ads for individual pictures. Right now, it’s all-or-nothing–you turn ISM ads on for the entire page, or not at all. If you mix thumbnails and large images on the same page, you won’t have the option of just turning the ads on for the large images. You also get ads in your header image (if it’s not a background image in HTML), which looks very weird. They should allow you to add a class or some other metadata to the <img> tags to prevent the ads from appearing. Updated 7/1/2011: ISM now allows you to use their website to turn off ads for specific images, but you have to browse through your entire photo catalog and select which ones to enable. That’s not practical for me; it needs to be something I can configure in my Web server code.
• Single ad format. You can’t control the size of the ads on pictures; you leave it entirely up to their algorithm. I might be able to leave small ads on my thumbnails, but the ads they use for the smaller images is just too intrusive. I’d also like to be able to configure a delay, so that the ad only came up if the user hovered over the image for a specific amount of time. Right now, ISM provides zero configurability.
• Bugs. Ads don’t appear in the right place for some images, and reporting always shows $0 earnings for the current day. Frustrating.

In summary, try out ISM on your blog or image site, but monitor it closely to verify that it doesn’t negatively impact your site. In my experience, it can make a few bucks without significantly impacting the user experience.

Update 7/1/2011:

ISM is beginning to roll-out more intrusive ads that appear automatically over an image the first time a user views your page. You know, it’s one of those animated ads that runs for 30 seconds or so, like you often see when trying to watch a YouTube video. Users can choose to close an ad to view the picture immediately.

Publishers can choose to enable or disable it. I enabled it, to see how it would do. Publishers can also choose to show the ad only the first time a user visits a site every hour or day, so regular users see them less frequently.

So far, it’s increased my eCPM by about 50%, and hasn’t had a noticeable impact on my pageviews per visit or my bounce rate. So, thumbs up from me.

Now, there is one big factor to consider besides the drive spin speed: The newer 700GB drives are more than twice as big as my older 300GB drives, which means their data is about twice as dense. Therefore, they should be able to read data about twice as quickly, if the RPMs were equal.

First, the older, 15k drives:

The average read speed of 174 MB/sec is very respectable, but not astounding given the cost. It’s a RAID 0 array, which means my computer is reading from two disks simultaneously and in parallel, so it’s probably about twice the rate of an individual drive. My stand-alone and much less expensive ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7500RPM drive averages about 100 MB/sec.

Next, here’s the performance of two 7500RPM drives in a RAID 0 array:

They’re about 15% faster than the 15k drives, averaging almost 200 MB/sec. The slower rotational speed decreases their performance, but the higher density increases it.

They lose in Access Time, however. If the Transfer Rate (in MB/sec) is how long it takes you to read a book, the Access Time is how long it takes you to find the book on the shelf. If you were racing someone with a faster Transfer Rate and a slower Access Time, you would win any time you had to read a small book, and lose any time you had to read a big book. Therefore, the bigger, lower RPM drives are better at reading large blocks of data, while the smaller, higher RPM drives are better at reading small, random blocks of data.

As you can see from the HD Tune screenshots, the 15k array has an Access Time more than twice as fast as the 7500RPM array. This makes sense, because, access time is determined by how long it takes the drive to spin around to the requested section of the disk (disks always spin in one direction, and don’t stop while they’re in use). On average, it’s going to have to spin about half-way around to find the next random piece of data. That should only take 2ms on the 15k RPM drives, or 4ms on the 7500RPM drives. However, the drive head also has to move in toward the center of the disk or out towards the outer edge of the edge, and then wait for the disk to spin to the right spot, which can take longer.

Individual disks not in a RAID 0 array would have a Transfer Rate of about half the speed. However, individual disks not in a RAID 0 array would have about the same Access Time.

So, I made the 15k RPM array my system drive, because system files tend to be a lot of random access. I’m also using it for my temporary/scratch files, virtual machines, and Lightroom Catalog, because they are limited mostly by access time. I use the 7500 RPM array to store my photos, because they’re large, contiguous files that will benefit from a higher Transfer Rate more than a higher Access Time.

The Burst Rate is just the maximum speed of the interface. Basically, that’s how fast the drive could transfer something to the computer if it were already cached on the drive itself. Clearly the newer RAID array has better caching built-in, but that probably won’t make a huge impact on my performance, because Windows will be doing higher-level caching–I have plenty of RAM.

Here is more information about understanding hard drive performance.

Hi, Tony.
I have a copy of your 70-562 Self Pace Training Kit book.
What are the differences between 70-515 and 70-562 Self Pace Training kits books?

Heya, Russell.

The 70-515 Training Kit was based on the 70-562 manuscript, so you’ll recognize quite a bit of it. If you’ve already worked through the 70-562 TK, I’d tell you to skip 70-515 and spend a week working with jQuery, LINQ to Entities, Dynamic Data Projects, and every aspect of MVC.

If you haven’t yet read through 70-562, scrap it and use the 70-515 book instead. In addition to adding the topics I just mentioned, Mike and I added quite a bit of content to the previous topics and fixed lots of little nit-picky mistakes that always work themselves into a big complex book like this. Not that there were big problems with the 70-562 Training Kit; it got good reviews. We found minor errors like C# classes with the wrong capitalization, etc–stuff that managed to slip past our reviewers.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Tony

Watch in 720p, full-screen.

Here’s a video overview I recorded showing the various improvements and comparing it to my current favorite browser, Google Chrome.

Be sure to watch the video in HD, full screen.

Hello,
I hate to bother you but I have been reading on the internet about the multi-screen topics you write about. If you have time to answer my question – I would greatly appreciate it.
I have been assigned what seems to be an impossible project – and given almost nothing as a budget.
My company want me to create a 3 TV set visual in our business.
I see where you write about similar set-ups – I had hoped you can give me some direction.
This is ULTIMATELY what I would like to make happen.
We have a computer that sits there and has little other purpose.
I would like to use this computer to drive 3 modern TV sets (which have perhaps VGA inputs). I see some links you provide to companies that make video splitting devices – but we would need the model that costs almost 2 thousand – which is my entire budget – so this won’t work. Anyway – I am looking for a cheap way to connect 3 TV sets to a computer AND have the computer to run 3 separate programs which will feed these 3 separate TV sets. I may be able to get this down to 2 TV’s – but 3 is the ultimate goal.
What have you seen or read about that is cheap that may be able to do what I need? I really would appreciate any advice you have on the subject.

And my answer:

Hiya, Scott.
For hardware, just get a video adapter that supports three screens. Here are several:

http://www.multi-monitors.com/SUPER_PC_Dual_Monitor_Video_Cards_Multi_Screen_Graphics_s/1914.htm

You have lots of options, but this seems to be the cheapest at $250: ATI FirePro 2450 Multi-View 512 MB PCI-Express Video Card

So, swap out your existing video card with that one (assuming you have PCI-Express), and use whatever adapter cables you might need to connect to your TVs. Then, just configure Windows for use with multiple monitors.

Are you playing independent video on all three monitors? If so, did you find software to do that, or do you need a hand?

After reading your superb article on restoring your computer’s performance, I was
only wishing that you were in Sydney Australia rather than in the US. If you were running courses, I would be the first to enroll.

Whilst it may seem impertitent on my part, I was hoping you would not mind answering one question please.

When attempting to free up wasted space, can the ‘Temporary Internet files’ as well as the ‘Temporary files’ be cleaned out to speed up the start up of my Laptop. As you can tell, I am rather new at this.

This is an easy one to answer–yes, you can delete temporary internet files. Those are just copies of pictures contained within websites that your computer accesses instead of having to download across the Internet every time. You might notice that websites you visit regularly load a bit slower the next time you visit them, but the difference shouldn’t be too much.

For more information, read this article about freeing up disk space using the Disk Cleanup Wizard, and check out this tool for finding files unused files that you might be able to delete.

These tutorials cover .NET Framework fundamentals such as creating classes, using types and events, regular expressions, reading and writing files, and using collections. I designed these tutorials to give people the prerequisites they need to take the 70-515 and 70-511 Microsoft Certification exams. Everything is available in both C# and Visual Basic.NET.

If you find them useful and you want more, drop me a note. I’m happy to create more content if people like it.

Hello,

I am currently a student at Liverpool John Moores University in BEng Computer and Control engineering and I have got a project to do.

The title of the project is “Performance of firewalls”, the goal is to compare the performance of different personal firewalls. I have already done a theoretical study thanks to your web page on firewalls and others books.

Now I’m faced with several problems for the practical test, because I do not know really how I can test the performances of different personal firewalls, how I can launch threats against the firewall to see his reaction, I wanted to know if you are able to guide me for carrying on my project, or when you can point me to people that could help me.

And my response (after the jump):

To test how well firewalls work, I’d get a computer with lots of vulnerabilities (such as a fresh installation of Windows XP, with no updates) and put together a suite of attacks. Install the firewall software, start Performance Monitor recording key performance statistics, and then attempt lots of bad things against it.

First, start by doing normal tasks on the computer and see how much the firewall interferes. Visit regular, safe websites, and measure how annoying the firewall is and how much it slows down the computer.

Next, start testing for vulnerabilities. For attacks across the (local) network, Nessus is good–it will attempt hundreds of attacks. There are other software packages that do automated attacks against a computer, too. Here are some:

http://sectools.org/

I suspect any firewall will block all those vulnerabilities, however.

You’ll also need to include attacks initiated from the client side, like visiting websites that automatically attempt to install malware (such as those that exploit ActiveX vulnerabilities) or trick the user into installing something. I always have a hard time finding such websites, since google blocks them from search results, but there are literally thousands out there. You might have luck by misspelling common urls (such as goolge.com).

Good luck, and let me know if there’s something else I can do to help.

I am studying for exam 70-515 using your excellent book and training kit. I just found what appears to be an error or maybe I didnt understand the wording used at page 87 where it says:
“ASP.NET calls the method you specify when it determines whether to use the cached version of the page. Depending on how you set the HttpValidationStatus in your handler, ASP.NET will use a cached page or a new, dynamically generated version.”
My question is, if asp.net already determined whether to use the cached  version of the page or not then what good is to set the HttpValidationStatus in your handler?

My response (after the jump):

First, the Visual Basic .NET version:

Now, the C# version:

First, the Visual Basic version:

Next, the C# version:

Next, the C# Version:

Hi Tony, This is totally random, but I stumbled onto an article you wrote for a Microsoft blog like six years ago about how to run multiple monitors off of a laptop. Are you aware of any easier solutions available since that article came out? I bought this thing below, but it only allows for two monitors to display the same thing, rather than spreading the desktop across three screens (which is what I’d like to do.)

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3521446

And my reply:

At the time I wrote my article, USB video cards only supported resolutions up to 1280×1024, which was too low for a decently-sized external monitor. They’ve gotten better since:

http://www.coolgear.com/usbgear/USB-Video-Card.html

Here’s a well reviewed adapter that supports 1600×1200, which is good for most non-widescreen monitors up to 21″:

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-100-U2-UV16-A1-Supporting-1600×1200-Resolution/dp/B00191GZ8U/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1279567417&sr=8-8

If you need a widescreen resolution, this might work better for you:

http://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Adapter-Multiple-Displays-2048×1152/dp/B0038P1TP4/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1279567600&sr=1-4

Well, check the resolution of your monitors, then shop around for “usb video adapter”, “usb video card”, or “usb display adapter” and let me know what you find. Good luck!

A reader dropped a comment onto another page with a question that I’ve asked myself many times…

I wonder if you can help with this perhaps related problem. Running Windows Vista, it reports the hard drive has only 58 MB of free space. Adding up the folder sizes as shown in the properties window for each folder in Windows Explorer (including hidden folders), indicates that there are hundreds of GB of unused space.
When the limit is reached and there is no space left, by Windows reporting, no files can be saved.
It seems obvious that Windows’ reporting is faulty, but as it stops the saving of files, it cannot be ignored.
Any solution / suggestions?

Unfortunately, it’s not likely that Windows is simply lieing to you. More likely is that your technique of evaluating the disk space used by each folder is flawed. However, just to make sure Windows isn’t lieing, you can run a checkdisk at an administrative command prompt by following these steps (after the jump):

1. Click Start and type cmd.
2. Right-click cmd.exe and then click Run As Administrator.
3. Type chkdsk C: /f /r and then press Enter. I’m assuming the free disk space problem is on your C:\ drive, but you can check any disk this way.
4. When prompted, type Y and press Enter.
5. Restart your computer and be patient while Windows scans your disk.

After you restart your computer, check your free disk space again. If your free disk space still isn’t where you expect it, then it really is being used by something. First, use the Windows Disk Cleanup Wizard to remove unnecessary files.

The trick is finding the files and folders that are using the space. Windows isn’t especially good at this, but there are many free tools that are good at it. My favorite is the free and tiny Scanner disk space usage analysis tool. Download and run the .exe file–no install necessary–and then examine the radial chart to find the folders using the most space. Hover your cursor over the bigger sections of the diagram to find the folders using up lots of space. If you don’t expect that folder to use that space, right-click the section and then click Open. Scanner opens an Explorer window to show you the contents. As you can see from this screenshot, my Shared Virtual Machines folder is using 17 GB–a surprise to me, since I don’t use that folder to store virtual machines anymore.

I managed to clear up about 40GB of unneeded files, postponing the purchase of more hard disks by another couple of months…

Tony do you know of a “Simple” program that will measure antenna signal
strength in dB while you are connected to your wireless link. I guess it could
be called a signal strength meter. The ones avaiable either show you in a
bar graff or some other rediculas manner that is good for Non Tech folks but
to most of us Geeks it would be nice to be able to see the readout in dB so
the antenna could be fine tunned for the best signal.

And my (less-than-perfect) answer:

Heya. This seems like something that would be exposed from the Network Interface object of the Performance Monitor snap-in, but I couldn’t find it. I did find the dB listed by network diagnostics, however. Do this (in Windows 7):

1. Right-click the wireless network icon in the notification area, and then click Open Network And Sharing Center. Or just open Network And Sharing Center some other way.
2. In Network And Sharing Center, click the wireless network.
3. In the Wireless Network Connection Status dialog box, click Diagnose.
4. Let Windows Network Diagnostics run. When it announces that it can’t find a problem, click the View detailed information link at the bottom of the page.
5. In the Detection Details section, scroll down to the “List of visible access point(s)”. It lists the dB of every access point. You can copy the whole thing to the clipboard so you can easily search it.

List of visible access point(s): 1 item(s) total, 1 item(s) displayed
BSSID        BSS Type PHY    Signal(dB)    Chnl/freq    SSID
————————————————————————-
00-13-46-86-01-FC    Infra     g    -66        2     myhomeap

It’s not quite as easy as I’d like, but the raw information is there. If you find a prettier tool, do let me know.

Tony

Tony,

I saw you as one of the authors of the Microsoft Self-Paced Training for MCITP Enterprise Administrator series from Microsoft Press.  I visited your personal website and really liked your photography as well… Very impressive.

Anyhow, I digress… I’m not really writing to talk about photography, though I could.  My question is about MCITP training and certification.  You have a substantial history and experience in training/writing about Microsoft certifications.  I’m moving up in my employer’s organization and I’m tasked with getting my certification.  I had my MCSE 2000, but it’s time to upgrade my skills.

As someone new to Win2008 (specifically R2) do you have any hints, tips, suggestions for getting GOOD training, but also receiving certification.  I’m purchasing the Microsoft Press self-paced series that you’re one of the authors of, but I’m looking for more as well… By no means am I suggesting your books aren’t great… they are!  But I’m one who looks for help from many angles (even emailing the author, as you can see).  Any guidance you may have is much appreciated.

Regards,

And my answer:

Of course, real-world experience is the best teacher. Sounds like you have quite a bit of that already. If there’s some area where you don’t have enough real-world experience, setup different scenarios with virtual machines, and make it actually work (without following step-by-step instructions like those in the Training Kits).

I like to read the TechNet blogs. They’re written by the guys writing the software, so you tend to get a deeper understanding of how the technologies work. I also like to check out different IT forums to see where people are running into problems in the real-world.

The #1 resource for MCITP certifications, though, is TechNet. Not only is it one of the best technical resources, but it seems to be the place where the people writing the questions get their inspiration. Note that I don’t have any inside knowledge on how they write the questions–I’m saying this based on my own experiences taking the certification tests.

Hope that helps! And thanks for the compliment on my other passion. :D

Tony

I bought a $700 64GB WiFi iPad, and it arrived a bit more than a week ago. Yet, I still feel like I’m waiting for my iPad to arrive.

I was promised an iPad that would revolutionize how I read magazines and books. It would bring the amazing Apple App Store experience to a bigger screen. It would serve my Web browsing needs at home and be my portable media player/game system on the road.

The iPad doesn’t do any of these things well, at least right now. Some examples:

• I needed directions to the Bronx Zoo from my house. I Googled Bronx Zoo, found the address, and pressed Google Maps to open it in Google Maps. With another press, the iPad routed from my current location to the zoo. Perfect. Now, I needed to print the directions. My $700 iPad can’t print. So, I had to repeat the process from a real computer.
• I know everyone complains about it, but the iPad doesn’t support Flash. Two of my websites use Flash extensively (northrupphotography.com and northrup.org). Flash is everywhere, and while I can get by without it when I need to look up something quick, you definitely need Flash if you want to casually browse and enjoy the Web.
• At least there are the apps, right? I immediately opened the App Store to download the dozens of Apps I have on my iPhone. They’re just not there. Very few designed-for-iPad apps are available now, and they cost far too much. Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone is fun and costs $3. It’s exactly the same on the iPad (but bigger) and it costs $10. Turns out, I’m willing to blow $3 on a dumb game, but $10 seems like way too much. Plus, when I’m stuck waiting in line, I can grab my iPhone and keep myself occupied, or toss it to the kid to keep her busy. The iPad is too big to carry everywhere, and why would I play a game on it at home when I have a real computer and an XBox, attached to much better screens?
• eBooks and magazines just aren’t ready yet. The formatting is terrible (in one book, literally unreadable because spaces and linebreaks were lost). Where are the gorgeous interactive magazines I saw in the previews? Zinio seems to be the only real option now, and all they do is show you scans of magazines, which means no searching, formatting not designed for the iPad (you have to pinch and drag individual pages around to see them full-size), and very little interactivity. USA Today and the Wall Street Journal have apps designed for the iPad, but they’re less functional and dynamic than their websites.
• The tablet format is clumsy. If I try and hold it like a book to read, my arms get tired after a few minutes because it’s too heavy. I can’t rest it on my lap like a laptop because the screen lays flat. If I want to use it as a media player on an airplane, I’d have to bring a stand to hold it up, which brings me to my next point…
• Media is a pain to copy over, because the iPad supports a very limited number of formats. So, I can’t simply copy them over. I tried converting some videos to a supported format, and it took a long time–and then iTunes refused to copy them to the iPad, because I guess I got the format wrong. iTunes could help out here by doing the conversion for me, but I suspect they want me to buy from their limited number of content suppliers.
• I use Google Reader to keep up with about a dozen different websites. Open the page on the iPad, though, and I get the mobile version of the page which doesn’t show any pictures until you click the individual items. Many of the sites I read are photography related, so this ruins them.

I really didn’t approach the iPad as a cynic–I bought into their vision of the future of publishing. The future just isn’t here, yet. I’ll check back with you in six months, but right now, I urge you not to buy an iPad. Instead, grab a Windows-based netbook, or hold out for one of the upcoming Windows-based touchscreen tablets. At least you’ll be able to use Flash.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve published many books for Microsoft Press, and I’m quite sure that Microsoft wants to compete with the iPad. I’m not being compensated in any way for slamming the iPad, though. I laid out $700 because I believed in it.

BTW, a few positive points:

• The battery life on the iPad really is great.
• The screen is awesome. I don’t buy into the idea that only eInk is suitable for reading. After all, so many of us stare at LCD screens all day, anyway. I have a Kindle, too, and I’d rather read something on the color iPad.
• My kid loves the iPad, even though she can’t play her games at the PBS Kids or Nickelodeon websites because they need Flash. I did download a couple of games for her, and they kept her occupied during a road trip. BTW, she’s six, and the first thing she said when she saw it was, “It’s a big iPod!” She’s right, too–it’s a big, heavy, non-portable iPod.