Travel’s a curse

Posted on by ewand

We all know that travelling on business can be a pain, and the glamour of travelling on holiday has long since worn off…

… so I thought I’d share some useful travel websites to help ease the pain (if you feel that way, and haven’t seen them before)…

  • http://www.flyertalk.com – a must-have resource for any frequent flyers, to check out the skinny on mileage claims, scams, best way to get discount business class etc etc
     
  • http://www.checkmytrip.com – use your IATA booking reference number for flights to check that you’re definitely flying, and maybe even see how full the flight is (if your airline doesn’t give you that already)
     
  • http://www.tripadvisor.com – I’ve used this site loads of times to pick hotels (some of them, a bit off the beaten track) when on holiday, or just to figure out where to go/what to do
     
  • http://www.seatguru.com or http://www.seatexpert.com – are you sitting in a seat which won’t recline? By a bulkhead with no legroom? Look on these sites and you’ll find reviews (yes) of specific seats on a load of carriers’ planes….

I’ve already booked the summer holiday, and have used all of these sites in making sure I get the best deal 🙂

 

Ewan

Use NewSID on cloned virtualised machines

Posted on by ewand

I came across a problem recently when a colleague was building a virtual Windows Server environment, and was reminded of it the other night when on a webcast with Exchange MVPs, when one of the attendees said he was hitting issues with Exchange 2007 servers not finding the Active Directory properly.

The solution lay at the heart of how the VM environment had been built – using a single source “base” OS image which was then configured to join the domain and had Exchange installed on it, for each machine in the environment.

If you’re building a multi-machine environment, it saves a lot of time if you build a single image and make sure it’s all patched up through Windows Update etc, then it’s just a matter of installing the Exchange (or whatever) servers once you’ve joined a copy of the VM into the domain.

Trouble is, when you install a new server (such as the base OS build), it creates a unique Security Identified (SID) which stays the same even if the machine is renamed and domain membership changed – whilst you’ll typically be able to join a cloned machine into the same domain, and it might look like it’s working OK, numerous strange things can happen – making it look as if the trust between the machine and domain is broken, or having problems authenticating to resources.

NewSID is a free tool that Mark Russinovich developed while at Winternals/SysInternals, and is now available from Microsoft since the acquisition of Mark’s company. The trick is to run NewSID on your cloned machine before joining the domain, and it will create a new, random, SID which means you won’t get clobbered later on with the kind of problems described above.

(NB: It’s worth noting that NewSID isn’t supported for production use – for that, you should really SysPrep the machines instead).

//E

Exchange Archiving – to be, or not to be?

Posted on by ewand

A lot of customers have looked at archiving solutions for Exchange over the last few years, and the most common reason for doing so is to reduce the volume of data held on the Exchange server. This obviously brings benefits for the administrators – they don’t need to back so much “stuff” up every night, and they have a chance to use the archive for longer term compliance/discovery purposes. I’ve even seen customers using archives as a way of migrating content from another email system – eg company migrating from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange decides they would just bung all the Groupwise content into an archive so they can start with nice clean mailboxes on Exchange, but the users don’t lose access to their historical data.

Archiving does pose an interesting question, though – what if you’re just archiving all the garbage that people don’t delete? I’ve seen cases of companies who have an archival solution but have implemented no mailbox quotas, on the basis that the archive takes care of handling everything they don’t want to back up every day. Now this, to me, seems like a situation where the Exchange mailbox stores are going to be relatively static, but the archives are just going to grow indefinitely…

Exchange 2007 Managed Folders

There are some good papers and demos here on Managed Folders in Exchange 2007, and if used appropriately these capabilities could provide a decent alternative to archiving altogether, or could at least provide a way of throttling the amount of junk that ends up in the archive. A nice side effect is that “important” mail is kept online on the server, so is always accessible from any client (without needing to put additional plug-ins or install any other archive-aware software) such as OWA or even mobile devices.

I say this with some personal experience, since I’ve been using Managed Folders for a while now, in the real world. My mailbox sits in the Exchange Dogfood environment where the Exchange development group and Microsoft IT get to implement very early technology before it’s finished, and before it gets rolled out to everyone else in MS, let alone our customers. My mailbox was on Exchange “12” for a year before it released, and it is set to a gut-busting 2Gb quota, so I don’t really need to use PST files any more.

The approach to using managed folders is one where all mailbox content (and it’s possible to differentiate different types – eg having different rules for emails, calendar appointments, voicemail etc) would have some age limit set (eg 6 months), and on expiry of that time, the content gets “dealt with”. This could involve deleting the content, forwarding it somewhere (through journaling, perhaps sending to a different mail system, to a Sharepoint 2007 site, etc), or moving it from the main mailbox folder into one of the managed folders…

 These managed folders are defined on the server and applied to the user via a policy (so that users in different departments might see different folders from others), but it’s important to note that they are mailbox folders (ie they appear as regular-ish folders within the user’s mailbox, are only visible to the same people that might be able to see the mailbox itself – ie they’re not public folders of any sort -and count against the mailbox quota).

Retention limits can be set on both the “regular” mailbox folders (such that after 6 months, everything will get shifted into one of the managed folders), and also on the managed folders themselves… so in this example, everything from the Inbox etc would get shoved into the Cleanup Review managed folder, and after 30 days in there it will be deleted from the server. So the onus is now on the user to decide if they want to keep anything in that managed folder, and if so, move it to one of the other managed folders, which will typically have a longer retention period (eg HR records might be kept for 7 years).

I’d liken this approach to pushing the user into deciding what they need to keep, and basically assuming that anything which doesn’t get specifically tagged or categorised by the act of moving them to the correct place, is therefore assumed to be disposable and can be removed from the server. Of course, it could still be archived somewhere else for long-term storage. It’s a bit like when I was a kid – my mother would periodically come into my room and put anything left lying around into a bin bag and threaten to chuck it out… if I protested, she would retort “Well, if you wanted to keep it, you shouldn’t have left it lying on the floor now, should you??”

//E

iPhone over-the-air experience

Posted on by ewand

Just read Jason O’Grady’s blog over on ZDNet and it’s quite eye-opening… one thing leapt out:

“Wireless syncing. iPhone can only be synced with a cable and can’t be synced via WiFi or Bluetooth. This is unacceptable. iPhone has three radios and should be able to be synced with all three. WiFi and BT minimally, then OTA to Dot-Mac for bonus points.”

So the device won’t be able to sync with Exchange natively and unless Apple changes the stance of not allowing 3rd party applications (another strange decision), presumably precluding a 3rd party ISV from building an ActiveSync client (such as DataViz RoadSync which is available for loads of other devices). Maybe even RIM would have wanted to build a Blackberry Connect client for the device, but again, might be unable to…

Sounds like the iPhone v1 will be pretty limited in terms of competition with other smart devices – basically a music player which can do a bit of web surfing and make and receive phone calls.

Who knows, maybe that’s what the masses actually want – maybe smartphones and connected PDAs are too complex for the average user on the street – but it could be some future iteration of the iPhone which expands on the basics which the v1 device establishes. It’ll be interesting to try out the iPhone when it comes out… no doubt, it’ll sell shed loads and if the UI is as good as the hype suggests, it could force everyone else to concentrate on doing a few things well, and carefully adding more functionality gradually.

Related reading:

IGot-over-it-already

Apple iPhone for now ignoring synch

Windows Mobile iPhone

Apple attacks iPhone UI emulators

Finally! Apple announces the iPhone!

“Dealers of Lightning” – an insightful history in Xerox PARC

Posted on by ewand

Ever since reading  Robert X Cringley‘s excellent 1996 Accidental Empires book (which actually has the even more excellent full title of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date), I’ve been interested in some of the history behind the way the PC and internet industry has evolved. I’ve always loved Cringley’s description of Steve Jobs as “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley”… (in fact, he even opens Accidental Empires with a line akin to the opener from the sadly departed Douglas Adams’ tome, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was, “High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.”)


Many commentators would trace the genesis of a lot of technology we now take for granted back to Xerox Corp’s famed Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC. The roll call of what was supposedly invented at PARC is long – laser printers, ethernet, the bitmapped display, GUI, mouse, object-oriented programming, distributed computing… the list goes on.


Legend goes a little fuzzy though – not everything that came out of PARC originated there, but a lot of the researchers who worked there in the glory days brought ideas with them and refined them enough to be useful (eg Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse before coming to Xerox but perfected its use with the new bitmapped displays and Graphical User Interface). Legend also has it (backed up by some fact, in fact) that The Most Dangerous Man in Silicon Valley himself was given a guided tour of PARC’s facilities, saw the Alto computer they’d invented (showcasing their GUI, mouse et al) and became inspired to have Apple launch the Lisa computer, which was the forerunner of the Mac.


Anyway, a few years ago I picked up Dealers of Lightning – a potted history of what happened at PARC, and it really is a fascinating read. It can be a bit heavy going in places but gives a great insight not only into the amazing work they did at PARC (and the disdain the industry poured on Xerox Research for basically inventing the world as we know it but then alledgedly doing nothing with it, because they couldn’t see how it related to selling photocopiers), and it also paints an inspiring portrait of the head of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor.


Taylor’s basic philosophy was to hire people that were smarter than he was (and he was the guy who founded ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, so must be a bit of a smart cookie himself). He also decided, in the CSL, that he couldn’t manage any more than 50 people directly, so he set the cap on that size of organisation (since he didn’t want to introduce layers of management), and just went about making sure those 50 were the best he could possibly find. What an visionary management style, and an amazing story.


It’s also interesting to see how many of the luminaries mentioned in this book as the fathers of computing as we know it, now show up in the Microsoft Global Address List 🙂


//Ewan

Choosing a new MP3 player – dilemmas, dilemmas…

Posted on by ewand

It’s time for a new music player. I got a Creative Zen Micro a couple of years ago, and it’s been a good little player but the headphone socket has now developed a loose connection and it’s getting a bit annoying. It’s time to start choosing a successor.


Things I liked about the Zen Micro, which help to shape the criteria I’m using:



  • 5Gb is a decent amount of storage; I’ve got about 1200 tracks and 1% free space. I tend to put a few whole albums on it, and just sync playlists from Windows Media Player for the rest. That can sometimes be a bit frustrating, when I’d listen to one song in the playlist then think “oh, haven’t heard him for a while”, go to play the whole album, only to find that’s the only song I’ve synced from that album… so maybe more space would be useful, but is it worth the tradeoff in battery life and physical size that might bring?

  • It’s small enough. I certainly don’t want anything smaller than the Zen, and although thinner would be cool, it’s not a big deal – I guess I’m thinking I don’t want to go for anything much bigger if I’m going to use the device a lot. It would be cool to have a nice big screen, but if it means the device doesn’t live in my bag that I carry everywhere because it’s too big, then it means I won’t use it.

  • It’s got a mini-USB plug on the bottom. Say no more – when I’m travelling or on holiday (which is when the device is getting more prolonged use), I have a single charger or sync cable for the music player as for the mobile phone. OK, you could argue that’s the thin end of the inevitable convergence, but I’ve covered some of that ground already…

  • I don’t use the radio much, but every year when we troop down to Le Mans to see the 24h race, it’s really useful… so if I could get a new device with an occasional radio use, that’d be cool.

All my music is in WMA format and I can’t really be bothered with the idea of re-ripping it all or converting to MP3 (a process which would inevitably degrade the sound quality quite some), and I’ve bought some stuff from MSN Music so would like to be able to carry that forward.


Point 1 (WMA) rules out anything in the iPod range (why won’t Apple just get over it and put WMA support on the iPods??), and point 2 (DRM) rules out the Zune for the moment since (almost unbelieveably) it’s not compatible with Plays4Sure.


I suppose at some point I’ll get a Zune: maybe even when I’m Seattle early next month… but for the moment, I’m leaning towards the Sandisk Sansa range… I did love their “iDont.com” viral advertising on the tube last year, and these devices seem to be getting decent write ups though there are some minor niggles (like no mini-USB, for example).


Buying the right technology and not ending up with an expensive dud or a short-lived manufacturer’s folly… it’s not easy, is it?


//Ewan

Sideshow Media Center remote – want one!

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been a long-time user of the Philips Pronto programmable remote – it’s an LCD touch screen based affair, which can be programmed to the 9th degree to create your own UI of macros which correspond to lots of different activities on different remotes – eg a “Watch the TV” button which powers on your screen, starts up the satellite box, switches the TV to the right input, fires up the Amp and selects the TV audio input on that. Or “Shut everything down”, where it would send “Off” commands to all your A/V kit.

To get a flavour for what’s possible, just have a browse on RemoteCentral‘s amazing file archive … the principal downside is you could spend hundreds of hours tweaking and tuning the setup …

Any IR-based remote can be frustrating though, since it’s all one-way – meaning, if it sends the signal to the TV to change inputs, there’s no way of verifying that the TV actually acted on the command – maybe something was blocking the IR window on the screen, or maybe your macro sent it too soon after switching the TV on so it might not have started up properly.

Anyway, I started looking into the promised Sideshow Media Center remotes which we’ll see later this year – remotes which have 2-way communication with a Vista Media Center PC (using the Vista Sideshow framework), so could not only control the PC and any associated A/V kit (using Bluetooth & IR), but could also let you browse media libraries or TV guides on the remote, without disturbing what’s happening on the screen.

Engadget has a preview of the Ricavision remote which was on display at CES … should be available towards the middle of the year, for around $200. I think I’ll get my order in now 🙂

//Ewan

Nice new calendaring features in Exchange 2007

Posted on by ewand

There’s so much new stuff in Exchange 2007, that it’s easy to forget just how useful some of it is… like the calendaring improvements both in the UI of Outlook and OWA, but in some server-side cleverness too.

In Exchange 2003 and earlier, when someone sends you a meeting request, it will just sit in your Inbox until Outlook picks it up and does something with it (depending on how you have Outlook configured). One standard behaviour would be for it to take meeting requests and stick them in your calendar as tentative appointments which you’ve yet to respond to. Outlook does need to be running, however…

This could mean that if you’re on holiday, people might be sending you meeting requests which conflict, but your free/busy time might look free because Outlook isn’t running. Exchange 2007 now does the tentative booking of time on behalf of the mailbox, as well as taking care of other meeting hygiene features – like removing out-of-date meeting requests when the organiser sends a change (solving another pain if you’ve been away for a while, and come back to loads of meeting requests which are out of date). This is part of what the “Calendar Attendant” does – more calendaring stuff can be found on a description of the collection of services referred to as the “Calendar Concierge“.

Now, I’m on a lot of internal distribution lists which I filter from my inbox into subfolders using server side rules. In the past, I’d sometimes missed conference calls etc where invites had been sent to the DL, but had been moved into my subfolders before Outlook had a chance to shove the tentative meeting in the calendar. Now, with Exchange doing both acts, anything sent to me directly or indirectly will get put in the calendar. Nice!

Well, there is one downside – in a multinational company, there are meetings and conference calls going on at all hours of the day and night… and invites might be sent to DLs to drum up interest in attending. It’s easy to forget to switch off your phone or PDA from reminding you about the out of hours meetings, if you’re not in the habit of deleting/declining the requests…

Sometimes, it’s the seemingly little improvements that make applications so much more usable – and yet don’t get the same degree of attention. The Calendar Concierge is definitely one of them!

iGot-over-it-already

Posted on by ewand

You have to admire the way Apple stage manages announcements and releases – despite months of rumours, there’s been little of real substance about the iPhone until it was announced in San Francisco on Tuesday. The media coverage the announcement has already got is hard to believe – let alone all the discussion that’s going on over the net about it.

Now, I have never bought an Apple product*. Partly through bloody-mindedness and some kind of desire to be a bit different, and partly because over a decade ago I never got on with the Mac and, more crucially, never (then) got on with the kind of Mac users who behaved like religious zealots…

The iPhone looks interesting for a number of reasons: time will tell if it is really a success in Europe when compared to all the various Smartphones, PDAs, Blackberry devices etc, as well as the more basic mobile phone devices as used primarily by consumers who just want a phone, maybe one that takes pictures, that can make and take calls, and do text messaging.

Some initial thoughts about the iPhone, IMHO:

  • From a feature point of view, it’s not really all that revolutionary – there’s nothing really on the device that isn’t already available from a number of different (more established) mobile operators and device vendors, and many offer (today) all the same (and more) level of functionality, for a lower cost.
    Where Apple will hope to score will be on the whole package and the design.
  • When iPods are announced (as well as other devices like the Mac mini), it’s often been possible to go right out and buy them that day. This contrasts with most tech company behaviours where products are announced months or even years in advance. The iPhone breaks with this tradition somewhat, by not being available months later in the US, much later this year (in Europe) and next year in Asia.
  • Network operators always have to go through a testing cycle for any new hardware – maybe that’s why Steve Jobs was waving about the iPhone on stage, but it’ll be 4 or 5 months before anyone will buy one. Talk to any of the entrant mobile device vendors in recent years, and you’ll find a lot of them who just haven’t nailed enough of the basics for the device to be usable… so the iPhone v1 might well need to be followed up pretty quickly with a later version, if there isn’t enough time to sort out the inevitable troubles early on. The lack of 3G might have put a lot of carriers off this phone, if it didn’t carry the Apple logo and the cachet that goes with that, so maybe a quick follow-on with iPhone v2 that includes UMTS would be a smart move for Apple, though at the risk of cheesing off all the early adopters of v1.
  • Cingular seem to have done well out of this arrangement – an exclusive deal (at least at first) where every salivating wannabe iPhone owner gets tied to a 2 year contract just to buy the phone in the first place. The other US carriers must be smarting a bit over that one – but to do this, Cingular may have had to give up any control on the device (custom UI, built-in activation of specific carrier services, application bundles etc) that they would typically impose on other handset vendors… although that isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
  • There’s no denying the iPhone looks nice – at least it does in the photos and videos. It’s a master of style and simplicity, just like the way the Mac has always stuck to a single mouse button rather than the 2 or 3 that Windows or various *nixes have adopted. It’ll be interesting to see how effective the touch screen is, not only for dialling (something that’s never as easy on a touch screen as it is on a physical keypad – the lack of tactile feedback really makes a difference), but also for texting using an on-screen soft keyboard without a stylus.
  • Who’s the typical user going to be? Twenty/thirtysomething consumers who quite probably own an iPod already? How’s Apple going to grow their installed base with the phone, if the main user groups just ditch their iPod Nano in favour of an iPhone…
  • Business customers are much more likely to either be using Windows Mobile, Blackberry or similar, or would at least want to connect their array of devices to some internal e-mail system with calendaring & contacts sync support, rather than relying on IMAP or getting an external service (like the push-IMAP that’s being offered from Yahoo!). Enterprise customers may also want some more control over the security of the device – is there going to be on-device encryption? What about policies to manage access in to internal systems from the GPRS network? And with a whole new OS (even if it is some variant of OS X, it’s still going to be “new” from a developer perspective), how quickly & readily will 3rd parties be to fill the inevitable gaps in functionality?

 

Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to wait & see what happens…

//Ewan

* I do actually own some Apple merchandise – the iPod sock that I use to keep my Orange SPV M3100 warm and scratch-free (thankfully now washed and smelling sweetly). And I once had a Mac classic – when I left a previous employer, one part of my leaving present was an old monochrome Mac (which I don’t think ever booted up). I took it home and turned it into a garden ornament – it looked quite funky sitting in the back border, covered in moss and with the plastic cracking somewhat. Wish I had some photos…