Martin Woodward

I am currently playing with SP1 of VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008 in a Windows Server 2008 VMWare instance I have.   Whenever I created this particular instance I kept the disk space at 16Gb which is normally plenty for these play instances but after installing the service pack of VSTS my disk space was getting low.

I thought I would try extending the size of my virtual disk and it was suprising easy.

1. First, I had to take a fill clone my image to remove the snapshot history.
2. The on the new clone's disk I executed the following command:
   

   "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -x 32Gb win2008-000004-cl1.vmdk

3. This extended the disk size, now I need to extend the size of the partition.  Boot up the virtual Windows 2008 server, right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage".  Go To Storage, Disk Management and then right click on the C: partition and select Extend to extend the partition the the size of the remaining disk.

Tada.  No third party tools (like Partition Magic etc) needed.

I swear, one day I'll learn.  Despite having promised myself to steer clear of the initial release of any Windows version of iTunes because they are consistently broke in some pretty severe ways - I read this report on Engadget and decided to upgrade thinking that they may finally haved solved the issues I have been having.  (My main one being that I could consistently crash iTunes on any PC by downloading a podcast and pressing the "pause" button during the download).

However, iTunes 7.6 gave me a great new issue - iTunes wouldn't close.  Every time I tried to close it (by pressing the X button, or doing File, Close) it would freeze and start consuming as much of my CPU as possible - the only way to get rid of it was to kill the process in Task Manager.

Anyway - after a bit of playing, I eventually figured out that this was something wrong with how they are calling Bonjour.  iTunes has the ability to listen for other shared libraries and to share your own library - which is something I had enabled so that I could stream stuff off my laptop onto the Mac Mini and vice-versa.  It does this using Apple's Bonjour service.

On my system, the Bonjour service is installed under the catchy name of

"##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##"

Very user friendly - I think I'll start using GUID's for all my user interfaces :-).  Anyway.  If I stop this service, I can close iTunes down happily.  It will even now let me go into the preferences in iTunes and disable sharing - something that was locking up iTunes 7.6 before (and what made me suspect the Bonjour integration).

Therefore - if you are having the same problems as me, right click on My Computer and select Manage.  Then go to Services and Applications, Services, select "##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##" and press "Stop".  Then right click, select properties and change the Start-up type from "Automatic" to "Disabled".

This obviously removes the sharing capabilities - but at least it allows you to sync your iPod.  When I finally got iTunes 7.6 to actually work a little bit, I was unsurprised to see that they have still not fixed the bug with the download manager, so if you attempt to do anything to a downloading purchase, podcast or whatever then it will still crash iTunes and will consume most of the available CPU while downloading.  Sigh.

Yesterday, Version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux were released on the Microsoft Download Center.  Officially, this provides addition support for Virtual Server 2005 SP1, however I have read reports from the beta program suggesting they may also work under Virtual PC (albeit unsupported).  The additions are for RedHat and SuSE based Linux distributions.  I tried converting the supplied RPM files into .DEB files for installation in Ubuntu, but the scripts would then get installed specifically test for being installed on a Debian distribution and fail early.  If I was feeling adventurous I'd remove these checks and see what happened - but my Linux knowledge is a little sketchy so I'll stick with VMWare for now for heavy duty Ubuntu use until I read about someone clever getting them up and running.

The new "Gutsy Gibbon" version of Ubuntu was officially released this week.  While some of the developers at Teamprise use Ubuntu as their primary OS, I personally prefer Windows Vista, however I keep an Ubuntu image around so that I can quickly test any new UI code I write in an alternate OS.  Getting Ubuntu to install in VMWare is pretty trivial - the standard installation seems to work just fine.  However getting it to work in Microsoft Virtual PC is a little more complicated - the various tricks are located in various forum and bug posts around the web that I can never find when I need them so I am collating them here for my own use later - hopefully you may also find them useful.  Please bear in mind that I know enough about Linux to be dangerous rather than useful, so this may not be the "best" way - however it is my way ;-)

There are a few basic issues with getting Ubuntu 7.10 working inside Virtual PC.

1. The default display color settings use a higher color depth than Virtual PC supports
2. Ubuntu has a hard time recognizing the emulated Virtual PC mouse
3. Networking does not work initially
4. Time syncronization with the host can be a little off.
5. Soundcard does not work initially
6. The ubuntu splash screen "usplash" causes problems when shutting down/restarting.

Anyway, here we go.  Obviously first things first, you need Virtual PC 2007 and Ubuntu 7.10 (x86 desktop).

Installation:

• In Virtual PC, create a new virtual machine by pressing "New..." in the console.  I use the following settings:
  • In the OS selection select "Other"
  • Ram 512Mb
  • New Disk of 8192 Mb
• One created, go back into settings and Enable Hardware Virtualization if available (only available if you have a modern processor, and even then you probably had to enable this in your host machines BIOS first).  This can make a serious difference if your hardware supports it, however having the flag enabled makes the image less portable as some machines cannot support this option so they have to switch it off before using the image for the first time. 
• Start the VM.  Then go to Edit, Capture ISO Image... and select the downloaded Ubuntu install image.  You may need to restart your Virtual PC to get it to boot from the mounted DVD
• When the ubuntu install menu comes up, move down to "Start Ubuntu in safe graphics mode" then press "F6" for more options. 
• In the boot options, add the text "i8042.noloop" without the quotes.  This is a parameter we are passing to the kernel to get the emulated Virtual PC mouse to work correctly.  You entire boot options line should look like this:
  file=/cdrom/pressed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper xforcevesa initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash  -- i8042.noloop 
• Press enter to start the boot into the installation live cd.  Sometime when I do this, when the UI comes into view and the mouse is captured but it is like the virtual PC is only showing the top left hand corner of the screen.  Not sure why, but to fix it hit CTRL-ALT-F1 to go into a console and then CTRL-ALT-F7 to restart the window manager.  You should be able to see the whole screen now.
• Install by double-clicking on the Install icon on the desktop.  I use the guided partition manager to assign the whole virtual disk.
• Once the install has completed, unmount the DVD from Virtual PC by going to "CD" and Release "ubuntu-7.10-desktop-x386.iso" (remembering that in Virtual PC, the right ALT button releases your mouse from the guest machine).  Then go to Action, Reset to restart the VPC.

Initial Configuration:

When you boot for the first time, there are a few things that you need to do to get everything working properly.  We need to get all the things (including the mouse etc) working again.  These changes will then be stored on the virtual machine disk so you won't need to do them again for this image.

• Log in (remember the mouse isn't working yet), so press CTRL-ALT-F1 to drop into a console.
• Let's now get the mouse working again.  type sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst.  Page down to the bottom of the file and find the first kernel line after the phrase " ## ## End Default Options ##".
• Add i8042.noloop clock=pit to the kernel parameters.  You'll recognize the i8042.noloop thing from before, the clock=pit is a fix for the time drift issues (KB918461)
• Now we want to ensure the modules are loaded for the Virtual PC soundcard and Network card.  type sudo nano /etc/modules.  At the end of the file add the lines
tulip
snd-sb16
  Ensuring that each is on a line of it's own, followed by a carriage return.
• Then we want to remove the fancy Ubuntu splash screen that has some issues under Virtual PC.  Type sudo apt-get remove usplash -y
• Restart by typing sudo reboot
• When you restart your soundcard will be working - you might want to get rid of the login/logout sounds...  System, Preferences, Sound, Sounds, setting Log out and Log in to "None".
• As this is a virtual pc, depending on the usuage you may also want it to automatically log-in with the user account created on install.  In which case go to System, Administration, Login Window, Security and check the "Automatic login" box - selecting your user.  Also, because this is a virtual PC you may also want to disable the display power-management (System, Preferences, Power Management, Display) and disable the screen saver (System, Preferences, Screen Saver, uncheck Activate Screensaver when computer is idle).
• To get networking fully enabled, I've found that I have problems with the "Roaming Mode" introduced in 7.10.  Therefore I go to System, Adminitstation, Network.  Click on the Wired Network and select properties.  Disable the "enable roaming mode" check box and then select DHCP configuration then press ok.  Finally, check the checkbox next to the "Wired connection" box to make this the default connection used on startup.

Configuring to run Teamprise

Now I have a booting Ubuntu instance, I usually want to configure it with Java, Eclipse and Teamprise.  This part may be of interest to less folks, but I need to do it so I'll write down the steps but feel free to ignore.

• Installing Sun Java.  Teamprise needs some encryption stuff to support NTLM authentication that is not available in the CGJ - therefore another JVM needs to be installed - in this case I'll use Sun's.  Go to Applications, Add/Remove programs, change the drop down to "All available applications" and then in the search box type "Sun Java".  In my case I'm going to pick Sun Java 6 Console then I press "Apply".
• Next is Eclipse.  Easy way is from Add/Remove programs, search for "Eclipse" and Apply - however that was Eclipse 3.2 at the time of writing.  Nothing wrong with Eclipse 3.2 of course, I just like to be on the Early Adopter curve so I go to the Eclipse.org site and download the latest for linux.
• Then finally, I install Teamprise.  That part is easy for me (copy paste the update site URL into Eclipse and unzip Teamprise Explorer)

Hope that helps if you are going on a similar journey.

RC0 of Windows Server 2008 was made available earlier this week.  I am currently installing it inside a Virtual PC and I have to say I'm impressed so far.  The installation process is much faster and smoother.  Also, it is very strange to see how far the "secure as default" mantra of Microsoft has come over the past few years.  In Window Server 2008 when you first install even the Sound Service is disabled and you have to enable it before sounds will come out of your soundcard (this is made easy by some nice UI from the standard volume control).  How times have changed... 

BTW, when installing Windows Server 2008 inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 I said that it should use the Windows Vista soundcard when creating the initial VPC configuration and it seems to work great.

Skype seems to have been having trouble this morning.  At first I thought it was a set of Windows Vista Updates I'd applied - but when the problem started affecting my hardware based Skype phone as well my suspicions went to my ISP.  I was thinking that they were doing some traffic shaping or something to Skype traffic.  Finally, after talking with a fellow Skype user (over an old fashioned POTS line) who was also having login problems I figured it must be Skype itself - and turns out it is.  The fault is apparently "software related" and they did some planned maintenance yesterday - coincidence?

Funny how long it took me to realize it was Skype to blame, must show how reliable the service has been so far.  Interestingly, when I called my ISP (Nildram) to ask if they'd did any traffic shaping they said that they did but that VoIP, Skype, and VPN traffic are all prioritized on my line during working hours.  That's actually quite reassuring and makes me like Nildram even more.

Update:  Skype is back up and running, with a few details posted as to what caused the problem.  Interestingly they are spinning it as that the software fault on Skype's servers was triggered by lots of Windows computers rebooting for patch Tuesday - not sure what I think about that.

People go on about iPod + iTunes + Store being this all time great combination.  I'll admit that I love my iPod, and if/when one comes out with similar capabilities to the iPhone player I'll be buying it.  However, I don't think I'm being controversial here when I say that iTunes on Windows really sucks.

It's not just the fact that the interface is alien to the OS in which it is running, or the fact that the much vaunted coverflow is much less "scrolling like butter" more "scrolls like screeching fingernails on a chalkboard".  It's not even the fact that it is a highly intrusive install, requiring QuickTime and making it take over more default file types than it should.  It's just the fact that it is really buggy, has a habit of totally crashing (especially when I am trying to access the iTunes store), occasionally trashes it's own library xml file that it requires for some reason and is a complete resource hog.  The software sucks.

What is worse is that the initial release of an iTunes version *always* sucks.  This is a universal given.  Recently 7.3 was pushed out the door to enable the iPhone on June 29th.  On July 11th they released a new version 7.3.1 - the release notes? iTunes 7.3.1 fixes a minor problem with accessing the iTune library.  Well, at least they've hopefully fixed that one then.  But seriously - every time a new version of iTunes is released, a bug fix release follows shortly after for some pretty easy to spot regression.

I'm not just ranting because I'm hacked off at having to go through another install and then clean up (to fix all the defaults that QuickTime has taken over), or the fact that they repeated exhibit the same quality mistakes when releasing software.  It is the fact that you'd think the quality of iTunes on Windows would be really important to their overall business model.  You'd think that iTunes should be one huge billboard for them on their switching campaign?

I'm guessing that the iTunes team is a pretty small one at Apple.  I'm guessing the Windows team is possibly the poorer cousins of the rest of the development.  I wish they would spend a little bit more effort on their Windows releases.

Rant over.  I'm about to head over to Teamprise HQ this weekend involving plenty of flying time, hence why was so annoyed this morning when I found all my podcast subscriptions had been lost.  Sigh.

This took me a while to figure out, so I am writing down here to help me remember later.  It may also be useful if you are playing with Gmail at all (BTW, the spam filtering on Gmail is very good).

To mark all mail as read:-

1. In the search box, type "is:unread"
2. In the select area press "All"
3. A link will appear that says "Select all conversations that match this search", press it
4. From the drop down, select "Mark All as Read".

Took me a while to do something that is usually option away on a context menu in most rich client mail reading applications, but this is mainly because I had thousands of unread mails to mark and so that went off the page.

The Vista Aero interface is awesome - but capturing that beauty has always been hard for me.  All that changed this morning when Jeff Atwood put me on to an awesome tool by Kenny Kerr. Kenny Kerr's Windows Clippings 1.5 is simply the best capture tool for Windows Vista that I have used.  I am probably the last person in the world to hear about it, but on the off-chance that I am the second to last, here are some of the things I like and why you should use it:-

1. It can capture shadows, transparency etc really well.  However, it can magically take out all the cruft that you get from background windows coming through.
2. When you are doing a screen capture - the effect that is used while you are selecting the windows is suitably beautiful for a capture tool that takes such nice pictures.
3. Screen shots are saved in a file name using the window name of the application you were taking a screenshot of.

It does one thing and does it really, really well.  Thanks Jeff for the top tip!  For a little user-guide on how to use Kenny's excellent tool see his post (with pretty pictures) here.

I'm loving Windows Vista RTM.  I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini.  Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.  He has a series of "Windows Vista Secret's" that are well worth subscribing to.  One of the things I've found when using Vista is that my hands can stay on the keyboard much more - making me significantly faster to navigate around the system.  I was particularly please to read his Windows Vista Secret #10: Open and Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes.

The "trick" in the tip is that if you press Ctrl+Shift+Enter on a command in the search bar, it will run that command with Admin rights - therefore to run a command shell as admin Tim recommends you do "Win key; type cmd; press Ctrl+Shift+Enter; and then hit Alt+C to confirm the elevation prompt". But you can also use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut to fire up Notepad as admin and then have the ability to edit your hosts file etc.

Personally, I have a shortcut to Cmd that opens it up with Admin rights and a different background colour (called "Admin Console") - that way I can get to an admin console by typing "a" at the search bar and the console is always a different colour so I remember which console is the admin one.  To do that, copy the "Command Prompt" shortcut from the Accessories group in Program Files, rename as "Admin Console" or whatever you want.  Go to the "Shortcut" tab and select "Advanced...", then check the "Run as administrator" box.  Press Ok, and then press Apply.  Finally you can go to the Colors tab and edit the background colour - I use the dark red to signify danger.

On the off chance that you read my blog and not Scott Hanselman's (shame on you) then I wanted to draw your attention to some invaluable registry tweaks he just posted - especially if you've been forced into installing Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to enable Outlook Instant Search - but also if you are a developer.

The first is how to make the normal windows search the default again after installing Windows Desktop Search, the second is how to get the full text search to search through *every* file (such as .cs or .java ones).  The latter tip is one I always do when I build a new Windows box, but the former is a new annoyance I was struggling with.  I can see why the new behaviors are the defaults for "regular" users - but it would have been nice if there was a way to change the defaults in the UI without resorting to regedit...

Just as a follow up to my previous post, I was having trouble switching back into Mac OS X once booted into Vista.  As part of the Boot Camp process, Apple allow you to burn a CD containing the Windows XP Drivers and Utilities.  Included is a handy utility to select the default Startup Disk.  Using various tools, I was able to extract the Control Panel extension and install it into Vista.  However, I was unable to get this to work - even when elevated to Administrator - it would always complain about not being able to get Administrative rights.  Reading around the problem a little I think this may be either a Vista security thing or a driver thing (probably the former).  I think pn XP the utility somehow manages to write a variable into the EFI telling it which boot partition to use - whatever mechanism is trys seems to not be working on my installation - but they again I may have just installed it wrong in my attempt to hack around BootCamps "Drivers for XP" installation program that really doesn't work on Vista.

The alternative is to press the (alt) Option key on startup.  However, I have a cheap Belkin KVM that I'm running this through and it didn't seem to work (think it is something to do with the USB keyboard detection).  Thankfully, this tip came to my rescue, by holding the menu key of my Mac Mini's Apple Remote I got the bootloader screen allowing me to select my OS X partition - nice.  Then I booted straight back into Vista, because I really am loving it :-)

I logged into my MSDN subscription account this morning to find the following additions in my Operating Systems section!  Obviously, the first thing I did was to start the download of the (single) DVD image for all 32-bit versions of Windows Vista.  I tired to request my product key for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, however there was an error in the MSDN Application - I guess that they are still getting those set up.  Anyway, the current estimate is that my download will finish in 20 hours 10 minutes (and that's while the US is asleep), so I'm guessing the keys will be available by the time I finish downloading.

Update:  It's 2pm now and my download got to 16% complete before it was interrupted.  Now I cannot get a connection at all probably because everyone else in the world is trying to download it.  I think I'd better wait until the weekend...

Update:  It's now 6pm and my download speed has picked up to 246Kbs (the maximum for my ADSL link), also the product key section of MSDN is now working and I am the proud owner of a Windows Vista Ultimate Edition key!!  Hmm, I wonder what I'm going to be doing this weekend :-)

I use VMWare a lot.  Not only do I use it for demonstrations of Teamprise, I also use it for day-to-day development and testing (one of the joys of developing a cross platform product that talks to a Microsoft server product).

I work on a laptop most of the time.  It's a Dell Precision M70 with 2Gb Ram, but the hard drive is only 60Gb (I went for speed rather than size).  When I first started running out of space, I ran up a virtual machine over my USB2.0 connection to an external hard drive.  I'd assumed that this was going to be even slower, but much to my surprise it was noticeably faster.

Jeff Atwood has an excellent post over on his Coding Horrors blog this morning explaining why this is so.

The Single Most Important Virtual Machine Performance Tip

If you use virtual machines at all, you should have the single most important virtual machine performance tip committed to heart by now: always run your virtual machines from a separate physical hard drive

Personally, I have a couple of the Seagate 100Gb 5400rpm USB 2.0 Drives as they strike a nice balance between portability, robustness and capacity.  They are also nearly always available when I pop into Best Buy or PC World.  However, the SmartDisk CrossFire drives look pretty good and I just noticed a 7200rpm, 250Gb one on Amazon for £120.  As Jeff's post explains, going for eSATA looks like the way to go in the future - especially a drive enclosure that supports both eSATA and USB.  However, for the meantime, I'll stick with my USB 2.0 only models as they are very portable and are powered by the USB lead.

I've used my old iPod Mini nearly every day for 2 years (since I discovered Podcasting for the first time).  Tomorrow I have a rather long car journey ahead of me and I have been saving up a few episodes of .NET Rocks, Slacker Astronomy, In Business and a new episode of Today in Parliament for the trip.  However - when I tried to switch on my iPod for my evening walk last night it just wasn't playing.  I figured that the battery had finally given up the ghost after all those recharge cycles - while a little annoyed that I was going to have to go back to the radio for my long car journey, I wasn't that unhappy as it meant I now had an excuse to get a brand new iPod.

However, this morning I did a bit of digging around and eventually stumbled on the following tip from the Apple Site:-

Slide the Hold switch and check the screen.
If your iPod is frozen or won't turn on, connect your iPod to your computer, then press and hold the "Menu" and "Select" buttons simultaneously for 10 seconds to reset the iPod

Worked just fine for me, my iPod is now charging from the mains adapter and looks set to last me a while longer - however I think I might treat myself to a new MP3 player of some sort soon - but now I can take my time researching :-)

Well, the benefits of the Live Writer SDK are already coming true for me.  One of my bug-bears with BlogJet was to copy/paste in code samples was pretty tricky.  I ended up evolving a manual process of visiting the excellent CodeHTMLer site to convert into HTML and then pasting the source into BlogJet source view (when pasting Java code I just to tell that CodeHTMLer it was C# and it usually looks great.

I was over at the CodePlex site this morning and noticed that Alexander Concha Abarca has posted a Syntax Highlighting Plug-in for LiveWriter.

Seems to work ok so far, the actual plug-in is very simple as it re-uses a code high-lighting engine from Wilco Bauwer which supports many languages including all the ones I may want to talk about such as C#, Java, XML, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, SQL, Visual Basic, ASP.NET and even Fortran (if I wanted to post my highly fascinating university projects).

Soon, we'll be going on holiday for the first time since my son was born.  This means that we had to apply for a passport for my 2 year-old, which was a fun process.  Anyway, the passport arrived this morning and much to my surprise it is a new biometric one, containing a little RFID Chip on the rear of the identification page.  This is the first time that I have seen a new biometric passport.  The notes that come along with it contain the following:-

"The chip stores a copy of your photo and the personal details printed on page 31.  There is no extra personal information in the machine-readable zone or one the chip.  The chip and antenna are sensitive electronic devices.  Please protect your passport and the chip from damage.  They must not be bent, torn or damaged in any way, or exposed to very high or very low temperatures, excess moisture, magnetic fields or microwaves."

I'll have to get one of these new passports soon.  I travel to the US a lot and it will make my life easier as I'll be able to carry on using the Visa Waiver program once they change the regulations concerning entry to the US to mandate use of biometric passports.  One thing is sure - I'll have to look after my new one a lot more, the current one is very bent and battered.

Apparently, if you pop in to your local passport office you can take a look at the data stored on the chip, which I might do when I get my own.  If nobody is making wallets for these new passports, then they should be.  There has to be a market in sturdy tin-foil lined wallets to keep the RFID chip from being broken and to stop the data being read until you want it to be...

On Rob's recommendation, I've installed Windows Live Writer today.  Up until now I've written most of my blog posts in BlogJet - however so far I'm liking Windows Live Writer and may well stick to it.  The thing that I like the most is all the features I use from BlogJet are here (Moveable Type support, image upload, spell checking etc) - but Windows Live Writer also picks up the stylesheets from your blog template and applies them while you are editing - very nice.

The final (and possibly the deal-clincher for me) is the plug-in model and Live Writer SDK.  I love BlogJet, but there were a few things that I wanted it to do that it didn't.  By providing an SDK it means I'll hopefully be able to get Live Writer to do these things.  By providing a plug-in capability they also increase the chance that I won't have to bother :-)

While, there has been plenty of comment on this already, JJ Allaire is on the Live Writer team.  Back in the day, I was a huge fan of Homesite - mainly because it supported the way I created web pages.  You can certainly see the influence in Windows Live Writer - the look and feel is quite similar to Onfolio.

There are a couple of things that would make me like Live Writer more. 

1. Fix the bug that seems to want to try and keep connections alive all the time.  I keep getting an error saying the connection has been dropped.
2. Better HTML code editing support.  I know I'm old school - but I like to dip into my HTML occasionally to do something particular.  Though Live Writer has a "HTML Code" view - it is little more that embedded notepad.  It would be nice to have code highlighting and even nicer to have side-by-side editing (ala Dreamweaver).  Even if full side-by-side is not possible just code highlighting and putting you cursor into the correct place when you go into code view would be great.
3. Auto track-back detection.  Be nice if it would figure out what posts I have linked to and automagically do a trackback.  Most of the time I can't be bothered when I have to figure out the trackback URL manually and paste it in.
4. Squiggly red underline spell check.  (ala Word - spell check as I type)
5. In the Image import - allow *.png along with *.gif and *.jpg. 
6. Allow me to easily control where the images were imported to and what they are called.

But all in all, for an initial beta it is very impressive - especially considering it is free.

I use VMWare a lot.  As we work on a cross-platform client to Team Foundation Server, I not only need to test our client on many operating systems, I also run Team Foundation Server in VMWare to talk to test our client against.  Teamprise Explorer and the Eclipse plug-in use SWT for the UI Layer.  This means that not only is performance great – the client takes on the native look and feel of the host operating system.  However, you do need to test dialogs on those operating systems to make sure they all look ok and size correctly.

Yesterday, I was so busy looking over the Specs of the new Mac Pro that I nearly missed the announcement from VMWare that their Mac-Intel version is on its way.  This means that we can get another one of those shiny Mac Book Pro’s and do a totally stand-alone demonstration of Teamprise talking to a (virtual) Team Foundation Server from Mac, Windows XP, Solaris and Linux all from one laptop.  It will also be a boon for testing as nearly a third of the Teamprise development team work on Macs (both Intel based and PowerPC based G5’s)

Parallels has offered similar functionality on the Mac-Intel platform for a while, however now that VMWare are going to be offering virtualization on the Mac-Intel platform it means that we can re-use our library of VMWare formated virtual PC’s – which will save a lot of setup time.  VMWare are one of those companies that don’t announce things publicly until they are well down the line and pretty solid, so I am hopeful that the beta will be available soon.  If you are interested, you can pre-register for the beta here.  Interestingly (and probably not that surprisingly) Microsoft have announced that they are shelving Virtual PC for the Mac and won’t be unleashing Mac-Intel support on to the public.

For those of you morning the loss of Monad as it henceforth becomes known as Windows PowerShell (it’s impossible to say that without putting some inflection into your voice to try and sound like a voice over for a cheesy advert) – we now have a new name to make fun of thanks to Nintendo renaming there next generation console the Nintendo Wii (and actually pronounced wee).  It’ll no doubt generate more titters than the name of the old Atari ST operating system.

Back to the Microsoft choice of Windows PowerShell.  Seriously – why wasn’t MSH good enough?  A fantastic new object-orientated command line shell does not need a consumer friendly name, in fact a TLA with an “in-the-know” way of pronouncing it is better for geeks – and let’s face it, the new shell ain’t aimed at my Grandma.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the popular linux terminal emulator (called PowerShell) – hope those guys don’t start feeling the weight of the Redmond lawyers trying to protect a name which a) Was allready being used and b) Isn’t that good anyway.  I know not everyone likes my companies name, but a least when you do a Google for it you get to our website…

With Apple about to celebrate it's 30th Anniversary, Wired is running a piece on the best Steve Jobs' comments ever. While I don't particularly like the proprietary way in which Apple goes about things - you have to admire the man's presentation skills, charisma, vision and the ability to go from a two man in a garage team to being a CEO. Also, there ain't no denying that his companies products are awfully nice looking and the consumer experience of buying technology from the Apple store compared with Best Buy or Dixons is like the difference between buying jewelry from Tiffany's instead of Elizabeth Duke. The following are my personal favourites quotes from the Wired piece:-

"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."

"I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do."

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much."

"It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans."

"Why would I ever want to run Disney? Wouldn't it make more sense just to sell them Pixar and retire?"

I'm confused. Sometime this year, we want to buy a second TV for our house. As this TV will be around for a while in our "posh" room it makes sense (to me - not my wife) to get a HD TV. However, every TV I'm seen marketed has 768 lines, with various widths (1366 or 1280 pixels seem the most common). Yet the HDTV specs I've heard about are 720p or 1080i (which seem to match with resolutions of 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080). Now none of the TV's I've seen match the resolution of the images as broadcast surely meaning that it will have to do some interpolation of the results. If the signal is a 720p one it will have to scale the image up, if it is 1080 scale the image down. In my experience LCD screens running at non-native resolutions usually look nasty.

I am I the only one confused? Anyone know of a good web page that will explain it all for me. I may just hold off a while until the formats settle down and get a cheap old fashioned analog TV to last us a couple of years - but that will hurt my early adopter pride.

I have a lovely Dell Precision M70 as my main development machine. It's a notebook so is great for when I am travelling around and has more than enough grunt to handle a few VMWare images running at once for cross-platform demos etc. The only complaint I have about it is a common one with laptops - there is no hardware volume control. There are buttons that control the volume but these link into a software volume control (which amazingly even work in Ubuntu Linux complete with a nice screen overlay showing you the current volume setting).

At my office I will quite often have the volume up pretty loud so that I can hear incoming messages etc. This is fine until I take my laptop mobile and then decide to switch it on while sat in the audience of a quiet presentation - the windows start music always blares out before I the software loads to control the volume allowing me to mute the sound.

An advantage of travelling on transatlantic flights is that most airlines give away a pair of cheap headphones so you can watch the in-flight movie. I'd collected a couple of pairs of these headphones and so this morning I snipped the headphones off a pair to leave me with the headphone jack. Plug it into the headphone socket and the sound is muted. A simple and cheap way to add a hardware mute control to my laptop courtesy of American Airlines. If I had left the headphones attached then it would have also doubled up as a pair of headphones - but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Like buses, you wait for ages then two come along at once. Following a wave of Skype announcements at CES, Creative have announced a new Skype phone. Unlike previous offerings, this one does not need a computer to make Skype calls but can do it all from the phone with a wired network connection. Then Netgear came out and trumped that with the announcement of a 802.11g WiFi enabled Skype phone that looks a lot nicer and can be carried anywhere inside the house, or other WiFi hotspot. Details on both devices are still sketchy but they should be available Q2 next year. The Netgear device might be just what I am looking for to get Skype past the wife acceptance boundary.

Recently, a colleague and I were struggling to get a Windows 2003 domain controller configured to use an external NTP time source. We were doing all the old registry hacks that you used to have to do to no affect.

It turns out that there is a domain controller group policy that now affects the behavior of the windows time service. What I don't quite understand is that it overrides the registry settings even if it is left as "Not Configured" in the group policy. Anyway if you do the settings as a domain controller policy and reboot the PDC, it works fine. There is probably a better way to get this working, if you find it let me know!

For more information, see the following article from Microsoft:- Windows Time Service Configuration for Windows Server 2003

Ok, so I'm probably not the first or the last person to use that sentance. Anyway, Google Base is responding to requests. See the Google Blog post for more details. This could develop into a massive tagged, searchable repository or it could just be another Web 2.0 idea that won't stick, filling up with out of date classified adverts, spam and pictures you probably shouldn't look at from work.

I can see where this fits into the Google master vision of making the worlds information searchable, but I don't quite get it yet. I didn't get the point of del.icio.us for a while and now I use it everyday so I'm no pointer for internet trends. Anyway, time will tell.

I've been a keen user of Konfabulator for a while now. I even paid for a couple of licenses in the pre-Yahoo days. It's really easy to hack up your own widgets, and I have a strange self-distructive streak that means I enjoy writing in javascript every now and then.

Today, I've just noticed a load of familiar looking exe files in:-

C:\Program Files\Pixoria\Konfabulator\UnixUtils\usr\local\wbin

With names like ls.exe, grep.exe, less.exe, curl.exe. Fire up a command shell and they are (you guessed it) ports of handy little unix utils. I now feel inspired to write a pretty version of tail for windows...

This week Siemens have demonstrated a cheap paper thin display using OLED technology. Sounds very promising, they are talking about displays being manufactured using print style processes making displays cheap enough to appear in magazines. See The Guardian or Physorg for more information.

Well, looks like I made a good prediction. According to the New Scientist, MSN and Yahoo are linking their IM products together and opening up their VOIP solutions to SIP. What's that saying about thy enemy's ememy? Be interesting to see how this works out in practise but looks like Google are meeting the objectives of Google Talk, without having to release a finished version! Will also be interesting to see how Skype react. I wonder if we'll ever see a unified IM system? I hope so.

This years DARPA Grand Challenge has seen a winner. Stanley, the modified VW Toureg from Stanford University, completed the 131 mile off-road course with a 19 mph average speed. Stanford University News has an excellent article, I'm sure there are more articles to follow.

Skypehave done it again. Using the latest windows beta version (1.4.0.47) you now have access to Call Forwarding features. If you are offline or do not answer a skype call then you can configure Skype to automatically forward the call to your landline or cell phone (using your Skypeout credit to pay the the forwarded portion of the call). This feature works even when all your computers are offline (in the latest version of the clients offline users who have call forwarding enabled have a new icon to show their status). This means that people can call my Skypein number or Skype me and they'll get through to my mobile phone if I'm not at the computer. Crazy.

Probably going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few days. Google has just released a first beta of Google Talk - ther own IM / VoIP client. Just giving it a try now, but it will be interesting to see how this competes with Skype, AIM et al. It uses XMPP so is actually a fairly open client (See the developer pages). They are also talking about supporting SIP which would be great. Also seems to have good integration with gmail. One to watch definately, I think the boys in Redmond may be moving more into this space as well.

UPDATE: BBC News has a story about Google Talk, still nothing on the Google Blog. Also searching Google for Google Talk does not yet yeild the product!

UPDATE: Skype have announced a limited opening of their client base. Looks like the weight of Google is already having an impact. It's amazing how big the Google brand is. Considering this frst release of Google Talk isn't actually that good compared with what is in the market currently, the move is getting loads of press today. I heard reports in the (very short) news on BBC Radio 1 - even a mention in the New Scientist website. This may actually be quite good for Skype as it is getting mentioned against the Google Talk product - which means more people are getting to hear the name.

A friend of mine called Mike Becker just passed on a tip that I am now committed to passing on to as many people as I know. You ever needed access to the information in one of those annoying modal dialog boxes? Well now you can. Simply hit "Ctrl-C" when the window is in focus and it will copy the contents into your clipboard! If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it. Try it yourself by clicking here.

Skypehave just gone public with their affiliate programme. Feel free to click on one of the links to Skype from the times I have recommended it in my blog and if you purchase Skype-Out credits, I'll get some money to waste on my own Skype spend...

I always end up getting a KVM switch at work. It doesn't matter which company I work for - I'm never satisfied with just one machine under my desk. I used to just have multiple monitors on my desk but I need room for all that crap that I don't throw in the bin. At the moment I have a fairly cheap (as KVM's go) Belkin 2 port one, but I used to have a fancy (and expensive) 8 port one from Black Box that was perfect for sitting my phone on top of. Both of these KVM's had a rather irritating flaw.

Sometimes if you switch between PCs and start using the mouse too quickly the KVM can get confused and your mouse goes all crazy. If you have never experienced this effect it is as-if your mouse flys to different parts of the screen and randomly has left and right buttons pressed, if you don't catch this quickly it can cause all sorts on unintended consequences.

In windows world, the best way to fix this problem is to do CTRL-ALT-DEL, Lock the computer, then CTRL-ALT-DEL and unlock the machine. Sometimes your left mouse button still right clicks but if you right-click the left-mouse button will start working again. Strange but true...

Wow, Adobe have announced plans to buy Macromedia. Guess I'll only be buying from one company in the future when I need to do creative stuff for the web. Not sure what I think about this move, hope the price tag for Dreamweaver doesn't go up too much - what about the future of flash? We live in interesting times...

I've been playing with GIMP lately. Coming from Photoshop, I find the interface really hard to use. Also, the number of windows that GIMP generates it just plain annoying.

Obviously I'm not the only person in the world that thinks this as on March 30th Scott Moschella hacked GIMP to make GIMPShop with menu structures easily to use for ex-Photoshoppers. Then on Monday it was ported to Windows with an easy to use installer by Dakira. If you are wanting to try moving to GIMP from Photoshop then take a look at GIMPShop for Windows. Don't you just love open source!

Today I had the pleasure of visiting London for the day. It's always a pleasure to visit London because I am so very grateful that I don't live there. (If you haven't heard the London Underground song then take a listen - NOT work safe!!)

Anyway, on the way down to London I had my NetStumbler open looking for WiFi links. (Wartraining anyone??) Done this a couple of times and you get amusing results, especially from some of the SID's giving very frank names as to the reason that person has got broadband...

Now, I'm on the 21:00 GNER service from Kingscross to Newcastle and I am sitting in the Buffet Car, connected to the internet wirelessly. Seems to work pretty well. I can access email and internet ok. The latency sucks - just tried to fire up a Skype session with a buddy in the states but that was too much to ask. The fact that you can check your mail for free (if you travel in first class) and surf the web while travelling at 125mph is pretty sweet!

Below is an example of the output from NetStumbler on my morning train ride down. You can see some great SID names, also you can see that a WiFi enabled train passed me at 07:27. Belkin looks to be the most popular router to leave WEP switched off and the default SID enabled. Also, 802.11G has an amazing adoption.

Recently, I've been trying to access some Microsoft webcasts but they just have not been working on my work PC. I got an error when media player tried to download the codec. Eventually tracked this down to needing the VoiceAge codec and not being able to find it.

If you have the same problem, you could try downloading and installing the codec manually from here. Works for me!

I am now back on the first page of Google when you search for Martin Woodward. Not sure what's changed as I still have the same number of links to my site. I think perhaps it is because the discussion of the Wikipedia definition for "Podcasting" very kindly links to me, and this definition is now linked to in many places - including news.bbc.co.uk (which seems to have near infinite page rank). However, I am still "below the fold" on Google, i.e. you have to scroll down to find me.

I'm also getting towards the end of some long hours at work (hence the lack of posting recently), so I think it is time to return to doing some stuff in the evenings and contributing back into the community (but more importantly do some programming just for fun). One of the things I have noticed is that people often are very kind and recognise the work you have done, the best form of recognition for me is a link back to my site - improving my pagerank some more. Unless of course you want to get something from my Amazon Wishlist ;-)

The Register have published the results of an important benchmark test - what is the best free rucksack. No matter how boring the presentation, everyones eyes always light up when the contents of the marketing cupboard are raided.

A simple but particular favourite of mine is my rather solid BEA pen - much better than the pack of crayons or USB power laptop light. I know many a BEA consultant who are fond of their watches. Sometimes I wonder what normal people place under their mice and where they get mouse mats from. Their are plenty of alternative uses for CD's (any probably a few websites devoted to the topic) but I don't know any other uses for mouse mats - so mine live in the back of dark drawers, hibernating.

My Interwoven pen-knife got me in a bit of bother when casually left it in my laptop bag and then tried to get on a plane. Clothing is always a favourite. Because I am of a somewhat unusal physique I have never been given a freebie that I can actually fit in to. To take revenge I get great pleasure in giving reps clothing belong to that of their competitors and make them wear it.

While not strictly manufacturers free crap, the best freebies of all have to be the wash bags and pyjamas you get in First Class on BA flights. They make great Christmas presents.

I've recently come across Podcasting (or blogcasting as it is sometimes called). Basically it makes use of a feature in the RSS spec called enclosure that allows links to downloadable content - in this case audio content. Tools such as ipodder have come out that allow a user to have the contents of the RSS feeds downloaded to their hard-drive for offline listening. Combine this with syncronisation with your iPod or other MP3 player and you have the ability for automated pushing of subscribed audio feeds to your MP3 player for listening to at your convienience.

Though podcasting is a fairly new trend (<2 months old), it is certainly getting a lot of media attention, with articles in Wired and Internet News. Wonder how long before the BBC and the Guardian run a story?

My first podcast subscription? DotNetRocks, an online talk show for .Net developers. You would expect nothing less ;-)

Update: While checking the derivation of the term, I found this article in the Guardian from Feb 2004. Looks like they were ahead of the game again.

Been wondering what to do with all those GMail invites? Well thanks to a couple of new developments you can now mount a gmail account as an external file system.

First up, for lovers of penguins we have GmailFS a mountable filesystem for linux. It is a Python application, using the FUSE filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail. GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename.

Next we have the GMail Drive, a shell extension for windows. GMail Drive enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder.

xdrive is dead, long live gmail (so long as you don't worry about the privacy of the files stored...)

I've been a regular user of programs from Sysinternals for a while now - today they just saved me again.

I've just been getting an "Access is deinied" error when I was trying to delete a directory telling me that it was is use by another process. I re-booted the machine and the directory was still in use. Then I remembered the Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This handy peice of freeware will tell you what files and registry keys are being access by which processes on the system. It even allows you to search for the file as a handle and it will show you the process that is using it. If only this feature was built into windows...

Another program I use all the time is BgInfo. This is installed on all my Windows servers and quickly tells me what the machine is along with its IP addresses and free disk space. Again, this has saved me loads of time traking down which server is which when connected to them remotely or through a KVM. Until this was installed, the quickest way I had to figure out which machine was which was to log in and eject the CD-ROM drive tray. Though this approach is funnier, it is not always practical...

The first commercial E-Ink product is about to hit the market in Japan. According to the BBC the Sony LIBRIé 1000-EP will cost around £200 and be available in April.

While this is the first version of the technology, it looks like it may well take off. If the screen is as good as it sounds, the propect of weighing your holiday bags down with paper-backs may well be coming to an end...

The Register have the specs of the new device. They say that the display is 800x600 @ 170dpi - as apposed to the usual computer display resolutions of 72dpi. The unit weighs 190g and measures 12.6 x 19 x 1.3cm. with a USB 2.0 port, Qwerty keypad, speaker and earphone socket.

Electronic Ink only requires power to change the display. The early prototypes had a slow refresh rate but the advantage that once the display has been changed the power is switched off, meaning you can spend as long as you want actually reading the text. Indeed, the press release says that 4 AA batteries lasts for 10,000 page changes.

No news yet on the systems OS. My guess is a palm based system as it is in Sony's ----é range. It would also support the speaker and headphone allowing you to play MP3's on the device...