Recently in Technology Category

I recently moved my domain email over to Google Apps for Domains. So far I have been very happy with it and all my family have been set up with accounts, and all is working well for them to. I decided to move my old mail archive into GMail so that I have the messages available for searching from whatever machine I happen to be on.

To do this, I used the Google Email Uploader, and it worked well (but did take a long time to complete against my rather large Outlook archive dating back to 2001).

The only problem was that I now had an awful lot of messages in my inbox that I didn't really want to see - also because I use IMAP to connect my mail clients up to GMail I didn't want them to download all that mail again.

It took me a while to figure out how to archive all the old mails, so I am logging it here for future reference. I exclude stared mail as I will flag a message in my email clients that I might want to respond to later and unflag when I am finished with it. The exclusion means that I won't archive the flagged messages which isn't so important this time round but will be handy if I use the query again to prune my inbox Hope it may also be helpful to you.

To archive old mails in Gmail:

1. In the search box type "in:inbox -is:starred before:2008/06/01" where the date is in yyyy/mm/dd format.
2. Press the Select All link. When you press this link, but you have more than a page of results a new link will appear that says "Select all conversations that match this search" - press that
3. In the Action drop down, select Archive.

The old mails will now be available when you search, and when you look in the "All Mails" folder - but will not be included in your inbox.

When I saw the news about the upcoming Windows Vista SP2, there was a little note right down at the bottom that got me quite excited.

"Windows Vista SP2 includes Hyper-V™ technology, enabling full virtualization of server workloads"

Microsoft have since clarified the position. SP2 does not add Hyper-V capabilities to Windows Vista SP2. The confusion all comes from the fact that the SP2 is actually a service pack to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 - which goes to show how similar the two code bases are now. There is a good explanation over at Springboard.

I wanted to post this here because I'd seen the announcement from Microsoft and mis-understood exactly what SP2 was providing and I know of others that were equally confused. Luckily Microsoft virtualization guru Brian Randell corrected my understanding - but not everyone is lucky enough to have a Brian Randell in their pocket so I thought I would share the clarification :-)

It is also very interesting to see how excited people were when they thought that Hyper-V was coming to Vista - I hope once the fuss of the confusing press release has settled down, Microsoft take note.

For the record, I like Windows Vista.  However, for those of us who remember the Vista beta program and even early days of running Windows Vista it wasn't always fun - largely due to the driver support but there were plenty of bugs to avoid even in the later betas. When I purchased my MSI Wind (OEM rebadged as an Advent 4211 here in the UK) XP was pre-installed.  I remember when I picked up my Wind from the local computer store the salesman tried to sell me on the fact that it came with XP rather than Vista which is not a good sign of Vista's reputation with consumers.  That said, XP didn't last long on my Wind before Vista replaced it.  The stock Wind runs a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor on the Intel 945GSE chipset.  As part of the initial batch of Winds, mine happily has the Synaptics touchpad.  One of the many things I like about the Wind is that it is end-user upgradeable, but the only addition I have made was to upgrade it to 2Gb RAM as the stock Western Digital Scorpio 120GB hard drive is a pretty good one for a budget netbook.

Remembering the early days of the Vista beta program, I had to contrast this with the absolute delight that installing and running the PDC build (build 6801) of Windows 7 has been on this diminutive device.  For a start stable drivers for the Wind were all available from Windows Update.  To get them I first had to install the Realtek WiFi driver for Vista by changing the compatibility settings to trick the installer into thinking I was running Vista RTM.  But once I had an internet connection, Windows Update found updated drivers for the graphics card, Wifi, Ethernet and even the SD card reader.  Everything on the device appears to be working, including bluetooth and the built in webcam.

I then ran the "blue-badge" unlock hack from Rafael Rivera Jr because I wanted some of the shiny eye-candy showed off on stage at PDC2008 that is not active in the standard 6801 build.  Note that after running the hack, I had to manually set the security permissions on the following files that the tool modifies to grant the "Users" group read permissions - but this was just because of my hackery and because I want the device to support multiple users, not something that a normal user would have to do.

• \Windows\Explorer.exe
• \Windows\System32\wisptis.exe
• \Windows\System32\ieframe.dll
• \Windows\System32\shell32.dll
• \Windows\System32\stobject.dll
• \Windows\System32\TabletPC.cpl
• \Windows\System32\themecpl.dll
• \Windows\System32\themeui.dll
• \Windows\System32\powercfg.cpl

Then I was up and running, and ready for the ultimate test - leaving the laptop on the kitchen table for my wife to pick up and use.  I warned her that I'd been "messing about" with the laptop - but she logged in, checked her mail (using the shortcut to the Windows Live Mail application in the fancy new taskbar) and did her online banking using IE8 (again from the pinned shortcut in the new taskbar).  All without issues.  Windows 7 = Passed. It is now the official operating system on my netbook.

Resume from standby is noticeably faster in Windows 7, and general system usage is also a lot snappier than Vista on this underpowered device.  Not sure what I think to the new "Libraries" but at first pass I class them as "not too annoying". 

I am liking many of the new features in Windows 7.  "Aero snaps" (where you can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize or to the left and right) is good, the new magnification tool (press Win and "+" to zoom in, Win and "-" to zoom out) will replace ZoomIt as the tool I use during on-stage demos and it was nice to see that the calculator has had a revamp (programmer mode will now be my personal mode of choice for it).

Despite all the additional stuff, what is really nice about Windows 7 is what they have taken away.  The overall experience is just less noisy than before.

I am very excited to see how useable this very early build is and what the later builds, betas and eventual release of Windows 7 will bring.  Windows 7 is looking to be exactly what Microsoft need - it will probably be known as "the release that Vista should have been" which is a little unfair as Vista obviously laid down a lot of the ground work in terms of architecture.  That said, at this early stage it looks like Windows 7 is going to be a very popular release.

Update (5 Jan 2009): The new version of the Blue Badge unlock tool doesn't require system files to be modifed so hopefully it will be easier to run. Also from what I read on the internet this tool will not be necessary from Windows 7 beta 1 (build 7000) onwards as the features will be enabled by default.

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.

Update:People are reporting that this same issue is true with iTunes 7.6, 7.7 and 7.7.1 so I've removed the version number from the title of this post. Luckily now that I've disabled Bonjour and sharing things seem to be working better for me so hadn't noticed myself that this was the case. Additionally, if you have ESET NOD32 Antivirus installed then you might want to look at this forum post.

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 ;-)