Eileen Brown's WebLog

The amazing Worldwide Telescope

Wow!

I downloaded the Worldwide Telescope today and I'm totally transfixed.  no wonder the press has been raving about it so much.

The mission of the WWT is twofold:

• To aggregate scientific data from major telescopes, observatories and institutions and make temporal and multi-spectral studies available through a single cohesive Internet–based portal.
• To re-awaken the interest for science in the younger generations through astronomy and new technologies through the virtual observatory of the WWT. This also provides a wonderful base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science.

When you install it, your computer turns into a virtual telescope so you can roam around the constellations.  You can pan and zoom around the night sky - just like you were in space - try visiting the Orion constellation and having a browse around.  Right click on something and find out the name of the star, its Right Ascension, RA - distance in degrees from the first point of Aries, Declination - DEC (Angle in degrees from the celestial equator),  Altitude (apparent height) and Azimuth (bearing)

My favourite constellation (and the easiest to find in the UK) is the Plough (Ursa Major).  When I first learned to identify each star in the constellation (I needed to learn them for my celestial navigation class when I was at sea).  I learned that Mixar, or Mizar as it's sometimes known, is actually a binary star, 2 stars that slowly rotate around each other like a set of dumbbells whirling around in space, bound together by the gravity that joins them (a bit like the pairing that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth).    I used to be able to see these 2 stars, but with my failing aged eyes, it's hard to see them - even with binoculars. But now, with the zoom ability in this amazing tool, Mizar and Alcor are there. whirling around each other - have a look at this.

It's the 2nd star in from the handle of the plough if you want to go and have a look for yourself.

Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.

What a great sentiment....

Right Brain or Left Brain illusion

My mother showed me something which has been driving me totally mad since yesterday.

(Click on the icon for the web page with the animated version)

It's an illusion which apparently tests whether you're using your right brain or your left brain.  I've stared at this image of the dancing girl for far too long, and to me, she's only going round in one direction.

So I asked James, who definitely uses a different side of his brain to me and he can only see her moving in one direction only too - the same way as me.

But both my Mum and my Dad, see her stop and change direction, Dad by breathing deeply, Mum by concentrating. Me?  Nothing at all.  She steadfastly goes in the same direction - round and round, round and round. 

So please please let me know - can you see her moving anticlockwise at all?  Can anyone see her moving in both directions.  It's driving me mad!

Or is this moving both directions something only the over 60's can see?....

Trojans in MP3's

Oh heck.  I need to phone my friend June after her PC became infested with worms and trojans the other week.  McAfee have reported that trojans are hiding in MP3 files (there's a really great and informative blog post on the site by the way)

Her reaction?

No - they wouldn't download any Girls Aloud songs...

I also tried to explain that as she bought McAfee anti virus with the PC 4 years ago, you still had to pay about £30 each year to get the updated data files and patches. June was puzzled.

"But I don't need to do that for XP, and I still get the patches from Microsoft" she said...

Yup - and she'll still get online support for the product for 10 or more years after its release.  Quite a bargain...

But I still feel a format C: coming on...

Save your Word documents in DAISY format and create your own talking book

I was interested to see this article the other day about a new technology we've announced  to help people who can't see too well and would prefer things to be read out using text to speech.  This add in allows you to translate Open XML documents into DAISY XML (the standard for talking books).  It creates a digital audio file which maps to a text file with the XML structure marked up.  There's information on the translator at the

Word 2007, 2003 and XP formats are supported.  All you need to do is open the document, and select the Save as DAISY option which then converts the document into a format for Braille and text to speech synthesizers.

This is amazing stuff.  Very empowering indeed.  And all from Word...

Coders hack Microsoft website? They need to learn DNS...

I was amused at Viral's take on the fact that we'd hacked our own website the other day with the Live to Code ethic that developers seem to embrace so much.  More so, as I recently met Josh at our Technical conference this year.  Josh had admired my Women in Technology sticker, and gave me one of his Live to code, code to live stickers (like this one) in exchange for one of my Women in Technology stickers like the one on my laptop. 

His mission (apart from coding of course) is to try to get more women into IT in the US as they can't seem to attract enough female developers into his team.

Girls, you'd like Josh.  He looks like someone who would be totally at home on a Harley, or building a custom bike, or tinkering around in his garage, or blogging, or writing code, or even out hiking with some large dogs. He's a really nice guy too - even though he is obsessed with developing and coding  (I wonder if he has a tattoo about it?)

But I reckon that instead of a hack, it was just a DNS mistake - and that's where coders need the infrastructure guys to help out.

"Live for Infrastructure.  Infrastructure for life"

It just doesn't sound the same does it?...

Operations Manager cross platform Extensions demo at MMS

I've finally got round to having a look at this video about Operations Manager cross platform extensions. Wow.  I wish i'd seen this before.  Just look at how easy it is to manage and report the health of Oracle, MySQL, Solaris, Apache, Unix and Linux systems - all in one interface.

Operations Manager with Barry Shilmover

The back end of this uses system uses open source so it's familiar to Linux and UNIX users.  it allows Operations Manager to discover Unix and Linux environments and then uses WS manager to manage them in the windows GUI

You can see all the systems with the agent installed, Operations Manager will view and install the agent on all of these systems.  you can then use health explorer to see the availability and health of the systems, configuration and performance of the systems.  it all ties in to reporting so that Operations manager can report on all of the systems.

You can have a look at the servers and services - all in Operations Manager, identify problems and components that are giving issues - no matter which platform the server is running.

So powerful - so amazing. - especially if you're trying to manage a heterogeneous environment.  you can now manage these 2 environments - side by side.

Well worth 11 minutes of your time...

Sharepoint Webcasts for July 2008

Momentum Webcast: The Enterprise Search Platform in SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 100)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Justin Chandoo, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374284&Culture=en-US

Unified Communications Webcasts for July 2008

TechNet Webcast: Configuring DNS, Certificates, Ports, and Load Balancers for Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
Tuesday, May 06, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374265&Culture=en-US

TechNet Webcast: Compliance and Archiving in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032372164&Culture=en-US

Too many worms

I didn't get a chance to blog on Friday due to the words all IT professionals hate to hear from their friends:

"My computer is running slowly, could you come over and take a look at it please?"

My friend June is a nurse who uses her computer for emails, IM and medical research.  Her 2 kids use it for all sorts of things, animation, movies, music, puppies and  kids stuff.   Well lately their PC had been running slower and slower and now annoying websites had started to pop up.  So I agreed to have a look at it.

The first thing I notices was that Windows Defender had been disabled on their machine and IE Privacy tab had been set to accept all cookies (there were hundreds and hundreds of cookies on the machine).  Every time I reset the settings and enabled Defender, the reboot would change everything back.

I tried all of the spyware killers and spyware destroyers I cold find, deleted lots of roadkill .DLL's and spent far too long deleting keys from the registry - just to make sure.  There were over 100 worms, bots, spies and other nasties in the machine - no wonder the damn thing wasn't working too well.  The malicious software removal tool certainly did it's job well enough.  But I'm still not sure...

And with everyone in the family having Administrator access, I knew I was on a hiding to nothing.  Who knows what the hell other stuff could possibly be on there?

So now I need to spend several more hours round there sorting the PC out (totally formatting it) out so it can be trusted again.  No more administrator access for them - and no more downloading of stuff just because it looks nice.  But the main thing I need to do is to educate them all on the dangers of downloading bits of software whenever they're asked to.

Just how I feel... :-)

Much more scary than doing live demos

I get nervous enough when I'm on stage, demoing beta products - especially the first time I demo stuff live (remember all the problems I had when I demoed Exchange unified messaging to a live audience when there was lots of background noise).  But sometimes I like to get scared for fun.  Like roller coaster rides, horror movies and Stephen King novels.

But this is just scary. Really My legs were twitching and trembling the whole time I watched this video.  The man is totally mad!

• Video of a walk along the path
• Video of a walk along the path (Extended)

So I did a little bit of research on the Camino Del Rey. Thanks to Wikipedia and discovered that mad souls have been walking this highway for over 100 years now.  Even though the government has closed the road 8 years ago, people still walk the walk.  Aargh!

I think I'll stick to demos - they seem rather safe after seeing this...

Build your own Photo Zoom demo...

Oooooh!  I've found a demo that the IT pro's will love, and the developers will have a great time creating more images.  I'm at our team offsite.  It's a great opportunity to find out what other parts of the Evangelism team is doing, find out our challenges (getting together often enough is one of them), and see some of the great tools in action.

I've been aware of SeaDragon technology for some time, and I've blogged about how amazing Photosynth is in action - it blows people away if they haven't seen it before.

Well the site i've seen today is the Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia site  (have a look at the plectrum selection at the bottom left of the screen).

But what makes this so amazing is the fact that you can make your own zoom images up fairly simply.  If you haven't read the Expression team blog, then you won't have heard about Deep Zoom Compser  It allows you to use the multi scale image control to put your photos up into a deep zoom environment, so with a camera and a bit of html knowledge you can build your own sites like Hard Rock.

You can also use the Photo Zoom site that MsLabs have created to make your own sites up too.   Or put the Photozoom application  onto your Facebook profile and amaze your Facebook friends with your compositions.

One thing though which frustrates me.  apparently there are Easter Eggs in the Hard Rock site - but I can't find any of them as they move around the site.  If you find anything really cool in there that looks like a hidden Easter Egg, can you tell me how to get there please - so my demos on this can look extra cool...

Playing with Live Meeting 2007

I've just been showing Claire and Maxine in the Developer Marketing team how to use Live Meeting 2007 this time as a presenter instead of a participant.  I often forget how confusing things may seem when viewed from the other side of the fence so to speak.  So walking them through the things that they need to be aware of as presenters reminded me to go and have a good look at the basic features of Live meeting 2007 before you get started.

Step one - if you've never seen Live Meeting before then watch the demo!

Step 2 - if you want to attend a Live meeting as a participant then I'd recommend that you attended one of the sessions held by the Live Meeting user Group and watch Chris demo the features for you.  Ask the team a question on the Live meeting forum and I'm sure that someone would be glad to get you involved in some demo / training.

Step 3 - Try it out for yourself - there's a free 30 day trial that you can use for your organisation - to let you all have a play with creating meetings

Step 4 - Read the notes on "fundamentals of presenting" - and don't forget the time lag from you changing the slide - to the viewer at the other side of the world getting the slide.  It's the thing that we all forget about whilst we present...

Step 5 - go and make yourself a cup of tea - after all you're working from home, you didn't need to travel in to deliver that presentation and you haven't used the car so you can feel good about your carbon emissions too - so go on - have a biscuit with the tea - you've earned it...

Get 30% off the TechNet plus subscription

We're running a little competition in the UK where all the team have been given promotional codes to give out so that you can get 30% off the cost of a new TechNet plus subscription or 10% off your renewal subscription either Online or on DVD

Steve so far is in the lead - as he blogged about this last week, but I'm amused to see the competition between each member of the team at the Roadshow.  Every opportunity to advertise their code is used, it's on screen, talked about, and cards with the individual code on are handed out at any opportunity.

They're even doctoring the VPC images to show their unique code on stage  -

And doctoring each others image and code.  Hilarious.

I've been roped into this too, so visit http://microsoft.com/uk/technet plus and use my code UKITPRO1 so I'm not trailing in the league table behind the team.  Ha!

But seriously - 30% is a good offer and certainly worth taking advantage of... so if your subscription is up for renewal, it's worth a look.

And I'll turn the team into Sales guys - eventually... 

Live Mesh - the next web...

I'm really delighted that we've announced the technology preview of Live Mesh (see the article in the NY times) after hinting about it at MIX the other week.

It allows all your devices to work together - wherever you are - even on the web - you can add a new device to your mesh.  Even if you need access to something that is only available on your PC at home- once you've added it to your own mesh, that program becomes available to you - wherever you are.  Keep track of what's going on too find out who has updated what on your  Live Mesh too.

This really is amazing stuff - even at this really early preview stage.  I've already subscribed to the mesh blog as there's some videos up there which are worth watching.  Have a look at the first entry too which says:

First, this is a limited Technology Preview and we’re seeking your feedback. There’s some pent-up demand, so we appreciate your patience and understanding as we scale the system. We’ll do our best to scale as quickly as possible, but we also want to make sure the system is reliable and responsive.

Second, initially the user interface will be English only and we are hosting the service from our United States data center; this may have impact on some users. We’re working on this, and will announce broader availability in the coming months.

Third, this Technology Preview initially supports Windows (Vista & XP) machines but our vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this. In the near future, we’ll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we’ll build upon that foundation.

It is only available in the US at the moment ( GRRRRR!) but you could try to add your details to the waiting list for when we open this up further. 

So as Ray Ozzie says: “The Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh,” I think we're really bringing it all together now - and it's a great thing bringing this all into the Cloud.

So I wonder whether it'll work over 1/2mb home broadband though?  one of the drawbacks for me living out of town...

Exchange 2007 Prerequisites

Andy mailed me as he's having problems upgrading to Exchange 2007

I wonder if you can help. We are just starting to transition to Exchange 2007. We have three Exchange 2003 servers all with Exchange SP2 (but two don't have Windows SP2). When we run setup.com /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions we get a failure and a message stating that not all of our Exchange 2003 servers have SP2. Do we need to have Windows SP2? Do you know of any other things that could cause this?

Fortunately there's a nice little table on the TechNet website that shows you all of the other pre-requisites you need to have before Exchange 2007 can be installed but Windows 2003 SP1 is a primary prerequisite.  Here's the table with all of the prerequisites

... just in case you were struggling with the upgrade too...