When I'm in the office I have a network cable on my hot desk and access to wireless networking. There's enough bandwidth available on wireless for most purposes, but for large downloads and software installations wired is greatly preferable.
Yesterday when I was installing software like Map Point - which is about 500MB in size - things were running very slowly. A quick look at the Networking page in Task manager said all my data was going over wireless. If I disabled wireless everything went over the wired network. I figured that there had to be a setting in Network connections. Sure enough on the Advanced menu, on Advanced settings, you can change the order which Vista uses different adapters and sure enough - as you can see it had placed the wireless network above the wirted one . A couple of mouse clicks to move wired above wireless and everything is the way it should be.
You know that manager saying about "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions ?" It took me a long time to see it as "Think a bit longer and tell me what you think we should do." But in either form it's something I couldn't say to a customer. And some of the questions I get are really difficult to answer. So it's great when I get a mail that goes like this.
-----Original Message-----From: Scotty To: James Subject: Windows 2003 SP2 Online instructions for deploying this for R2 are wrong. Working on a blog entry detailing it the fix.
-----Original Message-----From: Scotty To: James Subject: Windows 2003 SP2
Online instructions for deploying this for R2 are wrong. Working on a blog entry detailing it the fix.
Fantastic. Found it, fixed it, written it up. The way you would naturally slipstream the Service Pack will install Server 2003 SP2. Since the R2 components remain SP1 they won't install.
Scotty's described it all on his blog, a more detailed run down of the problem and the steps to work round it. Great work.
It's been great to spend the holiday weekend out and about with the family, and I spent Saturday evening been playing with the pictures I'd shot - I can't say much about the software involved but it's very, very cool. I set my laptop to record Dr Who and the qualifiying for the Malaysian Grand prix (yes I know I've still got to write part 2 of moving to ultimate. ).
I was watching the Motor Racing in a Window while I was playing with pictures and reading blog posts. One of the them was Darren's which has a link to a peice in the Grauniad about the Apple's Ads - here in the UK they star David Mitchell (PC) and Robert Webb (Mac). A favourite bit reads
[Mitchell and Webb] are best known for the television series Peep Show... .. in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.
These ads do get under the skin of a few people. Dell have responded in kind; when I was at Tech Ready I reported that someone asked Steve Ballmer about them - his reaction "Given their market share..." Funny enough that report linked to the same article - or at least to "the wonderful-if risqué Belle de Jour , who has an interesting take on Dr Who using a PC not a Mac" which stemmed from and linked to it. I wonder if Darren reads me, Belle, or if he's taken to reading the Guardian since he became a marketing luvvie.
That Tech Ready report focused on the shirts we had with Hugh MacLeod's Blue Monster on them - the event felt like "Fly in, change the world a little, Fly home" hence the title Change the world AND go home instead of the original "Change the world OR go home". It's interesting to look at Steve Clayton's peice on the traction this is getting inside Microsoft. And this Thursday Hugh announced he had a new client in Microsoft. 48 hours later he was telling us Why his client is dead - which must be some kind of record for the PR industry. I think I know when I see someone giving the pot a stir, and I'm seeing it here (Hugh went back with a bunch of updates for why this is false - which might have been what he was after). He'd picked up on a post by Paul Graham which said Microsoft was dead due to
I'm not sure about responding someone who makes it a plank of his argument that he lives in a different world from Microsoft, but lets look at these 4.
There's no denying Google's rapid profits growth and that they're the darlings of the media and of Wall Street. We'll see if things get harder for them. Google's growth depends on taking more advertising away from TV and other media. In the UK we used to have a lot of great TV but now a shrinking pot of advertising to pay for more channels means there's less worth watching. Google may mean the death of quality TV. But not a large scale replacement for desktop applications.
Ajax certainly means you can build decent web applications and Broadband means you can deliver them to consumers. But no one has ever shown me a side by side comparison between an app running in Browser and app running locally where the Browser app was better. Communicator Web Access is an Ajax app. It can't kick off an e-mail, do voice or video, or remote call control, give you presence data in web page or your mail client, or do search-as-you-type for contacts but in other respects it's as good as communicator. Apps where you want data off line or need to show legal complaince or meet freedom of information rules, or mine a collection of shared documents accross large teams don't work so well in an on-line model - so "Road warriers", Governments and large businesses won't store their data in the cloud. Small business and small office/home office users might, do but if you need a Mac, Linux or Windows PC to on which to run the browser, the local application is better. Interesting to wonder how those who work in and around IT view a move of everything into to colossal internet data centres: I don't see the Open-Source community embracing that.
Consumers have grown more demanding than business users. They run games (local processing isn't negotiable), and music, photos, and Video. Music is geared to downloads. It would be quite possible to host the music you own on a server in the cloud, stream it to your PC, or download to your portable player; it would simplify a lot of DRM issues. The songs on my PC total about 800 MB - I can shoot 5 times that volume of photos in a day, so storing photos in the cloud is a big storage and bandwidth problem issue. But every photographer I've ever met wants their own storage. Adobe are dipping a toe in the water with an on-line editor (which presumably will still cost much more in Britain), but it's rudimentary and designed to show people they need a proper editor on their computer. Since I mentioned recording TV: even at 480 line resolution this uses about 1.8GB per hour - you can do the sums for the storage this would need. Giant, free-to-access libraries of broadcast quality TV would reduce the storage requirement, if they existed (which the don't) and who's leading the delivery of TV over IP.
A blinkered desktop-only world is limitting. So is an only-at-the-server world. The best combination brings together servers - whether local, hosted, or in the cloud - with Personal computing power, graphics and storage. The best place for the server varies from case to case. There will always be an argument about what form Personal Computing should take. Which brings me to Apple. They've dropped computer from their name and are now about selling designer electronics (Phones which cost $500 with a contract for example) - a space traditionally occupied by the likes of Sony and Nokia. Apple punch above their weight, and their success since Steve Jobs came back proves that "Dead" isn't forever (not a bad theme for Easter). But you can't cite meeting a lot of Apple users - and then argue that Personal computing is dead, which Paul Graham does. 5 paragraphs in he says he lives in a different world to Microsoft - he's a venture capitalist who deals with Californian start-ups who need to prove they "think different". Sometimes the line beween thinking differently and being a "smug, preening tosser" is a fine one.
So here's a list of 10 things which people thought kill Microsoft and haven't
Happy easter
A while back I posted the diagram below to try to explain how Vista activation worked. Click it for a larger version.
There are two entries which are marked "due out in 2007", both of which show up on the Vista Downloads page. For KMS keys we now have Key Management server for Windows Server 2003, and an associated MOM pack, for MAK keys we now have the Proxy or Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) .
On Friday the Windows Server virtualization (WSv) team opened nominations for the Technology Adoption Programme (TAP) for Windows Server virtualization aka Viridian. The nomination process closes on May 16th
I should explain that a TAP is designed to be an opportunity for collaboration between customers and Microsoft to validate a new product. This is achieved through product feedback as a result of deployment of pre-release builds in non-production and production environments. Customers have an opportunity to validate the design and direction of the technology, through discovery of bugs and by submitting Design Change Requests (DCR’s) for the product development team to consider.
The WSv TAP is distinct from any other Microsoft TAP - although it has links with the longhorn server TAP. The WSv TAP is not a marketing or relationship programme: it is strictly an engineering validation programme focused on scenario testing and bug discovery/submission. There are a limited number of places and it is expected to be over-subscribed - nomination does not guarantee acceptance. Participants will be selected to get the mix of characteristics (planned deployments, LHS experience, location, technology, scenario coverage, etc.) needed by the product team.
Participating in any TAP requires a significant level of commitment. The nomination questionnaire, will ask for likely deployment scenarios. If accepted, it is expected that the customer commit to these deployment scenarios. In addition, Microsoft asks that participants test, deploy, and provide timely product feedback for each of the major milestone releases; TAP Participants get 24x7 production support for these releases. Other builds may be be provided for non-production use only and support will not be provided.
If you would like to be involved please contact me (or your Microsoft Account Manager, if you have one) for the next step.
In a couple of hours I fly off for week working in Athens. I've been talking to prospective evangelists this week and I've been saying we have a better work/home-life balance than some other parts of Microsoft. .I've already spent 20 nights away from my family for work already this year but I'll spend 20 away scuba diving too. This trip should be worth while (I had the option to say "No" so if it turns out otherwise, I only have myself to blame), but 'planes and hotel rooms and the packing and unpacking of bags hold no attraction for me.
I've mentioned before, that packing up all the gadgets can be a chore. Hopefully my new Orange SPV E650 will arrive soon after I get back. With it's slide out Keyboard, my Freedom keyboard becomes redundant – I never got in the habit of carrying it which is shame. Steve picked up on a post of Jason's about internet connection sharing, I've been doing this the hard way since I first had GPRS in 2002 (configure phone as an Bluetooth modem, and tell the PC to dial *99#) and it did make wonder if I should wait for a 3G version but I haven't felt the need for 3G so far. Orange's page for the E650 says it IS 3G – I have the details on that page to be right, but Jason has confirmed that it doesn't have UMTS and I'll need to buy a new memory card for it. I'll probably treat the memory card a permanent fixture as I do with my diving camera. It still annoys me that the 4 windows Mobile devices I've owned all use different memory. I've mentioned previously that my current C500 phone doesn't charge from a standard USB charger – it needs the normally unused pin 5 on the mini USB connector shorted to the neighbouring Pin 4, and I soldered my own adapter together. It also needs a 2.5mm-3.5mm adapter to plug my headphones in. The C500 is an HTC design and game of "guess what connectors they'll slap on this one." has been going on since they did the first iPaq for Compaq. The E650 (a.k.a HTC S710) delivers audio from a proprietary USB connector needs a Y cable to output to headphones and charge from a standard cable.
I've more-or-less ruled out Bluetooth headphones as a solution to the connector problem. I don't know if can listen to music on my laptop and then take a call from the mobile. They don't seem that great for travel, The C500 turns Bluetooth off in flight mode; even if the E650 turns WiFi, GSM and Bluetooth on or off separately, using Bluetooth in flight is a bit of a no-no. Using one in car doesn't seem very smart either. I dumped my Bluetooth earpiece after a road accident, a call didn't come through when I pressed the button, I looked down at the phone to figure out what had happened, and looked up to see the back of another car closing at about 50 Miles per hour. I've recently gone back but my current Bluetooth setup is more dangerous than holding the phone. The earpiece won't turn off any more, and it beeps it's incoming call beep when the phone finds "NO SERVICE". So old, wired, headphones and a new earpiece looks like the way to go. Hopefully any new earpiece will charge from USB – or failing that at 5 Volts- I put a USB connector onto the "tail" from an old universal transformer to power various 5 Volt devices (primarily my GPS Puck).
I've been carrying a USB A-Male to A-Female extension cable -I can plug a memory stick or my Hauppauge TV-Stick in for flexibility or use A-Male to B-Male, Mini-B Male or Camera adapters to avoid carrying 3 different leads. (Incidentally for any Pentax users, K10D connector that the I-USB17 cable plugs into is known as a Sanyo connector at Direct USB). Then I have my home made power adapters for the C500, and universal 5V supply. Unfortunately the USB B and Mini-B adapters both came apart. The Dell D820 had a tighter grip on the A end of the mini B adapter than the body did, and the two parted company. My WD external drive pulled the outer sleeve off the B adapter. I decided I'd get a travel kit with a retracting cable and direct replacements for the broken connectors. I found one from Lindy which had the bonus of connectors to turn a USB cable into a phone or Network (RJ11 or RJ45) lead. I can pop my headphones and extra connectors in a pack which takes the same space as the LAN cable I had in my bag. It comes with 10 year warranty, which is just as well because the first time I plugged in the phone connector it pulled apart. Lindy were very good about replacing it, but there do seem to be a lot of badly made connectors out there.
I'm taking the SLR camera on this trip. It's battery charger can share a mains cable with the Laptop's power brick, but I'll just take the spare battery – I'm getting about 750 shots to a battery and I won't shoot that many this week. Camera, lenses, laptop, cables all fit into one carry on bag with 5 days clothes and toiletries . Who says I can't travel light ?
Update: I had to leave the SLR behind - for the stupidest reason - no body cap. It only fits in my carry on luggage if I take the lens off the body and the body cap is off leading a life of its own. So I took the "diving" camera ad its charger. The Lindy USB kit has proved its worth - there have been huge problems with the wireless network here, but plenty of wired ports - providing you have a cable. I do - for once.
I'm tapping this in from the qwerty keypad on the E650 - which may turn out to be a masochistic thing to do.... My notes go into OneNote Mobile and are all bback to OneNote on my laptop. I can then hit "blog this" in OneNote: like Darren I love OneNote - it's a change-the-way-you-work thing. Obviously tapping things out here doesn't do everything - links go in later and only a few symbols (/+!@?*#-_:;',.) are accessible without diving into the 'insert symbol' menu.
I've put Voice Command onto the phone: this isn't a new application but it didn't work on the C500 - so it's been a revelation to me. It's supplied with the kit we give OEMs to build the phone software but it is not on the E650 as supplied, which is a shame. Out of the box the phone supports voice tagging contacts like the C500, but it's a pain. The tags aren't sync'd back into Outlook/Exchange, so I was never going to record tags for everyone in my address book: and Voice Command means I don't need to. I say 'call Jackie at work' or 'call Eileen on mobile'. And when I add a new contact on my PC they're voice dialable right away.
Of course other mobile phones can do voice recognition even the awful Ericsson I had back in 2002 had voice tagging. It reinforces my posts about how stupid desk phones are for the money and how keypad-driven voice-mail is an anachronism.
I expect to use voice command's media controls in the car - for now they are the phone's party trick - the child in me sees great fun to be had issuing play commands by Bluetooth from another room.
Here's a quick map of what you can say to voice command:
I'm back from in Athens, we had a 2 day evangelism summit (a synod ??) followed by after 3 days of Longhorn training, and those of us who will be out talking about Windows Server "Longhorn" got to spend time with a top presentation skills coach who works a lot with our US staff. It meant listening to a lot of different presenters and seeing a lot of Powerpoint. The Longhorn stuff used the Microsoft learning templates which were familiar to me from my past life as a trainer in the 1990s; the summit slides were a bit more of a mixed bag, and one of my colleagues mailed us this the link to this page on "Presentation Zen" - which in turn has some interesting links ("How Yoda and Darth Vader would present" is well worth a look) . This video by Don McMillan is the pick of them.
I also picked up a link to Seth Godin's "Really bad Powerpoint and how to avoid it", to summarize one a key passage, Instead of communicating, Powerpoint is used
Another page on "Presentation Zen" - not the only one there critical of how Microsoft people present - says "Leaders use speaking opportunities to communicate their vision in a crystal clear fashion (otherwise, what's the point of getting on stage?). You read it and you think, "well surely anyone uses speaking opportunities to communicate (whatever it is) in a crystal clear fashion ..?" and then to the sound of smacking your own forehead you realize that they don't - and you're left asking "why did they get on stage ?" And that leaves a couple of interesting questions. "Does leadership depend on the ability to make things crystal clear ?" and "Does technology hinder communication rather than help it"
Bonus link Interestingly Presentation Zen is critical of Bill Gates' presentations, but I find his e-mails are a model of clarity. I find Steve Ballmer isn't quite as good in e-mail, but is the better of the two on stage. Jason Langridge has some comments on the whole "Death by Powerpoint" thing and the advice he got from Steve B. He also has the obligatory link to Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 session. If you've never seen it, you should.
Update / Bonus link 2. Darren's thinking about this (not for the first time) - he must have been writing today's post at the same time as I posted mine.
Back in February I wrote about IBM and their attempts to throw a spanner in the works for the Open XML used in office 2007
The key bits of the story are
We have launched an on-line petition which we will present to the BSI to show there is support for Open XML. If you think it would be better for Open XML to be approved by ISO please consider signing it
Technorati tags: Microsoft, office, OOXML, ODF, ECMA, IBM, FUD, ISO
Hugh's Cartoons seem get straight to the heart of the matter. Service functions like Accounting, IT, Personnel, PR and Purchasing don't deliver product and they don't influence customers to buy it. They are there to help the others to do get on with their jobs. How do you assess whether they're delivering or not ?
When I first heard about "Corps I/O" I had no idea what it meant or why I should be interested. I learnt that it wasn't I/O in the sense of input/output but "Core-infrastructure optimization". Still: who cares it's just a Buzz-phrase... isn't it ? I've talked before about confusing language making people switch off. Late last year Eileen got someone to explain it in plain language for the whole our team. If you're work in IT, this model is about how well an IT department does its job, whether your job is worth doing and will it be there in a couple of years. It came up again last week in Athens. So here's my take on it....
The ideas in our model aren't new, we've used other work in the field - notably by Gartner. However some of documents are still written in "Gartner-speak."
We have an on-line self assessment, but here's a "pop quiz" way to see where you sit. Complete the ten sentences below; the more your answers come from the right the more "basic" your level, the more they come from the left the more Dynamic.
When the subject came up in Athens, one of the other evangelists said "Our IT professionals don't like to talk about it - they see it as a stick to beat them". To me that sounds like saying "Sure we could deliver a better service, we just hope if no-one talks about it we'll keep getting away with the status-quo".
More information here.
I sometimes tell the following Joke
"When people ask me what I do for a living, I say 'I work-to-bring-about-the-Kingdom-of-the-anti-christ-on-earth' and they say 'Pardon !' and I say 'I work for Microsoft' and they say 'I thought for a moment you said you worked to bring about the kingdom of the anti-christ', and I say 'Yes that people often think that when I say I work for Microsoft"
OK. with material like that I'm not going to get many bookings on the Comedy circuit. But there is a truth about it. King Charles I said "Never make a defence or an apology until you are accused." Hmmm..
Today in "Why am I working for Microsoft" Hugh MacLeod highlighted a comment from a reader. "One thing you should try and get Microsoft people to do is "STOP BEING SO APOLOGETIC". Whenever you put a Microsoft person on a platform - they always feel the need to apologise, or make awkward jokes. Do Yahoo people apologise for being from Yahoo? Likewise Google? Is this what the Blue Monster thing is about (could it become part of it)?"
I responded to the "Microsoft is dead" meme on Sunday, Mary Jo Foley linked to it, saying 'Make no mistake: Microsoft is still The Evil Empire. And if my arguments don't convince you, check out Softie James O'Neill's list of the "Top 10 things people thought would kill Microsoft and haven't." ' She called me the Blog Police before. A chap could get a complex about this...
Hugh also furnished me with a link to this story. Here's a quote.
Who has the right to tell the Microsoft story? Is it the Steve Claytons and the Robert Scobles? Is it Gates and Ballmer? Is it we, the users? Is it all of the above? And what happens when the story diverges? It seems to me that Gates and Ballmer tell one story — that of Microsoft domination at all costs. Clayton and Scoble tell another story — that of an emerging openness and a thirst for innovation. And the users tell a range of other stories, from “Microsoft is still #1″ to “Microsoft is dead.”
To me, the answer is that everyone tells the story, but at the end of the day it’s the story told by the top leadership that will matter
The last point is obvious. What Messers Gates, Ballmer et al say has more weight than an O'Neill, Clayton or Scoble. (A Scoble could be a unit of influence. Not to be confused with the Scoville, unless the poster is very fiery. I probably rate in the 10s of milliScobles. The impact of a Gates or Ballmer would put them in the KiloScoble range.)
"Who has the right to speak for Microsoft ?" is a tougher question (so are "Where does it stem from ?" and "What duties come with it ?"). Employees have been given the right to tell the story, by management from Bill Gates downwards, with only one duty: Blog Smart. And as Steve points out there 4500+ other bloggers exercising that right. My father believes PR shouldn't allow ordinary employees to speak for the company. Hugh's reader , Richard Stacy has a follow-up post to the "Microsoft is dead" one called PR is dead. It is as my father's generation knew it. We are all in PR now. I don't see that "divergence" I've never heard Gates and Ballmer calling for anything "at all costs", though I was stunned by what I called "the streets will run with the blood of our enemies" rhetoric at my first big Microsoft conference in 2000 . One senior Microsoft exec taunted us "Do you want to be the ones who put the fuel in Larry [Ellison]'s Jet ?". Ballmer used the story of Muhammad Ali and the Rumble in the jungle and the "rope-a-dope" - Ali spent most of the fight on the ropes soaking up punches before coming back with a decisive punch. A great story, until we got the bit about the fight audience chanting "Ali bomaye!", which means "Ali, kill him!" I can stile remember Ballmer yelling "Microsoft boom-aye-ay " and Microsoft people yelling it back. (Shouting Kill him ? KILL ?? ) But I haven't heard it in 5 years and that pleases me. Gates never spoke like that: Ballmer's fire has not gone out, but he was the one who started this change in tone, these days his metaphors are of building not killing.
Rights and duties aside, other people do tell the story. Some are neutral, others biased (not always against us), some call us the evil empire. Who's comfortable being called Evil ? We're engineers and marketeers, not mass murderers. Our business isn't based around polluting industrial processes, we don't make landmines or use child labor. People expect us to take it (cushioned no doubt by what they imagine we're paid). to laugh it off . We "always feel the need to apologise, or make awkward jokes" ? To get an idea of how we feel, think of Steve Martin in Roxanne doing 20 Jokes about his nose (sorry I don't know if that scene was in Cyrano De Bergerac). "Hi... yeah... SO ... I a work for a Microsoft, you know , the evil empire, We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. Ha ha etc" - <hand wring><awkward laugh>. "Do Yahoo people apologise for being from Yahoo? Likewise Google?" Try calling them Evil for 10 or 15 years and see.
Microsoft isn't staffed by saints and there are things we should apologise for; the fact that we aten't dead isn't one Here's an additional 6 things for which we shouldn't make a defence or an apology
And yes those form a cycle. And yes if squander the advantages that the Talent, the market share, and the Money give us or lose the passion to Change the world, we may as well go home. Which is where the blue monster came in.
Technorati tagsMicrosoft, Apple, Google, blue monster
On the roadshow I've been saying how great the Microsoft IT build of Vista is. The sheer simplicity of getting a new laptop - more-or-less any laptop, plugging it in, booting off the network and installing a usable combination of OS and apps in an hour or so is just fantastic. If we were normal customers we'd be using Vista enterprise, so that's what we use in the image that's available to install.
The trouble is I'm supposed to cover all of Vista, and I've had to let James Senior and Matt McSpirit take over the Vista after hours events that we're running in Reading and Leeds at the start of next month. There are some things I can't show without running Ultimate: Media centre being a prime example.
I bought a USB TV adapter to try out Media Centre when Vista was still in beta, but it doesn't have 64 bit drivers. Steve wanted a TV adapter so he took it off my hands last week. Saturday was my birthday which coincided wth the start of a new series of Dr Who: having young children we can't watch it live, and my ancient VCR has been acting up - you can guess what my birthday present to myself was going to be. I settled on the stick from Hauppauge because it has 64 bit drivers - and found it on a very good offer at PC world. I downloaded the latest software from Hauppauge's web site, installed the drivers without any problem.
Since I was running the Vista enterprise I needed Hauppauge's WinTV program: I said a while back that the worst bits of software I have on my machines come with Devices - Epson's printer driver, HP's Scanner driver and Pentax's imaging software. Hauppage's user interface and pig ugly appearance, fast tracks it into this hall of shame. It crashed on start-up until I discovered an badly explained option in tool called "primary" - which isn't mentioned in the documentation - the on-line help doesn't work either. To its credit it displays, records and plays back TV reasonably well, even if(a) It couldn't find TV channels which are currently off air (BBC Three and Four are on when CBBC and CBeebies are off and vice versa), (b) Channel numbers are assigned in the order which the channels are detected so don't match those used by a freeview box and my freeview-integrated TV(c) Its MPEG-4 files skip when played back in Windows media player(d) It won't start to play back a recording if the TV stick is unplugged.
It was time to move to Windows Media Centre and that, of course means moving from Windows Vista-Enterprise to Windows Vista-Ultimate. Unlike the other versions of Vista, with enterprise you can't go to system properties and put in a new product key to upgrade. I understand the logic of this, although I guess this whole post suggests that logic might be flawed. So was backup and reinstall time. It takes about as long to install Vista as it does to apply the image from the network, and then I have to:
and I'm ready to start work again, then for "play" I need to
My experience with Media Centre using the old stick, my old PC and the release candiate of Vista wasn't all that great. This time round the channel detection worked better (it found the "right" instances of the channels - where previously some were Ghosts on the wrong frequency), it associated all but 2 channels with the information in the TV guide (previously the TV guide was all holes, this time only 2 channels needed the visit to Settings / TV / Guide / Add listings to Channel). And the recording seems smooth (My last attempt at recording was the christmas special of Dr Who... which was so jittery we had to wait for the repeat).
Mission accomplished ... time taken, about 6 hours.
I'm not quite sure when it appeared, but this evening I noticed a link on the restore dialog box in Vista "Learn how to restore from backups created on Older versions of Windows", there are 32 and 64Bit versions. I considered using a Virtual Machine on Vista to read .BKF files made under Windows XP ... no need any more.
Gee what a name. The Release Candidate build of Virtual Server R2 SP1 is now available Before anyone posts a comment, yes I'm aware that we said we planned to have SP1 out in the first quarter and it is April now, so we've missed that. You're welcome to speculate on the final release date.
The download site also has a ReadMe file which details how to make Virtual Server work on Windows Vista (something which has caused a few headaches, although is now documented in other places) and gives a history of "What came in with R2" and "What is new with R2 SP1" - the list is as follows
Each of these is explained in the Readme.
I suspect there will be quite a lot of interest around VHDMount as we move to release. When beta 2 was out Dave Northey blogged how to install VHD Mount without virtual server (the instructions seem to have gone from the current release notes and I haven't tested them) and Ben Armstrong posted a guide to making VHDs mount when you double click them. Ben's "Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005" was published recently. I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, so don't consider this a plug for it, but it should be worth looking at.
I'm in Athens with other evangelists looking at Longhorn server and we got our hands on "work in progress build" of Longhorn's server virtualization today. I like the new MMC interface better than I like the browser interface to virtual server. The time we had with it was brief, and I learnt more from Jeff Woolsey's Public video . And since I started by talking about ship dates - you can read what I've already said here; and here I quoted Robert Townsend's rules for people talking on behalf of the company "Don't forecast earnings. If asked why not, tell them we don't do in public anything we can't do consistently well (and believe me, nobody can forecast earnings consistently well). " Replace "earnings" with "ship dates"
Teething troubles with the new phone have proved to be pretty minor. I'm finding more things to love about this phone.
I've got one major annoyance: on the C500 with Mobile 2003 I could go to Settings/Phone/Call options and program the Microsoft voice mail number with my account code and Pin as +44118909xxxxPyyyy#Pzzzz# (where xxxx is the voicemail number, yyyy is my extension and zzzz is my pin, so dials , P inserts a pause and then it enters my number followed by the hash sign, pauses for the password prompt, enters the pin and another #). On the E650 with Mobile 6 only + and digits are allowed.
I'll forgive the device this for a four of it's mail features. Here are the first three, I'll save the other one for another post.
On the left we can see a Rich Text mail ... I like the way Exchange 2007 does these mail notifications - and I let deleted items build up it had got to 5660 items by this afternoon. In the middle - I've gone back to the tools menu at my inbox: notice I can set my Out of Office from my phone. The number of times I've set off for a trip and realized I've forgotten to do it doesn't bear thinking about. I selected Empty deleted items from the tools menu and on the right you can see the warning I got. It was interesting to watch the deleted items folder in Outlook as the messages drain away. About this time of year 2 years ago, I was on holiday, without my laptop checking (and deleting) mail from my phone and my mailbox hit its limit. I had to pay to clear my deleted items from a cybercafe.