A technology which you might have heard of by the name of Windows Live Folders has a new name Windows Live SkyDrive
OK making our names rhyme might not be all that great. With the active X control installed you can just drag and drop files into your 500MB of free space, and you have a simple security model of share with no-one, everyone or people you choose.
It's still in beta, but open to US, UK, and India. Just go to http://skydrive.live.com .
I mentioned the post that I lost last night and that it referred to Clive James, a writer whose words I can hear as I read them. I can't think of many others like that: I hear Bill Bryson's words in the on-the-brink-of-mania tones with which Kerry Shale read them on the radio, rather than Bryson's easy paced burr.
When I read a transcript of James' essay "Smoking, my lost love" from the series "A point of view" I could hear it in my head. This, I thought, is someone whose blog I'd subscribe to, if he had one - which he doesn't. He does have a web site and I found myself in the audio section listening to a piece called "Insult to the Language" It shows a side of him which these days we are supposed to call "pro-detail" for fear that the a constable from the Political Correctness police will whisk us away if we describe someone as "pedantic", but nonetheless it has some quotable passages which show that his best writing is on the subject of the writing of others. For example
"Such blunders... drive the reader to re-work the sentence himself before he can figure out what the writer must mean. When the writer is getting all of the fee, and the reader is doing at least half the labor the discrepancy can cause resentment.......There is a brand of Lumpen prose which ... weighs like lead because the reader continually has to join in the writing. " and quoting an example "This is just a mass of raw material waiting for the reader to make something of it"
{Perhaps I should point the irony of quoting this after the passage I pasted into my previous post, lest someone else should point it out for me} But this idea of sending a "mass of raw material" for the reader to sort out is what I referred to in Why am I the one doing this as "Bad E-mail. Why am I the one who has to organize the writers thoughts into something coherent ?"
To show how sloppy writing distorts meaning, he talks about metaphors which people use incorrectly because they do not understand the practice which gave rise to them "He shot himself in the foot" James tells us "Originally referred to a solider in the great war, who hoped that a self inflicted wound would buy him a ticket out of the trenches. Perhaps because of the irresistible mental image of a western gunslinger pulling the trigger while getting his revolver out of its holster, the metaphor is nowadays almost universally used to evoke clumsiness, rather than cowardice" . Rather disappointingly neither of the editions of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that I have at home has this phrase in it.
Of course I'd need something newer than my 1980's copy of Brewer's to look up a term like Sockpuppet.
A little time ago I was writing about Open XML and the process of moving from an ECMA ratified standard to an ISO modified one; it was something that was in the news and I felt I had something I wanted to say on the subject. This week an update reached the mail boxes of many Microsoft Bloggers, with a suggestion that we might want to blog about it. I don't mind if someone mails me to say "we've got an event which may be of interest to your customers will you spread the word ?". I have more trouble when it's a news story where I don't really have an angle. The news in this case, and it is good news for Microsoft, is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts now support both Open XML and ODF formats. Great! You can read their comments about the process they went through here - with a link to the comments they received and the policy itself, though if I am to be honest, I really hope you have something better to do with your time. (Reading and listening to Clive James for example.)
I talked to Steve about it. "If we all blogged it at the same time wouldn't we look like a bunch of Sockpuppets" I said. To my surprise an upto-the-minute, on every-social-network, sidewalk-surfer-dude like Steve didn't know the term ,so I checked with both Wikipedia and Wordspy. The thing about a sockpuppet is that it is a false identity, I was spreading the term in the wrong sense - in just the kind of way that Clive James had talked about.
So having us all blog about it at the same time would make us ... well I don't know what the term is (suggestions please. Any along the lines of "Typical Microsoft employees" won't be accepted.). Of course I'd never blog about the subject. Oh no. Perish the thought. I might mention it in passing to illustrate something rather more literary, but that's completely different :-)
On the 28th of August we have a technet event here in Reading entitled Application Management – the foundation for desktop environments.
It's a little bit different from our usual events as the abstract explains.
You have asked us for more information to help you to understand WHY and HOW you should deploy a piece of technology. This session, focused towards large organisations, will look at the application-related technical obstacles and overheads which can stand in the way of achieving a flexible, desktop environment, capable of responding to ever-changing business and physical needs. This event is one of two pilots to see if we can meet your needs in this area
If this sounds like your kind of thing head over to the event's page to read more and register.
Windows Live writer is proving popular. I've been using it in beta for a year and there are only two things that I don't like
The Auto-save is matters at this point, because in place of the witty and erudite post I was writing yesteday (and I was borrowing from something I had listened to from Clive James) you have this one.I never turned Auto-save on. And last night when unzipped my bag, I could smell that my post was toast. Toast being the key word here - though the smell was not the comforting one of bread browning, but the distinctive tang of hot plastic. I knew before I touched the computer was hot. With no LEDs on there was a slim chance the computer had hibernated but I've seen this before it came as no surprised it had run that battery to zero. Recently, too judging from the heat - I was concerned that it might have damaged the machine made me a little concerned for it (doubly so as I hadn't removed the secondary drive after doing my last backup). Since the laptop had been in my car for last 3-4 hours and most of that time the car had been parked on the driveway, and this isn't the first time it's happened I want to know what's going on here. According to the event log it woke up at 18:53 and this was triggered by the ACPI Lid. What's odd about this is that the laptop doesn't power up when I open the lid I have to press the power button. Worse, closing the lid sends it to sleep ONLY when running on battery.
Looking through the event log I found when the machine boots, the event logging service records an Error 6008 - "The previous system shutdown at {time} was unexpected.", if it wasn't shut down cleanly. Now I don't know how it works out the time it happened. There are 5 of these events in the last 40 days. Roughly two hours before each is a message recorded by Power-Troubleshooting . "The system has resumed from sleep. Sleep Time: {time} Wake Time: {time}. Wake Source: Device -ACPI Lid"
I'd love to hear from anyone out there who has a Dell Latitude D820 which seems to have a problem of this kind. One hypothesis I'm working on is that this a scheduled service is waking the computer up (maybe to record something a 7PM) and the switch message is spurious, and it may be that if the machine wakes with it's lid closed something about the state of the lid switch then prevents it from sleeping - whether this is a bug or a hardware fault.
Feels like I've got to do a load more investigation before I even call the help desk.
Update. After a quick swap of hard disks between my laptop and Steve's the failure to sleep on closing lid when powered follows the drive not the chassis. Vista is definitely set-up to sleep in both states. But it's something on the hard disk .
I've mentioned Photosynth a few times before. I came back from lunch today to see some new collections which we have done with NASA are now live. It's great stuff. Go take a look.
I had a mail from the Unified communications team over the weekend. They were happy to announce that the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Trial Downloads (both Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition Servers) together with their associated client, the Office Communicator 2007 Trial download are now available. The OCS resource kit is still being worked on - I've proof-read some bits of it - but an early cut of the tools is also available. So is the Software Development Kit.
Initially these trials will be English only, the plan is to make Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese versions available on September 24th. Like all the best laid plans they are subject to change.
The idea of a trial is to help customers to evaluate the features, capabilities and scenarios delivered by these products in a lab environment. The evaluation code will expire after 180 days, if you were to use it production it is possible upgrade it with an appropriately licensed version of the product. We have public forums where customers can post questions and feedback.
I realize that voice / telephony integration is a big piece of the new product and not many organizations have a PBX in their labs. But the what's new guide runs to 15 pages which aren't all telephony or greater finesse in Communicator . New scenarios worth looking at include notably extranet connections, finer grain permissions, IMing distribution lists and On-premise conferencing; if you want to test the latter to full there is a download of the Web conference scheduler. To save yourself a lot of individual downloads, I'd recommend the documentation roll-up too.
By the way: if you're in the UK and you click through to the Office Communications server home page (http://www.microsoft.com/office/livecomm) from any of the links above you'll fetch up at a LCS 2005 page not an OCS 2007 one. The usual course of action in this case is either
After being taken to task by some recent commenters I'm a bit hesitant about suggesting that I (or others) are vain, but I can't come up with a better tag for it.
I find that quite often I want to find a post on my blog. Because I often write about things I've found on the web the link to them is in my blog rather than my favorites folder. There are other things like in house Wikis or sharepoint sites where we want to go back to our own stuff- hence vanity searching. I find this is a great use of the search box in IE7.
I've added "My Blog" to the search list, and I'd pass that on as a top tip. Add search for any site you post to a lot. The easy way to do this is to search for the word TEST and then copy the URL from the address bar - if you paste it on on the "Search Providers" web page the server there will generate the open search XML that IE needs.
By the way in the screen shot on the right you'll see I've got Live Search as my default - I'm now finding it's quite rare that I have to drop back to Google. Once I've switched I'll keep on using Google until a search there doesn't work out. I've got a couple of other bits, Wikipedia (as you can see in the screen shot) is on my menu and while you're at the site it puts itself on the menu - that's what the yellow star is showing - the pull down menu also goes Orange when the site supports this - I really wish all Microsoft sites would - but like getting them changed to use silverlight, to write phone numbers as TEL: clickable links this seems a bit of a forlorn hope.
I have been carrying on with my project to make EXIF data available in PowerShell.
When I searched for Powershell and EXIF it turned up this Blog post of Scott Hanselman's. He talks about a "nice little photo library" that extracts and interprets EXIF data from images, but when I tried to get hold of copy the link was dead, so I thought "How hard can it be ?" and looked the example in the VB Express's help. The answer was "Not very hard", and I built a class library I built goes like this.
Public Class ExifImage ' Declare Constants, variables, subs and functions ' - use PUBLIC to make them available to things which use the class. Public BitMap As System.Drawing.Bitmap ' I have lots of constants and a couple of functions to process information - just one shown here Public Const ExifIDDateTimeTaken As Integer = 36867 ' NEW is invoked when an item of this class is instantiated. Here I want to get a BITMAP object Public Sub New(ByVal s As String) Me.BitMap = New System.Drawing.Bitmap(s) End Sub ' Now declare code to return properties. I don't want to write properties, so I declare them read only ReadOnly Property DateTimeTaken() As String Get DateTimeTaken = {what ever code you need} End Get End Property End class
Public Class ExifImage
' Declare Constants, variables, subs and functions
' - use PUBLIC to make them available to things which use the class.
Public BitMap As System.Drawing.Bitmap
' I have lots of constants and a couple of functions to process information - just one shown here
Public Const ExifIDDateTimeTaken As Integer = 36867
' NEW is invoked when an item of this class is instantiated. Here I want to get a BITMAP object
Public Sub New(ByVal s As String)
Me.BitMap = New System.Drawing.Bitmap(s)
End Sub
' Now declare code to return properties. I don't want to write properties, so I declare them read only
ReadOnly Property DateTimeTaken() As String
Get
DateTimeTaken = {what ever code you need}
End Get
End Property
End class
[reflection.assembly]::loadfile("C:\...longpath...\OneImage.dll")
Now I can do something like this to get an image with my exif properties,
$foo = New-Object oneimage.exifimage -argumentlist "I:\DCIM\100PENTX\IMGP3797.JPG"
PS C:\Users\Jamesone\Pictures> $foo.Flash Flash off
Flash off
That post of Scott's talks about "spot-welding" new properties on to existing objects. Not object inheritance, mind you, "super-gluing." Like it or hate it, like super-glue, you have to respect that it solves problems. I copied his XML wholesale replaced his type name with mine and loaded it with
Update-TypeData My.Types.PS1XML
Which let me get a directory with the DatePhotoTaken field. I got a bit more adventurous and build a different XML file which would show me bytes per pixel - a quick way to find out which files have been heavily compressed and which haven't
<Types> <Type> <Name>System.IO.FileInfo</Name> <Members> <ScriptProperty> <Name>BytesPerPixel</Name> <GetScriptBlock> if ($this.Extension -match "jpg|raw") { $photo = new-object oneimage.exifimage $this.FullName $this.length / ($photo.Height * $photo.width) } </GetScriptBlock> </ScriptProperty> </Members> </Type></Types>
I've attached the VB code and DLL so you can experiment. Disclaimer . Like any code on my blog, this code is provided as an Example for illustration purposes is only. It comes with No support and No warranty that it is fit for any purpose whatsoever. Update - the code has been revised, and the link below has changed
Robert Larson has a post on his blog to say that his co-author on the VS 2005 resource kit, Janique Carbone has posted some sample chapters on the VS community web site. The paper edition is at the printers with a release date of August 28th: if, like me, you hate buying these kind of books sight unseen, these downloads are a great way to decide if it is the book for you or not.
Meanwhile, over on the Windows Server Virtualization blog, Jeff's posted a guide to running Virtual Server 2005 on Windows Server 2008. In case you think that's a daft idea, remember that Windows Server's native Virtualization is 64 bit only so if you want Virtualization on 32 bit 2008 you need Virtual Server. It may also prove to be a useful stepping stone for some customers on the way to WSV.
Finally we've posted some new Videos.
I'm back from Seattle, and after my outbound trip, the return was uneventful. I'd hoped to come back with plenty of stuff to blog about but most of what I heard that was interesting is still confidential. Before I left I had time to do "the Walk of Pork" and check out some more of Seattle's Pigs on Parade . This one was actually sponsored by Microsoft. Who says we don't have a sense of humour ?
One of the side meetings we had in Seattle was a "Bloggers' town hall meeting", and the usual subjects came up. A commonly asked question goes "If I can't write it on a 'work' blog can I write it on a 'personal' one ?" . "Ben", my blog, stalker mailed Eileen (as none@none.com but we have his IP address), because he didn't think I should post about "business travel rage"; he suggested I get "two blogs; one that deals with IT from a Microsoft angle that I can legitimately read at work and a 'violence' blog where we can all get our daily fix of automatic weapons, the 'red mist'". I'm unapologetic that I don't stick squarely to my technology cluster, but blog interesting things that I come into contact with in my working life. The problem with having multiple blogs is that as soon mention that you work for Microsoft and things that you say will be linked to that if it makes sense. Political issues do have a place on a work blog because policies set by governments affects what we do, but Party politics shouldn't appear on a company platform. - I want to write "Gordon Brown is a moron" or "Gordon Brown is a genius" a private blog would be the place and no-one is likely to run a headline "Microsoft attacks/praises Prime Minister" as a result. However if I were to write either of those about, say, Steve Jobs, you can see the headline "Microsoft attacks/praises Apple Boss" followed by "A Microsoft employee, writing on his blog said ..." Talking to Steve (Lamb - not Jobs) he thought it was a sad that we can't have individual freedom of speech because what we say isn't seen as the speech of individuals. Of course people can blog under a pseudonym (I quite fancy "Borg-Pig 4/19"); but if you have to guard your anonymity that's hardly individual freedom of speech either. There are things which might make good posts which I self-censor but so few could go on an out-of-Microsoft blog that I don't see the point of having one.
It was in the process of explaining the importance of context that a lawyer from our games division told us the following - which he was happy for me to retell. In making modern video games it's now quite common to make clay sculptures of the characters. These characters are dressed in their costume so that the clothes look right - which matters if the digitized image of the figure appears in the final game; underneath the characters are naked. The characters also need to be seen by people from legal, and during the production of Shadowrun they had to check out the figures of Naked Dwarves, Elves, Humans and Trolls. It was in this context that a lawyer came to demand a naked dwarf in his office. Not that the person who overheard him necessarily understood that at the time ...