I’ve developed a bit of a reputation as a curmudgeon, although I prefer to think that I don’t waste my good opinions on people who don’t actually deserve it. I mention this because when I say that I think very highly indeed of Scotty Macleod that’s not something I say of everybody, nor something I would say simply because of circumstances. If you asked for a shortlist of the best people I’ve met in this job he’d be on it.

Richard Siddaway (who’d also be on that shortlist) contacted me yesterday, to say Scotty is hospital with a serious head injury following what sounds like a freak accident. I know quite a few readers will have met Scotty and would want to know.

The nature of the major head injuries means it’s impossible to know what the outcome will be, and this must be tough for those who are closer to Scotty than I am. But I suspect there are quite a few people who aren’t all that close too him who will still be hoping or praying for him.

And Scotty, the day you read this and tell me not to be so daft can’t come soon enough.

Update. Steve S was also trying to let me know about this yesterday afternoon, with a link to a little more info.

Perhaps it's a bit strong to say "if complete and utter chaos was lightning, Jeff Jones would be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards' " (as a favourite quote  has it)  but you must admit it's a better opening than "Blimey, XP was better than we thought", or "See, there was no need wait for Vista SP1".

Jeff, you see, has posted on his blog an analysis of Vulnerabilities in the first year of life of Windows Vista, Windows XP, two popular linux distros and Apple's Mac OS X 10.4. Here are the bare numbers (though you should read the whole thing)

To explain the numbers a little, an update might fix more than one vulnerability, and more than one update might go out out in a patch event. Apple seem to roll all their fixes for a given event into a single update.

Vista is the newest of these operating systems and you could argue that the art of software engineering has advanced. But then Why did a 2001 Microsoft OS fare so much better 2005/6 products?

With all the claims of the Linux community like "With many eyes all bugs are shallow" - how did Red Hat have 360 vulnerabilities ? They released Patches 44 weeks out of 52, 20 of their patches came in weeks when there had already been a patch. Ubuntu didn't fare much better on that score.

If security vulnerability counts are indicative of bugs in general then Vista shipped in a better state than XP; Vista will go longer to SP-1 than XP did, it seems that they'll have roughly the same number of vulnerabilities fixed at SP-1.

So that's all good - why the "Wet copper armour" quote - and Gizmodo agrees with me ? Well, to bend another favourite quote, "The Internet is more full of exciting trolls and excruciating fan boys and girls than a pomegranate is of pips". Most times I mention Apple I get visited by one set or the other. Jeff just called their babies ugly. He's happy to discuss it. His document explains how he got to the numbers and he encourages people to do their own analysis. And he faces down point that "Of course you think the Microsoft products are good because you work for Microsoft" by pointing out it's the other way around, he works for Microsoft because he thinks the products are good. Like me. Like most of us.

I've been waiting for this for a little while, in fact I had hoped to see a draft before it went public (although I wonder if that actually falls foul of the rules on not having "Secret" APIs). I could see the WMI providers from Powershell but working out what to with them wasn't trivial.

The information is now published on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136992(VS.85).aspx

Calling WMI APIs from PowerShell is something I know a bit about having done a lot of that for the OCS resource kit so it looks like I'm going to be having some fun with this ... yes I do regard it as fun.

I've mentioned Jeff Woolsey before he's a contributor on the virtualization team blog and keeps us informed internally with clear headings about  what's confidential, what to share and what can be public with a "please don't paste to your blog" this one came tagged This is important customer information. Please provide this information to customers.

Here's a bit more informatiom from Jeff. Please note the final paragraph - the APIs are settled enough to share, but they are not guaranteed to be final.

The virtualization team is pleased to announce the public beta release of the Hyper-V WMI interfaces.

Hyper-V WMI APIs. Hyper-V uses WMI APIs (similar to the Virtual Server COM API) to create, manage, monitor, configure virtual resources. We expect the Hyper-V WMI APIs to be used widely in a variety of ways such as:

· By third party management vendors who want to write tools to manage WSV (examples, HP Openview & IBM Director)

· By enterprises who want to integrate with an existing management solution

· Developers who want to automate virtualization in a test/dev environments through scripts

The Hyper-V WMI APIs are publicly available here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136992(VS.85).aspx

Important: This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change. This same warning is provided online (see the screenshot below). While we’re trying to avoid any changes, modifications are still possible up to the final release. We encourage user feedback by clicking on the link below to “Send comments about this topic to Microsoft.”

I was wrong. People seem to get on better with "touch" phones than I thought. I understand that different form factors suit different people. Just as some want a PDA and some want a phone, it seems that some want 12 keys, some want Qwerty and some want touch.

HTC have sold 2 Million of their touch phones (thanks to Jason for that link). HTC don't have the brand glamour of Apple. Apple have sold 2.3 Million iphones according to the BBC's reading of their accounts, and 4 Million according a quote from Steve Jobs in the news story about HTC. (I suspect jobs is talking since launch, and the BBC is talking about the last quarter). And the HTC device isn't as beautiful an object as the iPhone. It does corporate things well, like all the Windows powered phones from HTC, but people must like the interface. There's no other way it could be out for just half the year but account for 1 in 6 of all the phones HTC sold. 

When I was in my teens, my school Physics class was taken on trip to the Royal Institution, and the star speaker we saw was  Eric Laithwaite. He demonstrated a famous experiment of his (lifting a spinning gyroscope which was too heavy to lift when at rest). Wikipedia says he "had a habit of championing the ideas of amateurs over those of experts" and this came out right at the end when he made an aside about centrifugal force. "Do they teach you there is no such thing as centrifugal force ?"  "Yes" we murmured: we were taught that there is no force which pulls something at the centre of a circle to the outside, only centripetal force which pulls an object on the outside towards the centre, making it go round in a circle. Laithwaite went on "You know Newtons third law ? ... Action and reaction are equal and opposite ?" we  did. "So... How can there be a force acting only one way on the the string ?   If something is being pulled inwards, something else must feel a force going outwards. It just depends which end of the string you're standing at." And quite quickly one of the teachers reminded us the Laithwaite was so eminent that the examiners hadn't caught up with him.

Until today I hadn't heard the news that we had announced a change to Virtualization licensing of the home versions of Vista. I spent the day with some journalists going through different kinds of Virtualization (Hyper-V , Presentation Virtualization with Terminal Services and Application virtualization -neé Softgrid). Somewhere the subject of applications which don't run on Vista came up. I think this problem is overstated, as I said responding to a comment by "CW"  to an earlier post.  OS changes break stuff. The bigger the changes the bigger the risk of breakage and although we put huge effort into keeping it small, XP broke stuff, XP service pack 2 broke stuff, and Vista breaks stuff: but not that much. However if you work in an organization with a problem with compatibility, then Virtualization can be a "Get out of jail free card" . Not just hardware Virtualization with Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V / Third party products (we had to show the journalists this post from May '07 to be clear that you can use third party products), but also hosting the problem application on terminal services, or streaming it with Softgrid App-Virtualization.

Now, Kelly Fiveash from the Register latched onto "Get Out of Jail Free" and used it a piece she posted later in the day. Actually she used it three times. But I didn't say it was a get out jail card for Microsoft or for Vista. I was about to set off on huge rant about being misquoted. Until Prof. Latithwaite's string came to mind. (I bet you were wondering how I was going to bring the first two paragraphs together).  It depends which end of the string you stand at. Perceived application incompatibility does worry customers, "you can always virtualize your way out" is a solution for us as much as for them.

The Licence currently on the web site hasn't been updated yet, so I can't tell if we only allow these versions to be run in a virtual machine, or whether we give a license to run a virtualized copy on top of a normal copy; the latter is the case in Vista-Enterprise - if it's only the former for the home versions we're only providing "get-out-of-jail cards." to enterprise customers.

I've recently bought Efficasoft's GPS utilities  for my phone - I keep thinking about GeoTagging photos. I was toying with writing a GPS logger of my own, but for $17.95 Efficasoft gave me that and a bunch of other things which range from the useful to the clever party trick. For example it has no maps, but you can give it co-ordinates of known points on an image file and it manipulates it accordingly. It will save key points as well as recording a track. Money well spent; it even has a choice of log formats, it's own compact format or a standard dump of the NMEA 0183 sentences sent back by the GPS device. The problem is that these are not exactly easy to read; they look like this

$GPRMC,132206.042,A,5207.8403,N,00059.2248,W,20.059710,146.77,200108,,*2C
$GPGSA,A,3,19,28,22,11,,,,,,,,,25.2,11.2,22.5*02
$GPRMC,132209.041,A,5207.8272,N,00059.2093,W,20.324416,137.87,200108,,*21
$GPGSA,A,3,03,19,22,11,,,,,,,,,4.0,1.6,3.7*3E
$GPGSV,2,1,07,19,71,151,32,11,41,269,34,22,39,058,49,03,37,145,33*75

The ones which begin $GPGSV, and $GPGSA are satellite diagnostics and of no interest to me here. I only want the  lines beginning $GPRMC which are the "Recommended Minimum data"

$GPRMC,132206.042,A,5207.8403,N,00059.2248,W,20.059710,146.77,200108,,*2C
Translates  as time=13:22:06.42, GPS Status OK, Latitude 52 degrees 07.8403 minutes North, Longitude 0 degrees 59.2248 minutes west. Speed 20.059710 knots, track 146.77 degrees, date 20 Jan 2008,,checksum.

Now what I want to do is to take that data and do something like this

$myPhoto=Get-Picture "picture.jpg"
 
Get-GPS_co-ordinates_at ($myPhoto.DateTimeTaken)
$myPhoto.geotag(NS,Latitude,EW,Logitude)
$myphoto.bitmap.save("TaggedPicture.JPG"

Easy. But Get-GPS-Coordinates at a given time ? A pipe dream surely ? Here's how I did it.

Since it's all comma separated to start with, I wanted to use PowerShell's built in Import-CSV. But I wanted to strip out the lines that weren't relevant. That's easy enough, but here's a trick, Get-Content returns an array of strings, one for each line, so if I put my header in an array of strings and add the cleaned up file content to it I get a useful CSV file.

@("HEADERS") +  ( get-content FILE.log | where {$_ -match "GPRMC" } ) > temp.csv

I'd like to pipe this into Import-CSV, but it insists on a file (Imust check if that has changed in the V2 CTP), so the next bit processes that.  Using Select-object , I can pare the data dow and splice the date and time together forcing the result to a DATE-TIME type - that accounts for most of the next bit

import-csv temp.csv | select-Object -property NS, latitude, EW , longitude , @{Name="DateTime"; Expression =
  {[DateTime]::ParseExact(($_.Date+$_.Time),"ddMMyyHHmmss.fff",[System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture)}} | 

 So now I've got a collection of objects with North/South, Latitude, East/West, Longitude , DateTime. Now to find the one that matches the photo's date and time.  Part of my brain took this as an idle process and came up with  "| Sort-on (Difference between GPS time and photo time) | select the first one"  it took me an age to realize I needed the absolute (not signed) value to sort successfully, which meant calling up the system.math library

sort -Property @{ Expression={[system.math]::abs(($_.datetime - $MyPhoto.TimeTAKEN).totalMilliseconds)}} | 
select-object -First 1 | 

Finally I added a GeoCode routine to the Exif library I published in August, so I can pipe the results into $myPhoto.GeoCode

foreach-object {$MyPhoto.geoTag($_.Latitude, $_.NS, $_.Longitude, $_.EW)}

Granted it is a heck of a long line, but Import | Select | sort | select | geoTag is one of only 4 lines needed: one to get the Photo (which is actually $MyPhoto=new-object oneimage.exifimage "Picture.jpg"), one to make the CSV file and one to save the result at the end. I don't want to think about how much VB script it would take to parse the file, and find which date was closest

I've added the latest version of my EXIF class here, for anyone who wants to play.

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.

Technorati tags: EXIF, Powershell, Windows, Photography

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I went to school in Brighton, and while the Brighton Evening Argus is the daily evening paper for quite a wide area, I don't think of it having an international readership. So I was surprised when Robert Scoble Linked to one of their education stories: Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia. It's by no means an isolated concern,  BBC had a story that "More than half of teachers believe internet plagiarism is a serious problem among sixth-form students". 

When I went to school, we had a standard history book and the teacher told us "I know exactly what's in there, so I'll know if you just copy stuff out " When I went to University the Internet was embryonic: the search engine we were taught to use was the library catalogue. I think it was expected to quote what we found in the library to show we'd done assignments properly.  The Internet is a fantastic library - though one that needs to be used with care, as the Ronnie Hazlehurst obituary debacle showed.

One of the surprises I had at the BETT show was the number of questions brought to us which were answered quickly by an on-line search. There do seem to be a proportion of teachers who don't search on-line.  To my mind educators at all levels should
(a) Encourage searches, but with that "I'll know if you just copy" message - updated as "I've already read the Wikipedia entry and the top search results for this". I'd put phrases which looked out of place in student essay straight into Live Search and/or Google. There's even a Plagiarism Advisory Service  for testing en-masse.
(b) Foster collaborative working by encouraging students to research different aspects and share the items they find - Eileen was wowed by Taffiti's ability to blog stuff on live spaces.
(c) Develop students' ability to distinguish good sources from bad
(d) Develop a culture of attributing research sources used. It's the difference between building a provenance to add to the value of your work, and being accused of plagiarism

As soon as the P word comes up I think of Tom Lehrer (and I was fortunate enough to get his complete work on CD for Christmas.)  

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

The difference between research and plagiarism is attribution. But we live in a world where pictures posted to the Internet are taken and reused without consent, where it is common to steal music and, increasingly, films (not forgetting software) and where the public sides with thieves who make a fortune by stealing the design of a game (Acknowledgement to Sharon for that link). Encarta defines plagiarism as "copying another person's idea or written work and claiming it as original". Of the students who worry teachers, I wonder how many are claiming the work as original, and how many just use anything found on the Internet without any sense that it is another person's; that intellectual property is property. Should educators be explaining that ?  

Back in the 1980s someone mooted the idea that in addition to the schools staple of the "3Rs" (that's Reading 'riting, and 'rithmatic for non-UK readers) there should be an additional R, the teaching of "Right & Wrong" (I remember Mrs Thatcher being involved, but whether she was arguing parents should teach this or schools I can't recall). It was out of the question - trendy thinking in the teaching profession held that it was oppressive even to impose spelling and grammar on children, who should express their ideas.  I don't think students should be told to rewrite the work of others so it appears to be their own - that is plagiarism. If they make proper use of other people's work to develop, even express, their ideas - that's fine with me. For example
"On subject X there are two basic positions. Expert A says that [long quote from A, properly attributed], the key part is [requote] because [original writing]. Those who disagree with this have a particular problem accepting [requote] and their view is best summarized by Expert B who says that [Long quote from B also properly attributed]. The weakness in this is [requote] because [original writing] or as Expert C says [further quote].
If the choice of quotes and the surrounding, original, material combine to demonstrate understanding, then the student should get a good grade. And if they regurgitate someone else's words without showing understanding they get a bad one. Which is pretty much what my history teacher was saying 30 years ago.

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One of the ways to divide I meet is break them into the "Stallers and Installers". I meet plenty of people who have installed are running Windows Vista. No OS is perfect, but those who have made the move to Vista seem to be happier there than they were with XP. The others divide into the very few who tried it and didn't like it, a few more who couldn't make it work with a specific app or device. Device support has come a long way in the last year: the present nVidia drivers work well but the initial ones were simply dreadful. With SP1 just around the corner the time is probably here for those who had a bad experience

What does surprises me is number who haven't even bothered to look at it, and the excuses I hear. I've had people whose companies have bought the right to move up to Vista telling me they're not doing it because of the cost (they're looking at the retail cost for one copy on the high street) without realizing they've paid for it. A couple of people at the BETT show last week said Vista wasn't stable, so they wouldn't try it. Monthly service packs cause my laptop to reboot about every other month; it goes into sleep or hibernate a couple of times a day but it's been an age since I initiated a reboot. Outlook and Internet explorer hardly ever close - I have 35 pages open in one instance of IE right now and 28 windows open. This workload would bring XP to it's knees. Unstable indeed !

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A snowclone I guess, with films like one of our Aircraft is missing , and Thomas Dolby's "One of our submarines"  ("One of our Submarines is missing, tonight. Seems she went aground on manoeuvres" ) something with a slightly military edge to it.

The latest evidence that when it comes to anything relating to IT the UK government achieves a rating of "Not fit to run a whelk stall" comes form the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC

West Midlands police are investigating the theft of a laptop from a Royal Navy officer which held the personal details of 600,000 people.
the MoD said.  "In some cases, for casual enquiries, the record is no more than a name.  But for those who progressed as far as submitting an application to join the Forces, extensive personal data may be held, including passport details, National Insurance numbers, drivers' licence details, family details, doctors' addresses and National Health Service numbers."

I watched the Lib-Dem leader on TV earlier and he got some good points over about the ID card and the database state - he actually used the term more than once. But if were  an opposition politician I would be demanding to know why  - when Microsoft have been shipping  Bitlocker in Windows Vista for a year, and third party solution are available for Windows XP (and I belive non-Microsoft OSes as well) - MoD officials are still carrying huge amounts of unencrypted data. (And if I were the Information commissioner I'd want to know why one person needed both casual contacts and a full set of intimate details on their laptop)

Vista Service pack 1 will be out soon. Now some people like to wait for the first service pack - it's an idea which really belongs to the 1990's but it's still there. Sometime I wonder if it is a way of making Luddite behaviour sound like prudence. If your organization has sensitive data (your employees', customers' or partners') then you'll be in the news if you lose it, and you're not using bitlocker or an add on product which does the same thing,  that would mean you're negligent and deserve everything that comes your way.

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I've talked about my habit of "Brutal e-mail triage" before my equation for guessing the usefulness of a mail is

100 Log₂(1+sentences_by_the_sender) / (recipients * Kbytes * Organizational-hops-from-me)

A 1 sentence mail from Eileen scores about 10. I got a mail this morning which

• Came from outside my normal circle.
• Was forwarded to a large list (about 150 people) 
• Was 3MB in size

With a single sentence of explanation would have scored about 1*10^-6 but it didn't have that so it scored zero, so normally that would mean straight to the bin.Except, something in the text jumped out at me: You might have seen the heroes happen {here} campaign (why they happen in a code block I don't know), well now it's having cartoons drawn by professional, and he's looking for stories. So come on you must have done something a bit more heroic than looking answers up on a search engine or getting someone's lost PowerPoint back. There's a "Help us Drive the story" link on the cartoon page so there's a chance for fame. Or you could share your story with Andrew or me and let us do one for you, or even do your own visit Janina Köppel's Excellent SP-Studio site which I used to produce the ones above (PowerPoint is a great tool for assembling  the pictures into trips). We'll find some reward for anyone who shares either a raw story or finished cartoon.  

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They called me the sparkle.
I was the best I worked them all.

I've used that quote before. But when I came across the story of The Lone Server, it popped into my head. The Lone server is the last Windows 2003 server being used on the Microsoft.com web site.

For years, my friends and I were on the front lines: we were the Windows Server 2003 servers that powered Microsoft.com ....
Quietly, without warning, the new kids took over... . All of ‘em on Windows Server 2008.
Except me. The last Windows Server 2003 left at Microsoft.com.

Note, we're only talking Microsoft.com here various other bits of Microsoft web presence might or might not be on server 2008.

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I blogged before about Lee Holmes' code to fetch and modify blog posts from PowerShell

I was talking to Eileen about her experience adding social book marking tags one of the drawbacks was that she has to

1. Post date the blog entry, and publish it
2. Go to the blog site and get the URL
3. Go back to live writer
4. Add the social book marking tags
5. Change the post date to "now"
6. Re-publish the blog entry

OK, I'm a geek but I thought "blow that for a game of soldiers: I'll upload it once and use powershell to make the change. I can even take a trick from Lee and add the links to old posts. So, I put the additional HTML in a text file, substitiute the necessary strings in and add it to the body of the downloaded posts, then re-upload.  

 My updated version of Lee's code and my additions is in the attached ZIP file. And everything below here was added by the script.

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One of my personality traits that makes me doubt my vocation as an evangelist is a general dislike of going to trade shows. The general hubbub being on my feet all day is my idea of purgatory.  Fortunately I don't have to stand, and the we've had a good ratio of interesting questions ("Can you show me photosynth ?" ... "Can I ? Try to stop me !") to daft ones ("Why do you produce software with a new version number in it - new versions stop some applications from installing ?")

Someone parked a Version of Asus's eee on the technical desk  and it's been quite the little crowd puller. A low cost - low weight, low cost (and it must be admitted low spec) PC, it's shown up already running Linux. Asus have said a version running Windows is on the cards , and we've been told that version as we're showing it is due in just a few weeks.

This is not a device I'd want - I couldn't live with the 800x480 res screen, but then it's a useful reminder that my needs from a PC aren't the same as school pupils. I'm happy lugging my "desktop replacement" around - but that would be totally unsuitable for my daughter's school bag. So it will be interesting to see how much of a niche this form factor carves for itself. 

I thought I had written about form factors here before, but I can't find the post. Basically devices have mixture of abilities to display, store, retrieve and process. Against these you have to balance weight, battery life and cost. A bigger display and more powerful graphics chip it needs demand a bigger battery to get the same life - so different compromises emerge.

What I do enjoy (and reassures me that I'm not in the wrong job) is seeing people look at a new technology and think "Hey with one of these I could ..." 

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When I explain Hyper-V to people I usually have to spend a fair amount of time on the Integration components. The other videos in this set of 4 have shown VMs with the integration components, these

• Allow Hyper-V to issue shutdown commands to the OS
• Provide "Heartbeat" links and clock synchronization
• Provide mouse integration and clipboard support
• Provide VM bus drivers for IDE Acceleration, Synthetic SCSI, Synthetic NIC and Graphics

Without these VMs still run but have to use emulated hardware, and lose integration support (most obviously they capture the mouse). One way around the mouse and display issue is to use remote desktop to connect to the VM instead of Hyper-V's. I show all that in the screencast, and as with the others, you can replicate everything in the video if you have your own trial copy

Watch in a new window using Silverlight (9 Minutes 30)

Right click here and choose "Save target as" to download video (~40MB WMV)

One of the limitations of Hyper-V is Virtual networks can't be bound to Wireless LAN cards. Initially I thought this was because of the way wireless is provided via a service in Server 2008, but I've since been told it's to do with MAC addresses; wired Ethernet allows machines to change their MAC address, and even to have the same card sending out packets with multiple addresses. 802.11 does not.

Since I do a lot of my demos and general messing about with no wired connection this is a little bit of an inconvenience; after reading a few comments on the subject I thought I'd try setting up Internet connection sharing, and this forms the third of my  four server 2008  screencasts. As with the others, you can replicate everything in the video if you have your own trial copy

Watch in a new window using Silverlight (3 Minutes 45)

Right click here and choose "Save target as" to download video (~27MB WMV)

Tomorrow, I'll post part 4. Using Virtual Machines without the integration components.