Something which by turns amuses and annoys me is they people seem to have become very fond of Windows XP only since the arrival of Windows Vista. Now... I'm an old hand at this, and I first heard it when I was working to upgrade my company's supplied software bundle from Windows 1.03 to Windows 2 and Windows/386. Every time, the complaint is either "Sure it works on hardware that's a couple of years old, but if you want to get the best out of it you need the latest machine". Or "If you have the latest hardware, old software really flies." Personally, I always think it is an excuse for NOT taking time to get to know new software. Once the betas of Vista were nearly stable I knew I couldn't go back to XP for day to day work; Yes there are machines out there capable of which can't run Vista well, or at all, but once Vista is past a certain speed threshold I don't give a tinker's cuss if XP is faster. I'll take the security, the easy imaging, the search, the deleted item recovery, DVD burning, the scheduled backup and defrag, sidebar, the multi-channel sound, the smarter bluetooth and WiFi, and the ability to have media center and business features in one version on my laptop, thank you.

Several people have sent me a link to Ed Bott's piece on ZDNet. Ed's posted some intelligent things about Vista and the article in question takes recalls what one of the people who is such a champion of XP today was saying about it when it was new. Seems we just have to wait a year or two.

This is, I'm afraid, another of those "Wow! what can you do with a couple of long lines of PowerShell" posts.

I wanted to create a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file for PowerGadgets' OUT-MAP cmdlet to do UK county maps. PowerGadgets, as I discovered is fussy about the SVG data it is passed, and I still have a bit more exploring to do on this: but an outline SVG file looks like this

<?xml Version=1.0?>  
<svg width="1200", height="1200", Viewbox="0,0,1200,1200">
<g>
   <g>
      <shape>
      <text>Label1</text>

   </g>
   <g>

    <g>
        <shape1>
        <shape2>
      </g>
      <text>Label2</text>
   </g>
</g>
</svg>

The G tags are Groups. So the the whole document is a group, and all it's subgroups are treated as map objects by PowerGadgets. These either contains one shape and text element - which PowerGadgets uses as its name - or a group of shapes and a text element. The SVG spec defines Rectangles, circles, Ellipses, Polygons and "paths", and I've only used paths with PowerGadgets so far. A Path looks like this.

<path d="M580,595 L574,590 L572,586 L576,590 L582,594 L580,595 Z" />

Everything is in the d parameter. Incidentally, be warned, a lot of this stuff is case sensitive. Inside the data says Move to 580,595,  Line to574,590, Line to 572,586, and the Z at the end says close the path Capital letters designate absolute co-ordinates and Lower Case  ones are relative, all my data is in absolute form. PowerGadgets doesn't like very long paths, so I made a decision to round the data I got from Nearby.Org.UK. Fitting about 10.5 degrees of Latitude into 1200 pixels of screen says there's little point in dealing with anything after the second decimal place. I also made a decision to ditch points which were very close together. That way I could keep the PATH in the SVG file inside PowerGadgets' limit.

Now I'm pretty impressed with the whoever did the work to produce the data on that site (the blog there says it's a chap called Barry Hunter). Each county in Britain and Ireland has its own file. If a county includes Islands, each Island gets a file - this is perfect creating those Paths, each file is a path statement in the SVG file. There are 300 files. There is no way on earth I'm going to hand process that lot. I mean... I could load them into Excel, do the rounding, calculate the distance between each point and it's predecessor, isolate the points with a suitable gap and then - somehow - get that data into the SVG format, but 300 times must be automated. Guess which tool I chose ? Yep PowerShell. 

I created a script called do-map and called it for each file . Do-map takes a filename as a parameter and is, essentially 2 (long) lines of PS. I added 3 little filters as much as anything to make the rest easier to read. So here is the beginning of do-map

param($filename)

filter round2 {Param ($Number) [System.math]::round($number,2)}
filter sqr   {Param ($Number)  [System.math]::pow($number,2)}
filter cos    {Param ($Number);   [System.math]::cos($number * [system.math]::pi /180)}

(@("Lat,long") +  (get-content $filename | where {$_ -notMatch '^#'})) > temp.csv 

My 3 filters all call the .NET math library: Round2 rounds to 2 decimal places, SQR squares a number, and COS takes a number in degrees and returns the cosine (which I need to do get the projection right). So the first line of proper code, takes the text file from  Nearby.Org.UK, strips it's initial comments and adds a header to make it a valid csv file. This goes into temp.CSV Next comes the longest line of PowerShell I have yet written, and bear in mind I've shortened it with those filters. To ease reading I've split it over 12 lines but it is really one line in the form Import-CSV | select-Object | where | foreach-object.

(import-csv temp.csv  | 
select-object @{NAME="Lat";   expression={round2 $_.lat}},
              @{NAME="Long";  expression={round2 $_.long}},
              @{Name="Delta"; expression={(sqr((round2 $_.lat)-$global:lastLat)) + (sqr((round2 $_.long)-$global:Lastlong));
                                          $global:LastLat=(Round2 $_.lat);
                                          $global:Lastlong=(round2 $_.long)}}
) | where {$_.delta -gt .0004 }| 

 foreach-object -Begin   {[String] $MyXml='<g><path d="M'} `
                -Process {$myXml += 'L'+[string](885+100*$_.long) + ',' + [string][int](3500-30*$_.lat/(cos $_.lat)) + ' '} `
                -end     {$myXml.REPLACE('ML','M') + 'Z" /><text transform="matrix(1 0 0 1 ' + 
                          [string] (885+100*$global:LastLong) +' ' + [string][int](3500-30*$global:Lastlat/(cos $global:Lastlat))+')">' +
                          ($filename.replace("C:\Users\jamesone\Counties\GBCountyBoundaryWGS84-","")).replace(".txt","")+'</text></g>'} 

The import CSV is obvious, so lets look at the other bits. The select-object section has 3 calculated fields, Lat and Long are the result of rounding columns in the CSV file. Delta is doing a bit of Pythagoras on the latitude and longitude.  I'm using a technique I've shown before: setting variables in the script block of a calculated field for select object to use outside the context of the current calculation; each row leaves its lat/long data for the next (The first row will get a big delta, which is fine)  There's no need to work out the distance itself, testing the Square of the distance in the where to filter out any points with very small Deltas. I'm aware that if there are many points all very close together they will all be lost (instead of taking out some to leave a more widely spaced set). In practice this hasn't been a problem.

Next we have a for in 3 parts.
-begin - create  string $myXML with the start of the path statement.
-process - for each data point add LineTo its X,Y co-ordinates. These are scaled, and make this a Mercator project the Y co-ordinate is based on latitude/Cos(latitude)
[at Latitude Θ, 1 minute of Latitude is 1 Nautical mile, but 1 second of longitude is Cos Θ Nautical miles. If lines of longitude are drawn as parallel 1 unit apart then at latitude Θ the lines of latitude need to be drawn 1/cos Θ units apart]
- End: Return the XML, first change the first point in the path to be M - because it will be built as ML. Add the Close path "Z", and close the XML tag. Then add the label as a text tag, position it using the data left in LastLat and LastLong by the calculation of deltas. The actual text is extracted from the file name - I've been very lazy with this

So I invoke this script for each of the files -

dir C:\Users\jamesone\Counties\GB*.txt | %{C:\Users\jamesone\Do-Map.ps1 $_.fullName} > temp.xml 

it took 7 minutes 20 seconds to do all 303 files. You can find this out with

Get-History | format table  -auto CommandLine , StartExecutionTime, EndExecutionTime 

(I'll leave a calculated field for run time as an Exercise for the reader). Temp.XML needs a small amount of cleaning up to become a usable SVG file - toping and tailing, then merging counties and their islands into a group and deleting islands with just one or two points, that's another 5-10 minutes. I test the file by opening it in Visio and assuming I haven't made any errors it looks fine so I can test it with out map, first to get a list of the object names, and then to use them to display a map

out-map  -mapsource "custom maps\uk-counties" -ListObjects 
  
Import-Csv countyData.csv | out-map -values value -Label county -mapsource "custom maps\uk-counties" -legendbox_visible false 

You can see the result - click it to get a comparison with the non-Mercator projection. One final thing. The data that this was based on was shared under Creative Commons by-sa 2.5 and I've attached the map on the same basis. You can use it as you see fit, just acknowledge the work of Nearby.Org.Uk geting the data and mine/Microsoft's in formatting it for this use. If you create another data-set using this, the CC license as placed on the data I used says you have to share the data, but not any app which uses the data.

Update, fixed a bunch of typos, bad edits etc.

Eileen phoned me from a traffic jam yesterday. "I've got a demon in the car" she said. A little late for a technical person Eileen has joined the world of Sat Nav owners and her characterization of hers put me in mind of the personal Dis-organizer device which shows up in some of the Terry Pratchett books.

An extremely annoying personal organiser, it is powered by a (usually incompetent) imp, which can perform various tasks. There have been 3 models encountered so far: the Mark 1, mark 2 and Mark 5. All of these start up with an unusually happy tune such as "bingly-bingly beep!", "bingle bingle bingle" or (when wet) "ob oggle sobble obble".

The [Mark 1] claimed to have 10 functions, although it appeared that five were apologising for the useless manner in which it performed the others.
... the Mark 5, the Gooseberry, [is] much more useful than its predecessors. It has games, such as "Splong", and "Guess my weight in pigs". It has an "iHum" feature, and can [send messages using 'BlueNose']

Eileen's late to GPS, but since she can find her position on the Globe with a wrist watch a protractor and a couple of match sticks (another of those Obsolete Skills that I referred to), I can't say I blame her. I'm into old-style navigation myself, having got an 'O' level in Air Navigation: actually I'm even more retro than that, I have prints of 17th century maps hanging on the walls at home - many by a Dutchman called Blaeu. Wikimedia have some of this maps - this one gives an idea of the style of the ones I have, and Taschen recently published some of his Atlases  and I had the "Anglia" and "Scotia and Hibernia" volumes as a Christmas present. They have an introduction explain Blaeu's role in making the maps (as publisher rather than surveyor), his business and the role of other cartographers, notably Mercator.

Mercator is famous for two things. One he was the first person to call a collection of Maps an Atlas, and he gave his name to a way of mapping the surface of the roughly spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper. "Mercator's projection"  is still widely used even though it is "wrong".  (West wing addicts may remember "Cartographers for social Justice" - the idea behind is here ).  Looking at a Mercator Map you'd think that if you were going to fly from Munich (Lat 48 degrees) to Seattle (also Lat 48 degrees) the shortest way would be to follow the line of latitude all the way, right ? The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right ? But (unless you're building a tunnel) you can't go in a straight line along the earth's surface, you have to go in a arc, and the shortest arc doesn't follow a line of latitude, but follows the edge of a slice which passes through the centre of the earth. Which is why flights from Europe to the use go North.

The problem Mercator solved is simple. As you move away from the equator, lines of latitude are equally spaced - 1 arc minute of Latitude is 1 Nautical Mile*. However lines of longitude are not. Just South of North pole you can jog round 360 degrees  of longitude in a few paces. At the equator its over 20,000 miles.  How do you draw that ? Mercator's solution draw lines of longitude evenly spaced and parallel (in real life they converge at the poles); but to allow for the fact they are actually narrower as you move away from the equator increase spaces between parallel lines of latitude (in real life they are constant distance). So grabbing a handy Mercator projection map (my local Ordnance Survery map) 5' of latitude takes 18CM of map, and 5' of longitude takes only 11CM.

Why does this matter? Well if you have GPS co-ordinates for mapping the boundary of something, then if you simply plot them as square, then the map looks wrong. I've found data for building the SVG file I need for PowerGadgets to do a British county Map. I processed it into the SVG file using PowerShell (of course - and that will be where part 2 comes in). But although the map is recognisable, it looks wrong because I haven't made allowance for the projection. I'm going to do that later, and then explain the PowerShell which I got me there.

*Foot note. A Nautical Mile is 6076 feet, so one arc second of Latitude is about 100 feet. I've seen GPS numbers locations with fractions quoted greater than 0.1 second acuracy the "10 foot" accuracy quoted for consumer GPS devices

–I referred to the PowerShell Community extensions in the last post. It's interesting, but not especially surprising to find that

• The Community can do some pretty cool stuff.
• A Community effort can encompass a lot of things, at the price of lacking clear direction
• Writing code is give a higher priority than writing documentation.

Lets start with the first of these. There's certainly some cool stuff in the Community extensions. Its a mixture of Scripts, Filters and Functions (which you can look at to get your own ideas) and compiled cmdlets, plus three new providers. It deals with Active Directory, handling files and the file system (everything from Calculating a Hash to Modifying the disk volume label), basic Bitmap handling, Clipboard handling, XML processing, Terminal services management an RSS provider, a speech generator and a lot general stuff to help you get around, including querying information about DLLs and a new tab-expansion function.

The problem is that this can give the impression of  "a very unevenly-edited [work which] contains many [things] which simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time."* Of course the question comes up "would you like to be the editor and have to tell people their code can't go in until their documentation is up to scratch." ? I wouldn't. How about "if it should be segmented would you like to be the one deciding what is spun off and what stays in the main part". Probably not. The profile script that comes with the extensions gives you the chance to see what's being loaded apart from the basic snap-in and leave out any bits out that don't appeal to you.

The discussion area on codeplex for the Extensions is has a handful of active threads which suggests that work is going on, but some aspects haven't been touched for a long time. For example everyone seems to expect to be able to pass an object to Get-Member to find  out what its Properties and Methods are; but this doesn't work with Posts returned by RSS provider.  It was suggested that this be corrected some while back but to date nothing has happened (you need to know the properties for the IFEED object). It was also suggested that some documentation be written for the feed provider and (in common with other places) this has not happened.

I don't know who is going to need, for example, speech output and AD support at the same time. Still, I have already found some of the bits pretty useful. Take this bit of code, for example, which I used to create a post at the end of last week.

dir E:\DCIM\102PENTX\Develops\*small* | ForEach-Object -Begin {[String]$myHtml=""} 
  -Process {$myHtml += '<p><img src="' + (upload-blogfile $_.fullname) + '" /></p><p><b>' +  (get-image $_.fullname).title + '</b></p>'} 
  -end {New-BlogPost -body $myHtml -Title "Testing Pictures"}

It gets all the pictures named SMALL in a given folder, uploads them to my blog and builds the body of a blog post as it does so; at the end of the process it uploads the post . 

Now the MetaWebLogAPI - which I've already written about needs the picture to be encoded in BASE64 format and the community extensions has ConvertTo-Base64. So the code for Upload-BlogFile is

function upload-Blogfile
  {param($filename, [string] $postUrl=$postUrl, [string] $blogid=$blogID,
          [string] $username=$username, [string] $password=$password)
#Requires -pssnapin PSCX
 $base64=convertto-base64 $fileName
 $ContentType=(get-itemproperty "hklm:\SOFTWARE\Classes\$($filename.substring($filename.lastIndexof('.')))" "content type")."content type"
 $postTemplate = "<methodCall><methodName>metaWeblog.newMediaObject</methodName><params>  
       <param><value>$blogid</value></param>        <param><value>$username</value></param>        <param><value>$password</value></param>        <param><value><struct>  
          <member><name>name</name><value><string>$($filename.substring($filename.lastIndexof('\')+1))</string></value></member>  
      <member><name>type</name><value><string>$contentType</string></value></member>  
          <member><name>bits</name><value><base64>$BASE64</base64></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodCall>" 
 write-progress "Uploading to blog" "Sending" -cu $filename

 ([xml]((new-object System.Net.WebClient).UploadString($postURL , $postTemplate) )).methodresponse.params.param.value.struct.member.value.string

}

This breaks down as
Do the transformation to base 64,
get the MIME type for that kind of file.  
Build the XML to upload.
Put up a progress screen as the upload can be slow
Perform the upload and extract the URL assigned to the image from the XML returned.

So that command line was building up HTML which repeated the following for each image <P><IMG SRC="url"/></P><P><b>Image title</b></P>

Get-Image in that code is a filter for "new-object" using my Exif library to get the title. As I said at the time I like this of for loop - the begin and end blocks let you do stuff outside the actual loop but keeping it to one command, so the -begin {block} sets up an empty string, and the -end {block} posts the completed string to my blog. 

You may be wondering how I got pictures which contained the word "SMALL"  That was using 3 more cmdlets from the extensions

dir "E:\DCIM\102PENTX\Develops\*1*" | ForEach Object {Import-Bitmap -Path $_.fullname | resize-bitmap -percent 20 | 
  export-bitMap -path ($_.fullname.replace("IMGP","SMALL")) -Format JPEG -Quality 70}

Import-BitMap, and resize-bitmap are pretty self explanatory. Export-Bitmap will change the format, and JPEG quality, since these pictures are being resized for the web I'm dropping the size from 3900x2600/4MB to 780x520/32KB 

Playing with the -Output option on PowerGadgets I realized I can do Import-bitmap temp.bmp | set-clipboard to make it easy to paste a chart straight into another application.

Despite the poor documentation I think most people who use PowerShell will find something useful in the community extensions. They are so diverse that everyone will find different bits useful. But if you haven't found which bits are useful to you go and download them from Codeplex and have a look.

*Foot note: Last week I got a copy of Bruce Payette's book "PowerShell in Action" which seems to be accepted as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom when it comes to PowerShell,  I was delighted to find chapter one starts with a quote from the Hitch Hikers guide to the Galaxy. Bruce is a guy who clearly knows where his towel is

At the end of this week I fly off for a few days Scuba diving, and shortly after I get back I have a major PowerShell presentation to do. As usual with such things the struggle is what to include and what to leave out. Do I show some of the cool stuff that has been done around PowerShell by other people ? Since I can't include everyone the fairest thing would be not to talk about anyone. But would that be less interesting for the audience. So I've made a conscious effort to look at two tool sets. PowerGadgets and the PowerShell Community Extensions (which for the sake of a sensible post length I'll cover another time). On the plus side both of them provide some great features to what is already a great tool. On the negative side both of them suffer from poor documentation (which isn't PowerShell's strongest area either) and the tumble weed blowing through both their discussion areas gives the impression of something petering out without being finished.  

Power-gadgets positions itself as "Desktop Reporting and Monitoring for IT/DB professionals who don't write code" and that's not an unreasonable claim to make. It does Graphs, Maps and Gauges. I suspect it will be gauges that interest IT Pros monitoring systems - you can see the battery monitor which I put together with a command as simple as

GET-WMIObject win32_battery  | Out-Gauge [Parameters]

Out-gauge is provided by PowerGadgets but it needs a command line which goes on forever.

-Type Radial
-Refresh 0:0:1
-Value estimatedChargeRemaining
-mainscale_max 100
-glass
-border_glare false
-mainindicator_color {if ($_.estimatedchargeRemaining -gt 40) {"green"} else {"red"} } 
-palette professional
-Titles_0_Text "Battery"
-Titles_0_Layout_Target AnchorPoint
-Titles_0_Layout_AnchorPoint "0, -0.3"
-mainScale_stripes_0_max 20
-mainScale_stripes_0_radius 1.2
-mainScale_stripes_0_color RED 
-innerGauges_add digital
-innerGauges_0_layout_alignment bottomCenter
-innerGauges_0_size 1,0.4
-innerGauges_0_digitalPanel_border_glare false 
-innerGauges_0_digitalPanel_value {$_.EstimatedRunTime}

-Type specifies which of 4 gauge types I want, and -Refresh means it will get updated 0:1:0 means every 0hours, 1 Minute, 0 Seconds.  -Value links to the the property of the WMI object.  The last thing to do for a useful battery gauge is to set the scale.If this were VB script we'd have lines which did things like MainScale.max=100, but here the "sub-objects" which make up are set with parameters like MainScale_Max , Titles(0).Text etc .
With the basics in place I can get the look I want.-glass turns on the glass effect in vista (it looks quite good here, but I prefer the -floating parameter which lets the gauge float without a Window)  -border_glare controls the effect of a light shining on the gauge - very smart but harder to read when the gauge is small. For added ease of reading, I wanted to change the needle colour to show when the battery was getting low, so that was -mainIndicator_color. I didn't like default colour scheme, but rather annoyingly Tab expansion fails to bring up the -Palette parameter - the first of several rough edges. Rough edge number 2 was the Parameter "Caption" doesn't set the title as it is supposed to, it's stuck as "PowerGadgets". So the -title parameters let me put text in the middle of gauge. Trawling through the help I stumbled on the stripe feature, so I added that with -mainscale_stripes, there is probably some sense to a radius of 1.0 being on the tick marks and not on the outside edge of the gauge, but it was one of several things I had to find by trial and error. Finally the -innerGauges parameters let me add a little digital readout for minutes of time left instead of %full, don't ask me why its value needs to be a code block when the one for the main indicator doesn't... I don't know and the "help" - isn't much help.

This kind of thing seems to be the sweet spot the "Digital Panel" gauge (I found wasn't flexible enough for things like displaying my IP configuration); but inner Gauges were the  root cause for two more rough edges. First: you  can add PowerGadgets to your Vista SideBar: what goes in is a place holder with a name like "Gadget 1" , you add -SideBar Gadget1 to the command line and Whoosh! the gauge goes on the sidebar. This has a major wow factor. Unfortunately my gadget crashes sidebar if I click on it (it works if I take the inner gauge out). Secondly there is a GUI PowerGadgets Creator and it comes up with a variety of errors when I try to stuff with inner gauges. The GUI editor has no help of its own, and I never worked out how to bind data values in it.  The editor can output gadgets as a file and they can be started on the desktop or side bar, but no way is provided to get them back as a command line (the files are XML format, so some hacking can extract the information, and no doubt some clever soul could write a PowerShell function to do it) similarly there is no way to get a gadget on the desktop into the editor or back to PowerShell - though it is possible to specify a -Configure switch in PowerShell to edit the gadget into the editor.

I tried the Out-map feature, and needless to say the first thing I wanted was to create a custom map of my own. PowerGadgets maps use SVG format - a way of writing Scalable Vector Graphics in XML. Visio can save as SVG, so this offers the hope of having PowerGadgets light up your network plan depending on the state of machines on it. Sadly it is incredibly picky about what's in the XML file (which suggests a poor XML parser) and gets thrown by the smallest thing. I found I could hand craft SVG files, but when I made an error in one PowerGadgets crashed and took PowerShell with it. So of the three gadget types Maps looks the least complete.

By contrast charts are quickest and easiest to use, of the three types in earlier post I was importing dive profiles and I can reproduce the charts my dive software creates with one, by selecting one dive and piping it into relatively simple Out-Chart

 Out-Chart -Values {-1 * $_.segmentDepth} -Gallery 3 -label {$_.dateTime.toString("hh:mm")} -legendBox_visible false 

All three gadget types support an output switch so you can save the gadget as .BMP .PNG or WMF file (though oddly not as a JPG), and they offer the opportunity to "drill down" into a selected data item; so if a chart or a map region has underlying data you can do something interesting with it (a demo on the PowerGadgets site shows charting the handles used by Processes, and killing a process by clicking its column in the chart), the "drill down command" isn't required to take data so a CPU gauge could open Task Manager. 

Although I didn't start out to write a review of PowerGadgets that's what this has become, so what conclusions would I draw ? The silence that has fallen over the forums part of the PowerGadgets Web site worries me: because this is a product with great potential which deserves to succeed: but potential isn't enough and I can't see it getting to required level of quality without a decent base of early adopters. Would I recommend people to adopt it or avoid it ? Neither: it offers great functionality, but it doesn't serve it up on a plate for you, which can be frustrating. People working with PowerShell should try PowerGadgets for themselves and decide if the functionality to frustration ratio is good enough to justify buying it.  

I'm always suspicious of people talking down security vulnerabilities, but I don't like to see them over-hyped  either; so I'm going down the former path. You are allowed to be skeptical.

A couple of people have mailed me this morning about this story, picked up by the register (a couple even forwarded me the Academic Paper. - SEND A LINK PEOPLE !)

Synopsis.
RAM contents don't disappear instantly. If you get to a machine which is powered on including low power "sleep modes" and reboot it, there is a window during which you can mount an attack on the RAM contents. An attacker can can extend this Window by chilling the RAM.

As well as getting at documents I happen to be working on, by attacking the RAM one can also get to the keys used by different kinds of whole drive encryption software - including Bitlocker. These attacks can be prevented by

1. Powering the machine off. Steve's been saying this for a while (though for other reasons)
2. Turning on the BIOS configuration password to prevent the Boot order being changed.

One of the researchers put it like this "Let's say you're in a coffee shop and you leave your Vista notebook screen-locked and tied to a table while you take a trip to the bathroom". I leave my laptop tied to a table ? With no one watching it ? OK... The attacker has to boot from his device, discover my key, and then what ? Steal the laptop I guess. Or maybe set about decrypting it's contents. I'd need to be in the bathroom a long time.

The register explains that  With certain types of DRAM, a simple cold boot won't do the trick. Data fades too quickly after power down. All [attackers] have to do is open up the machine and spray a little liquid nitrogen.

I'm trying to work out how likely the average hacker is to carry a Thermos of Liquid nitrogen with them. Using security screws on the RAM compartment would mean they had to carry more tools - why not just carry a set of cutters to get past any tie, but the simpler way might to carry a knife and force me to give them the keys/passwords they need ? 

I know a few companies which use security screws to stop users swapping company parts out of their computers and using them in their home machines, and lock the bios setup to prevent users breaking things. Add those the the good practice list for machines that need to be secure. Group policy can be used to disable Sleep - I'd tend to keep it for power saving - but it can set "Closing lid" to force Hibernate when the lid is shut. Add that to the list of good practices as well.

[UPDATE]

I've been refining my EXIF Library for .NET, and the blogging utilities I wrote in Powershell. Now I have Upload-BlogFile (on community server which hosts this blog it will only upload pictures) and NEW-blog post. Getting pictures which match some selection criteria, uploading them, building the HTML to display them (using the title in their EXIF data to caption them) and posting the HTML to my blog is all done in one line of Powershell It's a long line, but here it is. Split over 3 lines for readability

dir E:\DCIM\102PENTX\Develops\*small* | ForEach-Object -Begin {[String]$myHtml=""} 

-Process {$myHtml += '<p><img src="' + (upload-blogfile $_.fullname) + '" /></p><p><b>' +  (get-image $_.fullname).title + '</b></p>'} 
-end {New-BlogPost -body $myHtml -Title "Testing Pictures"}

Shortly, I'll write a longer post explaining these and with the code available for download, but I LOVE this 3 block FOR {before loop} {loop} {after you've finished}. In VB etc it doesn't matter, but in a script it means you can keep the stuff you're doing the FOR for in one line, even some of it falls outside actual loop. I'm doubt if that's a PowerShell invention, but wherever it came from it's seems something akin to genius the first time you see it.  The results of the code are below the line.

Frozen Sage

Frozen Sage 2

I mentioned skydrive a while back, well over on the SkyDrive blog they're celebrating. Now available in 38 countries the space limit has gone up to 5GB. The link for presentations on the side of this blog already uses SkyDrive... I'll must come up with some more uses :-)

I try not to stand still when I'm presenting; stand behind a lectern for too long and you end up holding onto it , staring down and droning on to your PC. Radio Mics and the wireless presenter mouse give the freedom to stroll around the stage to my hearts content. The problem with demos is that you end back behind your PC and if I have to show PowerShell I'm behind the PC typing long command-lines. Mistyping them as often as not (and wondering why they didn't work). Getting tempted to go off the script too.  Jeffrey Snover came up against this problem and created a fix as he explained here. There's a revised version here. Frankly once you've seen it, a demo without using it would be daft.

Still this leaves the problem of having to press keys.  I don't want to be stuck behind my PC, I want to click through the demo like I click though my slides.

I thought about this for a while, and thought there was the option to do some clever button assignment in the Intelli-mouse software. Sure enough you can assign different actions to different programs so I've assigned the Wheel button to [ENTER] (you can choose any key stroke) so now I can just click through the automated script.

I recently blogged about reactivating software - having rebuilt my computer I needed to get my activation keys for Mind Genius and Capture One reset. Neither was a huge problem - a quick e-mail, wait a couple of business hours and and I'm back in business. (A pain if your working out of hours but hey.).  A year or so ago my phone died and I had to go through the some process with my ALK co-pilot sat nav software. Again it just took a quick e-mail.

I've been listening to a  colleague trying to do the same for TomTom after his phone needed to be replaced (he's had some bad luck and this isn't the first replacement).

• He mailed them. No good. They wanted proof of a replacement
• He sent them the delivery note for the replacement phone. Not good enough
• He got the phone company to e-mail them. Not good enough. Sender IDs can be spoofed.
  (So reply and ask the sender if it was genuine !)
• He's got to get something on headed paper to fax though (as if that can't be faked).

In the time that has been wasted (and remember he has no sat-nav at all while this is going on) he could have activated vista over the phone a few dozen times. It's taken me less time to build my vista machine, activate it and reactive Mind Genius and Capture one. I think he might be switching to Co-pilot (especially as TomTom have told him his version is going out of support shortly). 

Skimming down my feeds this weekend I found a post from Scoble on obsolete skills (a new wiki has grown up). One was "developing film".

Unless you've done it it's hard to describe the rituals of processing and printing black and white film. It goes something like this.

• In the dark (or with your arms sealed in a dark bag) open the film canister and load the film into a "spiral". The spiral holds the film wound up but with a gap so the chemicals can get to it
• Put the spiral in a developing tank, which has a light-tight funnel for pour chemicals in and out
• Mix chemicals. For black and white you need developer, fixer and two lots of water. They should all be at the same temperature as big changes can "shock" the film
• Pour developer into the tank. Shake it. Bang the tank to get rid of bubbles. Wait, occasionally shaking the tank
• After the appointed time pour out the developer. Pour in water (this might be "stop bath" solution if you're very fancy). Shake, pout out, pour in the fixer, shake again, bang to get rid of bubbles.
• Wait. Wait a bit longer. Pour out the fixer, pour in water. Open the tank and lift out the spiral to see if the film has any pictures on it.
• Rinse the film. Add "wetting agent" at the end so the water runs off as you run it through your fingers (or a squeegee if you're fancy) . Hang up away from dust to dry.

It's a tactile process, a bit like baking your own bread, and like baking it has it's rituals (the way you you bang the tank, or shake it). Like baking it has its smells too, although I'll take the smell of bread over photographic chemicals any day. I miss all of that, truly I do. But it was so time consuming. There are some photos which are only possible with particular kinds of film nothing in the digital world quite matches Kodak High-Speed Infra-Red, which has just gone out of production. I bought 10 rolls of it because... why exactly ? I guess I can't bear the thought of not being able to create some of the IRs I've done in the past, although I haven't shot a roll of the Kodak in 3 years. Those rolls cost me £10 each.

I've just ordered an extra 4GB SD card for £8.99 (non UK readers, that's a little under $20 US). That's less than cost of that Kodak stock, although you can just about buy a roll of colour print film and get it processed for £8.99. Worst case shooting RAW files that card will hold something like 250 pictures, shooting JPGs it will be more like 1400. So even if I only used the card once - it costs only about 1/30th of film. It does pose the question why do I bother erasing and reusing memory cards... why not just use them once and file them as a backups ? I suspect they don't last forever - I wonder what the expected life of something stored on SD is.

Most Saturdays I freeze watching my daughter's football team. it's not so unusual. If you've got nothing better to do than read my blog, may I recommend this from Inspector Gadget about his football watching. It's good sometimes to be reminded that the worst I have to live with this weekend is the village under 8's deserving to get beaten.

If you want to read something philosophical but also computing related, Jeffrey Snover on the semantic gap is worth reading, if only for what he has to say about the inventor of a competing technology.

If you want something overtly technical, have a read of Mark Russinovich on file copy and why it isn't the trivial process you (probably) thought.

It's no use trying to pretend otherwise, we didn't do a great job on making Vista SP1 available. Some of us in the field  (Keith for one, Matt for another, Daniel for a third) felt the heat from customers and we did our bit to get the update out sooner. There was a lot of frustration internally.

Well if you're a technet subscriber the Update is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx. (Ditto for MSDN) You might expect it to be under downloads and product keys. It isn't (at the moment). Kathy has posted more information to the Technet Plus blog.

The slipstreamed install version will be posted soon. After what Mike Nash said I would have thought that would have be first - but what do I know ?

Incidentally there's a "notable features in Vista SP1" document which gives you a run down of the changes. Most of it is made up of a listing of the hotfixes which came out before SP1 and have been rolled into it, but also gives an idea of what's SP1 specific.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Vista,Windows,Vista,Service Pack,SP1

It's not when you see articles like this from Mary Jo  (Self styled Linux guy and VMware proponent Jason Perlow thinks Hyper-V is pretty darn good... I want to quote so much of this that really is easier for you to go and read it).
It's when it's the subject of a sequence of Dilbert Cartoons.

• Our servers are using too much electricity...
• I hired a consultant...
• A Team of blind monkeys...

Oh, and while we're on Dilbert...
(a)  I hadn't seen Sunday's cartoon when I wrote Sundays's post
(b) I've been trying to find a favourite strip which I'm sure is a Dilbert one form about 5 years ago to no avail. With mid year appraisals in the air at Microsoft I'd like to suggest this for some of the "mail bombers" around Microsoft. So with due acknowledgement to Scott Adams for the quotation/original idea (and the usual copyright act caveats which apply here in Britain if it was someone else) I've redrawn it roughly how I remember it.

(Note. I have carefully drawn the boss to NOT resemble any manager in Microsoft connected with me;  and the employee to look as generic as possible. Any resemblance to a real person is an accident - OK ?) .