Posts from 2010

Windows Home Server Vail Streaming Done How it Should Be

I was just looking at this video on Channel 9 about Windows Home Server Vail, and I noticed something I didn’t discover in my play with the Public Beta. Scroll through to 6:35 onwards.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

What you’ll see, is that at 7:07 the guy hovers over one of the images in the flowing album cover background and selects an option for play.

Zune 4.1 and 4.2 along with Windows Media Center have the same style interface with the flowing covers, however neither of them can do this click to play thing, and I have to wonder why.

The first time I used by Zune player I kept trying to click and wondering why it didn’t work – It’s a natural reaction I think, so congratulations Windows Home Server team for getting it right. I look forward to the Zune team and Windows Media Center team looking at your work here and adopting it for themselves.

On the downside however, I would have liked to have seem some Zune integration in Home Server Vail, especially as Windows Phone 7 and Xbox are making good inroads.

Upgrade to Office Live Workspaces Accounts

I got an email from Microsoft today announcing that my Office Live Workspaces account is being upgraded for free to build it around Windows Live SkyDrive and Office Web Apps.

Good news!

Your Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta account is about to become even better. You already know it’s a great way to store and share documents, and soon it will come together with Windows Live SkyDrive to become a great way to view, create, and edit documents from virtually anywhere.

In the coming months, you’ll receive notification when your Office Live Workspace account will be upgraded, along with further details. Until then, there’s no need for you to do anything.

With your SkyDrive account, you’ll get 25 GB of online storage for sharing both documents and photos. Your SkyDrive account is designed to work smoothly with other Windows Live services like Hotmail and Messenger. And you’ll be able to view and edit documents from virtually anywhere* using new Microsoft Office Web Apps.

Questions? Visit the Office Live Workspace upgrade center.

 

This is really exciting for people who use Office Live Workspaces and it means you no longer need to be on a PC with Office installed such as an Internet Cafe, and it also means the storage grows and becomes consolidated with documents on SkyDrive – Excellent.

I’m just hopeful that Live Mesh with integrate with SkyDrive meaning I can have 25GB of Live Mesh / SkyDrive / Office Live Workspace storage instead of three separate spaces.

Endomondo for Windows Mobile Review

This context for this post began as a dispute between me and my brother – Or rather my brother disputing me, but either way, I wanted a way to verify the distances being tracked by my Nike+ Sportband pedometer.

By accident whilst crawling the Windows Mobile Marketplace for free applications (I don’t like paying for them) I spotted Endomondo, a free community driven GPS running application for Windows Mobile.

I downloaded the application to my phone and over HSPDA it installed in less than a minute. You can use the software by itself without registration or you can signup online. I signed up online to see what it was all about and it’s really nice.

My phone has internal GPS which is a must for this to work (I wouldn’t recommend carrying a Bluetooth GPS module too). I normally use my Microsoft Zune to listen to music while running however fortunately my HTC Touch HD is the same size as the Zune so I was able to use my Zune armband to hold the phone.

By creating a profile on the website you allow for a couple of things to take place:

  1. An online log of your runs
  2. Calculation of calories burnt
  3. Instant upload

One and two are the norm for me using Nike+. My online profile requires me to complete some information about me and as a result it can calculate my estimated calorie burn although not precise as there is no corresponding heart rate information.

Three however makes this really interesting. Firstly, I have a data package for my phone is is needed unless you want to find £2.50 per megabyte or whatever the price these days attached to your phone bill. As the GPS data is gathered the phone displays in nice big text the time run and the distance travelled along with the satellite status (Green for OK and Red for No Signal). In real-time the data is uploaded to the website, which means if I wanted to for example, I could leave a PC with the website for Endomondo open and allow people to see my progress on the run. Although gimmicky to me, I’m sure someone such as a personal trainer could find a powerful use for this.

I returned to my PC after the walk and logged into the website and as expected the data was already there:

image

As you would expect from a GPS tracking product, it shows exactly my altitude, my speed and my route all visually on the screen using a Google Maps API to provide the mapping.

It’s scary really because I’ve only ever been used to the information provided by Nike+ and it’s quite bizarre to be able to see exactly when I crossed the road and exactly what path I took around a roundabout.

All in all, I think this is an excellent product made even more excellent by the fact that it’s free, however I won’t be using it regularly for a couple of reasons:

  1. I’m terrible at keeping my phone charged which means I would end up wanting a run but being stopped by my phone.
  2. Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile is clunky. The buttons aren’t easy to press while walking let alone running, and finger gestures aren’t very well accepted for swipe to change track or tap the screen to pause.
  3. My phone only has 8GB of capacity for all my apps plus music, where as my Zune has 80GB for all my music.
  4. I want to be able to use Zune as my music service/device so that I get the tracked play counts etc.

My primary use of Endomondo today was to allow me to calibrate my Nike+, however a 10km event I’m entering in Ropley near Winchester later in May might prove an interesting outing for Endomondo to see the how effectively the GPS tracks the altitude change as there is a large hill in the course.

If a version of the Endomondo application becomes available for Windows Phone 7 once released later in the year with it’s native Zune integration then count me in.

Windows Phone 7 + Zune Integration + GPS Running + 32GB microSD card = Success.

UPDATE: I just found a section on the Endomondo website titled Live Map. From here, you can use a feature called Peptalk which allows someone at a PC to type a message which is then converted through text to speed and played out of the headphones / speaker of the persons phone meaning this product is defiantly suitable for Personal Trainers to up the ante.

Windows Home Server Vail Public Beta Review

Earlier in the year, I got my hands on a leaked build of Home Server Vail. I didn’t bother to upload or post any of my findings because it was a very early build and a lot of the features didn’t work, and in addition because a lot of other people posted the stuff too.

This week Microsoft released the Public Beta of Windows Home Server Codename Vail which is to be the second release of Windows Home Server, this time based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition. I went through the installation process and then tried to get a few things configured in Vail so here is what I found.

I’m adding the break early on this post to stop the screenshots spoiling the view, but jump to the full post for all the screenshots and information so far on Vail.

Read more…

Windows Home Server Vail Expands Storage Possibilities

With Windows Home Server v1 being based on Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server you were limited to the features of Server 2003. This means no support for iSCSI in the case of my point today.

With Windows Home Server v2 (Vail) being based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition, this opens the plethora of supported storage types to those supported in Server 2008 R2.

Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 both have native support for iSCSI using the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator application from Control Panel. This is great news because it means that users will no longer be limited to USB or eSATA devices but can look to expand their storage out onto the IP space and look into opportunities for backup solutions for WHS using iSCSI.

Mark Vayman from the Windows Home and Small Business Server team posted on the Microsoft Forums confirming support for iSCSI along with a whole host of other features. My personal favourite besides iSCSI is the ability to now name the drives 🙂

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsvailbeta/thread/32844aae-9f41-41cb-8a4a-f6c26ddfdd6f

Configuring Plain Text Email Delivery

For a project at work I documented how to force Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 to delivery emails to a mailbox in Plain Text format even if the sender sent the message as HTML or RTF. This is highly useful for server-side email ingestion processes which do not support HTML or RTF.

I have re-produced the document in a global audience format, and I have made it available for download on my Windows SkyDrive account.

Please feel free to use this document for your own personal means, and if you have any feedback then please let me know.

SIP VoIP for Home and the Day of Sadness

Today is a sad day, because yesterday I came up with an evil super plan, however today I realise that it just cannot be.

My evil super plan was this. To purchase a SIP line from an ISP, configure my Cisco 2651XM with CME and have the SIP line trunked into the router. From here, I was going to replace our existing Windows Home Server with Windows Small Business Server 2008, which I would install Office Communications Server 2007 R2 onto.

The combination of SBS and OCS would give us the ability to use Unified Messaging (UM for Exchange) and would allow us to use the Office Communicator client on the desktop and Office Mobile Communicator on our Windows Phone devices. I would then have configure the 2651XM and OCS to trunk the SIP line between each other using guides available online for configuring OCS and CME to talk so that inbound calls on the SIP line would be routed to the OCS server.

This just gets better now, because the second part of the plan was to configure a hunt group in OCS which would group both me and Nicky together. If someone were to ring the home phone, it would ring both of us simultaneously and then the first one to answer receives the call (that’s the hunt group at work). If nobody answered then the caller could leave a voicemail on the OCS server which would be delivered to both me and Nicky to our SBS Exchange mailboxes using UM.

Just stop for one minute to think of the power and the feature set am talking about here?

  • Imagine being able to answer your home phone anywhere in the world from either your PC or mobile?
  • Imagine being able to receive voicemails left on your home phone from your inbox anywhere in the world via PC, mobile or Outlook Web Access from an Internet cafe?
  • Imagine making phone calls to numbers anywhere in the world just like using a normal telephone but at the fraction of the cost?

Read more…

LinkedIn Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010

In the Beta period I had been using Office 2010 64-bit, however after reading a Microsoft article that Microsoft are recommending people deploy 32-bit still for compatibility of add-ins etc, I decided to uninstall LinkedIn_Logo60px[1]64-bit and install the 32-bit RTM.

After installing it I decided that I would install the LinkedIn Social Connector which I saw was released previously during the Beta period (but only for 32-bit).

The idea is great, however I’ve discovered a problem with it and that is the way is associates email addresses. My primary use of Outlook in Exchange email for my corporate mail, but I also check some POP3 accounts for personal accounts. I personally use my @richardjgreen.net email address as my primary LinkedIn profile address.

My primary activity in Outlook is corporate email: I am sending and receiving email for people using business addresses – Are you seeing the problem yet?

The majority of people in my LinkedIn network use their personal address to register. When I engage in communications via email the LinkedIn Social Connector isn’t picking up these people and it’s not displaying any of their LinkedIn profile information.

There is a resolution to the problem, however I don’t think many if any people are going to have investigated this. Adding multiple email addresses to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn allows you to have multiple addresses associated with your account, so this means Outlook and the Social Connector will be able to detect you using either address (or three in my case as I added my corporate address as well as both my personal addresses).

On the LinkedIn site, select Settings in the upper right corner. and then Email Addresses from the Personal Information section within Settings. From here you can add as many addresses as you need to link your profile to all your addresses. LinkedIn will send confirmation emails to each account to verify the addition and once it’s done they will appear as Confirmed in the list.

I’m an MCSE – What’s Next?

I  had a booking today for what was to be the final exam in my path to becoming an MCSE – 70-298: Designing Security for a Windows Server 2003 Network.MCSE

I arrived at the testing centre to be told there was a problem with the link to Prometric and that the exam would need to be rescheduled. Whilst the centre organised a Prometric Incident ID for the fault they managed to get the link restored I was exuberant that I managed to sit the exam today.

I passed with a sore of 784 – Not the highest I’ve achieved on an exam but neither was it the lowest so I was quite happy with that fact.

The pass today does indeed mean that I have now met all of the criteria for an MCSE certification. These are the exams I’ve actually sat to make up my MCSE:

70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment
70-291: Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure
70-293: Planning and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure
70-294: Planning, Implementing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure

70-270: Installing, Configuring and Administering Windows XP Professional

70-298: Designing Security for a Windows Server 2003 Network

70-350: Implementing Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004

My plan was originally to also complete 70-299 to allow me to obtain my MCSE: Security status, however this Server 2003 usage falling by the wayside and Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 ever increasing in market presence, I’ve decided to drop 70-299 from my calendar and proceed ahead with the MCITP track for Server 2008.

I ordered the book for the 70-680: Configuring Windows 7 Technical Specialist exam on Thursday last week and Home Delivery Network should be bringing me that either later today or tomorrow.

In the mean time, I already have the ICND1 CCENT under my belt and I am sitting the second week of training and Global Knowledge in late May to allow me to plough ahead and sit my ICND2 to give me my CCNA certification.

My aim is to complete the ICND2 and the CCNA track by mid-June so that I can move to start the Windows 7 training and hopefully the Windows 7 exam by around July or August time. I slacked in 2009 on my personal training and development and I didn’t really get a lot of it done, however with 2010 being the year Microsoft seem to have a real product development rocket up their bottom, I’m going to try and make 2010 the year I put the rocket up myself.

Response to My Digital Economy Bill Email

At the time of the Digital Economy Bill being passed, I emailed my local MP Maria Miller who is now the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Basingstoke.

I emailed her for two reasons. One was to express my disapproval that she failed to attend parliament on that day to vote for or against the bill – Although she did vote strongly against revealing MP’s expenses information earlier in the year. Secondly because I wanted to voice my concerns over the bill.

Here is her response to me today which ironically got flagged as spam by my mail server:

Dear Mr Green,

Thank you for your recent correspondence concerning the Digital Economy Bill. I share your concern about the way this piece of legislation has been handled by the Government. Since the Dissolution of Parliament, there are no longer any MPs, but I can continue with casework/correspondence.

The Bill contained important provisions regarding the regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. It is completely unacceptable that the Government failed to allocate the sufficient time in the House of Commons for proper legislative scrutiny. It is wrong to push through these issues and because of this I did not support the Bill and I abstained from the vote.

The reason that I did not vote against the Bill is that a number of the measures within it have great merit – particularly tackling online copyright infringement. This is an extremely serious issue that costs the creative industries hundreds of millions of pounds each year. I want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual property framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses.

Also, the measures in the Bill designed to tackle illegal peer to peer file sharing set up a proportionate regime that would, only following public consultation, repeated warnings and due process, lead to people having their internet connection temporarily suspended. It will not, as many have suggested, lead to people being disconnected without an appeal. Even if people are disconnected they will be able to sign up to another ISP immediately without penalty.

However, the Government should not push through such significant issues without proper debate – the handling of this Bill means that the debate on copyright is not over and my Party will seek to revisit options for a balanced solution as part of a broader update of copyright following the General Election.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.

With best wishes,

Maria Miller, Parliamentary Candidate

(Sent on her behalf by Lynn Fox, Secretary)

 

I’m not going to bother voicing my opinion to this email response because I’ve actually already made my opinions quite clear through over postings etc, however I read this article on TorrentFreak yesterday regarding a report produced in the US Government Accountability Office which is available from http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423.

The report in summary states that “Lack of data hinders efforts to quantify impacts of counterfeiting and piracy,” however it then goes on to point out the following that “For instance, companies may experience increased revenues due to the sales of merchandise that are based on movie characters whose popularity is enhanced by sales of pirated movies.”

So is the Digital Economy Bill really going to help anything and is it in actual fact going to further hurt the economy because people procuring these downloads now aren’t going to buy the associated merchandise?