Posts from 2013

Windows Azure Backup Errors for Roaming Profiles

Richard Green on 12th July 2013

I was checking some of the logs of my Windows Server 2012 Essentials server last night and discovered that recently my Windows Azure Backup logs were reporting errors for the backups.

The errors weren’t serious but it was flagging that several files couldn’t be backed-up to the service. A normal person could accept this, but me having a little bit of offensiveness about things like that I needed to resolve it.

It transpires that the issue is temporary files generated by Facebook games and Flash video files in the roaming user profile. To resolve the warnings, modify the backup schedule on the server to the Exclusion Settings. Under Exclusion Settings in the Backup Wizard, define *.tmp *.swf and *.sol as exclusions for the root directory of your roaming profile share and set the Subfolders option to yes.

Tonight’s Windows Azure Backup completed without warnings.

Enjoy

My Windows Phone Start Screen

Richard Green on 24th June 2013

Earlier today, Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) tweeted a picture of his Windows Phone Start Screen (https://twitter.com/thurrott/statuses/349209094109921280). As I like to share, I thought I’d show off mine too.

So here’s the top half of my screen. In the top left corner, we’ve got my tiles associated with calling: Phone and Lync. Our company isn’t yet using Lync externally but we should be sometime soon so I wanted to get the icon in early. On the right side, I’ve got the People hub. Strangely, as I took the screenshot, Paul managed to work his way into the picture.

Back over on the left, I’ve got Rowi. I paid for the full version of the app because frankly, it’s worth supporting the guys at Hidden Pineapple because the app is great. To the right of this, I’ve got my SMS/MMS message box and my Linked Mailbox tile for my personal domain account and my work account. I love linked mailboxes as it means I see all of my mail and manage all my unread and flagged items from one view. Rowi and People Hub earn themselves large tiles as they have notifications and animations which deserve the size.

On the row below this, I’ve got four of my most used apps on the phone. These only deserve small tiles as they don’t give anything useful in terms of tile feedback and notification. From left to right, we’ve got Facebook, eBay, YouTube and the Music Hub. The new YouTube app is brilliant and so much better than the mobile site redirect which is what the old version amounted to.

One of the first things that I think is striking about my screen is how the People Hub and Rowi tiles are offset. This was my way of stopping the screen looking too uniform; a little bit of structured chaos.

The row below has my calendar exclusively. My calendar is heavily used with meetings for work and personal events such as kids lessons, appointments and birthdays, so I like to have this large as it means I get the subject and location of the meeting on the tile to save me having to crack into the full calendar app. It’s important for me to have the calendar here also as it means that I don’t have to scroll to see it; it’s there all the time on the first view of the start screen.

Here we have the bottom half of my screen. I’m a simple to please person, with not too many apps installed on my phone and as such my start screen is pretty short – So much that you can see the top half of the screen on the bottom half.

At the top of the bottom (like that makes sense) we have the Internet Explorer tile on the left as a large tile. I use the mobile browser lots so I like to have the icon large to make it easy to just smash at anywhere on the screen. To the right of the IE tile, I’ve got four small tiles in a block. These are lesser used but still often enough to warrant a spot on the screen. In order, we’ve got the Unit Converter, OneNote, MediaHub and IMDB.

Unit Converter is simple yet effective. OneNote speaks for itself. I use SkyDrive to store all my notes so that they are available across all my devices. MediaHub is a great little app that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself and finally IMDB speaks for itself – I’m a bit of a film lover but I’m not very good at recognising actors and actresses so I like to be able to easily look them up to see what other films they’ve been in.

Photos is last on my screen and gets a full tile. I’ve got quite a lot of pictures of the kids on the phone so I like to see them from time to time.

An Open Email to Hampshire Roads

Richard Green on 16th June 2013

I wrote an email to the Hampshire Roads and Maintenance enquiries address, including my local councillors on the email. This is response to recent resurfacing work which has taken place on our road which I’m less than amused about. I’ve decided to make this an open mail by posting it here on my blog due to the level of dissatisfaction I have.

Hello,

Recently, Shakespeare Road in Popley was resurfaced. I’d like to bring several points to your attention relating to the surfacing work which took place.

The road surface on Shakespeare Road should not have been due for resurfacing, although it is now. With the exception of the entrance from Popley Way into Shakespeare Road (the second entrance if coming from the A33 which the buses use to exit Shakespeare Road) the entire road was of satisfactory condition from my perspective as a car, motorcycle and bicycle user.

The new surface which has been applied is actually worse than the existing surface. The surface which was left consisted of extremely loose gravel which was not packed down before being left. The gravel was extremely unsafe to drive on even at the 10mph suggested by the signage put in place. The skid risk signs were removed two weeks ago but there is a still a large amount of gravel being thrown around by passing vehicles, with some parts of the road starting to form piles of gravel. With the recent bought of rain, much more gravel has been drawn out from the surface highlighting that the 10mph signs were removed far too prematurely.

The surface transition from the piece of road which actually needed surfacing to the new surface is terrible, with several undulations while passing over it and the surface transition from the work which was done on day one to that of day two of work is also terrible (http://sdrv.ms/11hBdt5). The entire stretch of road also has a tramline in it where the work done on day one differs from day two (http://sdrv.ms/11hBgVK). A sunken drain at the edge of the road near the entrance aforementioned has been left sunken and simply been surfaced around. The camber of the road no longer exists meaning that rain puddles are forming in the middle of the road right in the tyre tracks of cars which in a heavy rain will likely cause a loss of braking performance should a child jump off a kerb in front of someone.

The new surface is already breaking up in sections near the One Stop shop (http://sdrv.ms/19bDW96 and http://sdrv.ms/19bDU15). A pothole at the edge of the road at the crossing to Pebbles day care and nursery has been left unresolved (http://sdrv.ms/19bDZll). This, in my view is a health and safety risk as a number of children and parents with pushchairs use this crossing daily to access the nursery site. All it will take is for a child to trip over here one day and they could end up being struck by a car on this relatively blind corner. Another large bump at the edge of the crossing which leads down to the footpath between the new estate and the fields behind the doctors surgery hasn’t been levelled out either (http://sdrv.ms/19bE5JY).

These are just some of the faults with the surface that I’ve observed over the recent days so there are likely to be countless others, on sections of Shakespeare Road which I haven’t travelled.

I fail to understand how the council had decided to allocate road surfacing budget to a road which didn’t need it except for the portion outlined at the top of this mail and after the work was completed, the road surface has been made worse than it was originally? I also fail to understand now the only portion which should have been repaired has been left, completed untouched?

I do not see the point in spending money on applying a new surface if basic defects in the underlying road condition aren’t resolved first? It would be like me setting down a new layer of floor tiles over the top of the old ones because there are a few cracked ones instead of lifting the old ones and repairing them.

Whilst I understand that recent years of winter frost, snow and ice are causing road surfaces to deteriorate more rapidly causing road surfacing budget to be spread thinly, what I don’t understand is why the quality of work on resurfacing has dropped dramatically across the whole of Hampshire? Any resurfacing work I see completed in the region largely leaves a new surface marginally better if not worse that existing (take the A339 and A33 for example), and because the grade of work is so low, the new surface only lasts six months to a year at best before it should be surfaced again. What happened to actually correctly surface defects properly with the intention of providing a long term, lasting solution? Surely correctly something properly once rather than applying continuous band aid style short-term fixes would be more cost effective?

I’m sure that nothing will be done to rectify the situation in Shakespeare Road because frankly enough money has already been wasted on it, but I would none-the-less like my comments to be taken for the record as a complaint against the quality of work done here. In short, a waste of council tax payers money and council budgetary resources. As a resident of Shakespeare Road, I feel pretty let down on this occasion and my current frame of mind it to go to the top of Shakespeare Road and pour some concrete of my own to repair the parts which need it. I’m not in the trade of construction, but I don’t think I could do a worse job than that which has been done thus far?

Areas of road such as filter left lane on the roundabout adjoining the Ringway North and the Ringway West which is worsening by the week, the roundabout where the Ringway West and Winchester Road meet or the entire width of the road at the roundabout where the Ringway East meets the Ringway South and the M3 are in much greater need of surfacing work as these are heavily used commuter and main traffic routes throughout Basingstoke yet they remain untouched?

To be totally blunt about it, it strikes me as though all decisions are made on which roads to allocate surfacing budget to my bureaucrats in regional offices and not people who have actually ever driven in Basingstoke and understand the real roads maintenance requirements.

Sent from Windows Mail

How to Delete a VHD BLOB on for an Azure VM

Richard Green on 17th May 2013

A while ago I signed up for a 3 month trial for Microsoft Azure to allow me to continue to use the Azure Backup service after Microsoft moved it from Windows Azure Online Backup Preview into a more mainstream service.

Last night I decided to have a play whilst I’m still on the trial to see how quickly I could stand up a Windows Server 2012 VM instance. The answer is quickly by the way. Within five minutes, I was able to download the .rdp file and connect to the machine, but I digress.

After I was finished, I deleted the VM, but the disk remains in the event that you want to reattach it to another VM. When I tried to delete the .vhd file I got an error that it was still in-use. I wasn’t able to find the answer initially, but after a post on TechNet someone came straight back with the solution in an Azure Technical Support (WATS) blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_azure_technical_support_wats_team/archive/2013/02/05/iaas-unable-to-delete-vhd-there-is-currently-a-lease-on-the-blob.aspx.

In a nutshell, although the VM is deleted, it leaves behind a disk mount resource which is used to link the VM to the VHD BLOB. Follow the steps in the post to delete the link an you will be given an option to delete the actual .vhd file as well as the link. Job Done.

No Further Questions

Richard Green on 16th May 2013

I took the decision today to globally disable comments on the site. I’ve been getting in the region of 250 spam comments daily and I’ve had about 5 actual, real person comments in just as many months. To have the Akismet plugin for WordPress running to filter and manage all of these spam messages adds overhead to the blog and overhead for me to moderate those comments and it just isn’t worth it for the number of comments I receive.

To those of you who do want to contact me, please use the contact page on the site which has all of my social interaction addresses and handles listed.

I just want to stress that I’ve taken this decision not because I don’t want to hear from people about my thoughts and topics of conversation, but just because there isn’t enough real people interested in my material to warrant dealing with the spam.

I hope you understand?

Documents and Office XML Formats

Richard Green on 15th May 2013

This is a very short blog post; more of a rant than an actual informative post.

It’s the year 2013. Office 2013 has been out for sometime now, and the XML based office document formats such as .docx, .pptx and .xslx have been around since Office 2007. Additionally, there has been the Office Compatibility Pack (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3) available for download for at least since Office 2010 was released to allow Office 2003 versions of Office to read the XML based document formats.

Why, based on these two factors, do people still insist of sending documents through in the Office 2003-esque .doc, .ppt and .xls document formats? They are old and horrible. They take up well over two times the amount of space per file than the XML based file types as well as reducing the features available to the document?

I understand that some banks and larger institutions may still be using Office 2003 because of compatibility issues with other line of business applications, but the majority populous will surely be running a version of Office less than 10 years old?

I Need More Power Captain

Richard Green on 15th May 2013

So, anyone who frequents my blog may have noticed a performance improvement in the last two days. The reason? I’ve moved house, or at least my blog has.

Previously hosted byÂ a US company called ASPHostCentral, I had been having a lot of issues with MySQL of late where the blog couldn’t even connect to the instance. Several support tickets were raised for the issue and every time they resolved the issue, but never fixed the root cause which they claimed was a customer on the same shared server as me hammering the database engine. When the blog could connect to the MySQL database, I was seeing round-trip ping responses to the server of over 175ms at all times, with it sometimes peaking to 250ms. I setup a free website monitoring tool (http://www.uptimerobot.com/) to monitor the blog and a few other sites I own. I was receiving upwards of 10 alerts a day per site to say that they were offline for a few minutes and then back up again.

I haven’t fully completed the move as I have a forum site I run with a large database I need to migrate, but the blog and a few other mini-sites are moved over but so far it’s great. The blog is now hosted by HostingUK.net, a British company with datacentres based in the London area so the geography is much better for me and my primary user base. The new server is running Windows Server 2012 which means I get some of the newer features in IIS 8 for running the site not to mention a sub 20ms ping response from my home. If anyone is wondering, the reason I used the US to host the sites previously is that UK based web hosting hasn’t really been able to compete with the US companies until recently and being that this is all paid and run by me personally, I need to keep it cheap.

I’m going to be doing some performance tweaking of the blog soon, playing with caching plugins for WordPress, maybe even tweaking my theme to try and optimize some of the imagesÂ to try and make the site fly, but I’m really happy with the new service I’m receiving so far, it’s faster and seems more dependable, I can get support in my time zone and the couple of questions I’ve had for their support people have been answers by certified IT Pro’s who actually sound knowledgeable.

Enjoy 🙂

WordPress Upgrade and Hosting Woes

Richard Green on 12th May 2013

So after typing the Surface Pro article earlier today, I realised that all of my WordPress plugins and my WordPress were out of date. After about an hour of tinkering with plugin versions, authorizing Twitter OAuth plugins and upgrading the main install.

So what’s new? Well the media manager in the admin interface is very nice and welcoming over previous iterations. Internet Explorer 10 still doesn’t get recognized as a modern browser still as logging into the admin interface produces an error that looks like it thinks I’m running IE6 – Something I as hoping would be fixed. Looking at the categories in the admin interface makes me a little sad too because my categories are all over the place so I think I need to spent a few hours aligning and rearranging them, and I also noticed a few quirks with my custom theme which I need to resolve.

Every time I upgrade my WordPress instance though, it reminds me how junk my current hosting provider are. I was only able to get between 10-20Kbps transferring files to and from the FTP site. A ping to the site results inÂ a round-trip time of 165ms and the load times are terrible not to mention the HTTP500 errors I’ve been getting on a couple of my other sites recently because of some new user on the shared server pillaging the MySQL instance.

Normally, I forget about the issue by the time I get round to sorting it, but I’m determined to remember this time especially as my hosting is up for renewal soon, so I’m going to be finding a new home in the UK as UK hosting prices have dropped in recent years. I did take a look at Microsoft Azure earlier today, but the free instance doesn’t allow the use of custom domain names and the shared instance works out at about $45 a month for my sites which is too much.

If anyone knows a good UK hosting provider for £15 or less a month then please feel free to drop me a line.

Microsoft Surface Pro First Impressions

Richard Green on 12th May 2013

Friday just gone was my wife’s (@NickyCGreen) birthday. Being a student, she uses her laptop for typing up notes, writing essays and the like, but using a laptop in lectures was proving a little more challenging.Â On a few occasions, she has used the Acer Iconia W500 tablet I have and thanks to our Windows Server 2012 Essentials setup with folder redirection and roaming profiles, she can logon and get a seamless cross-device experience. She really enjoyed the form factor, but it went without saying that it was imperfect due to the fact that the W500 is pretty under powered and under resourced in terms of CPU and memory.

With the UK being far from the frontline in technological releases, the choices in tablets here are more limited than the US due to slipping release dates, so I made the decision to call in a favour from a previous employer and import a Surface Pro from the US for her birthday.

I opted for the slightly more expensive 128GB model purely because I didn’t want her to run out of space on the 64GB version. There’s no point having a roaming profile and folder redirection to offer her a huge capacity backend if she could then only make some of the work she has available offline.

I did some setup on the device before wrapping it and giving it to her which is what this review is based on.

The device itself is beautiful, with the VaporMag case giving it an amazing look and finish. The weight and dimensions are more than an iPad or the Surface RT, but that’s because you get a full Windows PC for your money. The Surface RT on the other hand is slightly thinner than the iPad but does weigh a fraction more. Neither of these facts make it unwieldy though; it’s still feels perfectly functional. The kick stand works really nicely and combined with a touch or type cover for the Surface, I can see it actually being useful, but I would personally like it to lean into the stand a little more; it’s quite upright and would worry me with the fear of toppling.

Powering the Pro on for the first time, I thought it must have been hibernated or sleeping in the box because it came straight up to the GUI within two seconds. I shut it down and powered it up from cold with the same effect. It boots so fast, it reduces the need for Sleep or Hibernate to null. I think the UEFI BIOS probably helps a lot here. I’d be interested to know how quickly the Surface RT boots being that it’s running a low-fat version of Windows?

The pre-installed Windows 8 Pro operating system has no bloatware, adware, freeware or anything horrid installed; It is the perfect OEM installation and was a real surprise and treat compared to normal OEM hardware releases. I only actually did three things to customize the installation asideÂ from checking for and installing updates:

Domain joined it using the Windows Server 2012 Essentials connector software.
Used the Create Recovery Drive wizard to backup and delete the recovery partition, releasing 8GB of disk as available storage. You even need to play with Disk Management as the wizard extends the existing partitions if you elect to delete the partition afterwards which is a nice touch.
Removed the pre-installed version of Office 2013 to allow me to install my TechNet licensed version of Office 2013 Professional Plus.

The touch screen is super responsive and you can touch type with as many fingers as you like using the on-screen keyboard and every touch is detected without fault. The screen size doesn’t make it the largest of tablets, but I think the size is ideal for portability. Small enough to carry around and use effectively, but not so small that you have to squint out of one eye and close the other, something which I think the smaller 8 inch tablets would suffer from with prolonged used. The 16:9 aspect ratio makes it less tall than it is wide compared to a number of standard aspect tablets also.

The MagSafe-esque power connector works well, connects easily and feels secure. I would personally like the indicator LED to be a little brighter to make it a bit more obvious it is charging, but that’s a minor complaint in the scheme of things.

The only actual complaint I have about the Surface Pro is the wireless adapter. It doesn’t seem to acknowledge 802.11d which is the standard for detecting Access Point deployment country to allow the adapter to use additional channels as available. In the USA, 802.11bgn can use channels 1 through to 11. In the EU, we can use channels 1 to 13. With most hardware being US based, the tendency is for hardware like routers to ship on channels 1,6 or 11, so I historically have used 13 at home to avoid some of the congestion, but the Surface just wouldn’t detect the SSID even with all of the User and System locales change d to UK. This may be a by-product of the fact it is a US import and that UK models shipping later this year will supports channels 12 and 13, but I’ve just changed channels to 11 to workaround this – My neighbour uses 6, so it’s hardly an issue.

All in all, it’s an amazing device and I am super jealous that my wife has one and I don’t. Fingers crossed she won’t break it and double fingers crossed she’ll let me use it from time to time because I don’t exactly have the spare dollars to buy another one any time soon.