This blog has been going for three years with this being the 301st post.  Within the last year, things have slowed down considerably for a number of different factors.  Perhaps the biggest reason is being too busy with the current project (XenClient).  However, there are several other factors as well.

Blogging turns out to be a mostly solitary venture.  It takes a great deal of commitment and time to formulate a blog that gathers widespread adoption.  Even then, I suspect that success breeds pressure to always push harder.  It is difficult to gain that kind of momentum and keep it there.  This kind of stress is similar to anyone trying to hold on to success and fame.  Very few go the distance.  Perhaps very few should.

Originally I had big plans for doing this.  It seemed like a great idea for bringing in new customer requirements.  It also seemed like a good place to try out some ideas of my own.  Quietly, I hoped for a large following.  I tracked the visits per day and experimented with different blog postings to see what would make a difference.  This theory was flawed.  Any particular post might do better than others but overall it really did not make a big difference.

At one point the goal was to have about a hundred visits a day.  There was a blog post almost every day.  This artificially seemed to push up the numbers based on the number of posts but never seemed to bring any kind of long term growth.  It was probably similar to typical sales cycles.  The sales guy can always make things look better based on activity at the end of the month but the same person will never guarantee long term great results.

Later on, it just seemed a bit pointless.  The things I had set out to do just did not happen.  Also, ironically, my visit rate jumped up consistently with complete blog neglect.

It seems a bit like tracking the stock market.  The sooner it is realized that logic has nothing to do with it, the better.

Which brings us back to passion and purpose.  Success is truly an internal event.  It is the belief that one has a passion for doing something that really brings about the best results.  In fact, it is also the belief in letting go and being able to admit to mistakes which clears the way to a better future.

My passion is mostly about making things better.  I enjoy learning how things work (in true engineering fashion) and proceeding to think of ways of making it work even better.  Everything can be improved.  That alone is a major passion of the entire business world.  Some people focus on how much they can get.  Others do it for the thrill of making a difference.

So, what the heck does all this mean?  Well, either it means nothing or it means that I might have finally found new purpose to doing this blog.  I suspect it is the latter.  Time will tell.

For some, this might be seen as some kind of “middle-aged” blog crisis.  Perhaps it is.  At this point I do not even really care.

It is perhaps when I am most concerned about what people think that I am the most evasive.

To clear the air and breath fresh, is actually quite good.  Shadows of the mind dance more harsh than the path of the real daylight.  In other words, the thoughts overshadow action.  In fact, thoughts can easily confuse what path to choose.

With that in mind, it is time to start over.  The blog needs renewing and obviously refocus as well.

We are entering a very different era from our parents.  Technology is shifting from a very individual experience into a worldwide exchange.  As each wave forms, the resulting push goes further and further inland.  The goal is to reach some kind of perfection that will satisfy all our possible wants.  The frontier continues to expand.

Devices (laptops and smart phones) which are currently the focus of a mobile and remote work force are becoming disposable.  This is due to a number of factors such as damage, theft, and becoming obsolete.  The point is that real devices are always going to have a limited lifespan. 

It has been interesting to watch the computer industry over the last thirty years.  The speed of which the changes have come has only made technology obsolete that much faster.  Using a computer from more than five years ago is often a questionable venture.  Laptops and phones are probably more around 2 or 3 years. 

Given the limited lifespan, what is the real value?  Much like human knowledge, the best things are passed down.  The information is the soul of the device.  It is this data that needs to be preserved and propagated to new devices.

Add the concepts of virtualization and the Internet, it is possible to build a model whereby the information will never die.  In fact, given enough focus, the environment will evolve and flourish.

The information can be safely saved on trusted servers.  If the device is lost, stolen, or dead, the environment can be brought forward to a new device.

It is similar to the idea of storing photos on the web for backup purposes.  In theory, your photos will never be discarded.  The same would be true of your standard computing environment.

This kind of strategy puts the focus on what is really valuable.  It certainly is not the disposable device.

Admit to yourself one thing.  Your laptop ages twenty times faster than a human (laptop years).  Your phone is closer to 30 years to one human year.  I would bet your phone or laptop is already older than you.

The information however, is priceless, ageless, and completely virtual. 

Doesn’t it seem we always focus on what we can see?  It’s the things that can’t be seen that really make the lasting impact.

Recently, I downloaded the Sysprep package from Microsoft for XP SP3.  It does not really matter why.  The package was expanded and the contents explored.  However, what happened next was unexpected.  See the screen capture below:

“The address is not valid” !  How baffling is that?  Not only is it not using the Internet to get the content, there is no context information describing how this happened.  My first assumption was that I did not have the same version as the content.  This turned out to be untrue.

The truth is that Windows is blocking the content since it came from another computer.  If you look at the properties of the CHM file, it will show ‘Unblock’ as an option.  Select Unblock and the problem goes away the next time you run the CHM.

If you would like a more detailed explanation, check out this post.

There is nothing more important.  More important than what?  What current preoccupation is that important?  Well, it seems that important so therefore it is.

It’s a judgment call,  and clearly not all the facts are known.

Largely, the computer industry is driven from very important factors.  Much like life, there is plenty of activity both on the development and consumption.  The desire for more is always there.  The hunger for bigger and better goes on and on.

There is clearly a parallel with how automobiles were first developed.  Initially cars were very complicated and costly.  The user had to know every control and quirk.  The industry was fairly small with not much sympathy for the amateur.  Even today, this is still mostly true.

The truth is that computers are not important.  The same is true of automobiles.  It is what these tools can accomplish for the user that brings value.  Functionally, different cars only add value based on what the drivers can derive as a benefit.  

What I am getting at is that the computer experience needs to be much more transparent.  Sitting at a monitor with keyboard and mouse is not conducive to being easy.  The hardware needs to blend in with the environment to the point that the user/consumer does not even have to think about it.  This is the mantra of ubiquitous computing.  The difficult aspect is thinking outside the range of current thinking.

I was talking with my Dad over the weekend and we started talking about airplanes.  In the 60’s to 80’s, he worked as a pilot and navigator.  He pointed out that modern control systems on planes make it very difficult for a pilot to override potentially very dangerous automated decisions.  We talked about centralizing the power in the computers, it actually takes away from the experience and thinking of pilots.  From talking about this, it became clear to me that pilots should see the plane as an extension of themselves.  The computers should be used like how the brain controls the body.  The brain is the pilot and the body is the plane.  Ideally, this would be true except for cases for when the pilot cannot process the information fast enough.  Dad mentioned that planes have an automated system for landing.  It is well known and a perfect application for planes since there is actually more risk having the pilot do it.  He explained that a pilot could easily cause a “Dutch roll” in specific situations. If bad enough, this condition can be catastropic.

This comes back to an interesting idea.  Since our computers are still very dumb, it is unwise to put too much faith in them in unknown situations.  The lack of intelligence is often forgotten due to the speed of how computers figure out known problems.  It is fine for it to focus on something that can be digitized and programmed, but completely helpless with sketchy data and an unknown state.  Most faults in computer systems can either be tracked to hardware failures or software that could not recover from an unknown state.  Lately I would tend to think that most problems are in software.  It is very hard to write software that will work in all cases forever and ever.  Things change.  

So, this brings us back to what matters.  First of all, we should not put too much trust in our existing frameworks to carry us forward to the more casual computing model.  The hidden message is that basing computers solely on digital on/off switches limits their abilities considerably.  By now, we should be looking more seriously at technologies that better duplicate intelligence.  Perhaps the most revolutionary idea is that it is okay not to know things.  Much like life, we have to accept that we don’t know everything and that the computer should be allowed to learn.  This puts the computer more in the category of having a real brain.  Obviously a computer also needs to ability to link multiple locations together (or unlink) so that it can more easily find connections.  This should be done more like our neural networks and made to accept unknown states.

The best analogy is this.  You are walking down the street and suddenly something amazing happens.  For whatever reason, gravity no longer works.  You have not been programmed to handle this situation but you quickly try to find an idea that will help.  If you were a robot, there is a perfect chance that you were never programmed to handle this.  So, either your software faults or you just keep on doing what you were doing.

So, what would happen if gravity just stopped?  I would guess that you’d be thrown (slowly?) off the earth based on inertia and the earth’s rotation.  I don’t know.  The point is that if it did happen, at least I would be trying something.  At the very best, it is clear that I should not fault.   Even if I did fault (pass out), most likely I would reset just fine (perhaps floating off to space).

I like the idea that people usually don’t fault.  It implies that we are much too accepting of existing models and hardware.

Please excuse the tangents.  It’s hard to think clearly due to my fuzzy programming .

What really matters is that our faith should be shaken to usher in something new.  In fact, given the success of the web, we have largely solved the act of exchanging information.  What we have missed is realizing that many our designs are based on 1960’s (or even earlier) thinking.  

We’ve come a long way.  We still have a long ways to go.  A key goal is removing the importance of the computer in how separate it is from everthing else around us.  Things should be more specialized, simple, and transparent.  It is a process that should be much more evolutionary than it currently is.  Competing models should be allowed to win and lose based on what the environment allows.

Microsoft obviously does not want to publish certain things even though it has published a number of other things (e.g. the VHD Spec).  One of those things is the format of the registry files.  However, they have taken the time to publish what they are willing to share.  It would be worthy of reading for anyone that has not tried to look under the covers yet.

You can find the page at the Microsoft support site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986/

This one is just for reference.  Citrix has published a much more interactive model for finding documentation.  On the support site is a web-hosted documentation system.

Navigation is much easier and it looks like all the products are included.  It should be easier than having to download pieces or looking at printed copies.  It even supports searching.

Search, and you shall find.  One of the many problems of dealing with VHDs is that they can take ages to create.  More specificly, the fixed VHDs can be very slow.  This is due to clearing the entire VHD with zeroes.  Creating any file that is gigabytes long is bound to be painful.

The Virtual PC Guy (Ben Armstrong from Microsoft) has come up with a solution.  It entails not zeroing out the file and creating the VHD footer at the end.  Very fast and just what most people want.  The only concern is security related to the VHD claiming deleted data since it was not cleared.  For most people this would not be a major concern under certain conditions (like a new disk).  However, this sounds like more a file system problem.  When files are deleted, they should be cleared then.  There might even be a NTFS option to do this.  Let me know, please?

Virtual PC Guy has also been nice enough to provide the binary and source for his tool.  This is a very kind gesture and I say thanks.

Microsoft produced a series of videos about Hyper-V last year from the Program Managers.  Based on recent investigations, I found a good explanation of how snapshotting works.  The VHD snapshotting video is a bit casual but captures the essence of the engineering design.  

The implementation does seem a bit rough in places compared to competing products.  Persistence will pay off.

My overall biggest concern is that the snapshotting mechanism should have built into the VHD spec.  Currently the implementation is expressed as code that manipulates VHDs for the purpose of snapshots.  The difference is subtle but enough to make this a Hyper-V only way of looking at things.  Unfortunately this will lead to other vendors to consider doing their own snapshotting technology around the weakness of the native VHD format.

If you look hard enough on the web, you are bound to find something good. It might not be what you started with but the distraction is worth it.  This time it is the official “unofficial” documentation from Microsoft for Windows 7 for VHD support.  This is key information about how to program to the VHD subsystem which is built into Windows 7.  

There is a great summary about Win7 VHD and here is the diagram from that section:

Don’t miss the actual API reference.  Key in mind that Microsoft is allowed to change the API before shipping Windows 7 but after that it is set in stone.  They have tried hard to match it up with the existing Windows API model so it should be very comfortable to most of you.

There are not that many API overall but some of them sound very promising.  For example, there are APIs related to creating new VHDs, compacting existing ones, and merging child VHDs with parents.  It also has the ability to grow VHDs apparently.

All this was brought to my attention by LeeL at work by referring me to an article about using the new VHD API with Windows 7.  This article brings it all together and shows examples of how to use the new API.  Things are moving along quickly with Windows 7 and the VHD support.  It’s good to see this much focus being put on VHDs for the sake of better management and flexibility.  The easier it is to manipulate, the easier it is to deploy and use.