My Digital Life

Microsoft User Experience Virtualization

Tom Basham — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:43:38 +0000

Who dreams up these names eh? Who knows… Well actually I do, usually it’s Microsoft. User Experience Virtualisation is a new user state virtualisation tool that’s just gone into public beta.

Whatever OS you use, all of your personal settings and preferences are likely to be kept together separate from others so that each person that uses the computer can customise it to their liking. These profiles hold details of the OS setup, application specific config and even documents. In both Windows 7 and Mac OS X this all sits in the ‘Users’ folder. That’s all well and good, but what if you use more than one computer?

These days the ability to make this profile information available across many (or any) computers is called User Virtualisation, or in MS’s parlance User State Virtualisation. In my day it was just plain ol’ roaming profiles. Whatever the name you give it, people have always liked being able to logon and use to any computer, and today companies are increasing looking to centralise their computing using technologies like VDI. In doing this they might just issue people a different random computer every day, or have apps delivered from many different remote computers. This capability then is as important as ever.

There a number of ways to do this of course, out the box Windows has ‘Roaming Profiles’, companies like AppSense will sell you dedicated solutions and both Citrix and VMWare provide tools in support of their desktop virtualisation tools. It’s interesting to then that Microsoft is adding a new tool to their Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP) called suitably, Microsoft User Experience Virtualisation.

Having taken a quick look at UEV, it seems to be a good step up from roaming profiles in terms of how and when the personal settings are applied, but it does seem to introduce a host of new management requirements.

One of the big limitations of Roaming Profiles is that the sync only ever happens at logon and logoff. It looks like EUV is much more flexible, applying application settings when applications start and close, and Windows settings on logon, when the computer is locked and when you connect to a remote computer.

This should work well when users roam between computers or use applications presented from different systems (local, App-V, VDI, etc). In theory you could also use it to restore settings following a computer rebuild.

The down side is that it achieves this by having specific ‘Settings Location Templates’ for each application you want UEV to process. The template tells the agent which application to monitor, and what registry keys and files need to be saved and applied. Whilst this does ensure that only the setting you want are processed, if you have lots of applications creating the templates could potentially be a lot of additional work – especially if you’ve already gone through the hassle of compatibility testing and packaging/sequencing your apps for Windows 7. If you’re waiting for Windows 8 however it would be worth taking a look so you can incorporate this into application planning.

The beta of UEV is available now from the Connect site.

Apple Mac OSX Wi-Fi Diagnostic Tools

Tom Basham — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:13:00 +0000

Like a colleague of mine, for the last few weeks I’ve had some random issues with my home Wi-Fi network dropping out. It' seems pretty random, though happens more in the evening – just when I’m likely to be using it.

It’s an odd problem, especially as its cause is normally invisible interference, the only symptom is the Wi-Fi not working. I figured that that there must be some tools out there that could help identify the cause, hopefully visualising it in some way so I can see what’s happening.

I’ve posted before about a Windows tool called inSSIDer that does a good job identifying other wireless networks around you. Keeping an eye on this few a few days ruled out a competing Wi-Fi network, and to be honest I doubt another wireless work could kill my network as completely as I’ve been seeing – they’re designed to be tolerant of that sort of thing.

I also did quick search for Mac tools, there doesn’t seem to be much out there, but a few sources did point to a native tools included in Lion, Apples own Wi-Fi Diagnostics. It’s not all that easy to find if you don’t know it’s there, but you’ll find it in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics folder.

In Finder click the Go menu and ‘Go To Folder…’
Enter in /System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics and you’ll find at the bottom

Start it up and you’ll be given four options:

The first, monitor performance give you a simple chart of both signal and noise strength over time – this is really very handy, it showed me that when my network drops out the amount of noise sky rockets way above the signal strength.

The second option shows a log of significant events that happen on your network, such as joining a different network or changing AP. I didn’t bother with a screen shot as not much really happens in here and it’ll mostly be empty.

The third option allows you to do a full packet capture of the traffic on your network, the traffic to and from your computer or traffic on nearby networks. These can be saved in the standard .pcap format and opened up in wireshark, but you can’t view them in real-time using the tool itself.

The last option shows a detailed log of what’s happening on the network, I don’t pretend to understand that much about what’s happening but I’d assume it’s useful into on the right hands!

So there you go, if you have a Mac there’s a handy little tool hidden away within it that could help troubleshoot Wi-Fi problems. Now I just need to figure out what might cause three 30 second bursts of 2.4GHz interference over a three minute period and therefore stops me streaming movies to my Xbox!

DirectAccess and OCS / Lync Edge Services

Tom Basham — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:35:02 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted anything about DirectAccess, and while this isn’t new info I thought it was worth sharing. DirectAccess (DA) is a remote access technology included in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Unlike traditional VPN solutions it establishes a connection into a private network automatically, and transparently. From the end users perspective once a connection to the internet is made, they can access both websites and any internal resources such as email or file shares. It’s not all easy going however, as DirectAccess uses IPv6 there are some services which just don’t work well over a DirectAccess tunnel, for example Office Communications Server or Lync. There are also services such as Outlook Web Access which are typically published to the internet anyway so are better accessed directly. As DirectAccess gives the remote client access to both the internet directly, and internal services through the DA tunnel, its perfectly possible to access external and internal resources. To configure this you can specify whether a given DNS name is resolved via the DNS server allocated from the ISP or via the DNS servers on the internal network. This is achieved using the Name Resolution Policy Table (NRPT) which is used to define which namespaces (domains) or DNS records should be resolved where. Generally this is pretty easy, you use the table to direct your internal namespace down the DA tunnel. Where you encounter exceptions such as OCS or Lync which may use the internal namespace but should be accessed externally, you can add specific DNS names to the NRPT as exceptions to the NRPT. So for example, you may have an internal namespace of mycompany.com with OCS installed. You’ll probably have a ‘myname@mycompany.com’ SIP address, and OCS will usually be accessed via the name sip.mycompany.com both internally and externally. If you add DirectAccess you would configure the NRPT to resolve *.mycompany.com addresses via the internal DNS – and therefore access them on the internal namespace over DA – but with exceptions (see below) to ensure that the OCS DNS records are resolved externally and therefore via the internet. You configure an NRPT exception by adding the relevant fully qualified DNS record, but without an associated DirectAccess DNS server address. Without the server address the client will use the local ISP assigned DNS server to resolve the address. As an example, for OCS you’d need to configure exceptions for the following: Service records (SRV) for auto-config _sip._tls.mycompany.com _sip._tcp.mycompany.com _sipinternaltls._tcp.mycompany.com _sipinternal._tcp.mycompany.com Servers sip.mycompany.com sipinternal.mycompany.com sipexternal.mycompany.com .mycompany.com .mycompany.com .mycompany.com For more info on how the NRPT works, the MS Cable Guys did a pretty good write up here.

Building a Holodeck

Tom Basham — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:10:24 +0000

Well almost…

Last year the guys at Microsoft released a video showing their vision of how people might interact and communicate using technology in the future. In one scene two classrooms, one in the US and one in India, are linked by a window of sorts, each showing a view into the other classroom with the pupils drawing pictures and writing to each other onto the windows. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve seen it, but I’ll out the video on the bottom of the post.

Over the Christmas break I spent a little time catching up on all the various article and videos I hadn’t had a chance to watch in the last few weeks of the year. One of them was a fascinating video from The Verge’s visit to Microsoft’s Applied Science’ s Edison Lab where they are starting to build real technology which could power the vision described in the video last year.

Ok I’m a geek, but there is some fantastic technology in there, a lot of which I’ve not seen before though I don’t know if others are doing the same sorts of research. It’s also interesting to see Kinect units being pressed into service in new ways too. At least it’s not just the hacker community thinking up new ways to use it.

Whilst the 2019 video showed this sort of technology in use within a school, it’s clear that it would find applications all over business. In a world where work is increasingly delivered by teams of talented people distributed around the world, this sort of natural link between locations could be huge benefit when working in that sort of virtual team.

Anyway, here’s the video and below it the original Vision 2019 video.

I wish I was an Astronaut…

Tom Basham — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:35:58 +0000

Some more fantastic time-lapse video from the International Space Station - well worth watching in HD on the Vimeo site.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

The Aurora from the ISS

Tom Basham — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:00:34 +0000

An amazing view of the Aurora from the ISS orbiting the earth.

I wish I was an Astronaut…

How to download and install the Window 8 Developer Preview

Tom Basham — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:35:11 +0000

With this weeks Build conference underway, the nice Windows 8 chaps at Microsoft have been good enough to provide us with a preview version of the new OS play with. I thought I’d write a few notes on how to go about obtaining and installing this preview in case it of use to anyone. Bare in mind of course that Windows 8 is far from finished, there are many months of development left and this preview is likely to be pretty flaky. It exists really to allow developers to get their hands on the new OS so they can set about developing and testing applications for Win8. I’d only try it on a spare computer or on a spare hard disk, don’t go upgrading your day-to-day computer, you will probably lose anything that’s on it! Download Download the Windows 8 Developer Preview media from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 There are 32 and 64 bit versions, and a 64 bit version that includes the development tools. Although the standalone versions do support an upgrade which maintains user accounts and files, personally I'd assume you'll need a clean install on a spare computer or hard disk. Create Installation Media To install from the ISO file you'll need to write the ISO to either DVD or USB. The easiest way to do this is probably using the Microsoft USB/DVD Download Tool from here: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool If you're using a USB stick for the installation you'll also need the boosect.exe tool. This is used to make the stick bootable. You can find bootsect on your original Vista or Windows 7 installation DVD. Simply copy it to the Windows7 USB/DVD Download Tool install folder (C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apps\Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool). Run the Windows7 USB/DVD Download Tool, point it at your downloaded ISO and USB stick or DVD burner then wait for the process to complete. Install Windows 8 Plug the USB stick (or insert the DVD) into the computer you’ll be using and start it up. The setup will launch and you’ll be presented with the usual Windows language setup options. Select you preference and click next. Now click the big ‘Install Now’ button. Read and accept the license terms and click Next. Assuming you’ll be doing a clean installation, select the ‘Custom (advanced)’ option. Create a partition for the installation, the 32bit version needs 16GB and the 64bit needs 20GB, so I’d use a minimum of 30-40GB to allow for some head room. As with Windows 7, system partitions will be created automatically. It’ll now take a while to carry out the installation, it’ll reboot a few times as it progresses. When its finished you’ll be asked to accept the licence terms (again), check the ‘I accept…’ box and click Accept. (At this point you’ll notice that this doesn’t look like Windows any more…) You’ll be asked for a computer name, so pick something sensible (or more likely something from Star Wars) and click Next. On the Wireless setup screen (its all very green), pick you’re wireless network, click Connect, enter in your wireless key (assuming you have one – you should have one by the way) and again click Connect. On the next Settings screen you’ll be asked whether you want to Use Express Settings to quickly get going, or customise you options. I chose Custom as I’m a geek. - You’ll be asked if you want to connect to shared resources on your network and share those on this PC, on a home or office network it’s safe to choose Yes, if you are on a public network or a network you do not trust then click No. - The next page asks questions about the security settings such as automatic updates, I would always leave everything switched on and click Next - Windows now asks if you want to help in its development by sending data back to Microsoft. Given that the development team have given us this preview it’s only fair to leave it all switched on and click Next (in my view) - More settings for troubleshooting and IE compatibility, as well as options for sharing information with applications – like sharing your location iPhone style. I left it all on and clicked Next. Now Windows asks for an email address, preferably (I think) the one from a Windows Live ID. This is used to help customise Windows using your content from online services. Enter your email address and click Next. (There is an option not to do this, but I figure its best to experience Win8 as MS intended) You need to now enter a password (or if it wasn’t a Live ID you might be asked to create one – I haven’t checked yet) and set a secret question and answer for account recovery. Your Win8 user account will now be created and you’ll be logged on. Welcome to Windows 8 – looks different doesn’t it!? The installation is very simple, and it was all up and working in under an hour. Not bad for something that’s far from complete. The only problem I found was that the touchscreen on my Lenovo X200 tablet didn’t work until Windows Update had run and downloaded them – again a pretty decent service given this is only a preview. What’s more, all the updates and drivers installed and were activated without a reboot, a very good sign for the future. In a corporate environment, I wonder how the online content will be handled, many organisations might not want users accessing personal content from Windows Live etc. Perhaps it will use the users domain credentials and access SharePoint MySites etc. for content.

Windows 7 on a Macbook Air

Tom Basham — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:06:56 +0000

For the last few days I’ve been running Windows 7 on my Macbook Air to see how well it ran. I bootcamp’d the Air as soon as I got it – I use too many Windows apps to run OS X alone – but usually run through the Parallels virtualisation solution.

For the most part running Win7 full time on the Mac hardware has been a pleasant experience, though not without a few hitches.

Whoever wrote the Windows hardware drivers that Apple ship with bootcamp needs to take a long hard look at themselves. The touchpad drivers in particular are awful. Gone is the easy accuracy you get from either OS X, or any other Windows laptop that matter. Two-finger scrolling is clunky, the detection of two-finger touches is often mis-interpreted as a right-click for some reason.

You also have to remember to take your finger off the touchpad for longer than feels natural when clicking and then moving the curser. If you don’t the driver thinks you’re dragging whatever you clicked, so you end up dragging files/tabs and selecting text you don’t want. I know these things work well in Windows itself because I use a touch enabled Win7 tablet for my work laptop.

Quite how Apple got these things so wrong, or managed to completely ignore all the other touch gestures Win7 supports natively, is anyone’s guess. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that bootcamp allows you to boot Windows natively on the Mac. It’s just such a shame that the shoddy drivers compromise the user experience so badly. Why should such great hardware suffer from such basic problems?

With Apple offering hardware which, in my experience at least, is significantly better than the current PC manufactures, I do wonder if Microsoft might step in to fix the problems themselves in Windows 8. It might sound like an odd thing for them to do, but there are a few reasons why I think it would make sense.

1) Mac users running Windows on their Mac with bootcamp are not experiencing Windows at its best. With such obvious issues Windows is actually frustrating to use even at a basic level, something it’s not on a normal PC.

2) Windows 8 with it’s new touch interface may actually be better suited to Mac’s with their large installed user base of multi-touch touchpads than PC’s – at least at first. MS will want hardware that can make use of the new OS and show it off. With so many existing multi-touch enabled Mac’s in peoples homes I doubt they’ll want that experience to be at the mercy of the driver engineers in Cupertino.

If MS doesn’t step up to the mark, there may be some other options. Touchpad++ is a driver written by Vladmir Plenskiy which aims to provide a better touchpad experience in Windows. He also offers a utility called Powerplan7 which (as well as some power management tools) offer Macbook users a simple tray icon that can enable and disable the WiFi and Bluetooth adapters. Useful stuff.

How the OS X Lion installer works

Tom Basham — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:33:41 +0000

So today is the day Apple went 'back to Mac' and released the latest version of OS X, called Lion. Apple have included some 250 new features this time round so there's plenty of new toys to play with, but something that tweaked my curiosity was the delivery method - Lion is currently only available through the App Store. You click the link, download the three and half gig installer and away you go. Seeing as my background is in desktop deployment I've been interested to see quite how Apple approach the challenge. The reason this is potentially quite tricky is that if you're running an OS, as you are when you download and install Lion, you generally can't then overwrite that same OS to upgrade it. At a basic level that's why you need to reboot OS X and Windows when you do patches and updates, they can't update running files. The way around that limitation is to reboot the computer into a second OS which can then be used to update the first. This isn't particularly new, it how the previous OS upgrades have worked - the OS boots from the CD - and Windows has been using the bespoke WinPE OS to deploy itself for years. What's new with Lion is that there's no CD or USB disk to boot from. Instead the installer carves off 650MB of your hard disk and creates itself a new partition from which it can boot. This new partition isn't visible within Finder, but the diskutil command line utility is able to see (and mount) it. When you install Lion, it's this partition which is booted after the system restart, it then uses the installer file you downloaded to install the shiny new OS. If you look within the new 'Recovery HD' partition you'll find a compressed boot image containing the installation environment and basic system utilities - including Safari. Once Lion is installed this recovery environment can be accessed either by holding down the option key during startup, where 'Recovery HD' is listed as an option, or by holding CMD+R (for recovery). This will then boot the new environment and give you options to reinstall OS X, recover from a Time Machine backup, change a password or even launch Safari to get online help. This is good news as it means you can reinstall Lion if you have a problem without having to go back to Snow Leopard and then download Lion again. Well in most circumstances anyway... I've not tried it but I assume it would try to use the original downloaded media. What happens if that's not there I'm not sure. So there you have it. That's how it works, which I'm quite pleased about as it's pretty much what I was doing 10 years ago with Windows 2000 and a fantastic little tool called Partition Magic Virtual Boot Disks. Those were the days :)

No related posts.

Office 365 for free?

Tom Basham — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:06:35 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been taking a good look at Office 365 and what it has to offer. On the face of it MS’s new toy is pretty compelling, it offered businesses a decent way of moving their basic communications apps – email and messaging – into the cloud whilst still retaining the familiar Office experience for users. For existing organisations that already have an MS platform it would seem like a decent path to follow. But what about new or very small businesses? One of the many good things about Google’s Apps platforms has always been that most of it’s capability is available for free. It’s buried within the apps pages of the Google site, but if you don’t need more than 10 accounts you can sign up for apps for no cost. There are some limitations but you do get Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Sites. You can also set it up to work with your own domain (so no @gmail email addresses) and use those accounts with all the other Google services like Reader or Picasa. The 10 user account limit used to be 50, so it was a pretty viable solution for small businesses or organisations. I’m sure this must have worked out ok for Google as some of those organisations expanded and moved to the full Google Business Suite. I do wonder why MS hasn’t offered a similar deal. With BPOS and Office 365 arriving quite late to the online office party it does have some ground to make up. Google has a proven offering, which is almost the default option if you’re starting a small business. MS does offer a basic 365 product – it’s Plan P – which offers 25 users or less an Exchange mailbox and calendar, Office Web Apps, Lync messaging/conferencing and SharePoint Online for £4/$6 a month. The basic Google Apps and Plan P are pretty much feature comparable for a small business, but why would you choose to pay $6 a month if you didn’t have to? (That said… $6 a month for 365 vs $50 a year for Apps is far closer… but that’s another discussion). If I were MS I’d be tempted to give Plan P away, at least for the same 10 users or less that Google Apps does. By all means charge £4 a month for 10-50 users but have a free option to gain some market penetration amongst very small businesses and the more technically savvy home users. Of course the economics of this might not add up, I’ve not idea how much this low end of the platforms offerings contribute to revenues… but I suspect it’s a very small part as Google kinda has that small market wrapped up at the moment. The only way to change that is ‘free’…

Windows 8 is here

Tom Basham — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:33:59 +0000

At work I have a set of floppy disks in my desk draw, three or four of them are MSDOS 6.22 and the rest are Windows 3.11. It’s been a while since I installed them on anything, but the last time I did a couple of years ago it was enough to demonstrate that a) Windows 3.11 was blindingly fast on a modern PC and b) the user experience wasn’t really all that different from today. Sure Explorer has replaced the old File Manager, and Windows 7’s Aero is whole lot nicer than Program Manager, but you don’t feel completely out of sync, the metaphors are still the same. Windows 8 is looking to change all of that:

It’s quite a change, and one that’s long overdue. Desktop operating systems, whether Windows, OSX or the various flavours of Unix shell all use the same basic metaphors, its incredibly refreshing to see Windows 8 try something new. It’s clearly borrowed much from Windows Phone 7’s UI and it’s Metro design language. As someone who’s IT background is in enterprise desktop deployment and management, what’s most interesting for me is the complete separation of the traditional Windows UI from the new Metro interface. As the video above shows ‘Legacy’ Windows apps (I can barely believe I’m say that given the effort I’ve put into those apps over the years!) launch in what looks like a traditional Win7 Aero interface, but this doesn’t seem to be part of the Windows 8 experience – in fact I’d bet that part of the OS has barely changed from 7. It’s easy to speculate about all of this, but the separation of these user experiences may be more than just visual. Windows 8 will be delivered on both on the x86 platform that PC’s have used for years, and the ARM platform. These are completely different architectures and this would almost certainly introduce application compatibility issues. One way around this however may be some form of virtualisation. This in itself this would be tricky, but perhaps the traditional Windows desktop is able to runs within a virtual machine which is surfaced though the new Win8 interface – much like parallels is able to surface Windows applications within OSX on a Mac. The enterprise IT people among you might also have thought of another interesting idea… what if that traditional desktop could be redirected off to a centralised Virtual Desktop (VDI) infrastructure. Low cost ARM devices all of a sudden look very tempting as thin client devices. No matter how it’s delivered, that old Windows desktop will be a welcome site for enterprise IT departments. Many of organisations are spending a lot of time and money migrating to Windows 7, and by far the hardest part of that is application compatibility. Microsoft would do well to minimise the application compatibility differences in the new OS, if Win8 breaks apps that work in 7 – on x86 at least – then it would be difficult for organisations who have invested in Win7 to adopt Win8. Just look back to Vista. It looks that may not be a problem for Win8, which is a good thing. With MS keen to adopt ARM as a way of competing in the tablet space, where x86’s power consumption destroys battery life, the new interface also gives them some interesting options to make a ‘clean break’ away from their legacy. If they have found a way to run the old interface virtually upon other hardware platforms, that could well spell the end for the old Windows. One of MS’s traditional strengths, the backward compatibility of apps (ok, that’s always true…), has also been a shackle around it’s legs stopping Windows developing into something new. Abstracting the old from the new would allow MS to move Windows on while still retaining its legacy apps. The big assumption there of course is that developers adopt the new interface and development environment. Of course at the moment we don’t really know whether the new Win8 interface is able to present the heavy duty apps that PC’s run day in day out. I guess that Office 15 will be the first real test of this. Will it surface through the new interface in Win8 or revert back to the old Windows. I really hope its the former – the Office apps on WP7 are slick and fast, it would be fantastic to have the full fidelity apps presented though the Metro front end. How long it would take the big third party apps like AutoCAD to follow is another matter of course, but if Win8 upgrades are made easy and cost effective it might happen sooner rather than later. I’m also very pleased to see MS asserting some control over Windows 8’s hardware. Whilst it’s nice to have choice, I’m no longer convinced that the vast PC ecosystem is a positive thing. It’s a volume market so margins are low and its too easy for poor quality hardware and software to slip though. Problematic driver software and the sheer amount of ‘crapware’ that litters new computers does nothing to help the end user in the long run, and is one of the main reasons for the PC’s poor reputation for performance and reliability. If by asserting control MS can improve the quality of the overall end product, I have to say that I’m not all that concerned by a restriction of choice – though I know some manufacturers are crying fowl. In the past I’ve spent too much time dealing with problems caused by crappy hardware and software, and I can still see those same problems today if I talk to the people doing those jobs now. So all in all I’m quite impressed with what MS have shown us today. Added to the other information that’s leaked out Windows 8 it’s looking like a very positive move. The only concern I have it timescales… late 2012 is too late. In my view they need to RTM this in the new year.

Lewis Hamilton at Monaco

Tom Basham — Sun, 29 May 2011 22:33:09 +0000

Today’s Monaco Grand Prix was probably the most enjoyable race from Monte Carlo since Senna and Mansell fought their way to the finish there in ‘92. Usually Monaco is a glamorous setting but a dull race but the 2011 race was a real classic. Perhaps the only disappointment from today was Lewis Hamilton. I’ve been a fan of Lewis since he joined the F1 circus in 2007. I liked the way he took his McLaren by the scruff of the neck and hustled it around the race track whether it wanted to or not. In the first season of his career he did things in an F1 car that no other driver did. He pulled off some fantastic passes like the one at Monza above. Today however I thought he let himself down. Not by the after race comments that will grab the headlines, I can understand the frustration leading to his unwise words. More I thought his driving was reckless and destroyed the races of others who did little deserve being hit by his McLaren. I wonder whether when he looks back at the videos he’ll regret his comments blaming the other drivers. He was never going to get past Massa in the inside of the hairpin, and his attempt on poor Maldonado was ambitious at best. I do hope that Lewis comes to realise that those incidents had more to do with his own driving that theirs. Following his championship win Lewis seemed to be maturing as a driver. He toned down his do-or-die style and whilst he wasn’t perhaps as exciting to watch, it did make him a more consistent driver. Since the middle of last season though he seems to have taken a step backwards. The composure that kept is aggressive driving in check isn’t always present leading to silly mistakes like those today (or Monza and Singapore last year). Lewis is clearly a world class driver, he’s shown a natural talent for racing that lets him haul even a slow car to a competitive position. I don’t think its his driving per se that’s at fault. Attitude and mental state play an equal part in success and I suspect that this is the problem. Looking back at some of the performances below I hope Lewis gets the support he needs to regain his composure as the sport will be all the better with an on form Lewis Hamilton. Silverstone 2006 (GP2)

Lewis and Kimi in the rain at Spa in 2008 Oh… and just because I can, the Senna and Mansell footage from Monaco. Sorry about the Japanese commentary!

Chrome Laptops for $28 a month?

Tom Basham — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:20:38 +0000

Google has been holding it’s I/O conference this week and has been announcing all sorts of wonderful things. One of the more interesting is a plan to sell it’s Chrome OS based laptops to businesses and educational establishments on a monthly subscription basis. Four different laptops from Samsung and Acer will be available for between $28-33 for business and $20-23 for education. This will include the laptop itself, warranty, support and updates for the 3 year term of the contract. Organisations will have access to a management console in which the devices can be configured and managed. So do the maths add up? The devices are available outside of a subscription for between $350 and $499, the subscription will cost the organisation over a $1000 over the 36 month term. That’s quite a premium, and it’s not really clear how much value the support and management capability will add. Most, if not all, organisations would spent more than the $500 mark-up supporting a normal computer over three years, so in that sense it makes sense. However I thought one of the main selling points of Chrome OS, and the Chrome Laptop, was that they weren’t a full OS, so wouldn’t need the sort of support, management and patching that traditional computers all need. If these devices are meant to deliver on that promise then why wouldn’t a business just finance the capital cost cheaply elsewhere and simply buy the devices outright? They’d still have the manufactures warranty, and the beauty of Google's services is that the end-point is disposable as it hosts no data. I suspect there are details yet to come as I think there has to be more value there that we’re not seeing – or I’ve just missed something! :) Either way it’s a highly disruptive move and something that could well change the shape of how IT is provided into businesses.

Office 365 and Skype

Tom Basham — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:56:43 +0000

I've been a bit slow to post about this I know, I've been offline for for the past few days so have only just started reading reactions to Microsoft's $8.5 billion purchase of Skype. The odd thing is that most commentary on the deal seems to be concentrating on video conferencing as the main driver for the deal. Sure, the integration of Skype with Messenger, Xbox and WP7 etc. is good news, it might even be the making of Skype as the de facto standard for web and home video conferencing. For MS it could be one of those 'good enough' solutions that business adopt ahead of the better, but expensive Cisco/Tandberg solutions. But, would MS spend $8.5 Billion for that? Skype has never been particularly profitable, though it does have a significant and loyal user base, something that its rivals in the video conferencing world don't necessarily have. Of course MS itself has a huge number of Messenger users, and can probably use its shareholding in Facebook to encourage further integration with Skype. So in the long term there may well be some significant revenues there, especially if MS can drive wider adoption of Skype's chargeable services. There is however another area of Microsoft that is crying out for some of the services Skype has to offer. Microsoft has invested huge amounts of time and effort in its unified communications tools, in little more than 5 years it has taken the OCS/Lync platform from being a half decent corporate instant messaging tool to a genuine competitor in the corporate telephony market. Whatever you might think of MS, make no mistake Lync is a very good product, if I were Avaya or Cisco I'd be scared of it. With the Office 365 platform Microsoft is taking Lync's core functionality to the cloud and offering organisations Exchange 2010 mailboxes (including voicemail), Lync instant messaging, presence, audio and video conferencing, SharePoint and even a copy of Office 2010 all as a per user per month subscription. The one large gap between 365 and the boxed product is the ability to make voice calls. If you talk to MS about Office 365 they're very keen to point out that voice calling capabilities will be coming later this year, they just never have any details. Talk to some of Microsoft's big telephony partners and the implication is that they will be providing the voice gateways into MS's cloud services. Partly this is because MS doesn't really want to be a telco, with all the additional regulation that entails. It all seems perfectly reasonable, and will probably still happen, but the Skype acquisition gives MS another option - tie the Office 365 platform into Skype's existing telephony services. This would give Office 365 the ability to make voice calls over the internet directly from the Office Communicator client, Outlook, SharePoint or any other app that surfaces presence. With Skype's VoIP network MS can offer those calls at its preferable rates, and potentially offer included minutes in the same way as a mobile operator would. You can even envisage MS providing free end-to-end VoIP calls between 365’s end users computers and a shiny new Windows Phone 7 Skype client. I reckon a combination of Skype and Office 365 could well be a winning combination for Microsoft, it's the missing link in the Office 365 sales pitch. The universal video conferencing stuff is nice and all, but it won't pay the bills. On the other hand Enterprise customers pay good money for their communications services, and with Office 365's subscription model they pay per user per month.

Windows 8 Application Delivery – AppX and App Stores

Tom Basham — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:31:09 +0000

As information about Windows 8 starts to become more common, a few sites are starting to discover details about the new application delivery model Microsoft are adopting called AppX. In a world where applications have become ‘apps’, and app stores look set to become the dominant distribution method for software, MS seem to have targeted AppX as a delivery model that will support as many types of application and distribution models as possible. In it’s structure AppX looks very similar to Silverlight’s XAP format, the distributable file is essentially a zip archive that contains the source media and an XML manifest file that describe:

- The applications identity – it’s publisher, the applications name, version etc.
- The target architecture for the application – the required processor architecture (presumably important for an OS that will soon once again span more than just x86), OS pre-requisites, any application frameworks required (.net, Silverlight etc.)
- Application pre-requisites – other applications which are required on the system, for example if the AppX package contains a plug-in for an application, this section might list the name, publisher and minimum version of the pre-requisite app.
- Required Capabilities – any capabilities which the application will request such as file system or networking. It will be interesting to see whether it will be possible for an app to check for specific system performance through the Windows Experience Index. This would help developers ensure applications always ran on systems capable of running them as designed.
- OS Extensions – such as file type associations
- Tile customization – This an interesting one, as AppX is similar to the formats used in Windows Phone 7 this could be a carry over from there so that the format is reusable, or it could be a hint towards new interfaces within Win8. It covers properties such as logo, name, and colours.
(Info from the excellent I Started Something)

One of the interesting questions that AppX raises is what this new format will mean for business and enterprise customers. Many will currently be investing small fortunes in readying their applications for Windows 7, either in traditional Windows Installer (msi) format or through application virtualisation technologies such as Microsoft’s own AppV. Adding a third format into that mix will, and does complicate matters. It could be that AppX can act as a wrapper for more traditional deployment tools, or it could be an addition – perhaps for surfacing apps though the App Store interface for example. Or it could be that newly developed apps will need to be in that format to make use of Win8’s new features. We also don’t really know whether the format will be limited only to MS’s forthcoming application store or whether it will be more commonly used for traditional download or CD installs. With many large organisations having made big investments in internal application delivery tools such as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), let alone then checking and fixing apps for Vista/Win7 compatibility, it will be interesting to watch how the interaction between the new App Store and these internal systems will develop. If the Apple app store is anything to go by people will want to make use of the tools and utilities on offer even in a business context. Company IT organisations will come under pressure to make these apps available alongside the apps they typically provide. It could be that the Windows app store will have a mechanism to publish existing applications though the App Store interface, or alternatively App Store applications could be made available though internal mechanisms such as SCCM (much like Windows Update apps are now). Personally I would rather be able to surface internal application portfolios through the MS store, perhaps though a ‘My Company Store’ section or something of that nature. I think that’s a neater solution and will make it easier for end users – if you want an app on any Windows systems you happen to use, there’s just one place to go. Even if the App Store interface is then going off an using SCCM (or equivalent) for the actual installation tasks. There are a number of pitfalls to that approach however. Businesses use different purchasing process to consumers – at least for now. People aren’t going to be keen to buy AutoCAD on their own credit card for example! The App Store would therefore need to have some form of approval workflow so people can request an app, their manager can approve the request and some sort of internal billing/purchase mechanism kicked off. It’s all achievable though, even through technology MS already sell and have at their disposal. The AppX format could work well for surfacing these internal apps. If internal SCCM host apps could be wrapped with an AppX manifest to inform the app store how to publish them, there’s no reason why internally packaged apps couldn’t be included.