Real World Computing Advanced Windows

BY JOn HOnEYBaLL
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Real World Computing Advanced Windows
Computing
Practical advice from it consultants
Real World
Advanced Windows Jon honeyball
How good is IE9?

noW thAt exploReR 9 hAs finAlly come out in Adult foRm, jon honeyball finds much to like, but could do With A bit of pRivAcy noW And AgAin
platform, and here are the tools to write some rich, IE6-specific applications. Once IE6 support was dropped from subsequent browser versions, these wretched customers found themselves abandoned up a dank and dreary cul de sac. Of course, IE9 will not run on Windows XP that would be too helpful of the IE team, whose number one priority is to winkle customers away from XP as fast as possible. Customers who dont upgrade arent spending money on new licences, and a powerful lever to pry them away from XP is to ensure that IE9 doesnt work on it. Job done, the team delivered faultlessly, and never mind that other companies Google, Mozilla and Opera have shipped browsers that work just fine on XP. Theres much to like in IE9. At first I liked its clean, minimalist design, but Im an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud when it comes to user interface design, and if there isnt a proper File | Edit | Insert menu bar I start to feel a little twitchy. Doubtless this is just a symptom of advancing age, but I feel that hiding everything useful behind a gear-cog symbol is a little Web 2.0, and it just doesnt feel right. I like the integrated searching within one edit box, even if the default engine is, predictably, Bing. I find the visuals of the edit box alongside the tabs annoying, first because there isnt enough visual distinction between the edit box and a tab, and second because the edit box takes up valuable column width that could be used for more tabs. The alternative would have been to devote one row to the edit box and another to the tabs, but I guess that would have spoilt the stripped-bare look and feel (although it is an option). Under the bonnet, IE9 definitely has a quick browsing engine, but that depends upon your using the right version. You see, there are two: the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions. If you have 32-bit Windows, then youll only get the 32-bit version, of course, but 64-bit Windows comes with both. You might think that sounds sensible, until you realise that the default version is the 32-bit one on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and you have to dig deep to find the 64-bit version on 64-bit Windows.
icrosofts latest web browser release, Internet Explorer 9, has emerged from the shadows after a rather public gestation period. I dont really mind public betas so long as their function is to ensure the quality of the final product, but public betas that exist solely to be part of the marketing ramp tend to be rather unpleasant affairs (especially when the PR people are crowing about how many millions of people have downloaded the damnable thing). When all is said and done, if its good enough to release then bloody well release it; if it isnt then dont inflict it on millions of your most enthusiastic users. Theres no doubting that IE9 is an awful lot better than some of its predecessors, but thats a comparison that doesnt set the bar astronomically high, given that there are low points such as IE6 in the equation. There are still hundreds of businesses that are stuck with Windows XP because they need IE6. Why are they stuck with IE6? Because they were foolish enough to believe Microsoft when it told them that this was a great development
IE9 is a rather bare-bones browser, here showing our new sister site cloudpro.co.uk.
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Contents
Advanced Windows Advanced Office
Jon Honeyball digs deep into Internet Explorer 9s privacy settings
Web Applications
Kevin Partner shares the lessons learnt from the closure of his online business
126 129 132
Open Source Networks
Simon Brock uncovers the pick of the open-source eBook authoring tools
135 138 141
120 123
Online Security Digital Design
Sending bank details by email is a risky practice, warns Davey Winder
Steve Cassidy clears up some commonly held networking myths
Simon Jones examines the future of the Document Foundation and LibreOffice
Tom Arah returns with an examination of Adobes Flash-to-HTML converter
Server Room
Jon Honeyball beomans buggy security software reporting false-positives
Why has this happened? Well, theres a perfectly sensible excuse by focusing on the 32-bit version, the IE9 team was able to make it the best one possible, with the 64-bit version coming second. I could just about handle this grimly realistic attitude, were it not for a couple of key points. First, 64-bit Windows 7 is the predominant version thats shipping today, if the laptops that I see being bought and deployed are anything to go by; and second, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 has the old JavaScript engine in it, which is far slower than the 32-bit version, so Microsoft prefers to hide it from public view. I can understand the pragmatism of this decision, but it still grates. We need to move over to 64-bit across the board, and well only have a strong 64-bit experience if people push the platform hard in a fully 64-bit way. I accept that there are few web pages that require 2GB of RAM, but if the reality is that 64-bit IE9 is to be left as the runt of the litter, then Microsoft shouldnt install it by default. Make it an optional download or installer, and make it clear that it isnt as good/fast/optimised/tested as the 32-bit version. Call it a developer 64-bit pre-release version of IE9 or whatever, but sticking it on every 64-bit machine and then hiding it away just irritates me enormously.
Privacy issues
Id quite like IE9 to offer the InPrivate browsing facility as a default option. With InPrivate you can set the browser so that it records nothing about your browsing session: no history, no cache of files, no record of clicks, no cookies and so forth. You cant make this the default mode (at least, not from the browser UI), which is rather disappointing. Ill have to have a poke around the Group Policy tools to see if I can force it from there. You might wonder why Id like this mode turned on by default? Well, I have a particular hatred of the way some sites insist on tracking what Im doing, and an even bigger hatred of the way that advertising engines use cookies to target me. Using InPrivate browsing mode as the default would automatically ensure that this doesnt happen, but Microsoft wont allow it. That takes me onto the subject of Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs), a new technology in IE9 that allows you to control the way that third-party websites track what youre doing. If you go to Contoso.com and look at some items, it might be that advertising.com links are embedded within the Contoso.com website, and advertising.com stores cookies on your machine logging what you were browsing. Now move over to happyclappy.com, which is an entirely different site, but also uses advertising.com advert management those advertising.com links from happyclappy. com can see what youve been looking at while on other sites that use its engine, and so can present you with targeted
The developer and debug facilities in IE9 are the high point of the browser.
jON HONEyBAll Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ jonhoneyball
suggestions and adverts. Naturally, the advertising industry thinks this is a really cool, whizzo feature thats a benefit to all of us (but especially the advertising industry, because a targeted advert can attract a higher click-through price than an anonymous item). Advertising people really want this sort of behavioural analysis to work in their favour, and naturally claim that its for our good too, because well no longer be bothered by pesky adverts that arent relevant to our areas of interest. Whats more, we wont see the same advert several times over, because they know what weve seen already. If all this sounds like a desperate attempt to justify a borderlineimmoral business model, then you could possibly be right. The problem here is that no user has been asked whether they want to sign up for this sort of tracking it just happens whether you want it or not hence the big interest in expelling these cookies and wresting back control from the advertising industry. TPLs are a way of doing just that, so at first glance theyre clearly a good thing, but dear reader youd be quite correct if you guessed that theres a big however lurking around the corner. To explain this downside, lets look at how TPLs work. Each one is a simple text file, which you can view and edit using any text editor you like. A TPL is usually hosted on a web server, and the page its referenced from will usually have a button that fires off some JavaScript to install and activate the TPL into
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your E9 installation. Within the TPL is an instruction that says where the TPL came from and how long its valid for, and when this times out, IE9 automatically goes and retrieves an updated copy. Now, on to the body of the TPL. You might expect that a TPL is basically an exclusion list of third-party domain names that should be blocked whenever you visit a primary site. In other words, when I visit Contoso.com, I want the third-party site items to be disabled if one of those deny items is analytics.microsoft.com for example, I want that blocked. However, when I go to analytics.microsoft.com itself, the blocking shouldnt happen because analytics.microsoft.com is now the primary site for the page. Clearly, a well-designed blocking list will help by nuking all references to advertising, tracking and analysis sites, and will help keep my browsing private to me.
ie9
Another great debugging feature in IE9 enables you to swap between various rendering engines. Even better, you can see how well a page would look in IE7, IE8, IE9 or IE9 Compatibility View.
allow and deny

However, theres a problem here. In the hierarchy of permissions that you can apply in a TPL, allow beats deny. When I read this in Microsofts documentation, I confess that I did a double-take. Since when does allow ever trump deny? The whole principle of security rests on a clear understanding that no matter how many things you allow, a single deny is enough to prevent access to them. But no, in IE9 TPLs, allow beats deny, so if you have a deny of analytics. microsoft.com in one TPL and an allow of Microsoft.com elsewhere, the allow will win. On the Microsoft site that deals with IE9 and TPLs, there are five TPL download links. You can, of course, download multiple TPLs, and IE9 concatenates them together, on the basis that you might choose two TPLs from two trusted sources. Now take a look at the TPL from TRUSTe, which is linked from the Microsoft site. This appears to be an organisation that certifies advertising organisations as being well-behaved, which is why its TPL has a very large number of allows within it. But combine this TRUSTe TPL with a blocking one, and because allow beats deny, you may well find more personal tracking happening than youre happy with. Im not at all happy with the way that IE9 handles TPLs. The UI is basic, and certainly doesnt give enough explanation to the user about whats going on. Suggesting that several TPLs might be a good thing isnt helpful either, because there will be the obvious temptation to believe that if three are good, then ten are better. This might carry some weight if this was a deny-only feature, but when the implementation puts allow ahead of deny, multiple TPLs could be highly counterproductive. Frankly, Id prefer a simple pair of checkboxes in the IE9 user interface, called enable deny and enable allow, along with a pair of radio buttons called deny beats allow and allow beats deny. Then it would be clear whats going to happen. Its unreasonable to expect users to go digging through the TPL files to work out whats happening, and even more unreasonable to imply that several TPLs might be a good idea when one can override all the others. This goes to the heart of the question: Who do you trust, and why?
The problem is that users want simple solutions they can set and forget. This is, after all, 2011. Unfortunately, few people appear to have clean hands in this area. Microsoft itself recently tweeted that at Microsoft today we do 3B+ in ad revenue. It is the most rapidly growing part of our business. Is it any surprise, then, that Microsofts implementation of TPLs puts allow before deny, or that one of its linked lists puts a blanket allow on Microsoft.com? After all, you wouldnt want to jeopardise a $3bn per year revenue stream, would you? Hearing this $3bn claim left a sour taste in my mouth with regard to the whole TPL issue in IE9. To finish on a somewhat more upbeat mood, there are some useful tools in IE9 that are worth checking out. I particularly like the F12 Developer Tools, which you can find under the Gear menu. Another window opens up at the bottom of the browser and immediately I feel at home yes, theres a traditional menu bar! Now try clicking on the Network tab, hit the Start Capturing button, then visit a few websites. Everything that loads gets detailed, including a superb graphical view of how long each item took to load. You can click through each item in turn and it will even display what the content was. This is a big step forward for web browser debugging, and for helping users who care about this to see whats loading on the page.
font rendering
Just a quickie to end on this month. The intersection of art and science, or analog and digital, arguably reaches its pinnacle with typography. This much-overlooked topic is crucially important to what we see onscreen, and to how things print. Today, its trivially easy to choose a font and type style, but in the past, before the days of TrueType from Microsoft and Adobe Type Manager, we had to build all those screen and printer fonts by hand. Installing them as soft fonts into a laser printer was like an exercise in brain surgery. Tucked away in a dusty corner of a building at Redmond is the Microsoft Typography department, whose work is rarely discussed, but heres something I found out: Office 2010 (and 2011 for Mac) supports much enhanced typography if you know where to look. Try the new Gabriola font, and dive into the advanced typography facilities in Word | Font | Advanced | Ligatures and Stylistic Sets. Check out the document at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/201aw1 and the excellent video at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/201aw2. If you want the best control, look at Microsoft Publisher 2010, which offers live previews of the stylistic sets. I once rather stupidly used Publisher to make a website the output was hilariously horrible and Ive been put off it ever since. The 2010 edition raises the typographical stakes, and this is to be applauded. Ive always loved typography the merging of vector splines with the fine art of best placing text by eye, and introducing both into the digital world of rendering and printing. When next I visit Microsoft, I want to track down this team, whose work is sorely undervalued by being reduced to a tickbox on the ninth page of the features list for Word. They deserve better than this. Take a look at Gabriola and these other high-end fonts that Microsoft has built or commissioned, and take the opportunity to look at typography with fresh eyes.
Enhanced typography, including Stylistic Sets, is present in Office 2010 and 2011.
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Computing
Real World
Advanced Windows Jon Honeyball
Stopping the rot

once tHe Rot sets into WindoWs, it cAn be impossible to cleAR. Jon Honeyball tHougHt WindoWs 7 64-bit WAs diffeRent HoW WRong He WAs
hate it when things dont work properly; friends will attest that Im like a bear with a sore head when confronted with a glitchy computer. Worse still, as I advance in years I find myself less willing to nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure (to quote from Alien). I have to be sure that Ive explored every avenue to fix the damn thing before Ill give up, which results in a worse temper, more grey hair and the consumption jOn HOneYBALL of a large gin and tonic. Twenty years ago, I saw it as a Computer journalist and consultant challenge: by trying to dig through whatever had befallen specialising in both Windows I learned a huge amount about its configuration, client/server and systems settings and so forth. Today, its just a bore. Our office automation operating systems should no longer implode. applications. email Windows has a poor reputation for being something that jhoneyball@woodley requires six-monthly reinstalls because it rots; in other words, side.co.uk or read his chronic problems accumulate and make the system behave blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ less solidly. Admittedly, much of this rot is self-inflicted. A lot of jonhoneyball Windows applications, particularly device drivers, arent well written. Add a pile of dodgy apps and a smattering of drivers to a clean Windows installation, and it isnt difficult to see how things start to go wrong. Whether thats Microsofts fault isnt really the point. Windows 7, however, appears to be more robust in the face of this six months rot, and this is especially true of Windows 7 64-bit, which requires the use of 64-bit drivers. This has helped to weed out the dodgy driver vendors, which has effectively minimised the rot. It was therefore especially galling to discover that a six-month-old laptop of mine, running Windows 7 64-bit, had fallen off a cliff in terms of performance and stability. This device is unknown but apparently working It happens to be a Dell, but Im not properly. No, it doesnt make sense to me either.
Inserting a USB drive into a laptop may be a simple operation, but if Windows wont recognise the device it can be a nightmare to fix.
convinced this is part of the problem since Dell has a pretty good reputation for providing up-to-date drivers on its website, although it does force you to download each one, piece by piece, in a ritual not unlike choosing individual pieces of sushi at a restaurant. That takes hours, and you dont feel particularly full afterwards. The problem first reared its head when the laptop stopped recognising USB memory sticks. I try to keep a minimum number of machines attached to my main network in the office, simply to keep the network browsing performance under control, and if I want to transfer a few files to a laptop then using a USB stick is just as quick. However, this laptop a Studio XPS suddenly decided not to play ball. It didnt matter which USB stick I used; none of them registered with the operating system. I could hear that familiar dum dim sound as plug-and-play found the device, but nothing was mounted as a file system. Unfortunately, pressure of work got in the way at that point and I didnt have time to follow up the problem for some weeks.
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Contents
When a trip to the pub doesnt solve a problem, you know youre in trouble
Web Applications
What happens when a cloud-hosted website is hit by a DDoS attack?
126 129 132
Find simple ways to write apps across multiple platforms
135 138 141
120 123
Online Security
Securing thumb drives isnt rocket science, says Davey Winder
Why cloud computing isnt ready to take over the world just yet
The spawn of the devil returns to torment Simon Jones
Mobile & Wireless
Paul Ockenden hunts for the ideal satellite phone and Wi-Fi router
Server Room
Misleading language in sales pitches has brought out the cynic in us
When the moment to investigate arrived I dived into Device Manager and discovered the Windows equivalent of a multi-car pile-up. It definitely isnt a good thing when you find multiple entries listed as unknown device under other devices. The first thing to do was to see if Windows Update knew about any new drivers, but that didnt help. So I went to the Dell website and downloaded every driver it had for that laptop model. One thing I like about Dells site is that you can enter the unique build number for your device and it should tell you what you need to know. At least, thats the theory; Dell has become lazy with implementing this valuable service and now cheerfully lists drivers that, when you attempt to install them, inform you that this particular hardware is missing. For example, it lists several versions of its Wi-Fi card as being present, despite the fact that my laptop has only one fitted. Its still better than the screw you approach taken by many other vendors, which insist that you waste whole lifetimes trying to dig up the right drivers from their opaque websites. After installing every driver I could find from Dell (with a few of them falling over) and popping in a BIOS update, the problem still hadnt shifted so I moved to Windows Fix it, which promises to solve common problems with the OS. This did nothing, so I dived into the Event log. That wasnt much help either. The next step was to fire up the Computer Management tool under Control Panel | Administrative Tools, and inside that I chose the Disk Management tool. My 64GB USB stick was present and correct, but it had no drive letter. I tried right-clicking on it and choosing Change Drive Letters and Paths, on the grounds that if Windows didnt think there was a drive letter, it would need to be given one. However, on choosing this option Windows threw up an error message: The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer. None of which was relevant in this particular case. It was time to get down and dirty. You may not have noticed them, but there are several ways of viewing hardware devices in Device Manager. It can be useful to go into the View menu and select Devices by connection rather than the default of Devices by type, which immediately revealed one part of my problem. It showed an Intel ICH9 Family USB Universal Host Controller with a child item of Generic USB hub, connected to which were three devices: a Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth mini-card and two USB human interface devices (HIDs). The first of these USB HIDs had one unknown device attached, while
What can you do when presented with a list of unknown devices such as this?
Microsoft Fix it wasnt much help: the problem was not fixed, yet it still succeeded? HAL, open the pod bay doors, please!
the other had two. Then, under consumer IR devices, was a child called Microsoft eHome infrared transceiver, which had a total of nine unknown device entries. Further digging revealed that my problem was definitely to do with HIDs. The Windows HID system is designed to allow a range of devices to be connected to control applications, and if I remember rightly it first came about to support much-needed peripheral devices for disabled users. Since then it appears to have grown to cover all sorts of devices, most notably remote controls, hence the reference to the eHome infrared transceiver, which allows you to use a handheld remote control unit. Unfortunately, clicking on each device didnt really help, as their drivers told me that one item was an HID_DEVICE_SYSTEM_ MOUSE, another was an HID_DEVICE_SYSTEM_CONSUMER (whatever that is) and so on and so forth. Some had VID_ and PID_ entries, but that didnt help much either. It was at this point that I came to a grinding halt: I could disable the whole HID device tree, which would remove the duff entries, but that wasnt solving the problem, merely sweeping it under the virtual carpet. My USB sticks still werent working, almost certainly because something in this USB driver stack was causing the devices to fail to initialise or mount properly. There was only one thing left to do: go to the pub. I tucked the laptop under my arm and set off for my local establishment, where I met up with friends. We were having an evening imbibing session loosely related to the #ITTU (IT Twitter Users) meetings we hold in London, but since this was Cambridgeshire we called it ITTU6SP1, a service pack refreshing session to be applied to the last major event in
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London. I handed my laptop around and asked for thoughts. Most people suggested all the things Id tried already, until @pjbryant came up with another USB stick to try. It worked immediately and mounted with no problems. Clearly something odd was afoot, so we dived into the Registry and looked at the area where Windows caches information about recently inserted USB devices (which it does to remember which drive letters were assigned to which sticks). Even I was surprised by the enormously long list of devices that had been inserted into this laptop over its short lifetime. The obvious thing to do was delete some of these entries and see whether flushing out all this old data would allow Windows to relearn my own drives letters. But Windows wouldnt let us delete the existing entries, and we drowned our disappointment in ale. The next morning, after my head had cleared, I tackled the problem yet again, and a web search turned up a tool called USBDeview at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/200advwin. This little utility showed me all the devices that were attached, or ever had been attached probably even those I might have thought about attaching to my Dell laptop. Wow, what a tool! I could sort the results by device type, so I chose all the mass storage items and then hit the uninstall button. Kapow! They were all gone from the system. To make this work, you have to right-click on the app icon and choose Run As Administrator. Having cleaned out all this old garbage and rebooted the machine a few times just to be sure nothing. The USB sticks still wouldnt work on the Dell. There truly is a ghost in the machine. What to do? Well, there really are no more choices. Ive tried everything from deleting the devices to forcing a plug-and-play rescan, and from reinstalling everything on Dells website to running Microsofts diagnostics. Ive come to the end of the road. This machine needs to be flattened and completely reinstalled. That this could happen after less than a year of on-and-off usage is somewhat disappointing. Despite wasting days on this problem and imbibing several rounds of beers to the detriment of my health, I cant make this damn machine work properly and Ive run out of things to try. I like to think that Im not exactly clueless at such things and that there isnt something obvious staring me in the face with a large Doh! sign writ large. Maybe it was asking too much for Windows 7 64-bit to be made completely bombproof, but the inescapable conclusion is that it isnt. Its still far too easy to break, and when things do go wrong the resources available to fix them arent up to the job. Later I will take a Norton Ghost image of the machines configuration for posterity and then nuke it from orbit, as Ripley would have advised. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.
The USBDeview utility showed me all the devices that were attached, or ever had been attached, to my Dell laptop
but on your desktop Windows can boot straight from a VHD held on the local hard disk, and you can choose this option from the front-end menu. There are many uses for this facility. My PowerShell wizard friend, Thomas Lee, uses it to boot Windows Server on his laptop, for example. The laptop normally boots into Windows 7, but when hes training he can boot Windows Server from a VHD. And if I remember correctly, this VHD OS image is actually Windows Server with Hyper-V, so he can then boot more servers from their own VHDs, held within the big daddy VHD itself, so his laptop switches from running a single Windows 7 desktop to an entire farm of virtualised servers. Setting up Windows to do this isnt difficult, but it does require a little forward planning. First you have to be using the right version of Windows, as only Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate can accomplish this trick; Microsoft has decided it should be beyond the capabilities of mere Professional or before. Boot from the install CD and, when it gets to Install Now, click on Repair Your Computer. Then select Command Prompt, which will open a command prompt window in which you can run diskpart and use the create syntax to create a new virtual disk. For example:
create vdisk file="C:\mywin7.vhd" type=expandable maximum=40000
makes an expandable VHD with 40GB of space. Now you need to choose this virtual disk and attach it to the file system:
select vdisk file="c:\mywin7.vhd"
followed by:
attach vdisk
Booting from VHD

The hassles Ive been having with this machine led me to wonder about ways to keep it running well in the future. Obviously, I could use Norton Ghost to take a snapshot image of a whole working machine configuration so that I could restore it in the event of future problems. This works well and can be very fast. However, theres another, more intriguing, way to solve this puzzle thats well worth considering. Its possible to set up Windows to boot from a VHD file. A VHD file is a virtual hard disk, and is essentially a big file that contains an entire file system. VHDs are used by Microsofts Hyper-V hypervisor, which basically mounts the VHD as a volume and then boots the OS thats held within it. Hyper-Vs magic allows you to do this with multiple VHDs at the same time which is how it performs its virtualisation magic
slimline
If I never use the base OS for anything other than booting from and managing VHDs, it can remain quite slimline and immune from rotting influences.
Now choose Exit and go back to the main setup window. Ensure that youve chosen the right disk, and then simply install Windows 7 on to it. Once all this is done, Windows will automatically modify the boot menu to allow you to choose to boot from either the main Windows 7 installation on the hard disk or the one you just set up in the VHD. Maybe you have an existing VHD you want to use? Maybe youve set up an OS under Hyper-V on a server, and would like to transfer that to your laptop to run it natively? All this is entirely possible: you just need to copy the VHD file to your laptops hard disk, then wire up the Windows boot menu, which isnt difficult but requires a little care. Search for BCDEDIT, which youll need to run as administrator. You then need to copy the existing entry and modify it so that it points to your chosen VHD file. Once youve done this, what was previously a single entry of Windows Boot Manager followed by one of Windows Boot Loader will now become one Windows Boot Manager and two Windows Boot Loader sections. Why exactly am I pondering doing this? Well, I have some spare Windows licences, so it would be interesting to run my new laptop installation from a VHD rather than from the base OS install. By doing that I can just boot back to the base OS install and xcopy the VHD file to make backups or restores, or keep a set of history changes over time. System recovery becomes easy: just xcopy the VHD over and reboot. Im coming to like this idea a lot, so I think my vape from orbit will include a VHD this time around.
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Computing
Real World
The tipping point?

Still Reeling fRom A monumentAl ceS 2011, Jon Honeyball WondeRS if tHe induStRy cAn cAll time on tHe micRoSoft eRA
y mind is still spinning from the experience of CES in January. I should be looking forward to the forthcoming Microsoft Management summit and Computex in Taipei, but the issues raised at Las Vegas still intrigue me and will have a profound impact over the next few years. Consider first the dysfunctional response by all major vendors to the arrival of the iPad. Rival hardware is mostly half-baked and the OS solutions via Windows 7 and Android leave much to be desired. Curated app stores are only just starting up in the Android world, or not there at all yet in the Windows world. Things will certainly get better: Android 3 will hopefully bring the tablet platform into focus; and Windows 8 is promised to have much better touch capabilities, if youre prepared to wait. Next, there was Microsofts announcement of its intention to move Windows onto the ARM platform, which raises more questions than it answers. For example, since apps written for Intel wont run on ARM, and vice versa, does this mean that well move towards a multiplatform world in Windows? How well did that work the last time it was tried with NT and Windows Server for DEC Alpha? Or is Microsoft going to bite the bullet and deliver
JON HONEyBALL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ jonhoneyball
fat binary applications, in which both executables are baked into a single file? In that case, will it fall foul of any patents held by Apple, whose NeXTStep OS was doing that in the late 1980s? Or will ARM-based Windows only allow apps to be installed from the forthcoming app store? If so, will Microsoft finally grasp the nettle by ensuring that future Windows will only allow the installation and execution of digitally signed code, a step that would rid us of much, perhaps most of the malware that afflicts us today? Or will it fall back into allowing any old junk from any dodgy source to install and run? Whats clear is that the world has changed irrevocably, and in the Microsoft ecosystem were talking about a revolution. A decade of complacency has come back and bitten the company on the bottom: its historical model of providing the same OS and apps to a range of third-party hardware vendors may now be in jeopardy. The biggest app store on the net has shipped its ten billionth application, into a sales space that has nothing in common with the PC/Microsoft world. Maybe Microsofts worst fear has finally been realised, and the market has left it behind, in favour of appliances from trusted brands, on which endless choice is no longer a good thing. Perhaps in five years time, CES 2011 will be remembered as the tipping point, the moment when all bets were off. What alarms me is that the response from most hardware and software vendors so far has been too feeble, too chaotic, too much promise and too little delivery. Someone needs to step up to the mark, take risks and deliver an appropriate response to Apple.
super snoop
Will Windows 8s app store mimic Apples, or will Microsoft continue to make the same mistakes?
A few weeks ago, I did a consultancy for a local firm that wanted an outsiders view of how its business was developing. During our conversation, the name SpectorSoft was mentioned, which piqued my interest. This is an extraordinarily powerful piece of software that could be truly dangerous in the wrong hands. It installs onto a PC and then effectively disappears.
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Contents
Will 2011 be the year the Microsoft era officially comes to an end?
Web Applications
Kevin Partner takes Microsofts WebMatrix development tool for a spin
126 129 132
Backing up with open source solutions isnt hard to do, promises Simon Brock
135 138 141
120 123
Online Security
Why cosmetics retailer Lush was left red-faced by hackers
Implementing IPv6 could throw everyones networks off kilter
Restricted features in standalone versions of Outlook annoy Simon Jones
Mobile & Wireless
Paul Ockenden tries to get the most out of Bluetooth in his car
Server Room
How F1 is driving innovation on server farms with Dell
It then records all keystrokes and mouse clicks, grabs an image of the desktop every few seconds, and can watch files being moved on and off the PC. Want to know exactly what has happened on that PC? Fire up SpectorSoft using its hot-key combination, log in and take a look. Clearly, this will capture everything that goes on within the PC, whose user is totally unaware of the snooping. If I ran an internet caf, for example, it would be tempting to run it to ensure that nothing untoward went on. But what happens when a user logs into their banking system, or makes an online purchase? The keylogger keeps all their keystrokes, IDs, passwords and so forth, and it would be impossible to defend against such blatant spying. This particular firm uses SpectorSoft in the area of remote management: it works with local schools by remote connecting into their networks, and proving that nothing malicious was done while there is vitally important to the credibility of the firm. The same consideration might apply on the trading floor of a bank, for example, or any other sort of remote management terminal. Those are the upsides, and the software performs this role brilliantly. The downside is that it would be terrifying in the wrong hands, so its fortunate that various antivirus software packages can spot and identify it as a professional keylogger tool (it wouldnt be that hard to exclude the necessary files from AV scanning, though). I believe that such capabilities should be available in a home PC. For parents trying to manage the use of their PC by their children, it can be like pushing water uphill with a rake. There are some great tools available to help, of course the built-in parental control tools in Windows 7, for example but it should be possible for the OS to provide this level of capability baked into the product. It could then be controlled and managed through Active Directory profiles, for example, or through a properly designed parental control account. Since this isnt likely to happen any time soon, SpectorSoft might be the tool you need. But like any such tool, use it wisely.
Spector Pro records everything that happens on your computer, and does so invisibly in the background.
one Windows to drive them all

Ive been looking at a number of multifunction devices recently, wondering whether you use them via their USB port or via an Ethernet interface. Theres much to be said for using a network interface of course, since it makes it easy to share the device with other people without worrying about keeping a host computer running to support the necessary print queue. Thats fine, and usually works well, but what about the scanner software? In years gone by, you were forced to use the one provided by the manufacturer, which was often terrible, but Windows Vista and Windows 7 have decent scanning tools built in. In my ongoing desire to declutter my life, I decided to see
just how far I could get using the basic Windows 7 tool. Given the dodginess of much of the vendor-supplied software, it was no real hardship anyway. I quite like the effort made by Epson, and Canons isnt too bad, but HP has extruded some truly nasty substances onto our desktops in the name of an integrated HP experience. When will vendors realise that locking users into some overblown monstrosity, whose UI looks like it was designed by a blind goat, doesnt engender love and affection? The reality, though, is that you often have to dive into the vendors software to get the best from a device. For example, I cant find any way to get my scanner to work over a Wi-Fi connection using the standard Windows 7 software printing seems to be no problem, but scanning over a wireless network seems beyond the standard Microsoft offering. Performing OCR processing on a scan also tends to not be available unless you use the vendors supplied software. It isnt that unusual for the OCR engine to be licensed into the OEM software itself. As an aside: if you need quality OCR then purchasing a full copy of the relevant program is often worth its weight in gold. Free OCR is fine, but lets define what we mean by OCR here. Some vendors think that simply extracting the textual content into a TXT file is good enough, while others think that the structure of the document is worth preserving too. The former is useful up to a point, but recreating the structure can become tiresome after the event. Some vendors go the whole hog by OCRing the scan into a PDF, complete with layout. By preference, Ill stick to the Windows 7 tools, because I prefer to keep my scanner next to my computer, and sending
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Windows applet to remove all this crap. I understand that theyre paid for putting trialware onto their machines, and its entirely possible that this represents their total profit on the sale but nevertheless, it would be quite nice if users could strip back the machine to the essentials without risking screwing things up. Badly labelled Blu-ray drivers and codecs feature in my hate list for things that arent obvious in the Remove Programs dialog box.
Whats in a colour?
The monitor is cheap as chips of course, connected via a VGA connector. But for the money, it offers very decent performance. To really stretch its legs, I decided to try to colour calibrate it, using my lab X-Rite i1Pro calibrated spectrophotometer. This is basically a reference-quality tool for measuring light, colour, reflection and so forth, and it comes in a kit costing thousands of pounds, together with all the mounts and adapters for putting the device onto screens, measuring paper or cloth, or even how a projector is working. While Im a big fan of the professional X-Rite calibrator hardware, its software is shaky (to put it politely). Finding Windows 7 64-bit support is difficult and the firm doesnt update its software fast enough for my liking so I was pleased to hear about LaCies Blue Eye Pro software. LaCie usually sells this software along with a fairly base-level X-Rite calibrator, but it also works with the i1Pro. Fire it up, run the appropriate device white-level calibration, then mount the calibrator onto the front of the screen. You can either run a test process that tells you how far out your screen is, or do a full calibration run, which generates the appropriate ICC profile file. This is then loaded into the screen driver, and
scanning tasks from the device to a remote computer around the house is a little like entrusting your important letters to the Post Office youre not sure when or if theyll arrive (or even at the right post box). Network scanning in the home at the moment is pretty much like this, and it really shouldnt be so.
taking the trash out

I decided to buy a new desktop for my lab at the beginning of 2011. My previous hack desktop is a rather tired HP, the first generation of touchscreen, all-in-one desktops. Its done sterling service and is far from overwhelmed by current applications, but it doesnt have much real grunt, trundling along with an AMD Turion 64 X2 processor at a rather humble 1.6GHz, although there is 4GB of RAM in there. Despite being handed almost unspeakable abuse over the years, it still works, but it has problems with Windows 7 64-bit specifically, the lack of any sort of drivers to control its touchscreen, or to figure out how to use the special hot keys to adjust the screen brightness. Im sure I could dig around and install some Windows Vista 32-bit items, but I have no idea whether theyd work. Plus, such a move goes against my fundamental principle that an operating system should be kept as clean as possible. So it was time to retire the old dear, hence my purchase. This time, I decided to go with Dell, and dived into its online desktop configuration tool. I ended up with a Dell XPS 8300, fitted with a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core processor. With a smattering of CPU tweakery, this can appear as an eight-core device, if you want to use Hyper-Threading. Other bits and pieces include a 1GB RAM graphics card from ATI, a few USB 3 ports, a healthy 16GB of main RAM and 2TB of disk space. Oh, and a 24in widescreen monitor, all for less than 1,500 exc VAT. My minds eye slipped back to the early 1990s, when I had a state-of-the-art graphics card the Hercules TIGA unit which could manage an eye-popping 1,024 x 768 pixels on a co-processor unit, and came with a mind-boggling 1MB of RAM (with 2MB optional for offloaded processing). My only regret was spending 69 on Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student edition, which turns out to be a singlemachine licence, whereas a similar amount could have bought me a three-machine licence from a high-street shop. Before you ask, I deliberately needed Home and Student for this test system, but my real work machines all run the full-fat Professional edition. Ive taken a full backup of the unit and am now setting about removing all the trashware thats installed by default. No, I dont want a trial of McAfee, thank you, nor do I want your media button bar splattered across my desktop. A Bing bar is something that comes from a sweet shop and is covered in chocolate, so that can go too. I really wish that vendors could be forced to supply a take me back to basic
Epsons scanning software isnt too bad, but most manufacturers bundle horrific, overblown software that does little more than annoy.
A Bing bar is something that comes from a sweet shop, so it can safely be uninstalled from my new PC
your graphics card and screen combination will be as good as that hardware is ever going to manage. The software outputs a PDF file showing all the measurement data, so you can fiddle to your hearts content. Overall, this is a great piece of software, which seems to be regularly updated. It works fine with a range of spectrophotometric analysers, and the LaCie bundle costs only a few hundred pounds. If youre serious about colour then you really need to have something like this. Of course, nothing can beat the performance of a top-end professional-grade screen, and my favourite item in this category is the 30in Eizo model. You can tell these boxes are on a different plane of performance because their calibration capabilities let you adjust the values stored on the screen itself, rather than just fiddling with the values in the Windows driver on the graphics card. This is a whole different level of properformance, and it comes with a price tag to match, but I see that Eizo is now producing monitors that have calibrator devices built into the screen itself. You can even set it up to calibrate itself at 3am daily if you wish. Just remember that out of the box monitors are often far from correct in their colour reproduction, and that you need the tools to help establish a trustworthy baseline. If youre carrying out only basic photo editing tasks, you might well decide that this isnt necessary for your work, but if youre tempted to rebalance the colour of a photo, ask yourself the question: what colour is it really?
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Computing
Real World
Back to the drawing board

As micRosoft fAils to impRess Him WitH its tAblet offeRing, jon honeyball WondeRs if A gRound-up Redesign of WindoWs foR toucH input is tHe solution
gestures are defined tap and double-tap, panning with inertia, selection/drag, press and tap with second finger, zoom, rotate, two-finger tap, press-and-hold, and flicks. This set of gestures certainly represents a useful set of core capabilities, but they all require two fingers at most. Its hard to say why Microsoft has done it this way. It would be easy just to trot out the hackneyed opinion that this is a typical half-baked Microsoft solution, but I suspect that isnt the case this time. I think it genuinely believes that two fingers are enough and that more than two is too confusing (just like Apple once thought about one versus two mouse buttons). Therefore, its interesting to discover that some Windows 7 devices are shipping with support for more than two-finger gestures. Although I dont have one to hand, a good friend tells me that his Dell Latitude XT2 has support for four-finger gestures. Some digging showed that this machine ships with multitouch drivers from a company called N-trig (www.n-trig. com), which specialises in multi-finger gesturing for Windows. The website lists a small number of computers for which the firm has written true multitouch drivers, both for Windows 7 64-bit and 32-bit, as well as Vista and XP. Apparently, the machine shipped with these N-trig drivers from new, and there have been several updates to the driver set since then, so this is a company worth looking at if your hardware is supported. However, wouldnt it be nice if Microsoft were to lead in gesture interfaces, rather than trail behind with an adequate but disappointing solution? Im told that the underlying OS supports up to ten fingers, but if the majority of the current peripheral hardware doesnt, then whos going to write truly multi-finger applications any time soon?
ve been looking at a number of touch-enabled Windows 7 computers recently, both desktop machines and tablets, and Ill have to confess that Im finding the whole touch experience in Windows 7 worryingly underwhelming. The almost inescapable conclusion is that Windows 7, despite its strengths and capabilities, falls a long way short of being a credible touch platform. There are a number of reasons for this. First, lets start with the multitouch issue. You might not realise this, but most Windows 7 touch-enabled devices actually only work with one or two simultaneous touch inputs: they cant handle three or four fingers at the same time. To check this, go into the Windows System Information page, where it will tell you that Windows 7 is touch enabled, and how many simultaneous finger touches it can manage. It seems that two is enough for most of Microsofts current requirements, as evidenced by this Microsoft posting, at www. pcpro.co.uk/links/198windows. You can see that nine touch
JON HONEYBALL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ jonhoneyball
Precision required
Lets move on to a more important limitation of Windows 7 with regard to touch, especially for tablets but also for desktop machines. The truth is that Windows has always been designed
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Contents
Is Windows 7 a credible touch platform? Jon Honeyball doesnt think so
Web Applications
Is Silverlight on its way out? Mark Newton looks into the rumours
126 129 132
Ian Wrigley explains how to stay secure when in a Wi-Fi hotspot
135 138 141
120 123
Online Security
RoboForm for home users, and 2010s highlights in security
Steve Cassidy visits the WorkTech conference at the British Library
The alternatives to the PCX file format, plus hyperlinks in Word and Excel
Mobile & Wireless
Paul Ockenden celebrates Christmas in February, with a bagful of tech goodies
Server Room
A weekend discussing PowerShell, plus tips on stress-testing a website
Caption here please caption here please
to work with a precision input device namely, the mouse. This is, in effect (to use a simplification that will make seasoned Windows programmers cringe), a pointer to one specific pixel on the screen, so that when you click on an object, the OS knows exactly where you clicked. Theres no room for error, no blurring or uncertainty you either clicked on that object or you missed it. Windows has been tuned to this design schema, and the hardware has become better and better over the years just compare the performance of a modern laser tracking mouse to a ten-year-old clunker with a rolling ball. Instead of a mouse pointer, if we now place a finger over that same screen button the fingertip will generate a huge splodge of positional data, and the system software has to work out the most likely centre of this splodge and call that the click point. This isnt a particularly difficult problem in itself the maths isnt too difficult and well within the capabilities of a modern PC to calculate in real-time. The problem is the size of the button itself if its too small, the fingertip will completely cover it, so that the user has no confidence that the button has been correctly pressed. At the very least, the user will be unable to see the button change colour to indicate its change of state. The solution fairly obviously is to make the buttons bigger. In fact, you need to make all of the screen furniture larger, and more finger-friendly. But, at this point, we crash headlong into an issue that has plagued Windows for 20 years. Its screen resolution, in terms of pixels to the inch, has been stuck at 96 pixels per logical inch (lets call it 96ppli) since the earliest days of the VGA (for more on what logical inches actually are, visit www. pcpro.co.uk/links/198windows1. If you want, you can tell Windows to increase the number of pixels per logical inch: a typical value would
You can make things larger on screen, but how many apps will cope properly with this?
Be brave and go for a custom DPI setting. Again, use it at your peril.
be 120, which was used back in the mid-1990s for the IBM 8514/A display, which is why its sometimes known as the 8514A setting. However, your screen has a fixed number of pixels because thats how flat-panel screens are made, so increasing the number of pixels per inch means that the logical system inch gets bigger in other words, youve zoomed everything. This is fine up to a point, as your buttons are bigger and more usable when touched with a finger tip. Text gets bigger, too, so everything can look zoomed-in, which can be useful. The problem is that you still have a dumb button thats simply bigger. Worse still, many applications are never tested at 120ppli, so all sorts of nasty text clipping and cropping may happen when the application attempts to lay out everything in 96ppli, while the OS is trying to force 120ppli. Those with long memories may remember the work done nearly a decade ago to produce 300ppli ultra-high-resolution screens for Windows, and youll notice the lack of such hardware on sale today. Not only was it prohibitively expensive to make such screens and the commensurate graphics cards, but almost every application barfed at a system resolution of 300ppli (it they cant cope with 120ppli, what chance do they have at 300ppli?). Some vendors are trying to get around all these problems by shipping a set of touch-optimised applications that run in their own touch-desktop environment. If you stick to this very limited ecosystem, you can paint, draw, control media and so forth. But as soon as you go back into a standard Windows application, the whole faade collapses. Custom graphical touch-orientated applications simply arent the answer, the solution has to be baked into the OS. If you want an example thats enough to make you cry, just look at the flyout onscreen keyboard Windows 7 supplies whenever it thinks you need to type something. Sure, it can be moved around the screen so it doesnt obscure an application, but theres no baked-in, OS-level intelligence about where to put it, or how to arrange its windows to work most effectively. In the end, you have to conclude that its in the wrong place wherever it sits. So, to the inevitable question how could Microsoft make a really good touch version of Windows? The answer isnt as simple as you might think. It needs a ground-up OS redesign that makes everything within Windows operate in a truly touch-orientated fashion, and then a decision needs to be made about backwards compatibility for existing apps. Do you change the ppli value and hope the app doesnt break? Some vendors are doing this, while others are shying away from even this small step. Could
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we have a composited desktop, where each application can run at its own preferred ppli value? Maybe, and that would allow hot-zooming in and out of applications. Surely this is possible, given the 3D compositing power of the Windows 7 desktop engine, but its probably beyond the capabilities of typical onboard Intel chipset graphics adapters, which tend to writhe on the floor when asked to do anything requiring 3D power. Microsoft announcing an ARM port of Windows 7 at CES in Las Vegas isnt a magic bullet. Simply putting Windows 7 onto ARM will be only a short-term platform fix, but it wont fix the underlying issues, and without determined vision these intractable issues wont get fixed any time soon. If they cant be fixed on a 24in desktop all-in-one PC today, with effectively unlimited processing and graphics power, they certainly wont get fixed inside the tight limitations of a portable tablet PC. Finally, some have suggested that Windows Phone 7 might make a good candidate for a touch desktop and tablet. Well it might, but there are serious issues there too. First, are we really sure that the WP7 user interface will scale up to an 8in tablet? Im far from convinced. Maybe Microsoft should be bold and forget touch for mainstream input and control. Instead, write a simple, clean OS that relies on touch for choices, but uses voice control for any sort of significant input. Microsoft could leverage the extraordinary capability that the Xbox 360 Kinect system has demonstrated and come up with something truly amazing. Microsoft has the brains, the money, and the need to do this. The only question is whether it has the determination to leap beyond the iPad generation.
Dropbox 1.0 is much-improved, but bandwidth control isnt very 3G-savvy.
usb 3
Ive also been playing with some USB 3 devices over the past month, and Im very far from being impressed by those, too. Yes, its a faster bus than USB 2, but that really wouldnt be too hard. USB is old technology at least in its USB 2 version, which goes back a decade. As disks have become faster, the bottleneck shifted from the drive itself to the interface. You might not worry about this on a bus-powered 64GB hard drive thats spinning at 4,200rpm, but it becomes a real problem when trying to get data on and off a 1TB drive, or if your drive is solid state with no moving parts. FireWire solved all these problems, of course power, speed and everything but FireWire 800 is a rare sight on machines these days, as everyone has slipped back into the torpor that is USB 2. With USB 3 and a fast disk, preferably an SSD model like the 128GB bus-powered unit that Iomega recently lent me, you can get superb throughput, but only if you have a USB 3 port into which you can connect it connecting it to a USB 2 socket works but really defeats the point. Unfortunately, there are still very few USB 3 ports fitted to new laptops or desktops these days, although things are improving slowly. So is it worth buying into USB 3 today? Its difficult to get enthusiastic if you have no USB 3 host ports, but if you do, then the move away from USB 2 is like taking off tight boots.
Dropbox now offers control over which folders to sync.
dropbox
My favourite cloud application, Dropbox, has finally come out of beta test and staggered into the world as a release 1.0 version. As you may recall, Dropbox installs onto your desktop machine and monitors a point in your file system, including all its subdirectories. Any files that are created, deleted, changed and so forth are replicated on a secure store in the cloud at Dropboxs datacenter. You get 2GB of
storage for free and can purchase up to 100GB, along with an unlimited undo that lets you reinstate any file you may have deleted. I simply love Dropbox and run it on all of my machines, irrespective of platform. With the new 1.0 release, Dropbox has added some much-needed new capabilities. First, you can choose on a machine-by-machine basis which folders will be synchronised to that machine, so you could decide that your desktop computer will get everything, the machine at home will get everything, but that Windows 7 netbook with limited disk space will get only the most important folders and files. Or you could decide to sync all media files between key media servers, but not onto desktops, and so on. There are still two things remaining on my wishlist. The application still isnt sufficiently connection-aware. It knows when its running on a local area network and takes advantage of this to sync to any other nearby LAN-connected machines running Dropbox on the same account, but it isnt particularly clever if you connect your laptop to the internet via a 3G dial-up modem. This could prove expensive if large files start to sync themselves over a painfully slow and expensive connection without you noticing. Second, while the files are sent over an encrypted link, and Dropbox says that its staff have no easy access to the data held on their servers, Id be happier if I could simply overlay my own encryption certificates into the Dropbox process, thus ensuring that everything that left my machine was encrypted using a key-pair that Dropbox couldnt decrypt however hard it tried. Of course, Id have to take full responsibility for looking after my own keys, but Im sure I can do a better job of this than any third party. How about using the encryption keys generated for encrypted NTFS, or other keys that can be stored in Active Directory? Yes, this would mean that an admirably cross-platform solution such as Dropbox would require key management facilities on nonWindows platforms, but it would certainly ease the minds of those of us who are understandably paranoid about our data being copied into the cloud especially data thats important to us and potentially sensitive. Yes, I could encrypt everything locally and then send these files to the Dropbox local tree and have them synced to the cloud, but thats too much hard work. While it would actually be easy to do on Mac OS X, because of its event-triggered filesystem capabilities, it would be somewhat harder to do under Windows, even on Windows 7.
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Computing
Real World
A litany of failure
As micRosoft pRovokes A stoRm by cAnning dRive extendeR, jon honeyball Reflects on tHe compAnys long list of disAsteRs in tHe stoRAge ARenA
deep, heartfelt sigh is all I can muster in response to the news that Microsofts Windows Home Server (WHS) team has decided to pull the Drive Extender technology from the next release of WHS, due later this year. Apparently its too difficult, it has bugs, it doesnt work under heavy loads, and its best that we dont have it at all if it isnt working properly (a view that has a certain logic to it). The handling of this news has been somewhat catastrophic for the WHS teams credibility. Apparently, we dont actually need Drive Extender. In fact, it seems weve been asking, nay begging, Microsoft to pull it, so the firm is really just doing what we asked. No, really, that might seem a typical piece of Microsoft corporate double-speak to you and me, but its what we want. Everyone laughed in amazement, then got angry and told Microsoft where it could shove all its future WHS products and they said so in public, on the Microsoft forums. Within hours came a second missive from the temple on top of the
Windows Home Server currently lets you add and remove drives without losing data. The next version wont.
mountain. Actually, the work done to redesign Drive Extender from the existing version 1 to the newer, cleverer version 2, has failed. Its buggy, it falls over, it loses your data, and Microsoft cant fix it in time. You still dont want or need it either, do you? Im not entirely surprised that Microsoft dropped the ball on this. Just look at its recent history with storage technologies. WHS version 1 is a lovely thing, based on Server 2003 with all the unnecessary corporate gubbins pulled out. It was designed to run without a screen or keyboard. It fitted nicely into home networks, and offered backup and recovery for desktop PCs. It offered a centralised store for multimedia content and streamed it on the network to any device that could consume it. Part of that multimedia requirement was a storage solution that could just grow with the users collection over time, so Drive Extender was created, which basically faked a file store running on top of existing NTFS disk partitions. And because it wasnt tied to any underlying drive letters, you could add another hard disk and seamlessly grow your store without having to move everything around or reformat the disks. This was ideal for home users with a steadily growing storage requirement: when their disk gets full, just pop in an extra one. Even better, Drive Extender added some extra tweaks that were genuinely useful. You could mark certain data as being important and WHS would ensure that, although Drive Extender made them appear that they were stored in one place, they would actually be stored across two physical drives, which protected you against a single disk failure. This was no replacement for a full backup solution, but it at least kept the machine running and your data safe whenever a disk failed. Such a solution was spot on for the home market, which was hardly surprising as that was where it was aimed in the first place. The implementation wasnt without hiccups; there was a bug in the first release that allowed Drive Extender to lose data. It took Microsoft months to fix it, which was the first indication that this wasnt a technology it took very seriously.
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Contents
Microsofts continuing inability to master storage technology
Web Applications
How easy is it to develop a game for Facebook? Kevin Partner finds out
126 129 132
Do free applications really save you money in the long run?
135 138 141
120 123
Online Security
A look at the not-so-funny side of spam: phishing emails
Steve Cassidy tries to cram a full working day into just 28 seconds
Can you trust Googles cloud? Plus, information leakage on Live Messenger
Mobile & Wireless
Keypad or touchscreen? Paul Ockenden joins the debate
Server Room
The must-have toolkit for 2011 and the importance of the five Ps
Now scoot forward to the current betas and Microsoft has decided that Drive Extender is going to be useful to a wider audience. We might like it in the Small Business Server, too. After all, we have similar storage needs there, which also grow over time. Buying an SBS server with a few empty drive bays gives us the room to grow in future. In order to make Drive Extender work well on a more business-orientated server, where the disks would be subjected to the heavy I/O loads of, for example, Exchange Server, it was decided to re-architect the product, and its this work thats failed, because it now appears it does rather unpleasant things when under load. So in typical Microsoft thinking, best pull the product from the whole platform and pretend that nothing happened, and that its all for our own good. The result is a spectacular revolt in the user community, and a demand that Microsoft actually considers the home server user as a real customer. How this will be resolved is anyones guess. Microsoft says we should be using RAID controllers instead. The vendor Drobo has spotted a market opportunity and is offering discounts on its range of well-regarded external intelligent drive arrays, which coincidentally provide just such a drive-extending and dual copy facility. Isnt it strange how its possible for Drobo to offer this functionality but beyond the geniuses at Microsoft (its exactly the same story with Dropbox, which is eating Microsofts Live Mesh for lunch)? Of course both Drobo and Dropbox just do what they do, and nothing else, which means theyre highly focused on getting it right as otherwise their business dies. Microsoft always has the luxury of walking away from difficult problems, although it would be nice if it didnt try to spin that as something else. The reality is that Microsoft has no
WinFS, the previous attempt by Microsoft to move storage forward. It failed, too.
overarching strategy for storage. End of discussion. I know this will go down badly with the people at Redmond, but history shows this to be a fact. Lets go back to the days of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. Remember DriveSpace, which Microsoft implemented in response to Stacs Stacker? It was a horrible thing, a piece of dodgy technology that empowered you to lose everything in one go. For Windows NT, Microsofts crack team of software engineers imported from Digital came up with the NTFS file system, which has provided the bedrock for Microsofts storage for almost 20 years. Thats been a paragon of stability and capability, but its now 20-year-old thinking. Yes, it allows for mount points and so forth in a way to get around the hegemony of drive letters, but very few people use this feature. Next up in the Hall of Shame was the Cairo Object File System. Designed to be an active store into which you could drop data, this never saw the light of day. In fact, I saw it for real only once, and it died along with the whole Cairo project. The next tragedy was drive M in Exchange Server, which allowed you to mount the Exchange Server public folders as a drive letter, M being the default one. This seemed a great idea at the time: to have file system access into the Exchange Server replicating store, and let Exchange Server do all the heavy work. The problem was that it was terrifyingly fragile, so almost anything you did via the M drive letter resulted in corruption of the Exchange Store. Clearly it was a hacked-together feature that wasnt tested properly. If you ever enjoyed seeing a grown Exchange Server system administrator cry, tell him that his running of a defrag tool on his M drive was equivalent to putting the entire public folder store through a blender. Not surprisingly, M disappeared soon afterwards. Meanwhile, the Windows Server team was still trying out new ideas. My favourite appeared in the betas of Server 3.51, wherein Office Structured Storage data files were deconstructed into NTFS Streams. A brief explanation: DOC, XLS and PPT files were in fact all mini file systems, called OLE Structured Storage. Internally they all had the same structure, except for the binary streams of each document component itself. Long-term readers might remember the Office Binder, which let you build super-Structured-Storage containers that could hold multiple office documents. The problem with the traditional file is that you have just one lock on it, at the file system level, so simultaneous multi-user editing was fraught with difficulty. By breaking the OLE doc structure into multiple NTFS streams, it was possible for multi-user editing to be done in a much more controlled fashion. Obviously, Office didnt know about this magic, so there needed to be a special chunk of code that sat inside the file system engine, called a file system filter, which did the
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Microsoft has no storage vision at all. It simply doesnt believe that anything beyond NTFS is really necessary
home server market that lets third parties develop add-ons and additional capabilities. And if it isnt based on Windows Server but on some potentially limited NAS engine, what hope do we have of lifting our home networks capabilities any time soon? The cold reality is that Microsoft has no storage vision at all. It simply doesnt believe that anything beyond NTFS is really necessary, or at least necessary enough to require a companywide push to solve these problems. Microsoft has worked on many different solutions over the years, but they were all siloed inside one of the separate product teams. The chronic lack of a company-wide vision for this type of problem-solving means solutions are worked on but never finished, and are ultimately dropped because they arent seen as being of high enough priority. You can delude yourself so thoroughly that you really come to believe that your customers didnt need this stuff after all. Knock back a few double espressos and youll become capable of writing a post that says the customers were begging for it to be removed all along, sort of like this: During our current testing period for our Windows Home Server code name Vail product, we have received feedback from partners and customers about how they use storage today and how they plan to use it moving forward. Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2TB drives and more are becoming easily accessible to small businesses. Since customers looking to buy Windows Home Server solutions from OEMs will now have the ability to include larger drives, this will reduce the need for Drive Extender functionality. When weighing up the future direction of storage in the consumer and SMB market, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs. Therefore, we have decided to remove the Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials) which are currently in beta. To which I can only reply: no, the issue isnt that disks are getting bigger, its that my storage needs are guaranteed to grow over time and Im sick and tired of drive letters and fixed partition sizes that cant be adjusted seamlessly. This stuff should just work. Fortunately, the Microsoft product manager, Michael Leworthy, realised the smoke appearing in his cubicle was from the hundreds of angry users who had set fire to his trousers, and so a few hours later he admitted that its a rough day for Vail, and I have been dreading today for a while as an avid Vail user myself. We know this is popular feature in regards to our home server product. Gosh, you dont say. So whats the way forward? According to Microsoft, Drive Extender is now dead across the suite of products coming this year: Windows Home Server, SBS2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Server Essentials. I suspect it will keep claiming it isnt a big issue, and that its third-party partners will come along with a hardware solution, either within the server itself or on an external storage or NAS box. The sad thing is that, although Microsoft clearly has vision, it simply doesnt have the determination to follow it through. But on the basis of past history, why would we expect anything else?
breakup and reconstruction on the fly. So why did this useful feature get canned? Well, the Office team had their client-side solution and didnt really worry too much about the server side of things. But the server team had a problem: the Office doc-file Structured Storage streams engine clashed with the hierarchical file system (HFS) N-tier storage management engine, which had been licensed from a third party. At the time HFS seemed to be sexier, so the doc-file streams engine had to die. Then we have the debacle that was WinFS. Designed to be a clever file system for Windows Vista, it had some spectacular capabilities. Filenames were deprecated down to mere marker points: when looking for something you could search by any of the logical Metatags that were available, so it was possible to search for a document last edited by me in the last fortnight, where you were the originator and it was a letter to the bank about Project Frog. Or it was possible to do joins across data types and across the whole network. It was based on the SQL Server code base, and indeed, around that time I was told that the SQL Server build was done daily in both a WinFS-enhanced and raw SQL Server versions. So why was this one cancelled? Well, as you no doubt remember, large chunks of the advanced features of Vista never made it to the final release, and WinFS was one of those casualties. At the time, Microsoft claimed the technology worked well but the user interface was difficult to refine. Other internal voices suggested that the SharePoint Server group took one look and refused to have anything to do with it. At that time SharePoint Server was and still is ruling the roost for complex server-side document storage, despite it being something of a hack that sits inside SQL Server on top of NTFS. Just enquire how many people have successfully migrated a large document store out of SharePoint Server into something else, and expect a very small answer.
WinFS had some promising capabilities, but it too ended up on the storage scrap heap.
WOnt Fit?
Im tempted to ask why Microsoft doesnt shoehorn R1 of the Drive Extender codebase into the WHS beta, but I suspect it wont fit. Remember the existing Windows Home Server is based on Server 2003, while next years WHS will be based on Server 2008 R2, almost two generations further on.
the here and now

Which brings us up to the present day. If you want a complex, clever document store for Windows you have to use SharePoint Server. Windows Home Servers Drive Extender worked well enough in version 1, but version 2 has now tripped and fallen. Meanwhile, the corporate world has moved on, into the world of active engine Storage Area Networks that look after volume management by themselves, while in the home market we should be looking to Drobo devices or NAS boxes on our networks. This despite the fact that we need a platform for the
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Computing
Real World
Thumbs up for mini-PDC

jon honeyball visits A diffeRent kind of pdc And finds some cleAReR pRomises foR AzuRe, but A muRky futuRe foR silveRligHt
From the perspective of one who attended the PDC, I think the new format works very well indeed. You get all the right people from Microsoft, because they dont have to do anything besides trundle across campus to the conference building. Any queries or follow-up could be dealt with in a few hours after all, almost anyone needed to answer a question is located within a mile or so. The more intimate feel worked well, and although there wasnt the buzz of a huge crowd, there wasnt a flood of people either, nor the intense competition to get into the sessions you wanted to attend. So what was this PDC all about? Well, that was interesting too, and also very different from some previous events. In the past, Microsoft has used PDC to showcase future developments, with a definition of future thats been somewhat elastic. Some PDCs have shown a pile of future technology, little of which ever actually came to market, the Vista PDC being a good example of that style. This one was different because everything shown was either about to ship or shippable within a few months, with no great arm-waving promises and no dubious deliverables. Lets start with the big picture. Microsoft has been working very hard on its Azure platform. Remember Azure was launched a year ago, making this its first anniversary. Looking for new features and capabilities was the order of the day, and Microsoft is certainly delivering them. Azure is turning from being an application-delivery and hosting platform into a more general-purpose cloud solution. This might be in response to the VMware successes, but I genuinely believe theres a Big Plan at play here from Microsoft and that its quietly following through on it. After all, the Windows Server division is one thats noted for doing high-quality, quiet and confident work. Facilities within the Azure application-hosting platform have been improved: theres more capability for IIS, the web server engine, for example. This will be very welcome because the range of capabilities available until now has been limited. Next
icrosofts Professional Developers Conference was different on just about every score compared to previous events. For starters, it wasnt held in somewhere like Los Angeles it was held on the Microsoft Campus itself in Redmond, near Seattle. It wasnt a multiplethousand attendee event either, as the number was limited to around just 1,000 a limit brought on by the size of the main conference theatre. For Microsoft, there were multiple advantages. First, it saved the cost of a huge conference facility in Los Angeles or Las Vegas. Second, it saved both on the cost and sheer hassle of moving hundreds of key Microsoft staff down from Seattle, and coping with the inevitably large work interruptions. To compensate for the smaller number of bodies on-site, Microsoft streamed the entire event over the internet. You could stay at home (given the time differences) or even go along to one of many sites where local offices held PDC parties, projecting the video onto large screens. Its difficult to argue with the logic behind the change, although it didnt have the same sizzle of the 17,000 attendees at the recent VMworld 2010 event in San Francisco, for example.
JON HONeybaLL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ jonhoneyball
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Contents
The latest from Microsofts PDC, plus Silverlights murky future
Web Applications
Lost your mobile or laptop? Mark Newton discovers a tool that can help
134 137 140
Merging two spreadsheets? Its easy with a little help from a pig
143 146 149
128 131
Online Security
Should security vendors go public if theyve been victim to hackers?
Steve Cassidy reports from Citrix Synergy in Berlin
Tap into Offices many unused capabilities and boost productivity
Mobile & Wireless
Buy into the smartphone world without having to spend a fortune
Server Room
Jon Honeyball corners Microsoft execs; David Moss sets up a Live@Edu account
up is support for Java as a primary application language and runtime system. Again, Azure hasnt had the necessary support, but this is changing, which is good news because Java is successful and important as an application runtime on servers. Its impact on the desktop may be small, and withering further, but server-side its a different matter. To back up this improved Java comes better support for PHP and for MySQL too, so theres an obvious move here by Microsoft to make it easier and more attractive for the non-IIS web developer community to use its preferred tools. Supporting this move are new features for Eclipse as Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business, said: Were making Java a first-class citizen with Windows Azure, the choice of the underlying framework, the choice of the development tool. Sure, well show Visual Studio, well talk about how great Visual Studio is, but were working hard on making Eclipse great to build applications against Windows Azure. Well make PHP great, well make Ruby great, were focusing across a broad set of underlying environments so you can choose the environment that best suits your application, because Windows Azure is a general-purpose platform as a service. In fact, if you take a look, its the only general-purpose platform as a service on the planet. Thats quite a claim, but theres even more to this story. One area where Azure has been seriously lacking is in its support for native raw virtual machines. Right from the beginning, Azure has been an application platform: you write your code to the Azure API (application programming interfaces) and then deploy the application through specialised tools that push up the app code into your Azure space. Its then executed on the Azure servers and you as the developer decide how many instances there will be running, how much storage they need and so forth, depending on the expected load for your application and the size of your chequebook. This is quite different to the approach taken by, for example, VMware. In the VMware world the cloud provider simply offers a container framework in which you run your virtual machine, which is something you can either provision from the remote host or package up and upload as appropriate. Its a fundamental difference between managed application execution and managed VM hosting. On Azure its all been about managed application execution so far, but thats about to change. Microsoft has demonstrated that youll soon be able to package up a whole VM and upload it into the Azure cloud service. Some of the details of this process remain somewhat murky. For example, how is this going to be charged for? Per-minute or per-hour execution runtime billing systems arent a good idea for VMs. Also, what happens in terms of backup, recovery and failover?
Steve Ballmer gave a typically bouncy and ebullient presentation, and the numbers are impressive.
What happens to the Service Level Agreement? If its your applications running on your VM, then how is Microsoft going to provide any service-level guarantee for apps that it has no control over? You can see there are many questions here, with few answers as yet, but this will change over the coming months. As a half-way house youll also be able to take a locally executing, standard packaged application, wrap it up and send it to run on Azure servers. Again, details are thin on the ground, but theres an aggressive timescale to get this working and available to customers over the next few months. Finally, Microsoft brought Pixar onto the stage to demonstrate how its RenderMan rendering software could run on Azure. RenderMan is a heavily parallelised server-side rendering engine that can be run on a wide range of hardware and operating systems. Its basically a large number-crunching engine thats ideally suited to having its input data chopped into little chunks, with each server in a farm working on one of those chunks, and the final image being composited back together. Its simply a question of horsepower, and the more cores you bring to the party the faster your frame will be
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rendered. Companies such as Pixar run several huge computer clusters designed to chomp through this sort of work in reasonable timeframes, and they tend to prefer to keep these facilities in-house, because network bandwidth to and from remote servers can otherwise present a significant bottleneck. If youre rendering the next Toy Story, you really want your own farm at your own fingertips. However, this simply isnt feasible for many mid-sized production houses, which cant afford to maintain a huge computing cluster even though Windows excellent HPC (high performance computing) server is pretty cheap per CPU cycle. For such organisations, being able to send out RenderMan tasks onto a farm of hosted servers is a very compelling proposition, and theres a direct relationship between the number of CPUs you rent and the time taken to complete your rendering. This is a superb example of that cloudy promise of being able to linearly increase cloud CPU capacity for a linear increase in cost (because its charged by the number of CPU minutes consumed). Pixar demonstrated a proof-of-concept application controller for Azure that let you decide how quickly you needed a particular image to be rendered, and you paid accordingly. I look forward to Pixar and its partners offering brokered cloud-based rendering for smaller and mid-sized customers in the coming months. Just to clarify something: no, Pixar itself isnt using Azure today to render its own films, and nor is it likely to do so in the near future, but it is likely to offer this service as an additional rendering option for customers of its RenderMan tools. In short, overall Azure is looking stronger, even though theres still much that needs to be firmed up in terms of SLAs, costs and so forth. The latest range of announcements certainly shows that Microsoft isnt prepared to concede these various parts of the cloud market to anyone else its entering a battle royal from which we all will benefit.
Is Pixars RenderMan coming to Azure? Maybe, and its a great cloud demonstration.
as the current HTML5 implementation leaves so much to be desired that it will take some time and a lot of work to flesh it out. But Apple says no either you must use native code on iOS, or use HTML5. This presents a real problem for Microsoft. On the one hand it does look forward to a HTML5 future: the build of IE9 shows that Microsoft is determined to be among the HTML5 leaders this time. It certainly doesnt want to be seen as lagging behind as it has been in previous versions. Its claimed adherence to standards means there will be less of the custom IE shenanigans weve seen in the past. For Microsoft, Silverlight is also a real problem. Its developed whats now a strong development platform and runtime, going from nothing to a quite robust new platform in just a few years. However, some claim that Microsoft is up to its old tricks already: the support for COM objects on the Windows version of Silverlight means that the Mac version is no longer in sync, and wheres the real Linux version we were hoping to see? Given a HTML5 future, you might expect that Silverlight is to be sidelined, and maybe it is, but its still the core development tool for the new Windows Phone 7 platform. So is it on life support, being re-targeted toward WP7 and away from the desktop? Microsoft wont say, other than that its priorities have changed. If I were trying to build an internet application today, the confusion surrounding Flash, Silverlight and a future HTML5 would be enough to make me tear my hair out. Maybe we need to accept that code has truly become a download, consume and dispose item, and theres no long-term future for anything just build what works today, and make sure you dont align yourself with one particular platform.
office 11 for macintosh

Yes, I know this is a Windows column, but the arrival of Office 2011 for Macintosh is significant enough to be worthy of a mention. First, it restores parity to the Mac desktop for Office tasks: the new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are far more closely aligned with their Office 2010 equivalents, and this is a good thing. Having file-level compatibility between the currently shipping versions of Office is too boring to be true. The previous version of Office for Mac was an utter disgrace, wherein anything that couldnt be finished in time was simply ignored. Do you have custom VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) functions in your documents? Tough, because VBA wasnt ported so they wouldnt work. Want to work against a SharePoint server? Here, pop these painkillers. Want a solid email client? Sorry, you cant have Outlook, just this Entourage monster that hacks its way into Exchange Server instead. For the 2011 version almost everything has been fixed: theres a native Outlook application; Visual Basic for Applications has returned; and the overall performance no longer feels like wading across a mudflat. Of course there are rough edges, and a few bugs that need fixing, but its a fine turnaround, and one that Microsoft can be proud of. It wont push Macs onto business desktops in a hurry, because OS X is far less manageable in enterprise environments than Windows 7, but for those of you who might want to keep Macs at home and Windows in the office, it makes moving things around vastly easier, and for that we should be grateful.
Bundles
It was good to see Microsoft research at the PDC. I was particularly impressed by the ordered bundles techniques for showing how things relate to each other. a standard sort of rats-nest routing diagram may be easy to draw, but its difficult to understand, whereas ordered bundles chop up the routes into bundles of varying width, making things easier to comprehend.
riP silverlight?
The struggle between HTML5 and its two major competitors, the plugin runtime systems of Microsofts Silverlight and Adobes Flash, continues to rumble. To the annoyance of both firms it appears to be Apple that holds sway over the outcome, thanks to its insistence that neither Silverlight nor Flash runtimes will be allowed onto its iOS platform, as used in the iPhone and iPad. In Apples opinion HTML5 is the future end of story. Well, theres no real doubt that HTML5 is the future, inasmuch
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Computing
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Virtualisation grows up
As viRtuAl seRveRs continue tHeiR meteoRic Rise, jon honeyball puts some floWeRs in His HAiR And HeAds to sAn fRAncisco foR tHe vmWoRld confeRence
2010 conference of VMware, called VMworld 2010. Everything just clicked into place. I was at home at the Moscone Center, which is the huge underground conference facility just south of Market, right in the middle of the downtown city, and next door is Moscone West, where Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference each year and which was such fun back in June. But hold on, somethings wrong here. VMworld isnt just on in the Moscone Center, but its at Moscone West too! At this point the sheer size of the event began to dawn on me, but even that realisation wasnt enough to prepare me for the numbers attending: 17,048. Ill say that again: 17,048 people, plus all the exhibitors, VMware staff and lets not ignore hundreds or thousands of support staff doing lunches, coffees, session management and so forth. To cut to the chase, this was the most significant conference Ive been to since the original Windows PDC for NT 3.1 back in July 1992, and it was significant for two things the sheer buzz, excitement and commitment from the attendees, and the crystallisation of real, meaningful plans from this major industry player. Did you know that the number of servers running in virtual machines recently overtook the number of servers running on bare hardware? Given that one physical server typically runs a handful of VMs, its clear theres a landslide going on, and as Ive said here before, if youre still running a server on bare hardware youd better have a good reason to be doing so. There are still some places where its the right answer of course, such as in very high-end database operations, very high-end numerical processing, 3D visualisation and video editing. But I cant stress that very high-end proviso too strongly, because in almost every lesser case virtualisation is the way to go. Back to VMworld. Over the past couple of years, VMware has gone from a company that had a hypervisor and a cluster of interesting management and control technologies to well, something else altogether. It really does now stretch all the way from desktop to datacenter and from there onward, up to the
The Moscone Center in San Francisco attracted more than 17,000 visitors to the recent VMworld 2010 conference.
ts quite a long way to San Francisco even if you fly direct, but there are upsides to making this trek: its a beautiful city, one of my favourites; its diverse communities are a revelation (where else can you go from hippydom to authentic Chinese within a few blocks?); and, best of all, there are lots of wonderful hills that I explored this time by embarking on a guided Segway tour. Whizzing down the zigzag of Lombard on a Segway was such fun that we went round and did it again. But enough of the fun, even though it was had on a lone day off that stood in lieu of all my lost weekends. This trip to San Francisco was made for a very serious purpose indeed: the
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Contents
The inexorable rise of VMware, plus speaking to Windows 7
Web Applications
Some simple and free tips to get to the top of the search rankings
136 139 142
We reveal the best JavaScript toolkits for adding panache to your website
145 148 151
130 133
Online Security
The new malware threat thats straight out of a Bond film
Why Hyper-Threading is no substitute for a real processor
Does the new LibreOffice suite mean the end of the road for OpenOffice?
Mobile & Wireless
Some favourite Wi-Fi tools, plus developing for the iPad
Server Room
Does putting an old product in a new box make it a new product?
cloud. I just love its agnostic approach to whats running inside its VMs: put in Windows Server, or Linux, or something else. Choose the right tool for the job. Have a mixture of platforms according to the needs of your business. Have some VMware software appliances in there too. The firms desktop strategy runs right down to a full virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation, which is now looking confident, well rounded and ready for deployment. The server side gets stronger too, while the pricing has had a welcome rejig. The VMware vSphere Essentials Kit will set you back just 337, for which you get licences for three dualprocessor servers, with the support subscription costing 88. If you want to add in the VMotion and High Availability facilities, and also the VMware Data Recovery capabilities, the price jumps to 2,660 for the vSphere Essentials Plus kit. This might seem like quite a sum of money, but to make good use of facilities such as VMotion youll have spent quite a bit more than that on high-end hardware, SAN (storage area network) and fast network capabilities required to make it work well. Where is Microsoft in all of this? Well, it would be fun, if somewhat cheeky, to compare the sizes of their conferences 17,000 at VMworld against just 1,000 at the forthcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. To be fair, PDC is limited by the size of the facilities at Microsofts campus in Redmond, but last years PDC was down on numbers too. No-one is suggesting that HyperV is going away or is no longer relevant, but its clear that a lot of customers think that VMwares approach has validity and that its approach to the cloud both public and private is more flexible and controllable than Microsofts Azure platform (which some view as yet another Microsoft lock-in). Whats certainly clear is that a lot of customers have been testing HyperV against VMware and decided to go with the latter. Just talking to attendees at the sessions, during lunch breaks and around watercoolers, it became clear that Microsofts hope for an easy win just isnt happening, and theres a great deal of excitement about the alternatives. Contributing editor Steve Cassidy may be attending the VMworld conference in Copenhagen to get his take on these issues, and hell also be going to Citrixs event in Berlin to see where its headed, but its abundantly clear that this stuff is now ready for prime time.
jOn HOnEyBaLL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/ jonhoneyball
MokaFive is bringing a desktop Type 1 client hypervisor to market shortly. This lets you boot whatever OS you want and manage it centrally.
bare-metal hypervisor
Some months ago, I said that I wanted a desktop bare-metal hypervisor known as a Type 1 hypervisor on which I could then choose to run whatever operating system (or systems)
I wanted. At that time a few vendors, including VMware, were working on such a product, but no-one had really got it to gel. Before going any further, let me explain whats meant by a Type 1 and a Type 2 hypervisor. These definitions like most things to do with virtualisation and cloud are somewhat murky, with different vendors meaning different things by the terms. Its easiest to think in terms of functionality. A Type 2 hypervisor is what happens when you run VMware Fusion on your Mac laptop or desktop, or a conventional desktop-style hypervisor such as Parallels, or a Windows desktop-based hypervisor. Essentially, you boot the main OS of the machine and do your work in that. Then you can start up the hypervisor that runs in the background and offers hypervisor services, inside which you can start a second or third instance of the OS, each running in its own bubble. However, the original main OS you booted is still the primary OS, and you can quit the hypervisor and all of its other OS sessions to return to just that primary OS. With a Type 1 hypervisor, you essentially boot a very minimal OS that immediately starts the hypervisor. This very small OS is little more than a bootstrap loader put there purely to get the hypervisor up and running, and it isnt something youll ever really interact with; instead, youll normally boot at least one main OS under the control of the hypervisor. Theres an issue about drivers, hardware compatibility and who provides which level of functionality. Without getting in too deep, you could argue that a Type 2 hypervisor is far less driver-dependent because it can rely on services provided by the primary boot OS, whereas a Type 1 hypervisor has less support for hardware-specific drivers and tends to be pickier about the base hardware platform. With a Type 2 hypervisor you work mostly in the primary OS, but can boot secondary and tertiary OSes to do specific jobs; all the weight is being carried by the primary OS. With a Type 1 hypervisor, the primary OS is wafer thin and of no value to you, so you must always boot a secondary OS inside the hypervisor to do any work. So what is the advantage of having a Type 1 hypervisor on a desktop machine? Well, given that such a hypervisor just boots whatever is your chosen OS within a virtual machine, the focus of your work and attention will be on that OS. You wont care about the very thin hypervisor OS boot layer, because it isnt there for you to work with directly. Think of the advantages of booting a VM on the desktop if you are using a Type 1 hypervisor. The hypervisor boots and presents you with a list of VMs that it can start up, and you choose one or more to run simultaneously. Each thinks it has full access to the hardware, and some
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Windows speech allows you to choose what type of mic you use. A headset is probably your best bet, though.
Type 1 hypervisors even have 3D graphics support too, so you can boot Windows and bring it up full screen just as if Windows itself had booted from your hard disk in a native fashion. But it hasnt, its booted from within a VM. Now wrap some management tools around this that allow central administrators to manage the VM packages on your laptop. Lets say this tool is very clever and allows the system administrator to slipstream differences to each VM on each desktop or laptop machine. It allows for central management and deployment of VMs to each desktop and laptop. But because each laptop is booting from the VMs that have been provisioned to it, you get the benefit of running a VM and the ability to take the machine offline, which is an absolute necessity for a laptop. From a users point of view, their laptop boots into a front-end shell from which they can choose which VM to boot. They can return to this shell via a hotkey and choose a second, third or fourth to run at the same time, depending on RAM availability. A whole new machine can be delivered to the laptop from central IT management just by copying in the relevant VM file. Existing files can be slipstream patched and updated. Sound like nirvana? Well, it does to me. So I was fascinated to see a company called MokaFive offering this technology at VMworld. Its tools are happy to work with Type 1 or 2 hypervisors, and you can also choose which hypervisor engine you want to use. In essence, its a package and management tool. You might want to boot native Windows on the hardware, then start a Type 2 hypervisor and bring up a VM in a window, or have a Type 1 hypervisor (with its attendant thin OS layer) boot and then have the user choose which VM they want to start up. MokaFive was demonstrating this solution running on a laptop with two VMs running at the same time, one doing complex 3D graphics in Windows, the other running business productivity applications. Both were getting full hypervisor support, and both were running at amazing speeds. Ive said before that the escape route from Windows to a newer, cleaner OS is to virtualise the old stuff into VMs and allow the user to decide how much containment they want to apply to their applications and operating systems. To me this is a logical step, but busting the hegemony of Windows booting natively on the hardware is a tough pill for Microsoft to swallow. Im sure there are many issues to consider, including driver support and so forth, but Im going to be watching the MokaFive product as it goes through beta. Others will follow, Im sure, and this is something you should be keeping an eye on too.
DRagOn
If you want even more powerful speech recognition, spend your money on Dragons products, which arent free but are even more powerful and worth every penny.
Lets roll back ten years or so to a Microsoft Developers Conference, where someone senior from Microsoft Research gave a demonstration of speech recognition. I remember him saying then that it was about 95% accurate and improving at half a per cent per annum. Here we are ten years later, so it should now be perfect, shouldnt it? Well Im tempted to say, yes, it is. Im really tempted to say that, because its stunningly good. The quality of recognition is simply amazing, and it requires only a short training period. Of course, it does help if you employ received pronunciation so that your voice sounds like a BBC announcer, but it has few problems with me gabbling at a faster rate than I usually manage. Of course, you need to learn some new commands to control the program. Things such as New Paragraph and so forth are obvious, but the application manipulation commands take a bit more time and effort. In the end, though, this simply comes down to practice. Its logical and easy to learn, but you have to avoid the temptation to keep reaching for the mouse. Maybe it should come with a set of handcuffs to keep your typing and mouse fingers from straying? Or maybe thats just a little too weird to think about on a Thursday lunchtime. Surely there have to be some downsides? Well, yes. Clearly, youre not going to want to do photo editing in Photoshop using voice control, unless you really have no other choice. But dont underestimate the power of what you can do with it. Whats really magical is the way it remembers what youve just said and knows how to go back and find something. For example, if you say, The cat sat on the mat and then change cat to sausage, you dont need to tell the cursor to go back a number of words to cat: the system knows where the last instance of the word cat is located. This is where it becomes almost spooky, as the system takes on a level of contextual cleverness that you really didnt expect. Best of all, its free and built into Windows 7. All you need is a decent microphone, preferably on some sort of a headset arrangement. I bought the Logitech ClearChat Pro USB headset, which comes in at around 40, uses a single USB socket for everything and integrates nicely into the sound and microphone settings of Windows 7. It has a mute button on the headset for the microphone, a red LED at the tip of the microphone so you know when its live and volume controls as well. For talking to Windows 7 its excellent because the close-proximity microphone cuts out a lot of background noise. On the downside, the headphone quality is pretty poor, which makes it disappointing for listening to music; the thin, tinny and coloured sound was something of a letdown. Frankly, though, I think everyone should try out the speech recognition in Windows 7. Its extremely powerful and has no hint of that nice, but lacking in power features quality thats so often found in bundled free software.
Windows 7 speech recognition

Thanks, Id love a coffee white with one sugar, please. No, a chocolate digestive biscuit is tempting, but not good for my svelte figure. Oops, sorry Ive left the microphone running live and its decided to transcribe everything Ive been saying here. I cant understand why more people dont use the speech recognition feature in Windows 7, because its utterly amazing.
Very little configuration is required once youve gone through the tutorials.
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Computing
Real World
Ripped by robot
Jon honeyball bids fAReWell to tHe compAct disc As He finAlly finds A WAy to Rip His cd collection to pc WitHout constAntly Running up And doWn tHe stAiRs
D is one of those audio formats that makes me go slightly misty-eyed. I remember very clearly the arrival of compact discs nearly 30 years ago, and Ill never forget my sheer mental bogglement at the sight of Sonys first Discman player, the D50. This gadget required a battery pack that was of a just plain silly size (and weight, once youd stuffed it with enough AA batteries to keep it going for a few hours). But even so, the principle of CD was sound in so many meanings of the word. Today, the market for CDs has taken a battering, from which it will never recover, and most electronics manufacturers have stopped making CD players altogether. At the high end of the UK hi-fi market, Linn stopped making CD players some while ago to concentrate on network streaming devices. Naim still makes CD players, as does Meridian, but it isnt clear how long either will continue to do so. The writing is on the wall: the future is digital purchase and download. However, many of us still have huge collections of CDs containing music that we really like and keep returning to, so our incremental rate of music purchases was already at a fairly low point. So, like many other people, I decided it was time to transfer all my music to a hard disk since its so much more convenient: I can transfer it from there to an iPod and use it in my car or on flights, and I can route it around the house. Putting your hands on any type of rotating plastic disc feels vaguely silly these days, which is fairly depressing when you consider just how clever the CD format was all those years ago. Take the way its 16-bit sample was split into two 8-bit samples and then encoded using EFM (Eight-to-Fourteen) modulation because of the limitations of the laser employed its pits and bumps mustnt change too quickly because of the upper frequency limit of said laser, and nor must they change too slowly, otherwise the laser would simply lose track of them. Or take the way in which RS (Reed-Solomon) encoding was applied to distribute the signal so that it was far more robust against optical reading errors, dust and scratches. Or again, consider
JON HONEYBALL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@woodley side.co.uk or read his blog at www.pcpro. co.uk/blogs/jonhoneyball
the way you could use an eye-height pattern view to calibrate its optics for best playback clarity. However, time moves on. Before I go any further I ought to remind you that, strictly speaking, ripping your CDs to hard disk is still illegal in the UK. Theres currently no provision that legalises such acts of sheer wickedness. Its different in Germany, where youre allowed to rip your CDs to disk for your own personal use, under a law known as Provision 53. Hence, please be aware that everything Im about to describe actually took place in Stuttgart. There are many ways of ripping an audio CD to hard disk, and many formats to choose from. The easiest method is to use a software package such as iTunes and pop the discs into your computer one by one: the software will then rip their contents to the hard disk in the prescribed format, look up all the artist and track metadata online, and even find an image of the cover art for you. A few minutes later, out pops the disc and you put in
The dBpoweramp ripping engine has a full robotic section that works perfectly with the Primera Disc Publisher Pro Xi2.
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Contents
How to rip a large CD collection to your PC the easy way
Web Applications
We examine WebMatrix, Microsofts latest foray into the web design market
138 141 144
A Linux-based project to provide an open-source GSM network
147 150 154
132 135
Online Security
How do price comparison websites compare when it comes to security?
Steve Cassidy cooks up a storm with the NDAS network architecture
Fixing hyperlinks in Excel, and getting into shape with Visio
Mobile & Wireless
Is Apples iPad just a rich kids toy or a viable business tool?
Server Room
A sneak preview of Microsofts new Small Business Server edition
I decided to use the FLAC file format, given that its open source and so less likely to be vulnerable to lawyers
another one. This is fine in theory, but the reality is somewhat more awkward. It means youre either chained to your computer for the whole day, or you keep a stack of discs on the desk and drop a new one in whenever youre passing. An experiment using my Windows computer in the office at home revealed that the effort of running up and down the stairs each time I needed to put in a new disc resulted in about two discs getting ripped per day. Given that I have around 2,500 discs to process, this really wasnt a viable solution. A web search uncovered a number of businesses that offered to perform the whole process for a fee, but given the number of discs involved that wasnt going to be pocket money. Some of these services also looked decidedly dodgy, and I could easily imagine my beloved CD collection as well as my cash disappearing into a white van, never to be seen again. The answer was becoming clearer the more I looked: I was going to have a shopping accident that would severely damage my credit card. A further internet search revealed that the best software to use for CD ripping is a package called dBpoweramp, a flexible and powerful product that allows you to make a huge number of twiddly adjustments to the music data (and, not coincidentally, a program that forms part of PC Pros benchmarks). It understands that different CD/DVD drives work in slightly different ways and can compensate for these differences. Better still, it offers a facility whereby your freshly ripped file can be checksummed and the result compared against those of lots of other users whove ripped the same song: if you obtain the same checksum then you can be sure your file is just the same as theirs, and logic suggests that this was therefore a good rip and one that can be trusted. If a particular disc is damaged, dBpoweramp can perform the optical equivalent of scouring the disc surface in an attempt to recover as much information as possible. It can automatically hook up to online music metadata databases too, and it supports just about every audio file format under the sun. I decided to use the FLAC file format, given that its open source and so less likely to be vulnerable to the whims of
The Primera Disc Publisher Pro enables you to rip up to 50 CDs at a time.
The Primera comes with its own software, complete with spelling error!
hormonally challenged lawyers in the future (after all, WAV is actually proprietary to Microsoft, while Lossless AAC belongs to Apple). The FLAC format meant Id be able to create a compressed but bit-perfect master rip of each track and then use the dBpoweramp software to transcode this into any other formats, I might require: for my iTunes and iPod, for example, it would make sense for that to be Apple Lossless. But the real treat comes from dBpoweramps support for robotic ripping engines: dBpoweramps developer recommends the multiple drive devices from Primera. Soon I came staggering away from the predicted shopping accident and a brand-new Primera Disc Publisher Pro Xi2 was sitting on my Tyrolean-style desk in Stuttgart. Its important to understand that Disc Publisher isnt a ripping engine, but is designed for duplication of CDs and DVDs. It also prints a full-colour label on the disc if youve filled it with paper-coated blank discs. However, dBpoweramp can also drive this device in the reverse direction, using it to suck data from its pair of DVD writer drives back to the computer via a single USB2 cable. dBpoweramps developer has even written its own driver software for Disc Publisher, so I was fairly confident it would work well. Getting the software up and running wasnt particularly difficult, although it felt slightly bitty in some areas: you certainly need to understand how its batch ripper engine is different from its main ripper tool, and how one calls the other. In essence, you load around 50 CDs into one tray holder in the Primera box, then fire up
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dBpoweramps Batch Ripper for Windows and do a calibration of the drives, which then become available for use. Next, you choose which file formats you want; a few other useful settings are worth tweaking too, including where you want the data to be placed and in what logical folder structures. Finally, you press the big Rip button and stand back in awe as its robotic arm trundles across, picks the top disc off the input pile, and drops it into an available and waiting DVD drive, which then closes. The disc is examined, its metadata downloaded from the internet, and the arm goes off and grabs a second disc for the second drive. This process is repeated over and over: when the first disc is done the tray opens, the arm picks up the disc and drops it into an output spindle, or if it was bad, on to a reject pile. Then it fetches another disc. This wonderfully choreographed ballet continues until the Primera has ripped all 50 discs, and the data for each disc is happily stored away on the host controlling computer. A few caveats are in order. Its worth setting up the system so the output pile is kept in the same order as the input pile. If you happen to be ripping a mixture of CD albums and singles, its possible for the drive thats ripping the singles to get ahead of the drive thats ripping an album, which isnt a problem beyond the fact that those discs will end up in the wrong order on the output spindle. This isnt a big deal, except when you come to put the discs in their cases, its easier to have them in the same order as they were input. Very occasionally, and usually with an out-of-spec CD, the system can become confused and pick up a couple of CDs at once, which causes the equivalent of an M25 pile-up that requires manual intervention to untangle. There may be a little bug there, so the developer is looking into it. My tech support query was answered within 12 minutes, so I have great confidence in the dedication of the developer. Using this system I can carry a whole box full of CDs into my (German) office every morning, load up 50 of them and let it run all morning. By lunchtime I can unload this first batch, sort out any rejects, and load up another batch for the afternoon. At this rate Ill have the whole lot done in a month or so, and then this device will have done its job, at which point Ill probably pass it on to a friend. The hardware wasnt cheap, especially when you consider that its basically just a pair of DVD burners, a robotic arm and the printing engine from a Lexmark printer, but its a low-volume niche product and I know I will find other uses for it in the future. Nor is the software easy to understand, with a certain amount of UI clunkiness to contend with, but its fairly straightforward once you get your head around whats happening. And when the whole system is running its a priceless piece of theatrical nonsense that causes people to stand around mesmerised, watching it perform its disc-
dBpoweramp includes powerful tools for handling disc errors.
juggling and waiting for each disc to get ripped so they can see it grab another during its unload/load cycle. Was fr ein wunderbares Gert! (What a wonderful device!) they exclaim. Having transferred everything to hard disk and available to be transcoded into whatever formats I want, I can now decide what sort of devices I want to use around my office and house for playback. Maybe Ill use the forthcoming new version of Windows Home Server, or else go for a more conventional file-sharing NAS device thats a decision still to be made. Then I might look into whether theres any DVD-ripping software that can control a robotic device such as the Primera, since it would be useful to rip the content from my DVDs to hard disk too, to make it all available for a video-on-demand solution. In the meantime, check out www. dbpoweramp.com for the ripping software and www.primera. com for the robotic hardware, and Gehen Sie glcklich alles!
Windows Phone 7
I was sitting in a pub in High Holborn last week when a dodgy-looking geezer sidled over to me and muttered Pssst! Want to try a Windows Phone 7 mobile?. He slid it across the table and finally I had my mitts on a Windows Phone 7 device. All right, I admit Ive embroidered this a little; the reality wasnt quite so cloak and dagger. A number of friends were meeting up for our regular #ITTU Twitter pub get-together, and a chap from Microsoft UK had brought one with him. But it was fascinating to finally try out one of these devices. Ill admit that my love affair with Windows Mobile fizzled out many years ago, back in the era when Compaq was still making such devices, if I remember rightly. Even an unpleasant Palm device was preferable to this monstrosity, which required you to employ a toothpick to navigate its arcane desktop-orientated user interface. But Windows Phone 7 is very different indeed. Its clear a lot of thinking has gone into its design, and it truly is revolutionary in the way it brings data to life on your phone. The way in which it uses a data-centric rather than an application-centric user interface is novel and has, at first glance, a great deal to commend it. That said, though, I fear it will become weighed down by the usual Microsoft lock-in nonsense: Bing, Bing and more Bing. Everything done The Microsoft Way. Any flavour so long as its Toasted Redmond. I hope not, and sincerely wish that its developers and its end users will be permitted enough configuration freedom to make it into a personalised and personable device. Okay, many of its features will be missing from the first release and Im far from convinced about the seriousness of this device as a business platform. Frankly, from what Ive read, Id rather have a BlackBerry or an iPhone over a Windows Phone 7 device at the moment. All will depend upon how well Microsoft can introduce each new feature to the emerging platform, without sinking back into its old trick of saying in a sighing Basil Fawlty voice Oh no! You have that version, this new stuff only works on the latest version. Microsoft has a miserable history of providing updates to its customers, as the two dead Windows Mobile 6.x devices that are sitting on my desk here can testify. That simply has to change if the Windows Phone 7 platform is to take off.
Will it Fly?
Is Windows Phone 7 going to make any impact on the smartphone market? Before my recent fondling of a sample device I confess to feeling very negative, but now I feel more neutral. microsoft might just pull this off, but the consequences of failure are truly terrifying and heads would really roll. To see it in action, visit www. pcpro.co.uk/ links/194wp7
When the whole system is running, its a priceless piece of theatrical nonsense that mesmerises people
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Computing
Real World
Intune with Windows

Jon Honeyball Asks tHe difficult questions of WindoWs intune, is pAined by Activesync, And eAgeRly AnticipAtes MicRosofts AnsWeR to tHe ipAd
To make it more interesting, add in the time dimension, so that this manager can see whats happened and when to each machine, so that ensuring everything is up to date is made easy and can be remotely managed. Even better, the manager can work out when something changes on one of the PCs maybe a user tried to install something, or some malware code came down through the web browser and onto their computer. Intune includes a full set of malware and antivirus technologies, based on well-respected existing Microsoft technologies. Sound good? It is, but thats only the start. An unlimited number of client computers can be managed through the Intune service, and there will even be a multi-site, multi-account version too, so if youre a support consultancy company you can use this solution to manage all the desktops at your customers sites. Wouldnt it be nice to be able to upgrade all your existing desktop machines to Windows 7 Enterprise too? Far too many SMEs are still running an eclectic collection of different Windows versions on their machines, with lots of Windows XP and Vista sprayed liberally around the organisation. Well, Intune gives you upgrade rights to Windows 7 Enterprise for each machine, assuming their hardware specification is capable of supporting Windows 7. And this isnt an extra cost on top of the normal Intune service, but is built into the subscription price. You dont have to rush to Windows 7 Enterprise keep as many machines running XP and Vista as you need and then upgrade at your own pace. Want to set up remote diagnostics and a helpdesk? How
Windows Intune there isnt much to see on the client side, but the Easy Assist is important.
t can be far too easy to knock Microsoft for being stuck in a business model that depends upon two great cash cows namely, Windows and Office and we tend to spread on an extra thick layer of cynicism when it comes to its cloud offerings. And dont get me started on the subject of territoriality of user data, which Ive ranted about here all too often. Despite all this, its clear there are some very bright people working at Redmond to solve the real issues affecting businesses today, especially in the SME arena. Hence my interest in Windows Intune. The background to this product, which will become available as a full cloud service shortly, is simple: store data in the cloud about your computers, their status, errors, updates and so forth, and add to that more data about the applications that are installed. Then allow a manager, through the cloud console, to manage those PCs, and allow end users to make tech-support calls to the manager too.
An unlimited number of client computers can be managed through this cloud-based service
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Contents
Windows Intune, ActiveSync and Microsofts answer to the iPad
Web Applications
Knowing when to call in the cavalry and when to just go it alone
136 139 142
A real-world look at the many bug reporting packages on the market
145 148 152
130 133
Online Security
Would mandatory reporting of security breaches make the world a safer place?
Londons O2 Arena is rocked by some seriously heavy metal
Its fun and games as Simon Jones updates his development environment
Mobile & Wireless
Paul Ockenden switches phones, while Vodafones Sure Signal divides opinion
Server Room
Jon Honeyball talks SQL Server Licensing, and David Moss goes green
about letting your users call a centralised management helpdesk that enables remote control of machines and full diagnostics? Yes, thats in the package too. And what about multiple layers of Help support, so that easy calls can be taken by the tech-support juniors, and are progressed through to the scarcer and more expensive experts only if the problem justifies it? Yes, you can do that too. Surely theres a downside? Well, the product will be aimed at those SMEs that have no real desktop management tools in place and frankly, that means the majority. If you already have a full-blown Microsoft System Center infrastructure, this product isnt for you. Or maybe youve gone for System Center in order to do server and VM management, and have been slow in deploying all of this out to the desktops too. This isnt surprising given how much benefit it provides to an organisation to get their old servers migrated to VMs and under some sort of managed control desktops are usually a lower priority and can come along later. So Intune could work alongside a centralised System Center installation if you wanted it to. There is, of course, a price tag for all this functionality, and although the UK pricing hasnt been announced yet, it will cost $11 per desktop, per month in the US. For this you get the entire package of desktop reporting, fault finding, support for the malware and AV solutions, remote updating and so forth, not forgetting those licence upgrades to Windows 7 Enterprise for each desktop. Lets call it 8 per desktop, per month. Of course, the value you get from Intune will depend on how much you use it and the time it saves you. I can see it being very effective for many organisations: it lowers the cost bar down so much that there really is no excuse not to have centralised management running in your office. So the question is, can you afford not to have something like this in place? It will be interesting to see how Intune affects the SME marketplace for antivirus, malware and basic management
Intune will be aimed at SMEs that have no desktop management tools in place that means the majority
software. I could see it making significant inroads at the expense of other vendors in this product space. Such a clean, simple and straightforward offering would be welcome here. Bundle in the Windows 7 Enterprise upgrade rights and the package is lifted to another level. Add in the multi-site capabilities for facilities management support companies, and it begins to look very compelling indeed. How will it work in practice? Well theres a beta version you can sign up to today: Ive done this, and can report that much work still needs to be done in the authentication and login area for administrators. Basically my install went fine, the accounts were created, the client-side control tools were downloaded and it all worked fine. However, after a reboot I cant log in and the website takes me on a trip though a long set of winding passages, all alike. It must be some sort of authentication glitch. Microsoft has plenty of time to fix it, because Intune wont be launched until the beginning of next year. Nevertheless, my experience does highlight a potential weakness in any cloud-based management tool: you have to rely upon both working connectivity and no problems at the cloud end which are beyond your control to ensure this type of solution is workable. Of course, keeping everything on your own site makes you responsible for every component, but it also means you dictate the speed of recovery, upgrade or fixing. It will be fascinating to see what the service level agreement amounts to in practice for remote solutions of this type. Clearly it would be fun to have a cut-down version of Intune for the home network. Microsoft thinks so too, which is why its working on a smaller solution called Microsoft Fix It. This is a similar idea: a web-based management console thats fed from a cloud-based management reporting solution. Client tools are downloaded onto each computer and there are expert tools for diagnosing and repairing each client computer. Many of these autofixing abilities have been built into Windows 7 itself, but its useful to be able to run them against older versions of Windows too. The design here allows a parent to set up and manage all the computers within a household, and to see whats installed, changed and updated. It also focuses heavily on fault-finding and fixing for example, solving problems like Your CD/DVD drive cannot read or write media, Diagnose
Microsoft Fix It for the home users onmachine, and home network management tools too.
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and fix problems with sound and audio and Common system maintenance tasks. These arent just prescriptive Help pages, but are a set of active tools that run on your PC that know what areas to check. Ive been impressed and, although not perfect, for a home user this level of information and hand-holding could well be as useful as phone a friend. Fix It is free and targets all Windows versions since XP Service Pack 3. Of course, you dont get free upgrades to Windows 7 Enterprise as with Intune, but what do you expect for a free solution from Microsoft? Both products, Fix It and Intune, are definitely worth taking a look at, and now the only problem will be to get users to actually try these solutions before they phone a friend.
Caption here please caption here please
Windows tablets
Mr Ballmer has announced that Windows tablets will be arriving soon, and that these will be different from existing pen-driven tablets because theyll be touchscreen-based like Apples iPad. I hope Microsoft can put some innovative thinking into this platform. Ive been running pen-driven versions of Windows for some 20 years now there were pen extensions to Windows 3 (for those with very long memories) and my first tablet computer was the Compaq Concerto back in 1992, which had a lightweight, detachable keyboard. Since then Ive gone through various models of tablet PC, but as the screen resolutions have increased the usefulness of the pen interface has become less and less. Unfortunately, we demand a great deal from a true tablet computer: it must be light, thin, switch instantly on and off, and have exceptional battery life. The iPad delivers all of this in spades, and Microsoft desperately needs to come up with a credible answer to it. Its said that it will be using Windows 7 as the base OS for the new tablet, which makes sense it can be moulded to fit the hardware requirements. Pen support is more prevalent than you might think in Windows 7, but its a huge unknown as to how well its user interface can be modified to support touch in a solid fashion, and whether the apps can be tweaked enough. And therein lies the core of my concern. I dont want to use a mouse orientated/pen-supporting version of Excel thats just been bodged to work with touch; the huge library of existing Windows apps mean nothing if they dont run well on a touch-based tablet. Actually, they have to be fabulous. Microsoft certainly can do this, but theres a huge chasm between can and will, so I fear the worst but hope for the best. A truly touch-optimised tablet with 12-hour battery life, a stunning screen, instant on/off and so forth is asking for miracles at every stage of the design process, and thats before a bunch of independent hardware vendors have managed to splodge all their misguided nonsense onto the device too.
a sync, or just threw a tantrum and forgot the phone entirely. Yes, things have become better in recent times, but its been a far from painless journey. The issue today is working out which phones and packages will sync fully to Exchange Server. This is a multi-dimensional brain explosion that needs some clarification, if only to ensure that system administrators know which thing will work with what phone and which connecting software. This being the case, you can imagine my delight at discovering the Comparison of Exchange ActiveSync Clients page on Wikipedia, which is directly linked to the Wiki site run by Microsoft and so is intended to be both complete and correct. What an eye-opener this page has been: it clearly explains a number of painful points that Ive seen at clients networks over the years. Running across the top of this monster table is a list of phones and connection software: Windows Mobile 6.1; Windows Phone 6.5; Apple iPhone/iPod 4.0.1; Nokia Mail for Exchange 3.0.50; Google Android 2.2; Notify Sync 4.7; Palm WebOS 1.4.5 and AstraSync 4.1. Down the left-hand side is each version of Active Sync, coupled to its version of Exchange Server, so we go from ActiveSync 2.5 with Exchange Server 2003 SP2 through to ActiveSync 14.1 with Exchange Server 2010 SP1. Theres no mention of Windows Phone 7, but Im sure it will appear shortly. As youd expect, the greatest number of green yes entries appear next to the Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 platforms. Apple doesnt do too badly, but there are some significant holes; things become worse as you move across the table of supported platforms, with significant gaps on Google Android 2.2, for example. Do all these no entries really matter? Well it depends on how much of your desktop Outlook experience youre trying to put onto the phone. Does it matter that, for example, you cant do Password Recovery on an Android phone? Or set a policy for maximum attachment size, or encrypt its storage card? Maybe, or maybe not, depends on your organisation. Whats clear, though, is as soon as you move outside the standardsbased world of IMAP, POP3 and SMTP and move into esoteric sync platforms for server-side line-of-business apps such as Exchange Server, you can be entering a whole world of pain. And it isnt just Exchange Server: a good friend who works for IBM showed me the hoops you have to jump through to get an iPhone to sync with Lotus Notes. Enabling VPNs that time out is just the start of it, and it only works because of some code squatting somewhere along the chain that makes your Notes server look like an Exchange Server.
Exchange ActiveSync compatibility on Wikipedia a very useful resource, linked from Microsofts own new Wiki.
Wikid!
Its a really good thing that microsoft is using this Wiki idea to push out useful information into the public domain in an easy-to-find fashion via Wikipedia. more of this please.
Pdc 2010
There will be a PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in 2010 but it will be like none that have gone before. It will be held at Microsofts headquarters in Redmond for only two days, and it will be restricted to 1,000 attendees. Im hoping to attend, but will be visiting various divisions at Redmond while Im there. My targets are Windows client, server and virtualisation, server management, and cloud. Who knows, I might even be able to do some podcasting too.
exchange activesync
ActiveSync is one of those technologies that has caused me more heartache than just about any other. Back in the days when I ran a Windows Mobile device as my day-to-day phone, I lost count of the times when it refused to sync, or died during
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Computing
Real World
IE9 and HTML5

FAiluRe is moRe HonouRAble iF youve tRied. WitH tHAt in mind, Jon Honeyball HAils tHe Html5 Revolution, condemns FAcebook, And pondeRs FAmily secuRity
he arrival of the third beta of Internet Explorer 9 is a significant step forward, and one for which Microsoft should be applauded. IE is one of those products that Ive disliked for years: its earlier versions were prone to all sorts of nasty security issues, and theres still a fair number of horrid old IE6 installations lurking out there on peoples computers, contributing to the insecurity of the internet. Of course, there are many different reasons for this tardiness in upgrading some businesses wrote web applications that took advantage of IE6-specific features, and so now find themselves cemented into a cul-de-sac. Its hard to raise much sympathy for them, but Microsoft shares some of the blame for this situation by promoting something that in hindsight is a bit silly. IE7 was a bit of an improvement, but I only really started to take notice again upon the arrival of IE8. That said, Im no longer much of a fan of IE8 either, finding its UI somewhere between plain confusing and downright impenetrable. Worse still, it seems to take over large wodges of my desktop space for no real benefit, but its clearly some kind of an effort to make a more secure and robust IE platform. With IE9, though, theres a really big change, and thats the move up to HTML5. Now Id rather not get embroiled in the frankly rather pointless HTML5-versus-Flash argument in this column, which is after all about Windows, but its hard to dodge the issue entirely given the political venom injected into it by Steve Jobs. Personally, I think Apple is absolutely right to want to keep Flash off its hardware platforms. While I admire the intention behind this technology that allows the same codebase to run on diverse target hardware, the end result has always seemed in practice to be unsatisfying in a cake-halfbaked sort of way. Yes, there are some stunning Flash-based websites out there, and indeed readers may recall my enthusiasm a few years ago when Adobe finally tied together Flash as a front-end to grown-up databases as the back end. At that time I agreed that this step opened up a huge opportunity
for dynamic, interactive sites to be built that were fully connected through to serious data stores. But now for the reality check just how many such sites have actually been built? Almost none I fear. The cold, hard reality is that Flash is mainly a tool for those who wish to create annoying scrolling banner adverts, pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders and pop-in-your-face distractions, which is why I run a Flash blocker on all my web browsers I can see the frame where a Flash object belongs and then decide whether to activate it myself (most of the time, of course, theres no point). Worse still, Flash is being used ever more frequently by lazy web designers as a stand-in tool for what should be simple, static graphic images: check out the World Class Sound title at www.naimaudio.com for an example of Flash being used just to put a font onto a static graphic. Whats wrong with a simple bitmap, chaps, like the ones you used further down the same page? Given that we now know Flash isnt going to be allowed onto Apples iPhones and iPads any time soon, and that many of us run Flash blockers in our PC web browsers, why use Flash for your static content and thus render your page unviewable on those platforms? Its madness. Anyway, along came a new web standard called HTML5. Now Ill confess that Im somewhat cynical when it comes to web standards, although the HTML Hairdressing world seems to love them and the more the merrier. Each browser vendor has decided to implement its own particular version of the standards, and the end result is a mishmash of displays from the various different web browsers, which isnt an acceptable way forward and the public is frankly fed up with this sort of nonsense. So with HTML5 we have the opportunity for web browser authors to finally get their collective acts together, and ensure that different browsers render the same code in the same way. Just to be clear, there are no excuses this time round. So, to come full circle, while theres a serious push towards adopting HTML5, the major vendors are of course playing a
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Contents
Jon Honeyball gets started with HTML5 but finishes with Facebook
Web Applications
Searching for a simple alternative to content management systems
128 131 134
Musings on the world of open source and the changing nature of business
137 140 144
122 125
Online Security
If you care about online security, its time you heard about DNSSEC
The benefits of teaming on a network, and TechEd 2010 in New Orleans
When Microsoft Word acts up, Simon Jones saves the day
Mobile & Wireless
Paul Ockenden looks at a few of his favourite things
Server Room
Firewalls on desktops, and mourning Windows Essential Business Server
Hardware-accelerated fish in HTML5 on IE9. How many can you keep?.
move forward, and every step forward that the HTML5 engineers take in the various browser engineering teams is a step backward for Flash. Which is just fine by me, because it means I can keep my Flash-blockers in place and maximise the battery life of my laptop, rather than watching it vanish down the plughole thanks to an onslaught of Flash-hosted advertising banners and widgets.
facebook finish
Have you seen the astonishing video from the recent D8 conference, where the boss and founder of Facebook is interviewed? Ill leave you to find the URL and watch it for yourself, but please dont opt for just the highlights, watch the whole damning mess. Having done that, any thoughts I might have had of putting any data onto Facebook vanished over the hill, never to return. Within hours Id terminated my account. Its rather rare since the glory days of Gerald Ratner to witness such a successful job of destroying public confidence in your company by a CEO. Ive said it before and will repeat it again, the wheels are starting to come off the whole cloud computing bandwagon now that grown-ups are getting involved in the decision-making processes. Its fine as a platform for teenagers to natter to each other, which clearly this must be so given the stunning statistics 570 billion page views per month, 3 billion photo uploads per month, and a serving rate of 1.2 million photos per second. But it isnt for me, thank you. Any company that screws around with its privacy settings so blatantly and in such an immature fashion isnt a company I wish to engage with. Period.
game of corporate willy waving, carefully concocting demo pages that may or may not load in their opponents browsers. Frankly, this nonsense needs to stop, and we need to see just what will work on each platform. You can download the beta of IE9 from http:// ie.microsoft.com/testdrive and its worth having a look at it. Most impressive in this new release is the addition of the Canvas element, and the use of graphics card hardware acceleration. Even my rather tired three-year-old HP desktop machine can manage 100 simultaneous fish at 50 frames per second, which is quite something. For font lovers the introduction of Web Open Font Format support is welcome, although I note that while IE9 renders the test page beautifully, IE8 makes something of a dogs dinner of the layout. Of course, none of this will matter until all the major browsers are released with support for HTML5, and then the inevitable finger pointing, wailing and blame game will start all over again. But this is the best opportunity weve had for a long time to get things to work together in a coherent fashion. It has to be the right way to
Windows parental controls

It was one of those discussions that could only be held in a pub, and which required at least three pints all round. Our merry, well-tiddled group of IT geeks was discussing the next decade, in that intellectual and balanced way that involved lots of shouting of no, No, NO, youre wrong! and Whose round is it anyway? I was asked what was my biggest IT regret of the last decade? and I pondered for a moment whether to say the lack of true innovation on the Windows client platform over that decade, and how many of the big efforts came to naught. I trotted out a long list of acronyms: the three pillars of Vista,
IE8 has problems with the IE9 font test pages.
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WinFS, Avalon and so forth. In fairness to Microsoft, at least it had made the effort. Failure is more honourable if youve tried, and although much of the effort and thinking was misguided, at least an effort was made. But the one thing that really annoyed me was how Microsoft flushed the home user community down the toilet by the way it handled Windows XP. This is a product I both love and hate. Its been a great platform in the business world (once we got to grips with it), so its hardly surprising that many businesses dont want to move forward from the platform that they know. I hesitate before adding love, but certainly know and respect isnt out of order. However, the way in which family computing was torpedoed by the Windows 9x-to-XP migration, plus the lack of insistence on the use of NTFS file system and hence the complete lack of security, really stuck in my throat. There were loud murmurs of agreement from around the bar-room table, so I continued. I said that despite all of this, I had to give credit where it was due in the area of home and parental controls, in Vista, and the subsequent improvements in Windows 7. The only place... let me repeat that, the only place for user management is baked deep into the OS itself. No amount of bolted-on third-party parental control tools will ever beat a properly structured, designed and engineered solution thats part of the OS itself. And here Microsoft delivered the goods. Parental control is a tricky subject because its so emotive. What is appropriate material? For what age group? And who decides Microsoft? The State? The parent? The child itself? Worse still, the childs friends who manage to unpick the locks? And thats just looking at the controller aspect: consider the content to be controlled. Is pornography bad? Is violence worse? How about unpleasant photos from official police websites? What about issues such as pregnancy, abortion and safe sex? This is all horribly complex, where one set of rules cant be applied. Ive looked at parental control software, and one thing is noticeable across many of these products: the vendors clearly have their own agenda in terms of the content. Some are stricter than others. Some clamp down on sex education and porn, while others seem to major more on violence and political reporting. Theres an undercurrent of religious belief behind many of them, although this doesnt bother me because at the end of the day, parents have to make up their own minds. But I still shy away from bolt-on tools simply because they tend not to integrate well with the underlying operating system. And if you look at Windows Vista, and especially Windows 7, theres a raft of tools there to help you set up and manage what your children can and cant view. First lets deal with application blocking. It isnt
Live Beta
theres more than Family Safety in Live Essentials Beta: Mail, Messenger, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Sync and Writer, all in beta versions. Some work online, some download and install onto your desktop. Youll recognise some that were in Vista but got pulled from Windows 7. Go to the Live Essentials site to get them.
In fairness to Microsoft, although much of the effort and thinking was misguided, at least an effort was made
unreasonable to lock down chatroom tools if you think your children arent old enough to go into the real-time outside world, or to run games or tools they might bring home on a USB key from school. Second, if you want to block websites, then consider that its probably right to split children into three age groups: under-8s should only have access to a whitelist of approved sites; between 8 and 12 you could argue for a blacklist solution based on pre-canned content filtering; for the over-12s it should be open season for content, but with ongoing monitoring by the parents. I must stress that these arent hard and fast rules, and different people will have different views. Also, theres much to be said for parents running the same parental controls against themselves: do you really want to have a one-click accident on a spam email and land yourself with a screenful of nastiness? Of course not. Finally, time control is important too putting a computer in your childs bedroom might seem liberal and embracing of new technology, but do you want them to still be at the computer after midnight, unbeknown to you? Its important to be able to control both the hours allowed and blocked, and maybe also set a maximum number of hours per week. The tools built into Vista and Windows 7 allow a parent to monitor what sites their child visits, to set up those whitelists and blacklists, to control the applications that can be run, and more. To do this each user must have their own login to the machine, but this is 2010, so there really is no excuse for not having this already. Most importantly, though, the OS gives the parent control and monitoring oversight of what the child has been doing, in the form of reports, status updates and so forth. And the child can, for example, go to a website URL thats off limits and make a request to the parent to allow access, which can then be done by the parent at a later time. The monitoring toolset is the crucial point here: security and safety software is meaningless unless theres a rich and vibrant discussion about the issues involved between all the parties. You dont want to get into a situation where the computer is locked down and theres no discussion at all. Thats just corrosive. So I was pleased to see with the beta of the new Windows Live Services that Microsoft is extending the reach of these tools with the Family Safety toolset. The parental control items I just described are on a per machine basis, but Family Safety takes this outside of the box to any of the computers that the child uses in the house. It does this by requiring a Live.com login, which then brings down the parentally managed policy to the local machine. It also pushes back all the reporting and management functions onto the internet-hosted site, so the parents can monitor this from anywhere. Just about everything that you could do from Windows 7 at the OS level has been transcribed into an online service that spans multiple machines. This is good stuff, and reason enough for any family to upgrade to Windows 7. You might well now be saying but Jon, you said this stuff has to be an OS function, and this is a web service! Yes, youre quite right, it does seem inconsistent. But look at it this way, its a web service controlling an OS function, not a web service controlling an app bolt-on, and thats the important point.
Theres a raft of new tools to play with in the Live Essentials Beta.
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Computing
Real World
Dropbox everything
if youRe looking foR A simple WAy to syncHRonise files in tHe cloud And dont like tHe look of micRosoft skydRive, jon honeyball mAy Just HAve tHe AnsWeR
few months ago, I was looking around for a way to sync files between various computers. I looked at SkyDrive from Microsoft and found its user interface to be almost unbelievably incomplete and nasty, requiring third-party tools to achieve any sort of usable integration with the desktop. Perhaps Microsoft is going to sort this out, given that SkyDrive is the cornerstone of its current Office 2010 online documenthandling solution? Youd think that it might have decided to sort it out before the release of Office, but it seems not. Around the same time I started looking at Dropbox, which you can download from www.dropbox.com. After a month or so of kicking this around and moving many tens of gigabytes of data into and out of the service, Ive come to some conclusions. First, a description of what it is: Dropbox is an online service that stores files. The server side of it is essentially transparent to you during normal operations. You specify a point in your file directory tree that you want to be your dropbox, and any directories beneath that point, including all files they contain, are automatically included. Its important to note that your files stay on your own disk, too, just where you left them; what youve done is tell Dropbox to monitor that specific area of your hard disk and to send any changes up into the cloud, so if
You can use Dropbox to share files and folders with others.
youre using a laptop and you lose network connectivity, everything is still there on your hard disk. Whenever you perform certain file actions (create, modify, delete and so on) within the Dropbox-monitored space, the changes are synchronised up to the online store. You get the first 2GB of space for free, and if you want more you can rent it for $9.99/month (around 6.50) for 50GB, or $19.99/month (around 13) for 100GB. If you refer other people and they start using Dropbox, youll get a small free space increment as a gratuity or introduction fee: at 250MB per referral, this is a useful amount to add to your 2GB of free space. To make Dropbox work across multiple computers that you own, just install the software on each device and log into your account: each newly added machine automatically gets a download of the current server contents into the place that youve nominated on each machine to be Dropbox space. Clearly, it wouldnt be a good idea if all the machines on your local network had to send and receive via your office internet connection or home ADSL line, so any synchronisation takes place directly, machine-to-machine over the local network if it can see the other machines on the LAN. This makes local synch very fast indeed, and saves on internet bandwidth. If you want to get to your files when youre away from your computer, then theres a full web interface into the remote store. Just log into the service and browse around your storage space. By default Dropbox stores one months worth of changes to each file in its cloud store. To retrieve an older version of a file, just go to the website and choose the file, then select the Show Previous Versions feature. You can use this to roll back changes over time, which is useful, especially for developers. If you pay for the Pack-Rat upgrade, which costs $39 (around 27) then Dropbox will store your all old versions for an unlimited time. This also applies to files that youve deleted from your local disk (the Pack-Rat upgrade extends file undelete from 30 days to unlimited time).
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Contents
A revolutionary server concept, plus an impressive online storage service
Web Applications
We reveal the best languages for budding programmers to learn
126 129 132
How to boost performance and reliability by tweaking MySQL settings
135 138 142
120 123
Online Security
Safer browsing, plus the battle of the botnets
Why you shouldnt worry about the saviour of the internet, IPv6, just yet
Insert scanned images into Word at the touch of a button
Mobile & Wireless
Oranges mobile-phone coverage black-spot solution put to the test
Server Room
Microsofts Hyper-V virtualisation engine gets the thumbs up
Obviously, managing the usernames and passwords across your accounts is going to be important. If you change the password on one machine, you dont want every other machine to be locked out until you go to each one and update their password too. Dropbox gets around this by treating each machine-to-host connection as being trusted, and so if you change the password on one machine the change is automatically sent to all other linked machines. Theres another feature that makes Dropbox interesting. If you have a friend who also has Dropbox, then you can set up special directories within your Dropbox tree that are shared between you. This isnt just a one-to-one share, but can be created around a group of users, which is ideal for sharing things between friends or members of a family. Setting up a sensible directory name is useful, to identify whos in that particular directory, and because you can set up multiples of these directories, you can create webs of sharing among the various groups of friends, family and colleagues. Finally, the cross-platform nature of Dropbox is a big issue. There are clients for Windows and Mac, and you can get to your data in the cloud either by the website, or by using a native application on an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, with BlackBerry coming soon. Naturally, I dont want to synch 100GB of stuff to my iPhone, but it has been useful to gain access to the files in an emergency. Items marked as Favourites are actually synched to your remote handheld devices, ensuring theyre available to you offline. All of this seems too good to be true, so are there any downsides? Well, lets start with the obvious one: the software isnt really network-aware. Yes, it knows whether a target machine is on your local LAN and then uses the local LAN to transfer, rather than using up and down the internet connection to the server. Thats fine, but if youre using a laptop and youre connected via a 3G connection, you may find you have a big synch happening in the background if many files were changed while your laptop was disconnected. This could be painful from a cost point of view, and almost unthinkable if youve trundled to somewhere in Europe and are on a roaming data rate. Dropbox doesnt offer many choices here, although pressing Quit will stop any synchronisation. However, Dropbox is set to autorun by default, and you may not notice a big synchronisation taking place in the background. Dropbox needs to become more network-aware so for example, it should be possible for it to auto-pause on change of default gateway, then to prompt with a Do you want to take Dropbox online again?
By default, Dropbox keeps a months worth of changes to a file.
MONSTERS
A product with such a clear vision from a start-up company must be open to takeover by some large vendor, and to be honest Im somewhat surprised that one of the monsters hasnt grabbed Dropbox already. maybe its just another case of not invented here.
question that has to be answered before traffic resumes. My next worry is that your data is held in the cloud, presumably in the USA, so it may be open to Patriot Act inspection, and there are implications under the UKs Data Protection Act too. You should therefore be careful about what you put into Dropbox shared space, because if you fall foul of the Data Protection Act youll be liable. It would be nice if Dropbox offered a European-hosted data service, but theres no sign of that at the moment. Finally, theres no way to control any encryption on the service. Dropbox says that all file transfers are over an encrypted SSL connection, that all files stored on its servers are encrypted with AES-256, that files are inaccessible without a username and password and that Dropbox employees are unable to view any files. All of that is adequate, but Id like to be able to insert my own certificate into the system for all my files, to ensure that everything is encrypted under my control. This would cause issues with shared folders, for example, but Id be happier about holding data outside of the EU. Overall, this is a great service for data backup, recovery and sharing. Its considerably more sophisticated than just a simple mounted drive using WebDAV. Clearly, its useless for disaster recovery, but as a means of ensuring you always have access to your stuff, theres much to commend it. As for myself, Ive paid for the full 100GB solution with the Pack-Rat upgrade, and have added it to my suite of backup, archive and data transfer tools. I now find it easier to get a friend to install the free Dropbox client and then join in a share than it is to push our files on to some other online shared space. For home and small-business users, this is a great solution. For larger businesses its lack of management umbrella control and user-controlled encryption could be a worry, but give it a whirl and you might find it incredibly useful I know I have.
server thing
Sometimes, its worth taking a step back and looking at technology from a fresh perspective. Occasionally when I do, I stumble across something so new, so clever that Im forced to stop in my tracks and say wow! Im regularly asked by PR teams to meet with their clients. Sometimes its possible, but sometimes real work gets in the way. (To tell the truth I could spend all day, every day meeting companies, getting taken for lunch and having a few post-work sherbets bought for me, but for health reasons its good that work intervenes occasionally!)
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Last week, I had a meeting booked with a software company at its PR firms offices in London. I cant remember what exactly it was that piqued my interest in this product, other than a usually reliable PR rep telling me that it was really quite something. Its website gave nothing away, so when I sat down in that office in London I expected this to be yet another dynamic, highly leveraged, cloud-enhanced, web-enabled strategic Tribble. How wrong I was. What Virtensys has come up with made me reconsider the design of servers, desktops and indeed the complete hardware design and implementation. Its radical but extremely simple in concept. Better still, its working now, you can buy it today and its British, run by people with an impeccable track record. The basic idea is quite straightforward: your PC, whether its acting as desktop workstation or server, contains a high-speed internal bus on which almost all the components sit, which nowadays is called PCI Express and works very well. Its an extremely fast connection fabric, and some of Intels processors will soon come with it built into the main CPU itself. Branching off from this PCI Express bus is a range of other, slower interconnects: there may well be a disk controller that provides SATA or SAS buses to the disk drives; theres probably a network card that provides TCP/IP over an Ethernet connection, or over multiple connections and hence wires in most cases; if you have some shared disk storage then there may be fibre channel connections from an FC card going to a disk storage array. The back of most servers, especially at the high-end of the market, is therefore a rats nest of wires and fibre. Some of this tangle can be alleviated by going for a blade server, in which multiple blades, each containing a minicomputer with its own processor and RAM, can be plugged into a single intelligent frame. The frame provides services such as networking that are shared among all the blades, which works very well but has the downside of locking you into one vendor. If youre lucky you might get the option of fitting, say, a Cisco switch that was custom-designed for your particular HP blade server, but thats as far as it goes. So what Virtensys has done is to extend the PCI Express bus outside of the computer itself. This is done at present by a simple, almost dumb interface card that drops into a spare PCI Express slot although in future there may be a PCI Express connector on the back of the computer itself which connects to Virtensys own box, which is in effect a PCI Express protocol switch. Inside this box is a custom motherboard that accepts PCI Express cards connecting to other host computers. Then theres another set of PCI Express slots into which you plug expensive, high-performance PCI Express cards, typical examples being 10Gb Ethernet cards
Virtual machines can also boot from the Virtensys box.
The Virtensys boxs motherboard accepts PCI Express cards that connect to other computers.
on fibre, 4Gb fibre channel disk controller cards, high-speed RAID controllers and so forth. And between the computer slots and the card slots theres a pair of very highperformance chips that act as a virtualisation switch. What does this mean in practice? Lets say you want to put all your servers on to 10Gb Ethernet, but youre baulking over the per-server cost of the 10Gb network cards, which can cost thousands of pounds each, so upgrading all your servers can run up a very large bill. After all, 16 servers need 16 cards. So why not virtualise a single physical network card and make it available to each of the host servers as required? Its important to realise that each server is made to believe it has its own 10Gb network card. You use the standard, vendor-supplied 10Gb network card driver for each server, and no OS changes are required. All thats happening is that the PCI Express bus has been physically extended and then put through a very clever switch, so that the one card is visible to multiple computers. Of course, if you have 16 servers all sharing one 10Gb network card there may come a time when the card is overloaded by the demands of all these servers, but the solution is simple: drop in a second card and make it available to all the servers too. Similarly, if you want to add fibre channel to your servers to allow multiple virtualisation hosts to access a single fibre channel store, you could pay for fibre channel cards in each server, or you can now put one fibre channel card into the Virtensys box and virtualise it to each server. In fact, you can run all your I/O needs up and down this bus, because if you think about it all your I/O is already going up and down the PCI Express bus within each server itself. All Virtensys has done is extended this bus out of the case and turned it into a switched environment. You can, for example, put a RAID controller into the Virtensys box, connected to a bunch of disks so that each server can boot from the same controller, believing it has its own boot disk. Virtual machines can boot from it too, because they also think they have their own set of storage. Although the Virtensys box isnt a cheap option, at around 30,000 to support 16 servers, the savings quickly mount up once you realise how much sharing can be done by these virtualised cards. Theres one final kicker: to get best performance, its common practice to use direct disk access from a VMware virtual machine to guarantee high-speed disk access. Unfortunately, this creates limitations on moving VMs around between machines, because theyve been hardwired into the disk infrastructure. With Virtensys you can move any VM from one host to another, and it will still see the same virtualised disk controller, so hot-moves will still work. This technology is interesting because it rewrites the rulebook for interconnect, for the cost of upgrading to high-speed networks and disks, and it provides a fully flexible solution that is vendor-agnostic. The firm says its working with every major vendor (except for Cisco, surprise, surprise). Maybe, just maybe, this piece of British innovation will provide the key to a radical change in the way we build and use servers, and thus percolate down to other devices such as desktops and even laptops.
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Computing
Real World
Good news for Microsoft

jon honeyball WRestles WitH A monsteR pRinteR, And toAsts tHe lAuncH of WindoWs 7 And tHe ReleAse of tHe public betA foR WindoWs Home seRveR
machine seems to think that well be pleasantly surprised by the inevitable early announcements of large-scale migration. So what are the approximate market shares of the various alternative OSes today? Its hard to know for sure because there arent many vendor-supplied numbers available, and things can get a little murky: for example, does your new laptop that comes with Windows 7 plus XP downgrade rights count as one or two OS sales? Nevertheless, there are a few metrics that can be useful, especially those that come from online companies that count which browser versions hit their sites. Now this measure can be skewed depending on the content of the particular site (for example, a Mac-only software site will show way above average Safari hits), but these numbers offer an interesting viewpoint. According to Microsoft, more than 10% of the PCs in the world are now running Windows 7, which isnt a bad at all. Other figures suggest that XP still has around 65%, with Vista in the mid-teens. If we add in Windows 7 at around 10% that takes Microsoft to a total of 90% or so. Apple Mac lies somewhere between 5 and 10%, and some sources claim that Linux is still languishing at around 1%. Thats a pretty good definition of market dominance for Redmond.
Printing an A4 page in Publisher onto A5 is more difficult than it seems, as Jon Honeyball discovered when a simple act of charity went awry.
icrosoft has announced that it has now sold in excess of 100 million copies of Windows 7 in the first six months, which is, by whatever metric you choose, an extremely good performance and one that will be a great relief to the Windows team. The company is claiming, bullishly, that there will be another 200 million sold by the end of this year. That Windows 7 is shaping up to become the fastest selling operating system in history is notable for several reasons: first, it suggests that the market cant be in that bad shape, despite the ravages of the ongoing world financial crisis; and second, theres no doubting that a lot of people were just hoping for anything other than Vista, thanks and Windows 7 clearly fits that bill. But before we break open the champagne, its worth remembering that few, if any, large corporations have yet migrated to 7 on any large scale. Of course there are a brave few pioneers who have dived in doubtless with lots of help and encouragement from Microsoft itself, whose marketing
Publisher grief
When you move house to another some distance away you come to appreciate the things you took for granted before but which are no longer just there. One such amenity was my local pub, the wonderful Half Moon Inn in Belchamp St Paul, which was featured in the Lovejoy TV series. The other service I miss is the wisdom of the parish priest, Father Eoin. Im not a religious chap, but his good counsel in times of need is something well worth supporting, and whenever he asks me if Id do a pile of printing for his church the answer is always yes. My HP 5500DTN printer is something of a monster, boasting five paper trays and full-duplex printing onto A3 paper (which means I could print my own tabloid newspaper, hmmm). I wrote
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Contents
Windows 7 is shaping up to be the fastest selling OS in history
Web Applications
Mark Newton has had a hectic month on Twitter and Facebook
136 139 142
Bashing big data down to size with Googles MapReduce and Hadoop
145 148 152
130 133
Online Security
How valuable is your login data? And where has all the spam gone?
Steve Cassidy looks for rational behaviour in the NAS marketplace
Mobile & Wireless
Office 2010 has finally been released, and it still has the capacity to surprise
The simplest way to jail-break your iPhone, and black-spot testing
Server Room
Jon Honeyball stiffens his fibre, and David Moss thinks security
recently in my PC Pro blog about how the performance of this beast collapsed to the speed of a cheap LaserJet whenever I asked it to print onto A5 it turns out that if the paper doesnt fill the full width of the heater rollers that fuse toner onto the paper, then the uncovered parts of the rollers quickly overheat. Its design relies on the paper carrying away a great deal of heat from the rollers in normal operation. Anyway, Father Eoin recently asked me to print some A5 flyers for him. Hed put together a nicely designed page in Microsoft Publisher, which is an excellent layout tool for such occasional users (provided they dont try to output any web pages from the package, a process that always reminds me of trying to get blood out of a stone). The problem was his page was A4 and I needed to print it onto A5 paper. My first thought was to take the A4 page and just tell the program that it was using A5 paper, but no way would this work. The page border itself resized beautifully, but all the items on the page stayed at their A4 sizes. Trying to pick up everything and squeeze it down didnt work because all the fonts were now the wrong size, forcing all the textboxes to just reflow the text. At this point I was ready to scream. I was probably going about this in the wrong way, and its likely that Publisher has a function called take this and make it that size please, but not being a Publisher fiend I couldnt spot where it was hidden I was lost in a maze of twisting menus and dialog boxes. Then I had a brainwave. If I could get a high-resolution bitmap image out of the program, I could then mung that in a bitmap editor (that is, mung the ISO-defined technical term to change or alter the size when in a hurry, as opposed to mung the old hackers term short for Mash Until No Good). So I tried to output the page as a PNG graphics file. That would be easy, so I thought load said full-resolution PNG file into some bitmap editor and then target the printer at A5. And it would have worked fine, except for the minor detail that PNG output from Publisher puts a single-pixel-deep black line across the top of each page, and you spot this only once youve printed the image file. Grrr. Time was tight, and my friends were waiting for me. What was I to do? Loud moans to the effect that I could do with a beer right now and dinner will be getting cold started to float up the stairs. Then I remembered that I could use the power of the printer driver to resize the image for me the application didnt need to know
that anything other than A4 paper was being used, and the printer driver had the power to re-render the entire page to any size I needed. So I opened up the relevant printer driver dialog boxes, made the changes and did a test print, which worked like a charm. As I was going to be away for a few days and the printing would be done in my absence, I also decided to turn the whole thing into a stored print job that could sit, preformatted and ready to go, on the hard disk of the printer itself. That way, the copies that Father Eoin needed could simply be run off by dialling up the print job on the printer and starting it, with Publisher safely closed and the myriad of driver settings forgotten about entirely. The moral of this tale is that when it comes to printing, you should always remember that theres a great deal of power in the printer driver itself, and that there are also many features on offer inside the printer, especially if it has local storage. Dont go nuts trying to fix things inside an application when you can fix it outside. The combination of HP print driver, job management and the printers own storage let me take a complicated page, resize it, store it in the printer and set it up so that anyone who could press a few buttons to recall that print job could do more printing unsupervised. Job done, and the beer was still cold.
Microsoft has released the public beta of the forthcoming version of Windows Home Server, codenamed Vail.
Who shall back up the backer up?

Microsoft has put out a public beta of the forthcoming version of Windows Home Server codenamed Vail. You can trundle over to http://connect.microsoft.com and download it today if you like, but as always the rules of beta software apply its probably quite buggy, certainly incomplete, and it might manage to totally ruin your day. If it were ready to ship it would have shipped, not gone into beta. You might recall that I have a soft spot for Windows Home Server (WHS), and the dedicated HP server on which I first got hold of it. It added a useful amount of functionality to my home network, and it can potentially introduce important facilities such as proper backup and restore, file sharing and media management to people who have never had a server before. It was designed to be run as a headless server without a screen, keyboard or mouse, and to be stuffed into a cupboard under the stairs and forgotten. WHS got off to a rocky start, and it was its innovative file system that caused the
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upset, making it possible for data to be lost under certain circumstances. That was obviously somewhat suboptimal for an operating system aimed at non-technical users, and Microsoft made things worse by not exactly being lightning quick in coming up with a fix. But once it was finally fixed, it became clearer how much the platform had to offer. A key component was the file system, which took NTFS and grafted onto it a new file system driver that allows all the storage in your server to be viewed as a single pool. Add more disks and this pool gets bigger, and you can mark files and directories as being of special importance, in which case WHS ensures theyre stored on at least two different spindles as a precaution against drive failure. This technology has never appeared on any other Microsoft platform, and I wondered whether it was a good idea that would never reach fruition. Those concerns werent without foundation, because it seems that for Vail Microsoft has decided to ditch that design and come up with something else. This new version is block-based rather than file-based, and again it exists as a file system driver buried deep down inside the file system stack. Microsoft claims that this new design is much better (a claim to which Mandy R-D clearly applies) and far more compatible with applications that might do somewhat naughty things with the file system. The downside is that your data isnt readable at all unless you have this new file system running, so you cant just pull a disk out of your WHS box and mount it into a normal PC. That sort of thing makes me nervous. I treasure the ability to take any disk from a dead box and mount it somewhere else. You can take a multidisk array out of Windows Server and plonk it onto another box and it will even remember its drive letters, for example. This is quite a major step away from compatibility, and its going to be important that Microsoft provides the flexibility to allow for routine backup/recover and disaster recovery solutions to be custom written for Vail in the future. It
would be a real pity if Vail, which is supposed to provide all of your home desktop machine backups, were not capable of being backed up itself.
hyper-v server
Sometimes, I wish I could get closer to the marketing people who name Microsofts products, close enough in fact to shake them warmly by the throat. Microsoft now has two Hyper-V products, both of which have the word Hyper-V in their title, one being called Windows Server with Hyper-V while the other is Windows Hyper-V Server or is that Hyper Windows V Server? Who can remember? Anyway, the important point is that there are two of them: one is your normal Windows Server with the Hyper-V engine bolted on to it (think of it as Windows Server that knows how to lift itself off the ground by pulling on both bootlaces), while the other is simply the core virtualisation engine, Hyper-V Server, alone without any useful OS attached. This latter is a good, free download from the Microsoft website. Theres a set of management tools available for it that are also free, which do all the usual VM things but not the sexy things that require you to pay. Thats okay, Hyper-V Server is fine for a lot of things. Getting Hyper-V Server up and running is simple download the image, burn a disc and boot up your server. The setup program takes a few minutes and asks a minimal number of questions, and once its up and running you have a working VMed server ready to accept virtual machines and perform real work. The user interface to Hyper-V Server is simple, just a text menu running in a window. Through there youll need to configure all the usual things such as network card settings, whether its part of a domain or not, and whether to allow for remote access and remote management. The desktop MMC tools are also easy to use, but youll soon discover that youve run into something of a brick wall. Searching the Microsoft website for Hyper-V Server information will soon swamp you instead with information that relates to Windows Server with Hyper-V, and youre back in that maze of twisting passages again. How much simpler it would have been if theyd named Hyper-V Server something like Fred, so that you could have a unique term to search for. Finally, theres some confusion about doing the configuration, depending on whether the client machine is in a domain and the server isnt, the client isnt and the server is, or both the other two permutations. There are several technical papers and blogs on this subject, and Id strongly advise you search for them. Finally, why cant I install Fred sorry, I mean Hyper-V Server onto a desktop PC and then put Windows 7 into a VM as the sole operating system on that machine? I could then snapshot it, manage it and treat it like other VMs. I could bring server roles in VMs onto the platform as and when I needed. I could do all the fancy VM stuff such as roll back at the end of a session. In short, I could build a truly impregnable computing platform. The only problem is theres no way to surface a desktop session to the screen, keyboard and mouse using Hyper-V Server at the moment. The Windows 7 session would run happily enough, but I wouldnt be able to directly work with it. Can we hope that Microsoft is looking at taking the Hyper-V Server technology and re-packaging it into something for use on a power desktop or laptop? Many server OSes run in VMs, and its really about time that desktops caught up.
Does Sir want Virtualisation with Hyper-V...
XP Rules
According to Microsoft figures, XP still holds a 65% majority of the Os market, but it will be interesting to see how that changes over the next six to 12 months. I suspect lots of company XP desktop PCs simply wont get upgraded any time soon, nor will a lot of home users who are quite happy with XP despite its flaws, and whose hardware hasnt imploded yet.
...or would Sir prefer Microsoft Hyper-V Server? Microsofts website isnt exactly clear on the matter.
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Computing
Real World
Sick and tired of Windows

AfteR 20 yeARs of dRiveR pRoblems, unReliAble updAtes And A fRustRAting inteRfAce, jon honeyball finAlly Runs out of pAtience WitH micRosoft
d hoped that my recent irritation over driver and update problems for Windows 7 had come to an end. Windows 7 has offered a fairly painful user experience since its release. Far too many things havent worked, while Windows Update and third-party vendors websites have fallen well short of being adequate. To recap my gripes from previous columns, everything should be available through Windows Update: every single driver, every widget, every little bit of Windows stuff required to make my PC work properly. Having to go to a vendors site to download stuff is a failure of process, while having to go to system component manufacturers sites is even worse. I accept that this a hard line to take, but Ive now had 20 years of updating Windows, finding drivers and trying to shoehorn the right component in and make it work properly, and to be honest Im just tired of it. Nowadays, there should be no excuse: we all have broadband, we all have enough local storage for drivers and information XML files, and we have plenty of computing horsepower to make it all work. The reality, of course, isnt so simple, and immediately falls into a trap whenever Microsoft wants to offer a service but doesnt want to offer it to everyone, or else its lawyers get in the way and basically screw the pooch. Microsoft says it cant ship third-party drivers lest someone in Des Moines, Iowa, decides that said driver has now become Microsofts fault and decides to sue, or some such equally silly (but probably true) legal nonsense. But driver problems have reared their ugly heads yet again this month, and Im somewhat embarrassed to say that its about a Dell PC yet again. Michael Dell must think that I have something against his company, but I can assure you that its just a coincidence. My problem has been
this: Ive been trying to get to the bottom of why Wi-Fi is so unreliable and Im not talking about when the base station is down the road and youre trying to browse from the pub. No, Im talking about when theres only a few metres between the laptop and the base station. Now, if Im to believe the claims of the Wi-Fi vendors, then this laptop should connect at lightning speed and the air should positively crackle with the data rushing through it. My cynicism begins with the knowledge that anything that runs at 2.4GHz is going to have a significant multipath problem, hence the arrival of MIMO technology, which is basically multipath cancelling using several aerials. But Ive been having problems trying to get this laptop to sync at almost any speed faster than 65Mbits/sec. Very occasionally it will hop up to 130Mbits/sec, but only for a few seconds, and then drop back again. Im pretty certain theres no co-channel interference; theres only one other base station within reach, with a signal strength of -93dB compared to the -52dB of my own Wi-Fi base station, and thats sitting on channel 6 when mine is on channel 1, so there should be no problem here. That drivers were the problem only became clear after I visited Intels site and discovered that theres a completely new version of the driver stack for Windows 7 compared to the one installed on my laptop, so I downloaded that, installed it and, hey presto, the built-in Intel 5100 AGN chipset decided it was okay to connect at faster speeds after all. I also recently tried USB sticks from Netgear and Belkin, and once again it was difficult getting them to work at all with Windows 7. Even though they were brand-new, shrink-wrapped products, the driver CDs supplied with both appeared to talk only to Vista. Digging around on the websites of these vendors allowed me to download the right driver stacks, but theyd only
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Contents
Drivers and updates, SkyDrive and Ikeas room design application
Web Applications
Do developers own the code they write, or does it belong to their clients?
128 131 134
We examine the state of the open-source market
137 140 144
122 125
Online Security
Ignore the lurid headlines hacking contests are good for us all
How much of your companys data is written once and never used again?
Inside OpenOffice 3.2, plus fun and games with Office Ribbon Hero
Mobile & Wireless
Understanding virtual mobile networks, and a shocking pink box
Server Room
Learning lessons from a server on the brink of collapse
consent to go on my PC after a thorough purging of all the recently installed old drivers from the supplied CDs. You might hope that things would be better on other platforms, and indeed thats often the case. I never think about screen drivers, mouse drivers or Wi-Fi code for my Macs they just come with the successive OS updates. But dont think that everything is rosy once you get away from Windows. My particular bte noir on the Mac platform is the driver stack for Epsons networked large-format A2 photo printers. Epson has taken months to produce any sort of update for OS 10.6, and worse still the drivers its currently shipping still include a bunch of PowerPC chipset code, which shows how old and creaky this stuff is. But the real slap in the face was discovering that the Epson Network configuration tool, which is required to make the printer work over Ethernet, had been updated from Version 2.2 to 3. The driver pages for the 4880 printer still list the 2.2 version, of course, despite version 3 being listed on the download pages for newer printers, and this is from a configuration tool thats supposed to be universal to all the companys products on the Mac platform. At the end of the day, I really do wonder how many computers (of any OS denomination or religious faith) are ever actually up to date. Why cant the big OS vendors such as Microsoft and Apple make it mandatory for any company shipping a third-party device driver that isnt available for whatever reason through Windows Update or Apple Software Update to have an email subscription model that tells the paying customer that theres a new version available? Or else that software auto-checks every week or so for updates, in the way that even the most humble of Firefox add-ons has no trouble in doing? It isnt difficult; too many vendors are simply too lazy to do it. Take Nvidia, for example: I just updated the screen driver for a Windows 7 desktop machine and was impressed that the old driver could be unloaded and the new one put in place without it requiring a system reboot. Even so, while a number of different adjustments are available in the driver control panel, I havent been able to find an option to keep me updated.
SkyDrives user interface, probably written by a fiveyear-old in an afternoon using a FrontPage wizard.
skydrive
A friend recently recommended Windows SkyDrive, Microsofts free online storage solution. If you have a Windows Live account, Microsoft allocates a generous 25GB of cloud storage space. Before I could get to http://skydrive.live.com to see how it works, I made the error of typing in www.live.com, which redirected me to www.bing.com. This annoyed me intensely. If I wanted to go to Bing, Id go to Bing hijacking my choices isnt going to endear your new search engine to me, Microsoft. Anyway, back to SkyDrive. First impressions matter. My jaw dropped and almost hit the table when I realised that SkyDrive
has absolutely no integration with the normal Windows 7 file browser. You heard that right: to get stuff into SkyDrive you have to drag and drop it on to the web page or use a clunky common dialog. My head was spinning at this display of amateurism. Surely Microsoft could have integrated this service into the Windows 7 desktop experience? There are some workarounds: a tool called SkyDrive Simple Viewer will give you the WebDAV URL of a particular folder in your storage cloud, which you can then wire up to your desktop if youre so inclined; or you can get SDExplorer from www.cloudstorageexplorer.com, which lets you mount your storage directly in Windows Explorer. SDExplorer is available in two versions: a free Base version and a paid-for Pro version. This adds a lot of useful features, such as opening files directly from SkyDrive on your PC, moving files within SkyDrive, changing folder share mode, changing folder content type and support for files larger than 50MB. At just 9.95 it isnt expensive, and theres a try before you buy option, too. I still dont understand why Microsoft doesnt integrate these features into the OS. Some softie contacts have suggested that its again all down to the lawyers and their fear of Des Moines, Iowa, and if thats true then they can all go to hell. In the meantime, Im trying Dropbox from www.dropbox. com, which Im told is fast and reliable, and is cross-platform too. Once Ive tested it, Ill report back with my findings.
ikea app
Having moved both office and house recently, I thought it might be a good idea to plan my new spaces rather than just throwing items into various rooms in the hope they might work. Ill accept this was a brave decision, akin to reading the instructions before operating a new piece of equipment, but it provided a great opportunity for some vendors to impress me. The first site I went to was that of Ikea, simply because I thought it would
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have something of interest, and indeed it did: a full-scale CAD-based room planning application that lets you specify the dimensions of your room, including awkward items such as inset doors, and then drop various items from Ikeas range into the layout to see if they fit. Better still, you can then switch to a 3D view and rotate the view of your proposed layout to see how they fit from every angle. Clearly, such software has great potential to enhance the reputation of the vendor and help you decide to buy everything from them; it can, for example, maintain the inventory of the items youve chosen and price everything up for you ready to place an online order. Thats the theory, but dear me there are some traps along the way. First, this software is slower than a slow thing swimming through chilled treacle. Anything involving the 3D mode feels as if its being rendered on an Amstrad PCW 8256 (a reference for those with long memories and deep scars from attempting to program in its graphics language!). And this is from a Windows executable running on your local CPU, so it isnt as if the hardware support is inadequate: mines a quad-core Core 2 processor running at 2.6GHz with 2GB of RAM and 32-bit Windows 7. Plus some SATA hard disks in a striped set and an Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT card with 512MB of RAM. And hows this for an extra annoyance: you must enter your room dimensions into textboxes that are pre-filled with default numbers such as 500.0cm but when you overwrite this with, say, 456.7, the program goes batty. It seems it cant handle decimal fractions, despite the pre-filled template showing decimal places by default. Sloppy programming, methinks. Far more effort is needed if its going to impress customers. A 3D planning application is a fine thing to offer, but theres no excuse for it not performing like greased lightning.
Ikeas room design tool is good, but boy is it slow.
RARe sight
Perhaps its just my particular client base or maybe its a real sign of Office 2007s total sales, but I still see very few instances of the suite out there on clients desktops when I visit them.
needed. As if that wasnt enough, you could end up with a whole row of the damn things as Uncle Tom Cobley and all his nephews lined up to warn you about an unspecified event in the future. You couldnt always remember what these icons meant, which didnt help. In Windows 7 things are somewhat better, but its still clunky. You can decide which icons will appear on the taskbar and which should be hidden under a pop-up window thats accessed from a small arrow head. If you click on this, a window pops up showing all the remaining detritus. If youre dextrous with your pointing and clicking you can probably get to an icon and right-click on it to bring up an icon-specific menu. Thats assuming the icon has a right-click menu at all, because theres no way of knowing without trying. From such a menu, you might finally be able to do something useful. This piece of design unpleasantness is an indicator of the depths to which the Windows interface has plunged. Theres no elegance here, no self-explanatory behaviour, and once again important functions are hidden away behind a right-click pop-up menu that may or may not exist in any particular context. Is this really the best result from those thousands of hours of usability testing, or is it rather the frustrating and ham-fisted ending for a product that couldnt be killed and yet proved just too difficult to wrestle into something better? While Im having this whinge about user interfaces, can someone explain why I now have Action Center telling me about all sorts of system security and update issues, yet I also have a (hidden) Computer Status Protected icon as well?
office 2007
I happen to be typing this column in Word 2007, which is a product Ive done my best to stay away from so far, because its user interface changes simply do my head in. I also find Excel 2007s UI to be a big barrier to doing any productive work, so its far less hassle just to stick with the previous versions. Office 2010 promises some more clarity with this stuff, but its clear that Office 2007 was produced without much clear thinking. (If I remember rightly its UI was, and still is, a matter of patent licensing or some such nonsense, and it was made clear at the time of its launch that Microsoft wanted to use such leverage to keep competitors such as OpenOffice at bay.) I just happened to press the Alt key and let go of it, and for no discernible reason I can now see a scattering of white labels all over my menu bar, like the floating debris from a wrecked Scrabble set. Choose one and yet more Scrabble tiles appear all over the items on the Ribbon below. Its a truly horrible sight, both from an ergonomic and an aesthetic point of view. Back in the days when Windows had a Style Guide and Microsoft made cursory attempts to stick to its rules, each menu item had an underlined character that indicated the shortcut keystroke from the keyboard. Some time ago this was taken away and the underline appeared only when you pressed Alt. Today, were left with this monumental bodge of floating white letters in boxes that partially obscure the item theyre supposed to be highlighting. But if theres a real menu there, such as the File menu (which isnt a file menu at all, because its a Splodge button) then youll get both the underlined item and the white Scrabble tile as well. The mind boggles at what they might dream up next.
icon notification
One of the items that has changed in Windows 7 is the ability to hide away icon notifications. These are the items that sit at the bottom right-hand side of your screen and are used to indicate the status of applications without popping up a large dialog box in your face. The implementation in Windows Vista left almost everything to be desired in this respect; the pop-up tooltip balloons would appear in a frustrating fashion, one after the other. This was especially annoying at boot-time, when you might want to get to some important data quickly, and spending time squashing these bugs was the last thing you
Take control of tray icons with Windows 7s builtin configuration tool.
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Real World Computing Advanced Windows

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