And now it starts: how to trash Vista
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Microsoft on
Over the last few years I’ve seen the technical problems of many Windows users in detail. I got to watch spyware arrive, get noticed and - to a perhaps surprising extent - get blocked by SP2. I ended up with a list of the five most common questions - which changed over time and would now include something complicated about wireless networking and workgroup membership. And I developed an antipathy for tweaking programs that almost amounts to a nervous tic.
The only ‘tweaking’ tools I let near my PC are Tweak XP - which you don’t need for Vista - and the Sysinternals tools like Autoruns, Process Explorer and the like, which are so good Microsoft did a Victor Khyam and bought the company. I haven’t used anything to speed up my machine, reclaim unused memory, optimise my settings, clean out the registry or generally interfere with my PC in years, although I’ve tried out and discarded dozens of them. It’s not that I know so much about Windows - it’s that a high proportion of the problems I’ve come across have been directly caused by these utilities.
Sure, disabling ten or twelve services may make Windows infinitesimally faster. It will also stop Windows recognising your digital camera, disable fast user switching, break Windows Update, stop Windows Defender installing, stop System Restore and scheduled tasks running, take away the XP look and feel, disable the Help and Support Centre - little things like that.
Hardly anyone ever said they’d been using a tweaking utility before the problem occurred, but I find it hard to believe that Windows would randomly corrupt just one registry setting that happened to hide the Shared Documents folder or turn off AutoPlay or change any other single setting so very often. And these are all options that nearly every tweaking program for Windows XP offers. Tweak XP is pretty benign but it has plenty of settings that I wouldn’t recommend trying unless you know what you’re doing. What I would recommend is the list of fixes at www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/
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Make mine mini-USB!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in USB on
We travel a fair bit. It’s something you can’t escape in this business, where companies are scattered around the country and the world. And when you travel you’re going to need to take stuff with you, especially your technology. GPS, MP3 players, PDAs, phones, cameras, they’re all in your bags and pockets.
And too often they all have different power connectors. So you need to carry different power supplies for each one (or at the very least one of those little multi-voltage suppies with the changeable tips that you always lose, and even if you didn’t you’d never remember which way round they plug into the cable anyway…). As airline baggage weight limits carry on getting stricter and stricter, I’m finding myself looking at power connectors in a very different way.
It started with mobile phones. More and more them have switched to using the same connector for syncronisation and power. The same with MP3 players. Suddenly the number of power supplies I had to carry was dropping. I actually found myself looking for kit that used USB for charging and power - I even bought a USB power adapter for the car. You can even get rechargable batteries with built in USB chargers…
So I think it’s time to put a line in the sand, and to tell proprietary power connectors that their days are numbered. There is a better way, and it’s USB. If manufacturers want to be proprietary, provide a USB cable adapter (preferably for a mini-USB plug so we don’t have to load up with USB cables!). We’re a mobile society, and digital nomads don’t want to invest in an extra camel for their power adaptor collection. Just one will do, thank you very much.
HP, Nokia, Palm and Apple - you’re all on notice. Make things easier for your users - and airline baggage handlers and bell hops around the world will thank you for!
I’ve even got a slogan: “Make mine mini-USB!”
What do you think?
–S.
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Excel tax tips
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Microsoft on
Simon is spending the rest of the weekend finishing his tax return. He submits online and uses TaxCalc to do the hard work, but there’s still all the typing in of income and expenses to do, which Excel can make a lot easier. Over the years I’ve developed several shortcuts and if you’re hard at it this weekend too, they might come in handy.
I love banking online. I can do it in the middle of the night and it saves queuing at the bank for half your lunchtime to pay one measly bill. You can move money around, check your balance - and not have to keep piles of paper statements gathering dust. But if you’re relying on online statements for your taxes, check how long they’re online for; Nationwide only gives you the last 12 months of transactions on your credit card. And while you can download statements, you normally end up with a CSV file for every month. It’s much more convenient to combine those into one file for each tax year - or for as many years as you want.
Tools > Compare and Merge only works for spreadsheets that started out as the same original file. You can open all the files and copy and paste the transactions by hand. Or you can use the Data Source tool, but you still have to work one file at a time. Choose Data > Import External Data > Import Data. Pick the file you want and Excel will automatically select the data on the first worksheet; for a CSV file select Delimited and set the separator as Comma. Keep clicking Next to get to the last screen of the wizard if you want to mark the date column as needing Date format. Use Tools > Customise to put the Import Data command onto the toolbar to speed things up.
If you’re going to do this every few months, create a macro to do the work for you. Record yourself copying content from one statement into your master spreadsheet by selecting the columns rather than the cells, because there will be a different number of transactions in each statement. You’ll need to add the code for picking more than one spreadsheet to copy from; there are some example macros at http://www.rondebruin.nl/copy3.htm.
You can also get utilities that will do the combining for you, like DigDB (from www.digdb.com); this adds a DigDB menu to Excel where you can choose File > Combine Files and select all your statements. This produces one spreadsheet with multiple worksheets, with one statement on each worksheet. To bring that together into a single worksheet choose DigDB > Table > Append. The free 15 day trial will be long enough to get your taxes finished, but if you do a lot with Excel you’ll probably want to buy your own copy because there are plenty of other handy tools in DigDB too.
If you’re typing things in by hand and you’ve waited this long, you have to type the full date; putting in 11/6 at this point will give you 11/6/2007 rather than the 11/6/2005 you actually want. You can speed things up by entering receipts in date order; put in the first date then use the fill handle to drag the date down as many rows as you need it, giving you a sequence of dates. If you have several for one day, put the date in once, drag the fill handle then use the Smart Tag to choose Copy Cells rather than Fill Series.
Or you can just type the day and month, then use formulae to massage them to the right year; you need two blank columns for this. If your date is in the A column, use a formula of =$A1-365 in the B column (and =$A1-730 for months between April and December - pesky tax years). Drag the formula to fill the appropriate number of cells - the $ makes sure you stay with the A column but you want the row number to change. To get a clean list of dates without the formulae, copy the cells in the B column and use Edit > Paste Special > Values to get just the dates.
If you’re doing this in Excel 2007, the Paste button on the Home tab of the ribbon has Paste Values on the drop-down, which is simpler. DigDB shows up on the Add-Ins tab. Start the Text Import Wizard from the Data tab by choosing Get External Data > From Text. We’ll be experimenting with how to turn a pile of CSV files into a single XML Excel file - but not for this tax return.
The one thing Excel can’t help with is remembering to get it done earlier next year. Try Outlook for that!
-Mary Branscombe
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Some enchanted office
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Browsing around the case studies, analyst quotes and other marketing gumph collected by Microsoft to promote Vista and Office, I found this charming Web comic - produced by Microsoft, but still funny. Madeline the princess meets Jensen and Julie the wizards, who give her a magic ribbon to conquer falling productivity, battle Inertia and turn frogs back into IT staff. Look out for the Battlestar Galactica, Office Space, South Park, Princess Bride
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Pennies for storage
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Storage on
The average office document is about five pages long. Don’t be mean; assume that you’re storing it as an image rather than skinny text files; the JPEGs take up about 200K, so five of them to the megabyte. At retail prices for something like the twin 500GB Maxtor OneTouch drive that comes out to one cent. The time it takes for you to hit delete costs your company more than the space to keep that file for ever.
RAID is a great idea but matching drives exactly is a pain in the neck, especially if you’re trying to match a new drive to the three working drives still in your two-year old system when the fourth disk turns up its toes. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a seamless volume incorporating all the storage on your external drives as well as the ones in your NAS box? That kind of storage fabric used to mean a huge investment in hardware and software but it was only a matter of time before somebody did the work to bring it to a wider audience. The first real candidates come from Microsoft; the Home Storage Server cherry picks features from Windows Longhorn Server including unified storage: all the internal and external drives show up as a single storage space that you can make available to users. Machines around the home (or in the office with Longhorn Server) are automatically backed up into the space too. For the larger business, the high availability features you get in Exchange 2007 with an enterprise exchange work with direct attached storage - Microsoft has thrown away its own SAN for this.
Businesses are going to be the first customers for several of the storage devices announced at CES this year, like Hitachi’s 1TB drive (imagine four of those in a Buffalo Terastation Pro if you have plenty of space or two in the new SATA NAS enclosure from D-LINK if you have space for a six-pack). SanDisk has a 1.8″ drive that looks to the system like a hard drive but is all flash - 32GB first, 64GB by the middle of the year; frequent travellers will put up with a little less space to get faster startup, faster file read and write and more battery life. We put two versions of the Sony UX micro PC side by side at CES; one with a standard hard drive and one with a flash drive. We tried to time shutting them both down and starting them both up, but I got so fed up waiting for the hard drive system to finish shutting down when it was still churning long after the flash system was done that I just pressed the power button on the flash system again. It had practically finished loading Windows by the time the hard drive system finished shutting down. Hybrid hard drives won’t give you quite the same speedup but they’ll be a lot cheaper - and they’ll be ready for anyone to buy when Vista ships at the end of the month; SanDisk will only have enough units for OEMs to build into new PCs.
My dream machine, the Port
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Blu-ray is dead
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Remember Betamax? Technically superior to VHS, a little more expensive to create content for and sunk without trace by Sony’s decision not to allow it to be used for porn. Adult entertainment has been the driving force behind key developments in DVD interactivity, ecommerce payment processing and Webcam connectivity; you don’t have to watch something X-rated for the adult entertainment industry to be relevant to you.
The Adult Expo has been side by side with CES for years; this time it only overlapped by two days and as the last of the ragged geeks and buyers trudged their footsore way off shuttle buses from one convention centre to the other, the halls started to fill with women balancing on impossibly high heels and tattoed men hugging greetings in passing. People started looking at my hair and asking where to get tickets for the Expo. But there was another shift too.
The Blu-ray Disc Association had been showing off its advantages at CES: higher capacity disks (because the active layer is thinner so you can stack on more layers) and the PS3.
HD DVD had been showing off cheaper players - including the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, dicsc that are cheaper to produce (even though the extra cost of the protective layer over the thin active layer on Blu-ray is being absorbed by the industry) and better interactivity. You can have picture-in-picture commentary and storyboards. You can mark your favourite scenes to show to friends - and send them a link so they can see the scene you rate on their copy of the disk.
And the peacemakers had been showing off combi drives that play both formats so the public can stop waiting for one to win and just buy a new player. Personally I’m more impressed by HD DVD because of the interactivity, but it’s a close one to call and I’ve been expecting combi drives to be the answer. Amazon shows a balance: 168 HD DVD titles vs 178 Blu-ray but fewer of the Blu-ray titles are in stock to ship today, the Blu-ray titles are slightly more expensive and the HD-DVD titles are selling more. It’s true for the top ten products - and for the Long Tail of the top 10,000 products. De facto success for HD DVD but not a big lead.
But at the Adult Expo, the founder of Digital Playground movies said he was shifting from Blu-ray - which he’d praised last year - to HD DVD, because none of the Blu-ray production plants in the US would duplicate titles for him. It wasn’t squeamishness; he says the copying plants tell him Sony will revoke their licences for Blu-ray if they go adult. It may be that Digital Playground is after some free publicity and we don’t have an official policy from Sony - but if they do block this huge industry they way they did on Betamax, I predict that Blu-ray without blue movies will go pretty limp.
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CES: Big Screen Monitors, Robots, Home Servers and Pocket Firewalls
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Three conference centres and more exhibitors than you could believe possible, CES is the ultimate technology playground. Forget the shiny toys in San Francisco - CES is where it’s really at. While it may be a Consumer Electronics Show, there’s a lot on display that will help the IT professional.
Need a new monitor for the wall of your NOC? Sharp’s 108″ Aquos LCD display should more than suffice. It’s a technology demonstrator at the moment, but will be sold as a professional quality display and high-end TV sometime towards the middle of the year. You’re more likely to get one if you’re setting up an advertising hoarding in the middle of London, but it’s a sign of things to come as Sharp’s new LCD fab comes online.
Pocket firewalls are a little more useful. Ethernet out and ethernet in, and they’ll filter spam and malware for a small network, and handle anti-virus for up to four PCs. Both Netgear and D-Link have devices on the way, and they’ll make a simple security tool for a branch office or a hone worker - and of course you could take one with you on business trips to secure a laptop connected to your hotel’s internet connections.
Microsoft’s Home Server is a useful tool for the branch office as well as the home. A SharePoint-like web UI gives access to files from the internet, while an ealry implementation of the Longhorn Server storage fabric means you don’t have to worry about what drives you’re installing. One of these in each branch office should keep back-up issues under control. Add one of the new generation of network printer servers, and you can keep a small office running with just a cheap multi-function printer/scanner/fax
You could also use it with Moka5’s managed virtual appliance solution, Live PC. No need to worry about what software is installed on each PC. With Moka5 on top of a base OS, you can quickly deploy client VMs - either a full Windows (with 3D acceleration), or a cut down Linux appliance with a secure browser ready to roll. Stick Moka5’s images on a flash disk, and you can use secure virtual partitions to make cyber cafes a safe business environment…
If you’ve got time to spare, the folk at iRobot have a challenge or two for you. The $129 iRobot Create is a Roomba without the vacuum cleaner - but with a complete SDK and a set of controller ports. Build your own hamster exerciser (yes, your hamster can steer the robot), or add an arm - the world’s your robotic oyster. The Create is an excellent platform for anyone who wants to become a robot hacker - and it’s cheap enough to buy two and turn them into your own version of Robot Wars!
–Simon Bisson (in Las Vegas)
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CES: Toshiba’s perfect tablet
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Laptop on
Today has been such a long week; CES is the best and worst of every business trip turned up to eleven. But some of the new products will make our next business trip easier.
Ever since I got my hands on the first slew of tablet PCs I’ve been begging Toshiba to do a tablet version of the Port
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2007: What to watch out for
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
It’s time to roll out the crystal ball and see what 2007 will bring. What technologies need to be on your radar, and what trends could change the way you run your IT?
While the shift to Vista and Office 2007 will be a major issue for many IT departments, there’s a more significant issue out there: the upcoming release of Windows Server “Longhorn”. With new management tools and a new deployment model, there’s a lot to learn. It’ll pay to be on the beta, or part of Microsoft’s technology deployment programme. Microsoft will also be rolling out a new development suite, with better support for Vista’s new technologies - so expect a big launch in August or September for a new Visual Studio and a new server OS.
Beyond Microsoft the world of Unix and Linux will see a new focus on virtualisation, with virtualisation tools appearing inside the Linux kernel for the first time. VMware will also bring out its first Mac OS
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New Year Tech Resolutions
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Strolling through a Jersey back street last week (because the January sale shopping frenzy is just as bad even in a small town), I was pounced on by the roving reporter for Channel 103; if you heard someone saying their resolution was to enjoy themselves more and be less stressed, you know now what I sound like. Actually, you know what I sound like when I’ve had a problem caused by technology and alleviated by cunning, which is the reason that was my resolution then and the reason why it’s my first technology New Year resolution:
1. Not to get so stressed by technology going wrong.
This one isn’t easy. If the interviewer had thrust the microphone at me on my way to the bank, I’d have bitten the top off. I had been trying to phone First Direct to arrange a payment on a new credit card and due to either the granite cliffs that tower over St Helier or the antenna on the Palm Treo 750 - or indeed both - I would get half way through the security questions only to have my end of the conversation fade to silence. Try this often enough and you get locked out for security reasons. Points to First Direct for not insisting on phoning my home number to unlock the account (as I wasn’t there); they would have been happy to phone my mobile if the connection had lasted until I’d finished reading out the whole number. The cunning bit was using the telephone at the nearest HSBC branch which they can treat as a secure line.
This resolution was already tested severely yesterday. I wanted to run Vista on the MacBook Pro I’m using as a check-email-and-play-Alchemy machine in the bedroom. I installed Parallels Desktop which is nice but virtualisation is always going to be slower - plus it doesn’t do Aero Glass so no live thumbnail previews of apps in the taskbar. I downloaded Boot Camp, agreed that I wouldn’t use it on a real machine or expect to keep using it after an unspecified limited period, installed it, completed all the checks, tried to run it and discovered that for some reason I have the Wrong Kind of Partition. I can, the dialog suggested, back up, format the hard drive, install OS X from scratch and start all over. Not much detail on what the Right Kind of Partition is or what to tick to make sure I get it.
Today I had to download an updated driver to get my Toshiba to work with a WPA encrypted access point rather than WEP. Not that you could tell this by the helpful dialog box that asked for the WEP or WPA password and then disappeared without telling me it hadn’t actually connected. Then there was the recursive message on the Companies House Web Filing system that said ‘Submission error: error in submission’. I don’t hold out much hope for this resolution…
2. Document everything. Twice.
New Year, New Year’s Resolutions, tax return deadline and the annual accounts for the flat management company to submit. These would be a lot faster if I’d put certain figures in one spreadsheet as they turned up during the year for the first or put the credentials in the reminder for the appointment for the second. Having the paperwork - accounts, service contracts or manuals as the case may be - neatly filed away is no substitute for having them pop up when you need them (or at least available through search).
3. Actually buy a new Tablet PC
I haven’t had a tablet for daily use since early in the autumn and I miss it but I’ve been hanging on for something lightweight with good battery life. I’m road testing an HP tablet at CES, I’m looking forward to the new tablet Toshiba will announce on the Monday of CES, and if neither of those are what I want I’ll get either a Fujitsu Siemens slate or a Motion Computing LS800 as a companion to my Toshiba Port
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