• 24Nov

    Silicon Valley Visit

    My Job No Comments

    From the 10th to 16th November, I was working in Silicon Valley with a global IT company based in San Jose. I’d been quite excited about the visit for a few weeks, both because I’d get to visit one of my favourite cities (San Francisco) and because it was my first visit to the valley and Microsofs Silicon Valley Campus.

    Despite its high-tech reputation, I’d heard Silicon Valley was basically a huge trading estate. I’d say it was more like a mixture of small businesses, light industry and massive corporate HQs. It felt far smaller than I’d expected with many companies on the list below within a 10 mile area.

    Driving around, I mentally ticked off the companies I’d seen;

    The most impressive HQs were Google and Oracle (seen from US101 ratehr than up close), the least impressive being Apple; for such a blue-chip company I’d expected a more open campus rather than a few multi-story office blocks.

    I really liked Palo Alto and driving round PARC, it had a nice rural feel to it compared with the rest of the valley. It would be a great experience to live and work in Silicon Valley for a few years.

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  • 30Oct

    Microsoft reveals its cloud Operating System: Windows Azure

    My Job No Comments

    Its been years in development, and even internally information was scarce until Microsoft publicly announced the release of Windows Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in LA this week.

    Codenamed RedDog, Windows Azure is a platform for developers to build applications which run inside Microsofts datacentres. This is in contrast to Amazon Web Services (AWS) which provide a computing platform. For example, using AWS you’ll need to build a virtual machine image and then upload this into AWS. Azure takes care of any virtual machines, letting the developer focus on the application and less on the plumbing.

    There are quite a few posts providing details on Azure, I’d suggest you looking at this post from Mary-Jo Foley, the long-time Microsoft watcher whom I met last week.

    Today, Azure is running in Microsoft’s Quincy facility, which I had the chance to visit in December last year despite winter storms, road closures and avalanches resulting in a 120mile journey taking around 7 hours. Mike Manos, the man at the top of Microsofts datacentre management tree allowed the BBC to film inside recently, the video can be seen here.

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  • 10Oct

    Cool application to switch your desktop background image

    Advice for friends and family, Cool or interesting stuff No Comments

    A few colleagues just shared a utility they use to automatically change thewir desktop background image at preset intervals, its called John’s Background Switcher (JBS). I’ve seen literally dozens of these type of utilities over the years and have not been impressed with any of them. Eitehr because their user interface was terrible or I didn’t trust the software not to by spyware. What I like about JBS is the number of sources you can configure for photos - it supports your photos in the the Piuctures folder of your computer plus a load of internet photo sharing sites, including Flickr. What more, you can tell it to use tags, so I’ve set it up on my laptop to display photos tagged with “mountains” it finds on Flickr.

    Lets see if I keep this running on my laptop for long, or get annoyed with the number of average photos it finds…

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  • 10Oct

    Transferring files and settings to the new Vista laptop: simplicity itself

    Advice for friends and family, My Job No Comments

    I picked up my replacement laptop on Wednesday and yesterday used Windows Easy Transfer to move my settings and data across from the temporary Windows XP laptop. The process was really simple and I was impressed with how quickly it moved my 5.25Gb of data and settings (less than 45 minutes).

    The only things which failed were a 2Gb Outlook PST file which seemed to get corrupted during the transfer (I just used a USB memory stick to copy this over again) and network printers (which I needed to delete and re-install). End to end, it took me about an hour to move off my old laptop onto the new one - complete with all my IE favourites, email, address book, documents and files, desktop settings etc etc etc. I used an Easy Transfer cable which connects the two computers via USB, but you could just as easily use the network or CD/DVD/External HD/USB memory stick.

    So, next time you buy a new PC don’t go and waste money paying PC World to transfer files, and don’t fall for the salesman selling you some additional software - just use Windows Easy Transfer which is part of Vista and a free download for XP.

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  • 26Sep

    You don’t know what you got till you lost it

    Industry Opinion, My Job No Comments

    I’ve been using a spare Laptop running Windows XP since my main laptop was stolen last Friday, and its been a revelation to me. There are quite a few Vista features I miss and some are not that obvious before you’ve lost them. In no particula order;

    • Search built into the Start Menu - I realise now that I use it to find programs more than documents.
    • Variable sized thumbnails - I have load of photos at home and viewing them in XP is painful.
    • Side Bar - this surprised me, but I use the Side Bar far more than I thought. I miss my clocks showing the different Timezones of team I work in, the C89.5 radio gadget, my Weather Station gadget and the calendar gadget. Without these I’m definietly less productive.
    • Suspend/Hibernate - now this may be driver/hardware based but the suspend and resume process on the temporary laptop isn’t as reliable/consisten as on the old Vista laptop. I’ve gone back to the “flaming rucksack” days (where the laptop wakes up in the rucksack then overheats).
    • UAC/RunAs - Even under XP I never used to use an admin account day-to-day, and I’m now reminded how much better Vista handles elevated access compared to XP (networking, timezone etc).

    As I said, some of these aren’t that obvious until you’ve lose ‘em. To be fair, I should also list the stuff I don’t miss;

    • Folder view in Explorer - the lack of a simple folder view in Explorer windows annoys me: I prefer the XP one
    • Startup time - the XP machine doesn’t bog down as much on first startup

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  • 20Sep

    HomeServer saves my bacon, but not without some pain

    Advice for friends and family, My Home Setup, My Job No Comments

    When I got home last night, I fired up one of my spare laptops, copied the HomeServer restore CD ISO image onto it and then created a new Virtual PC 2007 VM. Booting into the restore process worked fine, but for some reason the VM kept losing its network connection during the restore. After 3 attempts, I moved to the main server and repeated the process - a few hours of restore later and I’ve got my “laptop” now running inside a VM along with all data up to a week ago :-)

    I’m impressed with the fact that the VM just booted without any issues even though the underlying hardware is quite different. I was expecting to need to use Safe Mode to change the storage driver - but nope, Vista just booted, I logged on and off I went.

    What I didn’t mention last night is that all the confidential data on the laptop was encrypted using EFS. I did look at using BitLocker back in March but it was too much hassle when the machine is already installed. When I get a replacement Laptop I’ll install it with BitLocker from day 1 so I don’t need to worry about encrypting certain folders..

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  • 19Sep

    Laptop stolen, had to happen eventually

    Advice for friends and family, My Home Setup, My Job No Comments

    I just spent the evening with Matthew Boettcher a Microsoft colleague, playing pool in Bayswater and my rucksack got stolen with the laptop in it. For years I’ve known that it is a matter of time before something goes missing, and tonight was it. Thank god for my Homeserver which automatically backs-up my laptop every few days. I only have three days of data at risk. Let’s we how easy it is to recover my data tomorrow… Watch for the update on how easy (or not) it is to recover my data onto a different box.

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  • 13Sep

    Book recommendation: Microsoft 2.0 by Mary Jo Foley

    Cool or interesting stuff, Industry Opinion No Comments

    Whilst I was climbing with Beat Schwegler in Switzerland last weekend, he told me about the most recent book he’d read: Microsoft 2.0, How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era by Mary Jo Foley. I read the first two chapters whilst we were waiting for the rain to clear and enjoyed it sufficiently to order it from Amazon. This is unusual for me as I find business books mind-numbingly boring most of the time.

    Having read some more, I’m still enjoying her observations and perspectives. I don’t agree with some of what she says, but most of her insight seems rational to me (so far). Whilst the book obviously focuses on Microsoft, I’d recommend anyone pick this up if they’re interested in the future of IT.

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  • 13Sep

    HTC TyTN II Updated to Windows Mobile 6.1: Experiences

    Advice for friends and family No Comments

    Orange recently released an update to the TyTN II which upgrades the device to WM6.1 - I installed it last Monday and love the enhancements, the most significant being;

     

    • Battery life definitely seems better
    • audio quality and volume is improved
    • it includes the HTC Home Screen add-in which I really like and
    • the thread-based SMS reader is nearly as good as the iPhones

    Sadly no significant update to Pocket IE, and I’ve not yet bothered to install Opera Mobile 9 beta - I’ll get round to it.

    Seeing as all settings for my phone are stored on Exchange Server, the upgrade was no issue even though it flashes the firmware which deletes all preferences/config. Setting up a new sync partnership with my Vista PC resulted in all my contacts, web favorites, email and calendar automatically syncing with the phone. The only hastle was re-installing the apps, but that only took 30 mins or so. Oh, and I always turn off the Orange Home Screen app - I prefer standard Windows Mobile (and now the HTC Home Screen add-in).

    Well worth the upgrade in my opinion - a good phone made even better.

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  • 10Sep

    The Omnigoogle

    Industry Opinion No Comments

    Nicholas Carr has written an interesting article on how Google is disrupting many traditional businesses, from newspapers to movie studios and internet firms, and in so doing he explains their motivations (in his opinion) and draws a comparison with other businesses, including Microsoft.

    Whilst I don’t agree with Nicks opinion that Microsoft is in business only for the money, the article makes for a good read, as do the comments from his readers.

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