Web/Tech

Windows 7 RTM Installed via upgrade

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Windows7RTMWallpaper

Microsoft released the final RTM version of Windows 7 to partners via MSDN last week.  I have four computers, and I just finished upgrading all of them to RTM.  Microsoft recommends a clean install from the test version, but that is a LOT of work and I decided I would risk it and do the unsupported upgrade.  I've had a great experience with Windows 7 and I would recommend upgrading to at as soon as you can.  My experience, and benchmarks that I've seen, seem to indicate that it is even faster that Windows XP.  I have had very few issues and have been off of Vista and XP since the day the first Beta version of Windows 7 was available.

After finishing the last machine tonight, I wrote these notes up for a few people at Gold Systems who are also early adopters.  Remember, Microsoft recommends a clean install, and I recommend backing up your systems in case anything goes wrong.

I decided to upgrade all my computers to Windows 7 RTM, rather than do a clean install.  I found this website telling how to do it, and it really was easy.  Basically,

1.    Copy the DVD to your hard drive

2.    Edit an ini file to set the minimum version required to upgrade.  The file is 3 lines long and you just change a number

3.    Run setup from the hard drive

Here’s the link:

http://www.7tutorials.com/how-upgrade-your-windows-7-test-version-final-release

It seems to be working just fine, but here are the gotchas.

Because of patch Tuesday I think, my machines needed a reboot before I could install RTM.  The installer doesn’t check that until 5 or 10 minutes in, so you should start with a  reboot of your machines to make sure your patches are installed before starting the install.

RTM won’t install with McAffe virus software (my version)  installed, so uninstall it and reboot before starting.

On one machine I had an old SoundBlaster card that was listed as incompatible, but I went ahead with the install, and Windows update was able to find a good driver after the install was done, and it seems to be working now.

Once the installation gets going, you don’t have to do anything so you can just let it run.  I think it took 2 or 3 hours per machine.

The background wallpaper is new, and the stock tracker gadget has disappeared which is strange.  Other than that, I don’t see any difference.  Oops, I just noticed my printers on my laptop are gone.  And my homegroup is gone, which I’ve found to be useful, but it will be easy to set that back up.  Outlook, Communicator, etc. all seem to be working fine.

I hope this helps and saves you a few false starts.  Ned and Steve – THANK YOU for being so tolerant of me insisting on being on the bleeding edge!  J

Terry

P.S. – one of the computers is the FJ Car Computer, a strange piece of equipment if there ever was one.  The initial install and upgrade of Windows 7 worked flawlessly.   

Kindle in the cockpit

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I mentioned in my post about "The New, New Kindle" that I had seen a photograph of the Kindle displaying an approach plate, but that it had disappeared.  Russ Still commented on the post to say that Airbrief.com is doing an open beta, providing pilots with the approach plates for the Kindle.  Below is a photo from Airbrief showing how the plates look on the Kindle.  If you are a pilot or just interested in aviation, also check out GoldSealFlight.Com and if you use Airbrief.com, I'd be interested in hearing about it too.  It's been a long time since I sat in the front seat of an airplane, but I like keeping up with it and thinking about the day when I'll do it again.

Chart-comparison from airbriefdotcom 

Update #1:  Russ just emailed me to let me know you can get a free copy of the 2009 FAR for the Kindle right here, and it works on the DX as well as the Kindle 2.  For the Kindle DX, they have the Airplane Flying Handbook and Instrument Flying Handbook as well.  The Kindle just became a "Must Have" for pilots I think.

The new, new Kindle

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I won't be buying the new Kindle DX, because I like that my Kindle 2 is small enough to fit into my backpack for traveling, but it does look interesting.  If you haven't heard, Amazon surprised people this week with another new Kindle that has a screen that is "two and a half" times bigger than the Kindle 2.  It also auto-rotates when you turn it on it's side, can handle PDFs and it holds up to 3,500 books.  Some people are saying this device will save the newspaper industry, but I'm not believing that as long as they still think of themselves as the newsPAPER industry.  Amazon announced new deals with the New York Times and the Washington post and also partnerships with several universities and textbook publishers so that students can get their textbooks on the Kindle DX.

Yesterday I sat outside at lunch and read.  The sun was so bright that I was practicly blinded, but my kindle was perfectly readable.  When a new email arrived on my phone, I pulled it out to check it and was struck by how un-readable my phone display was in the sunlight compared to the Kindle.  In the photo below, the phone display is on, but impossible to read in the direct Colorado sunlight.

IMG_8407

(Click the photo for a closer look)

I was also going to link to a photo I saw yesterday of the new Kindle DX that showed an instrument approach plate on it.  Pilots carry big books of loose-leaf paper around with them with diagrams of how they are expected to fly instrument approaches.  Every month they get updates that they are then expected to file (quickly and correctly) into their spiral bound notebooks.  Occasionally they put one in the wrong place and then "discover" a new antenna or other structure has appeared near the airport.  The picture seems to have disappeared – maybe the idea of depending on technology in the cockpit scared to many people.  That's a joke – unless you fly a Piper Cub, you probably are already depending on a whole lot of technology in the cockpit.

Windows 7 RC first thoughts . . .

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I've got Windows 7 RC (Release candidate 1) running on my production laptop at work now.  No guts, no glory.  Actually it was an easy decision to do the upgrade as soon as RC was available because my experience with the beta version of Windows 7 has been so good.  I'm running Windows 7 on all but on of my computers now, and that includes the FJ Car Computer, and yes it runs Office Communicator just fine.  I've even done a video conference from the FJ.  (Safely parked, I promise!  And I don't have RC on the FJ yet.)

Windows7intheFJ 

Here's what I especially like in Windows 7

  • It's fast.  It boots very quickly and resumes from suspend within two or three seconds.  Lately I've noticed a lot of laptop users that always shutdown their machines completely.  I had problems in XP, and some in Vista with putting machines to sleep, but I haven't had that problem once with Windows 7.
  • I like the new look.  It isn't radically different, though the RC candidate release has a nice new login screen.
  • I LOVE the fact that when I open my laptop at home, it realizes I'm on a new network and gives me a new default printer which is actually at home.  With XP and Vista I was always trying to send things to the wrong printer.  Setup is as easy as telling it a default printer for each different network you really care about.
  • I LOVE being able to "peek" at running apps on the task bar.  Internet Explorer makes the best use of it, but other apps will pick up the ability in time.  Now when I have five windows or tabs (doesn't matter) open in IE, I can very quickly jump to the one I care about without cycling through all the others.  Outlook uses it effectively too.  You have to see it and play with it a bit to get it, but once you do you will curse Vista and XP for not having it.  This alone will drive me to upgrade my last Vista machine.  Here's a video showing Aero Peek, Aero Shake and Aero Snap – turn your speakers down if you are at work or the kids are asleep.  Aero peek
  • I've always customized my task bar and start menu with the apps I use the most.  Every version of windows makes this easier, but now it is dead simple and everyone will be pinning apps they really care about to the start menu and task bar.
  • In Vista the cool little app that became a part of my everyday work flow was the snipping tool. Snipping tool   With Windows 7, it might be the magnifier tool.  Magnifier tool
  • This may have happened in Vista, but the calculator now can server as a programmer's calculator.  I didn't care before, but now I do and I have no idea where my TI is anymore, though I'm sure I still have it.

Bottom line – It looks like Windows 7 is going to be a great upgrade.  I'll probably upgrade my last Vista machine soon, and then I'll buy my next new machine when I can get Windows 7 from the factory.  I realize this post is mostly about changes to the UI and apps, but I believe the real change is under the skins.  Windows 7 feels more stable and much faster.

Here's what I don't like, and all of these gripes have been around since even before XP.

  • Why is it that I can be working in a window, say typing happily along in a document, and then some other application can pop a window up and take the focus and thus my keystrokes until I notice that my window has been hijacked??  It always happens at the worst time too, like just as I'm about to type "yes, that would be a good idea" in an email, another application pops up and asks if I really want to cancel the download that has been chugging along for 20 minutes.  I hate it when that happens.  Many years ago I turned in a bug report as a beta tester of either Windows for Workgroups or Chicago about this behavior, but apparently I'm the only one who thinks this is a bug.  Do Apples do this too??
  • Have you ever noticed that when an error message does pop up, that you often can't copy and paste the error message into a document or email?  Why should I have to copy a message one character at a time into an email.  I often use the snipping tool to capture the error, but I can't always get to it.Error capture  By the way, I caused the error with the code I wrote, so I'm not complaining about the error, just that I didn't have an easy way to save the message.
  • Finally, why can't I sync notes back to Exchange Server just like I do email, calendar, contacts and tasks?  OK, that's not even a Windows problem but it still bugs me.

Virtual Clouds

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Virtualization and cloud computing are two areas that I think are coming together in a way that will have a huge impact on how we work with computers.  In this post I'm going to talk about virtualization.  I've been playing with Virtual PC 2007, a free download from Microsoft.  I'm running it underWindows 7.

 

Virtualization is the idea of having one computer run in software a emulation of another computer.  This isn't new – there have been emulators around since I was a young programmer, but I think we are starting to see an explosion in the use of virtualization, and average people will start benefiting from virtualization.  Already in my company we've virtualized many servers, so instead of having lots of little servers that aren't doing much more than wasting power most of the time, we run them as software simulations on bigger, but fewer servers. 

 

The benefits of virtual machines are many.  Besides using less power and generating less greenhouse gases, they actually can be easier to use.  To get a development machine ready to use, someone has to purchase and configure the hardware, load the operating system, get the machine on the network, patch it, load all the applications, create user accounts and then maybe it is ready to use.  A physical machine is fragile.  As soon as you login you start changing the configuration.  You run your applications, they drop temporary files and change system configurations.  It doesn't take long before the machine is in a funky state.  With a physical machine, you format the disk, and start loading CDs hoping you don't miss a step until you get it back to a clean state.

 

With a virtual machine, you just restart the virtual machine from the snapshot you saved when you had the machine in just the right configuration.  You can also run multiple copies of the virtual machine, so if you need four servers to play with, you create four virtual servers.  Need an old Windows 98 machine?  No problem, create a virtual machine, load a Windows 98 image and off you go.  How about running Linux under windows?  No problem.  Below is a screen shot I just made of my Windows 7 machine running Virtual PC 2007 and it is running virtual machines running Vista, DSL Linux and then just for good fun, I'm running an emulator of UNIVAC 1, the first commercial computer ever.  Next up is a Macintosh emulator and that Atari 800 I always wanted.

 

In my next post, I'll talk a little about cloud computing and how it will combine with virtualization. 

 

Virtual machines capture  

Kindle 2 arrives

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 Amazon.com beat expectations again, as they often do, and delivered my Kindle 2 a day early.  I love my original Kindle, but my first impression is that the Kindle 2 is a big improvement.  It is true that I can share content between the two devices, so everything I bought before can be moved to the new Kindle 2.  I don't know yet if I can have a book on both devices at the same time, but I think I can.

I had breakfast this morning with a friend who used to work in the publishing business, and we both are scratching our heads about why people get hung up on physical books.  For me, it's about reading, not the actual physical books.  I'll aways own certain books – my grandfather's and my father's books, or books that have really meant a lot to me will stay on my shelf, but soon I'm going to start getting rid of the books that I've already read (or never will read) using bookcrossing.com.    Let me know if you find one of my books in the wild.  And you can be sure that the book below will remain on my shelf.

Kindle 2

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy

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Lois C.K.

My good friend Marty sent me a link to a video clip of comedian Louis C.K. doing a bit on Conan O’Brian where he talks about how amazing things are now.  I sometimes have to keep my optimism in check a bit, because I know people are hurting and worried about the economy, but this is good for a laugh, and it’s a reminder of how much things have improved in just the last 50 or 100 years.  As a phone geek, I got a laugh out of the reminder of how phones worked not that long ago.

I would imbed the video, but the comments are interesting, to a point, where it just turns into a flame-fest.  I will say this though – the more I learn to appreciate what I’ve already got, the happier I become and the less stress I feel about the things that aren’t going the way I want them to go.  I still want still want a new guitar and the next cool gadget, but I now know that happiness is NOT defined by or provided by – stuff.  It’s often a choice and it’s about actions and relationships.  Seriously.

Click here to see the video.

Have a happy weekend!

President Obama Tests Microsoft Office Communications Server

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A couple of days ago I realized that a lot of people were going to be late to work today so that they could stay home and watch the Inauguration, or they were going to come to work and watch CNN from their desktops.  The last thing President Obama needs on his first day at work is a big drop in the GDP, so I decided to stream the Inauguration into our main conference room for anyone who wanted to watch. 

At Gold Systems we now have most of our outbound calls, and many of our inbound calls routing via SIP trunks from Bandwidth.com over our Qwest Fiber 10mbps Internet connection.  Because of that, we were very curious to see how everything would hang together today during what was likely to be an Internet-bandwidth-saturating event.

We were streaming the video in the conference room, and I’m sure many people were watching from their desktops.  At the peak we saw 68% saturation of our internet connection, and phone calls via the SIP trunks were “clear as a bell” according to Ned.  I’m sure that a lot of Internet and communications systems got tested today, and I hope they held up as well as ours did.

Oh – someone needs to go write a Wikipedia entry for SIP Trunks.  Wikipedia thought I meant Swim Trunks.

swimtrunks

 

Blackwater Rafting on the Kindle

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This weekend I bought my 20th book on my Amazon Kindle ebook.  I still read the occasional paper book, but if I could, I’d trade all but my favorite paper books for ebooks.  It really is that good in my opinion.

I think that the Kindle is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on at Amazon.  What really matters is the infrastructure that is being built out to support authors, publishers and other merchants.  To learn more about that side of the business and to see how this is all going to evolve, the Person Who Prefers Not To Be Blogged About has given me one of her short stories to experiment with, and I’ve published it on the Kindle.

If you own a Kindle, you can buy the story right here.  It’s priced at the minimum price of $1, and Amazon.com currently has discounted it to 80 cents.  It’s only 10 pages, but I’ve seen people cry from laughing so hard while reading it.  Waitomo Caves – Wonderland or WeirdoLand? is about a blackwater rafting trip we took in New Zealand.

The tourist description of this trip is the beginning of the story.  The “Lonely Planet” guidebook on New Zealand describes the blackwater tubing experience at Waitomo Caves as “… a three-hour trip on an inner tube floating down a subterranean river that flows through Ruakuri Cave … floating through a long, glowworm-covered passage.”   We began to realize this wasn’t the Lazy River at Disney World when we got fitted for our wetsuits and hardhats.  I’d be happy to answer any questions after you read the story, such as why I would take a claustrophobic person that I love deep into a cave with a maggot-covered ceiling, or what I believe the chances are of her ever going with me into another cave in this lifetime.

For the moment this is a "Kindle Exclusive" story, but I expect that Amazon.com will open the platform up to allow anyone to publish ebooks that can be downloaded to other devices and read in a browser.  The capability is there, they just haven’t made it as easy to use as the Kindle platform is.  To publish the story, I had to create an account, giving them my taxpayer ID and bank account information.  That’s going to stop some people right there, but I expect to make a good ten or twenty dollars off of this venture, so I kept going.

Next I saved the story in Microsoft Word as an html document.  Uploading the document was easy, and I even uploaded a photograph that I took on the trip, and I filled in a few fields of descriptive information.  After I uploaded the document, it took about 12 hours before it showed up on the amazon.com website.  They say that it will get even faster in time.

I realize that (besides the writing) the hard part about publishing is getting the word out.  That’s where you come in – if you like the story, please take a moment to give it a good review at amazon.com  I really believe this is the future of publishing, but I’d like to hear what you think. 

Welcome to the Mesh

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Brad Feld recently mentioned in a post Microsoft’s new product called, "Live Mesh".  I thought it looked interesting enough to sign up for the private beta, and just in time for the weekend, my invitation arrived to try it out.  If you are currently using Foldershare from Microsoft as a way to sync folders easily across multiple computers, you’re going to want to try out the mesh.  In addition to syncing folders, you can also do remote desktop sharing.

I just used it and saved enough time to write this post.  🙂  I was trying to find a website that I looked at this morning at home, but I had not saved the URL.  (All of my Favorite URLs are synced between my machines, including the FJ Car Computer using Foldershare, so if I had saved the URL I would have had it at work this morning.)  Then I remembered the mesh – I clicked on the little blue icon  Capture  and was able to connect to my home machine in seconds.  I’m at work, but it is as if I’m sitting at my machine at home.  The web browser was still sitting there on the page where I left it this morning.  I got what I needed and then saved the page to my Favorites.  Before I could log off, Foldershare had synced that new Favorite to all four of my machines – two at home, and two at work.  With the Mesh, I should be able to do the same thing.  Also there is "storage in the cloud" so I can have a bunch of disk space that is accessible from any web browser, even if none of my machines are running.

The Mesh is being called a platform, and this is just the demo app according to the team blog that I read.  They already are saying they will sync to Apple and to mobile devices in the near future, but they talk about a lot more.  Should be interesting.  At the very least, I’ll be able to move everything from Foldershare and have remote login capability.  When the car computer goes back into the FJ, I’ll be able to work on it from anywhere without having to sit in the garage with a little keyboard on my lap.  That alone is worth the upgrade.

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