Mark Roddis

I am a big user of virtualization both at work and at home. I design it into the solutions I produce for my clients and also use it at home for testing and the like. But it has other uses and sometimes lets you do things you would not normally consider.

So with the announcement from Microsoft that Windows 3.1 is about to be withdrawn forever, I just had to dive onto TechNet and grab a copy before it was gone.

Armed with a copy of Virtual PC, 3 MS DOS floppy disk images and my 8 Windows floppy disk images (and if anybody asked what a floppy disk is I will cry), I got to this stage

Read the rest of this entry »

That title should really be followed by an evil laugh but I don’t think it is us that should be doing the laughing.

Now I was reading today about a Polish start up called Belysio which is just another social networking site however it’s key differentiator is that it uses geotagging to map your location. Put simply, not only can you read about what your “friends” are doing, but you can also see exactly where they are. So much for the boss not knowing you are playing golf rather than meeting that client in London.

So there a whole load of privacy issues here although I suppose that you can always switch the service off (if you remember) but read on because this is actually going somewhere a lot darker. Read the rest of this entry »

Like just about everybody else, I own a digital camera. In fact I own Three.

First there is my Sony DSLR A100 which is my pride and joy. It takes great pictures and gives me complete control over what I am shooting.

Next there is my Sony T70 point and shoot camera which is small enough to drop into my pocket but still returns some really great pictures.

Finally I have a camera on my phone which is OK for the occasional snap shot.

So for a few years now I have maintained an online photo album on the same server that I run this blog on. I was always put off the free photo hosting web sites as they were plastered with adverts and had serious limits on storage etc.

For my album I have tried many different software solutions.

Initially I was using the open source software Gallery which worked really well for me but when I moved to Vista, the option to upload in bulk from within Windows folders went away so to upload 20 photos one by one was a painful and time consuming chore.

I then tried Coppermine and again it was the uploading that let things down.

So I moved over to using Jalbum which created the whole website locally on my PC and then let me upload it via FTP onto my web space. It may sound clunky and tied me to a single PC for uploading but the results were actually quite nice.

But because of the way it stored it’s images, if I ever moved my photos around on my hard disk or reinstalled my PC (like I did this weekend when I upgraded to Vista 64bit) I had to mess about and recreate the entire album AGAIN! For over 1000 images, this can take a whole day.

So time to review how I get my photos online moving forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

At PDC this week we have seen Microsoft set out their stall for the next few years and to be honest, it all looks pretty good.

Azure will underpin the Microsoft cloud whilst the likes of Windows 7 and Office 14 will look to that cloud for storage, synchronisation, collaboration and advanced services. New third party applications will be deployed into the cloud which can then be run on any device, anywhere. All good stuff.

And to support all of this, Microsoft is spending big bucks on massive data centres all over the planet. After all, these clouds don’t run themselves and you need lots and lots and lots of servers and petabytes of storage to do this kind of thing.

And we know that these data centres will be built properly with redundant power and great security and that the data will be synchronised between multiple centres so that if one is lost, the user will not be affected. Great!

But here is the problem. Whilst the platform may be secure, a US government official can approach Microsoft and demand access to everything that you have stored on their servers without a warrant and without having to disclose the reason why they want to look. Say hello to the USA Patriot Act.

Read the rest of this entry »

You may recall my post about this event that took place in London back at the beginning of the month where Steve Ballmer gave a great (all be it misreported) keynote speech.

Well the videos for that are now available online (no registration required).

The full list can be found here however the real interesting videos are (and has anybody noticed that somebody has managed to spell Steve Ballmers name wrong):

Steve Ballmer Part 1 - Microsoft’s Vision for Software Delivered as a Service

Steve Ballmer Part 2 - Microsoft’s Vision for Software Delivered as a Service

Bruce Lynn - Taking Virtualisation to the Next Level

And what I think was the most impressive

The New National Rail Enquiries Website

So take a look, download the slides and watch the videos and you tell me what you think Steve announced

Since the spring of 2007 I have carried a HTC S710 Smart Phone with me everywhere I have gone. When I bought it, I was nervous about moving away from a touch screen based device (I had an iMate JamIn before) but I soon realised that the QWERTY keyboard more than made up for the lack of a touch screen and so over the last 20 months the phone has been used to the full extent of it’s capabilities, tethered to a corporate Exchange 2007 server with push email as I have travelled around Europe and North America.

Note taking, browsing, email, and even phone calls have all been in the palm of my hand with 100% reliability and pretty good performance. Indeed I have got to a point where these days, for 80% of meetings, my laptop now stays at home because the S710 does everything I need and just slips into my pocket.

But 20 months is by far the longest time I have kept the same phone and there are a whole range of new phones on the market this quarter trying to tempt me to upgrade and compared to them my little S710 is looking somewhat dated but just what is a worthy replacement?

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft event in London where Steve Ballmer did a 45 minute keynote speech. He also spent some time to answer audience questions.

So the first thing to note is that my new HTC Touch Pro phone is not very good at taking pictures in low light. Also, I have seen numerous press features today that have totally misreported what he actually said. This has then been spread out of context around many many blogs so that now, the word is that there is a new OS called WIndows Cloud being fully launched in 4 weeks time that is just a Silverlight browser!!! Hmmm

Anyway, the event was held at the South Bank centre in London and had quite an impressive turnout. The event was hosted by Martin Veitch of CIO Magazine and was built around Hyper-V and SQL2008 however to be fair a lot of ground was covered including Silverlight, Deep Zoom, Vista, Mobile, Office and most other technologies.

Continued after the break (beware this is picture heavy)

Read the rest of this entry »

Now a couple of weeks ago, I downloaded the new Windows Live Search for my old HTC S710 smart phone. One of the key functions is that you can tell it where you are and then it can tell you your nearest garage, pub, pet store etc and then map this on a street map or even a satellite view. It will even give you directions on how to get there.

The downside was that I had to tell the application where I was.

Now up to now, I have always questioned the need to have GPS on a mobile phone other than as a true geek toy. Sure you can run TomTom on it but then you can play music on it but that doesn’t stop most people carrying a mobile phone AND an iPod. But here we have an application that really benefits from actually knowing where it is.

So we roll forward a couple of weeks and I now have a new phone in the shape of the new HTC Touch Pro. This phone has GPS and sure enough, Windows Live Search works a treat by using the GPS to work out where it is and then using that information to give you information relevant to where you are.

But Google seem to have gone one better. Sure Google maps for mobile will use the GPS function but they also have a feature called My Location and this is where things really start to get clever because Google and (others such as the Open Cell ID project) are busy mapping the whole planet but not only are Google giving us maps, satellite views, street view and goodness knows what else, they are also busy mapping the location of every mobile phone mast.

So as the phone is always connected to a mast, if you know the unique cell ID of that mast, you can work out roughly where you are. And you don’t need GPS to do it.

Now in a big city, this can be accurate to a couple of blocks whilst in the countryside it might only be accurate to a couple of miles but quite often, for looking up local services etc, this is more than accurate enough.

So now I have to question again, why I would want GPS on my phone?

All we need now is to see location aware applications developed.

Image by cuellar via Flickr

Well VMworld 2008 kicks off in a few hours time and for the first time, I am not there. So whilst it would have been good to be in Las Vegas to see what the world of virtualisation has got to say for itself, I can’t help but think that all eyes are not on Vegas this week.

The news of various key long term staff members leaving the company over the last few weeks plus some major announcements from the likes of Sun and Citrix seems to be casting a shadow over the event plus of course Microsoft are now ready with their Hyper-V product.

So is this the end of the ride?

Well life is going to get tough. That’s a given. After all, VMware have been THE leaders in this technology for a number of years now and have made a LOT of money out of the market place but most of this has been built on the idea of a Hypervisor that you license and sell.

But this is just the problem. Sun and Microsoft are both quite happy to give their hypervisor away for free. So regardless of how good the VMware product is and regardless of what features it is has over the competition, it’s very hard to compete with free.

And whilst the argument is that the new money in this market is going to be made out of the tools and management solutions, the VMware toolset has always been weak. Sun and Microsoft know this and when you look at their new products you can see where they have spent their development dollars. MANAGEMENT!

So is this the end of the ride?

Not yet but I think we are going to see huge gains by the new kids on the block and especially from Microsoft. A lot of large corporates run 100% Microsoft these days so it stands to reason that their virtualisation platform of choice will be the Microsoft one.

What I do know however is that right now, I will not be looking to buy any VMware shares.

Over the last few months, there have been loads of UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs) come onto the market.

Clearly Asus started it all with their EeePC however everybody has now jumped on the band wagon and the term netbook has been used widely.

Now depending on who you choose to listen to, a netbook is a device that allows you to connect to the net and access all the wonderful Web 2.0 services via a browser. One would not expect such a device to be running CPU intensive applications as this is not the purpose of such a device.

Ideally you will have a light OS (Linux is the one of choice right now but my own thoughts on why this should be Windows Mobile are well known) and a browser and not a lot more. This should all be in an inexpensive, small and light device that has a good battery life.

But hang on.

A lot of users are loading Windows XP onto their netbook. Indeed there are a number now showing with Vista which of course is not well suited to a low power device.

So I think we are kidding ourselves.

I don’t believe everybody wants a netbook. I think really everybody just wants a cheap laptop and you know what? I actually think that they are going to get it.

>