Interesting interview on Mike Burrows

Interesting interview on my brother-in-law Mike Burrows who used to work for Microsoft but has moved over to the Intel camp. http://current.com/100sm4c

TomTom navigation for iPhone arrives

After years of rumor and speculation TomTom navigation arrives for both the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Admittedly this is not the first app offering turn-by-turn driving instructions for the iPhone, Navigon was out a couple of months ago and worked well but this is TomTom, the industry standard. I have been a big fan of their products and owned everything from HP iPAQs to the TomTom one and I am now using a TomTom XL Europe.

The App is available in several versions based on the maps installed, just like the other TomTom product ranges. The UK and Ireland version costs £59.99 with the Western Europe version costing £79.99. International maps for US and Canada (£59.99), Australia (£44.99) and New Zealand (£54.99) are also available.

These prices are slightly dearer than Navigon which is currently priced at £59.99 for the Europe version and nearly double that of CoPilot Live which for the UK version is £25.99.

TomTom also offer a car kit that offers secure docking, enhanced GPS performance, clear voice instructions and hands-free calling, while charging your iPhone at the same time. This could be a real winner as there have been many complaints of Navigon and CoPilot that it isn't quite loud enough. Though pricing for this is not confirmed.

However the big problem with the iPhone and navigation software is that the iPhone cannot run multiple applications at the same time. So if you get a call the software closes so you can answer it. One good feature of the TomTom is that as soon as you finish the call the software loads again to the point you were at.

For more information see http://iphone.tomtom.com/

Your Blog posts in Twitter

Everyone seems to keep suggesting to me that I should do a Twitter page and link it to my blog. I had no idea how to do this, so I did some research and I came across Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed is a service that will automatically twitter any post that you publish on your blog. Here are a few quick steps to get your blog posts to appear in your twitter posts.

1. The easiest way to automatically tweet your blog posts is through Twitterfeed. Go to http://twitterfeed.com/

2. Login to Twitterfeed using your OpenID. If you have a Blogger account, you will just need to choose Blogger from the list of possible logins and enter your username. For example, if the URL of your Blogger blog is http://johnworsfold.blogspot.com/, then your username is johnworsfold.

3. After logging in, you will be able to go to your Twitter feeds. This gives you the option to enter a new feed. Click on "Create New Feed". Enter your Twitter name and password, as well as the URL for your RSS feed. Adjust the settings for how often you want Twitterfeed to check your blog for new posts, and click "Create".

4. Now, when you create a Blogger blog post, a tweet will automatically be created and posted to your Twitter account. Just like this one has! (I hope)

Mount a VHD within Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

Ever needed to mount a .vhd file into Windows? No, not many people have. However the other day I found that I couldn't find an .iso file that I had for some software. Then I remember it was in an old virtual machine I no longer used. So I restored the .vhd and .vmc files from a backup and was about to download and install Virtual PC or Virtual Server. However I didn't really want to go through the hassle of setting up and configuring those products just to get a file out. I then remembered that Windows 7 Ultimate includes the ability to run a virtual instance of XP and the ability to boot from a .vhd file. So I decided to take a look in Device Manager and Disk Management to see if there was an option to mount a .vhd file. And there was ! Below are some simple instructions on how to mount and dismount a .vhd file.

Instructions to Mount a vhd:

1. Open up Disk Management, you can Right-Click on Computer and choose Manage and then select Disk Management to do this.
2. Right-Click on Disk Management and choose Attach VHD.
3. Enter the path to the VHD. You can choose to mark it Read-Only as well. Click OK.
4. The drive will mount and display in Disk Management. You’ll notice the disk icon is also blue to help you distinguish it as a mounted VHD.

Dismount Instructions:

1. To dismount, Right-Click the disk and select Detach VHD.
2. You will be given the option to delete the VHD as well, but it is not the default. Click OK to detatch.

This allowed me to just browse to my missing .iso file and simply copy and paste from one drive to another. After finding this I wondered if this feature would be added to Windows Server 2008 R2 as R2 and Windows 7 are meant to share a lot of features. So I checked by 2008 R2 release candidate and I was pleased to find that it has been included.

Official Windows 7 upgrade chart

For those of you who don't like to do a fresh clean install of your shinny new operating system here is Microsoft's official Windows 7 Upgrade Chart.

Personally I prefer to do a clean install of an Operating system as it removes the chances of any nasty surprises or pulling through any bugs or issues.

Home Server and Windows 7 - Remote Desktop may not work

Myself along with millions of people have been pre-ordering Windows 7 Home Premium, especially with the special price of £49.99. Professional was also available but for double the cost and as I was in a rush to order it I thought the main difference was the ability to join a Domain and some extras like Backup and Restore.

However if like me you're a Windows Home Server owner, we should have purchased Windows 7 Professional, for one big reason – Remote Desktop.
Those of you currently running Windows XP Home or Windows Vista Home Premium may have tried to access and control those computers remotely using your home server, and found that you can’t. That’s because so called 'consumer' versions of Windows cannot act as a remote desktop host. Hosting remote desktop connections is considered a 'business-level' feature, and is only available in XP Pro and Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. To be honest and embarresed I was not aware of this as I had always used Windows Vista Ultimate. When it came to purchase Windows 7 I thought I didn't use a lot of features that came with Vista Ultimate so dropping to Windows 7 Home Premium seemed like a good idea. Apparantly I was wrong.

So with regard to Windows 7, you’ll see that editions up to and including Windows 7 Home Premium cannot be accessed using a remote desktop connection, whilst Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate do have this feature enabled.

So if you use Home Server I strongly recommend you go for Windows 7 Professional.

Channel Logos in Media Centre

I have come across this great little app that Makryger of The Green Button has developed to put channel Logos in our TV listings within the Windows 7 Media Centre Guide. My Channel Logos for 7MC as it is called comes bundled with a number of TV channel logos and a simple program to assign them to any channel in your listing. It's an automated process which walks you through the couple of clicks required. You can even add your own logos through the program’s easy to use interface.

For more information and to download this great app visit http://mychannellogos.com/default.aspx.

Windows 7 Media Centre

Well I finally got round to replacing my Windows Vista Media Centre to Windows 7 RTM Media Centre. I use the media centre for everything media related in my house and have done since the first version of XP Media Centre. With that in mind if my TV (Media Centre) is working, then I really do not want to mess around with it as my wife won’t be impressed if she can’t watch her shows. Anyway I moved to Windows 7 on all my other machines as soon as the RC was out and have been really impressed, so as my wife was out last night and we had nothing set to record I felt it was about time to move to the latest incarnation of Media Centre.

Whilst installing the OS I read Microsoft’s sales blurb on the changes they have made to Media Centre. I found a lot of their offerings were features I sort of already had via the TV Pack. However a lot of people didn’t have the benefits of the TV Pack as it was only provided to OEM so you only got it when you purchased a new Windows Vista Media Centre in the later half of last year. Some of us that build our own Media Centre did obtain versions of it via other means but to be honest though it brought some nice new features like interactive Digital TV it also had some bugs, in fact it was pretty buggy.

So how does the new Media Centre compare to the previous version. Well the first thing I will point out is that yet again our friends across the pond gain the vast majority of the improvements and us Brits are just left waiting for more.

New Features you can’t use in the UK,
· TV show images throughout the guide and Recorded TV (not a frame of the show).
· Series recording options have some welcomed additions like HD Preferred, Live, and airtime.
· Internet content has been improved with more channels added and this has been expanded on further with the new Internet TV Beta. Unfortunately the online services are still lacking and on the Internet TV Beta, well that’s US only. However a recent announcement by Microsoft has said it’s on its way to the UK.

Features you can use in the UK,
· Media Center Desktop gadget.
· The new mini guide is 100x better than the old one.
· Guide can be color coded by show type.
· Guide button added when in windowed mode.
· You can easily manually add missing DTV channels without editing xml.
· Windows 7 now supports four tuners of each type (analogue and digital) instead of only two.
· Skipping through a programme or video is noticeably more responsive. However I have an Antec case with a VFD and remote and moving from Vista to 7 meant I lost the ability to skip back and forward within a programme. I could skip a track whilst playing music or photos but not TV or videos. I assume this is an issue with the imon software than Windows 7 however I managed to find a work around changing the skip buttons from the skip function to the Ctrl + F (Skip Forward) and Ctrl + B (Skip Back) which are the controls for media player to skip through.
· Scrub bar when used on a PC is awesome, I really like the thumbnail previews as you drag along the bar.
· The scheduling of recordings seems streamlined.
· Fade in and out when you stop and start video adds to the experience.
· If one show in a folder is going to be deleted there is now an ! and towards the bottom it explains why.
· Current time to the seconds is displayed on the scrub bar when watching Live TV.
· New text input method with remote when searching is improved.
· Pictures and music have a few new features like ratings and favourites.
· The animation of playing music has been dressed up a bit as well as the photos slide show.
· There are now HD logos in the grid and in the show info at the bottom. This was something that was in the TV Pack for Vista. Interestingly I have two DVB-T tuners for Freeview and a lot of programmes now have the HD logo. Obviously they are not HD but it looks impressive.
· Accessing Recorded TV from another Media Centre is easy with HomeGroup, this is great if you have several Media Centres in your home and you want to share some recorded TV from one to another.
· Alphabetical order of Recorded TV is now correct (The Office is listed with Os, not Ts).
· One button press for show info when watching video.
· Can edit channel 3.1 to make it 3 instead of forced to use 1031.
· Extender UI for your Xbox360 is greatly enhanced, it also runs faster.
· Favourite views in the guide, which can be made static so you don't have to select them every time.
· Movie Library now no longer requires e a registry hack to enable the feature. This is one of the features that has really improved. Instead of the old DVD library store it now supports more file types, rather than those vob files. An addition to this is that it will also show all the films that are coming on TV over the next 14 days with the same cinema poster cover art as DVD’s stored in the movies folder.
· Ability to resume video types other than dvr-ms and wtv. This is something I have been after for some time.
· Ability to combine tuners of different types to resolve recording conflicts automatically based on priority.

Snow Leopard brings out of the box support for Exchange

With Snow Leopard, the Mac is the only computer with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server.

Well that's what Apple would have you believe. Truth be told Leopard and to a lesser extent Tiger had out of the box support for Exchange using the built in Mac Mail. I think the point they are trying to tactfully get across is that Windows doesn't have out of the box support but Mac does.

I have read apple's sales blurb on Snow Leopard and this miracle Microsoft Exchange support which can be found here http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange.html. After reading this I feel the marketing department at Apple changed the wording for dramatic effect. What Apple mean to get across is that they have improved the feature set of Mail, iCal and Address Book so they now provide nearly all the functions you would expect to get out of Exchange Server, like Auto Discover of the server for clients. So does this mean you won't need Entourage? Well that's a good question, Apple's sales blurb doesn't mention opening other users mailboxes, something which Entourage does do. However it may be an option we will just have to wait and see.

I think they key point that isn't covered is the imminent Exchange 2010 and whether Snow Leopard will support that out of the box. It would seem a shame if Snow Leopard is out for only a few months and then Apple's Out of the Box experience only works with the previous version of Exchange.

Planning on upgrading to Server 2008 R2? You may have to wait till Exchange 2010

For those of you like me who are keen to see Windows Server 2008 R2 released may be in for a nasty surprise.

Disclosed on the MS Exchange Team Blog it appears that Windows Server 2008 R2 does not support the installation of Exchange 2007. I magine this has something to do with the fact that 2008 R2 has more in common with Windows 7 where 2008 was more like Vista in some respects. But of course the main reason from Microsoft themselves is that Exchange 2010 is due to be released shortly after the 2008 R2 and Windows 7 release. Microsoft are obviously more concered with ensuring compatibility with the latest offerings as opposed to checking backwards compatibility. It will be interesting to see if Exchange 2010 will hapily run on Windows Server 2008 operating system.

However for those companies out there that have Software Assurance on their Microsoft Licensing won't have to pay for the new version of either software, so migrating to Exchange Server 2010 along with Windows Server 2008 R2 is not too much of an issue.

The Exchange blog clarifies it a bit better on point 4, Exchange 2007 will only use Windows Server 2008 R2 DC’s not run on them....
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/07/17/451835.aspx