Rob Atkinson - KnowledgeByte Ltd.

• Some interesting shortcut keys

• Also, Logo+right arrow key moves selected windows to right-hand side snap-to pane; logo+up, full screen;
  logo-bottom arrow, minimize
• And of course the usual logo-R, Run command prompt. I’ll let you experiment away with the remainder of the hotkeys :-)

• Just joined FriendFeed and stumbled upon this post from Jess Lee. Wot, no foundations! At first I thought this couldn’t be for real, because normally you would have very deep foundations, but these buildings look like they have simply been built directly on top of a flat surface with no stanchions cemented deep into the ground!! Somebody needs to go to jail that’s for sure. More info

Jess Lee - FriendFeed

• One of my favourite tools for presentations, also works a treat during Live Meeting sessions and the like. Mark Russinovich created this tool. He also has a whole collection of ITPro tools over at the replacement SysInternals site over at TechNet. ZoomIT also has some nice focus/zoom and highlighter tools, try using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out and say Ctrl-1 to invoke the box marker

ZoomIt

• On a less technical note - Eee, back in them days when I was a lad, we used to funk out to BJ with their smooth lyrics, acoustic and base guitars. Get the funk out of my face was one of their best, funk could be transposed to something else of course :-)

• A useful tool for OneNote 2007 that I use for creating an HTML version of a OneNote book that can be either be read via a browser, or downloaded into OneNote from the browser. Very cool for developing say a training OneNote, which could be posted to a web site, such as a SharePoint site. It doesn’t require SharePoint, any web site will do, it’s all just HTML pages. The only caveat being you cannot have sub pages
• It can be a bit tricky publishing directly to SharePoint, if you don’t have the correct permissions, so publish locally and move to the site

• I’ve created a WorkSmart video I use internally at Microsoft Ireland as part of my productivity training program, and have decided to share this to a wider audience. The http://useonote site I refer to is for internal use, but use www.iheartonenote.com for other cool tools and add-ons'. www.codeplex.com is Microsoft’s code sharing public facing community portal. The OnWebber piece is covered towards the end of the video session – enjoy

OneNote Web Exporter – on Codeplex

• Whilst perusing a smorgasbord of what Microsoft is planning to offer in the way of desktop and server based virtualisation (VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) I found this video on ways to spruce up Vista’s performance, which indirectly, lead me on to investigating ways, via virtualisation, that Microsoft can sort of freeze-frame an OS’s image to maintain performance with the additional benefits of OS security and application upgrade maintenance
• VDI and VECD (Vista Enterprise Central Desktop) along with Windows 7, plan to offer flexible operating system and application support without the user having to witness or understand the underlying technologies.
• So in theory, that means I could boot a thin client or aging PC, load an operating system (OS) image (.VHD – Virtual hard Drive) locally, or having it streamed remotely to my desktop. I could also opt to have a local host operating system like XP or Windows Vista and boot another OS up on the same system, either locally (on disk) or remotely streamed. I could also opt out via a Diskless License and boot a PC directly from a remote copy of an OS, say Windows 7 or up to four others!
• The aim of all this virtualisation is to resolve security issues by having a fixed (clean) image whereby a system administrator would periodically update said master image allowing users to save their data and configuration changes to i assume a differencing image stored either locally or remotely. Applications can also be streaming into said image based on a users profile. Again, these applications could be co-streamed along with the OS and data stored separately allowing the application images to remain unchanged and clean. It would also allow the administrator to remotely upgrade the applications and patch accordingly.. sounds an awful lot like main-frame technology to me
• Anyway, it’s all just smoke and mirrors to me and I’ll await the proof of the pudding when I get the chance to test this technology over the coming months
• Oh! MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation) is Microsoft’s upgraded Virtual PC software package, currently a free (non-MED-V) download. MED-V is more of a management application that allows complete control of the distribution, securitisation and deployment of Virtual PC ‘images’. One cool feature I recently saw demonstrated was the ability to stream a MED-V (image) directly to a users desktop. The example I saw was of a legacy application, something like WinWord 2003 and IE6 running in a separate windows on a Windows 7 desktop. The window itself was being hosted in a VM (Virtual MED-V PC) streamed across the LAN. As far as a user is concerned, the application just runs in the window, whilst MED-V is redirecting all requests across the LAN to Server 2008 machine which is actually hosting said applications. This is a sort of Terminal Services session, only it’s being run under Hyper-V on Server 2008
• As I said all smoke an mirrors. The upshot of all this virtualisation technology is that it should reduce the need for users to have to upgrade their OS and applications, because all they will actually be loading is virtual copies of these products. The system administrator will take care of maintaining these images on behalf of the users. The users images can also be cached locally allowing them to run the OS and applications offline provided they have been granted rights via the MED-V console
• So the end result will be a PC with no OS installed, just a virtualisation thin layer that directly loads an image (.VHD) which is then remotely updated and blended with remote applications via the LAN/WAN. Microsoft refers to something called Trim-Transfer technology that will be providing the high performance ‘streamed’ initial boot VHD’s to the PC and application updates via a HTTPS secure tunnel. You will however if I recall require a VECD licence to run said OS and applications – I’ll leave licensing to the experts as it’s one area that always ends up confusing me!

• OK, so I’m suitable impressed for once. The more I use Win7-64 RC1 and the embedded virtualisation technology the more impressed I become. I mentioned in a previous post that you could launch x16 or x32 applications in a Virtual Application (VM) straight from the desktop of Windows 7 and was wondering if I needed to install MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation). Well it turns out there is a non-managed version of MED-V component deployed with VPC2K7b combined with Win-RC1, that runs natively in Win7 without the need for Hyper-V, Server 2008 RC2 and all that jazz
• All you do is launch the XP Mode VPC session, install the legacy apps you need access to, then hey presto an Applications folder appears with said installed apps visible. What was also impressive was the PC like install experience in terms of speed and the cached launch of said applications. In a stroke Microsoft has effectively done away with the need for 16/32-bit support, at least for legacy apps to be natively run in Windows 7, instead launched via VPC as a standalone VM (Virtual Machine) in its own sandbox. The XP Mode sandbox also has USB connection support in addition to the usual network and seamless mouse support, so you just move your mouse over the VM-app window back to the Win7 desktop seamlessly
  
  

• Launch the app
  
  

• Which fires up Excel 2003 in its own VM

• And in the background you see the VSAL (VPC Application Launcher) and VPC processes

• First launch is slower, but not appreciably so, then second launch is real-time and seamless, having been cached. Like I said, impressive. I wonder what we have in store come RTM and when Hyper-V finally matures.. Seamless local VM apps and client-server VM apps streamed over the LAN/WAN from Hyper-V hosted application (client) VM’s with hopefully local cached copies of said apps available when no LAN connection – probably too much to ask maybe – but that’s the way my future-scope says it must be heading. A Mainframe hybrid model like experience anybody..?

• I’ve just installed Win7 RC1 (7100) Enterprise and noticed that there is native virtualisation support embedded in the OS. You need to activate it by downloading a Knowledge-base  patch. Interestingly there is also a free Windows XP VM that only takes up about 450MB of disk space. Useful for those apps that won’t run and for migration and testing purposes.. And.. you can create XP applications to run as though they where natively running in an XP OS, but launched from Windows 7 as a Virtual PC app, although I haven’t done this yet, I think you need MDOP/MED-V to make this happen via Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008 RC2 – essentially a terminal service (TS) app running over the LAN, with the application being hosted on the server. I will do some digging around and confirm this in a later post

• Download here
• More info and Video here

• Back blogging again after a short reprieve :-) Life has been somewhat busy over the past few weeks, especially un sunny Ireland
• Auslogics have updated their famed disk defrag tool for Windows. I still think MS ought to put back the defrag tool they used to have in Windows XP and prior. Why they doggedly won’t put it back in defies reasoning given that Auslogics give away a perfectly good one for free..
• I know there is a background defrag tool for Vista/Win7 and MS GUI based app for launching said. But after running the background app compared to running the Auslogics app, I see a marked improvement using the Auslogics tool

• Judging by the red blocks I’d say the MS defrag is only moving large (64K) blocks, effectively consolidating, whereas Auslogics does a more effective job on large and small blocks. When I get chance I will do a performance analysis. This screen snapshot was taken after doing a MS Defrag.. >14% improvement over the MS Defrag tool..

• OK, so I got up early today to watch a few more of the videos from www.vbs.tv. I think video 6 gets pretty much to the point about just how prevalent the plastic problem really is. The problem is endemic, everywhere. Fish, water supplies; chemicals contaminants are not only in the food chain, but they are in our water supplies and that means, wells, aquifers , the works – you me, we just can’t avoid them.. Captain Moore mentions that the Eskimo women's milk is getting contaminated leading to birth defects and associated anomalies. The same goes for Japanese women, so that’s endemic across all oceans. This is due to their high intake of fatty fish, but if you think that avoiding fish will help you avoid the problem you’d be wrong, the problem is widespread, not just the seas, but the rivers and aquifers, they are also contaminated.  This was recently mentioned on the BBC’s Country file, when they interviewed fishermen and Severn Trent Water. Fresh water fish stocks are dwindling with male fish turning into females, same goes for the ocean fish, males are getting smaller and some are starting to produce eggs.. so when I say endemic, we are really talking globally here
• Look, I don’t mean to rabbit on about this stuff, but unless you me, your wife, kids etc. don’t start changing our habits soon, the world in which our kids stand to inherit, won’t be worth inheriting. Basically we are crapping in our own back yard, so stop buying plastics and only recycle biodegradable items. Putting it in the recycle container won’t help, it just ends up in landfills or at worst in the sea. Video 6 below – my family has stopped eating ‘all’ fish, river or sea