TechAgility

So running out of space to store all those "must have available 24/7" docs and files? If you already have a Hotmail or Live email address you have 5Gb at your disposal?

Now I just need to rid myself of this crappy Internode ISP and switch to TPG so that I can ramp things up to a proper ADSL2+ connection and all should be sweet?

February 21

Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

We know it’s been mighty quiet on the SkyDrive blog, but we’ve been hard at work on a new version that we’re proud to announce today!

You’ve made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we’re giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favourite documents, pictures, and other files.

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

This release also includes bug fixes and improvements to make the site even faster and more reliable. We’re proud of this release — so proud, in fact, that we’re officially removing the Beta tag!

Check out the new version and let us know what you think. We hope you enjoy it!

Windows Live SkyDrive Team Blog: Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

written by dcaddick

I can only wonder about the stick this Pilot must have got once he landed back at base? As someone who was in the RAAF I’ve always had a certain affection for F18 as it looks like a serious “bird of prey” coming low and fast - much better than the replacement F18.

Awesome flybye!!

http://oopslist.com/F14-flyby.jpg

written by dcaddick

So while I don’t condone this, it is easy to see why people get annoyed trying to keep on top of all this when all they want to do is get the thing going and crack on with what they intended in the first place?

It all most makes me wonder if Microsoft is taking the stance that they have closed *most* of the obvious flaws but won’t get too carried away while Vista is struggling to gain widespread acceptance?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
My post on the Vista SP1 activation hack has generated a lot of feedback (especially in the form of questions) from both individuals and other media outlets.  I’ve put together this post in order to answer some of these questions.

First off, the hack.  The hack in question is another OEM BIOS hack but packaged under the name of Vista Loader.  This hack is similar to the Paradox OEM BIOS.  The Paradox hack was the most commonly used Vista activation hack (which is why Microsoft pulled the plug on it) but this one seems to have been quite popular, so I’m not sure why Microsoft didn’t pull the plug on this one too.  Since other outlets have now named this hack as working on Vista SP1 I don’t have any problem with naming it here.

As you can see from the video above (or the gallery - I’ve put up a separate gallery because the video is rather small), this hack can take a non-genuine Vista SP1 installation and turn it into one that appears genuine to the OS.

After the reboot you can see a product key being entered - this is one of many OEM product keys shipped with the hack.  Unless the hack is correctly applied these key is considered invalid by the OS.  With the hack the addition of the product key makes the OS appears like a genuine OEM install.

It seems to me that Microsoft has been rather half-heated about blocking OEM BIOS activation hack.  However, just because this hack works today, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t change tweak WGA at a later date in order to close it off.  Given how this hack works I’d say that it would be a trivial matter for Microsoft to add a detection routine for it. 

SP1 was supposed to seek out and uncover activation hacks so that life was harder for pirates and that customers were reassured that their install of Vista was legit - it hasn’t.  What I’ve shown here is that it’s easy to fool SP1 into thinking that a non-genuine copy is genuine.

More information on the Vista SP1 activation hack | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

written by dcaddick

Now somewhile back I produced the following post regarding any other alternatives to RDP and ICA and at the time I might have been somewhat flippant about NComputing’s model based on Windows XP SP2, and since then there have been a number of other companies like Miniframe jump on the same bandwagon where they are effectively using a desktop based OS to provide concurrent multi-user sessions and I always thought this did somewhat fly in the face of the EULA?

At the time I was sort of suspecting that MS might have actually been turning something of a blind eye to this in some parts of the world, but now it seems that MS has finally decided to get off the fence (or at least the Lawyers have now made a decision? and produced this document to clarify things.

So I’d like to clarify here that this is not that I don’t think NComputing can add value, but in doing any due diligence anyone who seriously wants to consider either NComputing, Miniframe or any other method of using XP SP2 in a multi-user model should seriously check this document from MS before going too far down this path?

If I was contemplating, or indeed already using this scenario I would be asking the Vendor to review this document from MS and provide some sort of legal indemnification?

Licensing Windows Client Operating System in Multiuser Scenarios

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. The opinions expressed within are my own and should not be attributed to any other Individual or Company or the one I work for.

SPICE might be an alternative to ICA and RDP?

Now this is very interesting news because with all the interest around VDI there is still no real alternative to ICA other than RDP (or VNC…?) and in this I’m not even going to consider Ncomputing’s WoIP, as from a techies point of view this would appear to simply be a rehash of RDP, although I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise?

But it might be exciting to see that there is a real possible alternative to the ICA/RDP stranglehold and this might have the makings of some interesting changes to how things might be approached in the VDI space?

******UPDATE******
As a consequence of this post I have been contacted by Ncomputing and it would appear that their WoIP is actually what they term a combination of UTMA and UXP and does indeed make the connection/transition/session at a lower level in the stack. However, you will not find much detail on the inner workings of this as it’s proprietary, and I’m still trying to understand how this all plays out with regards to the Microsoft Licensing side of things as detailed here in a post on their Forum
http://ncomputing.com/ncomputing/wbb2/thread.php?threadid=963&hilightuser=1087

If/when I find out more I’ll update either here, or as a separate post on my new blog at www.techagility.info
******UPDATE******

SPICE might be an alternative to ICA and RDP?

written by dcaddick

In some cases the regular methods of "Going to Market" with a new product is fraught with pitfalls as it is conceived by Marketing and/or Product managers who then seem to loose sight of what the Customer is actually after - I’ve always thought it better to get the product and solution in front of the customer as quickly as possible and let them make up their mind and give feedback?

In all fairness, with some of the larger Vendor’s there is so much red tape and bureaucracy this makes it nigh on impossible to actually create demo sites like this that Gareth has created - so kudos to him for getting this created.

What Gareth has alluded to but possibly failed to qualify was, if you don’t have a Citrix ICA client installed then you might also want to think about downloading that elsewhere than from his hosted servers as that will also be quite quicker at over 17Mb for the web client?

Xendesktop or VDM2? Compare them for yourself

When the beta code for VDM2 was first released I wanted to push them both out over the Internet, however there was a red tape / NDA issue.

Now that VDM2 is released I can put both of them out together. All of the components are running as virtual machines on one ESX host. The XP clients are identical in terms of their configuration and resources.

The two URLs are https://oasxendesktop.oas.co.za for the Citrix XenDesktop and https://VDM2.oas.co.za for the VMware VDM2.

username is demo
password is also demo.

The latency is likely to be pretty awful for those abroad. It is slow but usable in South Africa but I am interested in seeing how the performance is from Europe, I think our under-sea cable terminates in Europe so it will probably be even worse in North America.

We have unfortunately also been having to contend with an inordinate number of power cuts, so please bear with our Third World infrastructure. Crises notwithstanding, I will try to give you some more details on the configuration some comparisons on the two different mechanisms tomorrow.

Stop Press:
Whoa, the reason that the Xendesktop demo worked was that most people already had a Citrix client. The VMware VDI agent is 6MB in size and getting that over our slow link will be hopeless.
Try to download and install it from http://garethcharlotte.googlepages.com/VMware-vdmclient-2.0.0-403.exe , this is hosted by google and should come down fairly quickly worldwide.

VMware and CITRIX for South Africa

written by dcaddick

So as I’m going to be attempting this in the next few weeks it is interesting to note that this would appear to still be an issue with the RTM of 2008 as the Hyper-V is still in beta.

Another note mentioned that you don’t actually reinstall:

You don’t really need to reinstall anything. You only have to reset System & Default User regional settings to original (default EN-US) settings and then reboot the server.
Ciao,
Alessandro

Still, worth keeping mind if you are after the Hyper-V service?

Please refer to Ben Armstrong’s post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/12/13/hyper-v-beta-now-available-for-download.aspx

1. You need to install using ‘English (United States)’.  If you install with any other language (or flavor of English) Hyper-V will not work.  However - you can change the local / keyboard preferences for your user after installation without any problems.

Hyper-V on Win2008 RTM - VMM service fails to start?

written by dcaddick

So it would appear that Kyle at iFixit is something of a closet Mac Service guy? Really this is very nice to see exactly what is under the hood of this well hyped Laptop, this way you really get to see what’s under the hood and know what you are actually paying for.

It is nice to see that it is not that hard to get in to possibly replace the battery if needed?

 

• Look! We found the battery.
• Unfortunately, it’s no longer considered a user-installable part by Apple and is attached to the case by 9 screws:
• Four 3mm #00 Phillips.
• Four 3.8mm #00 Phillips.
• One 7.3mm #00 Phillips.

 

• The RF module, in all its blue glory.
• The Broadcom 802.11 chip had the markings BCM4321KFBG.
• Two other chips were enclosed in metal housings.
• And the backside had another chip marked with BCM94321COEX2.

 

• We found Intel’s new Core 2 Duo chip right beneath the heat sink (no surprises there). A temperature sensor sits on an external board glued between the CPU and graphics chips. A high-resolution image (632K) is available here.
• There are 16 RAM chips (eight one-gigabit chips on each side of the logic board) for a total of 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.
• The large microchip in the center of the picture is a low power Intel North Bridge GS965 integrated graphics chip with the markings LE82GS965.
• Three chips adjacent to the North Bridge/graphics controller have a semi-transparent blue epoxy covering them, as part of the HDCP hardware requirement for digital video signals.

 

• The reverse side of the logic board. Many of these chips are for power management. A high-resolution image (708K) is available here.
• You can see the second half of the Micron RAM chips.
• We identified the Silicon Image SIL1392CNU HDMI video chip and Texas Instruments TPS51120 dual current mode synchronous step-down controller (power management).

iFixit — MacBook Air

written by dcaddick