Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Computers and Internet

  • Kicking The Tyres

    I mentioned that I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. In that last posting I mentioned that I had a showstopper of an issue – Windows Vista would not start when the Windows Home Server Connector software was installed.

    Someone reported the same issue today on the feedback forum, and said that it was caused by a conflict between the Connector software and the CA Antivirus program for Windows Vista. A bit of testing on my part confirms this: either I can run the Connector software or I can run the CA Antivirus – but I can’t run both together. What’s also frustrating is that the Windows XP version of CA Antivirus does not have a conflict. Martin’s PC, which is running Windows XP, is happily sending backups through to the Windows Home Server box.

    I’ve reported this to Microsoft, and I’ve just received an email to say that they’ve confirmed this, and there is a fix in the works, so I’m looking forward to getting this and carrying on with testing.

  • Windows Home Server Hiccups

    Amongst other things, I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. Along with about 10,000 other people, apparently.

    It is only the second beta, so one should expect bugs; and in that I’ve not been disappointed.

    I’ve had a couple of problems with the Connector software. On one machine (which was running Vista at the time), it failed to find the server machine, even though it sits on the same subnet of my home network. That machine has now had Windows XP re-installed on it for other reasons, and now it is happily sending backups through to the server.

    But far more seriously, on another machine (also running Vista) the Connector service will lock up the machine completely after some time has elapsed. The only way to deal with it once it locks up is to boot into Safe Mode, and disable the Connector service. I suspect that it is conflicting with one, or even worse, a combination of the 73 other services that the machine happens to be running. I see from the bug reports that I’m not the only person suffering from this, so hopefully Microsoft will get around to looking at it at some point.

    Another bug that has started ringing alarm bells with me is that someone has reported that moving his 26,000 photos onto the server has corrupted the photos’ metadata. This would be a disaster for any photographer who uses metadata for digital asset management. I’m certainly not going to entrust my 24,000 photos to the current beta – at least not until Microsoft have identified and corrected this particular bug.

    Apart from real showstoppers such as these, there are the usual raft of niggles, which while they may be somewhat irritating, don’t cause active harm. One example I’ve got is the fact that each time I reinstall the Connector software on a client machine, the previous examples live on like ghosts in the administration console. Take a look at this to see what I mean.

    Home Server Console with Ghosts

    Those greyed-out icons cannot be got rid of, and represent previous instances of the Connector software on client machines.

    So, on we slog…

  • Fun With Computers

    I have a definite love/hate relationship with computers. My working life was centred around them, and inevitably at parties I was asked advice on PCs. But they usually put me in mind of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

    There was a little girl,
    Who had a little curl,
    Right in the middle of her forehead.
    When she was good, She was very good indeed,
    But when she was bad she was horrid.

    When PCs go bad, they can be really horrid. I’ve just spent a fun day working on Martin’s PC. It all began last week, when I decided to upgrade our home systems to Windows Vista. I had run the Microsoft Vista Advisor on the three systems, and it had suggested that Martin’s PC should have more memory, and that the graphics capability would not be capable of the Aero interface, but would be suitable for the basic Vista interface. OK, I thought, that’s no problem, I’ll just add in more memory, the Aero interface is icing on the cake, but not essential.

    So more memory was installed, I took backups and installed Vista Home Premium. There was a slight panic when I found out that Vista was only able to drive the onboard graphics chip (Intel 845G) at the minimum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. However, Intel’s Vista Graphics Support FAQ claimed that Vista would support the 845G shipset using XPDM (XP Display Model) drivers. Off I went to the Intel site and downloaded the latest version of these drivers. Well, I say latest version – some alarm bells rang when I read that the 845G chipset had reached the end of their support life. The key phrase being "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems or improve compatibility with third party devices and software products". Still, if Vista would support the XPDM drivers, then I should be OK, shouldn’t I?

    Well, at first, all seemed hunky-dory. The resolution went up to 1024 x 768, which is what the monitor wanted, and Vista Home Premium seemed to be behaving normally. I then spent several hours transferring across Martin’s data, installing applications and reconstructing his environment. Everything seemed fine until I decided, rather than logging off from one account and logging onto another, to simply switch users. Blam – a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). It was repeatable – every time I switched users I got a BSOD – but logging off and logging on was OK. So I decided to follow the apocryphal doctor’s advice (patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this". Doctor: "then don’t do that"), and not ever switch users. Martin was unlikely to do it, so I thought that he would be unlikely to trigger the BSOD.

    I was somewhat amused to find that after rebooting the system, Vista helpfully told me that the BSOD was caused by the Intel graphics adaptor, and advised me to go to the Intel web site to download the latest driver. Obviously, no-one at Microsoft had been reading the Intel web site: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems". Ho-hum.

    Still, Vista seemed to be running, and Martin started to use the system. All went well for the first few days, but then he decided to use the attached Logitech webcam for a video call with a friend. The performance was awful – like trying to do it over a dial-up connection. And – horror of horrors, the dreaded BSOD started showing up. There seemed to be no way to stop it, or to improve the situation – and of course the other shoe dropped as I remembered the second part of Intel’s fateful words: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to … improve compatibility with third party devices and software products".   

    Martin’s PC is a Dell Dimension 4500s; long out of production, of course. I bought it for him because it was nice and compact and whisper-quiet. The downside of its compactness is that it only has two PCI expansion slots available. It was at this point that I realised that the days of PCI graphics expansion cards are also long since passed – graphics cards today require AGP or PCIexpress slots – neither of which the Dell possesses. So there would be no possiblility of bypassing the problem by using a graphics expansion card. Really, the only way forward was to take three steps back, and reinstall Windows XP again.

    And that’s what I spent yesterday doing. Naturally, the Windows XP re-installation CD dated from years back, so multiple trips to Windows Update were called for to bootstrap XP into the latest version. Well over 100 critical updates – including SP2 – were involved. Finally, this morning I finished reconstructing Martin’s environment and got all his data back just as it was. Computers, eh, doncha just love them?

  • Windows Home Server

    I mentioned the forthcoming Windows Home Server product last month. It’s currently in beta test, and Microsoft have recently widened the scope of testing. There have been over 25,000 people asking to participate in the test. Last Saturday, yours truly received an email from the Windows Home Server team to say that my request to be included in the test had been accepted. So I’m currently kicking the tyres.
    It has promise, but it’s still clearly at an early beta stage. And I’d still like to see what I pointed out last month – there’s no facility to be able to take backups for offsite storage. It’s all very well having a central server in the home, but if your home goes up in flames, you’ve still lost all your data…
    I see that the marketing wing of Microsoft are already busy with their Stop Digital Amnesia campaign. Fairly toecurling stuff – and a very poor ripoff of the far superior campaign that John Cleese did for Livevault.

  • The Joy of Call Centres

    I mentioned my brush with call-centres a couple of days ago. Little did I realise it, but in comparison with some people, I escaped almost intact from that experience. My friend Andy Hayler has emailed me with a link to his own entanglement with call-centres. The Horror! The Horror!

  • Technology – Part II

    Since Saturday evening, I’ve been without ADSL service, and suffering withdrawal symptoms. As I suspected yesterday, the fault was not, as the nice man on the KPN helpdesk tried to persuade me, caused by a faulty splitter in the meter cupboard.
     
    That’s because today I watched a KPN engineer drive past in his van on his way to my neighbour’s farm. She had a problem with her phone line, and also her ADSL service was gone. Because her phone service was completely dead, an engineer was despatched. A short time later, he drove back, returning to base. Now, it may have been purely a coincidence, but guess what? My ADSL service was back and steady as a rock.
     
    So tomorrow, the postman will deliver a new, and surplus to requirements, splitter. Perhaps I can use it as a paperweight.

  • Technology…

    …when it works, it’s wonderful; when it doesn’t, it – well – it sucks… to quote our American cousins. 
     
    My ADSL line has gone on the blink, so communication with the outside world, for the moment, will be of the message in a bottle variety. I’ve had to resurrect a dial-up modem (which has the speed of a Galapogos tortoise), but at least I can squirt a few bits out into the ether.
     
    Hear Ye, hear ye… I shall be withdrawing from the frenetic pace of today’s internet for now. Hopefully, my service provider (KPN) will repair the problem in the course of the next few days. Although, I have to say, I am not convinced. The problem is that my ADSL line is going up and down like a yo-yo. According to the pleasant gentleman on the helpdesk, this will be solved by a new splitter. In which case, why is it that without the splitter involved in the connection at all, I can still see the ADSL line going up and down like a yo-yo? Ho-hum, let’s follow the script… This means that I shall install the new splitter that they will send me on Tuesday, and then report it has made fuck-all difference. Then, once again, on the merry-go-round we climb to see what the next solution will be that is spat out by the script.
     
    The fact that my neighbour has also got a problem with her ADSL connection is totally irrelevant. It is not in the script. It does not compute.
     
    Sigh.

  • The Vista Experience

    Last month, I mentioned the beautiful book reader for Windows Vista released by the British Library. It gives an inkling of how the user interface experience might evolve now that the Vista platform is out in the market. I see that Microsoft has started to collect examples of innovation using Vista at the Vista Innovation Café.

  • Office 2007

    I’ve been looking at the various versions of Microsoft’s Office 2007, trying to decide whether I can really justify an upgrade. I use Office 2003 Professional at the moment, but to upgrade to the 2007 equivalent would set me back a whopping 280 quid or 420 euros. And then I have three machines to upgrade. Frankly, that’s horrendous.
     
    But then I noticed something interesting about the Office 2007 Home and Student version. If you read the fine print of the license, it can be installed on up to three PCs (or licensed devices, as Microsoft’s lawyers want to call them). That then becomes about 100 quid or 150 euros to give a basic set of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on the three machines. That, I think, can be justified.
     
    It’s interesting that this ability to install on up to three devices in the home doesn’t seem to be much trumpeted about – I couldn’t find any mention of it on the main Microsoft pages for the Home and Student version.
     
    OK, I don’t get Outlook 2007 in this version (Microsoft for some reason have substituted OneNote in its place), but I only use that on one machine, and I can soldier on with Outlook 2003 quite happily – I don’t think that Outlook 2007 is frankly much of an advance, certainly in my non-Exchange environment.
     
    If I subsequently move across to Windows Vista on that machine, then I can consider moving from Outlook 2003 with the Windows Mail and Windows Calendar applications that come with Vista. Although I’ve already discovered that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to do that. There are no import and export functions covering that scenario. I will have to transfer all my contact information one by one – and even then the fields in Vista’s Contact Manager are not fully compatible with Outlook contacts, so I’ll have to re-create some information. It’s a similar story for the Outlook Calendar entries – I have to move them across one by one. Update: I found out how to do this; but the Contacts export still eludes me. Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that Microsoft product groups live in their own little worlds. 

  • The Race Is On

    There’s been a project called the Knowledge Web going on for some time now. It’s a project driven by the James Burke Institute. All very worthy, but I can’t help feeling it’s doomed to fail. It seems to me that it is trying to put in place a semantic web of connections between knowledge facts. And it is doing this by starting from ground zero, and building up.
     
    This may turn out to be its failure.
     
    There is already a large collection of knowledge facts. It’s called Wikipedia. And what if there were a way of placing a semantic web over this that would be easily navigable? Is that not the same as what the Knowledge Web claims to be trying to do? If it is, then the Wikipedia Explorer may be something that has just overtaken the Knowledge Web with one bound. Standing on the shoulders of giants is usually more efficient than building everything from scratch.

  • Total Immersion

    I mentioned the software company Total Immersion and their D’FUSION product some time ago. They’re still around, and apparently doing well in certain markets. Here’s a presentation that they gave at the DEMO conference this week. Very impressive.
     
    BTW, if you’re an elderly Brit, like me, you may remember Michael Bentine’s It’s A Square World on BBC TV. Do you remember his wall graph that came to life? I think I’ve just seen the 3D version in Total Immersion’s tabletop town…

  • Nothing Can Go Wrong…

    Good to see that robots can still be defeated by stairs… I love the folding screens bit. Do you think that is standard equipment? Buy Asimo, and get your free folding screen…

  • Do I Need Windows Vista?

    Just over a year ago, I wrote a post entitled: Why Do I Need Windows Vista? In it, I predicted that when Windows Vista was released, I would find that some of my PC hardware would not be supported, because the manufacturers would not be releasing Vista drivers. I reported problems with my soundcard, webcam, and video capture device, as well as with application software such as Steinberg’s Cubase SX2.

    So, now that Vista is released, what’s the current state of play?

    Well, the soundcard still doesn’t work. Actually, I have two soundcards on my machine – and neither of them work. One is the E-MU 1820M, which together with the E-MU Emulator X software, forms a major component of my music workstation. The other is a Creative Technology Audigy 2 soundcard. And, what a surprise (he said ironically), neither card has a set of working drivers for Vista. The E-MU card has neither a Vista driver, nor a Vista version of the Emulator X software as yet. The company is supposedly working on them, but, come on guys, Vista’s here, and you’ve yet to release even beta versions of your software… Creative Technology has at least got beta drivers out for Vista. The trouble is, they are very poor quality. The customer discussion forum for Windows Vista of Creative Technology is currently glowing white-hot with angry reactions from CT’s customers, and I can understand why. CT has long had a certain reputation for having good hardware with terrible software. For myself, I can certainly say that I never intend to purchase another CT product if I can possibly avoid it.

    The webcam is a Logitech product, and good news on that front, Logitech have released drivers for Vista, and the webcam works.

    The video capture device is an Adaptec VideOh! DVD Media Center USB 2.0 Edition (who dreams up these terrible names?), and guess what? Adaptec won’t be supporting this under Vista, not now and not never. It is a dead product.

    And what about Steinberg? Ah, Steinberg, another company that customers love to hate, and not without good reason. As predicted, Steinberg is not going to support Cubase SX2 on Vista – or SX3, for that matter, apparently. Nope, only their newest product, Cubase 4, will be supported on Vista. Oh, and Cubase 4 users seem to be up to their necks wrestling with bugs. As well as software from Steinberg, I also have a Steinberg Midex 8 MIDI interface as part of my music workstation. Another bad move on my part – Steinberg won’t be supporting this under Vista, not now and not never. It is a dead product. They can’t even release the hardware specs for Open Source folks to take a crack at developing drivers, because of contractual reasons.

    Oh, and I also have a Wacom ArtPad pen tablet. Guess what? Yup, Wacom won’t be supporting this under Vista, not now and not never. It is a dead product.

    So, out of five pieces of hardware, only one is currently supported under Vista, and a further two might be, if I’m lucky. And for the two major pieces of music software that I own (neither of which were what I would call cheap), one of them (Cubase SX2) is not going to be supported (and an upgrade to the supported Cubase 4 is €220), while the other one (Emulator X) may be supported in the future. More likely, though, is that I will need to upgrade to the latest version, Emulator X2, at a cost of €80.

    As I said a year ago, I suspect I’m going to be soldiering on with Windows XP for quite some time.

  • Finding Faces

    There was an interesting article in the Guardian recently about the current state of face recognition technology. Imagine being able to ask a Google-like service to search through the images on the internet for a face that matches yours, or somewhat more worryingly, a face that matches someone who you are trying to track down. The privacy implications strike me as being of concern. If you want to try this out for yourself, then a Swedish company – Polar Rose – is offering a beta to plug into your browser. I note that Google has also bought a company specialising in image recognition last year, so something similar may be being worked on there.

  • Browsing Books

    I see, via an article in today’s Guardian, that the British Library, in conjuction with Microsoft, has released a new version of the browser application that enables you to read its most glorious books online. This version requires you to have Windows Vista, and a graphics card that is capable of running the Aero interface.
     
    I have to say that the results are stunning. Looking at the Luttrell Psalter, for example, is a revelation. As you turn the pages, you can see the sheen on the gold leaf wax and wane. And you can move the book in three dimensions to show how the light catches the pigment on the pages.
     
    For those of us without Vista and Aero, there is also a Shockwave version of the application, but this is very dull by comparison. The Psalter, for example, has none of the richness of colour that shines through in the Vista version. This application gives a glimpse of the sort of user interfaces that are likely to be emerging on Vista over the next couple of years. Impressive.

  • Jim Gray is Missing

    I hope that this does not turn out to be bad news. Jim Gray has accomplished a lot in his life. I hope he will continue to do so.

  • Mission Impossible

    On the day before Microsoft has a collective orgasm over the introduction of Windows Vista, how could I resist this old promotional video for Windows 386…?

  • Robot Solves The Cube

    Here’s someone else who can solve Rubik’s Cube in record time. It’s a robot. As if I didn’t feel useless enough.

  • Another Slap In The Face

    So, Microsoft has now announced that it will be introducing a Family Discount option for families with several computers at home to upgrade to Windows Vista at a cheaper price than buying individual copies.
     
    Good news, thought I, until I read the small print: "this offer is only valid in the US and Canada". What??! Well, thanks for nothing, Microsoft. I notice that someone has commented on the announcement saying: "I know that those in the UK and Europe will be a little dissapointed [sic] that program is US and Canada only". A little disappointed? Listen, matey, I’m bloody fuming!

  • Tog on the iPhone

    Bruce Tognazzini has a column on the iPhone, which, given his background, naturally focuses on the iPhone’s user experience. He’s at a slight disadvantage in that he hasn’t actually used one, but he does a pretty good job of commenting on what it’s likely to feel like. More to the point, he extrapolates beyond this first generation of the iPhone into devices that he’s really like to get his hands on.
     
    By the way, his piece also has a link to his page on the Starfire Project, which is worth checking out – and you can download the Starfire film. I remember this from 1993. You thought that Minority Report got there first showing a gesture-based interface? Wrong – it was there in the 1993 film of the Starfire Project. Also notice the social interactions based around the concept of always-on video messaging.