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SYNACK

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  1. SYNACK

    Teams is the worst of Microsoft

    By SYNACK,


    Justified Rants
    Teams is the absolute worst showing Microsoft has and displays a dangerous lack of caring for end users and managment.  
     
    The client has always been a bag of hammers, 'conveniently' designed to run on a browser framework inside a container, inside an OS, inside an app container guaranteed to be slow on anything but a fresh new pc...
    That needs to update, as each individual user every 30 days or it will give them a 'you must upgrade' prompt with no button to fix it.
     
    The new AppX one has been around for some time now and is still unable to detect a computer in presentation mode, or focus mode and will helpfully spew chat notifications on screen while projecting to a wireless display.  Sure you can go into options and manually turn it off, but that is the only option. No shortcut, nothing.
     
    In the past Microsoft at least had the decency to release an API so if they forgot something, or could not be bothered, you could script it or make a plug-in via the API.
     
    No such luck now, they really don't care, whoever is running the Teams development needs to be re-educated heavily by sysadmins from education and corporate alike for their complete lack of care in this regard.  If you are not going to fix two year old feature requests then at least have an API to allow someone else to patch over your incompetence.
     
  2. SYNACK
    In the fun new world of lockdowns, pandemics and remote work sometimes you want to share a whole screen you don't have. Perhaps a quiz PowerPoint you want to share but keep your only monitor for managing the call and chat. What you really need is a virtual screen, in older versions of Windows there was a way to force a phantom VGA output

    but that has been removed.
     
    Luckily Windows 10 added Indirect Display Drivers(IDD) which allow you to add a virtual monitor to your system without any additional hardware. This is mainly designed to send the screen content through USB, Ethernet or other means 1.
     
    Happily someone has done the work and written a driver to give you a virtual 1920x1080 (or whatever resolution) screen you can share through any collaboration app that can screen share. As a byproduct of their cool sounding screen over USB to android software they also released the standalone driver:
     

     
    Full Instructions
     
    If you want to read more about IDD look here at Microsoft or to the Sample Github code.
     
    I have tested this with both Skype and Facebook Messenger to run video call pub quiz and it worked really well both times. I felt the need to document this as solutions like Window Powertoys Fancyzones, Display Fusion and the others I tried were perfectly able to split up windows into whatever pattern but these did not show up as separate shareable screens to Skype/Teams etc.
     
    I used PowerPoint presentation mode to get easy controls on my real screen and if you are looking for remote quizzes (at least while some of New Zealand is in Level 4 or 3 lockdown) check out the Believe It Or Not Quiz Facebook Page.
  3. SYNACK
    The new quad core Atom CPUs are great for 1:1 devices, long battery life, support everything and not too expensive, problem is imaging them. The issue with MDT imaging is that they are detected correctly as 64 bit architecture and so copy 64 bit EFI. This should work fine but most of the vendors have crippled the EFI implementations to only support 32 bit EFI. Some tablets support PXE with a USB NIC like the Acer Aspire Switch 10, others like the ASUS T100 don't. Either way if you are trying to use MDT it will happily fill them with un-bootable EFI code.
     
    Turns out that the detection algorythm used by MDT is largely WMI and as such, you can just tweak it to look for the offending processor type and switch to 32 bit instead. After a good hour in the company of notepad I found this:
     
    On line 515 of ZTIGather.wsf
     
    replace all of case 9 with this

    ' Compensate for bad EFI on atom units. WMI ProcessorId BFEBFBFF00030678 Case 9 If objInstance.Caption = "x64 Family 6 Model 55 Stepping 8" then sCapableArchitecture = "X86" bSupportsX86 = true bSupportsX64 = false Else sCapableArchitecture = "AMD64 X64 X86" bSupportsX86 = true bSupportsX64 = true End If
     
    In our implementation this seems to have worked nicely, hopefully it saves someone else some frustration.
  4. SYNACK
    Our tale starts with Windows Multipoint Server 2012 and it's inability to cope with USB3, after being turned away from many a Microsoft door we had enough and gave up on MPS 2012 again. Our lovely new hardware would just have to suffer with MPS 2011.
     
    MPS 2011 is not easy either with it faining no knowledge of many devices when confronted with their drivers, these however were usually just a case of pointing device manager in the right direction.
     
    Now onto the topic, the Intel® Ethernet Connection I218-LM a device that will work happily under Windows 7 or 8 but thanks to intel's drivers would not even show up as an option on a Multipoint server. I know, it's not exactly in the HAL but why not just remove the driver restrictions and let people use it if they want to?
     
    So, after an hour of messing that's what I did:
     

    Download the latest drivers for the Intel® Ethernet Connection I218-LM for Windows 7 and extract them.
    Find the \Intel\PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS62 folder
    Edit the e1d62x64.inf file in notepad
    Remove this: ,\ PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_153B

    from the ControlFlags section to just leave this: [ControlFlags] ExcludeFromSelect = \ PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_153A

    Now find your adapter in device manager, update the driver and tell it to brows computer, then select a driver from a list
    Select network adapter then have disk...
    navigate to your \Intel\PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS62 and hit ok
    Scroll down to the bottom and you should now see I218-LM at the bottom of the list, it will complain about being possibly the wrong driver and unsigned but it should work.

     
     
    In conclusion, I truly dislike intel's driver department, they seem to take great pains to cause as much rubbish as possible with their drivers.
  5. SYNACK
    The two latest versions of Office handle paragraph breaks differently to Office 2003 and this seems to cause negative reactions from some users. Lately I have been exposed to a group of people who were new to the Office 2007/2010 way of spacing text and have discovered that they dislike the default settings.
     
    I think that the issue is not so much based on usability but more based on inertia with regards to previously learnt behaviour. The standard behaviour of Office 2007 and 2010 is to create a new paragraph when you hit enter. This makes perfect sense in the context of a word processor where text is 'wrapped' automaticly to the margins of the page. This means that when you hit enter you want to insert a hard line break which ends the paragraph and creates a new paragraph on a new line. Why would you want to hit enter twice each time when the most common usage is to create a new paragraph?
     
    This behaviour apparently drives some people nuts, usually those who are using the enter key to move to the next line when they should be using the built in wrapping or those wanting to export the work somewhere else.
     
    These users often take some convincing that this extra automation is not there just to irritate them but actually does speed things up when used properly and encourages the correct usage of a word processor. You don't expect to have to hit enter at the end of every line, or need to add two spaces after a full stop, you don't even need to capitalize the first letter as the word processor handles wrapping, variable spacing and even sentence capitalisation if necessary so why expect to have to hit enter twice.
     
    The standard reply is that sometimes you do genuinely want a new line without starting a new paragraph and for this there is Shift + Enter. For those times that you are using Word to create a document for another purpose like putting into a CMS system then yes the best option is to switch it back to 'No Spacing' style right beside the 'Normal' style (below). This could be seen as a flaw but it is set up assuming that you will be using the content directly in Office and usually that is quite a safe assumption.
     

     
    Back when I first deployed Office 2007 I even had some people request that it be changed school wide back to the old settings for all users - including Times New Roman as the default font. I resisted this as the new defaults did make sense and setting them to emulate the settings of the past versions seemed more harmful than helpful. By altering the settings it would have meant that the versions of Office at school would have acted differently than any copies that were in use at home or in use elsewhere. It would also have encouraged the same adherence to the way things were done rather than where things were going. Using the defaults also means that better formatting is the default rather than the exception. I feel that it is better to expose students to tools that encourage good formatting to start with in the hopes that they take some of it on board and, that it leads to an environment where white space on the page is not a cardinal sin.
     
    In the end Office is optimized for general usage and when looked at as a word processor that can provide automation and correction in real time rather than a typewriter or text editor I believe that this design choice makes sense and was the right one to make. Plus after having this discussion with many ardent supporters of the old ways most of them have come to this same conclusion as well.
  6. SYNACK
    <-Link to Part 1
     
    Excel
    Excel is the flagship product for the 64 bit line of Office applications, as Excel itself now has no row limit on documents it is only limited by the memory available on your computer. Excel is in fact the only program that Microsoft recommends from their 64 bit offering for users working with large worksheets of millions of rows (note: this was not from the presentation but a recommendation taken from several different Microsoft presentations).
     
    Distilling large datasets into useful patterns is one of the main purposes of Excel and this has been improved upon with the inclusion of several new and enhanced features. More advanced and easier to use conditional formatting allows for trends to be displayed easily, visualization tools like sparklines – simple one cell graphs – also provide a quick way to better understand the data.
     
    The slicer feature offers a quick way to filter down large datasets live on things like pivot tables and charts to allow you to quickly dig down into the data and see just the trends that are important to you at that time.
     
    Functions have also received a bit of a makeover and now provides not only a tooltip hint of the expected variables for a formula but also provides quick lists of available options for when a function asks for a numeric value indicating how to handle errors or similar options that would previously have required you to dig into the help file or the internet.
     
    Paste is also improved by adding the paste special options directly into the right-click menu, this allows pasting without formatting, pasting as a number etc without clicking through several menus and dialogues.
     
    Office Extensions
    Possibly some of the most exciting features of Office 2010 are not even included in Office itself but are extensions provided by or supported by Microsoft and are available free.
     
    Ribbon Hero (Word, Excel, OneNote)
    Ribbon Hero is a little extension that builds in a training game to Word, Excel and OneNote. It trains you how to use all sorts of features included in the applications with a series of challenges. These challenges consist of five steps or less to complete a set task and provide hints with animation that will guide you through completing them. Your progress is tracked in points, half of which are earned by completing the challenges and the other half by using features while using software. This progress can be synchronized between multiple computers by integrating with Facebook. From a deployment point of view this is not quite ready for primetime as although it is an MSI it requires Administrator rights to use it for the first time which is problematic in a locked down school environment.
     
    Attachment Detector (Outlook)
    This one is relatively self explanatory and will scan your emails for references to attachments and warn you if you have not actually attached any.
     
    Excel PowerPivot and Data Mining Tools
    Excel gains enhanced data processing abilities with the PowerPivot and Data Mining extensions that use an SQL server as a backend allowing for quick and easy distillation of large amounts of data from databases to find trends and extract useful information.
     
    Mouse Mischief (PowerPoint)
    Mouse Mischief allows your computer to distinguish between multiple mice on the same computers and gives each mouse a unique pointer. This can then be used to allow for class participation by giving each group or each student a mouse that is connected to the computer. This lets each participate by answering poll questions presented in specially created PowerPoint presentations. This tool allows for setting time limits on answering questions and will give you stats like who first answered and who answered correctly.
     
    SharePoint 2010 and WebApps
    Although not specifically a part of the Office suite itself it is a core server product that provides many extra services and online integration with Office products. Office 2010 offers web applications that let users view and edit Office documents from within any modern web browser. This feature is available for every licensed user of the Office 2010 suite and can even be installed on SharePoint Foundation server which is free with a Windows Server. With SharePoint installed users are also able to co-author documents showing each users changes in real time. The latest version of SharePoint also integrates the same search technology built into WolframAlpha for much better and more relevant results when searching within your documents store.
     
    Live@Edu
    The presentation also briefly covered Microsoft’s Live@Edu program which offers schools a free 25GB Skydrive, Exchange 2010 hosted email and SharePoint Foundation server access including Office Webapps for every student.
     
    Microsoft Encoder
    The last thing that we covered and potentially one of the most useful for ICT staff and teacher making training material was the free Microsoft Expression Encoder. The standard version records the computer screen, webcam, microphone and tracks mouse clicks with a glow animation. This tool is perfect for making training videos to show how to use software and is quite easy to use even allowing you to choose which region of the screen to capture and what frame rate to capture at. This version records in WMV format and is limited to ten minutes of recording at a time. The software can even overlay the webcam footage on the screen capture and scale it as you wish. This software does require the .NET 4 Framework but this is distributable through WSUS and the software itself is extractable to two MSIs which appear to be easily deployable to.
     
    Overall I thought that the presentation was a great success and everyone who was there learnt plenty of useful things. The presentation even though originally intended for a more business audience was well received and made relevant to the education audience. Incidentally when the Road Warrior program is over the presenter Paul Conroy is moving to hosting presentations on the Live@Edu program and so we hope to have him back in a couple of months to do another presentation for the local schools on this offering.
     
    I would just like to say thank you to both Paul Conroy and Papakura Normal School for presenting and hosting this event along with all who took the time to attend to learn more about how to make the most of the technology that they have available to them.
  7. SYNACK
    The Road Warrior event at Papakura Normal was well attended attracting at least twenty participants from five separate schools to hear about the new features and improvements available in Office 2010. Part one of this blog entry contains the writeup on general features, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Publisher. The second part contains information on Excel, Office extentions like Ribbon Hero and PowerPivot along with a small amount on SharePoint, Live@Edu and Expression Encoder.
     
    I arrived at about 3:15pm by which point where already at least ten people had assembled and conversation had already turned to the Home Use Program that allows for registered staff to download a copy of Office 2010 Professional Plus to install on their home computers for only $10 while the school is covered under a Volume License. Under this agreement staff are not limited to solely work related use of the software and as their agreement is with Microsoft directly the school no longer has to worry about being required to remove the software from staff computers if they leave. The best bits of this are that this is free to the school to setup, easy for teachers to use and does not require any technician time to implement.
     
    Over the hour and a half long presentation a lot of ground was covered by the presenter Paul Conroy all of which was in the form of live demonstrations using the actual software. It was a quick overview of a selection of the features that makes Office 2010 a great step forward, the presentation also covered some of the extensions available for both 2010 and 2007. For the purposes of clarity in this write up I have re-ordered some of the features to group them all together by the product that they relate to.
     
    General Features
    Some of the improved features are universal and available and useful across all of the Office suite. The first of these is the new graphics handling engine, this has the ability to easily grab screenshots by active window or by cutout selection using the screen clipping feature. There are also live art effects available throughout enabling you to reshape using auto shapes, colorize using filtering effects, and apply transforms like tilts and 3D buttoning effects along with automatic background removal. This allows for users to do lots of the cleanup and editing on graphics that would previously need a separate application from inside the document with live previews. Integration of these features throughout means that all of this processing is accessible from Word, PowerPoint or even Outlook.
     
    Printing has also had a major overhaul, the print dialogue is now replaced with a full screen view that includes a print preview to show you how your document will look when printed. Simply forcing this has got to save reams of paper a year. This page also includes many of the printing features that can be customized including paper size, margins, zoom options and even stapling and duplexing options if your printer supports these. This further integration removes most of the need for digging into the printer properties which are organized differently between different types of printers.
     
    Document handling has also gained a few usability updates, from the File ribbon option you can now select the recent tab which allows you to pin both files and folders allowing you to quickly get to the places you need to get to often. Coupled with the separate ability to pin recent documents within the Windows 7 ribbon this makes for a very efficient way to just right to documents that you use all of the time.
     
    Outlook
    Outlook 2010 has also benefitted from a large number of improvements most of which are geared for dealing with correspondence as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is especially useful for those who deal with a large amount of emails daily but also benefit those with smaller inboxes by allowing them to clear them more quickly. The conversation view is now the default grouping emails by sender and allowing for a more coherent view of correspondence with each person or group of people. There is a new conversation cleanup feature that will take a large group of replied to emails from one or many people and compress them down to two email, one with the entire back history of the conversation and the other with just the latest reply. There is also a related feature which lets you ignore a conversation entirely which will automatically move any new replies to the deleted items folder.
     
    Quicksteps are a new feature that allows you to create little automated tasks that can be triggered right from the ribbon like forwarding the selected email to a group of people with a single click. Templates are now better supported with the Quick Pass feature located under the Insert tab, this allows you to store and use multiple email templates quickly.
     
    Meeting requests have also had a revamp, when you receive a meeting request you are now shown a small snippet of your calendar of the time covered by the meeting request so that you can easily and instantly see whether you are free and can attend. You can also reply to an email with a meeting request directly from the ribbon cutting out a step or two from dispatching the required responses. Multiple calendars can now be viewed side by side or even overlaid on top of each other letting you quickly see when multiple people have open time.
     
    Word
    Word now has an enhanced equation editor allowing you to add properly formatted complex mathematical formulas into your document easily from the ribbon. This feature is fully integrated into the ribbon making it much more user friendly than the old method of inserting a Microsoft Equation Editor object.
     
    The research features allow you to quickly translate selected text using the online Live translation service in addition to the usual thesaurus and dictionary tools. There is a much better find feature that can show results in context showing a small selection of the text surrounding the search term. The navigation pane has also received an upgrade and allows you to easily move large blocks of text around the document.
     
    Formatting restrictions are another new feature allowing you to force certain fonts and styles, these restrictions can be enforced within a document or over an entire domain with Active Directory.
     
    Publisher
    Publisher has joined the future and gained the full ribbon interface, along with the enhancements bundled throughout the Office suite there are lots of new templates available. You can also upload these to Microsoft to share with others which should lead to a very large repository of templates that can be used.
     
    One of the most interesting new features demoed was the ability to mail merge a graphically heavy publisher document to email and have it send off fully HTML compliant emails to each individual recipient.
     
    PowerPoint
    PowerPoint has some of the most visible and useful enhancements making it much more able to create modern looking presentations including all sorts of media and distribute it to your audience. The first big feature is vastly enhanced video support. This allows you to easily insert video files, crop out just the time section that you want and apply the same transforms available for images. This means that you can reshape, recolor and even apply 3D effects to videos. These are automatically embedded into the pptx file so this limits portability issues. A built in compression and compatibility option is now included that will quickly and easily shrink down the content to sensible sizes for distribution and publishing, this can also change some file formats for maximum compatibility. There is also a feature that allows you to add videos directly from the internet from sites like YouTube that allow you to embed their content. This feature just embeds the clip as it would on a web page meaning that you do need an internet connection to play it and cannot apply the same effects that you can to a natively embedded file.
     
    The options for packaging your presentations and showing them have been expanded with the options to save the whole show to a video file including your voice annotations, save directly to live drive or SharePoint. Possibly the most interesting new way to publish your presentation is the new online broadcast feature. This lets you present live to people all over the world by broadcasting the slideshow – without video and the fancy slide transitions – in standards compliant HTML in real time. This means that anyone with a web browser can view your show as in real time as you click through it. It does not yet handle broadcasting of your voice but with something like Skype or a conference call this can be overcome.
     
    Editing has also been improved and now allows you group slides together allowing them to be easily arranged and moved about. Copying of slides from one presentation to another has also been improved and now no longer bleeds the theme of one into the other. Other improvements allow you to deal with complicated slides easier by using the Selection and Visibility option under the Arrange ribbon to selectively show and hide elements to make working with large groups of layered elements much more simply. The animation painter allows for easier management of larger amount of animations letting you copy and paste animations between elements.
     
    Link to part two->
  8. SYNACK
    My opinion of Brother printers is well known to my employers and to anyone who has read more than a few of my forum posts so todays weird task was rather strange.
     
    At one site we have many Brother HL-20X0x series printers which routinely work fine, fine being a loose definition of cheap and only likely to jam once or twice a day. They also have a nasty little habit of burning out or cooking their paper sensor, oddly the newer ones more so than the originals.
     

     
     
    Today I went all Dr Frankenstein and dumped a couple of carcases onto the bench with the intent of building my very own monster. One functioned alright, accepting print jobs over USB and parallel, printing whole pages at a time but then had a habit of chewing them up and attempting to set itself on fire. The other showed up to a PC, just as offline and a different printer each time. It could print a test print (printer based) perfectly without chewing it or catching on fire but even when connected via parallel would only print business card sized bits of jobs on paper before going nuts and attempting to throw its own disco with error lights.
     
    In true Frankenstein fashion I had a beast that needed a new brain, I even had another brain from a worn out wreck two years its senior. After removing the side panels and the top I was eventually able to scoop out the squishy goodness of a functioning brain from the older unit.
     
    Upon opening the newer unit I found to my disgust the most probable reason for the newer unit’s premature brain failure. The older model had a large heat sink on one of the primary ICs of the main board, the newer, probably cheaper manufactured one had no heat sink on the IC at all.
     
    Fourteen screws later the board was in place and I was ready to harness the power of lightning to shock my beast into life. Although it in breathed deeply a troubling red light began to blink signalling a problem, paper, paper it cried. This turned out to be an issue with the toner door sensor that was not quite depressed enough to think that the door was closed.
     
    The next issue was a toner and drum warning, as the brain had been transplanted so covertly it was unaware of its new body. Removing and reseating the toner had no affect so I had to reset the toner and drum counter. To do this you simply hold the Go button for four seconds till all four lights light up while the toner door is open then close the door and do the same thing again. This spurred the brain into action and caused it to reassess its toner and drum.
     
    A single greet light then remained on the device, signalling its newly found confidence it its ability to control its new body. I switched it off quickly and then on once again while holding the Go button. All of the lights came on and then went out again in sequence, a short tap of the Go button and the green light reappeared, blinking this time as the insides of the beast stuttered into life.
     
    Success, paper emerged from its grubby interior with perfectly formed markings appended its surface. I quickly plugged it in to a computer and made sure the new brain was functioning as expected, again full pages of text emerged, un-crumpled and not the least bit on fire.
     
    My monster was complete, a sin against consumerist nature and, as an accursed Brother remains destined to spend the rest of its days driving me slowly insane.
  9. SYNACK
    Today I attended the first edIT roadshow in Auckland, it was held at the Ellerslie Event Centre which pleasantly had lots of parking available and because of its scheduled start time did not involve an extra hour of wadeing through traffic to get to.
     
    13:30 - Registration
    Arriving in plenty of time I wandered up to the second floor and was presented with a 'goodie bag' containing a lanyard, several flyers for the featured products and some free stuff including a micro mouse from Toshiba, a 75g sample of Cyber Clean compound, a couple of free pens and a pack of cards from VMWare. There was also a small bag of lollies waiting on the seats for us from Microsoft.
     
    14:00 - Thinking of placing notebooks in the hands of students? Toshiba presents a toolkit of things to know and consider. It is more than just picking the right notebook.
    This presentation looked at the different considerations for laptops for students schemes including procurement, insurance, maintenance and picking the right type of laptop for the job.
     
    Some interesting things that came up was the availability of an assurance program from Toshiba that could be purchased so that damage like droppages could be repaired under the warranty. Having a well thought out SLA with the supplier was also covered and suggestions like having spare easily replaceable parts stored on site and having laptops to switch out with failed ones as part of the original arrangement. Batteries were also discussed and are considered as consumable parts. The Toshiba batteries apparently usually live through about 700 recharges and are covered under a one year warranty. Comparitivly the hp gear has just increased its battery warranty to three years but has also increased the cost.
     
    14:35 - Microsoft in Education – an overview from Microsoft talking about licensing, operating systems, new products, free solutions and much much more
    The Microsoft presentation first covered what was included in the Microsoft New Zealand Schools deal - Windows 7 and Office 2010 along with CALS for Exchange, Server 2003 and SCCM. The rest of the presentation centered around the free offerings from Microsoft for education. The first product covered was live@edu which promoted features such as presence, live drive and Office online. This section was presented by Mark Woods who is Education Manager for MS New Zealand.

     
    The rest of the demos were hosted by Ian Morrish Technical Strategist for MS NZ and covered the products outlined below:

     
    AutoCollage 2008 - Which is a pay for program that is free to schools who register and automaticlly builds a collage out of pictures that you feed it. It automatically finds important features in photos like faces and centers the images around these points of interest.
     
    Multipoint Mouse - Allows for the use of more than one mouse on a computer at the same time, this can be used for interactive voting or feedback
     
    Pivot | Live Labs Pivot - This software takes a set of tagged images and organizes them into a sortable filterable pivot chart type that could make filtering through large amounts of images. It takes the source images and runs them through the MS deepzoom engine then it creates an XML file that is read by the program, there is a public api for this so there is the possibility of sourcing the images from something like a web based album or web portal and make them easily searchable in this format.
     
    WorldWide Telescope - This program allows you to navigate through terrabytes of telescope images in a 3D environment in all sorts of spectrums.
     
    Photosynth - Stitches photos together to create a 3D panorama of the images that can be walked through.
     
    Kodu - A game development environment for kids that can produce games runnable on Windows or Xbox platforms. This can use the keyboard or an XBox controller for input.
     
    The features of Photostory have also been integrated into Live Moviemaker Free Video Editing Software | Download Windows Live MovieMaker.
     
    15:05 - Tea/Coffee and time to meet all of the 9 exclusive vendors that will be showcasing their products/solutions
    During the break sandwiches and snacks were served which were quite good, it also gave everyone an opportunity to mingle a little and catch up with the featured vendors.
     
    15:25 - vmware – “Virtually Organised”
    VMWare did a few demos of their products including their application visualization solution and, their VDI solution. While the goals of visualization were conveyed effectively the actual description of the process was a little bizarre comparing visualization to "Mike TV" from Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory.

     
    16:05 - Adobe for Education – products, solutions and practical samples
    Abobe gave a short demonstration of some of the features of the new CS5 suite including the background aware element removable and exporting features that can create Windows mobile apps and eBooks right out of the creator tools.

     
    16:55 - Xirrus Wireless
    The Xirrus wireless presentation was interesting as the product appears to be totally modular with a central mainboard integrating the controller, a Power PC chip and CF card along with a reprogramable FPGA that provides encryption at 100% wirespeed. The radio modules are interchangeable modules that can be swapped out when new WiFi standards are created. The mainboard includes two GB links that can be teamed and the unit draws its required 66 watts of power from a PoE injector. The big thing is the number of clients that are reportedly supported, 512 from the eight radio setup and 1024 from the 16. According to the representative they are even working on active RF jamming technology to prevent intrusion for the military.
     
    Xirrus also offer a free wifi inspector tool here Xirrus: Switching Without Wires - Advanced IT Wi-Fi Networking Tools for Windows and Mac which could also be useful.
     
    17:00 - Drinks and nibbles – time to network, chat to exhibitors and ask questions
    Another break, more food and an open bar were available.
     
    17:30 - Prize draw followed by more drinks and nibbles
    The prizes that were given out were:
    1x Adobe Creative Suite
    1x Toshiba Netbook
    1x Accessories pack
     
    Overall the event was a worthwhile way to spend several hours and hopefully it will become an annual event.
     
    Original Event Notification Posted here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/nz-general-chat/53357-event-edit-national-roadshow-decision-makers-schools.html
  10. SYNACK
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Freeview-comingsoon.jpg+http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Windows7logo.png
     
    In one of my previous blogs I outlined the state and form of the new digital TV offering in New Zealand alnog with some of the trials that I had with the included software. To summarize, the use of the h.264 codec for NZ DVB-T posed numerous issues with both software and hardware. Vistas media center would not find a single digital channel and other solutions refused to talk to my tuner.
     
    Windows 7 on the otherhand works flawlessly with the tuner and the h.264 encoding and is vastly more stable than the software that came with the tuner. This is kind of bittersweet though as originally h.264 support was supposed to be included in an update for Vista but now has been pushed to 7.
     
    The EPG even seems to work, well as well as it worked with the included software. It will pick up the next three episode listings for a channel some of the time, I am guessing that this has something to do with how and when the full EPG data is broadcasted and if I left it on long enough it would pick up the weekly listings.
     
    In summary the Windows 7 beta finally brings a propper Windows Media Center experience to New Zealand, and only about 10 years later than the US. I guess that we are ahead of the usual Microsoft schedule.
  11. SYNACK
    New Zealand has finally (early 2008) released digital terrestrial broadcasting for most of the free-to-air channels.
     

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Freeview-comingsoon.jpg

     
    Strangely given the usual technology lag the providers chose to implement this new service in the H.264/AAC format rather than the more established MPEG2 format used by almost all other countries. This has both its advantages and disadvantages, the decreased bandwidth requirements mean that more channels can be broadcast in the same amount of brodcast space and the quality that can be achived is higher.
     
    The most evident disadvantage is decoding the video. Most DVB-T hardware now has built in MPEG2 decoding as standard allowing the video streams to be decoded in hardware and not taxing the computers CPU. The issue with using these cards in NZ is that as no H.264 decoder is built in this task falls solely to the CPU. This is unfourtunate as the full HD streams can easily overwhelm many processors and the added processing requirements make the computer in question less responcive.
     
    All is not lost on the decding front though as most modern video cards do include support for hardware decoding of H.264 video. This support has only been added comparitively recently and so for the most part you are limited to using a PCI Express graphics card in order to get this functionality.
     
    The next complication is software, support of this encoding is no where near as common as the MPEG2 standard meaning that media applications like Vista's Media Center simply do not support NZ Freeview and probably will not untill the full Windows 7 release. Support for the EPG is also limited as it to uses an encoding not found elsewhere so you are limited to using certain bits of software like Cyberlink PowerCinima which in my experience needs every update avalible to become moderatly stable.
     
    Overall though Freeview is a refreshing change from the imperfect 4:3 aspect analogue TV that we have been stuck with for so long and once you have the system up and running the quality of the picture is supurb.
     
    NZ's favourite TV Programmes in digital quality
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(New_Zealand)
  12. SYNACK
    Dust Bunnies, my own private war, a war waged unseen by the staff or pupils of the school. Vastly outnumbered I am left to wage war on these often unseen and unnoticed foes. They seem native so the school, appearing from out of nowhere and colonizing the cooling components of computers and switches throughout the site. Once there they breed, quietly waiting and building up their number biding their time waiting for the opportunity to rise up against us.
     
    The Costs:
    The costs of this war go unseen as its affects are slow, cumulative and indirect. These costs may be unseen but can be easily heard, you can hear it in the PC that sits alone in a cold room with its CPU fan cranked up as high as it will go, or the lab that seems to get louder and louder as the year goes on. You may also find omens of its covert war when looking at the average power usage of the computers over time or noticing increased instability overtime. This instability is tricky as it can show itself in different ways, the random reset, the phantom half second lockup and the inexplicably slows to a crawl syndrome. It is made more difficult by the fact that it may even be a sign of something unrelated. Over time these costs in productivity due to instability, extra electricity to run the fans and lost concentration due to the noise make us even more vulnerable to the eventual uprising that is sure to come if measures are not taken.
     
    The Weapons:
    To fight this inexorable march of the dust bunnies we must all take up arms. The primary weapons effective against their warrens are all based on their primary method of transport; air currents. In this category there exist several options after opening up the side of the case:
     
     

    Blowing into the case of the computer.
    A vacuum cleaner with an extension.
    Compressed air in a can.
    An air gun on an air compressor.

     
    Blowing directly into the case to clear out the first loosely organized troops is a dangerous proposition. It does clear out some of the loosest dust but barely does any damage to the warren. This method also involves the most personal risk as when provoked the first line of enemy forces will attack, soil your cloths and try to cut off your oxygen supply. The enemy has no morals and will use biological weapons that it has at hand such as bacteria that can also give you a nasty cold that may have been stored up from last winter.
     
    A vacuum cleaner provides a safer alternative to deal with the front line troops as it will catch them off guard and imprison them before they have a chance to attack. This also gives you prisoners to interrogate later. As a strategy it is effective to a certain extent and will remove the build up of loosely organized dust but unless you have a really powerful vacuum cleaner the well organized dust warrens will only be lightly damaged by this attack. Depending on the power of the vacuum there is also the danger of capturing innocent cables along with the enemy.
     
    Compressed air in a can, a small tactical weapon is best used to clean out single machine infestations. This weapon has the power to cut through the well organized fortresses of dust in components such as the power supply and CPU fan/heat sink. In conjunction with a mask this weapon can be used to eliminate infestations but as a tactical weapon it only contains a limited amount of ammunition which is expensive to replace. These should be used in short blasts as the extreme cold generated by a continuous blast causes moisture to condense in the jet of air which is harmful to the civilian components involved. Continuous blasting will also form dry ice around the outside of the can which is quite uncomfortable if you are holding it.
     
    Compressors are the next step up from canned air and you will need one if you are serious in your quest to keep the bunnies at bay. These handy devices are able to produce a much higher pressure jet of air than a can and so are far quicker at removing infestations. They also require the use of a mask if your machines have been heavily colonized.
    There are other considerations with this kind of weapon as well because it can be configured in different ways. The largest part of the system, the compressor itself can range in price from NZ$80 (£30) to NZ$2500+ (£1000+) depending on the quality and features. A cheap compressor will do fine but they usually do not include the most important component when using them inside a computer; the water trap. Due to the way that the temperature changes when the air is compressed condensation builds up inside the reservoir tank. This can be disastrous when used in a combat situation as the extra water will not only cause casualties among the innocent components inside the computer, it will also allow the dust to form even more organized and nefarious warrens that must be combated. Luckily a water trap is a very common component for compressors and can be purchased at a good engineering store for around NZ$30 (£10). You can then purchase a hose, air gun, thread tape and appropriate attachments to clip the whole lot together to complete your own personal cleaning weapon.
     
    You use this weapon in much the same way as the air can above aiming the gun directly into the fins of any heat sinks that have been colonized by the enemy along with a general blast to clear out the stragglers. You should be careful to hold any fans in the direct flow of the air still while you do this otherwise they will spin up and get in the way of the air blast. There is also a chance that the fan will generate electricity as it spins under external power again risking the components inside.
     
    Alternative weapons can also be useful in certain circumstances but are often more time consuming. For instance a clean dry paint brush can also be very effective but it may not be able to reach all of the way into some heat sinks. You must also be sure that the brush does not hold any static charge beforehand as this to will cause collateral damage.
     
    The Sad Truth:
    Unfortunately this fight will be perpetual as there will always be dust and so the fight must be taken to them when they build up to much. There are ways to slow them down though. Placing computers on desks or simply raised off the ground is a big help, a location without carpet is another plus. Certain cases do come with filters in order to slow the colonization process. Fresh air from open windows can also help as some of the dust will drift outside to attack other targets and simply vacuuming the locations were there are computers from time to time also helps out but will never eradicate the problem completely.
     
    As such the war must continue, to arms everybody, to arms…
  13. SYNACK
    The Idea:
    Built into practically all late model computers there is a small chunk of the BIOS flash memory reserved for management information such as the brand, type and serial number of the product. This was originally called DMI (Desktop management Interface) but has now been renamed SMBIOS (System Management BIOS). This little chunk of memory is accessible by a number of means including WMI and hardware identification programs such as Everest. This little chunk of information is a fabulous resource and should allow you to easily inventory your systems and identify them uniquely when performing image deployment through SMS or the new MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit).
     
    The Reality:
    The harsh reality though is somewhat different for most of us, in the never ending search for the best price and with management grabbing up whatever looks pretty in the brochures most of us have ended up with a collection of different types and brands of computers. The larger manufacturers can at least be trusted to write this information into the BIOS when the computers are produced identifying them by a serial number, product number, manufacturer and uid as such these machines are not the problem.
     
    Brand X however is a different matter. Brand X is my term for anything that was built from a non-major brand. You know the type, smaller companies from all over that build the computers from standard parts to order. In general these machines are fine and run perfectly in the school but in most cases the SMBIOS data is not written, in the worst cases the uid on all the machines is identical causing havoc with active directory.
     
    These machines usually show up in a hardware id program with the helpful system product name of “AMIBIOS” or something equally unhelpful if you are trying to connect a station name to a serial number. This also causes an issue if the serial number tag is removed from the system itself by the ever-present and destructive forces that inhabit your average school.
     
    The Solution (caution, without proper care this can brick a motherboard):
    The solution to this is actually not anywhere near as difficult as it seemed to be when I first encountered this issue. There exist small DOS based utilities that are specifically written to alter this information without the need to re-flash the machines in a manufacturing environment or manually edit a raw BIOS image. In the beginning the motherboard vendors actually used to provide the SMBIOS configuration utilities on their driver CDs, those days unfortunately seem to be over.
     
    I searched through the web always finding just the scent of information that had once been posted but had moved on or been taken down. But through the bread crumbs that remained scattered through forums and caches I found the name of a file that contained the utilities that I was after. The seemingly mythic “BNOBTC v6” a collection of these utilities written about in many places but all of the links lead to no where. In search of this file I turned to my peers and hoped that they were in a sharing mood. A quick torrent search and download later the zip file packed full of utilities for the differing BIOS vendors was sitting on the hard drive. This collection weighs in at 226MB when extracted so I just dropped the whole lot onto a DOS bootable USB key.
     
    There are different utilities for each main type of BIOS that are standard across the motherboards, for example Award BIOS, AMI Bios etc. After locating the latest version of the utility for my test machine, a AMI BIOS based system I the appropriate executable dmi236.exe into the root directory of the key for easy access then booted the machine off the USB key. To run this utility I simply typed in “dmi236 /p” (the /p is for Plug and Play detection) and edited the enclosure information as needed.
     
    The Result:
    With this done the computer knows its own systems supplier serial number and can provide it upon request. In my situation is also means that my inventory VBS script can uniquely identify each machine and relate the station workstation name to the actual piece of hardware. It also logs how much memory is installed, hard disk usage and more but I will write more about that in another blog entry.
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