I stumbled across this interesting and extremely useful Hyper-V Monitor gadget the other day. In a very compact workspace on the Windows Vista Sidebar, it shows you the status of every virtual machine configured on a Hyper-V Server and allows you to connect to or control any of those VMs with a single click. In the example shown here (which shows my live Hyper-V Server), I’m actually aiming the mouse pointer at the status section for the first VM in the list, making the the Turn Off, Shut Down, and Save buttons visible.

The gadget can list multiple servers at once and can save a custom username/password pair so you can log on with something other than your current account credentials. Each VM in the list is a live link; click to open the VM in a Virtual Machine Connection window.

Developer Tore Lervik has more details and the latest downloadable code: Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar.

Well, to all in the U.S., anyway. The LiveSide folks pass along this announcement from the Live Mesh forums:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to http://www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

If you’re outside the U.S., you apparently have to change your region and language settings to EN-US, which might be a dealbreaker for some.

Anyway, the current release of Live Mesh is an excellent way to sync files across machines and make them available “in the cloud.” Give it a try.

Update: The Live Mesh team has more details, including the news that there’s a cap on the number of new registrants:

This week we did two things:

1. Doubled the maximum number of users we’ll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview.
2. Simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process.  We’ve removed the requirement to sign up via Microsoft Connect, so that instead you can sign up directly from www.mesh.com.

So if you’re thinking of signing up, don’t wait too long…

My buddy Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has a barnburner of a post today whose key message can be boiled down to a simple phrase in all caps: PATCH IT, DAMMIT! (That’s Dwight’s phrase, from an e-mail exchange we had this morning about this very post.)

I agree completely with what I see as Dwight’s overarching message: computer security is serious business and complacency can have dire consequences. Absolutely right. But I cringe at the fear-based presentation from SANS, which is unnecessarily alarmist and seriously outdated.

Let’s start with Dwight’s headline:

Average time to infection: 4 minutes

That’s alarming. And so is the nut graf, which appear just above a chart that drives home the point visually:

Here’s how poisonous the Internet environment is these days: According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, just connecting an unpatched Windows XP system to the Internet can result in a malware infection in an average time of four minutes.

The implication is that you don’t dare connect to the Internet without full body armor. A casual reader would take away this message: if you go down to your local outlet mall, pick up one of those last remaining Windows XP machines, and then plug it directly into a cable modem, you’ll be infected within minutes. That is simply not accurate. And Dwight hints at that when he says, “I actually saw this happen first-hand years ago.” Me too. I remember watching in awe as the Blaster worm jumped across networks to infect Windows machines back in the summer of 2003. But that was years ago and I haven’t seen anything similar happen since those dark days.

Continue reading “The myth of the four-minute Windows survival time” →

I got an e-mail this morning from reader Bert Rivera:

I’m a long time reader of your columns on ZDNet and edbott.com. I’ve been a network administrator for 16 years but never got into programming. I’ve written batch files here and there but nothing real involved.

Over the years, the simple batch files I’ve done have met my needs, but lately there have been a few things that batch files couldn’t do and I would like to know if you can recommend some books on scripting for beginner/intermediate users. Any help would be appreciated.

That one stumped me. Although Carl, Craig, and I touch on scripting and batch files in our Inside Out books, we don’t go into much depth on the topic, and I haven’t had the time to really dive into scripting and other development areas in the past few years.

If I were going to get started with scripting these days, I’d probably focus on PowerShell, and I’d most certainly start by poking around at the Microsoft Script Center, which has a Getting Started page and a Windows PowerShell portal.

I’d also devour the Hey, Scripting Guy! archives, which are well written and practical.

To get a good Scripting 101 book, I suppose I’d start at Amazon.com and read the reviews. But I’d rather read some up-to-date real-world reviews from you all, especially if you can point out a book that really helped you get over this same hurdle. In fact, if you’ve written a scripting book and you want to plug it here, be my guest.

Here’s a snapshot of the collection of virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V here right now:

That’s one Windows Server 2008 VM, one Windows Home Server, two Linux distros, and Vista Ultimate. All are allocated 1GB except Windows Home Server, which is working fine with 512MB. Total RAM usage is just a hair over 5.5GB.

This is a quad-core machine with Intel Virtualization Technology enabled. Each virtual machine’s performance is snappy; without exception, each one feels like it’s running on its own dedicated hardware.

As you can see, I did a clean install of the latest Ubuntu version a few minutes ago (the VM name is Ubuntu Test2), and installed OpenSUSE 11 two days ago. Both Linux installs went very smoothly, with no tweaking except for the need to install a Legacy Network Adapter.

This announcement is welcome, but why only on the Xbox?

Microsoft Corp. and Netflix, Inc., the world’s largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer consumers the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets users instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost.

[…]

Netflix on Xbox 360 is an important component of the new Xbox experience, a new generation of games and entertainment experiences that will be available on Xbox 360 consoles this fall. The new Xbox experience, also announced today at the E3 Media and Business Summit, represents the first time in history that a mass-market consumer electronics device has been re-invented through free software, giving people more fun and intuitive ways to interact, play and enjoy entertainment content.

It sure seems like it should be possible for this service to be ported to Windows Media Center. As an early adopter of Media Center technologies and a Netflix subscriber who isn’t a gamer, I feel left out (to put it mildly) when I read announcements like this. Look at this description, for instance:

From the Netflix Web site, members simply add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will be automatically displayed on the TV screen via Xbox 360 and available to watch instantly. Once selected, movies will begin playing in as little as 30 seconds. In addition to instantly streaming movies to the TV, Xbox LIVE Gold members can fast-forward, pause and rewind, all using either their Xbox 360 Controller or Media Remote. In all, the user interface creates a highly personalized experience that puts viewers in control.

I’d love to be able to do this via a Media Center Extender, but I guess my only option for now is an unsupported user-written plug-in. Thanks, Netflix. And thanks, Microsoft. At least you can get an earful from your own community now.

Update: Chris Lanier seems to agree:

Yesterday Microsoft announced that they are partnering with Netflix to bring Netflix’s streaming content to the Xbox 360 Dashboard. What was not announced however is the same in Media Center. The good news is that Microsoft now has the backend to make it work. The bad news [is] that knowing them Netflix streaming may never be ported to Media Center. Looks like the Xbox 360 Dashboard is still Media Center biggest enemy.

Be sure to read the comments here and under Chris’s post.

So far I’m reasonably happy with Firefox 3. I like two features in particular: crash recovery (if the browser crashes, it offers to restore all your tabs when you resume) and download pause/resume (if you’re doing a big download and you need to close the browser for some reason, you can restart where you left off). Here’s the Download Manager in action. See that Pause button?

Unfortunately, these two features don’t work together. So, this morning, when I was 75% of the way through a 4+GB download, Firefox decided to crash. When it resumed, I noticed that the download resumed as well. From the beginning.

Ugh. Yes, I know there are extensions that do a better job with downloads, but this seems like it should be a core feature.

May 28 2011: Welcome, Daring Fireball readers.

You do realize that Mr. Gruber is playing a fun little game here, right? He seems a wee bit embarrassed that he has been so desperately wrong about the current state of OS X security lately.

You might want to ask him if he still stands behind his Wolf! post? He quotes a post of mine that turns out to have been extremely accurate. He published that post less than a month ago, so he can’t have forgotten about it. Indeed, many Mac-oriented news sites have written on the same subject, and yet Gruber has stopped updating it. Why do you think that is?

And for some reason, Gruber has completely ignored my detailed response:

Crying wolf? Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

I highly recommend that you read this post too:

Measure Twice, Spin Once

It revisits a 2004 post from, gasp, Daring Fireball that Gruber appears to have completely forgotten about. See how easy it is to go back in time and find examples of where someone tries to predict historical trends and guesses wrong?

I do hope Mr. Gruber addresses these important issues again one of these days. He seems to want to change the subject.

Oh, and on the point of this post: At the time it was written, in July 2008, the iPhone had been out for a year, but the App Store was literally less than 48 hours old. The 3G iPhone had been introduced less than 24 hours earlier.

If you had owned an iPhone for the previous year, you had not had access to Microsoft Exchange, the dominant business e-mail platform. You had had pitifully slow Internet access on your phone. And you didn’t have any apps. It was definitely a version 1.0 product.

If you had “come back in a year,” of course, Apple would still not have had any business products. Nor would they have had any two years later, in 2010.

Apple did correctly anticipate the rise of mobile platforms and build a great product line that is extremely successful today. They have done a superb job of targeting high-income consumers and small businesses. I tip my hat to Mr. Jobs.

Continue reading “Microsoft in an Apple store? Oh, the irony…” →

In my mind, there’s no question that any information worker will be more productive with two monitors than with just one. I’ve been using dual monitors for at least five years, and I can see my productivity drop when I try to work with just one, as I do when traveling with a notebook.

I’ve considered adding a third monitor, but it’s never made it to the top of my upgrade stack. Partly, that’s because I’m not sure I’d really get a lot more benefit out of it. Some time back, Jeff Atwood argued that three monitors is the "sweet spot" in terms of desktop space, pointing out that Google’s Larry Page and Microsoft’s Bill Gates both use triple-monitor setups. Today, Scott Mitchell says he doesn’t see the payoff:

I’ve been using the three monitor setup for a couple of months now and regret to say that I have not seen the same productivity benefits or improvement of worklife that Jeff espouses or that I enjoyed when going from one monitor to two. For certain tasks I am more productive with three monitors than two, a prime example being if I need to review a client’s email while bug bashing. I can have the email open that explains the error in one window, Visual Studio in another, and the web application running in the third. However, for most other activities the third monitor does not add too much value. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for one of the three to sit unused for long stretches of time.

In my hardware setup, the biggest issue is how to drive that third monitor. Currently, I have a 24-inch (1900×1200) widescreen LCD and a 4:3 (1600×1200) LCD. Because both displays are the same height, they form a continuous desktop surface. I keep the Windows Vista Sidebar and the Taskbar on the smaller of the two monitors, arranged on the right. The widescreen monitor is on the left, and I use Ultramon’s extra taskbar to manage windows on that display. Here’s a bird’s-eye view:

Jeff Atwood uses a Matrox TripleHead2Go device to drive his three monitors. [Update: In the comments, Jeff clarifies that no, he doesn’t use this device. Instead, he has a pair of PCIe video cards.] As he points out, though, this device is less than optimal because it creates a single large display instead of three individual displays. For me, the dealbreaker is that it requires all three monitors to be the same resolution, and the maximum supported resolution for each screen in a three-monitor display is 1360×768. (The digital edition will handle two 1900×1200 displays, but that won’t help me.)

The more logical way for me to get a third monitor is to add a second video card. Alas, none of my desktop systems have two PCIe x16 slots. I’ve looked into using PCIe x1 slots and PCI slots, buut the performance is terrible and the price is high for those options. For my next desktop PC I’ll probably spec out a gaming-class machine that has two video card slots.

Meanwhile, I’m happy and productive with two monitors, and I guess it will stay that way for a while.

Update: I love my readers.

In the comments, James Tenniswood suggests a USB-to-DVI external adapter, which can drive an LCD monitor at 1280×1024 ($110, free shipping), or a high-resolution USB-to-DVI adapter that works at 1600×1200 ($130 with free shipping).

Reader Jeremy (no last name) swears by MaxiVista and says he “experienced a great lack in productivity” when he had to go back to two monitors after using three.

From Italy, Paperino says he is using an EVGA USB adapter with good results. Customer reviews at Newegg are mixed.

Any other options worth exploring?

The idea of having separate physical machines for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Home Server has always seemed wasteful to me: space, hardware cost, power usage, and heat are all issues when you have two boxes.

So, as an experiment, I’ve installed Windows Home Server in a Hyper-V virtual machine running under Windows Server 2008. It seems to be working well so far. Here’s what the Server Storage panel looks like:

Interestingly, Windows Home Server recognizes that the drives are virtual and thinks each one is 400GB in size. In reality, they’re dynamic virtual disks on a physical drive that is 500GB in size. And right now, the actual physical space in use on that drive is only about 100GB or so. Eventually I’ll have to replace that drive with one that can actually hold 800GB, but I won’t come close to using that much storage space anytime soon, so I can afford to wait. Meanwhile, I have breathing room to replace the existing drive later without having to go through the hassle of re-creating the server.

In the long term, I think this option has tremendous potential. Anyone else out there trying it? I’ve seen this fairly old thread at the Windows Home Server Community forums, but the responses stop in December 2007, and most are talking about running WHS on Virtual PC (ugh).  Sean Earp has an old post (dating back to when WHS was in beta, in fact) that has installation instructions for WHS on Virtual Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003. but the Hyper-V platform is much neater. I can’t find anything in the license agreement that governs installation on a virtual machine, but I also haven’t looked closely.

I’m interested in hearing reports from those who are using this configuration today. Any issues? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

This post was revised for clarity shortly after its original posting.