Thursday, September 24, 2009

Quick Gotcha - Upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 with connected WinMo Activesync phones

OK - here's one that was very weird. I ran it past the DonK at TechEd, and he couldn't come up with an idea off the top of his head - had never seen it before.

We have an Exchange 2003 server. We've upgrading to an Exchange 2007 server - new server build and migrate the mailboxes across.

We have a number of WinMo smartphones - HTC Touch Diamonds and Palm Treo Pros. These are all connected to user mailboxes on the 2003 server.

I migrated my mailbox to the 2007 server, and edited the connection details on the smartphone to point it at the new external FQDN. Everything worked fine - mail would sync - happy campers. Because Exchange 2007 supports HTML mail, I flicked the switch across to HTML on the mobile client. This is where things started to go wrong.

Certain external emails (not all, but the certain senders/formats would do it every time) would sync to the Smartphone, with a blank body and a "click here to download the rest of this message" notification. Both server and smartphone had the sync size limits turned off, and anyway, the emails were quite often only 2k in size (forum update notifications for instance, with no attachments or embedded images). No amount of mucking around with either client or server settings would fix it. Set it back to plain text, and the entire messages would sync perfectly.

In desperation I broke the partnership between the device and the server, both on the device (removed the sync settings) as well as on the 2007 server (removed the device from my mailbox). Re-initiated the partnership from the device - same settings as before.

Now, it works perfectly.

So not quite the seamless upgrade that I was expecting, but we have a resolution. Unfortunately it means we need to schedule time with all our smartphone users once their mailboxes have been migrated. On the upside, their devices will still work fine in Plain Text mode following the upgrade, so we can schedule this at our leisure, and dangle the carrot of enabling pretty html mail for the users to encourage them to come see us.

Monday, September 14, 2009

TechEd 09 - All over for another year!

We came, we saw, we geeked. TechEd 09, on the Gold Coast, has been run and won.


It's a hard life, but someone's got to do it. After our accommodation people stuffed up and double-booked us, they upgraded us to their sister hotel. It was a little further away, but a lot flasher. That's a shot from our room on the 27th floor.

We still were pretty close to the convention centre - only a 5 mins walk. You could easily see it from our balcony - it's the white-roofed building (centre-left) next to the Casino in this photo:


As far as the conference itself went, well, there's not much to say that hasn't already been said. I found it tremendously useful.The thing I like most about TechEd is the ability most times to hang around after a session finishes, and talk to the (very knowledgable) presenters and get some real one-on-one advice and questions. There were three areas in particular - Hyper-V, DirectAccess and TMG - where I was able to have a quick chat to the respective presenters, lay out an idea of our organisation, and get recommendations and ideas directly from them, which are specific to our environment. In a lot of cases, the presenters are either people who've worked on building the technology, or have a lot of experience in installing and configuring it in customer sites. In other words, they're the people who know it inside out. And the ability to tap directly into that knowledge for answers to our specific issues is a great opportunity.

SO - what were the main take-home points for me?
  • Hyper-V Server. We're an ESX shop, and very happily so. However, ESX is very expensive. Hyper-V now offers the features that we care about, and does so for free. Sure, it can't do everything that ESX does. And ESX is better if you've got different VM guests (IE, linux, solaris, etc). But for us, a Microsoft shop with relatively low requirements, it looks like it can save us a considerable amount of money straight away, as well as continuing into the future. I want to seriously investigate what it would take for us to migrate from our current platform to Hyper-V as a priority.
  • DirectAccess. I truly believe that this is going to change the way people think about remote access and corporate connectivity. I think it's going to challenge a lot of current mindsets, especially about corporate-vs-private, and the concept of "Work is something you do, not somewhere you go.". Sounds a bit philisophical? Maybe, but currently you might have a laptop. It's provided for you buy your employer. Therefore, it's a work laptop. You don't use it at home - it's for work. If you need to work from home, you connect it to your internet and fire up a VPN. Then you're working. With DirectAccess, whenever the laptop is turned on and can get an internet connection, you're connected to your corporate environment. So there's no longer that hard divide between work and personal. It becomes just a laptop - something you can use to access all your corp data whenever you want, from wherever. But it's also something that you can use for your own ends if you want. The concept of "connecting to the vpn, thus I'm in work mode" no longer implies. And I think those conceptual benefits far outweigh the technological benefits, actually.
  • TMG / ISA. We were planning on installing an ISA firewall into our organisation soon, and then upgrading to a TMG server later in the peace. However, after seeing TMG beta3 working at TechEd, we've decided to go straight onto TMG instead of touching ISA at all. This means that we'll be running on beta software for a little while, but the presenter and everyone I spoke to about it certainly had no qualms about that. Indeed, Microsoft themselves have been using the beta code in their production environment now for some time, and have nothign bad to say. So that's an example of one area where we've changed our plans based on being able to talk directly to the people involved in the development of the software. And it's going to result in us being able to deliver a better service to the business, quicker, and more cost-effectively.
  • Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2. Having been using Win7 RTM on my main computer for a couple of months now, I was already pretty sold on the benefits it can bring to the organisation. What surprised me was how much extra capability you unlock by having Server 2008 R2 at the back end. Technologies like BrancheCache have the ability to both reduce WAN utilisation, as well as increase performance for users in branch offices at the same time. It's easy to configure, seamless to the users, and it just works. And it's "free", all as part of Server 2008 R2. We'll be looking to upgrade our laptop fleet to Win7 as a priority, to take advantage of abilities such as BitLocker/BitLockerToGo and other security enhancements. Following that, our plan is to roll Win7 to all our desktops office-by-office, and perform rolling upgrades of our remote servers at the same time.
The remainder of the time was taken up by Sharepoint sessions (we're currently implementing Sharepoint, and they were valuable for gaining insight into the architecture of the platform, as well as how easily it can be enhanced through software like InfoPath to provide electronic form routing and workflow, and PerformancePoint to give integrated BI reporting), ForeFront Client Security, Windows Mobile, Office 2007/2010, Exchange and a large variety of others! Often Jeremy and I would find ourselves attending different sessions, and meeting up for lunch and afternoon tea to discuss what we'd just been going through.

All in all, another very successful 3 days. We've come away with a better understanding of the Microsoft roadmap and their overall vision on how their seperate systems all work together. We've come away with ideas on how to increase our assistance to the business, and how to allow our staff to be as productive as they can be by giving them the tools that they need to do their jobs. And we've come away with a solid set of ideas that will see us through the next 12 months, and probably beyond.

When you look at what we took away from last year's TechEd, and how we have either implemented already, or are most of the way through implementing the platforms that we identified as important to us, it's easy to see how much of an impact this event has on the firm. I look forward to looking back on this year's event in 12 month's time, and seeing where we are then!

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Good Gear in Big Boxes


Well, looky what just arrived on my desk! An order from m'verygoodfriends at Umart down in Bris!

You may recall we've been having some troubles with our media centre PC at home. Where we last left off, I'd been speaking to Jeffa at Microsoft Oz, who suggested that the hardware I was running was just too old. I had kind of anticipated this, but had hoped he had some magical insights that would let me get out of spending money, but it was not to be!

The most sensible solution seemed to be to upgrade our main PC, and filter it's insides down to the media centre box. That has the dual benefits of significantly upgrading the MCE machine, but gives us the best bang-for-our-buck on our main use machine. And since Windows7 RTM is available for me to download tomorrow via Microsoft's corporate volume license website, I'll be building both machines with Win7 RTM. I've already been using the RC on the MCE machine, and it's been working brilliantly despite the hardware disadvantage, so I've got high hopes.


So - what have we got here??? :)

For the main machine:
  • Intel Corei7 920 CPU - full of quad-core goodness. The 920 is the smallest i7 you can get.
  • Gigabyte motherboard to suit the i7
  • 6Gb GSkill triple-channel DDR3. 6Gb is overkill for day to day stuff, but as I want to get more involved with editing out FullHD camcorder footage, it'll pay big dividends for those sorts of tasks.

For the MCE Machine:
From the main machine:
  • Intel Core2Duo CPU - replaces the old Athlon CPU
  • Gigabyte C2D motherboard
  • 4Gb DDR2 RAM
New from the order:
  • Corsair HX-620 low noise power supply - replaces the current old and very noisy PSU
  • 1Tb WD GreenPower HDD - plenty of space for recording TV
  • Compro Videomate dual DTV tuner card - for recording up to two TV shows at once
  • Sapphire video card with integrated HDMI out - includes it's own on-board 7.1 channel sound, and, more importantly, has a passive heatsink to keep the noise down. Also helps to decode FullHD video.

And to tie it all together:
  • Netgear 5 port Gigabit ethernet switch. Will allow much quicker network access for music, DVDs and recorded TV shows between the two computers.

So between all that hardware, we should have two very capable machines, for not very much money. And with Windows7 x64 loaded onto them both, performance should be pretty good. Plus, we'll be able to take advantage of all the new tricks that Win7 brings to the table, like Libraries, and HomeGroups.

So now the only thing I'm waiting on is for Windows7 RTM to be released via the MS VLK portal, and we'll be away! I'm hoping to be able to hook into this on Saturday afternoon, if everything goes in our favour. I certainly hope it does!

Friday, July 3, 2009

TechEd 09 - Locked and Loaded


This morning we received the green light for our TechEd registrations from our HR Dept. So I jumped straight onto the site, and completed my registration! I can assure you it had absolutely nothing to do with THIS :). Now it's all locked in and paid for. Can't wait. If it's anywhere near as good as last year's conference, it'll be well worth our time.

For instance, our experiences at last year's conference led directly to our current OCS implementation, which has been very well received by the staff, and is starting to transform the way we deliver our internal training sessions. Not only is the LiveMeeting functionality saving us real money in reducing the need for travel between our 20 sites (and growing!) spread across Oz, but it's allowing us to improve the quality and consistency of our training by being able to record the LiveMeeting sessions. This gives the presenters a chance go back through their sessions and evaluate their performance and improve their presenting skills. It saves us further money and time by allowing that recorded session to be made available across our intranet, so that new staff or staff who missed the original training session can replay the session at their leisure. Not only does this improve the consistency of the training that is being delivered, but it saves the presenters time as they only need to present the training once or twice, and it can be recorded and replayed as many times as necessary. Initial cost savings in reduced travel expenditure, ongoing cost and time savings for re-delivering the training, and improved quality of the training material - quite a win for the firm right there!

Later this year we will be looking to build on this success by upgrading our OCS implementation to the latest R2 version, and are even investigating the possibility of using it as our firm-wide VoIP solution. That last step is still a fair way off, but it speaks of the impact that this single platform is having within the firm, and it all started for us at TechEd 08.

This year I'll be putting a lot of focus into the Windows Client/Server track, as I believe that the Windows 7 / Server 2008R2 combination is possible of delivering real benefits to our firm that will equal hard dollar savings. Office System, UC and Mobility tracks will also get a fair workout, as they did last year. Technology like BranchCache and the more efficient file copy mechanisms will help us to make better use of our WAN links. DirectAccess will reduce complexity for our users, and give them access to all their data wherever they are. We have budgeted in the coming 12 months for projects around Exchange and Forefront, Forefront Client Security, and ISA server - all platforms that I'm hoping to delve into at TechEd and get the inside scoop on. Not to mention already-planned upgrades to Office 2007 across the firm, and other little tricks like that that should serve to show how busy our next 12 months is going to be!

In fact, I was very tempted by the pre-conference seminar on Sharepoint Workflow, and tried to stretch our budget to cover that day as well. Unfortunately our training budget has been somewhat pruned over late, and I had to give that a miss. Which is a shame, since we are rapidly approaching our Go! date for our current Sharepoint implementation project, and I believe that one of the real big impacts it will have within the firm is the capability to drive workflow processes. Even for simple things such as absence leave requests and accounts reimbursement forms, the ability to run those processes via a standardised workflow within Sharepoint will massively improve the service that various departments in the firm can provide. And I think that pre-conf seminar would have given us a great grounding in what we could do with the platform when we launch it. So if anyone wants to shout me a free ticket to that day, feel free to get in touch!!! :)

Tech Ed 09 - 2 months to go, and counting down!

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Coolest. Bribe. Ever.

Well, Microsoft have today announced that all paying attendees of Tech.Ed 09 will receive a free HP Mini 2140 netbook as part of their registration. More info, as always, at Jeff Alexander's blog , as well as at ZDNet.

Unsurprisingly, I think this is a great idea! Not only does it give attendees another great reason to go, but it will let Microsoft possibly cut down on the amount of physical media that they need to provide, as a lot of content can be pre-loaded onto the netbooks. So not only will attendees gain instant access to content from the conference, but it gives us all a chance to go a bit green.

Microsoft will be including a copy of Windows 7 on the device, which will hopefully be the final, RTM code. Again, this will be another great opportunity to get under the hood of the band new OS, which most, if not all, conference attendees will be eagerly awaiting. I've been running both the Beta and RC versions of Win7 for 6 months now, and have been very impressed.

All I have to do now is chase up the Powers That Be to ensure that, hell or high water, my registeration gets paid and confirmed!!! :) Roll on September!

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Haptic Feedback on Touchscreen Devices

After having a brief play with a workmate's Samsung Omnia the other day, I found that the simple haptic feedback it gave was very useful in using the device. For those who've been unlucky enough not to use an Omnia yet, whenever you touch a button on screen, the phone gives a quick little vibrate shot to let you know it's registered the press. It really does have more of an effect than you'd expect it to.

I set about this morning trying to find if anyone had created anything that would provide a similar experience on my Touch Diamond. I like the phone in general, but typing out SMSs on the on-screen keyboard is pretty terrible. It's far to easy to tap a key, only to find that it didn't register the key press, and now you're half-way through a misspelt word. It's not so much a case of pressing the wrong key (although that happens too with big fingers and small on-screen key targets...) - more along the lines of it registering the press half-way between two on-screen "keys". I could immediately see how something like the Omnia's haptic feedback system would make it much better in this regard.

And what do you know? XDA Devs to the rescue again:
I've downloaded it and installed it, and am happy to report that it does what it says on the tin! It's quite strange for the first 5 mins, clicking around on the phone and having it buzz in your hand. The software is quite configurable, with such nice defaults as disabling the vibrate when the phone is locked (so it doesn't vibrate away in your pocket if it turns itself on whilst you're walking), and to be able to restrict it to only work with the on-screen keyboard.

Unfortunately, it's not quite what I was after, though. Because it's done as a driver for the touschreen, ANY press on the touchscreen registers a buzz. So it still won't help me with my bad typing - I'll still press the gap between two "keys", and the phone still won't register it as a keypress, but it will buzz to tell me I've hit the screen. Which is disappointing. I really was hoping for something more akin to the Omnia's more deeply integrated haptic feedback system.

What I was hoping is that someone would have written a hook into the actual software button press event, so that the vibrate/haptic is only triggered when you touch the screen on an area that the app is interested in. IE, when I press a key on the virtual keyboard, the app detects not the physical press of my finger on the screen, but it registers a click on that particular key. It then interprets that as it would (IE, detects input of a "T" character, say), and prints it to the screen/adds it to the message, etc. What I would like is for the haptic feedback to be triggered at this point. IE, not all screen presses trigger a buzz - just the ones that the app is interested in.

I understand this means that the app can't be coded as a generic touschreen driver - that's too low a level in the app stack. The touchscreen doesn't know about the clickable areas in the app - it's job is just to register the click on the screen, map it to a set of X & Y co-ords, then pass that event through to the application.

The most obvious way to add the haptic feedback to an app is to have the functionality coded into the application itself. So, in the aforementioned SMS example, it would register the press on the T key, print the T to the screen, then give a quick buzz. Obviously this puts the burden of development onto the application developers themselves, and some apps might support it but not others, etc. All in all, not an elegant solution.

What I was hoping was that some smart cookie would be able to tap into the generic windows event for the click, and hang the haptic feedback functionality off that. But I'm not even sure that's possible these days with winmo in a touchscreen configuration. It's highly possible that the app authors don't use any generic windows controls for their touchscreen interfaces - they may have their own screen-press handler function that simply takes the X&Y co-ords, figures out what button was under that bit of screen, and then calls their own specialised action handler. I really don't know - I've never done any WinMo development at all.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that whilst TouchResponse isn't great, it's probably the best that can be done. I'll use it for a couple of weeks and see if there's any benefit to it, and how it impacts on battery life, and post back with my conclusions. If you want to try it out for yourself, simply click the link above to open the thread on XDA Devs - you'll need to register to be able to download the app.

Friday, June 5, 2009

VMWare Server 2 Sucks, MS Virtual PC Rocks Your Sox

So I had a need to make some virtual machines on my laptop this week. I'm looking to take the MS Server 2008 Network Infrastructure exam by the end of the month (assuming I can get up to speed by then!!!), and the lab exercises involve 3 Server 2008 machines. My default choice was VMWare's Server 2 - a free download. Since we use ESX here and I'm very familiar with it, I though Server2 would be the logical extension. Also, because it uses the has format as ESX, if I ever built a machine on my laptop and wanted to migrate it to our Production system, it would be as simple as shutting it down, copying all the files up into the ESX platform, and firing it up there. So Server2 it was.

Previously I've used the first version of VMWare Server - when they first bought it out as free to "replace" the paid Workstation product (which people are still buying today, apparently?), and to counteract the threat presented by the free MS and linux alternatives. It impressed the daylights out of me then as a super useful, easy to use and very well integrated product. Pretty much all the good points of ESX, but none of the downsides. So I had high hopes for the ver 2, which I had never used.

First problem - it's a 507Mb download. That's large. But that's OK - I was at work with the fast internet, and sometimes you need to be big to be good. Granted, even the ESX core isn't that big, but hey - maybe it's fancy management, or something like that.

Downloaded and installed fine, but then discovered there's not management app. In their quest to be cross-platform, all management is done via the web-based interface. I HATE web based interfaces. VMWare themselves acknowledge this, and I have a proper windows MMC-type app for VirtualCentre (which, again, is great). Why saddle me with this? And why install the tomcat webserver on my pc, just for this? If there's one thing I hate more than web-based interfaces, it's things installing their own webservers without my express permission. To add insult to injury, as soon as you fire up the web-based interface, it asks for an administrator password. Which it didn't prompt for during the installation. The standard guesses don't work, and some googling turns up that it just want's the windows admin account on the box. Since I'm an admin (naughty me, I know), I log on with my details, and it's all fine.

So far it's quirky, but it's free, so you learn to manage. Still hating the web-based interface and the inability to right click things, but I'll get over it. Load up my 3 VM's, which ,incidentally, takes me all day. Find that with 3 VM's running, the system is completely unusable. General windows stuff is so slow as to be worthless. Pressing ctrl-alt-del takes quite literally 6 minutes to go to the security screen, to get task manager up. Task manager shows a CPU utilization of around 4%, and a memory usage of around 3Gb (laptop has 4Gb installed). No disk queue length or paging of note. System still runs like a dog. Install VMTools on all 3 VMs, but no change. System as a whole is unusable. If only running 1 VM it's fine, but as soon as you boot a second one, then you're gone.

Which is a problem for me, since the purpose of having the 3 VM's is to play around with different network settings on each one to see how you initiate and then break network connectivity between them. Only having one available kinda won't work for that.

So that was where I left it yesterday. Server2 was broken, but I figured I could fix it. When I arrived at work this morning, however, I turned on my laptop to be greeted with the Bitlocker warning screen. My boot drive had been changed, and the laptop wouldn't start unless I could provide it with it's BitLocker key. Luckily I had the keys saved to a USB drive, so all I needed to do was plug the drive in and reboot, and the laptop fired up perfectly fine (Look for a future post about how much I love Bitlocker, and why I believe it should be a standard part of every Windows OS, at least at the Premium/Professional level and above). But it angered me that Server2 had made changes to my boot drive and drivers without also telling me.

So, basically, I got cranky with Server2. It was making my machine run slow even with no VMs running, it was taking much, MUCH longer to boot and to shut down, and it couldn't run 3 VMs at the same time.

Now is probably a good time to admit that my first choice was ACTUALLY to use Microsoft's VirtualPC for my virtualization needs. It's what the book recommends (funny that, since it's a MSPress book...), and I had heard good things about VirtualPC. Plus, it's free too these days. However, when I went to the Microsoft VirtualPC site, it has been taken over by Windows7. You may have heard about this little thing called "XP Mode" that's part of Win7. It's quite fancy, and uses the next version of Virtual PC to make the magic happen. However, the entire VirtualPC site has been taken over by it. When you click download, you're asked to choose which version of Win7 you have, because obviously you want the latest and greatest. Except when you don't.

So that was the single impediment which initially sent me down the Server2 path. I figured if MS was going to hide away Virtual PC for Vista, then I'd just use the (presumably excellent) competition. So this whole rant might be useful for someone to pull apart from a purely marketing perspective, since it neatly shows how one simple thing turned a potential user away from what is probably an excellent product and sent them straight to the major competition. But I digress.

Thsi morning, annoyed with Server2, I uninstalled it and deleted the VM's that I'd lovingly created the day before. Got rid of it all. Tracked down the download of Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 - as mentioned before, it's free these days from the MS Download portal.

First surprise - it's 30Mb. All up - that's all it is. Downloaded before I even knew it was here.

Second surprise - it installs easily, and quickly (it is only 30 Mb after all!). I had assumed that it would be an installer like the IE installers, which are only small in size, and the first thing they do is connect to the internet and download an additional 400Mb of junk. Not so with VirtualPC!

Third surprise - it's got a proper windows management client. And that management client is great. It's simple, it's small, it's got nothing that you don't need. But it's got everything that you do.

I've rebooted the computer since uninstalling Server2 and installing VirtualPC, and haven't been bothered by the Bitlocker checks, so I assume that Server2 has either left whatever it had there there, or has nicely cleaned up after itself. And it looks like VirtualPC didn't need to make any modifications there either.

So far I'm half-way through installing the second Server 2008 VM, and the system's running swimmingly. I expect it to continue that way, especially since VirtualPC's options that allow you to retain CPU priority to the host machine, and dedicate the lions share of resources to the VM that you're currently using at the time. Smart options that give the performance to the machine that you need, when you need it.


So far, I can whole heartedly recommend VirtualPC over VMWare's Server2. If you want a lightweight, easy to use and configure Virtual Machine system for your personal use, and you're using Windows, it's very hard to recommend anything else. As stated above, I work with an ESX3 Virtual Infrastructure platform at work every day, and love it to death. If you were looking at an enterprise-level platform to run your Production environment, I still believe it's the only way to go. Expensive, yes, but wonderful. I really believe it's one of the best things we've ever done for IT in the firm. But if you're looking for a workstation-based product, then VirtualPC looks to be the clear winner in my books.

Click here to go to the Virtual PC 2007 download page on the MS Download portal.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Media Centre IV - The Finale

I've finally sorted the Win7 Media Centre, and it's now working "correctly". After the last post, the machine rebooted, and started again it's "Updating You Library" malarky. After 3 days, it was still going. Previously, I had turned off the "Automatically update your music with information from the internet" option inside WMP12, but HADN'T turned off the same option within Media Centre. It was still trying to download coverart and other such info every time you were to go into the music library in MCE.

Turned that option off, and voila - fixed. Now, whenever you go into the music library, it's pretty much straight up. Scrolling through the library is now considerably faster too - it must have been trying to update the music as you scrolled.

So - if it's all working well, why the inverted commas around the word "Correctly" in the first sentence? Because it's not actually working correctly, but I believe it's working as well as it can. Problems continue to exist, but I can't lay the entire blame at the foot of MCE. For instance:

  • When playing an album, the audio output will occasionally (IE, once or maybe twice per song) skip a bit. It'll pause for half a sec while the machine does something more important, then resume. Hard to blame MCE for this when the underlying hardware is so old.
  • When playing a DVD, occasionally the sound will drop out for 3-4 seconds. The video keeps going, but the sound stops. The sound comes back, and it's in-sync again (which is good), but it's still annoying. Again, might be a hardware thing, but it's still annoying.
  • Random reboots whilst playing a DVD. We discovered this one when playing Dora yesterday for the kids. Dunno?
  • Random screen blanking. Every now and then MCE will get itself in a knot, and the screen will go black and blank. The system is still responding - plug a mouse in and you get the USB-plugged-in boo-boop! noise, and the cursor move fluidly. But even ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager takes about 3 mins at this stage, so you're better off just rebooting the machine - it usually needs it even after you've managed to end-task on MCE.
  • Random "Windows Cannot Start Media Centre" dialog boxes pop up. Oddly, they pop up when MCE is running, and working faultlessly. Leaving them there doesn't introduce any problems, but why?
  • I've not uninstalled MediaPortal yet. Every now and then you'll flick over to the MCE machine on the TV, but instead of MCE on top, it's actually started MediaPortal, and it's on top? There must be a button on the remote that's being mapped through to media portal still? Very odd.
  • MCE still has trouble with keeping it's window on top of everything else. It's disturbingly common to switch to the MCE machine and have an AV dialog (or some other warning message) on top, with no way to get back to MCE without plugging in a mouse and dismissing the dialog box. Annoyingly, the remote's OK button won't work for this, despite the "OK" button on the dialog having the focus. Sometimes you switch across and the Start menu/taskbar has the focus, with no way to get back to MCE other than attempt to start a second instance, which then doesn't play well with the running instance.

These currently are my main gripes with the system. The first few are easily blamed on the old hardware - I readily admit that I'm probably under the minimum suggested specs, and would be prepared to upgrade the hardware if it meant a better experience.

However, it's the last few items above which have me worried. In all the years that I ran MediaPortal (even through it's beta builds), I could count on one hand how many time I needed to plug in the mouse, and I'd still have fingers left over. So it's currently not looking so bright for MCE, I'm afraid.

I do, however, love:
  • The "Now Playing" screen for music, with the coverart scrolling down behind it.
  • Playing a DVD or ripped DVD is simple, and no need to muck about with selecting the right video decoder, or so forth - it all just works. Love that.
  • The GUI design of MCE. At first, I wasn't sold, but I like it now - very easy to get around.
  • The screensaver - uses your photos from your photo library - nice touch!

Bootnote
I dropped Jeff Alexander from Microsoft Oz an email about the issues I was experiencing, and asked for his suggestions, since he posted a few weeks prior about how much he loved MCE under Win7. He got back to me a few days later, and basically confirmed my suspicions. Running on 7-8yr old hardware that's well under the minimum specs just isn't going to give a good experience, no matter which way you slice it. 4Gb of RAM and a dual-core CPU seem to be the absolute minimum needed, and a quad-core CPU yields even better results. So it looks like I'll need to invest some money into the box to get it to perform how I want it to.

The other thing that Jeff suggested that hadn't even crossed my mind was to upgrade the wired network with a gigabit switch, instead of the hundred-meg switch integrated into my router. This will be a "quick-win", as it's certainly cheaper than the ~$1100 to upgrade the MCE machine, and should make indexing the shares a lot quicker. Also, it should take all the MCE/main computer traffic away from the router, so I might even pick up an increase in my VoIP call quality.

The good thing from this is that it looks like the main big issues I was having above are probably all related to the underlying hardware being unable to cope. Since I've uninstalled MediaPortal, I no longer have issues surrounding it "taking over" the session in front of MCE, but still experience random error messages popping up on screen, closing MCE and taking the focus. Library population is now much quicker than it was, but still takes too long to be usable, especially the music library. Scrolling through takes ~10 seconds per single right-button-press to move one album at a time. Again, a combination of increased bandwidth on the LAN, coupled with more CPU horsepower should see issues like this disappear, with any luck.

The items from the "Things I love" list above have really grown on me more now though - it really is a slick system. I just hope I can get it running right, and then will be able to really enjoy it.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Media Centre III - The Reckoning

Well, we've made some headway with my Media Centre trial! After the PC spent a week "Updating Media Library...", it's finished! And it works! I didn't change anything - I jsut left both machines on for a week, and left them alone. Even if I change some ID3 tags, or move some mp3's around on the source PC, it only takes a 5 mins to update the library on the media centre machine, and then it's right again! I had feared that it would require another week to sync up, but it seems to be smarter than that. I had turned off the "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" option on the media centre machine, but I'm not sure if it actually made a difference. I'm planning on turning it back on, and seeing if it needs to re-index the share.

So why did it take a week to do it's initial sync? No idea! Am I happy that it's finished? Yes!

The hardware is starting to show through a bit now - scrolling through the media library is slow, and occasionally the music playback will pause for a second as the PC needs to do something more important. But overall, I think it's acquitted itself very well, given the very old and basic hardware that it's being run on. It certainly is running better than I expected, and better than it has any right to. I might try upgrading the RAM to more than the 1Gb that it's currently got, but I suspect it's still mainly CPU bound.

Media Centre, however, has past the acceptance test. Jess was using it over the weekend, and was easily able to find the album she wanted to play and get it going. I particularly like the "now playing" screen with the album art scrolling down in the background - very visually effective, and good for our plasma TV, since the screen image is constantly changing.

The next step will be to budget for an upgrade to the main PC, which will allow us to shuffle it's current insides down to the media centre machine, and give it a fair upgrade in the power stakes. I'm reasonably confident that that will see Media Centre start to really hum along. In the meantime though, even with the slight performance issues, it's sold on me.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Telstra HTC Touch Diamond ROM Update Available

Just a quick note regarding the new HTC Touch Diamond update available for Telstra TD's. You can download the update from the HTC AU site here : HTC Touch Diamond ROM Upgrade (for Telstra Network Customers). It's dated 6/5/2009, and upgrades the ROM to version 2.07.841.2. You've got to enter in your serial number (under the battery) before you can download the ROM, as the website checks that the SN matches their list of official Telstra TD's. IE, if you don't have a Telstra-bought TD, the website won't give you the download.

I do, however, have a Telstra-branded-and-supplied TD, so have downloaded the files and updated my TD this morning. Happy to say that everything went very well. The download is 100Mb, so be ready for that, but otherwise it's very straightforward. The re-flash will completely erase anything on the main memory of the phone, but it leave the integrated 4Gb "Internal Memory" partition alone. So backup any CAB files or ring tones to that (or to your PC) before you start. The flash process takes about 10 mins.

Also, note that the update also removes any pre-existing ActiveSync partnerships, emails, anything - it's just like formatting your PC and starting from scratch. For me, that's not so much of an issue, since I just re-created the partnership with my Exchange server account via Windows Mobile Device Manager on my laptop after the update, and it automatically synced all my contacts, calendar and email back onto the phone. Love that. However, I've only just realised that all my SMS's are now gone though, which kinda sucks. Didn't even think about that. Bugger.

First impressions, however, are very positive. It's certainly much quicker to use, and that's with basically standard settings. Previously I had used both Advanced Config and TD3D Config to implement a number of hacks to boost performance and battery life. The new ROM is easily faster than it was, and I've not yet done any performance tuning to it. I plan to use it as-is for a couple of weeks, then get stuck in under the hood, and see if I can wrangle any additional performance and battery life out of it. I've been particularly un-impressed with the battery life over late, so we'll see if the new ROM addresses that at all.

The standout change, however, seems to be with the media player. The HTC media player in TouchFlow 3D always had problems picking up the Album Art associated with mp3's that were synced to the device. There was a hack to get around it, but it was an ugly, filthy hack that took a lot of time. it worked, but it wasn't nice. Since flashing the new ROM though, my existing mp3's (on the internal memory card) all picked up their album art, and everything looks pretty! So big kudos to HTC for fixing that - it was one thing that really took a lot of the polish off TF3D. Now that it's fixed, it's perfect.


It's also been a good chance to go over my list of "essential apps" for the phone. What I've re-installed this morning:
  • Advanced Config Tool 3.3 - Very handy customising tool - heaps of options to tinker with WinMo and TF3D. You will need the DotNet Compact Framework 3.5 to make this work. It's a PC download that you install to your PC with the mobile connected. It'll install the CF to the PC, then also push an install out to the attached mobile.
  • Black Carbon theme with dialer - Just a theme, but it's well done, a bit different from standard, and very easy to install
  • Diamond TF3D Config - Like Advanced Config, but with more TF3D-specific functions. Ability to re-oder the tabs along the TF3D ribbon, which is great as I use the weather tab a lot, and like to be able to move it so it's easy to get to from the main Home screen
  • Diamond Slide-To-Answer patch - Brings the Touch HD's fabulous slide-to-answer function to the Diamond. Once you've used this, you'll wonder how you ever did without it. NOTE - On a tip-off from Scotty (who has the same phone, and upgraded his last week), I've discovered that you don't need this - the new ROM includes it as standard! Awesome!
  • Google Maps - Can use the phone's integrated GPS hardware - very handy! Saved our bacon when we were in Japan ealier this year!
  • Microsoft Recite - Very tricky. You can record voice notes, and then search then by simply saying a key word. Works brilliantly. Haven't used it enough to make it as essential part of my day yet, but I feel it could get that way.
  • OneNote Mobile - Because I've got OneNote on my laptop, it automatically installs the mobile client onto the phone (and is the only way to get the client, BTW). I've not really used it yet, but have been using OneNote on the laptop more and more, and have been finding it really very useful. The shared notebooks in particular are awesome. So I'm looking forward to trying out the Mobile client as well.
  • PHM Regedit - Like it says - it's a registry editor for WinMo. Very handy for tinkering. This is my favourite regeditor - very easy to use and very powerful.
  • TD Cam Silencer (AU) (With the accompanying sdkcerts.cab) - Telstra have, in their infinite wisdom, locked their ROM so that you can't change the standard camera focussing and snapshot sound. It's an obnoxious noise, and it belts out at max volume. I guess they're wanting to cut down on people taking photos without others knowledge. However, for me, it's just terrible and renders the camera unusable. None of my other cameras do this, so I don't see why my phone should either. Thankfully a helpful soul on the XDA-Developers forum came to my rescue with a CAB install to remove the sound. Works a treat, and is easily the first thing I install now. You'll need to sign up to XDA Devs be able to download the files, but once you're there, you'll find a lot of other indispensable stuff anyway.
  • Disable SMS Conversation Mode - Windows mobile 6.1 devices default to a SMS Chat mode when reading and replying to SMS messages. I find it terribly annoying and hard to use. Luckily, there's a quick and easy way to disable it and set it back to how SMS messages should work! It's one little reg hack, so you will have needed to install the reg editor beforehand.
And that's about it! I've moved my standard ringtone back in and set that up, so I'll recognise that it's my phone ringing. I've had a couple of quick hacks in Advanced Config, but nothing major or that will affect performance or battery life yet. As mentioned earlier, I'm going to run the phone just like this for a coupel of weeks, and see how the new ROM stands up. But so far, I'm mightily impressed!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Media Centre redux

So after the weekend's problems with MediaCentre on Windows7, I spent some more time to straighten things out. So far, I've done the following:
  • Uninstalled MediaCentre in an effort to get MediaPortal recognising all the remote control's buttons. I thought maybe MediaCentre had some form of resident program such that whenever you pressed the Home/Start key on the remote, it would intercept the call and fire up MCE. After MCE was uninstalled though, the remote still wouldnt' function properly in Media Portal. I reset the configuration, and did everything short of rebuilding the machine. From what I can tell, Windows itself is intercepting the calls, and not passing them through to Media Portal. Which sucks, as currently it renders Media Portal on Windows 7 useless.
  • Uninstalled Media Portal, and re-installed MediaCentre.
  • Experienced the same problems as before.
  • Fired up Windows Media Player. Found that it needs to be run once to do all it's configuration. Is it possible that MCE is mucking about because WMP hasn't been configured? Ran through the WMP configuraiton, including adding in the libraries for the network shares.
  • WMP took a long time to rebuild the music library from the PC over the network, but it did get there. It ran all night an most of the day, but slow and steady won that race. It picked up all the ID3 tags (which are now correct, thanks Tag&Rename and AudioShell!!!), and sorted everything correctly into their right albums and artists.
  • However, as soon as WMP finished inxeding the library, it started again. And again. And again. All the time, eating up 100% CPU to do so.
So - it's NOT a MediaCentre issue after all - it's a WMP issue (which MCE heavily uses and relies upon). Some googling found this thread about people experiencing the same problem (and only that thread at this time. Strange...). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a resolution at the moment, other than "don't use WMP". I really hope Microsoft fix this, as it's rendered MediaCentre useless for me. I can't browse the music library, becasue the machine is too busy "Updating My Library" for me. I can't play a song, because all the CPU is going to updating the library. I click on Play, and nothing happens for 5 mins. Then, when I'm in brushing my teeth, the music starts. It plays for a second or two, then stops. 3 minutes pass. then another 3 seconds of music. Then golden silence. And so on. I've not even *tried* playing a DVD yet! Frustrating!

All that said, I've become quite attached to MediaCentre. It's interface is a lot cleaner than Media Portal's, which can be a bit fussy in areas. And it's installation and setup is much more straightforward and easy. When you can stop WMP from eating all the CPU, MCE is really quite snappy, even on this old hardware. I'm just intrigued as to what's causing this WMP behaviour - apparently it wasn't behaving this way in the Beta build. I really hope that someone in MS is alerted to the fact it's doing this, and is able to fix it up before it goes RTM. Personally, I hope they fix it before then, actually, since this is currently the only major roadblock for me to actually pay for the new OS when it's released. I'd like that re-assurance that it's working properly before needing to part with my hard-earned.

((hmm - really should get some photos up on this blog - it's looking very bare and sterile so far!))

Monday, May 11, 2009

Windows 7 Rocks, Media Centre Doesn't

Last week I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate. I had briefly used the Beta earlier in the year, and was mightily impressed with it. On a 6 yr old laptop it installed perfectly, without needing any drivers. And it ran considerably quicker than the previous XP install ever had. So I had pretty high hopes for the RC and the subsequent released product.

One of my main drivers for downloading the RC was to install it on my home theatre machine. It's currently running XP Home with MediaPortal installed to take care of the UI and remote control functions. It works really well, and allows me to have all my mp3s, DVDs and other media stored on my main PC, and watch/listen to them all in the lounge. However, it's not without it's issues. Chief amongst them is it's very inconsistent DVD playback ability, and the fact that it takes a long time to load the (rather large, but not as large as some) mp3 folder across the network. And not to mention the grumpy old audio drivers that every time I rebuild it take me a couple of hours to get it to use the coax SPDIF output in any meaningful sense.

I've been thinking of upgrading both machines to Vista, and using the Vista Media Centre on the HTPC box. My concern with this plan was that the HTPC machine wouldn't have anywhere near enough grunt to run Vista acceptably. It's an old Athlon2400+, with 1Gb of DDR Ram, and a Nvidia 7600GS graphics card. The graphics card isn't very old, but the rest of the machine is around a 7yr vintage. Certainly not cutting edge. One option was to upgrade my main PC to a new Core i7 setup and move it's Core2Duo brains into the HTPC machine, but that was an $1100 option, and hence not very attractive. By using the Windows 7 RC install though, I had the chance to see how it would run on the old hardware, as well as try out the Media Centre functionality, all for free.

The Windows 7 install was a mixed bag. It took a VERY long time, but keep in mind this is on older hardware that it's really designed for. First time through the install failed when the machine rebooted to continue the install in Windows. An error about corrupted files had me doubting whether the download or subsequent burned DVD install media were corrupt. Restarting the install from scratch though saw it install perfectly fine, which was pleasing. I still don't know what caused the problems first time through - I certainly didn't do anything differently the second time.

The biggest surprise, and what impressed me the most, was that Win7 detected ALL the hardware in the old clunker. The weird old onboard sound with it's coax output - 100%. As soon as the machine booted, I had system noises coming out the big speakers via the Sony receiver. The 7600GS AGP graphics card - 100%. All features enabled, all ready to go, and the res set to the maximum that the plasma TV can handle on it's VGA input (1280x1024). The XP Media Centre remote and IR receiver - 100%. Including all buttons mapping through the main shell, so you can navigate around in Windows with the remote if you wanted to.

So very impressed with Windows 7 itself. It takes a good while to boot on the old machine, but once up and running, things happen quite quickly. You wouldn't want to use it as your every day machine, but for it's intended role, it's perfect.

However, this is where we start going downhill. I fired up Media Centre, and set it up. Music and Movie folders were pointed at the network shares on the main PC (which Vista had automatically discovered and knew about - much nicer than XP!). However, the following issues soon raised their heads:
  • My mp3's are sorted into a standard folder structure - \\music\artist\album\files. As such, I've never payed much attention to ID3 tags, since I've always just navigated the folder structure that way, and played an album by playing all files in a folder. MC doesn't work like this. There's no way to make it view the files as they present on the disk. Everything is sorted by ID3 tags, which are either not present, or wrong. So there's a lot of fixing up needed there. But that's not really MCE's fault.
  • Either due to the low spec of the HTPC machine, or the speed of the 100Mbps wired ethernet network, when you go into the Music Library in MC, the display will freeze up. It'll show the first page of albums, then freeze. Button presses on the remote control will eventually be processed, but after 5-6 mins. Basically, MC just locks up and goes non-responsive for an amount of time. No matter how long you leave it, it doesn't get better. I thought that MC worked off a local database that indexed and referenced the file shares, in the same way that Media Player on a PC does? Apparently not. Whilst MediaPortal would take a couple of minutes, then eventually read all the remote files, Media Centre just seems to get itself in a knot, and locks up completely.
  • There's no way to play netradio in Media Centre? There's a Radio option, but it tells me I need an FM tuner to listen to radio. This is a big one for me, as I like listening to international netradio on a Saturday morning whilst doing chores around the house.
  • Media Centre doesn't seem to be able to stay on top. Often, after resuming from an overzealous screensaver, Media Centre had dropped from the foreground app, which left the remote control operating on the Win7 Start Menu and seemingly unable to get back down to the task bar. Thinking it would be smart enough to pick up the running instance, I had no choice but to click on the Media Centre icon on the Start Menu. Unfortunately it wasn't that smart, and so then I had two instances of Media Centre running on the one PC, which only a reboot could straighten out.

They're the main issues. Nothing wrong with Windows 7 at this point - it's just Media Centre that's playing up. I don't know whether it's the old hardware that's at fault, or if it's the network playing up. But at this point in time, Media Centre looks to be a bit of a bust. It's too inconsistent, it's too flakey in it's operation, and it just plain doesn't work with my mp3s across the network.

In it's defence, I did like :
  • DVD playback. Playing back a DVD that had been ripped to the main PC across the network was bliss. No need to muck around with installing DVD decoders, no need to change the decoder to a special one that came with the DVD drive's software to avoid stuttering, anything like that. Point it at the DVD, and it plays. no mess, no fuss. Love that.
  • Coverart. Media Centre seems to play much nicer with the coverart for CDs that have been ripped to mp3s. It just works, which is nice.
  • Music - playing a CD. When you can manage to get it working with a folder of mp3's ripped from a CD, I love how you simply "click" on the album with the remote, and the list of tracks opens up in a new window, with a handy "play all" button. And the new "Now Playing" screen with the coverart in the background is beautiful.
  • TV integration. This is not something I've played with yet, but I want to invest in a dual digital tuner card at some stage in the near future, and record TV that I'd like to watch. Even though I couldn't actually try it out, Media Centre impressed me with it's deep integration of TV services, EPGs, burn to disc or convert to iPod/PMP formats. I suspect that this alone might bring me back to Media Centre in the future.

For now though, I'm experimenting with a hybrid setup. I wanted music to play in the background for the mother's day brunch we had at our place, and MC wasn't working. So I quickly installed Media Portal on Win7, and that worked fine. I've not tried playing a DVD or anything, but at least I can see my mp3 folders, and can play an album, and it all works. I've still got some bugs to iron out, such as clicking the "Home" button on the remote inside MediaPortal actually launches a new running copy of Media Centre, instead of taking me back to the MediaPortal home screen. And the Back key on the remote doesn't work. And the music vis doesn't work anymore, by the looks of things.

So it's still a bit of a dogs breakfast, so to speak. I'm going to try to sort it out this week by removing Media Centre from the installation, and seeing if I can get MediaPortal playing nicely on the Win7 RC base. I hope so, because the device integration and support of Win7 is excellent. Whilst it takes longer to boot than the previous XP install, I feel it's snappier once loaded, and the networking seems rock solid. So I want to persevere with Win7, if at all possible. Hopefully once MC is uninstalled, MediaPortal will take full control of the remote, and assign all it's keys back to itself, and we'll be rocking and rolling.

There's still some things about MediaPortal I don't like - it's still slow to open up the Music share across the network, for instance. However, I think it's probably the best of a bad bunch for my needs. I did consider using XBMC, but it has no support for recording TV, which is a definite contender in the near future. MediaPortal has quite robust TV support, but I suspect it's not as slick or as polished and integrated as Media Centre is.

So we shall see. In the meantime though, the score is firmly planted at :

Windows 7 : 1
Windows XP : 0

and
Windows Media Centre : 0
MediaPortal : 1 (just 'cause it, you know, actually kinda works)

(Bootnote - after having this blog set up for ages, and not actually using it for work purposes [despite having half a dozen half-finished articles written in draft], I've decided to use this as my technology-specific blog. It'll be my nerd corner, as opposed to a strictly work-related blog. So expect to see articles such as this, which is clearly home-based, intermingled with interesting tid bits taken from my day to day wranglings with technology in a SME environment. Hope it's interesting!)