Tag Archives: Windows

Windows: Grand Unifying Theory

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While contemplating the upgrade status screen on my Vista to Windows 7 upgrade, I had a Eureka moment… the Grant Unifying Windows Theory which goes:

“The second or third iteration will any version of a Windows operating system be the one you want to install”.

Working backwards:

* Windows 7
Vista
* Windows XP
Windows 2000
Windows ME
* Windows 95
* Windows 3.1
Windows 2
Windows 1

Windows 1 and 2 were throwaways; it wasn’t until 3.1 came along that Windows was established as a GUI OS. Win95 was fairly solid, followed by the bastard children ME (hopeless), and Windows 2000 (based on the NT code…. but with inadequate driver support). Then came XP which is really the benchmark. And if you have XP working solidly now, why bother upgrading?

Vista to Windows 7 upgrade on Mac Parallels

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Earlier, I did a couple of fresh installations of Windows 7 and found it agreeable, so now I’m upgrading the Vista VM running on my iMac with Parallels 4.0. This has presented various points of interest .

1. You can do an in-place upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, but not from Windows XP.

2. I had to increase the size of the Parallels Vista VM disk from 30 gigs to 48 gigs to accommodate the installation files for Windows 7. You do this in Parallels through the Parallels Image Tool which expands the disk partition size. Before doing this is will merge any snapshots that you’ve taken. I had only a single snapshot that I had created when first installing Parallels a year ago. Rather than allow this merge, which would have taken several hours, I exited out of the program, deleted the snapshot through the snapshot manager, then reentered the Image Tool and performed the expansion in a about 30 seconds.

3. I increased the available RAM from 1 gig to 2 gigs, at least for the installation, since it was a stated requirement to have more than 1 gig. I may crank it back to 1 afterwards.

4. Among the steps during an upgrade, there is “Gathering files, settings and programs” The count of these was 414,061. That is not a misprint. Amazing, after less than a year of running this particular Vista workstation how much crap you accumulate. I’m also wondering at how they calculate the percentage in the upgrade status screen (above) which doesn’t seem to correspond with the numbers.

My guess is one reason XP isn’t supported for an upgrade is that XP still runs nicely on smaller, older machines, and these are probably not good candidates for a Windows 7 upgrade… notwithstanding the fact that Win7 is supposed to have a smaller footprint both in disk space and memory requirements than Vista. Accordingly, any machine that can run Vista should be able to accommodate Windows 7.

Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software

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You’ve probably seen the silly ads in those upscale magazines… “she was an Italian supermodel, he was a farm boy from Omaha”… or something similar. Very weird ad campaign, perhaps, but the consensus among many foreign language educators, and teachers of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) is that Rosetta Stone is a powerful program for teaching a second (third, fourth… ) language.

One of my clients, a provider of literacy and workforce development education has been happily using the standalone version of Rosetta Stone for some years. A couple years ago they somehow got talked into buying a network version which requires installation on a network server, and some hours of configuration and installation. This was probably not a good choice for them; they don’t really have the wherewithal or the need for this. After several weeks of phone calls and eMails attempting to exchange the licenses for single-user copies, we gave up and are now attempting to install the network version. (To be fair, their exchange policy states that there is a 180 day period after purchase in which to return their products…and we’re actually attempting this project 18 months or more after they purchased the program).

Rosetta Stone is available in several different configurations, including an online subscription which can be used via a web browser. Either this or single user copies would have been ideal. Instead, what they were sold appears to be the Rosetta Stone Enterprise version which includes a management server which tracks student progress.

One ironic twist is that this network edition includes the open source MySQL database and the Apache web server. Yet the Rosetta Stone server requires a Windows machine to run. So, instead of the server running under Linux, you have to have some kind of Windows box to host the server applications. The server installer then installs MySQL and Apache for Windows running as services and also installs Ruby. The server requires a static IP.

This was not something we wanted on our organization administration file server which is a a Windows 2003 Server. Hence the Dell T105 mentioned previously, running Windows XP.

Once the server applications are installed, you install the languages. In our case we have three levels of English, each on a its own CD. There is an installation program which prompts for the language CDs, and then gives you the option to activate them.

Activation is rather like activating Windows over the internet. For each language/level you’ve purchased, you can have one student running the program at a time. The license keys are similar to windows…. four groups of six letters and numbers. If you have already activated a language license elsewhere, then activation will fail…you have to go back to the computer on which you originally performed the activation, and “remove a language”. How this would be resolved if a hard drive had crashed or the computer was otherwise unavailable, I’m not sure.

The Rosetta Stone Manager is the management interface that allows managers to create user accounts for Rosetta Stone. This program is installed separatly from the server and is available in a Windows or a Mac version. The Mac version appeared to work OK, even on Snow Leopard.

Before going further, I called Rosetta Stone Tech support to inquire about updates. I figured that since the software was 2 years old, they probably had updated it within that time and there were no obvious links in the screens to obtain updates. Oh, yes… they would send new disks, and I need to do a complete reinstall. (Sigh), another three hours out the window. As Jerry Pournelle says….”we do these things so you don’t have to”.

After preparing the server. and adding myself as a user, I then attempted to install the workstation version of the software onto my Vista machine. This runs an Installshield installation. It worked great on an XP box. I was able to log in to the account that I set up in the Rosetta Stone server, and run the program. Seemed to work fine in a Vista session on my Mac with Parallels.

There is also a native Mac installer; this seemed unusual as I don’t recall ANY Mac software, no matter how complex, which actually requires an installation process on the Mac other than copying the application file to the Apps folder. This installer, “powered by Vise X” so far seems to be doing a search of all my hard drives. Once it does the search however, it then installs over 2000 files (!) including a Flash Player and a ton of JPG and Gif graphics files. Still, the application came up fine.

So, we’ve now got Rosetta Stone running on a Mac machine, a Vista virtual machine within Parallels on the Mac, and on an XP machine. I’m feeling confident enough to bring the server in tomorrow for a trial run.

Tech Friday — WES and Ruby

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Microsoft has made available considerable information about Windows Embedded Standard, (WES) which is the latest version of Windows Embedded, based on Windows XP.

There are (roughly) three versions of embedded operating systems from Microsoft:

Windows Embedded Standard: Allows a stripped down version of Windows XP for powering set-top boxes, game boxes, and machines dedicated to a single application. This is what we’re using in one version of our telemedicine set-top box.

Windows Embedded POS: An enhanced version of WES for cash registers and checkout scanner applications.

Windows Embedded CE: This is the version of Windows used for mobile phones and other hand-held and portable devices. The code base and software development tools for CE are different than Windows Embedded, with many of these related to WES.

There are a total now of twenty-nine (29!) training videos related to Windows Embedded Standard.

The Windows Embedded Developer Center site is the gateway on Microsoft’s Developer Network to all things related to Windows Embedded.

The Windows for Devices web site has information related to all version of Window Embedded as well as hardware that runs under Windows Embedded.

Other Notes:

Smashing Magazine has a nice introduction to Ruby on Rails.

NPower – Network Documentation Template

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NPower Seattle has a Network Documentation Template which is in Word. This is a great start for documenting your computer network. The file is called SBS2003template.doc which suggests it might have been modified by one supplied by Microsoft, and it includes inserted Visio files to show the networking diagrams. If you are a MS shop this will work out of the box. If not, you can easily modify it in OpenOffice, or Pages, or whatever. The object of documenting your network is not necessarily perfection…but to have something to give you a clue when things start going haywire.

Email Transition: Verizon to Fairpoint

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All of a sudden I’ve lost eMail contact with lots of friends who had verizon.net eMail accounts as Verizon abandons their landlines in three New England States, and Fairpoint takes over.

There is an official site provided by Fairpoint which will help people transition… but it is for Windows only. The site checks to see what your browser and operating system are, and if you have Windows XP or Vista, and are using Outlook 2000 or later, you can download a little program (ActiveX control) which will change your settings.

If you don’t use Internet Explorer, the automatic setting won’t work. The manual instructions are on the next page of the web site. I had a friend go through this with a technician, and this is what he came up with.

User or Account Name:
Your new myfairpoint.net email address
Example: ([myusername]@myfairpoint.net)

POP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (i.e. incoming mail)
SMTP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (outgoing mail)

Account name – on incoming mail server
[myusename].myfairpoint.net

Check My Server Requires Authentication
Settings next to it. “Use Same Settings as Incoming Server”

The technician also suggested that you change the outgoing mail port change from 25 to 1025 (WTF?)

I do have Fairpoint phone mail, and this no longer picks up when I’m on the line. Sigh.

If you have anything non-windows, and non-IE (Linux, Macintosh, Safari, FireFox) , you have to use the manual instructions.

Odds and Sods

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Going Aerial

Smashing Magazine has a collection of images taken from above and links to additional collections and tips for aerial photography.

There are a couple of tutorials over at Make Magazine’s web site for kite aerial photography, and photography on a pole. Both units use a similar yoke-mounted camera assembly that is controlled by servos. In fact, if you made the yoke once, you could probably use it for both applications.

Old Dogs/New Tricks Department

Jeff Duntemann gets Ubuntu. His Contrapositive Diary has now been moved over to a WordPress platform. I miss the old single page with the spiral-bound notebook illustration.

I’ve been working with MindManager for the Mac. This is available in version 8 for Windows, and version 7 for the Mac. Version 7 works fine; while not elaborate, it is quick to learn, and strikes me as an excellent example of “less is more”. More ideas for mind mapping are on Chuck Frey’s blog and he has a useful e-Book with lots of ideas. One suggestion from the book; when showing a mind map diagram to someone, don’t call it a “mind map”. My most elaborate map to date was the proposal outline of our NIH grant application discussed a couple posts ago.

Question of the Day: “Why is there no Visio for the Mac?” Or maybe a better way of asking the question, “What is the equivalent of Visio on the Mac?

Non-Technical Question of the Day: Watching the follies surrounding the confirmation of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, I have to ask, what is a guy who underpaid $34,000 in income tax using Turbo-Tax and doing his own taxes in the first place? Oh, and why did this happen to get resolved shortly before his nomination to the post of treasury secretary, even though the years when he didn’t pay were back in the first part of the decade? $34,000 is still a respectable salary in my neck of the woods… how much was the guy making in gross salary to be able to owe that much and then not pay it?

Tech Friday: Small Business Network

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In a recent column  Jerry Pournelle talks about problems with the Microsoft Active Directory.  

Back in 1999 I set up the Chaosmanor domain with Active Directory on two machines running Windows 2000 Server. I knew at the time that I didn’t need that complex a network, but a number of my readers did. In those days networking was hard, Active Directory was new, and many of my associates were curious about how well it would work. At worst this was another of those silly things I do so you won’t have to.

Actually, it worked pretty well. Windows Server 2000 with Active Directory had some infuriating requirements, and it really wanted everything done precisely its way, but from 1999 until this year it served me well. When Windows Server 2003 came out I was tempted to upgrade to that, but there was never any powerful reason to do so, and as time passed it seemed less attractive. I had novels to write and other work to do. I was able to try several Linux-based on-line backup systems – Mirra was one of them – and those worked just fine. Of course machines were getting better, and my old servers were getting more obsolete each year.

Now he thinks that everything he knew about networking is wrong. In particular, like many of us, his experience carried over from older versions of Windows networking, which makes things a lot more complicated than they need to be these days. You can reads more about workgroups, domains and routers and alternatives to Windows networking in the column.

At Microdesign we are reevaluating our own network, that has a core server running Windows 2003 Small Business Server; i.e. relatively unchanged for the past five years. Nothing has really changed as far as our core requirements are concerned, except there are several of us working from different offices, and on occasion when traveling. We increasingly collaborate on projects with partners who are outside our company. Our requirements parallel many small businesses and non-profits with 2-50 computer users. Here are our “legacy” requirements:

  1. Common file sharing area where multiple users/machines can access the same document
  2. Absolute trustworthy security of those files
  3. eMail and calender – available from anywhere on multiple devices
  4. Shared printing, from multiple machines to single printers.
  5. Reliable backup 

Those modest requirements suggest a file and print server based in the office, connected permanently to the internet, with printers shared off of the file server, and some kind of backup scheme (tape or additional hard drive). The network diagram which fulfills these requirements is essentially unchanged from the 1990’s.

Even with a server-centric network our advice to clients has always been to use the facilities of an internet service provider for two applications; eMail and the outward-facing (public) web server for the organization.  We (still) recommend having eMail outside the organization to provide greater reliability, ubiquitous access via the web, and industrial-strength spam control. We recommend the organization’s public web site be hosted outside the organization to provide 99.99% uptime, and to take advantage of higher bandwidth typically provided by an hosted provider. 

So, what has changed? Two things; disk storage and broadband. Broadband, or rather cheap broadband, has made it possible to reconfigure things so that the cloud  can now substitute or supplement a file server. With individual personal computers routinely having disk drives of 250 gigabytes or larger, the original justification for “server as giant hard disk” is falling away. 
Along with hardware improvements, there are now a host of inexpensive applications available on the internet that can supplement or replace software that used to require a file server. Basecamp is one example that can be used for project management and shared file storage. 

A more modern interpretation of the legacy network diagram puts the cloud at the center of the network.

So, I’m wondering whether to replace my file server. The server is no longer the be-all end-all of my network. Like Jerry, I don’t need a domain login mechanism. I barely use my printers, and those are attached directly to the local network. The small business server’s eMail, and web hosting have always been done off-site. The server does offer SharePoint, which is a capable platform for Basecamp-like project management, but Basecamp is about $12.00 per month, and it took about five minutes to set up. And, now that we have been invaded by the Macintosh monster…there are more reasons to find, (or at least evaluate) a cross-platform solution for our application needs.

Grants.gov and the SF424

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Four weeks to go, and I’m assembling an SBIR “Competing Continuation” grant, an odd-ball National Institutes of Health grant opportunity which requires an SBIR Phase II as a prerequisite, and basically allows you to continue research and development for “complex” medical devices, drugs, etc, that still have a way to go before commercialization.

NIH converted to an online submission procedure about two years ago. By most accounts it was fairly buggy, and they are continuing to refine it; it looks as if they are going to base the next version on Adobe Forms. As described a few days ago, if you have either a Mac with Leopard, OS-X, or a machine with Windows Vista, the only option that runs the forms is to use a Citrix terminal application which looks like Windows 95, crashes regularly, and logs you off after 20 minutes in any case. After struggling with this for a session last Friday, I’m punting and I’ve regressed to a Windows XP machine.

Even using the “native” PureEdge viewer, things are fairly kludgy. PureEdge installs as viwer, sort of like Adobe Acrobat, within Internet Explorer. You then navigate to the web page that contains the xfd for the web form. After inputting data, you can save the data. Unfortunatly the saved data from my Citrix session won’t seem to run…I have to reenter everything that I put on Friday.
After downloading the form again the form opens.

A couple of extracts from the SF424 instructions.

  1. There are odd rules related to the ability to have more than a single Primary Investigator, with NIH, you can.
  2. A budget must be created for each budget period.

    A budget peried is considered to be one year or portion of a year if the grant period is less than a year. If you have a multi-year budget, then you must fill out one for each year. The figures will be consolidated on a read-only summary sheet.

  3. If you are working within a consortium, and will be awarding some of the funding to the consortium, they (or you, or somebody) have to prepare a subaward budget that mirrors the award budget. This uses the same form (just with a checkbox for “subaward”). In my case, since this is a three-year grant, there will be six (6) separate “budgets”…one for each year for both myself, and the consortium partner. Woof.
  4. For the first budget I created a “simulation” in Numbers (the Mac spreadsheet) on the Mac which has the same format as the budget form. I’m going to try going native on the subsequent budgets, but if the data entry gets too hairy, I expect to create a simulation for the other five budgets too. (Later….didn’t end up doing this…now that I’ve sort of memorized what the form does and how works, I was confident enough to go commando as it were.)
  5. There is a budget justification (budget narrative) section which applies to the main budget, and a separate justification which applies to the subaward.
  6. Critical:When editing an attached form, you have to reimport or reattach it! In other words, specifying a file name doesn’t specify a pointer to the physical file; the file actually gets imported into to the form file.

If you are working within a consortium, it is helpful to have the consortium budgets entered first. These are done with the form shown in the lower left-hand corner, the R&R subaward budget form, which works similarly to the main budget form. You can even create the file for this and email it to your consortium partner to fill out and and return.

Totals from the consortium budget needs to be entered into the main budget. This is also the time where you can be sure to enforce rules such as the requirement that the maximum amount a subaward can be is 50% of the total amount for an SBIR grant. I sent the subaward budget back twice for revisions for this and similar restrictions.

All this goes considerably better when accompanied by music of your choice. Shawn Colvin was helpful.

Grants.gov = Windows Only ?

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Grants.gov is the federal government’s portal for online submission of federal grant applications. The National Institutes of Health have required applicants to submit their material online for the past two years or so. It has been a fairly rocky transition process, and I had hoped this time around things would go really smoothly.

I’m beginning to feel like Andy Rooney, “Have you ever really thought about the eraser on your pencil?” But the arrangements for completing grant applications for anyone running something other than Windows XP or below (Windows 98 is supported!) are nothing less than bizarre. When downloading the PureEdge viewer for Mac, I got this message.

The IBM Workplace Forms Viewer 2.5.1 Macintosh OS Special Edition cannot be installed on your computer.

There may be good news, however; according to this FAQ, Grants.Gov is transitioning away from the PureEdge viewer (aka IBM Workplace Forms Viewer) and moving toward Adobe forms which are cross-platform. Unfortunately, is looks like the NIH form that I’m using, the SF424, is PureEdge only. This means that that the only option is to use a Citrix client/server arrangement which turns my Mac into a Citrix terminal.

This is not going well. Among the warnings that they give is that you should really only use the Citrix terminal “off peak”… from 10PM to 10 AM, you should save every 20 minutes, and you should log off if you expect to be away for 20 minutes so you can give other users a chance. But, I’ve frozen up three times already, requiring a forced shutdown, and I just lost almost an hour of work, that for some reason did not get saved even though I deliberately attempted to save in a timely manner. What I think may be happening is that the connection is freezing considerably before the twenty minute limit….and there is no indication that has happened.

Since Windows Vista isn’t supported with the PureEdge form software, probably something to do with user rights, and since the SF424 form required by NIH isn’t available as an Adobe PDF form, I may resurrect a Windows XP machine, just so I can work on these forms without the added anxiety of technical problems. Its not as if 277 pages of instructions and a dozen separate multipart forms aren’t already nerve-racking enough.