Blog Reboot

A few years ago I started blogging on Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces service.  My topics ranged from mostly personal to technical and some political.  About a year ago I deactivated my blog since Facebook seemed to meet my need to post personal related information.  A couple days ago Microsoft announced that they were discontinuing their Live Spaces service.  What was surprising to me is that they joined with WordPress to migrate all their users.  Since I had been considering restarting my blog, I figured this was as good a time as any.  However, in the future I will only use this venue to write about content technical in nature.  I found that I would actually refer back to my old posts as a source of information. 

I have completed the migration of my old posts and deleted all of the non-technical related ones.  The WordPress interface is taking some getting used to, but I’m seeing some features that will be nice to use.  I’m glad to see that Microsoft has already updated their Live Writer program to post directly to WordPress.  Writing long posts in a web browser has never been fun.  It also appears that WordPress has already updated their site for Internet Explorer 9 compatibility.  I hope this ends up being a good relationship for both Microsoft and WordPress in the future.

Vista Certification and iPhones

Vista Certified

This week I attained my Vista Certification.  I think the official title is Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Configuring Microsoft Windows Vista Client.  I’m not sure how I feel about the whole “Technology Specialist” part.  They have changed it from the old 2000/2003 Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).  ‘Professional’ sounds much better than ‘Technology Specialist’ in my opinion.  I think it has something to do with the fact that many people in my company have the word ‘Specialist’ in their title, and they are anything but.  Overall, I’m pretty sure the last year I spent working with and deploying Vista at work has given me more experience than most with Microsoft’s latest and greatest.  It is just too bad that Vista has such a bad rep in the press.  I’m hoping Microsoft will be able to turn that perception around so I don’t have to bury my latest certification at the very bottom of my resume in small print.

iPhone

Alas… I think I am the only person in my immediate group of friends who does not have an iPhone.  I’m sure there are a couple of them that don’t have one, but I feel like the only one who doesn’t.  I must say congrats to Steve Jobs for inventing such a nice phone.  It really has set the bar in regards to most other phones out there.  That is kind of sad actually.  It is not that Apple has set the bar so high, but more that the rest of the cell phone industry let the bar stay so low for so long (Microsoft included).  Microsoft tried to shoehorn Windows into a mobile device for years when they should have trashed what they had and started over from scratch.  Granted they were trying to compete with Palm initially and the whole stylus thing (which was never cool).  But Windows Mobile 5 and 6 never did much to really up the bar.  They work alright, but have been in need of a UI overhaul for awhile.

One of the Windows Mobile Phone makers from Taiwan (HTC) has done more to experiment and develop new UI’s than MS has.  Pretty sad actually.  My T-Mobile Shadow phone had a pretty neat interface that T-mo made, and perhaps that is part of the problem.  Microsoft wanted to make the foundation OS and let the phone makers customize it.  I recently updated my Shadow to WM 6.1 which includes a really neat sliding panels UI made by one of the MS devs.  But it is clear this is just a stopgap until they can come up with something truly new (i.e. copy the iPhone).  I won’t go into all the reasons why I refuse to go iPhone since plenty of people have covered all of its inadequacies (go here).  What I am glad to see is that Apple has forced the rest of the industry to stop releasing such crappy hardware/software for mobile devices.  It is apparent that Apple is not going to let up on The Shiny®, so the rest of the industry will be playing catchup for awhile.  But this time, instead of a race to the bottom, it is a race to the top.

Flash Trash

Adobe’s Flash player is almost a requirement to view most web sites today.  My rant today is how much Adobe sucks.  For a long while now, some of us have been waiting for them to release a 64 bit compatible version for 64 bit browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer 64 bit).  When Flash 9 came out, they said they were working on it and it would be released when it was done.  Well, Adobe has begun releasing betas of the new Flash Player 10.  Yes!  Flash 10 for 2008.  Yea 64 bit!

Wrong!

Not only do they still not have a 64 bit version, I read that one of the developers said they aren’t releasing a 64 bit version AND, "we will evaluate that requirement, which has been requested before, for inclusion in possible future releases based on customer demand."

Based on customer demand?!?!?!?  I read an article on Slashdot from 2005 of people petitioning Macromedia (the original Flash developers) to release a 64 bit version of Flash.  3 years ago! GAH! WTF Adobe?  It’s not like this is some small developer.  This is Adobe.  Owners of fricken Photoshop, surely one of the biggest/complicated programs that exists.  How hard can this be?  Seriously.  I don’t code.  How hard is this?

I’m guessing it is hard.  Microsoft has their Flash competitor, Silverlight.  I was fully prepared to demand that all web developers switch to using Silverlight so we can move into the 64 bit age.  But upon checking… there is no 64 bit Silverlight support.  GAH!

Why does the Internet hate 64 bit? 

WDS Driver Injection

For my Windows Vista deployment at work, I’ve been using Windows Deployment Services on Server 2003.  Overall it has been going pretty well.  The server allows for entire disk images to be uploaded and then sent back down to the clients.  Once the initial setup is done, it makes the work go pretty fast.  I did however run into an issue last week.  I had created an image of one of our developer’s machines that I wanted to use in the future.  They have so many programs it takes a few hours to setup.  The problem I ran into is that they use Adaptec SCSI controllers which is not supported by the default Win PE environment.

I found a method of injecting a driver into the image so that Win PE could see the drives (this could also be done for NIC, video, or pretty much anything else).  First I had to install the Windows Automated Installion Kit (WAIK) in order to get access to the imagex.exe program.  This allows you to mount the .wim image file and manipulate the files inside.  The command is

imagex /mountrw c:path_to_imageimagename.wim X c:tempmount

where X = the image number you want to manipulate in your .wim (you can store more than one image in a .wim).  The “c:tempmount” is the directory will the files will be mounted, so make sure that is already created.  I also recommend copying the image locally as well.

Next I need to inject the driver.  The command is

peimg.exe /inf:c:drivers*.inf /image=c:tempmount

where c:drivers is where your (hopefully Vista compliant) drivers are located.  You can point directly to a specific .inf or if you use the *.inf wildcard it will inject all of what you have in that folder. You will get a successful/unsuccessful message.  So if it doesn’t work check for what you did wrong.   So now I need to unmount the image using

imagex /unmount /commit c:tempmount

The /commit one is pretty important otherwise any changes made will not be saved to the .wim.  I then copied my updated .wim to the WDS server and proceeded to PXE boot the image… only to find that it still didn’t detect the SCSI controller.  I found out that simply overwriting the image doesn’t update WDS. I still needed to go into the WDS console, right click the image and choose “Replace Image” and then choose my new image.  Voila!  Worked like a charm. Now I need to figure out any other drivers I need to add. 

Next step: Get the Windows SIM answer file to work.

Nvidia Crapiness

So I’ve noticed that the newest drivers from Nvidia now install a shortcut to some Valve/Steam games on your desktop when installed.  I’m sure this is some other way for them to make some money, but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I had icons on my desktop.  I like ones that I didn’t specifically put there myself even less.  I don’t even see an option during driver install to not add the shortcut.  So for now on, it appears that I will have to manually delete this stupid thing every time I update my drivers (or until I get a card from a different manufacturer). 

Bad move Nvidia.  This won’t be forgotten.

TechMentor Day 4

Wireless Security

Presented by Todd Lammle.  He is becoming one of my favorite presenters.  Todd demonstrated how easy it is to hack wireless networks and even provided a few tools.  He stressed that he is a big fan of Vista and Server 2008.  He agreed that the interface isn’t the best and there are program compatibility issues, but the networking stacks in both are far superior to previous MS network stacks. 

He also spoke about a feature in Vista that I wasn’t aware of. It is called Compound TCP.  Essentially, Microsoft Research developed some methods of increasing performance in high latency networks.  Compound TCP is in both Vista and Server 2008, but it is not on by default in Vista.  To turn it on, open a command prompt and enter:

netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp

Since I’ve turned it on, I’ve noticed my network performance has been much improved.  So if you have a Vista laptop and use wireless, I suggest giving it a try.  I think I’ll experiment later to see how it affects wired connections, if at all.

Todd had a great wireless security design tip.  He of course recommends setting up your real corporate wireless network and turning off SSID broadcasting.  But he also has several old Linksys WAPs around the building all broadcasting SSIDs, but not connected to the network.  He has a couple with no security, a couple more with WEP, and then a couple more with WPA (your real corporate network uses WPA-2).  He said it gives something for weak crackers to play with.  Even if they do get "hacked", no big deal since they don’t go anywhere.  Fun!

Vista Tips

Presented by J. Peter Bruzzese.  I felt pretty good that I already knew most of the tips from this presentation.  Peter interviewed 50 different Vista developers and compiled all of their best tips into a book.  I still think I’ll end up buying it.  With all the bad press, the more benefits for Vista I can find, the better.

One that I wasn’t familiar with was disabling hibernation.  This is a feature that is great for laptops, but not much use for desktops.  When you hibernate, an image of you system RAM is copied on your hard drive.  If you have a lot of RAM (ie 2GB+), this can be a good chunk of drive space.  To disable hibernation, run the command:

powercfg -h off

But then you need to run the disk cleanup utility to remove the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys).  I’m not sure if hibernation is on by default on all Vista installs, but I think it is.

Vista UAC

Another on by Mark Minasi. Why have I never heard of this guy?  He’s so motivating and inspiring.  And he knows his stuff.  I have become pretty familiar with UAC during the last year, but this session really broke it down even further.  I think Mark wrote a whole book on it.  This is another feature that has received bad press, but it is actually pretty sweet.  I’m sure it’ll only get better in the future.  He also covered another level of Vista security that I didn’t even know was there.  After years of implementing some poor security decisions, it is clear that Microsoft really tried to nail it down with Vista.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons most users are poo-pooing it?  Security isn’t sexy, but it is important.  It has taken them awhile to get where they are, but now that they have it I suppose they can focus on more "fun" features for Windows 7.

TechMentor Day 3

Keynote

The keynote speech today was given by Mark Minasi (www.minasi.com).  He covered what Microsoft got right and wrong with Vista/Server 2008.  He covered many of the points that I make to people, but more eloquently.  Great speaker.

Smart Card Show

After the keynote, I ran over to another trade show that is in town: the smart card alliance.  I only had access to the exhibitors hall.  Most of what I saw were people selling these huge machines to manufacture thousands of smart cards a day.  There were also a bunch of products for using a smart card (or your phone!) to make purchases at stores and kiosks.  I know it is already big in Japan, but I’m not sure I’m ready to pay for stuff using my phone.  But I suppose we better get used to it.  I came across this one company that sells printers that will put the UV/holographic images on your smart cards.  I’ve always wondered what I look like in UV.

Vista/Server 2008 Group Policy

Presented by Derek Melber.  Not too much exciting here.  Microsoft has added about million more policies.  There is a new preferences policy that allows you to set user desktop settings, but they users can make changes if they want.  The other big thing is that Microsoft has allowed you to add your own comments to the policies you set.  That way future administrators can see why you turned a particular setting on.  They even support hyperlinks so you can link to knowledge base articles.  Sweet.

Hardening Windows Security

This session was given my Mark Minasi.  Mark didn’t spend a lot of time covering technical security as I thought he would.  Instead, he spent more time covering the real security problem: users.  He stated more than once, "I believe that security is more of a carbon based problem than a silicon based one."  His main point is that if you have even one weak account or even one user who gives away their password, your entire security can be shot down.  We’re pretty hard on our users, but I think there is even more we could do.

He also pointed out about creating written security policies.  We have those, but he failed to mention the political aspect of that.  If a higher up wants something his way, security policies be damned.  I think it is important to have a strong CTO who has blackmail information on the CEO.  That should fix most problems.  The rest will take care of itself.

"Wild Wednesday"

Last night they had a geek social event.  There were some contests and humorous question and answer sessions.  Oh… and free alcohol.  I didn’t drink anything, but I laughed a lot.  But it was a stifled laugh.  All of the jokes were of a pretty technical nature.  If you weren’t an IT nerd, you probably wouldn’t get most of them.  Every time I laughed, I realized what a huge nerd I am.