More on iChat AV

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the issues I was having getting iChat AV working with services other than .Mac. Well, a few days ago, Alex and I finally managed to get it all working as intended.

This is what I learnt:

  • Audio/visual (AV) chat is not supported over Jabber (I thought that it might work on a point-to-point basis as some commercial real-time collaboration products do – e.g. Microsoft Live Communications Server); however it does work using an ICQ account via the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) transport within iChat AV.
  • If your buddy keeps switching out of iChat into other IM programs (e.g. Adium) then it will break your testing… Despite having loads of nice features Adium doesn’t support AV.
  • Some IM client combinations will render the conversation as raw HTML. That’s not very nice.
  • After deleting a contact from my buddy list, I was having problems recreating it (and was receiving a bizarre Feedbag error 14 message). Eventually, I gave up trying to add the contact via iChat (on either the AIM or the Jabber transport) and instead installed the native ICQ client, added my contact, and then switched back to using iChat AV (which could then read the contact from my ICQ buddy list). Following this, the audio/video icons (and menu options), previously greyed out, were enabled and we were able to have an audio/video conversation.

There’s a conversation thread on the Apple Forums that describes some more of the troubleshooting steps that I went through.

Reloading deleted podcasts in iTunes

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Recently, I’ve had problems with a couple of the podcasts that I’m subscribed to via iTunes whereby I’ve downloaded a new episode only to find it’s actually a re-post of the previous one with a new description. After deleting the duplicate podcast, iTunes does not download it again (even by forcing an update) but I found a tip (unfortunately I can’t find the original link but there is a Mac OS X hint that sounds similar) that let me to hold the option/alt key and click on the triangle next to the feed name (when the feed is collapsed) to resync the feed, after which it is possible to download all the missed episodes that are still available. I’ve tried this using iTunes v7.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.8 – I guess it also works on Windows but I haven’t tried.

Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Based on the content I write, I imagine that most readers of this blog will be IT professionals. That generally means two things:

  • Your family don’t understand what you do (e.g. “Mark works in computers”).
  • Your family and friends think that because you “work in computers” that you can fix their PC.

I fell foul of this a couple of times over the last few days. The first time was no big deal – a few months back, I had given my parents an old laptop and now they are really getting into e-mail and the web; however it was booting very slowly because a well-intended friend of theirs had installed the popular (and free for non-commercial use) AVG Anti-Virus (along with a load of unnecessary applications) and it was performing a full scan on every boot (I had already installed Symantec AntiVirus which was working quite nicely in a far less obtrusive manner). Once I removed AVG, performance was back to normal… so much for well-intentioned friends.

The second instance was last night, when my brother said he’d applied some updates to his PC and now he couldn’t get into Excel. That was easy enough (Microsoft Office XP required the original media to complete installation of an update), but I decided to check out the general state of the PC and was a little alarmed. Because the PC is only connected to the Internet via a modem, downloading updates takes a long time – automatic updates will trickle feed and my brother had kept his anti-virus definitions up-to-date but it still needed a lot of attention. Microsoft Update told me that it would need most of the night to download it’s updates, so I took it home (disconnected everything else from my LAN as a precaution) and hooked it up to my ADSL line, before spending the next couple of hours downloading and applying 61 Microsoft updates (as well as updating AdAware SE Personal Edition, which was over 700-days out of date).

Having given the PC a clean bill of health with AdAware (luckily the dial-up connection had minimised the spyware threat and it just had 52 tracking cookies to remove), I decided to check out another tool that, ironically, an Apple support page had alerted me to the existence of – the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan.

Other antivirus vendors have online scanners (e.g. McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro) but the advantage of the Microsoft version is that the full scan checks for viruses, spyware, disk fragmentation, temporary files, redundant registry data, and open network ports – what would appear to be a fairly thorough healthcheck, all through one ActiveX control.

Another feature is that you can run individual scans for protection, cleaning up or tuning the system (each effectively a component of the full scan described above). Finally, for Windows Vista users, the Windows Live OneCare site also provides a beta for a Vista-aware full service safety scan.

Note to ego: I am a blogger, not a journalist

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week I wrote about how I was expecting to feature in a couple of upcoming articles for Computer Weekly and The Independent. In future, I should remember that what is said to a journalist is not always the message that makes it to paper and what is written is not always what is published!

My part in Rob Griffin’s how to blog your way to fame and fortune article was short and sweet, but that’s fine – Rob was a nice guy to chat to and getting so much information into 1500 words is always going to mean that there’s only room for a small soundbites from the likes of me. I’m also a techie, whereas the target audience for the article was a typical consumer who’s heard about blogging and wants to give it a go. The original idea was that I might feature in a case study, but in reality I’m a small-time blogger who can cover his hosting costs and buy the odd gadget with his advertising revenue – nowhere near the £2000 a month that the chosen case study (Craig Munro) says is possible. In fact, whilst that figure is theoretically possible, most bloggers won’t get near that sort of income because it would be a full-time task (and someone who can write that much original content could earn more in a proper full-time job).

Computer Weekly’s pretty interfaces alone do not make a business case was slightly disappointing. I was asked to rewrite two existing blog posts into about 500 words for publishing in Computer Weekly. After a few hours of unpaid editing and redrafting, I submitted a piece entitled Windows Vista is finally here… but XP’s not dead yet; however editorial considerations have meant that just over 500 words became just under 300. I’ll admit that what was published was much punchier than my original submission, but it inevitably lost some of the background information and slightly distorted the message (this is what I actually wrote). Still, at least I got a link back to this blog from a well-respected publisher (which may help to drive traffic to the site – a cursory glance over my web stats reveals no evidence of that yet though).

So what should be learnt from this? Firstly, that bloggers are not journalists (at least most of us aren’t). Blogging is a time-consuming creative process that can be fun but is unlikely to make you a fortune. Secondly, print media is a hard world that takes no prisoners. If you submit something for publishing, expect the final result to differ from your original creation.

TalkTalk “free” broadband… here’s the catch

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Carphone Warehouse subsidiary TalkTalk‘s free broadband has always sounded too good to be true to me.

Now, one of my colleagues has just alerted a large chunk of our company’s technical staff to the fact that TalkTalk throttle VPN access as if it were peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. Powerless to cancel his 18-month contract, TalkTalk refuses to do anything to help my colleague as they state that VPN access is for business use and that they offer a residential service.

It seems to me that, for telecoms in general and specifically for broadband, you get what you pay for. I recommend PlusNet – not always great customer service (but not that bad either) but a reliable connection, both when I was on dial-up and since I switched to broadband a few years back. If all you need is a hosting provider, then get in touch with my friends at ascomi.

Anyone else having trouble with TalkTalk might be interested in the Less TalkTalk: More Service – unofficial, unaffiliated TalkTalk blog, although be warned that there are lot of frustrated (and some illiterate) people over there.

Licensing implications for virtualisation

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Ever since Microsoft announced its new licensing policy for virtualisation, I’ve been trying to get an answer on whether the “4 free guests with every copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition (or unlimited guests with DataCenter Edition)” applies when non-Microsoft virtualisation products are in use.

Various Microsoft representatives have indicated to me that to restrict it to Microsoft virtualisation products would not be possible but no-one seemed 100% certain on the answer and I didn’t want to place myself in the situation where I advised a client that they had sufficient Windows licenses when in fact they were under-licensed. Earlier today I found the VMware pricing and licensing FAQ: Microsoft licensing for virtualised environments which answers my question, although it is also heavily caveated:

“This document is provided solely as a convenience for VMware employees, partners, customers and prospects and does not constitute legal advice. Your review of this FAQ should not substitute for review of applicable Microsoft licensing agreements and documentation”

Basically, it looks as if the Microsoft licensing arrangements apply regardless of the virtualisation product in use – in fact you don’t even need to have Windows installed on the host server – as long as an appropriate Windows license is owned (so ESX Server users can run 4 Windows instances free of charge, provided that they also own a “spare” copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition).

Another licensing issue that’s been concerning me is VMware’s model of licensing server products such as Virtual Infrastructure 3 by pairs of physical processors (2 sockets). For example, a 4-way HP ProLiant DL585G2 with 4 dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs would need 2 licenses (2 x 2 sockets) even though there would be 8 logical CPUs. With the imminent arrival of quad-core CPUs and predictions of many more cores on future processors, I had to wonder how long this model could be sustained and VMware has provided a clue to the answer in the VMware multi-core pricing and licensing policy. Basically, it seems that 4 cores is the breakpoint:

“[VMware’s] policy defines a processor for licensing purposes as up to four cores per processor.”

So, any future 8-core CPU could be expected to use up 2-processor’s worth of VMware licenses. Confused? Well, even VMware are reserving judgement:

“This policy applies only to dual- and quad-core processors. VMware will revisit its licensing policies as x86 processors with a greater number of cores become available.”

There’s more information about multicore processors on the Intel and AMD websites.

Media junkie… Me?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I don’t know how, but all of a sudden this blog has started to generate a lot of interest. I’ve been quietly typing away, on the train, in my spare moments, and often late into the night, for over two years now and what started out as a project to store my notes in a format that was accessible from wherever I happened to be working has become something that I can no longer devote as much time to as I would like. I try to leave tech news to other sites that are better able to cover it but I do occasionally write some opinion posts in between the technical discoveries and presentation brain dumps that I hope are useful to others too.

Quite how they found me I’m not sure, but two journalists have been in touch this week – the first looking for a Windows Vista opinion piece which will hopefully appear in next week’s Computer Weekly and the second writing an article on blogging for this Saturday’s Independent.

Of course, the articles might never appear (or I might not be quoted) but it’s good for my ego to have the occasional burst of minor fame (I was quoted in IT Week a couple of years back, although that was a deliberate PR exercise by my employer at the time), but sadly I won’t be giving up the day job just yet!

Does the world really need another search engine?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Windows Live
Two of London’s free newspapers for commuters (Metro and The London Paper) are featuring wrap-around ads for Microsoft’s Windows Live Live Search today. The front page is almost entirely blank, save for a search box which asks “Does the world really need another search engine?”:

Does the world really need another search engine?

As Google and Yahoo! have once again extended their lead on Microsoft in the search engine rankings and Google has become the most visited website in the UK, I have to wonder if Microsoft should be asking themselves the same question. It’s all very well emphasising the extra features that Live Search offers – like controlling the size of the results on a single page, hovering over images for more detail, providing bird’s eye views to accompany maps and directions (all very well for pilots and birds, but not so useful on the ground) and personalising results; however, of all organisations, Microsoft should be well aware that it’s not necessarily the product with the best feature set that gains the most market share. Having said that, Google came from nowhere a few years back – and who uses the pioneering Lycos, Excite and Altavista search engines today?

Live Search is certainly impressive and Microsoft’s ads state that:

“To us, search is in its infancy. This is just the start.”

Maybe Live Search will push Google into doing some work to integrate their disparate Web 2.0 applications (many of which seem to be in a perpetual beta state); in the meantime, the message seemed to be lost as I observed commuters at Canary Wharf – one of London’s major commercial centres – simply flicking past the four full page ads to get to the news.

Give Live Search a try at live.com.

Entourage is eating my e-mail

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Well, “eating my e-mail” is a bit of an overstatement, but I had a problem earlier whereby all of my e-mail was being removed from the Exchange Server and copied to Entourage’s local folders (thereby making it inaccessible from other mail clients – e.g. Outlook Web Access). I found a fix to the problem – deleting my mailing list rules from the Mailing List Manager. Not ideal, but something to watch out for.

Incidentally, whilst I was trying to find an answer to my issue (I didn’t find anything online, only an old newsgroup post from someone with a similar, unresolved, problem – in the end it was just process of elimination) I stumbled across a very useful MacTech article about Entourage and Mail with an Exchange Server.