Scrobbling audio at Last.fm

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I hate it when websites gather more information about me than is necessary and more than a few sites now have nonsensical entries in their marketing databases as a result; however I have found one site recently that I’m more than happy to give information too – because I get something in return. You see, as I write this, I’m listening to a mixture of laid back beats, chilled house and trance, recommended to me by Last.fm (incorporating audioscrobbler). It’s being streamed to me over my Internet connection, free of charge, based on my musical tastes. How did it find out what I like? Well, I have a client application on my computer, which hooks into iTunes and each time I synchronise my iPod, play a track in iTunes or listen via the Last.fm website it “scrobbles” my recently played tracks to my profile.

I’ve been using the service for a few months now and still can’t get my head around just how useful (and varied) it’s many features are – so I’ll point you to this review by Steffie for a better idea of just what Last.fm can provide for your listening pleasure. For a review from a more mainstream media source, try CNET. Meanwhile, Steve Krause looks at the differences between Last.fm and Pandora – another popular music recommendation site that is often referenced alongside Last.fm but which, as Steve explains, is fundamentally different in the way it determines its recommendations.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how sites like Last.fm can stream music free of charge whilst others wrangle with the complications of DRM-protected content. Well, that’s because it’s not just a free online music library – whilst you can hear “radio stations” based on your preferences there is no choice in what is played next and if you do search for a particular track then only a 30 second sample is played. As for the viability of the site (a question that should be asked of many “web 2.0” sites) – it’s viable enough for CBS to buy it (for $280m – and hopefully not just to shut it down). The theory is, that if I like what I hear, then I’ll buy some more music and to some extent that’s feasible. If I enter the name of a well-established band then I’ll probably recognise the names of similar artists (those who like Kylie Minogue may also enjoy Madonna or Britney Spears – or, closer to my tastes, if I like Faithless then why not try Groove Armada and Moby, etc.) but for something more obscure (e.g. The Age of Love), then I’d never have known to try something by Kamaya Painters, The Thrillseekers or Nalin & Kane. As for CBS, they get access to a huge database of musical tastes (whilst others are relying on a combination of software and intuition to predict their next hit).

Microsoft’s MacBU is moving in the right direction, just not fast enough

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Office for Mac product iconsA few weeks back, I wrote about the frustration of working (or rather not be able to work) with Open XML documents on a Mac. Some wag even pointed out on a recent podcast that Apple beat Microsoft to provide support for its own document formats in the new iWork 08 application suite. I hear good things about iWork and it’s very reasonably priced (especially when compared to Microsoft Office) but I work with Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows and need something functionally equivalent for the Mac so I’m sure I’ll be getting a copy of Office 2008 for Mac in due course (attempts to get a beta invitation have failed dismally). There is light at the end of the tunnel though – since my original post, the MacBU has released a (time-limited) beta of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, so that at least gives me something to work with for now (the previous version was only for Word documents).

Mac RDC logoAnother new product from the MacBU is (at last) a universal binary version of the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac. I’ve been beta testing this and whilst it’s far more stable on an Intel Mac than the old version, it still doesn’t seem to offer something that I need – support for multiple client connections. I’ve provided feedback on this (others were less charitable in their contributions). In the meantime, I’ll be sticking with CoRD.

It seems that the MacBU is releasing new products but at an almost glacial pace. I don’t care that it’s been 4 years between Office releases – there was a similar gap for the Windows product – but surely the file format converters could have been ready when Office 2007 shipped on Windows. Similarly, based on what I’ve seen with the Microsoft’s RDC client for the Mac, it’s not exactly worth waiting for.

How Windows PowerShell exposes passwords in clear text

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m attending a two-day Windows PowerShell course, delivered by my colleague Dave – who I know reads this blog and should really think about starting his own…

I’ve written before about Windows PowerShell (twice) and I think it’s a great product, but it is a version 1.0 product and as such it has some faults. One (which I was horrified to discover today) is that this product, which is intended to be secure by default (for a number of good reasons) has the ability to store user credentials in clear text!

All it takes is two lines of PowerShell script:

$cred=get-credential username

(the user wil then be prompted for their password using a standard Windows authentication dialog)

$cred.getnetworkcredential()

(the username, password and domain will be displayed in clear text)

Some people ask what’s wrong with this? After all there are legitimate reasons for needing to use credentials in this manner. That may be so but one of the fundamental principles of Windows security is that passwords are never stored in clear-text – only as a hashed value – clearly this breaks that model. Those who think there is nothing wrong with this argue that the credentials are then only used by the user that entered them in the first place. Even so, I’m sure this method could easily be used as part of a phishing attempt using a fake (or altered) script (digitally signing scripts may be the default configuration but many organisations will disable this, just as they do with signed device drivers and many othe security features).

After searching Microsoft Connect and being surprised that I couldn’t find any previous feedback on this I’ve raised the issue as a bug but expect to see it closed as “Resolved – by design” within a few days. If it really is by design, then I don’t feel that it’s a particularly smart design decision – especially as security is tauted as one of the key reasons to move from VBscript to PowerShell.

Byte Night 2007

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Byte Night
NCH

For one night on 5 October 2007, I’ll be giving up my warm duvet and comfortable house as part of Byte Night 2007 – the IT industry’s annual sleep out in support of young people who are coping with life after care or facing homelessness.

I’ll be joining around 250 IT professionals and senior executives sleeping out next to London’s City Hall and Tower Bridge to raise money and highlight the problem of youth homelessness.

Given that we live in one of the world’s richest nations, I find the following statistics to be pretty shocking:

  • An estimated 77,000 children and young people aged under 18 run away overnight each year in the UK.
  • There are an estimated 32,000 homeless 16-21 year-olds in Britain.
  • A third of young homeless people have tried to commit suicide.
  • Each year, 10,000 young people are physically hurt or sexually assaulted whilst sleeping rough.
  • Most runaways are aged 13-15 but a quarter are under 11.

By joining in on Byte Night, I can help to make a difference – with your support.

The cold, rough, night in London will all be worthwhile if I succeed in raising £2,000 for NCH, the children’s charity. Since its inception in 1998, Byte Night has raised over £1.5m for NCH youth homeless projects.

Please sponsor me by visiting my online fundraising page at http://www.justgiving.com/markwilson-bytenight07. You can pay by credit or debit card, and the money will go directly to NCH, the children’s charity. Where supporters are UK taxpayers, the charity will automatically receive 28% extra in Gift Aid, which makes Justgiving the most efficient way of sponsoring me.

(Normal technology-focused blogging will resume shortly but I wanted to highlight this important issue – in any case, as Byte Night is exclusively for IT professionals, I think that falls within my technology remit!)

How not to upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2003 R2

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I just upgraded a server from Windows Server 2003 (with SP2 installed) to Windows Server 2003 R2 (SP2 slipstreamed).

It wasn’t exactly smooth, because I didn’t RTFM… (it’s my home server, it’s Saturday afternoon, it should have been trivial and I don’t have a lot of time to spend planning this… a perfect demonstration of the need for proper planning that I stress to my customers). If you want to avoid my cowboy IT guy approach (i.e. insert disk 1 and upgrade from running copy of Windows – what could possibly go wrong?), check out Microsoft knowledge base article 912309 before starting the job (I didn’t).

Because I didn’t do it properly, I had some issues but I imagine there are plenty of others who will try what I did and may now be googling to get out of a few holes. This is what I did – your problems may differ depending on your configuration:

  • When my screen reverted to 4 bit 640×480 colour (but Device Manager said my display adapter was working fine), I ignored the problem. After a reboot, I was back to my usual display properties.
  • My machine (which is a domain controller) complained that it couldn’t install the R2 components until I had updated the Active Directory schema. I followed the instructions (run opticaldrive:\cmpnents\r2\adprep\adprep.exe /forestprep) and then restarted R2 setup with opticaldrive:\r2auto.exe (I could also have used opticaldrive:\cmpnents\r2\setup2.exe).
  • Changing directory permissions (that’s what adprep.exe did) will break certain applications – in my case WSUS and Virtual Server (i.e. those apps that rely on IIS). I’m still working on that issue and will blog something when (if) I fix it.
  • The upgrade also wiped out at least one of the configuration changes that I made in the registry – in this case enabling IP forwarding.

When standard Windows utilities are just not enough

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Lifehacker often features great articles – I should read it more (as should I read so many of the feeds in my reader but I just can’t keep up). Gina Trapani‘s Geek to Live column from last Friday is just one such example – power replacements for standard Windows utilities. I already use some of these, but others may soon be finding their way on my systems.

Find out how a site is built

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This may not be news as it’s pretty high on Digg right now but it may be a useful resource to remember. BuiltWith is a web page technology profiler – a site to find out which technologies have been used to create a website. I even learnt a few things about the underlying technologies for my own site!

Useful source for Microsoft resource kit utilities

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of nights back, I needed to get hold of a Windows 2000 Server resource kit utility called cusrmgr.exe in an attempt to add a global security group from a domain to the local Administrators group on a Windows Server 2008 core server (following the advice in Microsoft knowledge base article 297307). Being many miles from home (and without a working remote access solution at present), I needed to download the utility from somewhere but, whilst Microsoft makes many resource kit utilities available for download from the web, this is not one of them. Luckily an Austrian firm called Dynawell web site services has provided various resource kits for download at their website. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please don’t shut them down – they do at least acknowledge that a license is required to use the utilities.)

Unfortunately, cusrmgr.exe -m \\remotecomputername -alg localgroupname -u globalgroupname didn’t work out for me on Windows Server 2008 Server Core.

A few commands to get started with Windows Server Core

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Quoting Scotty McLeod:

Mark mailed me last night to ask about my crib sheet for Core Server but as it was Friday evening was taking a rest from the digital world. A hour and a half later he mailed me back to say he had found all he needed.

Now this was from the mail Mark’s first real go in anger at installing and configuring Core Server but we have to remember he is an great Windows professional and old enough to have used command lines for a significant proportion of his life with computers.

I’m honoured that Scotty refers to me as a professional but somewhat concerned at the same time that my age (I’m only 35!) is linked with command line usage. Actually, I think it’s got more to do with geekiness and although I can’t confess to being a Linux/Unix expert, I do love diving into a command shell. I guess what Scotty is saying is that I’m old enough to have cut my teeth in the computing world before GUIs were the norm – and he’s right.

Anyway, back to Server Core. I love it. I hate it. No, I love it. Well, I love the idea and I’m sure I will love using the product but, because it’s not yet finished, the administration of a Server Core box can be a chore. Consequently, here’s my checklist of tasks from when I needed to get a Server Core box up and running last Friday (based on the June CTP build).

  1. Enable remote desktop (from a Windows Vista client):
    cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0
  2. Change the machine name:
    netdom renamecomputer %computername% /newname:newcomputername
  3. Set the IP address for the primary NIC:
    netsh interface ipv4 set address "Local Area Connection" ipaddress subnetmask gatewayipaddress
  4. Set the DNS server addresses:
    netsh interface ipv4 add dns "Local Area Connection" ipaddress [index=indexnumber]
  5. Disable the firewall (at least until everything is working):
    netsh firewall set opmode disable
  6. Join a domain:
    netdom join %computername% /domain:domainname /userd:domainname\username /passwordd:*
  7. Restart the server:
    shutdown -r
  8. Change the drive letter allocation for an existing disk (e.g. the CD-ROM drive):
    diskpart
    select volume volumenumber
    assign letter=driveletter
  9. Format additional disks (in my case, these had been partitioned during setup but additional diskpart.exe commands could be used):
    diskpart
    select disk disknumber
    select partition partitionnumber
    format fs=ntfs label="volumelable" quiet
  10. Label a disk (e.g. the system disk):
    label driveletter: "volumelable"
  11. Add a domain user to a local group (note that there are some serious restrictions around this – Microsoft knowledge base article 324639 has more details):
    net localgroup groupname /add domainname\username

This has just scraped the surface with a few commands that I needed – it would have taken me a lot longer to write this post without these excellent resources:

Other links that may be useful include the Windows command line reference and my own post on using netsh to set multiple DNS server addresses.

Enabling multiple VMRC client connections with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just been building some virtual machines and I wanted to run multiple copies of the Virtual Machine Remote Control (VMRC) client to monitor progress (they just seem more responsive than the administration website). Each time I connected the VMRC client, I was presented with the following message:

Connection to the VM stopped as multiple connections are disabled

It turns out that Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 has disabled multiple VMRC connections as a security precaution. It’s just a simple checkbox on the VMRC server properties to re-enable but useful to know about.