Bye bye Blogger?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Recently, I’ve written a couple of posts which hinted at the problems I’ve been having since I was involuntarily upgraded to Blogger‘s new platform and tonight was the final straw. For a while now, I’ve wanted to implement a category system for posts and a couple of months back I did actually start to tag my posts at del.icio.us in preparation for following Peter Chen’s advice for creating Blogger categories.

Unfortunately, the delicious2Blogger (D2B) method does not work with the new Blogger and to implement Blogger’s label system (in order to put a tag cloud on the site using phydeaux3’s label cloud code) I’ll need to upgrade my “classic template” to a “layout”. The problem is, that layouts are not supported for externally hosted sites that are published using FTP (like mine), so I’ll be stuck with my existing template, which has been broken since the upgrade.

Seeing as Blogger seems to be so full of limitations and I’m in the middle of a site redesign anyway, I’m seriously considering a move to a WordPress-based site – as long as I can preserve all the links and comments. I’ve also been having some issues with my hosting provider (and the fact that they have recently been bought by BT doesn’t fill me with joy either) so I’m probably going to move away from them too.

I’ll be trying to minimise the impact on blog readers and hope to maintain the domain name and all the links, but please bear with me if there are a couple of hiccups along the way.

Text me outta here

Posted on By Mark Wilson

When I was about 15, I remember using a telephone engineering number to get the phone to ring, then pretending that it was my friend’s Dad on the phone, that we were in trouble, and that we had to go to his house right away – just to get my girlfriend to leave so I could hang out with my mates!

Fast forward 20 or so years and teenage girlfriends are definitely a thing of the past (I’m happily married, with two lovely kids). The engineering code that I used to know is also long since confined to a distant memory (but you can do something similar in the UK with 17070); however there is a new service for those who need to escape from dodgy dates, or other potentially sticky situations. For £1, text me outta here will send an SMS message at a pre-defined time and you can either ignore it (if things are going well) or use the excuse you dreamed up previously to get you out of a situation. It’s only been running for a few weeks but sounds like an interesting service to me!

Portable applications – an alternative approach to mobile computing

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been playing around with the idea of running operating systems from USB flash drives for a while now but the main problem is USB boot support in the hardware I use (most notably the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D that I use for work doesn’t support it).

A while back I wrote about my experiences of booting Windows PE from a USB flash drive (and I believe that new versions of PE make this easier) but the reality is that I haven’t needed this – it not really anything more than a challenge that I set myself to see if it could be done and for those (up to now, theoretical) “system down” occasions there are CD-based solutions that I can use (e.g. Knoppix STD, Trinity Rescue Kit or Winternals Administrators Pak).

For other occasions (like working on someone else’s PC), there is the option of a portable application. I tried out two such packages tonight (my favourite Windows FTP program – FileZilla – and Mozilla Firefox) and was very impressed. Neither of these applications is installed on my wife’s Windows XP PC and yet I was able to run the portable versions of the them both from my USB flash drive without leaving any files behind. It’s the ultimate in mobile computing – literally anytime, anyplace, anywhere – as long as you can borrow a (Windows) PC!

There are alternative solutions such as U3 and MojoPac but, as far as I can tell, these rely on kernel hacks to implement technology such as roaming desktops and the beauty of the Portable Applications solution is that, even though there is an application “suite” available, I can just run the individual applications that I need, on any Windows PC, without any specialist hardware – and it’s free.

Don’t be misled by the Windows Vista myths

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In recent months, there has been a lot of criticism of Microsoft Windows Vista in the press and elsewhere – I know because I wrote some of it; however it’s good to see Deb Shinder’s TechRepublic article entitled don’t be misled by these 10 Windows Vista myths, which seems to be a thoughtful and well-reasoned view of why a lot of the hype (both from Microsoft and from the anti-Microsoft camp) needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Unfortunately, many of the comments posted about the article are ill-informed, or even just plain old trolling. Somewhat ironically, I came across the article via MacBreak Weekly (episode 28) – a podcast which often displays Apple fanboy tendencies.

Migrating WSUS to a new server without downloading all the updates

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve spent the last day or so decommissioning my old domain controller, which also doubled up as a DNS, WINS, DHCP, print, RIS, anti-virus and WSUS server (okay… so a bit more than doubled up then!). Migrating Active Directory/DNS/WINS services was straightforward – it just involved setting up the new server, replicating the data, updating client settings (via DHCP) then removing the old services. DHCP was similarly straightforward (I’ve blogged before about migrating DHCP databases between servers) and RIS just needed to be installed on the new server, the images copied across, and the remote installation services setup wizard run. I recreated my single print queue manually but I could just as well have used the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Print Migrator. That left just left my anti-virus management console (reinstall the console and reconfigure the clients) and WSUS.

I could just have installed WSUS, resynchronised with Microsoft Update and approved the necessary updates; however that would have involved downloading more than 10GB of updates (which could have taken my bandwidth usage for the month to a level that would result in my Internet connection being throttled under my ISP’s sustainable usage policy).

One potential WSUS migration option would have been to backup and restore the WSUS configuration but I wasn’t convinced about how that would work in a migration scenario involving a change of servername. Then I found a blog post from Nathan Winters about migrating WSUS between servers which helped me to import the content without going out to the Internet and downloading it again. Nathan suggests that the approvals database gets imported too, but that’s not the case – the wsusutil import command only imports the update metadata (not the file, approvals, or server settings). Similarly wsusutil migratesus migrates approvals from a SUS server (not WSUS) and wsusutil movecontent is for moving the content within the local file system. More details on managing WSUS from the command line can be found in the Microsoft Windows Server TechCenter.

By chance, I’d installed my new WSUS server as a replica of the original one so I could synchronise with the old server as my upstream source, leaving the new server with the content (from a a manual file copy followed by a metadata import) and the approvals information (from the synchronisation with the old server). All that remained was to finalise the server settings (synchronisation options etc.) and update group policy so that my clients went to the new server.

I hit a problem when I found that WSUS 2.0 doesn’t allow replica servers to be converted to standalone mode (that’s expected when WSUS 3.0 is released later this year), effectively preventing me from repointing WSUS to download updates from Microsoft Update. Luckily, Mohammed Athif Khaleel’s PatchAholic blog features a post on changing the mode of a WSUS server and a follow-up comment from SpJam includes a script to switch a server from replica to standalone mode (modified here to reflect subsequent comments):

rem Restore values after exec spEnableReplica stored procedure
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB UPDATE dbo.tbConfigurationA SET SyncToMU = ‘1′ UPDATE dbo.tbConfigurationB SET AutoRefreshDeployments = ‘1′ UPDATE dbo.tbConfigurationC SET ReplicaMode = ‘0′ UPDATE dbo.tbConfigurationC SET AutoDeployMandatory = ‘1′ UPDATE dbo.tbAutoDeploymentRule SET Enabled = ‘0′”

rem Add removed values in tables
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbTargetGroupInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, TargetGroupID) values (1, ‘A0A08746-4DBE-4a37-9ADF-9E7652C0B421′)”
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbTargetGroupInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, TargetGroupID) values (2, ‘A0A08746-4DBE-4a37-9ADF-9E7652C0B421′)”
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbUpdateClassificationInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, UpdateClassificationID) values (1, 1)”
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbUpdateClassificationInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, UpdateClassificationID) values (1, 5)”
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbUpdateClassificationInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, UpdateClassificationID) values (2, 1)”
“%ProgramFiles%\Update Services\tools\osql\osql.exe” -S %COMPUTERNAME%\WSUS -E -b -n -Q “USE SUSDB Insert into dbo.tbUpdateClassificationInAutoDeploymentRule(AutoDeploymentRuleID, UpdateClassificationID) values (2, 5)”

It looked as if the script worked as advertised (except that automatic approval options were still not available) until I started to encounter the following error message when running reports or attempting to view update information:

Windows Server Update Services error

Error connecting to the Windows Server Update Services database
There was an error connecting to the Windows Server Update Services database. Either the database is not available or you do not have the correct privileges to access the database.

If you believe you have received this message in error, please check with your system administrator.

Click here to reload the site: Windows Server Update Services

Thinking that I had corrupted the database and that I might need to go back and start the WSUS migration from scratch, I decided to restart the server “just in case”. After the restart, everything seemed to be working (including the previously-missing automatic approval options). I’ve since approved some more updates and run various reports and (so far) there have been no problems administering WSUS.

The final step was to edit the group policy that I use to control automatic update options on my clients – a minor edit to change the server which clients should contact for updates.

So, to summarise, my WSUS migration process was:

  1. Install BITS 2.0 (a fully-patched Windows Server 2003 server should already have this).
  2. Install WSUS (in replica mode) and WMSDE.
  3. Export the update metadata on the old server using %programfiles%\Update Services\Tools\wsusutil export filename.cab logfilename.txt.
  4. Copy filename.cab (created above) and the contents of the WsusContent folder to the new server (e.g. using an external disk to network connectivity issues).
  5. Import the update metadata using %programfiles%\Update Services\Tools\wsusutil import filename.cab logfilename.txt (note that this takes a long time – it was just over three hours in my case).
  6. Synchronise WSUS with an upstream server.
  7. Save the script above as filename.cmd and execute it from the command line. The output will detail each command followed by the number of affected rows in the database.
  8. Reboot the server.
  9. Configure server settings (e.g. set Microsoft Update as the update source) and administer WSUS as normal.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any variations on this approach – for example, I don’t really recommend installing WSUS in replica mode and then hacking the database (and this wouldn’t be an option if there was any network segregation in place). Indeed, since I completed the exercise I found reference to a tool called WSUSMigrate which is part of the WSUS API samples and tools and can be used to migrate the approvals data – that looks like a much better approach.

Testing torrents

Posted on By Mark Wilson

BitTorrent gets a lot of bad press. I’m a self-confessed geek and I’d been led to believe (largely by mainstream media it has to be said) that it was all about illegal downloads of copyrighted music and video and, to a large extent, that is the main use of the technology today; however it’s also potentially an immensely powerful medium for content distribution.

I’ve heard some great remixes recently of Snow Patrol’s Open Your Eyes. I waited for the single release (last Tuesday), went to iTunes and there was just a basic single with two tracks, just like the old days of buying 7″ vinyl (showing my age now). In the 90s I bought a lot of CD singles – with 3-6 tracks (mostly remixes) until the chart rules limited the number of tracks on a CD single (an anti-consumer practice if ever I saw one, as most record companies started releasing two versions of a CD single instead with different content, bringing in twice the revenue). Anyway, I digress – there was no sign of the Redanka remix that I wanted. A bit of googling turned up the track I wanted at AllOfMP3 for just $0.39 (but did I really want to hand over my credit card details to a website of dubious legality for such a small sum?) – googling also turned up versions on YouTube and various torrent sites but I was prepared to part with cash to buy this legally!

I went to the official website for the band and asked where I could get the tracks legally… no response. In fact my comment wasn’t even approved by the moderators!

It seems to me that record companies are not helping themselves here – but making different content available in different markets (as well as online/offline), they fragment the market and frustrate the consumer. Little wonder really that people turn to underground download sites…

Now, I’m not encouraging anything that might be illegal here but this blog has an international audience and not everywhere respects the UK’s copyright legislation. If one was to be driven down the torrent route then this is what they might find…

There are many torrent sites that offer content, both legal and illegal for download. I’m not going to link any here but they can be found by using your favourite search engine. If you want to know how to get started, then check out the TorrentSpy Forums‘ guide to BitTorrent for total newbies as well as how to use Torrents (a basic introduction to BitTorrent vocabulary may also be useful). There are also articles at TorrentFreak which look interesting including summaries of the popular BitTorrent clients for Mac OS X and Windows – many of these are also available for Linux.

There is one very important rule, if you download, then remember to leave your BitTorrent client running once the download is complete to seed the content for others (don’t be a leech). It’s this distributed distribution that’s the big advantage of the BitTorrent technology – leaving aside any illegal content, let’s imagine that I am a media producer trying to distribute content without any big business capital or sponsorship. Instead of running a website with potentially huge bandwidth costs, that cost is shared by those who download the content and make it available for others. Other examples of legal torrent use include distribution of certain software (e.g. Linux distributions) and podcasts and as people realise the potential of peer-to-peer technologies (of which BitTorrent is only one form), they will gain increased acceptance.

When Polydor/Universal Music release the track that I’m after as a download on iTunes, I’ll buy it and pay my dues.

More problems since the Blogger upgrade

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Blogger logoSince the middle of last year, I’ve been using a sitemap to help spiders to crawl around my little bit of the web. After looking into the various options, the easiest method for me (by far) was to use the XML-Sitemaps generator but the free version is limited to 500 pages. Upgrading to the paid version was the best $19.99 I ever spent as Google now indexes all my pages (therefore increasing my exposure on the ‘net and hence my advertising revenue, which may be small but is worth having).

Unfortunately, when I tried to run the generator yesterday, it refused to index my blog (which, at the time of writing, represents 98.8% of my website’s pages) but luckily (and this is another reason for having the paid XML Sitemap generator), within a few hours I had an answer to my problem from the administrator of the XML Sitemaps Forum – for some reason, my blog pages contained the following tag:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

It’s no wonder that the pages were being skipped as this is a directive for robots that says not to index this page and not to follow links!

Now, I didn’t add that tag… so how did it get into my code? It seems that it was added by Blogger. Blogger uses a system of template tags to generate content, one of which is <$Blog MetaData$>, used to insert all of the blog’s meta data. This has been working for me up to now, but it seems that the upgrade has added the directive for robots not to index my pages, nor to follow links. According to Blogger’s help text, this is only inserted if a blog is set not to be added to listings, but mine has a very definite yes (I do want to be listed):

Screen shot showing that the blog is set to be listed

After replacing the template tag with the correct (manually-inserted) meta data, I was able to crawl the site successfully and create an updated sitemap.

I’m not denying that Blogger is a great system for people starting out with their own blog (and many of the new features are good for more advanced bloggers too) but it seems to me that considering it’s owned by Google (a company with many products that seem to be in perpetual beta) it has more than its fair share of problems and it looks as if a major upgrade has been rushed out of the door (I’ve already had to apologise to subscribers that old posts are creeping back in to the Atom and RSS feeds). I wanted to stay on the old platform for as long as possible but when I logged in a few days back I was given no choice but to upgrade.

Thankfully, my pages didn’t drop out of the Google index (as I upload the sitemap manually and so spotted the error) but this directive may well have affected the way in which other search engines index my site… luckily I caught it within a few days of the offending code being inserted.

Apologies to subscribers on the RSS/Atom feeds

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Blogger logoAnyone who views this blog using the Atom or RSS XML feeds has probably noticed old posts coming back into the feed this week. It seems that after forcing me to upgrade from plain old Blogger to “new” Blogger (out of beta), Blogger now updates my feeds whenever a post is updated (e.g. if someone adds a comment), rather than when it is published. So far, I haven’t found a way to control this so for the time being, all I can do is apologise (I’ve been talking about moving over to WordPress for a while now… maybe this will be the catalyst although, to be honest, I’m a bit busy with the site redesign, among other things).

Whilst I’m writing this, I might was well point out that there seems to be a new RSS 2.0 feed available directly at the site (the old one was via Feedburner). I’m not sure how it got there (I haven’t found a corresponding option in Blogger) and I haven’t turned off the Feedburner RSS feed but you may want to switch existing RSS subscriptions to the new URL (https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/rss.xml). For Atom subscribers there’s no change (it’s still at https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/atom.xml) – Blogger has always supported Atom.

I’m still working out how to use the new features (it seems that a lot of the Blogger help content still relates to the old system) but I do plan to provide comments feeds (site-wide and per-post) as well as post labels (but with over 700 posts to go back and label that might take a while). In the meantime, please bear with me.

Recycling old CDs/DVDs and tapes

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Recycle now(Recycle Now is a UK website – United States readers can find out more about acting in an environmentally-friendly manner at Earth 911)

Leo Hickman: A Good Life - the Guide to Ethical LivingRecently, there have been a few posts on this site that aim to encourage reuse and recycling within our industry. It’s not that I’m going “green” – I’ve actually been interested in sustainability for a while now (and I recommend reading A Good Life – the guide to ethical living, by Leon Hickman). It’s not even about climate change – maybe mankind is warming up the planet with possible catastrophic consequences but maybe it’s just nature. One thing it’s almost impossible to argue with is that the world’s resources are finite and my personal belief is that we all have a duty to use those resources in the best way possible (well, ideally not to use them at all… but you get my drift).

Oh sure, I’m no saint (my family uses two cars and my kids use disposable nappies for starters) but there are things that we can all do and, whilst I don’t know the situation for any overseas visitors to this blog, here in the UK, the Government does little except pay lip service to environmental issues (and don’t get me started on wind “farms”).

Anyway, as part of my ongoing clearout of “stuff” from my loft/garage/office, I was about to throw away something in the region of 300 CD/DVDs (not music ones, just old software betas and demos, Microsoft TechNet CDs, etc.) and thought “these must be recyclable”. Well, it turns out they are (the United States Environmental Protection Agency has also produced a poster which demonstrates the life of a CD or DVD, from initial materials acquisition, through to reuse, recycling or disposal) and, even though my local authority only recycles the most basic of items, I found out about The Laundry (and it seems that they will accept CDs, DVDs, CD-Rs, VHS and compact cassettes for recycling from anyone, including the jewel cases and inlays).

The Laundry collectionThe Laundry is an excellent idea, because for as much as consumers control the amount of landfill waste that we produce, our hands are largely tied by local authorities that don’t recycle all items that it is possible to recycle (for example, mine won’t accept certain types of plastics, aerosols, Tetra Paks, etc. for recycling – even though the links I just provided prove that they can be recycled), meaning that consumers have to find another outlet for this type of waste (and most won’t bother). Businesses have an even bigger problem as many local authorities won’t accept anything but landfill waste from them, so they end up throwing away recyclable items (and paying for the privilege). By providing a weekly kerbside collection service for small businesses in London, The Laundry has the potential to really make a difference – I’d love to see them expand nationwide.

The next time I’m in East London, I’ll be dropping off my old CDs and DVDs at The Laundry. As for the packaging, there’s an amusing discussion on what to do with the plastic spindles that blank CD-Rs are sold on at the How can I recycle this? site.

Hunting down hot spots in Milton Keynes

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about the 40th anniversary of the creation of Milton Keynes, Britain’s last “new town”, the Borough of which includes the town where I live. That post included some rather tenuous technology links, one of which was VNU’s report that Milton Keynes is to become the site for the UK’s largest area of high-speed wireless broadband access – for free (in addition to the first WiMAX deployment in the UK).

According to the local press:

“Free Internet access is spreading across Central Milton Keynes as Britezone grabs people’s imagination. Already the two shopping centres and [the main street adjacent to the shopping centre] offer free connection for wi-fi phones and laptops… Britezone was launched less that three months ago and has been an immediate success… It couldn’t be simpler to register: as soon as you enter the Britezone your phone or laptop will offer Britezone as an ISP option and you click on it to be connected for free”.

[Milton Keynes Citizen, 1 February 2007]

Skeptical as ever, yesterday afternoon I decided to check it out, hunting down hotspots in Central Milton Keynes.

To be fair, the map that accompanied the text I just quoted showed two distinct rings of coverage, with more planned as sponsors are found. Interestingly, one of the main sponsors is the local newspaper, and a search of their website for Britezone turns up no results – not even a link to the (badly written – both in terms of textual information and coding) Briteyellow website. I headed for the point where the two rings overlapped most – “The Boulevard” – an area full of coffee shops situated between The Centre: MK and Midsummer Place. I fired up my Windows XP laptop, searched for Wireless networks and… no Britezone, although I did find a variety of wireless networks, both secure and insecure.

After walking a little further, into the middle of a busy thoroughfare, I spotted what could have been a wi-fi antenna on the roof of the shopping centre and finally picked up a weak signal (much to the bemusement of passing shoppers), connected and opened a browser, entering the walled garden and registering for my free 12-hour access code.

Could this be an antenna for the CMK Britezone?

The registration process was not simple – it required giving away chunks of personal information in mandatory form fields (name, mobile phone model and number, address, sex, age, inside leg measurement… well maybe not inside leg measurement but far more information than I was happy to part with for some free wireless access) and although the mobile phone model didn’t show up as a mandatory field, I couldn’t register until I provided the details.

Once online, I could browse the ‘net (I didn’t try much else) but I set about tracking the signal to see how extensive the Britezone is. As I found the strongest point, I spotted, mounted on the roof, outside Marks and Spencer, a Strix Systems access point. I wandered a little further around the shopping centre, and although I found many wireless networks on my travels, there was no evidence of Britezone anywhere outside this very small zone of coverage!

Strix Systems access point

At the time of writing, Milton Keynes’ free wi-fi coverage seems pretty poor. I’m sure it will get better but it got me thinking about who this service is actually aimed at. Wandering around a shopping centre with a laptop, I felt pretty vulnerable (and got a lot of strange looks). Once the rest of the city centre is covered then it may be of use for office workers but most businesses will already have Internet connectivity (and I wouldn’t trust a free hotspot to run a corporate network). I can see that metropolitan coverage will be good for home users (as the local cable network was built with aluminium cables – not copper – and so has technical difficulties to overcome before it can be used for broadband access) but there will be competition as Pipex Wireless is trialling WiMAX services in parts of Milton Keynes (the first users have been connected already). Given that Briteyellow, who operate the wi-fi service I tested, were so keen to gather my mobile phone model and number it seems likely that the main beneficiaries will be smartphone users and one of the registration options was to be notified of special offers. At this point, I realised the whole point – it’s not about free Internet access, but advertising – imagine the scenario – as you pass HMV (for example), the details of the latest CD releases pop up on your mobile… and there’s 10% off if you show the advert in store – you get the picture? Free Internet access is just the hook. Another service on offer is a low-cost softphone and instant messaging solution – why use your (expensive) mobile cellular phone when you can use a free wi-fi network and pay them for your phone calls?

Britezone is certain to have its uses. Whether it will ever cover the entire city (or even the whole city centre) is yet to be seen but until it covers the many parks and green spaces, or a few coffee shops where I can sit in comfort with my laptop (without constantly looking over my shoulder), I don’t think I’ll be using it again. I do wish them luck though – the service certainly has potential, as long as they can expand the coverage. In the meantime, I’ve registered my interest in the Pipex WiMAX service. Further information on broadband coverage in Milton Keynes can be found via the Milton Keynes broadband action group.