The effects of sunscreen on Volkswagen/Audi paintwork

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of years ago, my wife and I bought a brand new Volkswagen Golf.  We’d been happy with our previous VWs (a Mk2 and two Mk4 Golfs, a 2004 Polo and a 2005 Passat) so were more than happy to purchase a Mk5 Golf 1.9TDI Match (in Blue Graphite Metallic) as a family runaround.  Fast forward around a year and we were slightly less pleased with our purchase…

…The car had started to develop white marks on the paintwork.  Each time they were polished out, they came back.  Strangely, some of them looked like little handprints and, when I asked the dealer about them, they instantly recognised the problem.  “That’s sunscreen”, they said, “and it’s not covered by the warranty”.

Sunscreen?! Yep. It seems that the modern (water-based) paints are not as hard as the nitro-cellulose or isocyanate paints used on older cars and that they are susceptible to damage from titanium dioxide – an ingredient found in many sun protection products, including the sunscreen we had applied regularly to our young children.

With just a few thousand miles on the clock, I wasn’t taking no for an answer, but we decided to use a little of the motor industry’s sexism to our advantage too as, from this point on, the negotiations weren’t with me but with Mrs W. instead!  After escalating the issue to an appropriate level within the dealership, it was agreed that the car would go into the bodyshop and the offending panels would be machine polished, as a gesture of goodwill.  Even though the job took much longer than it should (most of the panels on the rear and sides of the car were affected – have you ever tried keeping toddlers from plastering their hands on a car?) they dealer was true to their word and the car was returned to us in as new condition.

Damage caused by sunscreen coming into contact with car paintworkWhen I asked if this was a regular issue, Volkswagen told me that it wasn’t (although, later, an Audi dealer was a little more truthful, admitting that it happens a lot with modern VW-Audi paints and that the resolution is usually a machine polish – we also have friends with similar marks on their silver Bora).  Had it been necessary, I would have kept on pushing until the car was completely resprayed (I might have settled with a compromise agreement to pay for the materials but not the labour) but, as it happens, the problem seems to have been resolved, with just one small area of damage still visible.

We were lucky.  With just a few thousand miles on the clock, it was difficult for Volkswagen to suggest this was “normal”.  If the car had been used a little more, we might have been seeking legal advice to see if we were entitled to a return under the Sale of Goods Act (it is a family car after all, and blemishes as a result of contact with sunscreen might question its fitness for purpose) but I frankly wouldn’t fancy our chances at suing Nivea et al. for damages because their products don’t carry a warning that they may damage car paintwork!

Needless to say, these days we’re ultra-careful to wipe our childrens’ hands with wet wipes after applying sunscreen…

[I waited a while before publishing this because a) I wanted to be sure we had resolved the issue and b) it’s not the normal sort of content for this blog. As a result, the events in this post are written as I remember them; however it’s entirely possible that there may be some minor errors as part of the effect of time on my memory]

[Update – 5 September 2012: Two years after writing this post and I’m sorry to say that fingermarks are back again. It seems that the long term damage of the sunscreen goes deeper than a polish can deal with and our choice is either to accept the damage (on our now four-year-old car), or respray.]

Hyper-V R2 Dynamic Memory: over-subscription vs. over-commitment

Posted on By Mark Wilson

There’s been a lot of talk about how Microsoft’s Dynamic Memory capability in Hyper-V R2 compares with similar features from VMware – including the pros/cons of each approach. Because that’s been so well-covered elsewhere, I’ll avoid it here (from the VMware perspective, check out Eric Gray (vCritical),  for Microsoft Ben Armstrong is your man and, for a completely unbiased and objective view… well, good luck finding one). I did see an interesting quote however from one of Ben’s TechEd sessions in New Zealand recently:

  • “Over-subscription is what airlines do by selling more seats than places in a plane.
  • Over-commitment is what happens when all those passengers actually show up to use their seat.”

[Ben Armstrong at TechEd New Zealand]

One of my fellow Virtual Machine MVPs, Ronald Beekelaar, extended this analogy and it seemed good to share it more widely…

There is nothing wrong with over-subscription – it happens in many real-world scenarios such as: public transport; libraries; Doctors’ surgeries; hospitals; utility companies; telephone systems; etc.  – and these work well (most of the time). The issues occur when all of the people that could actually use the service try to at the same time, at which time we have over-commited the service.

What do we do when we have over-commitment? We add more resources (run extra buses, add carriages to a train, add books to the library, open a new hospital ward, lay more telephone cables, etc.) – and in the world of virtualisation, we add one or more hosts and migrate some of the conflicting workloads away.

Karma

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I recently spent a couple of weeks on holiday in Dorset with my family. Being August, the weather was best described as “variable” (May, June and September are the best months for good weather in England) but we had a few sunny days and, the on last couple of evenings, I managed to get out and take some pictures.

We were staying in Swanage, which is a pleasant seaside town (a bit run down but not too spoilt) but, because Swanage Bay faces east, it’s not the best place to take sunsets (and I’m not too great at getting out of bed for the dawn shift). I decided to try and catch the last of the golden hour, as the low sun reflected off buildings and boats but it wasn’t really working out – there wasn’t even any cloud interest (although the clear sky was great for our holiday, it’s not very interesting photographically!). I did, however, bump into a fellow photographer on the beach (Scott Howse), who provided me with some inspiration for a return visit the following evening.

Once the children were in bed, I sneaked out and dashed around trying to find a suitable location, snapping some quick shots as I pulled up on double yellow lines across the town but I was struggling to find the right location. As a last resort, I headed for a point half way around the bay, where I thought I might at least get some beach shots. As I pulled into a side road to park, an SUV approached from the opposite direction and headed for the same space. I could have nipped in front but I chose not to, shrugging my shoulders to indicate that the other driver could have the space, before driving on to find somewhere else to park.

As I walked back down the hill, I considered that perhaps giving up the space might result in some positive benefit to me – call it Karma if you like but I really didn’t expect to get large chunks of beach and a pier to myself for a whole 10 minutes or so! Admittedly, it was the evening on a bank holiday Monday, so lots of people would have been heading home, but I consider myself incredibly lucky to have captured the shots below with no-one else on the pier.

I settled down with my tripod and, taking Scott’s advice from the previous evening, I knocked down the ISO to my camera’s lowest calibrated setting, as well as making use of my Lee Filters ND grad to balance the bright sky with the foreground. A few minor tweaks in Lightroom (cropping, removing dust spots) and these are the resulting images.

Banjo Pier 2
Banjo Pier 3

Later this month I’m off to the Lake District for a long weekend dedicated to photography and, if I manage to capture images like these, I’ll be a very happy punter.

(The images in this post are ©2010 Mark Wilson, all rights reserved and are therefore excluded from the Creative Commons license used for the rest of this site.)

Upcoming events (including special #uktechdays) event

Posted on By Mark Wilson

We’re having difficulties scheduling WSUG events right now. Without going into all the gory details, Microsoft’s funding for rooms, etc. is not available in the way that it has been in the past, so we need to find another way to do things…

Now that the summer holidays are over, I’d like to organise a “virtual” user group meeting, over Live Meeting – and have had some conversations with Microsoft about a session on “Azure for IT Pros” (how can we integrate our on-premise infrastructure with Windows Azure, etc.). Please leave a comment if you think this will be of interest.

In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about a Microsoft-hosted event that may be of interest, although it may also be a bit “developery” for some Windows Server admins.

In any case, Steve Ballmer will be the guest speaker at a special UK TechDays “Future of Cloud Development” event in London’s Docklands on 5 October.

The site has not gone live yet but you can registration on the event page or at 0870 166 6670, quoting event reference 9886 – you’ll also need the invitation code: 6D4723.

More details of the session content can be found below:

  • A lap around Windows Phone 7 (Mike Ormond) – In this session Microsoft will take a look at Windows Phone 7 and the developer ecosystem, from the capabilities and unique features of the platform to the development frameworks and tools you have at your disposal. Along the way they’ll build a simple application or two and explore how people can purchase your finished masterpiece.
  • A lap around the Windows Azure Platform (Eric Nelson) – Hear how the Windows Azure Platform provides a scalable compute and storage environment with Windows Azure, secure connectivity with Service Bus and Access Control Service, and a relational database with SQL Azure. Learn about these new services and see demos that show how to build applications that run in and take advantage of Microsoft’s new cloud platform.
  • We’re Not on XP Any More – A Windows 7 Application in 60 Minutes. (Mike Taulty) – In this code-only session Microsoft will use Visual Studio 2010 and any .NET assembly that we can beg, borrow, steal or even build in order to put together a simple, modern Windows 7 application from scratch using the journey to provide pointers on how your applications can shine by using features that Windows XP only dreamt about ( when it wasn’t dreaming of electric sheep in its world limited by 2 processor cores, 4GB of RAM and GDI based graphics).
  • Keynote: New opportunities and compelling experiences – Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Steve Ballmer, will talk about new opportunities to deliver seamless experiences across many screens and a cloud, and why now is such an exciting time for developers
  • IE9 The Best Browser for Windows (Martin Beeby) – In this session Microsoft will use IE9 and a sprinkling of JavaScript and HTML5 to show you how to create an integrated and immersive experience maximizing the full power of your visitors Windows 7 PC.

[A version of this post also appears on the Windows Server User Group blog]

Jailbreaking does not equal piracy

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of night ago, Mrs. W was watching Channel 4 News as they ran a lengthy package on “how iPhone jailbreaking is fuelling app piracy“.  The trouble is that Channel 4’s Benjamin Cohen seems to have confused jailbreaking (the process of allowing non-authorised applications to be installed, rather than using Apple’s walled garden approach) with piracy (copying, distributing and installing applications against the wishes of the software creator).

I have a jailbroken iPhone – and it’s not so that I can pirate apps.  Frankly, if you’re a teenager who’s made a hundred grand in your bedroom from writing iPhone games, well done and good luck to you.  But don’t complain when there are 20% more people running your software than paid for it – you should have thought more how you were going to control the use of your app.

The reason my phone is jailbroken is simple – I want to use an alternative music player (Spotify) whilst I’m tracking my exercise progress (with Runkeeper).  That requires multi-tasking and Apple doesn’t allow multitasking on my iPhone 3G.  In a sense that’s OK – the IOS4 operating system that allows multitasking seems to need more powerful hardware (so why it’s available for the 3G is anyone’s guess) but I can make it work using a simple jailbreak and an application called Backgrounder.

Basically, Apple charged me a lot of money for a desirable piece of computing hardware and is their business model relies on increasing obsolescence so that I buy a new device.  If I have the technical ability to make that hardware do more for me and avoid buying a new phone, then why shouldn’t I?  I haven’t installed any unlicensed software, I’m not putting additional load on my mobile provider’s network, and the hardware is out of warranty already.  You could even argue that, by not buying a new iPhone, I’m making better use of my legacy computing device and doing my bit to save the planet!

It’s kind of analogous to the guys who “mod” their cars to move away from the manufacturer’s specifications.  Sure, they won’t get warranty support, but if they get a few more horsepower or whatever it is they are looking for out of their vehicle, that’s up to them.

So, back to the point – whilst it may be possible to use jailbroken phones for piracy, jailbreaking does not equal piracy.  If I was so inclined, I could run unlicensed copies of Windows on my PC, or install an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop on my Mac, but I don’t hear national broadcasters suggesting that all Windows or Mac users are software pirates.

Useful Links: August 2010

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

More on implementing Twitter’s Tweet button

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A week or so back, I wrote about putting a Tweet button onto a self-hosted WordPress blog. The method I used was fine – it works – but I was struggling to place the button within my page (I knew where to put it in my code but it seemed to display in the wrong place sometimes, as a result of some of the floats that the stylesheet applies).

That’s when I called in my buddy Alex: XHTML and CSS wizard; and fixer of many things on this site.

He spotted that, even though Twitter gives us three options for implementing the Tweet button: JavaScript, IFrame, and roll your own, the JavaScript implementation also uses an IFrame.

The trouble with this is that IFrames are bad. Well, not really bad, but certainly deprecated for Strict HTML and XHTML, and certainly not the direction I want to be heading in for a compliant site. Ideally, I would find another way around the issue but rolling my own Tweet button doesn’t look great) and Twitter’s implementation uses several images in one file, just showing the appropriate section of the image. I could use this, with image replacement techniques for hover and click (which is what Twitter do) but, to be honest, that was a little out of my league, so IFrames it is…

Alex helped me style up the button – if you want to do something similar, this was the CSS that he used:

p.social-media {margin-top: -15px;}
iframe.twitter-share-button {float: left; margin-right: 1em;}

Together with adding class="social-media" to the

tag in the code to display the tweet button so that it now reads:

Running Spotify and other apps as background tasks on an iPhone 3G

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I like shiny toys as much as the next geek, but I don’t have an iPhone 4 for two reasons: firstly, I’ve spent far too much money on an iPad (so I have much less use for a smartphone); and, secondly, I consider iPhone upgrades to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary so my existing iPhone 3G has some life in it yet (even though the case has some nasty cracks and I may need to replace the back soon).

Given that my 3G needs to soldier on for a while, I’d like to be able to use it’s full technical capabilities, rather than being governed by Apple’s marketing decisions – and one feature I’m missing is being able to a run third party applications in the background. For example, I would like to use Spotify instead of the built-in iPod app whilst Runkeeper is tracking my rather slow progress at pounding the pavements of Buckinghamshire.

Luckily for me, even though Apple doesn’t allow multitasking with iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G, there are some clever hackers that have made it possible:

  • First up, you need to allow the iPhone to run apps that are not available from the Apple AppStore. This is commonly known as “jail breaking” the device and there are various methods evolving as Apple tightens up the security on the device – jailbreakme.com is probably the easiest way for people who haven’t yet upgraded to iOS 3.2.2 or 4.0.2.
  • The next step is to install the Backgrounder app, using Cydia (the package manager installed by the jailbreak process). Backgrounder is customisable and includes an FAQ with usage details but the basic principle is to start the app you’d like to run in the background (e.g. Spotify), then activate Backgrounder.
  • Now, when you leave the first app and switch to run something else (e.g. Runkeeper), the first app should keep on running.

Playing with video on the iPad

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One of the great uses for the iPad is watching video.  Seriously, it’s a reasonably large display, held close to the user and, whilst it may not replace the big flat screen in the living room for family viewing, it’s more than good enough for catching up on the normal stuff.

Whilst I’m waiting for the BBC to release an iPlayer app for the iPad (iPlayer support is currently limited to streaming content), I have some video content that I’d like to catch up on whilst disconnected from the ‘net.  Unfortunately, my iPad didn’t want to play it… until I converted the video to a suitable format.

My first task was to use GSpot (on a Windows machine) to have a look at what codecs the file used.  It turned out to be an XviD video/MP3 audio file at 30fps in a .AVI container.

According to Apple’s technical specifications, the iPad can cope with:

Audio playback

  • Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz
  • Audio formats supported: HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF and WAV
  • User-configurable maximum volume limit

TV and video

  • Support for 1024 by 768 pixels with Dock Connector to VGA Adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Component AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Composite AV Cable
  • H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to install additional codecs on the iPad (at least not on a non-jailbroken one), so the video needed to be converted to something that the iPad could handle.  To do this, I installed the DivX and XviD codecs on my Mac (although I should have just used Perian), and used Apple QuickTime Pro to export the video as an MP4… except it took ages and converted it to 4:3 ratio at a lower resolution and higher frame rate – not really the result I was after…

Then I remembered Handbrake.  Handbrake doesn’t have any iPad presets yet but Carson McDonald has created some and they worked brilliantly to create a suitable H.264/MP4 file (there’s also a thread on iPad encoding in the Handbrake Forums).

When it cames to getting the video onto the iPad, I had two options: drag the the video to iTunes and sync (it then appears in the iPad’s built in Videos app); or upload the file to Dropbox and access it that way (by marking the file as a favourite, Dropbox will cache it for offline access). Now I can catch up on my TV viewing whilst I’m disconnected.

I’m still waiting for BBC, Channel 4, et al to step up the mark with their apps though!

What features would you like to see in Windows 8?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Michael Pietroforte, of the 4sysops blog has teamed up with several prominant blog owners across the ‘net to ask people what features they would like to see in Windows 8, which is expected to ship around 2012.

As the poll is running on several websites (Demonic Talking Skull – msigeek – Standalone Sysadmin – Teching It Easy: with Windows – The Experience Blog – The things that are better left unspoken – The Windows Club – WindowsPro – Within Windows – 7tutorials – 4sysops) please only vote once!

Guidance for poll questions

  • New user interface: Android and iOS are good examples of operating systems with innovative user interface models. Even more revolutionary will be Windows 7 Phone. These examples show that OS interfaces beyond the Windows Start Menu and the Windows Taskbar are possible.
  • Support for different form factors – Support for different form factors, such as tablets and netbooks, includes the ability to run Windows with minimal hardware requirements and on devices with small screen sizes (as small as 5”). Optimization for touch, the ability to run Windows without mouse and keyboard, and orientation detection are other essential features.
  • More modularity: Linux is a good example of a modular operating system. It allows you to install only those OS components you really need. This would require a package manager that resolves software dependencies. The advantages of more modularity are lower hardware requirements, a reduced attack surface, and simplified patch management.
  • Third-party patch management: Third-party management would allow you to update common Windows applications of third-party vendors through Microsoft’s online update service. Linux has this feature for as long as I can remember.
  • Bare metal hypervisor: A bare metal hypervisor would enable you to run multiple Windows installations simultaneously on a PC. You could move your virtualized Windows installation with all applications to another PC or to a VDI environment by simply copying the virtual system drive.
  • Application virtualization: Virtualized applications run in an isolated environment that ensures no modifications to the OS are made during installation and at runtime. Application virtualization can solve compatibility issues and improves security.
  • Application streaming: Application streaming allows you to launch a Windows application from a remote server, for example, through the web, without the need to install the application manually. Application streaming solutions usually leverage application virtualization. An application streaming Windows API would enable third-party software vendors to offer Windows applications through the web.
  • Windows Store: Like Apple’s App Store, Windows Store would allow you to buy and download third-party applications that have been approved by Microsoft.
  • Windows Restore Button: If you messed up your Windows installation, this feature would enable you to restore Windows to its original state without losing your data and without the need to reinstall all your applications.
  • Cloud APIs: Third-party software vendors could allow you to use cloud APIs to add cloud features to their applications. For instance, a web browser vendor could store your bookmarks, plugins, and browser settings in Microsoft’s cloud or in the cloud of a third-party provider. That way, all your settings and data would automatically be available on every Windows machine you log on to.
  • New authentication methods: Wouldn’t it be cool if you could log on to Windows or an online service with a smile at your web cam (facial recognition), with a friendly “Hi, it’s me” (voice recognition), or by just touching your beloved PC (fingerprint recognition)? Biometrics applications have already been available for a while, but they will only have a fair chance of being adopted in the Windows ecosystem if Microsoft fully integrates these functions into Windows.
  • Instant-On: Instant-On means that Windows wouldn’t have to boot up when you turn on your PC. Considering that computers are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily life, this could be an interesting feature for home users in particular. It is probably a must-have feature for tablets.
  • Malware protection: If Windows were delivered with integrated malware protection, every PC would be protected right after the installation, which would make the whole Internet a safer place. Third-party vendors could offer services such as antivirus signatures and antivirus applications that run on top of the Windows malware scanning engine. This would also reduce notorious compatibility problems with antivirus scanning engines and would even allow you to run multiple antivirus applications at the same time.
  • Better UAC: Compared to Sudo in the Linux world, UAC (User Account Control) is a fairly simple security privilege solution. A UAC with more configuration options could improve security, especially in business environments.
  • Migration from Windows XP: Windows XP is a very popular operating system and it will still probably run on many computers even when Windows 8 is released. These Windows customers would appreciate a seamless migration from Windows XP to Windows 8.
  • Better compatibility: Better compatibility includes better hardware and software compatibility with legacy hardware and software.
  • Better security: If you think that Microsoft should focus on improving the security features of Windows 8, then you should vote for this option.
  • Better performance: Speed is always important. If it matters most in your environment, then you should tell Microsoft now.
  • Less hardware requirements: If you intend to run Windows 8 on old computers, then you need a Windows 8 which requires only minimal hardware.
  • Less bloat: Some people think that Windows already has too many features and would prefer a slim Windows 8.