markwilson.it

Tag: Useful Websites

  • Timezone blindness

    <rant>Daylight saving time is an outdated concept, a complete nuisance and should be abolished.</rant>

    I’m in the UK and I have a call with a Microsoft Product Group in Redmond (WA) tonight at 12:00 PST. US Pacific time is 8 hours ahead of the UK, and we’re both on daylight savings and in the northern hemisphere… or so I thought (I’m still pretty sure about the northern hemisphere bit).

    LiveMeeting tells me that the meeting has not started yet and to wait until the scheduled meeting time before trying again, so I checked the current time in the US and sure enough it’s only 11:00 on the west coast… then I checked the meeting request and saw that Google Calendar had picked up the time as UTC/GMT +7 (which is correct) but in the summer the UK time is not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but British Summer Time (BST) and somehow (possibly by Google Calendar, possibly by Microsoft Outlook, possibly by me), the iCalendar (.ics) file that Microsoft provided when I registered for the event had been mangled and my calendar only had a 7 hour time difference. Still, at least I was early not late…

    In future, I’ll be making good use of the other link in the e-mail from Microsoft – the world clock timezone converter – which takes into account daylight saving time (DST) as well as the local time zone.

  • Why the UK’s National Rail website is an IT disaster

    In a few weeks’ time, my wife is taking the kids to her parents’ house by the seaside for a week. I’ve got the week off work too but I’ve got a huge list of outstanding jobs to do at home, so I’m only spending part of the week with them. It’s daft to take two cars (especially as we will be travelling together in one direction), so I thought I’d try public transport…

    Problem number one is that I live in a rural area so public transport is not exactly plentiful – even though I’m just 12 miles from the thriving new “city” of Milton Keynes we have just one or two buses an hour, which run infrequently (and unreliably) and take at least 40 minutes for an indirect route to a location that is still just over a mile from the station. Not exactly convenient – and, at £3 (single fare), not exactly inexpensive either!

    Then, after a brisk mile-long walk from the shopping centre to the railway station, I’ll be catching a train to London, tube across London, and then another train to sunny Dorset. The rail journey will take just over 3 and a half hours – which is not bad really (it would take me about 2 and a half to drive using a much more direct route – or around 5 hours by National Express coach) but Cheapest available fare - £56.60 (or is it?)the National Rail Journey Planner tells me that the cheapest available fare is £56.60 with no advance fares available (at which price taking the car is suddenly sounding more economical). (RailEasy and The Trainline also reckon that the lowest cost single fare is £56.50, despite the latter site The Trainline claims to save travellers 39% on average compared with buying a ticket at the station on the dayclaiming to save travellers 39% on average compared with buying a ticket at the station on the day!

    Luckily, I spoke to my father, who knows far more about UK railways than would generally be considered healthy – and his advice came up trumps – instead of buying a single ticket for the entire journey, it seems the thing to do is to use the journey planner to work out which trains to catch, and then try again for each leg of the journey.

    Using this method, I found I can get the Milton Keynes-London leg for £14.50 (off peak return… not using the return portion), then cross London on the tube for £4 cash or £1.50 with an Oyster card and I can currently buy an advance single from London to my eventual destination in Dorset for £9 or £17 (depending on the time of day I travel). Using this method, £56.60 becomes £25 – and that is not really bad value at all (especially when compared with £41.50 for the significantly slower coach journey).

    Why is this relevant on a technology weblog? Well, if a travel website that is incapable of accurately calculating the lowest available fare is not bad enough, the next stage of the process is an IT disaster – the sticking plaster that bonds together the various websites used to provide this “service”. The National Rail website has the ability to hand off to third parties for ticket purchase, which sounds great – web services in action – except that I got more than my fair share of failed fare lookups (retrying seemed to result in success) and when I was passed across to the two train operating companies that I used (London Midland and South West Trains), I had to register with each website individually – despite the underlying infrastructure being hosted under the oddly-named trainsfares.co.uk domain by The Trainline (where I also have an account) and an error page after my session timed out referring to yet another train operating company (with which I do not)! I could almost excuse the National Rail website for being aesthetically dull (I find its basic colour scheme and busy layout presents a navigational nightmare – in web terms rather than its intended purpose as a travel aid!) but the results it produces are not even consistent – the train that I’ll be using for the Milton Keynes to London leg of the journey disappears from the list if I use the earlier and later links to navigate back and forth through the available journey options!

    Is it too much to ask that, now that train fares in the UK have (finally) been simplified, the systems should be able: to calculate the the various legs of the journey and find me the absolute lowest fare; reliably integrate to provide consistent results; and, where several train operating companies use the same service provider, for a single online account to be able to buy tickets for the entire rail network?

    Maybe I just want too much…

  • Some more useful Hyper-V links

    Regular readers will have realised by now that the frequency of posts on this blog is almost inversely proportional to the amount of my spare time that the day job eats up and, after a period of intense blogging when I had a fairly light workload, the last couple of weeks have left little time for writing (although James Bannan and I did finally record the pilot episode of our new podcast last night… watch this space for more information).

    In the absence of my planned post continuing the series on Microsoft Virtualization and looking at application virtualisation (which will make an appearance, just maybe not until next week), here are a few Hyper-V links that might come in useful (supplementing the original list of Hyper-V links I published back in July):

  • Useful links: September 2008

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

    I’ve been running these “useful links” posts for a few months now but it really would make sense for me to use a service like Delicious instead. I’ve been trying to work out a way to get Delicious to publish links on a weekly or monthly basis but that might not work out. Just keep watching this space.

  • Bye bye iTunes… hello 7digital

    For the last few years, I’ve been using Apple iTunes to manage my music collection. I ripped all of my full length CDs to MP3 using iTunes (at the highest bitrate it allowed at the time – 192kpbs) although I still have about 500 CD singles to do and I now favour a higher bitrate (even if I can’t hear it, I’d like to know that the quality is there should I want to do something else with the media at a later date as technology progresses). Sam C. Lin carried out an interesting study comparing MP3 encoding with and the linear PCM recording used for CD audio.

    Until today, all of my digital downloads have come from the iTunes Store (DRM-free where the record companies allow it). Unfortunately the record companies don’t like Apple’s market dominance and the DRM-free iTunes Plus catalogue is still very limited.

    Whilst indie music fans have DRM-free alternatives like eMusic, for my more mainstream tastes I’ve been waiting for Amazon to bring their digital download service to the UK but then, frustrated by the 30 second clips of various mixes on iTunes of “Paddy’s Revenge” by Steve Mac (sampling the Penguin Café Orchestra), I decided to Google a little and found an alternative download site – 7digital. 7digital logoNot only did 7digital sample a different section of the track (allowing me to decide which mix I would like) but it offers MP3 downloads at up to 320kbps and a big discount if I buy all the mixes together (just like when I used to buy CD singles). Furthermore, 7digital has just become the first European music site to offer DRM-free downloads from all four of the big music publishers.

    Within a few minutes, my shopping basket included a couple more individual tracks that I’ve been thinking of getting – “Love Is Noise” by The Verve and “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon (I did stop short of buying Katy Perry‘s “I Kissed a Girl” though). Then I saw that 7digital had a section for music from TV Ads and I got browsing… a few minutes later I’d also picked up “She’s So Lovely” by Scouting for Girls.

    I still don’t buy albums in digital format as I’d like a physical media backup and, to be perfectly honest, knocking a pound off the retail price is not a big enough discount – it’s not as if the artists get paid a bigger share and the distribution costs must be almost nothing – but then I saw that 7digital had albums on sale at £2, £3 (and even free). It’s not just obscure stuff that’s reduced either – I could buy “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” by Kaiser Chiefs in 320kbps MP3 format for £4.99 (although I chose to buy just the tracks I wanted) but not all albums are that cheap as their earlier album “Employment” was £7.99 (so, pretty much on a par with the supermarkets, Amazon.co.uk and Play.com).

    To checkout, I needed to create an account but I could pay by card, PayPal or text message and, once my payment had been processed, I could download my tracks individually or as a zip file (even change format for tracks that had multiple formats available at the same price) and those tracks are still available for me to download again at a later date (via a feature called my locker).

    7digital locker

    After downloading, I simply dragged the MP3 files to iTunes, switched to my “Recently Added” playlist, selected the new tracks and added them to the “Purchased” playlist. As should be expected, all tracks were supplied complete with album art and other metadata.

    So what does this tell me?

    1. iTunes is easy – that’s why I’ve been buying tracks there for the last few years. But, now that DRM is no longer an issue, downloading tracks from somewhere else is just one extra step (after importing them into iTunes they can be synced with my iPhone/iPod).
    2. It is possible to get better quality downloads (legally) and better pricing if you shop around. Maybe not everyone will have the same catalogue but 7digital has a major advantage through its arrangements with all four major music publishers.

    What should it tell the music industry?

    1. People will still pay for DRM-free music, at the right price.
    2. People like me, who are too old to spend Saturday afternoons hanging around HMV (anyway, I have a family these days) will still buy music if you make it easy enough – maybe not in the quantities I used to but it’s worth noting that I spent money this afternoon that I wouldn’t have done if there wasn’t a legal download option.

    I’ll still use iTunes to manage my music and video library but I don’t see any reason for me to go back to the iTunes store now… regardless of what the the new “Genius” sidebar in iTunes 8.0 tells me (I hate Apple’s use of that word!) – from now on, it’s 7digital all the way for me.

    Apple iTunes 8, showing recently added tracks and the genius sidebar

  • Useful links: August 2008

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

  • Windows 7 blog launched

    After a year of speculation about what will, or won’t, be included in the next version of Windows, it looks like Microsoft might be getting ready to tell us a bit more. Yesterday they launched a new blog called Engineering Windows 7 (thanks to Dave Saxon for alerting me). As the title suggests, it’s all about putting together the next version of Windows and is probably worth keeping an eye on.

  • Useful links: July 2008

    Not all of the stuff I stumble across on the Internet makes it into my blog posts so, here’s a list of items I’ve come across this month that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

    This Modern Life (original artist unknown)

  • Photoshop Velvia

    Back in the days when I used to shoot my photos on film, my preferred slide emulsion was Fujifilm Velvia (RVP). With strong colour saturation (particularly green) this film is particularly good for landscape work and, ever since I switched to digital, I’ve felt that there was some “punch” missing from my landscapes.

    Then I came across episode 19 of This Week in Photography, in which the subject of creating Photoshop actions is demonstrated using “Scott’s Photoshop Velvia”. I tried it out today and it really works.

    1. Take an image and create a duplicate layer (in the process giving yourself the ability to return to the original at any time).
    2. Next, use the Channel Mixer on each of the three colour channels (red/green/blue) as follows:
      • Red channel: R 118% G -9% B -9%
      • Green channel: R -9% G 118% B -9%
      • Blue channel: R -9% G -9% B 118%
    3. Finally, adjust the contrast by tweaking the curves to produce a very slight S shape.

    Here’s one of my images before and after the Photoshop Velvia treatment was applied:

    Without Photoshop VelviaWith Photoshop Velvia

    Hopefully you can see that the second image appears much more vibrant than the first.

    Photoshop CS3 users can download the Photoshop Velvia custom action, but please note there is no warranty implied, no support, and you use it at your own risk. Thanks are due to Scott Bourne for demonstrating this – it really is a great Photoshop tip.

  • Using packet level drivers for MS-DOS network connectivity

    One of the reasons to use Windows PE for operating system deployment is that it’s built on a modern version of Windows so, at least in theory, driver support is less of an issue than it would be using MS-DOS boot disks.

    Even so, there are still times when a good old MS-DOS boot disk comes in handy and networking is a particular pain point – NDIS drivers are a pain to configure so packet-level drivers are often useful for operating system deployment tasks (but not optimised for anything more substantial). Available for many of the more common Ethernet cards, they are generally 16-bit utilities for MS-DOS and so will not work in 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems.

    As this is not exactly cutting edge technology, many of the useful sites are starting to drop off the ‘net (but a surprising number remain) – here’s a few links I found that might come in handy: