markwilson.it

Category: Technology

  • Starting to play with the Internet of things

    Unlike some people, who find it invasive, I love the concept of the Internet of things. I’m truly excited by some of the possibilities that a world driven by data opens up. Sure, there are issues to overcome (primarily around privacy and connectivity) – but anyone who believes their data isn’t already being captured by service providers (even if those providers don’t yet know how to handle the massive volumes of data) is in for a shock. So why not embrace the possibilities and use our increasingly smart world to our collective advantage?

    In my recent presentation to the BCS Internet Special Interest group, I referred to the Technology Strategy Board‘s Future Internet Report, which talks about [emphasis added by me]:

    “An evolving convergent Internet of things and services that is available anywhere, anytime as part of an all-pervasive omnipresent socio–economic fabric, made up of converged services, shared data and an advanced wireless and fixed infrastructure linking people and machines to provide advanced services to business and citizens.”

    The report also acknowledges the need for more than just “bigger pipes” to handle the explosion in data volumes. We do need a capable access mechanism but we also need infrastructure for the personalisation of cloud services and for machine to machine (M2M) transactions; and we also need convergence to enable a transformational change in both public and private service delivery.

    That’s the big picture but scaling back down to a personal level, one of my colleagues, David Gentle (@davegentle – who happens to be the main author of Fujitsu’s Technology Perspectives microsite) highlighted a site called Pachube to me last week. I first came across Pachube a few months back but [partly because it used to be a chargeable service (it became free at the start of this month)] it got added to my “list-of-things-to-have-a-better-look-at-one-day” (that day rarely comes, by the way!). This time I had a better look and I found it to be pretty cool.

    Pachube is basically a cloud-based broker for connected devices with a web service to manage real-time data and a growing ecosystem of applications to feed and consume data. That sounded like it might need some programming (i.e. could be difficult for me these days) but then I found a method to hook an energy monitor up to the web, with no coding required!

    I’ve written before about the EnergyFit (Current Cost) power meter that E-ON sent me. I wasn’t a fan of E-ON’s software so I hooked it up to Google PowerMeter for a while, but that service has closed down (along with Microsoft’s Hohm service – which I don’t think even made it to the UK). Using a USB to serial driver and a companion application I now have one of my computers feeding data from my Current Cost meter to the Pachube website, where it gets transformed into JSON, XML or CSV format and “magic” can be performed. I used the Mac OS X software versions of the driver and the application but there are also Windows (driver/application) and Linux (driver/application) variants that I have not tested. The process of setting up a Pachube feed has also changed slightly since the original guidance was written but the basic steps are:

    1. Install the USB-serial drivers.
    2. Install the application
    3. Run the application and select the appropriate serial port (for me, on my Mac, that is /dev/tty.usb-serial).
    4. Create a feed (a push feed – and however many times I turn it private it seems to switch back to public…).
    5. Paste the XML version of the feed into the application.
    6. Set up a secure sharing (API) key (you probably don’t want to use the master key) and paste it into the application.
    7. Save preferences and wait for the application to start feeding data, at which point the feed should show as live

    The application I used and the Pachube website seem to work together to configure the datastreams within the feed (one for temperature and one for power) and it’s all set to go.

    Once the feed is live, there are a load of apps listed on the Pachube website with everything from graphs and visualisations to mapping tools and augmented reality. I decided to create a page to display some of these, starting out with a customisable PNG-based graph from my feed. That worked, so I added another, together with a PachuDial and a couple of PachuBlog gadgets (sadly, these are Flash-based, so don’t work on the iPad…). Next I created a second feed to consume the power usage from the first one and measure the associated carbon footprint.

    Having played around with energy usage, I found that I could also use Pachube to monitor my Twitter account (a pull feed this time) – which might be useful too.

    Now I’ve mastered the basics with my Current Cost meter, I might try some home automation using Arduino devices – although that looks to have quite a steep learning curve on the electronics front… In the meantime, you can see the Home electricity usage and Twitter statistics pages that I created using just the Pachube platform and some basic HTML.

    [Update 30 November 2011: added comment about Pachube becoming free to use]

  • Handy WordPress URL re-write

    Last week, I accidentally advertised a blog post using two different URLs (I edited the title, which changed the WordPress slug, but forgot to edit a draft email to refer the new URL). With Twitter advertising one URL to potential customers, and our internal newsletter advertising another, I needed both to work.

    I don’t have access to the server (only to the WordPress application), so playing around with IIS/Apache URL re-writes wasn’t an option. I started to look for WordPress plugins but couldn’t find any – and then I found out why…

    Although there is no mention of it in the Codex, when you change the title of a post, WordPress automatically creates an HTTP 301 redirect from the the old URL to the new. I’ve seen this on my own blog but Johannes Pille describes it beautifully on StackExchange:

    “The previously used slug(s) are stored in the database in the wp_postmeta table. Check for _wp_old_slug in the meta_key column (the actual slugs being stored in the meta_value column). Hence should you ever want this default behavior not to happen in a particular case, this is where to delete a value.”

    I also found that the URL (and hence the slug) is not set until the post is published. I had edited the title whilst the post was in a scheduled state, so there was only one slug recorded (the new title). By editing the slug post-publish, I was able to prevent the HTTP 404s that some people were seeing.

  • Bring your own… or use what you are told?

    A few days ago, I read an article about the risks presented by IT consumerisation. It rang alarm bells with me because, whilst the premise is sound (there are risks, some serious ones, and they need to be mitigated), the focus seemed to be on controlling data leakage by restricting access to social media and locking down device functionality (restricting USB ports, etc.). Whilst that was once an accepted model, I have to question if UWYT (use what you are told) is really the approach we should be taking in this day and age?

    One of the key topics within the overal consumerisation theme is concerned with “bring your own” (BYO) device models. I recently wrote a white paper on this topic (a condensed “insight and opinion” view is also available) but, in summary, BYO offers IT departments an opportunity to provide consumer-like services to their customers – i.e. business end users.

    In a recent dialogue on Twitter, one of my contacts was suggesting that Fortune 500 companies won’t go for BYO.  But the tide does seem to be turning and there are significant enterprises who are seriously considering it. I’ve been involved in several discussions over recent weeks and I’ve even seen articles in mainstream press about BYO adoption (for example, Qantas has publicly announced plans to allow up to 35,000 employees to connect their own devices to the corporate network). Interestingly, both those links are to Australian publications – maybe we’re just a little more conservative over here?

    Of course, there are hurdles to cross (particularly around manageability and security) and it’s not about undoing the work put into managing “standard operating environments” but about recognising how to build flexibility into our infrastructure and open up access to what business end users really need – information!

    We need to think about device ownership too and, in particular, about whose data resides where. Indeed, one of the best articles I’ve read on the topic was Art Witmann’s suggestion that a BYO strategy should start with data-centric security, including this memorable quote:

    “Understandable or not, if ‘your device is now our device’ is the approach your team is taking, you need to rethink things”

    Virtualisation can help with the transition, as can digital rights management. Ultimately we need to re-draw our boundaries and we may find ourselves in a place where the office network is considered “dirty” (just as the coffee shop Wi-Fi is today) and we access services (secured at the application or, better still, at the data layer) rather than concerning ourselves with device or technology-dependant offerings.

    Putting myself in a customer’s shoes for a moment, I expect that I’d be asking if Fujitsu is following a BYO model and the answer is both “yes”, and “no”. As a device manufacturer it presents some image problems if our people are using other vendors’ equipment so, here in the UK and Ireland, our PCs are still provided by a central IT function. Having said that, there are some choices with a catalogue to select from (based on defined eligibility criteria [- a choose your own device scheme]). We also operate a BYO scheme for mobile devices, based on [Fujitsu’s] Managed Mobile service.

    So we can see that BYO is not an all-or-nothing solution. And, whilst I’ve only scraped the surface here, it does need to be supported with appropriate changes to policies (not just IT policies either – there are legal, financial and human resources issues to address too).

    To me it seems that ignoring consumerisation is a perilous path – it’s happening and if senior IT leaders are unable to support it, they may well find themselves bypassed. Of course, not every employee is a “knowledge worker” and there will be groups for whom access to social media (or even access to the Internet) or the ability to use their own device is not appropriate. For many others though, the advantages of “IT as a service” may be significant and far-reaching.

    [This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

  • iMessage – the makings of a great idea but still needs some work

    A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with iCloud and photostreams. Well, now I’d like to touch on another iOS-related topic: iMessage.

    Released to much fanfare about how it will save us all money because we won’t have to pay carriers for SMS, over here in the UK most packages include so many text messages that SMS is pretty close to free anyway…

    But iMessage has a problem. It actually gets in the way of message transmission.

    Last week I wanted to send a message to my Manager. SMS was fine – I just needed to say I was running a few minutes late for our meeting and I would call him shortly. That’s what SMS is good for, right? Except that we’re both iPhone users, so iOS tried to send the message via iMessage. For some reason it couldn’t do that so, after five minutes, it timed out and and sent the message as an SMS instead. Except by then it was too late – SMS is an unreliable transport (i.e. there is no guarantee of delivery) but it’s generally immediate (as long as the device is in range and switched on). Unfortunately, iMessage’s delay meant that my Manager didn’t get my “running late” message until it was, literally, too late.

    Send As SMS is an option in iOS, but it’s only a fallback when iMessage is enabled [later iOS updates allow you to elect to send as text message]. Meanwhile iMessage has lots of potential for group collaboration and asynchronous conversations. I actually think Apple is onto something with a unified client for various message transports (now they need to add email, social networks, etc. into the mix) but it needs a manual override option too…

    [Updated 5/2/15 to comment re: later iOS releases allowing “send as text message”]

  • Brave new world

    One of the advantages of spending most of yesterday in bed nursing a dose of man-flu was that I got to catch up with some tech-related TV including Channel 4’s Brave New World with Stephen Hawking (via the 4oD app for iPad). The episodes I watched focused on Machines, Health, Technology[,] and the Environment (the final episode in the series is focused on biology and will be broadcast next week) [and biology] – with each one including five new technologies that have the potential to change our world, presented by prominent scientists like professors Kathy Sykes and Lord Robert Winston.

    As someone who spends a good chunk of his time thinking about the future application of technology (in an enterprise IT context), it was good to see the application of technology to much broader problems and here are the topics I saw covered:

    • Machines:
    • Health:
      • 75% of new human diseases cross from the animal/plant world to humans and the effect is exacerbated by increased communications (for example, it’s thought that HIV crossed over from SIV in the 1880s but was effectively contained until the 1980s). In Cameroon and elsewhere, the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative is looking to find new diseases before they cross over, potentially alleviating the greatest threat to mankind.
      • At St Thomas’ Hospital in London, biorobotics are being used to provide a less invasive approach to cardiac surgery. Advanced X-ray/MRI scanning is used to build a three-dimensional “roadmap” which can then guide a catheter to act on difficult-to-reach areas of the body with high frequency radio waves. Eventually, it is hoped that software can replace surgeons in the operation/guidance of the robotic procedure, increasing the number of operations that may be performed.
      • Some scientists are experimenting with optogenetics to take photo-sensitive properties from some cells and apply them to others then control them with light. It’s hoped that this ability to target and control parts of the brain may be used to treat brain disorders and even common mental illnesses such as anxiety and stress, where treatments based on drugs are less than ideal.
      • Every 30 seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies from Malaria and, whilst insecticides and drugs are available, they are expensive and often its an easily-damaged net that forms the first line of defence. At Columbia University in New York, scientists have found that they can use a light barrier to repel mosquitoes that might lead to the creation of a high-tech laser mosquito net. Elsewhere, scientists are experimenting with genetic modification of mosquito so that they can’t even carry the Malaria parasite.
      • Current forms of cancer treatment affect not just the cancerous cells but healthy ones too. At the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, scientists are working towards a new era of personalised medicines and smart-drugs that act on cancer at the genetic level. Unfortunately, not all mutations have drugs so it’s not a universal cure for cancer but treatments like this can be used to help people to live with cancer.
    • Technology:
      • At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists studying Reality Mining believe that that, by understanding our behaviour, they may help us to live happier, healthier or easier lives. The key to this is the data about our personal movements and activities – but people are generally not too keen on the idea of “big brother” watching. The scientists at MIT believe that, by treating our information like a commodity, we may each own the data about ourselves and this presumption of ownership leads to a different balance of power.
      • Most manufacturing involves shaping raw materials to create the desired object, typically hewn out of a solid block. Additive manufacturing (commonly known as 3D printing) takes a design and builds it layer by layer. This allows more complex/efficient shapes to be created with minimum material use. One day maybe we will be able to just pop into our local 3D print shop to create spare parts for our washing machine, car, computer, etc.?
      • With the closure of NASA’s Shuttle programme, it’s hoped that private space exploration may provide the means to transport people and cargo into space. Founded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is the first private company to put a craft into orbit and return it intact and hopes to be the next step in enabling humans to move towards a multi-planetary existence.
      • Abu Dhabi is both built on, and dependant upon, oil but on the outskirts of this city a new city is being created. At a cost of $18bn, Masdar will house 40,000 people and aims to be the most sustainable city on earth. Transportation is sub-surface, with driverless electric capsules (personal rapid transport), not unlike the pods at London’s Heathrow Airport guided by GPS and running on pre-determined routes/speed. Street level is reserved for pedestrians, with traditional Arab low-rise buildings and narrow shady streets. Wind towers catch air and bring it down to street level (no need for air conditioning) and the largest solar power plant in the middle east (with 88,000 solar power panels – and a new “beam down” solar concentrator project in development) creates all the electricity that is required, and more. The aim is that the technologies showcased at Masdar can be taken to other cities around the world.
      • Neutrinos or “ghost particles” flow around and through us at around the speed of light as a product of the sun’s nuclear fusion. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) has been created 2km below ground in order to avoid interference from cosmic rays, studying their reaction with heavy water and to help us understand how the sun is working.
    • Environment:
      • The Frozen Ark is aiming to save the genomes of endangered species of wildlife, 10,000 examples of which are expected to become extinct overt the next 30-50 years.
      • As out ever-growing population places new demands on the planet, around a third of our land mass is used for livestock production. At Maastrict University, scientists are “growing” in-vitro “meat”. As it’s more than 70% meat, it can be used as a processed meat product and consumed by humans under existing regulations but it’s still expensive and lacks the favour, texture and taste of real meat. Nevertheless, it could provide a method to produce meat for processed foodstuffs in the near future.
      • It’s expected that our energy usage will double by 2050 but with fossil fuels running out, nuclear under the spotlight and renewables unlikely to fill the gap, we need a new power source. Scientists believe that source may come from nuclear fusion. Unlike fission (splitting the atom), which requires the burning of heavy metals, available in limited supply, and creating radioactive waste products, fusion combines lightweight atoms (e.g. hydrogen) and, whilst it needs a lot of energy it releases more. The US National Ignition Facility has the world’s largest laser, split into 192 beams that can be fired onto a tiny pellet to generate tremendous amounts of energy.
      • Many of our planet’s problems are man-made but there are also natural forces at work – such as those when solar winds interact with the earth’s magnetic field (“space weather”). We our society based on complex electrical networks, we’re more vulnerable than ever but a new NASA satellite allows us to view the sun’s activity using different wavelengths of light and develop an early warning system.
      • Just as the Frozen Ark is storing animal genomes, the Millennium Seed Bank is aiming to store the seeds of plant life facing extinction. Each seed is cleaned, dried, x-rayed to check for an embryo, damaged seeds are discarded and healthy seeds are stored in a glass container at -20°C along with growing instructions for future generations (e.g. some seeds do not grow in soil/water but need smoke to trigger germination).
    • [Biology:
      • In central America, scientists from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups are looking to harness the power of bacteria to help defeat one of humanity’s greatest killers. By taking the toxins created by a bacterium that grows in the ocean, they have successfully killed breast cancer cells and it’s thought that the ocean could provide scope to further expand the frontier of medical science.
      • By combining biology and engineering, we can harness natural processes to work for us in what is known as synthetic biology. In the past this has been used to create paints, petrochemicals and plastics but now it could be used for fuel and medicines. In one example, at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, scientists are successfully altering the genetic make-up of e-coli bacterium before feeding them with plant cellulose, to create sugars that are then metabolised into biodiesel.
      • Medical research is also pushing the boundaries to allow our bodies to heal themselves. At the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, scientists are researching the use of extra cellular matrix (ECM) – a structure that can be used for the body to build/rebuild itself. Used as a “scaffold” upon which bodies are built in the worm, ECM also helps small children to heal but then stops working. By using ECM to recruit stem cells and build healthy tissue instead of scar tissue, it’s possible to overcome horrific injuries. In another example, regenerative cardiologists at the University of Texas have performed open heart surgery on mice, removing part of the heart and watching it grow back, after observing that heart cells continue to beat (and multiple) outside the body (in the first few days of life). Whilst this is still some way off a human application, in the future it may provide the key to new treatments for human cardiac diseases.
      • Much of the research performed by geneticists is concerned with fixing what’s wrong but advances can also come from looking at what’s right with our bodies. In San Diego, scientists are examining why some people (dubbed the “welderly”) are living into their 70s and 80s without encountering any serious diseases, regardless of their lifestyle. It appears that, whilst there is no gene to help us live longer, there may be one that controls dying sooner and that manipulation of this may provide opportunities to prevent age-related damage to our bodies, although with a growing population there are some moral issues to address around increasing human lifespans.
      • It also appears that our lifestyle can affect not just ourselves but also our children and our childrens’ children. Studies into epigenetics have shown that there is a correlation between early (pre-pubescent) smoking fathers and obesity in sons, regardless of social circumstances. Furthermore, overeating in pre-adolescence can impact the next generation. In females, stress during pregnancy has been shown to negatively impact cognitive ability and to increase emotional difficulties encountered by children. It seems that the lifestyle we choose not only sets and example but can also have a biological effect on health – i.e. that our environment controls us, not the other way around.]

    If you think these topics sound interesting, you may just catch the programmes on 4oD but the whole series is also available to download from iTunes.

    [Updated 21 November 2011: including details from the last programme in the series]

  • Force-ejecting a stuck CD or DVD on a Mac

    Yesterday, I was trying to eject a CD from my MacBook but it wasn’t playing ball. There doesn’t appear to be a hole to force-eject the disk and the media eject key wasn’t doing anything. Neither was there an icon to drag to the trash so, according to Apple’s advice, I needed to reboot the computer.

    Er… no… this is 2011 – reboots should be a last resort (even my Windows PC only get rebooted to apply updates once a month). Thankfully MacRumors has a much more extensive list of solutions to force-eject stuck CDs/DVDs.

    drutil tray eject did the trick for me although why Apple can’t direct people to the command line in their own advice is anybody’s guess…

  • Office 365 password resets… and disabling password expiry

    My Office 365 account password expired today and, somewhere in the midst of the password reset I managed to lock myself out.  As I only have one mailbox on the account (i.e. I am the administrator), that’s a bit of a problem…

    I tried creating a service request to reset my password but I’m not sure it worked – I had no call-back and when I checked later in the Administrator control panel, there were no requests listed; however Dhaval Brahmbhatt (@DhavalBrahmbhat) gave me some UK phone numbers to try (0203 450 6455 or 0800 032 6417).

    Using phone support I was able to log a password reset request, once the Technical Support Engineer had confirmed my details.  Because there was no phone number shown on my records, he had to email me so that I could respond with the details. Bearing in mind that I was locked out of my account, this could have been a problem but thankfully Outlook was still connected to Office 365 from my Mac.

    After 26 minutes on the phone (at great expense to Microsoft, I guess), I finally had a temporary password to reset my account and then log in as normal.

    Goodness knows how I’d have managed if I hadn’t been able to receive an email on the account – although the contact preferences on my Office 365 profile showed a phone number, there was no number in the information for my mailbox… so, lesson number 1, make sure you have a phone number in your mailbox properties (lesson 2 might be to have password resets sent to an alternative mailbox but that seems daft as it’s also where other announcements will end up…).

    I’ve decided that I’ll reset my password when I feel like it, rather than when the system says so and making this change involves some PowerShell:

    • First up, install the Office 365 cmdlets (intended for enterprises, not all of them will work on small business accounts). There are two components to install: the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant; and the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell.
    • Next, connect PowerShell to Office 365 by either opening the Microsoft Online Services Module for PowerShell or opening a normal PowerShell session and typing import-module MSOnline.
    • Authenticate the session by typing Connect-MsolService

    (An older method from Office 365 beta can be found in my previous post on changing the primary email address for Office 365 users – I haven’t tested it recently, but I see no reason why the standard Exchange cmdlets wouldn’t still work on Office 365)

    • Finally, disable password expiration with the following command (replacing MicrosoftOnlineServicesID with the appropriate username):
      Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName MicrosoftOnlineServicesID -PasswordNeverExpires $true

  • Adding extra social sharing services to WordPress with JetPack (ShareDaddy)

    Last night, as part of the rebuild of this site, I reinstated the social sharing links for each post. In the old site they had been implemented as bespoke code using each social network’s recommended approach (e.g. Twitter or Facebook‘s official button codes) but presentation becomes problematic, with each button having a slightly different format and needing some CSS trickery to get it right.

    I looked into a variety of plugins but they all had issues – either with formatting or functionality – until I stumbled across reference to WordPress.com’s social sharing capabilities.  If only I could have that functionality on a self-hosted (WordPress.org) site…

    …As it happens, I can – WordPress.com’s social sharing is based on the ShareDaddy plugin, which is part of a collection called JetPack. ShareDaddy is also available as a freestanding plugin but now I have JetPack installed I’m finding some of the other functionality it gives me useful (and it’s not possible to activate ShareDaddy if you have JetPack installed).

    I need to make some changes (like working out how to hack the code and turn off the count next to my Tweet/Like/+1 buttons – it’s embarrassing when the number is small!) but I’m happy enough with the result for now.  One thing I did need to do though was to add some services that are not yet in the JetPack version of the plugin (one of the major advantages of ShareDaddy is how simple it is to do this).

  • The 2011 Computer Weekly Social Media Awards

    Just over a year ago, we launched the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog – written by our Chief Innovation and Technology Officer, David Smith. It’s always been our intention to draw on a combination of external go-to-market and internal IT capability knowledge to produce content that translates IT trends into potential business value but one thing I’m particularly proud of is that we do not use external writers – what you read here is written by David or by one of his team.

    Now I’m pleased to say that we’ve been shortlisted for the 2011 Computer Weekly Social Media Awards so I’d like to ask for your support.  If you appreciate what we’re doing,  (either by clicking on the link or by scanning the QR code on this post).

    Whilst I’m sure that there will be many people supporting us, I’m equally convinced that there are some things we could do better. With that in mind, if you have feedback that might help us provide better insights and add more value through this blog, then please do leave a comment – we really would like to know what you think.

    Thank you for all of your support.

    [This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

  • Souping up SyncToy

    I used to back up my work PC to a set of Virtual Hard Disk (.VHD) files until one day I needed to recover from a failure, and I found that the hard drive encryption software we use prevented me from running a restore. That forced me to find another solution and one of my ReadyNAS devices (sadly not the one that recently suffered two disk failures on the same RAID 1 volume, taking with it a big chunk of my data) is now dedicated to backing up my work PC, with a regular file copy taking place.

    I have a drive mapped to a share on the NAS and the command line version of Microsoft’s SyncToy tool (synctoycmd.exe) is set to run as a scheduled task every evening at 10pm. Then, at 11pm, the NAS powers down until 8am the next day. The idea is that, as long as my PC is connected to my home network, it backs up all of the important files, at a time by which I should have stopped working.

    Unfortunately I’m not convinced that it’s working as it should be – just because the Windows 7 Task Scheduler tells me that the task completed doesn’t mean that SyncToy ran successfully (incidentally, if you are having problems with SyncToy on Windows 7, this thread might help).  I was googling for a solution and came across eXDee’s batch files (sometimes the old ways are the best) to check for network connectivity, presence of the appropriate volume and then run synctoycmd.exe, recording a log file on the way. Bingo.

    So, here are my versions (only minor updates from eXDee’s originals), called each night from Task Scheduler and a simple check of the lastsync.log file should tell me whether the backup worked or not.

    Incidentally, don’t be fooled (as I was) by the synctoycmd.exe output that says it saved time by not copying any files. That’s the output from the preview run and there is a long period after this during which there are no status updates whilst the actual file copies take place.

    synctoy.bat

    This is the control file, to be called from Task Scheduler or run manually from the command line:
    @echo off
    title SyncToy run in progress…
    echo Attempting file sync. Please wait…
    sync.bat >lastsync.log

    sync.bat

    This is the file that checks for the presence of my NAS and for a mapped drive before it backs up my data. You’ll need to subsititue your own IP address but I’m particularly impressed by eXDee’s code to look for a TTL rather than a ping success/failure (smart move). Note I haven’t mapped a drive if the connection is not there, although that is a possible enhancement:
    @echo off
    echo SyncToy Log starting at
    time /T
    date /T
    echo ##############################################
    echo Checking connection to NAS…
    echo ##############################################
    PING -n 2 -w 10 192.168.1.14 |find “TTL=” && goto NAS
    goto PINGFAIL

    :NAS
    echo ##############################################
    echo NAS is online. Checking for share…
    if exist “F:\Synced with Company PC\” goto SYNC
    goto NASFAIL

    :SYNC
    echo ##############################################
    echo Drive is mapped. Begin syncing files…
    echo ##############################################
    cd “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\”
    SyncToyCmd.exe -R
    if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto SUCCESS
    goto SYNCFAIL

    :PINGFAIL
    echo ##############################################
    echo NAS not found. Exiting
    goto END

    :NASFAIL
    echo ##############################################
    echo Share not found. Exiting
    goto END

    :SUCCESS
    echo ##############################################
    echo Synctoy finished successfully. Exiting
    goto END

    :SYNCFAIL
    echo ##############################################
    echo Synctoy Failed. Exiting
    goto END

    :END
    echo ##############################################
    echo Synctoy Log ending at
    time /T
    date /T

    lastsync.log

    An example of a run (the failures were down to file access, rather than any issue with the scripts):

    SyncToy Log starting at
    21:00
    08/11/2011
    ##############################################
    Checking connection to NAS…
    ##############################################
    Reply from 192.168.1.14: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=64
    Reply from 192.168.1.14: bytes=32 time=39ms TTL=64
    ##############################################
    NAS is online. Checking for share…
    ##############################################
    Drive is mapped. Begin syncing files…
    ##############################################
    Preview of Work Folder Backup (C:\Users\markw\Documents\Work\, F:\Synced with company PC\Work\) in time 00:03:08:253.
    SyncToy action was ‘Echo’
    Found 2 actions to perform.
    Found 47,158 files that did not require action.
    Analyzed 250.5 files per second.
    Avoided copying 135,013,767,205 bytes in 47,158 files.
    Saved approximately 03:00:27:00 by not copying any files.

    SyncToy run of Work Folder Backup (C:\Users\markw\Documents\Work\, F:\Synced with company PC\Work\) completed at 08/11/2011 21:03:27.
    SyncToy action was ‘Echo’.
    SyncToy options were:
    Active for run all
    All files included
    No files excluded
    Do not check file contents
    Include read-only files
    Include hidden files
    Include system files
    Backup older files (send to Recycle Bin)
    All subfolders included
    SyncToy run took 00:00:00:610.
    Copied 5,932,607,488 bytes in 2 files in 00:00:00:610.
    Bytes per second 9,725,586,045.9, files per second 3.3.
    Avoided copying 135,013,767,205 bytes in 47,158 files that did not require action.
    Saved approximately 00:00:13:882 by not copying all files.
    Warning: 4 failures occured.
    You can retry by selecting “Run” again or select “Preview” to see
    the operations that remain to be performed.

    The Sync operation completed successfully on folder pair ‘Work Folder Backup’ but some files were skipped. Please look at the logs for more details.
    ##############################################
    Synctoy Failed. Exiting
    ##############################################
    Synctoy Log ending at
    21:03
    08/11/2011