noble musings

I've been working with Andrew Westgarth, who runs the VBUG Newcastle events, to try to provide IT Pro (i.e. sys admin) content as well as their traditional developer events. The idea is that we'll run free developer and IT Pro events alternate months on the Newcastle University campus.

The first of the IT Pro events will be held on the 24th March in Claremont Tower and I will be presenting "Windows PowerShell: 0-60 in One Evening". The presentation will highlight a number of free tools to help you get up to speed quickly with PowerShell.

All the details are on the VBUG site at:
http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/March-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTLE-Windows-PowerShell-060-in-One-Evening-with-Jonathan-Noble.aspx

If you'd like to come along, please book your free place through the VBUG site (just so we don't run short of refreshments).

I know that I’m a sporadic blogger at best, but I’ve been more sporadic than usual this year. You more than likely haven’t been losing sleep wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to, but here it is anyway. Frankly, I’ve got a baby who, although well behaved, takes up a lot of time when I’m not doing my day job, but that hasn’t been enough to stop me taking big gulps from the firehose of life! ;-)

Tweeter Tags

I’m very much sold on Twitter (I’d love for you to follow @jonoble) and I’ve made quite a few friends locally who I may not have otherwise met if not for the service. In discussing Twitter with those friends, we decided that we’d been quite lucky to find each other as Twitter doesn’t make it particularly easy to find like-minded people. From those sorts of conversations, we built Tweeter Tags. The first meeting that we had was on 28th December (which was actually the first time that all of the team of 4 had met) and by 5th February we’d taken version 1 of the site into public beta.

Tweeter Tags basically lets you add tags (they can be whatever you want) to your Twitter account. You can browse through the tags, see who else has added them, see what other tags those people have added and then follow them on Twitter. “Why would you want to do that?” – I can hear the uninitiated among you ask; well it’s simple really…

Twitter may be labelled as a “micro-blogging” platform, but I prefer to describe it as “broadcast IM” – like Instant Messaging, but where other people can see the conversation and join in. Like any conversation, it flows better and you gain more from it if you have things in common with the other parties. That’s what we’re trying to enable.

If you’re already using Twitter, it only takes a moment to sign up to TweeterTags.com and tag yourself. We’ve got a bunch of new features planned for the site in the near future, so follow @TweeterTags and add blog.tweetertags.com to your RSS reader to keep up to date.

PowerShell Presentations and Podcast Interview

Last month I went down to Microsoft’s London office at Cardinal Place to a TechNet event where James O’Neill and Richard Siddaway were talking about PowerShell V2. Following on from that, I sat down with Jonathan Medd for a very enjoyable interview for the Get-Scripting podcast, where we talked about Tech·Ed, why PowerShell and its community are so great, and Tweeter Tags.

In the evening Richard had arranged a meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group where I did a presentation entitled “Hitting Moving Targets with PowerShell”. In fairness, the title was more snappy than the presentation because some initial technical glitches with Live Meeting (it was streaming live online too) meant that I had to sit in front of my laptop to drive what people were seeing and talk into James’ for the online audio. I still think it went pretty well though.

I spent most of the time talking about the PowerShell scripts that I use to manage bits of the Windows Infrastructure at Newcastle University, but I’d put a couple of slides and a demo in at the end to talk about using PowerShell with Twitter* and Tweeter Tags. Funnily enough, in the pizza break afterwards that was nearly all that people wanted to talk to me about! I’ve put the slide deck on SkyDrive if you’re interested.

* James subsequently wrote an excellent post about PowerShelling Twitter, which included this fantastic Hugh MacLeod cartoon:

Back in Newcastle, I did an introduction to PowerShell at the February Super Mondays meeting. I’m definitely a fan of Super Mondays – monthly IT community events held on the University campus, which cover a range of topics by the members of that community. I only had a short time, so this one was all demo. I used the Start-Demo script from the PowerShell Team Blog to run through a demo file (which I have put, along with supporting files, in my SkyDrive Public folder). I’ve got to say that I really enjoyed presenting and listening to content from the event. If future months are half as good the Super Mondays crowd will just keep on growing.

The very next day, I was on campus late again for a meeting of VBUG Newcastle, where Eric Nelson presented on Parallel Development with .NET 4.0. I’m working with Andrew Westgarth from VBUG to put on user group events in for developers (his area) and IT Professionals (mine). I’ll have more to say about that in another post very soon!

I’ll be at these two events next week on the Newcastle University campus. If you’re in the area, come along – they’re both free…

I will be preseting a brief introduction to Windows PowerShell at this month's Super Mondays event in the Beehive (Old Library Building) on the 23rd at 18:00. These events are growing rapidly and well worth attending - the topics are usually diverse enough that there should be something of interest to everyone. See SuperMondays.org for the full line-up and the Upcoming link if you're attending. I hope to see you there.

The postponed VBUG Newcastle developer event on "Parallel Programming in .NET (VS2010)" with Eric Nelson has now been rearranged for Tuesday 24th February at 18:30 in Claremont Tower room 118. Sign up at:
http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/February-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTLE-REARRANGED--Parallel-programming-in-NET-VS2010-with-Eric-Nels.aspx

So, I’ve been using the Windows 7 Beta for all of about 4 days, although I do now have it on 3 computers (64-bit desktop, 64-bit laptop, 32-bit netbook), so that’s enough experience to list a few things that I like. In the interests of balance, I’ll write a list of things I don’t like too. I’ll keep updating the lists as time goes on. Anyway, things I like about Windows 7, in no particular order…

• It’s faster than Vista on the same hardware.
• You can burn iso files to dvd without 3rd party software.
• The application previews from the taskbar are handy.
• Remote Desktop supports multiple monitors.
• When you copy a file, the Windows Explorer icon in the taskbar becomes a progress bar.
• When you download a file in IE, the IE icon in the taskbar becomes a progress bar.
• Context-sensitive menus on taskbar icons (eg. right-click IE and you get the history, Explorer lists frequently opened folders, Live Messenger provides a list of tasks).
• The same context-sensitive options are on the Start Menu (only on the first level though, not in All Programs)
• The taskbar groups multiple IE tabs and windows as though they were all separate windows, so I don’t need to remember which window a particular tab is in (Paul Thurrott doesn’t like this and he’s used it longer than me, so we’ll see if I change my mind over time).
• New shortcuts: Windows key + cursor keys maximize/restore/minimize or pin to left/right sides of screen. Windows key + Left or Right twice to move a window between multiple monitors.
• Windows Media Player has codec support for XviD files.
• Lower impact UAC (you’re still protected, but you’re less annoyed!)
• HomeGroup makes sharing resources (files/media/printers) across a home network a doddle.
• Neater interface for wireless networking, and to VPN connections over wireless.
• I initially forgot to add this to the list because I’m already used to it as my top Windows 7 feature – PowerShell v2.0 is installed and on by default, with the very nice Integrated Scripting Environment!
• Running an app from the taskbar with elevated rights by holding ctrl+shift while clicking it (this is brilliant!).

More to come (hopefully!)…

Incidentally, Tim Sneath has published a Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets which is definitely worth reading, as is the Ars Technica In-Depth Tour that he links to.

It’s pretty much a given that Microsoft doesn’t like the fact that they’ve had to do deals to get Windows XP put on new machines in order to keep a foothold in the rapidly growing netbook market. I’ve been happily using Vista since beta, but then I’ve been using it on a very beefy desktop machine and wouldn’t dream of putting it on a lower spec’ed device – neither would any of the netbook manufacturers! Windows 7 was always going to be a tighter version of Vista, and it’s clear that Microsoft wanted to make sure that it would be suitable for running on netbooks.

After looking at the available options, I got hold of an Asus Eee PC 901 a few months back, with a view to upgrading it to Windows 7 when it became available. So far I’m pretty pleased with the results, and I know that I can get it to perform even better (although I’m not going to invest that time until the OS is finished). In fact, I took the path of least resistance here – I’m sure plenty of people would say this isn’t the right way to install it, but then this is a beta, so a temporary situation anyway.

I’d already upgraded the RAM in my 901 from 1gig to 2 gigs, which was a good value upgrade at around 21 pounds from Amazon Marketplace. I’d also got an 8gig SDHC card in the 901’s SD slot that I was using for removable storage, but since Windows 7 can use any removable storage for ReadyBoost as long as it’s quick enough (my card is Class 6 SDHC, which is as fast as they currently get), I’d planned to use this to improve the performance. Looking at Amazon today, you can buy those two items together for just over 30 pounds, so we’re not talking huge expense.

I had access to a USB DVD drive in the office, so it was easy enough to burn the Windows 7 Beta iso that I’d downloaded through my TechNet Plus subscription. [Side note: I’d already installed Windows 7 x64 on my desktop, so when I downloaded the 32-bit version to go on my netbook, I was able to use 7’s new ability to natively burn an iso image to a dvd – handy!] If you don’t have access to a USB DVD drive, Gary Short’s blog goes though the steps he took to make a bootable USB flash drive to install W7 from. The installation process is pretty quick, but here’s where I had to compromise…

The Eee PC 901 that I have is the Linux version which is advertised as having a 20gb SSD (Solid State Drive). In actual fact it has 2 SSDs, a high speed 4gig drive which is soldered onto the motherboard, and a 16gig drive which is user swappable (in the panel on the bottom which also houses the RAM). Without using a tool like vlite to shrink down the installation (by removing features, many of which you would never need, like support for other languages) Windows 7 needs more than 4gigs for the installation. However, in order to keep the costs down (this is a cheap machine after all), the 16gig SSD that Asus put in the device is significantly slower, and you usually wouldn’t want to run your OS from it.

Anyway, taking the path of least resistance, and accepting that performance may be sluggish, I went ahead and installed Windows 7 Beta on the 16gig SSD (after deleting the current partitions and creating new ones for both SSDs, formatted with NTFS).

I did encounter a problem in the installation procedure, in that the screen went black for a period of time and I couldn’t see what was going on. This meant that I couldn’t see when the setup was asking me to input the name of the user account that it would setup as administrator. I had thought that the machine had gone to sleep, so I’d been hitting a combination of keys that I thought might wake it up (like Enter and Space). Seemingly this was sufficient for the setup process to complete, giving me a username of ‘1’ and a computer name of ‘PC’. Had I done more research ahead of time, I might’ve read: If you have an EeePC 901 Linux/Windows edition, please make sure you are using bios version 1001 or 1101.  Not doing so will render the installation procedure and login screen black out. If you’re reading this having not made sure you’re on those firmware versions, this is the way around it – briefly press the power button so the Eee PC does go to sleep, then press it again to wake the machine up and you should have a fully visible display.

Once the installation completed, I logged in, and in fairness it was useable, but not great. So I took steps to speed it up.

First, moving the page file to the faster 4gig SSD by going into Advanced System Settings (open the Start Menu and start typing “View advanced system settings”, you’ll only need to go as far as “View ad” before it finds it); under Performance, click Settings; on the Advanced tab, under “Virtual memory”, click Change. You need to make sure “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” is unchecked, assuming your C: drive is the 16gig SSD and D: is the 4, you need to set the paging file size on D: to System managed (so they both are), then reboot the system before going back in and changing the paging file size on C: to “No paging file” and rebooting again. This will create a big file on D: and free up the equivalent space on C:. It also makes the machine quicker.

Secondly, I popped in the SDHC card and selected the option to speed up my system using ReadyBoost. I took the default settings here, which created a ReadyBoost file on my card of 4gb (leaving me with another 4 to use for files, which is fine for me – you might want to get a bigger card).

This gave me a working Windows 7 machine, with Aero Glass visuals(!), but with no networking. I simply installed the LAN and wifi drivers that Asus provides for Windows XP on the 901 on and everything was fine. I’ve got Windows Live Essentials installed; Skype 4.0 Beta 3 working (including video calls with the built-in webcam); PowerShell is happily included; and I can run all of those things at once as well as playing an episode of Sarah Connor Chronicles, full-screen, in Media Player. I still have plenty room on the drive to install Office, but I haven’t got round to it yet.

Even though I’m using the slower SSD as a system disk, it gives perfectly acceptable performance, and I’ll look to replace that SSD with a faster, larger one before Windows 7 RTMs. I do think that when netbooks start shipping with Windows 7 installed, people are going to like the experience.

[UPDATE] I’ve started posting about the Things I like about Windows 7. I’ve also been tweeting about Windows 7 on Twitter, so you might want to follow me there.

If you're in the UK, here's something to look forward to and take your mind off the declining value of your pounds!

On the afternoon of 10th February, Microsoft's James O'Neill will present a TechNet event entitled Managing Windows Servers with PowerShell V2 at Microsoft's Cardinal Place offices (near Victoria station). James really knows his PowerShell, so that should be enough to entice the IT Pros along, but that's not all...

I've been talking to Richard Siddaway of the UK PowerShell User Group, and he's arranged a User Group meeting to follow the TechNet event, which is going to feature a modest presentation by me! (That's phase one of my attempt to under-promise, over-deliver!)

This is the first time that I'll have been able to attend the UG in person, so I'm really looking forward to meeting as many people as possible there. Hope you can make it!

It seems that the update to Live Spaces (which I generally welcome as a good thing) has resulted in a load of stuff appearing in the main RSS feed for my Space that I didn’t want in there and you probably didn’t want to read. Sorry about that, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I’d recommend to anyone that rather than subscribe to the feed for the whole Space, you just subscribe to the blog feed:

http://jonoble.spaces.live.com/blog/feed.rss

Or, if you’re only interested in my PowerShell posts, there’s a specific feed for items that I tag in that category:

http://jonoble.spaces.live.com/category/powershell/feed.rss

If you’re reading this with no idea what this talk of feeds and RSS is; I suggest you check out Google Reader.

I posted about the update to SkyDrive on my work team blog, and I’ve been looking forward to the new features there, but the Windows Live people haven't just been busy with SkyDrive. They've just launched a load of updates and new online services. home.live.com ties all of your existing Windows Live services together (such as Spaces, SkyDrive, Hotmail and Events) and they've added Groups, Photos and Windows Live Profile.

Check out the Windows Live Team Blog for the details.

We’ve just had an issue where we needed to know the GUID of a mailbox database on an Exchange 2003 server (in order to make a registry tweak in a hive named with the GUID and nothing which indicates the friendly name).

With Exchange 2007 it’s easy to do this using the Get-MailboxDatabase PowerShell cmdlet in the Exchange Management Shell:

Get-MailboxDatabase "Ex07Server\Storage Group 1\Mailbox Database 1" | Select Guid

However, if you try to do this against a database on Exchange 2003, you get an error from Get-MailboxDatabase saying the server is running Microsoft Exchange 2003 or earlier, which it doesn’t support.

You can use the Get-Mailbox cmdlet against an Exchange 2003 server though. This returns an object of the type Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.Management.Mailbox and it has a Database property. If you output this property, using a formatting cmdlet on the Get-Mailbox, you’ll get the name of the database, but looking closer with Get-Member reveals that the Database property is not just the name, but an object, which you can get at with this:

(get-mailbox -database "Ex03Server\Storage Group 1\Mailbox Database 1" | select -first 1).database

This doesn’t give you quite as much as Get-MailboxDatabase does for an Exchange 2007 database, but it does include an ObjectGuid property, which was exactly what we needed to identify the correct hive in the registry on the Exchange 2003 server.