Alice Kærast

Windows 7 SP1 is expected to be released late 2010/early 2011.  We’re not expecting any new features, and so whilst we ordinarily recommend waiting until the first service pack before starting to use any Microsoft product we strongly believe that Windows 7 is ready for use now.  It’s certainly a lot nicer than Vista and has similar performance to XP but with lots of extra features.  To gain the full featureset you need at least professional and a Windows 2008R2 server, but even without it’s still well worth the upgrade.

Windows 7 has been written about in great detail, but if you need some more reasons on why it’s worth upgrading to then here’s a few to take a look at:

• Open Search integration, together with Windows Search Server Express
• User Access Control – whilst Vista added this, Windows 7 makes it less annoying and therefore worth using.  Always log in to your Windows 7 machine as a regular user, and when you need to do something unusual it’ll ask you to enter an admin password.  This vastly reduces the number of drive-by malware infections (presuming you don’t just enter your password everytime you are asked)
• Bitlocker, enforceable using Group Policy, means that you can deny writing to USB devices without encryption. (not available on all versions, and requires Server 2008R2)
• Applocker – stop users from running certain applications.  Whilst this has been available for a long time, Applocker in Windows 7 makes it usable.  You can trust all software from Microsoft, any version of Adobe Reader greater than 9.3 and deny flash whatever version it is.
• Problem steps recorder lets users record a video of what they did to cause a problem and then send it to the helpdesk.  Previously you could use remote assistance to watch the user cause the problem, but now you can receive the video and watch it whilst drinking a coffee instead of staying on the phone to the customer.
• XP Mode (pro and enterprise, can be made to work in other versions) creates a virtual machine for running software which isn’t compatible with Windows 7 or isn’t compatible with other software running on your machine.  It uses virtual machines and RDP but is completely transparent to the end-user who thinks they are just running the application directly.  Another use for this is to publish applications, instead of installing them on a machine on first-use (which takes time and can cause conflicts) you just run them from a published virtual machine.
• Internet Explorer 8 when used on Windows 7 can be made to be very secure, with a locked-down mode allowing only access to a temp folder

Internet Explorer 9 is expected to be released at some point in 2010.  It will have better performance, particularly in its Javascript rendering which will make Ajax websites run much smoother.  It will use hardware accelerated graphics, which not only adds to the increased performance but looks much better.  Finally it will support most of HTML5, although not completely.

Small Business Server still remains a powerful offering to small businesses, but Essential Business Server is a relatively new addition which allows for between 50 and 300 users whilst Home Server can be used by very small companies with low technology requirements.

Home Server provides you with file storage, full image backups of desktops and Terminal Server Gateway and is built on Windows 2003.  It obviously doesn’t provide you with Domains or Active Directory, but it may be enough for you.  A new version is expected late 2010 which will be based on 2008R2.

Office 2010’s main selling point is better integration.  The ribbon has made it to all applications including Access, Outlook and Sharepoint.  Excel gets sparklines, Word gets collaborative editing (though can’t beat Etherpad or Google Docs yet), but the real changes are in Sharepoint which sees much better integration with everything.  If you aren’t already using Sharepoint then give WSS3 (a free download) a spin to see if it suits your business.

Exchange 2010, which is out now, adds some really impressive scalability improvements.  Continuous availability is a key feature, meaning users always have access to their mailboxes despite any backend work which may be taking place.  A Client Access middle tier is added, so you can have several CA servers which do caching and the real Exchange server will see very little traffic.  Outlook Web Access is much richer, introducing mail tips which alert you before sending an email to things like Out of Office statuses and sending documents outside of your domain.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2010 is due out towards the end of this year.  It provides voip, collaboration and instant messaging integrated into Microsoft Office.  Presence is a key addition, and means that the server can always know where you are.  Whilst this may seem creepy, and for many will introduce privacy concerns, the things you can do with it are really impressive.  For starters, you can have a single phone number which follows you wherever you are, but you can also integrate it into all your other Microsoft products.  Automated tasks can be sent only to people who are currently in the office, when receiving an email you can see if the person is available to phone back, important emails can be sent to you by sms or TTS when you are in your car.

Commerce Server 2009 was released last year, an e-commerce solution allowing you to sell your products online and link in to all of your other Microsoft software.

CRM and Dynamics makes developing applications for business intelligence much easier.  This, together with much of the new Visual Studio and .Net features are perhaps not of interest to most small businesses, so contact us if you need to know more.

Hyper V 2.0 introduced in Windows 2008R2 makes virtualisation much nicer, though still needs extra management tools to make it usable.  HyperV on it’s own is not a competitor to Vmware, HyperV with management tools is what you should be comparing and it’s a close-call on which would be better for your business – though HyperV is probably best if you need to do anything beyond the basics.

Desktop Virtualisation has come a long way, and is seriously worth looking at, but needs serious consideration as to whether it is right for your business.  When considering TCO, you need to consider what business benefits it gives you and also whether the lower hardware specs of the desktops means a reduced risk of theft.

MS Forefront is Microsoft’s new security system, based on the Stirling Wave.  It means that anti-virus software on the gateway, mail server and desktops all talk to each other.  If the gateway detects a large number of outgoing emails from a certain machine it can automatically tell that machine to run a full virus scan.  Again, worth looking at but also consider the requirements to get it running.

Microsoft SQL 2008 was capable of managing databases upto 7Tb but 2008R2 increased that to 10-30Tb depending on the hardware, Dell and HP are now offering custom MS-SQL hardware which is worth considering for very large databases.  Ms SQL 2010 is due out in the first half of the year and will allow for large MS SQL server farms for databases of over 100 Tb (or you could just use Azure).  Perhaps the most important offering in MS SQL 2008R2 and 2010 though is the self-service business intelligence and reporting which means that IT pros can get the information they want without having to talk to developers.

Whenever I come to test a new programming language, my application of choice is a simple in/out board.  The data storage is simple enough to not (usually) require particularly advanced database functionality, and there’s some level of network communications happening to share the data.

Today I developed this application in PHP-GTK2 with a CouchDB backend, neither of which I had used before and so most of the time spend developing was learning the intricacies of the two.  And I have to say that PHP-GTK2 is not something I plan on using again, whilst CouchDB definitely is.

The problems with PHP-GTK2 started before I began programming, php5-gtk2 is not available in the standard Ubuntu repositories and so getting a PHP-GTK2 application used on Ubuntu machines would not be easy.  You need to either compile it yourself or add a third-party repository, neither of which you want to do just to test some new software.  And even once it is installed you then need to edit php.ini.

Moving on, the documentation for PHP-GTK2 is fairly non-existent and so simple tasks like reading values of text boxes was problematic and displaying a table of data is something I gave up on.  Now I’m starting to understand the peculiarities it’s becoming an awful lot easier to use, and it is the first Linux gui-based development environment I’ve used so I’ve little to compare it to.

CouchDB in comparison was incredibly easy to get going with.  Aptitude install couchdb was all I needed to have a locally running server, then with the right PHP libraries (unfortunately not in aptitude) I could access databases in just a few lines of code.  It definitely helped to have heard Lorna Jane speak on working with web services recently, but even so CouchDB is really simple up until you need to start using Views.  They’re not quite so easy in that they involve some JSON and Javascript, but a short time spent reading the wiki or watching somebody create a view will set you going in the right direction.

So after an afternoon of mostly learning and a little coding I’m left with some code to set your in/out status and to view the in/out status of everybody else.  I’ll be implementing a C# version of this at some point soon both in order to say I’ve implemented something useful in C# and to have a working version for some clients we’re currently building a network for.  I then want to play with CouchDB replication and get Cobol talking CouchDB.

Finally, @couchdb on twitter is responsive and definitely worth following if you’re working with CouchDB.

Much has been discussed recently about how we are becoming cyborgs merely by the fact that we are connected to others through the internet.  Our keyboards and screens are our connections to the collective and the social networking sites we are members of are our filters to the wider internet.  The more connected we become, the more withdrawal symptoms we face when we are disconnected.  It becomes difficult to become removed from the collective not because we are addicted to the internet in itself, and not because we miss the people we connect to through it (we can always phone or visit them) but because those people we connect to provide us with something more.

The people we connect to online become not just friends and colleagues they become an extra pair of eyes, ears, minds and memories.  The information coming through 100 people we follow on Twitter is as though it came from us.  It is stored in collective memory, and if it isn’t cached locally (in your own brain) it is still available in somebody else’s brain or on the network itself.  It is filtered by the person posting it, which if our local network is fully trusted, avoids the necessity to filter it ourselves.  Even if out network isn’t fully trusted, most of the content coming in through it is unlikely to be malicious and so simple rather than complete filtering can be used.

There is of course also more raw information and data online which we as individuals seek out and then share with the network.  Here it is us that is doing the filtering and initial processing, which others then accept more readily than if had come from some unknown source.  It is important not to abuse this trust, otherwise we get become disconnected from the network.  Where computer networks suffer from viruses, and biological networks (close friends, perhaps even sharing bodily fluids) suffer from disease and infection, the social or cyborg network suffers from memes.  Because each one of us is more trusted than the wider internet, the memes we bring are more readily accepted and reproduce more easily.  These memes can be be benign ideas and statements, or they can be something more politically and culturally changing.

Our networks will have formed by finding people harboring and sharing certain types of memes, which along with the fact that nodes on our network are more trusted than other nodes on the internet, means we become particularly susceptible to new memes introduced by members of our network.  For example it has often been stated that kanban software development is catching, and that when one person or group start using it other close by groups do too.  This isn’t just because kanban is a great tool for software development (though obviously I’m biased) it’s because a tool (or meme) introduced by trusted network members is far less likely to be rejected than a tool introduced from elsewhere.

Now that we understand the transfer of memes throughout our network better we can more readily control them.  By taking measures to remove network members introducing bad (or even malicious) memes we protect not only ourselves but the rest of the network that connect to us.  By understanding how the transfer of memes work we can start introducing good memes, those that improve ourselves and society as a whole, and have them more easily accepted. It has been said that Moore’s Law still continues to hold true not because of some inherent physical properties of silicon, but because we believe it to still hold true and therefore work towards keeping it going; imagine if we believed, and I mean really really believed, that society would continue to exponentially improve.

Bibliography

• I, Internet – We are more Borg than we thought
• Weaponizing Cultural Viruses – A manual for engaged memetic resistance on the front lines of the culture wars
• Playing with the Built City
• Cybernetic Cannibalism – Why is Brazil the country of the future

Today I begin Mission 101 aka Day Zero Project.  Over the next 1001 days I will be aiming to complete a list of 101 things that I have been deliberating over ever since @101ofawolf gave a presentation on this at Barcamp Bradford.  I’m still not completely happy with my list, having removed an awful lot of stuff to get it down to size, but today is the day I’d been aiming to start on and so I’m rolling with it.

This morning I left the house with the aim of making a start on #76 – “visit 5 new parks”.  On the way I passed some new apartments which, although inconveniently located and overpriced, I had a look at and so began #7 – “move house”.  It’s still going to be many months before I can actually move – but it’s good to be thinking about it early.

It turns out that the new park I was aiming for, Northcliffe, is far more than just the little park it looks like from the main road.  It’s a beautiful wooded valley, a meadow with views over the Aire Valley, and there is a miniature railway there.  I think it’s big enough to count as countryside, so I’m working towards #74 – “Visit the countryside every week for two months”.  I failed to find the rumoured caves, but otherwise thoroughly enjoyed a beautiful hidden place which is just a mile from home.

I’ve a feeling this is going to be a good year.