Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD

More pictures of the HDD's with the platters showing ;-)

Good news around a sad subject. But an amazing data recovery that led to completion of a physics experiment.

This may be showing up on MyITForum now, so, howdy and I hope as I blog I hit a subject that interests you :-)

Managing, and collecting Asset information is a very important process for any business, small or large. And to get that job done, there are quite a few tools to choose from. Here I’m focusing on a product from Snowsoft called Snow Inventory to do the job. It’s quite a configurable asset information collection tool, but that’s not it’s only purpose in life. Using the software metering and application presence information from Snow Inventory, it can be used to under-pin another Snowsoft tool called License Manager, to give you rich licensing management capabilities. The Snow License Manager I’ll review another day, but now let’s get on with the review of Snow Inventory.

The whitepaper is probably the definitive place to source from. And it essentially says that this is an enterprise class tool that allows you to communicate with a desktop client in agent or agent-less modes , and using configuration policies and scheduling it can retrieve system information, perform software metering and restrict application execution. While all the data communications are done in an encrypted form. Bit of a mouth full, but essentially it covers a broad range of duties. All of this is easily managed in a console, which can be secured with a role-based design for the various levels of usage required in your environment.

Let’s start with what’s given to you, and what’s needed:

The installation documentation covers all the bases, and helps describe the installation from start to finish in good enough detail.

The Back-end requirements

Database:                            SQL2000 SP4, SWL 2005 Std Edition or MSDE (bundled)

                                             If installed, then SQL needs to be running in Mixed Mode

Server:                                 Windows Server 2000 SP4 or Windows Server 2003 SP1

Admin Console:                   Windows 2003, XP or 2000

Agent Client OS:                  Windows 95 to Windows Vista

                                            Client can operate in Agent and Agent-less modes

        It also says that currently the agent is unable to retrieve some inventory information on Windows Vista. However the vendor is about to release (within weeks) a patch to resolve this issue.

Installing the product

Snows Inventory Installation on the server is straight forward, with a very flexible requirements list. The only issue you’ll probably have is the need to add firewall rules to allow 19730 (to server) and 19732 (to client) port usage by clients and the Inventory server if portions of your IP network are segmented by firewalls. The port that the clients listen on can be changed, from within the console, but the port that the server listens on needs to be changed in a configuration file outside of the console.

The built-in help documentation is quite clear, and offers up a lot of detail.

If you’ve already installed SQL, then during setup you can choose to use the local instance. Alternatively, and giving you some flexibility, if SQL is not available locally then a remote instance can be specified, or, as a fallback MSDE 2000 will be installed locally.

Once the SQL wizard has been completed, the rest of the installation begins with the usual line up of questions such as Serial, Installation Path, and a prompt to enter a unique Snow Inventory Administrator login password (SQL Login). Finally, at the tail end of the installation you’re asked if you want to install the Inventory Agent on this machine.

The installation wizard defaults to using the SQL SA login credentials, but I’d say it’s not really a good idea to put a dependency on the SA login account . Depends on how twitchy you are to using known account names. I’m always trying to remove dependencies and not introduce them in an environment.  So, I created a new SQL account (for example called Snowsoft) and granted it the same rights as SA then installed under those credentials. Ideally this new SQL login shouldn’t need that level of access, but there is no mention of what rights are required; And, to continue with the review I just cloned the permissions. From what I’m told by the vendor, they use SA because of the advanced tasks Snow Inventory performs on the database, but this should be securable. Maybe nudge Snowsoft for some documentation on how to do it if you don’t want to use SA and, want to tighten a new accounts permissions.

Ok, the products installed, and first time use fires off a wizard that creates two shares on the server called SOFTINV and SOFTINV$ to hold client and configuration data. The wizard brings up the File System MMC snap-in and requires you to manually set the permissions of these two shares so that Everyone has full control on both the Share permission and the NTFS permissions. 

Client installation options

Management of the Inventory Agent client is done well using a built-in deployment solution. Casting the Inventory Agent out in to the environment as agent or agent-less is straight-forward and easy to do, with updates to the Agent or the configuration files all managed very easily. You can either use your currently logged in account, or specify a domain account that has local administrator permissions on the target to be able to deploy the client.

You can install the agent manually, through logon scripts or via the Snow Inventory Administrator Console. Manual installation of the client reveals how well thought out it is. You tell the agent using start-up parameters to Install, Uninstall, Update, Scan, Stop and Start. There are more options available, allowing you to perform an agent-less inventory without an installation, but this pretty much covers the installation methods and how to control the client once it’s installed on the target.

As I said above, you don’t actually need to install the Inventory Agent on the target machine to get an inventory report back, which is a nice feature. But, using the Inventory Agent in agent-less mode limits what can be done. So you get the most value from installing the Inventory Agent on the target as a service.

Using the Snow Inventory console, you can scan for machines and install the client with not much effort. Scanning can be performed on all domains, a single domain or via an IP Range. The results returned can then be used to deploy the client. I am quite impressed with the management of the agent on target machines. To clean up, you can remove a computer from the database, using the Delete button, but I didn’t see this uninstall the agent on the chosen machine. I would have loved to have seen this process de-install or schedule a de-installation of the agent to complete the client lifecycle process. It’s certainly by no means a show-stopper. But currently, you’d have to manipulate the computer outside of the Inventory console to achieve this.

Client Configuration options

The product comes with a pre-configured Client Configuration profile that acts as the default profile describing what should be inventoried, what features are enabled and a host of other things aside. This can easily be edited to your heart’s content, or you can start from scratch to easily make more configurations profiles. These profiles expose the really cool features this product has to offer, and, as with the rest of the product there are always a heck of a lot of options to choose from, to hone the configuration profile down to your needs. Whenever I open a dialog or click an option I’m constantly surprised and reminded at how much you can do, and how much can be controlled. Ultimately these profiles are assigned by the administrator to machine groups that you define using filtering methods within the console.

These configuration settings, I’ll try to whisk through what you can achieve with them.

The guts of the product is asset information collection, thus the core feature. A lot of information can be collected, and It’s collection can be configured for either machine start-up, with a time delay allowing the user or machine to stabilise before commencing the scan, or Daily, Weekly  and Monthly. Scheduling can become quite granular, with the option to specify what time of the day for a daily scan, what time and day of the week for a weekly scan and which day of the month and what time for monthly scanning. On top of this you can also introduce random skew on start time by up to 1 hour. What’s more, before scanning begins, you can execute a command to perform any clean-up\prep work tasks. The information collected by the Inventory agent is sourced from places such as WMI, the registry and other providers of asset information. Well thought out.

What system information gets inventoried by the client is controlled by the inventory configuration, unselecting what you don’t want returned, or keeping everything selected. It also seems to handle Delta and Full reports from the client, including a full sync performed after a chosen amount of delta sync’s. The default is a Full report every 5th scan.

Software Metering is the next feature, and it’s activities can also be limited to a specific time window, with monitoring start and end times, and which days of the week the metering should be enabled. As you’d expect you can exclude drives, files and folders from monitoring by modifying the Metering filter. The metering data can be viewed from within the console via the Metering overview view.

Moving on, next up is Software scanning, which is given wider reach by allowing a full disk scan for either a delimited list of extensions or everything, rather than just scanning parts of the registry related to software installations or user profiles to pick up on what’s actually installed on the client.

The next feature gives you the ability to restrict application execution. You specify what folder the bad applications reside in, or the binary filename, or meta attributes from within the file (Product Name, Version, Manufacturer, Language) and the Inventory Agent will force the process “out of town” when the user or system attempts to start them. And, to stop any adventurous user who decides to rename the file or even strip out the versioning metadata you can specify the title of a window related to the application, which is usually difficult for a user to change, and have that forced out of town when it loads. You even get to customise the message displayed when this happens. That’s so neat.

Another novel feature is called Custom Forms. These allow you to produce a custom form which is presented to the user for location and asset related data retrieval. You can also collect custom data from the machines registry. This data is then exposed in the reports.

Client-side logging can be performed, and you can choose what kind of information is shown to the user, i.e. when the scan is running, error messages, restriction messages etc. So not only can the client be debugged via the logs, but you can get it to become verbose and display more information via the interface.

Finally you can specify when the client performs an agent file (hotfixes from vendor, new client version) or configuration file update (updated configuration), using granular scheduling identical to the scheduling available for Inventory Scanning. If you want the client to update immediately, then you are going to have to tell the agent to perform the update outside of the console. I’d like to see this as an option in the console, so I can force groups of clients to update their configuration settings or files, rather than waiting for their next update cycle to begin. But the reason you cannot do this inside the console is mostly to do with firewalls on the clients refusing an incoming connection. If you want to replace a configuration profile and get a report back on new information, you’re going to have to wait for the client update cycle to take place, or force the cycle by remotely telling the client(s) to perform  an –update. Not a big deal really, once the products installed and setup, you won’t need to change too much. And change is usually planned,  so you could probably accept that it could take a day or more for new information to trickle in.

Once the report has been generated by the client, it can be delivered back to the server via HTTP as the product has a built-in web server. But, beyond that you can, after satisfying certain requirements, get the inventory report to can be appended to a file, stored in a folder as a separate report or sent via Email. Very flexible methods for getting the data from the client back to the server. There are some caveats on what method you use, depending on the agent type being employed, due to how the client service runs as LOCAL SYSTEM and thus has no off-system rights to files\folders on a remote server. IIS is not used for HTTP, instead a custom web server is installed. Be nice to see integration with IIS in later revisions of this product.

Using Email to handle reports is quite a good idea. You can configure the Inventory server to contact the Mail server using  POP or IMAP to collect the reports which are sent via SMTP from the clients.

If you think about it, you could create profiles representing geographical or network locations, containing a close-by (in relation to the clients) SMTP server that the report should be sent back to, then assign it to a group of machines. This way, you could reduce the overhead of all these clients talking back to one server in one network\geographical location. So, using email is quite a cool feature, and allows the product to scale upwards, that is if you’ve deployed mail servers locally to your clients in terms of subnets\line speeds.

If you have machines you don’t want a full report from, or perhaps you want your configuration settings to differ from computer group to computer group, you could create new Configuration profiles then deploy them to select clients. Assigning these Configuration profiles can be done by hand by choosing machines, or by creating an Inventory Filter and filtering machines on any of the criteria being reported on, then assign the profile to those machines. It’s a very well thought out design, you are given a lot of control over what is being reported via these configuration profiles, and assigning these to machine groups is again a very easy task.

Snowsoft Inventory Administration

You can delegate the functionality of the product via roles which can be assigned to users you create via the console. These users can be either Domain accounts or SQL logins. You create new roles and they cover enough options to give you your traditional Management\Helpdesk \Operator\Admin roles, by granting or denying access to the products features.

The console provides a rich focal point for performing the tasks required to get the job done on a day to day basis. It’s also supported by a help system that gives an overview of what your currently looking at in the console.

There is no built-in Remote Control, instead Remote control is implemented by falling back on and invoking from within the console a list of known remote control products such as PC-Anywhere, VNC, Microsoft Remote Desktop etc.

Data Management

Now let’s cover the information this product collects, how to manage it and what you can do with it.

You’re view of the data coming in from the Inventory agents is the Inventory overview, which is built-in to the console. The way to change the view is to create Inventory filters. These filters are the nuts and bolts on scoping and displaying Inventory information. The filter allows you to choose from any of the inventory data being reported back to the server, as columns that will be displayed in the Inventory overview view. That’s how to display information from the database, but to scope it you use a pretty advanced query builder, that’s dead easy to use. With it, you can build complex queries for the filter to use when you’re looking for data. These filters make flicking back and forth between views of information easy. And once you’ve honed down the data you’re after, you can then use it to display a group of machines that you can assign a configuration profile too, export for reports, or perform other tasks on.

On top of all of this, you also get an Historical view, so you can see a full audit trail of what’s been changed on a machine.

I like the Inventory filters. It’s a nice implementation of reporting on the information the product is collecting.

Summary

I’ve gone over the core and most important aspects of the product, but some stuff has been left on the editors chopping room floor. But what’s not covered here, like every option in every dialog, is in the user and installation manuals. I’ve touched on almost all the core and most interesting aspects and given you an insight in to how manageable this all is via the Administrative Console.

It’s important for a product  to not make you work hard to get the best out it, and Snow Inventory makes managing and viewing asset information a breeze.  The administrator Console is well thought out, exposing practically everything available. A lot of thought has gone in to making this product as complete as possible when it comes to surfacing and collecting asset information, from both machines and users, and as a result I could definitely recommend this for small to large businesses.

Not much pain to integrate, and has enough reach out in terms of functionality to justify its inclusion in the environment.

If you don’t have SMS\ConfigMgr in your environment, then this is a one-stop shop for Asset information. I’d definitely recommend it.

However, if you do have SMS\ConfigMgr, and want some of the features this product offers, then you can tell the Inventory server to index the computer records based on a custom index key. This is important, as you can generate this custom key by collecting information from INI files, amongst other methods. So, you could in theory collect the SMS GUID from the SMSCFG.INI file on a client (depending on if the SMS\ConfigMgr agent is installed of course, but a bit of VBScript\Powershell glue could figure that out and deal with it) and use it as the index for the client record going in to the Snow Inventory database. In theory this would pave the way to programmatically get at the data in the Snow Inventory database with an already existing union between the databases, making exporting from Snowsoft Inventory by building MIFs that reference an existing SMS\ConfigMgr client a possibility. That is one way I thought of for moving data around if you needed too. Which is usually an important design point one should consider, when bringing another repository in to the environment.

You can see a lot of time has gone in to getting the product to where it is. And, as a result it was a real pleasure to review, it’ll be a shame to power off the VM, but in a few moments time I’ll drop the snapshot and get things ready to begin reviewing Snow Inventory’s big brother, Snow License Manager. Snow License Manager can integrate in to SMS\ConfigMgr to get asset information, or use Snow Inventory to do the same job. It’ll make for a great review!

You can find Snowsofts homepage here, to see the products and get hold of the PDF's.

I was pondering (like you do) how accessible report creation is in SMS2003.

It requires a few skills to be under-your-belt (SQL, SQL tools, areas in SMS) before you can master this subject enough to produce quality reports. And, well I was taught (back when I was a padawan, I eventually killed my master in true Star Wars Sith Lord fashion while he slept after a heavy nights SMS2003 SP3 troubleshooting, the old fool! ;-) a trick for creating reports that lined up my knowledge a bit more and helped kick-start my efforts in creating new and modifying existing reports.

In the linked document I talk about how to use SQL2000 Enterprise Manager and present some screenshots to help guide the novice along to the conclusion ... a complex (in that it uses a JOIN) report.

Here's the file description:

A word document (due to so many screenshots) showing how to easily create SQL2000 queries for use in SMS2003 Reporting

I get a lot of SQL query creation questions, so thought writing up a short document on how to use SQL2000 Enterprise Manager to build complicated (well reasonably) SQL queries would be helpful.

If you're experienced with SQL, then you won't learn much at all from this document. If you've shied away from writing SMS2003 Reports due to lack of SQL knowledge then this is a great aid to getting "skilled up" enough to put you on the path that'll take you forwards to carving out epic-style reports

If you're new to writing reports for SMS2003 then this will really help you get a foot on the first rung of the proverbial ladder.

Go get that word doc and check it out ...

Hope it helps somehow,

A collegue of mine spent hours researching how to create a simple advertisement assignment. He was using the SDK in VBScript and was frustrated at the lack of easy-to-digest information out there. He'd arrived at MSDN, Technet, poured over the SMS2003 SDK help file and even googled around. He almost had the problem solved when he came across references (via google books) to "SMS2003 Recipes". Unfortunately he just couldn't adapt the examples to his needs. I thought he was just doing things wrong but after spending a bit of time seeing "what's out there" I realised this is another one of those niche areas that needs a bit more illumination with the "laymans" hat on.

So here's VBScript sample code to create a new advertisement, and then create a single Assignment for the Advertisement.

Note: I'll not be covering every aspect of what you can do with an Advertisement using the SDK. Instead i'll just reference the most common things configured for an Advertisement. If you want to configure it further, google is your friend ;-)

First you need to connect to your SMS2003 Site server. Here's a peice of code that does that using just the servers machine name:

 Function ConnectToServer(sServer)

 Dim oSiteDetails, oSiteDetail, sSiteCode

 Set objLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")

 If Err.Number = 0 Then

  Err.Clear

  WScript.Echo "Connecting to server " & sServer & " as the target SMS2003 Site server"

  Set objSMS = objLocator.ConnectServer(sServer, "Root/SMS")

  WScript.Echo vbTAB & "Connected, now attempting to connect to the Sites WMI Namespace"

  objSMS.Security_.ImpersonationLevel = 3

  Set oSiteDetails = objSMS.ExecQuery("select Machine, SiteCode from SMS_ProviderLocation where ProviderForLocalSite=True")

   If Err.Number = 0 Then
 
    For Each oSiteDetail In oSiteDetails
 
     sSiteCode = oSiteDetail.SiteCode

    Next

    WScript.Echo vbTAB & "Connected, Identified Site Code as " & sSiteCode & " for " & sServer

   End If

  Set objSMS = objLocator.ConnectServer(sServer, "root/SMS/site_" + sSiteCode)

  If Err.Number = 0 Then

   WScript.Echo vbTAB & "Connected to the SMS Site Namespace for " & sServer & " (" & sSiteCode & ")"

  End If

  ConnectToServer = Err.Number

 End If

End Function

Now you have a handle to the SMS2003 Site server, you can create the advertisement:

DIM array(), newAdvertisement, instToken, objSMS, objLocator, oSiteDetail, oSiteDetails

ReDIM array(0)

If ConnectToServer("<SERVER NAME>") <> 0 Then

WScript.Echo "Error occured connecting to SMS2003 Site server" 

WScript.Quit(1)

End If

Set newAdvertisement = objSMS.Get("SMS_Advertisement").SpawnInstance_()

newAdvertisement.AdvertisementName = "Advert Name"

newAdvertisement.Comment = "Advert Comment"

newAdvertisement.CollectionID = "<COLLECTION ID>"

newAdvertisement.PackageID = "<PACKAGE ID>"

newAdvertisement.ProgramName = "<PROGRAM NAME>"

newAdvertisement.ExpirationTime = "20080401220000.000000+***"

newAdvertisement.PresentTime = "20080401210000.000000+***"

Set instToken = objSMS.Get("SMS_ST_NonRecurring").SpawnInstance_()

instToken.DayDuration = 0

instToken.HourDuration = 0

instToken.IsGMT = False

instToken.MinuteDuration = 0

instToken.StartTime = "20080401210000.000000+***"

Set array(0) = instToken

newAdvertisement.AssignedSchedule = array

NewAdvertisement.AssignedScheduleEnabled = True

newAdvertisement.ExpirationTimeEnabled = True

newAdvertisement.IncludeSubCollection = False

newAdvertisement.Put_

Now you need to put the Function ConnectToServer at the bottom of your script, the code for creating the advertisement at the top,  change all references that need real information such as <COLLECTION ID> etc then finally adjust the ExpirationTime, PresentTime and StartTime. How you change these date\times is to use another function to massage the date\time in to the format expected by SMS2003. This format looks like this: "20080401210000.000000+***" and you can see a good example from Greg Ramsey and Warren Byles "SMS2003 Recipes" book via this link on how to produce these dates.

 This should get you off to a good start. Any problems leave comments and i'll try to defend my dodgy code

SMS2003 Advertisement SDK VBScript Assignment Schedule Simple Example Automation

Sad to hear, but Sir Arthur C Clarke has passed away at the grand old age of 90. He wanted to be remembered as a "writer", rather for the myriad of other things he's got up to in his life-time. And that's how I'll always remember him, one of the best SciFi writers and technical visionaries to exist in the 20th Century.

Hat off to Sir Clarke, I read a lot of his books in my "formative" years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7304004.stm

This is just the most amazing tech-demo of a functional walking robot i've ever seen. Boston Dynamics have produced a quad-legged robot called "The Dog". It trashes the kit coming out of china\japan, which are usually just a calculator in a (slow) mechanical suit. "The Dog" can keep it's balance even if it's kicked about, loses it's footing (ice beware!) or stumbles down-hill.

An epic implementation of technology. I cannot believe this isn't main page news, replacing those greedy banks that are grabbing the headlines with their efforts to prop each other up, while still screwing mores coins out of John Does pocket via his sub-prime mortgage ;-)

This is funded by ARPA, so in a few years execpt Arnie-look-alikes to be knocking on your door asking "Are you Sarah O'connor?" ;-)

"The Dog" just needs a few pump action shotties and an Ooozie or two attached and it's fit for war sarge!

In my iPhone not-a-review-but-kind-of-like-one, I said I'd blend my iPhone if Apple divorce the Generation 1 model from future firmware releases (due to Generation 2 iPhones about to come to market) ... well here's a list of things that Tom Dickson from BlendTec has blended in the name of MAN-science!

Chuck Norris - http://youtube.com/watch?v=NdD54rG9oQA&feature=related

BIC Lighters - http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yx4QgK_xEfE&feature=related

Golf Balls - http://youtube.com/watch?v=MC8Zvl-8ziA&feature=related

And the famous iPhone blendage ...

 iPhone - http://youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI&feature=related

You can view others via the links above, or visit here. They are all pretty much safe for work :->

Baseline Mag has put up an interesting top 10 list of VM tools, that, for a virtual engineer you should know about.

It's always a good idea to know the competing products and some of the third party add-ons\tools that are out there.

Some of the stuff on this list i've never heard off, mainly due to them not being for Windoze I guess :>

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/10-Free-Virtualization-Tools-You-Should-Know/

Oh man! What a day for Microsoft!!!

The European Commission has fined US computer giant Microsoft for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour

1.4 Billion! try saying that with a finger in your mouth in true Dr Evil (Austin Powers) style!

How will we conquer the world Bill? ... With our "Lazors ... sharks with frickin lazors on their heads!"

Oh darn we've just been fined 1.4Billion! Quick liquify some of our assets!

A couple of weeks back my cell phones contract was coming to an end, and I had a choice between getting a new handset and extending the contract, or going all out and buying the (£320+) iPhone with a new 18 month contract, while retaining my mobile number. I'd seen the iPhone in the media as well as having brief demo's and I liked the form-factor, weight and the functionality available. So I dived in head first and bought myself a fancy-pancy iPhone.

I've been putting off writing about the iPhone as I wanted to round off my experience with it by putting it to good use over a few weeks. Now i'm ready to write a few lines about how i've got on with it.

I'll be keeping this as a pretty fair, unbiased review and will not contrast and compare it with Apples evil nemesis's product (Windows Mobile).

I'll begin by blasting through the features I want to write about, and won't cover them all, such as the Calendar, Camera, Photos, Notes, Calc, Weather, YouTube and Clock.

Text messaging

Texting on the iPhone is very easy. First of all you press the Text button on your navigate bar (or wherever you've moved the launch Icon too) to launch the Texting application. Takes but a moment to load, and you're presented with a scrollable list view, with your text messages listed in a chronological order with the most recent being at the top of the list. So, you get a list of names from your Contacts list shown in this list view, with the text messages you\they have sent shown if you tap on their name. So, you tap on any of them and you'll go in to the Text message thread view. This view breaks the conversation up quite nicely, using balloons to represent the dialog, green balloons for what you've said and grey balloons for what the other person wrote. You can slide up\down to scroll through the thread. Very slick, it turns texting in to a threaded conversation, and makes it easy to follow, and to continue talking to your contacts without stepping through SMS texts to recall the thread. If you want to respond you can tap on the bar at the bottom where you enter text, or from the previous list view you can create a new text message, enter the phone number or choose from an existing contact then enter your text. You can also delete from the list view an entire thread, or do this in the threaded view and clear the conversation from memory. I'll leave the keyboard out for now, as it's worthy of a seperate heading for review.

Now, i'm unable to forward any of my text messages on to another contact. That's pretty poor, but the real let-down here is no support for MMS texting. You could say ... well you've got email so no need to MMS anymore, but you'd be missing the point. Lack of support for MMS is a real let-down. If you do receive an MMS text from someone, you receive a plain ASCII text message giving you a URL to visit (your provider\carrier website), and a several-digit number to remember so that you can access your MMS message via the built-in browser Safari. The problem with all this is that you have to write down or memorise this temporary PIN number, tap the link on the Text message to open up Safari, fill in your mobile number (groan, typing) then enter your memorised PIN. On top of this, Safari runs like a dead dog via the EDGE network and you can be looking at a blank Safari browser page for some time. Also, have you forgotton the PIN? Ok, as there is no Copy\Paste, you have to navigate back in to your SMS text thread and look up the PIN, then return to Safari to type it in. That to me doesn't rank high on usability, it expects you to get involved, requiring you to "handle" data as you shift out of the texting application and in to a browser session. Not so elegent. And, on top of this when you do get in, you get to see a thumb-nail sized picture included in the MMS text, with no option to save it locally. Gutting. MMS needs to come to the iPhone, without it we're missing something we're all use to using. Loss of expected functionality for this generation of phone is not limited to just texting, in fact the iPhone is lacking basic functionality across the board.

If someone includes a number in the SMS, then you can tap it. It'll begin dialling the phone number, you have to terminate the call then go in to your Phone application, visit the Recents tab and then choose the number that was previously dialled. At that point you can add it as a new contact, or add it to an existing contact. I'd of liked to have been able to do this without having to make a phone call :>

Email

Emailing from the iPhone is a breeze. All you need to do is setup your POP3\IMAP email account and let the iPhone connect and bring down the email messages. Using the EDGE network you're emails, as long as they are not wrapped in eye-candy will come down quickly and can be read easily, and sending them emails is just as quick.

The option to forward an email on only came in a recent firmware rev from Apple. I couldn't believe it when I heard that the email client lacked basic functionality we've had for over a decade! It gets even worse i'm afraid. You can forward an email on to multiple contacts, that's great but you cannot BCC unless (correct me if i'm wrong here!) you go in to Settings and choose the Email application then turn on "BCC myself", which BCC's your default email account. So as a business user, or even a consumer i'm only able to To\CC people, and i'm not allowed to BCC others. Stunning lack of functionality. Also you can tell the iPone to automatically check for new emails on a frequency, lowest value is 15 minutes, or keep it as manual which requires you to tap an icon before the iPhone will check for new mail. I'd like to have that value reduced to minutes, so that i'm getting new emails quickly and not every quarter of an hour.

Aside from that, the Email client is extremely easy to use. Is fast and logically laid out, with views of your email accounts. Tap an email account then you're looking at the mailboxes (inbox, draft, sent, trash etc), tap a mailbox and you're looking at emails. Quick, simple and usable. I like it. As for data entry, using the touch-screen keyboard, I will cover that later.

I let the iPhone collect, but not delete my emails from the email server. That way when I get home I get all my emails, but during the day I delete the emails i'm not interested in off the iPhone, retaining only those that I want close to hand (for contact information, important information, stuff like that).

Phone

I was concerned i'd have to perform multiple taps to call people. Unfortunately this is the case, unless someone is calling you (at which point one tap and you're talking). If you want to make a call you have to navigate to the homepage, tap Phone, tap Contacts, Scroll around looking for the contact, tap the contact and you're dialling. In practise this isn't that difficult to do. And realistically I cannot see any other way of it happening. You need to identify someone to call, then you call them. I don't think Apple could do it any better to be honest. The quality of the phone call is very clear, and the recipient can hear me loud and clear. Even the hands-free headset that comes with the iPhone are good quality for phone conversations.

iPod and iTunes

The iPod is integrated seemlessly, is very usable and has all the features that have been exposed in other reviews. I've not got anything interesting to write about the iPod that hasn't been written up before. Looks like identical code to the iPod and iTouch, although i've not actually owned either so cannot really contrast and compare. I like the iPod, I can watch movies on the commute in\out of work, or listen to music by album, artist or playlists. All easy to use. Sound is quite clear, no crackling\hissing and low\mid\high ranges come across natural and crisp.

Contacts

You can add multiple attributes on a contact, email addresses, phone numbers, notes etc. Managing your contacts is easy, and they sync with your PC\MAC address book application (outlook etc), so you have to consider the security implications of having Address, Email, Phone contact information going in to the Address Book. I use to keep my address book on the phone seperate from the data in outlook, but now they have converged and i'm managing the contact information easily. In fact it it triggered me to go clean that Outlook address book up! Bonus :>

EDGE and WiFi

EDGE is no good for web-browser period. It's good for texting, emailing and getting trickles of data down. But if you want to browse to various sites you'll be looking at a blank screen for a long time. Frustrating sometimes, I wonder if this is down to the over-usage of EDGE as it connects in to the providers network. Somewhere there is a choke-point producing a sluggish browsing experience. When I first bought the phone it seemed a bit faster on the EDGE network than it is now. This could be because a LOT more people have bought iPhones and the network isn't scaling up appropriately. Something I hope the carrier (O2 in england currently) can overcome this otherwise this iPHone is just for texting, taking calls and emailing with all the rest of the functionality used only when on a WiFi connection.

If you connect successfully to a WiFi node, it'll remember and connect if it comes back in to range. You can turn off auto-detection, and save a bit of battery power or leave it on so that you "mount" a WiFi network automatically. At home I have a secured WiFi node, and the iPhone links to it automatically and suddenly i've gone from 5mph to 60mph! Browsing and everything else becomes turbo-charged.

Battery life

So far i've had some interesting experiences with the battery on my iPhone. It makes no sense that sometimes i'm not doing much and yet the battery will deplete quickly, other times I get to watch a video, listen to music or browse the web and the battery gives me plenty of usage time. I've not actually benchmarked the battery life as over a typical day I either use it a lot, or do not use it much. At some point i'll fully charge it then let it play a few movies, and see how much juice is consumed. Maybe my experiences are to do with the first few charges conditioning the battery, or WiFi depleting the battery as it's switched on to auto-detect. Sorry folks, no data on battery life usage I can offer up right now.

Touch-screen Keyboard

 The touch-screen keyboard itself is used throughout the OS, with it changing in to different modes depending on where you are using it. For example if you open an email a key changes to "@" if you tap in to the To\CC (but no BCC!) fields, tap in to the body of the email and the keyboard switches on the dictionary and attempts to auto-complete words as you type. If you type a web-address in to Safari it will have modified keys for the ".COM" displayed.

The keys are seperated enough for slim fingers like mine to operate, if you are at the right angle you can pick up a fair bit of speed and knock out long emails\text messages. Otherwise you can plod along at a respectable one-finger speed. If you type in the wrong characters, the iPhone tries to determine if you meant another letter. I'm not sure how open-ended this is, whether it learns, but I cannot see how you enter new words in to the dictionary so you're pretty much stuck if some of your acronyms convert in to other words by the auto-completer. After a while you know which ones it'll auto-correct and you auto-correct the auto-corrector ;-) It is very easy to use, as long as you're static and not being shaken about. I don't see many draw-backs using the keyboard within the various applications that expose it. Nice feature.

One other thing to note about the keyboard. In Apple land it's hard to ASCII shout! You cannot lock the shift, it has to be tapped before each character is typed. The first character, depending on which application you are in is capitalised, but as I said it's HARD TO SHOUT IN APPLE LAND!

Maps

<WOW>

Maps on a phone. Forget everything else about the maps, yes they look like Google maps, Map\Satellite\Hybrid and Pins available to assist, but there is a KILLER feature called "Locate me". It triangulates your cellphones position in the universe, then shows you on the google map where you are.

</WOW>

"Locate me" is perfect for finding out where you are, then using the Directions feature to navigate to your destination. This in my eyes is a killer feature for the iPhone. No need to be lost anymore just as long as you have cell coverage. All your travel (direction) needs are met by simplying having a TomTom like unit in your car, then an iPhone for when you are walking about. I always seem to get lost, so having TomTom and iPhone, well I feel they have got my back ;-)

I found the "Locate me" feature stops working on the jailbreaked 1.1.3 firmware for UK users. I guess we have to wait for a UK jailbreaked firmware to be released. I do know if you reset back to the un-jailbreaked firmware this feature begins working again. Most odd.

Buttons and inputs

Nothing beats making unique connectors, or not using existing standards for interfacecs. Ho Hum!

The iPhone headset has a long jack plug, which means ALMOST ALL of your existing earphones will NOT WORK on the iPhone. Apple decided to recess the jack deep inside the unit, and the only thing that will plug in correctly is an Apple (hands free) headset that comes with the iPhone. The reason why this is a problem is that the units jack interface has been slimmed down so that practically everthing out there will not slip a few millimeters in to the unit due to their casing being slightly narrower than the jack plugs plastic body. Does this make sense? Look at your headphones jack, see the plastic body it is molded in too? Well the iPhone won't accept that, it's too wide. Welcome to product lock-in. Think Nokia, where everything is unique to the product, charger, headset ... Think Apple :>

I overcame this by buying a cable (off ebay for pennies) with a slim jack to plug in to the iphone, with a cable leading to a female jack plug that I can plug ANYTHING in too. There is another option and that requires an adapter that is a few inches long and sticks out the top of your iPhone. Well dodgy, as it could easily get damage the unit or snap.

There is a power button at the top of the device on the outside edge, and a navigation button on the bottom of the front face, and sounds increase\decrease on the left edge. That's it. That's all you really need to use this phone.

Excuse my total lack of terminology, when referring to these jack plugs :-)  I'm sure you get the picture.

Open-ness

The iPhone is not open by default, your SIM is locked and the iPhone is locked. Third party application writers cannot drop apps on to the iPhone. You can open it up using the Jailbreaker application but this currently has some draw-backs. For example the currently opened 1.1.3 firmware is for the US, and if you enable this on your UK phone suddenly some things will stop working (see maps above), or you'll have a bumby ride with odd freezes\total lockups appearing while using the basic iPhone software of the applications you install.

Essentially if you want applications on your iphone you have to currently use "Safari applications" which means you have to have EDGE\WiFI access to be able to use them. No offline applications other than those built-in to the iPhone. Jailbreak the fone and you can now install stuff from the community. A word of warning though, these applications are built from reverse engineering what is already there, they do not use an SDK as Jobs has delayed it's release. I expect once it hits the streets, within weeks we'll see well-coded applications appearing that are more stable and have the iPhones OS functionality built in (wheels for choosing values, scroll lists, tap\double tap, pinch etc, essentially gestures). For now YMMV when using these applications.

Summary

I have a Love\Hate relationship with my iPhone. At times it's the best thing since sliced bread, other times I wonder "Does it blend???". The missing functionality is purely down to software. So I hope (hopefully not in vain!) that as we see newer firmware releases from Apple, we'll begin seeing new functionality added.

Speed of the EDGE network via the o2 provider in the UK, missing MMS and lack of BCC on emails is all I can really gripe about. If I un-jailbreak the iPhone maybe it'll move from Love\Hate to mostly Love, then Married Bliss once the firmware flows out of Apple with all the goodness of additional functionality enabled.

My main concern is that the next unit to come out will cancel this Generation 1 iPhone out. I mean Apple may take this unit out of their main firmware releases and slowly wind down support for the unit in favour of the next best thing that they release (next up is 3G enabled I believe). If I have to buy a new unit to get features that are software based i'll go balastic, and REALLY WILL BLEND THIS iPHONE. If I go that far i'll be sure to record it and prop the video up on WMUG website :>

If you're using a traditional phone, with no real functionality beyond camera\phone\text then you'll love the iPhone. If you are a Windows Mobile user you may find the lack of functionality a disaster and prefer to stick to Windows Mobile devices until the iPhone has matured a bit.

Seems Vista SP1 is causing a few headaches, so Microsoft have suspended it's download until they can iron out the issues and get it stable. It's suppose to only be a small percentage of users impacted, so a lot of us wouldn't have become entangled in it. I managed to uninstall SP1 Beta 2 before applying the real deal, SP1;and it all went fine. It was all done in around 45 minutes, and i'm noticing that startup\shutdown is a bit more responsive as well as it being a bit more stable

 Update: Here's a KB article, detailing the currently recognised list of incompatible apps for Vista SP1

Interesting article on the 14 greatest engineering challenges of the 21st Century

Wonder how many of these will be put on the back-burner for the 22nd Century

Secure Cyberspace sounds ominious ...

Bring on that Virtual Reality! Talking of which I tried a set of these VR goggles a few weeks back. Did not rate them Felt like a raw version 1, not sharp, didn't fit correctly and could imagine my eyes becoming strained while trying to focus on the image. The focus problem was perhaps due to the product not fitting me right. At the same time I was looking at a Dive watch, but had to get on a plane and gave up on my duty free gadget bonanza

 * Make solar energy affordable

* Provide energy from fusion

* Develop carbon sequestration methods

* Manage the nitrogen cycle

* Provide access to clean water

* Restore and improve urban infrastructure

* Advance health informatics

* Engineer better medicines

* Reverse-engineer the brain

* Prevent nuclear terror

* Secure cyberspace

* Enhance virtual reality

* Advance personalized learning

* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

 Source: Slashdot.org

Well, pretty much back in to my routine with the Maldives (Meedhupparu) becoming more and more of a distant memory ... Such an amazing holiday. No internet for 7 whole days, no newspapers or TV. Just dedicated to chilling out, diving, eating, suntanning and snorkelling. I'd go again right now if I could organise the time off!

It was a small island, not many people around, almost white sand with water warmer than that in the Infinity pool.

Here's some of favourite pictures (out of 500+ taken!)

 (for some reason these coral shots are not rendering properly, you need to submerge and view these underwater maybe? will try fixing later)

And finally, me underwater (taken by my girlfriend, who has amazing underwater photography skills!)

Got some up and coming reviews to finish off and some more content for WMUG. Stay tuned.

Folks,

 Wrote another little VBScript, this one to change the SDK Site Control File delta value on a remote SMS Site server.

This script affects the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SMS\COMPONENTS\SMS_SITE_CONTROL_MANAGER\Sites section of the Registry on the remote SMS Site server.

I'd recommend reading up on this subject before you get this tool out and use it.

When would you use this? After determining you have several SDK Type 2 Flags in the SiteControl table on your SMS Site server. It beats RDP'ing to the remote server to make the change, or using the incredibly slow remote registry method.

http://wmug.co.uk/files/folders/sms/entry541.aspx

First hot holiday of the year just around the corner!

I'm almost packed, for a 7 day holiday to the Maldives. We fly this Sunday, with 12 a hour flight ahead of us. We leave late at night, so we should be able to get a good few hours of snoozing in before we have to grind our way through the in-flight movies, read books and generally idle the time away. Once we arrive we'll be flown via a sea-plane to the island itself. Cannot wait!

We'll be staying on an island called Meedhupparu (aka The Island that someone saw) Meedhupparu which is in the Raa\Baa atols (pretty much in the north section of the Maldives). You can walk around the entire island in 30 minutes LOL!

Here's a video to feast your eyes on, so you glow with envy hehe: http://www.holidaywatchdog.com/Meedhupparu_Island_Resort-Video-Clip-1454.html

7 days may not be enough time, it's all I could take off work at the moment, so we'll be trying to squeeze in as much beach time as possible, with trips across to other islands and POI's, along of course, with some Scuba diving!

There is great diving to be had around the Raa\Baa atoll, and my good friend Mr Scambler (Bsac diver) egged me on to get trained up so I could do some cool diving out there. I found a local dive club, and just finished the first half of a PADI Open water Diver Referral course ... 2 dives in a pool here, and 4 dives in open water once I arrive on the island. Scuba diving is so much fun, getting the basics, and understanding theory has been great. But, the real fun is yet to start!

We cannot wait to check out Manta's, every-colour-you-can-imagine fish, coral, and hopefully a few (friendly!) sharks!

When I get back, i'll be sure to upload the pics somewhere and link from here.

Rod Trent over at MyITForum blogged about this, looks like quite a cool tool so wanted to reblog here.

Snow License Manager automatically combines infrastructure information provided by Microsoft SMS® with information such as software contracts, purchased licenses, ownership, and prices.

Snow License Manager ensures central control of all your contracts and software licenses as well as enables you to track actual usage.

With local administration and built in report generation, Snow License Manager creates, controls and supports the management of your software assets.

I couldn't find anything about which versions of SMS are actually supported ... SMS 2.x \ SMS2003 SPx \ SCCM ?

Here's the link: Snow License Manager for SMS.

I'd like to eval this if I get time ... anyone else does an eval then would love to publish a review here, let me know.

There has been some real good content generated by the communities for SMS2003 SP3 so far, and here is my ten cents worth in the form of a quick review located here.

Also, if you haven't checked out Roger Zanders SMS Client Tool (not the SMS toolkit version ;-) then check out a brief review and heavy linkage here :> Sherry Kissenger and myself converted the documentation to English, go check it out :>

Keep up the good work Rod\Ron, the new site is looking awesome :>

Congrats Michael!

SMS2005 ... Watch out, Microsoft may turn up at your door and offer you $$$ to buy that name, or issue you with a legal notice to cease and desist!

I wonder if Sophia is going to operate on a 25hr clock?

BTW I think Sophia is one of the loveliest names to choose for a girl.

it's old news now, and has probably been linked here but heck, it made me chuckle:

http://wired.com/news/technology/bugs/0,2924,69355,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

from SlashDot

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report in the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer," the Windows Defender name was already being used by an Australian developer, Adam Lyttle. His Windows Defender product protected Windows users from malicious Web sites. Adam Lyttle told the Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop that Microsoft contacted him a month ago, charging him with infringing on the Windows trademark but neglecting to mention that the software giant wanted to use the "Windows Defender" name. Lyttle subsequently signed over rights to the name to Microsoft and was "shocked" when he later learned the company intended to use the name for one of its own products. "

not pretty :<>

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is out!

And yup, as I type it's installing it's bloated form on to my HDD (night on 4GB of space required, wow) ... i've got practically every star wars game ever released. One of my fav's was Jedi Knight 2 which allowed you to weild a Saber and duel with friends, quality game for LAN parties, friggin awesome!

This release of SWBF promises to let you become a Jedi, and run around doing things with light emitting poles of death! can't ask for anything more!

May the fork be with you

Holy cow!

I so want one of these to try out!

If anyone can send me one, pm me so I can give you my address! I promise to do a full write-up of it using the keyboard!

If it's responsive enough, and works in 99% of conditions, day\night then this would suit me down to the ground ;-)

http://www.itechdynamic.com/html/border4.htm