Category: Windows

Sing: Windows 7 Starter Edition, Murdoch & Facebook: These are just some of my least favourite things..

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 7, 2010

From the forthcoming musical, The Sound of Martyn Grumbling About Stuff.

But seriously, whoever at Microsoft decided Windows 7 Starter Edition would be a good idea should have been fired. From THIS cannon. I have spent two days attempting to figure out why our software has been causing the user massive problems – which ran happily on other editions of Windows – and today I’ve been thwarted by Windows 7 Starter Editions lack of anything useful – namely the ability to run SyncBackSE automatically on backup. You attempt to give the right credentials for starting up and Windows 7 Starter bitches about user policies. No problem under Home Premium. No problem at all! So I’m awarding Microsoft the Golden Arse of Fail for their implementation of a next-to-useless OS. And it frightens me that most netbooks ship with this version of Windows.

Next on my list of least favourite things is Rupert Murdoch, who wants to increase his vice-like grip on BskyB from 40% to.. 100%! It’s bad enough he’s got more fingers in media pies (and let us not forget that BskyB had a stake in ITV at one point), but for him to take BSkyB ownership to 100% would mean total control and the possibility of bringing Fox News style political bias to the UK. So I urge people to sign this petition at 38 Degrees.

And then there’s Facebook. But I’ve said enough about that on the previous post. All I can add to that is that it seems that companies are abandoning original content and sticking it all on Facebook instead because they can’t be arsed to do anything themselves. Let social media do it all for you. Yeah. Groovy. Except there is better and more interesting and less invasive social media systems out there. Explore them. Find out what they are. Facebook is not the be all and end all of “social media”.

Email client design: The basics, and why Outlook 2010 fails miserably..

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 28, 2010

I am an email client snob. I demand that my email client gives me the following:

1) Proper reply header/attribution control: no top posting, selective quoting, auto/manual rewrapping of long lines in quoted text if required.

2) Word wrap. While format=flowed is nice, I want to see nicely formatted paragraphs (

3) Easy enable/disable of HTML messages (plain-text part higher display priority to those clients that love sending multi-part HTML/plain text), reply to HTML as plain text only.

Three rules that keep me happy. And yet, both Outlook 2010 and Thunderbird fail on a number of levels. Let’s start with Outlook 2010. This is a popular email/calendaring/groupware client that’s been around since the stone age, and despite that, Microsoft have still completely failed to understand Internet standards and has failed to listen to customers regarding some of the most basic functionality of text transmission.

For starters, Outlook 2010 still only top posts. That is, it’s reply header consists of at least five separate lines before you get to the quoted message. There is absolutely no way (without having to delve into Macros, and those that I’ve come across have been woefully inadequate) to adjust that reply header. You could switch on the > quote prefix within the Reply Settings section of Outlook’s options, but you still have to do significant manual trimming to get it anywhere half decent. This is WRONG. People have been (rightly) bitching to Microsoft for years about this, and they still don’t listen/can’t get it right. I’d really like to hear from Microsoft why they think their version is better and why they don’t offer their customers a custom reply header system. IRONICALLY, however, their Mac Entourage email client gets it right. Single line reply header and decent quoting system. Sadly, Entourage is to become Outlook on the Mac, and I fear that it’ll adopt it’s Windows brain-dead reply system.

Outlook 2010 still seems to send out emails with extremely long lines that show up in Thunderbird as hideous unwrapped single lines. There’s a problem somewhere. Is Outlook actually sending out messages properly? Is Thunderbird incorrectly interpreting Outlook’s mess? I’ve not looked deep enough yet, but I suspect blame can be had on both sides on this one. Thunderbird is incapable of automatically wrapping quoted long lines unless you hit the Rewrap key (CTRL-R on a PC, CMD-R on a Mac). There should be an option (or Thunderbird extension) that does this automatically. I can’t tell you what an absolute pain in the arse it is having to CTRL-R each and every time messages from Outlook and other equally brain-dead email clients.

And while the internet is big enough to support HTML in email transmission, it still can be absolutely fugly having receiving email from somebody whose gone overboard on stationery making it bloody difficult to read anything they’re written. Or massive HUGE logos displayed in the signatures of email, courtesy of HTML tags. Outlook 2010 is still stupid in that if you hit reply to an HTML email, it’ll use HTML/rich-text text for your reply. I can understand WHY this is so, but nonetheless I don’t want to be forced into it. If there is an option to disable this, I have yet to find it, or make it work.

Right now, the only true email client I like is Apple Mail. It does everything I want without fuss. It’s not perfect by any means, but it works marginally better than Outlook and Thunderbird put together. If Apple would consider making this available for PCs (as it has with Safari and iTunes), I’d be a very happy man. Sadly I’m not going to go out and buy another Mac for the home simply because of Apple Mail.

In the mean time, I’ll attempt to pester Microsoft to add better reply functions to it’s email client. Outlook 2010 is generally a far superior product to it’s predecessors (as is Thunderbird 3), but at it’s heart – it’s text handling/reply capabilities – it’s still stuck in the late 1990s.

Anti-virus vendors: how about an affordable AV product for Windows Server?

Posted by Martyn Drake – April 23, 2010

Does anybody out there do a free or CHEAP anti-virus product for Windows 2008 server (R2 or otherwise)? The main reason is that everything I’ve seen is extraordinarily expensive and yet you can buy a Windows 2008 server VPS for as little as £12 a month. Ideal for people like me who are exploring, learning and ultimately training on these things and using them as simple web servers, email servers, file servers or whatever for personal use. Just because somebody is running a Windows server doesn’t necessarily mean that (a) it’s on dedicated server or (b) they’re a business with oodles of money to spend on software. I suppose most people associate Windows with “I’ve got lots of money” which is immensely annoying and the wrong attitude to have against this OS.

The opposite could be said of Linux. It’s a free operating system so everything has to be free. But there are some very good commercial products for Linux (some expensive, most reasonably priced) and strikes a good balance between the goodness of ‘free’ and that of commercialisation. But Windows, Windows is seen as a license to print money. That’s not to say there isn’t good ‘free’ software for Windows, but it’s nowhere near as plentiful than on Linux.

What I was actually thinking of is some form of IIS 7 AV/firewall that can determine potential worms hitting the server and temporary or permanently block the IPs that are sending them. And while I’m on the subject of firewalls, why the bloody hell has Microsoft made it almost impossible to import a flatfile list of IP ranges in CIDR format to add to the Windows Firewall? Useful for blocking or allowing large number of IPs, etc. There must be a command line capability for doing this? If there is, I’ve not found it yet.

Windows 0 – Linux 1 on the affordable AV front

Here comes the madness: Windows 2008 Server certification!

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 11, 2010

Memset is the only company I have ever worked for that actively encourages it’s staff to learn and try new things, and will pay for training and certification in technologies that interest individual members of staff.  It works out well for my employers because they’ll get back an employee whose has been properly certified in a particular discipline.  That’s not to say that we’re not already experienced in using these disciplines, but it’s nice to get recognized by the vendors that make it all possible.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what I’ve wanted to do now I’ve been given the chance.  Back at MPC, which promised the Earth but delivered only dirt, I had wanted to take a course on learning Maya – to help me provide better application support to the artists on the floor, and possibly take my career further in another direction other than just systems administration.  That never happened.  The best I got was a subscription to Safari Books Online.

But prior to MPC all my previous employers operated a bugger-all training policy[*] and I had to learn what I wanted to learn in my own time.  Pretty much my entire career to date was formed from self-learning.  I bought my own books (or borrowed from libraries), bought my own software and hardware, and just had to teach myself how to do things.

Windows seems to be the way forward despite the massive proliferation of Linux.  I’ve been using Linux since around 1994 when the kernel was seriously pre -1.0 and was very experimental.  Windows Server came into my field of version back in 1998 and I’ve been using it on and off since then.  That’s the problem – it’s been on and off.  When I suggested to one of my former employers that we use an email ecosystem that was not Exchange, they bulked at the idea – management wanted Exchange and management was going to get Exchange.  The IT department hadn’t much experience with it, so they paid a consultancy firm to come in and do all the work setting up Domain controllers, Exchange, and all the bits and bobs that go with it.  I dread to think how much was paid to these consultants to do the work.  All I know is that the mail server I managed under Linux and running Exim had survived a major version upgrade and move to new server without any hassles.  Exchange and Windows Server was a lot more problematic and we didn’t have the in-house experience to manage it ourselves.

All throughout my career, Windows experience has been in great demand by potential employers.  Good Windows system admins can earn considerably more than Linux sysadmins in some cases and there appears to be no let down in the demand for Windows servers and VPSes.  So it seemed logical for me to pick a Windows 2008 Server certification that should take me up to MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) at a minimum.  And that’s what I’m hoping to do over the next few months.

I had considered an official Linux certification such as LPI or RHCE, but it’s a popular choice here and almost everybody else is doing a certification in LPI.  Perhaps that’s something I’ll do after my MCITP, but for the moment I think the benefits that MCITP would bring to my employers and to my overall career development is the way to go right now.

[*] Thankfully not literally.

Cloudy with a chance of falling files..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 16, 2009

I’ve recently been testing a variety of products for storage in Amazon’s S3 service.  I first came to get to know S3 through Rackspace’s Jungle Disk service which provides a Windows, Mac or Linux client that can backup all your files to the “cloud” either using S3 or Rackspace’s own “cloud” offering.

While I am very impressed with Jungle Disk’s Windows server backup solution, I’m not so convinced on the Windows or Mac desktop service.  Timeouts at both Amazon and Rackspace’s Jungle Disk gateway as well as numerous other little problems has not convinced me I want to entrust to it my 17Gb of well earned music, film and TV collection on iTunes.  I’m fine with the Windows backup since (a) Memset backs up the MDaemon directory nightly anyway, and (b) I’ve not seen any errors.

But something with Amazon S3 (particularly their Europe service) made me think that if I could find a utility that allows me to upload and download stuff as easily as an FTP client, or even offer full sync capabilities, I would still have a use for it.  Sadly, the options are very limited and I have to say I’m not at all impressed.

On the Mac, there is Cyberduck.  This is an FTP, SFTP, SCP,S3, WebDAV, Rackspace Cloud, MobileMe file transfer client.  It’s literally the Swiss army knife of file transfer clients and the very best thing I’ve seen for any platform.  Ever.  I can create S3 buckets easily in Amazon’s EU datacentres and upload/download and even mirror entire directories.  If I interrupt the transfer, I can resume the next time without any fuss.  Very confident my data is safe with Cyberduck.  And Cyberduck is freeware/donation-ware in that it’s free to use, but a donation to the author is appreciated.

I then tried Time Warp for OS X.  This is currently in beta and is free to use while this is so.  Unfortunately Time Warp did not offer me the choice of Amazon datacentre and seems to default to the US.  No good.

Next up was Atomic Drive.  This is a cross-platform client, but like Jungle Disk, requires that you sign-up to them and pay them a small monthly fee for the privilege of using the client (fair enough) as well as the S3 transfer/storage fees.  Unfortunately the client only allows US datacentre use, and does not resume transfers if you’re in the middle of transferring gigabytes of data and need to interrupt for whatever reason you may have.  This is not good.

After that was S3 Bucket Explorer, but found the user interface unwelcoming and cluttered (and the queue system I found to be too fussy).  It also takes an age to load on the Mac.

Thus the winner on the Mac is: Cyberduck.  By far the friendliest and most feature packed S3 client I ever come across.

In terms of Windows clients, I was even more disappointed with the choice available.  Cloudberry Lab appears to the be leading developer of S3 clients.  They have a dedicated backup product (CloudBerry Backup) as well as a general S3 bucket explorer-cum-FTP client called CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO.  I liked CloudBerry Backup very much, apart from one problem.  The bandwidth and usability was sufficiently uncontrollable that my wife and I argued over it’s use!  I was forced, to keep the peace, to uninstall the product, even after limiting the bandwidth used by CBB, since stopping the manual backup saw the backup resume again after a minute.  Pausing the backup still seemed to  do the job, but activity was still present.  Thus, with regret, I had to walk away from this product which when I saw it working, seems to be one of the best I’ve seen.

Cloudberry S3 Explorer PRO is another product which I like, but seems to suffer from a problem whereby if I’m uploading a lot of files and then close the program, restart it, and kick off the queue again, just get errors upon errors and cannot resume the transfer for the files still in the queue.  I’ll need to look at the debug/log files to figure why that is.  Haven’t had the time to do so as yet.  The user interface is clean, crisp – everything I like in an FTP client and is very straight forward.  If I can get around the queue issue, I think this would be the best product for S3 bucket management for Windows.

I have yet to look at Cross FTP for Windows (or Mac), or CloudBuddy (Windows).  Everything else out there seems to be in perpetual development (alpha or beta).

It’s a Chrome away from Chrome.. I’ve switched from Firefox on two platforms!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 15, 2009

While I have given up Google Apps (no, it’s not because I fear the Google and it’s tight grip on my data – I’ll write a blog post about why I left Google Apps a bit later), Google still gets used an awful lot here at Drake Towers.  Google the Search Engine is the de facto here.  Then there’s Google Maps, Google Reader, Feedburner, Google Webmaster Tools,  Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, and so on.

I now use Google Public DNS on the Dell laptop at home and as a secondary DNS server for my MDaemon mail server.  And now I’ve converted to Google Chrome, Google’s efforts to produce a fast web browser designed for simplicity.  And it works exceptionally well on Windows.  And now OS X.  Despite Chrome being beta on my work Mac, I now use it as my primary browser despite a few kinks (the main one being the passwords are not saved if you’re browsing a site that uses an expired or self-signed certificate – I’ve filed the bug with the Chromium bug report system).

My dependence on Google will not end there either.  While I have no intention of running the Chrome OS on this PC (although if I had a netbook I would probably consider it), I am still very tempted by the T-Mobile G2 Touch which runs the Android 1.5 (at the time of writing) platform.  I’ll be carrying Google in my pocket too.