Blog:: Craig Pringle

I'm not Australian - but I live in Australia and as such I am an Australian Internet User.  I have to agree with my friend Chris on this one...

I am a little surprised that there has not been more noise made about this.. thought I would do my bit as I am a totally against internet censorship..

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force ISPs to censor the Internet for all Australians.

Like Chris I am totally against censorship.  Apart from squashing my civil liberteies, this is a hairbrained scheme at best and won't work...

For those of you who may be running the M3 build of Windows 7 and using either hosted Exchange or accessing a corporate Exchange environment via Outlook Anywhere (nee RPC over HTTPS) there is an issue you may run into. 

When you try to open Outlook you are prompted for credentials.  With most hosted Exchange providers you use your email address as the username.  If you do this on Windows 7 (M3) I have found that you are repeatedly prompted for your credentials but no matter how carefully and correctly you type your password it just keeps prompting you. 

If you run into this issue try entering you username in the DOMAIN\Username format instead of your email address.  I don't know why this works, but I know it does for at least two Hosted Exchange providers.  Contact your hosted provider if you are not sure what the domain name is.

I'm holidaying with family in NZ and I just got the news that I have been renewed as a MVP.

This is great news and - as always I am thrilled to be honoured and I am humbled by the exceptional caliber of my fellow MVPs. 

Thanks very much to Microsoft - I look forward to another year as a MVP.

I stumbled across quite a cool feature in Windows 7 today.  I was copying a large amount - about 11 GB - off my video camera to my tablet.  The video camera I have connects via USB and just shows up as an external drive. 

While the data copied I switched across to another window to carry on working.  Then I noticed that the button in the taskbar for Explorer was partially shaded.  I flicked through the open explorer windows and realised that one of them was the progress bar for the file copy.  The shading in the taskbar button was the same percentage as the copy progress window as the screen shot below shows.

This is a handy way to keep an eye on progress of a file copy.  Unfortunately it does not seem to shade the IE taskbar icon for Internet downloads.

One of the great features of Windows Vista is BitLocker.  This allows you to encrypt the system volume and store the keys either on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or on a USB fob.  This provides a degree of protection for the data on your mobile PC should it be lost or stolen.  Personally I've never lost a laptop or a tablet but for enterprises this actually happens with alarming regularity.

In Windows 7 in addition to being able to encrypt the system volume you can encrypt other volumes as well.  This will appeal to lots of organisations who continue to persist in having standard operating environments for laptops that have a OS partition and a Data partition. 

However, Windows 7 takes the BitLocker concept a bit further and addresses another major source of potential data leakage - USB thumb drives.  I selected one of my spares to experiment with.

Encrypting a USB drive with BitLocker is fairly easy.  You get the option of securing the drive with a smart card or with a pass phrase.  I selected the latter.  You can encrypt a drive with data already on it, without losing anything. 

Now that my USB drive is encrypted  when I plug it into a Windows 7 machine I get a dialogue that prompts me for a pass phrase.  Once the pass phrase is entered then you can just use the drive as you would normally.

To see what would happen I tried plugging the USB drive into Windows Vista machines, Windows XP machines and even a Linux machine.  With the default settings on the Windows machines the drive appears to have no files on it, but if you check the properties of the drive it is also full.  This seems a bit weird until you turn on the setting in Explorer that shows hidden files.  This reveals that he whole drive is filled.  There is one  really big file, a couple of smaller files and a whole bunch of 0 byte files.  Working with one of our security gurus at work we cracked open a couple of these files with various editor but the were just gibberish as you would expect. 

All of that is really great - but often the people who should be encrypting their thumb drives would never bother.  The good news is that according to Mark Minasi Windows 7 is going to have a number of Group Policies for the enhanced group policy.  Organisations will even be able to prevent writing to a drive unless it is encrypted.  Check out Mark's slides from TechEd Barcelona for more great Windows 7 tips.

Sony has a cool concept laptop that features a screen that is transparent when the device is off. 

I think that is very cool technology.  This came from a list of conceptual technologies on PickMore.

I got a sneak peek at a team doing some interesting development with touch technologies in Sydney on Thursday.

My friend Nick Randolph is the Chief Development Officer at nsquared solutions. He his heading up a team of developers working on development projects with a range of cutting edge technologies including Windows 7, multitouch, multipoint and Microsoft Surface.  

They are working on some really cool projects that are really going to show how multitouch can really change the paradigms we work with in user interfaces now.

It is exciting stuff and I am sure we will be hearing more form nsquared in the near future.  In the meantime you might want to check out Nick's teaser post about what they are working on and subscribe to the nsquared blog feed.

I've been using Windows 7 for a few weeks now and I it is time I posted about my general impressions of the OS.  Bear in mind that this is a very early release and that anything I write about here is subject to change before we see the release.

I have already blogged about:

• The changes to the TIP
• The improvements in the Display Settings
• Easier Networking

All of these things are great examples of the changes coming in Windows 7.  It is an evolution, not a revolution.

Windows 7 does not have a great deal of architectural changes under the hood.  The move from Vista to Windows 7 is not going to be as disruptive as the move to Vista was.  However, there has been much refinement of the foundation laid down by Vista. 

Usability

There has been a lot little refinements - like those listed above - that have made it easier to perform many common tasks.  Remember that this is a pre-beta release.  I suspect there is more to come.

Performance

Windows 7 is fast.  I had low expectations for performance in a pre-beta release and I was absolutely blown away with how fast it is.  Resume time from sleep is significantly faster than Vista on the same hardware.  Everything is snappy.

Device Support

Again much better than I would of thought for a pre-beta.  Everything works on most of the devices I have put Windows 7 on so far.  The exception is the Toshiba Bluetooth stack, which installs but it has some stability issues. 

Overall Impression

A very nice evolution of Vista.  I expect Windows 7 to be easier to use, faster and rock solid.

It is hard to believe it but I am on iPhone number four.  As I blogged a while back my first iPhone was DOA, the second developed a screen fault on the first day of use.   Both were replaced without a problem.  After a couple of months of use the vibrate function on my iPhone III stopped working.

I took it in to the Apple store here in Sydney and it was replaced on the spot with no hassle.  The service was, again, exceptional.  But - IMO that is just not enough.

You might think that I must be treating my devices really badly to have them fail so often.  I've been using both smartphones and MP3 players for years and I've had just about every brand out.  I've never had one die before.

Over all I like my iPhone, but I have to say it is just not there yet.  Apple clearly has some quality issues to work through.  In addition to that there are a number of feature gaps that just leave me wanting more.  I want to be able to send a meeting invite to someone from my phone.  I want to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard, or stereo bluetooth headset with audio controls.  Alas the bluetooth stack on the iPhone is knobbled to the point of uselessness. 

None of these are flaws that Apple couldn't fix.  They are all things others have commented on as well.  But, instead they invest in putting in features that are cool but that I will probably never, ever use - like adding street view to the Google maps app on the phone.  Give me a break! 

Apple - you still have some work to do.  I like the iPhone, but it is not good enough to be a business device yet.

It's that time of year again - Movember.  While I have decided not to "grow a mo" this year, because I looked way too dodgy as you can see from this photo when my son was born,  I still think it is great cause. What is it?

From the website:

Movember (the month formerly known as November) is an annual charity event held during November.
At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants, known as Mo Bros, have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their Mo, raising money along the way to benefit men's health - specifically prostate cancer and male depression. 
Movember culminates at the end of the month at official Gala Partés, Mo-Office and Mo-Town parties where Tom Selleck and Borat look-a-likes battle it out for their chance to be the Man of Movember.
While growing a Mo is left to the guys, Mo Sistas (ladies who support their guys or just love Mo's!) form an important part of Movember by recruiting Mo Bros, helping to raise funds and attending the highly anticipated Gala Partés.
But it' s not all fun and games, so why the extreme behavior?
Which ever way we look at it, men are far less healthy than women. The average life expectancy for men is five years less than for women.

The obvious question is why?

Men lack awareness about the very real health issues they face. There is an attitude that they have to be tough - "a real man" - and are reluctant to see a doctor about an illness or go for regular medical checks.
Movember aims to change these attitudes and make men's health fun by putting the Mo back on the face of fashion and in the process raise some serious funds for key men's health issues, including:
Prostate Cancer: because every year 2,900 Australian men die from prostate cancer and over 18,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. [ FIND OUT MORE ].
Depression in Men: because one in six men experience depression at any given time but most don't seek help.[ FIND OUT MORE ].

It is a great cause - even if you don't know anyone taking part you can still donate via the website.  Get over there and show your support for this great cause.