Blog:: Craig Pringle

For over a year and a half a small but dedicated group of IT professionals have been meeting for coffee once a week.  This has always been an open invite, but I thought that it would be worthwhile reiterating the invite.

When:

Every Wednesday @ 1PM

Where:

Jet Cafe Bar
Druit St
Queen Victoria Bldg, Level Ground, Shop 55, Sydney, NSW 2000
Here's a map
We are usually at or near table 11 or 12, which is outside on the Druit St side of the cafe.  Just look for a table with three or four geeky looking people on it and say hi :)

Who:

Generally it is a mix of Developers and IT Pros from all walks.  Specifically some of the long standing members include:

• Craig Bailey
• Nick Randolph
• Justin King
• Neil Carey
• Craig Pringle (Me)

There are several others who have floated in an out over time.

If you’re in the area stop in and join us.  If you are on Twitter keep an eye on the #sydgeekcoffee tag – I’ll be posting when I am heading to geek coffee.

I actually quite like my iPhone but I cannot buy into the zealous frenzy that some people whip themselves up into over the iPhone. 

The iPhone – and for that matter every other phone on the planet – is far from perfect.  Here are 10 things that actually really annoy me about the iPhone.

10 - No copy and paste.  The iPhone does not support copy and paste and this can be really annoying. 

9 - No support for A2DP bluetooth profile.  The iPhone is a personal media device, but it does not support the bluetooth profile that enables you to use bluetooth stereo headphones.  Why not?  Sure it will impact battery life, but shouldn’t that be my choice?

8 - No support for AVRCP bluetooth profile.  This is the remote control bluetooth profile that would let you control the media playback with a bluetooth remote.  Many bluetooth stereo headphones also have controls that let you play/pause, control the volume and skip tracks.

7 - No Support for HID bluetooth profile.  This is the worst of the lot.  Why can’t I pair with a bluetooth keyboard so I can type a longer email or blog post?

(7-9 could all be summed up as half-assed bluetooth support.  More on bluetooth profiles here.)

6 - call failed.  I hate that message.  You are in the middle of a call and it goes silent.  you look at the screen and there is a two word error message on the screen.  Grrrr.

5 - no true multitasking.  This, IMHO, will hold the iPhone back as an application platform.  Decent instant messaging, SIP and turn by turn GPS navigation are just some of the apps that would greatly benefit by being able to run in the background.

4 - Can't create a meeting request.  If I am in a meeting or having a coffee with someone I can’t book a follow up on the spot.  I can create an appointment for myself, but not a meeting request with an invitee.  PITA.

3 - Can't search GAL for phone numbers.  From the email app if I type a name it will search the Exchange and give me their email address.  But I can’t search my corporate address book for a name and get their phone number from the contacts application or phone application.   It is a phone – don’t you think I may want to get someone’s phone number and call them?

2 - No search for Exchange mailbox.  If something is in my Exchange mailbox but not synced to my phone, tough.  There is no way to search the rest of my inbox or the other folders on Exchange from the phone.

(2-4 are pretty freaking dumb for an “enterprise” smartphones.  If you have your mailbox on Exchange 2007 then Windows Mobile leaves the iPhone for dead.)

1 – Apple are not listening!  This is the worst of all.  Some of these issues, like copy and paste and the bluetooth issues, have been raising the ire of iPhone users since the first generation.  All of these issues are software related and as such CAN be fixed.  Why haven’t Apple been listening and fixing some of these issues?

The perfect phone for me would have the styling and UI of the iPhone, the business features of Windows Mobile and the reliability and battery life of a good old Nokia brick.

I’ve been using Slysoft’s Virtual Clone Drive to mount ISOs on Windows 7 and I recently stumbled across this post that outlined an issue with VCD on Windows 7.  What would happen is that periodically when you try to browse to a folder you would just get a grey box when you tried to change folders. 

I was having that exact same issue, but I had not made the link with VCD. 

However, it transpires that there is a new beta of Virtual Clone Drive that adds Windows 7 support, among other things.  There is a forum post with more details that makes for interesting reading.  Or if you like you could just download the new beta version.

I installed this straight over the top of the previous version and have been running this beta for a couple of days now and the issue with file browsing is gone.  Every thing seems to be working well with it.  As always, however, YMMV.

I just posted my thoughts on Starter Edition and how it could open up the bottom of the market to the Microsoft platform.  I think this is a good thing.  Could this be the birth of a new category?  Windows Internet Devices perhaps?

I’m actually starting to get quite intrigued by the possibilities here…

Microsoft announced their SKU line-up for Windows 7 (Geekzone has a good overview here)and the reaction has been mixed.  One of the six SKUs announced is the Starter Edition.

The Starter Edition will only be offered via OEMs, will be limited to three concurrent applications and will be limited to certain types of hardware.

This has met with quite a bit of negative opinion – like this from atmaspheric|endevors.

And the worst thing I’ve read yet on the topic is that Netbooks will get something called Starter Edition which limits you to 3 concurrent applications - who the hell wants that?

I don’t see this as a bad thing at all.  OK – there is going to be a SKU that is the same platform, but a bit limited.  In order for an OEM to license this SKU there hardware will have to meet certain specs.

That is not to say that every netbook will run Starter.  I believe that the units that are running Starter will not be out there to compete against the units running other SKUs of Windows .  They will be competing against the Nokia internet tablets.  They will compete against the bottom of the eee range.  They will open up that lower end market where the Windows license itself prices the unit out of the market.  It will be great to have devices at the bottom end of the market that can run Windows apps. 

If you want a fully functional companion device – buy a netbook with Home Premium on it.  If you want a glorified media centre remote, a device to browse feeds on in the lounge or look at recipes in the kitchen or a media device for your train commute then a Starter Edition device might be just the trick. 

The Starter Edition SKU could open up a whole new range of low priced devices that could be very interesting indeed.  At any rate it is far too early to get upset about netbooks being knobbled by Microsoft.  Wait  and see.

The other day I posted about the process of creating a homegroup to share data between multiple Windows 7 machines on your network.  The obvious question that was asked by Jerry in a comment was:

I have only one running Windows 7 and I would like to be able to access WinXP and Windows Vista machines that are on the network. How do you configure the Vista machine to be able to see the "shared" files on it with the Windows 7 machine?

Well – I don’t have any XP machines but I tried it with my wife’s Vista notebook.

On my wife’s machine I opened Explorer and browsed to \\TV-PC.  I was prompted for credentials, just as you would be browsing to a Vista machine.  Now the user on the Media Centre does not have a password.  I tried to authenticate as that user (which is called tv) by entering TV-PC\tv in the username and pressing enter.  Denied – I got a message that this was not allowed by policy.  I remembered that Windows Vista by default has a policy that users without passwords cannot connect over the network.  Seems Windows 7 is the same.  This is a good policy.  I jumped onto the media centre and created a user called sharing and gave it a password. 

I repeated the process above and used the newly created user.  At the top level there was a folder called users.  I expanded that and there were folders called Public and TV.  Note – TV is the name of the user that created the homegroup.

Drilling down into the TV folder I see the three folders I am sharing in the homegroup – and nothing else.

This is exactly what I see when I access TV-PC via the homegroup.  Here’s the view on Windows 7.

So the short answer is that you can access homegroup shared data from Windows Vista (and presumably XP – but as yet untested).  To do this you will need to authenticate each machine you are accessing with an account local to that machine – much as you do today.