Another Tech Blog

I don’t know why this is not getting more attention.  VMware and Landesk‘s Thinstall (now called ThinApp) has been out for close to two years now and I continue to be surprised that it is not more widely adopted. It is a great product that really lives up to the hype.

Application delivery to multiple devices is always a challenge for organizations.  An enterprise with 1000 machines will, without proper controls, have 1000 different configurations.  With IT resources stretched to their breaking point in the current ecconomic environment, it is not practical to sneaker-net software delivery.  What can you do?

You can package applications to create installable MSI’s then use a delivery tool like Landesk or Alteris.  This should be part of the solution, but packaging to MSI’s is not always easy, and done correctly takes lots of time and energy.

For smaller applications you can use auto delivery tools like ClickOnce.  These are great tools – they allow the application to check its version against a “gold” copy and if it is out of date, the new version will be delivered to the desktop automatically.  The problem with these types of tools is if an app has other software dependencies (Adobe, Office PIA’s, whatever) a simple upgrade via ClickOnce will not be enough.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy an executable (a la Linux)  to a machine that contained everything an app needed?  Well, you can with Thinstall.

ThinStall puts a shell OS and whatever components you want around an application then compiles them into a single executable that you can copy to any machine.  When you run the executable, it starts up a VM with its own registry and virtual C drive located in the user’s profile space (no worry about admin right here).  The target machine’s OS can be different than the OS the application needs.  This can be great for legacy apps that are not compatible with newer OS versions.  Also, since the executable runs in  it’s own space, you can run differing versions of the same applicatoin on a single machine.  For example, you can run IE6 and IE7 side by side.

The advantages of this technology are many.  In a Citrix environment, if you run standard installs and have to upgrade MS Office for example, you will have to go through the install on every machine in the cluster.   This can mean downtime and is time consuming.  If you ThinStall the Office suite, upgrades are just a file copy away.  Another advantage is that you can have the executable on a file server and just put shortcuts  on desktops.  Do that, and you only need to update a small number of copies to upgrade large numbers of people.

There are downsides, of course.  The executables are huge when compiled.  Half a gig for a single executable is not uncommon.  There are quirks to the software too – not all applications will work, especially those that require interaction with other applications on the desktop.  For example, if you have an application that uses Excel or Word components, it is difficult to get them to work right.  Also, if you have an application that contains code that can be used by another application on the desktop (think spreadsheet addins included with many market data applications) these too are difficult to get right.

Most applications are a breeze though – use Vmware to run a clean OS, start the Thinstall capture, install the components and the application you need, run the post capture and compile and you are done.  Many apps take less than 15 minutes to complete the package.

This is seriously good stuff.

I’ve been looking for a way to sync my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the native iPhone calendar app.  Google has come out with (I have no idea when this came out, so I may be late to the party here) a calendar and contacts sync to the iPhone native calendar and contacts apps using Microsoft ActiveSync.  Cool!

I set up the Calendar as a test – ActiveSync is a proven technology, so I expect this to work well.  So far it does.

Detail instructions on the setup are here http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html.  The setup is very simple, just set up an exchange account on your iPhone, give it your google credentials and sync to m.google.com.  

Only contacts and calendar are available at the moment – it will give you an error if you try and choose to sync your email.  That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see google turn up  activesync for email too.

This is the kind of thing I love about Google.  Most other mail providers would not go the extra mile to allow contacts and calendar sync without a cost.  This is totally free and works well.  Score!

Twitter is taking off like wildfire – you just can’t get away from it.  I’m still not a huge buyer of the technology, but as the number of people I follow increases, I’ve been having a hard time sorting through the posts.

Until now.

Enter TweetDeck, “A Simple and Fast Way to Experience Twitter”.   TweetDeck organizes your tweets in a simple columnar format so that you can run through posts quickly and easily.  You can also group people you follow into categories so that you can, for example, separate friends from colleagues.

Replies are also separated into a column so that you can see them easily.  This is really neat – a friend of mine replied to a tweet I posted a month or more ago and I missed it.  Once I loaded tweetdeck, the reply was right there and I was able to respond, belatedly, to him.

Additionally, the application will post an on screen notification (similar to outlooks new mail notifications, when a new tweet arrives.  This is helpful if the application itself is closed but you want to know when new tweets are posted.

Overall I’m really happy with the application – it makes browsing through my tweets much more efficient.

I get asked this a lot – what is the difference between POP and IMAP, and why would I want one over the other?

To put it simply, IMAP stores email on your mail server, POP stores email on your local email client.

IMAP is better for a TON of reasons.

POP or Post Office Protocol, is the most common protocol to get mail from a server to a client.  The protocol has been around forever and is in use by just about all email providers.  IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol is newer and was designed to plug the gaps left by POP.

POP was designed to work in “offline” mode, meaning that a client would connect to a mail server, download new messags and disconnect.  The messages would then be removed from the server.  This works very well if you connect to your mail server from the same computer all the time, but if you have multiple computers and or mobile devices, POP just doesn’t work well.  Messages once downloaded to one client be it computer or mobile device are then no longer available for download to another device.  There are options to leave messages on the server, but since POP does not have the ability to add state to a message (read, unread etc) leaving the messages on the server is messy.

IMAP was designed to take advantage of the mail’s state in the inbox and to be able to work in “online” mode meaning that the connection between the mail client and the server can be interactive.  Since IMAP can remember the state of a message, I can mark a mail as read on one device and have that information picked up by a different device later on.  It can also sync folders between mail client and mail server.  If you file messages to folders, IMAP will pick up this state change and synchronize between client and server.  This means that when you file a mail on your iPhone, for example, when you go home and look at your mail the filed message will be right where you expect it to be – in the folder in which it was filed.

While POP was great in the early stages of email adoption, IMAP is a more functional way to retrieve your mail.  If you can mange it, use IMAP instead of POP, you will be much happier.

Some resources for you:

http://www.imap.org/papers/imap.vs.pop.brief.html

http://www.imap.org/papers/biblio.html

After using the Kindle app for iPhone for a few weeks now, I’m totally hooked.  At first, I thought the small screen would be annoying, but I’m really loving this app!!  In my less busy days I used to read a lot.  These days life has taken over and I don’t make the time time read as much as I used to.  The Kindle App has changed that.  Since I have whatever I am currently reading in my pocket at all times, I can pick it up and read a few pages at times whenever I have a spare few minutes.  To do this with a book I’d have to have it with me always – not practical.  I have my phone with me all the time, so it’s easy to just open the app and read a few pages.  In line at the store, sitting on the couch ignoring commercials, whatever.  I don’t have to have a physical book on my hip, I can just reach for my phone.

I still love the feel of a book, that will never go away, but the huge advantage of having my books with me at all times is hard to ignore.  Why pack bulky books on a plane when I can load up as many as I want on my phone?  I don’t think that I’d spend the money on a Kindle just yet ($350 is way too much) because the main advantage for me (having the books with me at all times) goes away if I have to remember to bring the Kindle.

A friend said that he thinks this is just technology for technologie’s sake.  I disagree – this is a classic evolution of technology scenario.  Digital storage of media has been around since the first word processor was coded.  The end of print media was implied almost immediately and it never happened because people are too tied to physical media.  I don’t disagree with this – I love a good newspaper as much as the next guy, but I find myself moving more and more away from traditional print media toward online sources.  News media made the move to the web a long time ago and is thriving while traditional print media is slowly dying.  The iPhone Kindle app is just the evolution of books into the digital world in a way that makes sense, is functional and practical.  I don’t see this as the end of printed books, I see this as an augmentation of digital media to include books, a source that was looking for the right hardware and application combination to make people want to read books digitally.  I think the Kindle and the Kindle app hit the nail on the head.

If you are like me, you have too many email accounts. Work account, personal account, account for public use (spam mostly ends up here), blog email account, side business account, test accounts from various services. Too many to check all the time. What do I do to manage them all? Truth be told, I don’t check most since they are for all intents and purposes inactive. I have 5 or so that I do care about, so I need to see when I have mail in any of them at a glance.

I do this in two ways, the iPhone and through Microsoft Outlook.

Setting up multiple accounts on the iPhone is a snap.  All you do is go to the Settings application, then go to Mail, Contacts and Calendar.  Choose Add Account, then choose your email provider from the list.  iPhone has default settings for MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and MS Exchange.  If your provider is not in the list, just choose Other.

On the next screen, enter your name, email address, password and a description of the account (this is just a label), then touch save.  The iPhone software will look for the account and verify it.  If you are using an account from one of the default services that’s pretty much all you need to do.  If you are adding an account for which the iPhone has no information (a GoDaddy account for example), then you will need to enter the incoming and outgoing server information from your mail provider.  This information is specific to each provider, so go to your provider’s website and search for IMAP/POP settings.  For example, for GoDaddy accounts, the incoming server is pop.secureserver.net and the outgoing server is smtpout.secureserver.net.  Once you have the server information, enter it on the iPhone.  You will also need your userid and password for your mail provider.  In many cases this is just your email address or, if you have web access to your mail, then the the logon credentials you use to get in to your webmail is likely the user name you will need on the iPhone.  Again, check with your email provider to be sure.

Once you have all of the credentials entered, just touch save and you are done.  There are advanced settings you may need to adjust if things are not working (there are several outgoing SMTP ports – the default may not work, so try one of the others), or if you want to use SSL (and your provider provides SSL access) you will need to change port numbers and/or server names.  Check with your mail provider for connection details.  To change the SSL settings, go back to the list of email accounts in the Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings and touch the account you want to change.  Scroll down and touch Advanced.  Turn the SSL slider on and be sure that the port settings from your provider are correct.

If you want to add another account, just go back to the list of email accounts in Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings, click Add Account and go through the steps above for each account you want to add.  Currently I have 5 active accounts on my iPhone.  The nice thing is that the unread email count on the mail icon sums the number of unread emails across all accounts so I know if there is a new mail on any of them.  I can then open the mail app, go to the accounts listing and see which account has new mail.  Very convenient and helpful.

I won’t go into detail in this post, but setting up multiple email accounts in outlook is easy too – just follow the wizards ;)  The Outlook 2007 wizards are especially helpful here, and the 2007 version handles multiple accounts far better than Outlook 2003.

Have you ever needed to reboot a machine remotely? This is easy to do via MMC, the Microsoft Management Console.

In XP, do the following.

1) Right click the My Computer icon and choose manage to bring up the MMC.

2) From there, go to the Action menu and choose Connect to another computer (you can also right click on Computer management and choose the same thing).

3) Enter the name of the computer that you are looking to reboot.

4) In the next window, right click on Computer Management and go to properties.

5) In the next window, choose the advanced tab

6) Click the Startup and recovery settings button

7) Click on Shutdown. Don’t worry, after you click the button you will get options to shutdown, shutdown/restart etc. Choose the option you want and click ok.

8 ) Select Force Apps Closed and click ok.

9) Step back and enjoy.

There are other ways to accomplish the same thing – kill.exe from the NT resource kit, remotely install a remote control tool like VNC, or a shutdown tool from sysinternals.  Note that kill.exe is now part of the Microsoft Debugging Tools, not the 2003 resource kit.

My current favorite is FlightControl by Firemint.  It severley addicting.  The gist that you are a flight controller and you have to land planes and helicopters byt dragging a flight path from the plane to a runway.  Sounds easy, right?  It is, for the first few planes.  Then more planes come, and planes of differing speeds.  Pretty soon, CRASH, a mid air collision.  The graphics are simple but clear, and the interface is nice.  I’m sure I’ll be burning through my battery on this instead of working on the train ;)

eWeek is reporting that a Microsoft Executive, Stephen Elop, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo hinted that Microsoft will eventually release a version of the Office suite for mobile devices, specifically the iPhone.  I think this is important for a couple of reasons.  It further emphasizes MS’ current move away from desktop based toward web delivery of applications.  In the statement, Elop also eluded to an Ad supported web based version of the Office suite.  For a couple of years now Microsoft has said the the future of their software  is not the desktop but the web.  This move, along with the recent Office Live releases, are proof of that directive.  As an aside, I’ve been impressed with Office Live – it is a great collaboration tool, and is free – essentially you get sharepoint for nothing.  Very cool.

Back to the Office apps for iPhone – if this is a reality, it would be another rung up the ladder to getting more business away from Blackberry.  There are already apps on the Blackberry that let you edit Word and Excel docs; on the iPhone you can view documents, but not edit them.  There are apps on the way that will give users the ability to edit docs on the iPhone, specifically QuickOffice, but a release from Microsoft would likely trump any third party contenders.

As for the utility of native Office apps on a mobile device, that is another discussion entirely.  Personally, I think there is limited use for this – maybe editing a word doc for a word or three, or correcting a cell or two in a spreadsheet, but I can’t imagine trying to do any real work in Word or Excel on a mobile device.  That said, this “announcement”, if it becomes a reality, is good for Apple, and good for Microsoft.

If you don’t already know, conflicker is a worm that exploits a buffer overflow in the windows server service.  The worm is wiley – there are several hundred variants and it is difficult to know how widespread it is.  You can find more info on the Wiki or on the McAfee discussions.

The panic over this and other worms like it makes me mental.  Don’t get me wrong, these things can cause all kinds of havok not only in terms of potential identity theft, but also tons of lost hours to clean infected machines.  But if you pay just a little attention to security you’ve been innoculated against this and other threats like it for months.  Way back in October 2008 Microsoft released patch MS08-067 to close the security hole that conflicker exploits.  This was an out of band update, meaning Microsoft released the patch outside of the normal monthly patch release because it thought the release was critical.  I know that at my firm, we took this very seriously and had every node patched within two weeks, then made the patch “autofix” meaning that any node that connected to the network would get the patch automatically.

Getting rid of this worm is a pain in the ass if you have it, but protecting yourself from the exploit, which effectively makes the thing benign, is really easy.  Run Windows Update!  If you are infected, there are lots of resources to get rid of it.  Most decent anti-virus programs will get rid of it – McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc.  Google conlicker and you will get tons of help.

I hate the way the media jumps on these things and makes people panic for no good reason.  When did the news become just fear-mongering?  And what good does that do for anyone?  I suppose rasing awareness of malware is ultimately a good thing, but do they have to make it seem like the world is coming to an end?

Patch your system and you are fine.