All posts by onlyconnect

microsoft, software, software development, Uncategorized

Microsoft Softgrid: virtualization for applications

At Microsoft’s Heroes Happen Here launch, I caught up a little with something to which I’ve paid insufficient attention: Microsoft Softgrid, which is described as Application Virtualization. Softgrid is a way of packaging an application and its dependencies into an isolated bundle that runs on the client, but hardly touches the client environment. Each application has its own virtual registery, DLLs, COM DLLs, and even a virtual file system. As a consequence, it “just works”. It also lets you run otherwise incompatible applications side by side. For example, you could have an old Access 97 application, for which the developer left long ago and nobody dares to touch the code, and run it alongside Access 2007. This is apparently a huge hit for Microsoft, which does not surprise me as it solves all sorts of deployment problems. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to get Softgrid: you need to sign up for a thing called the Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance and it is hooked to other components of Microsoft’s enterprise server system:

I would like to see Softgrid’s technology also made available for more general use.

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Uncategorized

Tips on digitising vinyl

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Seeing announcements for Sony’s new PS-LX300USB USB turntable reminds me what a misunderstood area this is.

I sense that this post may work best in the form of a Q&A, so here goes.

Is digitising vinyl worth the effort?

In many cases, no. Try Amazon or eBay: chances are you can pick up a second-hand CD of the the same music for not much money, often with bonus tracks, or pick and choose from Amazon’s download store or iTunes.

Digitising vinyl is a great deal more work than ripping a CD, and the results may well be less satisfactory. When you rip a CD, it arrives on your hard drive already split into tracks with metadata like title, artist and track name already completed, presuming that the CD is in one of the internet databases like freedb, which it almost always is. That’s not the case with vinyl rips; you have to edit the tracks yourself. Further, CDs don’t usually suffer from crackles, dust, scratches or inner groove distortion, all of which afflict vinyl.

That said, there are a few reasons why you might want to do this:

  1. A CD or legal download is not available
  2. You are time-rich and money poor
  3. You prefer the sound of the vinyl

Point 3 is the most interesting. Sometimes the vinyl was made from better tapes, or mastered better, or features a mix not available on CD. In these loudness war days, the vinyl even of a new release may be better than the CD. Example: Icky Thump by the White Stripes. It has audiophile-quality vinyl mastering, but the usual over-compressed sound on CD.

Finally, sometimes you just want to hear that old sound that you remember. Pure nostalgia, but what’s wrong with that?

Still, if you are digitising vinyl for the sound, then the sound is all important. How then do you get the best results? Read on.

Will a USB turntable make it easy to convert my old records to digital?

Up to a point. A USB turntable is just a turntable with an integrated pre-amplifier and USB connection. It solves a technical problem, by applying RIAA equalization to the output from the phono cartridge, and by including an analogue to digital converter. If you are already set up for playing vinyl, you can achieve the same thing by running a cable from the line-out of your hi-fi to the line-in on your PC or laptop soundcard.

USB turntables will not make your old records any less scratched or dirty. They won’t turn the record over for you at the end of the side. They won’t magically enter the metadata or split the tracks (software might split the tracks for you, but it might not get it exactly right).

So you can guess the answer to the next question:

I already have a turntable. Do I need a USB turntable to digitise my vinyl?

No. In fact, your existing turntable may well be better. You do need a phono pre-amp, but you might have one built into your hi-fi amplifier, or you can get these separately. If you are already able to play vinyl, then you must already have a phono pre-amp somewhere in your set-up.

How do I get the best sound when digitising vinyl?

Not easily. Vinyl is a frustrating medium, because it takes so much effort and expense to get the best out of it. Critical elements include the turntable itself, the arm, the cartridge and stylus, the setup (things like the tracking weight and bias), even the table the turntable sits on makes a difference (wall mounts are good). In other words, the starting point to getting the best sound is the quality of the turntable, and it’s unlikely that a cheap USB turntable bundle is going to deliver anything close to the best sound.

Next comes the phono pre-amp. Since cartridges have low output, the quality of the pre-amp is more critical than it is for CD, especially if you have a moving coil type. Again, it’s unlikely that the pre-amp in a USB turntable is up with the best.

Third, there is the analogue to digital converter, or ADC. Same story: critical component.

So if you truly want the best sound, you need an excellent turntable assembly, an excellent phono pre-amp, and an excellent ADC, preferably external to your computer. Not a USB turntable.

I don’t mean to dismiss the USB turntable idea completely. I’d expect fair results, and if you just want to recapture a memory or two, or hear the record granddad made of his trumpet playing, it will do the job nicely.

What is audio restoration and do I need it?

Once you’ve digitised the audio signal, you end up with a sound file that faithfully captures all the hiss and crackle of the original. What you want is just the music, without the hiss and crackle. Most audio processing software, including Audacity and Sony’s Sound Forge (which comes bundled with its USB turntables), have audio restoration filters that aim to do this.

Two big problems. One is that these filters cannot eliminate problems like hiss and crackle, but only reduce them. The second is that all these filters compromise the sound. The filters are smart, and aim to damage the music as little as possible, but some audible side-effects are pretty much inevitable.

Further, once you have your digital sound file you can try your hand at applying other effects to improve it. Normalization is a good one: it brings the volume up to an appropriate level, which is useful if you recorded the vinyl at too low a level. Then again, it is better to get the level right in the first place. By all means apply other effects as well, but bear in mind that it is very easy to make the music sound less good than it did before.

My tip: the best audio restoration filter is none. They often do more harm than good. They are most useful when the original is really poor.

If you really have time on your hands, manual restoration can be very effective. You can zoom in on an annoying scratch and carefully edit just that short section, avoiding damage to the entire piece. Snag: it’s skilled work and takes ages.

A few closing comments

It can be worth it. Some early pressings of classic albums sound astonishingly good on vinyl.

I’d also like to put in a good word for Sony’s Sound Forge Audio Studio. It’s modestly priced, easy to use, fast and feature-rich. Audio Studio is a cut-down version of a professional tool, Sound Forge 9, which is also highly regarded. The main omission in the budget edition is multi-channel support; not a problem if you are digitising vinyl.

If you are in Europe, online retailer Needles & Spins has some handy “digitise your vinyl” bundles.

PS: Apparently some CD metatag databases recognize “needledrops”, if you rip a CD that was sourced from vinyl. This is done by looking at the track lengths. It is still going to be less comprehensive and reliable than a CD rip.

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linux, microsoft, nokia, qt, software development, symbian, trolltech, windows

Trolltech says Qt for Windows CE coming in May

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Trolltech has announced Windows CE support in the 4.4 release of Qt, its cross-platform development framework. A pre-release is already available. Qt already supports desktop Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, so this plugs a significant gap. Features include SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and OpenGL. It’s good to see this going ahead  despite Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, which is set to be completed in the second quarter of 2008. Nokia is committed to a couple of rival embedded operating systems, Linux and Symbian.

What about Qt for Symbian then? There are hints that it will happen. Then again, perhaps Nokia will increase its focus on Linux?

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internet, microsoft, open source

Chris Anderson on Freeconomics

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Chris Anderson, the Wired editor who coined the term “long tail”, has written a lengthy piece on Free – why $0.00 is the future of business, and is writing a book on the subject.

It caught my eye in part because of what Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz told me the other day: the only acceptable price is free.

The idea must terrify Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software licenses, while letting third-parties take the profits from custom development and services. Companies are less vulnerable if they sell both hardware and software, or have strong services departments.

The paradox here is that even when the marginal cost drops close to zero, there still has to be a business model. Something I am still trying to figure out as I give away content on this blog.

adobe, internet, java, silverlight, software, software development, web authoring

Adobe AIR now available; not just consumer fluff

Adobe has released AIR and you can download the runtime and SDK now, as well as FlexBuilder 3, the official IDE for AIR. Just to remind you, AIR is a way of running Flash applications on the desktop, supplemented by SQLite, a fast local database manager.

Among the most interesting case studies I’ve seen is from LMG, which runs loyalty schemes including the Nectar card and Air Miles. The big deal for the retailers is that using your loyalty card lets them identify who is buying what, providing mountains of data which can be mined for trends and the like. I do mean mountains. Nectar is used by Sainsburys. Between 25 and 40 million “basket items” are added to the database each day, and the database holds 2 years of data.

LMG’s Self-serve is an app in development which enables Sainsburys and its suppliers to analyze this data; it could potentially be used by other retailers too. “The application answers questions like how’s my brand performing, who’s buying my brand, what else are they buying,” says Garth Ralston, LMG’s Business Intelligence Development Manager.

Self-Serve is built with AIR and Flex. “Excel spreadsheets, which some of our competitors use, and the pie charts than you can create within them, are so 1990’s”, says Ralston. “We’re looking for a little bit more of the Wow factor.”

A couple of things particularly interested me. One is that SQLite is critical for the app, which works by downloading large chunks of data and manipulating it on the client. This means that Self-Serve would not work as a browser application, unless possibly with Google Gears, which also uses SQLLite. Another is the importance of offline working. “The ability to have a user run the app, run a report, download the data to their system, take the laptop on the train and continue to work is an absolute business requirement”, says Ralston.

James Governor, Redmonk analyst, told the press that BMC will be using AIR as a front-end to integrate its mainframe management offerings, and SAP will be using it. “Frankly, I think this will be the front-end for all SAP business applications,” he said. In other words, AIR is not just consumer fluff.

Governor is just back from Sun, as I am, and while I was there I picked up some anxiety at the way Flash and now AIR are doing what Java was intended to do – provide a rich cross-platform client. Has Adobe stolen Sun’s market? “Sun is quite capable of stealing its own market”, he said. “Java just hasn’t delivered the kind of rich desktop experiences that we would expect and hope.” That said, note that FlexBuilder is a Java application, Adobe’s server-side LiveCycle data services are Java, and Adobe’s ColdFusion runs on Java, so there are pros and cons here for Sun’s technology.

Actually, I suspect you could build Self-Serve in Java without much difficulty. The big win for AIR is that it’s home territory for multitudes of Flash designers. This is as much about designer and developer communities as it is about technology. The same applies to Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is ideal for Visual Studio developers to whom Flash is foreign.

I still have reservations about AIR, though there is also much to like. It’s early days of course; I’m looking forward to trying it for real. I also love the way these new initiatives are making us rethink the design of essential applications that have remained essentially unchanged for years.

drm, microsoft, multimedia, software, vista, windows

Fixing Windows Media Player after a system upgrade

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A while back I upgraded my motherboard. Windows Media Player seemed fine – in fact, it works quite a bit better with the faster CPU – until today, when it started crashing shortly after starting. The faulting module was Indiv01.key.

The solution is in this thread. On Vista, what you have to do is to delete the contents of the folder C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM (not the folder itself). Note that this folder is invisible by default. In Explorer – Folder Options – View, you have to check Show hidden files and folders, and uncheck Hide protected operating system files.

Observe the caveat:

Note that anything recorded on the old system that is DRM protected will not be playable after this procedure.

I recall doing something similar to get BBC iPlayer (download version) working.

This is all to do with tying DRM to hardware. You are not meant to copy a protected file to another PC and still be able to play it. There used to be a method for backing up and restoring your licenses, but it seems to have gone in Vista. From online help:

This version of the Player does not permit you to back up your media usage rights. However, depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet. For more information, see the question in this topic about how to restore your media usage rights.

This leaves a few questions for Microsoft to consider:

  • Why does a DRM problem break Windows Media Player even when playing non-DRM content?
  • Why does a DRM problem cause Windows Media Player to crash, rather than reporting a DRM problem?
  • Why does the user have to uncheck a box in Explorer options that says “Recommended” and warns you that you may make your computer inoperable, in order to fix a common problem? I mean “Hide protected operating system files”?
  • Is it acceptable to say, “you might be able to restore your rights”, when a user could in theory have thousands of pounds invested in DRM-protected content?

Fortunately I don’t have any DRM-protected content that I am aware of.

Everything is fine now.

apple, linux, microsoft, software, ubuntu, vista, windows

How long should it take to set up a laptop?

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So you need a new laptop. Ignoring those irritating voices that say you should go Apple, you select a value-for-money offering from one of the big names like Toshiba or HP, hit the buy button at Ebuyer or the like, and a day or so later a van is at the door and you have your shiny new laptop. You slit the tape, pull the thing out of the box, plug it in and turn it on. How long should it take before you are happily typing away in Word or enjoying a DVD?

The answer I guess is as short a time as possible. In principle, I don’t see why it should take more than 5 or 10 minutes. The manufacturer has pre-installed the operating system and can ensure that all the right drivers are in place.

Here’s what actually happened when I did this for a friend yesterday. Toshiba Satellite Pro A200 with Vista Business. Not a bad machine, great value. We also had a key to activate Office 2007, which came pre-installed as part of Microsoft’s Office Ready scheme.

I started mid-morning. Turned on. It takes ages before it lets you in. I lost count of the reboots. There is some sort of partitioning dance, then when Vista itself starts up it goes through an optimisation process, then various Toshiba and third-party utilities install themselves, sometimes requiring a reboot. I broke for lunch.

After lunch I connected to the Internet. Vista immediately set about downloading updates. Needed reboots, naturally. Then I ran the Office Activation Wizard. Microsoft’s Office-Ready program is great marketing, but fairly annoying, because typically you don’t want to purchase all of it. In our case we had purchased Office Small Business, but not Access. In consequence, you end up with an installation that is partially a trial version, even though you have paid. I’ve heard of this scenario actually preventing a machine from passing “Genuine Office Validation” when trying to download updates from Microsoft. Not a good way to treat customers. The solution is to uninstall the bits of Office you are not actually buying.

At this point I could have declared “job done”, but I knew that it wasn’t. I applied Vista SP1, which takes ages. I applied Office 2007 SP1, which is fairly quick. I removed a few things that I knew would not be needed, like Outlook’s Business Contact Manager.

I uninstalled Toshiba’s ConfigFree utility. This is a thing that is meant to “simplify” managing wireless (and wired) networks. It hijacks Vista’s perfectly good built-in wireless configuration utility. Now, it is possible that ConfigFree genuinely offers some added value, but even if it does this kind of thing is still a nuisance. First, because people like myself know how the Windows version works, and are disinclined to learn the foibles of an unnecessary replacement. Second, because the official item will be maintained and updated through Windows update, rather than at the whim of Toshiba (or whomever).

If you are really unlucky, the supplier of your wireless card, or wireless router, or your ISP, will persuade you to install yet more network configuration software. Once two or three of these guys are fighting to manage and diagnose your wireless connection, you have little chance of connecting successfully to anything.

There there is anti-virus to think about. Personally I reckon the practice of installing trial versions of Norton’s anti-virus suite (or similar) is a disgrace. It makes for a lousy user experience because the first thing you see after enduring setup is a nag screen assuring you that your new computer is insecure. It is a disgrace because if you accept the trial but don’t pay up, you end up with an out-of-date anti-virus utility, which leaves you vulnerable. Let’s not forget that basic anti-virus software is available for free from AVG and a few others – if Toshiba really cared about the security of its customers, it would pre-install that. I have zero confidence in anti-virus software anyway, but this is not the place.

Result overall: three to four hours spent on something that should take a few minutes.

I have a good understanding of the commercial, technical and political reasons for these hassles, and I don’t regard Toshiba as the worst offender. Nevertheless, Microsoft and its partners have failed to tackle the problem effectively, and this is a factor behind Apple’s resurgence. Frankly, Ubuntu and other Linux distros are more fun to install, though with Linux you inevitably end up Googling to solve one or more strange issues so overall it is no better for the non-technical user.

Recently I’ve been working with Windows Server 2008, which is a delight by comparison. The concept is simple: pre-install the bare bones, and make all the features optional. So Microsoft can do it. Why can’t consumer Windows work the same way? Install a clean, fast, basic version of Windows, and then let the user decide what else they require?

open source, Sun, Uncategorized

Sun’s OpenSolaris community fracas: not just a name thing

While I was at Sun last week I was following the discussion in the OpenSolaris community about the naming and repositioning exercise which saw a Project Indiana become the official OpenSolaris distribution. Some of the external members most deeply involved in OpenSolaris were immensely frustrated not by the decision itself, but by the way it was made and announced, with little consultation of those who were supposedly governing OpenSolaris. It was exactly this issue which provoked Ben Rockwood’s post which I quoted in a blog post on 15th February and again in The Guardian. Unfortunately I didn’t see Roy Fielding’s post resigning from the OpenSolaris community until later, otherwise I would likely have quoted him as well:

This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke. Sun should move on, dissolve the charter that it currently ignores, and adopt the governing style of MySQL. That company doesn’t pretend to let their community participate in decisions, and yet they still manage to satisfy most of their users.

On 14th February I spoke to Rich Green, Sun’s Executive Vice President, Software, and asked him to clarify the changes to OpenSolaris:

This is one of those classic “what’s in a name” things. OpenSolaris is a community, is a source code base, and is the distro from Sun Microsystems. We’re going to put a lot of energy into it, not only in terms of the quality of the technology, but the business model around it, very much akin to other open source programs focusing on subscriptions and support, but that open source base is out there for other distros to be derived, and we encourage them. There was a naming complexion change, but the feedback from the community was mostly, not uniformly, it never is uniformly: thank you, for clarifying what we all expected you to do. Thanks for putting your name and brand behind a distribution of the source code base which is out there. And thank you for moving it out into the open so others can do the same. So that’s where we are, that’s where we’ll stay. The reaction has been generally, never uniformly, very positive.

I didn’t realise at the time that “not uniformly” included the resignation of such a prominent member of OpenSolaris – Fielding’s post is dated just after midnight on the previous evening. However, Green is correct in saying that many see the decision itself as sensible, which makes this whole fracas rather unnecessary. Fielding makes further comment here.

Of course this is not really a naming thing, it is about how Sun relates to the community it is building around its open source projects, and to which it attaches huge importance. I lost count of how many times CEO Jonathan Schwartz and others used the community word to describe how it would create new business opportunities and monetize its open source efforts. Quite possibly Sun misjudged the impact of the way this particular decision was made, but in a way that is the point; it is a failure of relationship, and suggests that Sun wants to maintain tight control of its software even though it has made the decision to make it free and open source. I asked Schwartz about this but did not get a particularly illuminating response.

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microsoft, open source, software, software development

Microsoft moves to protect its Office business in format war

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Here’s a key snippet from yesterday’s interoperability announcement:

We’re also designing new APIs for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that will enable developers to plug in additional document formats and allow users to select those formats as their default for saving documents.

Translation: if OOXML fails to get ISO standardisation, and/or if the rival ODF catches on or is mandated by institutions, then Microsoft wants you to keep using Office.

Product Manager Gray Knowlton has a little more detail here.

I’m not clear how extensive these changes are. Presumably it amounts to more than just tweaking the open and save dialogs to enable different defaults. Office applications already let you select from a range of different formats.

A few further comments. First, I’d like to see OOXML standardized. Aggressive IBM-sponsored lobbying has not convinced me this is a bad idea. And yes, I’ve pored over the spec and even done a little development with OOXML. Standardization tends to improve documentation and helps to protect developers from arbitrary changes.

It is interesting to see someone like Patrick Durusau, Chair of incits, coming out in favour of  OOXML standardization [PDF]:

I have seen some attacks on OpenXML saying it is not an “open” standard. I am quite puzzled by those attacks and think that OpenXML makes the case for open development of standards.

Understand that as the Project Editor for ISO/IEC 26300 and the OpenDocument Format TC editor in OASIS, I carry no brief for OpenXML. However, a well defined and publicly controlled OpenXML would be a great benefit for future work on the OpenDocument Format standard so I have no reason to wish it ill.

That does not mean Microsoft has done everything right. Microsoft’s Jean Paoli, now an evangelist for standardization, told me three years ago that OOXML was not suitable to be managed by a standards body. Why the change of heart? Simply, the threat of losing market share to a rival that was standardized. Microsoft had years of unchallenged Office supremacy in which it could have opened up its formats; but did nothing until its profits were threatened.

This should tell us something about the benefits of competition.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts, gains in ODF market acceptance will damage Microsoft Office. It will take more than a few API changes to make Microsoft Office as good an ODF editor as Open Office, which has a family relationship with the rival formats.

Standardization is only a small piece of this puzzle. On the Microsoft side, Office is a decent product with massive market dominance. On the ODF side, Open Office is also a decent product and is free and open source. The fight will still be on, no matter how the standards thing plays out.

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apple, google, ibm, microsoft, open source, oracle, Sun

Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz makes the case for free and open source software

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I interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz last week, and wrote it up for Guardian Technology. By the way, the picture is much better in the print edition.

Sun is gambling on open source – not only open source, but free software. This is possibly easier for Sun that it would be for, say, Microsoft or Oracle, because Sun, like Apple, is a hardware company. You can therefore think of the software as an overhead for selling the hardware. It is not without risk though – most of the software (including its Solaris operating system) runs on commodity x86 hardware as well as on Sun’s SPARC processors.

Not everything we discussed made it into the Guardian piece. I put it to Schwartz that Sun has historically done a poor job of monetizing the software it gives away. For example, it made Java the most popular programming language in the world, with huge enterprise adoption, yet until recently the company was posting losses. I then asked whether he considered that the fundamental open source model – give away the software, make money on support and services – was the future for the whole industry, rather than just for Sun and a few others?

I think first of all our strategy is to build the broadest global communities we can, and then from those communities to identify the opportunities to make money by building datacenters and by building the technologies that go into those datacenters. Software, systems, services, and microelectronics. So right now, in responding to the question is that the future of the industry, right now if you’d like a free Microsoft-office compatible Office suite, you could go to OpenOffice.org, download it, as roughly 100 million people have done in the past couple of years, and you’d have to pay nothing. Or, you could go to your local retailer and pay for the latest proprietary office suite. So if you were a betting man, and you looked at 3.3 billion people online today, where do you think the majority of them will acquire their office productivity suites? They’ll probably acquire the free ones, by definition those will be the most popular.

Now the same thing would apply to search. If you wanted to be in the search business can you imagine trying to run a search portal today, charging customers 50 cents per search? You’d probably have no takers. So, if you want to be the broadest supplier of volume technology into the marketplace, the only acceptable price tag is free.

We are in fact interested in pursuing the broadest global developer community possible, for whom the only acceptable price is free. So I think, if you’re going to try to compete against our virtualization products, our office productivity products, our network infrastructure products, you have to come to the table with a free product. Absent a free product, you won’t even be considered by the majority of the marketplace. So right now I believe we stand alone in having evolved our business model to actually monetize that community. That’s exactly what we’re doing, every day. So when people ask, when will you monetize those free software downloads, again, we had 7% operating margin last quarter. It’s not going to be a single line item, it’s going to be the whole company’s market opportunity expanding. So I feel very comfortable that this is not only the direction for Sun, and it’s a great direction, it’s the direction for the industry. The move towards free software is unstoppable. Not simply in your home, but at your workplace.

Note that it helps to consider this in a global context, not just the traditional highly developed locations like Europe or the USA.

Is he right? The world’s biggest and most profitable tech companies are not built on open source. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, for example. All these companies flirt with open source, even make real and meaningful contributions, but they keep their prize jewels proprietary.

Bottom line: Schwartz may well be right, but he’s not right yet. Still, follow the trend. Free software continues to improve; the proprietary vendors are giving away more of their stuff; the cloud is growing in importance relative to the desktop; and tough economic times are likely in tech’s most profitable markets. I doubt Sun will be the only company to change its business model.

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