Ed Bott's Windows Expertise

Vanished mysteriously, and no one at Microsoft wants to talk about it.

Microsoft has just released Tweak MC, an updated version of a power toy originally written several years ago for Windows XP Media Center Edition. It allows Media Center users to adjust features without having to edit the registry directly:

TweakMC is a set of useful commands for Media Center Edition, adding additional flexibility to various areas of Media Center. The source code is included and can be used as a reference to create additional custom TweakMC settings.

It’s released under the Microsoft Public License.

Does this mean we can expect updated Power Toys for Windows Vista, such as Tweak UI? Nah…

(h/t Chris Lanier)

I stumbled across this interesting and extremely useful Hyper-V Monitor gadget the other day. In a very compact workspace on the Windows Vista Sidebar, it shows you the status of every virtual machine configured on a Hyper-V Server and allows you to connect to or control any of those VMs with a single click. In the example shown here (which shows my live Hyper-V Server), I’m actually aiming the mouse pointer at the status section for the first VM in the list, making the the Turn Off, Shut Down, and Save buttons visible.

The gadget can list multiple servers at once and can save a custom username/password pair so you can log on with something other than your current account credentials. Each VM in the list is a live link; click to open the VM in a Virtual Machine Connection window.

Developer Tore Lervik has more details and the latest downloadable code: Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar.

Well, to all in the U.S., anyway. The LiveSide folks pass along this announcement from the Live Mesh forums:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

If you’re outside the U.S., you apparently have to change your region and language settings to EN-US, which might be a dealbreaker for some.

Anyway, the current release of Live Mesh is an excellent way to sync files across machines and make them available “in the cloud.” Give it a try.

Update: The Live Mesh team has more details, including the news that there’s a cap on the number of new registrants:

This week we did two things:

1. Doubled the maximum number of users we’ll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview.
2. Simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process.  We’ve removed the requirement to sign up via Microsoft Connect, so that instead you can sign up directly from www.mesh.com.

So if you’re thinking of signing up, don’t wait too long…

My buddy Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has a barnburner of a post today whose key message can be boiled down to a simple phrase in all caps: PATCH IT, DAMMIT! (That’s Dwight’s phrase, from an e-mail exchange we had this morning about this very post.)

I agree completely with what I see as Dwight’s overarching message: computer security is serious business and complacency can have dire consequences. Absolutely right. But I cringe at the fear-based presentation from SANS, which is unnecessarily alarmist and seriously outdated.

Let’s start with Dwight’s headline:

Average time to infection: 4 minutes

That’s alarming. And so is the nut graf, which appear just above a chart that drives home the point visually:

Here’s how poisonous the Internet environment is these days: According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, just connecting an unpatched Windows XP system to the Internet can result in a malware infection in an average time of four minutes.

The implication is that you don’t dare connect to the Internet without full body armor. A casual reader would take away this message: if you go down to your local outlet mall, pick up one of those last remaining Windows XP machines, and then plug it directly into a cable modem, you’ll be infected within minutes. That is simply not accurate. And Dwight hints at that when he says, “I actually saw this happen first-hand years ago.” Me too. I remember watching in awe as the Blaster worm jumped across networks to infect Windows machines back in the summer of 2003. But that was years ago and I haven’t seen anything similar happen since those dark days.

Read more on The myth of the four-minute Windows survival time

I got an e-mail this morning from reader Bert Rivera:

I’m a long time reader of your columns on ZDNet and edbott.com. I’ve been a network administrator for 16 years but never got into programming. I’ve written batch files here and there but nothing real involved.

Over the years, the simple batch files I’ve done have met my needs, but lately there have been a few things that batch files couldn’t do and I would like to know if you can recommend some books on scripting for beginner/intermediate users. Any help would be appreciated.

That one stumped me. Although Carl, Craig, and I touch on scripting and batch files in our Inside Out books, we don’t go into much depth on the topic, and I haven’t had the time to really dive into scripting and other development areas in the past few years.

If I were going to get started with scripting these days, I’d probably focus on PowerShell, and I’d most certainly start by poking around at the Microsoft Script Center, which has a Getting Started page and a Windows PowerShell portal.

I’d also devour the Hey, Scripting Guy! archives, which are well written and practical.

To get a good Scripting 101 book, I suppose I’d start at Amazon.com and read the reviews. But I’d rather read some up-to-date real-world reviews from you all, especially if you can point out a book that really helped you get over this same hurdle. In fact, if you’ve written a scripting book and you want to plug it here, be my guest.

Here’s a snapshot of the collection of virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V here right now:

That’s one Windows Server 2008 VM, one Windows Home Server, two Linux distros, and Vista Ultimate. All are allocated 1GB except Windows Home Server, which is working fine with 512MB. Total RAM usage is just a hair over 5.5GB.

This is a quad-core machine with Intel Virtualization Technology enabled. Each virtual machine’s performance is snappy; without exception, each one feels like it’s running on its own dedicated hardware.

As you can see, I did a clean install of the latest Ubuntu version a few minutes ago (the VM name is Ubuntu Test2), and installed OpenSUSE 11 two days ago. Both Linux installs went very smoothly, with no tweaking except for the need to install a Legacy Network Adapter.

This announcement is welcome, but why only on the Xbox?

Microsoft Corp. and Netflix, Inc., the world’s largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer consumers the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets users instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost.

[…]

Netflix on Xbox 360 is an important component of the new Xbox experience, a new generation of games and entertainment experiences that will be available on Xbox 360 consoles this fall. The new Xbox experience, also announced today at the E3 Media and Business Summit, represents the first time in history that a mass-market consumer electronics device has been re-invented through free software, giving people more fun and intuitive ways to interact, play and enjoy entertainment content.

It sure seems like it should be possible for this service to be ported to Windows Media Center. As an early adopter of Media Center technologies and a Netflix subscriber who isn’t a gamer, I feel left out (to put it mildly) when I read announcements like this. Look at this description, for instance:

From the Netflix Web site, members simply add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will be automatically displayed on the TV screen via Xbox 360 and available to watch instantly. Once selected, movies will begin playing in as little as 30 seconds. In addition to instantly streaming movies to the TV, Xbox LIVE Gold members can fast-forward, pause and rewind, all using either their Xbox 360 Controller or Media Remote. In all, the user interface creates a highly personalized experience that puts viewers in control.

I’d love to be able to do this via a Media Center Extender, but I guess my only option for now is an unsupported user-written plug-in. Thanks, Netflix. And thanks, Microsoft. At least you can get an earful from your own community now.

Update: Chris Lanier seems to agree:

Yesterday Microsoft announced that they are partnering with Netflix to bring Netflix’s streaming content to the Xbox 360 Dashboard. What was not announced however is the same in Media Center. The good news is that Microsoft now has the backend to make it work. The bad news [is] that knowing them Netflix streaming may never be ported to Media Center. Looks like the Xbox 360 Dashboard is still Media Center biggest enemy.

Be sure to read the comments here and under Chris’s post.

So far I’m reasonably happy with Firefox 3. I like two features in particular: crash recovery (if the browser crashes, it offers to restore all your tabs when you resume) and download pause/resume (if you’re doing a big download and you need to close the browser for some reason, you can restart where you left off). Here’s the Download Manager in action. See that Pause button?

Unfortunately, these two features don’t work together. So, this morning, when I was 75% of the way through a 4+GB download, Firefox decided to crash. When it resumed, I noticed that the download resumed as well. From the beginning.

Ugh. Yes, I know there are extensions that do a better job with downloads, but this seems like it should be a core feature.

James Kendrick noted this little detail when he bought a new iPhone at the Apple Store yesterday:

The most interesting part of the entire purchase process was seeing the role that Microsoft played in every single iPhone purchase at the Apple store. You see, Apple doesn’t use cash registers or even Macs for the purchase process. No, they use handheld wireless devices made by Symbol, maker of such things, and every single one of them is running the Windows CE operating system. That’s right, Apple had to turn to Microsoft for a point-of-sale (POS) solution solid enough to work under such volume sales situations. These Symbol devices used barcode scanning to input each iPhone’s serial number and other information, used a credit card scanner to accept customer payment, and tapped a wireless connection to not only the Apple store’s network but to the AT&T network to activate the new service for the customer.

Without resorting to snark, I think this illustrates the fundamental difference between Apple, a seller of luxury consumer products, and Microsoft, a developer of business and consumer platforms.

Yes, I know that the current CW is that the iPhone is the new platform, and that might be true. But let’s come back in a year or two and see just how successful the platform really is.