Many moons ago I visited the Microsoft website for assistance in fixing a problem they’d created and was asked to install Silverlight. Since my job involves keeping up to date with web technologies I installed it and as far as I know haven’t used it since.

It turns out that one website does use it – Sky Player. I use Sky Player when I’m working in the evenings so i work on one Mac and then watch TV or a film on Sky Player using my Laptop.

At the weekend I was working a bit on Friday night and loaded up Firefox to go to Sky Player. Firefox then informed me that a plugin wanted to be run in 32 bit mode – a message I hadn’t seen before but I assumed was due to the recent upgrade to Firefox 5 which must now natively run in 64 bit and some plugins haven’t been updated yet. Since I knew Flash was alright, that’s when I found out it was running Silverlight.

Now here’s my problem with Microsoft and Silverlight. You upgrade Firefox and sometimes it informs you that you need to upgrade Flash too and so you do and then everything just keeps working nicely. Not so with Microsoft. Because everything they do has to have a business / revenue generating reason behind it, they don’t play well with others. That means that Firefox doesn’t inform you that Silverlight needs to be updated.

So, why is this a downside? Well, because in the case of Sky Player, they use a system to authenticate devices so you can only watch stuff through your Sky account on a number of devices and one of those must be authenticated as the main device, so in my case I have accountname-Mac, accountname-Windows and accountname-Xbox with the Mac being the main device. However when I went in at the weekend, it was saying the device I was using wasn’t registered and it would be registered automatically. Except that it was in the registered device list and wouldn’t add itself again or become authenticated so I couldn’t watch anything.

Arrrggghhh, they annoy me.

Normally on my Linux web servers as part of the backup setup I get it to do a daily mysqldump to the local hard disk in case something nasty happens. Since this was a managed Windows server and therefore has expensive built in backup systems as well as an external backup process I didn’t bother. I should have though.

The website is on Drupal and one of the users was trying to remove a duplicate menu item that had cropped up and ended up deleting a node, it’s webform and all the submissions. If you don’t know Drupal – that means retrieve required info from database backup. SO I went to the scheduled daily backup taken by Windows Server and tried to retrieve the files I needed. That’s when I found out that their idea of a backup has to backup the mysql .exe files and nothing else so there was no data!

Panic time and a quick call to the hosting company later I found out that they do an additional backup. But, our 200Gb server had gone over it’s 100Mb a week quota for daily backups! WTF!!!!

I ended up having to recreate the data from an old backup and applying new updates. Anyway, don’t trust Microsoft or anyone that thinks Microsoft is worth trusting your business to.

I’ve now created a batch file and scheduled task to do a mysqldump.

Our Sky+ box has stopped been able to record – I think the hard drive has gone and since it’s out of warranty I can’t be bothered to replace it since the majority of what we would use it for is available on iPlayer. The few things I want to watch and don’t get chance to at the time, I’ve been watching through Sky Player on my Macbook. However this week I was planning on doing stuff on my laptop but unfortunately I couldn’t use my girlfriend’s laptop to watch stuff on Sky Player because she wanted to use it.

Luckily I remembered that I do have one remaining Windows device – my Xbox 360. It had completely slipped my mind that the Sky Player is available on Xbox and since that was already hooked up to the TV is was perfect. Except for Microsoft’s accountants getting in the way.

So here’s the deal. I bought an Xbox from Microsoft because I wanted to play some Need for Speed games and a few others. I don’t want to connect to the internet and play against a thirteen year old in Kansas. I’ve also paid for the Sky channels I want and Sky has provided the Sky Player so I can watch stuff I’ve missed for free. Brilliant.

Except that Microsoft says I can’t use the Xbox I paid for to watch Sky that I’ve paid for unless I pay an extra £6 a month to them for nothing!

I hate them so much!

To save me going into the office for stuff like this I set a port on the firewall to forward Remote Desktop to one of the admin PCs where I can use a browser to put it back online again.

Well tonight I was lying on the bed when I read the email and couldn’t be bothered to get my laptop so I got out my iPhone and a quick browse of the app store came up with a free remote desktop app. It’s called Mocha something and is surprisingly easy to use.

Mac OS, Linux and Windows working in harmony.

Plus since I wrote this using the WordPress App I now never have to leave my bed.

Well, our company is still using the same Linux server we were using 4 years ago – the second hand server only cost £75 back then and of course the Linux distro on it was free – with other networking bits and some hardware failure that means we’ve provided a small business network at a cost of around £50 per year. Any manager would be happy with that. But what about the administration – has my life been much harder keeping this bargain network up and running? Simply put – no.

I was just downstairs on the customer services floor and noticed one of the printers had stopped. This usually happens with that particular printer when it has jobs in the queue but hasn’t had any paper in it for a few days and the printer tells the linux server it’s gone offline. With a Windows server all you would have to do is to find a spare PC, load up a Remote Desktop session and check out the problem. With Linux – even easier.

In this case all I needed to do was get my iPhone out of my pocket, load up Safari, log into Webmin on the server using our wireless network and with a few clicks taps put the printer back online. Before I’d even had chance to put my phone back in my pocket the printer was spitting stuff out again.

How can anyone claim Windows is easier to administer than Linux?

Anyway, the usual way I get it into a usable format is to import the Excel into Access, export it into a local instal of MySQL, and then dump it into an SQL file to transfer to the server I need it on.

Problem is, since I last did this I’ve had a new PC and when I tried using mysqldump on this machine, I kept getting the error “Access is Denied” at the command prompt. After a little searching it turns out that the problem is the User Account Control that’s been in place since Windows Vista. It doesn’t ask for permission in the command prompt environment, just comes up with the Access is Denied message.

The solution. Go to Start and in the search box type in “cmd”. This will show the command prompt in the results and all you have to do is right-click on it and click “Run as Administrator”. This will let you do a dump without any errors.

Windows DVD Maker is really good. It is easier and better than any of the free tools in previous versions of windows or as part of DVD recording software packages I’ve used in the past. All you have to do is add the video files, choose a menu design and then click burn. This worked fine for the first one I did but since then it’s been taking widescreen videos, adding them to a widescreen menu and then playing the resulting DVD in 4:3 format instead of 16:9. Even changing the very limited options does nothing – it ignors choosing either 4:3 or 16:9 from the options menu – it still burns everything in 16:9!

Turns out the simplest solution is actually more free Microsoft software – namely Windows Live Movie Maker. All you have to do is download it, install it and then follow the below instructions to create your DVD.

1. Open Windows Live Movie Maker, Add your movie.
2. Click on the View tab and set the Aspect Ratio to Widescreen
3. Publish the file in Widescreen format

You can then use the new video file to create your DVD. Simples.

This choice is completely unbiased – the user is informed on the first screen what they are doing (i.e. choosing their default browser) and then on the following screen will have a first level selection of 5 browsers to choose from (there are additional choices – who knows what), namely Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari.

No since IE currently has about a 50% market share, this is likely to be the portion of the browser market that is up for grabs. Anyone who has already been educated into the choice of browser – i.e. that there is one and that they don’t have to just click on Internet Explorer and use that to broser the web, will most likely have already made a choice and will probably stick with it – this prompt isn’t likely to change their mind much. That plus this is only for IE users – those that have chosen Chrome or Firefox shouldn’t see it.

So what about the rest – the 50% that’s up for grabs? Well to me it would seem that these are the people who are unaware that there are other choices out there or possibly just don’t have a need to change (either they can’t be bothered or haven’t been motivated to through IE vulnerabilities for example). For the people that don’t know about the options, I think that this will be something that will make them stop and consider the options. They aren’t likely to just scan across the list (which is displayed in a random order) and pick IE – they are likely to look and make an uninformed or slightly informed choice. For this reason they aren’t likely to choose IE – if they have limited computing experience they aren’t likely to be fans of MS, more likely they are border of staring at the Windows flag while waiting for their aging PC to boot so they can check their email. Or they’ve heard or experienced the horrors of BSOD – not something that’s likely to make them choose MS’s offering.

So which would they select? My money is on either Chrome or Firefox. Mainly because Firefox is the biggest name in the browser market but even more important, Google is the biggest name on the Internet, making them much more likely to ring a bell with the novice and gain their vote. Secondly – they look and sound cooler than the others on the list. Style is as important as anything else dont-cha know.

It’ll be interesting to see how this affects the browser shares in Europe over the coming months. If nothing changes that just goes to show that I was right and Windows update should be forced on people.

So, how does this affect the key players in the industry? Up until now the home market has been dominated by the same companies as the business PC market – Microsoft provides the software with hardware being handled by Dell, HP, IBM, Sony and others. However, if everything moves in the direction I think it will the main product there – Microsoft Windows – will go from being the one element that’s included on all the devices sold to a compontent included on some devices – such as a version of Windows being used on some smart phones and obviously Microsoft’s Xbox. This is a major change for Microsoft. If the death of the desktop PC in the home and growth of mobile and gaming devices causes Microsoft to become a minor player in that area then who will become the new major players? Sony? They already produce the PS3 and are a big player in the mobile phone industry. My thinking is no. I think the industry will be dominated by two companies – Apple & Google.

To understand why you have to think about what the customer in the home environment wants – simple, elegant, stylish devices that do everything they want. Problem is “everything they want” is not what it used to be – we don’t want an operating system that allows us to connect extra hardware to perform the functions we need and a million things we don’t. We just want a device that performs functions such as texting, calls, music, camera and as such is small enough to be carried around – anything that this clever little device cannot do is either not worth having or much more likely acheivable through some provider on the internet. Does this remind you of something? iPhone maybe? Apple Inc?

But just because Apple were the first to produce a good, popular mainstream product, doesn’t mean they’ll be the dominant player for years to come. The success of the iPhone has highlighted to the manufacturers you big the market is and as such everyone wants a peice of the pie. So who’s big enough to acheive this? The one company who is innovative enough and is already playing catchup in this area – Google. They have a massive user base both in terms of it’s search engine but also Gmail and it’s other products mean that they have the capital, marketing ability and product design capabilities to make something as good as the iPhone.

Where does this leave Microsoft? Well, the Xbox product line which could become the main living room device assuming they accept the fact that the PC won’t be part of the package, they’ve got the technology to ensure that the Xbox is one of the devices in everyone’s home. That and their dominance in the business software market means they aren’t going to disappear. They just won’t be the biggest technology company in the home.

I personally hope this is the case. I won’t miss going down the pub and being greeted with “Windows has gone and done….”. And I don’t think it will take too long for this to happen – I’ve already got the iPhone and Xbox (and Wii, and Sky) and as such very rarely turn on the laptop except for work related tasks.

At that point my Windows XP laptop was starting to suffer from various hardware problems – fans starting to seize and cause shutdowns, network failures for no reason, nasty wirring from the harddrive on occassions. This led my boss to give me a shinny new Vaio (VGN-FW48E if you’re interested) with Shiiny Vista. I would have been happy to stick with XP as that bit everything I wanted and had become stable and reliable to the point where it just ran and ran, day in day out. Unfortunately everyone in the office is on Vista and keep asking “how do i…” and the reply “how should I know – I haven’t got a new PC” apparently doesn’t count as quality IT support, plus XP is quite old now and although I was happy with Windows 98 at the time, things change and you eventually have to get up to date.

So – Windows Vista – what’s it like. Well…. everything has moved around to make it simpler for novices, making it annoying for me since I knew where everything was, plus now I can’t have access to all the advanced settings we used to have. UAC is a bit annoying – it’s like Health & Safety – just because some people are idiots who can’t but one foot in front of the other without having an accident, we all have to suffer.

What else? Ah yes – it’s looks have been overhauled and it does look very good. Gone are the playgroup colours and images, it’s now a lot sleaker looking and modern. But…. if you’re after something that looks good – why Windows? A Mac or even most Linux distros look well better than Windows, can perform the same tasks and in the Linux case – are free. But hey-ho, it’ll do for now.

Anyway, after a month or two of playing with Vista it became time to receive my free upgrade to Windows 7 that came with my laptop when I bought it. The actual upgrade was smooth enough – uninstall this, run that, re-install that. Then it was time to go – so what’s it like. Well, there is yet another facelift but as mentioned before – it’s not all about looks, personality counts too. So what else has changed?

I like the taskbar and quicklaunch changes – that’s a very nice improvement. However, as I have Firefox pined to the taskbar, it took me ages to find out how to pin it back to the start menu and as a massive fan of keyboard shortcuts (Win + down + enter to get Firefox up) this was really annoying.

So, what are my overall thoughts after my swift upgrades from XP through Vista and onto 7? Well, Microsoft – listen up! You’re not a government – you don’t have to force your “Health & Safety” policies on us all! After digging around you can turn all this crap of and find the advanced tab we were looking for, but don’t make it so hard! Turn on the security by default for the novices but have an Experienced user account for the computer professionals that easily lets us use our PCs the way we want.