Tech for Lunch!

We are seeing more and more websites who do not come up with a brand new product, but rather a product that sits on top of someone else’s site. In most cases, these sites are simply an interface to another tool or directly enhance your experience. This is the case with Powerset’s new Semantics-based search tool for Wikipedia.

“Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language. While this is a difficult challenge, we believe that now is the right time to begin the journey. Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.”

The idea is to allow you to run a search based on a natural language phrase instead of having to figure out the best combination of keywords to use. As a proof of concept, they have decided to use only the information from Wikipedia because it is already using a fairly consistent structure and because this limits the amount of information to search through. Eventually, the plan would be to allow users to search through as much information as Google is able to offer and apply the same filters and tools as with Wikipedia.

Let’s take a look at what they are currently offering. When you run a search on powerset, you get all the results that could contain what you are looking for (keep in mind it has to be information that is available on Wikipedia for now) displayed in a relatively familiar manner. The top shows the best match with a summary and if you click on that article, you get the actual wikipedia article, but enhanced with Powerset’s tools. The most important addition here is the “Article Outline” box which appears to the right of the article. This box is always visible to the right and follows the scrolling window. Inside that box are two display options: Show Outline and Show Factz. The outline is simply the same one as the Wikipedia article, but it does make large articles a little bit easier to navigate. The Factz are a summary of all the important details found in the article and broken down following the outline. This is where Powerset’s algorithms work their magic. The Factz are a bunch of snippets which are “understood” from the main article and show some relevant information that you could be looking for.

This promotional video is certainly the best way to see and understand all the features that are built in Powerset. I hope they will be able to further develop their product to include a complete internet search and add their tools to the results.

Pinnacle, a division of Avid (editing software used in television) offers a beautiful product to the general public, the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum. It allows you to simply capture images of your VHS and video cameras in your computer and then make montages to be transferred to DVD or video to the Internet.

The software comes with a capture card. An external module that you plug into a USB port on your computer. In this unit, you plug your VHS player, your video camera or any other video player connecting with RCA cables or S-Video.

You capture, edit and you create. During the capture, the software scans the video images on your computer. Once this stage is completed, it analyzes the images and divides them into chapters (like a DVD). This will help you when the time comes to create the menus. If you want to keep the images as they are (e.g. a TV show in full or video of your marriage) simply choose the beginning and end and voila!

If you wish to make a montage (best time, remove the ads, etc..), You can choose the samples to keep and paste, reverse them and choose transitions. The editing software allows you to simply create your montage and is suitable for most people. You choose the look of thee DVD menu, it gives a name to each clip and is almost finished.

Finally, you select the type of video you want. A DVD? A Web clip(Real Player, Windows Media)? A digital file in MPEG format?

If you have added several effects, transitions and added several titles, the computer will take some time to compile the video. Burn the result to the DVD itself and you have a true DVD as the ones you rent in video stores.

The software comes with Pinnacle Studio QuickStart, which offers a capture module only. This means that you cannot do anything other than DVDs or videos to computer.

The Dazzle Video Creator Platinum is a module which does not require installation. Just connect it to the USB port of a computer and you’re ready to go.

Be aware that any kind of video editing requires quite a bit of memory and processing power so make sure you have a good enough machine to do it. This will work on older machines but it just takes longer during editing and compilation.

I’m sure a lot of you have other suggestions for video editing software, but this is an easy to use solution for those who are looking for a quick and easy way to convert video to a digital media.

Everyday I look around the web and find interesting applications. Today, I landed on iexpenseonline.com, and I thought this could be useful to many people out there. If you have been reading anything I’ve written lately, you know that I’m quite fond of well presented and practical applications, especially the ones designed with Adobe Flex. This application fits in all those categories.

IExpenseOnline (or IEO) is an online budgeting solution that helps you manage your budget by assisting you in tracking your daily financial activity. The concept is inspired by a humble notebook, full of daily expenses and income, used by most of us to track and control our budget. IEO is totally FREE and can be used by anyone who wishes to manage budget without a pen and notebook. The data entered into different features offered by IEO is 100% secure, with all the latest technological and manual security parameters in place.

I found the layout very intuitive and easy to use. The presentation is probably what got me hooked right away though. It is very clean and gets you going exactly where you need to go to get things done. There are a bunch of tools and reports you can use to help manage your finances, but I found that the only thing that is missing is the capability to get information directly from your bank account. I had an article about Mint previously and I think that this application might get a portion of users who just need to have a tool for daily management. Best of all, IEO is free!

Take a look at their website to get a good idea of the product and see the interface. You can even give it a quick try without registering if you want.

I was very surprised when I came across this application about a week ago, that I had not heard about it earlier. I have seen and implemented a pretty good number of commercial “suites” that are supposed to be flawlessly integrated and offer everything you need out of the box. Truth be told, most of the time, you need some heavy customization to get the results you are looking for and you usually need to change your business process to fit the “mold” of the application. This is true for most suites that try to take over your entire IT Management activities.

Spiceworks may not offer the entire spectrum of IT Management tasks, but it does what it does very well and offers the most important applications that any IT manager needs in one simple and free package.

Essentially, Spiceworks is setup locally on a machine inside your network and installs its own web server on a port of your choosing. The entire interface is web-based and allows you to do a multitude of things such as:

• Automatic computer and software inventory
• IT asset reporting
• Network Monitoring and troubleshooting
• IT Helpdesk
• Connect to the spiceworks community for IT answers, product reviews and advice from other IT pros

I absolutely love the integration that they have done with this product and the way the interface is designed. It’s simple and intuitive and lets you get things done quickly. I especially like the portal section of the website which allows your clients to log on to open helpdesk tickets directly and gives them a source of information specific to your environment. You can place a message at the top of the page to let your customers know if there are problems on the system and give them a list of places to look for information to fix their own problems.

The software inventory portion is very well done and the best part is that it will run an inventory on your entire network without having to install anything on client machines. You simply supply an administrator username/password to access all the machines on the network and away it goes, capable of detecting Windows, OS X and Linux boxes. Spiceworks lets you complete the information manually to specify, for example, how many licenses of each software you have bought to make sure you are legit and up to date. You can pull out many standard reports so that you are always on top of what’s going on in your environment.

Network Monitoring will let you see all the recent activity on your network and one of my favorites is the “Recent software” section. This one lets you see what recent software was installed by your end-users so you can enforce company policies if needed. There are many indicators that you can use and another very useful one is hard disk capacity which lets you know whenever a machine is running low on disk space. Spiceworks will let you connect directly to a machine (Using RDP) for troubleshooting and has a few other helpful tools to diagnose network problems.

The community section connects back to the spiceworks site and lets you interact with other IT pros to get answers and advice for some problems you may be having and acts just like a portal with a forum, news, reviews, and even a store. I see it as a portal for IT Pros.

So how does spiceworks offer such a complete and well done package for free? There are a few very non-obstrusive ads in the application by IT partners such as HP, Rackspace and Logmein. Quite honestly, this is the kind of package that I wouldn’t mind paying for to use it in a company, but free is always good :-)

Overall, Spiceworks offers a well rounded solution for IT managers with an environment of less than 250 devices and admin rights on all of them. As mentioned on their site, it will work with larger networks, but it might be slower. If you need to implement a quick ticketing solution and/or a network inventory solution, Spiceworks may be just the thing you are looking for.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Google’s impressive array of online applications and, when it comes to desktop applications, they do an excellent job as well. Google Earth is one of those applications and an even more impressive one if you stop and think about the massive amounts of information that are required to make it possible.

Google Earth 4.3 was released this week and there are number of new features to make this a worthwhile upgrade if you like the application. Google Earth Blog has a great review with screenshots of this version. The best way to get a good look at the features without doing all the work yourself, is probably the videos on Youtube: This one by Google, and this one by Frank Taylor which is embedded below.

The most important new features are:

• Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
• Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
• Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level
• Improved Streetview
• Imagery dates

All of these features a pretty clear in terms of what they offer, but the Streetview feature is probably one of the coolest in its presentation. When you get to the street level of a city(a city which has streetview and pictures to go along) you can see “spheres” representing the images that you can walk into at that specific spot. Once inside the image, you have a picture-quality view as if you were standing there.

One thing I was waiting for and that is now available though, is the imagery dating which allows you to know when the images you are looking at were taken. This way, you’ll know if that’s really your car your seeing!

This is the fourth part of my review of the new features in Windows Server 2008.

Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7)

IIS has been pretty much the same old service for quite some time and now comes a much needed update with Server 2008. IIS7 is a robust solution for web hosting and application development using Microsoft’s technologies. Just like all other services of the same nature, Internet Information Service 7.0 becomes fully componentized so, should you decide to install this as a role on your server, you only get the required pieces to run it properly and nothing more, reducing the need for updates and the available attack surface.

The administration console, which is part of Server Manager, has been much improved as well and gives a more flexible management experience to the administrators. IIS7 can be installed as a ServerCore role as well as Windows Media Services 2008 and now supports direct xcopy-installations of your websites.

Terminal Services (TS)

Terminal Services is probably one of the features with the most noticeable additions, if your organization uses these services already. My favorite one is most definitely the RemoteApp capability. When your users access an application that is published through RemoteApp, they are actually logged in with TS, but the application looks and feels exactly as if it was running from the local machine. The great advantage of this possibility for administrators(and ease of use for end-users) is that the users no longer have to see the full desktop along with their application. Terminal Services Web Access allows you to deploy RemoteApp applications through

Terminal Services Gateway allows users to connect to their apps and desktops using a regular browser connected to the internet. This would also work from mobile devices with the right software. The Gateway Services run on the RDP protocol tunneled over HTTPS to make a very secure connection. This option is a great alternative when VPN connections are blocked in hotels or wireless access locations.

Regular Terminal Services also get some changes, although not as big as the previous ones. The new Easy Print feature lets users print to local printers when they are using RemoteApps or desktop sessions more easily and reliably. It also supports 32-bit colors and copy/paste operations between the client and the host.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V is a next-generation Hypervisor-based server virtualization technology that allows you to consolidate multiple machines on a single server or run a virtual test environment, for example. Hyper-V is implemented as simply as all other roles on Server 2008 which makes it very easy to configure and manage.

Hyper-V is not quite completed yet and, as such, only a beta version will be included in the first release of Windows Server 2008. When the product becomes available later this year, it will be updated through an automatic Update. The Release Candidate that is currently available for download is feature complete but the product will have to prove itself since there are some heavy contenders in this market slice such as VMware.

Versions

As usual, there will be several versions of Windows Server 2008 available which you can see in details here. Be sure to look around on that page to find all the comparisons that are available. I personally can’t wait for the Small Business Server 2008 edition to become available.

This is the third part of my review of the new features in Windows Server 2008.

Network Access Protection (NAP)

Network Access Protection is one of my favorite new features of Server 2008 because I’ve been in a few companies which asked specifically for such a functionality. There are third-party applications that allow this and some cisco gear also permits this but the management is sometimes problematic and decentralized. Windows Server 2008 allows you to implement NAP very easily and uses Server Manager for management and monitoring.

The purpose of Network Access Protection is to prevent unauthorized machines from getting onto your network. Using a Security Policy(or many policies…), Windows Server will verify the health of client computers (Vista and XP SP3 are supported) that connect to the network. Once their compliance is established, an action is taken depending on the settings you chose in the policy. Non-compliant machines are either denied network access completely or redirected to a secured subnet where they might only have access to the internet(for consultants, perhaps) or have access to the necessary resources to correct the problems that were found.

The requirements you choose to determine your system health can include certain software installations (anti virus, or a specific corporate software), patch level and even some computer settings such as having a firewall enabled. Once computer health is determined to be under par, you could set an auto-remediation policy which can automatically correct the problems found on client machines to allow them to connect more quickly.

Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

Previous versions of Windows Server had the firewall included in the bundle but it was not enabled by default. Windows Server 2008 ships with the firewall enabled. Most administrators tend to simply disable (or just not turn it on) the firewall in windows because it is fairly useless in the sense that it blocks only incoming traffic. So if your machine is being used as a launch pad for a virus, you might never know about it until it’s too late. The firewall in Server 2008 however, is much better because it monitors incoming AND outgoing traffic as well as offer the possibility to encrypt your traffic for increased security.

When administrators actually ended up using the old firewall, it was usually like swiss cheese because there were way too many ports opened. Everyone has probably done this: you need to figure out how to make a certain software go through your firewall, so you poke holes into it by opening a bunch of ports and when you finally get everything running, you don’t always go back to remove the unnecessary ports since you don’t really know which ones they are. Server 2008 offers a bit more flexibility on this perspective. Because the new firewall is integrated with roles-based installs and IPSec, whenever you add or remove a role on the server, the firewall gets configured automatically in the background, leaving nothing to chance(or your admin’s knowledge)

Windows PowerShell

The Windows PowerShell is a new command-line shell, based on the .NET Framework. Those who like managing servers through the use of text commands will certainly enjoy this new addition. Powershell was available as a download previously but is now built-in to Windows Server and adds many new possibilities to the “command-line enabled” administrators.

Because the PowerShell is based on .NET, it allows you to enter and return .NET objects. This has power written all over it. Windows PowerShell introduces the concept of a cmdlet, a simple, single-function command-line tool built into the shell. Windows PowerShell includes more than 130 standard cmdlets, and you can write your own cmdlets. Each cmdlet can be used separately, but their power is realized when you combine these simple tools to perform complex tasks.

You can use the PowerShell for pretty much anything including adding/removing/configuring server roles like IIS 7 and Terminal Server, or managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or Operations Manager 2007.

This is the second part of my review of the new features in Windows Server 2008.

Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODC)

Branch offices and remote locations are now an important part of Windows Server deployments and required a complete Server installation with previous versions of Windows. The problem with complete installations is that you might need to make someone an administrator in that remote location and usually, the physical location of the server is not as safe as, say, the head office.

The RODC allows you to setup a Windows Server 2008 with all the services that are required for your remote locations, but makes the Active Directory database Read-Only. This way, only the locally cached passwords are stored on the machine and the AD Replication only occurs unidirectionally, as opposed to bidirectionaly with a regular server installation.

Normally, you setup a remote office server and ship it to destination. When it gets there it only needs to be plugged in and switched on to allow all the local users to connect and get their services such as DHCP, DNS, etc… RODC is perfect for this scenario and will only authenticate users who use the server at that remote location, limiting the number of passwords that are on the server. If a hacker manages to get access to that server or if it gets stolen, you are much better prepared than if it had been a full Server installation. Using Server Manager, you can simply choose to remove that server from the Active Directory and only the users who authenticated on that server (thus having a cached password on it) will be listed to get their passwords changed. No need to get the entire user base to change passwords.

Now, you are going to say: “Well if the hacker left with my server, it’s not the passwords I’m most worried about, it’s the data!“. You would be right about that, but not if you used the next new implementation: BitLocker.

BitLocker

Bitlocker is not really a new technology. It has been around for a while now in Microsoft products, but it was not available on Windows Servers or it could only encrypt the system partition. In Windows Server 2008, Bitlocker offers Full-Drive Encryption and allows you to install this on any or all of your servers for added protection.

The idea behind Bitlocker was originally for executives’ laptops who travel a lot and were more likely to get their machines stolen or compromised. Bitlocker encrypts the data on the hard drive and requires TPM 1.2-based hardware to store the keys. Many laptops have this now and servers are more likely to have this hardware. Anyone with physical access to the machine without the proper password would not be able to access any of the data on the drive.

Windows Server 2008 now offers this possibility for the entire drive and allows Bitlocker management through Group Policy. If you are really picky about your branch office security, you could combine the Server Core installation to run only the minimal services and encrypt the entire drive with BitLocker. At this point, not only is the drive encrypted, but there aren’t any useful passwords on it.

After going to the Heroes Happen {here} event in Montreal, I thought I’d go through all the new features included in Windows Server 2008 to explain what they are and give my thoughts about them. I was pretty impressed with the feature set already, but seeing some of these in live presentations was the extra little push I needed to be convinced. The next step will be to see the OS operate in a real-world environment instead of Microsoft’s Utopian “Contoso” domain.

One of the biggest change that was brought in this version and that is not really a feature, is the fact that the emphasis is placed on “components”. What this means is that every role and every feature gets setup almost as a standalone portion. The components approach allows a very modular installation as I will discuss in the ServerCore feature and removes many dependencies to other components. Gone should be the days when you need to install 3 other components to get the one you want running.

Here is my list of new features and functionalities that I find are the most significant:

Server Manager

Until now, every little function that needed to be managed had its own tool or console to do so. The Microsoft Management Console (MMC) was a first step to try to bring all these tools together, but most admins just went for the one snap-in that they needed and there was no central tool to do it all. Server Manager aims to change all that and offers a single interface to manage your entire Server 2008 installation.

The Server Manager is still based on the MMC approach but gives you all the tools in on place instead of having to add the snap-ins yourself. On great new thing is that everything that can be configured through the Server Manager has a dedicated web page to give you up-to-the-minute information on the role your are configuring such as Active Directory Domain Services, Application Server, DHCP Server, DNS Server, File Services, Terminal Services, Web Server, and many others. It also includes diagnostics and troubleshooting tools as you would expect, just like in previous versions.

Server Core

One of my favorite features for Windows Server 2008 is called Server Core. This new installation mode allows you to install Windows Server 2008 for some specific roles and removes all the GUI and shell elements. What you end up with is a server that boots up very fast and only displays a boring blue background and a command prompt.. that’s it. Everyone who knows me is aware that I’m a command-line type of guy and Linux has always been appealing to me because of that. This time around, Windows Server 2008 offers the very same type of machine installation.

The purpose of removing the GUI and only running some specific services becomes very obvious if you have ever had to manage a server in your life. The attack surface is instantly diminished because only the services that you need are running and no useless software is installed just waiting to get hacked. There is no Windows Media Player, no Internet Explorer and no Windows Mail, for example, so this type of installation removes many of the wide-open doors that are on servers today. Also, because there is so much less software running on a Server Core installation, there should be a lot less patches to deploy. This makes your server maintenance that much easier.

Server Core is a Windows Server 2008 installation, but it does not have all the roles and services that the complete version does. It supports just nine roles, including AD, AD LDS, DHCP, DNS, File, Print, Virtualization (Hyper-V), Web Server, and WMS, compared to 18 roles in the full server. I can already see quite a few different scenarios where I could apply this type of server. Applications that require a full GUI or the .NET Framework, for example will not work on Server Core.

For the Command-Line impaired out there, fear not! Microsoft has made sure that the regular admin tools, like the new Server Manager, will work just fine to remotely manage Server Core installations. You will only need to use the command-line to setup the network connectivity and maybe join your domain, but you should be able to manage the rest remotely afterwards.