stuart test blog

After weeks of rumours, Apple today announced the new iPod that is capable of playing videos. It isn’t being called an iPod Video, it’s just the iPod, but it has a 320 x 240 (QVGA) screen with 260000 colours. The new iPod comes in two sizes, 30GB and 60GB, but each model is the same height and width as their predecessor but they are now much thinner, and available in either white or black.

iTunes has now been updated to version 6 to be able to handle the new video content and the iTunes Music Store now has over 2000 music videos available to download for $1.99 (USD) each. There are also several popular TV shows that have current and past season’s episodes available to download also for $1.99 (USD). Another cool, and essential feature, is that the iPod also has a video out connector to allow playback of video on your TV.

Google have released yet another new product! This time it’s a web-based RSS aggregator called Google Reader (Beta – of course) and it has a similar look and feel to the Gmail interface with labels for different categories and a lot of snazzy javascript.

This is probably one of the most beta products I’ve tested from Google – not all of the features work yet and there’s some obvious bugs. But it does look like it has good potential and already people have come up with some interesting hacks. One of them is a link which displays a site in the newsreader – mine shows up as this: “Click to view in Google Reader”

Google Reader here: http://www.google.com/reader

News just in….

Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the second Beta release of our next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to our developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

Project page here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Release notes: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.5beta2.html
Direct download here: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5b2&os=win&lang=en-US

Service pack 2 for Office 2003 was quietly released today. Nothing ground breaking (update: the only major, new feature appears to be some anti-phishing tools for Outlook 2003 – I haven’t tested them yet though), just the usual collection of security/stability/performance fixes. Download links here:

• Office 2003 SP2
• Visio 2003 SP2
• Project 2003 SP2
• OneNote 2003 SP2

For the past year or so I’ve been using Virtual PC for setting up labs for study and testing purposes, but recently I decided to give VMware Workstation 5 a go. I couldn’t believe the difference between VMware and VPC – the first major difference was the performance improvements in VMware. I had gotten used to taking three or four hours to set up a virtual machine in VPC – in VMware it was just about real-time. In full-screen mode in VMware you would be forgiven for thinking you were working on a host system – not a guest. No more stuttered key strokes or jumpy mouse movements, everything is smooth and works beautifully. The performance difference alone should make VMware the winner – I could never go back to poor performance of Virtual PC. The feature set of VMware is also far superior to Virtual PC. The networking features in VMware give you a near-endless array of possibilities. You can easily create different LAN segments and can simulate the speed of the links as well as the packet loss. A practical use for this is a lab I set up with a 100Mpbs LAN connected with a 10Mbps LAN over a 128Kbps WAN link with 1% packet loss. This gave me the chance to test some Active Directory replication issues that are faced in real life with seperate sites. When you’re setting up a complex network with several servers, LAN segments, routers, etc, VMware allows you to create a Team containing all the objects that can be managed from one screen. You can start the whole team at once and can change the boot interval between machines to allow your servers to boot before your workstations for example. Another cool feature is the PXE compliant network card in VMware guests. I recently set up an entire ADS environment in VMware which required the servers to boot off the network – this definitely isn’t possible with VPC. At one stage I had three servers (domain controller, ADS server, build server), one windows 2000 workstation, and a Freesco router all running happily together. This is all on my Centrino laptop with 1Gb of RAM. I definitely recommend you have a look at VMware Workstation 5 – you can read more and download a trial here: http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html

Forgot to mention this last week, but Opera have finally decided to release their browser for free! Well, they have always had a free version but it was embedded with somewhat annoying banner ads. I’ve always liked the Opera browser but the embedded ads had always turned me off.

Opera are a firm believer in web standards and their browser has always been recommended by sites such as Browse Happy. The browser also includes an email client but it requires a huge learning curve to master as it ditches the concept of mail folders, relying instead on tags and categories. I’ve tried using the mail client but found it unreliable and buggy and from reading the Opera forums, many others have found that too. There is also no support for composing emails with formatting despite this being one of the main feature requests in the forums.

Overall the browser is definitely worth checking out, although I would still have to recommend a combination of Firefox and Thunderbird over Opera. Read more and download here: http://www.opera.com/free

This is a bit old, but as I recently learned, when Citrix released Metaframe Presentation Server 3 they introduced a new feature called Session Reliability. Briefly, Session Reliability allows your ICA sessions to remain active even when the network connectivity drops out. It seems like a good feature so why would you not use it? Well, there’s no reason not to use it – but you need to be aware that if you enable Session Reliability, any client that is version 8.1 or newer will now use port 2598 instead of 1494.

This is a huge change and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be that well documented, or if it is documented it should be clearly highlighted in huge, bold, red letters! The reason why this is so important..? Most Citrix environments need to know the ICA port numbers in use so that the ICA traffic can be prioritised and also to be able to open ports on the firewall if necessary. If you’ve recently upgraded from MetaFrame XP to PS3 or PS4 then you should definitely ensure that you have the correct ports in use on your firewalls.

Brian Madden has a brief write up in this article too: Goodbye 1494, Hello 2598!

I spotted this last week and have been really impressed with Microsoft’s new IE developer’s toolbar (screenshot below – click to enlarge.) I’m a long time Firefox user and try to avoid using IE as much as possible, but as a part-time web developer it’s always important to test website in a number of different browsers. That, and our company OWA site are the only reasons I use IE, but this toolbar has kept me going back to IE several times over the last week to disect a particular webpage.

Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar for Firefox (which is always one of the first extensions I install) does a similar job – and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the IE version is a blatant ripoff – but the IE toolbar is superior in some regards. The first thing is that when you display ID & class details in Firefox it sometimes pushes the page out of position, whereas the IE toolbar merely lays the details on top of the existing elements. But the coolest feature of the IE toolbar has to be the ruler! You can drag and drop and resize the ruler on your webpage and choose to have it snap to the elements on the page, and also to the X & Y axis to enable you to draw straight lines easily.

Overall, Chris’s Firefox version has way more features, but this is definitely worth checking out – it may even give you a valid reason to use IE! Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads….

Ars Technica have just produced another high quality review, this one looking in depth at the iPod Nano. Highlights of the article include the stress testing and the subsequent autopsy of the iPod. Educational stuff…

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/1

Read this on the Engadget website, as a current Skype user it will be interesting to see what eBay is going to do with Skype. Not sure if I’m that keen on it to tell the truth – at least there are a few other options out there now, like Gizmo or Google Talk.

Yup, it’s happened: eBay just bought Skype. The price? An astoundingly ridiculous $1.3 billion in cash and 32.4 million shares of eBay stock for a company which expects to make only $60 million dollars this year. But, hey, it’s eBay’s money to spend as it pleases, and in the press release they describe their plans to begin integrating Skype into eBay auctions in order to ‘streamline and improve communications between buyers and sellers’ as well as their intent to combine Skype with PayPal to ‘pursue entirely new lines of business’ that would monetize ‘ecommerce communications’ on a ‘pay-per-call basis.’ Rockin’, we guess.