Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7

Now that Windows Vista is a mature product I believe the compulsory education sector needs to get up to speed on the process of upgrading to it, as Windows XP support is soon to be phased out by Microsoft. Windows 7 is due to be released in about three months’ time, and I’ve taken the opportunity to test it out by installing it into a Hyper-V virtual machine on our Windows 2008 server. I hope that it will be released to schools as part of the next MOE deal in 2009, but I will be seeking a new computer to run it on because this desktop has only an E2140 CPU that doesn’t support Intel VT and thus won’t run the XP Virtual mode. Our Windows 2008x64 Server has plenty of memory and a Xeon quad core CPU so it will not be overtaxed by running 7 as a virtual machine at all.

The installation of Windows 7 Release Candidate on Hyper-V was straightforward once networking issues were sorted out. Hyper-V by default installs a virtual network, which must be properly configured in order to give VMs proper network access. Specifically, any virtual network adapter that you set up in the Hyper-V Virtual Network Manager must be specifically configured to give access to the external network and then each VM must be hooked onto the correct VNA. I got fooled by the fact that the VNA has the same name as the physical adapter in the machine and wrongly assumed that this VNA would automatically connect to the external network when it was set up by default for private connection only. Apart from that issue, which stopped all the VMs of different OSs that I tried from connecting to the network, installing W7RC was extremely straightforward from a blank VM.

Now that we have it running I guess we will play with it a bit. I prototyped Vista in our school by running it on my own desktop for the last year and I will be an early adopter of 7 once it becomes widely available. In the meantime we are considering options for transitioning our users to Vista, much as we moved everything to XP a few years ago. This time around, though, there seems to be a marked level of resistance in the sector to Vista, which may to some extent be a reflection of the wider community’s attitude. There is not such resistance in tertiary institutions where Vista is being taught, and I would expect them to be on the forefront of adopting 7 when it is released. However, Microsoft has cautioned against organisations trying to bypass Vista and it makes no sense to jump straight from XP to 7 until the latter is well matured.

Picasa 3, Take 2

Last year, Google updated the Picasa software to version 3. At the time, I tried it, but was very unhappy with a few things. Principally, these were the forced automated update from 2.7 (it downloads the update without asking you and then installs it behind your back), and the way it interfered with my scanner and camera settings. The issue with the update is that comparable programs like Firefox will never update you to a new major version, and they do so much more transparently. It is almost impossible to stop the update from 2.7 without being underhand because as soon as you start it up for the very first time, and before you get a chance to change the settings not to check automatically for updates, it starts out downloading 3.x right away and automatically installs it the next time at startup. And if you do manage to stop it from updating, then it keeps hassling you every few days to download the update anyway.

At the time I found Picasa had taken over from Canon CameraWindow as the default application when I connected a camera to download pictures. This issue has been addressed in the newest version that I installed, 3.1.0. Picasa also doesn’t interfere with scanner settings – the Epson’s front panel button still launched the Epson Scan software without any quibbles.

One of the most useful features of Picasa 3 is the automated web album sync which removes the need to manually upload new or changed files. I expect to give this a good test out over the next few weeks as I update all of my existing pictures in lepidopterophile’s albums with tags. Being able to add the latter to pictures is another new feature, though the interface provided could use some design improvements. It was pleasing to see that this feature is implemented through existing IPTC tags. Last I heard, Google was having some trouble implementing these, so it’s good to see they have been able to make them work, because it means that when the occasion suits you can use another IPTC client (I use Irfanview). Another nice feature is being able to make a video from a set of pictures. I got the exploding camera into a video and uploaded it to Youtube.

Now I have decided to stick with Picasa 3, Google will have to work hard to overcome my previous negative viewpoint of it. So far, it’s looking promising.

Camera Totals

• Canon Powershot S1 IS: 9496 images, 47 months (202/mth). May 2005 – April 2009, display circuitry failed.
• Canon Powershot A400: 5960 images, 21 months (283/mth). June 2005 – March 2007, sold.
• Canon Powershot A450: 3265 images, 10 months (326/mth). March 2007 – January 2008, dust entered lens.
• Canon Powershot A460: 4512 images, 16 months (282/mth). January 2008 – present.
• Canon Powershot S5 IS: 1924 images, approx 9 months (TBD) (~213/mth). About August 2008 – present.
• Total 25,157 images (524/mth).

Since June 2005 I have always owned two cameras, except for the last 9 months or so when I owned three. Now, I’m back to two, but I also still own the A450 although it’s next to useless, and will probably buy an A2000 next month. Not sure what I’ll do with the A460 then.

The Exploding Camera Part 2

OK, I now have the top off the camera so let’s see what is revealed, starting with the top panel itself. At top left you can see a sliding switch that is moved by the rotating zoom controller to zoom the lens in or out. Below it is some shiny metal holding the power switch and mode dial in place. To the right of them is the mechanism (relay) for popping up the flash, the electronics of the flash itself and its storage capacitor (the large black object).

Going onto the main body of the camera, the only part we haven’t seen already is the board on top of the battery compartment. This is connected by wires to the flash release relay (red and white, already mentioned).

After taking this photo I detached the top cover and decided there was no further need to examine it as there is little in there apart from the top switches and the flash. So I went back to looking at the main body of the camera.

This is the back of the camera body with the main logic board pulled off so you can see what’s on it. Prominent in the right centre of the board is the DiGiC processor (Digic-1 in this model). You can see that the camera has a chassis made of metal, to which the main components are attached. Looking at this chassis, on the left we have the lens with the imager attached to the rear of it. To the right, the black rectangle is the plastic membrane that encloses the Compact Flash slot. At right is the board carrying most of the control buttons on the camera’s rear. This normally sits behind the CF slot, but I bent it out of the way for the picture.

Here’s a shot of the lens mechanism. Curiously, the covers for this mechanism are partly held in place by strips of what looks like duct tape. The golden-coloured object bottom right appears to be the ultrasonic lens motor, and the gears obviously transmit the rotation of the motor to drive the lens in and out. The number of gears shown appears to be a simple way of getting the drive from the motor up to the top right corner where the lens is engaged. I would have thought that direct drive would be the way to go, but I suppose the shape of the camera partly dictates this, with the bulky motor cover being aesthetically desirable to locate low down on the front rather than high up.

And then I undid a pile more screws in the chassis, and the rest of the camera separated into three. In the top left is the chassis. Top right is the battery compartment, and in the foreground is the lens with imager, which is the only part that is worth bothering with now. The metal bracket on the back of the lens holds the CCD imager in place; obviously you need a good rigid assembly for this. The bracket is held on with tiny Torx screws which I am not going to attempt to remove as I’m sure I don’t have a bit small enough to do it.

And now, at last, here is the live side of the CCD imager itself. That multicoloured rectangle inside what looks like a slide frame. The flash has revealed a bit of detail, that it’s basically a chip mounted on its own little board. The ribbon cable coming off the back of this has a number of tracks on it, including what must be some test points that are covered up by a piece of tape. The CCD is pretty well sealed inside what must be an airtight space, most likely a cleanroom assembly.

At this point I stopped to feel a little bit nostalgic and sad. This camera, after all, cost me a lot of money when I purchased it on the 6th of May 2005. The sticker price for the camera itself was NZ$710.00. A power adapter (which I still use sometimes with the S5) cost another $98, and a Sandisk 256 MB Ultra II Compact Flash card was $80. I got a trade in of $150 for my old Pentax MX 35mm SLR, so all up this was a $738 purchase. The decision to buy the S1 was a late choice in the process of selecting a camera. I had looked seriously at a similar but cheaper Fuji FinePix model, and deciding to buy the S1 was only made a few days beforehand. What swung it for me was the excellent video performance (almost Mini-DV resolution and a high data rate of around 100 MB/minute), the articulating LCD screen and some other smaller points. It was a stretch of my budget to buy the S1, but it was a worthwhile process overall and the camera served me well over the next four years as I took 9496 images with it. The first photo being taken the day it was bought and the last photo of record on 19th April. Its replacement currently retails for $775, which is probably about par considering the recent decline of the exchange rate.

And finally, here’s the box of camera parts ready to throw in the rubbish. All I’m keeping is the neck strap, the CCD and the three Compact Flash cards. There was a 16 MB card shipped with it, and I eventually bought two 256 MB Sandisk cards. That’s pretty small by today’s standards, but each one could hold several hundred pictures at the 3.2 MP Fine setting. The camera served me very well for almost 10,000 images. Maybe that is all they are engineered to last for.

The Exploding Camera Part 1

Technorati Tags: Canon Powershot S1

The first digital camera that I owned was a Canon Powershot S1 IS. It’s an ultrazoom camera with a 10x lens, and takes photos at up to 3.2 megapixels. The Powershot S1 IS was the first of the Powershot S IS series cameras which ended with the Powershot S5 IS and has now changed to the Powershot SX IS series this year. The S1 was first announced back in February 2004. I bought mine in May 2005, as it was being phased out to make way for the succeeding S2 model. It was the first digital camera I owned. Since then I have owned A400, A450, A460 and S5 IS models and am now looking at buying a Powershot A2000 or A2100 in the near future. The S1 has worked well up until now, a fault has caused the display to kind of lose vertical hold, or display a scrambled picture instead of a normal image. I could have got it repaired but it’s hardly worthwhile, so I decided to dismantle it to see what was inside. So this series of articles chronicles the exploding of the camera. These photos are from my Picasa albums and are stored there at their original 5 megapixel size so you can see the smaller details in the photos. Some of the earlier photos in the series are slightly blurred. I’m checking the photos more carefully for the rest of the pictures to ensure this doesn’t happen so much, but it’s just a fact that with pictures taken on macro, there will be some blurring due to lack of depth of field. Most of the pictures are reasonably sharp, some very; Picasa, Blogger or WLW seems to have problems generating sharp previews for me when writing this article.

The basic camera with all the attachments removed. That is, batteries out, strap and lens cover taken off. In other words this is what a fully functional camera looks like. At the end of this process the camera will be in pieces and fully unfunctional.

Not every picture in the album is reproduced in this post; view the album for additional pictures.

From this point I started removing every screw I could find on the camera. Most of them were in obvious places.

The first part I managed to get off the camera was the back cover of the rotating LCD screen. Oddly enough, this cover is one of the few metal parts of this camera; the coating on the outside of it would make you think it was made of plastic.

At this point I gave up using gentle pressure and started levering parts off the camera to get inside. First off was the little cover on the left that incorporates the four way selector and the Set and Menu buttons. You can see the little buttons under the selector.

To finish off this first article in the series, we have two shots of the camera with the main front and rear panels removed. Here is the back first. The LCD screen is unfolded out to the left. In the top left corner you can see the flash capacitor on the left of the viewfinder. A lot of electronic circuitry is visible. The tripod mount is surrounded by the circuit board that mounts the I/O sockets. The battery door and the Compact Flash card slot are bottom-right.

Front view. On the left is the battery compartment and the lens of course is next to it. Wrapped around the near side of the lens is the ultrasonic motor and drive mechanism for the lens. Above it you can see that flash cap. Otherwise there’s not a lot to see, we still have to get the top off to expose more bits of the camera.

Vista Deployment Delayed in many NZ Schools

I was talking to one of our software vendors about application compatibility, and they said that not many of their customers had asked about Vista. I guess there is nothing new in this. Not everyone will go to the latest and greatest. Not every school will have the ability to re image lots of computers with Vista. However, we faced the same argument when I started here 5-6 years ago. Everyone was running Windows 98, and upgrading to XP was badly needed. If we were still using 98 everywhere, I’d have about ten times the amount of work to do that I do now.

So there is a fairly compelling case for migrating to the latest and greatest. I suppose there may still be schools out there running Windows 98. New applications are not supported on 98, you can’t get patches for it, and most of all, it’s insecure and buggy. My school is careful about spending money, but they have long since banished 98 from the site. I really really really really really really do not think anyone can afford to have their heads in the sand about the need to migrate. At the moment new leased laptops aren’t yet offered with Vista, but that must logically change soon, because XP and Office 2003 are both falling out of mainstream support this year.

FIX: 500.19 error on IIS7 Default Web Site – WSUS & PHP

This article describes a fix to IIS7 configuration that will allow PHP 5.x to run on a Windows domain controller. The problem was first described in this article here.

The fix also affects the operation of Windows Server Update Services, if you have it in operation on the same server. The issue for PHP is that as a 32 bit application you have to tell IIS7 to allow 32 bit apps to run, and then you run into a problem with the DynamicCompressionModule when the 500.19 error is flagged.

Because WSUS relies on the self-update tree of the default web site on port 80 to deploy self updates to clients, even if you are using port 8530 for your WSUS site, the 500.19 error will stop the self update feature of WSUS working for your clients. You will see many requests logged by IIS looking for the self-update tree that all return 500.19 (“500 19” in the log itself).

The resolution is to disable the Dynamic Compression handler as described in this article. Now, I found by reading here, apparently this module handler is installed by WSUS. So I suspect that an ordinary DC would not have a problem running PHP. And a DC running WSUS by itself would not have a problem. It is because we want to run a 32 bit application like PHP on the web server that it conflicts with WSUS and causes this situation to happen when we switch the setting to enable PHP to run.

UPDATE: If you install WSUS 3.0 Service Pack 2, it will rebuild your database, and change the settings on your server to re-enable Dynamic Compression handling, if this was disabled as described above. I have just installed this update, and lo, the same issue is occurring. This time around, I just turned off 32 bit application support in DefaultAppPool to resolve the issue, as I’m not now expecting to use PHP on this web server for the time being. See the first referenced link at the top of this article for details on that setting.

A Big GPO Day

Today I spent a lot of time working on and testing Group Policy Objects. It was rewarding for the following achievements:

• We had a situation where our staff users, who had no policy for MMP snap-ins applied, still could not open those snap-ins while they were logged in as a local administrator of their own laptop. This one has gone on for years and I don’t know why it ever happened. It has to be some weird tattooing thing from the old NT4 type domain that was running on a Samba server, once upon a time, about three or four years ago. A bit of GPO explicitly disabling the setting that restricts MMC snapins has finally fixed that.
• Many of our staff computers had a default installation of IE that was locked down for pupil computers using the IEAK, back in the days of IE6. With updates to IE7 and IE8, the lockdown was still in effect. A GPO was set up to explicitly disable the lockdown features on a per-user basis in User Settings\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer. And it worked. No more complaints about not being able to create Favorites, or in my case, being unable to configure the tabbed browsing options. At the same time I set a few security options to maximise protection.
• I even managed to get GPO Preferences to set my default printer in Vista after putting up forever with Send To OneNote being the default printer whenever I logged in. This started to work after I installed a local instance of the same printer. This confirms that the real issue that Vista has with network printer deployment is that half the time it simply will not download and install the drivers properly off the print server. We have to figure out another way of deploying drivers, which I already found a problem with on the very first Vista computers being used by staff other than myself, who found that their per-user printer preferences would not install the drivers from the shared printer on the server. That said, remotely logging in to my computer from another desktop still gets OneNote as the default printer of that remote session.
• The one that I couldn’t fix was Windows Update settings. There was a GPO and there was nothing wrong with it, it turned out. Basically I’ve got two problems: a selfupdate tree that can’t be accessed by clients, and the clients, whether selfupdated or not, that won’t report back to the server. Not reporting back is a really big issue and the answer doesn’t seem to be that simple. But I will have a small play with the GPO settings to try to eliminate some options.

It is important for us and every other school in NZ to get up to speed with Vista because Microsoft is phasing out mainstream support for XP and this means software will no longer be supported to run on it. Software suppliers will switch to only testing for compatibility with Vista and Seven and then you won’t be able to get any information on resolving problems running things on XP. A big matter is to get Vista running properly on computers that pupils will use, and at the end of this year we have to look seriously at replacing as many as possible of our older computers because XP is all they can run.

Posting Resumed (Computing only)

From this point forward this blog will be about computing and technology only. Most of the other subjects previously posted here will appear on my new blog instead.

The Teach-IT Goes Up!

Here’s our Teach-IT 2C141 up in our building. We installed it yesterday and I’ve spent part of today doing a little tweaking.

The reason we picked this is the ceiling you can see above – how high it is, and its slope. It would have almost have needed scaffolding to get to the ceiling, and there is no cavity. Hence we decided to purchase the Epson EMP-400W projector which is seen here on the mount. This brought the projector close enough to the wall to use a wall-mount. But not any old wall mount, you have to get one that throws a metre or more. Enter the Teach-IT, and our wholesaler had only just started to sell Herma product at that time.

In this room where floor space can be limited, you can have people right up the front of the room  without them getting in the way of the projector and that is a big advantage. Note, that projector is about three metres off the floor as it is seen here.