Real Life Intrudes On Blogging
Busy day, actually doing some real work for a client who is making a transition. Doing it I learned that you get the complete Windows 7 system no matter which version is running on a new computer, and then you have to pay for the ‘key’ to get the appropriate level [Home, Professional, Ultimate] that is used. It makes upgrading easier, and Microsoft saves money by only producing one product disk.
Since Windows 7 doesn’t include a calendar, I grabbed VueMinder Calendar Lite [the free version] to see if it would do the job. Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I would recommend it for people who don’t want to trust their life to a Microsoft web app, the M$ solution for the absence of Outlook in Win 7.
My day was a lot better than Steve Bates’s. He had to deal with the flooding in Houston caused by a front moving through.
I gave a neighbor a ride to his job, because his car is down for repairs. There is nothing in the way of public transportation here, so his options were to get a ride from someone, or pay more for a taxi than he would make by going to work. The round trip is 25+ miles, so that’s at least a gallon of gas every day.
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Windows 7 also doesn’t include an email client. And — get this — it won’t email alerts unless there’s an email client installed. Despite the fact that the SMTP client class is actually there inside Windows and quite accessible from PowerShell, and it’s easy peasy to send an email from within PowerShell via creating an SMTP object then calling its send mail method with the mail you want to send, and this underlying COM object is the *exact same object* that the Microsoft clients call. And don’t think that installing Thunderbird will suffice to get your email alerts going out. No, it has to be a *Microsoft* email client — either the new Windows Live garbage or full-blown Outlook — because they register themselves as COM providers for the system innards to call while Thunderbird doesn’t.
And let’s not talk about security. Okay, so I wanted to do a remote DCOM invocation of a WMI enumerator class. Well, the WMI enumerator is a dll so you have to register a proxy via the remote registry operation. Except you can’t register a proxy via the remote registry because only the Install User has permission to register newly installed COM objects in that particular registry subtree and if UAC is turned on, you can’t get the privilege escalation dialogue which you get if you’re installing stuff as a local user, so you can’t get there. Which renders remote DCOM useful… how? Okay, so I gave up on that, and instead went to the SOAP-based mechanism for getting WMI information via WBEM/CIM. Which I had to turn on. Which actually works pretty well, that’s how PowerShell does its remote PowerShell invocation after all (via the WinRM SOAP service). Except you have to log on as a user. Not a problem if the system is on a domain, you just add the user to the domain and it pops up on all the systems that are part of the domain for you to authenticate against, but can be problematic on detached systems that don’t have a full-time system administrator like your typical video camera recording server.
Grr. So I go to turn on SNMP. Let’s see, go to Control Panel, Install Software, Install Windows Feature, select SNMP services to install, wait, go into Server Management/Services, double click the SNMP service, turn it on, add a group PUBLIC read-only, go enumerate from a different location… nada. Oops, forgot the flag “Enable Remote Access”. Sigh! Turn that on. So now I can at least get network performance stats and disk usage. But: No disk throughput information. And no disk *queue* information, which is sorta important to know whether my server is overloaded and thus the third-party video recording software is dropping frames because there are too many cameras attached to the server. I can get that via WMI, I know that because I’ve done it via Powershell. But see the authentication issue.
What annoys me most about Windows 7 / Windows 2008R2 is that all the right pieces/parts are there. Microsoft has the makings of a pretty darn good OS under the covers. But it’s like it was designed by a dozen different committees that refuse to talk to each other, with the result that the pieces are all there, but it’s impossible to use them together as a system without jumping through hoops. I wanted to be able to monitor the video recording servers without having to actually install software on them, because installing software on them means someone has to *maintain* the software by installing updates etc from time to time (see: typical computer skills of physical security guys, lack of). All the bits and pieces are there to allow that. But it’s like herding cats to get all these bits and pieces to cooperate. GRRRR!!!!
I see Windows hasn’t changed much since my developer years.
“designed by a dozen different committees that refuse to talk to each other” – Badtux
I remember developing a central component of a Windows-based system running on a large local network, testing it on a testbed running on my own account, and eventually spending over a week deploying it, because of permission issues. The eventual solution… not easy to find on M$ support sites… required installing components in a particular order, and making some (to me) nonsensical settings by hand. Microsoft just doesn’t care about its developers; M$ has already gotten its money, and stops just short of saying “screw you” aloud.
Times change, and that whole system, with dozens of specialized app servers on different machines, now runs in a single box. But I wasn’t around for that transition.
Boy, that Badtux penguin sure talks foreign…hahaha. I read Steve’s post about his car/flooding. What a day! At least it all ended well…just like for your neighbor. He was lucky you were able to give him a ride.
M$ wants you to use Windows Live so you will be tied ever closer to them, but that requires some level of confidence that you will have access to the Internet, which is definitely not something I’m confident about, given the number of backhoes in the local area – after hurricanes the leading cause of telephone outages is the installation of irrigation systems, followed by cars hitting the patch boxes, despite their location at least 10 feet from the road on the far side of the sidewalks. [Curbs are no barrier to SUVs.]
I considered using Outlook when I was looking for a replacement for Eudora, but went with Pegasus after several people I know had their Outlook e-mail directories taken over by a worm several years ago. I got deluged with spam and apologies for the spam.
It doesn’t surprise me that the pieces are all there, Badtux, as that seems to be the way M$ has been doing things – put everything out there and then only use the pieces you want. That accounts for a lot of the ‘bloat’ in their software. You shouldn’t have looked, it only upset you.
It is amazing, Steve, but they treat their developers just like all of their customers, with contempt. They still don’t make it easy to do anything – you have to figure it out for yourself. All they do is ship you CDs which might contain something useful, but don’t count on it.
I know, OWL, when computer people go off on rants, we do tend to speak in a foreign language which has no meaning for anyone who hasn’t taken the software and hardware apart to see how it works. Even if we expanded the initials, it wouldn’t help normal people understand what we were talking about.
Outlook is a great program, Bryan. It’s good at calendaring, it’s good at organizing TODO lists, it’s great at dealing with your contacts list, it’s good at doing everything except sending and receiving email :twisted:. I’m currently using the latest version of Thunderbird on Windows because Outlook simply will not consistently send and receive email. My iPhone bings to tell me I have mail, I flick the iPhone on and it’s something I need to respond to (thus needing a keyboard, I go to the computer that has Outlook installed… nada. Hit the send-receive, and five minutes later… nada. Maybe 10 minutes later the email will *finally* show up in the Inbox on Outlook… but geez! Meanwhile, it pops up in Thunderbird immediately.
And yes, that’s the latest 2010 version of Outlook, the “new and improved” version with the new and improved “ribbon” interface that turns all the useful menus we know and love into tabbed hieroglyphics because apparently the notion is that ancient Egyptian is the only proper way for computers to communicate with man. Or something. A user interface, I might add, which violates Microsoft’s very own user interface standards. Which, if you read the Microsoft user interface standards document, that’s some good stuff — the committee that wrote that document studied the best of the industry and distilled it down pretty well. But of course the committee that designed the Outlook user interface doesn’t talk to the committee that wrote the user interface document, so …
Regarding looking under the covers, I *had* to look under the covers, I’m being paid to look under the covers. What annoys me is thatMicrosoft’s OS has the capability to be a great OS, it has a lot of good pieces that the mess that is Linux can only dream about… but it’s like pulling teeth to get the pieces to work together! GRRRR!!!!
My email host, everyone.net (no relation to “Everyone’s Internet”), is entirely and only an email host, equipped to handle small and large companies. I switched to them based on a recommendation by the guy who runs Nearly Free Speech.
Until about two weeks ago, everyone.net had never let me down; their uptime was (to me) astonishing, and I used them from Mozilla Thunderbird, IMAP, with no problems. Then, suddenly, one day, it just quit receiving mail. It would whir forever, trying in vain to connect.
At the time I didn’t have time to fiddle with it, so I switched to their webmail, which is very decent and served my purposes adequately in the short term. But soon enough, maybe a week later, I needed my calendar (which is a Thunderbird add-on called Lightning), started up Thunderbird, and lo and behold, my email started downloading. There had been no updates to Thunderbird in between, so the problem must have been in how everyone.net talked to it; I guess it’s hard for even the big guns to keep everything working all the time.
OWL, the scary thing is that, although I haven’t had any Windows work for almost four years, I was able to follow most of what Badtux said. Doing that work really does transform your brain into something… odd. 😈
I realize that you were doing it as part of your responsibilities, Badtux, just as I’m dealing with multiple issues at the moment as a result of a client request, but I agree that M$ has a habit of taking a reasonable user interface and screwing it up for no other reason than to make it look different. The result is usually less useful and more confusing, but it is different.
M$ has always been bad with communications programs. The original Access was a communications program that was classified as a black hole because it sucked so badly. It was so bad they gave the name to their data base program to make people forget that the original ever existed.
That, Steve, is why I stay to straight text and an old-fashioned e-mail program – no surprises. It boringly receives and sends text, and that’s all I want.