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This is really only directed toward companies and schools that are using Microsoft Exchange (2003 SP2 or 2007) but others may find it interesting. Most people have heard of RIM's Blackberry devices and services. It was originally introduced as a server based option that required the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) which has either a 5 or 10 seat minimum license and isn't cheap. It is now available for single users using phone company provided email addresses as well. When most people talk about real time cell phone based email (and possibly contacts and calendar) this is what they are talking about.

With the release of Exchange Server 2003 SP2 (and 2007) Microsoft added Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) as a free service in the product. This service does the exact same thing as BES only for free and for a wider range of devices. EAS works with most Windows Mobile 5 devices and all Windows Mobile 6 and higher devices. It also works with most Palm Treo and Centro devices, I say most because it is sometimes carrier dependent. Lastly, Apple has announced that this service is coming to the iPhone with the 2.0 update this summer.

Once enabled on the server all that is needed to configure a cell device is to type in the sever URL, username and password. After that it is automatically configured and begins to do real time two way synchronization. There are two potential gotchas that I must warn about as well. First, you will need SSL on your Exchange Server (or firewall depending on setup) and I recommend an official cert rather than in house created for ease of device configuration. Second, make sure you have an unlimited data plan on whatever cell device you do this on or you will get a big surprise when you get your first bill.

The last part of this is that Blackberry itself now has a way for its phones to connect to exchange without needing BES. It is called Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) and is also free. What BIS does is it allows the phone to use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to simulate the same two way synch without the need of additional software. I don't know the full feature set of BIS since I don't have a device to test with but I have seen it used for email with our server. Again with this there was nothing done on the server and on the phone it was only URL, username and password and it is was working in minutes.

I tried to be high level on this post but if you want more details look at the following links, also feel free to ask me any questions and I will do my best to answer them. Hopefully this saves you some time and money when you have someone that wants real time email on a cell phone device.

EAS
BIS
iPhone

Kelly has nicely put up with me having the new server sitting on dining room table.  Today she seemed to be leaning toward me not having it there anymore.  I moved it to its almost permanent installation in basement.  The below picture shows it sitting next to its older much larger and louder soon to be retired brother.  This goes well with the last post to give you scale of this new tiny server.  Also you can see the amazing wiring mess that lives in the same area.

My friend Chris claimed that he couldn't get an accurate feel for the scale of my new server.  His suggestion was comparing it to the size of my head.  This morning before moving the server to more final placement I took the pictures.  First is front shot, one just server (on dinning room table) and next with me.

Next is a side view of the server and me.

I would say that in volume my head and the server are pretty close.  Which is pretty small for a server I would say.  In the front view you can see the add-on lunchbox external drives for my 1 TB mirror array.

I was looking for drivers today and I noticed nVidia has their own store, knowing that they don't sell much directly I was curious.  They had a hardware section that contained the Quadro Plex.  I am not quite sure what all this thing can do, but I figure for $20,500 it must be good at whatever it is.  Forget SLI this has 4 boards and some other bits to enable 16 screens, I suppose you could run some gigantic display like 16 30" LCD panels.  Cool.

I hesitate to even mention this since it is mostly on available to people who live near a MicroCenter.  Just in case though I want to point it out.  When I was building my server I wanted to get one of the new 45 nm 1333 MHz Intel processors.  The only one available at all so far is the E8400.  NewEgg would have them in stock for moments a day and their price was either 239.99 or 244.99, then I got an email from MicroCenter showing they had them in stock and for only 189.99.  I went and grabbed one since the price was so low.  Their prime cheap processor right now is the Q6600 which MicroCenter is selling for 199.99 as compared to the going standard of about $270-280.  On the whole MicroCenter is pretty average pricing wise but the sales like the two above I mention are definitely worth keeping a look out for.

This past week I built an entirely new server for hoyty.com (and the other sites I host).  The last time I build a new server was in the fall of 2001.  The specs for that server are at this link.  The specs listed there are pretty close to what the machine is now, I think the only difference is the SCSI controller as the on-board one failed at one point.  Also I added dual 250 GB SATA drives on a RAID controller running as a mirror.  2 GB of RAM and a dual processor (not single dual core) was pretty high end, now that is a standard low end desktop.  The old server started with Windows Server 2000 and Exchange 2000 and was upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 along the way.

Now onto the new server.  Ever since the release of Exchange Server 2007 I have been waiting for the release of Windows Server 2008 to build my new server.  Last fall the release date for W2K8 was announced as late February and I began planning for that as a new date to build server.  I ordered the bulk of the parts from NewEgg on 2/8/2008 and then picked up the processor on 2/10/2008 from MicroCenter as they had a really good sale on it.  You will see from the parts below that I built a dual core 3 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, Mirror of 10K RPM 150 GB and Mirror of 1 TB for a very reasonable price.  Admittedly I got a really good price on several components.

Some may think this is a bit overkill right now, but I hope this server will last me a really long time.  My last one lasted 6.5 years and I overbuilt it in a similar fashion.  If you wanted to build a similar server a little cheaper some places to trim pricing include using just one mirror of 500 GB HD, buying 4 or even 2 GB of RAM, use a motherboard with built in video and going with a lower end processor (just make sure it is 64 bit).  Below is an alternate configuration with some savings on overall price.

This system is a 2.2 GHz proc at 800 MHz instead of 1333 and 2 MB of cache rather than 6 MB, it has 4 GB of RAM rather than 8, has a software mirror of 500 GB HD rather than hardware mirror of faster or larger drives.  Having said all that this would make a very capable Windows Server 2008 box for a very affordable price.  You could still trim a little more off via smaller HD or lower end proc, but the savings are rapidly diminishing returns for the savings.

Happy server building.

In the last two days both Dell and Toshiba have released their new tablets on the world.  For Dell it is their very first tablet based machine whereas for Toshiba it is their 9th generation (Toshiba's claim).  Both models feature a dual mode touch / digitizer screen.  I am not sure if they are exactly the same screen or not, but they are both 1280x800 12.1 WXGA screens based at least partially on Wacom technology and feature LED backlighting.

Dell's Latitude XT is shooting for the low power long battery life price is no object market.  With a starting price of $2499-2678 it is not a model that my school will be considering.  This model comes with low power slower processors which will allow for longer battery life.  There is also the option of a SSD based HD which should further reduce power usage.  The XT has the option of an extended life internal battery as well as an additional slice battery attached to the base.  The two together should easily allow a full day's worth of use.  Dell chose to drop the optical drive from the main chassis and made it available in a docking station.

Toshiba's Portégé M700 is primarily a refinement of their previous M400 model.  As mentioned above Toshiba has moved from their 1400x1050 12.1 screen to a new 1280x800 12.1 wide screen model.  They are also now offering touch screen ability to go along with the continuing digitizer usage.  The external case is almost identical to the M400 model other than the movement of some of the ports.  Some highlights of the changes include an integrated webcam, the removal of the latching mechanism.  The starting price of this model is $1449 and it does include an optical drive.  Toshiba also offers a slice battery that in combination with the internal battery should provide almost all day use (7 Hrs to Dell's 9.5).  This will most likely be the model that my school considers for next school year.

Just for completeness some other models released in the not too distant past that will probably be options still available for next school year include HP's 2710p, Gateway's C-120X, Lenovo's X61, Fujitsu's LifeBook T4220 and lastly a new player to direct sales of tablets is ASUS with their R1E.

It is popular sentiment now to call Windows Vista a failure on a grand scale.  Some with historical context are even calling Vista the next Windows Me, which for those that don't know means that it will be a short lived disaster.  I firmly believe that Vista will far surpass Me in success, however I think it still is not going to be very long lived.  I think Vista is a bridge OS in terms of hardware.  I think it is a stop gap while hardware shifts from 32-bit to 64-bit in the mainstream.  I am going to go over a bit of history to give context to my thoughts on Vista, many will know the history already and may want to skip down a page or so.

If you look back at Windows starting with the original release of 95 on August 24, 1995 you can see some trends.  (I will be skipping Windows NT 3.5-4.0 since they were not targeting at the broader consumer market at all.)  Windows 95 was the first hybrid 32-bit Microsoft OS for consumers.  It had a great deal of legacy 16-bit code and to some extent sat atop a 16-bit base.  There were some problems with the approach 95 took but it was the first step in a transition from 16 to 32 bit as well as from DOS to windows.  There were many versions of 95 available in various forms each improving on the last.  Then came Windows 98 on June 25, 1998 and 98 Second Edition on May 5, 1999.  Most people I think would agree that 98: SE was the pinnacle of this branch of the Windows family and even today more than 8 years since 98: SE was released there are still countless millions of machines running this OS.  All of the 9x and Me were known as some version of 4.x.

The next transition was to be to NT 5.0, which was renamed to Windows 2000 during development and prior to release.  Windows 2000  was released on February 17, 2000 was not looking good for consumers and as a result Windows Millennium Edition was rushed out on September 14, 2000.  There were many things wrong with Me and it is best forgotten.  It is really unclear how 98: SE was so broken in going to Me but it was.  Windows 2000 was meant to be the big push to get consumers onto native 32-bit code top to bottom.  The problem was that Windows 2000 didn't have nearly the consumer side support that 98 maintained through most of its life.  Windows 2000 was a huge success in the enterprise market but a total flop in the consumer market.

Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001 and was in essence a merge of Windows 2000 and Windows 98: SE from a consumer standpoint.  It shows its roots by its version number of 5.1.  By the time it was released there was sufficient support for a native 32-bit OS that XP quickly began replacing both 98 and 2000 in the consumer space.  Today XP has mostly replaced 2000 even in enterprises.  Due to XP being the second attempt at a native 32-bit consumer OS and allowing for sufficient time for support to build up it had much greater success.  Shortly the third service pack will be released for XP making it a fairly reliable and stable platform, likely SP3 will be the last SP for XP.  On April 25, 2005 a 64 bit edition of XP was released, it along with Windows Server 2003 were known as version 5.2.  This was the beginning of the bridge between 32-bit and 64-bit on the consumer OS side.  For the most part this edition is mostly unknown and has seen very limited use.

Now onto Windows Vista which was released for general availability on January 30, 2007 and is known as version 6.0.  Vista had a tumultuous development.  There was an initial version being developed based more so on the prior Windows XP 5.1 codebase.  However somewhere during the beginning part of 2005 the development was reset and began again based on the Windows 2003 SP1 5.2 codebase.  Some will argue how much of a reset it is, but it was reset.  This had the result of causing Vista to take much longer than originally planned for release and began the downward spiral of bad PR.  I personally think it was a good thing that this reset happened and as a result the delay.  It allowed hardware to catch up and some regards surpass the Vista requirements.

Vista is the first Microsoft consumer OS to ship in both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition.  Unfortunately unlike the transition from 16 to 32-bit this time there are two distinct versions of Vista for 32 or 64-bit.  Also Vista has introduced a large suite of new security protections.  The protections are very obviously a first attempt and will I am sure be much refined in the future.  I think Vista will eventually become the next Windows 2000.  Vista's biggest forward looking feature will be 64-bit but that won't be an advantage due to lack of support in the short term in the consumer space.  However I think after SP1 or possibly SP2 enterprises will begin to adopt Vista for the enhanced control and security.  Quite possibly the enterprises will only deploy Vista 64-bit since they will have the hardware to support it.

This brings me back to the idea that Vista has the unfortunate position of being a bridge OS between 32-bit and 64-bit.  I think XP will continue for quite awhile in the consumer space with Vista slowly growing market share on new machines.  It won't be nearly the success that XP has been in the long run.  This will be spun as a failure for Microsoft I am afraid and they will simply have to weather the storm in the meantime.  There are a lot of new ideas in Vista that haven't had time to gel fully just as there were in Windows 2000.

The next release of Windows (known as 7 for now) which will most likely be out in 2009 will be the big step forward.  I am pretty confident that it will be 64-bit primarily with potentially a limited 32-bit version for parts of the world.  This will succeed since by 2009 64-bit processors will have been mainstream for 5 years and Microsoft can safely assume a sufficient user base to rely upon 64-bit.  Windows 7 will be and do for Vista what Windows XP did for Windows 2000.

I end with a SAT favorite
Windows 95 is to Windows 98 : SE as Windows 2000 is to Windows XP as Windows Vista is to Windows 7

I have been testing the semi-public releases of Vista SP1 since late September.  Today I downloaded what is supposed to be the final RC1 build on the way to a RTW in Feburary I would guess.  I noticed quite a large size decrease from the first preview bulid to the Pre-RC1 and now Rc1 builds.  Hopefully it was removal of debug code and not other fixes or features.

9/17/07 - 687 MB

11/8/07 - 434 MB

11/30/07 - 436 MB

1/2/08 - 436 MB

1/19/08 - 434 MB (Final)

Just for comparison here is Windows XP SP3 beta sizes.

9/1/2007 - 334 MB

10/30/2007 - 336 MB

12/27/2007 - 311 MB

1/26/2008 - 315 MB

4/14/2008 - 316 MB (Final)

These are all for the English language versions.

Update (1/25/2008): I fixed some of the dates above based upon the digital signature dates on the original files.  Those dates are when MSFT actually built the file rather than when they were released.  I also added the RC Refresh 2 for each of them which were just released to testers even though the dates are a bit older.  Hopefully the final versions will be out very soon.

Update (2/8/2008): I added the final SP1 installer.

Update (4/25/2008): I added the final SP3 installer.

I have had three iPods as I mentioned here.  At the beginning I used some older Sony headphones and then later I used the ER6i ones I mention here.  The only problem with the ER6i for me is that my first pair started having issues with the left headphone and then eventually both stopped working.  I bought a second pair since I liked them so much and they have also broken.  The second pair was under warranty so I sent them in for repair (replacement).  In the meantime I have had to use the Apple provided headphones, particularly the ones that shipped with the 3rd gen nano.  These headphones are HORRIBLE.  They don't fit my ear at all so as a result they both fall out and hurt my ears.  Secondly they have no sound isolation at all so you have to turn them up much louder than you should need to.  I can't wait to stop using them and go back to a decent pair of headphones.  I will say one thing in the headphones defense is that they are thrown in basically for free with iPods that sometimes cost less than the headphones I use.  Still they are BAD, VERY BAD.

Apple recently released iTunes 7.5 and the 1.03 firmware for the 3rd gen nano.  I am not sure which fixed this problem so I mention both.  My previous Minis would sync and then prepare for disconnect and only draw power from the USB.  The nano on the other hand would sync and they stay connected, thus forcing you to have to press eject in iTunes to allow you to properly remove the device.  The only downside to these upgrades was that they essentially reset my iPod and all of its previous settings.  I had to go back in and configure the music, podcasts and pictures tabs.  I also didn't get my status of podcasts synched back to itunes and had to manually update which ones I had listened to.  Hopefully a one time occurrence but still annoyance.