Northward Ho!

In sort of an extreme measure to dodge Texas summer heat, we overcompensated and flew to Alaska for 10 days. It's a long story, but add bonus Alaska Airline tickets, no Hawaii availability, fluid work schedules, and a dash of teenage angst, shake in a 31 foot RV...and here we are.

Because we left on the evening of the 4th, we missed the usual fireworks - and extreme fluid loss in the 3-digit temperatures - but we did get to see Seattle's fireworks from above as we started on the second leg up to Anchorage. Who knew there were so many local fireworks?

As we flew north to Anchorage, weirdly it actually grew lighter until it was twilight. We were headed much more north than west. So, even though we arrived at 1 AM and didn't get to sleep until 2, it felt like about 9 PM. And the airport was active, shops and restaurants open, people milling about. We didn't explore the town any, but I got a little of the feeling I experienced in Norway: It's summer, get your living done NOW! You can sleep in the winter.

Of course, even though we'd gotten catnaps on the flights, the three hour jet lag ensured we all woke up after about 4 hours of sleep at 7 AM. This worked out fine as we had a busy day full of trip preparations: shuttling back to the airport, pickup there by the Great Alaska Holidays shuttle, check-in, intro video, paperwork, loading the RV and unpacking, hitting Best Buy for an emergency notebook AC adapter (my bad), $300 worth of groceries, bike shop rentals and fittings, then FINALLY the 4 1/2 hour drive to Denali. Good thing it never got dark!

The Denali Riverside RV campground is nothing more than a graded wide spot in the Parks Highway road. Not a scrap of vegetation, nothing but dirt and gravel. Its one saving grace is that you back right up to the Nenana River canyon, with the rushing, glacier-milk-colored river right below you. It's quite a contrast between looking out the front of the RV and the back.

Technorati Tags: Alaska,Great Alaskan Holidays

Where’s My White Shirt And Cigarette?

I’ve been getting into presentation recording and screencasting a bit recently. It’s been an interesting experience. My first pass at it used a small mike I scraped up from my musician wife, and it was a pain trying to get it sound just right. (This is besides all the logistics of trying to make a quiet recording in a home office for the amount time necessary to record an hourlong presentation – stuff the dogs in a room, generally alone in the house, not a time of day with school buses roaring past, etc. etc.)

On the recommendation of my friend Dan Holme I bought a Samson Podcasting Kit, which comes with a prosumer (professional / consumer) quality cardioid USB microphone, a professional-looking vibration eliminating suspension mount (below), a stand to put ‘em in, and a shiny silver carrying case that makes me feel like I should be handcuffed to it.

Get Camtasia set up, get the mike level right, start up a VM and run the preso from it so you can run Slide Show in a contained size, capture that screen, put on your headphones so you can review the recording, open your printed notes if you’re a perfectionist like me…and be damned if I don’t feel like Edward R. Murrow or something! (With dogs barking in the background instead of bombs dropping.)

I found I even ended up holding up the notes exactly like radio announcers do, because there’s a very narrow sweet spot where your mouth is positioned at the mike correctly and you can still see the notes. The only thing Ed didn’t have is the copy of 64-bit Windows 7 in front of him :).

Technorati Tags: podcasting,camtasia,Samson,Edward R. Murrow,Murrow

Native OS Boot from VHD: The Windows 7 Way

Those of us that need to use a server OS from what’s normally perceived as a client (e.g., demonstrating a Windows Server feature or application on our notebook during a breakout session) have had to work with different ways to achieve it, and none were all that convenient.

Usually it entailed taking a SWAG* at the amount of disk space you needed for your primary OS, then splitting the volume to leave room for the second OS. In the days of small notebook disks, these estimations were precious indeed. Another option was to install a second hard drive – usually requiring you to lose the CD/DVD-ROM drive. (Hey, you usually worked rather than watched movies on the airplane anyway, yah?) The more daring of us simply installed the server OS and used it as we would a client OS, generally sacrificing device support and power management in the process. I could never quite do that; I valued the notebook-specific features too much when I traveled.

The situation has gotten a whole lot better with Windows 7. (What hasn’t?) With Windows 7 on virtualization-compliant hardware like my ThinkPad T61P, you can boot directly to a .VHD file.

What does this mean?

• No more partition guessing. Your second (or third, or fourth) OS simply resides in a .VHD file on your primary partition.
• It’s flexible. You can add and remove OSes as easily as moving the files around and modifying the boot menu with BCDEDIT.
• It’s fast. I’ve not run any tests, but it sure seems to be as fast as right off the metal. I wouldn’t have known the difference from a “real” boot. (What is real any more, anyway?)
• Your other partitions appear as  D:, E:, etc. on the VHD-booted OS. All your physical disk volume data is visible; I change the location of My Documents on the secondary OS so it points to my primary documents folder.

Steps to book a second OS from VHD

1. Create a .VHD containing an OS of your choice. I probably wouldn’t bother with Windows XP, because if you’re running Windows 7 you can install Windows Virtual PC for free and have a bootable XP image. You can build your image on either Hyper-V or Virtual PC.
   
2. Make a copy of the VHD in case something goes wrong!
   
3. run SYSPREP:
   
   %windir%/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe /generalize
   /shutdown
   
   to create an image that will customize itself according to the new hardware it finds itself on. If you don’t run SYSPREP, be sure to remove the integration add-ins from your VHD before you copy it over.
   
4. Copy the VHD to your notebook.
   
5. Configure your boot menu to recognize the VHD. For this, I lifted – er, “reused” -  the following from a TechNet article:

To add a native-boot VHD to an existing Windows 7 boot menu

If you are deploying the VHD to a computer with an existing Windows 7 or Windows Server® 2008 R2 installation, you can use the BCDedit tool to make the new VHD bootable and add it to the boot menu. For more information about using the BCDedit tool, see this Microsoft Web site.

Note : Before you begin, you can back up your BCD store using the BCDedit tool with the /export option. For example, at a command prompt, type: bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup

1. Copy an existing boot entry for a Windows 7 installation. You will then modify the copy for use as the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "R2 VHD Boot"

   Where “R2 VHD Boot” is what will appear in the boot menu. When the BCDedit command completes successfully, it returns a {GUID} as output in the Command Prompt window.
   

2. Locate the {GUID} in the command-prompt output for the previous command. Copy the GUID, including the braces, to use in the following steps. (I recommend enabling QuickEdit in the window’s properties so you can easily cut and paste the GUID. )
   
3. Set the device and osdevice options for the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   

   or whatever you’ve named the VHD. Note the syntax for the VHD location.

4. Set the boot entry for the VHD as the default boot entry. When the computer restarts, the boot menu will display all of the Windows installations on the computer and boot into the VHD after the operating-system selection countdown completes. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /default {guid}
   

   (Being conservative and not familiar with BCDEDIT, I went into the System properties on my Windows 7 boot and made sure that Windows 7 was the default, in case something went horribly wrong.)

5. Some x86-based systems require a boot configuration option for the kernel in order to detect certain hardware information and successfully native-boot from a VHD. At a command prompt, type:

   bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on
   (I did this on my x64 system too.)

   
   

That’s it. You should now be able to shut down and reboot into your secondary OS. It will complete its installation from the sysprep, and you’ll be ready to go.

There’s one more really useful step if your secondary OS is Windows 2008 R2. Even though it’s from the same code base as Windows 7, R2 doesn’t seem to automatically recognize range of hardware. So, when you open up Device Manager (devmgmt.msc from the Run menu for the lazy like me) you’ll probably end up with a collection of yellow exclamation points for hardware that isn’t recognized. You can correct most of these errors with this trick: Right-click on them, choose Update Drivers, and point the update location to d:\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository. This is where the Windows 7 drivers for your hardware are stored. If the hardware works on Windows 7 you can make it work on R2 with this trick. You can also update drivers that did load on R2 – but with the generic Microsoft drivers -  with the manufacturer-specific drivers automatically downloaded from Windows Update while you were booted in Windows 7.

* Scientific wild-assed guess.

** Update ** Boot from VHD will only be available in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Technorati Tags: Boot from VHD,Windows 7,VHD,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2

Analyzing your Windows 7 Notebook Battery Performance

One of the many nice features of Windows 7 is its increased energy efficiency. (Anything that lets me finish a movie on a long flight is goodness!) What I didn’t know until now is that you can actually generate a report that outlines your exact power usage and how to improve it (though somewhat cryptically).

Just run

powercfg -energy -output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Energy_Report.html

from an elevated command prompt (I created a batch file, then a shortcut to it with the Run As Administrator option checked). It will run for 60 seconds, then drop a very detailed energy report on your desktop in HTML format. 

I haven’t analyzed the report other than to see that I’m burning electrons at a good rate. But it’s on purpose as I’m running in high performance profile at the moment. Thanks to http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4569-power-efficiency-diagnostics-report.html for this tip! For more information on Windows 7 energy efficiency, please see

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,power efficiency,battery efficiency report

You’d Think I’d Learn

Today was the Plano Bike Association’s Memorial Day ridefest, and like last year I wanted to participate. I’ve (finally) been riding more regularly, encouraged by the fact that as beautiful as my   is to look at, it’s better to ride.

In the start-up confusion, with probably a hundred cyclists milling around in the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve parking lot, you have to make your decisions fast – and live with the result. Today I put an exclamation point to my previous post; that which doesn’t give you a heart attack makes you stronger.

“25 miles, over here! 14-15 MPH!” Hmmm, my back is sore today but that’s too slow.

“50 miles, over here! Medium pace!” Hmmm, might be too long. I haven’t ridden more than a 30 mile ride yet, but the speed has been fairly high.

“40 miles, faster pace!” The distance is right, but I can’t quite tell about the speed. I carefully eye the riders lining up for the group; I don’t see too many emaciated hammerheads in it. I opt for shorter distance vs. speed.

Well. Long story short, we averaged about 22 MPH for the 17 miles I was with them before I cracked and was spat out the back of the peleton. I could hang with them in the flat, but just didn’t have the depth yet in my legs to accelerate up the hills the way they did.  One of the ride leaders paced me and another blown-up rider back up to the main group. I was composing what I was going to say to my wife to have her drive all the way out to the airport to pick me up when we stopped at a convenience store.

The 50 miler group was there also, and I shifted over to them. I was none too happy about adding an extra ten miles to my ride when I was already tired, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Thankfully, at 16 to 17 MPH  the pace was more to my taste (and condition), and I completed the day with 54 miles at about 18 MPH – slightly longer, and slightly faster, than anyone else in that group due to my dalliance with the hammerheads. And let me tell you, a measly 1 MPH difference in average speed is a BIG difference in effort!

Walking slowly to the park pavilion after the ride, I received a tweet from Lance Armstrong that said, “Ouch ouch ouch, and more ouch.” Apparently today in the Giro d’Italia was really hard. But at least I was in good company!

After a little post-ride repair work (warm bath, back wrap), I feel pretty good. Other than the two minutes it takes me to climb the stairs…

Technorati Tags: Plano Bicycle Association

What Steve Larsen taught all of us

I learned from no less than Lance Armstrong today that Steve Larsen died Tuesday evening after collapsing during a running workout. He apparently suffered a heart attack.

This wasn’t the death of some couch potato salaryman trying to   get in shape for his class reunion. Steve Larsen was probably the only professional who competed and won major races as a mountain biker, road biker and triathlete. He had a wife and five children. And he was all of 39.

 

To quote Velonews:

Larsen began racing in the 1980s and was on the Motorola team for three years in the early 1990s, racing the Giro d'Italia and other major European events. He then moved into mountain biking, winning the NORBA National Cross-Country title in 1997 and 2000.

In 2001, he switched to triathlon, qualifying for the Ironman in his first year in the sport, and finishing ninth at the Hawaii event. He also competed in XTerra offroad triathlons. He was reportedly the only American to compete in the world championships for road, mountain bike, track, cyclocross and triathlon. He was a member of the 1993 U.S. world road championship team that helped Lance Armstrong win his first world title.

When something like this happens, the second thing everyone does (hopefully it’s the second, after feeling sorrowful) is measure how close they are to the deceased’s situation. This is, of course, what’s bothered me: He was in better shape than all of us.

I’m significantly older than Steve was. I always comforted myself in the knowledge that (in addition to checkups) I push myself to my maximum heart rate often enough that if I was going to have a heart attack, it would have happened by now.

So much for that theory.

But…tonight is a beautiful spring evening in Texas, not even much wind, so I went for a club ride with the Plano Bike Association. 30 miles @ 17 MPH average with peaks of 25-26. Getting back in one piece, acquitted myself without TOO much wheelsucking, feeling thoroughly exercised like only a road ride does, shower, and spend a few minutes in the evening backyard watching the martins chirp like parakeets on steroids.

Get out there, accept the reasonable risks you always have, and don’t shy away just because you don’t repair as fast as you used to. Woody Allen once said, “90% of success in life is just showing up.” Show up at work, show up at the dojo, the starting line, the conference, the volunteer booth. That’s all you can do, isn’t it?

I think Lance has a good summary of the situation:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do some pullups…

Technorati Tags: Steve Larsen,Lance Armstrong,Plano Bike Association

Creating a Virtual Machine Manager Guest OS Profile for volume clients that use KMS

I’m sitting in a VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) session by Mikael Nystrom called “Building The Master Image”. He provided an answer to a problem I’ve been wondering about (but honestly haven’t really pursued) for a long time.

The OS Guest Profile is a VMM component that specifies the operating system configuration to be used when VMM builds a new VM. When you build an OS Guest Profile, one of the fields you must complete is the product key. No problem, right? Well yes-ish. If you are building a Windows 2008 / R2 or Vista / Windows 7 machine in volume configuration, the preferred method is to use KMS. That’s the session I gave yesterday.

The problem is that a volume-built KMS client does not require a license key – indeed there’s no place for it. And there’s no equivalent key supplied with your license to put in the profile’s license key field. So what’s a VMM admin to do?

What I just learned is that there’s a table in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide that contains KMS client setup keys to be used exactly for that purpose. Depending on which OS you’re building, you use the corresponding key in the Guest OS Profile. You can bet I’m going to include this in the next version of my Volume Activation talk.

Technorati Tags: KMS,Volume activation,VMM,SCVMM,Virtual Machine Manager,license key,guest OS profile

3.74!

…out of a possible 4.0 in the evaluations for my session yesterday. 74% were “very satisified”, 26% were satisfied, and no one was anything less. One comment was that the title should have been “Activation and Licensing Demystified” (good idea), another said “Thanks for that session. Finally got it.” 91 attendees for a session on (zzzzzzzz) volume activation!

On the strength of the session, the track chair verbally invited me back next year on the spot :).

Technorati Tags: volume activation,Windows 7,Windows Server 2008,Vista,R2,Windows Server 2008 R2,microsoft

IT Manager panel discussions at Tech Ed

I had a chance yesterday morning to participate in a great IT Manager track on real-world challenges around virtualization. It was great to be able to simply sit on the panel with Edwin Yuen (aka “Ed-V”) from the virtualization team, Baldwin Ng for solution accelerators, Kevin Remde (all-round technical evangelist),  Peter Meister from Microsoft working on cloud computing efforts, Art Wittman from InfoWorld Analytics, and all the audience members that participated in the back and forth conversation. Great insights, and great fun as well!

Technorati Tags: Tech Ed,Edwin Yuen,Baldwin Ng,Kevin Remde,Peter Meister,Art Wittman,virtualization