James's Blog

So, I went...

James Saull — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:02:00 GMT

So, I decided it was time to start blogging alongside my colleagues at Conchango. You can find my new blog at: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamessaull/default.aspx

Many thanks indeed to Realise Systems for hosting me for so long - much appreciated!

Should I stay or should I go?

James Saull — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:55:00 GMT

I joined Conchango on 9^th October 2006 and astonishingly (tempus fugit) I am approaching my first review and then the end of probation and it has got me to thinking about my blog. I’ve been freeload-blogging here at Realise-Systems since the halcyon days of working on the Heathrow Terminal 5 construction phase in summer 2003! However, Conchango has a strong community of bloggers. Should I join them and blog under the company flag? Should I maybe start living the Windows Live lifestyle and setup my own blog at Live Spaces?

I’ll give it some thought and for my two loyal readers (unless they are web search engine crawlers too...) I’ll be sure to post if and where I move to...

Business Process Modeling and Management

James Saull — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:45:00 GMT

I recently attended the Microsoft Architect Insight conference in Wales where I gave a presentation on SOA. One of my ex-colleagues (Dr Andrew Rivers) gave a presentation on Business Process Management with a particular focus on Microsoft BizTalk Server and it just got me thinking...

One thing I have noticed is that the Microsoft don't have their own business process modeling & simulation tool. Other vendors in this space often boast about theirs. Although these tools are very useful in the analysis and design phases, and in later iterations, it occurred to me that none I have seen attempt to go to the next level.

At University, on my engineering course, I remember grappling with a couple of relevant concepts; namely Finite Element Analysis and Dead Beat Control. The first is a system for modeling complex systems (in my case it was mainly for modeling compressible flow) and the second is also a system of describing feed back loops to control systems. One to model behaviour and one to control behaviour.

So, for example, if we could model the basic dynamics of a car we could describe how more power translates to greater speed. However, we could improve the model to describe how, as the car went faster, rolling resistance increases in a certain way, wind resistance increases exponentially, engine efficiency varies across the range of RPM and so on. If we could model this we would see that as we increased power output of the engine through throttle position and gears the car would accelerate very well initially, then blip as a gear change was required, and then continue on a slightly gentler curve. Eventually the resistances will have increased to a point where they match the total output of the engine and acceleration will cease. In fact as the car then reaches a hill the forces would in fact cause deceleration. Etc. etc.

Dead beat control on the other hand is more akin to the cruise control on a car. It takes all sorts of inputs and a control model to determine how much throttle or resistance to apply to achieve the correct speed. Notice how good cruise control does not use constant acceleration to reach the desired speed and then, as it flies past it, issue powerful braking forces to bring it back, only to miss the desired speed again and then apply the accelerator and so on. Other examples include the chemical systems of the body attempting to keep blood sugar level in homeostasis without violent deviation. Perfect control will reach the required level very quickly without some form of damped oscillation around this level.

Now, if we could model a business process, its feedback loops, bottlenecks, constraints, inputs, outputs, variables we could use this to understand how the business process will behave given the data we could have available. Deploy this model into your Business Process Management system and wire it up to all the right telemetry as input and all the right activators (to control the system) and you'd have a Business Process Model-Managed system. Such a system could assist in leveling the schedule in a supply chain or deploying just the right amount of resources to an operation in response to incoming orders etc. A business process autopilot.

One place where we are already starting to see this is Health Modeling. Systems are instrumented via SNMP, WMI, Event Logs etc. The health model receives this input and resutls in transitions in the state machine (health model) to a new state (reduced service, failed service etc.) and then via scripted responses attempts to correct the system. Sometimes it is all 100% automated and sometimes it signals human intervention because the system is too complex (or uneconomical) to be modeled.

Current BPM systems really rely today on that human intervention. Business Activity Monitoring systems are the business telemetry that is visualised on a dashboard of KPIs (scorecards etc.), business managers then perform the modeling of the system and signal the response to correct the system - they then watch all the lag indicators and speculate on trends and issue more corrections. If we could begin to model more and more of this behaviour using next generation Business Process Modeling tools we could make them a runtime operational component of the system: tying up business telemetry (BAM) to the system controls for autonomation.

How far can we take business rules engines? What about AI? What about Finite Element Analysis? What about Windows Workflow Foundation state machine workflows? We don't have to boil the ocean but clearly we can make BAM do more than just let business managers know what is going on!

Updated Dell D820 Vista Video Driver and my Windows Experience Index dropped a point!

James Saull — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:23:00 GMT

Well I wasn't expecting that! Aero performance on my Dell laptop on RTM Vista seemed clunky (especially the Windows Tab application switching). In fact my recollection of my old Acer Ferrari running a Vista Beta was definitely better.

So I thought I would go to the Video Drvier panel and click the button to upgrade the driver. It found a driver and applied it. I re-ran the "Performance Information and Tools" panel to update my Windows Experience Index and it had dropped a point on Video Performance - see below for yourself!

I will keep checking back to see whether this improves...

Before (see how it knows my system has changed):

After:

Wasn't expecting to like the XBox 360 so much...

James Saull — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:23:00 GMT

I spoilt myself at Christmas and bought myself a Microsoft XBox steering wheel. It came bundled with Project Gotham Racing 3 - and I'm just loving it! I'm playing it via my 1280x1024 LCD computer monitor with rubbishy stereo speakers in my home office so I am sure this could be made even more impressive with a big widescreen and 5.1 surround but nonetheless I wasn't expecting this much fun!

At work we have one of these GamePods near the foosball machine, and I'm wondering whether I can't find somewhere at home to install one:

Customising Outlook 2007 to be a better RSS Reader

James Saull — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:07:00 GMT

Owen recently blogged about how he doesn't really like Outlook 2007 as a RSS Reader. I interpreted the gist of this post, with which I mostly agreed, as the difference between a Domain Specific tool (such as SharpReader) versus a generic tool such as Outlook. I do use Outlook 2007 now on Vista as my main RSS reader for the following reasons that work for me:

Flagging and marking of posts so I can manage important posts just like emails in task lists etc.
Integrated desktop/Vista search so I can find posts and emails alike
Ctrl+F to just forward the whole post to a colleague who would be interested in the post
Outlook Web Access - although it won't actively refresh the feed from the server, I can still read my posts remotely
Synchronise to my Windows Mobile 5 PDA phone - it is just an outlook folder
Exchange Server - the posts are stored on the server, so they go with me
... Outlook is a powerful customisable tool so I expect to be able to use RSS data in increasingly useful ways

Owen has two main complaints though:

Not being able to mark all the items as read without going to each folder and right clicking
Not being able to see all the latest posts without looking for all the emboldened RSS feed folders

I agreed, but I thought I'd have a quick go at cracking this. The easiest way I could see was to create a new search folder in Outlook that equated to the following queries:

"all posts that are unread" - I can then select all items and click "mark as read" to do a global catchup.
"all posts from the last week that are unread" - I can then just see recent unread posts

This has me thinking that in fact with all the rules and clever customisation you can do with Outlook you could really integrate RSS data into a full on knowledge worker workflow.

Below I show how I created the Search Folder showing RSS posts for the last seven days:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Turn on Windows XP SP2 Compatibility for Juice to make it work on Vista

James Saull — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:49:00 GMT

So if you installed Juice for downloading Podcasts and are wondering why it won't work - this is it. Summarised here:

1. Open Explorer and locate the Juice.exe file.
2. Right-click on Juice.exe and choose Properties.
3. Click the Compatibility tab.
4. Select "Run this program in compatibility mode for".
5. Make sure that "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)" is selected.
6. Click OK.

Windows Mobile Device Center is still in Beta

James Saull — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:45:00 GMT

During the RC days of Vista earlier in 2006 I was impressed with the simplicity of just plugging in my Windows Mobile 5 PDA Phone and it all being a cinch to sync. No Active Sync misery (although the latest versions have improved).

Having recently upgraded from XP to Vista RTM I plugged in my same phone only for very little to happen except to be offered to browse my phone filesystem or sync Windows Media. Errr - I'd like to setup a partnership...

Turns out that Windows Mobile Device Center is still in Beta and you can download it here. Seems to work fine for me. I wonder what is holding it back from RTM?

From Blackbird to XBOX 360

James Saull — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 19:29:00 GMT

I finally sold my Honda Blackbird on eBay. Last year I did 0 miles on it, and this year I managed about 2,500. Last year I moved house and my second son, Tom, arrived. This year I had reason to commute on it and I earned enough Brownie points at home to get a day away on the bike.

A friend organised a group trip to see the 1st World War graves in Northern France. Somehow the Friday we picked was a very wet day sandwhiched by some nice hot days! This didn't ruin the day at all really - for me, biking is mostly a social affair and having a day touring abroad with a group of strangers (except one) was a lot of fun. The WW1 museum and sites were very sobering too, and it was nice to pay some respect.

One of the first things my wife did when the cash for the bike cleared was to buy me a XBOX 360 as commiseration! I've managed to play it once so far, but having never owned a console and certainly not one that can be a media centre extender, HD DVD player etc. is an exciting prospect.

So, by means of the XBOX 360, I may finally get to do some laps of the Nurburgring!

I challenge you to external hard drive trumps.

James Saull — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:22:00 GMT

As consultants we get issued with pretty impressive laptops that strike the best possible balance between desktop replacement behemoths and portable machines with reasonable battery etc. The point being that as we move between a variety of projects in a variety of client sites the only constant is the laptop to deliver work on. It is impractical to have a proper workstation and ludicrously expensive and compromised to try and get a laptop to genuinely replace a workstation.

My current Dell has a single 7200 rpm 100GB laptop drive. In laptop land, this is great. But with 2GB of RAM (and the promise of 4GB) and a dual core processor I can run up several Virtual Machines and find myself with two problems:

Insufficient hard disk space for the increasing number of virtual machines.
Insufficient IO performance because dual core means two real parallel tasks dependent on one disk, and with IO orders of magnitude slower already...

The typical solution is to opt for an external hard drive, balancing the competing demands of convenience and performance as always:

Host powered and tiny: slips into the laptop bag with no extra weight, power supplies and cabling. However they typically lack serious performance and capacity.
Powered: typically USB 2 or FireWire and have fast and large drives. However, they are large and heavy and entail another power supply to carry and cabling.
Laptop integrated: whip out the DVD drive and pop in another HDD right into the laptop. This second spindle is straight into the motherboard controller and needs no cabling. Typically not so large in capacity but seriously convenient and offers one more spindle.

I was thinking that the laptop second hard drive was probably the best solution, but I was pointed at this hard drive from Lacie. So this offers:

eSATA (as long as you get a good eSATA PC card for the laptop) which by all accounts will out perform FireWire et al.
It offers 500GB of capacity - plenty for me.
It raids two drives in a stripe which means some pretty useful IO performance.
Still portable (didn't suddenly become a monster NAS in my laptop bag!) albeit another power supply and cable.
Reasonable price point.

Can anyone trump this?

Windows Server Virtualisation

James Saull — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:38:00 GMT

I just listened to a TechNet podcast on Windows Server Virtualisation. Windows Server Virtualisation is the replacement for Virtual Server 2005 R2 and some of the current gripes are being addressed in the next release. For example:

32 bit / 64 bit guests
Multi processor guests
Hot add memory, processors and NICs
Up to 32GB RAM Guests

With multi core, multi proc, 64 bit machines already the norm, it seems quite fair to want the above features today! So why do we have to wait until 180 days after Windows Longhorn Server to ship?! That is half a year after some very distant future date. Grrr.

I am not sure why I feel so committed to Virtual Server at the moment given VMWare ESX Server can already support 64 bit, 4 way, 16GB RAM guests... Being free helps and maybe that is enough to keep some market share whilst MS play catch up, but then VMWare have got VMWare Server which is free. I think I might have to try some defection.

Has anyone else got some guidance? Preferences? Nasty limitations of the free VMWare products I should know about?

Removing the O2 crud from O2 XDA Mini S Windows Mobile 5 PDA Phone.

James Saull — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:21:00 GMT

Ever since owning my PDA phone with its useful pull out keyboard I have been annoyed by the terrible performance exhibited of the screen re-render from landscape to portrait and vice versa. Some parts of the screen rapidly redraw in the new orientation whilst others remain stuck in the previous orientation. I suspected that this was down to the O2 today screen system that is overlaid on top of the standard Windows Mobile 5 today screen.

An ex-colleague had done a hard reset and interrupted the installation of any O2 software and configuration with the single purpose of moving the phone from O2 to Orange. He had observed the phone performed considerably better without all the O2 crud that sits on top of the base OS. He had, however, had to discover all the Orange settings so he could use the phone properly (voice mail, gprs, proxies etc.).

I was not entirely sure what to expect from a hard reset and did not relish the thought of having to find every O2 network/phone configuration detail throughout my phone before setting about a hard reset. I did though just in case!

As it turns out, if you are planning to keep the phone on O2 then all you have to do is a hard reset, be patient whilst the full reset takes place, and choose "Basic" from the choice of 3 configurations you are given when the phone finally boots (it is slow). This essentially configures all the O2 specific details and no more; leaving the phone much leaner and far more responsive. Screen reorientation is now brisk and does not get stuck in hybrid orientations and lock up.

I discovered this tip about hard resets which worked for me:

"Hard resets are awkward - hold in the two top side buttons, press the reset and keep holding the top two buttons after you have removed the stylus from the reset hole. About four seconds should do it."

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 - VHDMount.exe can mount VHD files as volumes

James Saull — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:40:00 GMT

Being able to mount VHD files from Virtual Server as volumes so you can access the file systems locked within could be very useful for virus checking, just grabbing the data out without having to run up the machine etc. Although it works there are some annoying steps you have to go through on Windows XP to make it work. The issues are well covered here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/09/05/740763.aspx

http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2006/09/02/4385.aspx

Here is a copy of the VHDMount usage:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Vhdmount>vhdmount /?
Command line utility to mount a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) file as a virtual disk device.
Usage:
VHDMOUNT /p VHDFileName
VHDMOUNT /m VHDFileName [DriveLetter]
VHDMOUNT /u VHDFileName | All
VHDMOUNT /q VHDFileName | All
/p Plugs in the specified VHD file as a virtual disk device without mounting the volume.
/m Plugs in the specified VHD file as a virtual disk device and mounts the volume.
/u Unplugs the virtual disk device for the specified VHDFileName.
/q Returns the disk name of the mounted virtual disk device for the specified VHDFileName.
VHDFileName - VHD file name including full path.
DriveLetter - Optional parameter for /m option. If drive letter is specified the volumes are mounted starting at the spefied drive letter. If drive letter is not specified it is automatically assigned.
All - Applies the operation on all mounted virtual disk devices. This parameter is applicable for /u and /q.

Do Dual Core machines really help when running Virtual Server?

James Saull — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:26:00 GMT

I remember this issue when I had a mighty Rock laptop with a desktop processor and Hyper Threading. Virtual Server can only allocate a single CPU to a guest. Therefore when the guest is CPU bound it is only really getting 50% of the host machine. This is far from ideal! This is made worse by the fact that the absolute clock speed of dual core machines is less than single core machines, which means it is 50% of less.

The mitigation is that when running one guest Virtual Machine the host has a full CPU to service the host, allowing the host to remain very responsive to other activities. The chances are more and more likely now that you will in fact be running more than one VM and therefore all cores will get utilised, but it still doesn't allow one very CPU hungry VM to consume all system CPU resources whilst the others are idle. This can be the case if you have a VM with all the dev tools on and another with all the server products on. When you run a build, the server VM will be mostly idle whilst the dev VM will be very CPU hungry and not able to get as much as it can.

What's the answer - VMWare?...

Dell Latitude 820 - tweaked default BIOS settings for performance and Intel VT

James Saull — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:23:00 GMT

Out of curiosity I interrupted the boot of my new Dell Latitude 820. There were two default factory settings that needed adjusting:

Performance - HDD Acoustic Mode:

Bypass (default) - Do nothing (needed for older drives)
Quiet - Slower but quieter
Performance - Faster but possibly noisier

POST Behavior - Virtualization: (sic)

Off (default)
Enabled

Clearly I changed the HDD Acoustic Mode to "Performance". This machine is equipped with a 7,200 rpm drive and I am guessing that spinning it slower makes it quieter. The background chatter of a busy HDD doesn't bother me, but hourglasses do!

With Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 B2 installed on my machine I had to enable Intel VT support now that Virtual Server will use it.

All in all, two performance options that *should* make my experience better, but I am not going to go through any exhaustive exercise to test the difference! The system is perfectly stable though - which is good news.