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Nivio to provide virtual desktops via web
You can get email in a web browser, and even edit documents in a browser using web-based applications such as Google Docs, so why not go the whole hog and have your entire Windows desktop accessed via a browser?
One company that will soon offer users this option is Nivio. Its service lets users subscribe to access a Windows XP desktop through a browser for £7.99 per month. The desktop is hosted by Nivio, and accessed through any browser supporting Java or ActiveX.
Anyone who has used a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn to view their PC desktop remotely will be familiar with the concept, but in this case the system you access isn't a real physical PC, but a virtual one living in a datacentre.
The drawback of this approach is that you can't install your own applications. Nivio provides a selection of free applications such as those from the OpenOffice.org suite, plus others such as Microsoft Office 2003 applications, which cost extra. Once you subscribe to an application, its shortcut appears on your desktop and the app itself is streamed in when you access it.
As you can see from the screenshot, a Nivio hosted desktop is nothing really exceptional to look at – it looks pretty much the same as any other Windows XP desktop, as it should.
Nivio believes that this service could save smaller companies on the cost of owning and managing their own PCs. Customers could instead use terminals or outmoded PCs to access a Windows XP desktop remotely. However, you would have to be pretty confident about the reliability of your internet connection to follow this route.
Another drawback is the difficulty of getting data files on and off your virtual desktop. Nivio provides an application to let you upload and download files, but for this you need….a Windows PC.
When ah’m cleanin’ Windows
Those clever Webroot people have released a version of Window Washer (WW) for Vista. The new version, 6.5, will only cost around £30 and supports Windows 2000, XP, together with Vista.
Easy to install and run, WW can clean all traces from web browsers AOL, Firefox 2.0.0.5, IE7, Mozilla, and Netscape, as well as instant messages from AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo. It can also wash the Windows start menu, system and desktop, as well as Office applications.
You can schedule a timed wash or a session wash and you can also add ‘bleach’ to your wash to overwrite everything a specified number of times. WW gives options to do a single pass, use DOD 5223-22M (3 overwrites), NSA (7 overwrites), or as many as you want with the custom option.
You can also clean unused disk space with Window Washer’s ‘Free Space Wash’ using the same overwriting options. If you are getting rid of your laptop (or donating it to ‘Chairidee’ – as FAB FM’s Smashie and Nicey would say), then Window Washer also allows you to create an Erase Boot Disk on floppy disk or CD, which allows you to erase everything on the hard disk.
There’s been all sorts of horror stories about people putting systems up for sale on eBay - with those who buy them (often for a song) delighting in digging out passwords, credit card details and all sorts of personnel information which they could easily use to create a new identity – namely yours. Having your laptop lifted by thieves is another way of getting at personnel details, with the added bonus for light-fingered types that they don’t have to shell out wonga for it.
Of course, if you leave cleartext passwords on your system then cynics would say you deserve everything you get. If you do have to put passwords on your system because you have so many of them, it’s better to remember them as a mnemonic and put that on the system. ‘Gelatinous Raccoon’ might not mean anything to thieves but it should nudge your memory into remembering whatever password such a mnemonic was designed to remind you of.
Microsoft’s Tafiti looks interesting but immature
Martin Veitch takes a brief look at Microsoft's Tafiti sample application.
Microsoft has uploaded an open beta of its Tafiti search site that has led to critics queuing up to admire its user interface. However, while Tafiti is noteworthy, don’t expect to dump Google anytime soon.
Tafiti requires Microsoft’s Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in that is intended to provide a platform for rich internet applications, and also mandates that popups are enabled.
It certainly has an interesting user interface with searches conducted through a virtual index card, a “carousel” for search types and the ability to store results stacked on a “shelf”.
Some reviewers suggest that Tafiti is slow although it performed well on a standard Windows XP laptop across a corporate internet connection.
The main, indeed the overwhelming, drawback is that Tafiti is based on Microsoft’s LiveSearch, which is still lagging behind the mighty Google. Searches were largely relevant but not as good as those from the world’s most popular site.
To get a second opinion on Tafiti, I spoke to Julian Harris, senior business consultant at Conchango, a UK services firm that is behind a lot of the smartest new consumer and retail web sites, many of them based on the latest Microsoft code.
“The usability is definitely taking a back seat to the eye candy and it’s basically a showcase for Silverlight,” Julian told me.
“It looks great and it’s fun to demo but there is no help if you mistype a search query, no cached view, and you can’t even search on the [stacked searches].”
The best way to think about Tafiti is, as Julian suggests, a flag-waving exercise for Silverlight. Many such proof-of-concepts get a bit of attention then fade away. So in that sense at least, maybe Tafiti is a case of “job done” for Microsoft.
The air smells sweeter after a while with O2 and Sierra’s 3G modem
Martin Veitch revises his early dislike of the Sierra Wireless 3G modem for laptops.
Frustrated at a duff installation experience, I wrote some disparaging notes a few weeks ago about my unhappy start to life with Sierra Wireless’s AirCard 875U Broadband USB Modem, the device that you’ll get if you buy 3G mobile access from O2.
The user guide’s installation information was below par and the product was only got up and running after a fresh set of drivers were located on the Sierra web site. Since then, however, the AirCard has proven a better partner than those early indications might have suggested.
On the plus side, the AirCard has worked pretty well faultlessly: in three weeks of use, I have been disconnected just once. Plug the device into a free USB slot and the software is quickly invoked with connection status displayed. In London, the link was usually a 3G connection with some dropping back to GPRS. However, despite promises of "speeds up to 3.6 Mbit/s", my experience was of speeds somewhat faster than a dial-up connection but slower than a basic broadband service.
The AirCard has a nice format. It is the size of a small mobile phone but its hinged design means it can be positioned erect, horizontal or pointing straight down from the USB slot. It feels a bit more solid than cord-tethered modems such as the Huawei 3G device that is offered by Orange. Another nice feature is that the high-speed HSDPA standard is supported.
On the negative side, I could only really complain about that installation experience and the fact that 3G connectivity is now starting to be built into laptops, so plug-in devices will soon become only relevant for legacy machines. If you can stomach the tariffs, then these are very handy products for getting online when other options are limited, such as when there are no nearby Wi-Fi hotspots in range.
King TUT helps sysadmins
Ever wondered why your sysadmin has locked down a specific feature of your desktop PC - like say stopping CD/DVD autorun or stopping you from blocking Microsoft Security Center alerts? They don't do something without good reason, but it's normally to stop the helpdesk being pounded with calls.
How do you acquire the knowledge it takes to be a system adminstrator? Normally, through judicious application of four-letter words - all of them being 'time'. However, there are utilities out there which can short-cut some of the knowledge required. I've been 'kicking the tyres' recently on just such a utility - called 'The Ultimate Troubleshooter' from AnswersThatWork.com. Normally, anything with 'Ultimate' in the title tends to fall woefully short of such an epithet. However, The Ultimate Troubleshooter or TUT as it's known usually, has features particularly useful to system admins working on system images to improve performance, security and managibility.
TUT costs around £15 for a single license and gives detailed information on the current tasks the system is running along with their associated services and processes. TUT also documents what programs fire up when you boot the system. For each service TUT gives its findings, views and importantly its recommendations on what to do with the service. Take for example, Microsoft's Error Reporting Service, ERSvc, TUT concludes its view on this service as "For 98% of users this is as useless a service as there can be." It then shows how to stop the service.
I should have a more detailed report on TUT, ready later this month.
Sierra’s high install demands
IT Week Executive Editor Martin Veitch tries out a USB 3G modem for laptops
As I mentioned in an earlier post, 3G modems are a very handy addition to the traveller’s collection of devices for getting online. While fixed broadband and Wi-Fi are great when you can access them, a cellular connection is very useful for those moments when you can’t - even if you find do yourself reduced using slower-than-3G links more often than is preferable.
Short of other options, 3G modems can offer a hassle-free experience. The Vodafone USB modem I tested in an earlier post even runs its monitoring software from the device itself and has on-board LEDs that denote GSM, GPRS and 3G status links. However, the Sierra Wireless AirCard 875U that is being offered by O2 posed a significant setup test in my experience.
In tests, I found the ugly install program seemed to have been hastily assembled. It recognised the USB device as a PC Card modem, took an age to display installation notes, but still would not load up and connect after several attempts.
Downloading a new setup program from the Sierra website finally fixed the problem. Let’s hope that the device works better than its installation routine. I’ll be reporting back on my progress soon, but in the meantime I'm feeling prejudiced in favour of modems that don’t need a separate install disk in order to work with a laptop.
