My Digital Life

(Please note the update at the bottom of this article)

If you you’re a corporate user of Google Apps you may well have been playing with the Googles recent release of Google Apps Sync for Outlook.

It’s basically a plug-in for Outlook that allows it to access email, calendars, contacts and global address lists from Google Apps rather than Microsoft Exchange.  It’s a pretty big release for Google I reckon.  With everyone including MS moving email services into the cloud, if Google can provide the same level of Outlook user experience from Apps as people expect from Exchange (at least for these basic services), it positions Google Apps as a more credible alternative to Exchange Online than ever before.

In practice the add-in seems to work a lot like the Live Mail add-in.  Rather than enabling the MAPI protocol on the backend, the add-in extends Outlook so that it can communicate with Google directly (though I should qualify that… I’ve not looked into it in detail, but that’s what it initially looks like).

Anyway… Whilst looking for some other stuff this morning I spotted this KB article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.  It looks like Google have been a little cheeky with some of the settings that are configured when installing the add-in.   From the article:

“The installation of the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability of Outlook to search the Outlook data. When you install the sync plug-in for Outlook, the sync plug-in changes a registry key. This disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies on the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken.”

Whilst I’m sure that there are sound technical reasons why Google chose to disable the integration between Outlook and Windows Search, the cynic in me does wonder if the Google recommend fix might be install Google Desktop Search :)

Fortunately you can turn the searching back on by changing the registry key back:

1. Click , type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

2. Locate the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search

3. Double-click the PreventIndexingOutlook registry entry.

4. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.

5. On the File menu, click Exit.

(backup your registry, I take no responsibility, yadda yadda!)

Update:  It looks like I posted to soon – it looks like Google have released a fix  that solves this problem and addresses a few other niggles.  It’s really good to see Google and MS working to fix these things quickly.  Thanks to @MattBrowne for pointing out yesterdays update from Google!

Alongside the release of the V.3 iPhone firmware Apple have also updated their Enterprise Deployment Guide.

If you’re using iPhones within a corporate environment this is a really useful doc.  I provides some good info on how best to configure settings for VPN connections, Exchange access, Wifi settings etc, and also how provision these settings and other applications to your companies iPhones.

One of the interesting changes to the overall solution has been the addition of an ‘activation-only mode’ to iTunes.  This setting configures iTunes to only only activate the iPhone then eject the device.  In combination with some of the other restrictions available both on installation and at runtime (through the parental controls) it goes some way to making iTunes more palatable to businesses.  I can only assume this was added in response to a fairly common complaint from businesses that they didn’t really want to install iTunes on their corporate machines.  Whilst this doesn’t do away with the need, it does help to mitigate some of the concerns around it.

I may write about some of the particular subjects covered in the doc over the next few weeks, but I thought I’d post up the link in case anyone hasn’t seen it.

A cool stop motion battle between Iron Man and Bruce Lee by  Patrick Boivin.

Yesterday I spent a fantastic day at the Porsche experience centre having a sneak peak at the new 911 GT3 with the guys from Drivers Republic. 

Unfortunately 911’s are a little beyond by price range, so I got to go through a competition on the DR website a couple of weeks ago.  The event itself was part of a two day preview that Porsche was giving for existing GT3 customers.  DR arranged with Porsche to extend the day out to a group of DR readers and offered places on their site.

It was a great day, as well as getting a really good look over the new car we got to chat to guys from the project team at Porsche who have developed the car (and in fact all the previous GT3 range of 911’s), have a tour of the Human Performance Centre and then finally have a drive of the cars on the test track.

The chaps from the factory are a fascinating bunch of guys.  What really stood out was their complete enthusiasm for not only their own cars, but for driving as a whole.  I spent the most time with Andreas Preuninger who was the project manager behind the GT3.  He’s a really good guy and had some great stories about his time at Porsche.

Over the years he and his team have managed to convince their accountants and management that their desire to create ever faster Beetle shaped cars isn’t just a flight of fancy.  In the process they’ve almost created a niche of their own for extremely focused, hardcore road and track supercars.   Whilst the sales teams doubted they’d be able sell the first 200 cars they planned, the last version of the GT3 sold to upwards of 5000 customers.

The latest 997 GT3 Generation II that we went to see really is a fantastic bit of kit.  There’s an incredible amount of thought and detail that has gone into making the car not only go a little bit faster, but feel better for the driver.  As an example of the levels Andreas and his team go to in order to find performance, you only really have to look at the effort put into just the engine mounts.

The engine in a car is one of the single biggest masses, so in a race car you fix the engine solidly to the chassis to stop it moving around as the car changes direction.  Any movement can unsettle the car making it harder to drive on the limit.  The disadvantage of this that there’s nothing to isolate the noise and vibration from the engine, so in a road car you just can’t get away with it.  Usually road cars use rubber engine mounts to soften the noise, with high performance cars using harder rubber to help keep the engine in check.  Even so, according to Andreas the even in the last GT3 the engine moved up to 15mm under load, and as it weighs 300KG that’s quite a bit of momentum.

The new GT3 uses engine mounts that are built using a magnetorheological fluid.  Essentially that’s an oil that has magnetic particles suspended within it.  By applying a magnetic field to the fluid its viscosity can be changed from thin (and therefore soft) to thick (and therefore hard).  This allows the car to sense when it’s experiencing high g-forces and stiffen up the engine mounts accordingly.  From what was said the engine now rarely moves more than 2mm from its ideal position, whilst also reducing unwanted noise when driving normally.

The driving part of the day was really eye opening for me.  Whilst I’ve done quite a bit of track driving in the past, that’s always been in my Elise so I wasn’t really too sure what to expect from the big, heavy 911.  Whilst I knew it was going to be very quick in a straight line, I have to admit I was very surprised by just how much speed the big car could carry once you pointed it into the corners.   You can tell there’s a fair bit of extra mass to move around, but it feels so stable and secure when you ask it to change direction it was never a problem.  Quite why I thought it wouldn’t be as capable as it was I don’t know, I guess I should have believed the hype!

One particular surprise was the electronic stability control systems.  Being a 10 year old Lotus my car’s lucky to have a radio, so the idea of driver aids is something a little alien to me. 

Stability control monitors what each wheel is doing at any one time, and uses this information to detect if the car experiences understeer or oversteer .  If it realises that something out of the ordinary is happening it can apply braking to each wheel individually to help the driver gather it up.  It’s a great aid to safety, but if you’re on track having fun it can get in the way by stopping the car doing what the driver wants.  I thought Porsches PSM system was very good indeed.  Even on the normal setting it allows a fair amount of slip, and with the sport mode on it gives you a serious amount of room to play before helping out.  It’s a world away from the systems I’ve experienced before with Mercedes that stop you doing anything interesting with the car.

So all in all I had a great time, the driving was fantastic fun but it was great to be able to chat to the techie guys behind the cars.  I guess it was quite a brave decision for Porsche to allow us lot in to quiz their guys and give their cars a good thrashing.  From what I understand it’s the first time that an event like this has been opened up outside of the motoring press and selected customers, so it was really quite a privilege to attend.  The Drivers Republic chaps are doing a great job building a community around their site, and whilst I originally had some doubts about how well a magazine would translate online, it really works well.  It’s great to see them working to get Porsche engaged with their community and from what I saw yesterday it can only do them a world of good. 

The enthusiasm of the factory guys was infectious, and just what I think petrolheads want to hear.  It was a completely different Porsche to the one you might expect, and from my limited experience very different to the one you see in your average dealership – sorry Official Porsche Centre (with a few exceptions to be fair).  Lets hope both Porsche and DR can do more events like this, and maybe even get a few more manufacturers involved. 

Right… I’m off to buy to lottery tickets!

If you’re a fan of F1 you couldn’t help but to have heard about the current fuss in Formula 1.  With eight of the biggest teams proposing to split from F1 and setup their own championship, it could be the end of F1 as we know it.

So what’s all this about?  Well F1 as a sport is governed by the FIA.  They set the rules for the sport, both sporting and technical.  Over the last couple of years, the FIA have embarked on a number of initiatives to try and cut the cost of the sport.  This started by setting minimum lives for parts like engines to reduce the number the teams need over the course of the season, but recently have evolved into an opt-in cap on the teams budgets.

With F1’s costs so high, and with the world in the midst of a recession a budget cap seems almost sensible surely?  As with all things it’s not quite that simple.

For many F1 is not just about the skill of the drivers, but also the innovation and technology behind the cars and teams.  And it’s this that attracts the big manufactures for the sport.  It’s a fantastic way of showing the world that they’re company – or their brand – is up there with the best of the best.  It’s an exclusive club, and even if they’re not near the top of the grid, participation alone implies a level of skill and commitment that others aspire to achieve.

For the teams to succeed they’ve built up hugely capable organisations to design and race two cars each year.  If they were to cut their budgets from what can now be as high as £400million to the £40million being proposed, it would tear the heart out of the big teams.  It’s hard to see how such a huge organisational change would greatly affect their ability to develop and race competitively in the short term.

In addition to this, as a sweetener to adopt the budget cap, those teams that do will have greatly relaxed technical regulations.  These would allow the capped teams to employ movable front and rear wings and engines with no rev limit.  Movable aerodynamics alone could be worth more than 2-3 seconds a lap, so cars running on the current fixed regulations would be at a huge disadvantage.

Alternative cost saving measures and regulations that have been proposed by the teams themselves have been rejected out of hand by the FIA.  The teams and their backers are quite rightly angry about this, after all they invest huge amounts into F1 and feel their views should count.

Whilst the smaller independent teams like Williams have embraced the cap – after all F1 is their soul business – for the some of the teams the new proposals are a nightmare.  To field a competitive car they would need to adopt the new technical regulations, but in the process of doing so would need to compromise some of the core values that make them compete in F1 in the first place, and dismantle large parts of their organisations.  If you add to this the financial assistance that’s being offered to new teams that join F1 under the new capped regulations it’s clearly not looking like a level playing field.  We would end up with two classes within the single championship.

In response to the FIA’s plans  the big manufacture teams, under the banner of the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA), have rejected the changes and are threatening to leave F1 and setup their own championship in competition to F1.

This is something that has been threatened before, and indeed not that long ago they proposed the Grand Prix World Championship (GPWC) as an alternative series, even getting so far as doing all the detailed financial feasibility planning.  This was only shelved after Ferrari were offered a deal they couldn’t refuse, and the resolve of the teams dropped off.  They now seem to be dusting off those old plans and preparing to set up a series for 2010 – no small challenge!

Could they succeed?  Setting up a championship would be no simple task, but there are a few things that could work in their favour.  The fans will probably follow the teams and drivers that they know and love.  With the FOTA teams promising a series with open governance, stable rules and a focus on the fans with cheaper tickets they will surely keep a big chunk of their current following.  And with the fans will follow money from TV and sponsorship.

Clearly the best outcome would be for the FIA and FOTA to resolve their differences and allow F1 to continue in it’s current form.  If that can’t happen however, I honestly doubt F1 under the FIA will thrive without the big teams and drivers like Ferrari and McLaren.  An alternative series that has the teams and drivers from the current F1 season but under a new title would probably do ok.  After all what’s in a name?  Certainly it’s a huge challenge, and it wouldn’t surprise me if any 2010 season was a little light on the number of races, but FOTA would have many of the ingredients needed for success.

Of the many bits of information that came out of Apples World Wide Developers Conference this week, one that really caught my attention was Snow Leopards native support for Exchange.

Within one of the sessions Apple spoke about how the out-the-box Mail app will support connectivity to Exchange for email (including folders) and tasks, with iCal supporting Exchange calendars and AddressBook integrating with Exchange Contacts.

Providing it works as advertised that’s really good news, if a little surprising.  It’ll be good to see it in action, assuming it supports the exchange auto-discovery tools it should be a very easy setup.

With the Snow Leopard supporting Exchange, Microsoft Messenger for Mac providing great access to OCS’s capabilities and SharePoint 2010 about to offer better support for non-IE browsers, Mac’s should offer a pretty good business platform for companies that use Microsoft infrastructure.  It will also be interesting to see how well Snow Leopard works with Microsoft’s hosted BPOS services that offer MS’s business platforms from the Cloud.

Although I’m not really a Mac user I’m quite looking forward to trying this stuff out.  Anything that builds interoperability and people more options has to be a good thing.  It should certainly help the Apple case for making Mac’s acceptable as a business computer.

The FIA’s cost cutting budget cap for F1 has spawned many different views and arguments, but the changes are certainly bringing some interesting news for the 2010 season.

One of the great things is that a few of the great names names from F1 history are returning.  So far we have Brabham and Team Lotus both with entries for next year.

As a bit of a Lotus geek, the Team Lotus entry is particularly interesting, for me at least.  Essentially the Litespeed F3 team posted an entry for the 2010 F1 season and have secured the Team Lotus name for their efforts.  At first that might sound a bit strange but Nino Judge and Steve Kenchington, the team principle and director and engineering are both ex-Team Lotus so hopefully the name is safe in their hands.  What’s more they’ve based the team in Norfolk which is Lotus’s traditional home.  With Mike Gascoyne on board they’ve got the makings of a pretty good team there.

The Brabham entry is a little less straight forward with the entry from Franz Hilmer using the Brabham name possibly being contested by the family of Jack Brabham. 

Now if only Tyrrell would turn up we’d almost have a full set!

It can sometimes be quite difficult to articulate quite what architecture is outside of the context of buildings, I thought this was an interesting take on the subject.

Architecture from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

As you might have guessed from some of my other posts, I’ve been doing a fair amount of work recently on Windows 7.  One thing I’ve been doing a bit of reading about is power management and if/how Win7 can influence our energy efficiency. 

Like may organisations we’re actively looking at ways to reduce the energy we consume, both in terms of within the work we deliver (i.e. designing buildings for our customers that consume less energy), and also the energy we consume as a company in our day to day operations – of which IT plays a part.

Having dig into it a little, Windows 7 has some interesting capabilities that should help us achieve our green computing objectives by reducing the power consumed by our desktop and laptop computers.  There’s some detailed info available from Microsoft directly so I won’t talk about it too much, but a few points are worth talking about.

A big part of a computers overall power consumption is the energy it uses when idle – not least because most computers spend a fair chunck of their lives in that state.  If you can’t turn them off or put them to sleep when idle, you should at least try to optimise tham a little.  Win7 helps by reducing the system resources that are used when idle, and reducing or postponing background tasks until the computer is being actively used.  It achieves this partly though increasing the number of background services that are only started when needed, cutting the amount of work Windows asks the computer to do.

In addition to managing core CPU, memory and disk usage, Win7 is also more intelligent about how it manages devices that are attached.  Displays, network adapters and Bluetooth radios can be scaled back to reduce power consumption, and in the case of displays Win7 natively supports ambient lighting sensors to optimise the brightness of the screen.

A big advantage for organisations managing a large number of computers is Win7’s improved support for management and diagnostics.  Group Policy can be used to set power policies, and a WMI provider allows for better scripting support through PowerShell.  This will allow a much more consistent application of power saving features across organisations.

Of course Win7, whilst an improvement, isn’t a sliver bullet that will solve all your problems.  There’s still a place for third party tools such as 1E’s NightWatchman. 

NightWatchman is actually a pretty good product.  Not only does it help you to shutdown computers overnight whilst gracefully closing applications etc, the backend components will also help you track benefits across your organisation.  It’s worth a look if you’re looking at cutting power consumption, whether for green or financial reasons.

Further info:
-  MS Win7 Power Management White Paper
- MS Win7 Power Management Webcast (it’s level 200 so not too techie)
-  1E NightWatchman

Looking through some Facebook updates earlier I spotted a link to this Guardian gallery with some fantastic pictures from the Apollo moon missions alongside quotes from the astronauts that took the photos.  It’s part of history that’s always fascinated me so I thought I’d pass it on.