Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Windows Live Search 2.0 released for Windows Mobile so if you have a Windows Mobile device – 2003, 5.0 or 6.0, go to http://wls.live.com to download the latest version.

What’s new:

1. Movies Near You
   Lists all movies playing near your currently listed location along with all theatres in your general vicinity.  For each movie it provides ratings, how much money it’s brought in over the weekend, it’s ratings and how long it is.  It’ll allow you to dial the phone number of the theatre as well as get directions or SMS a friend the address.  It’s lacking "movie showtimes, "user reviews" which kind of bugs.
2. Cache size
   The cache size used to max out at 8MB even though you could put it all on a flash card.  Now it maxes out at 128MB which is particularly good if you look at a lot of satelite photography through your phone.
3. Turn-by-turn & Rerouting
   The turn by turn directions are much better and easier to understand.  If you go past your location with GPS, it will even automatically reroute you to your destination.

Have you ever been concerned about maxing out the CPU utilization on a machine?  Say for instance, a Terminal Server user starts an Excel sheet and it pegs the CPU of the whole server and everyone else’s Terminal Server sessions becomes unresponsive or experiences a degraded session.

THREADMASTER… THE FREE CPU THROTTLER
CPU throttling prevents applications using more than a X percentage of CPU time for a Y period.  There’s a bunch of tools available to accomplish this however one favorite of mine is Threadmaster (http://threadmaster.tripod.com/), a free program that’s been around for 5-6 years now and has been a staple of terminal server users all over the world however remember – it’s not tied to a Terminal Server:  It can be used on desktops, servers, and anything in which you want to control the CPU used by an individual piece of software.  Here’s the description:

ThreadMaster monitors threads and handle high CPU utilization on a per application basis.
This function is primarily indented for Terminal servers hosting multiple users. ThreadMaster can also be used when running multiple virtual machines on the same server, to limit each virtual machines CPU usage.

ThreadMaster is a background service implementing a CPU Quota mechanism on top of the standard thread scheduling algorithms of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating Systems.

A single user is capable of hogging all of the processor resources. The result will be a reduction in the quality of service experienced by all other users on the server. ThreadMaster can help you to deal whit this situation.

ThreadMaster monitors all running applications, and detects when a application starts to use excessive processor resources. It dynamically hunt down the offending thread, and clamp the CPU for this thread. This feature ensures that other users can remain working without noticing anything. The clamped process will eventually finish, and the clamp will be removed automatically.

Remember: 20 applications, each having a CPU utilization of 5 % still adds up to 100%.

Administration of ThreadMaster is extremely simple, the behavior is in general, controlled by only two key parameters. The first parameter instructs ThreadMaster to monitor application activity over a given of time.  The second parameter is the allowed max. average CPU utilization for the process over the defined time.

MSTerminalServices.org has a great article that discusses CPU throttling using Threadmaster in greater detail:  http://www.msterminalservices.org/articles/ThreadMaster-Rogue-Applications.html

ALTERNATIVES FOR THROTTLING
Now if you’re looking for something a little more comprehensive and you have money to invest in the issue, there are numerous 3rd party software solutions available for the Enterprise… but to the cheapskates out there, don’t expect these to be in your price range.

• AppSense:  Throttles more than just CPU but also memory, networking, etc.:
  http://www.appsense.com/products/performancemanager/
• Relevos:  A low cost alternative to AppSense with many of the same CPU throttling capabilities.
  http://www.wmsoftware.com/relevos/

In case you weren’t aware, video games have hit the big time.  Yeah, folks like "Tsquared" and "Fata1ity" have made it big in the ‘sport’ but now they have the equivalent of the Video Game Olympics and it’s called the "World Series of Video Games".

In fact, the Los Angeles regional competition is coming up on October 18th at the LA Convention Center in tandem with E4All – the gamer’s replacement for E3.  http://www.thewsvg.com/events/info/8/  It’ll be shown on CBS on November 17th.

The Louisville, Kentucky event already took place on June 21st-24th and is being broadcast on CBS on July 29th.

The games being competed on include:

• World of Warcraft
• Guitar Hero 2
• Quake 4
• FightNight Round 3
• Counterstrike 1.6
• Call of Duty 2
• Warcraft 3
• Gears of War

(Yeah, you read that right:  No Halo 2.  They included Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, and Counterstrike but no Halo 2.  Yeah it’s B.S., but whatever.)

The Dallas event just took place about week ago.  Here are some notes from the World Series of Video Games – the world’s largest video game competition held there:

1. Over 99% of the consoles present were XBOX 360
2. Guitar Hero II, UFC and Gears of War Ranked Competitions were of course on the XBOX 360
3. Every kid we talked to (Ages 8 to 40) stated that their most anticipated game is “Halo 3”
4. Free Mountain Dew “Halo 3” Special Edition Soda. Free and 73mg of Caffeine per serving.
5. The series is being aired nationally on CBS

Desktop Optimization Pack 2007 (MDOP) is now available for download by Select/EA customers on MVLS.  For those of you who have licensed the Windows desktop OS on Software Assurance or have Enterprise Agreements, the MDOP 2007 is a monster upgrade from the previous Desktop Optimization Pack 1.1, which was released earlier in the year. 

The download is 490MB in size.  The 2007 version of MDOP now includes:

1. SoftGrid 4.2 for Desktops with Windows Vista/Office 2007 compatibility
2. Diagnostics & Recovery Toolset 5.0
3. System Center Desktop Error Monitoring 1.0
4. Advanced Group Policy Management

(The last remaining component, Asset Inventory Services, is slated to go to Beta sometime this month)

Visit https://licensing.microsoft.com to download – assuming you have been authorized for access to the site by your company.

Technet Magazine is an awesome publiciation from both CMP Media & Microsoft.  It really addresses real-world issues in IT and highlights not only Microsoft technologies but also 3rd party tools that can be helpful in mitigating risk and labor.  For example, there’s an ongoing column on scripting and automation written by "The Scripting Guys", with whom I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with.

They also have articles that cover best practices and Windows internals.  Mark Russinovich for example (formerly of Winternals) frequently writes articles for the magazine. 

Anyway, you can now get a free subscription to the magazine.  To sign up, go http://technetmagsubs.com/bshx and fill out the information.  It’ll be worth the time.

I recently was fortunate enough to receive a lot of collateral that might be valuable to you folks reading this.  If you’re a customer of mine, please contact me if you have interest in receiving any of the following:

1. Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 DVD (32-bit)
2. Windows Vista Resource & Deployment kit DVD
3. Windows Vista Training Voucher ($150 discount)
4. Office Communications Server 2007 Beta DVD
5. Technet Security Process Map/Wall Poster
6. Microsoft Management Summit 2007 Sessions DVD
   This is my favorite:  It’s a full recap of most of the sessions delivered at MMS2007 in case you couldn’t attend. 

   It covers server & client monitoring using Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007 software distribution, virtualization using Windows Hypervisor technology & Virtual Server 2005 R2, and Windows Server Active Directory management technologies including Group Policy.

   This is a great resource as it includes not only summaries of all the presentations delivered but it also has the Powerpoints for most of the sessions along with soft copies of the lab guides for the hands-on-labs AND most importantly, it has full audio recordings & Windows Media video captures of the sessions themselves.

I have a limited quantity of all this stuff and I’m currently getting it out to you folks slowly but surely.  If you are working on something that requires this stuff now and can’t wait, contact me and I’ll hook you up.

Did you know Microsoft has podcasts?  Good ones at that.  One of them is Technet Radio.

Microsoft’s Technet Radio is one of them and it’s a great way to stay plugged in either through an archived Internet stream over Windows Media, or by download/RSS subscription as a Podcast.

Personally, I use JuiceReceiver (a popular Windows Podcast downloader) to download the podcasts every time I boot up my computer and synchronize the content with Windows Media Player/Zune Player to my Black Zune and my Rio Carbon MP3 Player.  (I have two players… I use the Zune for weight lifting and overall use in the gym to watch recorded TV programs and ripped DVD movies while on the stairmaster & I use the lightweight Rio for jogging and listening to music & podcasts.)

Here’s a few of the topics to whet your appetite:

1. Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance
2. How Microsoft Does IT: The Future of Server Virtualization
3. Review of Server Management in Windows Server 2008
4. Direct from Day One of Tech Ed 2007
5. How Microsoft IT Implements System Center Operations Manager 2007
6. Behind the Scenes of Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3
7. The Evolution of High Performance Computing

LINK:  http://www.microsoft.com/tnradio

PODCAST LINK:  http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0512/25568/TechNet_Radio.xml

Have you ever wanted to maintain a publicly accessible computer without the fear of someone downloading viruses on it or modifying it’s configuration until it’s broken beyond repair?

Enter "Windows SteadyState".  (Catchy ain’t it?)

Windows SteadyState is designed to help people set up Windows XP computer kiosks for corporate, education, or public access usage and provide reliability in maintaining/recovering it’s state so that it delivers a consistent experience to everyone that uses it.

The successor to the Shared Computer Toolkit, Windows SteadyState provides the ability to completely ‘erase & rewrite’ the profile & configuration of a computer back to the state it originally was in simply by a reboot.  Yeah, yeah… it can lock down the workstation and restrict access to stuff like control panel, but what differentiates it is it’s ability to essentially undo the workstation’s profile – sort of close to reimaging the workstation.

It’s free.

LINK:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) is a set of technologies that EA/SA customers may license that provides:  (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/mdopoverview.mspx)

1. Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization
2. Microsoft Asset Inventory Service
3. Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management
4. Microsoft Diagnostics & Recovery Toolset

Well, we just recently added a NEW technology into the MDOP!

1. Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring
   (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/scdem.mspx)

System Center Desktop Error Monitoring enables customers to proactively manage problems with applications and system components that crash or cause live PCs to hang. This is an enterprise-ready, scalable, low-cost deployment solution for granular error filtering and alerting. It identifies the impact, probable cause and resolution for failures—making desktops more stable and reliable.

DATASHEET: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/teched/docs/SCDEMDS.pdf

(Note:  The MDOP package of software is only available to Enterprise Agreement customers or customers with Windows client on Software Assurance.  Pricing ranges from $7-$10/desktop/year.)

The NM3.1 is now available on http://connect.microsoft.com featuring wireless sniffing and an easier way to create filters using "Right Click Add To Filter". Here is a list of features that are new to NM3.1.

Why is this a big deal?  Because of feature #1:  
Wireless (802.11) capturing and monitor mode on Vista

There’s a ton of other features but the ability to sniff wireless WiFi packet data is very key.  You can sniff all channels or just a subset.  And you can see what signal strength and transfer rate you can get in different physical locations.

What makes it even cooler is the fact that this tool is usable by humans that don’t have PhDs in packet analysis, it runs only on Windows, and it’s TOTALLY FREE!

READ MORE AT:  http://blogs.technet.com/netmon/