Darren Straight's Blog

Christmas has passed but hey you can still come and roast your chestnuts on the red-hot fire that is The Magic Condom – a racy new online Panto starring Jodie Harsh and Paul Kaye that promises to be the filler in your stocking.

Your ticket to The Magic Condom is just one click away, so visit the website and watch the hilarious, sexy and interactive safe sex panto.

The latest Virtual Earth release of imagery and photogrammetrics includes 36.3 TB of photography and models of 58 new cities worldwide! At a high level the Virtual Earth team have updated the Manhattan imagery, added 44 new cities with their Microsoft (Vexcel) ortho imagery, 36 new US bird’s eye areas, 26 new European bird’s eye areas, 5 areas of US orthos from GlobeXplorer, 17 international orthos from GeoEye, updated UK photos from GetMapping and Holland orthos from Digital Colour Orthophotomap of the Netherlands (DKLN).

Orthos (3Di Hi-res {15cm, unless indicated – Microsoft proprietary}):
United States
Allentown, PA
Bridgeport, CT
Cary, NC
San Bernardino, CA
Pasadena, CA
Ogden, UT
Manchester, NH
Fontana, CA
Corona, CA
Chino, CA
Gladstone, MO
Newport News, VA
Riverside, CA
Salt Lake City, UT
Stamford, CT
Waterbury, CT
West Valley City, UT
Aurora, CO
St. Louis, MO
Kansas City, KS
Eau Claire, WI
Cleveland, OH
Arvada, CO
Boulder, CO
Davenport, IA
El Monte, CA
Independence, MO
Kansas City, MO
Lakewood, CO
Overland Park, KS
Peoria, IL
Salem, OR
Topeka, KS
Wichita, KS
Eugene, OR
Fargo, ND
Green Bay, WI
Medford, OR
Nampa, ID
Springfield, IL
Waukegan, IL

International (3Di Hi-res {15cm, unless indicated – Microsoft proprietary}):
Calgary, Canada (30cm, 2006)
Quebec, Canada(30cm)
Tokyo, Japan

United States (GlobeXplorer, 1ft):
Birmingham, AL
Portland, AL
Maryland/Northern Virgina
Tampa/Ft. Myers, FL
Sacramento Region, CA

International (GeoEye, 1m):
Valencia, Spain
Oporto, Spain
Thessaloniki (Salonica), Greece
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Goteborg, Sweden
Copenhagen, Denmark
Brussels, Belgium
Oslo, Norway
Grand Canaria/Las Palmas, Canary Islands
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Casablanca, Morocco
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Tahiti, French Polynesia
Moscow, Russia
Christchurch, New Zealand
Wellington, New Zealand

United Kingdom (GetMapping):
England/Wales
Scotland
Holland (DKLN)

Obliques
United States (Pictometry):
Kern, CA
Shasta, CA
El Paso, CO
Danbury, CT
City of East Haven, CT
Prince George, MD
Kalamazoo, MI
Kent, MI
St Louis, MO
Mississippi Metro, MS
Mecklenberg Metro, NC
Raleigh, NC
Hunterdon Metro, NJ
Columbia, NY
Erie, NY
Nassau, NY
Niagara, NY
Orange, NY
Rensselaer, NY
Steuben, NY
Ulster, NY
Poughkeepie Metro, NY
Philadelphia, PA
Harrisburg Metro, PA
Greenville, SC
Spartanburg, SC
Loudon, TN
Knoxville, TN
McLennan, TX
Nueces, TX
Potter-Randall, TX
Beaufort Metro, TX
Richmond, VA
Fairfax, VA
Skagit, WA
Dane, WI

Europe (Blom):
Brussels, Belgium
Luzern, Switzerland
Winterthur, Switzerland
Zurich, Switzerland
Frankfurt, Germany
Madrid, Spain
Zaragoza, Spain
Castleford, UK
Chester, UK
Crewe, UK
Darlington, UK
Dearne Valley Urban Area, UK
Harrogate/Knaresborough, UK
Hartlepool, UK
Leeds, UK
London, UK (several Areas of Interest)
Macclesfield/Pretsbury, UK
Middlesborough, UK
Milton Keynes, UK
Newcastle, UK
Reading/Workingham, UK
Scarborough, UK
Scunthorpe, UK
York, UK

3D Cities
UNITED STATES
CALIFORNIA
Chino (124 sq. mi.)
Corona (65.17 sq. mi.)
El Monte (129 sq. mi.)
Fontana (100 sq. mi.)
Fullerton (122 sq. mi.)
Ontario (99.43 sq. mi.)
Pasadena (108 sq. mi.)
Riverside (123 sq. mi.)
San Bernardino (126 sq. mi.)

COLORADO
Arvada (207 sq. mi.)
Aurora (237 sq. mi.)
Boulder (131 sq. mi.)
Lakewood (108 sq. mi.)

CONNECTICUT
Hartford (89.32 sq. mi.)
New Haven (70.29 sq. mi.)
Waterbury (81.46 sq. mi.)

IOWA
Davenport (93.46 sq. mi.)

IDAHO
Nampa (103 sq. mi.)

ILLINOIS
Peoria (83.34 sq. mi.)
Springfield (79.38 sq. mi.)
Waukegan (77.33 sq. mi.)

KANSAS
Kansas City (53.21 sq. mi.)
Overland Park (168 sq. mi.)
Topeka (74.54 sq. mi.)
Wichita (97.86 sq. mi.)

MASSACHUSSETS
Lowell (85.32 sq. mi.)
Springfield (87.43 sq. mi.)
Worcester (54.55 sq. mi.)

MISSOURI
Gladstone (82.76 sq. mi.)
Independence (83.61 sq. mi.)
Kansas City (94.76 sq. mi.)
St Louis (129 sq. mi.)

NORTH CAROLINA
Cary (83.93 sq. mi.)
Charlotte (75.73 sq. mi.)
Durham (113 sq. mi.)
Fayetteville (99.34 sq. mi.)
Greensboro (91.59 sq. mi.)
Raleigh (104 sq. mi.)

NORTH DAKOTA
Fargo (86.02 sq. mi.)

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Manchester (88.08 sq. mi.)

OHIO
Cleveland (122 sq. mi.)

OREGON
Eugene (90.13 sq. mi.)
Gresham (148 sq. mi.)
Hillsboro (111 sq. mi.)
Salem (77.59 sq. mi.)

RHODE ISLAND
Providence (82.71 sq. mi.)

SOUTH DAKOTA
Rapid City (207 sq. mi.)
Sioux Falls (64.72 sq. mi.)

UTAH
Provo (79.74 sq. mi.)
Salt Lake City (99.66 sq. mi.)
West Valley City (95.8 sq. mi.)

VIRGINIA
Newport News (144 sq. mi.)
Norfolk (172 sq. mi.)
Richmond (99.76 sq. mi.)

WISCONSIN
Eau Claire (86.58 sq. mi.)
Green Bay (85.28 sq. mi.)

CANADA
Lachine (60.9 sq. mi.)

UNITED KINGDOM
Liverpool (43.04 sq. mi.)

Happy Christmas to you all, I hope everyone has a great Christmas and an even better New Year, thank you all for visiting my blog this year, it’s been a pleasure having you here!

Please Enjoy The Snowman animated movie from 1982 below, it’s a great story:

Britons are risking losing valuable images and data forever with almost one in five who own a portable device losing phone numbers and contact details on mislaid items and 40% admitting to not backing up photos on portable devices, according to research commissioned by Network Appliance (NetApp), a leading provider of storage and data management solutions.

The YouGov survey of 2,035 online adults, reveals that whilst 58% of those that own a portable device store up to 500 photos, only 6% are very worried about losing them. It also indicates that 60% who had lost a device with phone numbers on had to source the contact details from scratch.

Surprisingly, only 44% said this had made them think twice about backing up information in future. Not surprisingly, however, 25 to 34 year olds (33%) have mislaid more portable devices with phone numbers and contact details than any other age group, with over 55s (8%) losing the least.

Mark Stevens, UK Area Director at NetApp said: “Data backup and protection is not just a concern for businesses. Today’s ‘Digital Generation’ load an increasing amount of information onto phones, iPods and laptops everyday, and with this comes risk.

“People need to be aware that saving images and numbers without backing them up means they could be lost forever.”

The research findings also highlight a gender gap in attitudes towards data loss among those storing photos on portable devices, with three times as many women saying they were very worried about losing images than men. Men who have lost devices with contact details are less likely to change their behaviour than women with 54% saying they would not backup or change the way they store information, compared to 43% of women.

Mark Stevens, UK Area Director at NetApp said: “Clearly there is a level of education needed to help consumers protect their information.

“Protecting your data doesn’t have to be complex. The right solution will speed and optimise backup and recovery processes, heighten data availability and you can keep in contact with friends and family, as well as retrieve lost images.”

Other findings from the study include different attitudes towards data protection across Britain:

• People from the South of England are least likely to have photos backedup on their portable devices than in any other region (32%)
• Those from Scotland are the most careful with 48% having images backedup.
• Londoners are most likely to lose a portable device containing contact details (26%), compared to 15% of people in the South and 15% in the Midlands and Wales
• 47% of Northerners would change the way they store information following the loss of a device with Southerners least likely to change their attitudes (35%).

If you think texting “I luv u” doesn’t capture the emotion and that letter writing can be a bit OTT, then here’s the perfect solution for you, the world’s first talking message tag.

From now on, you can personalise your feelings to a best mate or a new date by sending a pre-recorded pre.vu Talking Message Tag. These credit card size mementos let you record your message of up to 60 seconds, anywhere on the planet, which can then be replayed hundreds of times by the recipient.

Imagine gran and grandad listening to the grandchildren’s birthday wishes time and time again. Or alternatively, pre.vu Talking Message Tags can be used to cheer a friend in hospital or a distant relative who feels out of touch. Your pre-recorded sentiments will last long after the bouquet has withered or the chocolates have been eaten.

In fact, pre.vu Talking Message Tags let you personalise your feelings for almost every occasion from Valentines to Mothers Day and new arrivals to new home moves. Use them to surprise, say sorry or set the record straight. Their uses are as creative as your imagination.  

Recording the message tags couldn’t be easier. Just visit www.pre.vu and order online. You can either record the message on an automated phone line or direct from your computer. As soon as you are happy with your recording, you press the order button and the recorded tag is sent to your address or directly to the ultimate recipient.

The whole service, including postage and packaging, costs around £5.50, and provides a priceless message that will last for months to come.

Microsoft has acquired Multimap, one of the United Kingdom’s top 100 technology companies and one of the leading online mapping services in the world. The acquisition will hopefuly give Microsoft a powerful new location and mapping technology to complement existing offerings such as Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services, MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform, with future integration potential for a range of other Microsoft products and platforms, leading the way to new hights.

The addition of Multimap enhances Microsoft’s position as a leading provider of mapping and location platform services, said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally. We are thrilled to welcome Multimap onboard.

One of the best-known online mapping companies worldwide, Multimap provides a publicly available personal mapping service at http://www.multimap.com, as well as a range of integrated business services.

Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications, said Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Multimap. As one of the world’s foremost technology brands, Microsoft is in a position to bring even more value to the Multimap service and give people everywhere new, exciting and fun ways to get from point A to point B.

If you’ve ever wondered how microsoft.com uses their technology then you’ll be interested in this post from Jeff Alexander an IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft Australia. Though unfortunately Jeff’s blog seems to be down at the moment or better said nonexistent as visiting his blog will get the following message (The forum you requested does not exist.), I’ve still got a cached copy of the post so for the time being you can read the main points below thanks to Jeff and his information gathering from the people over at the Operations team at Microsoft.com.

At this point we still don’t use firewalls for MS.COM sites and don’t have any plans on the books to put them in place.  Here is the short answer as to why:

1. We don’t handle HBI data so we don’t have the need for external logging capabilities.  If we did handle HBI, we’d have firewalls.
2. We have ~650GB/day of IIS logs just for www.microsoft.com and update.microsoft.com (not including the 6GB/hour for each download server).  Just IIS logs are a challenge without trying to parse another ~650GB of firewall logs. 
3. 5+ years ago, there wasn’t a firewall solution that would scale to our needs and this forced us to focus on network, host, and application security.  Based on the success of that work, we’ve not looked further at firewalls even though there are solutions that I believe (haven’t tested) would handled the traffic load (our non-download based web traffic alone can be in the 8-9 Gbps range and ~30 total for internal hosted traffic).
4. We also used NLB for load balancing exclusively up until July 2006 and the micro segmentation of networks required by that solution made firewalls an expensive and very complex solution.  Again, especially at the scalability that used to be available.
5. Application security is critical since a firewall is likely going to allow traffic on the correct port and protocol through to the web servers so IIS/ASP.NET/Applications must deal with these requests gracefully.  I realize there are other options/features of firewalls/IPS that provide other options.

In terms of how we protect the sites, we utilize (starting at the outside edge of the network and working in):

1. Cisco Guards for DoS detection and automated response
2. Router ACLs are in place to block unnecessary ports
3. NetScalers for www.microsoft.com and MSDN/TechNet (NLB still for update.microsoft.com) and those also provide DoS protection inherently as well as providing a few other knobs we can turn when required.
4. Windows and IIS…rock solid and secure!  www.microsoft.com is on Windows Server 2008/IIS7, MSDN/TechNet are migrating to Win2k8/IIS7, and update.microsoft.com is on Windows Server 2003/IIS6.  We do all the normal shut-off-unused-services practices that line up with MS published security guidance and we utilize GFS images to ensure standardized builds of systems.
5. Automated Netmon/Perfmon captures for attack analysis on NLB systems when SYN floods occur (event trigger).  We’ve not yet done this for NetScaler systems, but we are noodling on how in our copious spare time .
6. We do run AV on our servers when we can.  At times product adoption means we don’t install it, but we do normally run AV.
7. Application security as mentioned.  ACE is very good resource for this aspect.  ACE is an internal team that does threat modelling for applications.

Online social network site Facebook has now opened up its developer platform to other social networking sites. The move comes in response to criticism that developers wouldn’t create applications for Facebook because the website is too “closed” to be an effective market, and sets up a potential clash between Facebook’s now open platform and OpenSocial, the open development platform initiative Google Inc. launched in November. Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora first posted the news in a blog entry on Wednesday.

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information. We look forward to supporting other social sites as they release their own platforms, and look forward most of all to the added benefit for developers and users.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) RC should be used to update a PC running Windows Vista RTM to Windows Vista SP1. This standalone package will install SP1 as well as any applicable pre-requisite packages.

The 5-Language standalone package supports installations on all versions of Windows Vista with one or a combination of the following languages installed: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish.

The All-Language standalone package supports installations on all versions of Windows Vista with one or a combination of the 36 Windows Vista languages installed.

Download: Windows Vista SP1 RC – 5 Language Standalone Package (x86) (x64)
Download: Windows Vista SP1 RC – All Language Standalone Package (x86) (x64)

Via: WinBeta

The Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Release Candidate (RC) is now available to the public. In addition to previously released updates, SP1 contains changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several new technologies. SP1 also addresses some management, deployment, and support challenges.

Things to know before you download

• If you have a prior version of SP1 beta installed, you must uninstall it prior to installing SP1 RC.
• Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems.
• Windows Vista SP1 Release Candidate is time-limited software.
• Support is through self-help and peer support via the Windows Vista SP1 forum and FAQ page.
• Additional information about the above items and others. Be sure to review.

Download: Windows Vista SP1 RC Windows Update Release

View: Release Notes | Deployment Guide | Vista SP1 RC TechCenter