Recently I was wondering why my iMac is showing a Guest account on the login screen:

I’m pretty sure that I’ve disabled it and indeed when I checked it still was. And even more weird, it’s not possible to enable it. Why is that? Even as a fairly new Mac user I know that Apple usually is looking after details and tries to be perfect. The riddle is easily solved. The checkbox for enabling the guest account has a tooltip stating

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Swyx started building a native SwyxIt! Mobile App for Apple’s iPhone. We’re used to be a pure Windows company. There are rumors that there was a Mac hidden in Marketing somewhere, but except a short side trip into the Linux world many years ago, Swyx Development was all PCs.

Windows PowerShell is secure by default. It won’t execute a script when you double-click it. It won’t even run scripts per default when you told it to. You should understand this aspect of PowerShell’s security because it might bite you when you’re not expecting it

To connect to the server with SwyxWare’s PowerShell module, use use connect-ippbx. It allows to either use your current Windows account or a SwyxWare username and password. When using the latter variant you typically use get-credential to prompt for user name and password. get-credential is a PowerShell cmdlet using the standard Windows credential dialog. We decided to use a credential object for connect-ippbx, because this prevents having the password as normal string parameter, visible in the shell and as clear text string in Powershell memory. Get-credential uses a .NET SecureString which is much safer. However, if your SwyxWare username contains a comma, get-credential doesn’t work, because Windows does not allow comma in user names. Here’s a workaround:

For my PowerShell session at Swyx Technology Conference I prepared an additional demo. I didn’t show it, because there was no time and most of the audience had little experience with PowerShell anyway. This demo uses the APIs described in the SwyxIt! Client SDK to consume events from SwyxIt! and uses that to display state changes of every speed dial key the current user has configured.

SwyxWare 2011 will ship with updated SwyxIt! skins which properly show the new speed dial key states “Away” and “Do not disturb”. If you have own customized skins you might want to continue using them. Supporting the new state requires every speed dial key on the skin to be edited to define the images to show for the new states. I’ve build a small PowerShell script to help.

The latest ASCOM IP Dect firmware (4.1.x) allows to provide a central phonebook by importing a csv file. With SwyxWare 2011 and the IpPbx Powershell Module it’s possible to automate the upload so that you could keep the IP DECT phonebook up-to-date.

Some already noticed. There will be a Windows PowerShell module for SwyxWare v8.0. I want to explain how it came to be, what's the status is and where we're heading.

If your regularly buy new SwyxPhones for your SwyxWare you might need to update SwyxWare’s SwyxPhone whitelist in order to use the new phones without buying a SwyxPhone license. It’s possible to do this automatically using the following Windows Powershell Script:

$url = "ftp://ftp.swyx.com/pub/phonewhitelist/phonewhitelist.msi" $msi = join-path $env:temp "Phonewhitelist.msi" if (test-path -PathType leaf $msi) { remove-item -force -Path $msi } $webClient = new-object "System.Net.WebClient" $webclient.DownloadFile($url,$msi) msiexec.exe /qb /i $msi

Save this as .ps1 file and schedule it with Windows Task Scheduler to run regularly.

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Shortly after the beta you’ll be able to download a Windows PowerShell 2.0 module for SwyxWare Administration. It’s something I wrote for automating some initial testing of our daily builds. It’s based on the ConfigDataStore API. Here’s an example:

As with each new SwyxWare version we will release a beta version to Swyx Partners. With v8.0 it will be a little bit different. The initial beta build will be quite early in regard to the planned release date. It will not be feature complete, but stable and robust enough. As I’ve mentioned a few months ago, we (= Development, QA, Product Management and some colleagues from sales, marketing and presales) are using the daily v8 builds on our production SwyxServer.

We made some rather extensive internal changes in order to support new features like encryption or HD audio and to be prepared better for future enhancements. Therefore we’re planning to make newer builds available on a regular basis after the initial beta release. Direct updates from build to build are possible, even unattended. Each build will have a change log so you can decide if to use it or not. Support will be available via Swyx Partnernet Forum...

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If you're a Swyxware partner or customer you probably have installed a quickfix before. It's a rather tedious, error prone process. You have to unzip the quickfix, stop services, backup files, copy new ones, run Configwizard, etc. Starting with v7.0 Quickfix 3 we'll have a small installer to simplify the process. You unzip the quick fix ZIP file and run install.cmd, which starts the installer. It's able to

Check SwyxWare version Detect SwyxStandby Configuration and warn about DB replication Making backup copies of existing files Copy files Make a SwyxWare Database backup Update the SwyxWare database Update script or other files in the database Stop and start services What it is not

It's no replacement for a full-featured installer like Windows Installer, the technology we're using for our normal setups. It has no graphical user interface It's in English language only (but can update all SwyxWare language variants)

We'll plan to improve the quick fix installation...

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In the software industry "eat your own dog food" means to use the software you create for yourself. At Swyx we did this from the beginning. We never had another PBX*. Every new SwyxWare version is used internally first. In the past we hand-selected interim builds to be installed on our production system.

We keep this policy for for our main SwyxServer system to ensure maximal availability. We start updating that system to beta versions after we made sure that it works well enough. Swyx Development/QA has a separate system connected to the main one via SwyxLink. That system is used by all Swyx Development/QA staff for their day to day work.

With SwyxWare v8.0 we go a step further. We have a build system which builds [sic!] SwyxWare from the latest source code automatically every night. About two weeks ago we started to install and use these daily build on our Swyx Development/QA department SwyxWare system.

The update of the system is done automatically with a small Windows Powershell script...

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I have a computer at home which sometimes automatically powers on during the night. Windows event log was of  no help. My main suspect was Windows 7 task scheduler, which is able to wake the computer to run a scheduled task. But clicking through all tasks is tedious, therefore I used my favourite tool, Windows Powershell:

get-scheduled-task –recurse | where { $_.definition.settings.waketorun }

That all. It produces a list of all tasks which are configured to wake the computer if necessary. I found the task, switched off the wake flag and now have to wait and see if that has been the culprit.

What’s the output of this c# code? Is the result always the same?

string s = "I";
Console.WriteLine(s.ToLower());

Tom’s last blog entries about getting the right perspective about our home in the universe reminded me of a photo made in 1990. Carl Sagan urged NASA to let Voyager 1 turn around at the end of it’s mission to take pictures of the planets in the solar system. Here’s the result:







Carl Sagan definitely got the right perspective about us:

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator...

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When we designed extended call routing and remote inquiry ten years ago, we never imagined this design to last a decade. The function to announce a date like “January 1st, 2004” was implemented using a fixed set of audio files. We shipped files for years 2000 to 2009. For SwyxWare v6.10 we added audio for 2010 to 2030, because 2010 was not that far in the future anymore.

Today we had to learn that this was not sufficient. The ECR script function loading and playing the date audio files fails for years greater than 2009. You can observe this using remote inquiry or if you have a custom ECR script using the “Say Date” block. Instead of the correct announcement you’ll get “invalid date”. It is rather embarrassing that we didn’t recognized this during v6.10 tests.

For v6.12, v6.20 and SwyxWare v7.0 you will find a fix here:

http://www.swyx.com/support/ssdb.html?kbid=kb4081

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The most exiting new product Microsoft made in recent years is Windows Powershell. Yesterday they released version 2.0 as part of the

Windows Management Framework

While Microsoft positions it as the Windows management tool every administrator must know, I find it equally useful in software development. As soon as you start using it and write Powershell scripts you’ll never go back to batch files. But besides the great scripting the shell itself make day-to-day work of a developer much easier. I often see colleagues doing this to stop a service:

Navigate through Windows start menu to find the Services mmc snapin Make the MMC window bigger, because the default size is always too small Sroll through the services list to find the service Select the service Click the Stop button in the toolbar to stop the service. Even if you have the services snapin already open,...

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Wow!







Hint: Mute it, the sound is horrible :-)

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If you’re a SwyxWare Partner it’s a good idea to have a look into the Swyx Partner-Net Forum. You’ll find information and download links to SwyxWare v7.0 BETA. Enjoy.

Convince your boss to twitter:

What’s better than to start the week with a smile:







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No, this is not about Microsoft’s latest and greatest, but about SwyxWare. In the same way as Windows 7 technically is a rather small step from Vista, SwyxWare v7.0 is based on the foundation of v6.20.

Tuesday I wrote that we were planning to install v7.0 on our main production system next week. Well, we did it Thursday instead :-) As we expected, our Swyx colleagues immediately found some bugs. I spent the whole Friday hunting and fixing a nasty problem causing wrong “logged off” state to be shown for some SwyxIt! users.

But altogether the update went rather well. After a rather quiet Friday we’ll see how the new version holds up on Monday and the coming week in a real-life environment.

There’s one thing I’d like to share. Until now, SwyxFax and SwyxWare technically were separate products which their own administration tools and configuration store. We finally integrated both in SwyxWare v7.0. Now you only...

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This blog is not abandoned. I’m still alive and well. As everybody else, we had a rough time this year at Swyx. The world financial and economical crisis left it’s marks. We had to reduce costs, which slowed us down, of course, had changes in management and advisory board, etc.

On the plus side, we released a great SwyxIt update, iPhone support and continued working on SwyxWare v7.0. If everything goes well we will install SwyxWare v7.0 on our production SwyxServer end of next week. It’s planned to have a beta version available roughly at the same time via the Swyx Partnernet forum.

Compared with our original plans from last year, SwyxWare v7.0 got...

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No funny things this time, but something for everybody who knows C++. Somebody (not me) changed this line

if (str.find(‘x’)==0)

to

if (str.find(‘x’)>=0)

This is not made up, but a real code change, a little bit simplified. The intention is to find ‘x' everywhere in the string, not only at the first position. str is a std::string. Why does this change not work as expected?

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If you’re a regular SwyxIt! user, you probably know F11, the global hotkey to dial a number from any application. Select a number, press F11 and SwyxIt! will dial it. This works very well with applications where you have the number in textual form such as Word, Excel, Outlook, Notepad, etc. But what if the phone number you want to dial is not available as text, e.g. in a scanned document or a fax you received with SwyxFax.



Wouldn’t it be great to be able to dial numbers in arbitrary images? That’s much easier than I thought. Office 2007 has a component called “Microsoft Office Document Imaging”, which includes an optical character recognition (OCR) module with a documented API. I’ve written a small prototype to demonstrate dialing from images.

You need:

SwyxIt! v6.25 (I do not use any specific SwyxIt! v6.25 function, but that’s the version installed on my system) Microsoft Office 2007 (I’m not sure if all editions have the OCR functionality. Furthermore, it’s an optional...

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On Thursday I visited a jazz club in Iserlohn, which is about a half-hour drive from here. Swedish jazz band Oddjob had a gig there that evening. I stumbled over their fourth album last year on the website of my favorite jazz label. I think the most interesting things happening in European jazz are coming from Scandinavia. And Oddjob is a prime example.

Most commercials are either boring or annoying or both. But this one is cool:

Today, 10 years ago a few people started a new company based in Dortmund, Germany. It’s goal: Realize a pure software-based Voice over IP PBX running on Windows Server.

We called the company:

Astonishing that it’s already ten years.

And it’s still a lot of fun :-)

Update: I found a photo from that time. That’s Swyx in 1999:

I’m not sure of the exact date of the photo. It’s sometime in 1999.

That’s incredible: http://vimeo.com/keithloutit Look closely. It’s no stop-motion animation, even if it looks like it.

Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.



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Last week we released an internal beta of the upcoming SwyxIt! version. At the moment it looks like we’re right on schedule for the official release. I won’t post a picture, yet. The skin is not the final one and I do not want to risk disgruntling our marketing department :-)

When it’s released you’ll get a SwyxIt! installation package to be deployed to client systems and a set of skins you have to upload into the SwyxWare database on the server. The new set of skins won’t work with SwyxIt! v6.20 or older. There won’t be a new SwyxServer or SwyxWare Administration version. An existing v6.20 will be sufficient.

My impression is that while the new client version still lacks some useful items it’s better than any SwyxIt! we ever released before. There will probably a lot of users who discover “new” features we already have for years, but which were not easily recognizable.

I’m pretty sure this ingenious invention will be a huge commercial success:







I probably would buy some if a software development kit would be available for it :-)

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Here’s my contribution to the funny friday blog posts

… and cool new skin, designed by graphical user interface experts. That’s in the next SwyxIt! version. I’m using an internal build on a daily basis for some time now. Would love to show a screenshot, but I can’t. You’ll have to wait for official announcements.

Ok, just a tiny snippet:

Sometimes small features make the difference. A few minutes ago I recognized a new context menu entry on music files stored on my Notebook:



If you click it, a small player opens which allows you to control a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) media device. In this cases it’s my Roku Soundbridge network MP3 player which Windows discovered automatically. The player looks like this:

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I just finished reading “How to use Twitter for Information Mining”. Scary. While twitter seems an innocuous tool to keep in touch with your friends, everybody can get an impressive amount of personal information from the service. To say it with the words of Steven Levy from Wired magazine:

“No matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It's like a psychographic version of strip poker--I'm disrobing, 140 characters at a time."

But is it reason enough to stay away? Or could it be used responsibly without revealing anything you do not want? I tend to stay away, because you cannot conceive what aggregation of the data might reveal in the future. Every tweet seem to end up in a central database so that Twitter’s search function can access them. And so everybody can.

On the other hand could it be useful for Swyx to communicate with Partners...

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Something rare happened yesterday and during the night. It snowed almost continuously and temperatures are below zero (Celsius) The result is 20cm snow in Dortmund right now.

Well, not completely…

During the last days I’ve been viewing some of the talks of 25C3 which are streamed live via the net. Very entertaining and informative. About an hour ago in a talk called “Making the theoretical possible” an international group of security researchers showed that the MD5 weakness which is known since a few years can be used to create a rogue certificate authority certificate which allows to sign arbitrary certificates which are accepted by all major web browsers.

That means that even if your web-browser shows that the connection to www.yourbank.com is encrypted and the SSL-certificate is valid, it’s still possible that a man in the middle reads or modifies the communication between your browser and your bank.

On one hand this was bound...

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I’m not that much into computer games, but this one I’ll probably buy:

http://www.telltalegames.com/wallaceandgromit

Today is my last work day before Christmas vacation. Therefore it’s the right moment to wish you merry Christmas and a successful new year.

It’s Friday, the week is almost over and here’s something funny for the weekend.

There’s an official Monty Python channel on youtube now.

In Germany colds calls are forbidden. Today I experienced a way to circumvent that. I got a letter from Gruner & Jahr, the publisher of a monthly magazine I have a subscription for. The letter heading in bold face is:

Important: Your subscription of magazine:…

The remaining letter was quite short. Here’s the original text:



In English:

Dear Mr. […]

We would like you to call us about your subscription

      using the toll-free number 0800-…

Our service is available at...

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Maybe I should print out that as a poster and hang it on a wall near our office kitchen so that everyone can see it.

[Edit 27.11.08]To prevent any misunderstanding: I think simplicity is a successful design principle one should remember and it's a worthy goal to strive for.

Before you continue you should read the first part about how to write a SwyxIt Plug-In in managed code. This blog post extends the first sample and adds full-text search support.

There’s a software development kit for SwyxIt with a lot of useful examples. However,  SwyxIt’s roots are native, unmanaged C++, and most of the examples are in native code, too. Recently somebody asked in the forum if it’s possible to write a client plug-in in C#.

In the German language there is a derogative slang term called “merkbefreit”, meaning something like “not notice anything”. Here’s a prime example:







This reminds me. I haven’t seen Fargo for years. May I should watch it once more.

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Even politicians should understand this. But I’m pretty sure they’ll ignore technical facts as they do all the time.

During lunch last week a colleague mentioned that there are two small features concerning SwyxIt! skin saving which will not be documented and which are not visible in the user interface. Reason for hiding these functions is that the GUI was fixed already for the release and, most important, no additional QA time was available to test it.