Martin's Blog

My Mac’s guest account

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:57:57 GMT

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

That’s reasonable. I’ve enabled the hard disk encryption and it would be rather useless if a guest account could decrypt it. But why is there a login available anyway?
Turns out that for the guest login a Mac boots into a restricted environment where only network is working and Safari can be used to browse the web. Nice.

Apropos detail. If you have enabled the “Find my Mac” iCloud function, which allows you to locate a Mac (or iPad or iPhone) remotely anywhere in the world and optionally wipe it clean, you can still use it when somebody is using the restricted guest login.

“To boldly go where no Swyx Developer has gone before” ;-) –Part 1

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:17:04 GMT

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.

More...

PowerShell is secure by default

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:03:32 GMT

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

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SwyxWare PowerShell Module: Using connect-ippbx with usernames containing a comma

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:47:55 GMT

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:

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Consuming ClMgr Events in PowerShell

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:00:03 GMT

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.

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SwyxIt! Skin Update Script for SwyxWare 2011

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:44:21 GMT

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.

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Sync SwyxWare Phonebook with IP DECT 800

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:26:38 GMT

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.

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SwyxWare v8.0 PowerShell Module

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:31:59 GMT

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.

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Auto-update SwyxPhone Whitelist

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:48:39 GMT

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.

Power

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:34:33 GMT

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:

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There’s something new coming…

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:10:30 GMT

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 or beta@swyx.com. If you’re a Swyx Partner or distributor I encourage you to try the beta and later builds, test it and tell us what you think.

If your feedback makes it into the software you can test it in a later preview build instead of waiting for the v8.0 release.

Beta is only a couple of weeks away if everything goes to plan.

Swyxware v7.0 Quickfix Installer

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:07:00 GMT

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 process, depending on the customer/partner feedback we get.

The first QuickFix with this installer is v7.0 QF 3, which is going to be released today. It would be great if you would share any feedback you might have. Just leave a comment here or write into the forum. Thanks.

Eat your own dog food

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:31:53 GMT

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 using SwyxServer’s unattended installation feature available in v8.0. In case you're interested, here’s the update script:

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          <#                
.SYNOPSIS                 
   Updates SwyxWare and SwyxWare Administration with a daily build                 
.DESCRIPTION                
   Retrieves server and admin setup packages from daily build drop location,                 
   creates a VM snapshot, removes snapshots older than two days, executes                 
   SwyxWare and SwyxWare Administration setup packages,                 
   runs ippbxconfig.exe -c unattended.xml                 
.PARAMETER Date                 
   Date of daily build to use. Uses current date if not set #>               
param($date = (get-date))               
              
# HyperV server where the VM to update is located               
$HyperVServer = "hyperV1"               
              
# Daily build drop location               
$BuildDropLocation = "\\fileserver\Builds\"               
              
# Buildname prefix. Script appends $date time stamp               
$BuildNamePrefix = "Main_"               
              
# SwyxWare computer name               
$SwyxWareServer = "SwyxWare02"               
$Result = 0               
              
try               
{               
    $ScriptFolder = (split-path $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path -Parent)               
              
    # logging helper               
    . (join-path $ScriptFolder Init-logging.ps1)               
    # init logging               
    $logThreshold = [log4net.Core.Level]::Info               
    $LogFilesPath = (join-path $ScriptFolder "logs\")               
    md  $LogFilesPath -erroraction silentlycontinue               
    init-logging (join-path $LogFilesPath "\Install-SwyxWare.log") $logthreshold               
              
    # some logging utilities we need               
    . (join-path $ScriptFolder Swyx-TraceUtilities.ps1)               
              
    # ensure that hyperV module is loaded               
    if (!(get-module HyperV)) { import-module HyperV }               
                  
    # daily build root path. Setups are expected here.               
    $rootPath = (get-childitem  ($BuildDropLocation + $BuildNamePrefix +($Date.ToString("yyyyMMdd"))+".*") | sort -descending | select -first 1)               
                  
    if (!$rootPath)               
    {               
        throw "No build found for $date"               
    }               
                  
    $ServerSetupPath = join-path $RootPath "setup\server\english\"               
    $AdminSetupPath = join-path $RootPath "setup\admin\english\"               
                  
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "update-Swyxware.ps1 starting"                
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "RootPath $RootPath"               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "ServerSetupPath $ServerSetupPath"               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "AdminSetupPath $AdminSetupPath"               
              
    # create snapshot               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "create VM snaphot"               
    $vm = get-vm -Name $SwyxWareServer -Server $HyperVServer               
    $note ="Before installing daily build $rootPath"                
                  
    $snapshot = New-VMSnapshot -VM $vm -Note $note -Server $HyperVServer -Wait -confirm:$false               
                  
    # new-vmsnapshot bug. It returns a string and the snapshot object               
    $snapshot = $snapshot[1]               
                  
    Rename-VMSnapshot -Snapshot $snapshot -NewName ("BeforeDaily_{0:yyyyMMdd}" -f $date) -confirm:$false               
                  
    # remove older snapshots               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message ("Remove snapshots older than " + ((get-date).AddDays(-2)))               
    Get-VMSnapshot -VM $vm -Server $HyperVServer -name "BeforeDaily_%" |                
        Where-Object { $_.ConvertToDateTime($_.CreationTime) -lt  ((get-date).AddDays(-2)) } |               
        Remove-VMSnapshot -confirm:$false               
                  
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "get setup packages from daily build drop location"               
    copy $ServerSetupPath -Destination (join-path $ScriptFolder "Server") -Recurse -Force               
    $ServerSetupPath = join-path $ScriptFolder  "server\english\"               
                  
    copy $AdminSetupPath -Destination (join-path $ScriptFolder "Admin")  -Recurse -Force               
    $AdminSetupPath = join-path $ScriptFolder "admin\english\"               
              
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Stop services"               
    stop-service -Force -Name HwdSrv               
    stop-service -Force IpPbxCDS               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Stop all mmc.exe instances"               
    Stop-Process -Name mmc -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue               
                  
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Install SwyxServer"               
    copy -Path (join-path $($ScriptFolder) "unattended.xml") -Destination $($ServerSetupPath) -Force               
    msiexec.exe /qn  /i "$($ServerSetupPath)setup.msi" /l*vx "$($LogFilesPath)msi-server.log" | out-null               
    $result = $lastExitCode               
    if ($result -ne 0)               
    {               
        throw "Install SwyxServer FAILED, error $result"               
    }               
              
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Install SwyxWare Admin"               
    msiexec.exe /qn /i "$($AdminSetupPath)admin64.msi" /l*vx "$($LogFilesPath)msi-admin.log" | out-null               
    $result = $lastExitCode               
    if ($result -ne 0)               
    {               
        throw "Install SwyxWare Admin FAILED, error $result"               
    }               
              
    $p = join-path (ls env:'programfiles(x86)').value "SwyxWare"               
    $u = join-path $ScriptFolder "unattended.xml"               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Run '$p\ippbxconfig.exe -c $u'"               
                 
    &"$p\ippbxconfig.exe" -c "$u" | out-null               
    $result = $lastExitCode               
    if ($result -ne 0)               
    {               
        throw "IpPbxConfig FAILED, error $result"               
    }               
}               
finally               
{               
    gather-logfiles -destinationPath $LogFilesPath               
              
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Result: $Result"               
    add-logMessage -Level Info -Message "Install-Swyxware.ps1 done"               
    $result                  
} 
       
 

* When we started we rented rooms in Dortmunds technology centre which provided us with old-style telephones until SwyxWare v1.0 was ready

Who’s waking my computer?

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:30:34 GMT

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.

ToLower()

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:13:19 GMT

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

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

More...

Pale Blue Dot

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:21:44 GMT

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:

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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 and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[…]

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

A Year 2010 problem

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:37:30 GMT

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

(At the time of this writing the KB-Article is not live yet)

The fix is an updated template_v4.3.vbs file. If you’re still using an older SwyxWare version please contact you support channel for help.

Windows Management Framework

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:15:57 GMT

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, this is tedious. Using an already running Powershell window you just type

spsv myService

and hit enter. To work with SwyxWare services I wrote a small Powershell function returning all installed SwyxWare services called get-swyxsvc, gave it alias gsw and now can do things like this:

Stop all SwyxWare services:

gsw| spsv –force

or list all SwyxWare service with the current state

gsw | ft name, status

or list all running SwyxWare services

gsw | ? { $.state –eq “running”}

I also have scripts to update SwyxIt and SwyxWare Administration installed on my PC to the newest daily build. It does not show the usual setup wizard, but installs both without user interaction.

If you run a SwyxWare v7.0 setup MSI, you have a setup package which got built using a combination of Windows Installer XML, some old batch files and a lot of new Powershell scripts.

I just wish I had the time to build Powershell cmdlets for managing SwyxWare. Wouldn’t it be great being able doing things like this:

get-swyxwareuser | where { $_.internalnumbers –contains 4711 }

100 .. 199 | foreach-object { $u = new-SwyxWareUser; $u.Name = “User $_”; $u.InternalNumbers.Add($_); $u.Save() }

200 .. 210 | foreach-object { $u = get-swyxwareUser | where { $_.InternalNumber –contains $_}; $u.FaxNumbers.Add($_ + 100); $u.Save() }

get-SwyxWareTrunk –computer MySwyxServer | format-table Name, usedChannels, MaxChannels

Lego Pop-up Book

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:43:02 GMT

Wow!

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

SwyxWare v7.0 BETA

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:06:09 GMT

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.

Twitter

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:42:09 GMT

Convince your boss to twitter:

Star Wars meets Kill Bill

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:39:55 GMT

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

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Seven

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:48:22 GMT

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 need one setup package including SwyxServer and SwyxFaxServer. All configuration can be made SwyxWare Administration. As a side effect we have to migrate the fax configuration into the SwyxWare configuration database. I learned from experience this week that this can take it’s time:

Fax Forwardings

In v6.20 SwyxFax has a forwarding table which defines per fax number what to do with received faxes. Examples:

Fax number 123: Forward fax client of Windows user domain\john.doe

Fax number 471: Forward to email address alice@example.com

Fax number 888: Print on \\printserver\printer47

In v7.0 we kept SwyxWare’s user-centric configuration, i.e. a SwyxWare user now additionally gets fax numbers and can have one or more forwarding definitions. But how to map the old forwardings to SwyxWare users? Configuration wizard finds users for a fax forwarding by checking if the user has assigned the same windows account or uses the email address as voicemail address and assigns the fax number and forwarding in that case. ConfigWizard displays a list of all forwardings which cannot be matched exactly, e.g. because there is no SwyxWare user to derive from the Windows account or email address, or if more than one user matches. You have to define the user in that case.

We had a special configuration here at Swyx where the whole dev/qa staff uses fax on our main server, but a separate server for voice. We therefore had to assign a lot of fax forwardings manually.

Fax documents

Fax documents used to be stored in a folder on the server managed by SwyxFax Server directly. With v7.0 SwyxConfigDatastore manages fax documents and fax server uses the CDS-API to access them. And internally all faxes will be stored as SFF, which takes less space than the old format. SwyxWare configuration Wizard converts all existing fax documents to the new format during update. It’s probably a great opportunity to get rid of old faxes you now longer need before doing the update to v7.0 :-)

I’ll keep you posted about how v7.0 holds up next week and about the date for the beta.

We know that this update/migration might be a pain in certain scenarios, but we had to weigh the time and resources we spend to implement this one-time update process against using the resources for other features.

I’m still alive :-)

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:37:17 GMT

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 not as many new features as we would like to have. But it still offers a lot of useful things and some refurbishments under the hood to prepare for future enhancements. And there will be a new ISDN driver which should finally let us get rid of the remaining sporadic fax transmission problems in certain high load scenarios.

Quiz

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:59:39 GMT

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

if (str.find(‘x’)==0)

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?

Dial from really any application

Sun, 31 May 2009 09:45:55 GMT

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 component. The sample program’s setup tells you if it is not installed.
The attached sample program

Download the MSI file attached to this blog entry, install it, make sure that SwyxIt! is runnning and start the program. You get this window:

Minimize the window and you’re ready to go. Press Shift-F11, the screen is dimmed and the mouse cursor changes to a cross. Draw a rectangle around a number you want SwyxIt! to dial.

As soon as you release the mouse, the selected screen portion is fed to the Office OCR module and via SwyxIt! API the detected number is dialed. If you have a mouse with some additional buttons you can configure, try assigning OCRDialSample.exe to such a button and specify command-line parameter –d. Now you can just press that mouse button to start selection.

What do you think? Is this useful? Should SwyxIt support it out-of-the-box? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Oddjob

Sat, 30 May 2009 12:44:14 GMT

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.

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Commercial

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:18:00 GMT

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

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10 Years!

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:12:38 GMT

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.

Wow.

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:21:28 GMT

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.

Ink

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:28:44 GMT

Internal Beta

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:40:20 GMT

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.

Siftables

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:21:34 GMT

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 :-)

Creedocide

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:50:37 GMT

Here’s my contribution to the funny friday blog posts

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Some great new productivity features…

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:01:05 GMT

… 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:

Play To

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:50:33 GMT

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:

(click to enlarge)

Windows Vista already could stream media to UPnP devices, but there was no means to control such devices. Windows 7 now can.

Twitter Information Mining

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:59:05 GMT

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 and customers?

20cm Snow

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:53:07 GMT

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.

They broke the internet

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:42:40 GMT

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 to happen sometime after the MD5 weakness has been published. On the other hand, it’s extremely disturbing that until today CAs still issue SSL certificates using MD5 hashes and only a practical demonstration will urge them to finally use safer hashing algorithms.

All the details are here: http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Grand Adventures

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:25:28 GMT

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

http://www.telltalegames.com/wallaceandgromit

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Happy Holidays

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:19:33 GMT

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.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead”

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:24:15 GMT

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

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Jehova

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:49:26 GMT

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

How to circumvent Cold Calls

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:28:31 GMT

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 the following times:

[…]

I called them. Turns out that there’s nothing wrong with my subscription. They just wanted me to offer another magazine and offered a voucher for some bonus if I subscribe to any magazine they publish.

What a devious way to let me call them, because they’re not allowed by the law to call me. Even if their offer would have been interesting, the way they tricked me to contact them is reason enough to reject any offer.

Simplicity

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:17:32 GMT

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.

SwyxIt Full-Text Search Plug-in in C#

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:02:20 GMT

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.

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Write SwyxIt! Plug-ins in C#

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:09:51 GMT

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#.

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Turkeys

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:10:46 GMT

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

<\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" alt="">

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

Fishing net

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:21:20 GMT

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

SwyxWare v6.20 – SwyxIt! Save Skin

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 06:03:42 GMT

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.

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