Martin's Blog

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:

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

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!

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

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:

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

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.

More...

Commercial

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:18:00 GMT

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

More...

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

More...

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.