istartedsomething

Popular hardware vendor NVIDIA who has been rightly criticized for their buggy Windows Vista graphics and chipset drivers is now one of the first third-parties to commit their support for the next version of Windows.

It comes at little surprise the job advertisement NVIDIA published last week is for a Senior Quality Assurance Lead on Windows 7, perhaps to ensure the same mistakes aren’t made again. It writes,

SR. QA ENGINEER, WIN 7 LEAD #1047614

NVIDIA is looking for a senior QA engineer to lead the roll-out of Windows 7 within the GPU Software QA organization. This is an exciting opportunity to work with nVidia’s world class GPU and software offerings that are the heart of visual computing.

Once on-board, this technical leader will work with each of the GPU Software QA teams, Windows 7 driver development, product management, and our Seattle QA team to assure a smooth roll-out of this new operating system into QA. This leader will also drive improvements into the test planning process by working with NVIDIA’s industry leading development organization to assure that our testing is enhanced using a broader range of testing techniques. For example, the addition of white or gray box testing to the validation process to augment the unit and black box testing already being performed. This leader will also assure that coverage meets target levels and that testing leverage between operating systems, system hardware, and GPU hardware and software is utilized wherever possible.

Specific duties include reviewing of product specifications and requirements required to create comprehensive and effective Windows 7 test plans and subsequently driving cross-functional review of those plans.

The bandwagon has just started rolling.

Out of what little we know of the next version of Windows, this feature might just be the most interesting yet. A team at Microsoft is hiring developers to work on adding native support in Windows 7 for Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) – Microsoft’s semi-proprietary specification for single-file virtual machine hard disks. Their job posting reads,

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.

Do you want to have the opportunity to work on a great Core OS team at the heart of Windows? If you have big ideas and want to implement them, if you love writing code, if you love delving into operating system internals, if you want to work on high visibility projects with direct consumer and customer impact and still work in a very technical environment, then you will feel right at home in this team.

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

Whilst “one of the great features in Windows 7″ might be a bit much, this is right up there with the new multi-line Calculator. No seriously, this has rather interesting implications for IT administrators and even home users.

For example, having an VHD dedicated to gaming with optimized system configurations is entirely feasible then. A dynamic VHD would mean it would only take up as much room as it needs, you could move the file on many system and have the same experience, but best of all, you can still enjoy the maximum native performance at the same time being able to load it as a virtual machine to maintain and configure without rebooting.

Considering how much we don’t know about Windows 7, this is extremely promising.

Update: A few people I’ve talked to have expressed their concern this may not make it to RTM and I think it’s a valid point at any time feature may be cut so I’ll just add that note for everyone else.

Update 2: Apparently the technology already exists in Windows 7 today, as indicated somewhat below.

Novelty boarding pass. Photo credit: Jordan Knight

For the last couple of months I’ve been involved with a small group of students (David Burela, Edward Hooper, Dimaz Pramudya) in Melbourne to participate in Microsoft’s worldwide Imagine Cup Software Design contest for students and our hard work has finally paid off today when we were judged out of four finalists as the Australian Imagine Cup winner to compete at the world finals in France early July.

I’ve only had a couple of hours sleep today so I’ll just share with you briefly what our project is about.

SOAK which stands for “Smart Operational Agriculture toolKit” is an integrated hardware and softwares platform that aims to help farmers make the most of the water (and other) resources on their land. It does this through an integration of a wide range of sensors which gathers data about the environment in real time, provide rich visual information to end-user about the status of the farm, and electronically controls various systems such as sprinklers.

None of the individual components are exceptionally revolutionary, but it’s the integration that we deliver that separates SOAK from other traditional systems.

For example by gathering online weather forecasts about the property, if the weather is predicted to rain in the next 48 hours and the current soil moisture is adequate till then, our system can conserve water usage by not watering before the rain falls. Also as a precaution, is the rainfall is inadequate, the watering system will resume operations to compensate for the difference.

Obligatory screen teasers:

For the main administrative interface we built a web application with a mashup of Windows Live Maps and Silverlight 2.0 overlaid on top.

Of course I couldn’t miss a good opportunity to whip up some Vista Sidebar gadgets.

My team partner David has a bit more detail and documentations about the project. I’ll keep everyone updated with how we go at the world finals in Paris.

Update: Australian PC Magazine has just published a very insightful story on our project and the competition.

Update 2: We’ve also won the world finals. You can read about the whole Imagine Cup journey here.

Here’s an interesting campaign from Microsoft Australia to promote Office 2007. By listening to a short thirty-second demo of Office 2007 presented by a nine year old kid, Microsoft promises to donate one Australian dollar to the Smith Family – a charity in Australia to support. Although the site’s terms and conditions state “Microsoft may choose to donate up to $100,000 regardless (of number of views)”, the kids puts a smile on your face anyway so check it out.

Ethan (top left kid) especially has a rather interesting explanation of “What is Microsoft”. And Elani (bottom right kid) has a rather blunt answer to the question “What do you learn at school”. I’ll leave you to check it out for yourself and everything else.

If you need another reason to have a look, it’s also a pretty polished Silverlight site.

A couple of hours ago Microsoft Research released the first public beta of Worldwide Telescope since it’s debut last month. The software is a seamless combination of various state-of-the-art Microsoft technologies including Live Lab’s Photosynth and Seadragon with of course the magical high-resolution pictures from numerous imaging satellites including the Hubble. Those who’ve played with it already will probably agree with how breathtaking the experience is.

Sooner or later you’ll probably want to share some of the galaxies you’ve visited. Whilst you could design and distribute your own “Guided Tour”, pictures are probably still the safest bet. Here’s a couple steps to make sure you get the most out of your pictures.

Step 1: First and most obviously is to find something interesting in the universe. A good place to start are the galleries on the top. Once you’ve found something, play around with the zoom and pan to get it perfect.

Step 2: In the “Settings” tab, move the “Image Quality” slider to “Sharper” and tick “Auto Hide Tabs” and “Auto Hide Context”. This will maximize your view to get a much wider picture.

Step 3: In the “View” tab, untick “Figures”, “Boundaries”, “Ecliptic”, “Reticle/Crosshairs” to remove any artificial lines or overlays in your image.

Step 4: Maximize your window (and wait for any image tiles to update), and then click the sub-menu in “View” and click “Copy Current View to Clipboard”. Wait a few seconds, then paste it in Paint or your favorite image editor.

Voila. Fit for a wallpaper or just send it to your family and friends to show off your new astronomy skills.

Not too long ago, users on the Neowin.net forums started complaining about not being able to send YouTube links to their contacts on Windows Live Messenger. I was skeptic at first, but it didn’t take me very long to confirm that is indeed the case.

As you can see, any messages that contain in text or links to “www.youtube.com” fails to be delivered.

Curious as a cat, I loaded up a network packet sniffer to find out exactly what’s going on behind the scenes. Technically, the message packets are in fact sent to the Messenger servers (so it’s not being blocked at your client), but the server sends back a negative acknowledgment (NAK) packet instead of an acknowledgment (ACK) packet. Simply speaking, the server is refusing the message.

As some people may recall, in 2006 there was a report quoting MSN Sweden admitting Microsoft is “censoring” messages it deems a security threat. How it does this is by matching messages with a known list of text strings which are commonly found in phishing and malware sites such as “download.php”. Microsoft doesn’t publishes which strings are on this list for obvious reasons, but a comprehensive list of known blocked strings can be found here.

We all love a good conspiracy, but I don’t think anyone at Microsoft was dumb enough to do this deliberately to undermine Google. On the other hand, even if it was an accident, how do you ever trust this system?

Update (11/5/08): Not surprisingly YouTube links are working again.

Update 2: The Windows Live Messenger blog published a post admitting the problem which they claim was entirely controlled by a third party and their process of blocking harmful URLs. Another good reason to outsource.