As such, I am pleased to announce these gadgets are now available for download once again from my Skydrive account by clicking on the following links:

Countdown Gadget v1.2.0 – http://bit.ly/CountdownGadget

Melbourne Freeway Times – http://bit.ly/FreewayTimesGadget

Of course, if you wish to know more, please click on the Gadget link of the blog for more details.

Since Christmas lots has happened, I have been busy posting over at my other site, epmsource.com, which covers stuff I tend to do on a daily basis. The site is doing extremely well, with visitor numbers climbing steadily and some great feedback from the community. I am aiming for one to two original posts a week, which is pretty hard to achieve. It’s quite easy to repost other stuff, but it’s the originality that is the killer. As well as the site, I also have been spending a heap of time getting the EPM 2010 message out there either in person or in the forums.

In April I was lucky enough to be awarded a Microsoft MVP award for Project. When I first found out I was nominated I was blown away, then to receive the award a few weeks later put me into orbit. It certainly is humbling to think my colleagues and the community feel that my knowledge in Project was sufficient to be recognised.

Whilst talking about Project, I have also been involved in a heap of public speaking engagements, including:

• Numerous Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) meetings
• The Office, SharePoint and Project Server 2010 community launch event
• The Australian SharePoint Conference

As well as bending anyone’s ear I can find at the monthly MOSSIG meetings.

On a more personal note, my folks came out on holiday for a few weeks at the beginning of the year which was awesome. The kids loved spending time with their grandparents and getting to see there is more to them than an hour a week on skype. I have also been trying to spend more quality time with the family over the weekends, and as a family we have been making sure we use the weekend time wisely. We have had some great times out at the museum, in the city, cinema and generally hanging out and having fun. We’ve also managed to squeeze a number of birthdays and parties into the mix, both kids starting kinder as well as building what felt like the worlds biggest cubby house, dancing concerts and a wedding to boot.

So there you go, as you can see it’s been a busy time, hopefully it will ease up over the next few months so I can get some nerdy posts out… in fact I have one I am working on now.

Of the four times a day I have to touch the myki card on a reader, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. One of those touch’s will fail or take a long long time to scan. Pretty unacceptable, but also damn annoying for those people in the queue behind me whilst they wait for the card to work.

So, I figured it would be good to warn them why you are stooped over at the ticket barrier swearing, so I have designed a t-shirt. It has the same message printed on both side and lets your fellow commuters know why you are holding them up, and why you are muttering swear words to yourself.

Now I was going to use interpretive dance to go over the major milestones of the past 10 years, but the video camera is broken, so here it is in a smart mosaic format (I won’t rule out doing the dance on special occasions though) 

1. Australia

I came to Australia, just over ten years ago on holiday, but only really decided to stay in the year 2000 after being made an offer by my boss at Admiral (-> CMGAdmiral –> LogicaCMG –> Logica) to stay on as a consultant. It was a huge decision to make, to leave my friends and family and to start afresh. Luckily I had already made a stack of friends in Australia and caught up with a mate from the UK who also lived in Melbourne. On reflection it was the best decision I made

2. Rachel

In 2001 I met Rachel, since then we have never really been apart. We have been through a heap together, building a house, starting a family and bringing up two fantastic children. She is my best friend and I love every moment we are together.

3. Abbie

In March 2006, my daughter Abbie came into the world and changed everything. She is awesome. Perfect in every way. I am loving watching her grow up, explore the world around her and learn. I love her inquisitive mind, her pure logic and banter.

4. Jack

In March 2007, little Jack joined his sister in the world. Whilst Jack had a pretty full on couple of months when he first arrived, he has gone from strength to strength ever since. I sometimes forget he is only 2 and 3/4 years old, he has such a developed vocabulary and self awareness. Every week he totally flaws me with what he says, not the words, but also the context

5. Family

Even though I live in Australia, I am in full contact with my family in the UK thanks to Skype and cheap telephone calls. I have been really lucky that Rachel’s family have taken me under their wing and treat me like a son. Unfortunately since being out in Australia a few people have passed on and I was unable to attend their funerals, Grandad Bob, Nan and my cousin Janet.

6. Work

Work has been an interesting one. In the last ten years I have done a number of things including:

• Sheep Rousing – Working on a sheep farm outside of Geelong
• Road Crack Counter – Long long story
• Developer
• Business Analyst
• Project Manager

At the moment I have switched back into a consultancy role, specialising in Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solutions. It may sound strange, but it’s the ideal mix between my love of all things techy and Project Management (which I am actually quite good if I do say so myself).

7. Nerdy

There have been a number of nerdy milestones in the past ten years. For what started out with me minus any gadgets whatsoever whilst backpacking, has seen me morph into a gadget collecting superfreak. Of course during this period I have had many different computers and run a stack of different software which I am not going to list as it would be way to sad.

8. Permanent Residency

For some damn fool reason, Australia decided that I could stay in the country. Glad they did really as it would have been awful to be paying off a house I couldn’t live in. Up until getting my PR there was a very real possibility that I could have been sent back to the UK, giving up everything I had made in Australia. This was very much the case until 2006, when it was finally granted

9. Geelong

When I first got to Australia I worked on a sheep farm outside of Geelong, hence when it came to picking a team, they were my first choice. When I was in the UK, sport never really bothered me, but it’s part of the Australian psyche, and if your in Melbourne, you might as well be a leper if you can’t hold your own in talking footy.  Since 2000, I have watched them lose and then win, finishing up with three grand final appearances in the past three years and two wins, the final being an epic battle against my wife’ family team of St Kilda. Way to go Cats!

So there you go, my reflection on the past decade. At the beginning of the decade, when I was seeing the new year in with some backpacking buddies at Wineglass Bay in Tasmania, I had no idea that I would still be in Australia ten years later and all the things mentioned above would have happened. It will be interesting to see in another ten years what transpires

And on that note, Happy New Year, 2010 is going to rock

• The first time Project or Project Server had been presented at MOSSIG
• The first time Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 had been seen by a number of people
• and most importantly, the first time I have ever presented to a user group.

What I thought was going to be daunting, was actually quite exhilarating. I loved it. The presentation was very light on slides and heavy on showing off some of the awesome features of Project and Project Server 2010. Unfortunately the demo gods were against me, and one part of the demo died, but the rest behaved itself.

Anyway, why am I sharing this with you? Well I have been light on the blog posts here and have been spending my time absorbing all things Project 2010, getting my hands dirty on some big PS projects and starting a new blog where I can share my findings and thoughts with the community called EPMSOURCE.COM.

I will be posting on all things Microsoft EPM over at EPMSOURCE regularly, you can subscribe at http://epmpire.wordpress.com/feed/ or alternatively, go to www.epmsource.com and enter your email address to get the posts directly in your inbox.

Updated 12/1 – blog changed to www.epmsource.com, please update your bookmarks.

Today I had two virtual machines chugging along when we had a power outage. Yes I know I should have bought a UPS, but to be honest I would rather spend the money on a SSD When the power came back, I couldn’t get the VM’s to boot back up, getting a “Could not get the storage format of the hard disk” error:

After a quick Bing, I stumbled upon someone suggesting mounting the VHD in Windows 7 which may fix the problem. Low and behold it did. So in an effort to give something back, here are the steps to ‘fix’ the vhd  in Windows 7.

1. In Computer Management, Choose Action and Attach VHD.

2.In the ‘Attach Virtual Hard Disk’ dialogue, choose the location of the disk and click OK

3.When the VHD has mounted you will see it in the list, with a blue icon indicating it’s a VHD

The process of Attaching will have fixed the VHD, so now you need to do is detach the drive and it should work in VirtualBox again

4. Detach the drive by right clicking on it and choosing Detach VHD:

Click Ok in the Detach Virtual Hard Drive dialog, do NOT choose the ‘Delete the virtual hard disk file after removing the disk’ option.

The VHD should now be fixed and ready to use in VirtualBox once again.

Last week at TechEd there were a few people going around with some strange monsters with massive hands attached to their passes. On further investigation I found out these were called Poken and probably one of the coolest things I have seen in a long while.

So what is a Poken? Well it’s an RFID device with a USB interface that when you touch another Poken or ‘High four’ there is an exchange of RFID Id’s.

Now why is that cool? Well when you insert your Poken into a computer USB slot, you are taken to a website where you can configure your contact details and more importantly, your social networking details. So when you High Four someone else, you automatically exchange contact details, but also add them to whatever social network sites you have configured. Tres cool.

Now I just have to hope more people get on the Poken craze so I can use mine a bit more! In the future it would be great for conference organisers to consider giving out something like this as part of the freebies, so you can exchange contact details with fellow delegates instead of it being exhibitors grabbing delegates details.

Well, I am pleased to announce that after successfully completing my 70-633 and 70-634 exams last week, and along with the 70-632 exam I passed last month, I am now a Microsoft Certified IT Professional in Enterprise Project Management with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend Tech-Ed on the gold coast. This was my first Tech-Ed after wanting to go for a number of years but not having a job that easily allowed it. This year I decided to fund the trip myself so I could go and to 
sum it up in one word – AWESOME!

Here is my round up of the event, including some thoughts on things I would like to see in the future…

Session choice – There was a raft of sessions to choose from across a number of tracks. I picked a number of sessions and in many cases had three or four options to choose from for each timeslot. From my perspective there were a couple of standout sessions including Reed Shaffners Office 2010 overview, Project Gemini and Will, Lee Hickin and Elaine’s BPOS presentation.

Networking – I really underestimated the networking opportunities at Tech-ed. As usual it was great to catch up with the usual ex SDM Crew and other Melbourne based SharePoint people, but it was also good to catch up with other SharePoint and Project Server people from both Microsoft and other partners.  On the way home I was giving a bit more thought to the networking aspect, next year it would be good to formalise some of the networking aspects other than just the expo hall and adhoc sessions in the local bar. I personally would love to see a Microsoft competency or technology based breakfasts / meetings / dinners similar to what happens at the partner conference for the various groups of partners or people with relevant technology skills could meet up and build their network.

Social networking – Twitter was huge with an absolute stack of posts and information being distributed via the #auteched hashtag. It was funny to go to sessions and see everyone sitting there on their netbooks with Tweetdeck running away   I read Jeremy Thake’s post about improving the social aspects and having some kind of twitter integration into the session planning tool would be great. Building on this I would love to see users twitter names on their delegate badges as well as many of us are known by our twitter alta egos.

Facilities – The facilities at the Gold Coast Exhibition Centre were excellent. The quality of the catering absolutely blew me away.

Network – There was a heap of posts about getting the GCECC network up to scratch for the Tech-Ed. The Microsoft team did a fantastic job in getting the network up and running and maintaining the speed. There were a few idiots who thought it would be good to start up bittorrent, with one wally sitting next to me in a session surfing The Pirate Bay

Netbooks – The netbooks were fantastic. Microsoft pulled off a blinder with the netbooks that will be the envy of other conferences the world over.  Seeing delegates that haven’t used Windows 7 get blown away by it’s speed and functionality on the netbook was really cool to see and no doubt served to build on the already fantastic reputation of  the software.  My only gripe around this was the TechEd websites, it would have been great to have optimised the sites to work on the smaller screens of the netbooks as this was the main mechanism for access.

Session level – On reflection of the content, I felt that the level of the sessions was more aimed at customers and didn’t really hit the target for the more cutting edge partners. I brought this up with a couple of my colleagues who agreed that a more partner focussed technical track would be good.

Certifications – I had the opportunity to take two exams whilst I was at Tech-Ed at a vastly reduced rate. The process for signing up was incredibly simple and the prometric exam centre well set up and staffed. As for the exams, more on that in a later post.

Hands on Labs – I stumbled across the HOL area late in the piece and had a pretty limited experience. However what I saw and tried out was easy to use and well implemented. I loved the fact that at the end of the lab you could email the lab notes to yourself to try again later. Whilst valuable, it is limited as you don’t have access to the the underlying VM. On the friday afternoon I was hoping to kill some spare time doing some labs, but they had shut, it would have been great to extend the opening times until the end of the Friday. Finally I would love for MS to allow the other HOLs that I hadn’t specifically tried to be available for use / download after tech-ed.

Free BPOS account – The free BPOS account was a stroke of genius.  I loved trying out the functionality and trying out the full functionality of Office 2010 including Communicator and using it to connect to my peers and people I met during the conference. The only downside to the whole BPOS experience was the need to register and have it configured at the BPOS stand in the expo hall which meant some attendees had to wait a while before it was set up. Next time it would be good if the default password was included on your attendee credentials and the user prompted to change them again.

All in all, I loved the whole experience and can’t wait to go again next year and learn about the next wave of technologies coming through and catch up with my peers! If you get the chance to go, do!

During my time off I have had a chance to catch-up on a few things I wanted to do for a while and as is my want, I will share them with you

• Wrote the first version of iFreewayTimes which I am looking forward to using in anger next week when I start driving to work;
• Went to the dentist with toothache and came out minus a wisdom tooth which has been pretty damn painful, but is getting better;
• Took the family to Philip Island for the day and had a great time searching for Penguins with the kids;
• I went through my twitter following list and was pretty brutal in un-following people. Twitter can be a very powerful tool, but it also can be a great source of noise. I don’t care if you need to go to the toilet, go, don’t tell me;
• I nuked most of my RSS subscriptions, of the 100+ feeds I subscribed to, I only really read 10 or 15;
• Learned to love my iPhone (no not that way @grumpywookie), damn it’s a fantastic device;
• Had an awesome time going shopping with the kids to buy mothers day presents, next week we get to repeat it for Birthday pressies;
• Was wrapped to learn that the last project I managed for Hyro went live without issue the week after I left to a fantastic reception all around the globe. It was unfortunate it was delayed two weeks so I couldn’t see it go live in person;
• Installed Windows 7 x64 Release Candidate. Wow. You would have already read all the posts about how good it is, they are true. It really is (more on this in a later post).

So there you have it, I can’t promise I will be blogging any more regularly, but I will try to.

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The web app uses the same logic as the existing FreewayTimes gadget and parses data directly from the VicRoads Traffic status site.  The flow and logic is pretty simple, you choose a direction, inbound or outbound, and the app then shows you the traffic times for all freeways in that direction and a traffic light based on flow.

The web app itself makes use of the excellent iUi framework for iPhone web app development that provides everything you need to create a fully functional web app that resembles the normal iPhone look and feel.

I intend to give this a bit of a workout over the next few weeks when I return to driving to work and back and will no doubt come up with a few enhancements. Once I am happy with it, I will release it properly.

Anyway, enough Beagle marketing. Of course if I am going to have a new ISP, I need a new way of viewing my usage, so I developed a new gadget… introducing Beagle Gadget v.1.0

I have to admit it looks pretty similar to the Optus gadget, but it has a couple of noticeable exceptions… TWO GRAPHS!!  Thanks to the excellent jQuery + jQuery progress bar I have been able to make the bars into dynamic graphs. The top bar shows your downloaded MB’s, if it’s green you are below your daily quota limit, if it’s red, your over.  The bottom bar shows the number of days remaining for the period. 

The gadget will also tell you if your shaped and will give you a countdown until you get your quota back.

There are a couple of other scenarios that certain beagle users can run into, depending on the accounts they use, but I haven’t coded them up as I don’t have specific test data to cover those accounts.

I am still not convinced as to whether I like the colour scheme of the graphs, but it’s fairly trivial to change them.

If your a beagle user and you would like to try the gadget out, it’s available for download from my Skydrive:

BeagleQuota.v1.0.0.gadget

Anyway, I have fixed the gadget so when there is no time available it will show ‘—‘ in the time.  I also took the opportunity to add a new News link which links through to Twitter for up to date news and communication and update the gadget to support Windows 7 a bit better.

The gadget will be up on the Live Gallery as soon as MS approve it. In the mean time you can get it from my SkyDrive.

Update : Gadget has been approved to the gallery and can be got from here.

As you would no doubt of already seen on the internet, the stability and quality of the build is rock solid. I haven’t really run into many show stopping bugs with day to day use of the operating system, but what I am finding as I explore more and more are the little things that make Win 7 stand out.  So in the style of Tim Sneaths post, here are some things I love!

1. Progress is displayed in the taskbar

When you do a file operation that results in a progress bar dialog being displayed, the item in the taskbar will also show the progress (see the copy below)

2. The Common Dialogs now have Search

Not sure if this was there in Vista, but the Common Save As dialog now has search in it. Damn it’s useful!

3. Improved Search Experience

By default each Explorer windows has a Search box in the top right hand corner, just the same as Vista, but the the text in the search lets you know the scope of the search straight off the bat.

Vista	Windows 7

Also, when you start to enter a search term, it will autosuggest, and give you the option to filter the search straight away.

Finally, the results displayed via the new Content view are pretty impressive. It shows more information, notice the thumbnail and image size and creation date.

4. Libraries

Instead of having to consolidate tens of folders into one folder in one location, through the concept of libraries you can have a virtual catchall that encompasses a number of directories spread out throughout the computer, both internal and externally attached drives. The GUI also looks to let network drives to be included in a library but I haven’t managed to get that to work yet. 

In the library you can set one of the included folders as the default directory, so if you are downloading files to the Documents library, they will always be stored in your nominated directory within the library. Pretty neat. 

5. Problem Steps Recorder

This isn’t something you would use everyday and certainly most home users would never encounter it. However, I work in the software industry and have been involved in many projects where users have been testing software and gone through nightmares documenting issues they found in the software. Enter the Problem Steps Recorder, the answer to my (and most IT companies) dreams.

What the PSR lets you do is record all the actions you take on the screen, each time you do something it takes a screenshot and highlights what you did. You can also choose to annotate each step manually. The output is a HTML archive that contains all the screenshots and steps you took which can be passed on to the IT dept, or development team with the most detailed steps to reproduce ever seen!  Awsome!

6. Gadgets

Well it wouldn’t be a post from me without something on gadgets. Vista introduced the concept of gadgets, they could exist in two places, either docked in the sidebar, or undocked on the desktop. Windows 7 removes the need to dock them in the sidebar, you can have them wherever you want. Each gadget now has an option next to it allowing you to choose between the docked (smaller) and undocked (larger) version of the gadget.

Microsoft have updated a couple of the gadgets and introduced another new one around the Media Centre. I have to admit, the Media Centre one is good, but it’s too big and obtrusive for me.  The weather gadget changes have impressed me, it now uses Windows 7’s location functionality when you configure it to make an educated guess on where you are. If you lose your net connection (as I am experiencing now), it will still show the weather as per when it last downloaded, including a xx hours ago notification in red. Finally, if there is still no connection, it will show the forecasted weather instead of the real up to date info. Nice!

6. Reliability Monitor

Another concept that Vista introduced was the Reliability Monitor. This gave you an indication of how reliable your system was behaving. When you first installed your machine, it would start at 10, and then as an error occurred, either in the OS itself, or an application or driver didn’t behave itself, it would decrease. 

With Win 7, the reliability monitor has been given a face lift and now has a much more polished way of showing the issues affecting the machine and provides a mechanism for looking up those issues within the GUI. 

On the whole my machine has been behaving pretty well and I reckon the reliability monitor is being a little harsh (as per the above screenshot). As you can see, there are no real Windows failures, but heaps and heaps of Application failures which are mainly cases of the Windows Installer bug and Internet Explorer crapping out. I really hope IE 8 gets better with RC1, because the version in the Beta is letting the side down at the moment.

After pulling the feed, there is no common interface to call so it is necessary to code up a number of special cases to get the data, which has become to painful to implement using my knowledge of Javascript and the sidebar gadget platform. 

Now it’s not all doom and gloom, I have managed to get the gadget going for some people:

• At the risk of sounding like a developer, the gadget works fine for me and my Optus account. I can also confirm it works ok for other users;
• Thanks to some of the guys on Whirlpool, I have also tested and confirmed the gadget returns and parses data from a static Fusion account usage page;

What you should be aware of is that there is some complexity around certain users where a number of http redirects occur to authenticate. It appears some users have account details stored in different machines within Optus, so when you try to logon, your credentials are handed around with hidden forms and session strings to other machines before coming back. The gadget hates this and returns the redirects. During debugging with the Grumpywookie I found four different redirects happening and decided that this was too damn hard to implement. If you account falls into this I am sorry. 

Anyway, the gadget is up on my Skydrive account for downloading. I won’t be releasing it to gallery.live.com as I don’t feel it is of sufficient quality to be up there. Once Optus release a stable feed to query I hope that the gadget will once again return to it’s previous stable and working for everyone state. 

Download the gadget

The most important point I need to highlight is that the gadget effectively implements screen scraping to get the data it needs for calculations and is at the mercy of Optus. If they change the source of the usage pages it may stop working again.

The best approach IMO would be for Optus to publish a secure API that we could query against.  Given usage info is of no use to anyone really except the user, maybe allow the user to activate an API key, that provided anonymous usage info at http://usage.optusnet.com.au/APIKEY. It should be relatively simple to query against and would remove any of Optus’s security concerns. Given the comments recieved on this blog and on WhirlPool, I think the users would like it too.  How about going on the front foot for once Optus?

For those of you that are interested the release notes (as they stand) are after the break… 

1. The way the gadget gets the usage info has changed significantly (duh!). The gadget now logs into the member usage pages, parses the info and logs back out.  The code has been tested for the last few days and seems to work ok;

2. It’s too damn hard to parse the usage page to get the period start and end dates and work out the number of dates in the period. The gadget assumes 30 as this seemed to be correct for most if not all users;

3. The gadget has special code for parsing Fusion and Non Fusion account types. During testing it became apparant that there is nothing common in the pages presented for the two account types, so the parseing routine had to be coded up again to handle a special case.

4. If you have a usage page session open, the gadget may crap out when it first tries to connect due to what is returned by Optus on the web page. In such a case you will either need to logout of the page, or wait 15 minutes when the gadget polls again and the correct info will come down;

5. The gadget has a fix for Windows 7 that stops the annoying expand / contract / dock / undock side effect [I noticed it, didn't you? ].

6. I have removed the automatic update notification, instead click on the news link to get a Twitter feed of news for the gadget (twitter rocks!)