1. Revenge of the Start Menu. Microsoft will resurrect the fabled Start menu in Windows 8, and will provide a startup option that allows users to run in a Windows classic desktop mode or the new tiled interface. This will very likely coincide with the Surface Pro early in the year, and may in fact help them gain some inroads to the tablet market. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the rest of the year will continue to be dominated by all things Apple.
2. Intra-Cloud Networks. Many organizations currently undertaking cloud initiatives will re-examine ways for these to get managed in-house. If you already oversee network infrastructure, particularly in a production environment, there is little benefit to cloud-sourcing components in this configuration. As such, you can expect the boon of cloud sourcing to dwindle without many of the larger organizations ever really getting onboard.
3. Autonomous Vehicles Hit the Road. There is going to be a lot of this, but before the end of the year expect to have one or more cars to choose from that support some kind of autonomous driving. This will very likely mark the end of the hybrid craze as drivers start shopping for cars with advanced cruise control capable of regulating both the speed and direction of the vehicle.
4. Android Growing Pains. This may be nothing, but we should expect to see some Android vendors defecting to other platforms, with Windows Phone 8 being a logic alternative. The legal wrangling with Apple and Microsoft has many of these vendors scared, and so far Google has done nothing to ameliorate these concerns.
5. Apple Content Deal with TV Networks. This will be the lynchpin of an AppleTV product; a content licensing agreement for TV on demand covering the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, FOX) at a fixed monthly cost similar to your current cable. Imagine if $15 a month gained you access to on-demand access for all of your favorite shows using iTunes and of course the as yet unannounced AppleTV.

As always, the real surprises haven’t even been imagined yet. It is quite likely we will see the end for both BlackBerry and Nokia in the months ahead, along with potentially a few other technology giants as the economy continues to drive a downturn in consumer confidence.

Let me preface this by saying these instructions assume Ubuntu Server. Additionally, unlike my previous instructions this does require development tools and a little bit more hacking.

1. Install Pre-Requisits. You are going to need to compile a filter for CUPS; to do this the libcups library is required. Unfortunately, this cannot currently be installed directly using the CUPS development libraries for Ubuntu as a result of a downstream dependency error. However, the Linux Standard Base (LSB) libraries will include this for you:

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install lsb-build-base3

After installing, you will need to fake out the cups include directory:

$ cd /usr/include
$ ln -s lsb3/cups .


Finally, the library version is currently at 2 which requires another tweak so that we can link directly:

$ cd /usr/local/bin/
$ ln -s libcups.so.2 libcups.so


2. Install libHaru. This is a PDF library and can be downloaded from http://libharu.org/wiki/Downloads. It can be easily compiled and installed on Ubuntu, you may cut and paste the following and execute at a command prompt:

$ wget http://libharu.org/files/libharu-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf libharu-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ cd libharu-2.2.1/
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install


3. Download urftopdf and compile. This is the most critical part, and is contingent on the previous steps. You can find this on GitHub at https://github.com/superna9999/urftopdf or you may refer to the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/superna9999/urftopdf.git
$ cd urftopdf
$ make
$ sudo ./install_pdf.sh


During the build process, pay particular attention to the output of make. Since there is no standard configuration script, any kind of build failure presents itself here; this is a typical result of compiling urftopdf on an x86_64 Ubuntu server with Linux kernel 2.6.32:

$ make
cc urftopdf.c -lhpdf -lcups -o urftopdf -lm
urftopdf.c: In function ‘main’:
urftopdf.c:327: warning: comparison between pointer and integer


4. Update URF Text Record in AVAHI Printer Configuration. In your AVAHI printer configuration file(s), either update or add the following <txt-record/>

<txt-record>URF=W8,SRGB24,CP1,RS600</txt-record>


In most cases, your AVAHI printer definitions can be found in /etc/avahi/services.

5. Update MIME Type in AVAHI Printer Configuration. Within the same printer configuration file(s), ensure the following record exists with these MIME types:

<txt-record>pdl=application/octet-stream,application/pdf,application/postscript,image/gif,image/jpeg,image/png,image/tiff,text/html,text/plain,application/openofficeps,application/vnd.cups-banner,application/vnd.cups-pdf,application/vnd.cups-postscript,image/urf</txt-record>


6. Restart CUPS and AVAHI.

That should do it. From your iOS 6 device the printers on your Linux server will be visible and you can once again print. As previously noted, this has the added benefit that the AirPrint devices can also be shared with your Mac OS X computers.

Make no mistake about it, Windows 8 is a significant paradigm shift for Microsoft.Unfortunately, in the process of doing this, desktop users are going to be impacted as a result of the redesign of the traditional Start menu in favor of a tiled main menu screen. Many of the start menu features that users are accustom to have been either moved to new places on the screen or eliminated entirely. This revised interface has been called Windows Metro UI or now simply just Window 8.

In many ways this is similar to the Unity redesign that Ubuntu Linux went through over a year ago. Unity is a revised application launcher menu for Ubuntu desktops, but it lacks the simple organizational structure of the previous launcher. As a result, many users are installing the old menu or switching to distributions like Mint that don’t support Unity.

So how can Microsoft make their tablet redesign into a killer feature for desktops?

1. Restrict the new Start screen to “tablet” mode. Users would only see the new start screen when running a device in tablet mode. Once the machine is either docked or connected to a keyboard it would automatically switch to the standard Windows interface with Start menu intact.

This particular design choice would likely require applications to have two versions; one version that can run as a standard Windows application and another that runs from the new Metro UI.

2. Force everything to run in Metro UI. Use the API hooks for Windows to present a Metro style UI for all calls. For example, when creating an IFileDialog the Metro UI version would pop up instead. This would cascade all the way down to opening the main window for an application, and would in fact force your application to run in a full screen mode.

Obviously, Microsoft would need to handle cases where application windows are small or model, and of course somehow the custom screens that some applications present would need to be fully tested. Games would continue to work well as most of these are a full screen experience anyway.

3. Rely on the tablet hardware. This is another approach, simply rely on the fact that the new Windows 8 tablets are highly coveted and users will retrofit these to run other tablet operating systems like Android.

There are plenty of opportunities for the Metro style UI paradigm evident in Windows 8, but clearly Microsoft is going to need to arrive at a more cohesive approach across different devices.

The first step was to configure a media server that would be visible from our TiVo. Using pyTivo was the ideal choice, and this was incredibly easy to configure. There were a few key settings to optimize it for our Tivo Premiere. Using the output pixel width/height the max resolution was bumped up to take advantage of the HD resolution, and ffmpeg_pram was used to maximize a dual-core dual-CPU server configuration:


[Server]
port=9032

# Full path to ffmpeg with options
ffmpeg=/usr/bin/ffmpeg
ffmpeg_pram=-threads 4

# Output Pixel Width
width=1440
height=720

# Use 16:9 aspect ratio
aspect169=true

[Movies]
type=video
path=/export/video/Movies

Increasing the number of threads for transcoding allows the pyTivo server to make HD quality video instantly accessible from my TV. You will need to exercise caution, however, if your server has less hardware then you need to adjust accordingly.

In this configuration, getting videos to the Tivo is as simple as copying them to the /export/video/Movies directory. While this is possible to do directly, automating this process for videos and movies in my iTunes database is more ideal. For movies tagged with meta-data it would be even better to publish this so that this information is displayed on my TiVo.

My first step was to relocate my iTunes database to my pyTivo server. These files were placed into /export/video/iTunes and includes Music, Movies and TV Shows. For the purposes of this only the Movies are going to be considered for publishing to Tivo. As videos are added to my iTunes database, they are copied into a subdirectory under /export/video/iTunes/Movies so my script simply watches this directory for new content.

Typical execution is something like this:

perl AtomicSage.pl monitor /export/video/iTunes/Movies /export/video/Movies/


A few things are going to be needed for AtomicSage, both AtomicParsley and the Perl library AtomicParsley::Command need to be installed. Additionally, the script assumes a Linux environment to monitor the iTunes movie directory for changes. When a new movie appears in iTunes, AtomicSage copies it to /export/video/Movies and organizes the files by genre. A meta file is created for each video, inside this file things like movie title, description and genre are stored – this information is displayed on your Tivo screen.

You can use this with home movies and something like MetaX as well. Once your videos are built, run MetaX and you can edit the meta-data within the M4V container. Using AtomicSage, once videos are added to iTunes the meta data is extracted and displays on your TV as you browse media from your movie collection.

If you’re ready to go, download AtomicSage and get your movie database organized.

A few factors govern the total size of your DVD media. Obviously, if you have a lot of video footage you are going to immediately be in trouble – the typical rule of thumb is a video will minimally require approximately 1 GB for 1 hour of footage. Since a DVD is limited to 4.37 GB this pretty much restricts you to about 4 hours of video with some flexibility for a main menu or 4+ hours if you’re willing to sacrifice a little.

Audio tracks can have significant impact on the size of the media. Surround sound formats like AC-3 require additional streams to store data, most motion pictures include a number of audio tracks usually with a minimum of a stereo AAC and a surround sound AC-3 data stream. For a small video with both of these audio tracks, there might be 500 MB of audio and 900 MB of video information for approximately 1 hour. For the audio data, my example has 350 MB of AC3 sound and 150 MB of AAC stereo audio – if you’re looking to conserve space, you can imagine which one you will want.

The other factor is arriving at a way to shrink your video. On a DVD disc the standard is pretty well established, it must be MPEG-2 and the screen resolution is fixed at 720×480 so you can’t shrink your videos by decreasing the resolution. On the other hand, you can alter the video bitrate (kbps) to control the amount of video data being rendered. I highly recommend checking out the DVD-HQ: Bitrate & GOP Calculator to help you determine the optimal settings for this. Once you arrive at a number for your video bitrate, use SmallDVD to convert into a disc image.

A few other commercial solutions exist for creating DVD discs on a Mac, but most don’t offer the flexibility to adjust the video bitrate. If you are trying to squeeze the most out of your discs and aren’t looking for movie studio quality results then this is the best way to go.

In most cases, users are happy to simply recover files off the computer and this will invariably include Internet Explorer bookmarks. If a replacement computer has already been acquired, it is most often either a Mac or an iPad, which are not compatible with IE bookmarks. Most users are happy to at least get an HTML file with all of their IE Favorites in it – and this is exactly what my conversion tool does for you.

Create a ZIP of the Favorites directory and upload it using this form, the result is a bookmarks.html file with your IE Favorites converted into links that you can view on a page or import into popular browsers (most notably Mozilla Firefox). You do not need to get the host computer running again to do this, and if you end up converting the PC to something like Ubuntu then this bookmark file can be imported directly.

None of these files are kept on the server after processing, they are temporary and translated in memory only. Depending on your browser, you may be prompted to download a file called bookmarks.html or this file may get automatically placed in your Downloads directory.

Programming paradigm shifts were rather evident on TIOBE during the past year, Objective-C moved from an 8th position into the top 5 programming languages and C# nearly overtook C++. I expect within a few more months the C# platform will move into the third position right behind Java and C, and of course Objective-C will continue to grow. What’s in store for 2012?

1. Microsoft Releases Software. There are a number of platform shifts underway, which is making it difficult for Microsoft to maintain a virtual monopoly on the PC desktop. In the new year, expect to see more apps for iOS and even Android from Microsoft, this will likely include a full Office offering that runs on your iPad. Microsoft may position their developer tools – including Visual Studio – for additional platforms including OS X and iOS development. Opportunities abound if Microsoft can return to its roots and focus on building great software and development tools without being locked to the Windows operating system.
2. Streaming Internet TV. This is going to be an emerging trend as consumers vent frustration with the complexities of cable providers like Comcast. The switch to digital cable has required subscribers to attach set-top boxes to their TV’s which invariably makes the entire configuration difficult for a PVR. Services like Hulu and Netflix continue to erode the market share of cable subscribers, and consumers will increasingly rely on online streaming for their television viewing. The key here is services that already integrate with your PVR (Netflix, Hulu and Amazon) are nearly universally available, and there is an opportunity for streaming TV providers to rebroadcast television over the Internet in much the same way as Comcast sends it to your home on cable. This paradigm shift will begin to disrupt cable TV providers in much the same way as VoIP rattled the land-line telephone industry.
3. Solid State Standard. SSD (Solid State Drives) have permeated the PC industry, and there are now a number of popular laptops that only ship with SSD. Expect this trend to continue and the popular MacBook Pro will get an update next year to have it ship with an SSD by default. As a bonus, MacBook Pro owners will have the option to also drop a 1TB hard drive into the unit so they can run the core operating system from the SSD and use the storage capacity of the larger hard drive. Dell and Toshiba will also revamp their model lineup to include an SSD in popular entry-level units as the default drive; for example, the Dell Inspiron and the Toshiba Satellite models.
4. Nokia Bankcruptcy. The popular cell-phone maker continues to lose market share, and the Lumia isn’t exactly going to turn the tide for them. While they continue to secretly work on Symbian in case the whole Windows Phone 7 thing doesn’t pan out, it’s pretty clear they have been left behind in the smart-phone market. It’s likely that a company such as HTC will acquire the Nokia name and use it for marketing purposes.
5. Google Acquires T-Mobile. They have Android and Motorola for headset hardware, the only thing remaining for Google is a cell phone carrier for their phone. The T-Mobile/AT&T merger has fallen through the cracks, which leaves T-Mobile ripe for an acquisition. With a complete solution like this, Google would be able to offer something that Apple cannot – a full service solution at a price point that Google can set.

The tablet computing market has emerged as a viable platform primarily as a result of Apple’s iPad gaining wide acceptance. Google and Microsoft are trying to get a corner of this market, and while it remains to be seen it seems likely that both Android and Windows 8 will end up playing a key role in the evolution of tablet computing as year unfolds. We should expect to see continued growth in the tablet market, and while opportunities abound it’s certainly going to be Apple that continues to dominate.

By the fall of next year, Apple will be openly discussing their television platform which will likely be a combination of a subscription service and a unique amalgam of technology that may include both a set-top box and a standard TV set. Microsoft will lament Windows Media Center and may try to re-market WMC on Apple’s coattails, but it’s unlikely to have any impact. Needless to say, 3D televisions will be out of vogue almost before the new year begins and the rest of the 3D market (cell phones, cameras, etc.) will dwindle as the year progresses.

Finally, Lytro will introduce a camera that you can actually use – 6 megapixels – but with 3D falling out of favor and the tricky proprietary software it may end up being too little too late. Whatever happens it will continue to be a wild ride and as always the most amazing stuff isn’t even on the technology radar yet.

Fortunately, the advent of OS X Lion also means you can legally virtualize your operating system for the purposes of development and testing. This is going to certainly offer a number of other advantages, but it immediately occurred to me that it would be an ideal springboard for testing my TimeMachine backup.

For this test, the latest version of VMware Fusion 4.0 was used, which includes drivers for OS X to easily enable your VM video, audio and network. Since I had already installed OS X Lion, it was necessary to download again from the App Store. After this downloads, do not run the installer but instead open your Applications directory from a command prompt and convert the installation disc from a DMG to an ISO that you can boot with VMware:

cd "/Applications/Install Mac OS X Lion.app/Contents/SharedSupport"
hdiutil convert InstallESD.dmg -format UDTO -o /Volumes/FantomHD/ISO/MacOSX_Lion
mv MacOSX_Lion.cdr MacOSX_Lion.iso

Don’t leave the ISO in the OS X install directory, you should copy this to an alternate location where it can be safely kept.

With the CD image in hand, launch VMware Fusion and create a new virtual machine. Select your OS X ISO for the installation media and VMware should automatically detect that this is Mac OS X. Rather than launching right away, you will want to customize your settings – particularly the network and hard drive size. Since you are going to be testing a restore of your system, select a hard disk size that matches the size of your OS X volume. If you’re not sure, from a command prompt you can usually use something like the following:

hostname:~ df -h /
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2  465Gi  222Gi  243Gi    48%    /

On my system, the primary volume is 500GB with 465GB formatted and 222GB used. So my virtual machine was given 300GB for the purposes of validating a full restore.

For the network configuration, change from NAT to bridged mode, this allows your VM to appear as another machine on the network and is going to be easier for me to test other things later on. If there are other VM settings you would like to change, this is a good opportunity to do so. After you are ready, launch the virtual machine and the OS X installation should start up for you.

When the installation is complete, there will be a reboot and you will be asked if you would like to restore your machine from another Mac or a TimeMachine backup. Do not run this process yet, for the time being create a new user account with a login that you can remove later (e.g.: “test”) and logon to a default OS X desktop.

Inside the virtual OS X desktop, open the finder and eject the OS X Lion installation disc. At this point, the operating system is installed and the only installation task remaining is to setup the VMware drivers. On the VMware menu, select Virtual Machines – Install VMware Tools; this will mount another ISO image in your OS X virtual machine and will provide you a VMware driver package link you can use to install. Once this is finished, a reboot is required after which you should be ready to initiate the restore.

If the system you are about to restore is still running, you should either shut it down or turn off TimeMachine backups. You won’t be able to initiate the restore from the TimeMachine volume while backups for the system are still active.

The restore is done using the Migration Assistant application, which can be found under Application – Utilities.

This utility is extremely flexible, it can restore settings from another Mac over the network, a hard drive connected to your machine or from a TimeMachine backup. For this test, I selected my TimeMachine backup and waited for it to find my remote volume.

After it connects, be patient while the size of your backup volume is analyzed. On my system over the network this took about 30 minutes to complete, at which point I was able to review everything available for the restore and could then initiate the process. The restore process itself took closer to 2 hours to complete, but this ran overnight so it was ready for me to check the next morning.

On my OS X desktop, all of my cosmetic settings appeared exactly the same – right down to the desktop wallpaper. There were a few applications that had licensing issues, and Mail required quite some time to analyze my inbox before it was ready, but critical data was instantly accessible – things like home movies, pictures, and source code.

It’s a relief to know that my OS X backup strategy is working, and that if it was necessary to restore my machine or any other Mac computer in our house that this TimeMachine volume is functional and would be able to facilitate that process.

Unfortunately, Oracle acquired Sun and has since discontinued the project and will return the OpenOffice framework to the developer community. There are a few new projects that have cropped up to address the gaps Oracle OpenOffice may be introducing, including the popular LibreOffice, but in the near term it’s not really clear what the prospects for OpenOffice.org are going to be.

So, despite my better judgment, after more than 10 years with OpenOffice I’m planning to standardize on Microsoft Office for a while. It has only been in the last few years that I have moved from a Linux desktop to Mac, which makes this transition even easier. However, I have a significant number of documents in OpenOffice format that need to get converted into MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Fortunately, I can use OpenOffice to do this for me.

My first step is to create some macros for automating the conversion, you can find this under Tools – Macros – Organize Macros – OpenOffice.org Basic.

Here you can see the macros that I have added under Module1, you may choose to create a new module or simple amend as I have done here. For each core document type, I have added a macro that is able to convert that file.

' Save document as a Microsoft Word file.
Sub SaveAsDoc( cFile )
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )
   oDoc = StarDesktop.loadComponentFromURL( cURL, "_blank", 0, (_
            Array(MakePropertyValue( "Hidden", True ),))

   cFile = Left( cFile, Len( cFile ) - 4 ) + ".doc"
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )

   oDoc.storeToURL( cURL, Array(_
            MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "MS WinWord 6.0" ),)
   oDoc.close( True )

End Sub

' Save document as a Microsoft Excel file.
Sub SaveAsXls( cFile )
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )
   oDoc = StarDesktop.loadComponentFromURL( cURL, "_blank", 0, (_
            Array(MakePropertyValue( "Hidden", True ),))

   cFile = Left( cFile, Len( cFile ) - 4 ) + ".xls"
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )

   oDoc.storeToURL( cURL, Array(_
            MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "MS Excel 97" ),)
   oDoc.close( True )

End Sub

' Save document as a Microsoft PowerPoint file.
Sub SaveAsPpt( cFile )
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )
   oDoc = StarDesktop.loadComponentFromURL( cURL, "_blank", 0, (_
            Array(MakePropertyValue( "Hidden", True ),))

   cFile = Left( cFile, Len( cFile ) - 4 ) + ".ppt"
   cURL = ConvertToURL( cFile )

   oDoc.storeToURL( cURL, Array(_
            MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "MS PowerPoint 97" ),)
   oDoc.close( True )

End Sub

Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue ) _
   As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
   Dim oPropertyValue As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
   If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Name = cName
   EndIf
   If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
   EndIf
   MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function

The next trick is to automate this, and I did that with a quick shell script. It’s really nothing fancy, and could easily be improved on – the idea is to find all the corresponding document types (ODT / ODS / ODP) and then execute the right macro from OpenOffice to convert from the OOO format into an MS Office file:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/OpenOffice.org.app/Contents/MacOS

find ~/Documents -name \*.odt -print -exec soffice -invisible "macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsDoc({})" \;
find ~/Documents -name \*.ods -print -exec soffice -invisible "macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsXls({})" \;
find ~/Documents -name \*.odp -print -exec soffice -invisible "macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsPpt({})" \;

That’s it. With a final backup from TimeMachine, I then went ahead and removed the remaining OpenOffice documents from my Document directory.

After this is installed on your system, it will take over your Windows desktop shell. As a result, when your computer restarts rather than run the standard Windows desktop you will be running Crashes Deliverer instead. This program actually creates a randomly assigned file name for the application and places that in:

%ApplicationData%\User Profile\Microsoft\[random].exe

Where [random] is in fact a random series of letters and numbers. Removal will require something like RKill to eliminate Crashes Deliverer from memory, I will explain in a little more detail how this can work.

1. Run Fake Scan. On reboot, Crashes Deliverer will take over your desktop. Follow the instructions to run the fake scan and then press Fix Errors. You won’t be able to get to your Windows desktop (or at least a crippled version of that) until completing the fake scan.
2. Close Crashes Deliverer Window. Close this window after completing the fake scan. Be aware that the program doesn’t actually exit, it will continue to run in the background thwarting many activities. For example, if you attempt to open Window Task Manager at this time it would erroneously identify that as a virus. Ignore all these warnings, this is not a true anti-virtus program.
3. Run RKill. Use RKill to terminate Crashes Deliverer, since you can’t bring up Task Manager or many other popular utilities for process management, RKill is going to be your best bet. Note that Crashes Deliverer can identify RKILL.EXE, so you must rename the program in order for it to run.
4. Update Your Registry. Remove the invalid registry key for the Windows logon shell, this will be pointing to the invalid Crashes Deliverer [random].exe. The following registry path should be purged: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Shell.
5. Remove Malware Executable. Remove the malware executable under %ApplicationData%\User Profile\Microsoft\[random].exe. You can use the name of the executable from the previous step or look for a sufficiently cryptic program name.
6. Run Anti-Virus. This should be something other than the anti-virus you were running before Crashes Deliverer, since it was unable to detect it. You can use something like Malwarebytes or Spybot.
7. Reboot.

It’s easy to see how you might get lured into running this program, it purports to be a trustworthy source for anti-virus protection. In fact, the only intention is to convince you to spend money on a program that will actually do nothing for you. If you do enter your credit card information, you should contact your credit card company and inform them of what has happened