Real World Computing
VM licences
Yes, it undoubtedly has a range of powerful capabilities, and when you need them you'll really need them. Being able to remote manage a smartphone is a welcome capability, especially when your CEO has just left his phone on the back seat of a cab in central London. By one tool too far I meant this system centre now has such a large set of capabilities that it's almost bigger than the various platforms it's trying to manage, and it increases the amount of "stuff" that a sysadmin has to know significantly - despite the system centre being there to help with online information consolidation. Microsoft needs to be careful here as, although I think a system centre is a great idea, it's an area that would benefit from a healthy dose of smart thinking, maybe from Microsoft Research. At the end of the day, I want a management tool that says, "I'm happy" or "I'm not happy" and then takes me to the location of the ache.
Trackstick
Now here's a device that falls into the must-have category. I accept it's a little pricey and that there are doubtless other ways of solving this problem, but this one is such a neat way of going about it that I just had to present it to you. It's called a Trackstick, from www.trackstick.com, and it looks like an oversized USB key - and there is indeed a USB plug under a removable cover. But it isn't a storage device at all,but rather a complete GPS (global positioning satellite) receiver and processing unit. It runs on a pair of AAA batteries that will keep it functioning for weeks, and all it does is turn itself on to record your position, speed, altitude and a bunch of other stuff including temperature. It does this every few seconds and there's enough memory in it to store many days worth of such data. There are no controls on the device, since it's activated by vibration or movement. And, best of all, the device is water-resistant and comes with a magnetic mount clamp, so you can clip it onto a range of interesting places, or just pop it on the dashboard of your car.
This in itself is most interesting, but where is the Windows angle? Well, that comes from the free, bundled software. When you're done travelling around, you remove the USB plug cover and pop the Trackstick into your Windows machine onto which you've installed the software, and this lets you download the data files, convert them into a range of formats, and even to walk through each measurement step by step. Where things become really wild, though, is with its integration with Google Earth - the free 3D visualisation software. Press the right button and save the data file in Google Earth's KMZ file format, and then up pops your route directly on the Google Earth world-space - move your mouse around the route and it tells you your speed, the date and time, and the overall direction.
Speed is interesting, of course: this is no sure way to get you off a Gatso prosecution, but it might well raise "reasonable doubt" in the minds of the magistrates if you can show that, at the point in question, you weren't doing the speed claimed by a policeman armed with a hand-held radar gun. Don't for one moment think that I'm proposing this as a means to get out of a rightful prosecution, and bear in mind that a judge might well wonder why you feel the need to keep such a device ready to "prove" your claimed innocence. But it might be useful to pop one into the car that your teenage son is borrowing for the evening, for example. Or it could be fun to record where you've been on a long holiday, so you can work out which places had been visited or missed. Overall, I think this is a fun integration of tiny GPS technology coupled to a great Windows application. I'm certainly going to keep it on the dashboard of my cars for the next month or so, to build up a plan of the routes that I actually take!
