Gallery

Climbing on the Cloud

Posted on 8 Dec 2008 at 16:47

Jon Honeyball tries not to get too cynical about azure, finds the best of British in a high-end hi-fi kit, and breaks the iris scanner at Heathrow.

Naim HDX

I've now had the chance to have a good play with the new Naim HDX hard disk-recorder system, which rips CDs onto a pair of internal hard drives, does all the internet lookup and plays top-quality audio, too. And my reason for mentioning this piece of high-end hi-fi kit from a top British company? Because it runs Windows XP Embedded. Of course, you wouldn't know this from using the front-panel touchscreen - there's no Start button displayed, but by using embedded XP Naim has managed to meld the best of the computer world with the best of the hi-fi world into one package.

Bringing together such hardware into one box was always going to be risky, and the marriage of an electrically noisy PC-style switched-mode power supply in close proximity to high-end audio components was brave, requiring lots of tweaks to keep noise and interactions under control. But Naim has worked tirelessly since the product's launch and finally nailed all the initial glitches, and it's also released a set of software updates for the Embedded Windows side of things. It's good to see UK companies using PC technology this way.

IRIS scanner

Talking of unusual applications of Windows, I was recently in the Concorde Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 5 waiting for a flight to Los Angeles. I had a few hours to spare, so once I'd tired of the champagne and canapés I decided to wander out among the great unwashed to find the IRIS registration room. Here, I could get my eyes scanned by a clever optical system, so that whenever I return to the UK I can whizz through the IRIS lane and don't need to queue for Passport Control.

I'll confess that I sometimes have a bad effect on digital devices, so I shouldn't have been too surprised that the scanner crashed as soon as I sat down. The operative sighed and said "it's having a bad morning". Moreover, as he rebooted the computer I noticed the words "Windows 2000 Professional" staring at me from the scanner's display screen. Could it be that this leading-edge, state-of-the-art security solution from the Home Office, charged with keeping unwelcome malcontents out of our country, employs a dual-output video card running Windows 2000 Professional? Does it matter that support for this vintage OS has long since been withdrawn? Clearly not.

VMware Fusion

I'll have to admit that I'm still in love with VMware's Fusion desktop product. Okay, I run it on my Mac, but there's a Window-hosted equivalent. You might wonder why I prefer to use the Mac for hosting desktop VMs, and the answer is simple: sometimes, I have to deal with dodgy software - cleaning spyware, viruses or other nasties - and I prefer the host operating system to be unrelated to the one that's running in the VM.

Of course, I ensure that there's no networking from the infected VM machine back to the outside world, but often I do need to be able to inject an application into the VM from outside. Fortunately, VMware has a great tool called host directories that lets you map file space on the host machine through to the VM. Again, it's preferable the host OS be in no way related to the test OS, so I can ignore the possibility of something nasty in the VM trying to escape via shared file space.

Anyway, I recently needed to push this product hard, by which I mean to make extensive use of its snapshotting capability. To do this, I set up a base Vista installation and patched it and service-packed it up to date. Then I took a snapshot of this setup, which created a freeze-dried image of the OS. I could then install one set of test applications and work on those, then take another snapshot and store all the changes. Then I could restore back to the base OS snapshot and start all over again - install a second test environment, work on it, take a snapshot when done, roll back to the base OS snapshot and install a third set of tests, and so on ad infinitum.

Download a year of Jon Honeyball's Advanced Windows columns by heading to our Free Downloads site