I have had two issues with Windows 7 so far. The first was 64 bit support for Citrix Access Gateway – delayed apparently until December or even first quarter of next year. Rather than waiting we have implemented a temporary solution in OpenVPN. This works really well, however you do need to make some changes on installation and running (mostly to do with admin privileges). It also doesn’t get around the port restrictions people face when travelling thanks to overzealous hotel firewalls. Still, it works well for us.
The second issue was weird – Windows 7 doesn’t like WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol). That’s not really a bad thing in itself, as WEP is trivial to crack, and is strongly discouraged in practice. I was at one of the big four law firms in Auckland for a board meeting, to find that their guest network uses WEP and Windows 7 would only allow a manual add of the network. The interface for doing this is screwy, because you use a wizard initially to create the wireless profile, but if you have to change the encryption method you lose the network key hash, so you have to re-enter it. This is very frustrating when it was 25 characters long! Needless to say I have been talking to their CIO and asked them to upgrade to WPA2.
I have to go to a meeting in the United States in October, and I was pleasantly surprised about some of the tools to make travel a little easier. Air NZ have the great mpass app for the iPhone (and any java capable phone like Blackberry), visit www.airnz.mobi to get it and to quickly lookup deals, flight timetables and arrivals / departures.
Another innovation was how much travel you can book online, including multistop, and returning from a different city. As an example, I always prefer to fly into San Francisco as it is an easier airport to arrive and transit, whereas the Koru lounge at Los Angeles is just like home so always prefer to depart from there. The only feature missing from the multistop booking tool is that arranging travel in different classes on parts of your journey is still a manual process. Fortunately we have a great travel agent in Paula Ward at the Air NZ Travelcentre Hamilton.
SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest) have a nice app for tracking your accommodation plans, making bookings (great for when you forget details like the address of the hotel), for the endless forms and pre flight online paperwork.
Last week it was like all my Christmases had arrived at once. IT Partners continues to grow with the latest addition being Christo Allers, an engineer who comes to us with a lot of experience. He will be a great addition to the team. We are also having great new clients coming on board and we are finding the business environment very positive (so some of those stats coming out must be correct).
It was made even better by an Apple TV. For those of you not familiar with one, think of your latest generation iPod connected to a TV with internet connectivity and massive amounts of storage. I have connected mine via an HDMI cable, which made the whole setup easy, and the device is connected wirelessly and secured by WPA2. It automatically syncs with our home laptop, has our iTunes account on it (so you can download movies and music independently) and connects into our Bose music centre. Previously we were using the headphone jack to connect the iPod or laptop so the sound quality is vastly improved. The best functionality though is that the device is so easy to use.
With all the enquiries and interest in the iPhone 3 GS – I could no longer resist the urge to upgrade. Basically, it’s just faster (which I do appreciate), so a little ho hum if you have been upgrading from the Gen 2 models running the 3.0 firmware.
However all this was topped by the NBR article on Femtocells. As Chris Keall so nicely put it, the possibilities are potentially seismic for Vodafone. The ability to improve in-building / in-house call strength is going to do away with a real bugbear, but where the excitement is building is what this could offer in new functionality: VoIP on your mobile at home or work, presence detection, and further “local zone” improvements.