I’ve been playing around with Orb, a sort of Slingbox Free, on the PC and iPhone and have got the usual remote login issues in that it tends to not connect more than it does connect, problems which I’ve had with all remote login apps.

But when it does connect it’s good. On the PC the software can be pointed at your iTunes folder and all of your media on iTunes is read into the Orb app. Takes a while but with 10’s of thousands of tracks, films, podcasts what do you expect. You can also sign up for internet TV stations and subscribe to them but this isn’t live TV but specially made content ready for streaming. If you’ve got a tuner card in your PC then you can stream live TV.

What is great though is that you can play any movies that you have ripped to iTunes which isn’t bound by any iPhone memory limit as it is streamed whilst you watch. That and access to 250gb of music on iTunes and played back on a 8gb iPhone is impressive. Then there’s access to your photo’s and documents. The picture quality isn’t perfect but what the….

I suppose we are all pioneers at this stuff at the moment but in a few years when they have got 4g out the door (Try several years. Ed) then the picture quality should be just about perfect and we will have high quality sound and video access to everything in iTunes and live TV. What comes after that, heaven knows.

As I’m having some trouble with VMware at work, in that I can’t get the darn thing to install an operating system from an ISo image file, I thought I’d do some research at home.

I downloaded VMware Workstation from their site and got stuck at the activation code page as I didn’t have one. I keep checking my email but I’m not receiving anything from them apart from a confirmation of the username and password. Did a search of Google and someone else had the same problem 3 times. Someone did respond to him that they no longer send activation codes via email but it’s actually on one of their web pages.

I’ll have another go at that later. In the meantime I’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 a bit more. I was thinking of having a play around with Sharepoint Server and that needed Windows Server so I installed a VM for Windows Server 2003 which installed OK. I immediately ran the Windows Update function and that couldn’t get a connection. I noticed that IE 6 when installed with Windows Server 2003 has the security settings set high so you can’t go anywhere without adding the URL as a trusted site. I added some sites to that list and of course it still didn’t work. Had a look at the hardware settings and there was no wireless adapter but there was the ethernet port so I plugged in a cable and was able to go visit the Windows Update site. That needed 43 updates. I then thought I’d see how the PC coped with another virtual machine running Vista Ultimate and also getting updates to itself. Lastly I created a new VM for Windows 2000 and at the same time as the updates for both VM’s were being downloaded I installed that operating system.

And it all worked, though a bit slow.

We managed to get a release of software live the other week and it was on time, a miracle where I am right now.

A whole load of problems came up in the last few days but we got them sorted out. Seems that this happens a lot, everybody gets stuck in to try and make the release get delayed, but it didn’t work this time. I got a lot of goodwill from this release. I was bcc’d an email to the one of the top guys at the company and was it a good reference. Jeez, that’s getting put in the resume.

We have another release due and its a magnitude more complex and, because of the last success, I’ve got no more help. That’ll teach me to be to smart. There are a whole load of specs and they’ve finally been signed off and that is a teeth pulling exercise in pain. Everybody looks at the process of signing off the specs and fails it numerous times. Eventually it got OK’d then I thought I’d have a look at it and guess what? I found loads of problems. Problems that were found in the last release and ended up either as raised defects or change requests and they’ve wrongly been re-spec’d. Why weren’t they found by those people failing the specs at sign-off time? So now there’s 6 major issues that have been sent to the software house pleading with them to amend the specs to reflect the changes. Now people are accusing me of finding problems with the software before it’s been written. He-he. Better now than later I suppose.

I spent the whole day writing test requirements in HP Quality Center and that’s one of the few times when I can listen to the music on the iPhone or iPod. If I’m writing test plans or running tests forget it, no chance of listening to music. Today all I listened to was Jay-Z for about 6 hours, and it was great.