Clouds of uncertainty are hovering over China’s airspace amidst signs of a confrontation brewing between the Chinese government and six foreign banks over state-owned airlines’ wrong-way bets on oil prices that resulted in losses, which the state wants the banks to bear.

Three of China’s leading airlines — Air China, Shanghai Airlines and China Eastern — slipped into the red after taking losses on derivatives contracts they had taken as hedge against aviation fuel price hikes. The losses came about because the airlines made market bets without hedging against prices moving the other way — because they wanted to save money on the additional fixed cost of insurance on those hedges.

But rather than pay up, as they are bound by the contract, it appears that the airlines may be allowed to walk away, leaving foreign banks to absorb the losses — or litigate and lose lucrative mainland banking licences.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (Sasac), the powerful regulator that oversees state-owned enterprises (SOEs), said in a statement that it would conduct an internal investigation into the contracts that banks sold these airlines.

“The purpose of this move,” the statement said, “is to protect our own interests by resorting to legal actions in commercial activities.” Last week, China’s reputed Caijing magazine claimed that Beijing would allow the airlines to default on the derivatives contracts. It reported that Sasac had written to six foreign banks to warn them that SOEs “reserve the right to default on commodities contracts.”

It isn’t immediately clear how serious the threat is, given that the contracts between the SOEs and the foreign banks are enforceable in jurisdictions outside of mainland China, principally Hong Kong and Singapore.

But even if the threat of litigation isn’t serious, bankers are bracing for bad news in the form of requests for ‘negotiated termination’ of the derivatives contracts. As with most things about doing business in China, the choice for the banks is between yielding ground to Sasac and opening themselves up to refund claims from others whose own bets have gone the wrong way or standing their ground and losing out on goodwill and the prospect of lucrative mainland banking licences.

Chinese companies have a particularly undistinguished record when it comes to honouring their contractual obligations when prices turn against them. In the 1990s, Chinese steel mills dishonoured contracts to buy iron ore when the spot price slipped below the prices at which they had entered into a contract. Likewise, even now, buyers have refused to take delivery of steel after the price fell in recent weeks.

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Folks, it seems that Microsoft is coming up with something quite interesting in Windows 7. Feature is called “Problem Steps Recorder”.

Problem Steps Recorder can be used to automatically capture the steps performed by a user on a computer, including a text description of where they clicked and a picture of the screen during each click. This capture is then automatically saved to a file that can be used by a support professional to help the user troubleshoot the issue or understand what steps were taken by the user.

Note that they’re still in beta, and this feature is not complete. For example, it won’t record typed text, which means it is TOTALLY USELESS for command prompts or PowerShell commands or even outputs, but if properly guided, the user can add his own comments for any screenshot.

It’s worth noting that unlike enterprise-wide visual recording solutions like ObserveIT, Problem Steps Recorder is not designed to capture videos, centrally store the captures, or even allow for indexing of the content by users, computers or applications. It will be probably used as a personal solution aggregator for help desk and support scenarios.

In any case, PSR is more than just a screenshot capturing tool. Besides automating the capturing of what’s going on the screen, it will also highlight the user’s mouse clicks, and, most importantly, will provide a detailed textual metadata with a description of what the user is doing.

Note: Remember, Windows 7 is still under development. The version I’m working with to grab screenshots from is beta build 7000, and things might (and probably will) change by RTM comes along.

I especially like the detailed metadata that is textually recorded by Problem Steps Recorder. For example:

1. User left click on “Items View (list)” in “Libraries”
2. User keyboard input in “Libraries” [... Alt]
3. User left click on “Tools (menu item)” in “Libraries”
4. User left click on “Folder Options… (menu item)”
5. User left click on “View (page tab)” in “Folder Options”
6. User left click on “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder (check box)” in “Folder Options”
7. User left click on “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder (check box)” in “Folder Options”
8. User left click on “Hide extensions for known file types (check box)” in “Folder Options”
9. User left click on “OK (push button)” in “Folder Options”

Problem Steps Recorder will create a ZIP file containing a compiled MHTML file. It will display the screenshots as SEPARATE images, and NOT as a video. This file is actually an XML page documenting each step of the user’s actions complete with a screenshot with the item highlighted. You can view the report as is by using Internet Explorer, or as a slideshow. If you need to, you can even dig into the raw XML to expose greater detail like the X&Y coordinates of the mouse.

To run Problem Steps Recorder (or PSR for short) please type psr in the Start button’s search area:

You can also open Control Panel and type in problem in the search box, then click on the “Record steps to reproduce a problem” link:

By default, PSR will record only 25 screenshots, but this can be changed to any number. Click on the small down-arrow next to the help icon, and then select Settings:

To start the capture simply press on the “Start Record” button:

During the recording, when adding a comment, click on the “Add Comment” button:

To stop the recording click on the “Stop Record” button:

You will be prompted to save the resulting ZIP file:

After saving the file, if you send it by e-mail or any other method to the support professional, after double-clicking on the ZIP file (or extracting it by using another method), they will be able to view the attached file:

When opening the file, you’ll see something similar to this output:

Click on the following link to download a sample zipped MHT file.

We need this!!! I hope Microsoft will go through the required steps of creating PSR as a built-in tool in Windows 7!

If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft’s Virtual PC or Virtual Server, then you know that those products work in the same way as any other Windows application. They sit on top of the host operating system, and all of the virtual machine’s hardware calls are passed through the host operating system, which manages the server’s hardware usage. Hyper-V takes a completely different approach to virtualization though, and this means that network communications are implemented in a much different way than they were in Microsoft’s other virtualization products. In this article, I will show you how networking works in Hyper-V.

The Virtual Switch

What really sets Hyper-V apart from Microsoft’s other virtualization products is that virtual machines perform much better because they can communicate with the server’s hardware directly rather than having to pass hardware requests through the host operating system (although there are some exceptions to this). Of course you can’t just bombard a network adapter with simultaneous traffic from multiple virtual machines. There has to be a way of managing the traffic. To get around this problem, Microsoft has introduced the concept of the virtual switch.

To understand how this is possible, you have to realize that Hyper-V is not a Windows Server 2008 add-on, but rather is a part of the operating system. When you install the Hyper-V role, the hyper visor is placed “underneath” the Windows 2008 operating system. The existing operating system (known as the host operating system) is placed into something called the parent partition, and each guest operating system is placed into a separate child partition.

To make this type of architecture possible, Microsoft had to unbind the host operating system’s TCP/IP stack from the server’s NIC. In doing so, they have created an additional layer of abstraction known as the virtual switch. The virtual switch is the only networking component that is bound to the physical network adapter. The parent partition and the child partitions use virtual network adapters (known as vNICs), which communicate with the virtual switch using Microsoft’s Virtual Network Switch Protocol.

I realize that this description may be difficult to follow, so I have created the diagram shown in Figure A as a way of helping you to understand the architecture.

Figure A This is what the virtual switch architecture looks like.

Additional Virtual Switches

Hyper-V allows you to create additional virtual switches beyond the one that I just talked about. To do so, open the Hyper-V Manager and then click on the Virtual Network Manager link. Upon doing so, Windows will display the Virtual Network Manager screen, shown in Figure B.

Figure B The Virtual Network Manager allows you to create additional virtual switches.

If you look at the figure above, you can see that the default virtual switch is bound to my physical network adapter. You also have the option of creating a new virtual network, which is the same as creating a new virtual switch. As you can see in the figure, there are three different types of virtual networks that you can create.

Your first option is to create an external virtual network. Doing so creates a virtual switch through which virtual machines can access your entire network, and even the Internet assuming that you have the necessary infrastructure in place.

One thing that you do need to know about external virtual networks is that they must be bound to a physical network adapter. Additionally, each physical network adapter can only be used for a single virtual network. Therefore, if you are creating a secondary external virtual network then you’re going to need a secondary NIC that you can bind the new external virtual network to.

Your next option is to create an internal virtual switch. An internal virtual switch is not capable of accessing the yarn that, or even your private network as a whole. It serves primarily as a mechanism for allowing communications between the virtual machines that are hosted on the server. Additionally, an internal virtual network can facilitate communications between the host operating system and the guest operating systems that are running on it.

Your third option is to create a private virtual network. A private virtual network can only be used to facilitate communications between the virtual machines that are hosted on the current server. Private virtual networks can not access the outside world, nor can they access the host operating system.