stuart test blog

Microsoft have recently created a new page on their Vista site that provides details on their new offering for Software Assurance customers. They’ve bundled up their recent purchases of Winternals, Softricity, and DesktopStandard into a free offering for those that sign up for Microsoft’s controversial licensing program. Here are some of the details from the site:

Using the solution’s virtualization, dynamic streaming and desktop manageability technologies, customers will:

• Improve PC manageability
  • Streamline and accelerate the entire application management lifecycle from planning and predictable deployment, to using, maintaining and migrating software
  • Further reduce total cost of ownership of the Windows desktop
  • Enhance management of software assets
• Accelerate and simplify desktop deployments and migrations
  • Reduce end-user downtime
  • Increase IT and business agility
• Enhance change management process and roll backs
  • Enhance group policy management
  • Reduce downtime
  • Provide end users with on-demand access to applications for which they are assigned

Source: Windows Vista: Optimizing the Windows Desktop

I was a little late to the party but my Movember effort is now in full swing. I have a week’s worth of stubble to carve into something embarrassing! Thanks to my sponsors (Damian, Lisa, Ness, Sheri) who haves donated so far – I’ve raised $25 $55 $60 for prostate cancer research. I’ll be posting the first round of photos tomorrow night…

For those that don’t know, Movember is a charity that raises money for prostate cancer research by getting males to shave a moustache during the month of November. Here’s the blurb from the website:

Movember – Changing the face of Men’s Health
Movember (the month formally known as November) is a charity event held during November each year.
At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache and along the way raise as much money and awareness about male health issues as possible.

If you would like to help out this worthy charity, please go to http://www.movember.com/nz/sponsor, enter my Rego number which is 45478 and your credit card details. All donations over $5 are tax deductible.

Microsoft are following VMware’s lead by providing pre-built virtual machines for download. Have a look at this search on the Microsoft downloads site and you’ll find a few there already: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=VHD&DisplayLang=en

These are only official trial versions from Microsoft, so VMware still has the lead here with a whole community of user-created virtual machines most of which are fully-licensed machines ready to run. But these offerings from Microsoft will definitely make it easier for end-users to trial Microsoft’s software.

Just noticed today that the Sysinternals site has completed its migration to Microsoft’s TechNet site. The new address is http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx

I’ve had a quick dig around and noticed this tool which looks new, Process Monitor. Here’s a screenshot from the site:

Everything else seems to be the same apart from the lack of source code which Microsoft have said they will not be migrating due to lack of interest as well as potential future complications as the tools get merged into the Microsoft suite.

I’ve been playing online poker at Party Poker for the last couple of months but I hadn’t been playing for real money up until tonight when I made my first $50 deposit.

On the play-money tables, you can win a lot and it’s not always that much fun because players will bet stupidly, not caring about losing points as you can just sign up again and get more. So all the poker sites that I’ve been reading to get advice has all seemed pointless because the tactics don’t work when people don’t care if they win or lose.

But on the real money tables, it’s a completely different story. Players take the betting much more seriously and there are a lot more folds than on the play-money tables. So all of a sudden the pro’s tips started to come in handy and I started to play with a bit of controlled agression.

Granted, I was only on the 25c/50c tables, but you feel the pressure once you realise that you’re playing with your hard-earned cash. I had to force myself off the table to get to bed as it really was fun. I finished on $13.20, up from my original $10 I started with so I was quite pleased with that.

If you’re thinking of giving it a go yourselves, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite. (There’s a referal system that includes bonuses for signing up.)

Another juicy bit of documentation for the AD geeks out there. This is an updated version of Microsoft’s best-practice documentation for recovering your Active Directory forest.

Brief Description

This paper is a best-practice recommendation for recovering an Active Directory® directory service forest, if forest-wide failure has rendered all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally.

On This Page

Source: Download details: Forest Recovery

This is more of a bookmark for me rather than a blog post, but there may be others out there interested in this MSDN blog focusing on (much-needed) ADFS documentation.

Link to ADFS Documentation Blog

Less than a day old and there is already a critical security alert for Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7. This vulnerability only affects IE7, so I guess it’s not recommended to upgrade just yet.

This is a big blow for Microsoft as they have been touting this as their most secure browser ever. Let’s hope they can get a fix out for it soon.

Link to Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure – Advisories – Secunia

Sun are breaking all the rules once again with a datacenter in a box product. Dubbed Project Blackbox, this is essentially as many servers, networking and storage devices as possible all crammed into a shipping container. Using revolutionary cooling systems this thing is guarranteed to stay cool in any situation. You could even consider it ‘portable’ as all it needs is network connectivity and electricity. There’s a bunch of photos on the site showing different scenarios – I especially like the mars landing! But this is a serious product and although I can’t think of too many uses for it off the top of my head, I still want one, just to run my little empire from the back garden!

CEO, Jonathan Schwartz blogs about it.

Link to Project Blackbox

Here’s a nifty site that may or may not be useful to you. FeedRaider lets you set up your own pages with feeds that you choose displayed in a variety of formats. Not too sure what market this is aiming for as you can already do this with Netvibes and the other home-page providers. But it’s a cool site anyway and worth checking out to see if it’s useful for you. I created a page here, which should accessible to the public: http://feedraider.com/u/amanzi/p/4fxd1/