stuart test blog

I just found about this crazy game! Unfortunately I’ve already lost, and I expect to lose a whole bunch more!

News just in is that Microsoft have purchased Winternals and have made co-founder, Mark Russinovich a technical fellow. I hope that Microsoft aren’t planning on changing much at Winternals, or their community site, Sysinternals.

If you’ve worked on Windows networks, you’ve probably used one or more of the free utilitites provided bySysinternals, or you’ve come across Winternals’ flagship product, ERD Commander.

Read more here:

• Mark Russinovich’s blog
• Cnet coverage
• Technorati search

The second week of Rockstar: Supernova has just been on and I am LOVING it. The quality of talent seems so much better than last season and the band members are way more tougher!

Favourite so far has to be Dilana Robichaux, and not just because of her South African roots – she is by far the most talented of the bunch. She nailed Nirvana’s classic, Lithium, in her first performance, and then completely nailed an awesome rendition of the Johnny Cash song, Ring of Fire.

Downside is that the official website doesn’t support Firefox or Opera – none of the videos play! That’s pathetic.

It’s not that often that I get overly excited about a server, but you’ve got to hand it to the guys at Sun – this is an impressive box! It’s a 4 core server with 24 TB (yes, that’s TERRABYTES) that fits in a 4U chassis and weighs 170kg when fully loaded. It packs in 48, 500GB SATA II drives which, when coupled with the new ZFS file system, should give some impressive performance. In fact, Sun’s internal name for the X4500 server is the Thumper!

Read Jonathan Schwartz’s blog for more.

I came across this link from the GigaOM site this morning with details on Yahoo’s new travel site. I’ve seen a couple of these sites before but as this integrates nicely with my Flickr account, I’m quite looking forward to making use of it on my upcoming trip to London and Amsterdam.

So I’ve set up a trip and will modify it over the next week or so with my schedule: http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?pid=706739&action=view

Update: TechCrunch have also just covered the new, Yahoo site too.

Microsoft employee, Ryan Rogers, has posted a blog entry asking for the public’s thoughts as to whether Microsoft should release an open-source version of Windows. Now I’m not sure whether Ryan is that high up the food chain to be able to influence this decision, but he seems to think it’s  a good idea. Read on for more…

Blah Blah Blog [Ryan Rogers] : Wouldn’t a Free, Open-Source Windows be Great?

Photo sharing site, Zooomr, are apparently giving away Pro accounts to bloggers who display one or more of their Zooomr photos on their blog. I checked out the site this morning and it definitely has a lot going for it, but there are also a few things I didn’t like about it. I particularly didn’t like the log in system – instead of just signing up and creating an account, you get redirected to a 3rd party site to set up an OpenID account. You can also sign in using a Google account or a few others too, but this seems to be an overly complex system for just creating an account. I’m not going to do much with my account until next week as they are planning to implement a lot of changes during the upcoming week, so I’ll check it out after that and see if it gives my Flickr Pro account a run for it’s money. In the meantime, here’s a Zooomr photo I took of the sunrise over Wellington, NZ.

Sunrise over WellingtonHosted on Zooomr

The news just in is Joanne Colan will be taking over from Amanda Congdon as the new presenter of Rocketboom. Joanne previously worked as a presenter for MTV Europe. I used to watch MTV Europe 8 years ago when I lived in South Africa, and If this is the same presenter that I’m thinking of, then I’m looking forward to downloading the new Rocketboom episodes!

Techmeme: BREAKING: New Rocketboom Girl Chosen, Looks Strangely Like Old One (huffingtonpost.com)

Let the blog-mobs begin…

The blogging community loves a controversy, especially if it involves ‘one of their own’. Amanda Congdon from RocketBoom, has left the show suddenly after some disagreements with her business partner and majority shareholder of RocketBoom, Andrew Baron.

Depending on who’s blog you read first, you’ll probably get different sides of the story, so best to follow the discussion on Techmeme.

Update: I don’t think Amanda will find it hard to get more work, especially with an offer like this!

The rumour mill is buzzing around Microsoft’s plans to release their own portable media player which will compete directly with the iPod. I’m losing track about what is fact or fiction here so take the following with a pinch of salt, bu this is what we know so far:

• The media player will be released by Christmas
• It will have a larger screen than the current iPod with video
• It will have a wireless connection to allow downloads on the go
• Microsoft will match the songs that you’ve purchased from iTunes with songs provided by them for free

This does sound pretty exciting and I do think that Microsoft have the ability to pull it off, but whether they succeed or not will be determined later. Their recent release of the UMPC showed how they can build up great buzz around a product which could never be able to live up to the hype.

I personally think that Microsoft already have the iPod killer – the PocketPC. If they can somehow squeeze a mini hard drive and a solid 10 or more hours of battery life, they will have a device that can not only play music and videos, but also have a built in camera, wireless access which provides internet and email connections, as well as the raft of other PocketPC apps that are already out there.