Yesterday I passed the last exam I needed to gain Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) status. It’s taken me a long time (four years to be exact) to get here but I’ve finally got it.

These are the exams I passed and the certifications I picked up along the way…

• Aug 2001 – 70-210 – Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional (First MCP)
• May 2003 – 70-215 – Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server
• Aug 2003 – 70-218 – Managing a Windows 2000 Network Environment
• Sep 2003 – 70-216 – Implementing and Administering a Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Network Infrastructure, A.K.A. The Beast (MCSA status)
• May 2005 – 70-224 – Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft® Exchange 2000 Server (MCSA Messaging Specialist status)
• Oct 2005 – 70-217 – Implementing and Administering a Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Directory Services Infrastructure
• Oct 2005 – 70-219 – Designing a Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Directory Services Infrastructure (MCSE status)

Next, I’ll be looking to do the two upgrade exams to bring up to the 2003 track. I’ve just bought the self-paced training kit from Amazon and will be reading through that over the next few months with the aim of doing the exams early next year.

VMWare have released a free tool called the VMware Player. You can use it to run virtual machines that have been created with VMware Workstation (or GSX/ESX). You can’t create VM’s but it’s definitely useful if you’ve only got a few full VMware licenses available. I haven’t tested it yet – it won’t install on a machine with full VMware already installed – but it looks good. It can also run Microsoft VirtualPC images as well as Symantec LiveState Recovery(?) images.

Link here: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

The new iPod plays video too

After weeks of rumours, Apple today announced the new iPod that is capable of playing videos. It isn’t being called an iPod Video, it’s just the iPod, but it has a 320 x 240 (QVGA) screen with 260000 colours. The new iPod comes in two sizes, 30GB and 60GB, but each model is the same height and width as their predecessor but they are now much thinner, and available in either white or black.

iTunes has now been updated to version 6 to be able to handle the new video content and the iTunes Music Store now has over 2000 music videos available to download for $1.99 (USD) each. There are also several popular TV shows that have current and past season’s episodes available to download also for $1.99 (USD). Another cool, and essential feature, is that the iPod also has a video out connector to allow playback of video on your TV.

The Net Solutions team at Datacom spent the day on Saturday on the Kapiti Coast doing a quad-biking adventure. The quad-bikes were powerfull, 4×4’s that could get in and out of anywhere – we were almost completely submerged in muddy water at one stage.
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The quad-biking was great fun which was followed by a huge, barbeque lunch. We then spent the afternoon doing some skeet-shooting, archery, golf, and air-pistol shooting. A great day all-round!

Google have released yet another new product! This time it’s a web-based RSS aggregator called Google Reader (Beta – of course) and it has a similar look and feel to the Gmail interface with labels for different categories and a lot of snazzy javascript.

This is probably one of the most beta products I’ve tested from Google – not all of the features work yet and there’s some obvious bugs. But it does look like it has good potential and already people have come up with some interesting hacks. One of them is a link which displays a site in the newsreader – mine shows up as this: “Click to view in Google Reader”

Google Reader here: http://www.google.com/reader

News just in….

Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the second Beta release of our next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to our developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

Project page here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Release notes: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.5beta2.html
Direct download here: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5b2&os=win&lang=en-US