26 January 2007

Vista’s UAC – Good or Bad?

Filed under: Infrastructure — Tags: , — Stuart Maxwell @ 2:44 pm

There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the merits of Vista’s UAC; Jim Allchin wrote a long blog post detailing how they tried to balance the security with usability. My personal opinion is that UAC is too strict and becomes too annoying with too many prompts for seemingly innocent tasks. Installing iTunes, for example, [...]

Height of laziness

Filed under: General — Tags: , — Stuart Maxwell @ 10:44 am

Is this the height of laziness? If you can’t be bothered taking your dog for a walk, you can get them their own treadmill!

[Via: Gizmodo]

24 January 2007

No more summary text feeds

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Stuart Maxwell @ 7:36 pm

I’m not sure if it’s too early to call this a “movement” but Ethan Kaplan from blackrimglasses wants everyone to unsubscribe from RSS feeds that don’t provide the full posts. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now anyway, so I’m unsubscribing from the following feeds:
All About Microsoft
Ars Technica
BetaNews.com
Digital Photography Review
Web Worker Daily
ZDNet [...]

BitTorrent is doomed… or is it?

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Stuart Maxwell @ 4:24 pm

Mark Cuban recently posted on his blog about how he thinks that BitTorrent is facing some challenges, and the (slightly-biased) Torrent Freak blog picked up on some of his points and argues against them. I actually agree with some of Mark’s comments but I think that they have been taken out of context slightly.
* Conflicting [...]

23 January 2007

Another Exchange 2007 link dump

Filed under: Infrastructure — Tags: , — Stuart Maxwell @ 7:57 am

Some more Exchange 2007 links to get through…
Get ready for Exchange 2007
Well, the IT’s Showtime team have products a “Get ready for Exchange 2007 roadshow” videos. You can watch your way through a set of videos discussion architecture, deployment, management and Unified Communications from the guys at corp. Here’s a list of sessions [...]

11 January 2007

TradeMe down again

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Stuart Maxwell @ 10:12 am

Last week Juha reported that TradeMe experienced a ten hour outage due to a failure of one of their core, load-balancers. This morning, TradeMe appears to be down again:
UPDATE: TradeMe have now posted the following message, doesn’t look too good.
11 January – Problems this morning
Trade Me’s auction site suffered a database failure at 3:50 am [...]

8 January 2007

Watching the CES keynote

Filed under: Infrastructure — Tags: , — Stuart Maxwell @ 8:25 pm

Bill Gates presented the keynote at CES a short while ago and I’m just watching the streaming video now. Lots of Windows Vista features displayed, nothing which really excites me at all. Zune mp3 player gets a bit of a push too – number 2 mp3 player in it’s segment?? Windows Live……
Most exciting announcement so [...]

7 January 2007

PLAYB3YOND.COM

Filed under: Infrastructure — Tags: — Stuart Maxwell @ 12:04 pm

I’m still not sure who will come out on top in the console wars, or whether the Blu-ray disc will prevail over HD-DVD – but if you visit this site and watch the videos, you may be convinced that the PS3 has it all! 
Link to PLAYB3YOND.COM

Exchange Help File

Filed under: Infrastructure — Tags: — Stuart Maxwell @ 10:00 am

You can now download the full Exchange help file in CHM format. In previous versions there were a number of large Word documents that needed to be downloaded to get all the operations guides, so this compact help would be very convenient to anyone who will working with Exchange 2007 in the future.
Link here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

Back to work

Filed under: Personal — Tags: , , — Stuart Maxwell @ 9:56 am

Well the holidays are coming to a close so we’re preparing to head back to work tomorrow. The weather in Wellington has been a real disappointment with the coldest December on record (it’s supposed to be summer!) and so far January hasn’t been that much better.
The year ahead will bring some big changes to our [...]