Testing the capabilities of Windows Live Writer to Blogtown NZ.

I should be able to upload the following image just fine (with the drop shadow too.)

No special configuration required.

I need an extra four or five hours in each day at the moment. I’m adding these videos to my to-do list.

System Center Essentials 2007 Training Videos

Presenter Biographies

Scott Bleasdell

Scott Bleasdell is a program manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for product planning, focusing on future releases. Scott has been with Microsoft since 2005 and has a vast background in the Systems Management space including roles in consulting and software development.

Dustin Jones

Dustin Jones is a program manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for the deployment, upgrade, configuration, monitoring and service provider experiences. Dustin has been with Microsoft since 2004, working in both the field and product groups with systems management products.

Casey McKinnon

Casey McKinnon is a Program Manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for user experience. Casey has been with Microsoft for over 4 years, designing and implementing Operations Management tools for Microsoft’s Live services, as well as with System Center.

David Mills

David Mills has been with Microsoft for 7 years and is the senior technical product manager for System Center Essentials 2007. Before joining the System Center Marketing team, David led User Assistance teams in the Windows Server division shipping IT professional technical documentation for Core Networking and Management technologies.

Lost in the hoopla of the announcement that Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 has been released, was that their ‘Express’ counterparts have also been updated to Beta 2 and are now available to download from here: Visual Studio 2008 Express Downloads

This is great news for us part-time coneheads and there’s a whole bunch of great resources such as the Facebook Developer kit for developing apps for the Facebook platform.

Darryl Burling from Microsoft NZ was kind enough to provide me with the links.

I try to stay away from politics as rule-of-thumb, but I find this interesting:

LATEST: Environment Minister David Benson-Pope has resigned from Cabinet after being found to have misled the public.

This wasn’t the first time that this minister was caught being ‘economical with the truth’ and looks like he got what was coming to him.

[Article on Stuff]

I’ve been creating a bunch of WordPress plugins recently. They are really easy to make and the documentation is great. I don’t really know much about PHP but it has the same structure as the way I write VBscript, i.e. write a bunch of functions, then call them with parameters.

Most of the plugins I’ve made have been for the Blogtown NZ site, but I’ve made a couple for standard WordPress installs too. I’m also working on a bigger one at the moment which started out as a time tracking plugin, but is now turning into a full service desk application.

This is my latest one, and I love it because of its simplicity and raw power: “Amanzi Text Control”. All it does is remove the filters that process posts and pages when rendering the output. What this means is that you can put anything in a post, including JavaScripts, CSS, HTML tags without worrying about them being stripped or modified.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Amanzi Text Control
Plugin URI: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/tag/amanzi-text-control
Description: Inspired by Jeff Minard's Text Control plugin. This plugin does one thing - removes Wordpress's fomatting filters from the posts and pages.
Author: Stuart Maxwell
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz
*/
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');
?>

From the Geekzone forums, I found out about TelstraClear’s speed increases on their cable network – FOR FREE! (Official press release here: More broadband speed for free)

More broadband speed for free

TelstraClear has doubled the speed of two of its most popular InHome broadband plans. 
The free speed increase raises downstream speeds on the 5 GB plan from up to 2 Mbps to up to 4 Mbps, and the 20 GB plan from up to 4 Mbps to up to 10 Mbps.  The plans are available to homes on TelstraClear’s InHome network in Wellington, Kapiti and Christchurch.
TelstraClear Head of Consumer Steve Jackson says customers on the 5 GB and 20 GB plans will be automatically upgraded to the new speeds.
“This is great for our customers and they don’t need to do anything. They’ll notice everything gets a lot faster – for free.  On our 5 GB plan alone, more than 12,000 customers will reap the benefits of an increase in speed. Who wouldn’t want at least twice the speed for no increase in price?”
Mr Jackson says the company was noticing a change in customer behaviour, with customers wanting to optimise their broadband experience for things such as streaming video.
“We’re staying ahead of the game, offering customers plans to suit their needs.  An increase in speed makes surfing the Internet, downloading music and videos and playing online games easier than ever before.”
“Customers on our 5 GB and 20 GB plans will be able to download their favourite television programme such as Shortland Street from sites like TVNZ ondemand in half the time.”
The 20 GB plan is now in line with the company’s top-of-the-range LightSpeed plans by offering downstream speeds of up to 10 Mbps.
Existing customers will receive the new speeds by 1 August 2007.
TelstraClear’s InHome six broadband plans include:
HighSpeed 1G – 1G of monthly traffic  – 2Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream *
HighSpeed 5G – 5G of monthly traffic -  4 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream *
HighSpeed 10G – 10G of monthly traffic – 4 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream  $49.95 per month
LightSpeed 20G – 20G of monthly traffic  – 10 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream $69.95 per month
LightSpeed 40G – 40G of monthly traffic – 10 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream $99.95 per month
LightSpeed 80G – 80G of monthly traffic  – 10 Mbps downstream/2 Mbps upstream $139.95 per month
* TelstraClear HighSpeed Internet is only available as part of a package including a phone line on the HighSpeed 1G ($62.90 per month including phone) and 5G ($72.90 per month including phone) plans. 

I know that it’s not supposed to be good for the economy, but it’s definitely good for those of us that like shopping online at American sites like Amazon. The Kiwi dollar hit the US80c mark after hovering just beneath that for the last few weeks.

So to celebrate, I bought a bunch of books from Amazon, and ordered some Thankyou cards from Shutterfly. (I do feel a bit guilty…) 

Strongest-performing currency in the world – New Zealand, world, sport, business & entertainment news on Stuff.co.nz

As far as I’m aware, Microsoft have been keeping very quiet about Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Paul Thurrott even theorised that Microsoft may never release a SP3 for XP.

So it was interesting to read two posts on the TechNet Blogs site, mentioning the “forthcoming XP Service Pack 3.” This is the first official mention of it in a while, so perhaps we may see a beta of it sooner rather than later.

Posts are here:

• NAP FAQ: Are you planning on releasing NAP Clients for Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc?
• NAP FAQ: How much does NAP cost?

I signed up for Pownce today to see what it’s all about. Signup was nice and easy and updated my profile (http://pownce.com/amanzi/) with the same photo from Facebook.

But now what…? I went to add some friends and my only option is to add someone who’s already on Pownce. The thing is, I don’t know who’s on Pownce already and even then, I don’t want to have add everyone individually.

To me, the best feature of Facebook is how easy it is to find and add friends. I begrudgingly signed up to Facebook just to see what the hype was all about, and was then hooked from day one when it scanned my address book and told me that almost 50 of my contacts were already using Facebook.

Now I know that Pownce isn’t the same thing as Facebook, but both services are really only useful when you have lots of friends using them too. Pownce needs a better system of finding and adding friends I know.

Via: Nigel’s Blog