James Moody: Geek in Paradise

Not any more.

British Army develops "invisible" tank.

The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank.

Next in line is a jacket that uses the same technology and refining the technology to work without the cameras since they are the weak point.

Tags: Q James Bond British Army Invisible Tank

Congratulations to Steve Clayton and Hugh MacLeod for driving their vision of Microsoft forward for the past year.

Steve has a history of significant events in the Blue Monster’s trip from initial cartoon to having it’s own Facebook group with 1k+ members to winning awards with a Stormhoek wine bearing it’s name. Good times.

I, myself, carry Blue Monster business cards from Street Cards and that has led to some interesting conversations with clients and prospective clients. Having the conversation has definitely led to more project closings (the good kind of closing) for me than not. The little guy has led more of my meetings into a "what do you think about this" type, than the "here’s what I can do, this is how much it will cost" type, which lets me connect more on a personal level with prospective clients. Once most people see how passionate I am about the software I’m recommending, it changes perceptions of the "big bad bully" on the block.

Here’s to a long future for the Blue Monster.

Now I just need to get my hands on a Blue Monster sticker somehow to go along with my Blue Monster Lithograph hanging over my desk.

Tags: Microsoft Blue Monster Steve Clayton Hugh MacLeod Stormhoek Street Cards Facebook

Ahhh, it was just a matter of time before someone blinded by Apple fanboyism in the media posted an article predicting doom and gloom for Microsoft with the release of Leopard.

With all his boasting of Leopard and downing of Vista’s pain points (UAC, slowness), it became quite clear to me, and apparently judging from the comments to the article, that he’s never used Vista and latching onto public opinion as fact. Bad journalism at it’s finest.

I can attest to the minor annoyance of UAC when first setting up a new Vista machine. Good thing it only takes a couple of hours for me to get a Vista box to the point where UAC prompts are very few and far between. My clients that have made the swap to Vista report they may get 1 to 2 prompts a week during normal every day usage. Hardly what I’d consider a pain point and my clients are very happy once they’ve become accustomed to the changes from XP because of the added security and features that Vista provides. It’s a good thing MacOS doesn’t have UAC prompts huh?

Slowness. Hardly. When Vista first released, it was sluggish, true. I can attribute that to 3rd party driver support. It was pretty bad. When I moved my laptop to Vista in April, it was slightly painful. Driver crashes, sluggishness, etc. Now, I just reloaded Vista Business again now that the drivers have matured and it is an absolute joy to work on. No more crashes, no more sluggishness. It’s like a brand new machine that’s approaching a year in age. BTW, those that think you need a powerhouse machine to run Vista, the laptop here is a screaming fast Sempron 3500+ (1.8GHz). Smoking, I tell ya.

I think it’s also safe to say that he’s steered clear of anything negative about Leopard. I mean, how could there possibly be anything wrong with Apple’s finest OS to date? Right?

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9265

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/27/leopard_install_problems/

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/26/apple_yanks_wireless_backup_from_leopard_last_minute.html

http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/10/27/time-machine-apple-s-advertising-is-correct.aspx

UPDATE: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/98120 Leopard Firewall turned off by default. Major security flaw. Deny all connections, doesn’t.

Just an inkling of the unhappiness the finest OS to date has brought to consumers.

Not to even mention all the buyer backlash from the iPhone price reductions shortly after launch, iPhone bricking after updating, refusal to provide unlocking codes to AT&T who is the only legal provider, refusing Apple Bucks for iPhone purchases along with Cash and limiting purchases to 2 (so much for Christmas iPhones for the fam).

Apple’s blunders are just as much as Microsoft’s, people just don’t want to admit the "cool" kid can do wrong.

I’m sure Apple may gain some marketshare, but I don’t foresee a major uptake. Most of my friends that use Apple aren’t in a rush to get Leopard because they’ve waited to see the results and they don’t like what they’ve seen so far enough to upgrade. No blinders on them, for sure.

Funny that, just like Vista’s release.

Update: More discussion over at Robert McLaw’s blog.

Tags: Microsoft Vista Apple Leopard iPhone UAC Blatant Fanboyism

I finally decided to load up Server 2008 this morning in Virtual PC to spend some time playing with the new Server OS of choice (not counting Cougar) in the next 6 months. Installation was painless, although I was disappointed I couldn’t load up the x64 version in Virtual PC. I had wanted to see how Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 interacted, but alas, not to be for now.

I do love the interface changes for adding the various roles and features associated in Server 2008. It just looks and feels better overall.

As I was flipping through the roles, I got the crazy idea to see how it would integrate into my existing SBS2003 environment. Surely it would break things and give me something to wrap my brain around on a lazy Sunday. I hadn’t had anything break in awhile, this could be fun.

The join to the Domain was flawless as expected and I was greeted shortly thereafter with an update being pushed down by WSUS for Forefront Client Security, which I have running on the SBS2003 box. I had bigger fish to fry however and ignored it for the time being.

I checked off Active Directory Domain Services in the Add Roles wizard and after some thinking on it’s end, was prompted to run the various adprep’s on the SBS box. I flipped the 2008 CD over to the SBS box and ran forestprep, domainprep, gpprep and rodcprep. The schema was updated to v44 fyi.

I popped back over to the 2008 VPC and the wizard continued onwards, adding the 2008 Server as a domain controller into my existing domain. Nifty. No griping or moaning, it just did it’s thing and let me know when it was done. Replication of AD was painless as well, taking maybe a minute or 2 to replicate from the SBS box.

I also set up DNS on the 2008 VPC and delegated/transferred the zone over without any hitches. Very painless process from start to finish.

Once I was happy that AD and DNS were doing their thing, I returned to the WSUS update. Forefront Client Security installed with no problems. A quick trip over to the SBS box and approving the manual agent install in MOM 2005, had the 2008 VPC showing up in the FCS management window with an outdated policy. No problemo, a quick deploy of the policy and all was as it should be.

Event logs were extremely noisy during the process, but haven’t popped up anything of note in the last few hours. 1 recurring error for PerfNet (which I need to look into), and a warning on security related events for anonymous logins in AD.

Way easier than I had expected to be honest and very happy with the results.

Tags: Microsoft Server 2008 Forefront AD DNS Virtual PC WSUS MOM 2005 SBS 2003