babbling since 1980

Have eliminated a bunch of posts which were horribly broken by previous blog editors. Apologies if you arrived here via a 404.

Date: 31 July  2008

Time: 7pm BST (GMT+1)

Marco Shaw, PowerShell MVP will be talking about /n software netcmdlets

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It had to happen I guess, I’ve had my 16Gb iPhone less than 6 months and there’s every indication that some time next month the next version will be hitting shelves.

Rumors are coming from all directions, starting with O2 UK discounting the 8Gb unit by £100 and subsequently running out of stock to AT&T telling their staff they can’t take leave in a 4 week window from mid-june and execs from several firms giving “off the record” hints of a 3G device.

As June also brings the big 2.0 software update it makes sense that there would be some 2.0 hardware - I’m guessing the features between v1 and v2 will only really differ when it comes to UMTS/HSDPA so I’m not entirely fussed, but I have a few friends who are already working out if they can bear the cost of cutting their existing contracts short…

My commute is pretty easy so the data connectivity side of things isn’t of particular interest, EDGE is fine for reading the odd blog as I travel - in fact the only positive for me is that all the 2.5G haters will hopefully suck it up and buy one and hopefully increase the draw/demand to create decent stuff for the app store

Not sure how I missed this one but CTP2 of Powershell version 2 is available for download.

Remoting is working (requiring a separate download of WinRM 2.0 (also a CTP).

From the official blog:

 

This release adds a plethora of new features. PowerShell remoting now allows a one-to-one interactive experience. Thought about partitioning and organizing PowerShell scripts? Use modules to create self-contained and reusable units. This release introduces transactions support in PowerShell engine and APIs along with an update to the Registry provider to support them. We introduced eventing support in Powershell engine for listening, forwarding and acting on management and system events. Support for multiple parameter sets in script cmdlets bring them to par with C# cmdlets. For the adventurous folks…. application developers can host PowerShell in IIS to support multiple remote PowerShell sessions in a single process. These are just a few of the new features we have packaged in this CTP2 release. Additionally this CTP2 includes some simple updates… like new parameters to several existing cmdlets. More feature descriptions and details are in the Release Notes and in the “about” topics included with the installation.

 

As with the previous release I’ve got to stress that this code isn’t even at beta stage yet and shouldn’t go ANYWHERE near a production system. Everything *should* be backwards compatible but V1 and V2 can’t coexist so this could really break things if you’re unlucky.

Download Powershell V2 CTP2

Download WinRM 2.0 CTP (needed for remoting)

Link: Official Blog

After a pretty long silence from Blizz it appears they’re finally giving out some decent info on Wrath of the Liche King.

An NDA must have ended at 12:00 PST or something as it’s not common for game sites to elect to put new content out when most folk are asleep, gamespy are the first to break silence:

Hands on
Death Knight info
Videos
5-man and raid instances 

I know a few folk are considering straying to the likes of Age of Conan and Warhammer at the moment, with AoC releasing this month I’m thinking the timing of this barrage of news isn’t a coincidence

Update: WorldofWar.net have posted their take on the preview info here and a separate piece on death knights here.

Source: WoWInsider.com

I’ve tried several Outlook add-ins to help organise and get more information from the data which is my inbox, thus far they’ve all been a pretty big disappointment.

Well, another one has appeared on the horizon aka ‘xobni’ (it’s inbox, backwards).

As I’m happy to be the software equivalent of the crash-test dummy I need a couple of kind folk to click the below so that they’ll “move you [me] to the top of the beta list and send you an invite code (usually within a few days)!“.

Why does that sound like “yes, please rush me my free catalogue of detritus monthly? Hmm.

Anyhow, clicky ->>

Isn’t iPhone wallpaper utterly useless? Where do they use it? The unlock screen… Of course!

stroking 16gb of iPhone goodness…

After the news of kernel-parity between Server 2008 and the first service pack for Vista it was no surprise to hear that they would both be available prior to next months launch. What is surprising however is that I’ve just received news that they’ve RTM’d within 20 minutes of each another.

From the WindowsServer blog:

As I write this, I’m in the room where it all happens; in building 26, better known as the ship room. Ten minutes ago Windows Server 2008 officially RTM’d. Also in here with me are my colleagues who have been working on Windows Vista SP1; also RTM’ing today. We’ve all been working towards this day for the past 3 years and over 5,000 people have contributed to this release.

A separate post on Vista SP1 RTM’ing is available at the Vista Team blog here.

Technorati Tags: Powershell, Windows Server, Windows Server 2008, Vista, Vista SP1

I’ve just heard from Adam that Dmitry has posted news that Scotty McLeod, leader of the UK Windows Server user group and  a member of GET-PSUGUK’s  is currently critical in hospital after being hit by a train last night whilst travelling home. It doesn’t sound like a great deal is known at the moment, but we’re obviously all thinking of Scotty and wishing him a speedy recovery.

You may have noticed the blue overlays appearing on images on TT now, I’m experimenting with Photocrank which is a service to allow images to be commented and tagged by users without wrapping special code around each element on a site.

They offer a neat Wordpress plugin which once installed adds the necessary code to ‘Crank’ an image, for any images you want to prevent being tagged (the header here on TT is a good example, I wasn’t keen on the idea of random comments appearing there) just add crankstate=”false” to the img tag.

So, good idea? Bad? Here’s something to get you started:

 Yes, I know, LOLCats=BAD but after the recent release of the LOLCat compiler for the CLR I just had to. Sorry.

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately and concluded that the easiest thing to do would be write a post (mostly for my benefit) on the topic of why I registered and keep seeming to fail blogging here on TT.

To answer the question I’ve been asked several times lately, I came by the name back when I was in Year 10 at PGS. One of my lecturers wasn’t entirely keen on the direction our discussions took and one day dubbed me the “master of tangential thinking” and when I was scrabbling around for an apt domain to register it came to mind… It’s only more recently when looking at site maps and SEO I find that it’s also a symptom of schizophrenia (I’m not, thankfully).

Anyhow, this blog, originally I started it with the intention of writing about the things which interest me in my everyday faffing with gadgetry and trawling of ‘teh intarweb’ but since the transition back from journalist to SysAdmin I seem to have lost a lot of the organisational skills which I developed and feel much more like a monkey at a typewriter when I sit down to post.

It’s frustrating as nearly every day I encounter things of interest which would be worth discussion, one of the reasons I began getting in to GTD was to start capturing all these ideas in a logical and structured fashion to begin making more sense of the various todos which form my everyday life.

There’s a whole range of topics I’ve yet to cover in any detail, my day is spent working on products such as Exchange 2007, ISA 2006, Office Communications Server 2007 and Windows Server 2008 but I’ve posed on none of them. Nil. Nada.

 I’d say there’s a fair share of procrastination too in the sense that being a bit of a  perfectionist (read: picky sod), I’ve changed the design of the site countless times - I’m not quite sure how I want TT to look or behave but seem to have adopted the tactic of changing it frequently because that elusive layout is obviously going to be produced by my next redesign (or the one after that) - imagine more monkeys + typewriters here…

All these changes don’t just hold the process of blogging up, they’ve been fairly counterproductive in other ways too, a recent ecto upgrade hosed 90% of the larger posts on the site, I’m not sure which button I pressed but as of now I vow to stick to Live Writer, the Wordpress WYSIWYG or Scribefire. I should probably schedule some regular backups too :).

So, from tomorrow I’m going to quit thinking about layout, lists and what the best topics would be and just make sure I post something daily. Actually make today my first day - not an interesting post but one I had to write so that I could get on with the task in hand.

Ah, the "great" british rail system.

Following the failure of my AppleTV last night I visited the retailer where I picked up my unit and was told that they couldn’t simply swap it, instead insisting it had to go to their repair center for diagnosis, I’m not sure what that would do to the manufacturer warranty but I gave up discussing it with the counter staff and instead opted to call Apple this evening.

Within 15 minutes one of their support people had diagnosed the machine as dead and arranged a replacement to come out to me. All they needed was a delivery address and VISA details (in case I run off with the dead one, obviously) - I should be back up and running before the end of the week. Hurrah!

I’ve no doubt cursed it and the courier will lose/drop/throw/eat my replacement unit, but what the heck, I feel like being optimistic

Technorati Tags: Apple TV, Apple