When Software Attacks!

The Acer Iconia W3: An object lesson in how NOT to design a tablet

As you may have seen from my recent tweets, I was fortunate enough to attend //Build again this year in lovely San Francisco. In what appears to be an emerging tradition, conference attendees received not one, but two Windows 8 tablets: A 128Gb Microsoft Surface Pro with Type Cover, and an Acer Iconia W3 with keyboard dock. Many column inches have been dedicated to the Microsoft device, which I won’t bother repeating.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 8, 2013

Tech Update for Public Sector

Right now I am putting the finishing touches to my deck for an event Black Marble are running at Cardinal Place next week. As many of you will know, for the past ten years we have run the annual Tech Update covering moves and changes across the entire Microsoft spectrum of products. Until now that has only taken place in Leeds but for the first time we are taking that show on the road.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Speaking at NEBytes about TFS 2012 Lab and SCVMM 2012

On Wednesday 15th May 2013, Black Marble travels north, as Steve Spencer and I will both present sessions for the great guys at NEBytes. Whilst Steve covers fun hardware and software dev using Gadgeteer, I will be talking about our experiences with TFS 2012 Lab and SCVMM 2012. If you have seen some of my earlier posts, our migration to the latest and greatest was interesting, to say the least. I learned a great deal about how SCVMM and Lab talk to each other and I will be running through how we built our environment and the things we learned that could save you pain as you follow in our footsteps.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Fixing a dodgy proximity sensor on my Nokia Lumia 920

I’ve just had a really infuriating half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the keypad to appear during a call on my Lumia 920. When I took my phone away form my ear the screen stayed black. Pushing the power button made the display switch on and then immediately switch off. Power cycling and even resetting made no difference. A close examination showed that the small round circle next to the speaker slot at the top of the phone display was full of dust.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force

As you’ve probably seen, our Lab Manager/SCVMM 2008 R2 upgrade to SCVMM 2012 SP1 was not the smoothest in the world. The end result was a clean lab manager and SCVMM install, but a raft of virtual machines that had previously been part of environments. In tidying up, Richard and I learned a few things about picking apart VMs that were once part of an environment such that a new environment could be built form the wreckage.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013