When Software Attacks!

Tech Ed EMEA IT 2008: Day 1 - Keynote

So, the keynote was interesting. Much of the content I had seen before, but there were some demos that were interesting and a few snippets that made me take note. For example, I had not understood that the acquisition of Kidaro will enable interaction between applications running within a virtual machine and the host desktop in ways that are not currently achievable. That the technology will ship as part of a new Desktop Optimisation Pack was news.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, November 3, 2008

Tech ED EMEA IT: Day 1 - Waiting for the Keynote

It’s an exercise in surreality. I’ve just walked through tunnels reminiscent of THX1138, to emerge in a wonderful blue-bathed auditorium, and they’re playing the Akira soundtrack (specifically the bit from just after the first nuclear explosion). Weird. Andy and I travelled all the way from Bradford, and the first guy we strike up conversation with… is from Salford! What are the odds? Anyway, here’s a pic of the view from our seats.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, November 3, 2008

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 1

It’s 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote. I thought I’d take a picture of the conference pack, especially since I’ve heard grumblings about the PDC bag. The TechEd pack looks pretty much identical to the pack the devs brought home last year, to me. However, when I opened the curtains I was greeted by a fantastic sunrise:

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, November 3, 2008

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 0 - Greetings from Barcelona

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it’s not sunny. Oh well… However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you’re passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food. I’m also extremely impressed with the Metro system here in Barcelona. It’s my first time in the city, and the transport is pretty efficient, with a wonderful simple trip-based charging mechanism.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 2, 2008

Barcelona-bound

Andy and I are travelling to Barcelona this weekend for TechEd EMEA IT. I’m really looking forward to some of the sessions on Hyper-V, SharePoint and Forefront.If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop us a line and say hi.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, October 31, 2008

Mix Remixed

I don’t visit the Mix community site often – historically, the content has been of little interest and infrequently updated. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a relaunched Mix Online with a new Microformats project – Oomph. In short, it’s cool – a microformats extension for IE plus other goodies to help implement them, including a live writer plugin for creating hcards. Go check it out, and I’ll try to post more later…

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, October 26, 2008

Vista on Dell Mini 9: Using junctions to move files off the SSD

Flush with my success earlier in getting apps installed on the SD card now mounted as ‘c:\SD Program Files’ I installed a few things. I then hit a snag. When you install apps using an MSI, the installation files get cached by Windows Installer. Steadily, c:\windows\installer gets bigger and bigger, so whilst my apps were no longer taking up space, the install files were (and some of those are quite large).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, October 17, 2008

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Installing applications on an SD card

I’m still trying new things with the Mini 9. I now have an image file that I can restore to the Mini which has my base install after running sysprep. The problem I have is storage space – the SSD isn’t quite big enough. So, Richard wandered in this morning and handed me a 4Gb SD card to experiment with. The question: Can we use the SD card and install app onto it?

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, October 17, 2008

Getting Vista on the Dell Mini 9

Our second Mini 9 arrived in the office today. This one is for Andy and myself to use whilst out of the office. Richard has successfully upgraded his to XP Professional, so we had to try to push the bar out a little further – we’re running Vista Business. I have not spent any time tweaking or prodding yet. I used install media with SP1 included and obliterated the partition on the SSD, then installed the drivers from Dell where necessary, and a driver for the battery hardware that Vista itself suggested rather than the Dell solution.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Redux

I’ve been chipping away at this for a while now today, and I’ve learned a few things on the way: When Vista says it suggests installing the battery drivers for the system, don’t. The zip file it suggested I install broke power management. Patch the system fully as an admin user before logging in as a restricted user. It will save you hours of time. Sysinternals Diskmon doesn’t work with Vista - you need to run it as admin, and that certainly isn’t an option for my restricted users.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, October 14, 2008