When Software Attacks!

Places to eat in Seattle: Marcella’s Cookery

Tonight we ate in a place we’d seen recommended by Sara Ford in her blog: Marcella’s Cookery. A fantastic little New Orleans-style eatery run by the eponymous (and very friendly) Marcella and her husband, Anthony. The food was fabulous, well cooked and happily discussed by the chef himself. Between us we tried a number of dishes and all were excellent. Anthony (the chef) told us that he moved to Seattle after Hurricane Katrina and I think it’s Seattle’s gain – we had a great time and I can wholeheartedly recommend the place.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 7, 2009

Places to eat in Seattle: Lowell’s

slide1 Richard’s an old hand in Seattle, so he suggested we ate breakfast at Lowell’s down at the Pike Place Market. I’m really glad he did – the eggs benedict were fantastic. We ate great food with a fantastic view of the bay. If you’re ever in Seattle I can wholeheartedly recommend that you try Lowell’s while you’re here.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, June 3, 2009

UK Hotels take note – this how to do coffee in my room!

I’m in Seattle this week (just as a big heatwave has rolled in). As I type this I’m looking out from my room at the Westin over a great view of the bay. In the corner I hear my coffee brewing. None of your little kettles and sachets of instant coffee here. Look what I got: Coffee filter machine and Starbucks coffee That’s right, my very own coffee machine with Starbucks coffee.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Configuring IIS Bindings to include host headers with https on Windows Server 2008 (for SharePoint)

NOTE: We use a wildcard SSL certificate which makes our life much easier when dealing with multiple hostnames. I have not tested this approach with multiple SSL certificates for specific sites. We’ve been reconfiguring our SharePoint 2007 farm over the past couple of days and it’s now hosted on Windows Server 2008 and using NLB (network load balancing). The load balancer has been configured with a single public IP address and all our previous DNS CNAME registrations have been replaced with hostname A registrations pointing at the address.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

NewSID fails on Windows Server 2008 R2

The title says it all. I’m currently building a virtual lab to test DirectAccess and every time I run newsid on windows server 2008 R2 the system bluescreens irrevocably on reboot. I’ve now switched to using sysprep to change the SID. Here’s hoping the sysinternals guys update what is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools around!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 8, 2009

Windows 7 on the 8Gb SSD Mini 9: Redux

You may remember that I ended my previous post with about 1.6Gb free on the 8Gb SSD of the Mini 9 after installing Windows 7. I still needed to install Office 2007, or at the very least Word and Excel for the ‘book to be useful. I therefore rummaged out another 16Gb SD card and revisited my earlier vista post about installing apps to an SD card. This time I simply let the card allocate a drive letter and installed Office to d:\Program Files instead.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 20, 2009

Windows 7: Attempting to install to VHD – an odyssey

One of the things I am most impressed about with Windows 7 is the latest Media Center. As a result, I wanted to install the build 7000 beta release onto our media PC at home. However, I already have that working nicely with Windows Vista and, frankly, I didn’t want to have to repeatedly reinstall if the beta caused problems. The solution seemed simple: install Windows 7 to a VHD file sitting on the Vista disk.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, February 7, 2009

Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9

What better way to try Windows 7 then installing it on the Mini 9? Having read all the commentary about the smaller footprint of the new OS I couldn’t resist. If you want to try this yourself, the procedure is exactly as if you were installing Vista. You will need the drivers folder from the Dell, along with the contents of the Program Files\Wireless Select Switch folder from the XP install and the R192569.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, November 10, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 3 - Steve Riley

The last session of the day was just incredible. A surfer-dude with boundless energy wandering around the audience in shorts, cracking jokes and telling stories and every single one related in some way to his point. Steve Riley is a fantastic presenter, and his session - Do these ten things now or else get 0wned was a great session on security. Sadly, I don’t think it’s repeated or I would urge you all to attend the next viewing.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 4 - Guru Central

So, we’re on the penultimate day of TechEd EMEA and I have to say that exhaustion is starting to creep in. However, the day had a great start with sessions by Steve Riley and then Mark Russinovich. Steve was talking about security implications of virtulisation and his views were stimulating. He was talking in depth about what to consider when virtualising machines and why Microsoft took the architectural approach that they did for the Hyper-V stack when security was considered.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2008