Dugie’s Pensieve

Kleefy’s Indestructible Shuttle Case

I got a chance to catchup up with Michael Kleef and Kyle Rosenthal at the recent Ready Launch Tour in Brisbane. Other than talking about Kyle’s new Vista Website VistapcGuy.net (insert shameless plug),  I got to see Michael’s shiny new suit of armour to protect his AMD Demo Box as he and it flies around the country.

I was impressed, after all can you to stand on your computer carry case?  Check it out:

Been meaning to blog this for a while.  A couple of weeks ago now, I planted a veggie garden - well sort of, it’s more like veggie pots.  :)

Brisbane is is under level 4 water restrictions at the moment, so I had to get creative.  I’d previously installed a “grey water bypass” on our second laundry sink:

Now all that wonderful ‘cleanish’ water ends up in the veggie pots. I’ve got tomatoes, capsicum, lettuce, onions and shallots.  All growing nicely

All the other water (like laundry) ends up on the lawn and the fruit trees.  For the first time in months I’vee seen green lawn :)

A little late (and a little off topic) but I spent last week with a 1:1 with Wyse and their VDI solution.  (VDI is a nifty innovation called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure from VMware)

Wyse gave me both a S10-VDI and a V90 (in a snazzy little carry case) with NFR copies of both their streaming server and connection broker server.  The two aren’t really related, but are in a similar space - so I spent a fair bit of time on both anyway.  :)

Anyway, some quick points of note for VDI are:

• You need some flavour of a VMware Server product with Virtual Center
• You need the LeoStream Server Software (called the Connection Broker) to “Round Robin” the connections to available Desktop VMs, and to create new desktop VMs when the existing pool is full.
• The connection broker setup was straight forward, done via a browser
• There were a variety of options/policies for defining what VMs a user could connect to
• Your WYSE terminals will naturally need to support VDI, so we used the S10-VDI

Once everything was together, it all just worked.  You powered up a thin client, connected to a workstation hosted within a VM, and could use and abuse the workstation as you saw fit.

I think that was everything?  I was pretty happy with everything I just saw.  When time permits I’ll post some screenshots or even a blogcast.

Uh huh, it’s here and it looks gooood !!  Go grab the RTM for yourself:  “Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows XP (KB926139)“

It’s taken a while, and a name change along the way - but I’m genuinely excited.  It’s cooler than cool:

Once you’ve got it, drop by the PowerShell blog.  :)

Well the IE7 readiness Toolkit VPC was there last week.  Really it was ?!

But it’s not now.  Keep you posted if I find out more.

I’ve already blogged about the VHD testdrive, so now it’s time to take it for a spin.  I used Virtual PC, because most people I know prefer Virtual PC to Virtual Server when doing “this sort of thing”.  Maybe it’s a drag-n-drop thing?

Anyway, with that in mind, this is what I found from my quick test drive:

• Once downloaded and run, the VPC extracts to 2.7 Gb
• Firing up in VirtualPC gives you the warning “The hardware standard is not recognized“.  Click ok and everything will work ok
• When you turn the VPC on for the first time the image comes out of SysPrep
• The default timezone of course if US time :)
• The Username and Password (Evaluation1) are in the ReadMe
• In an effort to keep the image “Vanilla”, Winver as apposed to BGinfo has been used in the startup group.  A nice touch
• Networking is disconnected by default
• The Virtual Machine Additions v13.552 are already installed
• Eventlogs are of course empty
• There is an evaluser account, with the password Evaluation1
• You can’t activate the image, because the product key is invalid - no surprises here the doco tells us this
• For those interested, the product key is: “HDWHK-W7VPV-CJKT4-DMG9J-CBF4J”
• By default, you only get 30 days of use before rebuilding your VM
• VHDmount works very nicely with the VHD
• I’ve rolled my clock forward to March 10 2008 - tried to kill the image but I couldn’t.  Guess I wasn’t trying hard enough
• The i386 files are under “c:\Windows Installation Files\I386“, these allow you to make the VM anything from an IIS box to a DC

So in summary, the build is a “next, next, finish” with no tweaking.  I’m pretty happy with that, because it’s a known standard that can be used as a base-line.  I tried a variety of informal tests, and they all worked as expected

PS: Thankyou to the mysterious “Jeff” who put the image together - you left your name in the VMC  :)

Just a reminder for all us Aussies.  Tomorrow at 11am on 11 November is Remembrance Day in Australia.

For my non Aussie readers, this is where we pause for (usually) a minute at 11am to remember the sacrifice of those men and women who have died or suffered in wars, conflicts, and all who have served during the past 100 years.  

If you can tomorrow set your phone alarm for 11am, and please take a moments silence, perhaps with a cup of coffee or a cigarette.

Image credit:  Wikipedia, Remembrance Day

Today I noticed the “WinXP SP2 IE6 VPC Image” was added to Microsoft downloads.  The image is a 290 Meg download, and extracts to just over 1 Gig. The image itself is:

• Windows XP SP2 with IE6
• latest production release of the VM Additions (13.552). 
• Includes the IE7 readiness Toolkit

From what I understand (briefly firing up the VM) it is designed to give a fully operational toolset to developers to test websites.  A snippet is below:

Use this toolkit to evaluate what’s new in Internet Explorer 7 and find information and tools to help you test the compatibility of your sites, extensions, and applications with Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft is eager to give you a head start and ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 7 is seamless for you and your audience.

Nice, download it, run it, use it.  Gotta be happy with that.

Nice - Process Monitor v1.0

I’ve just had a chance to check out the newly released, Process Monitor v1.0 (the 1.0 moniker almost seems  and insult doesn’t it?)

It’s sort of like RegMon and FileMon in the same tool, just better.  This little guy is going “straight to the pool room” - I mean going straight to my quick launch bar.- I give it the thumbs up

Anyway, you can read all about it on the new Sysinternals site on TechNet, and a screen shot is below:

This is awesome news.  You can now download pre-configured Virtual Machines  legally for testing, straight from the Microsoft Web Site — similar to the VMware virtual appliances.  There are 4 VMs posted so far:

• SQL Server 2005 VHD 2.4Gb
• Windows Server 2003 R2 VHD 1.4 Gb
• ISA Server 2006 VHD 1.5 Gb
• Exchange Server 2007 VHD 1.4 Gb

Pretty cool huh?  A big thankyou to all the wonderful people in the Microsoft Virtualization Team (especially the mysterious TB) for making Virtualization not only more accessible but a real enabler!

Thanks to John and Ben for the news, you find all the details on the TechNet VHD Test Drive web site and the Virtualization Business Technology Blog.

PS:  I’m downloading the R2 VHD as I blog this, it’ll take a while - so I’ll post back later with an update on my findings.