New domain name – markwilson.it

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few weeks back, I registered a new domain name for this blog, along with my other IT-related activities. markwilson.co.uk will still remain in place (and will be the primary domain name, so as to preserve my Google PageRank) but over a period of time (as some page re-writes will be required) the IT-related content will also be made available at markwilson.it.

The .it top level domain is intended for Italian sites but as, in English, IT is also an abbreviation for information technology, it makes sense to register it for my IT-related activities.

EuroDNS
It’s the first time that I’ve used the EuroDNS domain name registration service and I’m pleased to say that the process was extremely smooth (despite La Naming Authority Italiana‘s insistence on the use of a written contract, which delayed things for a while). EuroDNS were able to send me the contract electronically (together with an English translation) and I was able to send the signed copy back in electronic form too. Something else I found (which is extremely important as domain name registrars are generally notorious for poor support) was that, after the application had gone into a black hole at La Naming Authority Italiana, EuroDNS were helpful and responded to my e-mails to get things moving again.

A feature-complete Windows Vista CTP (build 5308) is available for download

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back, I blogged about the imminent release of the next Windows Vista community technology preview (CTP). It turns out I was premature – my source obviously didn’t know about the x64 driver problems which delayed the release, but build 5308 is now available for registered beta testers to download from Microsoft Connect.

Interestingly, Microsoft still don’t seem to have written off the idea of a second beta, but the February CTP is feature complete. Quoting from the e-mail I received “This build is not beta quality but is being provided as a preview of our progress towards Beta 2. It should allow you to confirm the many bugs fixed since the last build and best of all, you can begin to explore the full Windows Vista feature set as we are now feature complete!”.

John Howard’s moving to Redmond – Good luck John

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Yesterday evening, I bumped into Microsoft UK’s John Howard (not to be confused with the current Australian Prime Minister). For the last year and a half, I’ve known John as an “IT Professional Evangelist”, covering a variety of Windows infrastructure topics, but anyone who’s seen him present on virtualisation will understand it is one of his main interests.

Back at the end of January, John had told me that he’s moving to Redmond to join “Corp” and take up a position as a Program Manager in the Windows Virtualisation team and whilst it wasn’t the biggest secret in the world, he did ask me to keep quiet until it was all confirmed. Well, it’s confirmed – John’s published the news on his blog, so it’s okay for me to talk about it now!

It’s a big move, selling up in the UK and moving the whole family to North-West America, so I’d like to wish John all the very best for that, to say thanks for all the help and advice – and thanks for being a friendly face around Microsoft UK.

I still can’t say who’s stepping into John’s shoes but I worked it out for myself at a recent event so it’s not that difficult. Purely by coincidence, I was idly wondering a couple of months back if there were any positions vacant in the IT professional technical evangelist team at Microsoft UK (it sounds like a great job to me), but I didn’t see the post advertised externally and I’ve not been back at Fujitsu for long so I plan to be staying put for a while – anyway, I’m an unofficial Microsoft evangelist right here!

As for John’s blog – a lot of what he’s doing will be Microsoft confidential; but he did say that, together with his colleagues Ben Armstrong, Mike Sterling and Mike Kolitz he’s hoping to start a Virtual Server team blog – along the lines of the Exchange Server team blog (you had me at EHLO) or the Internet Explorer team blog (IEBlog). I guess that will be the space to watch and catch the latest details on the development of the Virtual Server hypervisor technology.