markwilson.it

So here I am, last Friday before Christmas… trying to clear out my Inbox before the holidays and an urgent client request comes in…
We have received a late requirement for a virtualised global distribution system based on a traditional Linux Red Hat (with Red Nose) operating system utilising fat-client vertical drop-off delivery systems. The solution [...]

I’ve spent most of this month working with a customer who is consolidating various Active Directory forests into a single domain. We didn’t use any third party tools – just the standard Microsoft utilities, i.e. Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) v3 and Exchange Migration Wizard (one of the Exchange Server 2003 deployment tools) [...]

A few weeks back, I saw the number of browser visits to this site drop dramatically overnight whilst RSS subscriptions remained constant. Thankfully, traffic is now back up to the previous levels and there could be many reasons for this but I have to suspect it’s down to Google’s latest round of cat and mouse [...]

There’s been much discussion of the UK’s archaic copyright laws as I’ve questioned the need for DRM and written about ripping DVDs and converting between multimedia formats. I’ve also criticised the BBC for it’s substandard iPlayer service (even if it does now stream content it still doesn’t allow offline playback on all platforms and, [...]

Just over a year ago, I bought an iPod speaker system from Altec Lansing. Easily as good as the Apple equivalent (and at less than half the price), I’ve been really pleased with them, so when Altec Lansing’s public relations team got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in a new portable [...]

So there I was, lying in bed in my hotel room, when Dara Ó Briain comes on the telly and starts talking about IT… it made me laugh a lot. So much that I thought I’d reproduce it here:
“[IT is] full of amazing bullshit job titles that didn’t exist 10, 20 years ago. [...]

I’m attending a Microsoft Forefront Security course and it was interesting to hear the analogy that the instructor used to describe how people perceive Microsoft and security when used in the same sentence… he referred to it as the Škoda badge problem – i.e. that everyone knows a modern Škoda is a well engineered car [...]

For the last few days, I’ve been writing a migration process for an Active Directory and Exchange migration that I’m working on.
It shouldn’t be necessary to cram documents for technical people full of screenshots but experience tells me that:

It’s what many IT team leaders expect.
If you don’t provide lots of pictures then people don’t follow [...]

Windows Server 2008 beta testers are probably aware that the release candidate distributions include a pre-release version of the new virtualisation platform that is now known as Hyper-V (formerly known as Windows Server Virtualisation and codenamed Viridian).
With Hyper-V due to follow Windows Server 2008 release (within 180 days), it was widely anticipated that no formal [...]

Arghhh! I’ve just spent the last 3 hours trying to write a post on another site that I manage using WordPress. I can’t find anything on the support forums but it seems that every time a page or post includes more than 10 items that look like an e-mail address then the following [...]