Wednesday 15 October 2008

November 2008 MVUG meeting announced

Posted on Wednesday 15 October 2008Monday 10 November 2008 By Mark Wilson

Those who attended the first Microsoft Virtualization User Group (MVUG) meeting in September will probably appreciate the quality of the event that Patrick Lownds and Matthew Millers put together with guest speakers from Microsoft (Justin Zarb, Matt McSpirit and James O’Neill) presenting on the various elements of the Microsoft Virtualization line-up (which reminds me… I must finish up that series of blog posts…).

The next event has just been announced for the evening of 10 November (at Microsoft in Reading) with presentations on Virtualization Solution Accelerators and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (i.e. backing up a virtualised environment) – register for the physical event – or catch the event virtually via LiveMeeting.

Timezone blindness

Posted on Wednesday 15 October 2008Wednesday 15 October 2008 By Mark Wilson

<rant>Daylight saving time is an outdated concept, a complete nuisance and should be abolished.</rant>

I’m in the UK and I have a call with a Microsoft Product Group in Redmond (WA) tonight at 12:00 PST. US Pacific time is 8 hours ahead of the UK, and we’re both on daylight savings and in the northern hemisphere… or so I thought (I’m still pretty sure about the northern hemisphere bit).

LiveMeeting tells me that the meeting has not started yet and to wait until the scheduled meeting time before trying again, so I checked the current time in the US and sure enough it’s only 11:00 on the west coast… then I checked the meeting request and saw that Google Calendar had picked up the time as UTC/GMT +7 (which is correct) but in the summer the UK time is not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but British Summer Time (BST) and somehow (possibly by Google Calendar, possibly by Microsoft Outlook, possibly by me), the iCalendar (.ics) file that Microsoft provided when I registered for the event had been mangled and my calendar only had a 7 hour time difference. Still, at least I was early not late…

In future, I’ll be making good use of the other link in the e-mail from Microsoft – the world clock timezone converter – which takes into account daylight saving time (DST) as well as the local time zone.

Lusting after the new aluminium MacBook

Posted on Wednesday 15 October 2008Wednesday 15 October 2008 By Mark Wilson

I really like my Apple MacBook. It’s expensive (compared with other similarly specified PCs) but I really enjoy using it – whether I’m running Mac OS X or Windows. Even so, I’ve always fancied an aluminium Mac but the Mac Pro was too expensive, I didn’t like the keyboard on the MacBook Pro and I still think the MacBook Air is little more than a toy.

New Aluminium MacBook - image used courtesy of Apple. A few hours ago, Apple announced the MacBook that I’ve been waiting for. The only problem is that with a 9-month-old MacBook White, there is no way I can justify the upgrade (even if I did have any change left in the piggy bank…)