In my blog post last year about Microsoft Photosynth, I used my desk as an example and, even though I had cleared it up before taking the images for the photosynth, it was still looking congested – as the various items of IT that I use for my work and hobbies vie for placement on a desk that is a best described as small but functional.
So, last Friday, I decided that something had to change. As well planning a trip to Ikea for some new shelves to organise the assortment of items that are spreading across the office floor (most of which is waiting to be advertised on eBay, Freecycled or otherwise disposed of), I purchased a sheet of MDF. Nothing remarkable – just a single sheet of Medium-density fibreboard, sized 1900x605x18mm.
Laying this across my desk and filing cabinet gave me a large expanse of flat work surface, upon which to place: the MacBook and external monitor that I use for digital photography; the notebook PC that I use for work; my Netgear ReadyNAS; the PC that I use for video production; my IP phone; and the mouse and keyboard that control the server under the desk (connected to the same monitors as the PC, using a Linksys KVM solution). Now I can reach them all, I can leave my graphics tablet and film scanner on the desk all the time, and I still have room for papers when I’m working.
It might only overhang the edge of the desk by a few inches either side but I really cannot overstate how big a change to my workspace this simple change has made!
I bumped into Aaron Parker at tonight’s Windows Server/Active Directory/Vista joint user group meeting and he showed me his latest toy: a Dell Latitude XT2 tablet PC. The great thing about this tablet is that it works with the stylus and with fingers, so you can use the multitouch features in Windows 7 but also use the stylus to write notes.
I spent most of yesterday working on some more How-Do-I? videos for Microsoft. The delivery mechanism for these is via FTP, and the command line FTP client in Windows is pretty basic so it doesn’t show progress on uploads by default. My problem was that, when I’m uploading 50MB .zip files to a server, it’s nice to know that the transfer is still working.
Then I remembered something that Garry Martin had mentioned a few months back – the hash command.
Before starting an upload, I turned on hash printing, so the FTP client prints # characters to the console during the upload, demonstrating progress. I still prefer the BSD version on my Mac, which shows progress updates as a percentage by default, but at least I could see progress as Windows XP pushed the file to the server.
A couple of days back, my friend Stuart and I were trying to configure a device via a serial port. You’re probably thinking that’s not so hard, just hook up a console cable, fire up a terminal emulator, make sure you have the right settings and you’re good to go, hey?
Except that neither of us had a serial port on our laptops… and the only PC we had available with a serial port wasn’t configured with an operating system (at least not one we had the password for).
Thanks to a great Linux distribution called Slax, we were able to build a boot CD that included minicom in just a few seconds and after downloading and burning we could boot the PC from CD. All it took then was to configure Minicom to use /dev/ttyS0 (if we had used a USB to serial connector it would have been /dev/ttyUSB0), with /var/lock for the lockfile, 9600 8N1 Baud/parity, hardware flow control on, software flow control off and we were connecting to the console output (David Sudjiman described something similar to configure his Cisco router from Ubuntu).
I’m sure I could have used an alternative, like Knoppix but the real beauty of Slax was the ability to create a custom build on the fly with just the modules that are required. I could even put it on a USB stick…
Reading around on the ‘net afterwards I came across Van Emery’s Linux Serial Console HowTo which turns things around the other way (using a serial port to get into a Linux machine). I though it might be fun (in a retro sort of way) to hook up some dumb terminals to a Linux PC but I’m not sure what I’d do with them though… web browsing via Lynx? A bit of command line e-mail? Definitely a geek project.
Another day of playing with SharePoint which varied between quite interesting and extremely tedious, I thought I’d share a little tip that my colleague, Alan Dodd, gave me tonight.
In my recent blog post about the R2 wave of Microsoft Virtualisation products, I mentioned the management products too – including System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 (which, at the time was at release candidate stage). That changes today, as Microsoft will announce that SCOM 2007 R2 has been released to manufacturing.
“Enhanced application performance and availability across platforms in the datacenter through cross platform monitoring, delivering an integrated experience for discovery and management of systems and their workloads, whether Windows, UNIX or Linux.
Enhanced performance management of applications in the datacenter with service level monitoring, delivering the ability to granularly define service level objectives that can be targeted against the different components that comprise an IT service.
Increased speed of access to monitoring information and functionality with user interface improvements and simplified management pack authoring. Examples include an enhanced console performance and dramatically improved monitoring scalability (e.g., over 1000 URLs can be validated per agent, allowing scaling to the largest of web-based workloads).”
Further details are available on the Microsoft website.
Stack Overflow is a Q&A site – but (and I thought this before I read it on Jeff’s blog post announcing Stack Overflow), it’s not like Experts Exchange – the site that charges money for access to community-generated content (thank goodness for Google’s cache) because it’s free – as community-generated content should be. Of course, not everyone will agree with my opinion there – I’m sure the people at Experts Exchange think they have a fine business model but I think it stinks to charge money for something that has been generated by your users. Anyway, back to the point, Stack Overflow is a sort of forum-meets-wiki-meets-blog-meets-digg site for software engineers to ask and answer questions, earning reputation points based on the value of their input.
So Stack Overflow is a great site for developers but I’m an IT admin-type… is there something similar for us? Well, no – not really. There hasn’t been, but now the Stack Overflow guys are launching Server Fault. You can hear more about it in Jeff Atwood’s recent interview on RunAs Radio but it’s aimed at IT professionals and system administrators, running on the same concepts as Stack Overflow.
I wish Jeff and his cohorts all the best with Server Fault and I plan to spend some time over there myself. Right now the site is in semi-public beta – if you have an OpenID and you know the password then you can get in – and the full public beta is expected to commence next week.
Together with my colleague, Alan Dodd, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time this week cleansing data in a SharePoint list. Quite why I can’t import e-mail addresses from an Excel spreadsheet to a column of type “Person or Group” I don’t know, but we couldn’t seem to make it work…
Checking names or browsing the directory was tediously slow; then I found that if I pasted the e-mail address, rather than the person’s name, SharePoint immediately resolved that address to a name and let me move on to the next record… might be a timesaver for someone?
