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HORRAY

Currys, Dixons and PC World are to stop stocking analogue televisions and will instead promote “integrated” sets with built-in digital Freeview tuners.

Well after waiting 3 weeks by FON router (with optional 7dB antenna) finally arrived on Friday

Much to my surprise, it did the business straight out of the box

Plugged it in to my network and away it went (using the serial no for the private network WPA key)

Logged into the FON web site via the FON_AP public WiFi configure the location and that is it done, the FON locate WiFi maps now shows my house as a FON node.
Jobs a good’n

It is a condition of my house insurance that I have a catalog of ALL my DVDs. I used to use a package called DVD profiler from invelos. After some digging I found my old licence key, which was upgraded for free to the latest version, they do a mobile version too, which means I can keep a copy on my PDA and know what DVDs I have next time I see any on offer (During that catalog I discovered I had two copies of memento and goonies). The software support bulk entry using a bar code scanner, which being a tech hoarder I have one stashed away which I acquired some time ago.

Now this is where the fun starts…..

Apparently bar code readers can be programmed, with pre amble and post amble characters, and various other options. This one seemed to be programmed to insert and ‘ESCAPE’ before the output and a ‘CR’ after, so in notepad it all looked fine, but the escape caused the data entry screen to ‘cancel’ DOH!
Time to RTFM for the scanner, to program the scanner, you scan special bar code from the programming manual.?? So print the manual, 10 Blank pages later, power cycle printer, 10 more blank pages, clean heads, 10 more blank pages, replace black ink, 10 more blank pages. DOH !!!!!!!
Of to the shops for a NEW printer, being a fully networked house hold it would be nice to have a network aware printer, and I hate trying to work out whats what from online reviews, so 5 shops and lots of box reading and helpless staff later, cheap Lexmark wireless printer from Sainsburys !

Print Manual, re program the reader, sorted.

Nah not that easy, some DVD barcodes have check digit, which is not sent by the reader, but it expected by the software, read the manual again, and enable check digit transmit,

Sorted, 350 Bar codes later. All done, 6 hours after I started !!!!!!!!!!!

I am currently looking at Enterprise RSS technology. What a mine field ! No one knows what they want, let alone how to do it.
So I look at it like this.

1. Central  location to discover internal and external RSS feeds
2. RSS feed consumption stats
3. Easy to use
4. Easy to configure
5. Flexible

Newsgator seem to provide all of the above. However with the small problem of a proprietary clients which then have to be deploy to 80,000-100,000 desktops (in my case), and you can guarantee that a large portion on the community (mainly the geeks) won’t like the client. So what you really need is a RSS Proxy server,  that will consume, cache and aggregate RSS feeds and republish them as standard a RSS or ATOM feed, which can then be consumed by the users favourite RSS client (outlook 2007, IE7, Vista, Feedreader etc etc )
Only found one so far http://gregarius.net/ which is open source PHP, I have budget and can buy a solution but can’t find one. 

Are my requirements that bizarre ???

A corporate version of FEEDBURNER woudl be perfect

Just in case anyone thinks a week at TechEd in Barcelona is a jolly, you are sadly mistaken. FIVE days of rapid fire presentations is total DATA overload, which despite the doing apparently nothing is extremely tiring.

So Day 4…..

Session 1. PHP on windows, now don’t laugh. Monday saw the release of fastCGI for windows server 2003, this is a Microsoft bolt on to run supporting CGI apps almost 15 times faster. CGI is traditionally very slow on windows due to the over head involved in creating and destroying a NEW process. CGI creates a NEW process for EVERY request. In fastCGI the process is persisted and re-used offering almost a 15 folder performance improvement. Add to that you can use asp.net forms authentication in front of the zend PHP and obtain the login credentials i may just have to try standing up a copy of Wordpress on windows, Cuz I can !!!

Session 2. IIS7 on Server core, Server core is the NEW low foot print install for windows server 2008, it is not actually a SKU, but an install option you buy standard edition licence and install CORE or Full, (I wonder if they will rebrand ARCADE edition like the XBOX 360) Core will present some interesting challenges for the “right click” boys, as there is NO GUI, it is CMD line (hooray) or remote admin. I have never fully understood why a server needs a GUI, but my first server was novell 2, Shame that server CORE does not support managed code, so you can’t install a .net frame work, which sort of cripples a windows web server

Session 3. SQL Server indexing by Kimberly Tripp, OH MY GOD, a serious session on SQL indexing and tools and scripts., using DMVs on SQL 2005, she demonstrated scripts she had created that woudl recomend index creates and index drops. the most enlightening statement she made (which made so much sense , but i had never though of it before) dont just look at the long runing queries, but run a trace over the a fully daily workload and look for common queries, shaving 50% of a query which is run 5000 times day provides better overall performance gain than looking at the long runing query which only runs a few times a day.
 

Well it is actually day 5, and nearly time to go home, but i have only just found the time to to write this up
Yet another day of many sessions and information over load

Session 1. Microsoft search server, wow look like that have spent some time on this one, really cool fedarated queries etc , which being based on opensearch technology (which is fundamentally RSS) you could just add a normal RSS feed to the side of your normal search. Picture you corporate search engine has you TOP news article down the side….
I wonder if it could be tweaked into a feedburner type app by republishing RSS feeds

Session 2. missed that one and gave the IIS guys in the exhibition  hard time. Well worth it, deep dive into IIS7 and the IIS& FTP server (which is not part of server 2008, but a separate install for some reason)

Session 3. Interactive session, SQL server best practices, did not realy get much from this session, it would appear my current recommendations for SQL security in a WEB farm are pretty good

Session 4. Far too tired, for more data in take to did a LAB on server 2008

Very Busy day, 6 Session, some good some bad

session 1, IIS7 to IT Pro’s by Issac Roybal
Tonnes of really good new features, many of which directly address problem i have experianced over the past FOUR years, I wonder when i can get it on the ground

Session 2, went to a?? great hand on, self paced LAB on configuring IIS7, this actually left me with more Questons than answers

Session 3, Lunch team slot on Windows Home Server, fantastic home Pc backup and central storage box, full support for up to 10 media connect 2.0 devices, (shame i dont have any YET !!!!!!), built in web server to allow uncle jim to acces a slice of your library, yoiu even yourself from that nasty hotel 1000 miles from home! soon to be shipping with a pucker public cert on the homeserver.com domain with full support for UPNP and dynamic DNS too.

Session 4, MORE IIS7, but how to used the new shared config feature in a WEB farm, so many NEW features to fix problems i spent weeks writing scritps for in IIS6. (met a dutch bloke yoiu managed a web farm doing 150,000,000 hits per day, make my intranet 8,000,000 per hit look pathetic)

Session 5, SQL server storage and performance, some excitable lunatic talking about 32CPU server with 512 Gig of ram and 92 hard disk spindles just for the data

??Session 6, Windows server 2008 core, seem like a nice idea, but with .net being “managed code” it cant be deployed on CORE, making the IIS CORE version suitable for ASP (yeh right), ??HTML and PHP (i think DONT QOUTE ME)

ah well time to return to the hotel for nosh and an early night, unless i can find seom of the guys i met in redmond in april

just left the Keynote speech at MS TechEd in Barcelona
some really great stuff on the horizon, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, system center etc,
However the most impressive thing for my, as a geek, was Home server, and dedcated windows based server for the home, automated back up household PCs, support from windows media devices such as XBOX 360. Full PC backup and restire etc etc

Far too many usefull feature for a home PC enironmrnt too mention here

however some what ammusing was when the speaker asked how many people are running a “server” at home over 20 % of the audiance raised their hands,
So I am NOT the only one

Microsoft has fired its chief information officer (CIO) barely two years after he was appointed to the post.

Thousands snared by malware warning from big-name websites

ICANN tweaks root DNS server

got my self one of those domestic power meters and been around the house,

HOLY COW!!!!

Need to change my storage strategy, the Compaq RA4100 fibre channel chassis with 12 disk may well be over kill, but it is also DAMN expensive to run,
and I have NO idea why the UPS is pulling 100Watts with NO load !!!

??As i am only ising the storage for archive type stuff not “live” apps, I am planning to replce it with an external USB2 disk,
the Cost Recovery Period will be less than 4 months !

Not sure what to do about the server though, it is runnign AD, Exchange, VMware server with VOIP PBX and dansguardian ….