electric bunnies

iPad vs Samsung Galaxy tab

2012-01-29T20:25:00.001+02:00

Been playing a little with Quentin's Galaxy tab to compare it to the iPad. Today's test was simply the quality of a YouTube video, so I pulled up Ensiferum's From Afar on both tablets.

The sound quality on the iPad is marginally better than that of the Samsung, and the graphics are crisper too. In fact, I was surprised at how blurry bits of the video was on the Samsung.

I also noticed that the loadtime on the iPad was much shorter than on the Samsung.

I will be performing the same test with the Asus EEE Transformer as soon as my daughter remembers to fully charge the tablet :)

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

First glance: Windows 8

2011-12-21T06:48:00.001+02:00

I finally installed the Developers Preview of Windows 8 onto my netbook (HP Mini 200) last night after much deliberation and several stabs at getting a variety of Linux distros to work with this netbook, and am quite happy with both the performance and ease of use.

The disk image (iso) is a whopping 2.8GB for the 32bit version, while the 64bit version is 3.6GB. Once downloaded, you can either burn it to a DVD or convert to a bootable USB key. As my netbook doesn’t have a DVD-rom, I used Linux Live USB Creator to make a bootable USB key from the disk image. You will need a USB key/memory stick with a minimum of 4gb of storage.

The installer is reminiscent of the Windows 7 installer, with a few small changes, and you are offered the option of configuring your Live account as your primary log-in account – obviously gearing up for the tablet-market.

The tablet-style home screen is easy to navigate, but a desktop view is also available for those of us who like some things old school.

What is glaringly missing is the old start bar. When one clicks on the Start button now, the view switches between the home screen and the desktop.

The control panel – that has, admittedly been evolving massively over the last couple of versions of Windows – also now reminds one more of the settings screen in both Android and IOS than the Control Panel of old. And it is pretty, and it is good. But don’t fret, the old school control panel is still available.

So far, all the apps I have installed were automatically pinned to the home screen. Right clicking on the icon allows one to unpin the app – so one can still keep the home screen clean – and this applies to the apps that are installed with the OS.

Those already using tablets may find this version of Windows easier to use, while I think those who are still attached to Windows XP may resist conversion quite vehemently. Performance, however, is a massive perk, so if you are running a netbook and would like to get a bit more out of it, I would happily suggest giving Windows 8 a try – just be sure to read the minimum requirements and ensure that your machine matches the minimum at the very least.

First glance: Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc

2011-12-11T11:15:00.001+02:00

After many, many months of deliberation, research and arguments - both internal and with others - I have finally made the switch to Android.
I really had my heart set on the Sony Ericsson S006, but had to look at other options when it became clear that this 16 megapixel camera phone would not hit our shores. Being a fan of Sony Ericsson phones, I looked through their catalog and after much deliberation settled on the Xperia Arc.
A beautiful slim and lightweight phone running Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), it is fast and responsive and sports a very nice 8 megapixel camera. Getting up and running if you already have a Google account is quick and painless, as is connecting to all other social networks.

I ran into a small issue with the wireless network for a bit, which was resolved by reconfiguring our wlan a little. I would normally be reluctant to reconfigure a network for a single device, but our wireless lan has been a little sluggish recently anyway, and the config changes improved the overall performance for the other devices too.
Changes were switching from mixed auth to TKIP, and excluding the n option. If you are having issues with the WiFi just dropping on this phone, have a look at your router config.

Once the wireless issue was resolved, my love for this phone grew exponentially, and I started liking Android too. I prefer the marketplace over the Apple app store, and love the ability to add active widgets to my screens. And android is made for online living.

This phone is a vast improvement over all previous phones I have owned, and I look forward to travelling with it.

(ETA - photo below taken while writing this post)

Need for speed Hot pursuit on Android

2011-11-27T00:37:00.001+02:00

So you will be able to play the game on any platform.

Media streaming

2011-10-19T20:09:00.001+02:00

After 2 days of playing around we have media streaming to the devices.

Androird tablet
Android smart phone
Ipad 2 tablet
Xbox 360

The xbox 360 is connected via windows media streaming services and media center.

All tablets and smart phones are connecting via Tversity.

Getting all the devices to stream media has been a long battle for us, but technology has improved greatly in the last couple years.

The tablet challenge

2011-10-18T17:58:00.001+02:00

The Q and I have decided to set a couple of challenges for our tablets, so we can really compare apples with apples (even if the other apples are of the android persuasion :p)
As a reminder, I have the Apple iPad 2 running IOS5, while Q has the Asus Eee transformer running Android Honeycomb.

If there are any apps/functions/features you would like us to test and compare, leave us a comment here or find us on Twitter or Facebook.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

ASUS Eee pad Transformer Android.

2011-10-18T15:01:00.001+02:00

Finished the homepage customisation on the table.

The iPad experience

2011-09-27T21:04:00.001+02:00

So, here I am almost a week later, whodathunk, having loads of fun with the 'pad. Even figured out how to take screen caps, so here is a bit of my desktop:

Finally catching up on all the feeds, comics and obscure books I have wanted to read for some time.

So far, my favourite apps include the Citrix app and the wonderfully awesome 3d sky orb app, a great beginners astronomy app. Like the ability to read my mail on a decent screen size, without having to unpack my lump of a laptop. And, of course, being able to blog easily from anywhere is a major win for me.
Now, I know have most of those capabilities on my phone too, but I am not a dainty girl, and often find mobile phone keyboards awkward - even the touch screen ones - so combining what I love about my mobile (ignoring camera quality for a moment) with what i love about my net book without the heat and power issues, as well as the awkwardness of the flip, makes absolute sense to me.
I am feeling more at home with the device now, and not quite as stupid and clumsy as I did last week, but it will take some time before. I feel like I own it.
I have been stuck in bed recently with a minor alien invasion, but hope to take this puppy on the road with me this week-end to rAge (http://www.rageexpo.co.za/) as well as shopping for the garden - should be interesting.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

First glance - iPad 2

2011-09-23T09:48:00.001+02:00

This is unusual. I have never really been a big apple fan, but have suddenly found myself in possession of a sparkly new iPad 2 32gb, courtesy of my employer.

Once I managed to install iTunes, getting started was a breeze. Setting up my corporate email was almost easier than setting up Outlook, and I almost prefer the email interface to that Outlook presents.

It took me a while to get used to downloading apps from the store, abut have found a couple of nice apps so far, including Blogpress - which I suspect may start a love affair.

I still can't see a tablet replacing my laptop, but I think it may be a nifty business tool.

OpsMgr 2007: Cumulative update 5

2011-08-15T12:40:00.002+02:00

I notice that CU5 was released while I was on leave, it is available for download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26938
Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 resolves the following issues:

Restart of non-Operations Manager services when the agent is updated.
Updated ACS reports.
TCP Port Probe incorrectly reports negative ping latency.
MissingEvent Manual Reset Monitor does not work as expected.
Drillthrough fails because of rsParameterTypeMismatch in the EnterpriseManagementChartControl.
ACS - Event log message is truncated or corrupted in SCDW.
UI hang caused by SDK locking.
ACS Filter fails for certain wildcard queries.
Edit Schedule button is disabled with SQL 2008 R2.
Web console times out when you open the left navigation tree.
Scheduled Reports view for Windows Server 2003 and for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services SP3 CU9 returns "System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array."
Signed MPs cannot be imported when new attributes are added to existing classes.

Cross Platform Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 resolves the following issues:

Performance data for LVM managed partitions is not available.
Process monitor does not keep name if run by using symbolic link.
AIX with large number of processes crashes with bad alloc.

Cross Platform Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 adds the following feature:

Support for Red Hat 6

KB article here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2495674

OpsMgr 2012: before you install

2011-07-21T20:20:00.001+02:00

Before you install OpsMgr 2012, be sure to work through the OpsMgr Pre-Upgrade tasks. Pay particular attention to the collation on your SQL server installation. If your collation is set to anything but SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, you may want to look at changing your configuration. You can find help on doing this here and here.

And of course, be sure to work through the installation prerequisites too. You will need to request and download the Authorisation Manager hotfix for both a clean installation and an upgrade from OpsMgr 2007 R2.

OpsMgr 2012 Beta now available

2011-07-21T13:06:00.001+02:00

I was very happy when I logged onto the Connect site this morning and discovered that the OpsMgr 2012 beta is now available.

The downloadable file is only 1.06GB in size, so it shouldn’t take me longer than a couple of hours to download

Updating Twitter from Facebook

2011-07-03T12:53:00.001+02:00

I have a small confession to make: Twitter and I don’t really get along as well as we should. I typically don’t have time to keep twitter open all the time, so when I do visit, I tend to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts. Of course, I could unfollow a couple of people, but who do I drop? Yes, well… So, I visit Twitter irregularly, and tend to use a bunch of different services to update Twitter. And, well, Facebook gets all my attention.

Following this blog post, I found a quick and simple solution: update Twitter from Facebook.

Now to see how annoying I can really get to those ~~poor sods~~ of you that decided to follow little ole me on Twitter. Sorry in advance.

Orchestrator 2012 Beta now available

2011-06-18T09:29:00.001+02:00

The System Center Orchestrator 2012 public beta is now available for download here. Orchestrator was previously known as Opalis, and it is the tool for automating all your run books (repeatable processes) and has some of the following features:

Powerful Runbook authoring and testing optimized for IT Pros
Publish/Subscribe mechanism for integrating Microsoft System Center with 3rd party systems that reside in the enterprise data center
Distributed runtime architecture
Silverlight Orchestration Console to manage deployed Runbooks
Extensive Standard Activities library including support for SNMP, SSH, Web Services, WMI, Databases and other industry-standard interfaces
Extensive support for PowerShell and Microsoft .NET
Extensible by design

The system requirements for the beta as follows:

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 R2

Recommended Configuration
- RAM – minimum 1GB recommended 2GB
- Disk space minimum 200MB
- CPU Dual Core or better
The following software is required to install Orchestrator:
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
- .NET Framework 4 (if you are installing the Orchestration console or web service)
- Microsoft Silverlight 4 (for the Orchestration console only)
Operating System

Management server, Runbook server, Orchesrator web service: Windows Server 2008 R2
Runbook Designer, Runbook Tester: Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7

This should keep me busy for a while while waiting for the OpsMgr 2012 beta

Stuff I have been thinking about for a while

2011-03-30T08:28:00.000+02:00

Warning: Lots of rambling, wondering, pondering and thinking follows, based on my own experiences and observations. This is by no means influenced by the keynotes address delivered or related by MMS in anyway whatsoever.

Today’s keynotes dealt with the commoditization of IT, and how to manage a wide range of devices using mostly ConfigMgr. While I know very little about ConfigMgr, this is an exciting topic and something I have been thinking about for a while. Most of our users now use multiple devices to consume both personal and work-related data – anything from ultraportable devices like netbooks and tables to smart phones right down to gaming consoles. And it is actually something I have been thinking about for a while – not necessarily managing those devices, but rather ensuring that the systems behind deliver a consistent service to users regardless of platform. It also comes back to the mind-set change I wrote about yesterday.

I seem to encounter two different people on a daily basis – those who are connected, and those who aren’t. And those who aren’t often make negative comments about those who are, and often, those who are connected are not technical staff, but rather information workers. I find this incredibly interesting, as one would expect technical staff to be more connected, or have more of a need to be connected than pure information workers – but then, potentially because information workers consume rather than manage, they are more inclined to be connected all the time.

I am not saying that there aren’t techies who are connected. Quite the contrary – many of my peers are very connected, as connected as I am or even more so. And I get the feeling that the techies who aren’t connected have disconnected themselves because they have become disillusioned with technology after years and years of fire-fighting, and working in IT has become a job rather than chasing a passion.

However, I firmly believe that, as an IT Professional, we need to consume these services to understand our users. It is also important that we, at all times, deliver the same level of service that we would ourselves expect from a service provider. To paraphrase, ask not what our users can do for us, but what we can do for our users. Because, ultimately, as much as we dislike the thought, without the users there is no need for IT.

So, if you, as a techie (or IT Pro, as some may call us) are not using social media such as Facebook or Twitter in some way or another, and you have no interest in connecting with others using technology, you may not be an IT Pro, but purely a salary worker that happens to find themselves in a technical line of work. And yes, there is a difference. And I am not sure for how much longer there will be space for technical salary workers within the IT Industry.

Resistance is futile.

Thoughts on the MMS keynotes

2011-03-22T20:27:00.001+02:00

Just sat through the first keynotes address at MMS 2011. The focus of the keynotes was on the cloud – just as it was at Tech-Ed Africa 2010 – and while there weren’t really any surprises, there were a couple of new System Center products demonstrated, as well as the next version of the current products. I am really excited to start implementing OpsMgr 2012 at some of my customers, especially to leverage off the now built-in AviCode capabilities. System Center Advisor also looks very promising, and I can see that providing great value to a lot of our customers. Of course, Opalis is mentioned again, and its new name has been released – with the 2012 release, Opalis will now be called System Center Orchestrator.

I am concerned about the adoption of the Cloud within the African and South African markets. I don’t think the market is mature enough to transition to the cloud – not because of the infrastructure, but rather because of the named resource thinking. The thinking in most of our customers is still that an application belongs on a server, and that server belongs to that application. They think about applications the same way they think about people. I would like to think that we can change this mindset, but considering they still see technical resources in this same way too, and believe that if they don’t see the person no work is being done, I am not sure how we will drive this change in the market – but luckily this is not really not my problem, is it?

MMS 2011

2011-03-18T12:21:00.001+02:00

I’m hopping on a plane tomorrow to attend MMS 2011 in Vegas (Yeah Baby!) My husband is insisting that I blog about every single little moment of it, which I doubt would happen. But I may jot down some of the daily highlights to this blog.

I will be attending sessions on OpMgr vNext, as well as VMM and Opalis. I have a couple of free sessions, so I will probably attend a couple of other sessions on things that may grab my attention.

OpsMgr 2007 R2–A funny thing happened on the way to happiness

2010-12-03T14:33:00.001+02:00

So, a funny thing happened on one of my customers. Funny in the sense that one would expect this behaviour if you sit down and think about it. But really, who has time to think, right?

You see, we use ConfigMgr (SCCM) as a standard to deploy OpsMgr agents automatically. This typically ensures that every server in the environment is covered.

One of our new SCCM admins configured a package on a customer that recently migrated from MOM to SCOM, and, somehow, included the OpsMgr servers, which means that the OpsMgr agent was pushed out to both the RMS and the MS in that environment. Needless to say, OpsMgr became completely non-functional, as the agent configuration overwrote the MS healthservice config.

Luckily customer had an RMS and an MS. Unfortunately, the agent was deployed to both, which made recovery a little tricky.

Now, to recover, I’ve done the following:

Promoted the MS to RMS. Easy peasy. Bugger, MS reports the same error. Oh, right, agent was also deployed to MS.
Uninstalled OpsMgr from the RMS. Ok so far. No, not really, because it failed.
Stress, turn up the music. Think.
Oh, look, uninstallation succeeded after a reboot.
Rebooted again, just for good measure.
Attempted to install OpsMgr, but UAC was turned on, which returns an error. Ok, disable UAC, reboot again.
Installed OpsMgr, reconnecting back to the database. OMG, it worked.
Breathe.
Promoted newly installed RMS back to RMS role. Ok, right. No errors this time, and it reports healthy in the console.
Run ManagementServerConfigTool.exe UpdateDemotedRMS on the MS that was promoted to RMS. Still ok. Just checked the console to make sure, and everything is still fine.
Vodka! (or it would be, if I could consume alcohol)
Uninstalled OpsMgr, failed. Oh, wait. Uninstall agent first, then uninstall SCOM. Rebooted for good measure.
Switched off UAC (being pro-active here), and reinstalled OpsMgr and Voila! Environment returned back to how it should be.

Don’t try this at home. Please

Soundtrack for this morning’s activities provided by Korpiklaani, Ensiferum, Eluveitie and Kaizers Orchestra

Windows 2008 R2 as a workstation

2010-11-15T21:17:00.001+02:00

I’ve always been a server kind of girl, and after I ran into some problems recently on my laptop and was forced to reinstall, I thought I would give Windows 2008 R2 a bash.

My current work laptop is a little old, and is only running 2GB of memory – which has been a problem for me on Windows 7, mostly because I work my machine to death, as I typically run at least one Virtual PC vm, multiple remote desktop connections, at least Outlook, Word and Excel, as well as the OpsMgr Authoring console at the same time, not to mention a wide variety of browser tabs in both IE and Chrome, as well as MusicBee. My machine works hard. And often, while running Windows 7, I would need to shut down my VM if I am not actively using it, to ensure the rest of the applications run all right-ish.

With Windows 2008, I installed Hyper-V rather than Virtual PC, and simply configured my standard VM as a hyper-V client in a couple of clicks. *phew* And it just ran. Without completely killing my machine.

The only thing I missed was Aero, or at least some of the Aero features, but, lo and behold, it is possible to enable this and run Win2k8 R2 very successfully as a desktop.

To enable Aero:

Be sure to install your graphics driver (you will need to get it from your vendor more than likely, as it will probably not come down via Windows Updates)
Enable the Themes service (Server Manager > Configuration > Services > Themes, right click, properties, change from disabled to Automatic, apply, start service)
Right click on Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings. Click on Settings in the Performance section, and select Adjust for best performance.

You can now go to personalise your desktop and the Aero theme will be available.

I have noticed that, obviously, it has impacted performance slightly, so you may want to keep that in mind if you have an older machine (like mine) with minimal memory. I will probably have to switch to a basic theme while I run my VM, but at least I can have the pretty when i want it.

OpsMgr: vNext (OpsMgr 2012)

2010-11-14T13:35:00.001+02:00

Found this on Stefan Strangler’s blog this morning:

Cannot wait.

What I got from this video is that vNext will be easier to manage with more focus on application health, which makes me very happy. Also like the idea of delegated rights within OpsMgr, as well as the fact that the AviCode bits will now be built in.

According to Ian Blythe, we can expect to see public beta in Q2 of 2011, RC in Q3 and RTM in Q4.

MusicBee

2010-11-06T11:51:00.001+02:00

Oh MusicBee, how I love thee!

I’ve been looking for a new music player for some time now, as both Windows Media Player (WMP) and WinAmp are just too resource hungry for my liking. I had a couple of other requirements as well, such as the ability to either scrobble directly or support a Last.fm scrobbling plug-in, build playlists easily and help organise my music library. I’ve tried a couple of players over the past couple of months, but kept reverting back to WMP, simply because of the playlist building abilities. I happened to be browsing the Last.fm site again recently and stumbled onto MusicBee and decided to give it a bash as a last hope.

I fell in love within minutes, and haven’t found a single thing I don’t like about this multi-featured yet lightweight music player.

Other than being a kick-ass media player with a built-in scrobbler, you can also automatically fix those pesky tags with a couple of clicks and organise your music using presets that you can create.

But, my favourite feature must be the way MusicBee pulls together all the information about a song into the player, including lyrics.

Tech-ed Africa 2010: Things that got my attention

2010-10-23T07:03:00.001+02:00

I attended Tech-ed Africa this past week. It was a great couple of days, as always, but I must admit that I mostly ignored the OpsMgr sessions. Instead, I got really, really excited about a couple of new things.

System Center Opalis

My new best friend, and I am hoping we can take the relationship to a whole new level – even possibly make some babies. Yes, really.

I’ve been watching the Opalis story with interest with some time, but haven’t really had the chance to get my hands dirty. With it now being a member of the System Center suite, it has suddenly become much more accessible to us.

Here is a quick product overview video:

I have always believed in automation – I guess it is one of the reasons I started playing in the OpsMgr space in the first place – but Opalis makes it just so easy, not using it is almost anti-evolutionary

We were fortunate enough to also have a intimate session with Mark Gosson from the Opalis team yesterday at work, and our deployment team is already looking at deploying Proof-of-Concepts at a couple of our customers, so I can see Opalis taking off rapidly within our business. I will probably also be preaching the gospel for some time here.

Forefront Identity Manager 2010

I’ve never really been big into identity management or anything related (such as AD management), but for some reason, FIM has me all excited.

I guess it comes back to the automation abilities within this product, and the fact that it is no longer required to write reams of code to get the thing going. This makes it far more accessible to our customers, and easier for our engineers to maintain and support.

FIM 2010 looks like a great product, and I like the fact that one can control access to multiple systems from one location. It also makes it easier to ensure the correct people have the correct access by means of automation rules and workflows.

Up until recently, we had to enforce monitoring tool deployments within our customers, but with OpsMgr 2007, it seems that this has now almost become an accepted part, almost expected part, of any IT deployment.

I suspect we will now go through the same process with Opalis and FIM, and these two products will also become part of the base requirements for any outsource engagement we enter into – maybe not in the next year, but definitely in the next 3-4 years.

Live Writer updated

2010-10-23T06:40:00.001+02:00

I’m sure by now it is no secret that I am just a little bit in love with Live Writer, and this crush has just grown stronger with the release of Live Writer 2011.

LW2011 now features the wonderful ribbon, like the Office suite does, which gives it a much cleaner interface and makes it easier to find a lot of the formatting options.

One of my favourite new featurettes is autopopulation of copied hyperlinks into the hyperlink fields – this saves so much time.

You also now have the ability to post drafts to your blog, so you never need to lose your drafts again and you don’t have to quickly edit a posted draft to set it to draft. Bravo!

Kinect

2010-10-10T13:12:00.001+02:00

We went off to rAge last week-end, mostly to check out the new Xbox Kinect. Here’s a little video I put together of the games on display.

It really does look like a lot of fun. Most of the players were able to play without much assistance, and it got even the geekiest of geeks moving.

OpsMgr CU3 now available

2010-10-04T15:21:00.001+02:00

And then, Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) is also now available for download here. Before running the upgrade, read this great blog post by Marnix Wolf, as there are a couple of things to watch out for.

According to the accompanying KB article, CU3 fixes the following:

Feature addition: Azure Application Monitoring
Feature addition: Parameter Extraction in Web Application Synthetic Transactions
Some ACS reports do not work as expected in Windows Server 2008
SCOM 2007 SP1 Reports do not run after a shared Data Warehouse is upgraded to SCOM 2007 R2
The SDK Services stops working due to an unhandled exception, and the operations console becomes unresponsive
Multi-selection in the alert view is not maintained during a view refresh
The operations console stops working when creating an override on the cluster resource group monitor
When Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) is set up to use SharePoint, reports from Watson are blocked
The Operations Manger Console stops working when a high number of instances of State Views or Alert Views are left open for extended durations
Upgrading MPs that include new properties may not recreate views correctly
The total transaction response performance counter in URL monitoring is not accurate
MPs with empty knowledge elements cannot be imported in Operations Manager 2007 R2
Monitoringhost.exe does not work reliably on Windows 2003 SP2 X64 Domain Controllers
Alerts using the “Specific Time Period” criteria are not included during automatic alert view refresh
ACS forwarders with 15 character names in workgroups are unable to communicate with the ACS collector
Language packs authored for a previous version of an MP cannot be imported once an updated MP is released
Language Pack import fails if the MP contains strings which are not contained in the English Management Pack
Generic performance reports consume a large amount of temporary database space and can fail for Windows Server 2003 Computer Groups
When using a remote console the notification wizard does not work in certain situations
The SDK service may stop working due to an arithmetic overflow error in very rare circumstances
The notification scheduler does not compensate correctly for different time zones