Sunday, February 24, 2008

Possible USS Shark Cannons found

It's very possible they are from the 1846 shipwreck of the USS Shark, a survey ship that struck Clatsop Spit while leaving the Columbia River. If true, these have been buried in the sand for more than 150 years.

http://www.oregon.gov/OPRD/PARKS/cannon.shtml

Photos

http://www.oregon.gov/OPRD/PARKS/cannon_photos.shtml

Cannon on the beach

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Microsoft Windows with Steve Ballmer

Too funny!  I prefered DESQview at the time...

 

 

Monday, February 18, 2008

Presidents Day Drive

Woke up to great weather, low to mid 50's, Elin was out of school for the holiday, so we decided to go to Glass Butte for some obsidian hunting.  Found a nice map on the internet ...

 

Glass Butte rockhound map

 

Found lot's of snow! So on to Chickahominy reservoir for lunch, and watching people ice fish. Then off through Burns, then Seneca on Hwy 395, and back home via Izee-Paulina highway. A fun 320 Mile drive through the snow covered high desert.

 

Google map of route

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Creating, Encoding and Delivering Silverlight Streaming Screen Capture Videos

Great Code Project article, instructions for using either Camtasia or Microsoft Expression Encoder

An in-depth article on the process of creating screen capture videos for your Code Project articles and for your blog. Article will cover creating, encoding, packaging, uploading and consuming screen cast tutorial videos. Updated 2-13-2008 code download and new video on embedding videos.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scrapbook/HowToCreateArticleVideos.aspx

Saturday, February 16, 2008

MSDN Blogs Snippets

SQL Server 2-D Matrix Builder available on CodePlex

If you need to build a very complex query that returns a matrix with dynamic columns and rows from T-SQL,  you might want to take a look at this new project posted on CodePlex :

SQL Server 2-D Matrix Builder

http://www.codeplex.com/SQL2DMatrixBuilder

 

Microsoft Office Binary Formats – now freely available to all!

This afternoon we published the specs for the office binary document formats and placed them under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. This means that anyone can now freely use these formats for any reason without any concerns over intellectual property rights.

 

Office Developer Conference: Developing and Deploying Office Solutions with VS 2008

Last Monday I presented session CLI202:  Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose.  This blog post is a mini-version of the slides and demos from my session.

 

Banish Missing.Value with the Office Interop API Extensions

I like VSTO.  I like C#.  What I don't like is having to write VSTO code in C# ... VSTO Power Tools announced at this week's Office Developer Conference are expected to be released in the very near future.  One of those tools is the Office Interop API Extensions, a set of libraries that extend the Office object model and provide a more elegant and consistent API for the C# developer.

 

New Excel Development Blog

Ghaban Berry has created a phenomenal new blog on Excel development over at http://blogs.msdn.com/gabhan_berry/default.aspx. Not to be missed!

 

Install software on new PCs without paying for it? Through the Open Value Subscription annual true-up process, you get this flexibility

A benefit unique to the new Open Value Subscription Program, is the annual true-up and true-down feature. Through this process, for any of the Enterprise products you are licensed for through Open Value Subscription (this is not a feature of any other Open License Program), you simply count your PCs one time per year and place your order for that many subscription licenses. That is it!

What if you add new PCs during the year? No problem. Install the licensed software and don’t worry about any orders or payments until your annual anniversary. Then, you just count your PCs and place your order for that many subscription licenses for the upcoming year. That is it! No more trying to order more licenses in time for a deployment or scrambling to ensure you have enough before you install, etc.

 

An Operating System You Can Play With in C#

The contributors over at Channel 8, the web community for students interested in computer technology, are really turning us some interesting things. Recently there was a student interview with Bill Gates and then the other day I read about Cosmos. Cosmos is an operating system that is being written in C#. It's an open source project so you can get the code and mess with it yourself. Yeah, I know, you can do that with Linux too. Of course you have to be pretty good in C/C++ to mess with Linux and Linux has grown to be a pretty large bit of code these days. Sometimes one wants to dig into something a little more manageable.

Cosmos is still pretty small and there appear to be a lot of pieces that are either waiting for someone to implement or not quite so far done that there is nothing left for others to do. At the Channel 8 article you will find some step by step instructions for getting it up and running in a Virtual PC environment. And of course links to the code.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2007 provides centralized administration of your virtual infrastructure and enables increased physical server utilization and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines.

The technical documentation for VMM consists of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Library, which provides the following types of information:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb740737.aspx

 

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 How To Videos

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scvmm/bb688094.aspx

 

Third party P2V tools

PlateSpin products allow organizations to adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center. With support for physical and virtual machines, as well as images, our products improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, hardware migration and disaster recovery initiatives.

http://www.platespin.com/products/powerconvert/requirements.aspx

 

Portlock Storage Manager for NetWare

Portlock Storage Manager for NetWare offers customers the ultimate storage management solution. New in Portlock Storage Manager is support for NetWare 6.5 Service Pack 6, software mirroring, support for Virtual Server and VMware, and support for EMC and NetWare multipathing.

https://secure.portlock.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=1

AD Domain and Forest Trusts

 

How Domain and Forest Trusts Work

"Active Directory provides security across multiple domains or forests through domain and forest trust relationships. Before authentication can occur across trusts, Windows must first determine whether the domain being requested by a user, computer or service has a trust relationship with the logon domain of the requesting account. To make this determination, the Windows security system computes a trust path between the domain controller for the server that receives the request and a domain controller in the domain of the requesting account."

 http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/f5c70774-25cd-4481-8b7a-3d65c86e69b11033.mspx?mfr=true

 

Creating Domain and Forest Trusts

"In Windows Server 2003, there are four trust types that must be created manually. External trusts, realm trusts, and forest trusts help provide interoperability with domains outside your forest or with realms. Shortcut trusts optimize access to resources and logons that are made between domain trees in the same forest. "

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/98f03b77-d816-4f52-ae63-28f57967118b1033.mspx?mfr=true

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Namdaemun Gate

Such a great loss!

 

Namdaemun, Seoul, 11 February 2008

 

Image:Seoul-Namdaemun-at.night-01.jpg

Namdaemun - also known as the Great South Gate - was built in 1398, serving as the main southern entrance into the walled city of Seoul.

The two-storey pagoda which stood on a stone base was the oldest wooden structure in Seoul.

It was one of the few buildings to survive both the Japanese occupation and the Korean War.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Interactive Developer Map

 

"The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs)."

ClickOnce .NET 3.0 Application

Interactive Developer Map

Introduction to Windows Deployment Services

 

Short demo of Windows Deployment Service using Server 2008

Introduction to Windows Deployment Services [6 Min ] | Media | TechNet Edge

Windows Server 2008 Clustering

Demo of iSCSI based Hyper-V virtual machine on a fail over cluster

 

Windows Server 2008 Clustering [SCREEN CAST] | Media | TechNet Edge

How to setup iSCSI on Windows Server 2008

 

How to setup iSCSI on Windows Server 2008 [11 mins] | Media | TechNet Edge

"This is the second in a series of “How To’s” with Adam Carter. This time around, he provided a quick introduction to iSCSI, which is a technology which is part of Windows Storage Server which allows SCSI commands to be shared over the network to enable cheap and simple network storage options. In this 11min screen cast, Adam walks through iSCSI basics on the white board and then sets up an iSCSI target disk to share on one machine and then connects to this disk over the network to a second machine using the iSCSI initiator. This creates a new disk on the second server machine, which he then formats and puts into action. This is very useful for creating clustering scenarios, reduces the complexity of managing shared nothing SCSI ID’s and can be a very cost effective storage scenario. "

Monday, February 4, 2008

Microsoft E-Learning Offer

 

Save on E-Learning Courses

You can build skills and gain knowledge with self-paced, in-depth Microsoft E-Learning courses. Do you learn best independently? If so, these training courses provide a simple and effective way to learn at your own pace and on your own schedule. Online courses include pre- and post-assessments, as well as simulations of real-world scenarios to help you train and achieve certification more quickly.

Save 35% on two new-generation of certification e-learning course collections for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, the Windows Vista operating system, and Windows Mobile 5.0.

https://partner.microsoft.com/US/trainingevents/training/40029197

Partner Skills Plus provides you with special partner savings on all new generation of certification Microsoft E-Learning titles. Through November 30, 2008, enter your Partner name and the promotion code LMLRC during checkout to receive 35 percent off the price of any two popular e-learning course collections in the following list:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/elearning/skillsplus/default.mspx

Network Monitoring

 

Tobi Oetiker's MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher

What it does

You have a router, you want to know what it does all day long? Then MRTG is for you. It will monitor SNMP network devices and draw pretty pictures showing how much traffic has passed through each interface.

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

What is Cacti?

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

http://cacti.net/what_is_cacti.php

Logging & Graphing

RRDtool is the OpenSource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data.

http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/index.en.html

 

Network Management Station - Cacti, Syslog, SNMP Traplog, Apache and MySQL

Network Management Station

VMware™
Network Management Station

Monitor and manage your network devices.
Manage everything from servers, printers, wireless gear to switches and routers.
Anything on your network that has an IP address can be monitored.
Full featured network management station capability.
SNMP and Sysloging, audible alerting and threshold monitoring made user friendly
and cost effective.

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/310