Offline Blog Editor Settings

I've been in the process of rolling out a new comments module to the site, which fully integrates with Disqus and with our timeline feature. The developers are the same as those who do our blogs module, and I like their style (and their support).

So far the Webcasts and Events sections have been recipients of the facelift - Blogs is a bit more complex as there are a significant number of comments to migrate across, while the others didn't really have any of note.

In the process of working on Events, I noted that there were a number of user groups that are no longer meeting, and cleaned them up. We also recently upgraded Events to include full timezone support, so I needed to update the existing events to the right timezone. This means that events from other timezones (such as Perth, Adelaide, etc) can be better accomodated, and of course that ical subscribers will see events in their local time.

I also adjusted some recent changes to the ical feature, which will allow broad compati ...

This is a crosspost from my blog at flamingkeys.com.

One of the people I was lucky enough to meet at Tech·Ed Australia 2011 was Mr Paul Cunningham, who runs the popular website Exchange Server Pro. Paul is one of the most respected names going around when it comes to Exchange, and he has the real world experience to back it up. As a favour to the community (and our profession) Paul has decided to produce a free (as in free beer) boot camp for those wanting to learn Exchange 2010. The boot camp consists of four modules  containing physical challenges, early morning runs, rope climbs*, text, screen shots and videos to help you learn the basics of Exchange Server 2010. Having worked through this boot camp myself, I can say that this is an invaluable resource for those getting started with Exchange Server, and also those who may have managed an Exchange environment but not installed one before.

Please make sure you check the boot camp out, and also be sure to stick Paul’s blog ...

Dwarf Fortress is a game.

…

What? You want more?

Dwarf Fortress is a dwarven life simulation written by Toady One of Bay 12 Games.
If you have enjoyed this review, why not check out ...

…

What? Still not enough? Sigh … okay. Here goes.

…
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress is a horrendously bug-laden, incredibly inaccessible, and incomprehensible game that's still only in Alpha after many years of development, and with no end in sight to development. At the same time, it's also possibly the single most fun game ever written, and purportedly the inspiration for Minecraft. It's certainly given me plenty of enjoyment.

Like many others, I stumbled on Dwarf Fortress via Something Awful and their Let's Play Forums. One of the most well-regarded Let's Play threads around, Boatmurdered, is often the first introduction anyone has to the game. Boatmurdered was a succession game ...

So the last post I wrote was 3 months ago. A lot changes in 3-months. The products I was advocating at the old company (they retrenched me for commercial reasons) are still there, and are great, I am just not selling them anymore.

One of the comments on my old post about backup hit a chord. It was about small users, backups and tapes.

I am a mac user. I have been for several years, even when I was only using a PC, I would skin it up to look like a mac. (sad, right?) Anyway.

Apple gives all apple users a product called time machine. Smart mac salespeople convince you to buy an external hard drive. So I back up once a day, all my data is duplicated and goes into the drive. PC users have similar options, home users back up so as to save valuable photos & documents.

The basics of backup are there. 

What happens when a small to medium business has lots of data? Do they:

a) Back up every day?

b) Backup once a week?

c) Backup every day to th ...

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

 Quite a number of people have noticed I've been uncharacteristically quiet of late, both here on AuTechheads and around the social media traps - not to mention offline. The short answer is that I've been job hunting, with increasing levels of desperation. It's distracted me quite a lot, and I'm sure most can understand.

I'm by no means alone in this - my good friend @themolk up in Queensland has been working his heart out to find a permanent job for a couple of years now.  His is a tale of disappointment and letdowns which dwarfs my own - but thankfully he's been able to make ends meet for the most part. That said, if anyone has a job lead for him, I know he'd be grateful! There are yet others in the AuTechHeads community that I know of looking for work, but of course each has their own tale to tell. This is mine.

Up until September, I had a job in the public sector as an IT manager. It was quite a good job for the grea ...

Hi All,

Quick post to let everyone know that the AuTechHeads are getting together for social drinks on December 3, 7pm after Infrastructure Saturday. We're meeting at the Villager in Brisbane.

All AuTechHeads members are welcome, attending Infrastructure Saturday is not a prerequisite so please spread the word and RSVP so we can book the venue with correct numbers.If you're a new member or you're looking to meet some new people in the group please come along and introduce yourself.

If you're interested in sponsoring this event or future events please get in touch with any of the core team members.

Where: The Villager, 185 George Street, Brisbane
When: 7pm - lateWhat: Drinks (Beer & Wine) + Snacks & a lucky door prize all sponsored by TechSmith !

Numbers are limited
RSVP by November 30

Last night was (at long last) the first AuTechHeads Melbourne MeatUp! At 7.30 a bunch of geeks rocked up to Squires Loft Steakhouse for a night of steak, wine, beer and chat. We were fortunate enough to be joined by Microsoft staff Jeff Alexander, Catherine Eibner and Rocky Heckman, in addition to AuTechHeads James Bannan, Chris Brown, Jodie Miners, Ben Ball and Jerome Brown.

Much discussion was had about all things ranging from Xbox to System Center to Golf. Zune Music Pass was the subject of much attention, in the wake of its Australian release last week.

Hopefully last night is a sign of good things to come within the Melbourne end of the AuTechHeads community. If you're in the area, please sing out, we'd love to hear from you. Please don't forget to join the Melbourne Members group.

Thanks again to everyone who came along, we appreciate your support

Yes, we know it's next Monday, and a school night, but hopefully we will see you there!

Venue has been confirmed as Squires Loft City Steakhouse at 12 Goldie Place, Melbourne 3000, booked for 7.30PM.  RSVP is mandatory for numbers reasons, so please use the registration form below or tweet us.  Please hit either @hjmcmanus or @chrisbrownie up on Twitter.

Officical hashtag is #MelbourneMeatUp so check it out!

Link to map of venue here.

I was recently privileged to be the guest of HP in Singapore for their Cloud Innovation in APJ event, where they announced a number of new Converged Systems products and services. HP is making a big push toward the cloud in the Asia Pacific region, with some major investments in Cloud Centers of Excellence, and product suites to match.

One of my long standing thoughts on cloud services is that they often don’t consider the existing infrastructure, from the client site(s) all the way through to the cloud’s edge. I’ve always disliked the assumption that ‘everything’ can go to the cloud, and that the WAN or Internet providers in-between the cloud and its customers can deliver 100% availability. Neither of these can be proven true with any level of certainty – especially third party network uptime. You could argue that, in Australia for example, matters have improved significantly and will probably improve even further with the advent of the National Broadband Networ ...

After reading about the improved battery life in the 4S, I had a great first day with the phone. After actually getting it and turning it on from about 8:30am, playing with it for the morning, and then doing a full restore from my old phone. Apart from the charge while the restore was going on, I didn't charge it for the rest of the day. Played lots with it in the afternoon and had about 10% charge left by 11pm that ...

I recently moved on from my IT Manager job within the NSW Government, and a top priority for me was to buy a new notebook and desktop computer - the old ones having gone back to my employer. I don't use a desktop myself, but the family does for various purposes, and they've fallen in love with the All-in-one touchscreen style; I'll review that one next. I'm in the habit of using a notebook for everything, and I find I need a fairly high powered specification to meet my many and varied needs, including;

While my work notebooks have grown ever greater in power, they've never totally suited my needs - the closest I'd come was a HP Elitebook, but I've found the HP offerings can be quite inflexible and limiting within my price range. There are plenty of HP notebooks that do suit people, and I feel they're quite good for business use (with a decent SOE), ...

This is my first real foray into blog posting. This was originally written for someone that had recently implemented Microsoft DFS Replication and was having a bit of trouble. Having dealt with some evil DFS replication issues in my past, I thought it would only be proper to lend a helping hand. I have decided to share these tidbits with the world so that hopefully it helps someone else out in the future.

So here goes:

File Quotas are a pain -  File quotas in DFS replication can burn you – hard. The DFS health report will come up with an error about being out of disk space, but will not reference anything to do with file quotas. Essentially, DFS will try to replicate a file that has ownership to a user. The user will have filled up it’s quota at one side of the replication. When this occurs, DFS will error out. If you decide to setup user folders with quotas and DFS, make sure that you use FSRM and set up the quotas to email the users when they are rea ...

If you've been living under a rock, you would probably know that Apple released the iPhone 4S on the 14th of October, to much noise and hullabaloo. I was one of those who trekked out early to pick one up on the day of release. Now the noise has gone away, and I've had it for just over a look, let's take a look at it and see how it goes.

As a point of reference, I had an iPhone 3GS for over 2 years, didn't upgrade when the 4 came out, and have been struggling with iOS 4 on the slower processor for some time. So naturally, an upgrade to a 4S would be a sizeable one, regardless of the features of the new phone.

Image (c) Apple, 2011

The Apple iPhone 4S is the latest smartphone from Apple. In many ways an upgrade from the iPhone 4, the new device sees Apple enter the dual-core mobile processor era, with the 1GHz A5 dual core chip with 512MB RAM. Apple claim the A5 processor improves graphics performance by up to 7 times, and while it's hard to ga ...

G'day All (and anyone else listening in),

Just a heads up to let you know that SMBiT Professionals Brisbane is running a Spotlight Session this coming Sunday (2011-10-23) at the Chalk Hotel in Woolloongabba where we're delving into Group Policy with Alan Burchill and Remote Desktop Server with Bryce Telfer as related (in particular) to an SBS 2011 environment.

The event will be streamed live for financial SMBiT Professionals members in our SharePoint site, under the Brisbane sub-site.

For everyone else, the event will be streamed free (of cost, password, however not advertisements) at:

http://www.justin.tv/hiltont

http://www.Ustream.tv/channel/SMBiTPro-Brisbane

So, feel free to get your geek on with us this weekend - the show starts around 10:00 AM and will be over just in time for us to watch the Rugby Union final!  :)

Hi,

Thanks to Telstra, I've been given a 4G card to trial - so let's see how we go! This is just a quick 'Out of the box' experience and not intended as a full review or guide. 

First, I've put the SIM into the rather short and fat 4G modem, and plugged that into my laptop. It's autodetected and kicked off an installer.   Several minutes later, the installer is done and launches the Telstra Mobile Broadband app! But, it's saying 'Cannot detect SIM card'. What have I done wrong?  

I pull out the modem, open it up and switch the SIM card around the other way. It's not too clear as to which way it's supposed to go, but looking at the manual it does confirm I had it incorrectly inserted.   Back in it goes, and look it's now detected and showing me signal strength!   I click the 'Connect Now' button and am instantly connected.

The Telstra Mobile Broadband program pops up a top news story, as well as giving me links for some Online Services - BigPond H ...

Please click here and check out our website, PowerShell Down Under for more info!

A few years ago, I had a coffee cup that stated, with a picture of a homeless man busking: "Software Meltdown, Data Destroyed, Didn't do no Backup, Now I'm Unemployed". I used to trot that cup out at meetings with clients, vendors, you name it, the cup was at nearly every meeting I attended. Then it crashed. I didn't drop it, it just died when I was on holidays. When I bought it, there were two cups exactly the same. A smart bet would have been to buy the second cup as a backup when this exact situation occurred. I didn't. When the cup was cracked and unusable, I realised that my attitude was that I would be ok, it would last forever.

I treated data exactly the same way, up until the day the cup broke. I kept everything locally, I didn't use the H: drive set up on the server for me, I didn't even bother to save my Outlook PST file. As is the way with data, it grew. the outlook data grew until one fateful day, without warning, it crashed the system. When I rebooted, I got the chilling message that a ...

Stepping away from a strictly tech related post for a moment ...

One of our members and long-time friends, Heather Samsa - on Twitter as @i_enigma - has been tirelessly and single handedly helping to rebuild the small town of Marysville - which Australians may remember as being utterly devastated by the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. She created the Marysville Cookbook, a combination of memories and recipes that is truly charming and unique. The initial print run was for the residents of Marysville, but others wanted to purchase it.

Heather started to sell the book, which costs around $20 per copy to produce, for $30. The $10 "profit" goes directly to Marysville through various community ventures, and so far Heather has raised $4,700 single handedly.

That's no small feat by any means! I actually bought the book as a gift for my wife, and it is simply gorgeous. The recipes are delicious, the photos are fantastic, and my wife absolutely loves it. The fact that it m ...

I am LIKING Windows 8 - everything I love about using Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, except all bright, shiny and new-like.

I'm also liking that the skillz are instantly transferrable, even with the pre-beta.  So, I've been tooling around with a couple of IT Pro-related tasks, specifically deployment and virtualisation, and here are my shameless cross-posts to what I've found so far:

Sysprep/OOBE experience in Windows 8 Server

Deploy Windows 8 with SCCM 2012

As ever, there's more to come :-)

Hello,

Lying in bed last night, I had a revelation about where I can see us heading in the next few years. This is mostly reliant on better broadband though (hello NBN!) but regardless I believe my idea is where we are heading.

Firstly, if you use more than 1 PC/device then you'll know the frustration of having to either do multiple installs of applications you use, or re-do settings. A good example of this is your browser's favorites/bookmarks list. Sure you can type in the websites, but it's nice to have a full list to just choose from. To fill this void, services like Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ popped up - your bookmarks in the cloud! Now it doesn't matter where you are, you can access that same list.

Email went the same way - Outlook is nice to use, but it doesn't help you when you're at work and want to check your personal emails. Again, the solution was to have your emails in the cloud and sync all your devices/PC's to that single point, or even just use a web interfa ...

There seems to be a growing trend to publish articles that are of interest to a select few of the IT industry, and throw it out to the general population, in an attempt to sensationalise mundane events and occurences in the Australian Government.

 Recently, I saw a new article talking about the recent tender release from a department where the brand was named. The journalist seemed to think that this was of the utmost importance, as they had contacted the department to advise of the error, and the department had retracted the tender, only to re-issue it without the offending brand. The thing is, regardless of whether the department re-released the tender, their preference was made known by the first document. How does an IT company respond effectively to the tender? they quote the product that the tender originally mentioned.

How does this effect the greater IT community? well, the department made a mistake. the journalist got them to re-issue the tender, the resellers quoted on it a ...

27/09/11 Update: Tommy Tudehope has written an article on his thoughts here: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2913064.html

Today I was listening to the current affairs show 'Hack' which airs daily on Triple J at 5:30. One of the topics today was from a Social Media Consultant Tommy Tudehope (on Twitter at @TommyTudehope), who was predicting that SMS would be dead in 5 years, and Email dead in 10.

For the audio of the broadcast: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2011_09_21.mp3

Webpage of Triple J's Hack: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/podcast/

Tommy's claims:

"... People think SMS is one to one, of course it is, but is it really private, who has access to it, and are you always relying on your service provider Telstra or Optus to connect you through."

"...A lot of businesses have trouble working/collaborating with other businesses so sending mass emails to different people who you're working with. Now with Google Plus, you can h ...

“It’s simple, straight-forward, intuitive, and ‘just works’. ”

That statement is the reason for my blog ...

Yesterday, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview to the general public - Microsoft's first public release of their new Windows operating system. We have seen hints of the new OS in screenshots leaked and posted on their blog, so naturally plenty of people jumped at the chance to grab a functional copy of the new Windows operating system. You can grab yours from here.

Lots has been made of Microsoft's new OS, including what it needs to do to stay competitive against Apple's OS's in both the desktop and mobile space. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will be the same platform across x86/64 desktop devices and ARM-based mobile devices - importantly, tablets and mobile phones, which Microsoft entered recently with the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

There's plenty to remember when reviewing any software that is essentially still in Alpha, or brand new Beta. Importantly, it's not complete software. Many people often review software at this stage as completed software, wh ...

Do you trust the cloud?

Just to rehash the last week, there were two major events, one from Google and the other Microsoft.

Google:

Micr ...