So at long last the NSW Labor government has been routed. Time will tell if their successors are up to the challenges that face them. We know well that Labor wasn't.

But let's speak of an ICT vision. We've seen suggestions in CIO / Computerworld that the Liberal ICT policy platform includes;

Now, while I'm by no means a fan of the Liberals, this is actually a pretty good basis for a policy platform. After nearly 3 years of being virtually punished for being in NSW public s ...

This is a review for something that I own, a neat little video camera called a Flip. It is a flash drive unit, it records 60 minutes of video, and, via a usb connector that is built in, you can upload to storage on the computer, to email, to twitter, to facebook and, in the latest version of the software supplied in the device, to a cloud storage system. Neat. The Flip cameras are multi-system compatible, they work with windows systems and macs, and there are versions of the software preloaded on the camera, so there are no requirements to connect to a website before being able to use it and upload from it.

There is an ad running at the moment about a kid who has had a party, trashed the house and his mum calls to let him know they are on the way home. He looks at the carnage and tells her to"take the scenic route" - in the background, we see his little sister videoing the house and him, plugs it into her laptop, uploads the video, sends to an email address, her mum's, and then we hear the mother ...

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the net was what you caught fish in, I discovered that if my father and his colleagues at a large computer company ran a series of commands to a massive thing called a computer, it would print, on a large dot matrix, a massive picture of the moon and its craters. And so it was done, and it was good. (for me) Never knew what trouble I got them into for doing it, or the money wasted on paper, ribbon and processing power. I had kudos for at least a week at high school over that one...

The computer "lab" had an apple IIe, and we could control a "turtle" on it. wow. riveting stuff.

My father decided to get a computer - a scaled down one for "me" at home. He bought a personal computer, a microbee series 3, with a whopping 32kb of memory. It was so cool, but, sadly, it was on a green screen. (about a week later, my neighbor got a commodore 64, and his house was THE place to be for the neighborhood kids)

Dad then sent me off to my usual ...

I was lucky enough during my orientation at my new employer to get a look at a modular server. Yes, it is another ASI product, and yes, this is my opnion, not that of my employer.

 I have had experience over the years with blade servers, from the IBMs to the HPs, I have seen a broad spectrum of these devices. I have even visited blade.org to get an idea of the baseline design structures of these servers, and what makes them so interesting. I like the idea of running multiple blade servers in a chassis to increase performance, throughput and uptime.

When I saw the ASI Modular server, I immediately thought it was another Blade server. I was wrong, and realised my mistake only after the product manager pointed out that the blades have no hard drives, so cannot really be called blades. They are compute modules. Made me think that I was back in my youth, learning about technology in school - compute module sounded like a different way of saying CPU, as we knew it back then.

So I go ...

[UPDATED 9th February 2012 - see end of the review]

If you’ve read past product reviews of mine, you’d know that I tend to avoid reading other articles on a given product, at least until I’ve done my own. So it is with the Fritz!box, in spite of the impressive buzz that’s been going around ever since Internode announced their partnership with broadband specialist PCRange to bring the German product to Australia. I’d already known that Internode was looking for hardware that could sustain National Broadband Network (NBN) speeds of at least 100Mbps, with most routers on the market being unable to sustain these. The Fritz!box 7390 is their solution to this, along with the cheaper – and lower throughput – 7270 model, which provides sub-100Mbps throughput.

The Fritz!box 7390 has an impressive range of features that certainly make people sit up and take notice;

We are super excited to have Scott Emerson MP speaking to the Brisbane Usergroup Community, on the "State of the QLD ICT Industry". Scott is a Liberal National Party member in the Queensland Parliament, representing the seat of Indooroopilly in Brisbane’s inner-west since 2009. More importantly for us, Scott is the Shadow Minister for Science, Research and Information and Communication Technology.

In a recent discussion with Scott It was surprising to find out that "In terms of ICT, the Queensland Government is the largest consumers of ICT products in the state; yet they are NOT the biggest consumer of Queensland’s ICT products and services."

The LNP as a party is determined to support the local ICT industry. Scott understands the value of our input as ICT professionals, and is keen for our feedback on how the LNP can better serve the ICT community.

This session will be a round table discussion so please come armed with your IC ...

The 2011 Scripting Games begin on April 4, 2011, and run through April 15, 2011. The Scripting Games are the premier learning event of the year for IT pros and others who want to master Windows PowerShell. For each of 10 events, you as a registered contestant have seven days to script a solution to a scenario-driven problem and post your code to an MVP-maintained script repository. A panel of internationally recognized judges scores each script you submit. And daily leaderboards and prize drawings help keep your interest high throughout the two-week international, online event.

Last year, people from more than 200 countries visited the Script Center during the Scripting Games. Because the scripts are written for real-world scenarios and problems, they are of immediate value to everyone, participants and spectators alike.

This page includes all essential 2011 Scripting Games links. Add this page to your favorites. (For that matter, make it your home page.)

Cast your mind back to the early days of Blackberry in the Enterprise. Not only was it 'executive bling' but it also introduced new functionality. Secure email anywhere in the palm of your hand. It worked well for IT Security due to the security, the ability to kill the device and the encryption. Finally IT Administrators loved the ease at which devices could be provisioned.

However what the blackberry devices excelled at was also a weakness... email was limited in functionality, plain text only, not all attachments could be rendered and S/MIME were all problems back in the early days but as devices and servers matured and new non-blackberry devices appeared on the market much of this functionality improved.

Then a new device joined the market.. not as a corporate device, but as a consumer device. The iPhone. At this point let me preface my comments to come. I have used the following devices to connect my corporate email account over the years. A Blackberry (the old blue one) and a 9700 B ...

Geeks are a funny bunch … in their own eyes at least. Wikipedia (at time of writing) defines geek as “a slang term, with different meanings ranging from "a computer expert or enthusiast" to "a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts", with a general pejorative meaning of "a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp[ecially] one who is perceived to be overly intellectual".”

I actually wasn’t going to put a definition in, except that I found it funny … you probably didn’t, and that’s okay. Being a carnival performer who … ah, I mean IT professional … myself, I am both exposed to, and a participant in, geek culture and the associated humour. I’m even part of a geek group. In my experience, IT professionals will happily identify as geeks, and especially in preference to nerds. You could say that it’s lost the pejorative angle, at least in the minds of said geeks.

Information Tec ...

Hi,

I thought this would be a good discussion point. I'm sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there'd be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.

Personally, growing up I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do - but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC's sense - so I sort of assumed I'd do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn't want to be a computer technician after all.

After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad's new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the j ...

As some may be aware, the AuTechHeads site is based on DotNetNuke, and heavily uses the Active Modules "Active Social" product throughout the site to deliver key functionality. I was recently excited to see the acquisition of Active Modules by DNN Corp, the owners of DotNetNuke - yet also surprised to see the level of negativity amongst existing Active Modules owners.

I have worked with DotNetNuke since the 2.x days. I've seen it evolve somewhat through v3.x and v4.x, and mature somewhat with v5.x. Nonetheless, it can't be denied that in many ways, it's been allowed to stagnate. There are core modules which haven't been updated in years, and I've seen reference to acquisitions of good products that have essentially gone nowhere after DNN Corp got their hands on it. Really, DNN by itself is fast becoming a vastly out of date framework - especially in the Community (free) edition that we use.

That's where Active Social comes in - and it's by far the most superior "social" framework ...

Hello,

I thought I'd share with you my experience with taking the first steps to be Cisco certified. I didn't really know what to expect when I started, but hopefully for anyone else considering doing their CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) or CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician).

This is part 1 of 2, as I've only gone so far as doing CCENT. It's half way to becoming a qualified CCNA, and a lot of good fundementals in general networking. To explain further, the first half of the CCNA course is called CCENT 1 (which is just CCENT) and the second half is CCENT 2. You can either do a seperate exam for CCENT 1 & 2, or just a full CCNA exam which contains questions from both courses.

At this point, I'll quickly mention that if you've done your CCNA pre 2007, the course changed and became a LOT harder. So if you see someone's resume listing CCNA, find out when they did it. Also, Cisco certs are only valid for 3 years unless you do another exam!

So what di ...

It's an Apple product launch day, so fanboys and haters are all excited to see what's come out of the pome factory (an apple is a type of pome, thanks wikipedia).

The iPad 2 by all accounts, is a whole 1 better than the iPad 1, even though the iPad 1 wasn't actually called an iPad 1. What does this extra 1 mean?

It's thinner, 33% smaller. Smaller is better.

It's faster, 100% faster CPU. What that really means is it's a dual core. It's also 900% faster in the graphics department, which to me indicates the iPad 1 didn't have very good graphics. I think part of this is that some high graphics quality games have started to come out in the App Store, and really a lot of people want an iPad as a casual gaming device.

It's got cameras. Two! Just like your iPhone 4! The front is VGA, so facetime chats are the only thing it's good for. The back camera will take 5 megapixel stills, and record video at 720p. At least that's what I can make out, there's so much misinformation on th ...