SharePoint, Office, Visio, Project 2010 RTM – A BIG week for Microsoft

Well, it’s official.  SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 all RTMed on Friday.  They joined the ranks of Visual Studio2010 and .NET 4.0 which RMTed on Monday and SilverLight 4.0 which RTMed on Tuesday.  So all in all, a HUGE week for Redmond!

Get those MSDN downloads cranking!

Cheers
C

Things that annoy

Have you ever wondered why:

• The windows on planes are set 6 inches below a useful height for anyone amongst us, save the shortest?  It’s almost like they don’t want us to look outside.  As a pilot, glass canopy and great visibility is always a raved about feature.  So why rob passengers of the experience?  Instead, you end up having to bend over to peek outside.  Hmm… maybe that’s it…
• Families on vacation completely ignore the “Expert Traveler” sign and clog up the fast lane at airport security?
• People would park their shopping kart broad way in the isle, completely blocking traffic, and then wander off to look for something?  Of course, you get the stink eye if you dare move the kart out of the way.  Like I wanted your groceries anyway…
• Security at the local city/county building won’t allow a garage clicker in, but cell phones breeze right through?  Supposedly it’s a one button detonator… with about 200 feet range…
• Marriage licenses are only valid for a short time, like 60 days?  Anyone who’s ever planned a wedding will tell you, it takes a YEAR to do.  Why not dispense with paperwork early and be done with it.  Oh right, that’ would be efficient…

I should probably put these in a running list…

Cheers
C

SharePoint built in automatic thumbnails for an image library

SharePoint maintains some built in thumbnails that’s automatically generated when images are uploaded to the image library.  This is in order to allow for the thumbnail view of the image library.  Here’s an example from my blog.

On the left side is the original image that exist in the image library.  Click on the link to see the image in it’s full size.  The right side is the SharePoint thumbnail.  You can click it to see the size of the image.

The formula is pretty simple…  simply change the URL as follows:

Original:  http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Photos/042308_1817_VMWareSnaps3.png

Thumb:   http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Photos/_t/042308_1817_VMWareSnaps3_png.jpg

As you can see, simply:

• Insert “_t/” in front of the file name,
• Replace any periods (.) with underscores (_) and finally,
• Append a “.jpg” at the end of the file name.

As you can see, my example was actually a .png file, but the thumbnail is still a .jpg file.

Cheers
C

Want some cores with that?

OK, so I’ve been starting to look at new hardware… new iron to run my life on.  I recently acquired a new Intel i7 Quad Core laptop for my mobile VM needs and am currently writing this article on my Asus Eee 1005HAB Netbook in flight to Boston, MA.  Unfortunately, my servers at home, including the one hosting this article, are aging fast and will be in need of upgrade within the next 12 months.

I have therefore started looking at hardware, specifically, server type hardware.  I’ve only just begun this process, but I ran across something so sweet, I just had to share.  Now I know it’s not in production yet and I know even if it was, I would certainly NOT be able to afford it, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t put it on my Dream Hardware Wishlist!    Just imagine what you could do with a 100-core processor!  That’s right!  100-cores baby! 

A new upstart called Tilera has unveiled a series of 4 processors of which the Tile-Gx100 is the flagship.  There’s also the Tile-Gx64, Tile-Gx36 (No, it’s not a typo.  I can’t quite figure out why 36 and not 32 cores either.  ) and Tile-Gx16.  Hey, maybe I’d be able to afford the baby in the family. 

The CPUs are built on 40nm technology and top out at 1.5 GHz, which may be a little low unless your OS and apps were specifically designed and written to take advantage of multiple cores, which is mostly not the case today. 

Nevertheless, it’s nice to dream.  And don’t worry, with mainstream octa-cores on our doorstop, mainstream centu-cores should only be about 6 years away from reality, according to Moore’s Law. 

Cheers
C

Inline hardware disk encryption

If you’re like me, you’ve probably not given data encryption on your home PC a second thought. Sure, most employers use some form of data encryption or another for our corporate laptops, but at home it’s a totally different story. I’m in the process of evaluating my server hardware at home, the topic of encryption came back up.

The problem with encryption is that it’s a pain to implement and use. If you’re doing file level encryption, you have to remember to encrypt your files or you have to remember to save your files in an encrypted folder. That sounds too much like work, so most of us just won’t even bother.

The other alternative is to have whole disk encryption. The down side to that is that it adds a software abstraction layer between the hardware and operating system which takes CPU cycles to process thus taking away from your system horsepower… i.e. it slows the computer down. Now if it’s implemented in conjunction with a hardware upgrade, you may not notice it and it might be OK. Mostly though, it’s not. Nobody wants to give up CPU cycles.

The only true solution is actual hardware based encryption. Something that can encrypt the data on the fly as it’s being written to the disk, but without taking any of your CPU cycles for it. It must read, write, cache and encrypt completely self sufficient.

Enter Addonics with their new Dual CipherChain (CCM35MK2). This little beauty lives in one of your 5.25” drive bays and configuration is dead simple. Connect your SATA drives (it supports two), to the card. Connect the output port of the card to the motherboard. Insert the encryption keys and you’re good to go! The device provides real time 256-bit AES encryption and at just over $150, it’s a small price to pay for the safety of your data.

I’ll report back in the future on my experience with this device.

Cheers
C

Moral responsibility – Doing the –RIGHT– thing…

A friend of mine went to see her family doctor.  The doctor has been her family doctor for decades.  He was her family doctor ever since she was a child.  This makes for wonderful continuity in patient history and allows the doctor the get a more holistic view of their patient and the patient’s family.  She went to go see him because she was having major lower back muscle spasms and pain.  This had been going on for about a week and his response was to prescribe some muscle relaxers for her… Flexeril to be exact.  Now having a pharmacist for a father, she’s always been keenly aware of drug reactions and side effects so, she specifically asked the doctor if there was any side effects to the drug he prescribed.  His reply was “No, not really.”.

She filled the prescription and called her dad to just double check on possible side effects of the drug.  He said that it could cause extreme drowsiness so it should only be taken at night.  She followed her dad’s advice.  What precipitated during the course of the next two days, was nothing short of mind blowing.  The drowsiness was certainly there, as her dad had warned (yet the doctor failed to note), but there was also a weird change in mood swings that was just unnatural.  Thankfully she recognized the sudden, irrational changes in mood as well as the acute anger and sensitivity that accompanied it.  She began to do some research on the topic and within 10 minutes on Google, found information that could only be described as disturbing.  

• http://www.askapatient.com/viewrating.asp?drug=17821&name=flexeril

She immediately stopped taking the drug and disposed of the remaining pills, vowing never to take it again.  This is all good and well, but what if she had NOT been so acutely aware of side effects?  I don’t want to play “what if” games, because it doesn’t lead anywhere good.

In my profession, I don’t have any legal or ethical responsibility to keep up to date with changes in the marketplace, yet I do it diligently because I see it as my moral responsibility to provide the best possible service to my clients and to have as much information available and processed as possible before making one recommendation over another.  I know we live in an “it’s not my fault” society and yes, I despise that mode of thinking, but with a medical doctor, especially one you’ve trusted your well being to for so many years, there’s a very deep level of trust associated.

Shouldn’t this doctor KNOW what the potential side effects of the drugs he prescribe are?

Shouldn’t this doctor ASK QUESTIONS of the pharmaceutical rep that pawns this crap off for him to prescribe?

Shouldn’t this doctor at least DO SOME RESEARCH on the kind of drugs he prescribes?

To me the answers are and always will be YES, YES and YES!!!  But alas, that wasn’t the case here.  It seems to me this doctor has been in the business too long and has become complacent.  Maybe it’s easier to improve your swing and make your tea time than it is to spend some time researching facts that may affect the lives of those who trust their care into your hands.

Cheers
C

Utility – Battery Low

*UPDATE* I had the opportunity to test this utility with Remote Desktop in full screen mode recently and it worked like a dream!  

OK, really quickly.  I love playing my strategy games.  One of my long time favorites has been Hearts of Iron II – Doomsday Armageddon.  This game plays on my Netbookjust fine, so it’s an easy one to spin up on the plane etc.

The crew over at Paradox Interactive sure did a good job on the game’s logic engine.

Anyway, as I said, I love playing this game.  The only thing is that there’s one small problem with it on the Netbook.  See, when you are playing full screen graphic games, things like system warnings of battery low status and the like, simply does not pop up over the game.  As a result, you’d be playing your game happily when all of a sudden, the Netbook would start going into Hibernate.  That’s all good and dandy, but see, the problem under Windows XP is that once you boot up out of Hibernate, the game doesn’t seem to restore itself and you’re forced to kill the task and reload the game.  Not pretty.

So I fired up Visual Studio 2008 quickly and just wrote a simple app that displays a warning message.  I set it’s properties to pop up over everything else and then configured it as follows:

• Download my BatteryLow utility.  Place it somewhere on your hard drive. 
• Right click anywhere on your desktop background.
• On the popup menu, click “Properties”.

• On the Display Properties screen, click the “Screen Saver” tab.
• One the Screen Saver tab, click the “Power” button.

• On the Power Options Properties window, click the “Alarms” tab.
• On the Alarms Tab, click the “Alarm Action” button.

• On the Low Battery Alarm Actions window, click the “Configure Program” button.

• On the Low Battery Alarm Program window, click the “Browse” button.
• Browse to the BatteryLow utility location and double click the file.

• On the Low Battery Alarm Program window, click the “OK” button.
• On the Low Battery Alarm Actions window, click the “OK” button.
• On the Power Options Properties window, click the “OK” button.
• On the Display Properties window, click the “OK” button.

Tired of clicking “OK” yet? 

OK, now go ahead and go play your game.  When the battery low action triggers, this is what you’ll get:

The popup message will actually occur even before the Windows system message as seen below.

Hope you enjoy the utility.

Cheers
C