Nothing of Any Quincyquonce |

My changing desktop – from Novell to Microsoft

by ezs | Mar 20, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

So what changed between running a laptop at Novell and Microsoft?

Desktop OS

Firstly my Novell laptop was primarily a Vista machine. I’ve been using Vista as my primary desktop since November 2006. It’s helped build a better ZENworks Configuration Management.

Microsoft is obviously standardised on Vista.

Collaboration

Email is the killer. I do miss a lot of the advanced features of GroupWise – particularly the email status tracking. Outlook/Exchange won’t show me the delivery/read/deleted status. GroupWise was a killer in knowing that your ‘red’ emails had been delivered and deleted without being opened.

I don’t miss GWIM at all; I still use Pidgin (formerly GAIM) as my IM client – running plugins to all of the major networks. I do really like the Unified Communications via Office Communicator and Outlook. One thing that Microsoft IT has done well is brought together IM, email, fax, voice and voice messaging into a single place.

Applications

Obviously most of the Microsoft internal sites are IE only. (Great UI, great user experience – but lots of ActiveX). I’m also running Firefox 3 Beta 4 – that’s my personal preference.

No OpenOffice – that’s a given; one thing that did surprise me was that everyone is using the newer Office 2007 doc formats; even to outside people.

Network and access

Wow. I was really impressed by the IT organisation. IPv6 on the wire; IPsec everywhere; smartcard and certificate security for wireless and remote access; Network Access Controls running with quarantine.

Certainly it’s given me some new ideas for my home network 🙂

Web server upgrade

by ezs | Mar 19, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

A new and faster server for the web site, blogs and photos.

WordPress 2.5 beta 1

by ezs | Mar 17, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Back to the nightly builds. WordPress 2.5 beta 1 is sneaking out soon – and it’s running here.

Nice work on the admin UI – looks clean and fresh:

Choosing the Blue Pill

by ezs | Mar 15, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Blue Pill Hand

Rumours were flying around last week – I even got a factually incorrect mention from Matt Asay on CNET which paid for this months hosting bill.

Well just to extinguish the rumours – I started with Microsoft – the Beast of Redmond, The Borg, the Monopolist – this week.

I’ll blog some time in the next day or so about my first week.

Inbetween jobs – it must be honey-dos time

by ezs | Mar 8, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

In true geek style I’ve been using Backpack from 37signals for a while. I use it for work, planning and just keeping on top of projects. I also share it with Grania for packing lists when travelling and most importantly – the Honey-Do list.

Here’s an example:

Honey Dos

Sheer joy. Coupled to an RSS feed so your feed reader can tell you when there’s more jobs put on the list.. 😉

As well as the household tasks I’m also spending the downtime updating the infrastructure. WordPress, Gallery2, plugins, anti-virus, patching, checking logs, cleaning logs – there’s a lot to be done.

Zero Day Stop

by ezs | Mar 7, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Wow. My experience of being “Zero Day Stopped”.

Suddenly at 7pm Utah time everything stopped working. GroupWise, IM, Bugzilla, Innerweb – everything.

I’m now set adrift in the world of no BlackBerry, no email, no IM, no Bugzilla, no testing..

It’s refreshing – but very, very strange.

Apologies to everyone who has been Zero Day Stopped in a less planned way.

My last day at Novell was quite civilised.

I went into the office; dropped off a ton of confidential materials for shredding, dropped off my hardware (laptop, hefty ESX server), wandered around saying goodbye, did my exit interview with HR, went for lunch with my good friend Father Fowles, went back into the office to say goodbye to a few more engineers, handed in my badge, went home.

[Update: My Novell ID is now lost down the memory hole.]