by ezs | Jun 5, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Missionaries, Uncategorized, Utah
I’ve been travelling to Utah to work for about nine years now – first with Intel then with Novell; I’ve lived and worked in the state for nearly four years.
When I first visited one of my colleagues from the LANDesk team – a returned LDS missionary and LDS Bishop – told me that missionaries always wave if you sound your horn and wave when you drive past them.
That started a silly game. “Honking at Missionaries”. Don’t blame me. Blame a Bishop from Pleasant Grove, UT.
In the past nine years I’ve had fun honking at missionaries in Nottingham, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester in the UK. Also in Auckland, New Zealand, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia – and in many places across the US.
Most fun is the high concentration in Utah itself. I always honk and wave; I’ve got a 100% hit rate on the return wave.
I’d be really interested to hear from any return-missionaries – is this part of the training at the MTC? Or are missionaries just ‘nice people’…
Disclaimer: I’m not LDS and this really was started by an LDS Bishop..
by ezs | Jun 5, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, Utah
Utah is not exactly a hotbed of coffee drinkers and coffee lovers.. In fact with the LDS faith being predominant most coffee produced is downright dreadful.
A couple of exceptions – Coffee Garden at 9th and 9th in Salt Lake is consistently good; as is Juice n Java in Provo.
Starbucks is a reliable standard too; when we moved here four years ago there were three stores. Now there are dozens. We stopped by our newest local store tonight – on Highland Drive at about 7800 South.
by ezs | Jun 5, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Finally pulled my finger out and went to sit the ISEB ITIL Foundation Certificate exam.
Usual laziness – book the exam, read the book, sit the exam. 40 multiple choice questions; over in less than 10 minutes. I passed.
by ezs | Jun 2, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Gonetoutah, Uncategorized
HP sauce. Food of the gods. Made in Birmingham for years.
Even my good friend Alan from Halifax, Nova Scotia loves it.
HP sauce. Perfect on sausages, greasy fry-ups, veggy burgers, chops – pretty much anything.
The company that bought out the HP brand are now threatening to move production; not to another site within the UK; but to Holland.
Not unsurprisingly there is uproar in Birmingham. Now there is even an online petition – http://www.saveoursauce.co.uk. I urge all HP sauce lovers to show their support.
by ezs | Jun 2, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
–
… there was Planet Novell.
Written at: Draper, UT
Apologies. I paraphrased and plagiarised.
A planet is “a flexible feed aggregator” – in other words a centralised, ephemeral collection of similar(ish) themed blog posts. A popular implementation is at Planet Planet!
Planet Novell was a pretty busy, reasonably well known site. It has been gone for a while.
Why mention it now?
One thing that was mentioned in the ‘Cool Blogs 1.5‘ project was aggregating Cool Blogs posts from the bloggers own blogs.
A logical extension of this is to resurrect the Novell Planet concept – and really combine all feeds from all Novell bloggers. Not Cool Blogs – where generally we tend to stick to blogging about Novell and our technology but everything from these bloggers – and more. That means posts from Nat, Miguel, Reverend Ted, Michael Meeks – pretty much everyone from Novell and SUSE who blogs – even me.
What do you think? It’ll certainly be an interesting additional insight into how Novell operates – and there’s likely to be a lot of non-technology blogging. A useful companion site to Cool Blogs; or not?
Let us know! We’re going to be working next week in our staging lab testing a lot of the new features.
Written at: Draper, UT
by ezs | Jun 1, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Hot off the WordPress subversion mill – here’s WordPress 2.0.3
Security updates and a few niceties – it works for me so far.
by ezs | May 31, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized
Everyone in IT knows that Dilbert works at their office. It’s so true of Novell.
Here’s an online archive of ten years worth of Dilbert cartoons. Not searchable – but a wealth of fun.
by ezs | May 31, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
–
We’re working on the next round of improvements to Cool Blogs – and we are looking for feedback.
First we are looking to add ‘threaded comments’ – you know the kind of thing – nested comments so that relevant comments can be kept together.
The second piece we are looking to add is ratings for each post. This way you – our loyal readers – can do the right thing and vote with your mouse. More popular posts will be marked such. Maybe good bloggers can get T-Shirts… maybe the T-Shirts belong to the good comments…
The third piece we are working on is improved information about the Cool Bloggers themselves. Afterall – it would be interesting to read a little more about what these people actually do.
The final area we are working on is to aggregate posts from other Novell Cool Bloggers own Blogs. This is an interesting area of work; essentially Cool Blogs will become a centralised blog for lots of Novell people an their information and posts.
[Edit – I’ve also been asked about improved RSS – including Atom and better feed data – that’s on the list too.]
As always – comments welcome.
Written at: Draper, UT
by ezs | May 29, 2006 | Customer Service, evilzenscientist, travel, Uncategorized, Utah
Salt Lake City International Airport has WiFi access – powered by Sprint.
It kinda sucks right now – it needs Internet Explorer to sign in. Firefox just barfs.
by ezs | May 26, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
–
A short while ago I wrote about Windows Vista and some of the implications it has for organisations.
Since then there have been several developments. At the start of May 2006 the analyst firm Gartner mooted that Vista will ship en masse in the second quarter of 2007
A research note released this week from Gartner Inc. predicts that Microsoft Corp. will miss its target to ship Windows Vista on PCs by January 2007. According to Gartner, Vista won’t be broadly available to customers until the second quarter of 2007
InfoWorld, 2 May 2006
The report document is here; there is a fee for the original.
There has also been a lot of commentary from many bloggers – from Robert Scoble to MiniMicrosoft – and a lot more.
All of this commentary – from analysts, press and bloggers – is having an impact with CIOs and their teams. I am seeing a lot more customers planning to refresh to Windows XP SP2 during 2006 and stay on that new platform for ‘a while’. The general impression is that Vista is still a ‘moving target’ – not helpful for planning purposes.
Written at: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
I promised in my last post on Windows Vista that I would comment on on large area of any desktop refresh – application refresh and validation.
In the last six or seven years we have seen several phases of this process – moving from DOS to Windows 3.1; moving from 16 bit Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 or NT4; and moving from NT4 to Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Each of these desktop OS changes introduces a fresh round of application testing.
Here is the typical process – one that is being followed my most organisations.
- Select a new standard desktop OS
- Most customers are at Windows XP professional or are rapidly re-standardising on this platform.
- I have recently seen a wave of ‘third generation’ Windows XP refresh projects – for deployment in 2006 and to be in place until 2008-2010
- Usually a combination of SYSPREP, ZENworks Imaging and ENGL tools are used to create a universal image.
Inventory the current list of supported and deployed applications
- We see more usage of tools such as ZENworks Asset Management helping here
- Most organisations have ‘hundreds’ or ‘thousands’ of applications
Pragmatically evaluate whether there is a consolidation in applications possible
- Aquisition and expansion historically means that applications are duplicated
- Lax standards and non-centralised, departmental purchasing also leads to multiple solutions being in place
- Consolidation can lead to license savings and more financial muscle in negotiating a better deal
(re) package applications
- Many IT organisations are now squarely focussed on packaging applications as Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages
- ZENworks includes the Macrovision Installshield Admin Studio – this is really helpful – and can move NAL snapshots (AOT/AXT) to MSI packages
Test
The next post will cover the re-packaging and test phase of this process – one of the largest areas of time expenditure – but also one of the most vital. I’ll talk about how good process and procedures will really make this successful.
Notice how nothing so far has been ZENworks specific? Everything here is really for any customer deploying XP and refreshing their standard desktop. My final post will be to tie this all together with ZENworks glue and magic – and show how we can make it very, very efficient and cost effective.
As always – I’m looking for your feedback and updates – comments welcome.
Written at: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Recent Comments