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Cool Blogs

by | Mar 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

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A great question from a friend in Norway:

# Roger Foss Says:
March 9th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

Please clarify something:

Blogs have traditionally been a little edgy; a place where employees deviate a little from the corporate line.

These cool blogs sound very corporate and official, though. They contrast to the blogs of, say, Miguel and Nat, where you barely see a Novell logo.

So if they are official blogs, how are they different from the newsletters, mailing lists and news groups that already exist?

Its a fair question, no? So we know what to expect.

I think the answer is that we’re just getting going. Most of the bloggers here are new to blogging – and in many cases are being somewhat conservative to see how ‘the powers that be’ react.

There are naturally differences between this Cool Blogs site and the personal blogs of Nat and Miguel (and others..)

We are trying to keep the focus on Novell technology, with blogs written by Novell technologists. We want to be edgy, sometimes irreverent, never irrelevant, occasionally funny and I hope soon a trusted source of information on the inner Novell.

Does this help answer your question? What else would readers like to see here?

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland

Microsoft Origami / Intel UPMC

by | Mar 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Technology, Uncategorized

There has been a lot of hype in the last week or so about the Origami device – or Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)

ASUS UPMC

Intel have a way cool video here – this looks like a technology teaser more than anything.

Details are starting to trickle out of CeBIT in Hanover – as well as on MSDN Channel 9.

From what I can see and read:

– this is clearly a first generation product.
– three hours battery life. Urg. My Thinkpad gets double that! My iPod Nano gets over 14 hours!
– the form factor leaked on the web earlier this month looks cool; the products shown so far look less cool.
– 1GHz Intel x86, 512 MB RAM, Wireless, Windows XP Tablet Edition.. that’s just enough to run an RDP client and iTunes 😉

Clearly there is a cool factor here; the challenge will be in running to second edition – I’d certainly look at needing more battery life.

As Scoble said:

It’s not an iPod killer.
It’s not a portable Xbox.
It’s not an OQO killer.
It’s not a PSP killer.
Update: it’s not a Nokia N90 killer either (thanks to Marc Canter for asking about that).
Update 2: it’s not a Treo 700w killer either (thanks to Dave for pointing that out).
Update 3: hey, PalmAddicts, it’s not a Palm killer either. 🙂

So, what is Origami?

The UPMC doesn’t look like any of these; the closest I can describe right now is a ‘home laptop replacement’.

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland

ZENworks customers in Scotland

by | Mar 8, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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I am Edinburgh for a few days visiting some of our global ZENworks customers.

One thing that I love about visiting customers is seeing how Novell technology is being used. Every customer deployment opens my eyes to the seemingly endless imagination of technical architects and administrators like yourselves. Every large customer deployment is somewhat unique – whether for ZENworks, Novell Identity Manager or any of our technologies.

The other part that makes customer visits so vital, is getting a first hand account of new trends and activities within IT organisations. It is direct interaction like this that helps Product Managers collect requirements for better, innovative products.

I’ll report back on what I find in the next couple of days.

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland

Scotland

by | Mar 7, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’m off to Scotland for a few days – customer visits and strategy and roadmap presentations.

I’ll be in Edinburgh at the end of this week – hopefully I’ll get some time to see more than airports, plans and offices!

Firefox Feeds

by | Mar 7, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I had a comment:

urm how do I add your blog to my firefox 1.5.1 live feeds.

I’m just too used to seeing the rss button in the address bar.

If I click on the rss 2.0 link I get the error about the xlm not having any style info associated with it.

Thanks

Marcus

I added the icon on the Firefox address bar. This was pretty simple to add.

For those interested – the following needs to be added to


<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Evil ZEN Scientist feed" href="/index.php/feed">

I made modifications to index.php within my theme under WordPress.
[I also ran into a WordPress 2.0.1 bug]

ZENworks at BrainShare 2006

by | Mar 4, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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BrainShare 2006

Many of you will be familiar with BrainShare – Novell’s annual gathering of customers, partners and channel partners.

One thing that may be news – this year BrainShare will be bigger than ever – the event is now ‘BrainShare Global’ – where people from across the globe will descent on Salt Lake City, Utah for a week of bonding, information gathering, research and fun. As always ZENworks will play a central part in this major event.

I will be blogging frequently in the next few weeks about the run up to the event – but we have keynotes, breakout sessions, Birds of a Feather sessions, hands-on-labs and much, much more.

One event that I encourage every technologist reading to attend – is Meet the Experts. This is a unique chance for you to spend some face-to-face time, in informal surroundings, with the people that make Novell’s products happen. Architects, engineers, support people, testers, localisation engineers, the odd Product Manager – we’ll all be present to let you ask questions. Any questions. No – I mean it – anything! From experience I know that this truly is ‘Meet the Experts’ – and it’s humbling to know that often you are the expert.I’ll give a running commentary of our BrainShare preparations in this blog (and some behind the scenes updates too).

Written at: Draper, UT