Well, only one person came back with the correct answer to what i'm holding in my profile picture ... Steve Thompson who guessed it was an SMS 1.0 retail box!

I was tempted to tear the plastic seal on the box and load it on to WinNT, but, the realisation that i'd probably stop laughing and getting warm goofy retro feelings within 10 minutes of loading WinNT has put me off, so it's still sealed and probably will be forever!

Congratulations Steve Thompson (profile) you're the proud owner of a few pens that flash when you click them!!! Very classy, and totally invaluable for true flashing pen mobility that easily slip in to any shirt pocket! Will put them in the post soon ... who's the SMS daddy!

I'll knock some more stuff up for laughs, and we'll do another competition but call it ... "can you guess what it is yet?"

I thought i'd raffle something, not sure what it is yet, but hey i've got some goodies and not letting on what!

So, first 5 people to ping me a private email with the answer win! You can email me by visiting this URL and then clicking on Send an Email

Now, the question: In my profile picture, what box am I holding? Visit here for my profile picture

No generalisations please! Correct answers not only identify the weight of the box (hehe only kidding) but the product and version ;-)

If you are outside the UK but want to email, by all means do I'd love to hear your guesses!

Check this out, that's so cool. I love seeing social events being organised so that they can get a picture taken from satellites in orbit!

(Brazen and Blatant lift from SlashDot)

"Citizens of the Russian town Chelyabinsk calculated when the satellite, QuickBird, which takes images for Google Earth and Google Maps, would cross above their city and used people to make a giant smiley face. A rock concert on the main square attracted many people and everyone got a yellow cape. It looks like someone at Google was quicker than usual to put up the new data. Maybe Google likes the idea of an entire town working hard to get its 15 minutes of fame. The article has a screenshot of Google Maps and images taken directly at the event."

I think we need a geek-fest organised at a Microsoft Campus in time for the Live Maps satellite to pass over and snap a picture or too ;-)

Configuration Manager 2007 RTM\SP1 has a wee bit of an issue dealing with GMT dates that are offset by DST. Essentially if you are in a DST timezone then the DST offset is not factored correctly, resulting in Wake On Lan (WOL) packets arriving at the destination machines one hour earlier than intended\expected.

There is a work-around, but it simply involves shifting the start time for the advertisement forwards one hour ahead of when you plan to deploy. Not an elegent work around, as all you are doing is moving this one hour window forwards.

If you've been struggling with this one for a while, then you're going to have to wade on until after DST finishes for your timezone, unless of course Microsoft releases a hotfix before the next scheduled service pack release ;-)

Here's a handy link to countries that are currently in DST, and when they revert back to normal. Once DST is behind us, problem is gone.

Got a tip for you ... once DST has finished, SERIOUSLY consider performing a Hardware Inventory on those clients that reside within the timezone that has just come out of DST (keep in mind if you're spanning multiple countries ...). If you have a 1 week HINV schedule then these clients will still be considered to be within DST, at least until their HINV is processed and the clients timezone information is updated in the site servers database. You should be able to guess why this speeds things up. Essentially, you could leave things alone and put up with the DST\WOL issue for a short time longer (depends on your HINV schedule frequency), it's just if you want to make sure your clients wake up in time once they come out of DST.

News of an up and coming UK based messaging and mobility event:

November 2008 MMMUG Meeting:

This event will be held in London at the MSFT offices in Cardinal Place near Victoria.

This month we have a topical session led by Clive Watson, Brett Johnson and Julius Davies from Microsoft. We will be discussing the new support statements surround the issue of Virtualising your Exchange environment. Having understood which pieces of Exchange are now supported we will look at some of the key design issues facing those Virtualising Exchange.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday 11th November and starts at 18:30.

For more information and to sign up please see the link below:

Messaging and Mobility user group - http://www.mmmug.co.uk/forums/thread/23926.aspx

Copy\Paste from the relevent Stanford page:

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.

Go here to read the full posting

More info on signing up here

Always wanted to do something with Robotics, other than busting a few moves when drunk ;-)

Takes your interest, go check it out!

Straight from the Windows Server dvision technet blog:

Microsoft and Cray Team up to Bring High Performance Computing Mainstream

Wow, who would have thought of that, a CRAY running a Windows OS! If ol' Seymour was still around, wonder how he'd handle this news? Wonder what he'd think about CRAY not currently having the fastest super-computers in the world (IBM currently?).

Who is Seymour Cray\CRAY? Don't know your nuts from your bolts when it comes to computing back-history? Wonder no more, follow this link to read about a once leading light, in the pursuit of faster super-computing. Talking of notable IT engineers, another worth checking out would be David Cutler, who is still above ground and working for ... Microsoft!

Do all IT roads eventually lead to Microsoft?

Lifted straight off the Lucas Arts webby:

LucasArts Unleashes a New Chapter in the Star Wars® Saga With Star Wars®: The Force Unleashed™

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - Sept. 16, 2008 - Thirty-one years ago, the first Star Wars movie galvanized audiences around the word, sparking a phenomenon that has spanned generations. With today’s release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, one of the most highly anticipated video games of the year, LucasArts proves that the Force is stronger than ever.

http://www.lucasarts.com/company/release/news20080916.html

Can't wait to play this one on my Wii!!!!!!!

Review of the game on the Wii here, and general info on the game here

And yes, you guessed it, i'll play anything that has "Star Wars" in the title ;-)

Oh, and I should add the words "Configuration Manager" to the post, just to make it look like i'm focused on technology, sigh ...

Stumbled in to this somehow

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2007/0113226.html

Retrogeek found a mother-lode of magazines recently, and decided to scan them in and prop up on his blog for us all to see!

Some of these scans pre-date my tinkerings with computers, some I just never saw, and others such as the Load Runner magazine and WH-Smiths brought back memories of a different era in computing!

Look at this for an answering machine!

Keep scanning and posting RetroGeek ... I love this stuff!

I found this on a TechNet thread, thought might be handy for those of us that may want to sequence the ConfigMgr Console for deployment using App-V

Sequencing Config Manager Admin Console (MMC) 

CERN tripped the switch on the Large Hadron Collider this morning, and we're all still very much alive!

No news on black holes, or aliens breaching the fabric of our universe and sending in an army with technology far more advanced than our own! Thank god for that!

I tuned in to the radio especially to hear the event take place this morning. What a moment, as they released the protons and counted down from 5 seconds and then got some results (no black holes observed I believe!). Moment in history indeed.

Hat off to the folks at CERN. Congratulations on pushing the boundaries of science forward another notch!

Here's a snippet from Mike's blog on Linux Integration for Hyper-V:

The final version of the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V have been released!

Driver support for synthetic devices: The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed for Hyper-V.
Hypercall adapter: The Hypercall adapter is a thin layer of software that translates the Xen-specific virtualization function calls from a Xen-enabled Linux kernel to Microsoft Hyper-V hypercalls. This results in improved performance for the Linux virtual machine.
Fastpath Boot Support: Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.
...
...

Read the full posting at source here

Oki, so maybe tomorrow the world won't end. Maybe all these scientists are right and these mini black holes and odd stuff will appear and vanish in a flurry of recorded activity. Maybe all the information gathered from the experiment will extend the boundaries of science further and help humanity to progress.

Or, as the doomsayers say, maybe tomorrow the world will start to be consumed by a mini black hole. Switzerland and France begin to be sucked in to the singularity that will form. Parts of the planets core in that region getting sucked in too along with the atmosphere spiralling down and in to the mini black hole, leaving us gasping for air a long time before this rock we call our home disappears.

Got to admit, this one does have me worried. I'm all for science, and it's progression but this is a real risky thing to do, just to answer a few geeky questions. I'm sure if I was a scientist i'd be better informed and as confident as they are that all will be well, but i'm not and no matter how many scientists are put in front of me to reassure i'll always have an element of "oh, darn, but what if?"

What I find funny is no one has a DR plan, like how on earth (arf!) do you shut down a mini black hole? Feed it tons of Doritos and hope it gets constipated and ergo winks out of existence?

Anyways who wants to dwell on the death and destruction of this lovely blue planet. Instead why not watch CERN's Large Hadron Collider web-tv and see the amazing event taking place on the day. Here's some great links, first is the LHC Start-up webpage, technical information for the media, and finally a link for Geneva timezone information (CEST) so you can loosly confirm the time we're all going to vanish, cough I mean discover some fascinating scientific facts!

I think it works out to around 08:30am BST on Wednesday 10th, if that helps anyone offset to their timezone (BST = UTC+1)

Don't forget to take time out to tell your loved ones how much you loved, erm love them and don't get all shaken up if you hear a rather large BANG!

Oh and also you can check my blog for a countdown to the big event (top left!) See, I do think of you all!

Saw this over at BoingBoing, amazing that Apple developed this tech nigh on 15 years ago, but couldn't shoe-horn it in to the iPhone!

The video is an example of the Apple Newton in action ... doing ... Copy ... Paste!

And if that video doesn't work on here, then here's the source

Whenever I need to move around a line of text on the iPhone I put my finger on the area of text i'm looking to edit, then a magnifying glass pops up and in a balloon it shows me a few of the characters under the highlighted area. I can then roll my finger from one side to the other to shift the cursor left or right pretty easily. I think these taps and double taps on a text area, and the magnifying glass to refine the selection a bit more, and word\sentence\paragraph snap-to is a great way to go about implementing this! Would love to shift text from Emails in to Texts, web text to email\text, anywhere in to the actual phone softwares number fields for entering dial in details ... Annoying that I cannot.

Classic example of when a fancy iPhone and no pen nearly led to a time keeping disaster! I was suppose to dial in to a meeting last week, didn't have a pen let alone a scrap of paper on me, and couldn't memorise (eek!) the 8 digit passcode for the conference call. 45347687, or was that 54347687, or was it 4543.687 darn i've forgotten a digit, recheck ... ok got it, now tap tap tap, nope that's not it, GRRRR! Well, because I couldn't copy it from the text message and paste it in to the phone touch-pad I ended up misting up the car window then writing the number out, and then tapping it in to the phone. From Phone, to Window, and back to Phone. Sheer genius on my part I thought! But wish I didn't have to reach for a pen or mist up a window when I'm using this gadget!

Note to Microsoft: Please make a decent uncluttered easy to use phone, like this iPhone ... I'd buy it in a Flash (get it? Flash not supported on iPhone, arf arf)!!!