The Uphill Battle

And now for something completely different

2011-06-03T09:25:00.000+12:00

Spied KiwiRails new loco 9135, being dropped on the rails for the first time. It's HUGE!

Microsoft Releases AD FS 2.0 Capacity Planning Spreadsheet - hillarity ensues...

2011-04-04T09:53:00.002+12:00

OK, so it's been a while since I last blogged, various excuses are the reason... But today I was tracking new downloads from Microsoft, we use their products a lot here at work and that can be both good and bad. I'm involved in a project that will be using AD FS 2.0 and SharePoint 2010, so when I saw that MS had released a Capacity Planning Spreadsheet for AD FS 2.0, I ran off and downloaded it

SharePoint 2010 RTM - Least Privilege Install - My Experience

2010-06-04T16:15:00.018+12:00

WARNING [11/11/2010]: It looks like Google's update to the template and rich text editor has mangled my post, so watch out for instructions that don't make sense or are out of order.... I need to replace this whole article now Update [5/10/2010]: I've actually switched to a script based install, which appears to get around some of the problems that I'm seeing (I think User Profile Syncing is

Informal Telecom HSPA+ performance test

2010-05-12T21:17:00.011+12:00

I recently recieved an HSPA+ USB stick from Telecom/Sierra Wireless, without a SIM/plan. So being the geek I am, pulled the SIM from my HTC Touch Pro 2 and dropped it in the USB stick.And then proceeded to do the very unscientific test below using SpeedTest.net, comparing it with my aging Telecom CDMA Rev A card and the built-in Wifi (802.11g) on my laptop via my Telecom/Xtra BigTime plan, during

Review: HTC Touch Pro 2

2009-11-02T14:00:00.003+13:00

OK, having only had it for 24 hours, I can't really give the HTC Touch Pro 2 a full review, but here goes:Overall, I like this device, based on WinMo 6.1 Pro it's a full featured PDA with full Email, Calendar, Task and Notes syncing. The keyboard is great and the screen is big, bright, clear and hi-res (320x800), way higher than Boss. The phone call quality seems OK, though I see myself using a

DIY Dilbert RSS Reader for SharePoint 2007

2009-10-15T14:08:00.001+13:00

Everyone seems to be jumping on the "Here's my custom web part to do this…" band-wagon, so here's my "Here's how to do it out of the box…"Everyone loves Dilbert, and Scott Adams has been on the money for so long, it's a wonder he isn't a gazillionaire…Various people have posted ways to get around the fact that the out-of-the-box RSS Reader in WSS 3.0/MOSS2007 doesn't display the images from the

The wonders of Kerberos, SharePoint and SQL Reporting Services

2009-08-31T08:54:00.001+12:00

OK, so we’re trying to get a little more modern here, decreasing our reliance on Oracle Reports (yetch!) and Access based reporting (shudder) and move on to the spiffy SQL Server Reporting Services, only 2005, but hey, we have to start somewhere.Given that our Intranet is SharePoint based (full MOSS2007), I of course wanted to run SSRS in integrated mode, so along came Kerberos.I’ve had Kerberos

Microsoft Web Experience Events

2007-06-06T08:57:00.000+12:00

Microsoft is hosting free Microsoft Web Experience events at the Los Angeles Microsoft office on June 8th and the Denver Microsoft office on June 15th. They will be presenting information on building the next generation user experience on the web. They are providing breakfast and lunch, hosting a reception with beer and wine, and attendees are automatically registered in a drawing for an XBox 360

VMWare vs MS Virtual Server for MOSS2007 Development

2006-10-26T11:22:00.000+13:00

OK, so it's been nearly two months since I last posted, but then the work I've been doing is a little hush, hush, at least as far as our competitors are concerned.But here's a hint:While investigating the state of MOSS2007 BDC generator tools, I came across Todd's post on virtual machine performance for MOSS2007 development.Makes for very interesting reading and his results are probably not all

Windows on a Mac is here

2006-04-07T09:17:00.000+12:00

Windows on a Mac is here - Product Review - CNET AsiaApparently some non-IT industry guys won the US$14000 competition to get Windows on Mac/Intel and now it looks like Apple are releasing the method into the wild!Spot the entry that points to Photoshop running faster on Windows than on OS/X (on the same hardware)...I don't think the writing is on the wall for OS/X fans, but at least they now

Google Copies Corporate Data to Google's Servers?

2006-03-05T20:27:00.000+13:00

Slashdot Google Copies Corporate Data to Google's Servers?It's clearly stated during the install, but Google is getting busted for copying corporate files to Google's servers via Google Desktop.I hate to say it, but it's all about user education and standardising corporate desktops.If non-standard applications are being installed by uneducated users... the corporate already has an a problem.We

Chapman Tripp makes waves in the Geek Community - Slashdot | 'Infectious' Open Source Software?

2006-03-02T09:26:00.000+13:00

Slashdot 'Infectious' Open Source Software?Some of our lawyers wrote a piece for the New Zealand State Services Commission on the use of Open Source Software.While I don't agree with everything they say, I wont speak up about it here (I have internally).There a few more relevant bits on our website here & here.

Telecom takes a spanking...

2006-02-23T09:18:00.000+13:00

It's about time and kudos to TV3's Campbell Live (who's sponsor is Telecom) for hosting an article on the poor state of Broadband in NZ [windows media].Unfortunatly TV3 didn't stream the debate that followed, though some enterprising people have made it available:NZ:http://sneep.net/CL-Broadband.avi orhttp://www.blakjak.net/adsl/CL-Broadband.aviNon-NZ:http://wibble.focb.co.nz/CL orhttp://

Minimo

2006-02-21T21:42:00.000+13:00

Minimo - The opensource (Mozilla) browser for PDA's...Finally, something to replace the crappy PocketIE on my PDA!

Publishing in China

2006-01-31T13:32:00.000+13:00

Google and My Red FlagVery interesting insite into a) how Google and other Tech firms do business in China and b) how one author came up with his answer to publishing in a land of censorship.

Steve Jobs' Magic Kingdom

2006-01-31T13:25:00.000+13:00

Steve Jobs' Magic KingdomExcellent (long) artical on the rise and fall (and rise again) of Steve Jobs with respect to Pixar and Disney.

Can you take identity verification too far?

2006-01-27T14:27:00.000+13:00

The Race to run Windows on MacTEL heats up...

2006-01-27T14:17:00.000+13:00

First Dual-Boot On Intel Mac Contest Draws Crowd - Yahoo! News

Linux vs Microsoft: Has Linux's time come?

2006-01-26T11:01:00.000+13:00

LXer: Linux not standing in wait as Microsoft sinks its own shipInteresting article that presents some different ideas on why Microsoft might have to start worrying about Linux and other "competitors".

Wine starts to catch XP!

2006-01-24T09:53:00.000+13:00

BenchMark-0.9.5 - The Official Wine WikiI'm impressed! They're a little selective on the tests (old versions of 3DMark, etc) which means the benchmarks aren't necessarily giving current APIs (DirectX 9, etc) a real work-out.

Neat: VGA Adapter for your PDA/Smartphone!

2006-01-17T11:08:00.000+13:00

Video-on-the-GoAll you need is an SDIO slot and away you go!Possibly quite handy if you don't want to lug a laptop AND a project around for PowerPoint presentations.Shame it's only 640x480...

"Most Vulnerable OS"

2006-01-03T08:38:00.000+13:00

A number of sites are reporting this CERT article as pointing out that Linux/Unix had more vulnerabilities reported in 2005 than Windows did.The point they're missing, is how many vulnerabilities are 3rd Party apps and how many are core OS? I know this is very hard to define for Linux/Unix, since so many of the apps shipped on the install CD/DVDs are 3rd party and have always been. Unlike the

Get your FREE VMware Player now!

2005-12-16T12:05:00.000+13:00

VMware Player Runs existing VMWare and VirtualPC/VirtualServer images!

Microsoft working on another OS, but it's more like Unix...

2005-12-16T12:03:00.000+13:00

Apple Matters | Singularity Some interesting stuff here about a MS Research OS called Singularity. James makes some great points about the pros and cons, but one of his arguments is flawed. He talks about the short-sightedness of using Sing# to code the OS and code apps for the OS. I don't see any problem in this, longer term, since MS would no doubt use their existing CLR (Common Language

Moment of uber-geekness...

2005-11-25T11:56:00.000+13:00

Not entirely sure why, but I went hunting for myself on Google (actually, I must confess I do this every year or so...) and found that Google Groups has me way back in 1992! "craig humphrey" - Google Groups

RAID5 catching up with RAID0

2005-11-24T12:54:00.000+13:00

It's long been well known that RAID5 creats additional overhead (thanks to parity information) which makes it slower than say RAID0 (striping). While following up something I was reading today (distributed.net) I came across this 3ware page, touting the performance of their recent SATA2 RAID contoller. While their main point is to compare with their previous SATA1 RAID controler (and the

Running Windows without a swapfile

2005-11-23T08:04:00.000+13:00

I know i've done this every so often to do a good solid defrag, but I must admit, it had never occurred to me to run this way the whole time.I've got two desktops and a laptop, all with 1gig RAM. My primary desktop would probably struggle (thanks to a Netscreen/Juniper java based console), I think the other two could be prime targets, at least until I start VS05 & SQL05 development again...http:

How to Build an Intel Mac

2005-11-22T17:19:00.000+13:00

Hmm... someone leaked an early release of Mac OS/X for INTEL... So now the latest trend is showing everyone how you can get it working on XYZ Intel based hardware.... ExtremeTech BuilderAU Might have to see if I can locate a copy and have a little play...

Even more Sony DRM...

2005-11-18T13:05:00.000+13:00

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

More Sony DRM

2005-11-18T13:03:00.000+13:00

Sony Yanks DRM Uninstaller - Because that was a security risk, too

Sony distributes DRM - Rootkit!

2005-11-18T09:51:00.000+13:00

All the major players out there are trying to come up with the perfect DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution to stop all this CD/DVD pirating. So Sony starts shipping CDs with it's own flavour of DRM that auto-installs on your PC when you put the CDROM in. Only, they then try to hid the DRM software using XCP, which is basically a rootkit! XCP can be used to hide ANY process/file/folder/

MS gets all leaky on us...

2005-11-18T09:45:00.000+13:00

There's a bit of a bru-ha boiling on the net around some leaked emails/memos from Microsoft: Miguel de Icaza [memos can be found here] Miguel and others point out that it's all a little bit suspicious and staged, which to my uneducated eyes appears true, though having seen some of the emails/memo/presentations that we get at my office... Sometimes the powers at be really believe (and write) this

RainbowCrack Goes Online and Commercial

2005-11-14T16:02:00.000+13:00

RainbowCrack Online

VoIP phone Denial of Service!

2005-11-03T16:04:00.000+13:00

Get lots of people to ring the same guy and shout "Boo"!Field Notice: [Cisco] FN - 62121 - CP-7940G and CP-7960G May Reboot if Volume is Set to MaximumSummary: The IP Phone may reboot if volume is set to maximum, a call is placed to it, and the caller makes a loud noise.

Object based querying of data sources

2005-10-20T16:53:00.000+13:00

Very informative video from the Channel 9 team over at MSDN. Object based querying of any (more or less) data source: arrays, XML, DBS, etc. Some of the comments below the vid are interesting, particularly the comment about FoxPro. I've never used FoxPro, but I'm sure Delphi had/has similar methods for data source access (considering that Anders is ex-Delphi...) and I have vague recollection of

At last a justification for having a WinCE4.0 PDA...

2005-10-06T15:57:00.000+13:00

OK, so I've got this Harrier PDA/Cellphone, which is all well and good, but what really can you do with it (other than make phone calls, TXTs, crappy pictures and Solitaire? Here comes the answer... get a 256+meg SD card for it and load Quake3A! That's right, this guy has ported the now open source code from Q3A to WinCE4.0! Now all I need to

Remote surveilance of CRT's and LCD's

2005-09-29T21:23:00.000+12:00

Saw an episode of Numb3rs last night, it included the remote surveilance of a computer LCD screen.No while the monitoring of CRTs is well known (The US DoD first talked about it in 1947! ARC Search Results: Details pitty they haven't digitised this!) I hadn't heard of it being extended to LCDs yet.OK, so I'm not security guru (I'm supposed to be developing most of the time), but I still hadn't

Looks like Blue-Ray is dieing the death of underliverable...

2005-09-28T14:14:00.000+12:00

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News

All the Bandwidth you can eat! And then some!

2005-09-26T10:19:00.000+12:00

Computerworld > London is global internet bandwidth capital

Is this steganography?

2005-09-23T08:39:00.000+12:00

Select/highlight the image.

10 Minute IIS5.0 hack

2005-09-13T11:58:00.000+12:00

Flash video, showing someone hacking an IIS5.0 site in just 10 minutes. Whoppix and WHAX demos from whoppix.net and iwhax.net [flash]

Place Shifting - View your home TV/Cable/Sat from anywhere, over the Internet!

2005-09-07T13:41:00.000+12:00

TomsNetworking Product Reviews : TomsNetworking : Sling Media Slingbox Very cool idea, hard to justify in NZ where you pay for your (broadband) bandwidth usage (or you're capped).

Intellisene for SQL!

2005-09-06T22:06:00.000+12:00

PromptSQL: Intellisense style help for MS Query Analyzer, VS.NET 2003, Management Studio and VS 2005 What a cool idea! Especially since MS apparently have pulled it from SQL Server 2005... couldn't get it to work properly, apparently....

The slacker..

2005-09-05T20:31:00.000+12:00

Hi People,OK, I've been a bit slack on the tech blog of late... that's an understatement...The jokes have trickled in, thanks to the likes of Con and my IT co-conspiritors (at least the ones that aren't leaving/left!).So anyway, here's what I've been up to:Battling Hummingbird's DM and KM products. Mainly to having very little clue :(Spent three days last week at MicroSoft TechEd, Jesper

Radio NZ will be simulcasting David Lange's memorial service

2005-08-17T17:03:00.000+12:00

Radio New Zealand Given that they're a radio network, I wonder if they'll be using video?

10Gbit/s All the bandwidth you can eat...

2005-08-17T15:18:00.000+12:00

broadband � News � 10Gbps Monster Connection - Scientists have all the fun... Pah! Users will find a way to fill it... Next year it'll be 100Gbit/s...

Dell's new Inspiron XPS Gen 2 is "laptop of the moment"

2005-08-17T15:06:00.000+12:00

Tom's Hardware Guide Mobile Devices: The World's Best Gaming Notebook? - Introduction Creaming even the Acer Ferrari 4000! (which is admittedly is a thin&light).

The rest of the world makes fun of our "Telco"

2005-06-29T09:09:00.000+12:00

Yup that's right, rats took out one of Telecom NZ's fibre paths and then just two days later a spade took out the rest of their North Island network. That's right, our major "Telco" only has two paths for it's core "carrier grade" network. So much for their "Five 9's" propaganda.http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/24/0249231&from=rss

ComCom suggests Telecom take it's own pill...

2005-06-28T09:50:00.000+12:00

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/MediaCentre/MediaReleases/2004/telecommunicationscommissionertele.aspxThe Commerce Commission is suggesting that Telecom NZ take a quick lookat what it's (subsidiary is) asking Telstra (in Australia) to do, andthen apply it to it's operations in NZ.Heh heh, all rings and round-a-bouts... Telecom is beating up onTelstra (in Aussi( for doing exactly what Telecom is doing

64bit .Net? v2.0 only - nearly...

2005-06-28T08:54:00.001+12:00

Came across this interesting blog entry.By default v1.0 and v1.1 apps will only run in the 32bit mode on 64bit Windows.And even if you force 64bit mode, using a 64bit loader/wrapper, it will only stay 64bit if there are no 32bit dependancies.Kinda logical, but it would have been nice if they'd used some kind of 64-32bit glue, so 64bit apps could have 32bit dependancies.Isn't that how Win9x worked

When is a crack not a crack?

2005-06-28T08:54:00.000+12:00

"When it presents no real threat." Yeah, right! Some Indian programmer breaks Microsoft's anti-piracy scheme and that's no threat?http://theinquirer.net/pocket.aspx?article=24134

Unrest over Microsoft's grading scheme for staff...

2005-06-24T09:58:00.000+12:00

Looks like Microsoft's "innovative" grading scheme for staff (affecting bonuses, promotion, etc) is causing a fair amount of unrest...

Symantec Worm propogation simulator

2005-06-19T12:13:00.000+12:00

http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/content.cfm?articleid=5479&EID=0

Talking furniture?

2005-06-17T15:19:00.000+12:00

Sounds like a university project has gotten loose!

Instant Fame

2005-06-17T09:46:00.000+12:00

Telecom NZ have had enough of money grubbing advertising agencies... So now they want us to come up with their adverts! Want Instant Fame?Rather a lot of "Adult" examples...

The Joy MINTEL/INTAPPLE/MACTEL?

2005-06-10T08:35:00.000+12:00

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/693.html

More Apple on INTEL

2005-06-08T08:45:00.000+12:00

This is one of the better takes on this.http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005/06/06/425849.aspx

Steve Jobs confirms rumors - Apple to transition to Intel CPUs

2005-06-07T14:29:00.000+12:00

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News It's true.. [sigh]

PCWorld.com - IRam Speeds Windows XP Start Up

2005-06-07T12:04:00.000+12:00

PCWorld.com - IRam Speeds Windows XP Start Up It's funny, solid-state hard drives have been around for ages, but have always cost an arm and a leg... So why has it taken so long to come up with a simple little board with RAM slots and a battery? Kudos to Giga-byte for doing it! But you've flawed your system. You're using SATA (presumably v2.0 at 300Meg/s) for the data transfer! (dispite

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

2005-06-06T22:03:00.000+12:00

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!Just when POWER CPU's are poised to take off (thanks to being in the three leading next-gen consoles), Apple is going to switch to INTEL! Now if they were switching to AMD... (but AMD often have volume problems, so probably not a great idea)But as this article points out, if OS/X will run on INTEL (sounds like Pentium-D or Pentium-M

Windows x64 home truths...

2005-06-03T10:11:00.000+12:00

Nathan Mercer (Microsoft NZ) has been running around New Zealand, touting Windows x64 with AMD and has put some interesting tit-bits in his blog. I was reading this article from Microsoft and noticed a few things: Windows x64 does not use 64bit memory addressing, it uses 40bit! (OK, that's still 16 terabytes of addressable memory.. but still

MS Snubs porting to PowerPC

2005-06-03T09:40:00.000+12:00

Computer World article Key phrase: "No, this is not one of our supported platforms."Of course not, you've only recently started porting the Xbox code to PowerPC, so of course you don't "support" real Windows on PowerPC.Key phrase: "...no plans to port to Power at this time."Maybe not, but I bet MS have a team doing a feasibility study...Given that

Google Toolbar now supports Blogging!

2005-06-02T18:24:00.000+12:00

Just downloaded the latest Google Toolbar and it supports blogging!.Just a basic plain-text editor, that links to www.blogger.com. But still, makes it even easier to blog while I'm at my desktop and spot something interesting.Now I just need something for my PDA... must take some time to find one (or an HTML email editor...)Hmmm... I also wish blogger.com had a better way to support attachments,

If you're really bored... You can follow my luck with the MS newsgroups...

2005-06-02T18:06:00.000+12:00

I've got a few background issues at the moment:One is Performance Monitor on my Win2k3 Dev box.It's gone nutz and lost all the performance objects (CPU, Index Server, Disk, etc, etc) and only displays numbers...Someone has previously reported this, but got no response and their post has mysteriously disappeared from the MS Web Newsgroup but thankfully still appears in Google. [Actually, and I

MRTG 2.12.1 broke my graphs :(

2005-05-30T15:23:00.000+12:00

I've been using MRTG to do network usage graphing for a long time and it's been a great, basic, free tool. But I recently upgraded to v2.12.1 and it appears to have broken some of my graphs :(Usually I have the 2Mbit/s Frame Relay interfaces (on our WAN routers) set up to be unscaled, so that they top out at 2Mbit/s, which makes visualising the usage very easy. While the LAN interfaces I had

The Pentium 4 is dead...

2005-05-26T14:55:00.000+12:00

Kudos to Tom's Hardware Guide for doing a great job of comparing Pentium M's with Pentium 4's and discovering that the Pentium M looks like it beats the P4 hands down in almost all benchmarks. Turns out the P M has more in common with the old P3 than the P4. The catch? You need the CPU Upgrade Kit CT-479 from ASUS, which only works with some Pentium

All this talk about AJAX

2005-05-26T09:59:00.000+12:00

I seem to recall a collegue (Aidan Humphreys - no relation) and I, did some work in 1998/1999, that used JavaScript on the page to do dynamic updates of dropdown-lists.The JavaScript called a Perl CGI backend into a propretry stock tracking system.Maybe not as well defined as AJAX, but I'm sure we weren't the first in this arena.We were working for CSK in Frankfurt at the time (I see they're now

Please tell me this is a joke!

2005-05-26T08:30:00.000+12:00

Apple to addopt INTEL chips?Right when both the leading next-gen consoles are moving to PowerPC and Apple wants to move away from it? I don't think so. Apple should be looking for ways to integrate the two new multi-core CPU's into it's computers, especially as console volumes will bring the price down!And can anyone see OSX on PS3/XBox2 and/or PS3/XBox2 emulators on OSX?

StarWars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

2005-05-24T20:09:00.001+12:00

Well, just like most geeks, I headed off to see Episode 3 last night, down at The Berkley in Mision Bay. Nice little theater by the way (you can take your beer into the movies!)I wasn't expecting too much of the film, having heard a mixture of reviews and seen a number of shorts. But in the end, I was quite impressed, heavy on the action (particularly lightsabre scenes), nice SPFX (mostly) and a

XML document parsing in classical ASP

2005-05-24T20:09:00.000+12:00

Unggg... The bain of my last two days!I've gotten into the bad habit of coding ASP in VBScript, virtually all the XML examples are in JScript and C++. VBScript really isn't the place to be passing around Objects and either I've missed something (quite possible give MS's atrocious XML docs) or you end up doing nearly as much work as if the XMLDocument object didn't exist...Oh well, just as well

Updated my CV

2005-05-20T16:11:00.000+12:00

Updated my CV recently (must update web one too...)It's been about a year since I last did, aside from some training, couldn't really put anything of note in it... [sigh]

Developing for Windows Mobile 2003 SE.... nearly...

2005-05-17T13:29:00.000+12:00

Thought I'd help out and write some code for the PocketPC RSS feed reader that I use (PocketFeed). Downloaded the source... Fired up VS.Net 2003... project type unknown...Darn it... need to load in all the PocketPC SDK and then I'll probably discover that I need to use VS v6 :)UPDATE:After much hacking, slashing, editing of paths, adding of libs, SDKs and patches...PocketFeed compiles and runs on

Internet over gas!

2005-05-17T09:24:00.000+12:00

10 Gigabit wireless, delivered over gas lines!Can't see that arriving in NZ anytime soon...BTW my first post via email, on my PDA/cellphone. [edited: hmmm I need a way to do html emails from my PDA...]

SQL Error in ISA2004 install

2005-05-16T14:03:00.000+12:00

Found a mistake in the ISA2004 install the other day.If you want to log to a (MS) SQL DB, then you have to run a couple of SQL scripts against the DB you want to log to, then set up an ODBC connection.It talks about giveing permission to a particular stored proceedure, only it doesn't exist...Thanks MS. No response on the MS newgroups on that one...

Tax breaks for R&D in NZ, finally!

2005-05-16T13:54:00.000+12:00

The government has finally come around to the idea that tax breaks for R&D are a good idea... even if they are only going half way!

Craig joins the blogging world

2005-05-11T09:10:00.000+12:00

OK, so I've been reading various blogs for a while now, mainly via RSS feeds to my PDA/cellphone, but figured it was about time to start my own.I have no idea what will end up on here, it will probably get forgotten about quite freqently, but hopefully I'll at least put my Friday missives on here (jokes/interesting links).Perhaps I'll even vent some vendor based anger on here too :)