IT Industry

Ars Technica has a fantastic write-up on why Microsoft is irrelevant in the phone market, and what they need to do to fix that.

…if the company wants to achieve any relevance in this market, it needs to stop acting like a software company, and start acting like a consumer electronics company. It learned that lesson with Zune. It knew it was the only option with Xbox. It needs to do the same for phones.

We’ve been testing our first install of Server 2008 R2 this month, it will be replacing an aging webserver running Server 2003. IIS 7.5 brings with it a few new things, the most notable is a new interface. Less noticeable at first, is the lack of an SMTP server. Sometimes you need a quick and dirty SMTP server for delivering email from websites, and the Windows SMTP server is great for this. Coupled with the use of a smarthost for relaying, it can cover a lot of basic needs very well. Server 2008 R2 DOES actually include an SMTP server, More >

While in Toronto recently, we rebuilt our terminal server cluster taking advantage of a new VMWare host server. We had 2 physical servers for our TS cluster before, linked up with Microsoft’s NLB (Network Load Balancing). We provisioned 3 new VMs (we’ve got lots of headroom, so we can pass that to our users), and went about setting up the NLB service to cluster them. We quickly ran into some odd behaviour, so I’m going to list a couple of things to be aware of.

• NLB can run in unicast or multicast mode. Each method has drawbacks and benefits, but if you’re More >

People have talked about what the future may hold, for computer interaction. The keyboard and mouse are stalwart input warriors, but surely their days must be numbered. Lots of people talk about touch and multi-touch as they future… but there are plenty of problems to be addressed there. I’ve just seen a video of the most impressive and potentially realistic solution to this problem… it’s certainly worth your while:

http://10gui.com/video/

10/GUI works by providing a hardware and software platform, so a considerable rethinking of the entire process has been done. It works by using a multi-touch interface that is separate from the More >

I took the trip to the store today to get some new chairs for the living room, and there was Samsung 1640 (basic laser) printer on sale. We’d been in need of a printer, so I snapped it up. Getting it set up in Windows and OS X was a snap, naturally, but getting it going on my Linux server took a bit more work. Samsung are good enough to provide Linux drivers for a good number of their printer models, so that’s of huge benefit. This is not a totally exhaustive walkthrough, but it details the specific tweaks I More >