Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Not much more to add to this than the subject line, but I found this blog posting interesting as a sign of things to come. The landscape in virtualization has really changed in the past few months, with Citrix buying Xen, and Microsoft diving into the hypervisor realm.

I'll be curious to see how everything pans out in the next year or so. It is going to be a wild ride.

Fun fact of the day: Virtualization isn't a new concept - it has been around since the DEC PDP-8/E!

Despite what some LiveJournal people might think, the PDP-8/S was the original "Serial Adder".

Exciting news for anyone that has been following the Thinkpad line of laptops. Of course, you can add 4GB of RAM to a T60/T60p but due to i945 chipset limitations (mainly dealing with PCI-E MMIO space and x86 braindamage), the maximum usable RAM will only be around 3.2GB.

My work laptop is a T60 with 3GB of RAM and I dream of a day when it will be a T61p with more RAM!

Read firsthand experience of Vista x64 on a T61p here.

I'm jealous!

I'm having trouble keeping up with all the releases today! If you go here, you can grab all the latest Live goodies, which are now thankfully organized in a sane and consistent manner.

Windows Live Family Safety
Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Messenger 8.5
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows Live Writer (the little app that could - it is amazing to see how far this program has come from the original releases)

It is good to see more community driven/created content on the web for Softgrid. I posted a great forum the other day for Softgrid help and now Microsoft has a new forum on their website here.

Why is Softgrid cool? You can run different versions of programs on the same computer, among other things.
A great tool for running applications that would otherwise never "play nice" with each other on the same host.
A good example: Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007

For Softgrid for Terminal Servers and Softgrid for Windows Desktops only - Fixes a rare package corruption bug.
You can read more about it here and download the update here.

It looks like there are another batch of DST updates coming out of Redmond for some upcoming DST changes.
Go here to get the latest information on the updates.

Thankfully, it looks like this round of changes will not affect as much people as the original DST changes earlier this year.
Unfortunately, DST 2007 as an event in general showed the world just how complex a "simple" change can have a ripple effect across many platforms and services.

I always dread "Spring Forward, Fall back" because it throws my (human) system clock out of whack for a good week or so.

If you need guidance on whether or not you absolutely need to install these updates ASAP, go here.

One piece of the upcoming/new Windows Virtualization part of System Center is out the door.

To quote some marketing speak:
“Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, part of the Microsoft System Center family of system management products, provides a simple and cost-effective solution for unified management of physical and virtual machines, consolidation of underutilized physical servers, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by leveraging the expertise and investments in Microsoft server technology”

Why I like it:
More like VMWare, less like Virtual PC.

The best part:
You can use it today.
You don't have to wait for Viridian / Hypervisor / Windows Server 2008.

You can read the announcement here.

One unexpected aspect: Planned support for Xen and VMWare! I think that is great!