Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

One reason, besides not off lease yet, I have held onto my Thinkpad T60 due to the reported speed problems with the CardBus/ExpressPort interface of the T61. It has been widely reported, mainly here and here.

Well, in June, Lenovo released a BIOS update with a very interesting changelog, as noted here:

This issue appears to have been resolved with the bios update released on 6/11/2008 (version 2.19-1.08) Speeds have gone from an average of 14 MB/s to about 60MB/s.

The changelog entry: "(Fix) Some CardBus and IEEE 1394 devices may slow down the performance."

You can download the new T61 BIOS here and the new X61 BIOS here.

On a good note, Adobe Acrobat 9 seems to run faster and has a few compiler/at-link-time security features enabled (ASLR and DEP).

On a bad note, they have opened up new vectors that can be exploited due to the new playback of Flash content.

You can download the new version here.

Overall, I'm still undecided whether or not I will use this or keep using Foxit Reader. For now, both are installed on my primary OS.

I'm still waiting for a software company to come out with a new version of a product and just advertise that it "sucks less" and "does everything we said it would the last version". It would be some refreshing honesty from the marketing droids, but I doubt I'll ever see it happen. I'm just hoping the Earth doesn't become like the state of the Earth in the movie Wall-E. That was utterly depressing.

Just a heads up if you are experiencing web browser crashes with Flash 9, along with a bunch of additional features, it seems that they have fixed some of the annoying crashes that would happen from time to time inside Firefox 3 and the Firefox trunk builds.

I tend to run the trunk builds of Firefox and Thunderbird, so these updates are quite handy.

You can download the IE version here and the non-IE (Firefox/etc) here.

As always, before installing these new versions, make sure you uninstall the old versions with this.

Strange but true, I've never owned a portable media player, unless you consider my old Motorola Q as an iTune/Zune wannabe. Unfortunately, after many refurbs, I no longer have a Motorola Q, replaced with an HTC Vogue.

In a last ditch effort to use up some store credit before it expired on July 1st, I picked up a red 8GB Zune and immediately upgraded it to version 2.5 in my VMWare XP VM. The wireless aspect of the device and the FM tuner seem to be a nice touch. I fought with a coworker's Zune 30 back in the Zune 1.0 software era, so the overall software package has improved quite a bit since then.

My wife and kids have iPod Shuffles, which they enjoy a lot. As long as the parents keep an eye on the volume level of the Shuffles, I don't really see any reason kids shouldn't have these devices. The Shuffles are particularly resistant to abuse due to the lack of a LCD screen.

With that said, I'm not sure why the Zune has a bad reputation, because it seems to be a great little device. I know the original Zune 30 was mostly created from off the shelf components in a bit of a rush, but this 8GB device seems to be very polished and well thought out. I also like the fact that I don't have to go down a DRM-infested road and don't need to transcode most of my existing music collection. It also fits in the little utility pocket of my work bag perfectly.

I might even get adventurous and write a few XNA applications for it.

Install this update to enable remote management of a Windows Server 2008 computer that is running the Hyper-V role.

Grab it the x86 version here and the x64 version here.

Grab it from here.

New features and feature improvements:

Configuration Change Tracking - Registers all configuration changes applied to ISA Server to help you assess issues that may occur as a result of these changes.

Test Button - Tests the consistency of a Web publishing rule between the published server and ISA Server.

Traffic Simulator - Simulates network traffic in accordance with specified request parameters, such as an internal user and the Web server, providing information about firewall policy rules evaluated for the request.

Diagnostic Logging Viewer - Now integrated as a tab into the ISA Server Management console, this feature displays detailed events on packet progress and provides information about handling and rule matching.
Improvements for existing features, including:

Support for integrated NLB mode in all three modes, including unicast, multicast, and multicast with Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). Previously, ISA Server integrated NLB-supported unicast mode only.

Support for use of server certificates containing multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. Previously, ISA Server was able to use either only either the subject name (common name) of a server certificate, or the first entry in the SAN list.

Support for Kerberos Constrained Delegation cross-domain authentication. Credentials from users located in a different domain than the ISA Server, but in the same forest, can now be delegated to an internal published Web site by using KCD.

Support for client certificate authentication in a workgroup deployment. This removes the requirement to map each client certificate to an Active Directory directory user account.

For more information about this service pack, see KB 943462.