Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

More info here:
http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/1207

The big items are support for the Intel Macs, and a lot of incremental updates.

The bigger news for Test 2 is that it is going to include the DT_GNU_HASH support in glibc and binutils which boosts dynamic linking performance by about 50%, apparently.

That is a bit of a bummer but it was a beta exam and I *almost* passed but that is also like saying you are *almost* pregnant. It was free so I can't complain, although I wish I could find some free exam codes because I figured out where I went wrong on the exam. I didn't look at the changes between Office Live Communications Server 2003 and 2005 enough and flip-flipped the 'Access Proxy' and 'Proxy' portions.

It is no longer in beta. I never got the change to install the reporting agent in the beta, but from the sounds of it, it looks pretty cool.

http://www.vamsoft.com/orfee_changelog.asp

I'm waiting for the next beta build to drop to get my feet really wet in Exchange 2007 but it is going to be one of the first products to really exploit/use PowerShell for administration. Once again, I prefer command line prompts over GUI interfaces so this makes me a happy camper.

More details here:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/06/29/428183.aspx

Ideally I want a mobile device like a Motorola Q or something else that is Windows Mobile 5.0 based, so I can do e-mail from anywhere and take phone calls. Trying to type out SMS or e-mail messages on a normal digits-only cellphone just seems campy to me, even though I still love my Motorola v710. I've got a good analog connections whenever I'm in the middle of nowhere with old towers and I still have good digital support for the other areas.

Grand Rapids still is without a decent EVDO presence from Verizon and the Sprint EVDO coverage is well south of my house, so it is pointless at the moment to try to get the E815 and/or a PCMCIA card and/or PCI card for EVDO speeds.

Thankfully 1xRTT is perfectly fine for most Exchange operations with ActiveSync / Push.

Anyway, here is the link to the contest info:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/06/29/428183.aspx

In general I don't like web based front end programs for programs like this, but thankfully going from 4.6 to 5.03 on a client's machine brought on a welcome change. It looks like 5.x is more .NET based and less klunky-web based. It also seems to fix a lot of issues I had with the older versions, which ultimately led me to recommend other software/hardware when needed. It isn't a CPU hog like the 4.x versions tended to be on a fairly loaded server.

I also was able to log into a Symantec Hardware firewall recently and it looks like they are running a very modified version of Red Hat 7.1 and/or an early version of RH EE. You can pull up lists of RPM packages installed, compile programs with GCC, which I am tempted to do to get 'real' SNMP support and otherwise use it like a full blown Linux box for the most part.

I don't know, I guess I just like being able to SSH into network appliances and keep an eye on them from a familiar bash prompt.

If you've got a current license/update for Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate edition, and are still running an old version like 10.0.3xx, I highly recommend grabbing the latest release, if anything, to avoid the non-paged pool kernel memory leaks that plagued the v10 initial releases.

It also removes the forced default scan on boot up on client machines.

I'm going to try the Vista release on my main machine at home. I'm trying to use Vista as my default OS to get used to it but I still find myself going back to XP from time to time for software and/or drivers that don't work under Vista yet.

You do have to 'enable' it by going to this site: http://ideas.live.com/signup.aspx?versionId=7adb59de-a857-45ba-81cc-685ee3e858fe

It is possible (and likely) that the link will change or expire so the sooner you do it, the better.

Once you have signed up, you can start adding Yahoo users to Windows Live Messenger by just adding them as 'userid@yahoo.com'

I'm tempted to make a 'Cool applications' category because this program and FolderSize don't really fit under any of my other pre-defined Categories.

This program will allow you to save process priority for applications under Task Manager, and it also colorcodes each application based on whether they have a valid digital signature, and other properties. You can also peak into what TCP-IP connections each process has open. It is a lot like Process Explorer, but instead, adds-on to the existing Task Manager built into Windows.

Both of these apps were 'found' by people in the Something Awful 'Freeware apps you can't live without' thread, and it is bringing many cool applications some much needed attention.

http://www.prnwatch.com/prio.html

This feature is something that would be have native in Windows instead of applications that rarely get used or get in the way. It runs as a service in the background to take inventory of folder sizes, which I find more useful than indexing files and their content like how the new Vista index engine works and/or Google Desktop. Maybe I am a bit of a directory/file structure "Nazi" with the way I arrange my files but typically needing to use Search to find files on your hard drive means you are not storing them in a coherent manner. Of course, I say that, and by contrast my desk is quite messy usually from the amount of chaos going on around it.

Anyway, this program has lessened my need to use TreeSize, which is also an excellent program.

http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/

The 'Feedback' section of that website is rather amusing too.

Worth a download and install if you need native-ish ISO CD / DVD burning abilities beyond what is provided by default with the IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service in XP and Vista. It also supports non-admin users if you are running XP SP2 or Vista.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

One big change that I know a lot of people are complaining about already, and declaring that they will stay with XP MCE or go to MythTV, is the heavyhanded DRM in the Vista edition.

Here is a link to a lot of the differences between the two:
http://blogs.technet.com/cswartz/archive/2006/07/08/440837.aspx

Cassandra and I just spent the past 6 or 7 hours doing a co-op LAN game, on our home gigabit network. It was great fun until my game crashed. Even v1.08 of Titan Quest will eat your character for breakfast. My Level 12 male magically turned into a Level 1 female.

It looks as if the backup copy that it makes isn't quite right either - I'm looking to see if I can do some type of recovery on it. Ironically, I was playing under XP at the time so my Vista-safety-net didn't save my character advancement.

I still feel like we're BETA testing this game and that it was rushed to market. I would be more angry if it wasn't so much fun and, in general, a well-running game.

Interesting way to work around the profile corruption bugs in Titan Quest - setup the volume to use the Previous Copies client in Vista. Using the ForceWare 88.61 drivers with build 5456 and the 3665 build version of the SoundMax XP drivers for my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe makes Titan Quest work really well with my GeForce 6600GT.

I had some Father's Day money left over on my gift card from Best Buy and some birthday money so I picked up Titan Quest on DVD this week during vacation. The new Titan Quest v1.08 just came out so that will hopefully fix many of the crash bugs but ironically, I haven't run into ANY crash bugs under XP or Vista on my system, which seems to be rare, apparently.

Performance seems to be the same under XP and Vista, although my Vista setup is much like XP. Classic skin, User Access Protection turned off, all bells and whistles turned off. Overall the system feels snappier under Vista, but I think it is due to better use of threads and hyperthreading.

Discovered this one by accident. I have a HP nc6000 and recently had a rebuild two HP iPAQ desktop machines to become network monitoring stations. Since the data density on a DVD is so much higher than a CD, I wanted to use the Fedora Core 5 DVD to install the OS instead of ten billion CDs. The original CD-ROMs in the iPaq desktops looked a lot like laptop slimline devices, and that is exactly what they were. I popped the DVD-ROM out of the laptop and popped the DVD-ROM into the iPAQs and installed away. When I was done, I yanked out the DVD-ROM and put back the original CD-ROM. Neat.

This is a handy link to have if you suspect there might be an issue that needs fixing. Most likely, the items listed here are fixed in SP2 when it comes out, or you can request them for PSS.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;914962&sd=rss&spid=3198