Blog Split

I've decided to split my blog into two - an IT, gadget and generally more geeky blog (The Calm Geek) and my personal one (The Personal Geek).

The reason is I'm going to post some details about how I've recently got Windows 7 deploying using nothing more than SCCM SP1 and if people started coming here I didn't want them bored to death reading my posts about my wedding plans and recent walks!

Hero tethered!

Well my new phone arrived - and I have been playing with it while on holiday. I'm still getting to grips with it, but so far I am very happy with it. I got internet tethering working (currently on the laptop in the caravan browsing the web via the phone), I've got my number ported over from Orange, got a few apps from the Android market. A couple to highlight so far is the SMS backup app which saves all my text messages in my gmail, and the Google Sky Maps which shows the stars in the sky in the direction my phone (and therefore me) is facing.

The holiday is going well, and I'm enjoying seeing the Isle of Wight and playing with my new gadget. A few pics taken on my phone have been uploaded to Picasa, see below.

Laters,

HTC Hero ordered!

I have just bought an HTC Hero.....online! I've been looking at these phones for a little while now (see this post for last weekend's efforts!), and I've finally bought one from mobilephonesdirect. The phone is free, and will cost £29.36/month for 18 months on T-Mobile with unlimited internet which is you cannot do without on a phone like this.

Initially I was looking online at the phone operators websites, then at Phones4U. P4U's online had the phone for free, then £25/month for 18 months and then you added 500mb internet for an extra fiver; so really the same price. The clincher with the T-Mobile one is that its unlimited internet (Fair use policy) and I get access to the T-Mobile wi-fi hotspots. This extra nudge of internet goodness from T-Mobile coupled with last nights poor sales pitch from the Orange sales chap (what kind of sales man hangs up on customers?) I decided to bail from Orange and a PAC code has been requested.

So hopefully the new phone will arrive tomorrow - though I suspect it will be Thursday as I was a few minutes past the cut-off for next-day delivery. My fear is that I will get a "Sorry, we are out of stock" email and I won't be able to play with my phone while away on holiday next week. Fingers crossed!

Laters



For more info on the phone, see here and also check out the youtube clip below.

Tired

I did my first proper out-of-hours work last night. Power was being shutdown to our only internal systems room. As such all servers were gracefully shutdown - then the sparkies did there thing - and then the servers brought back. I took the opportunatity of server downtime to do patching on servers I am responsible for.

I got home at 3.30am, my alarm went off at 7am - was at work again at 9am. Initially I felt ok, but now I'm starting to feel the tiredness creeping in. Lots of tea and hopefully I can make it through the day without making a tired-related mistake :)

Not quite a new phone

For the past couple of days I've been looking at a new phone. I've had my current phone for a few years now and since I got it better devices have come out. My iPod touch+ (it's plus for a reason) shows how much difference a good interface can make. I want a phone with a good interface and Internet connectivity. I also want to get a little compact camera for when I'm walking; no point taking a heavy bulky camera when there is a good enough compact one. Keeping with the walking theme, it would be nice to record my walking routes using GPS. In the past monh a new phone has come out which ticks these boxes. The HTC Hero

After watching YouTube clips, Reading reviews, looking at a work collegues G1 I came to the conclusion that it is the single device for me. Easy to use, Internet enabled, 5m pixel camera, Gps built in, digital compass. GPS logging is done via google tracks which looks great. Sadly it's too new a phone a the moment for it to be affordable for me either as a one off purshase or for reasonable monthly contract.

I will just have to wait a little while :(

Happy Birthday

The Internet is 40 today. However, like a Pet you get from a rescue center, its exact birthday is a little fuzzy; it could be 40 on October the 29th!

Without it I wouldn't have a job, wouldn't be able to write this blog, wouldn't be able to do most of the things I do on a day-to-day basis.

So thank you Professor Leonard Kleinrock and your team, and happy birthday!

More info

Wasting Time?

I find certain kinds of wasting time gets me down. This morning I sat and watched a PC install the latest service pack and I couldn't get on with doing anything else. I like to multitask when it comes to IT and spend a bit of time in my head thinking about how best to do multiple tasks in as little time as possible; overlapping jobs (e.g. one PC building, another installing, a 3rd I'll be fixing a problem).

However I'll happily waste the day by not getting out of bed in the morning; at other times time wasting can be a good thing when I just need to switch off.

So no more wasting time today - well at least once I've posted this blog ;)

Live Mesh

I've been looking for a way of having a backup of my documents and other files. Local backups onto CD are ok but I'm lazy and the time I need the backup will be the time I have forgotten to do them. I had the thought of uploading my files to somewhere on the net. I have a server in co-lo at work (ubuntu) with ~10gb of space so that might have been an option. Setup some automated sync script and then I would also have access to my files anywhere.

Then I stumbled upon Microsoft's Live Mesh (http://www.mesh.com). I had read about it when it first was launched into beta a few months ago but never thought I would use it. However with 5Gb of space, auto-syncing between all your windows devices, and access to those files from any Internet enabled computer though the Live Desktop, it ticked all my boxes.

I have been using it for a month or so now and its working perfectly. I have my main PC connected for "My Documents", and have my work laptop connected up with a "My Documents\Personal Documents" so I can keep my work docs and home docs separate. Just today I have connected up my home favorites to the Mesh and when I'm next at work I will set my laptop to sync them. Never again will I loose my favorites on a rebuild (a thing I regularly forget to save!)

Next thing will be to get L's documents saved as I know she has no backup at all of all her work that is on her laptop. Eek! :(

.tel

Although I feel that I have no particular use for a .tel domain, I felt that if I did in a few years time want one and found that mine had been taken I would be a little upset. So yesterday I registered stuartclarkson.tel and when I checked this morning it was all up and working.

So, if you want to contact me, check my tel :)

stuartclarkson.tel

Forcing a SCCM client to check for new Advertisements

When creating an advertisement in SCCM and you are testing it, it can be a pain waiting for the client to check-in. I know I’ve always just gone to the SCCM control panel aplet and from “Actions” clicked all of them which does the job, but which one is it?

Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle is the one you really want. It will take a minimum of 2 minutes before a new advertisement is presented to the client AFTER the policy retrieval cycle. There's no supported way to speed that up.



Source: Various users on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrswdist/thread/a1066dfb-a71e-4e52-b7b7-c225ea0935a4/

iPhone Blogging

Even though I work in IT it still amazes me how far technology has come and how easy applications link together.

As a quick example I've just downloaded an app for my iPhone which should allow blogging including pics I have taken. Hopefully below is a pic of me!!

Until next time

Geolocate this post

Posted with LifeCast

EDIT 23/1/2009
Ok, so the picture uploading didn't quite work. My faith in IT still having its problems has been restored :) Technology still has a way to go before it will start doing my housework and generally taking over the world.

My media player

For a month or so I've been getting together a media center PC for the living room. After looking at online at various pre-built ones like the Netear EVA700 amongst others, but none seamed to fit the bill. The list of things I wanted was:-
Ability to play

Source: Posting by MCentre at http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/278917

Finding Visnetics usage

We use Visnetic Mailflow at work. With over 250 email addresses being processed by the system I was curious as to which are still used. There is a admin page that shows how many times a rule has been hit, but not in a given time-frame. I can do some basic SQL queries but none got me what I needed. I knew I had to query the 'MatchToAddreses' table which lists all the email addresses all the routing rules use, and then also query the 'InboundMessages' table for the prevoiously found email addresses, but only count emails that have arrived since a given date.

Luckily there are some clever SQL boys here and they came up with the following query:-

SELECT  COUNT(DISTINCT im.InboundMessageID) AS [Count],
       mta.emailaddress AS [Address]
FROM dbo.MatchToAddresses mta
   LEFT JOIN dbo.InboundMessages im
       ON mta.emailaddress = im.EmailPrimaryTo
           AND im.EmailDatetime > 'Specify date'
GROUP BY mta.emailaddress
ORDER BY mta.emailaddress

I now have a list of how many times in the past 6 months an email address has been hit. From the 250 email addresses, 130 have been hit 10 times or less, and many have not been hit at all. I now have a fun job of pruning the addresses and subsiquent ruleset. Joy!

Ubuntu, ZFS-fuse and communication freezing

I have recently been building a NAS box to store all my pictures, documents etc. I have been trying Windows Home Server on the eva. While i was happy with its ability to make shares resilient to a drive failure by making a copy of every file be on a different drive I wasn't too happy with how it used the available space.

So after doing some reading and testing I setup an Ubuntu box and got zfs-fuse on (Google zfs and ubuntu for a good wiki guide I followed on how to do this). I was very impressed with how quickly I could setup a raid pool and with the ability to expand the space by replacing drives I in theory have a resilient, and expandable storage solution.

However when I was ssh'd into the box it kept hanging. I couldn't figure it out. I'm not all that familier with ubuntu and/or Linux in general to start in depth diagnostics. I thought it was something to do with the zfs-fuse so I installed opensolaris. However that was too bloated for what I needed. I thought it was because I had put on hardy and the guide said I should use intrepid. After installing that I still had the problem. But then I was using ssh from an external location into my home has and it was working fine. Why? Tech support days flashed back. Could it be MTU? A local ping of 1400 bytes worked. 1500 did not. A quick change to the ubuntu network settings and it's all singing.

My next step is to slowly replace the 4 120gb drives in the pool with 1tb drives. Nice!