Virtualisation eLearning

With all the recent virtualisation launches from MS (App-V 4.5 and Hyper-V Server 2008) I’ve been doing a bit more reading on the subject over the last few days.  I’ve always used various flavours of VMWare in the past so I thought I’d better catch up with whats going on on the MS side of the world.  There’s quite a bit of good info out there, but this caught my eye so I thought I’d pass it on.

Its a collection of four online elearning clinics on the the MS virualisation products.  Obviously they’re not at detailed as proper training courses, but they look like a decent overview to see what the products are all about.  Not bad for free :)

Included are:
Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization
Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008

Link:
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=228501

A Better Place

I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while since I read about it in Wired.  Better Place is a company formed by ex-SAP product chief Shai Agassi, it’s mission is to end the worlds dependence on fossil fuels for transport.  No small objectives there then. 

Better Place

To be honest I’d never heard of better place until a few months ago.  I came across it while I was doing some reading into alternative fuels, and it struck me as a fantastic idea.  The Wired gives a much better overview than I could, but in short Better Place proposes to build whole new infrastructures for the use of electric cars and vehicles.  To help achieve this Shai has re-thought the business model we use for buying cars and fuel. 

Cars are offered at a discount, subsidised by the energy companies in the same way as mobile phone companies subsidise handsets.  As a customer you subscribe to a monthly energy tariff as you would a mobile phone.  The phone becomes a car, and the cell stations become recharging points. 

With Better Place and the energy companies building the network of charging points and providing a standardised battery technology, the car makers can concentrate of building cars to make use of that infrastructure. 

They’ve already got Israel and Denmark lined up, and Renault/Nissan designing and building cars.  Take a read through the Wired article and see what you think.  It’s an idea that could change the world.

Digital magazines… the wrong format?

Over the past few months I’ve noticed a crop of new Internet based, and digitally published magazines like Road and Drivers Republic.  Being a bit of a petrolhead generally new car websites are a good thing… but for some reason these new online magazines haven’t really clicked with me and I’ve not really been sure why. 

It hit me earlier that it’s not the content that I don’t like – most of it is very good, its the format.  In most cases either the whole magazine or individual articles are presented in what are essentially glorified PDF files.  For me at least that format just isn’t nice to use.  What works in print doesn’t necessarily translate into digital media.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d rather have articles published in a blog like format – something I can subscribe to, search etc.  in my view Car magazine does a much better job.  Sure the PDF style approach has its purpose, and I can see the benefits for the publishers, but I don’t think it works for publishing content online.

On the plus side, it’s great to see such good content being available for free.  Drivers Republic in particular has some fantastic features and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops over time.

Posterous

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki I just signed up to Posterous.  It’s a pretty good idea, the site allows you to email in text, documents, music, images or video which it then posts up onto a blog.  What’s more it can then cross post the new blog onto twitter, flickr, wordpress etc.

It seems to work really well.  You can mail from a number of different email accounts or phones and setup personalised domains or sub-domains. 

The one little niggle I noticed – well its really something to add to a wish list – is that there’s no way of automatically filtering out email signatures.  All my mail accounts have them, and my work account also adds the usual company disclaimer after it leaves my computer or iPhone.  It’d be really great if Posterous was able to filter these out so that every post didn’t have my phone number and company address appended to it.

Still, a great idea I reckon!