Newfangled modern computers.

I was just going through my RSS feeds and spotted a post from Laughing Squid about a video IBM commissioned in 1968 as a glossary of computer terms.

I was going to send it as a joke to a mate of mine who’s doing something similar, but having watched it I was surprised that it’s all still more or less accurate.  Not sure why it surprised me, after all the basic principles are all still the same.  I guess I still think of this stuff as being modern!  It’s easy to forget that we’re not really doing anything new… we’re just doing in differently.  Hell, before computers people managed and organised data and information quite happily for centuries.

Oh… and there’s a nice bit of early DeepZooming in there too!

A computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

OneCare

A few months ago I decided to rebuild my home laptop, once I installed Vista and all the drivers and stuff, it came to the point that I’d usually install McAfee AV… and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

Now I’m sure McAfee does a great job detecting Viruses, but without exception every computer I use it on seems to grind to a halt afterwards.  Whether this is the software or something I’m doing I don’t know… but either way I decided to look for an alternative.

It was then I remembered an email I’d received about a OneCare beta program, so I went off the the MS site, signed up and installed the app.  It wasn’t until I got the notification that the beta program was ending that I remembered that I’d installed it.  In one way that’s bad as I didn’t provide any feedback to the dev team, but actually the fact I didn’t have to is pretty encouraging. 

Once installed OneCare just sat there and did its thing.  I can’t say that I noticed any performance hit at all, and with the laptop being quite old and slow I probably would have noticed – I certainly did with McAfee. 

So what’s the point of this post?  Well really just to give some credit where credit is due.  I like OneCare (as much as you can like some security/AV software anyway!) it does a good job and offers some useful functionality (I won’t go into details as they’re all on the web).  In fact I signed up for a year and get cover for three PC’s included in the cost. 

Apple Mac’s in Active Directory

I just found this pretty good video on the apple site describing – at a high level – Mac integration with Active Directory. 

http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/activedir/apple/

For someone from a Windows background (like me) it’s worth a look.  It’s also interesting to see the difference in style between the Apple and MS.  Given the brand personas of the two companies you’d expect the styles to be reversed, with the more friendly informal stuff coming from Cupertino rather than Redmond.  But, you can’t fault the content.

These Mac’s are ok eh?

I got a Mac today.  Ok… it’s works rather than mine, but you know what I mean! :)

I’ve always been a PC kinda guy.  Not for any particular reason, I’ve just never needed to use a Mac, PC’s and Windows have always done the job.  Recently however a few things have made me look more closely at Mac’s. Some of it is personal interest (I am a geek after all), but my immediate need is for work.

Although we’ve got a few Mac users dotted around, we don’t really support Mac’s in a big way.  We’re essentially a PC house, based around Windows and Active Directory.  Over the next few years though it’s pretty clear that we’ll need to adopt and support multiple platforms – at least on the client.

So… I ordered a Mac.  It’s only a plain old Macbook, but it’s all I should really need for now.  First impressions?  I really like it.

In fact, the first impression you have of Mac is bound to be great because of the beautiful packaging.  Apple really know how to make feel good about spending your money.  Quite why the PC vendors haven’t caught onto this over the years is beyond me.

One thing that impressed me was the out-of-box-experiance, that’s in the desktop deployment sense, the initial setup and config.  As one of the first things to be configured is the networking, the OOBE was able to go onto the net to get the latest up to date setup.  Or at least I assume it does as I was asked to join Mobile Me, and I’m pretty sure this Mac was built long before it’s release last week.

With regards to the hardware itself, it’s as pretty as a Mac should be.  Nice and shiny white.  The keyboard is fantastic – much nicer than the ones on my Lenovo or old HP laptops.  Although having said that I’m still getting used to the different layout and shortcuts (no del key?!?) but I’m sure all that will come in time.

Tomorrow I’ll start looking at how I go about integrating this new toy into our MS environment.  From what I’ve read and planned, basic integration won’t be too tricky, but I want to do it myself to be sure.  Then I’ll start looking at the basic applications.  First on my list will be Office 2008, like it or loath it businesses run on Office, especially exchange.  I’ll also need to take a good look at AV/Malware tools and print drivers etc.  Should be fun :)

Oh… and I’m already missing Live Writer.  What a great little app MS have there.

iPhone Web Configuration Utility

Apple have just released the new configuration utilities for the new iPhones.  As I covered a few weeks ago, these will allow enterprises to develop specific configuration files for iPhones within their infrastructures.  It’s a very welcome move, like many businesses I’ve certainly seen a number of business requests for iPhones and the prospect of managing another platform could have been quite daunting.

iPhone Web Configuration Utility for Mac
iPhone Web Configuration Utility for Windows
iPhone Configuration Utility 1.0 Mac OS X

Each of these tools will allow you to create xml configuration files that can be either emailed to the devices or opened from the web browser.  The Configuration Utility 1.0 however can also track and install provisioning profiles and authorized applications, and capture device information including console logs.