It was a good day for Robert Kubica and BMW in Bahrain today as they achieved their first F1 Pole Position, and with some style. It was a great lap, hopefully he wasn’t running on fumes and can give the Ferrari’s and McLaren’s a good run tomorrow.
I’ve got a huge amount of respect for BMW Sauber. Since BMW bought Sauber in 2005, year on year they’ve consistently hauled the team up the grid. If I was the president of Toyota I’d be asking my guys some very serious questions…
Guy’s like Gianluca Fallone make me wish I had enough talent to do design and illustration. No matter how much money I spend with Adobe, Autodesk, Wacom and whoever else I figure might help, nothing I finish ever turns out quite this good.
Check out his site: http://www.gianlucafallone.com/
(This reminds me… I really must do something about the default theme I’m still using on this blog!)
Back in the day I used to look after big desktop deployments both here at Atkins and a few other places. Managing large numbers of desktops is always a problem. There’s no doubt that managed desktops are A Good Thing(TM), but the tools available to do the job were always a bit harsh on either the end users or the IT guys.
Whilst Group Policy is great, you almost always needed other scripts and tools to get the complete result you wanted. Whether those were included in the image or applied at logon it didn’t really matter, they were a pain to manage. Group Policy also completely enforces the settings, there is no way to set the default value, but allow the users to edit the setting if they wished. Once its set, that’s it for Joe User.
The new Group Policy Preferences functionality allows you to configure mapped drives, deploy files, setup shortcuts, quick launch buttons etc, manage ODBC sources, IE settings, all kinds of stuff. It can also filter the settings on a per setting basis, no need to have new policies for each filter like GPO. Plus the range of criteria available for those filters is huge.
There’s too much detail to go into here, but take a look at this screencast over at Technet Edge to see some examples. It’s good stuff and will take a lot of work out of the more detailed config that enterprise managed desktops require.
Spotted a nice new service over over on Jason Langridge’s Blog. Dashwire syncs Windows Mobile (and soon Symbian apparently) phones and PDA’s with a web service.
I’ve only just signed up but it looks pretty cool. It runs a client on the device that syncs all your basic phone info (contacts, bookmarks, SMS’s etc) as well as integrating with services like Flickr and Facebook for photos. Interestingly it can also post status updates (and other Tweeting goodness) to Twitter.
The killer bit of functionality for me is the ability to Sync configuration from device to device. I’ve not tested it yet, but I change my phone loads as I get to test out new toys devices for work, so this could save me loads of time.
Check it out over on dashwire.com
Seeing as I’m involved in getting a new Data Centre at the moment this post over on ZDnet could my eye. Looks like HP is to target a ‘data centre as a service’ product at enterprise customers.
I’ve heard bits about this for a few years now – HP account managers will bore you silly with stories of renting computing time to Shrek – but this is the first I’ve heard about an actual product. It sounds like there are four favours of service on offer initially:
From what’s described it looks like a decent start, it’ll be interesting to see whether they start offering additional specific configurations. Something for SharePoint would probably be a good start. As it takes off within bigger companies more people will start grappling with the infrastructure required to run SharePoint in a big way and look for service solutions.
