There was a speaker, Advanced IT student, who gave a rousing speak on Project Management Software. It was an okay intro to that Software, but seemed to miss a lot of what’s happening right now. He gave some examples, but none with software development. I think software development is a totally different ballpark then for example winery. I think Agile Development is really changing what software we use and how we use it. Mingle is probably the “best” for Agile Development. I’ve used Agile Track to have management on an Agile project.

There was a web seminar on some new features of Visual Studio 2008. I’m quite excited about some of the cool new features. The one feature I am most excited about is Javascript Debugging! Debugging Javascript is so annoying… to be able to step through Javascript will save so much time. The split screen mode in 2008 also looks very promising.

I also won the main door prize! I got a wireless keyboard and some software (Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008). Visual Studio and SQL Server are both developers version while Windows Server is a year free trial. I’m going to try them out and see what they are all about.

“With so many machines restarting, Skype says the network was sunk into a vicious cycle of deprivation, wherein rebooting machines would attempt to log on to the Skype network, but so many machines were rebooting that the network was unable to meet demand. “

I’m glad they found the bug and hopefully came up with a solution for this in the future.

This comes down to an issue of trust. Do you trust Microsoft? No, I don’t. I’ve had updates break drivers before, FUBAR things, and so forth. In a perfect world you would want to install updates in a lab environment. Then you could have a little reassurance that it would run in the work environment.

We don’t live in a perfect world and things can be rolled back. I guess it all depends on the scale of your company. I couldn’t imagine rolling back everyone of our computers at work. That would be an entire day or more of work.

So I think Automatic Updates is good in theory, but in practice I think it is a very bad idea. IT is about control and you have to control your technology.

I remember when Service Pack 2 dropped for XP. Not a fun experience in the IT world. We now have planned days for the updates and to allow them to “ripen” for a bit.

Have you used Vista? It is like a foreign alien or something and the stupid pop-up, “Windows needs your permission”. What is pretty funny, is yes, the Mac commercial with the security guy is an accurate depiction. Yes, Windows, I would like to install flipping Adobe Reader please leave me alone, that’s why I double-clicked on the damn file! Granted, using Linux to do system wide changes you’re going to get a similar pop-up asking for your root password; like going into synaptic. Basically Linux isn’t so needy, Windows you need to calm down.

“To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.” ~ Professor from Washington University.

While this rings true, I think companies are still going to use Windows XP. XP is the easiest OS to setup in the world, just my opinion, I’ve done it so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I’ve installed Vista a few times and I’ve always had a problem with drivers; this was the same when XP first came out. Also, I don’t think Linux has become easy to install drivers on, NVIDIA is pretty easy to install drivers for, and ATI has released some drivers recently, but companies have been slow to adapt for the Linux community. There are some programs like Automatix for Linux that simplify the process. but usually have mixed results for people.

“…But Linux can only go up, and its growth potential is enormous. While Linux only has 1 percent of share on the desktop versus Microsoft’s more than 90 percent, that is changing, and the Linux desktop is expected to gain some share over the next two years” ~ Cole Crawford

We are currently in an interesting time for the Linux desktop. I ditched Windows XP earlier this year, because I had no desire to switch to Vista. My experience has been nothing but great. Everything that I did on Windows, I can do on Linux, Ubuntu is a great distro.

Also, it seems Vista updates have been leaked to the net and are coming soon! August 14th it seems. The most surprising thing that I have found, since I start using Linux, is that Ubuntu pushes down a lot of updates. Not just kernel patches and so forth, but actual security updates to programs. They are released much faster than Windows updates and these people aren’t being paid! Well some are I would imagine. It looks like Vista has a lot of work to do to become relative.

How the market reacts and businesses adapt to Vista should have a direct effect on the Linux desktop. At my work I don’t see us switching over to Linux, but I don’t see us switching over to Vista either; has Vista and Linux become synonymous?

Related: Ubuntu, Windows

According to the government’s best estimates, energy usage at data centers has doubled between 2000 and 2006, and it’s poised to double again by 2011.

That means our wonderful data centers will cost twice as much to run as they do today, which is a bad thing. I can definitely see our government leading us to greener pastures. Hopefully, Solid State Disks (SSD) will become more aggressively created and better power saving devices will come about.

Software will also play a crucial role in the deployment of future systems. Windows is a power hog in the essence that it needs beefier hardware requirements. And as just about everyone knows our nice friend Linux can run on much lower system requirements and give you the same or better performance.

Are we entering the age of solar powered server farms? I don’t think so, but that would be pretty sweet.

In the little free time I have gotten I’ve been listening to twit and diggnation; my favorite podcasts netcasts; I am definitely for changing podcast to netcast. I digress. Twit is really cool. I would really like to do a netcast one day with my views on technology and the world around us.

So here are some links on how to make your own PODCAST/NETCAST

A nice beginner tutorial
Cnet Guide In-depth
Podcast Alley podcasters
Little overview of podcasting

Audacity seems to be the program of choice for podcasting/netcasting in the Windows/Linux world. I have used this program before to record music off a PA system and it works really well. Open source is great. I will look into this more. Again I think a podcast/netcast would be a very fun thing to do.

Fortunately, Ubuntu comes with a built-in VNC support. It’s easy to implement:

System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop

Under sharing select:

• Allow other users to view your desktop
• Allow other users to control your desktop

Under security select:

• Require users to enter this password:
• Password: PICK A DIFFICULT PASSWORD

This is not the most secure method of having remote desktop on your linux box, but this is the easiest way. Since ubuntu is utilizing VNC it will use ports 5900 – 590x depending on how you have it setup. 5900 will be the port you want.

To access my linux box remotely from an XP box I use a free web-based VNC viewer from s-code.com, which I believe is open sourced.  It is much like logmein.com, except logmein.com also supports java, but not linux.

http://www.s-code.com/products/viewerx/webvnc.aspx

This lovely little site will allow you to access your VNC at home on whatever port via http port 80. Firewalls control what ports you can access, but as long as a port is open you can get to anything.

Since I got Windows Vista from School for free I decided to install it in VirtualBox. Installation was uneventful, VirtualBox said support for Vista was experimental, but it went off without a hitch. Vista ran very smoothly which was surprising, but it is Windows Vista Business, so it doesn’t have all the eye candy. Vista is very strange, Microsoft made some weird choices for UI presentation. I mean I guess it’s cool, but it is such a departure from Windows 95-XP. I guess that is what they were going for but I think it is going to confuse a lot of people. It is scrolling menus and such, but I will give it a try and see how it works. The default Windows icons and wallpapers are nice though? Quit tugging on my heart Microsoft, *END SARCASM* hehe.

Oh yeah back to VirtualBox. The UI face is easy and intuitive and there are no surprises – straight forward. Such a great concept. I love virtualization it makes moving things much easier when everything is combined into one image. Also it helps make systems less hardware dependent, Linux will run on anything, but Windows will not and that is life.

My next project is to VMware convert my main XP box and install feisty on it. I can’t wait for the semester to be over! 2 weeks to go woo.