Comfortably Dumb

I’ve been a road warrior for over 10 years. I’ve had the highest status available on American Airlines and Delta Airlines during that entire time. Over the past few months I’ve become increasing bitter when I compare the value of my airline status compared to my hotel and car rental status. Out of my last 10 flights I’ve probably been upgraded twice. These are not short hops but 5 hour flights to Seattle. Not only have I not been upgraded I’ve taken a middle-seat in the back of the plane 4 of those flights. I know you can’t upgrade everyone and I know sometime people actually purchase their first-class tickets, but here are a few changes I’d like to see Delta implement… and soon.

1) Offer a complimentary adult beverage to premium travelers sitting in coach.

2) Offer a complimentary movie to premium travelers sitting in coach.

3) Offer a complimentary premium snack to premium travelers sitting in coach.

4) Offer free Wi-Fi to all premium travelers on the plane.

5) Act like they care that I spend thousands and thousands of dollars every year.

What really irritates me is that other airlines attempt some of these things. I’m not sure if it includes movies, but Frontier enables the entertainment system for its premium travelers. They walk in the back and say “Thank you Mr. Whatever for being a loyal customer. Let me enable your entertainment system.” Alaskan Airlines offers the complimentary beverage. They walk in the back and say “Thank you Mr. Whatever for being a loyal customer. Can I offer you a beer or cocktail?”

Okay, I think I’m ready to drop Sony Vegas for Windows Live Movie Maker. I know that there are many knobs on Vegas but WLMM does 90% of the things I want to do, and makes them dead simple. My kids could actually film, edit, and publish their own movies. I think I’ll put that to the test when Gabi puts the finishing touches on her Science project.

So, I finally got my first article published in The Architect Journal. It is titled “Enabling Business Capabilities with SOA” and demonstrates how organizations can provide traceability between business capabilities and technical capabilities with technology available today while aligning to future products and technologies.

This is the best feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2… period. The opportunities here are endless. So much so that I really can’t figure out how I want to use it at home. However, for my Microsoft laptop I’m using it to boot into Windows Server 2008 R2 so I can work with Hyper-V virtual machines. Yes, I could do this before, but I had to create multiple partitions guessing at their appropriate size and wasting precious mobile disk space. Using a dynamic VHD I’m able to give myself this capability and only lose 8 GB of space! Now, I’m thinking about creating an MSE demo VHD that I could use to run with the full power of my laptop.

I am happy to announce that the Microsoft Managed Services Engine Feb’09 CTP has been released on CodePlex. This release represents a major milestone of our solution. Not only have we rewritten the management tool from the ground up in WPF, many changes have been made in the Enterprise Service Model we are attempting to manage. The new UI presents a visual view of the Enterprise Service Model.

If you think about service providers sitting off to the right of the screen and service consumers sitting off to the left, then you quickly get an idea of how resources are organized onscreen.

Double-clicking a resource will expose the detail for that resource. You can also collapse the other panels if you need more space. Please explorer the new drop and please give your feedback.

I like to relax by playing video games. My game of choice is Team Fortress 2. So, when I started randomly crashing when entering different servers and game play became too choppy to play if I did get in I was pretty upset. This happened on Windows 7 and Vista, so I wasn’t sure where the problem laid. My gut reaction was my hardware was failing or one of the latest hardware drivers was bad. However, I realized that I had installed IE8 on Vista and that Windows 7 comes with IE8. I’m a fanatic Internet Download Manager fan and it always installed and I remembered an issue I had when Vista was first released. At that time Steam would lockup upon opening. The trick then was to disable IE integrated in IDM and what do you know that did the trick. Several TF2 servers display a home page that is HTML based when you join, just like Steam renders its content using HTML. However, the Steam issue has been long fixed (not sure by which party) so this caught me by surprise. Choppy game play was a separate issue. I recently switched from AVG to Forefront, so it was aggressively scanning my game files for viruses and the like. Simply adding HL2.exe to the list of processes and the files it uses from being scanned did the trick.

I'm super excited to say that T-Money has joined the team! Tony is at orientation this week in Redmond and will start drinking from the firehose shortly. :)

To be honest, I was skeptical when Windows Home Server was originally announced. At the time, I was already using Windows OneCare Backup for my family's computers and I was using using Acronis for the computers I personally use on a daily basis. Acronis failed me when I had a massive disk failure and it was not able to restore my backup. Talk about not being happy. After that I switched to ShadowProtect and I have been extremely pleased. I had another failure and ShadowProtect was able to restore without a hitch, including using third-party RAID drivers. They only issue with ShadowProtect is the size of backups. I have roughly 270 GB that make up my system drive and personal data. This doesn't include my virtual machines, which I don't backup. ShadowProtect does image based full and incremental backups. There is a way to make it do differentials, but the implementation was not very useful to me. I also defrag frequently, which caused the backup size to artificially inflate. When I came across the Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore whitepaper it sounded too good to be true, so I decided to evaluate the product. I've been running WHS full backups daily for 3 months now. The backups for 5 computers only occupies 358 GB! And that is with every computer defragging every night. It is hard to wrap your head around how that is possible without reading the whitepaper. This brilliant piece of technology is the killer WHS app for me; everything else is just gravy.

Since the Oslo announcement at last year's SOA & BP Conference, it hasn't been really clear, at least publicly, what it is and what capabilities it provides. Now that PDC has come and gone and the SDK has been published, we are more free to talk about solutions that can be built on this type of technology. However, to explore the capabilities you need to get it installed. The installer wants a default instance of SQL Server to create the repository on. If you have a named instance you can still create the repository. To do so, you need to open a command prompt in the "Microsoft Repository" directory under the directory where you installed the SDK. Use the SqlServer argument in conjunction with CreateRepository.exe to specify the named instance.

Now that you have the repository setup, start exploring M and the Repository.

I encountered a NullReferenceException when I tried to install the Visual Studio content that comes with the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 1. I found a work around, so I thought I'd share. Download the source package from CodePlex and in the "Futures/Visual Studio Templates Installer" directory you will find RESTStarterKit.vsi. Just double-click it and you should be good to go. When I tried to execute RunVsi.exe it just crashed.