blog://brycem@microsoft.com

AD: Two slightly used TiVos for sale

2005-06-22T03:35:00Z

Before Windows Media Center Edition was released, I purchased two TiVo DVRs. My family has really enjoyed these units - In fact my 3 year old daughter has become so used to being able to watch a favorite episode of Rugrats on demand that when we explained that grandma's TV can only play scheduled programs she was shocked and disbelieving :-) Also, (slightly embarrassing, but true) TiVo taught my 5-year old how to read! Nevertheless, the TiVos in our household are being supplanted by superior technology: Windows Media Center Edition! I started by playing around with the free CD that Microsoft employees could get and putting a Hauppauge MCE250 tuner card my desktop, and helping them beta test their subsequent updates and was finally won over. When I started using MCE, it seemed a weak facsimile of my beloved TiVo, but the rate at which it has been evolving has far-outstripped TiVo, and the home media scenarios they've been working on have made the anemic Tivo II Home Media Option seem pretty, well anemic. We really liked our TiVos but I'm thinking the time has come to sell these units while there are still people out there willing to buy them!

-Bryce

The Windows Server System Song

2005-05-10T05:36:00Z

Jeff Swift was asking me about royalty-free music earlier today and the first thing that popped to mind was Richard Stallman's magnificent "Free Software Song" - Jeff thanked me for my suggestion, but pointed out that it wasn't very appropriate fare for a Microsoft blog entry... He was of course right as usual, but he got me thinking: Why not introduce my very own version of this timeless classic that is (slightly) better suited to a Microsoft blog? Without any more ado, I present to you the Windows Server System Song for your listening pleasure! (MP3 version here)

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

Penguinistas get tons of free press,
Sad but true, admins, sad but true
Hippy freeware can't run an enterprise;
Not "good enough", admins, hold out for great---

If you buy Penguinista freeware
Support costs, admins, Kernels Panic,
Just fdisk that kludgey OSS
Windows Server, admins, ever more---

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

-Bryce

6/21/05 note to Groklaw.net readers: I wasn't my intention to mock the FSF itself, so much as it was to mock Richard Stallman's taste in music and I stand firmly by that criticism :-)

Paintball Outing

2005-05-06T22:01:00Z

This last weekend a couple of guys from the EEC and the Windows Server TAP team went down to a place called Hole-in-the-wall Paintball to shoot each other with small projectiles from pneumatic weapons :-)

Before

From left to right, we have Matt Wagner, Dave Kearney, Do Kim, myself, Nathan McAffee, and Nathan's neighbor.

The tactics were pretty loose, but we got better as the day progressed. We played "air ball" (shooting at each other while taking cover behind inflatable obstacles), and "woodsball" team matches until someone had the bright idea of challenging a large contingent from the Woodinville High School Baseball Team who were there playing that day as well. We were outnumbered by about 2.5 to one against this large band of high school boys and girls :-) We acquitted ourselves honorably by taking out about 2 or more of theirs for every player we lost, and won 2 out of four matches by the time we were ready to pack things in. There were no serious casualties, but a few paintballs did manage to find their way behind Matt's mask (the swelling had gone down considerably by Monday, thankfully :-)

-Bryce

After

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

2005-04-19T22:09:00Z

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? - Having been born and raised here in the Redmond area with a couple of years spent in rural parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland and elsewhere, here's how I tested out on the latest "timewaster of the week":

75% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

-Bryce

Terminal Dodgeball

2005-04-15T06:15:00Z

Last week the Terminal Services Team squared off against the EEC crew in a very one-sided dodgeball game at the ProClub in Redmond... I wasn't able to make it, but as I hear things, the score was something like EEC=3, TS=0! Stanley Jones took some video of it using a Kodak digital camera which I've put up on a streaming media server for your viewing pleasure :-)

-Bryce

iSCSI in the Real-World

2005-04-13T22:49:00Z

The EEC has recently been evaluating iSCSI technology options from some of our vendor partners - Really interesting stuff. We haven't had any requests from customers for this technology yet, but we want to get up to speed on it and gain some operational experience before they do. There are iSCSI options for our Brocade SilkWorm 24000 and are evaluating an IP7500 unit from Intransa that looks promising (below). Have any of you deployed or are you considering the use of iSCSI in production yet? What iSCSI hardware? What are you using it for?

-Bryce

Microsoft's version of the Darwin Award...

2005-04-04T23:03:00Z

Well, it's official: Richard Gregg has been sentenced to 2 years in one of Washington State's fine correctional facilities for the crime of tragic stupidity. This is really a shame - Richard is a very likable fellow who had run the software library for the Windows Application Compatibility Testing Team, first as a contractor and later as a full-time employee, since the days of Windows '97 "Memphis" (later known to the world as "Windows '98" because we shipped late). Given that a large part of his job was to buy MS and 3rd-party software, his management chain had been shuffled a half-dozen times over the years, and the inadequacy of our controls on the internal software purchasing system, I can see why it would have been easy for his activities to go undetected and unquestioned for quite some time. Two years plus full restitution is a stiff penalty, but I'm really glad to see that he's had the courage to own up to this rather than going the way of the dude...

-Bryce

Windows Messenger in Corporate Environments

2005-03-30T23:03:00Z

I had a surprise the other day - I run MSN Messenger 6.2 on my laptop here at work for occasional IM sessions with friends and family, and after I signed in yesterday morning with my user@microsoft.com Passport, it prompted me to change my Passport email addy to user@messengeruser.com! It told me to wait an hour to sign back in while they "upgraded" my account, and then later in the day when I did sign back in with MSN Messenger 6.2, it prompted me to download and install a special version of Windows Messenger 5.1 for my new corporate account... It was automagically configured to use both internal LCS SIP accounts and external .NET Passport accounts and seems to work fine. In fact, nothing appears to have changed here on the front-end so I'm kind of curious about what may have changed on the backend... I'm guessing that anyone with a user@microsoft.com Passport will have gotten the same prompts - Anyone know what's going on here?

-Bryce

Inappropriate relations with a Sun server...

2005-03-12T02:50:00Z

Wow! If a Microsoftie has a few complimentary words to say about Sun's latest Windows-compatible hardware, should he be fired for revealing his latent "hardware fetishist" tendencies? According to TheRegister, the answer is a logic-defying "yes". Fortunately, my boss doesn't look to the Register for staffing guidance, and colleagues assure me that having the Register tear into you personally is in fact something of an honor:-) At least el Reg managed to preserve the core message that Microsoft and Sun are capable of putting the customer's needs before egos (even if it was sandwiched between baseless hints at an impending termination) I'm thinking of having some nice t-shirts made for my team here at "the Beast's Enterprise Engineering Center", what do you think of enlisting Beastie's help, now that he's about to be unemployed? Ok, ok - Perhaps not that's not such a great idea, after all...

-Bryce

My boss is running a SUN workstation on his desktop!

2005-03-04T05:59:00Z

I never saw this one coming: After playing with the new WindowsXP x64 Opteron-based Sun workstations at tonight's Sun mixer held in honor of the deployment of two racks worth of new SunFire Windows Server 2003 gear, my boss cleaned off his old HP desktop and and rolled in a new Sun Workstation to use as his dektop! Am I jealous? Nah - I have an AMD 4-way reference SDV that's loaded for bear sitting under my desk that can run a small server farm of Virtual Servers, but I gotta admit that those Sun monitors have as nice a picture as I've seen yet!

-Bryce