When I was at school my father gave me a copy of an article he’d seen at work. I remember nothing of the article itself, but the title has stayed with me: “You can’t be a 20th century man without maths”. I think even then “You can’t be a [time] [person] without [skill]”  was a  Snowclone - I’ve adapted it from time to time - hence the title.  In a recent conversation someone asked me if I knew “That sunscreen thing” which was turned into a song by Baz Luhrmann (On you-tube) and having been reminded of it, I found it wanted to morph into the the opening of a session I was doing on managing Server 2008-R2 The original began

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

.. it was all I could do to avoid opening with “Ladies and Gentlemen: Learn Powershell. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, PowerShell would be it”, the long term benefits of PowerShell …”

I’ve been saying the same thing in different ways a lot recently. The slide on the left was in the session I delivered at the big Wembley event in October.  A few people picked up that I’d said “Everyone should learn PowerShell”, and I’ve since had to explain that this requires a suitable definition of “Everyone”. But it is my firm belief that IT professionals working Microsoft technology are at an advantage if they know at least the basics of PowerShell. Being able to automate complex processes , and show that the steps have been followed isn’t a new idea ; it always was important in the mainframe and mini computer world. There are plenty of situations where using a graphical interface is easier than using an obtuse command line tool, yet the focus on GUI tools in the Microsoft world means that command line and scripting skills are less prevalent among system admins than is the case in Unix / Linux world. Those skills can mean better efficiency, or allow tasks to be carried out which would otherwise be impractical. If the setup is simple or IT management is not a persons main job, doing the work optimally matters less because there isn’t much of it. If there is little repetition writing a script takes more time than it saves. When IT is your main role and includes repetition of complex tasks then scripting puts you ahead. Of course I equate “scripting” with “PowerShell” which simplifies things too much: the tools will vary between environments – I took the following list from one of the Slides in the Wembley deck: – it is not designed to be complete but to show pre-eminence of PowerShell in the Microsoft world.

You can see anyone who says “I don’t do PowerShell” is at a disadvantage, and the first thing to explain to them  that opening up a PowerShell window and running the cmdlets which are provided by any of the above is no different from starting a CMD.EXE Window and entering commands there – in fact it’s easier because the way parameters and help are handled is consistent. The idea of an environment extended with task-related Snap-ins which we saw with the GUI management console is the same in PowerShell – we load something which understands the task into an environment which provides the UI. The cmdlets are just a foundation: building things up from them takes things to another level. But you can build things up around free-standing programs too – by allowing them to be scripted, PowerShell makes it possible to deliver things which otherwise would be too time consuming. The example I’ve been using to show this is the following:  In Server 2008 R2 we have a new feature called off-line domain join; ODJ allows you to create a domain account for a computer, and a file containing the information needed for that computer to be added to the domain. This file can be applied to the OS offline without needing to boot it, logon as an administrator, connect and change the computer name and member-of setting from the default workgroup to the chosen domain. The command to do this is a traditional .EXE and it looks like this.

djoin /provision /domain MyDomain /machine MachineName /savefile filename

Great … but what if you have 1000 machines ? Are you really going to sit there all day typing the names in, and checking you didn’t mistype any or miss any out ? If you have a list of machine names in a text file, you could do this with PowerShell

Get-content Machines.Txt | forEach-object {djoin /provision /domain MyDomain /machine $_ /savefile $_ }

For each machine name (line)  in the file machines.txt the command will run djoin with that name as both the machine parameter and the filename parameter.

The successful admin is not automatically the one who knows every possible way to use every possible command in PowerShell. Nor the one who turns their back on GUI to do everything from the command line , but the one who understands the tools available for the task at hand, can select the right one, and can put it to use competently. PowerShell is one of the tools available in so many cases in the Microsoft world, that you can’t meet that definition without it.

A few days ago I linked to a post of Viral’s which showed some of the holes in the hype around Google’s “Chromium OS” or more accurately just-enough-os-to-run-a-browser.   He had an interesting link showing the work from Phoenix to slash the POST time – and you can’t help but be impressed when Windows starts booting within 2 seconds of hitting the Power button, but has booted and loaded a local HTML file into IE in about 15 seconds. I suspect a lot of the speed improvement comes from loading the OS from a solid state disk. But I keep wondering who is it who keeps booting their machines over and over. I often say in my presentations that when I travel by train I notice people starting their laptops up from cold, and shutting them down cold, and under XP up to SP2 I had problems with a machine with loads of memory refusing to sleep, so I can understand that.  I’m a pretty heavy user of my PC, but I don’t reboot for weeks on end. I see it as  like retuning the TV, something you do every few hundred hours of use. When I do, I start outlook, communicator and IE and they remain open pretty much until an update needs me to reboot.

I got to thinking “How long have IE and so on been running”. I’d make excuses for Outlook as I’m running the Beta of 2010.  I put the following command into PowerShell

Get-Process| sort starttime  -ErrorAction silentlycontinue | format-table –auto -property name, starttime, @{name="CPU"; expression={("{0,10:n1}" -f $_.cpu)}}

and it came back with the following

As you can see it’s about two weeks since I logged on, (although the machine has been an out of hibernate and sleep a few dozen times) and I started IE pretty much at once – one of the web pages was PDF which opened in Foxit reader and has remained open (IE 8 spawns multiple instances of itself). Outlook – beta status not withstanding - has been open for 9 days. Some days I wonder if the problem is in the naming of the functions – that we’re somehow conditioned to shutting things down. I should propose to the Windows team they change the labels “Shut-Down” and “Hibernate” and possibly “Sleep”, calling hibernate something like “Save Windows”, so they convey Power-off-and-start-from-nothing-next-time, Power-off-and-resume-next-time and so on.

So I’m curious to know how many people want to see faster boots and how many people see my way of working as one they use now / will use ?

Someone at work (no names, no packdrill) keeps telling me I’m set in my ways, and I keep disagreeing, since I’ve always thought it’s one of my personality traits to challenge the status quo (see Apparatchik vs Autistic). But I’ve been forced to confront my own conservatism when it comes to phones.

I’ve had my E650 since April 23rd 2007. Our phones normally get replaced after two years, but we wanted to make Windows mobile 6.5 the base level for phones and so people renewing were asked to wait for the new phones to start arriving.  2 years and 7 months have been hard on my E650. Being shoved in pockets with coins and keys has done horrible things to the finish, and it’s been dropped onto hard surfaces on several occasions – even bouncing down a flight of concrete steps. When I get fidgety I play Bubble breaker, obsessively, 200 games without leaving my seat is not unknown (yes, yes, another Asperger’s type behaviour, don’t think I haven’t noticed). I’ve played just under 12000 games, and if a typical game involves 100 button clicks that’s well over a million key activations. The keypad is getting to the end of its working life.  I need 3G data only rarely but when do the E650’s lack of it is a nuisance. 

For the moment we have a choice of 2 phones the Samsung Omnia Pro and the HTC touch pro 2 either would be a new form factor for me.The Samsung has a qwerty thumb-pad which isn’t as good for dialling numbers as a 4x3 keypad and not great for typing messages (some people – Blackberry users think this compromise is ideal. I don’t) and it can’t use a standard USB cable to charge. So I’ve ruled that out. The HTC can use a standard USB (although HTC have added the ability to output sound and video via extra pins), and has a slide out keyboard for messages and correcting documents. But no keypad on the front, and it has GPS integrated so I no longer need to worry about my bluetooth GPS puck; and the big screen should work nicely with co-pilot. It’s a nice piece of industrial design, and it’s had good reviews especially for the 480x800 resolution screen.I wrote a piece called the mobility dilemma before I got the E650, and a lot of it still applies. iPhone users seem to manage doing everything including typing messages by caressing the screen: the slide out keyboard removes my biggest objection to the iPhone design, yet after 17 years using phones with 4x3 keypads, some instinct says without one it’s not truly a phone. (“See: you are set in your ways” … “No I’m not, because of the next question”).  Why am I carrying a telephone ? These days I use my “mobile” more as a PDA than a phone – but it is designed to be a phone first. When I ring someone it is almost always using a saved or emailed number, so the lack of keypad  to dial from shouldn’t matter. My PC has replaced my desk phone thanks to Office Communications Server and communicator, so if the telephone isn’t the best template for a mobile device why cling on to it ? I’ve rationalized getting the HTC by telling myself I’m going to stop carrying a “phone” and go back to a proper PDA (I loved the original iPAQ back in 2001) – just a PDA which can do phone calls. I have a suspicion one iPhone user I know (she knows who she is) will say “A-ha you get it now. Phone calls aren’t the main function why not optimize for the other stuff”. Indeed “Phone” may turn into a throwback term like “dial” or “ring”. The order should go in on Monday and the experience should give me the material for for some more posts once it arrives.

A couple of posts back I showed the video of deploying an operating system with Windows deployment services. But if you have an image in a Virtual hard disk , it is quicker to copy VHD file than it is to make an image of its contents and then expand the image back onto a new system. That’s one of the options in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, so at tech-ed one of the demos I did was to to show how that worked – Andrew and I were showing how the new version of SQL server can be pre-installed with the Operating System. I captured the rehearsal version to show just how quickly this can be done, and the ease with which we can set the virtual hardware settings and configure the things which are set at first boot (like the administrator password, domain membership).

Bonus Links.

Over the coming weeks I plan to put up some more short screen casts focusing on specific tasks in SCVMM but in the meantime I’d like to share the a longer piece of work from my US-based colleague Kevin Remde. He broke a session he ran, entitled Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 into 6 parts of roughly 30 minutes each. Here are the links.
Part 1 SCVMM Administration

Part 2 Common management of Hyper-V and VMWare

Part 3 The SCVMM Library

Part 4 User Roles and the Self Service Portal

Part 5 Integration with Operations Manager

Part 6 SCVMM wrap-up

In my previous post I mentioned a correspondent – his name is Andy – who’d written asking the question “What the hell is the point of libraries and if you have the name of the person whose idea they were please post it for summary flaming” He made another comment which I think goes to the heart of it.

…  as with the advice to people to avoid Vista unless buying with a new machine and then only a powerful one which one then customises to remove things like pointless indexing, I am now launching the ‘destroy or develop libraries’ campaign!

I’d like to drill into that.  I just checked my home machine’s asset tag with Dell and it will be 6 years old next week. I wanted to replace it but I spent £30 on upgrading the memory to 2GB and although the graphics card can’t do glass effects,  it runs Vista well enough on its 2.2GHz Celeron (single core) processor that the replacement has been postponed indefinitely. It works as a media center and streams stuff to the TV via the Xbox. Memory is critical though: I’ve been saying since Windows 3.0 “don’t worry about CPU , throw memory at systems.”   a 256MB XP system isn’t going to make a happy upgrade, on that we can certainly agree.

But  “Pointless indexing ?” Indexing is a low priority task and only consumes resources when files change, so removing it saves very little and costs a lot. The big thing , the HUGE thing for me as a user in Vista is search, and clearly no index: no search. Anyone who has got into the Vista or Windows 7 way of working will understand that, just as internet search engines mean we don’t try to remember many complex URLs any more, so on Vista and 7 we don’t remember complex paths to find files.
When I first  first worked on Sharepoint (it was still called Tahoe at the time!) it became clear to me that file hierarchies work poorly.  Do you organize files by date, by subject, by type? If you write thousands of letters how do you name them so you can find all the letters for a given customer ? Or all the letters for customers interested in the WidgetMaster 2000 ? Bluntly, if you can’t find the stuff, is there any benefit in keeping it ? And it’s not just in office automation settings that this matters. I had over 30,000 photos on my PC at the last count. How do I quickly get to the Vulcan Collage I used in this post – did I put it in folder of “pictures for blogging” or did I make a folder for the vulcan shots and put the collage with the source pictures, or did I save the collage with other collages. To find it I just press the “Windows key” and start typing “vulcan” in the box on the start menu. Starting programs which are not on quick launch bar… life is too short to remember folder hierarchies on the start menu: I hit the same key and start typing the program name. Want to remove a program? Why bother to remember where that is in control panel? I hit the same key and start typing “remove” and the correct link to control panel appears. And Windows search is the search for Outlook. With my recent car problems I found I hadn’t got the number for the fleet management people in my contacts. So I typed “Fleet” in the search box and a second later there was a mail with the number I needed. I am totally dependent on search now.

I’ve mentioned here before background noise drives me nuts (it’s one of boxes that gets ticked doing Asperger’s questionnaires). Some noise in the office is unavoidable, but it’s long been my view that filling other peoples workspace with noise from your computer is plain rude :  I have been known to ask people “Do you need to borrow some headphones”.

I still have not replaced the headphones which were stolen along with my laptop bag a few weeks ago, but I have another, quite bulky, set of headphones with a boom Mic: they plug into the USB port and show up as a second sound device.  This gives me a problem. How do I now if sound is going to come out the speakers in my laptop or out of the headphones ? Given my attitude to other people when they fail to keep their computers silent I’m going to deserve some flack if I start a broadcast to the whole office.

Quite by chance I discovered that Windows 7 can display volume controls for each of the sound devices (right click the volume control, and go to volume control options to decide what is displayed.)  So, I can mute one device and have sound coming out of the other. That’s perfect. It turns out that the headset becomes the default audio device when it is plugged in, but if I come back to my desk, don’t plug it in the on board sound stays muted – so I don’t disturb the office, but if I plug the headset back in, it is not muted. Perfect.

A couple of posts back I put talked about how easy it is to use Windows Deployment Services with a video to reinforce the point: some roll outs of Windows 7 will need nothing more. Depending on exactly what is needed there are plenty more tools out there.

Looking for something else over the weekend I stumbled upon the deployment section from the Windows 7 resource kit as a free e-book. Going all the way back to Windows for Workgroups in the early 90’s I’ve thought that (a) the resource kits are some of the best books to come out of Microsoft Press (b) If there is a res kit for a product you work with you should have it on your shelf.  The Windows 7 one runs to over 1700 pages – thick enough, as someone said, to stun an Ox. I was one of the small army of people made a small contributions it, so the only thing that keeps me from buying a copy is the complimentary copy which (I’m told) is on its way to me. I like to thumb through a real paper book and pencil the occasional note in, but I also like having a searchable e-book (Manning publishers gave me a complimentary e-copy of Bruce Payette’s Powershell in action and it’s a whole different experience as a searchable text).  So even if you have already bought the hard copy I’d recommend pulling down the PDF.  This is no mere sample chapter . It runs to 330 pages - I haven’t read every word: what strikes me about having skimmed it is it’s completeness.

Bonus Link

Sometimes you don’t want a complete reference but a set of easier to digest pieces, and there are there is a 5 part series in the deployment section of the Springboard blog which covers a lot of useful ground; so that’s an alternative starting point.

For as long as we have been talking about “Green IT” I’ve thought the opportunity to save carbon emissions by using IT to reduce travel was far greater than the opportunity to reduce the carbon emissions of IT itself. That’s not an excuse for leaving your monitor on or not using the Power saving features of Windows 7 (and Vista) or Server 2008-R2, but a recognition that the savings that be made by reducing the amount we fly or drive to where we do business – and maintaining less office space when we get there are greater than the savings that would be made if we turned all the IT off.

As a high tech company you’d expect Microsoft to be further down the track of using this technology than most doubly so as we produce some of the technology which makes it possible. While I was at tech-ed in Berlin we had an “environment day” where web-cams were handed out for all who wanted them. We already try encourage flexible working – in my old role in consulting things couldn’t be all that flexible, but in evangelism I work from home a day or two most weeks. I’m more productive without the hubbub of the office, and cutting out the journey doesn’t just save carbon. I get between 40 minutes and an hour back at each end of the day when it is of most value to me.

We have a web page about what Microsoft UK is doing environmentally , everything setting a ceiling on the C02 emissions allowed for new company cars and lowering it each year, to a “proximity printing” system which cuts down the amount left unclaimed on printers and which is credited with saving us 50,000 sheets of paper per month  Think of it as a tree a week.

I picked up the web cam on when I got back from Berlin. I don’t do many video calls – I find our RoundTable video conferencing useful because I can see a group (and it seems rude not to let them see me), but 40 odd years of using the phone has proved to me that 1:1 doesn’t need video calling, so I don’t now how much use it will get It’s a Life-Cam show , and it has a clever way mounting on a stand, laptop lid or monitor. Both front and back have the socket part of a ball and socket joint and then the stand and clip provided have the ball part, which is magnetic. The joint means the camera angle can be adjusted easily, and if you need to attach to anything else the “ball” part of the is provided separately with a self adhesive backing. Image quality seems pretty decent even in low light– it has a 2MP sensor which it samples down to 800x600 for moving pictures, and up to 8MP for stills. Sadly it doesn’t seem to support WIA, and given what I’ve just said about the environment, our packaging police could find ways to reduce the packaging. Fortunately the packing includes a case so the lens doesn’t get scratched to bits in a laptop bag. It comes with a CD and it tells says install the software first. This is where Windows 7 gets clever. 

Oh darn – it knows this software won’t work – quite rare for Vista software not to work on 7 and knowing what will fail is quite clever in itself, but not new – Vista did that. But I don’t remember Vista ever offering the next step - knowing the signature of things which don’t work you can check in a database and see if a fix has been logged and guide the user to it. Like this.

And Hey presto everything is installed. Since I don’t use Windows Live messenger – only office communicator, I dug out the details of how to make the button on the camera activate communicator. Now lets see how much use it gets....

 Update. I pasted in the wrong link for "how to activate communicator"  - thanks to David for pointing that out.

My colleagues from the other side of the Atlantic  Dan Stolts, Blain Barton, Yung Chou and John Baker have lined up a a set of on-line sessions on virtualization aimed at IT Professionals.  
They will go from the desktop to the enterprise, Covering VHD native boot , Windows XP mode, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V™, and  System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

When : Thursday, December 10, 2009 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)  / 4PM-8PM (UK)  Register here.  I tend to drop into these things from home, and listen to the sessions which interest me as the clock shifts from working day to early evening.

Here’s the full Agenda.

My colleague Graham Watson has a secured a number of senior folk based in Redmond to do some on-line chats – which we’ve styled as fireside chats. Although the map on the side of this blog tells me I have readers in the Southern Hemisphere, but here in Britain and in Redmond this is the season for such things. Here’s what we have lined up for the next month or so. They are run at 8AM Redmond time, which is 4PM UK, and repeated at 6PM Redmond (2AM for UK insomniacs).

• Dec 1st Cloud side chat: Microsoft Online Services and the evolving world of software + services
• Dec 3rd Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 - Solution Accelerator
• Dec 8th SharePoint 2010 for Developers
• Dec 10thWhat’s new in Office 2010 and Implications for IT Pro’s
• Dec 15thWhat’s new in Office 2010 for Developers
• Dec 17th SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals
• Jan 12th Microsoft IT: Chief Architect and CTO

If you need to like to register for any fire side chat,  on that page you’ll also find the up to date list of Chats and a link to a survey so you can give us feedback or suggest future topics

Back in the middle of October I started writing about couple of big events so-called “world of social media”. One was the reaction to a piece which appeared in Daily Mail about the death of Stephen Gately. On Twitter Stephen Fry showed 140 characters is no bar to a devastating response. “I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome [sic] and inhumane.”  Without the space constraint his blog post,  covered more of the issues including his self-confessed tendency to engage the mouth before the Brain is up to sufficient revs. By linking up some of the other comments – not least Charlie Brooker’s demolition piece – Fry became a focus for the the reaction (in fact, to a lot of the media it seems Twitter is Stephen Fry). The storm of complains to the press complaints commission was greater than their web site could handle. Derren Brown picked up the story and linked it with another I had also seen on Twitter: to travel on the London underground – or indeed to simply be in London at all means having cameras of many different organizations watching your movements.  The latin tag Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “who can guard the guards themselves” has been around for a couple of thousand years: recently people have said looked at their camera-phone and thought “We Can”, and started to turn lenses back at the organizations who watch them.  Jonathan MacDonald did that when he saw a London Underground employee being abusive to a passenger. It caused a fuss on twitter and reached the Mayor of London and powers-that-be at Transport for London, and within a few days the man had resigned.

Both can be held up as examples of how campaigns can be “Orchestrated” using social media. But only by people who don’t understand it.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s more famous quotes was “There is no such thing as society”; and, if I understood what she meant correctly, she would have argued that there is no such thing as a cloud – just billions of water droplets in lose formation. That thinking says Society is not an entity of its own right , just the imprint of millions of individuals: society doesn’t do things people do things, and so on. Seeing the impact of “society” is like seeing a shadow : unless you live in the world of Peter Pan, a shadow does not lead a life of its own. I’m sure arguments can be had about whether the idea is right (and whether I’ve correctly explained the sound bite) but it is a good way to think about “Social Media”.This cartoon of Hugh’s came in about the same time, and summarized part of what I had been writing

From the start, internet has reduced the “friction” in communication. I don’t know if Bill Gates coined “at the speed of thought” which was part of one of his book titles, but with (effectively) instant one-to-Many or Many-to-many communication, ideas can spread about fast as you can think them. Forums pre-date the Web: dial-up bulletin boards were there in the 80s. But it would take hours for a message to spread, the same effort pushing out a message on the internet causes it to spread faster and further (because there are more people on-line), that’s what “less friction” means. Initially the web had a model was like newspapers: few had the capital needed to get their message out and there was little by way of reply. Your choice was simple, read or not read. Web 2.0 has become a shorthand for describing a place where anyone can choose to have a voice, and inevitably most of those voices are noise. Trying orchestrate that is as pointless trying to shape clouds. But every so often someone will say “I think this” and others will join in and say “So do I”, and a wave develops.

Once, Daily Mail columnists could assert, with relative impunity, that as a homosexual Steven Gately lived an unnatural life and died an unnatural death. If people found such a column “loathsome and inhumane” what could they do about it ? Who would write a letter to the paper or the press complaints commission? I suspect the only people who would have put to paper would be those who felt their own lives were being called “unnatural”. But in October people who neither cared much for Gately’s music nor shared his way of living his life paused and said “No one should be written about like that”. It’s possible to argue that people adopted that view because someone like Stephen Fry told them to, but Jonathan MacDonald’s video didn’t have a famous name telling people to do anything  and still people saw it and said “No one should be treated like that”.  Each comment saying so was like a rain drop – and when a lot of people coalesce around an idea we get a storm. The BBC's Moral Maze programme was not the only place where people wondered aloud when this legitimate democratic protest (and they cited the Trafigura injunction case, described by PR week here) and when it shades into rule by lynch mob – I can’t help feeling that the answer is “when you disagree with it”.

The ability for ideas to spread quickly changes how we put our messages across. On the right are a couple of comments a few minutes apart from my Twitter feed. First, Sharon links to this comment – again from Stephen Fry. “Today, Britney Spears tells her PR manager, ‘Why should I care about this journalist of this newspaper with a big circulation? I will reach their circulation just by typing into my keyboard.’ So well, whole newspapers are on the one side filled with resentment against Twitter, on the other side they are using it and searching Twitter messages.”  It seems it is not just Britney who thinks like that. James picked up that McLaren tweeted the fact that they signed Jenson Button for next season 15 minutes or so before they posted the press release.

I’m starting to see people in Microsoft get that what is said about us in the different kinds of social media is at least as important as what we say. It isn’t always knowing to know what is being said and it is telling much harder to tell noise from the thunder of an approaching storm, but we are learning, for example what was said about Tech-ed or our Wembley on twitter was used as evidence for the success or failure of different parts of those events. And for the launch of Windows 7 the main Microsoft web page had a collection of quotes from ordinary people on twitter about how great the product – in past years these would have come from journalists. Does that mean the profession  of journalist will peter out ? I doubt it, because just as social media allows a spotlight to pointed at the “loathsome and inhumane” so it allows it to be pointed at the great piece of writing or photography: that’s all that happens when a you-tube video “goes Viral”

I don’t normally blog just links, but after Google took the chrome OS into the open last week I was going to put something up, I enjoyed the post from Fake Steve Jobs on the subject when it was first announced, but Viral has done a better job than I would have done.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been having a frustrating time putting videos together with a lot of time waiting for them o render: this would have been even more frustrating had Viral not sent me an invitation to Pivot.   He's written that up too. I saw a post from Mary-Jo about Pivot a few days back and it is fascinating. It is a great way to slice through “proper” databases – anything that is a catalogue can be browsed any which way.

To avoid just throwing the links out there, let me just thrown in my tuppence on Pivot: it might get people thinking about Taxonomy. They’ll say “Wouldn’t it be great if we could that with Photos”; and then they’ll hit something of a wall. To visualize the problem I’d like you to think of St Paul’s Cathedral - which is on anyone’s list of the most iconic buildings in London. [A quick Bing search shows Paul is a popular enough Saint to have cathedrals named after him in quite a few other cities round the world]. Suppose you had a huge database with pictures of buildings. Which slices through that database might come up with St Paul’s ?  Buildings in London / Buildings in England (not Scotland or Wales) / Great Britain (not Northern Ireland) / The United Kingdom (England Scotland Wales, and Northern Ireland) / Europe. Places of Worship, Churches / Protestant churches / Cathedrals. / Cathedrals in capital cities. Buildings by Sir Christopher Wren. Buildings started in the 1600s. Buildings completed in the 1700s. Buildings built following the great fire of London. Buildings with domes. Classical Buildings. Important places in the life of [anyone buried / Married there]. Places mentioned in Films/Books. How do we get the information to make all the different slices we want associated with every picture ? I can see that if we geo-tagged it something clever could know the boundaries for London or Europe, and whilst we might put St Paul’s in a picture title, at a pinch the city or names of famous architects might make it to the keywords, but how many people would tag a picture of St Paul’s with “Nelson”.  It’s by no means clear how these problems can be solved, [I’ve got a personal taxonomy for classifying photos, but making it shareable is something else] however, that should not blind us to the data sets where problem has been solved already: they can give some fascinating results. I spent a little while with films and endangered species databases. You find yourself saying “I never knew …” which is the point of these things.

For a little while I have had a beta version of a project I call PSCONFIG on codeplex. I’ve changed a couple of things but from the people who have given it a try, it seems that it is working pretty well. It’s aimed at servers running either Hyper-V server R2 Or Core installations Windows Server 2008 R2, although it can be useful on just about any version of Windows with PowerShell V2 installed. Here is breakdown of the what is included.

Installed software, product features, drivers and updates
* Add-Driver, Get-Driver
* Add-InstalledProduct ,Get-InstalledProduct ,  Remove-InstalledProduct,
* Add-WindowsFeature , Get-WindowsFeature, Select-WindowsFeature, Remove-WindowsFeature
* Add-HotFix,  Add-WindowsUpdate, Get-WindowsUpdateConfig , Set-WindowsUpdateConfig

Networking and Firewall
* Get-FirewallConfig , Set-FirewallConfig, Get-FirewallProfile , Get-FireWallRule, New-FirewallRule
* Get-NetworkAdapter, Select-NetworkAdapter, Get-IpConfig , New-IpConfig , Remove-IpConfig, Set-IpConfig

Licensing
* Get-Registration , Register-Computer

Page file
* Get-PageFile, Set-AutoPageFile

Shut-down event tracker
* Get-ShutDownTracker , Set-ShutDownTracker

Windows Remote management
* Get-WinRMConfig , Disable-WinRm

Remote Desktop
* Get-RemoteDesktopConfig , Set-RemoteDesktop

Misc
* Rename-Computer
* Set-DateConfig , Set-iSCSIConfig  , Set-RegionalConfig

It has a menu so it can replace the SCONFIG VB utility , to show how it works I’ve put a Video on you tube (see below). It includes on-line help and there is a user guide available for download from codeplex. The documentation is one step behind the code, although the only place where I think this matters is that the New Firewall rule command doesn’t have any explanation – hopefully if you use tab to work through the parameters it is obvious . Obvious as a release candidate I’m looking for feedback before declaring it final. Codeplex discussions are the best place for that.

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When I was at Tech-ed in Berlin a couple of weeks ago I recorded an interview with Andy Malone, one of our MVPs, as a follow-up the session he ran on cybercrime. The results have now been posted, and apart from wishing the camera crew had told me just how awful I looked on camera I think it’s quite a good interview – my job when I do these interviews is to try get the “guest” to talk about what they know, and not show how much I know , this is Andy’s specialist subject, so it wasn’t hard to do. If this piques your interest he does longer sessions for various Audiences, just put his name into your favourite search engine.

Since I just mentioned Andy Malone, one of our MVPs, I should also say that he got a session together in Berlin to talk about our “Most Valued Professional” program and asked me to to join the panel, which had two MVPs, an would-be MVP, an Ex-MVP working for Microsoft Greece, and two other Microsoft people who deal with MVPs. If you wonder what we’re talking about when we mention MVPs or think you might like to be one , this is well worth a listen