After a little more than two years of existence of this blog I've decided to end its life in a brutal and quick way. Simply stop blogging.

I run two blogs: ITblog in Polish and ITblog on Technet in English. My plan was to keep my Polish blog with wider audience alive and post 15-20 entries a month and translate some of these entries to English to be posted here. Although, idea seems to be OK, the execution was a complete disaster. I couldn't keep up with blogging and working same time and I was hardly meeting personal "deadlines" with the Polish blog. What you have seen in here was a scrap of what I was planning to blog about.

I don't have blogging on my commitments list, my position in operations department doesn't face external customers. It's hardly called a personal achievement and with number of visitors around 15-20 a day this place doesn't justify effort already put into creating it.

So, silently singing one of my favourite songs of the Doors: "The End" I prononunce this blog dead.

This place with all it's content will dissapear in two weeks time.

P.S. I will rethink my strategy around the whole blogging concept and maybe I will return to blogging in English. However, whatever decision may be this place wouldn't be a part of it.

It may not happen often than Microsoft blogs cover topics from Linux world (from various obvious reasons). Of course, why should we? At the end, there are guys in Port25 and they do very good job.

Just recently I found a document titled OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication. I remember this topic from my course at DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology). We discussed ways of authenticating Windows users against Linux/Unix authentication systems and vice versa. The process of login on to Linux with authentication in AD has been described in a very smart way in the document mentioned above. It's worth reading if you have heterogeneous systems in your network and you're looking for a single point of authentication for all users.

Last Tuesday the Great Place To Work Institute announced Microsoft as Europe’s Best Workplace 2008. The G company was second. Full results are here.

Yup, we're the best!

Until now, Ireland was not included in "bird's eye" views on maps.live.com. What happened last week was a huge blast to users Live.com experience with great photos from Dublin, Carlow, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Navan and Wexford.
Below, a compilation a few photos of some famous spots and "my places" from Dublin.

Most of guests to the Republic start their journey at the Dublin Airport. Here, AerLingus terminal with at least 1 transatlantic plane.

Driving to the city centre you can't miss historical monument GPO - General Post Office and The Dublin Spire - 120 metres tall needle in the middle of the O'Connell St.



Moving along the O'Connell St you get to O'Connell Bridge - world unique bridge, wider than longer.



Following down the road towards Heuston Train Station you will come across Ha'Penny Bridge. Famous for used-to-be levy of half of a penny to cross it.



Next, Four Courts - location of the Supreme Court, High Court, and Central Criminal Court of the Republic of Ireland.



However, if you decide to make a U-turn and go towards the Dublin Port you see building of Custom House. From Liffey's river bank opposite to Custom House Irish fled the country seeking better perspective and runaway from the Great Famine devastating Ireland between 1845-1851.

 

Moving towards St. Stephen's Green you will see Trinity College. The oldest college in Dublin, established in 1952 1592 by English queen Elizabeth I.



If you follow crowds you may be more than sure you're on Grafton Street. The most expensive street to shop in the whole country.



If you're big on shopping you might want to visit Dundrum Shopping Centre, the biggest shopping centre in Ireland. Only 1/3 of the complex is presented below.



Microsoft in Ireland is located in 2 building complexes - Atrium A & B, presented below in Sandyford ...



... and Microsoft EDC (European Development Centre) in Leopardstown, 2 km away from Atrium.



Just to compare, my team's building 114 on Redmond Campus which I'm visiting next Wednesday.



There photos were not taken yesterday, which may be easily proved by looking at my place in Stepaside. These cranes were removed in August last year and all buildings and surroundings are completed.



The yellow crane presented on the photo above was a subject to photo I took from my balcony in August 2007.



Update to maps.live.com opens a brand new chapter for Ireland in Internet.Now you can "fly" around the city without moving from your home and show your friends your favourite places without a camera, simply sending them URL address. Also, it's always better to see a place before you go there, right?

On my other blog I noticed that only 0.8% of guests leave any comments. Out of 35k unique visitors that's really, really low volume. I was wondering why it is happening so I blogged about that... and so far 7 people commented! Funny, I hope it will create a bit more comments than just that.

On the other hand, I enabled anonymous comments on blog on Technet cause I haven't got any comments for months. 

There has been a lot of discussions around a post on my Polish blog about prices of MacBook Pro in different countries in Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. Some other bloggers picked up the comparison and published on their own pages, even one of the Polish national magazines (Chip, owned by Vogel) did the same. For some period of time I noticed the digg/slashdot effect on my stats hiking way above the normal level on interest.

What I discovered going from one Apple Internet store to another was that MacBook Pro was the cheapest in Switzerland and the UK and the most expensive in Poland, country which in fact doesn't have own Apple store (which might be an answer for the price). The difference was rather staggering €500 between the cheapest and the most expensive store. For this kind of money you can buy a new Dell in USA.

The second discovery came just right after the first one, as I call it "self-flammable hype". People started to justify prices, picking up errors in creating the comparison while the others reacted with disbelief or saying "I will rather spend on a plane ticket than give a penny to local resellers". Some of highly emotional discussions went into details of what sales tax rates are in different states in USA. But what is the most important to me is that people started to talk how companies regulate their prices based on country of residence. Sometimes ignoring simple facts like salaries, demand or technology trends.

I think my next step would be asking my colleagues in pricing team in Microsoft how do they do that... Stay tuned.

I've lost touch with news and while Windows Vista Service Pack1 was released I was far, far away on a Moroccan desert.

Since 18th of March SP1 is widely available on Windows Update. I'm just downloading my copy to install on my desktop machine, which I encourage to do the same with your machine.

I wrote two posts about CodeSigning, part of my job in Microsoft. But this post is not about me and my job, well, just this time. I'm proud to present blog of my work colleague - General BlogOn the verge of a boundary by John O'Brien. John is CodeSign program manager, based in Dublin, Ireland. Originally from Limerick, so please forgive him all misspells and grammar mistakes :)

John, welcome and thanks for joining the blogsphere!
 

Great chart showing relation between time and ability. Great for finding answers for questions: "why bother" and "why am I pushing myself so much".

Found on Flickr, link here. 

One day I was preparing for SQL Server Reporting Services presentation. I don’t do it much often but it was required for a bigger presentation about Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007 which was a part of my project. I was configuring my presentation box, Windows Server 2003 Standard with own AD (yes, you’re right I used contoso.com), SQL Server 2005, Project Server 2007 and so on. I installed SQL 2005 engine on a dedicated user, SQLServiceUser but from some strange reason, and I blame my laziness in this part, I decided to configure web application pool for Reporting Services to run under LocalSystem.

Strangely enough during configuration of SQL Reporting Services I couldn’t get my service to start. I found log and here is what I saw:

Error: The user or group name 'LocalSystem' is not recognized.

How on earth name LocalSystem can’t be recognized on Windows? I went to Live.com and started looking for answers. What I found proved I am lazy indeed but also showed me something which is worth to remember for future reference.

When configuring web application pool to run under LocalSystem account the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider writes an incorrect string in the RSReportServer.Config file (the one usually located in \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportServer).

When set to LocalSystem WMI provider writes

<WebServiceIdentity>Local System</WebServiceIdentity>

Instead of

<WebServiceIdentity>NT Authority\System</WebServiceIdentity>

Simple solution is to install web application pool identity to user different than LocalSystem. In my case I used my SQL Server dedicated user and I was back on track.

KB907267, You may not be able to access Reporting Services after you create an application pool that runs under the LocalSystem account was very helpful in finding the cause and resolution.

BTW, this post has number 50 on this blog. This kind of puts me in celebration mode.

Jeff Jones published very interesting report comparing vulnerabilities in Windows XP, Vista, RedHat, Ubuntu and MacOS X 10.4 in first year from release. It's pretty self explanatory and I don't think it requires any explanation from myself.

All I can say I felt any report like that will look in a similar fashion. I've been using Windows XP for many years and since Vista RTM'ed I don't have to install so many patches as previously. I was using RHEL4 some years ago on a server and it was rather painful scheduling regular downtimes to install patches. I've never used Ubuntu or MacOS for long enough to know what patching on these systems means. Oh, hold on a sec there ... I've patched MacOS once. Have had to reinstall system afterwards. But that's another story, right? :)

You can download the report from here or directly from here. 

I'm an amateur in photography. It's my hobby, maybe even a passion. I have my own gallery on Flickr which people see from time to time to enjoy those few frames I've put there.

Some time ago I watched a video presenting how Live Photo Gallery can be used to put photos together and stich them into panorama. Warning: it's a marketing video.

After this short presentation and actually having some photos from my trip to Portugal I've decided to compare a tool I've already been using for some time, PTGui with the new baby from Microsoft.

Here is a result of stiching in PTgui:

And here is a result from Window Live Photo Gallery:

It's pretty amazing that tool which can be downloaded for free can do something as cool as a few $$ software!

The results are not entirely the same. Live Photo made the picture a bit flatter than PTGui and didn't give me any options to correct that. This is why right side as well as the left side of the photo is climbing towards the centre of the frame. OK, it's not ideal but it's hardly recognizable!

That was my one and only test I made with Photo Gallery but I have to say, I'm quite impressed with its results. I'll have to start making more panorama photos.

See you in Madrid tomorrow!

Copyright Michal Osmenda, Ireland 2007