TONYSO

More Floors Added to the Tower of Babel: Free-as-in-beer Maren Arabic Romanizer

From the website:

“Lack of access to an Arabic keyboard or lack of familiarity with one are two of the most common problems preventing Arabic users from communicating in their own language.

Microsoft Maren is a Windows extension that comes to the rescue, allowing you to type Arabic in Roman characters (Romanized Arabic, Arabizi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic) and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script.”

Get the inside scoop on the Maren blog.

Did I mention lately? “I love this company”

Don’t Get Nineballed

According to the Washington Post yesterday there is a new kind of click fraud waiting to take out your unsuspecting users of internet search.

Slashdot says:

“The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise, which attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "AdSense for Search" API, which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. (SecureWorks' writeup indicates that Yahoo search is targeted too, but the researchers saw no evidence if the malware redirecting Yahoo searches.) While most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher "...converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay."

Apparently one way the victim can identify the hijacked results is the lack of the total number of pages that contain the word or phrase for which the victim is searching.

Free-as-in-beer Bingtones

By now you must have heard/read/tried Bing. If you are a fan, or, perhaps you have a highly developed sense of ironic geeky humor, you may wish to download the free-as-in-beer ringtones for your phone called Bingtones.

How To: Become a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft

Joe’s Misfit Geek post today gives some good answers to I’m asked, how did you learn what you know ?”, including:

“1. Spend your beer money on books.

…

3.) Always have two jobs.

…and…

4.) Fight with your boss.”

Tony’s additional tips:

1. Leave no free-as-in-beer money on the table

Example, clicking on the free-as-in-beer tag of this blog will give you a plateful of free offers from Microsoft – why aren’t you asking for second helpings?

2. Show up, on time

Sheila O’Malley spins this one out thus:

…“showing up" is what you MUST do - and that doesn't just mean getting to rehearsal on time, but showing up, with all your talent, openness, creativity, fearlessness, self, fears, whatever - at your disposal. There are those who WANT to "show up" but honestly can't. That's what separates the talented from the not-talented.

3. Look for a pattern, and solve it for everything

2 new TN Edge Virtualization Videos

Find them all at http://edge.technet.com/Tags/Hyper-V/

2 new ones to check out:

Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 on TechNet Edge

7 minutes, 25 seconds
The announcement of Windows XP mode caused a lot of excitement. In this screencast we have a look at how it is set up, what users see, and get an idea of what it can do. Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 makes it easy to install and run many of your Windows XP productivity applications directly on a Windows 7-based PC. Download Windows XP Mode Beta.

TechNet Edge: Dual Boot from VHD with Windows 7 and Windows Sever 2008 R2

23 minutes, 0 seconds
Want to learn how to boot from VHD with the new operating systems we have coming? How about dual boot with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2?

Free-as-in-beer IT Pro career dev

There is a new site to help you grow in your IT Pro career: Microsoft Thrive.

There is a lot of material there on developing your skills (‘natch), but there is also a hidden gem, no, maybe better to call it a hidden pot o’gold? Well, it’s an RSS feed of free-as-in-beer stuff, so maybe stream o’gold? Ick, wrong associations to that search string…

Whatever, check it out: RSS Feed for Thrive: Technical Offers

Example: Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions

By Mitch Tulloch with the Microsoft Virtualization Teams
ISBN: 9780735693371

This guide will teach you about the benefits of the latest virtualization technologies and how to plan, implement, and manage virtual infrastructure solutions. The technologies covered include: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

View Chapter 1: Microsoft's Virtualization Solution

or

Sign up to download the entire e-book (PDF, 14.4 MB).

Also: (note nifty use of (nested) parens)

私は、ガイジンです。

I am a gaijin. That’s what the title of this post is supposed to say after running it through Bing translator, but how would I know? I don’t read Kanji. Is the title even written in Kanji? Or is it hiragana? Me, clueless. And gaijin, still.

In these cases, and especially when trying to communicate technical info, it is really great to have a knowledgeable human translator to help.

Meet Paul. He writes in both English, like this MSDN Magazine article: Configuration Testing With Virtual Server, Part 2, and in Japanese, like this blog.

“Paul Despe is a Program Manager on the Hyper-V team. Paul has worked as a Software Design Engineer in Test on both the Virtual PC and Virtual Server products. Before joining Microsoft, Paul worked in Japan and at Connectix, a virtualization software company acquired by Microsoft in 2003. Paul can be reached at paulde@microsoft.com.”

If you follow the Technet blogs feed, you can see all the different languages that TN bloggers post in, but how can we bring all these together around technical content in the library?

Like this, maybe?

Thoughts? Leave feedback and thanks in advance.

Brand me

Discussion continues here in content development about whether/the extent to which customers care who develops content – as long as they can distinguish that the information is “supported”. The debate covers a broad range of suggestions, from putting author’s actual names on content (do you care?)

to tracking/reporting all a writer’s activities across TN/MSDN, blogs, forums, the twitterverse, etc.

It is also performance review time at Microsoft, which drives some (thankfully only once-yearly) bizarre behavior. For example, my review process this year includes some “360 feedback” (don’t panic, I initiated it). One website that purports to help with this provided me the following “brand map” of brand tonyso:

Attributes:

• Community-oriented
• Discerning
• Ethical
• Persuasive
• Self-motivated
• Strategic
• Visionary

Brand Skills:

• Innovating
• Presenting
• Learning
• Visioning
• Performing analysis
• Identifying problems

Projective Exercises:

Apparently,

“if I were a dog, I’d be a greyhound, moves fast and hits his own personal target”.

“if I were a car, I’d be a Mustang, runs on lots of power underneath.”

Just curious – any of this come across in the blog? If so, why? For example, if you, dear reader, from reading the blog, find me overly-sycophantic, do please explain why :-)

Perhaps this “internet brand management” is just Myers-Briggs repackaged and updated for the 20-somethings? (I’m an ENTJ, BTW)

Oh, and if you know of an IT Pro job description that covers the visionary-visioning thing – please share.

Fear No Pirate

CNN reports today that a Minnesota woman has been fined US$1.9M for 24 illegally downloaded songs.

NOW the economy can turn around, whew! That was close…

A Day in the Life of an IT Pro Evangelist: James O’Neill

I recently spoke with UK Evangelist James O'Neill about PowerShell - including 2.0, authoring best practices and the free PowerShell Management Library for Hyper-V at www.codeplex.com/psHyperV. James blogs at http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/. You can listen to the 12 minute audio podcast, click on the thumbail to download the .WMA file from my skydrive:

We also chatted about the innovative first-ever TechNet Virtual Conference 2009. Click the thumbnail below do download the 3 minute podcast audio file (.WMA) on that:

Stupid User Bailout - Free-as-in-Beer Microsoft Security Essentials Beta

You spend more time supporting users than you’d like – you’d like to be doing more proactive stuff, right? You spend the majority of that time bailing users out of security issues. Why should only big banks, insurance, and car companies get bailouts?

Microsoft is offering you a bailout for your users who are security-consciousness-challenged:

Microsoft Security Essentials Beta: Free-as-in-beer (Live ID signin to connect program required – BUT WORTH IT!)

From the website, for free you get “High-quality protection against viruses and spyware, including Trojans, worms and other malicious software. And best of all, there are no costs or annoying subscriptions to keep track of.

Security Essentials is easy to install and easy to use. Updates and upgrades are automatic, so there's no need to worry about having the latest protection. It's easy to tell if you're protected – when the Security Essentials icon is green, your status is good. It's as simple as that.

When you're busy using your PC, you don't want to be bothered by needless alerts. Security Essentials runs quietly in the background, only alerting you if there's something you need to do. And it doesn't use a lot of system resources, so it won't get in the way of your work or fun.

This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People's Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).Please visit the more information page to learn more about system requirements, our End User License Agreement and other important information.”

Hyper-V How To: Manage Hyper-V with MOM

If you manage your environment with Operations Manager 2007 SP1 or R2, you’ve been waiting for the Hyper-V management pack, which includes:

• Management of critical Hyper-V services that affect virtual machines and host server functionality
• Management of host server logical disks that affect virtual machine health
• Full representation of virtualization in a single Hyper-V host server, including virtual networks, virtual machines, and guest computers
• Monitoring of virtual machine hardware components that affect availability

Important Note: This MP takes following dependencies:

• System.Virtualization.Library MP v.6.1.7221.0, included in this MP download package
• System.Hardware.Library MP v.6.1.7221.0, included in this MP download package
• Windows Server Operating System 2008 management pack, v.6.0.6321.5.

IT Pro and the “remix”

As an IT Pro, you may or may not be aware of the “remix culture”. Really, when you read TN/MSDN blogs, you are participating in it…even if you don’t think about it that way.

I’m looking for some feedback from you about an idea I’ve been discussing with my IT Pro content colleagues here at Microsoft.

Here’s the thing, you get a call from one of your users who has a problem, you go to various sources of information to help them solve that problem. Let’s just say one of those sources is TN/MSDN. How useful would it be if when you found the fix on TN/MSDN it included text you could “remix” into a mail to your user?

The security folks are inching down this path, for example see the Conficker content at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/dd452420.aspx

which includes helpful pointers for “consumers” like this

I am wondering – how useful would this idea be to you if it was prepacked right there on the TN page? Something like:

Here’s a mail you can send to your users:

“The network is at risk because of a possible Conficker worm infection. While we <insert your text here describing the action you are taking>, you can help by doing the following:

1. Go to http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate to verify your settings and check for updates.

2. If you can't access http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate, go to http://safety.live.com and scan your system.

3. If you can’t go to http://safety.live.com, contact support at 1-866-PCSafety or 1-866-727-2338. This phone number is for virus and other security-related support. It is available 24 hours a day for the U.S. and Canada. For support in other countries, visit the Worldwide computer security information page.

Thank you.

If you would like more information about the conficker worm, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx.”

Thoughts? Leave comments to send mail to tonyso@microsoft.com

Hyper-V How To: Monitor Hyper-V R2 VMs in a Sidebar Gadget

Over in the Windows Server R2 Virtualization Forum Dale Unroe shared a nifty tip:

Once you install the RSAT tools for Win7, you can use Tore’s Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar to monitor your R2 VMs  - slickness.

Translator? Traitor!

There is an old Italian saying that goes “Traduttore, traditore.” that warns “"The translator is a traitor."

Localization is a hugely important activity for us in IT Pro content development. So is this whole “community/Web 2.0” thing. There is a new effort in this area we need your help and feedback on. Check out this page

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pt-br/library/w0x726c2.aspx

What’s going on here? We publish a page of technical content in English, run it through Machine Translation (MT), post the MT side-by-side with the English, and then rely on you, dear multi-lingual reader, to use the wiki-like functionality on that page to help improve the MT translation.

Is this going to work? What do we need to do to help you as multilingual IT Pros embrace this pilot, and help us make it a success? Leave comments here, or send feedback/suggestions to tonyso@microsoft.com and I’ll route to the correct team.