TONYSO

New SuperFlows Published

A new type of content has arrived – the SuperFlow. See an example in the SCCM Software Update Deployment SuperFlow.

Among the innovations, flowcharts that are interactive, like this:

When you click on the Process to Create an Update List, it expands so you can see detailed info, like this:

Nifty. Check out all the new SuperFlows in the Download Center.

Hyper-V Security: First SecBul Released

The first Security Bulletin for Hyper-V is out at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-010.mspx.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-010 - Important

Vulnerability in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Could Allow Denial of Service (977894)

Hyper-V How-To: Convert VM Memory Contents to a Dump File

Released today for free-as-in-beer on MSDN Code Gallery:

Microsoft Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter

Check out this great troubleshooting tool.

Did I mention it is free?

Daleks Invade Seattle

Only for those who know what a Dalek is. I thought you would be amused to see this architectural marvel in downtown Seattle, in the international district, across the street from Uwajimaya.

Hyper-V TV: Virtualized SLES 10.2 on Hyper-V v2

There’s a new video from Shai Ofek on screencast.com showing installation of Virtualized SLES 10.2 on Hyper-V v2. Just click on the image to check it out!

How Deep is Your Bench?

Do you know where your next IT staffer is coming from? Do you know what they are doing right now to prepare for their duties managing your infrastructure? Need some further training for your own IT career development? Check out the free-as-in-beer Microsoft Student Career Portal at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/start/start-career-student.aspx.

BTW - why does the Comsumer Support Technician in the pic above wear a backpack?? 

Short video from MS Europe on the eSkills program here (or click on the image below):

We Must Disenthrall Ourselves…

Listening to Sir Ken Robinson this afternoon talking about his book “The Element.”

William James told us “common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds“ and we’d all do well to remember this and how to shift speeds (and change directions).

Beware, we don’t know most of the things that we take for granted…because we take them for granted. If you are over 25 years old, you are probably wearing a wristwatch, and didn’t think about putting it on this morning. Look around at those under 25 years old, and most of them aren’t. They’ve grown up surrounded by digital clocks. They don’t understand why we choose to strap on a “uni-tasker” to simply tell the time, since you can see it all around you (cellphone, computer, DVR).

Considering that the obverse of the “wisdom of crowds” is the “madness of crowds” and Jaron Lanier’s new book “You Are Not A Gadget.”

"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disentrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." -- December 1, 1862 - Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress

In the IT Pro world, I have the sense today that a paradigm shift has occurred: “Microsoft and HP announced a $250 million engineering, sales and services partnership to advance cloud computing and help customers better use IT for business success.  The press release, supporting documents and (embed-ready) videos of Steve Ballmer, Bob Muglia and HP executives commenting on the agreement are here. “

Hyper-V TV: Deploying a virtualized server with WDS

James has posted a video demo on the Edge of how to use Windows Deployment Services to deploy a server onto a virtualization host in a data center.

Hyper-V TV: Getting to Know Hyper-V

Technical writer Felipe Ayora has a new video out to drive awareness of the new Getting to Know Hyper-V: A Walkthrough from Initial Setup to Common Scenarios doc in the TechNet Library*

Click the image to play the vid, or go to:

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/40500ac7-a9b3-437a-bf5b-f9cb5ca4e09c

*You can download a printable version of the guide: Getting to Know Hyper-V: A Walkthrough from Initial Setup to Common Scenarios (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=179636).

What other videos would you like to see? Leave feedback.

Hyper-V How To: Find Hyper-V Technical Information and Resources

There’s a new aggregation page on TechNet that collates TechNet Library, Blog, and other resources such as Videos and scripts: http://bit.ly/7UiIjp. Highly Recommended. Interesting taxonomy too – how do you like it? Leave feedback and thanks in advance.

1. Planning
2. Pre-Deployment Tools
3. Installation
• Guidance
• Deployment
4. Management
5. Workload Specific
6. Benchmarks

Add to that the new free-as-in-beer Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster for IT Pros.

If you don’t want to download the poster, or just want to check it out ‘cause it is cool – see the online, zoomable version of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster for IT Pros at http://bit.ly/6AMCdY

This is Your Brain on Twitter

The interwebs quote “studies” that claim we humans have ~70K thoughts a day. That’s about .81 thoughts per second if you are awake every second of the 24 hour day (86400 seconds per day/70,000 thoughts). I can’t seem to find the underlying “studies” to determine if they are using an 18 or 12 hour “work-day” for the calc, but, hey, we’ll go with it for this exercise.

70K is also just over the threshold the industry sets as a benchmark for the number of words in a novel.

How many words/characters in a thought?

Consider twitter. Is that a good length for a thought? How long does it take to think 140 characters? Perhaps better to call it between 1-3 thoughts? 1.5 thoughts per 140 character tweet then?

A quick Flesch–Kincaid readability analysis of my recent tweets yields a character to word ratio of about 6.2 characters per word (including spaces). This nets out to average 22.5 words per tweet. Call it about 15 words per thought. Seems right to me. Pattern-matches to the the haiku 3-5-7 syllable pattern. But I digress.

Assuming I type as fast as the average typist (~60WPM) it should take me ~30 seconds to type the 140 character tweet. Max twitter throughput for this human then would appear to be in the range of 2160 tweets per (18hours) day. Call that 3240 thoughts shared per day when you’re full out and doing nothing else for 18 hours.

Hrm,  best case, >5% of our thoughts shared because of implementation limitations? That’s what we call high drag, no wonder writers are filled with angst and frustration.

Assuming about an hour a day sharing “thought–sized chunks of text”, it’ll take about a month to tweet about 70K words, encompassing about 4600 thoughts. About the same number of words/thoughts in a novel.

Consider, if you could harvest your thoughts more efficiently for 24 hours you could fill the same novel.

Now, how many thoughts in a symphony?

Hyper-V TV: Martin McClean on the Free-as-in-beer Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster for IT Pros

My colleague Martin McClean recently sat down with me to record a video with some information about his recently released Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster for IT Pros.

You can see a bit it of it behind his head…

Click on the image to play the vid.

After 9 days, it has passed the WS2K8 Eval DL in popularity on the download center – something is going on there.

You can also access the online ZOOMABLE version in Seadragon here: http://bit.ly/6AMCdY

Very cool. Saves many trees.

Hyper-V How To: Backup Hyper-V with Windows

John Kelbley’s blog has a recent series of posts (including helpful screenies) explaining everything you need to do a Hyper-V backup is included in Windows Server.

Highly recommended.

• Best Part of Hyper-V Backup and Recovery Is Windows!
• The Wonder of Volume Shadow Copy and Hyper-V 
• DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V
• DiskShadow / Xcopy RESTORE of Hyper-V
• Backup and Recovery of Non-Windows VMs on Hyper-V – IT JUST WORKS! 

How Content Planning Works

Once again XKCD proves how much content development for the IT Pro is like software engineering:

Free-as-in-beer Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components poster

There’s a new free-as-in-beer poster on the download center showing Windows Server 2008 R2 features and how the relate to each other.

Salty goodness.

For example, confused about Hyper-V architecture?

For Hyper-V, if you like your pictures to move – check out the Hyper-V Architecture Demonstration Video on Microsoft.com 3:56.

From the DLC:

This poster provides a visual reference for understanding key technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2. It focuses on Active Directory Domain Services, Hyper-V, Internet Information Services, Remote Desktop Services (including Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)), BranchCache, and DirectAccess technologies. In addition, updates to core file services and server management are illustrated. You can use this poster in conjunction with the previously published Windows Server 2008 Component Posters.

Management? It’s in there:

RDS? it’s in there:

Be warned, is big download, if you are on a slow link like me, pour yourself a cuppa.