Disturbing News From The Religious Nutter Front

It appears that the Australian National Anthem isn't good enough for some people - a number of "christian" schools are now using an unauthorised 2nd verse that has never been part of our National Anthem nor does it have anything to do with anything other than pretending that Jesus Christ is head of our country (when he was nothing other than a regular human being - like the rest of us).

Have a read of this News.com.au article for some more information on this disgraceful episode.

Now, I have to say that as a proud Australian, I know as many of the words to our National Anthem as the next person does (ie, some of them), but trying to use our National Anthem to push one particular religious fairy tale as being what we all believe in really makes me feel dirty.  If you want the real words to the first two verses, then have a read of them over here.

And while I'm going on about abusing our National Anthem (and I've said this before), I'd really like all Australiand to have a good read of the proper/authorised second verse and especially these particular lines:

For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.

Yes, that shows, in our National Anthem, that we're not a country who will let people suffer the fates that many have suffered in trying to reach our shores when escaping from horrific situations overseas.  No, I don't think we should accept "just anyone", but I most definitely do think that we need to have a think about these words and our own humanity when handling illegal immigrants and processing their requests for asylum.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

LOB Vendors - The Bane...

Why is it that Line Of Business Vendor support (sic) technicians (sic) who barely know even a little bit about how computer networks (especially Windows AD-based networks) operate and should know a lot about how their product functions always insist they know more than the system admin about the network (until they eventually have to agree that they don't understand much at all) and even more annoyingly keep showing that they don't know a great deal about their own product?

Not to mention that if these guys actually administered a network, all firewalls, anti-virus and anti-malware would be disabled permanently and more than likely, all users would have the same password: "password".

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Office 365 - The Sep 8th Outage Explained

According to information released recently, a configuration update on the tool that Microsoft uses to load balance network traffic failed, causing the load balancing to fail, taking out services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365.

This was the latest in a long line of service disruptions for Microsoft's online services - especially of BPOS and Office 365 - which leads to the question: Just how stable are Microsoft's hosted solutions, really?

With all the emphasis Microsoft is placing on their online services, wouldn't you think that they'd be testing things like configuration updates to critical infrastructure before deploying it to soon find that it takes out their "we're all in" cloud services moments later?

Now, whilst I agree that online solutions are appropriate in some situations, they are most definitely not a panacea.  Issues like this that result in thousands (or orders of magnitude more) of their clients being taken offline with no access to their data only goes to show that this is a technology in its infancy and running on technology that's still being stress tested.

If you have moved your data to "the cloud", what happens when your cloud hosting provider breaks or closes down?  How do you get access to your critical business data?  Backups are at least as crucial for cloud-based data as they are for on-site based data - and a proper backup/restore/alternate access regime needs to be worked out with any potential hosting partners well before your data is moved from on-site to the cloud.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Windows 8 Tablet PC Part II

So, after spending a little while using Windows 8 x86 on this Tablet PC (Slate) I have started to restore the Windows 7 image backup I took before installing Windows 8.

The *main* issue I have is the seriously reduced functionality of the "Desktop" in Windows 8 - there's no Start Menu any more and clicking on what appears in place of the Windows 7 Pearl just takes you back to the (currently - this is pre-beta) almost totally non functional Metro UI.  If this is what Microsoft relegates the desktop to, then I can't see anyone except personal (home) users and tablet users looking at Windows 8 - Enterprise and SMB clients will not be able to function in a barely usable desktop environment as I can *guarantee* you that very, very few of the LOB vendors out there will release their apps through the Microsoft Win 8 App Store as full-screen (Metro-style) apps.  And the "just use search, not the Start Menu" response Microsoft gives is a crock - especially on a Slate!

Obviously, as all of the tiles in the Metro UI are place holders except "Explorer", "Desktop" and "Control Panel", it is next to useless right now - however that aside, it *does* seem to be an interesting way to handle a Touch UI and I'm sure when devs start releasing apps that will work, it will become quite nice.  Right now, however, there's nothing useful in it at all.

So, back to Windows 7 I come.  This is disappointing as this is the fastest I have ever returned to a previous OS when starting to beta test the next one.  :(


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Windows 8 Tablet PC

Well, I just (as in just) booted my no-name Chinese Slate PC into Windows 8 (Developer Preview) x64 and it seems to be basically working - most of the hardware was detected and seems to function.  Of course, the 3DSP BT/WLAN card didn't function and the Windows 7 drivers supplied with the tablet are only x86 drivers, however I found x64 drivers at Syntek Semiconductor site - but they also didn't do the trick.  So... back to x86 I go!  :(

The Slate PC (Tablet) I have can be found here at DinoDirect - however don't bet on it being shipped with a functional 3G device - mine's totally non-functional.  That aside, I'm pretty happy with the rest of it.  Obviously the 3DSP Bluetooth/Wi-Fi card is a bit of a pain and I may well look around and see if I can find a card with functional x64 drivers - though it works fine in x86 (as supplied with the Tablet).

As to Windows 8, well since most of the Metro style buttons are only there for show and as the older Windows 7 interface is pretty much only partially functional, I don't know how long I'll be able to run with this on my Tablet for now, but soon, no doubt, things will be picking up speed with Windows 8!  :)


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Windows 8, Hyper-V And Power Saving

Well, it seems that the updated version of Hyper-V that will be included in x64 builds of Windows 8 will allow the PC to sleep and hibernate, unlike that in the current Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 version of Hyper-V.

That's great news as it means that people who want and/or need to run Hyper-V guests on their desktop can now do so and retain the power-saving functionality built into the operating system - something I've been a little concerned about since I started running WS2K8R2E on my desktop to gain access to Hyper-V functionality.

Hyper-V in Windows 8 will also support Wi-Fi NICs - as this blog post details.



Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Hyper-V - Failed To Compact VHD - File System Limitation

If you find yourself wanting to compact a Hyper-V VHD file and see the error message "The system failed to compact disk.vhd. Error Code: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation" you may find the information below handy.

First, check to see that there are no VSS backups on the VHD by running a "vssadmin list shadows" command in an elevated command prompt.

Second, delete any VSS backups that are present by running "vssadmin delete shadows /all". If this fails to delete the VSS backups, you may need to resort to the "DiskShadow" utility in WS2K8 and WS2K8R2.  (There's some more information on DiskShadow here (free registration required) and also here.)

Finally, defragment the drive to enable greater compaction.  I'm using MyDefrag in this example, but I also use Defraggler and UltraDefrag at times.

After this you should be able to compact the VHD without any issues.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

ABC and its News, News and News Policy

Are you concerned with the direction ABC is taking by dropping sport, arts and pretty much anything not news or current affairs? Well, speak to your State and Federal members of parliament to have them take this up for you.

Bowls Australia has an online petition available at http://www.bowlsaustralia.com.au/index.php?id=30&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=4602&tx_ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=4abf12dc0e

Microsoft's Office 365, Hotmail and Skydrive Go Down Again

It seems that in an effort to one-up Google again, Microsoft's major online "cloud" offerings went offline again this week for around 2.5 hours.  This was a global outage, not the more common localized outages we've seen, and was apparently caused by a DNS issue.

One additional issue is that Chris Jones of Windows Live said that "We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers" whereas anyone with a good understanding of both English and DNS knows that DNS records do not propagate.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Google Explains This Weeks' Docs Outage

Google Docs went dark on Wednesday this week for around an hour.  Google's Engineering Director, Alan Warren, posted this explanation of what happened and what Google's doing to ensure these sorts of issues are both less likely to happen and if they do happen, quicker to detect and recover from.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Google To Acquire Motorola Mobility

In some very interesting news (after all, as an Amiga fan, I am a fan of the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs, as well as some of their other offerings), Google has announced its intention to acquire Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion.

In Feb, 2010, Motorola announced its intention to split the company into Motorola Mobility - mobile devices and home businesses, and Motorola Solutions - business and mission critical communications products.  On Jan 4th, 2011 this split was finalised.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

This Week In Social Media

It has been a bad week for Social Media and Privacy.  First, LinkedIn decided that they'd emulate Facebook's utter disregard for their members' privacy by enabling anyone you're associated with to use your images and details in their advertising.

To disable this reduction in your privacy and copyright, in LinkedIn, click on your name and go to Settings, then click on the Account option on the left and then Manage Social Advertising.  Uncheck the "LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising" box that LinkeIn has checked for you by default when they introduced this feature.

Now, as if Facebook could allow some other social media site to invade your privacy without having an invasion of their own!  So, Facebook decided to one-up LinkedIn and make available to others the phone numbers of all of your friends, whether they are on Facebook or not.  I don't recall them asking me if this was what I wanted...

To disable this invasion of your friends and colleagues privacy, you need to click on Account, Edit Friends, then Contacts over on the left.  Now, click on the "this page" link over on the right and click the "Remove" button.  Also, on your iPhone, in Facebook's main menu, click the Friends icon, then click the Sync icon (arrow in a box) and then "Sync Contacts".  From here you can set syncing to on or off and can also remove any synced data.

Now, I have no issue with people HAVING the choice as to whether they use these features or not, however I DO have an issue with these privacy invading features being introduced and enabled by default, especially when their introduction isn't made well known to all their members.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Cloud Down Due To Lightning

Ironic as it may seem, a good portion of Microsoft and Amazon's cloud offerings available from Dublin, Ireland were taken offline recently due to a lightning strike.

Have a read of this article for more info.

Now, if you had data on these servers, your business would be offline until they got it restored.  Was this your office, we could restore a backup onto a temporary server in around an hour or two and have you up and running from an alternate location.

So, it's your call - cloud services that you have no control over or locally hosted servers that we can restore from backups relatively easily?

**Update** According to a TechEye article, lightning didn't take out the transformer in question, however there is currently no explanation as to why the transformer caused the issues.  Amazon was out for less than a second whilst Microsoft was out for a number of hours.  (Thanks to Robert Crane for bringing this additional article to my attention.)

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

It Seems The Jews Hate Paedophile Laws, Too

Along with the Catholic Church and Ratzinger's protection of the paedopholes instead of the children, it seems that the Jewish faith has also just taken a stance on the wrong side of morality over this issue.

Rabbi Yosef Feldman seems to have told the Australian Jewish News that he seens no reason that when something as serious as child molestation is reported, it is necessary for their church to take this to the "secular authorities" (otherwise known as the Law - the same Law for everyone in this country, that is).  Have a read of The Age for more on this vile story.

Now, before anyone gets all hot and bothered that I'm being anti-semitic, realise that this is your children these guys don't want to protect.  The same as Ratzinger's doing.  And I'd be equally as outraged if I found out any secular organization was promoting the rights of the paedophole over the rights of the child.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Charlie 1 - Fred 0

If you've not read this, then you simply should.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie