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06 November 2008

No Stilgherrian Live, but some live blogs today

I won’t be doing Stilgherrian Live tonight. Instead, I’m covering two presentations via “live blogging”.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of some tin-pot outfit called Microsoft, is doing his Power to Developers presentation at 3.30pm Sydney time. It’s being promoted as a “Liberation Day” and a “live web rally”. Wankers.

Peel away the pseudo-revolutionary bullshit, though, and there’s something worth hearing about: “Microsoft’s vision around Cloud Computing for the software-plus-services world, followed by demo-packed sessions on the new technologies just announced at the Professional Developers Conference — including the much anticipated Azure Services Platform.”

Using “around” as an all-purpose preposition and failing to hyphenate “much-anticipated” confirms Microsoft’s illiteracy, and The Register‘s negative review of Azure has already poisoned my view. We’ll see.

Then tonight from 6.30pm consulting firm Gartner has “Gartner meets you in the blogosphere”. They’re previewing material to be presented at next week’s Gartner Symposium: “emerging trends and technologies… and what to expect in 2009”.

I’ll be live-blogging both events at special pages on this website. The links will be posted soon. Stand by.

22 October 200822 October 2008

Links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008, slightly burnt at the edges:

The twisted language of politics | Bloghound: A nice post on the hypocrisy shown in the differing descriptions of Republican US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Send an e-mail message on behalf of someone else | Microsoft Office Online: The procedure for setting up delegated email access in Office 2007, e.g. a secretary having access to their boss’ email. I think it’s rather quaint that Microsoft still uses “e-mail” with a hyphen.
Use Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange server without VPN | Microsoft Office Online: This is the procedure for making individual Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”. I’m tagging this because I’ll be making this work for a client shortly.
Configure Outlook Anywhere in Outlook 2007 | Microsoft TechNet: This is the procedure for making a group of Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”.
2006 Olympic Food Stealing Champion – My Dog! | First Dog on the Moon: One of First Dog’s more delightful (as opposed to deeply cynical) cartoons.
Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?: A live feed of everyone who swears on Twitter, with a nice animated effect when a new curse pops up. Compelling viewing.

02 October 2008

Links for 28 September 208 through 01 October 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 28 September 2008 through 01 October 2008, posted automatically and covered in badger fat.

How to be Creative | gapingvoid: Hugh MacLeod’s classic article on how to be creative, starting off with Tip #1: “Ignore everybody.”
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight | CNET News: A news report on the 2001 experiment to implement Internet protocol RFC1149, which allows Internet data to be sent by carrier pigeon. It’s not fast, it’s not particularly reliable.
Welcome to my world, the “online community” that prefers to keep out of site | theage.com.au: A strangely misinformed article about online communities, which commits what I think is the great sin of assuming a social relationship becomes less valid when mediated online.
Height | xkcd: xkcd is “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, but this episode is a wonderful diagram of the universe drawn to a logarithmic scale, from the height of a giraffe to 46 billion light years out. It’s also available as a poster print (hint hint).
How to change the product key for Office XP, for Office 2003, and for the 2007 Office system: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Microsoft Office. This article explains how to reset it and change it back.
Change the Windows Vista Key | About.com: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Vista.
How to change the Volume Licensing product key on a computer that is running Windows XP SP1 and later versions of Windows XP: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Windows XP.

30 June 200830 June 2008

Politics & Technology Forum videos & tweets

Until I get time to write my essay about last week’s Politics & Technology Forum in Canberra, you can relive it on your own.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

You can also trawl back through the Twitter stream using Summize.com. There’s a lot of material, though, so unless you’re a complete political junkie and want to read through it while listening to the discussions you may want to wait for my essay.

[Disclosure: I was in Canberra as a guest of Microsoft.]

24 June 2008

In Canberra!

As previously warned, I’m in Canberra for tomorrow’s Politics & Technology Forum as a guest of that little husband-and-wife firm called Microsoft.

I’ve repeated the programme below, but right now my head is spinning with ideas. PubCamp Sydney was bad enough, what with conversations coming left, right and centre. And I watched the Twitter stream from Melbourne’s event yesterday — and I’m still processing the thoughts.

But this…!

My Twitter stream will use the hashtag #poltech and you’ll be able to track everything at Summize.com.

Meanwhile, tonight I’ll be reading, thinking and pondering over a quiet drink courtesy of that minibar over there [points]. If I have any amazing insights I’ll let you know.

I may even so an impromptu Stilgherrian Live Alpha later this evening. Watch Twitter for the announcement.

Continue reading “In Canberra!”

18 June 200818 June 2008

Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008

Photograph of a feral goldfish

Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

Continue reading “Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008”