work.rossbrown.net

I am still learning Windows PowerShell 1.0 and it's one of those products that the more you learn, the more you appreciate how much work has gone into it to make your life easier.

If you're a Windows Administrator, you need to get into PowerShell now. It represents a huge leap in functionality and ease of use from VBScript (and NT4 command scripting) and really will make your life easier. But just wait until you see the Remoting features in PS2.0 CTP.

Microsoft have just released Live Mesh Tech Preview, allowing you to synchronise files between machines and also control your PC from remote locations.

It looks very interesting, I'm going to install and have a look.

If you're like me, you have a handful of apps that you use all the time. To access them quickly, you probably have them on your Quick Launch toolbar (next to the Start button). But did you know that there is a system-wide keyboard shortcut which allows you to launch them really quickly?

So you have probably heard about today's unveiling of a new search engine to threaten Google's comfortable lead over... well, everyone. It's called Cuil (pronounced 'cool' - it's an old Irish word meaning knowledge) and it contains a whopping 121 billion indexed pages, three times that of Google.

At this point it's customary to point out that size isn't everything and it's the quality of search results that counts.

One of the things that frustrated me most about moving to NZ was the state of the ISP industry and the lack of decent products on offer to home users. In this post I set out just how bad things are.

Today I took the plunge and rebuilt my work laptop to Windows Server 2008. Aside from a small problem with getting printing working, everything else is going well. Audio drivers, graphics drivers (including dual screen support), networking all look great. Speed is snappy too, it's really responsive and I can use it to experiment with IIS7 and PowerShell too.

There's a few things you need to change if you want it to be useful as a day-to-day operating system.

More than a year after release, reaction to Microsoft's latest desktop OS is still less than enthusiastic. Sure, SP1 went some way to address some of the shortcomings but on the whole people are still frustrated, underwhelmed and in some cases left with nagging driver and performance problems (although to be fair some vendors are at fault here).

Apart from being a good way to get to grips with another web technology, this site is intended as a place for me to post my non-personal / work-oriented / techie stuff. For instance, I had to change some settings in order to get Drupal to play nice with my host, ICDSoft - I was getting errors at the database configuration screen, no matter what I entered.

I created a php.ini file in the Drupal directory with the following contents:

register_globals = off
post_max_size = 20M
memory_limit = 80M
upload_max_filesize = 20M
max_execution_time = 120

So here it is, the obligatory 'Hello world' first post.

I'm experimenting with Drupal, after using other blog/CMS software before. I've heard good things, we'll see how we go.