Sunday 27 March 2011 at 6:02 pm
A new header - a view from the harbour to the side of the
Te Papa museum (
top view here).
Shot on
Ilford FP4 125 120 film with a
Mamiya RB67. The camera is a complete beast (it weighs 2.6kg!) but it takes amazing pictures.
Sunday 27 March 2011 at 5:15 pm
My four year old MacBook was starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Since originally purchasing it I've added additional RAM and two disk upgrades to keep up with OS upgrades and burgeoning storage requirements.
However after all those years it was starting to suffer from cruft-accumulation. The disk was ticking, it refused to sleep and it'd freeze randomly. On top of that iPhoto was really starting to creak under a growing library of RAW files.
So, I replaced the laptop with an iMac for day to day processing and storage. There are some great deals on the Core i3 21" model these days.
For arm-chair surfing I contemplated the iPad but it still seemed limited. Instead, I went out and bought a 32Gb 2.5" SSD drive and got it installed (be warned - you'll need some of those annoying star-shaped torx screw driver heads to get the drive out of its tray). The drive itself was a relatively cheap ($150NZD) no-name brand unit.
After a clean OS X install, the MacBook now boots in 2/3's of the time it takes for a hard-drive. Apps launch marginally faster, the system seems a little more responsive and its marginally quieter.
Almost 90% of the applications I use are now web-based and I access my data from shares on my iMac so I'm hoping the small drive will extend the life of my MacBook by another couple of years.
Thursday 17 March 2011 at 07:44 am
Just wrapped up day two of the
SharePoint New Zealand Community Conference.
Pretty good so far - Microsoft did a pretty awesome job with 2007 and now 2010. I think this is reflected in the rapid adoption of SharePoint as the de facto standard for Intranets worldwide.
The conference itself is good - the keynote was a little dull. Focussing on the building of global SharePoint user-groups and communities - it came across as a bit more of a travelogue rather than a 'SharePoint is awesome lets see how people do cool stuff with it'.
The second keynote to kick off day two was much better -
Dux is quite the dynamo. Covers alot of ground in terms of a successful SharePoint platform deployment from a business perspective.
The other sessions were a bit hit or miss - but there were definitely good bits in every sessions to file away for future reference.
High-lights (there was lots of good stuff but being a pessimist at heart the Lows outwiegh the Highs)-
*
Pingar Auto-Populating meta-data
* Who knew there was a SharePoint Developer Debugging Dashboard you could enable for every page ?
*
WebParts360 demo - a bit over my head but building an order system without writing code in five minutes was cool
* Clear explanation of CRM/SharePoint strengths and weaknesses plus integration options
* Community Solution - helping a Not For Profit make the most of their SharePoint system through community aide
Low-Lights (note really bad its just from an Ops perspective its useful stuff I'd like to learn about) -
* Its interesting that a lot of SharePoint 'stuff' appears to be done by Government or Education - they get hefty discounts on SharePoint - for everyone else its painfully expensive (don't get me started on internet connector licenses !)
* People bandying around 'Document Management' for scanning solutions (you're not really going to tell me a Fuji Xerox Scan to SharePoint solution is in the same league as a FileNet or DocsFusion solution ?)
* People talking about sync and offline use while bagging Lotus Notes . . . Domino web-enabled all databases several years ago !
* No discussion about SharePoint working with Team Foundation Server for automated builds
* No discussion around packaging SharePoint solutions or best-practises for deployment between environments
* No discussion on DR, BCP or High Availability
* No discussion about forming a suitable support team
* No discussion about permissions, roles or security delegation
Definitely recommended - and as a community driven conference (rather than vendor) it was very well attended and professionally run. There would have been a thousand plus people and four simultaneous streams running over two days. Thats alot of organising and coordinating.
Wednesday 02 March 2011 at 9:49 pm
Not the ideal first post for 2011 (March already - how time flies!)
A cautionary tale not to ignore a security alert concerning an exploit in old
Pivotx versions. Luckily I did have a current site backup available to run an upgrade and re-load onto my hosting provider.
Thanks to an eagle eyed friend the hacked site wasn't up for to long. Must remember to keep the site updated lest it get completely out of date.
Sigh.
At least it was a good excuse to update the engine and I can now have a bit of a poke around under the hood to see what new features are available.
More posts to come
Update - looks like some people from Turkey are being quite persistant (Turk Telekom 78.180.200.23 & 88.230.162.213) - we'll see if the newly patched
Pivotx can hold-up.
Update - More hits from Turkey - must be hitting that Pivotx exploit (Turk Telekom 95.14.203.223 & Vodafone Turkey 3g Ip Pools 46.155.122.115).
