Monday, September 28, 2009

SCCM Guides

I've been messing around with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) for work and I just wanted to point to these great tutorials at windows-noob.com.  Also this screencast was a good starting point as well.

I used virtual machines for my setup. Active Directory / DNS / DHCP servers are required for SCCM. Run them in their own virtual machine, away from SCCM to avoid headaches!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Phoenix Instant Boot BIOS video

 

 

via engadget

A good list of reasons not to have an always active update daemon.

 

Here are a few reasons why an always-active daemon (software speak for a tiny app that runs in the background) for handling software updates is a bad idea:

  1. It opens up an always-on tunnel to Google. While Google may be confident its update servers will never be compromised, how confident are you? If a third party gains control of that server, it can inject nearly any code it wants into your machine.
  2. It’s always on, always looking for update. On an expensive, pay-by-the-megabyte EVDO network? Google Updater doesn’t care and will suck down any available updates without asking, costing you money.
  3. Google updates Google Earth or Picasa or Gtalk, but the update ends up having a bug that wipes data from your drive. Sorry, too late — the auto-updater already grabbed the latest version without asking. Kiss your data goodbye.
  4. Administering a large network that needs to be locked down and tightly controlled? Cross Google software off your list. All the above problems apply, but they’re cascaded across your network for added headaches.

via Why Google’s Software Update Tool Is Evil | Epicenter | Wired.com

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

This is a test

Just testing to see how long it takes for this post to show up in friendfeed.

Update: Took about 8 minutes for the item to show up. Thats not real time… though a wiki says its 95% done.

Friday, September 11, 2009

On tornado

Started playing with the tornado library released by facebook recently and it seems you cannot run tornado on windows. The framework seems to use fcntl which only works on Unix platforms.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Python on snow leopard

Seems snow leopard comes with two version of Python. Python 2.6 and Python 2.5. Python 2.6.1 seems to be running in 64 bit mode by default. When I try to import wxPython I get the following:

ImportError: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/wx-2.8-mac-unicode/wx/_core_.so: no appropriate 64-bit architecture (see "man python" for running in 32-bit mode)

I need to have the 32 bit version of python execute. One of the methods listed in the man page is:
export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

Adding this to my .profile leads to the 32 bit version of Python running which loads wxPython just fine.


Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...