HP aquired Novadigm.

Altiris acquired Previo, Computing Edge, Wise, FSLogic, Bridgewater Tonic and Pedestal.

Symantec have aquired Ghost, Powerquest and On Technologies.

Novell aquired Ximian and Tally Systems.

LANDesk was aquired by Avocent.

Microsoft aquired Softricity and Desktop Standard.

Now Symantec have spent again and announced the intent to acquire Altiris.

Ah - this takes me back ten years to 1997/1998 when I was training Intel LANDesk 2.52 and 6.x to customers.

I’m in Singapore and training about 20 partners and internal people. 4 of the training room machines have hardware failure. It seems that about 20% failure rate is normal; the other two Novell tracks are also seeing hardware problems at that rate.

As always - it’s the wear and tear of the training room regime - lots of uptime and rebuilds; as well as the additional shock of running in a high temperature, high humidity environment.

I remember training in Wymeswold with Netman and having 50% failures after a cold weekend - totally different problems.

I’m in Singapore at the Asia Pacific Partner Academy; we are training partners on the forthcoming ‘ZENworks Pulsar’ release. It’s just gone beta 1.

One question that came up:

How do I integrate ZENworks 7 with Active Directory?

Well - here are the links.

Here is a really cool article from Novell Connection Magazine; it’s from December 2004 and refers to ZENworks 6.5 - but the concepts are valid today.

Also take a look at the Novell Wiki.

Here is how to integrate the ZENworks Middle Tier with a Layer 4 switch; here are the Middle Tier Best Practices.

There have also been several BrainShare sessions on Windows only management. I’ll try and find the links to presentations.

My final two ‘missing’ Vista applications got fixed today.

Ping Plotter and Flash Video Studio.

I had a problem with Ping Plotter crashing on installation and startup; I emailed Pete Ness the author - he found a problem with a component interacting with DEP on Windows Vista.

Turns out that this fixed the Flash Video Studio crash too. I just added the two apps to the exclusion list.

Cool.

I’ll keep adding thumbnails to this page during the week.

28 Jan 2007

I’m always needing to check the integrity of ISOs and other large downloads; I use md5sum on Linux - and now a new tool on Windows.

digestIT 2004 is a free (beer not speech) tool for calculating the md5 and sha-1 checksums of files.

There is also an interesting project - the Antares Project - which seems to move the integrity checking game a lot further. FIPS-140-2 certification too. That’s interesting.

I’m in Singapore - it’s hot (28′C) and humid (90%)

Walking around this morning with Mark - and we saw a huge advertising display for the Vista launch; tied in nicely to the Chinese Lunar New Year.

More from Singapore later. Last time I was here was almost exactly four years ago.

A week late posting this - sorry.

For those that haven’t heard it - Pandora is an online music player - that plays music that you like and other music similar in style to it.

We’ve been wowed by it for over 15 months.

So late last week I read on the Pandora Blog that Tim - a founder of Pandora - was going to

be in SLC for a public ‘Town Hall Meeting’ - we decided to turn up.

I’ll let Grania add her comments too - but it was fascinating hearing about the business and the music side of Pandora; especially the level of detail, training and consistency of breaking down the genes of a piece of music. I think Grania was almost ready to move to Oakland, CA to train for the Classical analyst role.

Friday morning I got on a plane; Sunday morning I am in Singapore.

Where did Friday and Saturday go?

I asked for a feature; it got included in GLoSS 1.3.6.1 - I’m impressed.

I asked for the ability to turn off caching of bitmaps.

I got my feature; I paid the bounty.