Planned upgrades this weekend

SLES 10 SP1 –> SP2 for both x86 and x64

How-to: http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=7000387

Local update: http://www.novell.com/support/documentLink.do?externalID=3065146

Release notes: http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/release-notes_sp2/release-notes_sp2.html

WordPress 2.6 is live; I just updated from 2.6 RC1 to 2.6 live here.

Download from http://wordpress.org/download/

Main highlights:

• post differencing
• support for Google Gears

There’s an offical blog post about it here: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/ - with a great video overview.

Hopefully these notes will be useful for others; based on my experience of last weeks Bridging course and exam from The Art of Service in Brisbane.

The Curriculum

• the curriculum is available from APM Group here
• I didn’t see any surprises in the exam - i.e. everything in the exam was described in the curriculum
• the focus of the exam is the differences from the ITIL v2 Managers exam.

Differences … but..

• the bridge does assume that you understand the ITIL v2 space pretty well - i.e. your managers is still fresh!
• you should read the five ITIL v3 books; there is a lot of contextual information that you really do need to understand.

After four days of cramming in Brisbane I ended up with five annoted ITIL books; five ‘books of notes’; each based on one of the phase books; a book of sample questions and exam-style questions; and finally a book of mind maps from The Art of Service.

For my own learning style the cross-referencing between the ‘bridge notes’ from The Art of Service and back to the books was really useful. It let me refer quickly from a concept - such as Portfolio Management, back to the relevent sections in the books.

Also useful is cross-referencing where the different roles and processes intersect. There is a lot of emphasis on the holistic lifecycle; also on the relationships between phases in the lifecycle. It’s not enough to try and map the v2 linear world onto the v3 map; I found it invaluable working with others to really understand the lifecycle and how it all fits.

Exam is done. Fingers crossed. Results in a week or so.

I’m in Brisbane – at the end of day one of my ITIL v3 Managers bridge course.

Phew. I’m tired. Just like the training for the v2 Managers Certificate last year (here, the exam here and results just before new year.)

The training and exam are for the ITIL v3 Managers Certificate. That gives me the ‘ITIL Expert’

The ‘ITIL Expert’ is the new description for the ITIL v3 Diploma; also an update on the Intermediate modules for the direct route – they are slowly being rolled out later this year and into 2009. I wouldn’t expect to see the Managing across Lifecycle until maybe March 2009.

The other interesting point is that the ‘Advanced Level’ in the diagram doesn’t exist yet.

I travelled wearing my black Ximian staff shirt; then I got stopped in the airport by a Gnome fanboy who told me that the Ximian Desktop rocked!

Now live:

http://wordpress.org/development/2007/12/wordpress-232/

Download from:

http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.3.2.zip
http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.3.2.tar.gz

Works well so far.

I’m in Provo for a couple of days - sitting on an ITIL v3 Foundation course.

The main reason - it’s a cheap and convenient way to sit the exam..

I can’t sit the electronic exam at Prometric in Utah until the New Year. If I was in London I could do it today. Strange how electronically delivered tests take so long to roll out.

Just a quick note; WordPress 2.3.1 adds support for WLW Keywords.

Some nomenclature changes - tags to keywords; but it works just great.

Here are the Keywords in WLW:

… and the corresponding tags in WordPress:

A long title for a short post.

The default agent deployment packages created during Primary Server installation are hard coded to the Fully Qualified DNS Name and the static IP address of your server. All well and good for a single server; but what about:

• DNS round robin
• servers behind static NAT
• etc

Here’s how to build a custom agent deployment package with either no server details (add them via registration at deployment time) or with a single DNS name.

 I’ve been hosting a family blog and photo site for a good friend for over a year.

They decided recently to ‘lock down’ the site and restrict access to both the blog and the photos to family and friends only.

I spent some of yesterday doing this.

I’ve extensively use WPG2 to integrate WordPress and Gallery2 - and I use the permissions and roles within Gallery2 to successfully limit access to pictures. The most striking example of this is with my sisters Cub Scout web site; non members can read blog posts; but not view pictures.

Securing the WordPress side was a little more tricky. Drupal has a very strong permissions module -especially useful for the anonymous user. Nothing like that for WordPress.

In the end I used the post-levels plugin from Filipe Fortes - it needed some SQL mungling to work with WordPress 2.3 - but the end results were pretty good.