Ok the video is the contents of the bag. It is complete with a lot of paper handouts and software, both trial and registered. The vendor list was not overwhelming like I was expecting, I am not sure if they limited vendors or not a lot of them wanted to show, but all in all there is already a LOT of information out there for Windows Server 2008.

Included in the vendor flyers was:

HP
AMD 
CommVault
IBM
ESRI - In the video I think I called them ERA, my apologies
MicroFocus
McAfee
Kingston Memory
Juniper
NEC
Qimonda
CodeProject - after looking at this again I am not sure that is Microsoft
EMC
Hitachi
Fujitsu
DellCisco System
Symantec
Autodesk
SAP
CitriX
Unisys
GP Anywhere
Quest Software
Foundry
BMC Software
Avanade
Sun Microsystems
RackSpace
InterOp Ability
Network Appliance
Seagate

That was all the flyers that came with the bag. I am going to make you suffer through the video to see the actual products that were handed out.

I would like to apologize for the "shakey" cam look of the video, it was done on my digital camera because I thought it would turn out better then with the web cam.

No idea why it choose that location for a screen grab. That is like half way into it

Ok I am happily running Windows Vista, with only one issue. On  my happy dappy laptop I can not run Aero. This might not sound like an issue but I am unable to run Windows Movie Maker on it. I recorded a video from my digital camera last night and with that I am not to post it to SoapBox because the file size is to large. With WIndows Movie Maker I can edit it and drop down the resolution and then upload it. Looking at the video right now and it is about 300MB for a 15 minute video direct from the camera. Well I will continue looking. It is hard getting a start in this new digital age.

Also some more about the Windows 2008 Launch Wave, I forgot to mention the after party, it was a little late but they had Bare Naked Ladies show up for the gig, that was pretty nifty as well.

Also in this very ADD post, Hyper-V again. I actually got to get more into it last yesterday after making the post, and it is smooth. The application support is a lot better for virtual applications, operating systems, and servers. You can now put a server on the same virtual machine as a workstation, and it will not steal the resources that you have allocated for it.

Now it is time to check out the demo from Quest Software on their exchange products for exchange server manager. Hopefully it will be as cool as nagios.

As for the video for this post it will be tonight, and for yesterdays post, soon I hope.

So I am here at the Microsoft Windows 2008 server launch event in LA. I thought I would just post a blog while I was here and everything is still LIVE (the event ends at six)

So the event started with a keynote speech from Steve Ballmer where he spoke about the vision for the future and some of the newer technologies being released and integrated with the three new environments that are being released today.

SQL Server 2008 - even though this product was delayed they are still trotting it out as a show pony. But it has a lot of new features like encrypting data on the fly.

Server 2008 - Just WOW. So far everything I have seen here, everything that I have tried to do has just worked, with one or two minor issues but that is part of the learning curve, I actually can not wait to install this when I get home tomorrow.

Visual Studios 2008 - Nice features added, including Split View (code + app view), team interrogation so if one person makes an update to part of the project everyone gets the notification for it.

Yeah, I have my Microsoft goggles on right now, but what can I say, I am a Microsoft Whore.

Some of the other items that were not mentioned as much but are just as big at this event are:

Expressions - This is a tool to help with making Silverlight projects. It gives a nice GUI interface so that you are not re-arranging code around by hand. It also allows for better control of the canvas in Silverlight.

Hyper-V This one actually makes me the most giddy. I currently am a fan of virtual servers, a bigger fan then I let me guys or even my dearest know, and I love all the possibities that I have seen with this in general, now I have not done a lot of research on Hyper-V myself, and the lab I was at broke. But it actually looks like it will be a serious competitor for VMWare with all the basic features of the current Virtual Server 2005. I am giddy to be here, and I hope that I can make all this last.

So WOW in general. I should take a video of this and post it. I will debate it. so maybe a video later, of atleast something.

Microsoft hopes so. In recent announcements and site redesigns, Microsoft has been updating their web site to use Silverlight to enhance their web site and user experiences. This isn't about numbers or

Ok so I do want to redo my photo gallery, and I would like to make it flashier and prettier and smoother. After doing the quick and ugly thing that I just did to get it to display, I think I might have found what I would want to do. I think I want to make the photo gallery in SilverLight, or find one that I can hack up to suit my wants. I think that might be the easier option. There are only a couple of questions that I do not have an answer to yet.

1. what will people on linux/mac do?
2. should I code two different picture pages for each?
3. Does it work with Visual Studio Web Express?
4. Do I have to install Web Expression?

I have just started looking at this, it turns out I am having some issues with my development site on Windows Server 2008. I need to resolve those first. But for the moment I think I will just use Visual Studios 2008 to do it instead of VS Web Express.

Ok I did some minor house keeping with the site. I moved the Blog to /blog and I will be making the changes from there. The reasoning behind this is after doing some tweaks, adjustments and playing around, I was not able to get the photos into a nicely displayable format on the web page. So I will just use both systems and make my site use the database for storage.

I also added ustream.tv as a live video of me. This will not always be on and I will not always be broadcasting. But if I am broadcasting, feel free to ask a question and I will try to answer it.

I do most of my slacking work from my laptop, so I tend to not to much. I recently found out how under powered this laptop actually is. I think it might be time to start saving my pennies for a new one, maybe something with a Core Duo just for the amount of stuff I have been doing. The new video section, and console for it, are flash, that is more resource intensive then I had though. Then there is the simple fact that I want to have Aero with it. I am a slave to eye candy is part of it, the other part is that I want the GUI features that aero has as well. So I have been making a list of the features that the laptop should have.

• Bluetooth - I actually use this
• Wireless   - This is standard on laptops now but at least G
• Camera    - This is still optional but would be nice to have
• Aero Support - This is a MUST
• higher resolution - would like a 15.4 with 1440x900

I like Toshiba's laptops a lot, and for the record all major manufactures have the same features, I just developed a loyalty for the Toshiba brand early, the first laptop I ever used was by Toshiba, it was a 486DX 66 with a build in modem and ran Windows 3.11/DOS 6.22

Ok I think I have ranted long enough.

No video post this time, trying the live thing more and want to get comfortable with that as well.

Well I tried a couple of "quick" hacks to Blog Engine.NET to get it to pull my photos from my old site to this one. It looks like I might have to change the setup for the blog engine, put it in its own sub directory, and put the old one in another sub directory, then cross link them. This is not the method I wanted to go, but own well.

I guess I will keep working at it though. I mean I was able to find the information from the old site, but I need to convert it to C# to work with this project, or create a new way to pull the data from the database. I think I might go with writing parts of it from scratch and using the databases. This does kind of kill the idea of making the code portable, at least for me. Let me state that I am not some uber coder or programmer. At best I am a good system administrator. That is why this is  a hobby and a personal site.

Also if anyone knows a asp.net 2.0 photo gallery software that can work with blog engine, let me know.

If I do get a photo gallery or picture plug-in to work, I will post it here.

Another item of interest, I have been recording my weekly team meetings on my web cam. I have run into my first issue, this last week's meeting was about an hour long, the video file size came out to be around 360MB. This doesn't sound like much, and on a local network it isn't, but I need to have the files sent to another country and they are on a slower speed.
I have tried to convert the file to other video formats in hopes of lowering the file size with no luck, on a couple it actually grew in size.
The other option, that I am working on, is to break the on file into smaller parts. I have no experience with video editing so this is a new realm for me. I am however trying to do this with Windows Movie Maker, and it doesn't run on my laptop. But if anyone knows a better way, give me a shout.

So the question is how to get a massive amount of users on to an email system that does not break.

The problems were

1. they already have existing data that they need to keep
2. they were on Qmail Toaster 
3. must have a web front end (for some users not all)

So in keeping with those requirements we decided to try to farm qmail-toaster.

The idea was to use a Foundry load balancer for the incoming mail connections that would delegate them out to the independent email servers.

The email servers themselves would have a shared back end mounted to the maildir, in this case /home/vpopmail and this would be done via a NetApp. Sadly the iSCSI implementation for Linux sucks so the only option would be NFS, on a private gigE network.

Also since qmail-toaster requires MySQL, the idea is to break that service as well. This would also make sure that when someone logs into any of the servers to get their email that they would be authenticated correctly.

By breaking some of the base services off to other servers it would make it so that everything would have shared resources across the farm. By breaking off the web services, we would be able to have two separate types of web mail, a new slicker interface, RoundCube, or the current qmail-toaster web interface. This makes sense when you take the thought that some people fear change and would complain if you changed their interface without warning.

  To the left is the mockup that was done for this layout. It should help with some of the basic information. The full image is here

I would like to state that you are on your own for trying to implement this. I do not claim anything here will work, it is just a conceptual mock-up to get a basic idea. We might implement this and we might not. It could fail miserably because of the spam filtering/anti-virus. There are many details to this that have not been touched on, so if you try it and it doesn't work do not blame me.

And the video

So let me start by saying that there is nothing special about me, I state some information about me on the professional side, but not to much.

Some things I will not mention:

• the company I work for
• my woman's name
• my kid's name
• my personal details like if something is wrong
• Aliases are ok to mention
• Friends REAL names

What I will try to mention, with photos/videos

• technology
• hardware hacks
• software that I like
• reviews (good or bad)

Now I do not have any sponsors for anything that I do, this means that everything I do comes out of my pocket and I am not planing on changing how this works, it gives me a totally unbiased opinion of anything that I do.

An example, I really like the Microsoft Windows Live Writer for doing blog posts. It needs some work with embedding video posts, but other then that it works great on Blog Engine and Community Server. I have not tried it on anything else, but I like how it has spell check, simple linking and tools around for everything.

Ok I have stalled long enough and my post is not up on SoapBox 

It says the video is not found at the moment, hopefully it gave me the right link and it will update shortly.

Also I am not sure if I like doing it all on the front page, or if I like the more... option better.

I got a web cam and it works well now.I had vista on my laptop, and the camera would not work for anything on it. Nothing I tried got this damned thing to work.

Just so you know, it is vista certified.

I did get it to work on Vista on my desktop, my workstation, and on the XP side of my laptop so the camera did work physically. I ended up reinstalling my laptop with Vista and it worked after that. It does take a nice video at some interesting resolutions.

First try at a video post

Ok so I had to sign up for to get a site to host my video, when I tried to do embed the video here it got all kind of funky in Windows Live Writer

Ok so I think I got it, but the Windows Live Writer is giving me a bunch of errors, It doesn't like my "Image"

I will go ahead and give this one more try later. But for now, I am going to post this.

---UPDATE----

I switched it to the SoapBox  and will just have to wait the 30 minutes or so for the video to go live.

Side Note - My hands are NOT that big