The Sikh Geek

Yesterday was the Trend Micro Birmingham Roadshow which was a 2 hour seminar followed by go-karting! What an excellent idea and who do you think was on the winning team? Yes, moi! This was a really well organised event with just enough sales and technical information to not bore you but give you just the relevant information. The Trend Team were relaxed and informal. As they say people buy from people!

The go-karting teams were a random selection of 3 per team and a total of 8 teams doing an endurance race, i.e. as many laps in 90 minutes as you could. The cars were electric driven and have twice the horsepower of petrol driven ones and 4 times the torque. That meant that if you pushed hard on the accelerator the backend would spin. My team mates were Matthew Riddle and Nick Roberts. We were about fifth for about half the race and then everything changed suddenly. Matthew who was a very unassuming fellow suddenly became a demon on the race track and put in some amazing laps and death defying overtaking moves and as he came to handover we were second! After that we didn’t look back and pretty much held the lead and yours truly brought us home for the win despite spinning twice on the final stages! I have to apologise to Celine Astre of Trend because I did crash into her at one point with quite some force, sorry! Lee Evans from the Yorkshire SBS Group won the prize for the fastest lap, nice one Lee! There are still some venues available so check out the Worryfreeway site.

Oh, and the Trend SMB solutions look kinda interesting as well!

I got the confirmation today that iQubed has become a Microsoft Certified Partner after successfully completing the Networking Infrastructure Competency. One of the great things about the SBSC Programme is the route it provides to partners for achieving Certified Partner status. Hopefully, this will allow us to serve our current customers and potential customers even better. I’m looking forward to that MSDN subscription!

CRN have an article stating that HP are sigining some large or as the report says “massive” Linux desktop orders! Yes, DESKTOP not SERVER! Apparently they are so happy that they might even start factory loading it. Hmmm, I wonder what Microsoft are going to think about this? I forgot Microsoft signed their own Linux agreement with Novell.

I managed to drag myself out last night to the Sharepoint User Group Meeting near Ullesthorpe in Leicestershire and boy was I glad. The US guys were in town namely Bill English and Todd Bleeker of Mindsharp who are Microsoft MVPs. Bill English is co-author with the Sharepoint Team of the Microsoft Press Book, “Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resources Kit”. Andrew Woodward showed an example of Excel Web Services where you publish Excel Spreadsheets to a Sharepoint 2007 site and a user can then intereact with that spreadsheet through a web interface and also show BI (Business Intelligence) through Excel reports. Nice!

Then the Americans came and the normally shy and retiring UK audience were forced to sit up and take notice. Bill talked about the decisions to be made when deploying Sharepoint and Todd demonstrated branding it. One of the things that Todd said was that AJAX was coming like a train and Sharepoint 2007 will be updated to make it work fully with ASP.NET AJAX sometime this year.

The more I see of Sharepoint, the more I feel this is a really key technology. The guy I was sitting next to was working at Credit Suisse deploying MOSS 2007 and the meeting had about 60 attendees all working just on Sharepoint. The event was organised by Steve Smith (Microsoft MVP) of Combined Knowledge which is based in Leicestershire.

I know there are some avid Star Wars fans out there so own up if you were the secret bidder who bought the original Obi Wan cloak for £56,000! If so are you going to wear it out, or will you film yourself for YouTube doing death defying light sabre moves wearing it ??!!

That’s what Miguel de Icaza wants in order to protect the future of web development and to ensure that WPF/E can compete effectively with technologies like Flash. He mentions OpenLaszlo which is a server side Flash generated application server (although it can target other things such as DHTML) and produces some fantastic rich browser client applications, so got check out the demos. Miguel has got an interesting point and personally I don’t think it will be that long before Microsoft starts to consider “Open Sourcing” certain stuff!

This secrecy clause that BECTA and Microsoft have signed regarding the costs of the deal just doesn’t seem right. Why? Because £615 million of public money was spent on ICT by Schools in 2005-06 and a conservative MP asked about the costs of Microsoft purchasing agreements and was told we can’t tell you becuase it’s commercial in confidence. That can’t be right, that an elected Member of Parliament can’t know where “our” money is being spent. If Microsoft is giving substantial discounts to Schools, then so what and good on them? However, what we all have a right to know is how much that is? What we need is more transparency and not less, otherwise the “Change the World, or go home” statements just don’t mean anything! I feel sorry for all those good people at Microsoft who do a great job at showing Microsoft is not just one big conspiracy and then get their good work undone with stories like this.

James has blogged about Longhorn Server and in particular the virtualisation available within it. He’s linked to a nice video of Longhorn Server which shows it running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v10, amongst other things. Virtualisation is a key technology and is not just for datacentres. I don’t know what the next version of SBS (codenamed ‘Cougar’) is going to be, but with Longhorn Server and Exchange Server 2007 as its core components, it’s going to give unparalleled capability to small businesses. I wonder if ‘Cougar’ will have the virtualisation technology built in? It’ll be a fantastic thing to have, so please Microsoft leave it in! The limitation on virtualisation is memory addressing and disk access speeds. It’s not processor speeds as the typical Intel CPU utilisation (across all Intel based workloads) is less than 5%! With new products from Microsoft moving to 64bit hardware only, then virtualisation for smaller businesses becomes a real possibility.

Yes, they do exist! The OSSL team have posted their first roundtable video discussion talking about their top five Open Source projects. It’s notable for me as two of the team are Sikhs!

Novell’s first quarter results for 2007 have been released and they show revenues are down from the previous year by 5% but Linux revenues for the quarter were $15 million, up 46% and invoicing was $91 million, up 659% year-over-year.

Novell has recently released its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v10 and is a supported platform by iQubed and also by Microsoft under their recent agreement. I’ve always preferred SUSE Linux over Redhat in the commercial Linux arena. The ease of management of SUSE Linux is way beyond Redhat’s, as many tasks can be completed via YAST (the GUI management interface). Also, SUSE was the first to move to the 2.6 Kernel and add support for Xen (virtualisation hypervisor technology). Microsoft and Novell are working on supporting each other’s OS on their respective virtualisation solutions. If you want a sneak preview of this work check out this post on Microsoft’s Port 25 Blog. Exciting stuff and I would bet part of my business on this strategy paying off! It’s something that I’m keen to have as part of my business strategy.