Everybody be cool. I’ll take it from here.
I am building a PowerShell SnapIn (more on that in another), and decided it should have a proper Windows installer. Of course, at the time I decided this, I was at the Shoe. No matter. I pulled out my trusty laptop and added a WiX project to my snapIn solution. Next I added my files [...]
Halifax has plenty of coffee shops. Most every one of them offers free wireless internet access. When you think about it, this seems like a reasonable service to offer when your customers are willing to shell out five bucks for what is, essentially, a big glass of milk.
Unfortunately, Starbucks has recently partnered with Bell Canada [...]
I finally broke down and bought a Playstation 3. After one day of ownership, I have to say, I couldn’t be happier.
I bought the 40GB version, which lacks the media card reader and Playstation 2 emulation. Neither of those features was particularly important to me, so I couldn’t really justify an extra hundred bucks for [...]
Vista Service Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing and will be available in mid-March for most customers. I’m looking forward to testing it. I have not been able to find a comprehensive list of the issues addressed, but they are generally believed to be largely around performance and reliability. Of course, various updates over [...]
QGPM uses programmatic interfaces exposed by GPMC for various functions, including backup/restore and reporting on GPO settings. Primarily, these features are implemented in the QGPM service, but GPMC is also used on the client if you try to export a GPO from the live environment.
With SP1, Microsoft is removing GPMC from Vista. For the majority [...]
I was debugging a customer issue in QGPM today and came across the strangest problem. Part of the issue involved using a service account with minimum permissions, so I duly followed the steps to set this up. This is something I should do more of, as you will soon see.
Once I finished setting up [...]
Back in the old days, it was extremely common to buy software that just had a plain old version number. You know, "Windows 3.1", "WordPerfect 5", etc. If you got your hands on a beta copy of a piece of software it meant you were usually a highly-valued customer, a paid tester, or your brother-in-law [...]
On my product team we have been using the SCRUM methodology of software development for a while. For those of you not familiar with it, here is the oversimplified version…
Get a big list of all the things you want to do, prioritized by our customers (in our case by proxy via our product manager)
Estimate how many [...]
One of the other tracks I have been following at CanHEIT is on identity management. At Quest we care about this quite a bit. Our customers have obvious concerns about security and compliance, as well as significant costs associated with customer, employee, and partner identity.
It probably shouldn’t have surprised me that our institutions of higher [...]
I went to see Tim Bray talk at CanHEIT this morning. I really enjoyed the talk, though I missed the first two or three minutes as he seems to have started fifteen minutes before his scheduled time. I’ve never had a chance to see him speak before and I was not disappointed. I’ll try to [...]