Brent Rockwood

I will be attending the Canadian Higher Education and Information Technology conference at the University of Waterloo at the end of the month.  I’m very interested to learn more about the challenges faced by universities and public institutions in general around the issues of governance and regulatory compliance, configuration management, and identity management.  The smart [...]

From the Facebook help…
When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose.

Seriously.

I just finished reading an article on copyright by the always insightful Dare Obasanjo.  I have many friends in the film and music businesses and I often end up trying to explain my thoughts on the issue.  Here’s what I think…
I guess I have two issues, not with copyright per se (I am a software [...]

I’ve been reading the fantastic future perfect blog this morning and it’s got me thinking about my mobile essentials — i.e. the things I absolutely must have on my person when I leave home.  Most of the time these include keys, cash, wallet (credit/debit, id, business cards), USB key, and my cellphone.  Sometimes it includes my [...]

My hosted email at Google is down again.  This is the fourth time this month.  Growing pains?

I’ve got some old gear I’m trying to find a home for. First off, some high end CRT monitors which would be great for a graphic designer or anyone who cares more about colour accuracy than what an LCD can offer. Check them out on Craigslist at the link above if you’re in Halifax and interested. Also if [...]

Wired is running an article about the changing nature of big computing. It is no secret to most CTO’s that electricity and cooling are now the single largest costs in running a data center. By some estimates, Google and the other big search providers, for example, use up to 5GW to power and cool the [...]

I spent the weekend putting together this shiny new weblog. It was quite an experience. Two days of package installing, page designing, server configuring, code wrangling, error figuring goodness.
Inspiration
There were a few reasons why I decided to spend days of my precious free time on this project. First off, my DNS was on a server [...]

Gmail is down.  I just moved my brentrockwood.com addresses to Google Apps for Domains.  Stay calm.  Drink beer.  Hope for the best.

I turned on Vista’s BitLocker feature on my laptop last night.  First I started by doing a complete PC backup.  Then I turned on BitLocker.  It asked me to insert a USB drive (I don’t have a TPM, read my earlier article on how to enable this) to save the encryption key.  Then it asked me [...]