Studybug
My Windows 7 configuration book has arrived, time to begin studying and my path to Windows 7 certification, and also my MCITP (Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional) in Enterprise Server 2008 Administration!
Certs get me more money!
ITIL V3 Foundation Course
Today I got the results of my exam for the ITIL V3 Foundation course, and I passed. It’s not something I still totally understand, and I think that’s what most of my co-workers are like as well. Given that we had 5 books of information rammed into our heads over 2 and a half days, followed by an exam was a hard feat. ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library.
ITIL is valuable in my career, but I think I’m going to need to read into it more. I managed 70% on the course, but if you don’t know what ITIL is, then here is an extract from Wikipedia.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology (IT) services (ITSM), IT development and IT operations.
ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library
New files not displaying in XBOX 360 folder browsing
If you’ve come to this page, it’s because you’ve hit a problem streaming media on your xbox 360.
I already racked my brains for a week trying to work out what was wrong, fiddling with permissions, rebooting several times and still nothing. Well stop worrying about the sharing and permissions on your folders, because there’s nothing wrong with them.
I’ll assume that you’re running Windows 7, or possibly Vista. If you’re on XP it’s time to upgrade yourself to Windows 7, why? Because it will rock your damn socks off. But enough of that, I’ll also assume that you’re sharing your videos and music to your XBOX 360 through Windows Media Player.
What’s wrong is that the Windows Media Library has gone corrupt, generally this will happen on Vista and Windows 7, and here is how to fix it.
Go to task manager and stop the processes:
- wmplayer.exe
- wmpnscfg.exe
- WMPnetwk.exe
Close Internet Explorer and Windows Media Center, any software that has a Winodws Media Player plugin, and Windows Media Player 12 if you’ve got it open.
Browse too – C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft
Rename the “Media Player” folder to “Media Player.old”.
Start Media Player 12 and a default library is made. Add media files again and it will index the files again and show on the xbox 360.
LightsOut – Computer power management
I’m going to try out this piece of software, apparently it works very well. Especially for those with home networks and home/media servers. Made by Germans, so I’ll see how it goes on my desktop.
from the LightsOut Website.
LightsOut – The name says it all.
This Add-In is used to put a Windows Home Server into suspended mode or hibernation and resume on user defined events.
Description
To go to sleep, you can choose from several methods:
- On demand, when no more clients are active
- Based on a calendar, as a single action or repeated each weekday
- Or as a combination of both methods
You can define times, where the server has to be up and running:
- Using the calendar
- Based on the defined backup time
Wake up
A suspended or hibernated server can be resumed using a calendar event.
You can also install a small application on your client machines to wake up your server when needed.
Additional functionality
The Add-In visualizes the uptime of your client machines, your server and the backup time. So you can easily identify the
machine which puts the server into sleep.
Data integrity
To reduce the risk of data loss, the server is never put into sleep during an active backup operation or a backup cleanup.
You can define services, which are stopped on suspend and restarted after resume. The DriveExtenderMigrator always belongs to this list of services. Additional services like a mail server can be added.
Download from LightsOut: http://www.axonet.de/whs/LightsOutInstaller0.8.2.235.msi
Update: This only works on Windows Home Server, it does not work on a desktop operating system, XP, Vista or Windows 7.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers
Came before the Apple video years ago, but worth having this up here too.
Get your Veyron
This morning I saw something I wanted to see for a long time in driving games, some actual supercars. Forza 3 for XBOX 360 will finally feature one of the worlds fastest road cars.
Forza Motorsport 3 developer Turn 10 Studios has decided to share some exclusive video footage with Autoblog (and our sister site Joystiq) that features one of our favorite cars: the Bugatti Veyron. When the game is released, you’ll be able to take the wheel of the world’s most expensive ‘bug’ without having to drop $1.6 million large. And of course, you’ll get to customize it all you like. Take that, Sang Bleu…
Said Turn 10 head Dan Greenawalt, “Including the Veyron allows our fans and community to experience one of the world’s rarest supercars at an unparalleled level of realism. Few people will ever get to see this car in person, let alone race or drive one, so the fact that we have it in Forza Motorsport 3 where it’s fully drivable, tunable, paintable and even damageable is a very exciting concept to us. We hope our community shares that passion and enthusiasm!”
Damaging the Veyron in the game wouldn’t be as bad as overcooking the real thing into the Armco, but we still recommend against it. However, having driven the thing twice, we can say that if you can get the actual Veyron to lay down rubber or drift through corners, then please give us a call – we have a trophy for you… Check out the video footage after the jump.
Windows 7 logon screen as your wallpaper
If you’re like me and think that pretty logon screen that Microsoft has placed in Windows 7 RC is worthy of a wallpaper, well here it is.
1920 x 1200 – Click to get the larger version
Life without walls
While I haven’t been blogging much on here, mainly due to having limited internet access. I have been blogging fairly often at work on our internal blog. Yeah, I know… an internal work blog? Well it’s more as a resource blog for the staff. So I’m always writing things up on that, of which I’ve had some posts lately that have been epic and informative. Also that we push out the Blog out via RSS feeds into Staffs Outlook mailbox. Which in itself is really cool.
I’ve been thinking of doing something lately that I guess you could call Personal Development. I’m going to attempt to make some part of my life Microsoft.
So many people seem to bag Microsoft, and I still do these days. They aren’t that original with their ideas, and theres always some alternative to their products that someone else has made, and improved on. But I’m going to attempt this to see how and, if, it is possible. But I’ll be doing this on my laptop.
I’ve already gotten to the stage where I have installed Windows Vista Home Basic (after using Windows 7 beta for a while) back on my laptop, and Office 2007. I’ve got myself a Live.com.au account and I’m hoping this can all be linked together. Microsoft have a lot of products, but you don’t see their full potential until they are all knitted together. Next will come a home server to stream media to my Xbox 360 and then I will go from there.
What else is happening? Well I’m working my arse off, I’m pretty tired but theres a holiday break soon in which things will ease off. I’m waiting on my ADSL to be provisioned and then I’ll be a happy lad, applying for a personal loan to get some things done on the car, maybe a holiday, and a new computer. Trying to manage my money also, I’m hoping to be out of some debt soon!
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