January 11, 2010

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

November 29, 2009

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.

November 10, 2009

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.

October 6, 2009

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers

Came before the Apple video years ago, but worth having this up here too.

September 3, 2009

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.

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