Friday, May 29, 2009

A little tip for the Road Warrior

Off topic but relevant to travelling consultants/trainers ;-) The World Electric Guide contains an Electric Power guide that I check each time I’m delivering Voice Ignite’s and/or UC R2 Boot Camps in a new country. It is simple to use and contains images of different adaptors/outlets for each country. At the main page you will also find guides for International dialing, Internet roaming and much more ;-)

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Live Mesh Logs

If you are using Live Mesh, you may want to dig deeper into what it is really doing. To do so, I just found some interesting log files.

Mesh has a trace/activity log placed in C:\users\*\appdata\local\microsoft\live mesh\gacbase\Moe-*-*-*-YYYY-MM-DD-*.log. It seems to log quite a bit of information, so expect huge log files.

The file is a kind of CSV-file, but without headers. Luckily, Import-Csv in PowerShell V2 has a –header arguments, so you can decode the file using -

dir *.log | import-csv -header Date,Severity,Component,Number1,Number2,Number3,Message







As you can see, I have no clue as to what numbers 1 to 3 are for, but please comment, if you know.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Windows 7 RC on the Lenovo S10e

A bit off topic from our normal posts on msgoodies, but though I'd share this anyhow, as some folks might find it useful.

I've found the Lenovo S10e to be pretty much the perfect netbook for me when travelling. So naturally, once the Windows 7 Release Candidate became available, I went and installed that on the box.

Now, this poses a few challenges, as the only official Lenovo-supported OS for this machine is Windows XP Home Edition. Most things work straight off the bat, but one thing was missing - hotkey support.

Now, hotkeys actually work for some functions - volume & brightness, for example. But you do not get the ability to turn wireless and bluetooth on or off, and you don't get any OSD indicators of the actual hotkey actions. So this is really something you want working on the machine under Windows 7 RC

Couple of things you should know about the software for the S10e. There is no standalone hotkey application - this functionality is part of the energy management application / driver set.

Initially, I tried installing the XP energy management drivers / application, but no joy - didn't work. In some cases, it would work initially, but after a reboot, OSD functionality was lost.

After some digging around on the web, what I found was this: You want Lenovo's Energy Management application, version 3.1.5.2. Once you install this, hotkeys & OSD function as intended - also after rebooting the machine. Furthermore, it is a native Vista application, so you won't need to run it in any sort of compatibility mode.

Being a sucker for eye candy, I think the OSD display is also a lot nicer than the included XP version as well ;-)

So, where to find Lenovo Energy Management 3.1.5.2?

Go here: http://consumersupport.lenovo.com/en/DriversDownloads/drivers_show_678.html

Virtualization with OCS 2007 R2

Quick goodie - As expected/promised all roles except those handling Audio/Video are supported – read more at the Communications Server Team blog in the blog post Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Virtualization.