Category General

Earlier today I was faced with the biggest challenge of “Holy crap I haven’t written blogs in a million years… why? Because I hate powering on my ancient Win7VM to launch Microsoft LiveWriter” and don’t get me wrong, I *LOVE* Microsoft LiveWriter, I’ve found that to be hands down one of the best and most favoritest blog writing apps of all time. I mean it’s free, it’s WYSIWYG and all that jazz.  But sometimes, just sometimes I don’t want to launch my VM … Or I run into a very weird bug in Windows (it’s not LiveWriter’s fault, it’s more Microsofty Faulty!) so I figured I’d see what other amazing apps are available.   There are lots of really good ones, some for high cost some for low cost in the world of Blog writing apps and after many great responses from friends in the Twitter and Facebook-o-sphere… I bring you…. The WordPress OSX App! Let’s see how this goes!

So far one thing I’m NOT a fan of, is the inability to just copy/paste images from Clipboard.  The image below was my test case there… I had taken a screengrab of it within the tool and I cannot simply “insert” I needed to save it out to a file. It’s by no means the WORST thing in the world, but it’s midly annoying for those of us who have a tendency to manipulate MANY data points at a time, including lots and lots of images.

It is nice that it maintains a “word” count in the bottom corner while I’m writing the blog post so I can get a gauge of how crazy town my writing is going in the words department.

It doesn’t seem to import the current / active theme like LiveWriter does so I can see what things look like as I do it (when you have a black/grey theme like I do, your entire presentation can look drastically different when it comes to publishing… I’ll see if there is a way around that.

It has an interesting “Featured Image” option on the side which I’m giving a try, and handling of Tags and Categories seems pretty straight forward.

All-in though, it seems interesting, I’ll continue trying some other tools to see if they can provide as good or better of a solution of Windows Live Writer, this certainly is leaps and bounds above the benefit of the ‘native’ WordPress editor so there’s that at least.

If you have some favorite WordPress editors (For Mac / OSX) definitely make it known! I have a list of things to look into including OneNote plugin, MarsEdit, UlyssesApp, Blogo, and to finish reading this post; Best Blogging Apps For Mac Users: 2016 Edition

Now the real test … Will this publish or will it error out with some weird RPC error :)

Wow! New Version of TweetDeck! Lots of new Features! Lots to get used to, and some things to get annoyed by!

Firstly.. there is a new Icon! And to tell you the truth, I keep losing it in my application list! doh!  But once I get past that (Yes I keep trying to get past it) I am fine!

Many people are really intrigued by the “Facebook” integration, though that has been there since v0.22b, so I’m not really going to talk about it too much here! – Just to say you’ll end up seeing this:   which will show your friends status on Facebook below it! – You are limited to a single Facebook account (FYI :)) Oh, and part of that is the functionality to post to Twitter, Facebook or both!   Again, not a big deal to me – especially as I use the Facebook plugin app to auto-pull my tweets and update my status (To the semi-annoyance of my Facebook friends, but I use Twitter more formally anyway, so people need to get over that :))

On to Options! (re: Settings)

Look at some of these new settings!.. The big ones is really.. “Show preview information for short URLs” which looks something like this:

So, that is pretty cool, and yes I have that enabled so I can see what kind of content it will be! When you do click on the URL it will still launch via the ‘short’ URL meaning if it’s an Adjix, Bit.ly or other type of ‘tracking’ link, it’ll still get the tracking on it

Oh, and last but not least.. If you’ve ever heard me complain about the Resource Usage of TweetDeck, and how it will tend to eat up >1gb of ram on my system.  Well, it seems the memory leak is fixed (for the moment.. I’ll leave it on over night and see how much I rack up) but it’s been going pretty good to stay in the ~200mb range!

So, good luck out there on your upgrades – Upgrade now! I’ll continue to monitor my resources and more, and if I find out anything new that I’d really like to complain about.. I will :)

Wait, what’s this? I thought these tests were only available at the Prometric Testing Center!

Apparently I am wrong! and just by visiting this site, I’m able to take online tests at Prometric!

Infact, there’s even a whole list of other companies for online testing here as well :)

These exams (as far as I can tell) are Free so long as you pass it the first time! If you fail, it sits at $50.00 for the retake, so I suggest not failing :)

Don’t miss the bus! You have to enter by 9:00 am Pacific time on April 6th!

Get on the Bus is an 11-day learning odyssey across the United States aboard the Career Express bus. The Career Express will travel from Tampa to Los Angeles, ending at Tech·Ed 2009!

What exactly is this Bus?   It’s a contest of sorts, and yet it’s also an adventure all rolled up into one!    The Bus will be taking a tour of various locations, stopping to meet with individuals, organizations, user groups, authors and various meet-ups along the way before ending at TechEd 2009 (North America)

Get on the Bus winners join the Career Express in their city and accompany the Microsoft Learning crew as we stop to visit with the Microsoft Learning community along the way. We will blog, Twitter, video blog, and have a great time!

How to enter the contest

Step 1: Play the “Are You Certifiable?” online game and get a screen name. You’ll include this screen name in your entry. After you submit your entry, you can keep playing to try to get the highest score possible. You can play as many times as you’d like before 9 a.m. Pacific Time on April 6.

Play the online game: Are You Certifiable?

Step 2: Get creative and write an essay that strongly justifies why you should be selected to compete in Get on the Bus. Have a camera? In addition to your essay, you can submit a video to tell your story.

Step 3: Complete the entry form

Be sure to include your “Are You Certifiable?” screen name and the URL where we can review your essay (and video, if you have one). Remember, creativity counts! The deadline for entering is 9 a.m. Pacific Time, April 6, 2009.

Step 4: Get ready to pack your bags because you might Get On The Bus!

Enter today!

Learn more about Get on the Bus: Read the contest official rules

Here are the links you need to know in order to get everything you need from this!

In each Challenge, a panel of judges will review all eligible entries received and select up to five (5) finalists—based upon the following criteria:

35% Technical and certification knowledge as attested to by your “Are You Certifiable?” high score;

65% Passion and creativity as demonstrated in your essay

The judges, in their sole discretion, may award each entrant who submits an optional video up to ten (10) additional bonus points toward his or her overall score.

The decisions of these judges are final and binding. If we do not receive a sufficient number of entries meeting the entry requirements, we may, at our discretion, select fewer than five (5) finalists in each Challenge. In the event of a tie between any eligible entries, we will have an additional judge review each entrant’s Round 1 video, and break the tie based on the judging criteria set forth above.

Get On The Bus learning offer

THE MICROSOFT “GET ON THE BUS” CONTEST OFFICIAL RULES

How to Get on the Bus!

Get on the Bus!

Get on the Bus – YOU really can win!

Firstly, let me commend Beth Pariseau for this great article and interview with Fusion-io, including the deep-dive discussions with them!

Now that the formalities are out of the way… time to be not so nice ;)

I like the idea of the Fusion-io devices, I even mentioned them last June, so I’ll call it like it is!

What Fusion-io brings to the table is indeed a nice comprehensive solution to provide high-speed data access in a very small foot-print.  This is indeed a fact, I’m sure none of us will argue that they are indeed providing you to have very FAST storage operating in a distributed model, which works out perfectly in a one-off scenario in ways hard to even address!

The business challenges which Fusion-io solves is the difficulty of getting high-speed disk closer to very specific applications (such as grid-computing in ‘x’ number of boxes or OLTP) and it does a pretty good job of that, allowing me to insert their solution into my existing commodity servers!

However, for the one challenge this solution solves it still leaves all of the other pressing issues as this forces us into a distributed fashion, almost contradicting the consolidation efforts which Virtualization, FCoE and and Virtualized storage bring into the Datacenter.

So, I commend the effort, however the implementation of distribution not only increases my risk but it raises question of my scalability of this as a long-term viable implementation.   Here’s a top down list of challenges addressed and non-addressed with this implementation.

Infact, when you think about it, the Fusion-io introduction is a clear replacement for DAS in the current datacenter, but it lags so behind conventional (and even archaic) models of SAN implementations that it’d be hard-pressed for any Data Center or Enterprise Architect to use this in any extensive deployment with the lack of scalability, DR/BC sensitivity, HA application and short and long-term backup and archival.

On it’s own, it’s a challenge to see it last and take a significant portion of the Enterprise Storage market as a whole but as a niche player it is king.   With offerings like TMS – RAMSAN, the NetApp V-Series RAMSAN Bundle, and other SSD/EFD solutions premiered by the larger storage vendors this will not only continue to be an aggressive play in the future but will set a precedent of things to come.

It just goes to show, storage is dumb – It is how you use it and the intelligence into managing it which is the clear differentiator, and these differentiators will set the dogs apart from the wolves. (or lolcats if preferred)