I’m a little bit sad that I saw this. Australia day is always about listening all day to find out what hits number one (then being outraged when it isn’t a song you like, having said that I like this song)

BTW i take no credit for the image or finding the leak, I am just sharing it, original at http://i49.tinypic.com/ab2zrk.jpg

I have been waiting for the ESM tools for Exchange 2010 to hopefully work with Exchange 2003 but that hasn’t happened either. Although I did find a really quick and easy solution this morning after reading the following posts on TechNet (Exchange System Manager for exchange 2003)

You will need to download the Exchange System Manager for Windows Vista then use something like WinRAR to extract the contents.

You will also need to make sure you already have the RSAT tools installed (Remote Server Admin Tools)

Finally open up a Command Prompt as Administrator. Browse to the directory that contains the ESMVISTA.MSI file. Run the following:

ESMVISTA.MSI /q

Once this is done you should be able to open the “Active Directory and Computers” and edit an Exchange User with all the required email tabs.

After searching through forums and mailing lists I was unable to find an answer so I started looking into mplayer itself. If i used mplayer on it’s own while Mythtv was running the same problem would occur. If I exited Mythtv then mplayer functioned perfectly. I found a possible idea from the Ubuntu forums whereby someone else was having slight playback issues (no mention of Mythtv though).

The problem appears to be with the audio driver mplayer tries to use. On my system it comes up with an error about pulse (that is something to fix some other time). To fix this I told mplayer to use ALSA instead, and it worked!!

So to fix with MythTV go into the Setup -> Media Settings -> Video Settings -> Player Settings then set Default Video Player to

mplayer -fs -zoom -ontop -ao alsa %s

Alternatively you could just add

-ao alsa

before the %s.

The upgrade the VMWare ESX 4.0 Update 1 ran smoothly and all hosts came back to life after the upgrade as they should. Installation of the client on Windows 7 was also painless, and best of all it actually worked.

To anyone from VMWare who may be watching, it would be nice if you had some form of announcements mailing list so we could be informed of these updates being made available.

At this time I wrote my own craptacular mashup called The Gob Shite, this site was a mashup of Google’s YouTube, Google’s News feeds and a new API of my own called the TrendEngine. TrendEngine was developed using Google Hot Trends information and provided some level of stability to the constantly changing trend list. It does this by detecting reoccuring trends in the list and applying a weighting formula to them.

TrendEngine currently operates from a private server written in PHP, I am currently converting this code to Java to run on Google’s App Engine. The new TrendEngine service will be publicly released shortly and will be listed up on ProgrammableWeb for all to use.

More information to come soon.

There are certain things that when it doesn’t work you wouldn’t be surprised. We all have that application that hasn’t been updated in years but we still need to use on a regular basis. I can somewhat understand why these things don’t work within a new operating system. But for something that gets updated on a regular basis to not work, that is a different story altogether and that really annoys me.

Given that some form of Windows 7 has been available to vendors for a long time it shows VMWare with a high level of contempt for it’s users. There is absolutely no excuse for there not to be an update to support Windows 7, especially considering there have been reports of it not working from early RC days.

The official response from VMWare (KB 1011329) is to just use a XP virtual machine. There is not even a mention on how long they will take to fix the issue.

Kiwi Si at Techhead has found a better workaround but still while this gets things working there should be a better option. We all pay a lot of money for VMWare and as such should deserve better treatment.

This release bring further customisation ability for those who need it. You can now take full control of how you want Custom Menu Links to operate, fully automatic integration or manual integration (modifying your theme for LJ Custom Menu Links).

Changes

• Fixed compatibility issues by adding the ability to disable the core wordpress override and manually add the LJ Custom Menu Links code to your theme

Wordpress Plugin Directory: LJ Custom Menu Links

I run 4gb of ram in my laptop so I though that I would go 64 bit (and get back that extra 600 or so mb of ram that gets stolen on 32bit machines). The initial install went well, including the install and subsequent windows update yielded a full set drivers for my machine (except the fingerprint sensor, for which Dell haven’t released a Windows 7 driver for yet either).

Everything started to fall apart when I needed to install the Cisco VPN Client. No deal, the Cisco VPN Client wont install on 64 bit windows installs. After some research I found that people were having success using the new XP Mode feature of Windows 7. XP Mode allows you to run an XP virtual machine on select hardware (needing CPU virtualization support). I quickly realised that this wouldn’t be very practical as you can only access the VPN resources from within the virtual machine (I also had limited success in actually getting the Cisco client installed in the XP Mode machine anyway).

So that was it. I need VPN access for my work, and 64 bit was getting in the way of that. Back to 32 bit I go. The installation ran just as smoothly as the 64 bit install, and once again with a full suite of drivers (still with the exception of the fingerprint reader, but that’s not a big loss).

It may be just me but the 32 bit installation even feels like it is performing better then the 64 bit installation, windows feel snappier to move around, open and close and the machine is quicker to boot as well as resume from hibernation. The question that I am left with is that we can run 32 bit applications on a 64 bit platform with wow (Windows on Windows) so why can’t there be a similar situation for drivers. I understand there would be a performance hit for doing this but with 64 bit being ultimately pushed as the way forward there needs to be a solution to allow legacy applications and devices to operate.

Changes

• Bugfix: Cron function had a bug which lead the the cron tasks not being performed

Wordpress Plugin Directory: LJ Longtail SEO

SUSE Studio allows you to build/create your own Linux distribution based on SUSE linux.

“Build an appliance — or your own custom Linux distro — with a few mouse clicks. Customize it to your heart’s content, and share it with the world!”

You can currently choose from one of many options available to create a OpenSUSE, SLES 10, SLED 10, SLES 11, or SLED 11 machine. You can create a custom boot menu with the option to upload your own image for bootsplash. Complete control over packages, ability to overlay files (this means you can inject scripts or your own program you are distributing) right into the machine.

Once you have completed creating your custom machine you can build it into a Live CD/DVD or a disk image (this can be DD’d onto a USB Stick or another for booting) or a VMWare Disk Image or a XEN Disk Image.

From here your SUSE Studio machine is just a quick download away, the machine I test built was just a 220MB download and on a 20mbit internet connection I was able to download my image at roughly 550kb/sec and took around 15 minutes.

This is a very well polished service and is currently still in beta. I can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next.