The last week I have been up to something completely non-technical. The summer is around the corner and the house needs a terrace.

In case your wondering. The time stamps shown for blog entries seem to be always wrong. I've written this at 8:20 CEST (i.e. UTC + 2). But the time shown on the web site is one hour off. Maybe the website is still on winter time?

Yesterday the new PCs arrrived. I sat mine up and left it yesterday evening copying my data to from the old to the new system. This morning I was greeted with a blue screen stating

Today was rather successful. After a long, strenuous discussion with my boss, he approved purchasing new PCs for my team.  And our system QA gets some necessary hardware replacements, too.

And we will setup the systems by ourselves, of course...

www.dilbert.com

... to use Windows Vista instead of any older Windows version, then it's this one:

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) data shows that the infection rate for Windows Vista–based computers is 60.5 percent less than that of computers running Windows XP SP2, and 91.5 percent less than the infection rate for Windows XP with no service packs installed.

From the MS Security Intelligence Report July-December 2007. The numbers are normalized, i.e. they take the different number of installations of each OS into account. They are even more impressive when you consider that the number of PCs running Windows Vista has increased by millions during the last two years. I'm pretty sure that this is mainly because per default users on Windows Vista aren't administrators. Most of today's malware assumes that the user has administrative rights. You should read the whole...

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Did you know? You now can embed Dilbert comic strips in your blog.

www.dilbert.com

And there are a lot more goodies. Like animated Dilbert comics, a big archive including every strip since 2001. And finally they have an official RSS feed for the daily comic.

It's an old issue, but it came up again in the forum today. For future reference I post it here, too. Per default SwyxIt! enables application sharing so that you can share your desktop or an application with another SwyxIt! user with a few mouse clicks. SwyxIt! uses Microsoft Netmeeting for this feature. When Netmeeting starts the whole screen flickers or, depending on the speed of your graphic hardware goes black for a short time.

XKCD is one of the best online comics. Check it out :-)

And btw, how do you know that you have a rather cheap GPS? Look here.

Hint: Hover you mouse over a xkcd comic and read the tool tip.

Newsflash: Swyx has secret plans for the new training sessions when SwyxWare 7.0 will be released by the end of this year. This video has been found on the desk of the Training Planning Manager (TPM) at Swyx. See you in Dortmund in the end of the year.

No Internet in South Park:

While the US economy is sliding into recession and the rest of the world is trying to figure out what is going on, this video explains a lot. BTW, this is not a joke.

Yet another week is history. It is Friday and I want to share with you what I have been up to this week.

SwyxIt! setup is a standard Windows Installer MSI package and can be deployed with any method which supports Windows Installer. SwyxIt! manual describes in section 9.3.3 how to do an unattended installation using command-line parameters. When you want to deploy SwyxIt via an Active Directory Group Policy object instead you need a Windows Installer Transformation (MST) to customize the setup.

Last year Larry Osterman, Microsoft "Veteran" who started working there in 1984, had a series of blog entries about craplets, small, helper

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It all boils down to your preferences, but Mozart performing on his own piano for classical music lovers or Ridley Scott lecturing about Blade Runner if you are crazy about sci-fi movies, would be moments to take your breath away. On Saturday 12th of April almost 1600 people had such a moment in Oslo.

Reminder to myself. Be more careful with green curry paste. It's really, really spicy.

But my wife would probably say that it would have made me a liar. Anyway, you judge if this is a progress or not.

Have a nice weekend everyone, and easy on the fastfood.

Can you imagine that a nine-year-old taking the subway home makes the news?

If you do love Star Trek and Monty Python this is what you want to see !

That's the headline of a story in the online version of The New York Times . Bottom line is that

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If you are a frequent reader of the forum, you have noticed that from time to time there will be posts about SIP Trunking. We often then ask the poster if the provider is tested by Swyx. This is not just something we say because we can't help...

Since I am working with Hosted SwyxWare I subscribe to a newsletter from Parallells, the developer behind the server virtualization product Virtuozzo. This morning I had a fresh newsletter in my inbox.

A student in Michigan has a rather unusual hobby.

Jean Michel Jarre has a video blog on YouTube from the Oxygène Tour. If you like this kind of music, check it out.

Jean Michel Jarre YouTube Video Bog

To improve the Swyx-experience in my office, a new attraction is taking shape.

Tom showed a view from his office window. This is the view from my office:

It get's bettergreener in the summer

I just wanted to share the current view from my office window with you.

SwyxWare v7.0 is supposed to support voice data encryption. Today we had a discussion about if and how to show a SwyxIt! user if the audio data is encrypted or not. We plan three modes of operation an administrator can choose for a SwyxWare installation: Forbid encryption, let client decide and only allow encrypted connections.

Yesterday I found a weblog written by a man walking home. What's interesting about that?

Martins blog article, Klaatu Barada Nikto , mentioning the Theremin make me think of a big event happening in Oslo in just one week.

I went shopping yesterday to get some CDs. Yes, I'm old-fashioned and still buy music CDs. Fortunately jazz music is mostly sold without copy protection. Otherwise I wouldn't spend a cent for it. I rip all my CDs and store them on my Windows Vista Mediacenter PC. That's much more comfortable then juggling with CDs. And I can easily put them onto my MP3 player. Maybe I'm not so old-fashioned after all. While in the store I had a look through the DVD section and found this one:

Want to impress a mother and her baby? Here is the German way...

Per Default Windows Live Writer can only insert arbitrary images. Today I found this plugin from Rahul Soni who works at Microsoft:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rahulso/archive/2008/02/17/smiley-plugin-2-0-for-windows-live-writer-wlw.aspx

It offers a new "Insert" option:



Per default you can insert smileys from MSN and Yahoo. And you can define custom smileys, too. I've used that feature to use the smileys stored on this website:

...

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Have you ever wondered how to do workouts in the office ? Well, there is an American company selling the Hawaii-Chair.

This is more a reminder for myself than a useful blog post. If you have a .NET application which seem to ignore its app.config file when running on Windows Server 2003, it could be this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2006/08/09/692996.aspx

QA today found this problem while testing Swyx Trace Tool.

This year's 1st of April was again, like every year, filled with lots of nice fools in newspapers, websites, tv shows, a.s.o.

Martin blogged about a fool "Adaptive Personal Response Inference Layer" in the German computer magazine c't.

Usually we have funny blog posts on Fridays to start the weekend. But this one can't wait till Friday :-D

When you installed SwyxWare v6.10 or later you might have recognized a new service called SwyxReporting:



It's disabled per default except you install SwyxWare as hosted version. In a hosted scenario SwyxWare uses a different licensing model which is based on feature usage. For each SwyxWare instance the configured users are counted together with the associated feature profiles. The data is kept in a separate database. Once per month an email report is generated which goes to the service provider who hosts SwyxWare and to Swyx. We use the reports to calculate the monthly license fees.

Querying the hosted SwyxWare instances is done by SwyxReporting service which runs...

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After years of "beta" versions (0.9x) the first v1.0 has finally been released !

Last weekend I'd configured a new test machine at home and figured an interesting bug-chain. I was also able to reproduce it yesterday in the Swyx QA lab. Under special circumstances it is possible to use the GSE "Send Email" block to sent an Email to more or less the entire world. I guess that's the wet dream of every spammer (and I sincerely hope they don't read this article).

You don't believe it ? Read this article...

If you read my blog post, Stream me up, Scotty , you already know that we have looked into the possibilities of streaming. Here is the result.