Archive for January, 2010

Just a quick reminder for those folks who live north of the border… After a successful meeting late last year in Edinburgh – the next Scottish User Group will be in Glasgow on the 21st Jan. I will be speaking – quite informally – doing a round-up of virtualization news since our last meeting:

http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/invites/Scottish_1-21-10.html

Let me take sometime out to introduce you to pal of mine – Jay Rogers. I first met Jay at the North Carolina User Summit a couple of years back. We kept in touch by email – and bump into each other at the VMworld Events. Jay’s a really good contact of mine – as he has bit more contact with the real world experiences of VMware than my position sometimes allows. Anyway, Jay has been upgrading to VS4 U1 (that’s vSphere4 U1 btw). What interested me about Jay’s upgrade experiences – was his move to the 64-bit build – something which I have yet to get my hands down and dirty on. You can learn more about Jay’s experiences on his blog here:

http://virtual-jay.blogspot.com/2009/12/vcenter-4-upgrade-success.html

During the Xmas break I was rather stupidly changing tracks on iPOD 160GB classic whilst on a cross-trainer at the gym. Unfortunately, the pod took a tumble was never the same again – it kept on ticking loudly like clock, and wouldn’t sync. Clearly, the disk was shafted – that’s a technical term!

So I took it to my local apple reseller who told me that as it was out of its 1 year warranty (my warranty wasn’t reset the last time this happened – it might add by no fault of my own) – it was classed as unworthy of repair. I did look into repairing it myself – but all the online guides on how to do this were for very old iPODs.  So I decided not to take the risk and get it repaired by a 3rd party in the UK.

I selected – http://www.ukipodrepairs.co.uk/

I would have to say it was a very simple, easy and quick process – the turn around on the fix was very quick and I was very impressed by the work done. I won’t be making the same mistake twice. It turns out the new gym equipment has USB slot which will take thumbstick with MP3′s on it. I’ll be taking it instead of my iPOD in future!

The cute thing about the repair – is the company leaves a little song on your ipod all about its repair. It’s in the style of X-Factor ballad – a long the lines of the “Winner’s Song”. It made me and Carmel laugh anyway.

iPOD Repair Song

Well, were days into 2010 and already the rumour mill is turning – with blogsphere alight with speculation that VMware maybe acquiring Yahoo Zimbra technology.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100104/exclusive-vmware-likely-to-buy-zimbra-from-yahoo/

Quite what VMware would do with Zimbra is unclear with one source claiming that VMware Exec want to “expand up the stack”…