A few weekends ago I picked up the looqs Meebox from Novatech. I would link to the looqs site, but as of the time of writing it's currently unavailable because they've not renewed the domain (edit: this is now resolved). TL;DR: The meebox is cheap because it's cheap. Runs an old Linux kernel, given time could probably get your own/other distros running, but I called it a day due to (lack of) hardware performance, the likelihood of not increasing its performance with custom “firmware”, and the fact that the vendor site wasn't available to dismantle a firmware update file at the time.

I've been the happy owner of a Gigabyte GA-HA65M-UD3H-B3 for a little while, however any drives connected to the Marvell 88SE9172 chipset have never been recognised. Turns out that the standard AHCI driver supports it just fine; it just doesn't know the vendor and product PCI identifiers. Simple fix is to teach the kernel about them post-boot; /bin/echo 1b4b 9192 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ahci/new_id This basically tells the AHCI driver to load itself for the vendor (1b4b) and product (9192) ID.

The majority of IT workers are aware of Steve Ballmer's “developers, developers, developers” incantation from 2006. Earlier this year Ballmer performed a repeatof Microsoft's modern day rain dance at BUILD 2011. Due to this philosophy Microsoft have produced some pretty nice tools for developers and designers. I'm told (admittedly by a more Microsoft orientated HCIdesigner) that XAML is the dogs bollocks. I don't really mix with many other UI or HCI designers, so that maybe very biased and it's out of the scope of things I'm interested in.

I'm openly paranoid about many things. Probably a secondary reason I'm basically bald at 25. The future of my profession is one I'm very paranoid about. It's one I love, despite all my moanings, and as the world starts it's seemingly inexorable move back to the mainframe^Wcloud, I fear that as time progresses we'll be in a world where there are few of us outside of large cloud companies. How much longer is on-premises server hardware still required?

I know that the content of this entry is common knowledge among certain circles, especially after an email to van Hauser of The Hackers Choice(THC), and some time spent this afternoon checking out a few mailing lists. However this is not who I'm aiming this post at. Or that's what I'm telling myself so that I don't feel like I've wasted a few hours of my life over the course of 2 days.

Whilst it's possible to get Debian, and by proxy Ubuntu, running under Hyper-V it's nice to see that Microsoft are potentiallygoing to officially support them along side CentOS, Red Hat and SuSE. As someone who is running Debian and Ubuntu under Hyper-V I would heartily welcome this official support. Sadly I suspect that if Gupta really does represent Microsoft's view, then the odds of getting on the official list is probably going to be quite low; "Gupta says Microsoft is drawing the line at ‘touching’ the Linux code.

Unfortunately this isn't one of those success stores. But then again if I wrote about those I'd be hitting a few thousand posts a year, and plus they're really boring to write about. We began the project by powering up some virtual machines and test importing the configuration from ISA 2006 to Forefront TMG 2010, and all appeared fine. The ruleset was there, the VPN configurations were there, and so on.

A little less than a month ago Patrick from Red-Track online marketingcontacted me and wanted to know if I'd be interested in reviewing a TrainSignaltraining DVD, specifically one about Exchange 2010. If you want the final word on the quality of the training head straight to the final paragraph, otherwise strap in; This is a long post. I'll have to be honest, I had never heard of TrainSignal until that point, and I was wondering if it was a bit of a scam.

All in all for the last 5 years I've worked exclusively from home, and prior to that it was on and off depending on circumstances, and so on. During this time I've often been asked the same sort of questions over and over again;"Is it lonely?“"How hard is it to motivate yourself? I don't think I could get stuff done!“The first question I can understand. Sometimes you do need to see someone else, physically there in front of you, but to be frank, I've never been a great social animal, which probably helps massively.

It's been a while since I've played EVE, but one of the issues even since the beta was that certain systems were laggy. Jita springs to mind. To combat it as much as possible the EVE team have used some cooland interestingtech over the years, but earlier today they announcedwhat might be the biggest change in their hardware (that I've noticed). Being a massive nerd it's an interesting read, especially with further promises on more information.