Still Here, just spread about a bit

alistairl

My goodness, almost a year since I posted on my blog. What have I been doing? For one thing my inane chat and comments albeit briefly have been recorded on the currently more trendy Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps I’ve got a bit quieter and less inclined to waffle on about my life and work. Facebook with appropriate privacy settings seems more appropriate for delivering updates to those I know personally, and twitter has settled into brief broadcasts biased to work matters with a smattering of local and other mutterings.

Otherwise a big aspect of my non-work life has been losing weight – I’ve found a diet that works for me and although it appears to be strange on face value, I’m already 3 stones down in weight this year and sticking in to see how far I can go. It has greatly improved my quality of life, my knees don’t hurt like they used to and my motorcycle kit is looser on me and this makes a big difference to my comfort.

I’ll have a think about what more I can say and get back to you here!

Riding new BMW Motorcycles

alistairl

With it being summer in the UK, and the two BMW Motorcycle dealers in central Scotland being under new ownership is the wonderful idea called the “open day” when they set out a whole pile of things including food etc, but even better they arrange “demo rides” where you can come along and have shots on a whole number of new BMW motorcycles just by providing details of your (full motorcycle) driving license.

As a result of open days at Motorrad Central East and West, or as their websites call them now Motorrad Central Edinburgh and Glasgow, I’ve had a great opportunity to try out a whole load of different new BMWs this year. The thing about trying out motorcycles is it throws out all of your preconceptions about how you think a bike will ride when you look at it compared to out on the road.

I was at both weekends at both dealers a couple of months apart in Edinburgh first and Glasgow second and this it how it went:

Edinburgh

The Edinburgh weekend was first and I popped down on the Saturday – lovely warm dry weather was a great opportunity:

  1. BMW F 800 GS – I hadn’t ridden anything other than my R1100RS for about a year, in fact other than that I had only been on a 250 and 400 KTM Supermoto in recent history, and that was on a track. The F 800 felt very light, although the seat was a bit low for me. The engine was great, albeit a bit buzzier than I expected at higher revs. It had more suspension travel and felt a lot like a supermoto, in fact I stuck my foot out on the last roundabout – couldn’t help myself!
  2. BMW R 1200 GS – This was the bike I was here to try, but I had tried the smaller bike to get my confidence up to spec. This was a revelation – the off road styling led me to expect a big bouncy thing, but all i felt was a machine like my RS with more room and easier to steer. The handling felt just the same, the telelever feel was identical and the controls just fell in to place. I found that I had really bad turbulence off the screen though – my head was bashed about at motorway speeds.
  3. BMW R 1200 GS – I had another shot, but this time with the seat in the higher position and the screen lower. This gave me a bit more room, but talking later I discovered it was still the low seat, albeit in the high position. This felt really really good, no problem with fast or slow manoeuvring and very flickable.
  4. BMW R 1200 GSA – The last run of the day, and as I was about to go they put the standard seat on the normal position. This was a bit strange as I am used to my feet hitting the ground quicker – I could put my feet down flat, but the RS is so much lower. It took a bit of getting used to the extra weight, it was quite scary turning in and felt top heavy, was a bit bouncy in the country and I was still getting some turbulence from the screen. The seat felt really comfortable – the most comfortable bike I have ever ridden. I had big problems with the rear brake lever though – didn’t seem to be in the right place.

In summary, the standard GS was a revelation but the Adventure was a bit scary and big. Although the F 800 GS was nice, the R 1200 GS just felt like a more roomy flickable version of the RS – excellent.

I subsequently had a long discussion about the handling of the ESA equipped GSs and came to the conclusion that with my weight it would be better to adjust the preload to a higher setting – I hadn’t appreciated that this was set before going. I also discussed the brake and it might have been that I had the pedal on the off road setting i.e. folded down instead of up.

Glasgow

The weather wasn’t as nice but stayed dry on the Saturday. The bikes I tried were:

  1. BMW R 1200 GS Anniversary Edition – this was a quick run round the demo route on a brand new bike – fully kitted out with tank bag etc. It was a bit strange with the tank bag (my belly is too big) but looks lovely in the colours. I went for a setting with 1+ Luggage on Normal. Handling was excellent as before.
  2. BMW R 1200 GS Adventure – With the seat on full height I set preload to 1+Luggage and normal and went out for a run. This was a revelation – none of the bounciness and I didn’t notice the top heavy feel as last time. I wondered if this was due to the tank level but the bike was showing 300 miles for range – a full tank. I don’t know what the difference was but this was excellent – same comfort and weather protection, brilliant handling – a lot better than it should be on a bike of this type. I was quite besotted.
  3. BMW R 1200 GS – With a low seat I found it a bit cramped, but with less weather protection it was a bit nicer on a warm day.
  4. BMW R 1200 RT – As the police and ambulance motorcyclists run these I expected a lot from this. Unfortunately I found it was far too low even with what I thought was the seat in the high position, and my feet kept getting caught on the lower fairing. The handling is excellent though – no real impression of extra weight that the fairing would suggest, and the electric screen is hilarious.

So the Adventure is the bike for me, after a lot of miles on it over the weekend I don’t know what the issue was with the first run – whether I wasn’t used to it, or the suspension was on an offroad setting I don’t know, but the handling was excellent with a full load of petrol. I even had opportunity to put it on and off the centre stand and it wasn’t a problem at all.

Now to spend a few years saving up!

Post by Spencer Harbar on Configuring Back Connection Host Names using Group Policy

alistairl

Ok, a rather long title but I didn’t want to go too far on the paraphrase. If you work with SharePoint I’d recommend a look at the latest blog post by Spence over at Groundhog Day: Configuring Back Connection Host Names using Group Policy .

For one thing it is a nice reminder that SharePoint administrators need to understand their infrastructure. Sure we can’t keep all of the detail in our heads, but at least know the roles of the technology and what to use to do what. In this example Group policy is used to implement something on the servers in a farm.

Back after a while

alistairl

My goodness, it has been a few months since I posted here and that was after a run of postings every month. So what’s my excuse?

Well for one thing, I mucked up slightly with the blogging software hosting this site. I use SubText and I’ve been quite happy with it. The only thing is that I forgot the password, actually more specifically I deleted the email with the latest password reset, and it was then that I discovered that the version of SubText I was running did not have a functioning password reset. So it has taken me a couple of months to get organised and upgrade the software to then get it to reset and send me a password. I just did that with a bit of a manual merge and a bit of ftp work.

Other than that the last few months have been interesting – I concluded my work on a project in Basingstoke with a week off in London with my wife, followed by a week in Berlin on a course about SharePoint 2010. As you can imagine this was an excellent opportunity and the product is excellent, I am really looking forward to sharing my experiences when the product is released later this year. If you want to learn more about that week then check out my work blog – you should be able to find it easily but drop me a line if you can’t.

While working in Basingstoke I did my best to keep up with my voluntary work, which translated into keeping up with my work with IAM Observing. This is assisting with others working to the IAM advanced test, the weather got a bit bad towards October so this work will resume in the Spring with the better weather. Between now and then I will be trying to catch up with my committee work with the local IAM Motorcycle group and bringing together the annual accounts as treasurer.

This isn’t quite my “Thoughts on 2009, looking to 2010” posting, but I am heart of hearts hoping that I don’t go through a repeat of what happened with my job last year in the opening months. I’m as optimistic as I can be with things under my control, but I’ve held back with any further plans for motorcycle training until I am confident things are stable. So in the summer it could be that I cram in some late bookings with i2imca.

As well as here, you’ll catch me on twitter on work and day to day stuff, facebook for more personal stuff, and my work blog for the official line on what I do in my day job. Catch you soon.

SharePoint 2010 Emerges from NDA

alistairl

With the start of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, the much awaited information on SharePoint 2010 is beginning to emerge from NDA. For those SharePoint community members itching to share information there have been a flurry of obviously pre-prepared articles on the changes and improvements we can come to expect.

My only caveat at this early stage (the product has yet to reach public beta) is that many of the articles are a bit on the light side, so the depth of material like we have with MOSS 2007 is absent at the moment.

Two blogs to check out are those of Spencer Harbar and Andrew Connell. Both have a bit of a history in Web Content Management, but Spencer has also got a good bit of security and enterprise deployment in his background and the spread of articles released by the guys in the last 24 hours is a good taster of what is to come.

I predict the head strain that you get when introduced to Shared Service Providers will continue with Service Applications, but I wholeheartedly recommend sticking with them. I think that the flexibility that you get from them will be really useful and it is worth taking the time to understand them.

And yes, no big apologies for a meta blog entry – I don’t get my hands on SharePoint 2010 until next month, so I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here.

Spencer Harbar

Spencer has blogged a few entries that then link on to articles on the subject matter, I’ve linked to the blog articles which I think is the courteous thing to do:

  • SharePoint 2010 Developer Tools Overview – We got a good hint of this in the Visual Studio 2010 introduction at Tech Ed last year, finally SharePoint gets better support as a development platform.
  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Readiness – I was going to summarise what Spencer had written here, then realised I was simply going to list the whole thing. All of the elements that Spencer has chosen to highlight are real issues with MOSS 2007, it wasn’t impossible with MOSS it is just that things could be better. Managed Accounts and Service Applications are a couple of highlights to take a look at.
  • SharePoint 2010 Service Applications Part 1 – Ok, so it is a taster article and leads you in to what is to come. I’m looking forward to what has been done to replace Shared Service Providers – yes those!

Andrew Connell

Andrew has so much to say that, like Spencer, his introductory article is split.

That was the week that was

alistairl

So where do I start? I’m in quite a different working arrangement at the moment, spending the working week in Basingstoke of all places. We’ve getting towards completion a project for the website of a High Street retailer and if you know anything about retail you know that the bulk of their annual sales fall around the Christmas period.

I’ve worked on a handful of retail websites in my time, only a handful for a number of reasons. One of them is that there are very few organisations that are big enough to be able to afford to run a sizeable presence on the internet, and of these perhaps one or two are based in Scotland. So the opportunity for a Microsoft based Internet Retail job is quite a rare one.

So I’ve been down in Basingstoke for a few weeks, backfilling for some of the team members who work in the “pre-live” team – the team that handles the final stages of taking a development project to live – checking deployment, managing the pre-live environments which tend to be a half-way house between the free-for-all that is a development environment and the “don’t touch” of a live environment.

My primary role is to do with Microsoft SQL Server administration, so I had to swap my SharePoint hat off and start thinking of life in terms of T-SQL, transactions and general stability. I’ve also had great opportunity to get my hands on environments with replication – another thing that only tends to live in the larger environments. As well as that I’ve also had opportunity to muck in with the deployment of environments – all good stuff for someone with a development background. I’ve always said that a distinction between Developers and Infrastructure consultants is the willingness to subvert change control and make changes to live operational systems, and then to forget what was changed. Infrastructure consultants tend to be a bit more measured in their approach to change. I think this may be because support etc tend to fall more to Infrastructure types and if you have had the joy of live support you learn to be a bit more careful.

Repeatability of complete build is also an interesting situation too – automated build goes a long way to checking over a solution, but getting from a “base” operating system to a running website is a complex beast and demands a combined set of skills to build on a single machine – split this over a number of different servers in different roles and you also have to understand networking, firewalls, and all that stuff too.

Posts will be sporadic while I have a lot more time doing and less time thinking, but keep up with me over on twitter – http://twitter.com/alistairl/

Create custom movie settings for Windows Movie Maker

alistairl

I’ve got a bullet camera and solid state video recorder that I use on my motorcycle from time to time, and I use Windows Movie Maker to edit them a little and then upload to YouTube. The unit I have is the so-called MiniDVR1 from dogcamsport – which creates videos at 640×480 resolution at 25 fps.

The only thing is since I upgraded to Vista Ultimate, it offers all sorts of excellent HD based resolutions in Windows which are way over the top for the budget recording kit I have. I found this guide on Microsoft.com on how to create a custom output profile which is nearer to the quality level I record at.

Be careful to follow the instructions on the settings – i found that missing a step meant that the profile wasn’t read by Windows Movie Maker.

The guys at dogcam pointed out they have a new version of the MiniDVR – superb 🙂

Motorcycle Maintenance Evening Classes

alistairl

I’ve missed the start of this course, but worth keeping an eye out for if you live South of Edinburgh. Scottish Borders College continue to run their Motorcycle Maintenance evening class “Know Your Motorcycle”. I did an introductory version of this a couple of years back and it is good to get along and fiddle with someone else’s bikes!

The evening class details are on their website , unfortunately I am a bit late in flagging it up as it started a couple of weeks ago, but it looks like they are running a 10 week course from Newton.

Now to see if there are evening classes nearer to home.