New gadget

I got the most wonderful gift from my wife – a brand new IPAD3 for my birthday.  It is really and truly a wonderful gadget. I already managed to load a few apps onto it. For now, they are simple apps like the weather and traffic. I also have dropbox and 2 apps with children’s nursery rhymes for my little one at home.

I tried facetime calling and the quality is fairly ok. Also installed Skype which I am using to chat with family and friends. Skype on the Ipad is certainly a step up as compared to using a laptop.

Certainly being connected to the wifi net at home it works well. I personally feel that the quality is better on Skype than Facetime.  

The changing life of social apps

More and more IT departments are struggling to keep up with the new economic realities and fast changing technology environment. This changing environment  includes more mobility, social apps and cloud based services.

It is strange that we I had a meeting recently with someone from outside my company I was surprised to see that in front on him was my linkedin profile. Although uniquely resourceful it goes to show that this guy took the initiative to “google me”

Now the question is how far does one go with this. There are many stories of people using social apps for a range of things however from a business perspective – how much of the information can be trusted that resides on the social and cloud platforms.

I for one at this moment am not sure however I think that time will tell and we as consumers of this new technology will soon uncover whether it is good or not….

Windows 8 server

The windows 8 server has recently been out on beta and all the initial feedback is that the product is ground-breaking and offers a totally new refreshing server platform.
IT has loads of new and enhanced features. I am not going to list all of them however I would highlight a few of the ones that I will start looking at.
Specific aspects from the link above:
"Server 8 is also set to start breaking down some very important barriers by commoditising traditionally proprietary (and expensive) technologies and integrating them into the core OS. Long overdue features like NIC teaming join game-changers like deduplication, virtual HBAs and a thoroughly tested, enterprise-ready iSCSI target. Storage Spaces offers Drobo-like functionality, and Cluster Shared Volumes have moved beyond "Hyper-V only."

Be sure to read more on it Windows 8 server: the game changer

Migration of Response groups

here is a useful when migrating OCS response groups. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ocsvoice/thread/a0821cfd-10fd-4552-9ace-24fa8e444973/

and a second post on some of the changes: http://ucken.blogspot.com/2010/11/changes-in-lync-response-groups.html

Not complaining about the weather

I certainly cannot believe it that we are in the middle of November and the weather is still sunny and warm. It seems that with global warming and all the changes that the season timeframes have shifted slightly. Normally around November the average temperature high is around 9 degrees celcius however this year it was well over that at 12.
while I am not complaining about this is seems that all the stores have their winter season clothing on sale for more than a month while the temperature outside is well over 12 degrees during the day. Yesyerday was a nice example - in the afternoon is was a whooping 18 degrees celcius and was wonderful to be outside walking during this time of year. The autumn leaves was also nice look at and my little son was joyfully playing with them as well.

Studies are over

Hi peeps,

Finally the exams are over - well for now anyway. Wrote 7 exams and while all of them we fairly OK I am conrened on the software development one. I think should I pass then it would be a just....
Anyway, so now its waiting for results. I certainly hope that I pass all as it was a tough year and I would not want to repeat all of them ...
Will keep u guys updated

Research methodology

Hi,

Just going through the module called research methodology. Although quite nice I find that sometimes the model answers provided are suspect. One such case is there the model answer states an answer and the explanation for it is "most likely". Now that would be an assumption and I cannot understand how that is provided as an explanation.
What the answer provided and something else that was based on the information provided and not on a most likely assumption....
Strange, however still going through all the materials for tomorrow. Wish me luck and will be back again soon.

Studying for exams

Hi,

Been hitting the books recently and therefore had little time for updates here. I am currently completing the IT studies at unisa. Throughout the year the assignemetns were going fairly well. For all except the project module that is. The project module requires the full development of a project using any development language. I chose Java thinking it is the internet languiage and would be easy.

Boy was I wrong on that one. I realsied that it is by far much more advanced and integrated nowadays with additional tools like grails, ruby, IDE's, etc, etc. Sadly I had to drop that module as I did not have enough time to complete the program development. A disadvantage for me is that I was attempting this alone as compared to having a group which made the worload 5 times more. The positive news is that I have increased my programming knowledge at least 10 fold and will probably have another go next year.

I already wrote the first paper which was Information and Technology Mangement INT4 and I though it was quite OK. I prepared well and feel good on that one.
However I still have 5 more to go which seems at this stage as mega stuff to go through.

Speak soon

Nextplane

Ever had the need to federate with another presence solution?? I came across a nice solution for federation. Nextplane provides federation solutions for almost all UC platofrms. The variety of platforms include include OCS R2, OCS 2007, LCS, IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber XCP, Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco Unified Presence Server 8.0, Jive OpenFire, and Google Apps.

I was surprised to see that Skype was not included. Hope fuully now that Microsoft has bought Skype that will happen soon.

Cisco rumors on selling Linksys and Webex

Rumors about on Cisco selling Linksys and Webex

 

Rumor is that Cisco is planning to sell off Linksys and Webex. Cisco have not attempted to squash the rumour! Checkout the following links:

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/18/cisco_linksys_sell_off/

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/73984   

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2011/05/18/cisco-seen-near-sales-of-linksys-webex.html

 

Cisco wants to cut $1 billion dollars and they are doing that by reducing product lines and jobs. This is going to be crunch time for Cisco as according to Network world this could result in the elimination of 4,000 jobs!! – that would be the largest layoff in Cisco's history. Cisco is already offering early retirement to US and Canadian employees over 50 years old – so much for loyalty.