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After abandoning this blog for a long time, a I have an update:

I have taken a new step in my professional carreer, I have started a new consulting company called Trust in Change GmbH. After working for more than 25 years in IT management consulting, I found the time to be ripe to build something myself.

Trust in Change ist important for every major change in IT, you need to trust the process to get to your new goal, you need to trust new systems that they perform and you need trust in your IT partners that the help to make you successful.

So I will again leave this blog and will continue to post new thing on trustinchange.net (mainly in German, sorry).

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I just upgraded to the Anniversary Windows 10 Version. And as I had read a few things about the ubuntu linux subsystem, I wanted to try it. So add the feature, reboot, enable developer mode and run bash.

No problem. I looked around a bit (it even did not keep me as root as the original insider versions did, I had to setup a user during the initial run process). I wanted to try something I had not seen yet, I wanted to run desktop applications from linux.

So I installed the Xming x11 server. Next step was to set my display to use it (export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0, yes localhost is needed as Xming is a windows app and it can not be talked to inside the linux subsystem). Now I needed an application to demonstrate this newfound abilities. So i tried

apt-get install firefox

Which took some time and 170 MB diskspace. I slowly typed firefox & pressed enter. I waited, an error message appeared, I waited a bit longer and firefox started! I am typing this post from it’s window.

So Microsoft & canonical: Great job, works out of the box.

Proof:

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In the latest televised Sunday night address, the US president Obama wants to urge high-tech to do something against terrorist:

And that’s why I will urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.

See here for the full text. Why stop here? Why not spread engage more industries in working against terrorism? Let’s see, maybe we should require the automobile industry to make sure that bad people can not drive a car? Oh, wait, bad people should not be allowed to buy a pressure cooker? Hmm, what was it that is used in most recent terror attacks? Well, I guess there were more terror attacks using guns than there were attacks that relied on encrypted communication to terrorize the US, French and other governments into finally getting a better control of their own people.

So the most effective way of reducing the terror (and more than 1 accidently shot American per day) would be to require that all guns sold may only be fired by the good guys and may only hit the bad ones! That way the stupid idea of more guns will save us from guns might even be true…

Can you guys hear the NRA shouting “But it is impossible make a gun like that!”? Well, true.

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I have not found a perfect solution yet – but you might want to check out CryptSync (http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/CryptSync.html). It replicates a folder encrypted using 7-Zip. This compresses and encrypts your data in a proven secure way. And as an added plus, you can decrypt using 7-Zip if you do not have CryptSync or if the project goes dead.

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After MS is going all-in on ist Office 365 Cloud offering, dropping the previous high limit of 1 TB per subscription to unlimited, you can get unlimited cloud storage for as low as 5,75€ (Office 365 Personal, 1 year plan for 69,-€).

The problem is you will need to transfer all your files to MS, which will open up to the NSA and anyone else capable of listening in. Now I am wondering if the following app exists, or if not if someone is developing it:

Provide a layer on top of any given cloud service (interface via WebDAV or other protocols) that will transparently encrypt / decrypt the files in a streaming fashion, so that the cloud holds either one or several large files, or the file is encrypted as well (so no file name/directory name or file properties, incl. size) will stay the same. This might mean padding small files to a uniform larger size and splitting large files to a set of uniform smaller files.

The application should be transparent, so that on a PC it works like a file system (aka drive letter on windows). For phones it would need to have a separate application. Direct access to the files via web would not be available anymore, as it would not be possible to do that in a secure way.

Is there something like that?

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A ridiculous article by Matt Burns complains that the start button for Windows 8.1 is not a start button (http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/26/windows-8-1s-start-button-isnt-a-start-button/). And then he goes on by saying that right-clicking on it shows a non-customizable admin menu.

Well, Matt, use Windows 8 and right click the start menu corner and: You get the same menu! Of course the Start Button is a start button, clicking on it opens the full screen start menu of Windows 8.1. It works better than the old Windows 7 start menu, it has:

Larger targets for your mouse to hit, so you can use it quicker.
Direct search (just start typing, same as in Windows 7 btw)
Grouped entries, but now even all of them visible at once.
Active tiles that give you info directly
A sortable all programs menu (you can sort by name, group, install date, frequency of use)

The only thing I see missing is the recent documents. Well get over it, and create a short cut to the explorer search and “PIN IT TO THE START MENU”.

TL;DR; TC & Matt Burns write stupid nonsense articles

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@CharlesTBetz, @IanClayton and the @ITSkeptic were just tweeting about the difference between the service catalog, requestable services and their instances. Since I would like to add some of my 2 cts to that and I am not satisfied to discuss complex data modeling issues using just 140 characters I decided to quickly write up this post.

For me there should be a strong separation between models or types and instances, even if a given instance of one type can be the model for another. For me the service catalog describes all services that are available to a customer, just as the skeptic says – these are not per se available to a user. Someone with money has to order them. If they order these, the services are instantiated as a service (level) agreement. I put the level in parentheses because right now that is not the focus of the discussion.

In addition to this, each service has a list of 0 to many request types. These are the things that a user (for which the organization has ordered the service) can request. So if a customer agrees to a service (level) agreement, the users associated with that customer (named Person in the image) may request the service¹.

Each service level agreement (here identified by a ServiceInstance) also contains a list of these request types along with some more customer individual specifications like cost or service level2, called RequestTypeInstance. This is an entity that is both an instance and a model.

A user may then put up a service request (labled RequestInstance), which refers to all the RequestTypeInstances, so provides all the details needed for approving, executing and monitoring the request. Each request will contain multiple RequestTypes as in real life no one will put up with having an “Order” just containing one item at a time.

My idea of some of the needed entities for a Service Catalog

tl;dr;

Next time you think about a simple thing like “Service Catalog”, “SLA” or “Service Request”, please think again. The standards are not helping a lot here as they confuse matters more by not being explicit enough in their definitions.

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¹ This may be more complex than it sounds as the individual request may require formal approval from the client as well, since each request type may incur cost, or other restrictions may apply, e.g. Licensing issues.

² If the service level should be defined in the Service Catalog or in the list of Service Level Agreements is open to discussion. In my experience any provider with a larger list of customers will have individual service levels per customer, so putting these in the catalog is not useful. In contrast, providers that standardize more should put these in the catalog.

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Are you prepared? What happens to your IT and to your business if there is a power outage, a flu epidemic or if your main network provider goes out of business? What happens if your cloud provider is closed due to piracy allegations?

noventum consulting helps with your planning. http://www.continuitymanagement.de/

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I really like the Windows 8 enahncements to the Windows Explorer interface. The ribbon feels natural to me and the idea of having it minimized initially gives you a lot of extra screen real estate. It allows me to show the Details Pane on the right as a standard setting as most screens are 16×9 or 16×10, so wide.

But I have one minor tweak to suggest, since I often want to quickly switch between the Details and the Preview pane, why not add a small button to both switching to the other? Here is a small mockup:

I know I can add the commands to the QAT, but having them in place feels much more intuitive.

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TL;DR;

 

Image via Wikipedia

I must admit one thing: I really enjoy tinkering with new software. So I know I am a bit of a geek in that area. So what did I do when the Windows 8 Developer Preview came out? I installed it in a virtual machine (Oracle Virtual Box). I did not play around with it much as it could not fully utilize my system. So what did I do when the Consumer Preview came out? I did not want to have the trouble of virtualizing it again, so I tried to upgrade my work notebook.

Here are some of my ramblings about that experience.