IN COMPARISON

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SCOM 2007: OpsMgr can monitor everything: The Coretech Coffee Monitor Management Pack – 0.0.0.1

OpsMgr can monitor everything: The Coretech Coffee Monitor Management Pack – 0.0.0.1: "
How cool is this? Coretech has created a coffee monitor MP.

This management packs can be used to keep track of the level of coffee in left in the pot.

With this management pack, you will never run dry of, what we all know, is the most important part of a productive environment!
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First glance: Sony Ericsson C905

I picked up my new phone yesterday, the Sony Ericsson C905.

I chose this phone mostly because of the stunning 8.1 megapixel camera, but was secretly concerned about the interface, especially because my previous phone was a Windows Mobile phone (which I do adore), but have been pleasantly surprised so far.

Rather than the 8-16 hour charge that I am used to for new phones, this one only required a 2.5 hour charge, and I was able to use the phone while it was charging.

Syncing my contacts back from Outlook was a quick and painless process – almost easier than with Mobile Sync Center on first run. In fact, I was up and running within minutes – including installing the software that comes in the box.

The camera is phenomenal. The shutter is fast, the flash not overpowering and the picture quality is fantastic. I love taking pictures, but have struggled with the camera on my previous phone, because most of the pictures were just too blurry to use, even online. I took a couple of pictures last night and this morning, and here are some of the results:

Our tortoise, who fits into the palm of my hand.

The dude’s future garden (where I am trying to grow lettuce, spinach and morogo).

My daughter, hula-hooping.

The phone includes MotionGaming and comes with Need for Speed Prostreet installed. To play, you simply move the phone. I am sure if I had to find a lightsaber app, I could have hours of fun :)

I am a little disappointed that the WiFi only supports up to WEP and not WEP2, because this means I cannot connect the phone to our home network seamlessly, but this is not the end of the world, as the HSDPA connection is blistering fast. And with the Blogger app built in, I suspect I may do a LOT of photo blogging going forward.

First glance score:  4.5/5

Ninja cat

Stuff that I have been working on

Been hectically busy recently, hence the lack of activity here. I have been working on a couple of SCOM projects, mostly, with the following:

Unix/Linux agents: The Unix agents were mostly Solaris, so once we got the first one in, the rest were easy. When I got stuck, the following blogs were great:

- Xplat Xperts
- Daniele Muscetta
- Contoso.se

The linux agents area little more complicated, because they are running CentOS (not currently supported in SCOM) and is still in progress.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager integration: This we did to enable SCOM to monitor the VMWare environments for our customers. Simple, easy and straight forward, providing your install media is not corrupt (as ours was in the one instance).

I have also been building web dashboards, much against best practise, to display pie charts and so on from SCOM. The current dashboard I am working displays an overall state from SCOM, machines not reporting, machines with disk space issues, patch compliance from SCCM and AV compliance from McAfee. Most of this is functional now, but I am suddenly needing to learn SCCM, which has also proven interesting.

I used the free components from Fusion Charts for building the graphs, which made life very easy for me. The pie chart here is a FusionChart that displays the overall state from SCOM in my home environment.