Month: January 2009

Problems causing Win 7 to shutdown slowly

I am having issues with Win 7 – keeps hanging (will post that another time); but I like the irony of things causing this (see screen show below).

image 

BTW, if you can get to the Performance Information and Tools via Control Panel => All Control Panel Items =>Performance Information and Tools => Advanced Tools.

Code is King! Role of a Software Architect

I was looking for something else and stumbled upon this post from Joe where he lists the qualities that makes up a “good architect” (despite the feelings that have been expressed to me in the past). I have to agree with him and am quite pleased to see that a “typical” Avanade architect would fit the bill. Smile

  • Inspire and empower people to do their best work.
  • Oversight, but not dictatorship.
  • Taste is a hard thing to measure, but is invaluable.
  • Write code and get your hands dirty.
  • The power of the dyad: know your weaknesses.
  • It's for the customer, not you.
  • Admit when you're wrong, fall on your sword, and then fix it.

Top 10 Technology Priorities (for 2009)

Gartner has published CIO’s top 10 Technology priorities for 2009, which are:

  1. Business intelligence
  2. Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)
  3. Servers and storage technologies (virtualization)
  4. Legacy application modernization
  5. Collaboration technologies
  6. Networking, voice and data communications
  7. Technical infrastructure
  8. Security technologies
  9. Service-oriented applications and architecture
  10. Document management

Enabling Bitlocker Pin on Win 7

You should be using Bitlocker on your machine (which btw is faster on Win 7 compared to Vista). When I enabled this on my laptop running Win 7 – I did not get the option to also add a PIN – not sure if I did something wrong or by default it does not ask for it.

In any case, if you also want to add the a PIN on boot up then you can use the following command in a command prompt or power shell (with admin privileges) to enable this. Of course replace the “c:” with the drive you want to do this for.

manage-bde -protectors -add c: -TPMAndPIN

New Way to listen to Radio

I always have been a huge fan of Screamer Radio and still cannot recommend it enough! There are a couple of other ways as well if you prefer that.

One is the new open source application called Songbird which is my choice for listening to Music. Songbird is from the same guys who wrote Firefox and the quality is pretty good. I particularly like the Lyrics add-on which displays lyrics of the song you are listening to. Another add-on can scrobble to Last.fm.

Another option is to use RadioBeta which uses Ajax and you need to have that window open in your browser.  The search option is cool and it allows you to search for radios and themes that you otherwise won’t probably think of. One of the stations I like listening to is “All California Rock”. I think there is a lot of scope of improvement – maybe they should create an add-in for Songbird and allow on to view lyrics, etc.