By Shawn Bass on Friday, December 21, 2007 8:25:38 AM

Whether your company has started it or not, companies all over the world are investigating what it would take to become more green.  What does "more green" mean?  Well, it means finding ways to reduce your companies electrical power consumption when you're not needing it.  Many companies have done simple things like ensuring that all desktop PC monitors have a Power Saver timer after 20 minutes of inactivity.  However, many organizations still leave their desktops (and servers) powered on 24x7.

Citrix is attempting to do their part by releasing their Citrix PowerSmart Management Utility.  What is PowerSmart?  In essence, it's a utility that let's an administrator control which servers in a farm are able to be powered off when their session co ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, December 20, 2007 10:25:45 PM

Ok, I'll admit it that it's not a business reason to use a software product, but it is ridiculously cool.  Derek Thorslund posted a video about a month ago that demos the features that Project Pictor brings for OpenGL acceleration.  While acceleration of Catia CAD software is really exciting stuff, it leaves a little to be desired for those folks who aren't familiar with how poorly CAD software runs on Terminal Services.  If you're in for a more true to life demonstration, then watch the end of the video when they play Quake 3 in OpenGL acceleration via Project Pictor.  That's some amazing stuff.

Thanks to Doug Brown for the heads up on the video.

 

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, December 20, 2007 9:58:37 PM

There is a bug in the installation routine for PS 4.5 HRP01 that in certain server configurations will cause MSI Self Healing to be triggered on systems where HRP01 has been installed. There are very specific conditions that cause this problem and there are several workarounds/fixes. Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, December 20, 2007 9:21:14 PM

If you've been following my blog you'd know that I'm a recent Mac convert trial (can't call it a convert when I have 15 other Windows PCs in the house).  Anyway, when I bought my Mac it came with OSX 10.4 on it, but there was a 10.5 Leopard disc that was shipped in the box as a free upgrade.  Well, you can't go sticking a free software upgrade in the box and let it sneak by me without immediately installing it.  So I've been using Leopard since I first got the MacBook Pro.  Generally I've had a lot of success with it, aside from a minor nuance with the wireless that never seems to work unless I reboot my wireless router (seems to be Mac related though since other Windows systems are able to use the wireless router during this time).  The inexcusable problem though has been a frequently occuring loss of keyboard functionality that varies from 30 to 60 seconds.  During this time, the touchpad continues to work but no key ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:48:19 PM

VMware has recently released version 3.5 of their Virtual Infrastructure suite.  This release proves yet again that VMware is king in the virtualization space.  I'm not going to go into details of all of the new features as it's already been well covered on other sites.  Here are two great overviews of the new features from VMblog and Virtualization.info.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:22:30 PM

Citrix has finally integrated an official blog site into their public presence.  I have to say I've been very happy with the content that has come out of Citrix in the previous Citrix Community and Citrite.org blog sites, and I'm hoping to see even more content coming out of the official site.  Go visit them and give them some feedback on the new site.  Between this site and the Knowledge Center updates, Citrix has really been investing heavily in overhauling their web presence.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:11:11 PM

Jason Conger has published a development road map for the amazing Web Interface for Resource Manager.  If you're not using this tool, I highly recommend that you download it (it's free) and start using it.  You need to have an RM Summary database as it uses that info, but it's one of the greatest free utilities for Citrix server environments.  Anyway, Jason recently published the roadmap which hints at some fantastic new features such as AJAX, MFCOM Real time performance data, and integrated Configuration Logging database reports, etc.  I can't wait for the new version.