News and Views of a Technical Nomad

May

30

Beta News have an interview with Ward Ralston of Microsoft on upcoming server developments in Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) including some stuff on Server Core and Powershell and the componentisation of .NET Framework to make it easier to pick and choose pieces of .NET to include inside Longhorn.

Read the whole thing …. here.

Source: Betanews.com

May

25

I make it a point to keep a distant eye on the Mini-ITX marketplace; especially now that I am planning on building some Mini-ITX systems for myself; every week it seems there are new announcements of new Mini-ITX and equivalent motherboards from an ever-increasing list of manufacturers.

Just in the last week, we have had news from Epiacenter that Ibase is to announce three new Mini-ITX boards at Computex in Taiwan; although the article only mentions the MI900 and the MI920. The article does not say much about the MI920, but the MI900 has the following spec:

Core 2 Duo with support for 533MHz / 800MHz / 1066MHz FSB, 2x DDR2 533/667/800MHz, Q965 integrated graphics (GMA3000), PCIe x16 slot, Realtek ALC888 7.1 audio, 10/100MBit LAN (2x GigaBit NICs as an option), 4x S-ATA, 1x P-ATA and 6x USB2.0. These specifications make the board similar to Commell’s LV-676.

Source: Epiacenter

Similarly, ElectronicsTalk.com have a new article on a new AMD Mini-ITX board from BVM called the LV-681 which according to the article is packed with features:

The AMD S1 processor socket is compatible with AMD Turion 64×2 dual-core, AMD Turion 64 and Mobile AMD Sempron processors. The board also implements the ATI RS485M chipset with the ATI Radeon X-300-based 2D/3D graphics engine that supports dual displays. Up to 2Gbyte of DDR2 SDRAM is available via two SODIMM memory slots; there are eight USB2.0 ports, three RS232C and one RS232/422/485 serial ports, two integral 10/100/1000 LAN ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and a CompactFlash slot.

Source: Electronicstalk

Finally, ThomasNet.com have a press release from Advansus, which is a joint venture of ASUS and Advantech, on a new VIA C7 motherboard called the VCN700:

1.0 GHz ultra low power VIA C7 processor and CN700 digital media chipset, fanless Model VCN700-LIC10 provides solution for Point-of-Service, kiosk, thin client, digital signage, and medical applications. It offers multimedia platform that features 2D/3D graphics, dual independent displays, dual 18/24-bit channel LVDS, and 5.1 CH audio. Motherboard also supports 1 PCI expansion slot, 1 Ethernet LAN port, 2 serial ports, 2 SATA, and 6 USB ports.

Source: Thomasnet

May

23

According to PCAuthority.com, Google are in talks with Salesforce.com with regard to a partnership or possible purchase of Salesforce.com by Google.

Salesforce.com is a San Francisco based CRM company who provide CRM over the internet (it is built on top of a Siebel foundation apparently) who have been very successful at providing a cut-price alternative to Siebel in the last few years.

Google need no such introduction of course.

Source: PCAuthority.com

May

16

According to a recent article in Redmond Developer News, Powershell which was recently released for download by Microsoft for use with XP and Vista is becoming increasingly popular with developers, as well as its target audience of system administrators. According to the article, it is also starting to be used as a replacement to VBScript, Perl and various shellscripting technologies.

Powershell is a command line interpreter which allows users to write script to invoke and manipulate .NET objects.

I have played around with it and it certainly looks promising, but I have not yet really found a major need for it myself. That will change if I can figure out how to use it to automate a lot of tasks I currently do manually and if I can work out how to invoke my own .NET objects.

Read all about it here.

Powershell can be downloaded from here.

May

15

DailyTech has a news item today on an upcoming Intel board, the D201GLY Little Valley which is part of the Desktop Board Essential Series, most of which are Micro-ATX format (24.3 cm x 24.3 cm). This board however will be a Mini-ITX board.

The board has an embedded Celeron 215 1.33GHz Yonah processor and uses the SiS chipset with integrated North and South Bridges. It also has integrated AGP8x graphics, support for DDR2 memory (1 slot) and 512Kb of Level 2 cache with the usual connectors.

It will not be “certified” for Vista Premium. It is expected to be released at the end of May or in early June. 

This would seem to be good news for the Mini-ITX market as it can only increase competition and it shows perhaps that the small board market is coming of age and is no longer a niche market, coming as it does after AMD has announced their DTX format and after an ever-increasing number of board manufacturers have jumped into the Mini-ITX format.

Suddenly, there seems to be a lot more choice in this area.

Source: DailyTech.com

Epiacenter has more on the board here.

May

9

I have been quite interested in the concept of building Mini-ITX boxes to replace my various Mid-Tower machines for a while. I am also interested in the idea of using Flash Disks instead of large hard disks inside the case to hold the operating system files while installing the actual software on external networked or USB Hard Drives which can be shared across several machines, a sort of thin client concept.

However, I wanted to go further and use the idea on my Windows Servers as well!

The problem is that there is no currently customisable version of Windows Server available to slim down (in the same way that XP can be slimmed down using XP Embedded or PCLite) and that the use of Virtual Memory in Windows can “wear-out” flash drives due to constant read-write cycles during regular operations.

Well it seems that some recent developments may have come to the rescue…

First off, Logic Supply (among others) are now selling Flash Memory modules by Emphase which are suitable for XP (and one would assume Windows Server) due to the fact that they have a Read/Write endurance of 4,000,000 and a Wear-Leveling algorithm to spread page-use across all the pages of the disk.  

The other new development is a feature of Windows “Longhorn” Server called “Server Core” which allows the installation of a core number of server “roles” onto a server without a built in GUI, Internet Browser etc. Apparently, this will allow installation of the standard Windows Server Services, such as DNS, DHCP, AD etc, and will use only 1GB of space on a drive with another 1GB required for regular operations etc. Users would access the Server using Remote Administration tools. A command-line remote interface is also available.

Put together, these two developments look like they might allow people to run Windows Servers on quite small Mini-ITX boxes with minimal disk space inside the box.

For more information on Emphase, have a look at Logic Supply who are the distributor for the USA and Canada here.

For more information on Server Core in Longhorn Beta 3, go here.

May

4

The ADO.NET Entity Framework, which is currently part of .NET Framework 3.0 Beta 1 (Orcas), is now not expected to ship as part of Orcas, but will be released as an “add-on” after Orcas has shipped.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is an extension to ADO.NET which allows developers to program against a “conceptual” data model rather than against a physical data schema.

Read all about it here.

See also Oakleaf Systems Blog for a lot more information on LINQ and various Microsoft data-centric technologies.

May

4

Web site Hardware.Info have a good introduction to building Mini-ITX systems which can be found here. The article discusses some of the new Motherboards available for the Mini-ITX and which peripherals are appropriate for different uses.

Source: Hardware.Info

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