Category Archives: Old Blog Post

Bob Muglia, president of the servers and tools business  at Microsoft, have been forced to step down after 23 years at the company. According to Computerworld and IDG News Service, Steve Ballmer wanted to accelerate the move into the cloud, and felt that Muglia was not the right person.

According to DailyTech, the division run by Muglia have been successful, with $5.5 billion in profits for 2010.

So obviously Steve Ballmer want to push Azure even harder, and Bob Muglia have been more cautious. Time will only tell what the right choice was.

I want to point out this recent post here on my blog related to Microsoft and clouds…

My big Christmas gift was a new printer, a Canon Pixma MG6120 inkjet printer. It replaced my HP Photosmart C3180, which I have had for 3-4 years and who now refuse to feed paper. I have now had time to use the Canon printer for a few days, and below are my first impressions.

The printer was extremely easy to setup. Drivers installed faster than HP, and WiFi support mean that I did not even have to worry about the USB cable. To get the printer connected to my wireless network was easy, it was all done directly from the printer, using the 3" LCD display on the printer. It almost took longer to remove all protective plastic and tape from the printer. Since the printer is black (hence a magnet for fingerprints), Canon had put protective plastic sheets on all exposed (and some un-exposed!) surfaces.

One of the things I like with the Canon, and which was a requirement for a new printer, was separate ink tanks. This printer actually have six (6) different tanks:

The bigger cartridge (marked 225) contains black pigment based ink, used for regular text. The other five ink cartridges (marked 226) are dye-based. In addition to the traditional cyan, magenta and yellow, there is also black and gray. Each cartridge have a small red light indicating that they are correctly positioned.

Well, what about the print quality? That is the important thing on a printer. Well, at first the printout were a disappointment. They were washed out, gray and not nearly as vibrant as the old HP printer. I tried different settings in Photoshop and the printer driver, and eventually got a better result, but still not near what the HP produced. That is, until I tested the sample of Canon inkjet paper included with the printer. What a difference! I had used inexpensive paper purchased at Fry´s Electronics, and it simply did not work well with this ink. So after purchasing some more Canon paper (both the "Plus Glossy II" and the "Pro Platinum") I found that the quality was fully on par with the HP. I would not say it was better, as the HP generated beautiful prints, but it was not worse.. I tested some Kodak photo paper, and they turned out pretty good as well.

I have not been scanning much, just one test this far. It looks good, though, The optical resolution is 4800×4800 compared with 1200×2400 on the HP. The scan driver is not as intuitive as the one that comes with the HP. The highest setting it accepts (when scanning from within Photoshop) is 1200 DPI, and it is listed under "output". It seems like you at the time you scan you pretty much need to know what you want to do later with the scan. You select "screen display" or "printer" as target. Could be a dumbed down version of selecting RGB or CMYK”…” But I prefer to change the settings myself.

After a couple of days, I can already tell that the separate ink tanks are a good idea. They are all on separate levels, with the gray much lover than the cyan, magenta and yellow. Both black ones are still showing full.

What also is cool is that all buttons are hidden on the lid. Depending on what you want to do, different buttons light up, but only the ones you can use for the task. The other buttons are hidden and disabled. Clever.

There is plenty of additional built-in functionality. Not only can you print the photos directly from your memory card (or from a mobile phone using an optional Bluetooth adapter), you can print calendars, contact sheets, graph paper, lined paper and more. Put a PDF on a memory card (USB is not supported) and you can print it from there.

The printer driver lets you print booklets, and since the printer support duplex (double sided printing), a 16 page story by H.P. Lovecraft was printed as a neat booklet, only using 4 sheets of paper.

Talking about paper, there are two separate paper feeds. Up to 150 sheet of letter (or A4 for anyone in Europe) can be loaded in the front drawer, and feeder in the rear is used for all other formats, from 4×6 inch up to 11×8.5 inch.

Summary:

The print quality is very good, but it requires Canon paper, or at least high quality photo paper. My old printer performed as well using inexpensive paper. The scanner driver is probably good for a regular consumer, but need improvements for the more demanding/knowledgeable user. Setting it up was very easy, and it´s easy to use it. The printer driver is good, but the scanner driver need some work.

Duplex printing and separate ink tanks are big benefits. Separate tray for regular letter paper is also very good. Printing directly from a memory card yields good results, even without processing in Photoshop.

Even if the print quality is pretty much identical to my old printer, the benefits of separate ink cartridges makes this printer my choice. Wifi and duplex printing are just bonuses. The listed MSRP is $199, but I seen it on sale for as low as $129 (at Best Buy before Christmas).

Disclaimer: Product was a Christmas gift.

As Andy "Macian" Donaldson reported on Facebook, this years Wednesday party will take place at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

The park is brand new, it opened last June, but already during Lotusphere 2010 I blogged about the park as a potential venue for the 2011 party.

John Head just visited the park in late December, and gave a good review on Twitter. He especially recommended the butter beer, which just the other day sold it´s one millionth serving.

From The New York Times:

The problem is that Wi-Fi was never intended for large halls and thousands of people, many of them bristling with an arsenal of laptops, iPhones and iPads.

Wi-Fi is meant for homes and other small spaces with more modest Internet demands, says Ernie Mariette, founder of Mariette Systems, which installs conference Wi-Fi. "You´re asking a technology to operate beyond its capability."

Conference organizers and the Wi-Fi specialists they hire often fail to provide enough bandwidth. Many depend on the infrastructure that the hotels or convention centers hosting their events already have in place.

Companies that install Wi-Fi networks sometimes have only a day to set up their equipment in a hall and then test it. They must plan not only for the number of attendees, but also the size and shape of the room, along with how Wi-Fi signals reflect from walls and are absorbed by the audience. 

 

Let’s see how it works at Lotusphere in January. Perhaps there need to be some areas during the OGS with network cables to plug in to, to complement the Wi-Fi network?.

What might be the first major cloud data breach happened Wednesday. Microsoft announced that data contained within its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has been downloaded by non-authorized users.

You’d better get used to this kind of thing because we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the future. All any of us can do is pray we’re not a victim.

[T]he whole affair will feel like a stomach punch for anybody considering cloud adoption in the coming year–especially those considering Office 365, Microsoft’s major cloud offering that ties into its Office suite.

 

More here and here.

Interesting explanation. I have only seen this solution in a couple of places, mainly Best Buy and Fry´s (both electronics stores).

(Via Anders Lotsson)

I just got everything finalized for Lotusphere 2011. I managed to find a $155 roundtrip fare on AirTran from Dallas to Orlando, and I got a room booked at Dolphin.

IdoCheckin is back for the 3rd year, and as some of you in the community already may have noticed, I have been adding people on FourSquare and Google Latitude (where I am texasswede@gmail.com) during the last few days. Add me if you like. I will try to check in frequently during Lotusphere if anyone want to meet up.

So what’s left to do? Well, the most important thing: planning! The first thing I did was to download Ben Langhinrichs‘ Lotusphere Session Database. You haven’t downloaded it yet? Then go do it. I also went and ranked some of the sessions here.

This year I will focus on Xpages. As I mentioned previously, we are just now finished upgrading our users from Notes 5 to Notes 7. Most of them still got the Notes 5 mail template, though. But the IT Operations Manager have mentioned that he plan to get us on 8.5.2 soon. I am hoping for sometime before next summer. So I can see a possible use for Xpages at my current workplace, especially after the issues Sean Cull wrote about have been addressed.

There are a number of interesting sessions about Xpages, but I will also attend some sessions about user interface design (something I am very interested in) and of course harass the poor developers in the labs.

I am of course also excited about seeing so many of the people I consider friends, even if I know that several long-time Lotusphere visitors will not be there. I will be flying in Saturday morning, so I can attend BALD (Bloggers Annual Lotusphere Dinner) that afternoon at Big River Brewhouse. Of course you do not need to be a blogger to attend. That’s the beauty of the Lotus community, everyone is welcome.

If this is your first Lotusphere, don’t miss Andy’s Guide to Lotusphere.

See you in Orlando!