rvanherk's blog

I just saw an interesting post on Slashdot about the fact that Virgin Atlantic announced that it won't allow passengers to use batteries in any Apple or Dell laptops.

This must have been a difficult decision, as Apple and Dell have indicated there is a safety risk with a certain series of battery pack's, but why ban the use of all batteries and not only the re-called ones. I assume they just ban all as it's not doable to check all batteries during check-in, but how long would they need to keep this rule? And who ensures me that no other electronic device might have similar issues?

Personally I had one affected battery-pack, fortunately I had a second one that I'm using at the moment so I assume that the system I've got doesn't have any more chance to catch fire than any other laptop. I wonder how the competition between airlines will have it's impact to this, if I need to fly somewhere and I would have the option to pick an airline where I can use my laptop and I've got one where I can't, you may guess once witch one I would use.

I wonder what other airlines will start doing with this, I assume we'll find out within the next few weeks.

In my post last week I mentioned we where finalizing the agenda for the ZEN sessions at GWAVAcon Europe, the GroupWise and ZENworks conference. With just two weeks to go we've got it all lined up, at the last moment we added some sessions from three of our ZENworks partners (ENGL, Touchpaper and Macrovision) to the agenda.

Traditionally our GroupWise users have had a strong user community with GroupWise user groups in different countries and GroupWise specific events like GWAVAcon and the GroupWise Summit. With the specific GroupWise events the community has been an important way to spread knowledge about GroupWise and the third party products that provide additional functionality to GroupWise. OK, so now a few ZENworks freaks came up with the idea to add a ZENworks track to GWAVAcon, I think it's a very interesting combination as many of our customers are using both products. It will be interesting to talk to some of the ZENworks specialists from all over Europe and hear what they think of ZENworks and the way ZENworks is moving forward, besides that it will be interesting to talk about how we are going to educate all ZENworks enthusiast about our next generation ZENworks.

Back to the session schedule, I'm very exited about the fact that we scheduled a Brimstone sneak peak session, within this session Martin will discuss how ZENworks will evolve in the near future. It's great to see that we can finally show a little bit of what engineering has been working on in the past few years.

Well, see you in Munich :-)

When we started with Cool Blogs we had some conference calls with the people that would start to blog on Cool Blogs, I still remember the comment from Martin (Buckley) about the fact that blogging isn't a sprint, it's a Marathon. He had been blogging on his evilzenscientist blog for quit some time and as such he was one of the more experienced bloggers (together with Ted) from the people that started to post on Cool Blogs.

Now that we run Cool Blogs for half a year I have to agree, blogging is like a Marathon, you have to get into the rhythm of posting with a certain frequency. Sometimes it's easy to find a subject for a post, sometimes it's a little more difficult, but once you get the right rhythm it becomes more easy to find a topic to write about.

OK, so what should I write about this time, the Formula One race today? Ferrari did a great job at the race in Monza (Italy), it's unfortunate to hear that Michael Shumacher will stop racing at the end of this season, three more races to go. You might think this is not too much Novell related, well I'm not sure about that, Linux has become more and more important in the high-power systems that are used to calculate the aerodynamics on a Formula One car. Nah, Americans don't know anything about Formula One, let's find something else to talk about ;-)

Maybe I could write about the fact that we are finalizing the Agenda for our ZENworks conference in Munich and that the free registration has been extended. Nah, we are still working on some interesting last additions so let's talk about the agenda somewhere later this week.

I could mention that we released the ZENworks 6.5 SP2 IR1 as beta patch (I didn't create the name for this, don't blame me). Nah, the real freaks will have seen that already on the "New this week" page.

I could mention that the general support for ZENworks 7 seems to be extended and will go on until the end of August 2010 (and extended support will be up to 2012). Hmm, maybe I should keep that for one of the Product Managers to talk about.

OK, so nothing to blog about today :-), can you think of something?

People talk about the new Novell, the company that has been changing from the arrogant PC Networking company to the Linux, Identity and Access Management and Resource Management company we are now. Well, as a Novell employee I have seen Novell changing during the last few years, a change of focus, change of platform and a change in the way the company has it's focus to the customer. But there is something weird with the phrase “the new Novell”.

On Wikipedia I found the following:

The name for the company Novell was suggested by George Canova's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French. (In fact, the feminine singular of "new" in French is "nouvelle").

So if Novell already means new, should we then say New New, or Novell Novell ;-)

Today I saw an article from Daniel Lyons about Desktop Linux where he points to the fact that Linux has been replacing expensive systems in the data center and indicates that phase two of the Linux revolution is targeting user desktops. I especially liked the last two lines within his article:

Visit the home of a Silicon Valley software programmer and you'll find two things: Macs and Linux boxes.

To these guys, Windows has become the operating system equivalent of the America Online Internet service--a mass-market product that only appeals to people who don't know any better.

Last week I wrote about the new battery recognition feature within ZENworks Asset Management, well let me follow up on that one.

As you might understand we haven't got a little camera that is able to read the information from the label on your battery-pack, we are using the SMBIOS (System Management BIOS) and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to gather this info. Unfortunately the information that the manufacturer puts inside the battery pack doesn't always match the information on the label :-(, this also seems to be the case with the Dell (Sony) battery pack's. The product code on the label is different from the information that we can gather with Asset Management, we are currently working with Dell to see if they can provide us more information about how we can identify the faulty batteries based on their SMBIOS and WMI information. Will be continued ......