blindsquirrel.org

I guess I need to go to the grocery store more often, because I was blown away by the cost of orange juice.  I picked up a half gallon of Tropicana orange juice that was on sale for $2.39.  That’s $4.78 a gallon!  What do you think costs more to produce, a gallon of orange juice ($4.78 US) or a gallon of gasoline ($2.19 US for regular yesterday)?

I had posted about Vista’s startup sound here. In that post I commented that

“I’m willing to bet that before Vista ships you will be able to mute the startup sound just like I can on my PowerBook, and I’m sure they’ll expose a way to change or control it via the registry or group policy.”

I forgot the followup that you can now control the startup sound, so we’ll just let Robert explain it.

On the subject of Vista delays and the initial gloom, doom, and panic, I stated…

“All Microsoft or manufacturers have to do is one thing and the Vista slip becomes irrelevant; for all purchases made after the date that Vista ships to the enterprise, include a free upgrade to Vista when it is released. That would appease 99% of new buyers.”

Looks like I was pretty close. The internet has made gaining access to information incredibly fast. Unfortunately, negative reaction sometimes tends to spread quicker than the truth. Always do your research. And don’t forget, you can keep up with other blog posts that I find interesting by following my Google Shared Items page.

For some reason I have a hard time cutting up the girls food when they need help. Things like waffles, french toast, etc. give me a hard time. I found a quick and easy way to take care of this – a pizza cutter. You know, the metal wheel used to cut pizza? It works perfect for cutting through a waffle for the kids in seconds.

Did you remember to set your clocks back if you live in an area that supports changing the clocks? We completely missed that today was the day to change the clocks until I noticed the time on my computer being 1 hour earlier than normal. Spring ahead, Fall back.

My 7 year old daughter asked us not just where babies come from, but how they are made. Since I wasn’t ready for a 7 year old to know the full story, I told her that eBay had a division called eBaby. She said she knew that wasn’t true,which I admitted to, but still told her that she would learn about that later. She’s 7 going on 17.

Those political ads on TV crack me up because they always seem so cheesy. They also depress me because the majority of them are used to attack the other people they are running against. You know how there is always a voice-over at the end of the commercial of the candidate saying “this is blah blah blah and I approve this message?” Like it is supposed to give it validity. Recently I saw one that seemed even more ridiculous because it was a commercial starring only the candidate with a voice over of herself stating that she “approves this message.”

If you’re doing the commercial, don’t you think we’re smart enough to figure out that you must approve?

The Citrix party tonight was a blast. We ran in to the guy in this picture in the parking lot on his way to Universal. I had to get a picture and he was happy to oblige.

Third Eye Blind was the band tonight. It’s hard to get really good pictures with a digital camera at night with so much motion happening, but I don’t think they came out too bad.

You can check out the pictures by clicking here.

Today’s sessions that I attended were pretty good. I was good seeing some of the new features that will be in the next release. The health monitoring looks to be a step in the right direction, but for those of us already running something like HP OpenView, I am not sure if this is a plus or not. I’d like to see Citrix rip out RM and replace it with an EdgeSight “lite.” What I really need is a decent reporting package that shows me the health of all of my Citrix servers in one picture. With RM today i have to go server by server to get a picture of individual components. Not the easiest thing to use when trying to study capacity or look for issues. It looks like we can expect some performance improvements with the client, but that may be the part that causes me the most heartburn.

I noticed at last year’s iForum in Las Vegas that Citrix seemed to be moving more of the processing down to the client to get better performance. Great for you if you have a PC, but what about those of us running thousands of thin clients? Maybe the XPe or Linux based thin clients will perform better, but we run WinCE based thin clients. I’m guessing these won’t have a prayer of taking advantage of all the new client-based bells and whistles. With XPe, if I stll have to manage it like a regular desktop (patching and anti virus) why wouldn’t I just put a PC on someone’s desk and lock it down tight with group policies? Might be the best way to go, but I’ll wait until I see a shipping product before I panic over our thin clients. The nice thing is the Neoware thin clients that we use at work can run WinCE, Linux, or XPe, so we may get lucky.

I believe this is my fourth Citrix iForum this year.  As always, Citrix puts on a first class show, and I always enjoy Mark Templeton’s keynote, but this year the message felt like it has for the last few years – the same.  It’s really all about the access.  Presentation Server had very few new tricks, although WANScaler looks promising.

Citrix seems to be pushing their desktop strategy, but based on the presentations the first revision will not do much more for me than publishing the Remote Desktop Client to allow someone to get to their desktop.  Citrix does make the management of the process easier by pooling those desktop resources, but my problem with it is that it doesn’t go quite as far as I was hoping.

I was hoping for a solution that would allow my users to access an external Web Interface/Citrix Secure Gateway server, enter their credentials, and then select the desktop they want to connect to; no ICA to RDP, just WI to an RDP desktop.  ICA is still there, which still feels like what we have already been doing for a couple years; publishing out the RDC.  I love ICA, but since ICA is not on the desktops and RDP is, ICA needs to step out of the way and allow WI/CSG to tunnel the RDP session back to my users via https.  I bet we get this in a later revision.  I believe I heard that Microsoft will come out with a web accessible gateway with Longhorn, so I may get my wish, only through a different vendor than expected.

Don’t get me wrong, Citrix is still a great product and the best game in town, but there are only so many ways you can repackage the same message.  It’s all about giving people access to their applications from anywhere in the world.  Nobody does that better than Citrix.

Maybe I’m just a little disappointed that the rumors flying around about version 4.5 being released this week look like they are not going to come true.  On the positive side it is nice to see that everyone is not complaining about printing issues much anymore.  Looks like Citrix finally has a decent solution in that arena with their Universal Printer Driver.

I finally got around to moving my old iBlog blog to WordPress. The text formatting was a bit of a mess, but at least it is done. I deleted the old blog from my server, so at least everything is now located in one place and is searchable.

The US Airways flight from Pittsburgh to Orlando ended up being a non stop sales pitch trying to get people to apply for a Bank of America Visa card.  I was trying to just relax and listen to music on my iPod but the announcements seemed to never end about applying for a Visa card.  When they weren’t announcing the deal, they were walking around the plane with applications explaining the it further.

Between the sales pitch and the flight attendant that kept bumping in to me every time she went up and down the aisle (more than 20 times) it was a terrible flight.  I should have known it would not be fun when I found out I have an aisle seat.  I’d rather be at the window.

I can’t believe they figured out how to bombard our lives with even more advertising.

I think I have used browser alternatives for too long, because I am struggling with IE7.  My Gmail has a little bit of an issue, but my Google Reader is a mess.  I can’t see the next article until I have it highlighted in the reader and different articles are running together.  Firefox has spoiled me.  It lead me towards Camino and I see even less reason to ever go back.

The problem is not at home, but at work.  My team is over 10,000 desktops and 1200 servers, many of which are Citrix/Terminal Servers.  It would be a big deal to move away from IE, but my first 24 hours with IE7 is making me wonder if we couldn’t actually make that move.  We have been doing some testing with Firefox and so far we have been lucky because we have yet to run in to any ActiveX requirements.  Could we pull the switch off?  Who knows, but we could not just roll out IE7 to all of our users as it is.  Since we will need to do some kind of training for either (or at least some kind of documentation for the users) this would be the time to do it if we really wanted to.

I may feel better about IE7 once we have complete control of it with Group Policies, like we do with IE6, but right now all I see is extra work for my team that already has more than enough to do.  We’ll ride out IE6 for a long time, but eventually Microsoft is going to stop supporting it and we will not have a choice.