Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of IE8 RC1. A release candidate is a version of the software that has been made available to the general public while it undergoes some final testing. You can download IE8 RC1 here.

Been playing around a little bit with VMware’s Fusion 2.0 and Sun’s VirtualBox 2.1.2, two virtualization platforms that are available for Mac users.I will eventually expand this brief test to include Parallels 4.0, since it seems that Parallels and Fusion are the frontrunners when it comes to virtualization on the Mac platform. For this initial test, I wanted to understand the differences in which the virtual disks were accessed and how that impacted performance. Sun’s VirtualBox, although a nice little application for being free, doesn’t allow for the configuration of multiple processors, the network interface binding is a little strange, and merely doesn’t seem to have the flexibility. Fusion (and Parallels for that fact) provides the capabilities to support multiple virtual processors, works great with multiple Ethernet interfaces, and provides better integration into the platform being virtualized. With that being said, boot time was of particular interest to me. In…

Just like about everybody else out there that is a “bleeding edge” technie like myself and doesn’t mind running some beta software downloaded the Windows 7 beta last week. Needless to say, it definitely has a better look and feel to it than Windows Vista, and the performance even though it is a beta seems to be as good as if not better than Vista. Here are a few other observations from some testing that I did. Every scenario that I ran through was via a MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 loaded on my machine. Windows 7 was installed into a virtual machine for the test phase. I had the intention of trying to run this virtual machine as my production desktop, but I found that too many of my applications had challenges running correctly under the OS. Most notably was any Java applet in the…

Even though we had a number of technical difficulties, I really enjoyed the interview with Jon and Hal over at the Powerscripting Podcast. I was excited to listen to the playback to the interview which should’ve been available a few days after we recorded the live show, but the interview went missing from what I hear, so Episode 54 was MIA. Our people are working on seeing if we can reschedule the interview for another show to take another run at it.

I will be the guest for an interview on the Powerscripting Podcast, a Powershell podcast designed to help people learn Windows PowerShell. I will be on to discuss the Compellent Command Set for Windows PowerShell, our free offering for customers who want the ability to manage their Compellent Storage Center via script, or automate administration processes, a lot of which I will talk about in the interview. This is a live show and the hosts will take questions during the broadcast, So, tune in Thursday night (January 8) at 9 AM EST (8 PM CST)!