I got 955 on the 70-293 exam today and have started on the 70-294 which I hope to get done next Friday. The hours of study paid off!
Month: May 2008
As I found out that the 2nd chance exam offer runs out at the end of this month (for the initial exam – you have until the end of June to take the retake) I’ve decided to try and get my MCSE by the end of the month so I’m swotting really hard. I’ve finished the first half of the Microsoft Press book for 70-293 tonight – I started it on Sunday night and last night we were out for a couple of hours so it’s not bad going. I’ve scheduled the exam for Friday afternoon and after that I’ll only have 2 more to go.
I’ve also pushed the guys at the office to take advantage of the offer, so far I know at least 2 of them have booked exams and if the others are reading this – then just do it! With this offer I really don’t think there is any excuse for someone not to be an MCP at a minimum, especially when the exam fee is reimbursed on passing and the 2nd chance removes a lot of the pressure.
As I found out that the 2nd chance exam offer runs out at the end of this month (for the initial exam – you have until the end of June to take the retake) I’ve decided to try and get my MCSE by the end of the month so I’m swotting really hard. I’ve finished the first half of the Microsoft Press book for 70-293 tonight – I started it on Sunday night and last night we were out for a couple of hours so it’s not bad going. I’ve scheduled the exam for Friday afternoon and after that I’ll only have 2 more to go.
I’ve also pushed the guys at the office to take advantage of the offer, so far I know at least 2 of them have booked exams and if the others are reading this – then just do it! With this offer I really don’t think there is any excuse for someone not to be an MCP at a minimum, especially when the exam fee is reimbursed on passing and the 2nd chance removes a lot of the pressure.
Microsoft just released version 1 of their Pro Photo Tools (genuine advantage and .net framework 3 required) that allows you to geotag your photos. Interestingly the software seems to think it is called Photo Info v2 as trying to install it popped up a message saying I needed to remove Photo Info version 1 before installing version2. Having got that hurdle out of the way I loaded the software. I was pleased straight away as this application loaded a lot faster than photo info v1 which could take about 45 seconds to load but at first glance I shuddered at the dark grey colour scheme but then continued to click around the application.
I loaded a photo I had already geotagged and sure enough the information was displayed in the gps fields and on the map. One cool feature is the “Get Location Text” button that gets the street address from the co-ordinates – very cool. The application also allows you to load in a gpx file (or other location files) from your gps and automatically sync the location with the time stamp from the camera. I haven’t tried this yet as I don’t have a recent gps log with photos – I’ll have to go out geocaching some more to rectify this! If your camera time is slightly off (I just realised mine is an hour slow due to the time change) you can change the time stamp on all of your photos basing the original time on gps time or exif time.
I finally stamped a whole load of photos with my name, website and description of the event and quickly saved all the information back to the files. Keywords can be entered to tag the photos but need to be comma separated (the software doesn’t tell you that and space separating them puts them all in as one long keyword.) It was handy to have the photos open in Windows Live Photo to view the keywords as the files were changed to see how this would work. No changes in WLP were necessary – as the files were saved the tags were changing in real time.
I’d really like to be able to create macros in this application to automatically stamp my data into photos such as Photographer, url etc as at the moment its a process taking a few steps – not many, but it would be nice to automate it. Also the ability to select various copyright choices such as creative commons would be good too (it defaults to all rights reserved).
Overall a nice package to be added to my existing set of photo editing tools – it will probably replace wwmx as my geotagging tool of choice.
Ricoh copiers can save scans and incoming faxes to a network share as pdf’s and tif files. However if a previous company used the administrator username and password and you come and change the administrator password then this functionality breaks – to the tune of about 500 pieces of paper all over the floor of the office!
It took me a while to find this information out, but the user name and passwords for accessing the network shares are stored in the address book on the copier – they are not stored in the many other option pages of the copier, this functionality can be found in the management web interface, so an onsite visit is not needed (the default use name and password for the web console is admin and no password). At the same time I would strongly recommend changing the username to a service account that is not the administrator account on the network!
I downloaded an evaluation copy of Windows2003 for my MCSE training tonight from Microsoft. The cd image is in an img file that of course can not be read by Hyper-V! Now I could burn the file to a cd and then capture the image within Hyper-V but that was too much work and I’d have to hunt for a blank cd. I knew that VirtualCloneDrive wouldn’t work in Windows2008 as I had already tried this for something else earlier on, but I did find MagicISO – a package I had also used on XP – it said it would work on 64Vista and as Windows2008 seems to have a lot of similarities with Vista I thought I’d give it a go….I ran the install of MagicISO and then mounted the img file with it and explorer recognised the drive. I closed down the Hyper-V console, re-opened it and was able to capture my new drive for my new Windows 2003 installation. It’s working very well – highly recommended.
Hopefully this will come in handy for others as I couldn’t find any useful information on mounting a virtual iso img or cd image in Windows 2008