Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Virtualization – Old Hat?

Although humans in general and members of its subspecies “marketing manager” in particular tend to treat currently “hot” topics as new and revolutionary, they only rarely are. In fact, “new” should be considered as in “new wine in old bottles” rather than in “did not exist before”. Take virtualization. Although the topic of the day seems to be cloud computing, virtualization can probably still be called “hot” (especially since a cloud also is a kind of virtualization). But is it new? Judge for yourself: Below I have compiled a list of boring old technologies that employ virtualization. Continue reading ‘Virtualization – Old Hat?’


New XenDesktop 4 Licensing Model: Flexibility? Yes, but at what Cost?

It seems the Citrix community had only had one topic recently, albeit one discussed hotly: licensing. Now that Citrix has given in and practically allowed all conceivable license types, everybody is happy?! It seems so, although CCU licenses have doubled in price, as Shawn Bass points out. But is this really the happy ending of a short but wild story? Maybe, maybe not. Let me explain. Continue reading ‘New XenDesktop 4 Licensing Model: Flexibility? Yes, but at what Cost?’


DiskLED – A Flexible Hard Disk and General System Activity Indicator System Tray Applet

What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy, because if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved – if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you are using a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED. Continue reading ‘DiskLED – A Flexible Hard Disk and General System Activity Indicator System Tray Applet’


Profile Hell – The Reality of Windows User Profiles

A user calls the help desk to report a strange malfunction of an application. What does the help desk technician do? Analyze the root cause of the problem? Probably not. Most likely, the user’s profile will be deleted and the problem will have gone away. Happy ending? Not at all! Continue reading ‘Profile Hell – The Reality of Windows User Profiles’