Jonathan Hardwick

Reminder to self: never eat dogfood just before heading home, it'll keep you up all night. The "dogfood" in this case is release candidate 1 of the upcoming XP Service Pack 2 . We're not recommending that customers use it in production environments...

If you haven't seen electric sheep yet, you're missing out. It's a distributed evolutionary ecosystem of fractal screensaver e-life. Which is to say, you contribute cycles, and in return you get the finest damn eye-candy in the entire world. The "best...

Last year I took a course on the Microsoft Operations Framework . One of the best parts of the course was the McKinley airport simulation , which is an evolving simulation of IT support at a busy airport. You have to operate as a team with different roles...

Ok, for all those of you who weren't at MMS 2004 last week, here are the free downloads that you missed: MOM 2005 beta 3 and MOM 2005 Express beta . Yep, our latest bits. SMS 2003 Admin Feature Pack - three tools that let you manage site accounts...

By default, Windows XP comes with a pretty good set of power schemes . But if you're a control freak, you'll really love the Power Saver application that Toshiba ships with its Tablet PCs. You can create an unlimited number of additional power schemes...

Last of the news summaries of this year's Microsoft Management Summit: Infoworld's article " Microsoft offers glimpse of management software future " reports on Kirill's keynote, where he talked about capacity planning (yay Indy demo!) and desired...

Well, our demo's not till tomorrow, but apparently "sources close to the company" (and I have my guesses as to who they are :-)) have already been talking to the analysts. Mary Jo Foley gets it pretty much exactly right in Modeling the Datacenter With...

If you actually get to kick real hardware in your job, then head on over to KC Lemson's blog and add your name to the comments - we're wondering why there are so many developer blogs around, but so few administrator blogs. Where are tomorrow's BOFH s...

Scoble's interview with Bill Hill reminded me that font choices are another weapon in the ongoing battle against information overload. Of course, any conversation about fonts is almost as likely to escalate into an all-out religious war as is a conversation...

Update : autoruns has gotten even better — check out my latest post about it. The first time I ran task manager on my Tablet PC, I was faintly horrified at the long list of Windows background processes. What were they doing? And how could I make them...

I think the Tablet PC is one of those things that people often don't "get" until they actually use one. So this post probably has two audiences - my fellow drooling gadget freaks who didn't order a laptop at work until they could get a Tablet PC, and...

Ok, they might not be blogging about it, but we've got over 2000 customers coming from 45 different countries. We've even added extra late-night lab sessions to cope with demand. In other words, our customer are so keen on computer management that they...

Thanks to Scoble's nice mention *, I'm not feeling so alone any more. That, plus the PR machinery is starting to kick into gear for the Microsoft Management Summit next week - and right on cue, Mary Jo Foley is running some analysis . If you're only going...

" All alone in the night " was originally entitled "Point man" - but I couldn't get a really good analogy going between being the first blogger in a Microsoft group, and being the first guy through the door in a game of XBox Live Counterstrike, so I went...

Some disheartening Feedster results: "Microsoft Management Summit": my introduction , a couple of analysts, and some job postings "MMS 2004": zero, nada, nothing Yep, that's right, the ANALYSTS are doing more blogging about our upcoming conference...

Advertisers, Wall Street traders, and anyone who's ever fought for a share of the Windows desktop knows that the most important real estate on the planet is the screen you're looking at right now. And like all real estate, while some is good, more is...

Hi - I'm Jonathan Hardwick, and I'm software architect for the Indy team in Microsoft's Enterprise Management Division. EMD are the fine folks who make it possible to manage thousands of computers using SMS and MOM - and if you know what those TLAs mean...