Big news yesterday as the endgame for Spaces was finally revealed.  The handwriting has been on the wall for quite some time for Spaces, with anything of value (Photos, People, etc.) pulled out of Spaces quite some time ago, and a whole Wave of innovation passing it by.

Still we were relieved and even encouraged by today’s announcement that Microsoft was partnering with WordPress.com to allow current Spaces users (and future Windows Live bloggers) will be able to migrate or start a new blog at WordPress.com, and connect their blogs to Windows Live Activity Streams through Messenger Connect.

Source : www.liveside.net

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We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download!

Source : windowsteamblog.com/windows_live

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I just found out about some simulators available for IBM servers. Mostly they are BIOS, uEFI, ServerRAID or MegaRAID software simulator that allow you to see what the interface looks like.

They are very cool.

You will find them here.

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Yesterday I was trying to build a bootable USB Key with WinPE 3.0 (from Win7/2008 R2 AIK) to use on my new IBM x3550 M3. I was unable to boot the computer with the key. Strangely the key works fine on another computer.

I was building my boot image (boot.wim) for x86 (32bit) OS. This morning it hits me, why not try to build an x64 image (amd64) ? and it worked !

Here’s my understanding of the problem (and I could be wrong) :

My IBM x3550 M3 is an EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) system, you know the replacement of the old BIOS. It looks to me that booting an EFI system with a x86 WinPE is not supported because the bootmgr.efi file is missing. When you build an x64 (amd64) WinPE the file (bootmgr.efi) is present and everything works fine on my server.

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Recently Microsoft published the security update MS10-039 for Sharepoint. You may want to read the following articles BEFORE applying that update :

• Did a Security Patch Bust SharePoint Server 3.0?
• After SharePoint security update MS10-039 Central Admin and web pages not working

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Starting today, you can embed a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet in a blog or website. With PowerPoint presentations, viewers can page through a mini version of the slides or view in full screen. For example, you might embed a PowerPoint presentation of photos from your last vacation, share slides from a lecture or talk that you enjoyed, or broadcast your knowledge of a special subject.

Source : meraTechPort

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta has been released !

Check it and download at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com

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Powershell has become a defacto scripting environment for a lot of  companies and rightly so considering its capabilities.
However, not every place do we find all modules loaded into powershell as one would like for the ease of scripting. I faced a similiar situation wherein I wanted to perform few admin tasks on an IIS box and din't have the IIS powershell snap-in installed. Wish the server was Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS module is out-of-the-box loaded). There are more than a couple ways which could handle the script I was aiming for. Nevertheless, I thought it was a great opportunity to check out this functionality.

Source : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

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It's gotten to the point where iTunes is simply something that we, as Windows users, have learned to live with. It's a bloated, poorly-written, poor performing pig of a program. But it's also an absolute necessity for the hundreds of millions of us who use iPhones, iPods, and iPads every day.

Source : Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

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iTunes 10 might be brand new, but little has changed in Cupertino. Apple still gives Windows users a single installer that clutters your hard disk with a bunch of unnecessary components, some of which can be harmful to your system’s security and reliability. I show you how to take control of the iTunes 10 installer so you get exactly what you want and nothing more.

Source : Ed Bott's Microsoft Report Blog RSS | ZDNet

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If you want to insert some dummy text in a Word document, start a new paragraph, type =lorem() and hit Enter.

...

Or Just type the command =rand.old(m,n) at the beginning of a new paragraph and hit enter. The number n is the number of paragraphs while n is the number of lines that you want to appear in each paragraph.

Source : Digital Inspiration Technology Blog

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