I remember a lecture (Management of Research and Creativity) where Prof. R. Boutellier explained that the successive stages of an academic career and when a scientist should gamble, and when she should do secure science… But there is another similarity between faculty and gamblers, as Derek Bok wrote in University in the Marketplace: "Universities share [...]

Under XP, I used wab.exe for years as an LDAP query utility. The functions of the Windows Address Book has been enhanced with Vista, and the configuration changed quite a lot. So just follow these few steps to have a nice LDAP query utility: Create a shortcut to "C:\Program Files\Windows Mail\wab.exe" /find, find a nice [...]

I must admit, it is much more comfortable even if it does not comply to "real men don’t click" I can easily insert tables, lists, pictures, links, maps, and more… And there is a spell checker!!! This is the street plan of Hönggerberg… … the view for finger 4 of HCI. I’m working in the [...]

The BCDEdit function used by the ZTIBCDUtility.vbs script of MDT 2008 writes an incomplete entry in the BCD file of Vista SP1. Called by LTIApply.wsf /PE after the sysprep task, this function is responsible for forcing the computer to reboot in PE in order to capture the built OS. Because of the incomplete RAMDisk PE [...]

“You can only manage what you can measure” is a very famous sentence of Peter Drucker, the guru in modern management therory and also attributed to W. Edward Deming another famous management diva. I think, it’s true for managing Toyota, Dell and for sure UBS as well. But you cannot run your family, your school, [...]

When running WAIK 1.1 on a x64 Vista or x64 Windows 2008 systems, you cannot generate a catalog for a captures x86 Vista or Windows 2008. It’s a shame, really. But there is a workaround: Copy the original catalog of your Vista x86 (INSTALL_WINDOWS VISTA ENTERPRISE.CLG) from your distribution share’s original OS (Distribution\Operating Systems\OriginalVistaEntSP1x86\sources) to [...]

The script LTIApply I got in the download of MDT2008 x64 has a bug, to my humble opinion: Line 255 should read: BackupStore oEnvironment.Item(“DestinationLogicalDrive”) & “\boot\bcd.save” and not: BackupStore oEnvironment.Item(“DestinationLogicalDrive”) & “\sources\bcd.save” Without this correction, the script ZTIBackup.wsf will not fine the bcd.save to overwrite the bcd store and your capture image will always try [...]

Until June 2008, I’ll have to somewhat reduce my IT activities and concentrate on thesis of my postgraduate Master in Advanced Sciences. My topic is pretty controversial one: “Resource allocation in higher education organizations”. So I will post some interesting thoughts and citations. I like this one very much: “Education is not about filling pots. [...]

System state includes more data on Windows Server 2008 than in the Windows Server 2003 operating system. In Windows Server 2008, the exact system components which make up the system state depend on the configuration of the computer. System state data includes at least the following and may include additional data that is configuration dependent: [...]

Here the download site… … and the instructions raising Hyper-V beta virtual machine to the new version.

Would you really like to manage your server core with the mouse? Here is a solution: the CoreConfigurator

Each time I need them, I’m loosing a lot of time to find them: List of Locale ID (LCID) Values as Assigned by Microsoft NLS information page Language Codes Tine Zones

This excellent ETH paper proposes an interesting new metric to assess the committment to the security ecosystem and the effectiveness of the patch development process of Apple and Microsoft. Frei et al., suggest the 0-Day Patch metric, “being the number of patches a vendor is able to release at the day of the public disclosure [...]