Month: August 2010

I’ve had some interesting conversations with folks from North America in the past about how different regions in the world have different laws.  You might come up with a corporate “acceptable IT usage policy” over in New York but that document’s restrictions or contents might be completely illegal in somewhere like Germany or Italy, even if the employee has to sign it in order to keep/get a job.

I picked those countries because of my experience in running a multinational system that included offices there.  We had to set up proxy services just for them that had no content logging.  We also had different rules for PC’s in Germany so that admins could only log into them with the user’s permission!!!

I just saw another example of how things are different.  We all know how people who are recruiting will google for the person they are looking at.  I do it.  I once found that a candidate was a raving loony Nazi.  That and his “I want to kill everyone” demeanor in the interview put us wa-ay off him.  Silicon Republic has published an article that reports on Germany considering a new law to ban recruiters from looking up candidates for jobs in personal social networking sites such as Facebook (a common practice).  They will be able to use LinkedIn.  I have no idea how this can be enforced – considering that you can’t log web activity on the proxy in Germany!

As always, consult the appropriate legal experts in the remote region before applying some law that is fine in your own jurisdiction.

We’re getting to the end of the production phase (reviewing the final PDF versions that go to the printer) of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment, the Hyper-V book that I have written.

There’s a bunch of people to thank:

We’ll start with Sybex … you all know who you are.  From helping me with the original proposal, keeping the project on schedule, to keeping the quality high, and fixing my many grammatical mistakes (should I now reveal that I got a lower D in English in secondary school?), everyone has been of great help.

My co-author was Patrick Lownds, another virtual machine MVP in the UK.  Patrick came in late on the project and bailed me out on a couple of chapters, taking on one particular chapter that I would not have been able to do in time, but that I thought was central to the story: DPM 2010.

The technical editor was Hans Vredevoort, a clustering MVP (and honorary virtual machine MVP) in the Netherlands.  Hans made this a better book, spotting mistakes and providing new ideas.

Mark Minasi was kind enough to contribute a foreword to the book.  Mark gave me my first opportunity with Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2, and he’s taught me a lot over the last 5 years.

Wilbour Craddock in Microsoft Ireland helped me out at a crucial point in the project.  I hit a pretty big snag at one point and things got delayed.  Will helped out, not to mention providing a lot of help to me over the last few years.  He, Dave Northey and Enda Flynn have given me some opportunities over the past 2 years that have made a huge difference, and helped me get to a position where I could write this book.

Then there’s my friends in the MVP program.  I’ve learned a lot from those folks, including the MVPs, leaders, and various people in the product groups, the Virtual Machine and Failover Clustering groups in particular.  A lot of what I learned, be it new ideas, configurations, etc, have shaped my view of Hyper-V and System Center (nothing under NDA, honest!).

Finally, a lot of folks I know online supported and encouraged me over the last 5 months: my friends on the Minasi forum, and words of encouragement from folks by email or on Twitter.

Thank you all!

Aidan.

Microsoft has published a cyber bullying fact sheet that is aimed at parents, guardians, and those looking after kids.  It’s concise and easy to understand, and it should be read by anyone who has kids online (pretty much everyone).  Cyberbullying is a growing problem; it’s not something that happens somewhere far away or in the headlines.