Amazing technology from Microsoft

If this makes it into production form I'll have to do some saving!

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/will-microsoft-s-illumiroom-bring-the-new-xbox-to-life--1147730

If you love COD...

Check out my friends channel - plenty of BOPS action.
http://www.youtube.com/user/druidhwang

Hyper-V 2012 - Best freebie in a while

If you are looking for a free hypervisor platform then I strongly suggest you take a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V 2012. I've been using VmWare Esxi for the last few years and although it has served me fine, the speed improvements and management of Hyper-V are so much better now. I'm no MS fanboy, as previous versions of Hyper-V have been horrible but now they seemed to have cracked it.
The killer features for me are free, out of the box, failover and replication between Hyper-V servers. Basic management is OK but in order to handle the replication and failover functions you need to run the Hyper-V manager from either a Windows 8 PC or Windows Server 2012 desktop.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx

Ubuntu tweaks and themes from Noobslab

Grab some excellent tweaks, themes and wallpapers (I'm talking about you, Black Wallpapers) from Noobslab - http://www.noobslab.com/

SOLR 4

Think it may soon be time to revisit a SOLR build. Probably will concentrate on SOLR 4 http://lucene.apache.org/solr/features.html with Ubuntu LTS, 12.04 64 bit http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

More on IIS 8 and Windows server 2012

Further to my previous posts, it is also possible to setup app pools and change identities, using the syntax below:

appcmd set config /section:applicationPools /[name='purpleotter'].processModel.identityType:SpecificUser /[name='purpleotter'].processModel.userName: purpleone /[name='purpleotter'].processModel.password: APa55word

Windows Server 2012 and IIS bindings problem

Just starting to deploy some 2012 servers. If you can live with the interface then they can be a lot quicker for some operations. However, when working in IIS we've found some interesting buglets, specifically, when setting up a site with multiple bindings, addition net.pipe or net.tcp will fail.
The solution to this is to set the site bindings from the command line using the appcmd command. Create the site as normal and set an http binding on port 80 or whatever. Then to add additional bindings, open a raised privilege command prompt, navigate to the folder where appcmd is (usually C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv and follow the syntax below:

appcmd set site /site.name:MySite /+bindings.[protocol='net.tcp',bindingInformation='40011:*']

appcmd set site /site.name:AService /+bindings [protocol='net.pipe',bindingInformation='AService']

Restart IIS and all should be fine.