Richard Campbell Blogs Too

Greg and I had a great time talking to David Lowe about the Windows Server 2008 Core installation. David works for Microsoft on the Windows Server Team which is totally focused on getting Windows Server 2008 out the door.

What's really cool about the core installation is that it reminds me of the old version of NT3, where we didn't need a GUI or any of that stuff, it was a server product. In some ways, the core is just like that - stripped down to the fundamentals of what servers really need to be. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it in the future.

As always, questions and comments about the show are welcome at info@runasradio.com.

Donald Farmer talks to us about data mining on the IT side of the world, away from the traditional concepts of "people who liked this book also liked..." and into the idea that we could be data mining application and event logs to help us anticipate the needs of our information systems.

Data mining is a specific set of features of Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005 - and its included in the box! If you own a license of SQL Server 2005, you own Analysis Services and its data mining capabilities.

Like this type of show? Let us know at info@runasradio.com.

Well, our family trip to the east coast is finally wrapping up, I put the girls on the train back to Newark today for their flight home. Always a kind of melancholy event, sending your family away.

I'm staying at PWOP Studios for a few days to do some more work, I go home on the weekend. Actually, I shouldn't say staying there, actually I'm staying at Carl's home and working at the studio.

It's been fun to actually hang around New London and Mystic, rather than tearing through on a pure-work mission. I'm beginning to understand why Carl lives here.

After spending a week in New York, we hopped on the Amtrak and headed for New London in time for Carl's 40th birthday party.

We're staying in a cool older hotel near the seaside on the edge of New London.

Carl's party was, of course, totally over the top. He held it at his home, and had an entire barbeque pig brought in for dinner. All sorts of interesting folks, including Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Scott Hanselman and Miguel Castro attended.

After the party, we headed over to the studio to record Mondays. This time we had an audience, most of the folks from the party came to listen. To record a Mondays together we all have to be stuffed into audio isolation booths. There are three in the studio - a pair in the main room that face each other and one across the hall. Mark and Karen were in the pair, so they could see each other. I was in the booth across the hall, so it was almost like being back home in that I couldn't see anyone, just hear them through the headphones.

Carl was in the main studio room with the audience, which is why he's able to interact with them.

Recording the show was hilarious, not only did we have good bits, but the general chaos of having everyone there just kicked everything up a notch.

I almost never travel for fun - travel is work. Folks who don't travel for a living think that the constant travel is something to enjoy, and while it does have its perks, the reality is that my idea of a vacation is being able to stay home for a whole month (I dare not hope for more, I haven't been home for longer than a month in many years).

But this trip is the rare exception. My daughter is turning sixteen and she wanted to go to New York for her birthday. Top that off with Carl's 40th birthday around the same time, and we had an excuse to go to New York and New London for fun.

So here we are in New York, actually as tourists for a change. We're staying in a nice hotel near Central Park, only a block away from Steve Forte. The girls are having a gas, and I'm getting a chance to see The City from a different viewpoint.

After having a couple of laughs around whether we were talking about Virtualization for Disaster Recovery or Disaster Recovery for Virtualization (it was the latter), Greg and I went deep with Bob Roudebush into the issues of doing backups of guest VMs and host environments using Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare.

We keep coming back to virtualization as a key topic for today's IT personnel. Let us know if this is what you'd like to hear at info@runasradio.com.

Our longest-distance interview yet, we talked to Sarbjit Singh Gill all the way in Singapore about his work with Sharepoint 2007. Sarbjit did a great job of helping us understand the role that Sharepoint plays in the enterprise, from a project management point for Office documents into full-blown portals for the business.

More Sharepoint shows? Send us an email at info@runasradio.com.

We got a chance to really dig into where server virtualization is at with Stephen Rose. Stephen digs into both Microsoft's Virtual Server product and VMWare's goodies. We also dive into migration strategies.

There's still plenty more to talk about in the server virtualization arena, send us an email at info@runasradio.com and give us your suggestions!