It was five years ago this week that Novell acquired Ximian.

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/08/pr03051.html

I clearly remember heading to the Ximian offices at the back of Fenway Park in Boston a few weeks after the acquisition; my task was to meet with the Red Carpet Enterprise team and work on integration plans with ZENworks.

I arrived at the offices at around 8.30am – and waited until around 9.15 before someone turned up. The RCE team started heading in at around lunch time. I quickly learned that they worked like me Work late, up late.

So started one of the most rewarding and exciting times of my time at Novell. The Red Carpet Enterprise team were an incredible team – I don’t think any of us are left at Novell.

RCE evolved into ZENworks Linux Management and then became the underpinning technology for ZENworks Configuration Management.

Big grins this morning. I got an email overnight from Brisbane – the results are in.

I passed the ITIL v3 Managers Bridge – it was an 80% pass score and I got 95%

I’m just waiting for the certificate to arrive in the post – but this means I am an ‘ITIL Expert’

One of the last things I did before the move was to move some of the retired servers from physical to virtual. The hosts were all SLES 10 – so I did the move to VMware server; the idea being that if I needed anything off the server could find it again.

This week I needed to move one of my previously hosted sites to another host – and I couldn’t find the pesky virtual hard disk. Eventually I found it lurking on a backup server.

Sigh.

Oh joy.

I’ve been digging into the mapping between ITIL v3 and the new Microsoft Operations Framework v4.

There are a lot of white papers from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc506049.aspx

There is also a good MOF v4 overview from Rob van den Burg here.

WordPress 2.6 is live; I just updated from 2.6 RC1 to 2.6 live here.

Download from http://wordpress.org/download/

Main highlights:

• post differencing
• support for Google Gears

There’s an offical blog post about it here: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/ - with a great video overview.

Hopefully these notes will be useful for others; based on my experience of last weeks Bridging course and exam from The Art of Service in Brisbane.

The Curriculum

• the curriculum is available from APM Group here
• I didn’t see any surprises in the exam - i.e. everything in the exam was described in the curriculum
• the focus of the exam is the differences from the ITIL v2 Managers exam.

Differences … but..

• the bridge does assume that you understand the ITIL v2 space pretty well - i.e. your managers is still fresh!
• you should read the five ITIL v3 books; there is a lot of contextual information that you really do need to understand.

After four days of cramming in Brisbane I ended up with five annoted ITIL books; five ‘books of notes’; each based on one of the phase books; a book of sample questions and exam-style questions; and finally a book of mind maps from The Art of Service.

For my own learning style the cross-referencing between the ‘bridge notes’ from The Art of Service and back to the books was really useful. It let me refer quickly from a concept - such as Portfolio Management, back to the relevent sections in the books.

Also useful is cross-referencing where the different roles and processes intersect. There is a lot of emphasis on the holistic lifecycle; also on the relationships between phases in the lifecycle. It’s not enough to try and map the v2 linear world onto the v3 map; I found it invaluable working with others to really understand the lifecycle and how it all fits.

Exam is done. Fingers crossed. Results in a week or so.

Firefox 3.0.1 is in beta.

Looks like the main changes are security fixes – but it’s all working ok so far.

Two weeks or so – then I’ll have the results.

Now I’ve got an evening to relax in Brisbane; the guys from The Art of Service have given me some pointers.

It’s the middle of the Queensland winter – so it’s about 18′C right now; the patio heaters are on and it’s dark at 5 pm.

Right now I’m settled with a glass of Western Australian Cabernet, listening to classic reggae in a bistro on James St. Lovely.

Five books, six volumes of notes, one pack of homework and exam-style questions, 122 pages of mind maps.