Last year I started out on a quest for a new laptop. I had two important requirements for a new device: mobility and tablet capabilities. Why is that you may ask yourself.

For a few months I had been noticing a change in my work style. While I had always needed to run virtual machines on my laptop, I had long begun to move them to the cloud. I already talked about this at ice:2011 (German). Meanwhile virtual machines became less relevant for my work as I needed collaboration, taking notes, presentations and drawing infrastructure diagrams interactively with customers. So I decided I needed a more agile device – so much for the mobility requirement.

At the same time, Microsoft was already talking about the upcoming successor of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. I wanted to be able to test the new version as it was meant to be – a touch-optimized OS. So there’s the second requirement.

Finally, I decided to get a Lenovo X220 Tablet – a convertible laptop. Due to its lean form factory and powerful battery it has become the perfect companion for my mobile work style. In the following sections I will focus on different aspects of the new Windows 8 Beta while I have been running for a few weeks now.

Lately, I have been working on a lot of new reports for EdgeSight along my previous posts about building custom reports. This involves writing SQL query against the EdgeSight database and incorporating EdgeSight parameters to react to user input. Recently I have become annoyed by starting my virtual machine for these jobs and thought that I would be really neat to have an EdgeSight database available at all times. So I decided to migrate my EdgeSight database to the cloud.

Certificates are often considered to be binary blobs that cannot be expressed in human readable form. In this part of my series about what everybody needs to know about certificates (part 1, part 2 and part 3), I will introduce well-known formats for certificates and private keys and how they can be display in clear text to survey the information therein. When different plattforms are involved, conversions between these formats may be necessary to work with the files.

After having introduced the very basic concepts about certificates, we need to dive into the trust issues I raised in the first part of this series. Working with certificates means trusting someone else because a certificate contains a foreign signature combining a public key with identity information. In this part, I will explain why that trust is necessary and how every one of us implicitly places trust in certificates through the operating system.