Recently, I got the chance to sit down and chat with Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow, and all-around Windows Internals mogul. You may recall that we acquired Mark’s company, Winternals and its sister site, Sysinternals. (Formerly NTinternals.com if you go back that far)
Well, above all that, we got Mark – who is now a bonafide "blue badge" as they call it here in Microsoft-land and has been honored with the designation of "Technical Fellow", a rank bestowed only to 16 people in the company, including folks like David Cutler, father of Windows NT; Rakesh Agrawal, the inventor of the modern datawarehouse; and Anders Hejlsberg, the man responsible for Delphi, C#, and many of some of the most significant improvements in computer programming languages in the modern age.
I asked him quite a few things but the funniest thing that stuck out in my mind was:
Wow. Mark demos better than me. Sigh.
You see, Mark consistently uses two of his tools from Sysinternals which are available for free off of Microsoft.com.
- ZoomIt v1.21
The first is ZoomIt, which with a flick of the keyboard immediately zooms in on the portion of the screen the mouse is hovering over. Zoomit makes it a cake walk for people in the back row to see exactly what you’re showing on the screen, and it allows you to "ink" the screen to circle and highlight things that you’d like point out to the audience. ZoomIt is a tool I used to use 6 years ago but lost track of. Now it seems that everyone within Microsoft is using it because it does such a good job of maintaining the audience’s attention.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/ZoomIt.mspx - BgInfo v4.0
BGInfo is just a tool that runs and changes the background of your computer to list out the computer’s name, the IP address, CPU type & clockspeed, OS running, Service Pack level, etc. It’s a very good way of identifying what computer is what when you’re running a demo with multiple computers or multiple virtual machines.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/BgInfo.mspx
This was the first time I’d ever gotten to talk with Mark and admittedly I was a little awestruck which is very rare for me. This guy was brilliant. I’ve met Brian Valentine, Jim Allchin, Mark Minasi, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and other famous Microsoft icons and honestly, meeting Mark was right up there.
I’ll write more about what we talked about but suffice it to say, he’s got a lot to say and it’s extremely fascinating.
kurtsh
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