Today is the last time that Microsoft will publish any updates for Windows 8.1. Today marks the end of extended support for Windows 8.1, and Windows 8.1 is now officially end of life. To say that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 were controversial is an understatement, but at the end of the day they were both solid improvements over Windows 7, despite the issues that they introduced.

Is 2022 over already? I don’t have a lot to talk about, but this was the first year that has felt like normal since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I recently deleted my Atlassian accounts and migrated all of my code from Bitbucket to GitHub. This was for a couple of reasons, but bottom line I am just finished with Atlassian as a company. Their business model is horrible, and they are just not worth it anymore. On the upside, GitHub is pretty much the defacto standard for Git, and Bitbucket is more of a niche at this point.

I am launching a dedicated website that is going to be just for documentation that I have created over the years, and for all documentation that I will be creating going forward. It uses Hugo and Netlify just like this website, and GitHub for hosting the Git repository. I have decided to make the repository for the website public, so anyone can download it if they want.

I published my book, Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server on September 22, 2021 and it has now been over a full year since I made it generally available for purchase. I wanted to reflect on what I have learned since releasing the book, what issues I have encountered, and what the next steps are.

I have received several emails lately from people who have purchased my Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server book and from people who have been downloaded my free guide on the same subject. There isn’t a problem with this, I am actually glad that people are reading both publications and have questions about it, but I wanted to set expectations with people whenever they have questions about it.

Internet Explorer 11 has officially gone end of life and it had a good run despite the issues associated with it. The first version of Internet Explorer was released on August 16, 1995 and it had a 26+ year run as one of the most well known Web Browsers in the world. Unfortunately, with the widespread adoption of modern Web Browsers, there was no longer a need for IE and it is time to move on.

I have had some time to think about it and I don’t normally comment on things like this, but the recent news that Broadcom was acquiring VMware from Dell for approximately $61 billion has me quite concerned about the future of on-premises virtualization and what is going to happen to enterprise solutions like VMware. Perpetual software licenses are going away faster than ever, and once it is normalized there will be no going back.