I like having a copy of the TechEd DVDs as they make great reference material.

This year’s Tech-Ed DVD Conference DVD Set contains 9 Dual-layer DVDs!  Those  9 DVDs are from the North American Tech-Ed Developers (Disks 1 –> 5) and IT-Professional (Disks 6-9) conference.

I’ve extracted the presentation lists from those DVDs, and have made it available below.

You can buy the set here.  Note that I’m not sure if it ships with 5 disks (pictured) or whether you get the full 9 DVDs.

What I do with my discs is extract the presentations, this year they are all Powerpoint 2007 based, and keep them in a reference folder.  Which is then searchable by my desktop search tool (Google Desktop at the moment).  This year’s collection is 2.6GB in size.

The presentations which have caught my eye so far are:

For the curious, I have:

• extracted the DVD content list
• added it to my Tech-Ed 2005 / 2006 / 2007 content list, and

placed it in a (zipped) Excel spreadsheet here.

edited 18th October: expanded out why the DVD set is worth buying.

In part one, I described the creation of a Proxy Server/Content Blocking solution.

It worked.  Just.  But it was slow.

Back in part one, I said I’d review SquidGuard, but never got around to it.

Why? Mainly time pressures with work.  But as the man said, distance lends perspective.  I don’t think SquidGuard is for me, as it doesn’t inspect page content, whereas Dansguardian does.

This weeks exercise was updating the NSLU2 to an ASUS EEE Box PC.

And it works really well with Squid & Dansguardian.  If you don’t mind not having a GUI frontend, as there’s not video driver available under Debian Lenny.

If anything, too well.  It identified a Wotif search as being Japanese Porn.  This is the downside of inspecting page content.  Sometimes it’s wrong.

And the Squid Proxy saved me 20% of my bandwidth in the first week:

In weeks 2 & 3, it dropped down to 5%.

I’m happy with what I’ve got now BUT I’m not sure for a 2 computer household, that it was worth it.

Other options I’d consider would be:

K9 Web Protection
is BlueCoat’s content web filtering solution for the home user.  It has good functionality now and promises more in future releases.  From their website:

"Blue Coat® K9 Web Protection is a content filtering solution for your home computer. Its job is to provide you with a family-safe Internet experience, where YOU control the Internet content that enters your home. K9 Web Protection implements the same enterprise-class Web filtering technology used by Blue Coat’s Fortune 500 customers around the world, wrapped in simple, friendly, and reliable software for your Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista computer."

They also state the following:

"The function that K9 provides is not antivirus, anti-spam, or firewall functionality. K9 is a Web filter; it determines where the computer user can go inside your Web browser. (In our upcoming release, we’ll also be offering Instant Message/Chat controls, and Peer-to-Peer controls.)"

OpenDNS
provides a FREE web filtering service.  You can do this by pointing your network router at OpenDNS, and OpenDNS does the rest.