January 2006 Archives

This is interesting: Computerworld's running a story saying that IBM has promised to make good its years of benign neglect by shipping a Mac Notes client that has feature parity with Windows. As someone who had to suffer through writing applications for the Mac Notes clients back in the day, I say "it's about time". Now, Microsoft: how about improving SharePoint support for Mac OS X?

Forbes Magazine has an interesting, if short, interview with Exchange sensei Tony Redmond. For those of you just stepping out of the spaceship, Tony is an ex-DEC, ex-Compaq messaging specialist with an incredibly deep background on messaging in general and Exchange in particular; he's also a VP and CTO of the services division at HP.

From CERT yesterday, an announcement of Oracle's latest security patch. They're so clueless it's not even worth making fun of them at this point.

Various Oracle products and components are affected by multiple vulnerabilities. The impacts of these vulnerabilities include remote execution of arbitrary code, information disclosure, and denial of service.

Ever want to know how to effectively use limited user accounts (LUA) to run on Windows XP? Me too. Fortunately, MS just released a white paper that details what LUA is (and isn't) and how to implement it on XP desktops. This is very valuable guidance-- try it yourself and you'll see what I mean.

It's not often that I can praise Toledo (which I live near) as a technology leader. However, in yesterday's Blade, a story by Mark Reiter gives me something legit to praise: the local federal district court is using iPods to pass out evidence to defendants for review. I've got a call in to Jeff Helmick, who's quoted in the story, to ask some follow-up questions; check back here for an update.

I love Popeye's. It's not just that their food is good; I've certainly eaten at better Cajun restaurants. No, a big part of Popeye's charm is that it's consistently good. I've never had a bad meal at a Popeye's, even in skanky locations like turnpike rest stops.

So it is with James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux books. They pretty much all taste the same: there's an Evil-with-a-capital-E bad guy, a host of amusingly named minor players, and at least one troubled woman who wants to jump in the sack with Dave. Either Dave or Clete Purcel beats the stuffing out of a few people; some of these beatdowns are deserved and some aren't. In the end, justice triumphs; the details aren't necessarily important. Along the way, Burke writes some masterful descriptions of the climate and rhythms of life in south Louisiana, and he usually teaches me a few new phrases of copspeak.

This book contains all those formulaic elements, in spades, and so I'm happy with it-- when I opened it, I knew what I was getting, and that's just what Burke delivered.

I’m cleaning out my office (that faint sound you hear is applause from my wife). I have 12 copies each of Secure Messaging with Exchange 2000 and Secure Messaging with Exchange Server 2003 to give away. If you want one, reply via email with your postal address (be sure to tell me which one you want) and I’ll ship it to you. First come, first served.

Update: all of the Exchange 2003 books are spoken for, but I still have a few Exchange 2000 books available.

While searching the Interweb for something else, I found this review of Secure Messaging with Exchange Server 2003 by fellow MVP David Sengupta. Somehow I completely missed it when it was originally published. Duh. It was fun to look back (and, of course, if you haven't bought the book yet, you should read the review and then Make the Right Choice!)

A reader wrote to quiz me about my recent columns on 64-bit Exchange and the performance benefits it should offer. He asked:

In your last e-letter you mentioned the added performance boost putting Exchange on a 64-bit box. For those of us that connect our Exchange servers to an iSCSI SAN, would we not run into bottlenecks at the NIC (1Gb backbone, assuming we were not using a TOE card or maybe even if we do), before a 32-bit setup cut into performance?

I'll trot out my all-purpose answer: "it depends."

First, let's assume that you have a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the iSCSI SAN, with an HBA that has a native x64 driver-- no thunking required. That's just a clarification, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Why? Assuming that you have "enough" RAM (where the precise value of "enough" varies according to the user workload on your server), JET 12 is going to be able to cache a significantly larger portion of the EDB data than it can now, meaning that the amount of bandwidth between your server and the iSCSI cabinet becomes much less relevant from a perf standpoint. We already see a similar effect now; when SAN vendors are hunting for business, they often put lipstick on the bulldog by adding a very large cache to the controller. Of course, this only works until the disks hit 70% or so of capacity, then the cache detunes and performance drops like a rock. That's a problem only because the SAN controller has no idea what the application is doing; it's not a problem for Exchange in this case because ESE is in charge of the cache. Given "enough" RAM, the amount of bandwidth you use for a given set of user behaviors should decrease because you'll be making fewer requests to the actual disk.

What about page size? My gut feel is that the page size change will be a wash; caching will reduce the total number of IOPS that have to go over the wire, but those pages that do go will be 8KB vice 4KB. I'm looking forward to seeing hard data to confirm or disprove this, though.

Why did I say "it depends", then, if the performance news is so rosy? Because one of the key reasons people will be deploying Exchange 12 is to consolidate servers. Obviously if you take four or five Exchange 2003 servers and stuff their mailboxes onto an Exchange 12 server, the new server is going to require a significant amount of SAN bandwidth, and I suspect it'll easily be possible to build configurations that would saturate a GigE HBA. So, don't do that and you should be good to go!

Another cool MacWorld product: Griffin's new TuneCenter, an iPod dock that lets you play videos or music, or show pictures, from your iPod on a regular TV. I wonder how well this actually works? I love the idea, especially since it's much simpler than the current lashup I have now. One key difference is that pictures displayed through the Xbox360 UI should use a much higher resolution than the iPod will support, but then that requires my Xbox360-MCE connection to work properly.

So, Paul Thurrott asks if it's odd that Microsoft is promoting Telestream's Flip4Mac QT codec for WMV playback (I wrote about that earlier this week). Short answer: no, it's not odd at all. The Mac version of Windows Media Player has always been a poor stepchild. It doesn't play all current WMV formats; it can't dynamically load new codecs, its UI is poor, and it's got more bugs than a Tennessee anthill. As I understand it, it was never owned by the Mac Business Unit at MS, which has a great track record of producing Mac-specific versions of MS tools (witness the RDP client or MSN Messenger). It was owned by the Windows Media group, which probably has negative interest in doing anything that makes things better or easier for Mac users-- after all, Apple is their #1 competitor in the digital media format war.

In that light, this isn't an odd move at all: some smart folks at Microsoft realized that they could save money and make themselves look better by licensing Telestream's excellent product instead of foisting WMP Mac on users. I'm a little surprised they're not touting it more, actually; I found out when I got a press release from Telestream, well in advance of hearing about it from MS.

If it's MacWorld week, it must be time for more Mac news here. Today's dose: Research In Motion has licensed IAA's PocketMac product. It'll be made avaialble as a free download on RIM's web site starting in February. This is obviously a good move for IAA, makers of PocketMac, and clearly it's an effort by RIM to remain competitive with Palm for hearts-and-mindshare among Mac users.

Flip4Mac has been making Windows Media codecs for QuickTime for a while now. They work as advertised: download them, and you can play WMV files in your QuickTime applications. They also make some other products that provide QT/WMV import and export. Microsoft cut a deal with them, and now you can get the Flip4Mac WMV playback codecs, for free, from them directly. This is particularly nice because of the low quality and functionality of the Mac version of Windows Media Player; I hope it means that WMP for Mac will die, and that the engineering effort behind it will be redirected to other Mac projects.

This is great news: Google finally released Google Earth (their 3-D map program) for the Mac. Get it here. The coolest thing I've found for it so far is a real-time 3-D flight tracker-- check out FBOweb and watch flights into ORD, JFK, BOS, or ATL in real-time, with altitude and speed.

I recently finished helping my friend Brian Dreier build a new web site for his Japanese sword business, Ronin Swords. Along the way I learned a ton of new vocabulary (for example, I now know what tsuka-maki are, not to mention same). If you're into actual or reproduction Japanese swords, check out Brian's site at roninswords.com.

It's Patch Tuesday, so you know what that means. This month, there's actually an Exchange patch, although it only applies to Exchange 2000, Exchange 5.5, and Exchange 5.0 on the server side (Outlook 2000, Outlook XP, and Outlook 2003 are all affected too, though). The vuln reported in MS06-003 is a problem in the TNEF decoding engine that can allow remote code execution. Interestingly, MS released security patches for Exchange 5.5 even though it just went end-of-life 10 days ago... and what's up with that crazy Exchange 5.0 patch? That's been out of support for quite a while, and I'd bet the percentage of sites using it is very, very small.

Lenovo and Apple are fighting over my wallet. I'm thinking about buying a new laptop, and the two contenders now are the Thinkpad T60 and the brand-new MacBook Pro. The big variable is whether the MacBook can run Windows, either using VirtualPC (Microsoft isn't saying) or natively. If yes, that's my choice; if no, I'd probably lean towards the Thinkpad. Fortunately, neither one is actually shipping, so I don't have to make a decision quite yet.

Lenovo and Apple are fighting over my wallet. I'm thinking about buying a new laptop, and the two contenders now are the Thinkpad T60 and the brand-new MacBook Pro. The big variable is whether the MacBook can run Windows, either using VirtualPC (Microsoft isn't saying) or natively. If yes, that's my choice; if no, I'd probably lean towards the Thinkpad. Fortunately, neither one is actually shipping, so I don't have to make a decision quite yet.

Update: there's some great stuff at AppleIntelFAQ.com that partially answers my question about dual-booting. Dave Schroeder also commented at Macintouch that side-by-side Windows solutions will be available in "weeks/months", and that XP won't install on the MacBook Pro because XP lacks EFI support-- but that Vista might install. Now that would be worth trying.

Jim McBee says something that I've been evangelizing for a while: turn off outbound SMTP on your network. The only machines that should be able to send it are your messaging servers. Maybe, if you're feeling generous, you might allow VPN users to send SMTP so they can send mail while on the road. That's it, though. There's no good reason why Joe Cubedweller should be able to send SMTP direct from his machine. Worms like Sober use it, as do a number of rootkits/botnet droppers.

Fun, breezy read covering Ben Rich's life as an engineer at the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich (and his ghostwriter, Leo Janos, who also helped out with Yeager) has a breezy, conversational prose style and a ton of great war stories. Kelly Johnson was who I wanted to be when I entered college; as Rich points out in the last two chapters, though, those days are gone-- that realization is part of what led me to stop pursuing a career in aerospace. Good thing I did, because the problems for aerospace companies that Rich pegged in the last chapters have all happened in the years since the book's published. As someone who built model SR-71s and U-2s as a kid, and who eagerly snapped up every tidbit of info on the F-117A as it gradually became public, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but admittedly it's not for those who aren't interested in aviation or aircraft design.

I wore contacts once upon a time-- when I was about 13. My old pal Dr. Otis J. Bourg prescribed a set; as I recall, they were stiff little circles of plastic that required a draconian regime of toxic chemicals to keep them from turning into encrusted eye-ruiners. The regime wasn't a big problem because I kept losing them, so after a few weeks my experiment was over.

Enter my current eye doctor, Mike Zysik. He's been telling me that there are now silicone hydrogel lenses that are much more comfortable than the old ones. I tried a pair, and whaddya know? He was right. They are very comfortable. Unfortunately, I have funny eyes: one's farsighted with an astigmatism, and the other is nearsighted. The hydrogels aren't made in the same range of prescriptions that regular glasses' lenses are, so we couldn't exactly match my prescription. Turns out that for my left eye, I need a toric lens, which meant switching to another brand and lens material. The lenses I have now are not nearly as comfortable as the originals, but with them in I can see as well-- or better-- as I do with my glasses, at least until the lenses dry out. I've asked Mike if he has any other potential lens types to try, but I'll probably stick with these for six months or so and see how they work over the long term.