March 2006 Archives

I need to take the time to write up the next installment of our cruise experience, but I've just been too busy doing other stuff. To wit, this has been a big week for the ol' Xbox 360:

• NBA 2K 06: fun if you like sports games; I got bored with it pretty quickly. Great graphics (except for the player faces!)
• Fight Night Round 3: unbelievable. It's like watching ESPN. The body motion, voiceovers, and environmental effects are perfect. The only thing missing is the smell of liniment. I made a boxer named Smokey Boudin anhd had a great time getting pummeled, since I couldn't quite get the hang of the interface. I may pick this up when its price goes down some, but I'll definitely rent it again.
• Burnout Revenge: yep, it's a Burnout game. Lots of crashing, only now in high definition! The game's sense of speed is excellent-- far better than Need for Speed or even Project Gotham 3. When you're doing 200mph down a freeway, it feels like you're going that fast. Great fun.

Here's an interesting idea: a small, silent spam-filtering appliance for the home. The folks at SpamCube may be on to something here-- if, that is, their filtering works well. For $150 MSRP, it's probably worth a good look, especially if their filtering works. (Their site does some unfortunate handwaving about "AI", which always makes me suspicious!)

Morgan Stanley is in the news again because one of its former employees (who coincidentally was central in the Perelman affair) is suing for wrongful termination. Messaging Pipeline says it best:

A saga of inappropriate, incompetent, and potentially illegal conduct continues to unfold at Morgan Stanley, with the company's own E-mail trail at the center of it all.

Man, I hate it when that happens. The plaintiff, Arthur Riel, claims that he was terminated after pointing out inappropriate emails, including requests by the CTO to fix things so no one except the CEO's direct reports could email him. The company claims that Riel misused his access as head of the company's archiving project to spy on others. I don't know who's right, but it's clear that a) this case will get uglier before it's resolved; b) there are probably other similar Lurking Horrors waiting in other companies' archiving and retention efforts; and c) if I were a corporate counsel I'd be boning up on messaging case law.

An update on yesterday's migration bounty story: IBM's press release clarifies some details: the bounty is $20/seat, with a max of $20K. It applies only to customers who move to Domino hosted on Linux, Domino Web Access on Linux desktops, or the Notes plugin for the Workplace Managed Client. Like I said yesterday, that's a tough sell, especially when you consider the management environment of Linux desktops vs Windows desktops.

This is a hoot: after complaining bitterly that Microsoft was offering bounties to business partners to encourage them to get customers moved from Notes/Domino to the MS collaboration stack, IBM is now doing the same thing. This Washington Post article quotes Peter O'Kelly at length, pointing out that it's unusual for IBM to offer a bounty like this. I don't want to say or imply that it's a desperation move by IBM, but it's certainly unexpected, and it seems to be funded (at least in part) by IBM's Linux division. Selling Notes on Linux is harder than selling it on Windows, since partners will have to convince non-Linux shops to make the leap to an unfamiliar OS and to throw away much of their investment in Windows infrastructure-- an irony, given IBM's claim that Notes/Domino provides better investment protection than does MS' stack.

A modest proposal: in six months, both IBM and MS should publicly tell the world how much bounty money they've paid out. That's a good way to gauge the effectiveness of their respective programs.

Last week, I went to a press briefing to find out what had become of FrontBridge. The answer: a lot!

This press release sums it up nicely; the former FrontBridge services are now known as "Exchange Hosted Services" (EHS). Not a great name, since one of the first orders of business in the briefing was to clear up the difference between hosted Exchange services and EHS. That was easy enough, but imagine having to have that conversation over, and over, and over, and ... well, you get the idea.

There are four EHS components: archiving, filtering, continuity, and encryption. The EHS filtering service combines all of the previously unbundled FrontBridge offerings into a single whole. The other services are, to me, more interesting because they provide pay-as-you-go options for services that formerly would have been required to be self-hosted. For example, the encryption service provides a simple way to send encrypted mail to outside recipients who may not have the capability to receive encrypted mail: you send a mail, the service captures it and sends the recipient an SSL-protected link, and the recipient clicks the link to go to the mail. This is a simple and effective approach that, in the past, would have required a hefty investment in Tumbleweed's products. The continuity component is interesting, too, although I'd have to give the nod to MessageOne's EMS product because it supports calendar and contact data, has better synchronization options, and offers BlackBerry support.

My Exchange UPDATE column this week has more details (I'll link to it once it goes live); the bottom line, though, is that the FrontBridge acquisition is complete, the new EHS products are commercially available and competitively priced, and they offer some interesting capabilities. In fact, you could even use EHS to provide filtering and policy enforcement for non-Exchange systems like Domino and OCS (both of which lack any serious built-in capabilities).

The Anti-Phishing Working Group has posted their phishing trends report for January 2006. The group reports 9,715 unique phishing sites in the month of January, up almost 35% from December 2005. That's pretty scary. It's interesting to see what major collaboration and messaging vendors are doing to address the problem, too: IBM and Oracle are ignoring the problem, while Microsoft's already added anti-phishing features to Outlook 2003 SP2 and has shown both server- and client-based solutions for Office 2007 and Exchange 12.

My main homie Jim McBee has been working on a new e-book for RealTime Publishers: the Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging. It's available as a free download (registration required) from Microsoft.

Jim also has a new book coming out May 1 -- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Advanced Administration (see?) It's basically the second edition of Exchange Server 2003 24Seven, so it's probably going to be worth picking up.

Arik Hesserdahl at BusinessWeek says that Apple needs a security czar. So does Microsoft's Stephen Toulouse. So, I sent Steve Jobs a letter touting my qualifications for the job. We'll see what happens.

I used to have separate categories for posts about Workplace and Oracle Collaboration Suite, but now that I'm starting to work with Zimbra and Scalix, I figured I'd lump all the non-Exchange material into a single category so that people who aren't interested will only have one category to skip. Thus, the new "Non-Exchange" category.

Devin, Missy, and I will be doing a book signing for the Exchange Server Cookbook at the Orlando Exchange Connections show next month. The signing's at 3:30p on 10 April; see O'Reilly's page for details. C'mon by and say hello!

Speak of the Devil : A Novel

by Richard Hawke

Malone is a likable character, in part because he's a sort of Everyman PI. He's not blessed with the physique of Lee Child's Reacher or Robert Parker's Hawk, and he makes some critical mistakes as he tries to get to the bottom of Nightmare's plan. The supporting characters (including Malone's girlfriend, his highly dysfunctional family, and a couple of NYPD beat cops) are well-enough drawn, and Hawke moves the plot along rapidly. Unfortunately, the denouement was unbelievable, at least to me; it wasn't plausible to me, and that undid a lot of the work that Hawke had done to build a credible story. Not a bad read, though.

(Note: this is billed as a "debut novel" but it's not. Richard Hawke is a pen name for Tim Cockey, an accomplished mystery writer. For that reason, I guess I expected a bit more.)

So, the Riya service is now in public beta. The point behind the service is that you send it your photos, and it applies some magical image processing to recognize faces and objects. In theory, once I pick out a particular face and tag it, say, as "Matthew", the software is supposed to be smart enough to find all other pictures that have Matthew in them and tag them accordingly. If it works well, this would be a huge improvement over the manual metadata systems that programs like Picasa and iPhoto use now. Does it work well? Beats me; I'm still uploading pictures. The one glitch I've had so far is that in my first batch (350 photos from 1999), the uploader got stuck on the last picture. However, clicking the "cancel" button got rid of it.

Update: a few notes. First, the service certainly does what it says; I uploaded about 1000 photos, and it has indeed auto-recognized a significant number of faces. Cool beans. A few nits, though:

• It looks like the uploader is indiscriminately uploading every file it finds in the source directory-- including .NEF (Nikon RAW) files, thumbnails, and iPhoto's data files. It's not clear whether any of these files are in fact uploaded or skipped, because there's no logging.
• On the web site, I don't see any summary that tells me how many total photos I have uploaded. Oops: there it is, in the upper right hand corner.
• It'll be interesting to see how well the facial recognition works with kids' faces. I trained several different images of Thomas as a baby from 1998 and 1999; now I'm going to feed it some pictures of him from last summer and see how many it catches.

Tag: riyarocks

This is super cool: Microsoft's started a series of Exchange podcasts (in both WMA and MP3, naturally!). This is a very smart move on the Exchange team's part, since it will unlock their webcast content and deliver it to a much broader audience. I was hoping to find the Exchange 12 preview webcasts from last week in podcast form; no word on whether that content will be added later.

There's an interesting article in last week's InfoWorld that compares four Exchange management tools: the MS MOM Exchange management pack, DYS Analytics, Quest Spotlight on Exchange, and Zenprise. Zenprise came out on top because of its powerful troubleshooting engine, which is about to be expanded (look for an announcement later today).

Disclaimer: I'm on Zenprise's advisory board, though I don't claim (or deserve) any credit for their troubleshooting engine.

The Census Bureau has a page of fun facts about St Patrick's Day. For example, according to Hallmark, 8 million occasional cards were exchanged last year; there are 9 places named Dublin in the US, and there are 34.5 million US residents who claim Irish ancestry (almost 9x as many people as actually live in Ireland!)

Sweet! Microsoft has an annual security conference called BlueHat (see MikeHow's comments on the 2005 version), and this year they've started a blog to cover it. Sadly, the blog is a retrospective, since the conference was actually last week. Still, this should make for intersting reading.

Cool script from the Windows Mobile team blog; it creates a CertificateStore CAB file, containing the root certificate of your choice, directly from the command line.

Today's Al's Morning Meeting had a very useful set of links to government info on pandemic preparedness. Ohio's state planning page is at http://www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/states/ohio.html (substitute your own state name for "ohio" in the link); more to the point, preparation for individual families has its own page.

What are we doing to prepare? Well, there's a basic scripture that we follow (imagine that... a family of Mormons following a scripture...). Doctrine and Covenants 38:30 says it very simply: "If ye are prepared ye shall not fear." Read in context, that promise was made by the Lord to the early saints, who were facing a great deal of uncertainty, and not a little hostility, in New York state. The Lord's guidance was simple: prepare yourselves spiritually and temporally to move to Ohio, and-- if you're prepared-- you'll have nothing to worry about. Accordingly, we've been following the Church's long-standing counsel to have supplies of food, water, and basic needs on hand. President Hinckley gave a great talk on this topic in the October 2005 general conference; if you're at all interested in knowing why Mormons believe that food storage is so important, read it and you'll see.

We have plenty of ammunition, too

Man, these are funny: a series of VW ads parodying MTV's "Pimp My Ride" series. German engineering in da house!

The Ghost Brigades (Sci Fi Essential Books)

by John Scalzi

I really liked Old Man's War, so I was naturally predisposed to like the sequel... except that The Ghost Brigades (or just TGB) isn't really a sequel. It's set in the same universe as OMW, but it focuses instead on the Colonial Union's special forces, a race of human-derived troops who are essentially created to serve as a warrior caste. After Charles Boutin, a prominent scientist, turns traitor and disappears, the Union creates a clone of Boutin and attempts to imprint the traitor's consciousness on it-- but the result isn't what they expect, and neither are the consequences. The clone, Jared Dirac, has his own consciousness and ends up doing some things which neither Boutin nor Jared's bosses in Special Forces expect (including a terrific twist of an ending that, in retrospect, might have been predictable but wasn't.)

Scalzi's writing is still crisp and tight, which makes this a faster read than I expected. I started regularly reading his blog after reading OMW, and I definitely noticed some of the same stylings in both-- not a bad thing at all. If I were going to complain about this book, I'd have to say it was too short (not a criticism I often levy). I'm already looking forward to the third, and probably final, installment in this series. Highly recommended.

Update: If I'd known that Scalzi was going to see my review I would've, y'know, fawned a bit more over the book. Really.

Well, isn't this sucky: Northwest is now charging $15 to book exit row seats on some flights. Want extra legroom? Pay up! I sure hope other airlines don't copy this "enhancement", although I admit that paying $15 extra for seat 6D is a decent deal for a long flight.

I like country music. Let me amend that: I like some country music. I attribute this to my upbringing, where I spent hundreds of hours listening to Sons of the Pioneers, Marty Robbins, Shelly West, David Frizzell, and so on-- you know, the old-school western-style music that used to form the core of country. Then came a persistent liking for Randy Travis, and year before last I ventured to Columbus to see Shania Twain (note: I said "see", not "listen to"). Now I'm at it again; we just bought tickets to see Tim McGraw and Faith Hill at the Palace in May. Should be a fun show, as we're going with several friends in a caravan. I could rant about how much I hate Ticketmaster, but why bother... they're a monopoly and there's nothing I can do about it. Now I just need Big & Rich to come play somewhere near here!

From the Department of Obvious Statements: everyone hates cubicles.

Sage advice from Jesper: don't worry about clearing the page file (I love his list of things to be worried about). The setting to clear the page file at shutdown has always seemed like security theater to me, so I'm glad to see him point it out.

Devin got a Qtek 9100 earlier this year, and he's been eagerly waiting for the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP). Now he's got it, and I think he likes it. (Disclaimer: I lent John my Jasjar after he broke his HP 6315, so until I get it back I'll be MSFP-less.)

I figured I'd put in a plug for my chronicle of my last visit to Nice in 2000. I'll probably be going again in April, hopefully with better note-taking than last time.

When the United States bought the US Virgin Islands in 1917 for the then-astonishing sum of $25 million, I wonder if they knew what a bargain they were getting for their descendants.

We arrived in port at St Thomas about 6am, announced by the rumble of the bow thrusters. All four of us were excited to get off the ship and start investigating, so we had a quick buffet breakfast and hit the gangway. St Thomas gets about 2 million visitors a year (although this Wall Street Journal article says their total passenger traffic is down 19% since 2000), and that's easy to believe given how crowded the gangway area was. Anyway, we left the ship and caught a taxi to Charlotte Amalie, the capital city proper. More specifically, we went to the downtown shopping area, so named because, well, it's full of shops. On the taxi ride, we saw a cool sign painted along the fence: "No hurricanes for VI". I hope that turns out to be true!

Almost all of the shops in the downtown area are jewelry shops, but we saw a few other neat things (Arlene bought a great-smelling lemongrass candle with Bob Marley's picture on it, and you've already seen the pictures of Oprah.) Arlene admired the medallion on one of the taxi drivers who accosted us, and he said that "all the island people buy their jewelry at Gold Corner". Of course, that was like a challenge: find Gold Corner. Eventually, we did, right on the waterfront. Matt and I amused ourselves by taking pictures on the waterfront (see below for some samples). Arlene and Anita each found some Nice Things™, then it was back to the ship for a quick lunch.

We'd previously decided to tour with a local guide instead of booking through the ship. (This turned out to be a great policy for all our stops!) When we first arrived downtown, we hooked up with Timothy, who bears a resemblance to Andre Braugher (only shorter). Even on an island filled with friendly people, Timmy stood out; he took us on a wonderful tour of the island, with a hilarious running commentary (example: he was amazed that we thought iguanas were interesting, since they're as common as squirrels; when someone asked him if they were common on Aruba, he said "Hell no, because people there eat 'em!"). We stopped overlooking Magens Bay, but we didn't go there, since we'd heard that Sapphire Bay was both prettier and had a reggae band playing on Sunday. The beach was spectacular; there's no other word for it. Words don't do justice to the shades of blue in the water. Coki Point was pretty good too, although I preferred the beach at Sapphire. (Interestingly, we also saw some ducks at Sapphire-- not what I would have expected!)

Overall, it was a fantastic introduction to the Caribbean. We went back to the ship and had dinner, but I can't remember what I ate. One takeaway from this trip: I wish I'd kept a journal like Matt and Anita did so I had a better at-the-time record. As much fun as this blog is, it's not really a substitute.

Updated: Now, for some pictures that I'd previously posted separately:

The water at Sapphire Bay is unbelievable, and the reggae band was pretty good too.

My lovely wife in the tour jeepney (she's wearing the sunglasses that our son says make her look "rad")

Matt, Anita, and I with Timmy, our tour guide; overlooking the bay. Not shown: nearby iguanas or the chain-smoking Russian lady from our tour group.

Amusing post from Roberto Boccadoro in which he attempts to explain IBM's Workplace branding. He dismisses the existence of multiple products with the same name ("Does this create confusion? I do not think so") and heaps fun on Microsoft from the explosion of products that live under the Office brand.

Why is this amusing? Because customers don't understand what the difference is between Workplace-the-product and Workplace-the-brand. I see this time and again when I speak with people. Just as it was a bad idea for Microsoft to have two different products both named SharePoint, IBM's differentiation between Workplace and its subordinate products isn't, well, working. And don't get me started on the many subordinate products-- when you install Workplace Collaboration Services (hmm, they didn't steal that name from Oracle, did they?) you also get WebSphere and a passel of other, un-Workplace-branded products. By contrast, Notes/Sametime has a much more consistent branding message... at least, it did until I got hoovered up into Workplace.

We're hiring! First, I need a good Exchange administrator with strong writing skills. The position's in Seattle. Contact me directly if you're interested.

Second, we need some Office solution developers. Dave Gerhardt's got the full scoop at his blog. (Note that in your cover letter, we want details of a product demo you've actually worked on or built!)

Coming very soon: a week's worth of webcasts on Exchange 12. Harold Wong's blog has the details.

On March 1, Microsoft announced that it was making Exchange 12 beta 1 available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers as a community technology preview (CTP). When beta 1 first began, late last year, it was a private beta restricted to about 1400 Microsoft customers, all of whom had to be nominated by Microsoft employees. MVPs and a few third-party developers were also nominated, but—even including participants in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP)—only a relative handful of the tens of thousands of Exchange-using sites were in on the beta. That's about to change dramatically, since there are more than 200,000 TechNet and MSDN subscribers, all of whom will have access to beta 1.

This isn't the first time Microsoft's offered a CTP; you may remember that Exchange 2003 SP2 was released as a CTP in August 2005. As with the SP2 CTP, the Exchange 12 CTP is being released so customers can get familiar with it in their own environments. It's not supported for production use (obviously), and Microsoft has already told beta 1 customers that they won't be able to upgrade from beta 1 directly to the released version.

As part of the CTP announcement, the product team also announced that beta 2, coming later this year, will be a public beta, so we'll all be able to discuss it to our hearts' content. Until then, both reviewers (which technically means me) and CTP participants are bound by the relevant NDAs and EULAs.

One thing that's no longer under NDA: Microsoft's finally starting to talk publicly about the new continuous replication features in Exchange 12. There are two flavors of continuous replication: local continuous replication (LCR) copies transaction log data to a second local volume, essentially giving you a protected local copy of your data. Clustered continuous replication (CCR) is cooler; with CCR, cluster nodes don't have to share disk resources, meaning that geographically dispersed clusters get much, much easier to design and deploy. Look for more on LCR and CCR in future columns.

Interestingly, the CTP builds will be made available in both 32- and 64-bit versions. This is a smart move on Microsoft's part, because customers that haven't decided on their forward path from Exchange 2000 (or even Exchange 5.5) will be able to evaluate Exchange 12 features (if only in an early state) on the hardware they already have. I don't expect any changes in their previous commitment to release the production version of Exchange 12 as a 64-bit-only product, though.

MSDN subscribers can download the Exchange 12 CTP starting today, while TechNet subscribers will get the bits as part of their March delivery. If you're not already a subscriber to one of these two programs, you can subscribe through Microsoft's web site.

Microsoft today released the new version of their Application Analyzer tool for Lotus Domino applications. It features a new UI, better reporting, and a customizable XML-based system for customizing the analysis it does and the ensuing recommendations. This version of the tool uses the four-phase process that MS has defined and refined since the last App Analyzer release. There's also an accompanying best practices guide. I'm looking forward to seeing customer feedback on these tools; the previous versions of the app analyzer had some shortcomings that I hope the new version fully addresses. In particular, I'm interested in seeing Paul Mooney's take on it.

Microsoft is making two pretty interesting announcements today. Stay tuned for more details.

Update: now you know what the first one is.