April 2006 Archives

What a great show! The sessions went well, the attendees enjoyed the sessions, and Nice is a fantastic place to visit. The big news was that PowerShell is now upon us, and that Exchange 12 is now officially named "Exchange Server 2007" (big surprise there; can't believe that was actually under NDA).

I was missing two pieces of hardware for this trip: an airplane power adapter (have one, can't find it) and a small portable wireless router. I didn't miss the adapter because I have a spare laptop battery; I did miss the router, though, because if I'd had one I could have worked on my hotel balcony. So, I now have a Linksys Compact Wireless-G Broadband Router WRT54GC on the way; Devin has one and recommends it, so I figured I'd give it a try.

If I can't find my power adapter, I know there are several now that take an Empower plug and have a regular two-prong, 110VAC outlet. That's the kind I want, since I can use it with whatever device I happen to have.

Getting out of France turned out to be more of an adventure than I wanted it to be. I arrived about 0845 for a 1005 flight, which I figured would be plenty of time. Unfortunately, when I went to the Air France check-in desk, they couldn't find my electronic ticket because when the helpful Delta TA in Detroit rebooked me, I'd ended up with a new number. After 15 min or so of fumbling, she directed me to the Delta desk. More fumbling ensued, then they produced an itinerary receipt. I returned to see Air France again and waited while my agent tried to reach the ticketing desk. When that failed, she walked me over to the ticketing desk; more fumbling, and I was the proud owner of a paper ticket for NCE-CDG. Apparently there's some lingering animosity between the respective computers at DL and AF. Paper ticket in hand, I went back to the AF check-in desk and checked in. A short walk took me to my departure gate, where I boarded. The first thing I noticed was the unfortunate fact that the plane stank like a locker room. The second thing I noticed was that, after our departure time had come and gone, we were still at the gate. It turns out that some of the folks in the back weren't in their seats; for whatever reason, the cabin crew didn't do anything about it. Once everyone was finally strapped in, we'd missed our arrival time slot into CDG, so we sat for another 45 minutes, departing at 1110. The rest of the flight was uneventful, but I really had to hustle to make my CDG-CVG flight.

Security procedures were essentially no different than they are at US airports; the French equivalent of the TSA is no more or less efficient or polite than the average in the US (excepting such places as EWR and SEA, where TSA is chronically rude, and MCO, where they're practically Italian in their efficiency).

Wednesday night, I fired up the ol' Citroen and drove to Monaco with fellow MVPs Jim McBee and Sue Mosher. We took le moyen Corniche to get there, a coast road that overlooks some beautiful scenes of the Meditarranean and more than a few fancy houses. (In Nice, given that a 700-square-foot apartment might set you back 120,000 euros or more, I can't imagine what some of these houses must have cost!) When we got to Monaco proper, we drove around the town a bit until we got to Parking les pecheurs, the big parking garage downhill from the aquarium. Sadly, the aquarium was already closed, but we had a nice walk around the area, followed by supper at Le Pinocchio, an excellent Italian restaurant.

The highlight of our outing actually came as we were returning to Nice. We'd decided to take the A8 autoroute back so I wouldn't have to drive the Corniche in the dark; we followed the signs in Monaco faithfully, but the road we wanted to take was blocked, so we had to go in the opposite direction. As a result, I got to drive about a mile of the course for the upcoming Monaco Grand Prix. I can now add "Grand Prix driver" to my resume and be at least partially accurate.

This was my first full day in Nice; I arrived mid-morning yesterday and got settled in to my hotel (le Palais de la Mediterranee-- extremely nice). For some reason, when I checked in at the DTW ticket counter, the DL TA called the international routing desk and changed my routing from DTW-JFK-CDG-NCE to DTW-JFK-NCE. This was a great optimization, as it got me 3 extra hours in Nice and saved me from having to change planes in CDG.

Yesterday I spent some time exploring the immediate area around my hotel, combined with a little shopping and a hunt for the nearest Carrefour. I found it, bought some snacks and a pair of shorts (which I inexplicably forgot to pack), and drove around to find the conference center where Exchange Connections is being held. For dinner, I met my friend Jim, after which I collapsed in an exhausted heap at the hotel.

Today was day 1 of the conference. I only had two sessions, and they were spaced well apart, so I got some work done in the speaker lounge. As you might expect, the convention center food was good (we're in France, after all) but not as good as restaurant food (it's a convention center-- what do you expect?) The sessions both went well, with lots of audience interaction. By the time I got done, it was late, so I stopped back at Carrefour for some ibuprofen, went back to the hotel, then walked around the pedestrian district some. It wasn't as crowded as it was last night.

A few random observations:

• There are lots of scooters here, and it's not a good idea to follow them through traffic unless you want to end up playing chicken with a bus. Trust me on this.


• Apple is maddening. I heard some songs I liked on the local equivalent of MTV. iTunes will show me the French version of the music store, and it will let me search for songs-- but I can't buy them. To make things worse, the prevailing price for a CD single with two songs on it is €4.99, or about $6.20. To make things worse still, don't even think that anyone will sell you an iTunes Music Store card in France-- even Carrefour, which sells iPods.


• Parking in downtown is very expensive, but forget about parking on the streets! Even with the little micro-cars people drive here (like the Citroen C4 I rented) it's a very tight squeeze.


• It's hard to beat French bread dipped in olive oil.

It's time for me to hit the bed; I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow.

Blown

by Francine Mathews

The plot of Blown follows linearly from the end of Cutout: Caroline Carmichael is a CIA analyst whose husband is implicated in the kidnapping and murder of the Vice President by 30 April, a neo-Nazi terrorist group. Carmichael returns to the US-- just in time for a series of attacks staged by 30 April in the US. That starts the hunt, involving Carmichael, her husband, and a cast of other characters first introduced in Cutout.

Like Greg Rucka, Mathews' characters don't have superhuman powers of deduction, intuition, or physical strength. That doesn't mean that they're ordinary in any way, merely that they're believable. In particular, Caroline Carmichael is a terrific heroine, combining a quick mind and temper (her husband's nickname for her is "Mad Dog") with an active interior life and an affecting set of emotional issues (to be expected after your husband comes back from the dead).

Highly recommended, but be sure to read Cutout first (it's just out in paperback, so this should be easy). Mathews' forthcoming The Alibi Club is already on my to-read list.

Private Wars (Queen & Country Novels)

by Greg Rucka

Highly recommended.

There don't seem to be any general repositories of Monad scripts for Exchange yet, so I've added a new "Monad" category to the Exchange Cookbook web site and will be posting Exchange-ish Monad stuff there. If you're interested in Monad, you might want to grab the Cookbook RSS feed.

Educause and the National Cyber Security Alliance just posted the winning videos in its Computer Security Awareness Video Contest. Some of them are pretty funny (here's my current favorite), and all of them are generally appropriate for most non-technical audiences. Try 'em, you might like 'em.

Educause and the National Cyber Security Alliance just posted the winning videos in its Computer Security Awareness Video Contest. Some of them are pretty funny (here's my current favorite), and all of them are generally appropriate for most non-technical audiences.

Conventional presence (is Paul online? is Missy on the phone?) is useful. Extended presence (when is Peter free to talk? what does Devin's OOF message say?) is even better. Microsoft has done a great job of delivering both of these capabilities in Outlook, Communicator, and the SharePoint twins. However, I want to kick it up a notch: I want to see Plazes-like

I already do something like this, updating my IM status message to say things like "DTW enroute SEA" or "Exch Conn - Orlando" so that people will know not only what I'm doing but where I am. It would be great to make this more automatic, though. You could probably do this easily enough by making Plazes queries for your team then plotting them on Virtual Earth or Google Maps.

Looks like it's going to be a busy summer!

• Rucka, Patriot Acts (no date on Amazon yet)
• Mathews, The Alibi Club (29 August; no idea whether this is a sequel to Blown or a new book)
• Eisler, The Last Assassin (1 June; w00t)
• Silva, The Messenger (25 July; double w00t)
• Dozois (ed), The Year's Best Science Fiction, 23rd Edition (11 July; reliable as clockwork)
• Thor, Takedown (no date yet)
• Mills, The Second Horseman (8 August)

Now, if only Scott Westerfeld would quit fooling around and get the next Risen Empire book out. Or even Specials.

The Last Coach: A Life of Paul

by Allen Barra

Barra has written a wonderfully conversational biography, with lots of juicy quotes from Bryant, his peers, and his players. He doesn't shy away from pointing out some of the more controversial aspects of Bryant's career (including the issue of whether he could have done more to make the University of Alabama integrate its atheletic teams), but he does so in a fair-minded way. Ultimately, I found the book to be uplifting, not least because of Barra's inclusion of the devotional Bryant carried in his wallet:

This is the beginning of a new day.
God has given me this day to use as I will.
I can waste it or use it for good.
What I do today is very important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.
When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever,
Leaving something in its place I have traded for it.
I want it to be a gain, not a loss--good, not evil.
Success, not failure in order that I shall not forget the price I paid for it.

Highly recommended, even if you're not much of a football fan.

I posted about NewsGator's outage on my personal blog, and got a comment pointing me toward the official explanation. If you're interested in messaging and collaboration HA, it's worth a read. The money quote:

Frankly, this was a pretty frustrating experience. We have a lot of redundant systems - pretty much any piece of hardware in our data center could fail, and we can absorb it without a significant outage. For example, if an entire SQL box would have lost power, fallen on the floor, and broken into pieces, no problem, we'd have an approximately 10 second outage. But this case, where the database gets into an inconsistent state, wasn't helped by the redundant systems.

Some differences I've noticed in my first day of toting the MDA. I'll update this as I get more time under my belt with it.

• With SnapperMail on the Treo, I can hit the "mail" button twice and get mail-- once to turn on the device if it's off, and once more to tell SnapperMail to pick up the mail. There's no equivalent on the MDA.
• Speaking of mail: why, oh why, does Pocket Outlook not allow you to easily navigate from a message you're reading to the next or previous message in the message list? This drives me crazy. It's a simple feature that every other mobile mail client I've ever used has.
• It drives me crazy that most apps don't recognize the center button in the 5-way nav pad as "OK". This makes one-handed navigation about 100x harder than it needs to be.
• DirectPush is awesome. 5 minutes of setup and I was wirelessly getting my mail-- first via 802.11g here at the house, then via GPRS at the library. I called the chiropractor, made an appointment, put it into my calendar, and was delighted to see it in Outlook when I got home.
• I created some test IMAP accounts and needed to get rid of them, then I couldn't figure out how to delete an email account. I found the answer, but it wasn't intuitive-- guess I'd better get used to tap-holding things to see what actions are available.
• The built-in apps have some limitations, e.g. not being able to create a task from the Calendar app, that bug me after my long years with DateBk+ on the Palm.It looks like PocketInformant might be worth a try (as will FlexMail, the same company's Pocket Outlook replacement).
• Microsoft Voice Command is super cool. I love being able to have it read me my calendar. I don't quite have it working with my Bluetooth headset yet, though.

What a cool idea! This guy wrote an Exchange event sink to take incoming attachments from Vonage's voice mail service and transcode them using a codec natively supported by Windows Media Player on both the desktop and on mobile devices. I wish I'd thought of that.

They say it's "scheduled maintenance" but I find that hard to believe; no one schedules maintenance for the middle of a workday.

I'm waiting for my new T-Mobile MDA to get here. In the meantime, I've gathered a few useful links:

• How to back up and restore ROM images on the Wizard (and still more on the same topic)
• The Wizard tweaks wiki
• This thread on essential free downloads for the Wizard
• A great review of the Cingular 8125 (same device, different carrier), with details on customization and tweaks
• A comprehensive set of notes from a guy who switched to the MDA from a Treo and wanted to customize the MDA for as much one-handed operation as possible

Before the device gets here, I need a new cert for my Exchange FE (some WM5 devices don't like self-signed certs), and I have a few dozen things to download to prep the install :) In particular, my first step will probably be to put an MSFP ROM on the device so I can use DirectPush. That will be invaluable when I travel.

Update: just ordered a 2GB miniSD card for the MDA, which got here about 30 minutes ago. I'm backing up the ROMs right now preparatory to installing the MSFP AKU2 image.

So, Ed made our email exchange front-page news by posting summaries, but not the actual messages, from the thread of email we exchanged after my March 15 column, "Tooling Up for Exchange Migration", went out. I think the summaries miss some important details, so I'm going to post the full messages in the next day or two; it's a hassle to turn them into readable HTML, and I'm busy with several things that have to be done before I head out for Exchange Connections in Nice, so I don't have time to do it right now. For now, suffice it to say that it's interesting to see the comments from the Notes faithful complaining about IBM's branding for WCS, Workplace, Websphere, and Notes.

Oh, heck, why not. Here's Ed's first message:

Paul --

I'm disappointed that you continue to push this falsehood about the Lotus product line:

"IBM is pushing Notes, and its successor, Workplace Collaboration Services, as a future-proof way to protect existing investments".

Could you please provide documentation to evidence where IBM has indicated that Workplace Collaboration Services is the successor to Lotus Notes. When you determine that none exists, I ask that you please discontinue such references, which you also made in comments on your own weblog and others.

I'll also question your assertion " although Exchange clearly offers a better messaging and calendaring system than Notes (particularly when you include the desktop client in the comparison), " but I guess you're entitled to your opinion -- clear or not.

Also, will you be covering the deficiencies in the Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Notes in a future newsletter, now that you've promoted its use in this week's?

Thanks --Ed

And my reply (I've converted footnotes into links for readability and changed the formatting a bit):

Ed--

It’s clear that we disagree on a few things, and it’s ironic given that the intent of the sentence you complain about was to say that IBM is strongly pushing the notion that Notes/Domino/Workplace offers better investment protection than does Microsoft’s platform.

IBM has introduced WCS to offer “converging and complementary functionality”. Arthur Fontaine says that “Workplace Managed Client is an enhancement, not a replacement.” This sounds like the introduction of a completely separate product that provides a parallel path to Notes/Domino. On the other hand, you said: “When that happens, whether it's Notes 7.5 or 8.x, the Notes client and the Workplace client become the same thing," Brill said.

If they’re the same thing, that certainly gives the impression that the two are converging. That’s the whole idea of a one-lane road, isn’t it? In my experience, that means that only one will remain. Very, very few technology companies are willing to maintain two separate but parallel product tracks given the degree of investment that doing so requires. Erica Rugulies of Forrester gets the point when she questions whether IBM’s going to maintain two sets of collaboration tools.

David Via of Ferris said something analogous, quoted in an article with your own byline:
"It is now very clear that Notes technology (and most importantly millions of applications) will live on, effectively embedded in the new Workplace Client.

So, Notes applications will be embedded in the Workplace managed client, at which point they’ll be what? Notes applications not running in the Notes client? Notes applications that won’t necessarily be hosted on a Domino server? Sounds like a replacement to me. In fact, using language like “sets the stage for extensions to applications”[6] is very reminiscent of what Gary Devendorf keeps talking about, although in the opposite direction.

So, to answer your request [ed: for a correction]: no. I think there’s ample evidence to support the claim that Workplace will be the eventual successor to Notes, although you’re welcome to try to convince me that the quotes I cite mean something different.

Now, on to what “clearly” means in “clearly offers a better messaging and calendaring system”. From my perspective as a messaging administrator, and as a consultant who deals every day with a wide range of customer messaging environments, I think it’s fair to say that the current version of Exchange offers a number of desirable messaging features that Notes and Domino do not. These features include an integrated anti-spam filter and integrated wireless access for a wide range of devices, to say nothing of Exchange’s higher scalability on identical hardware. There are lots of little things, too: Exchange offers a much broader range of performance parameters you can monitor; the scripting environment for performing admin tasks is much richer,

On the client side, you and I both know that the Notes client has been lambasted over the years for its user interface. You can argue over whether that’s just a matter of it being unfamiliar to Outlook users; I think the bigger point is that the Notes interface diverges significantly from other Windows productivity applications (including not only Microsoft Office but Lotus’ own SmartSuite products); this divergence confuses users and makes them think that the Notes client is hard to use— because for them, it is. To its credit, the Notes team has worked hard to make the client UI more consistent; however, the very strength of interest in DAMO should indicate something about user preferences in the broader market.

As for writing about the app analyzer in more detail: I may or may not, depending on the amount of reader feedback I get. With Exchange 12 around the corner, most of my reader mail recently has been asking questions about some of the new features (notably unified messaging and compliance) that Microsoft hasn’t been discussing in detail.

Cheers,

-Paul

I'll post more later, but now I really do need to get some real work done.

An eye-opening article from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention: several people are thought to have caught mumps from flying on commercial airplanes with infected passengers. Yikes! Maybe I should take a surgical mask to wear next time I fly somewhere.

From the "own goal" department: Oracle found a vuln affecting multiple versions of their database, so they promptly posted a description and a description of the exploit on their Metalink web site. Oooops. Good thing they have a security czar to make sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen.

Well, mine are, anyway. (For once, I got this done before Jim McBee... yay me!) The sessions:

• EXC04, Cookbook Reloaded: Cool Exchange Scripting with Monad: a 200-level introduction to the new Monad shell and how you can use it with both Exchange 2003 and Exchange 12.
• EXC10, Improving Your Message Security: an overview of what CIA really means and how to get better confidentiality and integrity for your Exchange environment. One slide on E12 security features.
• EXC17, Using Continuous Backup: coverage of storage- and host-based continuous backup solutions for Exchange, including a discussion of local continuous replication (LCR) and clustered continuous replication (CCR) in Exchange 12.

Wow, busy day yesterday! I got up early, hit the hotel gym (man, I love those elliptical machines!), had a huge breakfast with Devin and Missy, and hit my room. I say "my room" because I was in it for three sessions back-to-back: one on continuous backup, one on Exchange security, and one on scripting with Monad. All three were well attended, and I got a ton of questions in each session. Some of the questions were pretty thought-provoking, too, which is always fun.

Atypically, I didn't spend much time on the exhibit floor; I went to Devin's Sender ID session (which I'll be delivering in Nice), and we had a short book signing at the show bookstore. (Thanks to those of you who came by!) I missed the MVP get-together because I had planned what I thought would be a short trip via water taxi to Epcot for a souvenir run. Turns out that the water taxi takes you to the Epcot entrance on the opposite side of the lagoon from the front gate, and there's no gift shop there. By the time I made it back from the hotel, I was too tired to do anything but order room service (which was excellent) and start working on the list of session submissions for the fall Exchange Connections show. If you've submitted proposals, I hope to let you hear something back by week's end.

A couple of observations: first, I was surprised that no one in any of my 3 sessions (close to 400 people in total) was running 5.5. That's a very good sign. There was a lot of interest in Monad, with tons of questions about what specific tools the Exchange team would be shipping in beta 2. Cemaphore and Mimosa have gained a lot of name recognition since the fall San Diego show. Finally, I didn't win the Harley Sportster that the show organizers gave away. Maybe next time...

Wow, we had a blast in Appleton! We arrived mid-day Wednesday and went to Dad's condo for a quick tour. It's in a good location, well-built, and furnished with all the mod cons (including a robot vacuum that was a big hit with the boys). Once the hotel was ready for us, we went there and dropped off our stuff, then Dad and I had dinner with Chris Vogel at the Black and Tan downtown. The food and company were both excellent.

Thursday morning we got up and made the short drive to Green Bay to take the Lambeau Field tour. The only other pro football stadium I've been to is the Superdome, and this couldn't have been more different. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and friendly, and the history of the Packers and Lambeau really captured the older boys' attention (Matthew was mostly interested in the elevators).

We drove back to Appleton, dropped Arlene off at a quilt store, and located The Big Picture downtown, a nifty little IMAX theater where the boys and I ate a huge tub of popcorn and saw Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag. There's no such thing as a bad IMAX movie, this one more so because it was full of airplanes! For dinner, we went to Prime Quarter, where the deal is that you cook your own steak on their grill. This was fun; fortunately we got there just before the crowd hit.

Today once we get everyone together, it's back on the road-- through Oshkosh, where we'll stop at the EAA museum, then back to Perrysburg.

I wasn't sure if this was a review or a travelogue; I guess it's both. We left Sunday for spring break, setting out to drive the ~420 miles from Perrysburg to Lake Delton, Wisconsin. Why? Kalahari, that's why-- it claims to be America's largest indoor waterpark. After an unnecessarily long drive (thank you, Streets & Trips, for not telling us to avoid the Ryan Expressway in Chicago), we arrived at a huge building with a prominent sign that says "Kalahari". When we entered the lobby, the boys remarked on the carved wooden animals and other African-themed decorative touches; Arlene and I remarked on the big Krispy Kreme stand immediately next to the registration desk.

We'd reserved a Desert Room-- two queens with a pull-out sofa bed-- but at checkin, we were upgraded to a two-room family suite. This was a really nice touch, and it set the tone for our overall visit: every person we met was friendly and helpful, the facilities were spotless and well-maintained, and the waterpark... well, how can you not have fun with six waterslides, a big wave pool, and too much other stuff to list?

Each day, we'd have breakfast, hit the pool for a while, and take a break in the middle of the day (usually accompanied by lunch). On Monday, we went driving around the downtown Dells area, which is clotted with tourist-y stuff. Unfortunately, it was all closed; apparently high tourist season doesn't start for another month or so. We found a grocery store and stocked up on provisions. A good thing, too, as the Great Karoo restaurant was only OK in our collective opinion. One beef: food is very expensive here, even in the lobby shops ($6 for a caramel apple? Get real!) Overall, though, we had a delightful experience-- even Matthew, who's leery of most kinds of swimming-related activities.

Today we're headed to Appleton to visit Dad for a couple of days, and to explore. We've planned a trip to Lambeau Field and the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh. Arlene's taken a bunch of pictures, but I haven't had a chance to download any of them yet.

Sweet! Apple released software called "Boot Camp" to allow the new Intel Macs to dual-boot into XP. Yes, I know someone else already released the details of how to do this, but Apple's announcement is significant because it means that they'll support this as a feature. That sure makes the MacBook look more attractive to me-- if only there was an ExpressCard-size version of the Verizon aircard I use...

Sweet! The conference organizers for Connection Europe just sent me email solving an issue I've been asking about-- they're offering a special discount to my readers. Come to Nice, learn from your favorite speakers (like me, for instance-- OK, OK, just kidding) live and in person, and hear directly from Microsoft experts about the next generation of Microsoft technologies, particularly Exchange 12. Although I'm most excited about the Exchange part of Connections, there are actually 4 conferences located together for one price: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server and Exchange plus bonus sessions on SharePoint and Windows!

So, what's the deal? Register with code "PAULEX" and you get a buy-one, get-one-free deal: € 675 per person. This is a great deal, and I encourage you to take advantage if you're considering going but are balking at the price. If you've complained in the past about having to travel to North America for premier events, now is your chance to show concrete support for bringing the good stuff to your own backyard!