June 2008 Archives
The mating dance in archiving and compliance continues; I just got a press release announcing that Proofpoint has acquired Fortiva, a major software-as-a-service archiving player. This gives Proofpoint a great entrée into the world of archiving, and extends their reach in the SaaS world. This FAQ outlines how the combined entities will function; basically, Fortiva will keep its Toronto development operations, and customers will still deal directly with them for the foreseeable future.
Very interesting article from The Register: it seems that Salesforce.com has announced a set of application migration tools to move Notes/Domino applications over to their hosted platform. They are doing so, in part, because Exchange is displacing Notes for e-mail, but the broader MS collaboration platform is not necessarily displacing Notes applications-- at least according to the article; they don't cite any statistics to back it up.
Geez, I never would have figured this out on my own. Xcode has its strengths, but it's certainly a much different beast than Visual Studio, which I still prefer. Anyway, if you want to rename an Xcode project, you can't just change the project name in the Finder; you have to modify a bunch of the project metadata too. See these steps for complete details.
I'm teaching a developer-focused class, and the organizers put together a group dinner last night. It was catered by David Hayward from Carolina Smoke, and the food was fantastic! Rarely have I had better BBQ. I had a big plate of ribs, pork, salmon, baked beans, and brisket: all smoked, all delicious. I went back for more beans and a second piece of sweet cornbread. On top of the excellent food, David mingled with the crowd, telling jokes and both enduring and dispensing ragging about various styles of BBQ. (My favorite: the two guys from the UK at my table who'd never had Southern-style BBQ before!) I want to see if they can cater our next company outing-- that's how good it was.
Major props to Peggy Simon, family friend and regular reader! (Betty says hello, too.)
I'm working on a demo application that uses Exchange Web Services from Cocoa, Apple's object-oriented OS framework. Cocoa is a really interesting environment, with a lot of very cool capabilities. One thing it can't do, though, is give your application a way to examine a returned certificate that the framework thinks is bad. The certificate might appear to be bad because it's expired or invalid, or merely because it's self-signed (or issued by another untrusted CA). Because many Exchange servers will have self-signed certificates, the demo app won't work on them without a way to finesse this problem. Because it's just a demo application, I didn't want to require the user to add the self-signed certificate to their certificate trust list, and I didn't want to turn off certificate checking completely (if that's even possible).
The answer, which I found here, is to override a private, unsupported, category method, allowsAnyHTTPSCertificateForHost. Just call it with the FQDN of the host whose certificate errors you want to ignore and you're golden.
I've read a fair number of books about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have been written by soldiers and Marines, others by analysts or journalists. Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
Sheeler has written an incredibly powerful and moving book centering on perhaps the hardest job in the military: the casualty assistance calls officer whose job is to notify families that they have lost a loved one. Marine Major (now LtCol) Steve Beck had this role for Colorado and Wyoming, and the book chronicles his visits to a number of Marine and Navy corpsman families. Beck is totally committed to this job, and his dedication in support of the families is awe-inspiring.
We don't get much of a sense of Beck as a person (apart from his obvious integrity and devotion to the Marine Corps and his country), but the same cannot be said of the families Sheeler interviews. Their anguish comes through clearly, but so do their love and pride, and even their esprit de corps. From Indian reservations to Denver suburbs, the families span a wide range of backgrounds and situations.
I admire the deft way in which Sheeler elicits their feelings without seeming intrusive or angering them, and I very much appreciate his political neutrality. This isn't a book about leaders or government; it's a book about leadership, principle, and sacrifice. Sheeler writes economically, without a lot of needless embellishment or soppy sentimentality. He's not flowery, and that makes his prose hit all the harder. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried at several points during the book, but reading it simultaneously renewed my pride in the Marine Corps and in our remarkable nation.
Whatever your political affiliation, whatever your view on the war, I urge you to read this book to get an idea of the kinds of sacrifices that your fellow Americans are making on your behalf. Highly recommended.
I've been wanting to blog about this for a while, but we had to keep the lid on until today. Microsoft just announced the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), primarily developed by 3Sharp. PKS is a completely integrated kit that lets you use SharePoint as an enterprise-scale podcasting aggregator and management system. You can publish your own internal podcasts, plus you can catch and redistribute podcasts from other sources. Wherever their origin, the podcasts you manage with PKS can be rated by users, tagged using tag clouds, and played back using Silverlight so that you don't need a separate podcasting device or application. We've already implemented PKS internally and will shortly be rolling out a PKS portal stuffed full of tasty IT Pro content-- check our web site for updates.
Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune handles the polygamy beat for the paper. Yes, that's right; the Trib has a dedicated reporter who researches and writes stories about polygamists. Because of her topical knowledge, she's written some very interesting stories about the Texas polygamy case. Alone among her peers, Adams challenged the legality of Texas' raid on the FLDS compound, pretty much from the start. This Poynter article has a great Q&A with Adams-- well worth reading. How I wish we had more investigative reporters like her, and fewer like the kind we see on FoCNMSNBC.
One of the record companies' major beefs with Apple is that Apple won't let them charge variable prices. One of the chief reasons that Amazon was able to get permission to sell non-DRM MP3 files is because they do in fact use variable pricing. That means, of course, that Amazon can offer things on sale from time to time. Today I picked up Weezer's Pinkerton
