October 2009 Archives

Neat-o e-mail I just got:

Hello from Cody, Wyoming!

I am a seminary teacher trying to create a Seminary Feud game (similar to Family Feud on tv). Remember how the contestants try to guess the most popular responses? Well I need as many responses as possible to make this fun. I won’t use or keep any names; I’ll just tally the responses. Please fill out the attached survey and e-mail it back to me at codywaltons@vcn.com, and then if you have a few extra minutes, would you PLEASE forward this message to as many of your LDS friends/relatives as possible? I would love to tell the students I have responses from all over the country!

Here’s the clincher: I need this by FRIDAY, October 30th, so I can be ready for next week. We just finished studying the Isaiah chapters in 2 Nephi—these kids deserve a party! Please note somewhere on your survey if you’d like me to e-mail you a copy of the survey answers and numbers when I’m done. Thanks for your help!

Sister Noma Walton, codywaltons@vcn.com

SEMINARY FEUD SURVEY

Please answer the following questions very quickly, writing the first answer that comes to mind.

Name a book from the Book of Mormon:
Name a Book of Mormon prophet:
A wicked person in the Book of Mormon:
A group of people in the Book of Mormon:
A time when Nephi’s life was threatened:
One of the 11 witnesses to the Book of Mormon:
A Book of Mormon hero:
One of the 10 commandments:
One of Christ’s original 12 apostles:
A weapon used in the Book of Mormon:
Something in the Tree of Life Dream:
Popular Primary song:
Most popular hymn from Hymn Book:
A book from the Old Testament:
A prophet in the New Testament:
The most well-known Old Testament story:
The hardest commandment for teens to obey:
A good Sabbath day activity:
Habits that break the Word of Wisdom:
A modern-day apostle, still living:

Over the years, lots of people have asked me about how I got into the writing business. I got one such mail yesterday, and it dawned on me: I'd never told the whole story here on my blog! It's long past time to remedy that oversight.

The short answer: naked greed.

Yes, it's true. I really, really wanted to buy a debugging tool called QC. However, it was $100, which at the time was a ridiculous amount of money for me to spend. While racking my brain to think of ways to get it, I decided "hey, maybe I could write a review of it!" A few e-mails later, I'd gotten the QC folks to agree to provide a review copy, and MacTech to agree to publish it. I wrote the review, sent it in, and a few months later saw my name in Genuine Print.

At the same time, I was working with a group of folks at Intergraph on setting up what would become their first public web site (note that the really old version from late 1994 isn't online, for which you should probably be thankful.) One of my teammates, Brady Merkel, had just gotten a gig to coauthor a book on writing Internet applications with Visual C++. After hearing me mention the article, he asked if I'd like to contribute a chapter or three, so I did.

The acquisitions editor on that book was Jenny Watson, who (miracle of miracles) still works for Wiley, the acquirer of a number of other publishers. Anyway, Jenny was kind enough to refer more chapter work to me, so I wrote chapters for several other books.

When she left Que, she went to Prima Publishing, at the time a publisher primarily of cookbooks and other "lifestyle" books. She signed me to write a book on Windows NT 4.0; I returned the favor and got Bo Williams, Jim Kanya, and a number of other friends and coworkers to contribute chapters. When the book came out, it did well enough for Prima to sign me for a couple of other books. None of them made any money, but they were fun, and they did a great job of building experience.

Thanks in large measure to the remarkable, and sadly now-dispersed, community of experts on StudioB's computer book publishing list (including rock stars like Sharon Crawford, Bob Thompson, Laura Lemay, and too many more to list), I learned enough to know I needed an agent, and thus began the next chapter of my writing career.

Suppose that you wanted to allow your users to play back voice mail through Outlook Voice Access 2007, but that you didn't want them to have access to their e-mail. That was the question I recently got from someone who was replacing their old Avaya system, in part because they didn't want people to get their e-mail over the phone.

(To me this is sad; I depend heavily on that feature, but different strokes and all that.)

The trick is to use the -TUIAccessToEmailEnabled flag to Set-UMMailbox ("TUI" stands for "telephone user interface", in case you were curious.) A little of this:

Get-Mailbox | Set-UMMailbox -TUIAccessToEmailEnabled:$false

and you're done! There are also separate parameters that control TUI access to the calendar and contacts folders.

Exchange 2010 improves on this in a couple of ways.

First, instead of applying the fix to individual users, you can apply it at the UM mailbox policy level. Poof! Instant consistency.

Second, you can control user access to their personal contacts and the organization's GAL separately. Where Exchange 2007 lumps both together with TUIAccessToAddressBookEnabled, Exchange 2010 gives us AllowTUIAccessToPersonalContacts and AllowTUIAccessToDirectory.

There are lots of other improvements in Exchange 2010 UM, some of which I'll be writing about in the not-too-distant future.

From the "man, I can't believe I haven't written about this yet" file…

Exchange Unified Messaging can make phone calls. (OK, OK; I did know that much!) For example, when you call in to Outlook Voice Access, you can ask Exchange to place a call to someone who's in your personal Contacts folder, or in your organization's GAL. It turns out that you can harness this feature by writing code to have Exchange UM place calls for you… sort of.

"How does it work?" you ask. Good question. It's the same as the mechanism that Exchange uses to route calls through an auto-attendant. Let's say that Alice calls the main number at Contoso. Alice's device connects to the PSTN, which routes the call to the Contoso PBX (or OCS server, whichever; it doesn't matter for our purposes).

The PBX sees the inbound call, consults its call coverage map, and sends the call to Exchange, which answers it and triggers the auto-attendant. If Alice requests Bob's extension (or does anything else that requires the attendant to route the call, as opposed to just playing prompts and recording responses), Exchange will make a SIP request to the PBX asking that the call be transferred.

It turns out that Play on Phone uses the same trick. In fact, there are several other cool things you can do with the UM web service: play messages, reset user PINs, and play greeting messages among other things. This article has a summary of the things you can do, along with some (.NET Framework-based) code showing how to do raw SOAP calls and to use them to connect to the UM service. (There's sample code for using the web service here, too, if you're the coding sort.)

The article, sadly, doesn't mention the power of Autodiscover, which is what you can and should use to find which UM service a given user should be connecting to. Regular users of Exchange Web Services already know that, however.

It's too bad that you can't use this feature to place a call to an arbitrary number and play whatever content you want (although that would be easy to do with Speech Server). Still, it's a useful capability; I'd love to see an iPhone app that would tell the Exchange server to Play-on-Phone all my voice mail messages.

So Tuesday morning, the Atlas Van Lines truck showed up right on time. The driver handed Arlene a form.

"What's this for?" she asked.

"Gypsy moth quarantine," said the driver. "Yer s'posed to have it when ya move here."

It turns out that the great state of California requires you to have your belongings inspected for the dreaded gypsy moth. Then again, maybe they don't. Santa Clara County says yes, but other sources say no. I went ahead and called the inspectors to come check out the kids' toys (which were pretty much the only outdoor thing we brought from Ohio), but no one came.

Of course, it might have helped if someone had told us before the move that we'd need an inspection. I mean, by the time the truck's unloaded, these hypothetical moths would have free run of our yard… if all the rain didn't kill them first, but that's another post.

Here's an executive summary of the way Apple handles multi-part messages in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app.

Here's the problem. Say that you use Mail.app to compose a message that has some text, then an inline image (or PDF; doesn't matter), then some more text. What you'd probably expect is that it would display properly in Outlook, OWA, and other non-Apple mail clients. What you get instead is rubbish.

It turns out there are two ways to construct a MIME message with multiple parts, and at least two ways to put them back together again. Exchange and Outlook use one method: the messages they generate are tagged as MIME multipart/related, and inline attachments are referenced as separate parts. The body text for the entire message is one contiguous block, with "cid:XXXX" references to the inline items. Outlook or OWA are responsible for rendering the inline images. Apple Mail uses the other method: inline attachments are tagged with "content-disposition:inline". Any blocks of content after an inline attachment are created as separate message parts. The client is responsible not only for rendering the inline images, but also with taking any additional attachments and putting them inline.

What does that actually mean? Say you compose a message. The image on the right show what it looks like when you send it. The image on the left shows what it looks like to the recipient. You'll have to click on the thumbnails to get the full versions, but you can see what I’m talking about: the Outlook user gets no cheese, no lolcat, and no text below the picture—at least not without clicking on them.

Now, perhaps I'm being too harsh by saying that Apple’s doing it "wrong". I mean, can't we all just get along?

In this case, no, Apple is doing it wrong. One of the major features in Snow Leopard Mail was supposed to be Exchange compatibility. If you produce messages that Exchange clients can't read, well, that's not very compatible, now is it? There are tons of complaints about this on Apple's discussion forums, mostly centering around Mail's inability to read voice mail messages from Vonage-- so it's not just Exchange users who are being bitten by this.

For another day: how I used the ever-useful pickup directory to figure out exactly what the problem was.

So yesterday I had my first real "official California" experience. You've probably heard all about the state government here: the problems with bloated pensions, the budget, the knuckleheads in Sacramento, and so forth. I was worried about having to deal with the DMV, because-- really-- does any state have a good one?

First I hit this extremely useful unofficial DMV guide. It was a lifesaver. The fun started when I wanted to make an appointment. The web-based interface for doing so is ugly, but functional, (and hey, at least they have one, unlike Ohio), but I was really surprised to find that the soonest I could schedule an appointment was... yesterday, or almost three weeks from my scheduling attempt. There weren't any better times available at any of the other offices that are quasi-near my office, so I decided to wait the three weeks instead of trying to show up and get in.

Second hurdle: you need to fill out a form 44 to get your license, but you can't get one online; they're all individually barcoded. So much for being prepared. Anyway, I showed up yesterday (about 15 minutes late, sad to say). When I got there, I waited in line for 5 minutes or so, got a copy of form 44, and was sent to fill it out. After filling it out, I got back in line, spent some time with the nice appointments lady (10 min, say), sat and waited for 10 minutes, went to a different window to have my documents verified and pay, went to yet another window to wait in line to get my picture taken (10 min), got a rules-of-the-road test form, took the test, and waited for it to be graded (15 min). At the end of all this, I walked out $30 poorer with a paper "provisional license" and a promise that my real license would be in the mail in two or three weeks.

Was it bad? No, but a far cry from the efficiency and speed of even the Bowling Green office of the Ohio DMV. I still have to go back and register our vehicles, too. Le sigh.