Recently in General Stuff Category

In part 1, I started talking about how I got into the writing business. Part 1 ended with me having written a couple of non-Windows-related books (including this) and contributing to several Windows-oriented books (like this). I began to wonder if it made sense for me to get an agent, so I started talking to David Rogelberg, the owner of StudioB. He offered me the tempting possibility of being able to write for O'Reilly, something I had always wanted to do. I signed on as a StudioB client and, true to his word, David got me in touch with O'Reilly about writing a book on programming for the Palm Pilot.

Of course, I didn't know anything about programming for the Pilot, but I wasn't about to let a minor technicality stop me.

What did stop me was a communications mixup between Robert Denn, my editor at O'Reilly, and another ORA editor who shall remain nameless. This other editor had signed Rhodes and McKeehan-- the experts who had written a book on Newton development too-- to write a Palm programming book. That left them in the position of having two PalmOS books under contract, only one of which would be written by, y'know, people who knew what they were doing.

Robert offered to let me write a book on another topic. In fact, he even gave me my pick of topics. I wish I could say that I jumped at the chance to write about Exchange, but I didn't. I had to be more-or-less bullied into it my my agent, who realized the long-term potential of working in the Exchange market. I didn't know anything about Exchange either, but I was quickly determined to learn, given that I had just signed a contract to write about it. I started joining every Exchange-related mailing list in sight, printed out all the product documentation, and set up Exchange using Virtual PC on my Powerbook. (Yes, that's right; my O'Reilly Exchange book was written on a Mac-- a trend which continues to this day).

I learned sooooo much from the folks on the swynk Exchange list. Not only were there rock stars like Andy Webb, Missy Koslosky, and Ed Crowley there; there were also a ton of Exchange developers. Just to cite one example, one of the primary perpetrators of the Exchange 5.5 MTA was on the list, as was Laurion Burchall, one of the key ESE developers. Everyone on the list was super generous with their time and knowledge, and it didn't take me long to get up to speed. (My first "live" exposure to the community, though, was attending the 1998 MEC. I was there when Tony Redmond made his famous "I'll pass on the clap" remark, and I heard Pierre Bijaoui explain that the average human has one breast and one testicle!)

Coincidentally, at about the same time I got a call from O'Reilly: Windows NT Pro magazine was looking for someone to write a regular Exchange column. Was I interested? You bet I was! I started writing it in September of 1998 and it's been in print ever since, although it's morphed into a few different forms.

All this time I was still holding down a real job at LJL Enterprises, writing crypto code on the Mac. Eventually my agent brought me an offer that was too good to refuse: Ford Motor Company wanted someone to write a book about their CAD system. I gave my two weeks' notice, set up my home office, and got ready to hang out my own shingle as a full-time author. That's when the real adventures started...

Wow, how did it get to be the end of the year already? I've fallen down on my blogging bigtime, but I have ambitious plans for 2010-- mostly consisting of posting a batch of articles at once and letting MovableType publish them on a schedule. That way when I'm in the blogging mood I can write up a bunch of stuff and post it.

A few end-of-the-year notes:

• Christmas was wonderful, even though (or perhaps because) we were here by ourselves. We gave Mom and our boys a Disney cruise, which means I'll miss the MVP summit this year. I think it's a reasonable tradeoff, though.
• Julie and Paul gave me Cruise Ship Confidential, which was a real hoot. The author struck me as someone I'd love to sit down with over lunch. If you like true-confessions-style books, this one's excellent.
• Lego Rock Band is a ton of fun, especially with the boys. We also gave them Lips: #1 Hits, which is way more fun than I expected it would be. No surprise that the Lips wireless mic works with the Rock Band family, and having a wireless mic makes those games more fun (and easier for us to stage).
• I bought a USMC license plate frame from the Stars and Stripes Shop. It was cheaper than any place else I found, I got it in two days, and they sent me a 10% off code to share: sssfrienddec09. Share and enjoy!
• This year's Aviation Week & Space Technology photo contest winners are even more awesome than usual. The little tiny online versions don't really do the pictures justice; if you can find the print magazine, you'll see what I mean.
• One of my coworkers is an Iowa fan-- the first one I've ever met in the flesh. Too bad his team is going down when they play the mighty Yellow Jackets.
• Speaking of work, I'm really excited about some of the stuff we're going to be doing. I can't share any details yet but there are some exciting things coming up.

I probably won't be posting again this year, so until next time, have a wonderful New Year's Eve and get ready for a great 2010!

Jeri Wendt, a friend of mine from Perrysburg Rotary, sent me this note, and I wanted to share it. If you have a loved one with Alzheimer's in metro Toledo, please look into Paul's Peers and support them in any way you can.

When you come across something that you care about and think others may benefit from you just HAVE to pass on the good word… so, please take a minute and read about something that makes my life so much better.

For those who don't know, my mom has Alzheimer's. My older brother and I share in her care and luckily for us, about three years ago, we discovered Paul's Peers Respite Care in Maumee where we take her four days a week. (See attached article featuring me and Mom!). Paul's Peers is a senior day-care center whose main purpose is caring for elderly people who need assistance. This includes people with Alzheimer's. It is a place to drop off your loved one knowing they will be cared for by the kindest people you would ever hope to meet. For $35 a day you have up to eight hours of free time for yourself and in our case, Mom gets a day away from us. (A win-win situation!)

I am sending this to you in case you know of someone who would be interested in this program. Due to the economy, many people aren't working now and are staying at home with their loved ones eliminating the need for elder care during the day. Much to our dismay, Paul's Peers has had to temporarily stop care on Tuesdays due to lack of enrollment. So… if you have a spouse, parent, grandparent or know of someone who could use this service please let them know. It is a program offered as much for the care giver as it is the recipient.

We would not be able to have my Mom stay at home were it not for this “gem”. We drop her off at 9:00 in the morning and her day begins with a continental breakfast, (donated by Panera Bread), and David, the assistant director, reading the newspaper and discussing current events. The rest of the day the incredible staff keeps things interesting by mild exercises, playing games and cards, watching old movies and listening to music with weekly entertainment such as an accordion player or a story teller. Other events are bi-weekly manicures, trips to the movie theater, crafts, tea parties, church every Wednesday and visits from the children's day-care. The staff patiently learns the likes and dislikes of each participant and gently works with them accordingly. It didn't take them long to find out my mom is an avid gin-rummy player who is tough to beat!

There you have it... now you know. If you don't have the need right now maybe sometime in the future you will have a friend who is at wits end and needs a break. You can offer them a solution.

Paul's Peers Respite Care

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

310 Elizabeth Street

Maumee

(419) 893-3381

Last month I wrote about my experience with American Standard's warranty process. I praised them a little too soon.

Friday, I installed the new "Champion 4 Accelerator" flush unit. Rather than the old-style flush tower, the Accelerator is a short, wide cylinder with a domed lid an an L-shaped overflow tube. When you push the handle, the lid lifts, and the accumulated water dumps into the trapway. Installation was easy, and the kit American Standard sent me included all the hardware I needed, including new tank bolts. Unfortunately, the new valve's performance was actually worse than the flush tower.

It turns out that the design of the Accelerator leaves about 4" of water in the tank. In other words, it doesn't deliver enough water through the trapway to empty the bowl. Ooops. Its height isn't adjustable, either. I set the water level to about 1/4" below the overflow tube, and that didn't do it. Thus it was with great irritation that I put the old, broken flush tower back into the hall bathroom yesterday. To compound the problem, American Standard doesn't take phone calls on Saturday, so I'll have to call them and find out what the suggested fix is.

Now I see why there's a class-action lawsuit against them over these toilets.

Last month I wrote about my experience with American Standard's warranty process. I praised them a little too soon.

Friday, I installed the new "Champion 4 Accelerator" flush unit. Rather than the old-style flush tower, the Accelerator is a short, wide cylinder with a domed lid an an L-shaped overflow tube. When you push the handle, the lid lifts, and the accumulated water dumps into the trapway. Installation was easy, and the kit American Standard sent me included all the hardware I needed, including new tank bolts. Unfortunately, the new valve's performance was actually worse than the flush tower.

It turns out that the design of the Accelerator leaves about 4" of water in the tank. In other words, it doesn't deliver enough water through the trapway to empty the bowl. Ooops. Its height isn't adjustable, either. I set the water level to about 1/4" below the overflow tube, and that didn't do it. Thus it was with great irritation that I put the old, broken flush tower back into the hall bathroom yesterday. To compound the problem, American Standard doesn't take phone calls on Saturday, so I'll have to call them and find out what the suggested fix is.

Now I see why there's a class-action lawsuit against them over these toilets.

I finally found the comment problem: an obsolete version of the Javascript site template. Somehow I missed it during one of the (multiple) MT upgrades. Comments appear to be working properly now, which will no doubt thrill the two or three people who regularly visit here (hi, Mom!)

I finally found the comment problem: an obsolete version of the Javascript site template. Somehow I missed it during one of the (multiple) MT upgrades. Comments appear to be working properly now, which will no doubt thrill the two or three people who regularly visit here (hi, Mom!)

Well, not really. They did, however, overturn their longstanding style rule that says that "Marines" shouldn't be capitalized. The Marine Corps Times has the whole story, drawn from the Times' Philip Corbett's blog entry here. Semper fi, Old Gray Lady!

UT is doing a series of "Saturday Morning Science" presentations on topics ranging from wind farming to inflammation to aluminum. I'll definitely be hitting these with the boys. Here's the link (hat tip: Mark Chandler)

UT is doing a series of "Saturday Morning Science" presentations on topics ranging from wind farming to inflammation to aluminum. I'll definitely be hitting these with the boys. Here's the link (hat tip: Mark Chandler)

From a friend in the Seattle area who wanted to stay anonymous:

• Most of my disasters preparations; food, water, generator, water filters, supplies, etc... are for the days after things go bad. Getting through the first 24 hours in the best possible condition is much more important. How you get through and what you do in the first 24 hours will set the tone for everything that follows.
• Do you know where your community rally point is? Where emergency services will be available? Where to get sandbags? Closest chopper pad?
• Disasters are a come as you are event. I spent the first three hours of the flood in slip on moccasins and sweat pants. No gun, no multi-tool, just my Spyderco knife and a Sharpie. If it isn't on-hand in three minutes or if you don't remember that you have it or exactly where it is, it might as well be on the moon.
• Don't overfill sandbags. 90% full is about optimum. That way, there's room in the bag for the sand to shift, conform to the space to fill in the gaps.
• A wheelbarrow. Its not just for farmers. You can move twice as much material for less effort in a wheelbarrow than by carrying it. I recommend the dual-wheeled models as they're more stable and less likely to get stuck in the mud.
• Energy drinks. Legalized "speed" that will carry you through with extra energy when you need it.
• An American flag, pole and holder. Hanging the flag outside your residence is a good way to signal to aid/rescue that your house is occupied.
• Pre-packed disaster equipment. Hoses with your pumps, extension cords with your generator. Saves time and effort as everything is in the box ready to go so you don't have to gather it up or remember where it is under pressure.
• Physical skills. Do you know how to build a sandbag wall quickly and efficiently? (I never thought about it before now.) Do you know how to drive your SUV through deep water? How deep can you safely go?
• You might be prepared and know what you're doing, but there's lots of idiots out there. Law enforcement and officials are going to assume you're the latter until they see otherwise.
• Hand sanitizer.
• Your most useful tool is the one between your ears.

There's some very thought-provoking advice in the above, especially knowing your community and convincing the local law that you're not an idiot. I know I'll be applying this list to our family's disaster planning.

So the boys and I took care of the Christmas Fish on Christmas Eve. First we called Bassett's Market. Nope, they don't process fish, but they suggested calling Churchill's. Nope, they share a sink between the seafood and deli department and didn't have time to sanitize it-- but they told me to call Rohr's. I did, and they handled the fish with no muss and no fuss. (Turns out it was a snapper from Costa Rica, not a rock cod). As a bonus, the boys and I had lunch at the Chinese buffet across the street from Rohr's.

As a second bonus, the smoked salmon arrived Tuesday as planned. Good eatin'!

@ihenpecked on Twitter just said he wasn't sure if the Marines would have been right for him. I didn't think they were right for me, either.

Flashback: it's 1986. The Cold War is happening, big time. I wanted nothing more than to fly jets, pretty much for whoever would have me, but I certainly didn't work hard for it. I made a desultory effort to be nominated to the Air Force Academy or Annapolis, but my heart wasn't in it (and neither were my grades, sadly). More or less as a lark, I took the ASVAB and did pretty well on it. That resulted in a flood of calls from recruiters. All the Air Force guys could talk about was missile maintenance, and the Navy recruiters kept talking about subs and nuclear power, neither one of which I wanted any part of; I was firm on going to college and couldn't see putting that aside for active-duty service.

I had no interest in the Army or Marines, and told their recruiters that. The Army guy took me at my word, but the Marine recruiter, bless his heart, was made of sterner stuff. He kept calling me every few weeks, and it seemed like he always knew when we were sitting down to dinner. I finally agreed to go to his office to talk to him, and that was my downfall: he totally sold me. He convinced me of the benefits of serving in the Marine Corps Reserve, and that it was better to "test-drive" military service before making the commitment to get a commission and the obligations that come with it. (Advice that I took, having heard it from my grandfather, a WW II vet and retired USAF pilot.)

I left for boot camp about four months later, two days after graduating from high school. Then the real fun started :)

This one's for you, Jim. Air & Space has a great article on ground resonance in helicopters. Basically, if you get the blade system to vibrate at just the right frequency, the helicopter tears itself apart. A couple of related videos: here's one of a US Army Chinook from the rear, and another from the side.

I'm normally not a huge Oprah fan, but she's giving away 8 MP3-format Christmas songs by different artists, including Faith Hill and Aretha Franklin. Visit http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahshow/20081118_tows_holiday/2 to download them.

Every year, I write an Exchange UPDATE column with gift suggestions for your Exchange administrator (here are the 2007 and 2006 editions). This year I decided to try something different; I hit up HelpAReporterOut to put my query in front of about 35,000 people. The responses started to arrive almost immediately.

First responder: the folks at PCWeenies sent me a blurb about custom-drawn comics featuring your favorite admin. Neat idea, and very timely response. This is definitely a contender: it's unique, and it would make a nice keepsake.

Best comment: "The best gift you can give a SysAdmin is a Faraday Cage that blocks cell phones, pagers, and WiFi: it cuts off all connection to the outside world. It's _very_ popular with their wives, too!" I bet it would be popular! Sadly this respondent didn't give me a source to actually buy them. Time to break out the power tools!

Least likely to actually be given as a gift by anyone I'll ever work for: plasma TVs from a very large consumer electronics company who shall remain nameless. Great idea, but probably violates whatever office-Christmas-gift price policy your company has. If your company thinks it's OK to give its Exchange admins such expensive gifts, please contact me for a resume.

Least likely to actually be given, runner-up: a one-question "stocking stuffer" e-mail exchange with a Hollywood psychic.

Coolest suggestion I never would have expected: handmade stamped-metal keychains. Check them out.

Claim most in need of testing: "[IgnaFire chocolate] morsels are SO strong in flavor and texture, that a very small amount satisfies. No one can eat this chocolate by the handful." We'll just see about that; I ordered some for Arlene, whose expertise in the world of chocolate is known throughout the world.

Apart from these, I've gotten some very cool leads for potential gift ideas, and I'll be going through them for the remainder of the week to come up with the best list for next week's column.

Every year, I write an Exchange UPDATE column with gift suggestions for your Exchange administrator (here are the 2007 and 2006 editions). This year I decided to try something different; I hit up HelpAReporterOut to put my query in front of about 35,000 people. The responses started to arrive almost immediately.

First responder: the folks at PCWeenies sent me a blurb about custom-drawn comics featuring your favorite admin. Neat idea, and very timely response. This is definitely a contender: it's unique, and it would make a nice keepsake.

Best comment: "The best gift you can give a SysAdmin is a Faraday Cage that blocks cell phones, pagers, and WiFi: it cuts off all connection to the outside world. It's _very_ popular with their wives, too!" I bet it would be popular! Sadly this respondent didn't give me a source to actually buy them. Time to break out the power tools!

Least likely to actually be given as a gift by anyone I'll ever work for: plasma TVs from a very large consumer electronics company who shall remain nameless. Great idea, but probably violates whatever office-Christmas-gift price policy your company has. If your company thinks it's OK to give its Exchange admins such expensive gifts, please contact me for a resume.

Least likely to actually be given, runner-up: a one-question "stocking stuffer" e-mail exchange with a Hollywood psychic.

Coolest suggestion I never would have expected: handmade stamped-metal keychains. Check them out.

Claim most in need of testing: "[IgnaFire chocolate] morsels are SO strong in flavor and texture, that a very small amount satisfies. No one can eat this chocolate by the handful." We'll just see about that; I ordered some for Arlene, whose expertise in the world of chocolate is known throughout the world.

Apart from these, I've gotten some very cool leads for potential gift ideas, and I'll be going through them for the remainder of the week to come up with the best list for next week's column.

This year's edition of the annual Ohio State-Michigan game has been cancelled. The Wolverines were on their team bus headed down to Columbus, but unfortunately they couldn't get past Toledo. (But hey, neither could the Marines, so don't feel bad, UM fans!) All kidding aside, the boys and I will be watching tomorrow, probably with a plate of boudin in front of us. Go Bucs! (oh yeah, then LSU plays, and then the Saints are on Monday night!)

I got rickrolled for my birthday today.

I'm in Redmond for meetings with customers and our team. Our company tradition is that we bring in cake of some kind when people celebrate their birthdays; my birthday is tomorrow, and Jason Weiss (one of our QA team members) has his birthday today.

About 1:30p, everyone gathered in our break room, and Paul Flynn brought in a big ol' chocolate cake. It was strangely rectangular, but the frosting made it look good. I was a bit skeptical when Paul said he'd baked it himself, but I took the proferred knife and tried to cut it. It was oddly crunchy when I cut it. Paul let me saw away at it for a few seconds, then removed the cardboard box that was covering the real cake... adorned with a picture of RIck Astley himself. At the same time, Tim started playing the original rickroll clip from YouTube.

This all came about because back in the spring I managed to rickroll nearly the entire company via a well-crafted e-mail. Apparently they collectively decided to get their revenge on me via cake, so I am happy to say that the cake was, in fact, not a lie.

Tomorrow marks the 233rd birthday of the world's finest fighting force: the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fidelis to all my brethren who have served or are serving our nation as Marines and corpsmen. On this day, I hope you will join me in celebrating the Marines' traditions of honor, service, and duty. Here's the Commandant's annual birthday message to help get you in the mood.

Every Marine knows the name of Samuel Nicholas, the Quaker businessman and farmer who was commissioned as the first officer of the Continental Marines back in 1775. For the rest of you, here's an interesting article on the quiet and little-known ceremony that marks the founding of the Corps each November 10th. Semper fi, Major Nicholas.

It's hard to believe it's been two weeks since my last posting here (and, at that, it was a short rumination on vegetables.) Since my last post, a lot has happened:

• I decided to forgo my spot in the first Microsoft Certified Master: Exchange class. This was a very difficult decision, but it turned out to be a good one because…
• Mom sold her house in Perrysburg. It closes in late October, which means we essentially have a month to help her get packed up, moved out, and down to Louisiana. We've been busy with various house-related tasks, like turning the lights on for showings and so forth.
• I got some kind of stomach flu of doom that made me sicker than I've been in 20 years. I'm talking full-blown, flat-out, can't-hardly-get-out-of-bed sick. Fortunately, it only lasted a couple of days, but it was rough during that time. The kids and I have all intermittently had snuffles, too
• We got our hardwood-- all 1900+ square feet of it-- refinished. This sounds easier than it is; it involved compressing several rooms worth of furniture into the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen, then living in it for two weeks. The results are beautiful but we're all eager to get everything put back where it belongs.

Of course, it wasn't all drudgery; I watched the LSU-Auburn game with Mom, Arlene, and the boys, played a bit of Rock Band 2, and so on. I hope to get back on a more regular posting schedule. There are certainly a lot of developments in the unified communications world to talk about!

It's hard to believe it's been two weeks since my last posting here (and, at that, it was a short rumination on vegetables.) Since my last post, a lot has happened:

• I decided to forgo my spot in the first Microsoft Certified Master: Exchange class. This was a very difficult decision, but it turned out to be a good one because…
• Mom sold her house in Perrysburg. It closes in late October, which means we essentially have a month to help her get packed up, moved out, and down to Louisiana. We've been busy with various house-related tasks, like turning the lights on for showings and so forth.
• I got some kind of stomach flu of doom that made me sicker than I've been in 20 years. I'm talking full-blown, flat-out, can't-hardly-get-out-of-bed sick. Fortunately, it only lasted a couple of days, but it was rough during that time. The kids and I have all intermittently had snuffles, too
• We got our hardwood-- all 1900+ square feet of it-- refinished. This sounds easier than it is; it involved compressing several rooms worth of furniture into the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen, then living in it for two weeks. The results are beautiful but we're all eager to get everything put back where it belongs.

Of course, it wasn't all drudgery; I watched the LSU-Auburn game with Mom, Arlene, and the boys, played a bit of Rock Band 2, and so on. I hope to get back on a more regular posting schedule. There are certainly a lot of developments in the unified communications world to talk about!

From the "I knew it" department: eating vegetables makes your brain shrink.

From the "I knew it" department: eating vegetables makes your brain shrink.

Wow! This puts Arlene's complaints about my snoring in a whole new light. Apparently, heavy snoring is a risk factor for carotid atherosclerosis, as measured by an Austrian research team. Better keep an eye on that (or an ear!)

It's always fun to joust with my friend Bob Thompson, who is perhaps the most libertarian libertarian I know. Sadly, I think he's flat-out wrong about food allergy warnings. I admit to being biased; my wife is gluten-intolerant and I have other relatives (and friends) who suffer from various kinds of nut allergy.

The problem with the current labeling standard is this: there is no standard. Quick: what's the difference between "may contain", "made in the same factory with", and "produced on the same equipment with"? If I have three products with those labels, how can I tell which one(s) (if any) are OK to bring home? The existing US law, FALCPA, requires manufacturers to label products that contain certain allergens. Manufacturers have voluntarily been adding "may contain"-style warnings to reduce their liability-- but there's no standard for doing so, and this is resulting in a lot of needless hassle for the producers and consumers.

On the gluten-free front, there is an existing EU standard for deciding which products may be labeled as "gluten-free", based solely on measured gluten content in the final product. The FDA is in the process of adopting it, which I think is great: it gives people a tangible indicator of whether something is safe to eat, or not, irrespective of where and how it was produced. Until then, I don't see how standardizing on a labeling phrase could possibly be a bad thing. In fact, if I'm going to have the government spending money on regulations, better they should do it for food safety than on firearms or political contributions.

This is a pretty sweet deal: Amazon will sell you a Kindle for $259 if you apply for (and qualify for, it must be said) their Amazon-branded credit card from Chase. See details here. (Bonus link: James Fallows on how to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore).

I've decided to give Twitter a try. So far, I'm following Chris, Ed Brill, Erica, and Al Tompkins. Follow me here.

The fine folks at CERN have made an enthralling yet educational rap video about the Large Hadron Collider. FTW!

The fine folks at CERN have made an enthralling yet educational rap video about the Large Hadron Collider. FTW!

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.

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 for $2 and Led Zeppelin's Mothership for $5-- significantly cheaper than buying the album, or the individual tracks, from iTunes. The only way I know of to get notified of these sales is to sign up for Amazon's MP3 newsletter (or check slickdeals.net daily, which is what I do).

So, Devin tagged me with the latest random meme circulating through the intertubes. Without further comment, here are my five quotes:

Bear Bryant's devotional

Time is the one thing we can't get any more of. How we choose to use our time says a lot about our self and our values.

"I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves".

Joseph Smith, Junior, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said this when asked how he managed the rapid early growth of the church. This is exactly the strategy Arlene and I are trying to follow with the boys, but some days I think it works better than others.

"It doesn't matter how long you've been in the Corps; you'll always be a boot to someone."

My senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Taylor, told our platoon this one night at Parris Island. His point has stuck with me ever since: no matter how smart or skilled you are, there's someone out there smarter and more skilled, so don't get cocky.

"Don't get stuck on stupid".

Lt. Gen. Rusell Honoré said this during a press conference after Hurricane Katrina. Would that the national media had taken his advice. I try to take it daily. When you think you're not stuck on stupid, that's precisely when you need to double-check.

"What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say."

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the claimed originator of this quote. I have never been a big Emerson fan (even less so after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's climate-change trilogy), but this quote neatly sums up the importance of trying to live in harmony with one's beliefs.

In retaliation, I tag Arlene, Julie, Tim, and Ed.

I'm on the plane, headed home after a quite successful UC Metro event. A good time was had by all :)

While I was in Reading, I stayed at the Hilton St. Anne's Manor, Bracknell (which is actually in Wokingham, go figure). It's an old manor house that has been converted to a hotel, and quite nicely at that. The hotel sits on about 25 acres of land, including both wooded and open spaces. On arrival, the desk clerk upgraded me to a room in the "Buckhurst Club" area of the hotel; apparently that's where they put HHonors members. My room was quite nice, with a small patio that looked out onto the (grass) tennis courts. When I arrived, there were three fat rabbits outside my patio, munching happily on the lawn. However, the air conditioner didn't work. Normally this would not have been a problem, except that the kind souls who prepared my room had turned on two halogen lamps, apparently early that morning. Between that and the fact that the room faced south, the room temperature was about 85°. I slept on top of the covers with the door open; after an undistinguished hotel breakfast the next morning, I headed out, asking the clerk to fix the air conditioner during the day. I got back to the hotel about 11pm after visiting the local mall cinema to watch Iron Man (summary: it's made of win!), but the air conditioner wasn't fixed. The surly night clerk sent one of the housekeeping staff to look at it, and she concluded that--sure enough-- it was broken. As a result, I moved to another room, just as nicely outfitted as the first but with working air (and, thankfully, no halogen lamps). The staff quality varied pretty widely, from ignorant and surly to helpful and pleasant, but the weather and grounds made up for that. In the photo below, if you look closely you can see my laptop on the table under the umbrella... sure a lot nicer than working in some drab office somewhere.

Tuesday was uneventful: I got up, went to work, taught, and went back to the hotel.

Wednesday I repeated the pattern, at least until the class was over. I had intended to stay at the London Temple accomodation center, but they close the doors at 7pm. By the time my class was over, I had to catch the 5:35 train to Gatwick, which put me there right about 7pm. Instead, I booked a room at the Hilton Gatwick: the last-minute rate was cheap, and I hoped that I'd be able to easily get to the terminal in the morning. It turns out to be quite a hike from the terminal to the hotel, but then the same is true of the Sofitel, so no big deal.

The Hilton itself was quite nice-- just a basic airport hotel (albeit with terrible, fuzzy TV reception). They upgraded me to the "executive floor" (ha!), with a small lounge with a nice variety of drinks and snacks. I wanted a real dinner, though, so I roamed the airport shopping area, looking for food, and found a place to have a panini while watching the UEFA Cup final. I then discovered that Marks & Spencer had a small "Simply Food" convenience store, where I bought some snacks for the boys and... drum roll... a two-pack of scotch eggs.

Let me describe the joy of scotch eggs. First, you boil an egg. Then you wrap it in minced sausage (spicy is better, of course), bread it, and deep-fry it. Delicious! Unfortunately, the custom is to eat them cold; Simply Food keeps them in the cooler, and I didn't have any way to heat them up. However, they were still delightful. I'm glad I finally got to try them. (I also had fish and chips while in Reading, but I understand they don't really taste right unless you eat them out of wax paper at the seashore.)

At lunch on Wednesday, I told the class attendees that this was my first visit to the UK. This sparked a lively conversation about how my expectations matched up to the reality, and what surprised me. So, in no particular order, a few thoughts:

• Everywhere I went, I saw electricity-saving devices like speed-sensitive escalators and individual light fixtures with motion sensors. However, nowhere did I see any water-saving devices like automatic faucets. (And speaking of faucets: for some odd reason, many of the restrooms I saw lacked dividers between urinals, but had floor-to-ceiling walls on the toilet stalls... a little TMI to brighten your day!)
• At the hotels, airports, and shops, I was surprised to see how many jobs were taken by immigrants from Eastern Europe.
• I loved the ubiquity and ease of public transport, although it seemed rather expensive. The office park where I was teaching had a free bus that ran between the offices and the town center (where the train station is), and the train system was easy to figure out and use.
• Shops and businesses close much earlier than I had expected. For example, there's a large mall near Gatwick (well, it's in Croydon), but it closes at 5pm. Hard to get much shopping done on that kind of schedule.
• In the mall, on the train, and on the street, women tend to dress better than they do in the US. Not so much for the men, however.
• Over and over I heard how unusual the nice weather was. That's a bit scary.
• I was very surprised to find out that this is not only legal but widely available in England.

On the China earthquake, from a friend who manages the Chinese manufacturing and development teams at a large company:

It’s much, much worse than what you hear through western channels. Think of 80% of downtown Seattle destroyed at 3PM on a weekday. Give if you can.

On the China earthquake, from a friend who manages the Chinese manufacturing and development teams at a large company:

It’s much, much worse than what you hear through western channels. Think of 80% of downtown Seattle destroyed at 3PM on a weekday. Give if you can.

I thought I'd posted on this Tuesday night, but apparently I didn't. Anyway...

I've been speaking on Exchange and other topics professionally for about ten years. During that time, I've probably spoken at more than a hundred events, ranging from the small to the gargantuan, and I've only cancelled one. Tuesday afternoon, I made the really difficult decision to cancel another, my appearance at Connections. My wife has been ill for the last week or so, and I just wasn't comfortable leaving her alone. She's feeling somewhat better now, and three of my four sessions were covered by people who are even smarter than I am (thanks to Jim, Jüergen, and John!) so I feel better about my decision. I still hated to miss Connections, though, and I'm really looking forward to the Vegas version! My apologies to anyone who was disappointed by my absence. I hope it never happens again :)

Arlene just found an ad for a new gluten-free product supplier: TastesLikeRealFood.com. They sell several kinds of imported flours and mixes from Norway. With a name like that, no doubt their stuff is good, so we ordered the sampler to try it out.

David managed to break his Nintendo DS Lite; he snapped off part of the headphone plug fairly deep inside the jack. I didn't want to tackle taking it apart, and I'd heard rumors on the intertubes that Nintendo offered drop-off service. Because Nintendo customer service center. It's conveniently located a few blocks away from Microsoft's campus, so I took the broken DS with me and drove over there yesterday afternoon. It took less than 10 minutes for me to walk in, show the busticated DS to the friendly guy behind the counter, and get a refurb unit with a fresh 1-year warranty. David is now back in business. This is the best customer service experience I've ever had at a store-- I wish Microsoft would take some lessons from this and apply them to the Xbox 360 service process.

I didn't post this yesterday because no one would have believed it (and I was skeptical myself). Here's a video of a Finnish rock group, the Leningrad Cowboys, singing "Sweet Home Alabama"-- accompanied by the Red Army Choir. Yes, that Red Army Choir. No word on whether the audience demanded an encore of "Free Bird".

Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, is opening his own checkbook to help cover the cost of treatment for veterans at Atlanta's Shepherd Spinal Center:

Marcus got involved in January after he heard of a soldier who was treated at the Shepherd Center and was improving, but faced the loss of funding. "It angered me," said Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot and now a billionaire philanthropist. "It is disgraceful and it is not something that we should have to tolerate in this country."

I don't know about you, but I plan to go spend some money at Home Depot tomorrow.

Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, is opening his own checkbook to help cover the cost of treatment for veterans at Atlanta's Shepherd Spinal Center:

Marcus got involved in January after he heard of a soldier who was treated at the Shepherd Center and was improving, but faced the loss of funding. "It angered me," said Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot and now a billionaire philanthropist. "It is disgraceful and it is not something that we should have to tolerate in this country."

I don't know about you, but I plan to go spend some money at Home Depot tomorrow.

I've been hearing Yves Larock's "Rise Up" on XM, and I finally found it on iTunes. It's a very cheerful, reggae-infused song with a great bass line. The video, which features some awesome jumprope stunts (how often do you get to type that>) is on both YouTube and iTunes. DJ Paul says "check it out!"

Here's what Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft will be like.

This is a great song; I found it more or less by accident.

You might have been wondering how Marines can re-integrate to civilian life. A friend just sent me this handy guide (which I have edited somewhat to make it more family-friendly).

1. ADMIT you have a problem. Say "I am a Marine, I have a problem."
2. SPEECH
• Time should never begin with a zero or end in a hundred. It is not 0530 or 1400; it is 5:30 in the morning (AKA awful early)
• Words like deck, rack, and "PT" will get you weird looks; floor, bed, work out will work better-- get used to it
• "F---" cannot be used to replace whatever word you can't think of right now. Try "um" instead.
• Grunting is not talking
• It's a phone, not a radio. Conversations on a phone do not end in "out"
• People will not know what you are talking about if you tell them you are coming from Camp Lejeune with the MWSS platoon or that you spent a deployment in the OCAC
3. STYLE
• Do not put creases in your jeans
• Do not put creases on the front of your dress shirts
• A hat indoors does not make you a bad person, it makes you like the rest of the world
• You do not have to wear a belt all the time
4. WOMEN
• Being divorced twice by the time you are 23 is not normal, neither are 6 month marriages, even if it is your first
• Marrying a girl so that you can move out of the barracks does not make "financial sense", it makes you 'SPECIAL"
5. PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS
• In the real world, being able to do pushups will not make you good at your job
• How much pain you can take is not a personal accomplishment.
6. ALCOHOL
• In the real world, being drunk before 5pm will get you an intervention, not a "good for you"
• That time you drank a 5th of Jaeger and accidentally relieved yourself in your closet is not a conversation starter
• That time you went to the combat medic school and practiced giving vodka IV's will also not be a good conversation starter
7. SPENDING HABITS
• One day, you will have to pay bills
• Buying a $30,000 car on a $16,000 a year salary is a really bad idea
• Spending money on video games instead of on diapers makes you a fool
• One day you will need health insurance
8. INTERACTING WITH CIVILIANS (AKA YOU):
• Making fun of your neighbor to his face for being fat will not be normal
9. REAL JOBS
• They really can fire you
• On the flip side you really can quit
• Screaming at the people that work for you will not be normal. Remember, they really can quit too
• Taking naps at work will not be acceptable
• Remember 9-5, not 0530 to 1800
10. THE LAW
• Non-judicial punishment does not exist and will not save you from prison
• Your workplace, unlike your command, can't save you and probably won't. In fact, most likely you will be fired about 5 minutes after they find out you've been arrested.
• Even McDonalds does background checks
• Fighting is not a normal thing and will get you really arrested, not yelled at Monday morning before they ask you if you won
11. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE




• You can in fact really say what you think about the President in public


• Pain is not weakness leaving the body, it's just pain


• They won't wear anything shiny that tells you they are more important then
  you are, so be polite


• Read the contracts before you sign them. Remember what happened the first time
  

I was delighted to get a Zibra OpenIt for Christmas, all the more so because I'd never heard of it before. The OpenIt is basically a pair of shears where the blades are perpendicular to the handle. It works a treat for opening those stupid blister packs, plus it has a built-in utility knife for cutting other kinds of packaging. I used it heavily for our family Christmas presents, and as a result we suffered no incidences of wrap rage. Highly recommended. I've already ordered one for our office.

Wow, this is neat-- NewsGator just alerted me to a book review of a book called McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire. This sounds like my cup of tea. Or something.

Courtesy of my Marine mailing list, here's a video of this year's Marine Corps birthday message from Gen James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps.

Courtesy of my Marine mailing list, here's a video of this year's Marine Corps birthday message from Gen James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps.

I have a long list of stuff to blog about, but I'm far behind. Expect a stream of short (and possibly pithy) posts over the next few days as I get ready for my trips to Vegas and Barcelona. I've got book reviews, trip reports, and more!

David's watching TV to help him recover from his appendectomy, and I was passing the TV I noticed that he was watching an "Ant and Aardvark" cartoon on Boomerang. Our whole family loves these, so I did a quick search when I got back upstairs and was delighted to find that Warner has issued a DVD of all 17 original Ant and Aardvark shorts: volume 5 of the Pink Panther collection. Yowza! I know what somebody's getting for Christmas!

Steve Teffenhardt has started a comprehensive new site, www.ottawaflood.com, centering on flood relief efforts for the people affected by this summer's flooding in Hancock and Putnam Counties. Check it out.

This was great to see: John Cargill sent me a note about his Scout troop's trip down to Ottawa for flood cleanup.

Thank you for your assistance in locating a relief agency that my Scouts and I could work with.

We traveled with 13 scouts and 7 adult volunteers. Scout Camp Berry hosted us at no cost for tent camping - and with thanks for our purpose in traveling to Ohio.

The agency you directed us to was very efficient and registered us quickly. They listened (some don't) to our level of preparation and tried their best to assign us to matching tasks. We responded to one home where the owner had approximately 3 feet of ware in her basement and questioned whether there was mold behind the paneled walls. We carefully removed one sheet - found no mold, but some moisture, and recommended that the base molding be removed for better drying.

She agreed as she really didn't want to strip off all of the walls unless there was a clear need. Her family had already spray bleached the external paneling so we
proceeded to Murphy oil soap the whole basement. Some furniture washing and yard work finished us up on that site.

We returned for additional assignment and responded to the need for re-insulating a shop garage and yard raking and cleanup of wet plaster scraps. While this particular home looked okay from the outside, we were aware that they had had to pull up all of the floors and part of the wet plaster walls - so despite our not being involved in demolition or internal reconstruction we were able to help with some work that they did not have time to get done.

All-in-all a good trip. Several scouts and parents said that they really enjoyed the recovery work and would be interested in future trips of the same kind.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is dedicated to finding the cause of, and cures for, type-1 diabetes-- the insulin-dependent kind. Using insulin doesn't cure diabetes, it just postpones the inevitable slow degeneration of major organs that eventually leads to death. That's no good.

Our martial arts school is sponsoring a team, the Black Belt Brigade. As part of that team, our family has signed up to raise $500. That's a lot, on one hand, but on the other, it's a very small fraction of the $90 million that JDRF hopes to raise this year.

If you're reading this, please consider donating online. $2, $5, $10, or more will definitely help. You can donate, or just check our family's status, here. (and if not, that's OK too... but Dad's ghost may come haunt you. No, wait, that was just a joke.... maybe!)

Last night, 13 ABC here in Toledo did a short piece on "Flood of Hope", my effort to "surge" volunteers down to Ottawa to help with flood relief. I haven't had time to set up a formal website, so here are the details-- hopefully people searching for "flood of hope" will find this article.

The Ottawa / Blanchard River Valley area has been badly afflicted by the recent flooding. More than 500 homes are uninhabitable, and the Red Cross estimates it will take several months of cleanup work to get the area back in shape. If you haven’t been there, you might not appreciate the scope of the destruction— it’s worse than you might imagine,.

I am coordinating “Flood of Hope”, an effort to surge volunteers from the metro Toledo area down to Ottawa on September 6th. The goal is to get teams from Toledo-area employers to go down and help with restoration and cleanup work.

Here’s how you can help:

1. If you’re a business owner or manager, please consider giving your employees a paid day off or vacation day to participate. (A big shout out to Ritter and Associates, the first company to volunteer to do this!) The cost may even be deductible as a charitable contribution (but maybe not; only your accountant knows for sure.)
2. If you’re not a business owner, consider taking a vacation day to come help anyway, even if it’s not on September 6th. The cleanup efforts will continue for some time to come, and they need help every day, including weekends.
3. Spread the word. Tell your friends, neighbors, church members, and co-workers. We need all the help we can get.

The recovery efforts can use special skills if you have them—they need construction expertise, data entry and office skills, and good old-fashioned demolition and cleanup too. Whatever you can do will be appreciated.

If you want to join the Flood of Hope, please email me or call me at 419 873 8308 and I’ll get you signed up. It’s important that you call ASAP so I can keep the volunteer staffing coordinators apprised of how many people to expect. If you can’t reach me, call the volunteer center at 419 523 3288 and tell them you want to work on September 6th.

Yesterday I headed down to Findlay to help with cleanup. I didn't realize the extent of the flooding until I got down there, mostly because I haven't been watching the local news.

Matt and I first went to the LDS chapel in Findlay. The church has been designated the lead for all the church-based service groups participating in the cleanup; we drew cleaning supplies and a map to Ottawa, about 25mi W of Findlay. As we got about 10mi from Ottawa, the flood damage in the fields became readily apparent-- miles of dead corn stalks, ruined tomatoes, and high-water marks on trees and greenery. When we got into town, it was even worse: the streets are lined with piles of debris. Many businesses are still closed, and many of the people whose homes were damaged have few local alternatives for housing-- as a small town, Ottawa doesn't have any hotels and little spare rental housing.

At the Ottawa center, we signed in and quickly got a work assignment. Matt and I teamed up with four missionaries (the Ohio Cleveland Mission has assigned 50 missionaries to the cleanup efforts) and headed out. We spent the day tearing out the interior of a two-story house. Wallboard, lath, and insulation all had to go; the homeowner had already taken out the carpet, but the trim and tack strips had to be removed too. It was hot (94° outside), messy work, but we could definitely measure our progress. It was rewarding work.

I'm going back down on Thursday with a few other folks, and I'm trying to coordinate a broader business-based effort for sometime next week. Drop me an e-mail if you're interested in taking part.

David Pogue asks a good question:

…could somebody tell me the point of LinkedIn? … What I don’t understand is: If somebody knows me well enough to e-mail me with an invitation to join, why doesn’t he just e-mail me directly with whatever his problem or offer is?

Easy. LinkedIn has very little value for someone like you, David, because you're already super-connected. For virtually any problem you have, you can easily find a resolution because you're David Pogue. You have access to a huge audience, hundreds (if not thousands) of contacts from all walks of life, and the accumulated knowledge of the entire NYT staff (or, at least, those you get along with well enough to ask for favors).

For those of us not similarly blessed, LinkedIn is valuable because it provides a tool for finding contacts or expertise in areas where we're not necessarily connected. For example, say I want to know about a particular market segment in depth, or I want to ask an alumnus what he thought of a given MBA program, or I want to find someone who works for Company X. LinkedIn makes it easy. I've used it to find contacts at famously opaque companies like Apple, as well as contacts at companies I didn't even know existed. I occasionally get linkage requests from people I don't know, and I don't feel obligated to accept them, but usually I do. Why? For the same reason I accept business cards when I meet people at face-to-face events: a) it's polite and b) that person may turn out to be a very useful contact.

So, David, feel free to send me a link request now that you have your answer. Heck, you can even write a recommendation if you like.

Yes, it's true: up to 60% of shopping carts have coliform bacteria. Yikes! I think I'll be bagging my fresh fruits from now on, thankyouverymuch. And wearing a biohazard suit, too.

Want to get your week off to a great start? Try an 0830 appointment with your doctor, then top it off with a 1000 visit to the dentist. After that, the rest of the week is guaranteed to be a breeze!

The headline says it all. Semper Fi.

Finally. The FDA is getting more aggressive about regulating companies that harvest useful tissue from cadavers. I still recommend reading Body Brokers if you want to know more about the industry (provided you have a strong stomach!)

Wow, this is a fascinating video clip of a guy whose job it is to fix high-tension power lines. Not for the faint of heart! (It's from Straight Up: Helicopters in Action, which I may now have to order!)

This video shows home prices, adjusted for inflation, since 1890-- as a roller-coaster ride.

This just in from my pal Kevin Engman:

The Unified Communication Marketing team will be conducting six focus groups at Tech Ed, Orlando in June 2007 focusing on Unified Messaging and the IP telephony space. We are conducting focus groups to gain clarity concerning the roles and responsibilities in an IP telephony environment, given Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and the public release of Beta 3 Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. We would like to talk to IT administrators and IT managers currently working in an enterprise environment, which is defined as an organization with 100+ servers and 500+ PCs. They may work as full time employees or as contracted vendors. We are looking for a group of IT administrators and IT managers who have experience with Microsoft products such as Exchange Unified Messaging, Office Communications Server 2007, Office Live meeting, Live Communications Server, etc. We are also interested in IT administrators and IT managers who have experience in an IP telephony environment and not strictly a TDM/legacy telephony environment, with expertise in IP telephony equipment from vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel.

The sessions will be held at the Peabody Hotel in Bayhill II. The session times are as follows:

• Session 1: June 4th, 1:00pm-3:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Microsoft LCS or Microsoft OCS pilots.
• Session 2: June 4th, 3:00pm-5:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Microsoft LCS or Microsoft OCS pilots
• Session 3: June 5th, 3:00pm-5:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Exchange Unified Messaging or Cisco Unified Messaging solutions
• Session 4: June 6th, 12:00pm-2:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Exchange Unified Messaging or Cisco Unified Messaging solutions
• Session 5: June 7th, 1:30pm-3:30pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Cisco, Avaya, Nortel or any other VOIP solution.
• Session 6: June 7th, 3:30pm-5:30pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Cisco, Avaya, Nortel or any other VOIP solution.

If you're interested, drop ucgfg@microsoft.com a line and let them know.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

I'm at the MVP Summit this week, and Computerworld's Eric Lai has written a background piece on the MVP program that's pretty interesting (and no, I'm not saying that just because he quoted me!) For example, I didn't know that the original set of MVPs were mostly FoxPro developers. Check it out here.

Back to the grind after a wonderful holiday break. OK, I admit it; it wasn't a break from work, except for the few days I took off around Christmas. However, it was a big change in our routine since David didn't have to get up at zero-dark-thirty to catch the junior high bus, and that made a big difference.

Santa (or, more properly, the section 179 fairy) brought me a couple of new gadgets that I'll be writing about. Stay tuned.

Original poem by Michael Marks:

The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
my daughter beside me, angelic in rest.

Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree, I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.

My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep
in perfect contentment, or so it would seem.
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,
But I opened my eye when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.

My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
and I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.

A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.

"What are you doing?" I asked without fear
"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts,
to the window that danced with a warm fire's light
then he sighed and he said "It's really all right,
I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night"

"Its my duty to stand at the front of the line,
that separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.

My Gramps died at 'Pearl on a day in December,"
then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of 'Nam
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.

I've not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red white and blue... an American flag.

"I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home,
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat,
I can carry the weight of killing another
or lay down my life with my sisters and brothers
who stand at the front against any and all,
to insure for all time that this flag will not fall."

"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright
Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."
"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,
"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you've done,
For being away from your wife and your son."

Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
"Just tell us you love us, and never forget
To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone.
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.

For when we come home, either standing or dead,
to know you remember we fought and we bled
is payment enough, and with that we will trust.
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us."

When I get super busy, the first thing to go is the Xbox 360; the second is this blog. That explains my relative silence. I'm trying to finish up a large project at work before the end of the year; last week I was in Seattle and Toronto, plus we had a major power outage in Redmond that slowed my progress down considerably.

Plus, let's not forget, it's the Christmas season! That means lots of evening time spent wrapping, shopping, going to chorus concerts, and so on. I have a couple of book reviews to post, but I probably won't get to them for a few days. In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all!

Last year, I made a bet with some folks over at Ed's blog:

@5: I'll take that bet, Bill. I've got $20 that says MS will only ship 64-bit production versions of E12 (although they will probably ship test / demo versions that run on 32-bit hardware). If I'm right, you pay Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans $20; if you're right, I'll pay the $20 to a charity of your choice. In fact, I'll take up to 5 identical bets. Ante up!

Today Microsoft released Exchange 2007 to manufacturing, which I'd say counts as "shipping" it. As I predicted last year, they're only shipping 64-bit versions; there will be a limited-use 32-bit version that is not licensed for use in production, but MS hasn't announced how or when they'll make it available. By my lights, that means that Ed, Mike Lazar, and Bill Buchan each owe the New Orleans chapter of Habitat for Humanity $20.

The folks over at ITSecurity.com just published a wonderful article, "Hacking EMail: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips". None of these tips will be surprising to power users (don't forward chain mails; respond promptly; remember, e-mail's not private). However, it's refreshing to see them collected in one place, and I hope the list makes the rounds of corporate America, where hopefully it will start to sink in. (Hat tip: Rich).

Wow, so much to write about and so little time to do it in! I'll be blogging less than usual for the next week or so. This is mostly due to the fact that I have a large project due by month's end that I don't want to slip, combined with the happy news that my new upstairs office is ready for me to move in. First, though, my existing office needs a good Thompson Deep Clean, which will take time in itself. Not to mention that my birthday gifts included both Viva Piñata and Gears of War, both of which could suck up a huge amount of free time. Then there are the basement ceiling panels I have to put up once I move out... and the Ohio State-Michigan game on Saturday... and so on. Thus, don't look for a huge volume of posts here for the next little while.

I've made some long-overdue changes to the blog layout and categorization. You may or may not have noticed, but:

• the categories are now streamlined to better reflect what's actually in them
• the Google ads from the right sidebar are now gone, since they were basically just an annoyance
• the RSS syndication info in the "about" block of the right sidebar now works
• the monthly archives are gone, replaced by a list of category archives

I still have a number of other things to tweak, but this is a good start.

It's been a tough two or three weeks here, at least for computer hardware.

First, I flattened my trusty ThinkPad. Ryan Femling, my coworker, says you can easily go two or more years without performance problems on a stable Windows install. He's right; I got just over three years out of the install, but for some reason, the machine had decided that it would permanently disable both its wireless card and its onboard Ethernet port. That made it, if not useless, much less useful. There wasn't anything wrong with the hardware; some combination of Windows patches and software installs/removals apparently whacked the driver. A clean install using IBM's recovery partition certainly fixed things up.

The next weekend, I came back from Michigan to find my only x64 machine (an Athlon 3800+ in an ASUS A8N) was beeping every two or three seconds. All the fans spin up normally, but the machine just sits there and won't POST. I haven't started diagnosing it yet.

Two nights ago, our electrician was here doing some work. He had to take down house power, so I cleanly shut down all my servers. When the power came back on, my primary file server wouldn't boot. After a little troubleshooting, I found that the video card was at fault; after I removed, cleaned, and reseated it, I was back in business. Coincidentally, Windows maven Ed Bott had the same problem two weeks ago, and his post is what reminded me to check the video card first, so I'm passing the tip on.

And another thing, which I originally forgot: I lost a 16-port network switch early Wednesday morning. It was making a cool frying-bacon sound when I came downstairs; this is annoying since it's the link to the ground floor of the house. Until I replace it, no Internet in Arlene's workroom.

Thanks to Technorati, I just found that Walter Glenn has a blog; with characteristic modesty, he hasn't been plugging it anywhere, so I found it through searching for links to my own blog! Walter and I first worked together on an MCSE guide for Exchange 5.5 back in 1998 or so. He's a great guy and knows a ton about Windows and Exchange. His blog is focused on simple tips for making Windows easier to use-- check it out.

Oh, bother.

I got a testy e-mail from Shane Keats of McAfee asking us to remove SiteAdvisor from the study, based on his claim that SiteAdvisor isn't an anti-phishing toolbar. I wrote a detailed response, in private e-mail, and was prepared to leave it at that.

However, Mr. Keats cried "foul" to InfoWorld and on the IE blog, saying that including SiteAdvisor is "silly and wrong. We don't claim, anywhere, to offer phishing protection. In fact, we're pretty explicit that we don't."

I'll admit to sometimes being silly, and I've certainly been wrong before, but I think in this case it's fair to include SiteAdvisor. Here's why:

• The SiteAdvisor.com home page contains this text: “McAfee SiteAdvisor also complements and enhances your existing security software by detecting threats which traditional security products often miss, including spyware attacks, online scams, and sites that spam you”. I think a reasonable person would likely interpret the reference to “online scams” as including phish.
• Question 2 of the SiteAdvisor FAQ page says “SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company dedicated to protecting Internet users from all kinds of Web-based security threats and annoyances including spyware, adware, unwanted software, spam, phishing, pop-ups, online fraud, and identity theft.” This definitely seems to represent SiteAdvisor as an anti-phishing tool.
• Mr. Keats included a partial quote from this support article: "SiteAdvisor's software does not currently provide automated or real-time phishing detection". However, the full text of this article explicitly says that user reports of phish sites are reported by SiteAdvisor. In our report, we didn’t distinguish between tools that use automated reporting and those, like SiteAdvisor, that can incorporate user-generated reports.
• On August 3rd, I spoke via phone with both Craig Kenwec of McAfee and Scott Van Sickle of Global Fluency, a PR agency that handles client-security PR for McAfee. Both of them told me that SiteAdvisor incorporates anti-phishing functionality.

Technorati Tags: 3sharp, phishing

Arlene and I got our free iPod nano units from KeyBank's promotion today. I was expecting a 1GB unit because that's what the ad promised. Instead, though, they shipped me one of the brand new (as in, introduced two weeks ago) aluminum 2GB models. I'm delighted! That's way nicer than I expected. Now, if I can just get Key to send me that debit card I asked for...

At the Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft made a couple of huge announcements about the Xbox 360. First, they announced some new games for the Japanese market, where the Xbox family has traditionally been pretty weak. They announced some excellent new Xbox Live Arcade titles, too, including Gyruss, Rally-X, and Track & Field. Konami and NAMCO BANDAI have really jumped on the potential of XBLA; Konami alone had three or four titles released just within the last couple of months.

On Friday, I posted that I was starting to experiment with Naturally Speaking. The results are in: here's my first post written using NS.

I just bought Dragon Naturally Speaking and was eager to try it, then I had second thoughts: what if it doesn't work well with Office 2007? I installed it anyway. Unfortunately, despite what Marc says, in my initial tests performance was quite poor. This may be because I was running it in Parallels on my MacBook Pro. However, other people seem to be pleased with its performance in Parallels. I'm going to try it on the Thinkpad tonight and see if it's any better. If not, back to Amazon it goes.

Reader mail from Mike in Canada:

I’ve read your articles for years and they’ve always provided me with invaluable timely information. I have a quick question about the “Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5”. This seems to be a hard feature pack to find good information about. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a download for it so I assume it must come with a Windows Mobile 5 Device that has a version after 148xx.2.x.x. My organization is about to get the latest Motorola Q’s from Bell Mobility in Canada. Apparently the Q’s that Bell have support the messaging and security feature pack for Windows Mobile 5 but I don’t really have any good information on it. This article is supposed to step me through the process of getting Windows Mobile devices working with Exchange SP2. Step 7 in this article tells me to install the Exchange ActiveSync Mobile Administration Web tool but I’ve never seen that tool (I’m guessing it comes with the feature pack).

I have an ISA 2004 server and I already have active sync working for older Windows Mobile devices but I’m very interested in the new live sync “direct push” technology so I’m trying to get as educated as I can before my new devices arrive from my provider. I don’t even know if the new “direct push” requires me to change my publishing policy in ISA Server as I can’t find information on that topic either (I used the wizard in ISA server to publish Exchange active sync over SSL for my older devices). Can you direct me to some more information and let me know if the feature pack is downloadable?

Arrr! Avast, ye scurvy dogs! Make ready the TiVo! In honor of National Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September!), I'm happy to report that ABC's "Wife Swap" is doing a special pirate-themed episode the day before. Normally I avoid reality TV like the black spot, but I'll make an exception in this case.

I was very tempted to make this my voicemail announcement. I'm guessing they're not going after the Republican market.

Man, this is a pretty good deal: open a new Key Bank checking account and get a free 1GB iPod Nano. You have to open a checking account, fund it with at least $50, and either sign up for direct deposit or get a Key credit card. Arlene and I have already signed up; it's too good a deal not to.

Dilana Robichaux is apparently a contestant on some kind of reality TV knockoff of American Idol. Good luck, cuz!

How cool is this? A fellow Marine, also named Robichaux, "borrowed" the picnic table where he and his girlfriend shared their first kiss. Why? To propose marriage, of course. The proposal was successful; no word on whether the po-lice will drop the hammer on him (he e-mailed the City of Irvine to let them know that he'd taken it and that he would be returning it).

Those Cajun Marines... you just can't keep 'em down!

I've got a ton of work to do, and that's been keeping me too busy to blog (even to say "hey, I'm too busy to blog!") I'm making travel plans to go to Lisbon, Oslo, and Johannesburg over the next few weeks for a new roadshow that Windows IT Pro is putting on in those cities, and I'm trying to wrap up several ongoing projects that all close out at the end of this month. I also have some great info on the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging server role, and I'll be posting that as time allows over the next couple of months. (Plus, I had to write a cover story on Monad, er, PowerShell, and that took some time to boot!)

Got a good question from one of the folks who attended Exchange Connections Europe in Nice. He wrote:

I am running a nightly full backup to disk of my exchange mailbox servers. This is then backed up further, to tape. I use NTBackup on Windows 2003. Do you know off-hand whether it is necessary to set verify on for these scheduled jobs? The current verification adds an additional 70 minutes, which id be happy to remove if it is overhead. Or does keeping the verification allow me greater comfort that the bkf files are good for recovery.

In my earlier post, I compared some aspects of the new-to-me T-Mobile MDA with my familiar Verizon Treo 650.

First, about the customizations. I installed the AKU2 ROM (which includes the MSFP DirectPush bits), and I stil love it. Having wireless sync for all my calendar and contact data was extremely valuable when I was in France (although I'm not looking forward to getting the bill for data charges, which are something like $0.015/KB). I also installed a ton of software, including SPB PocketPlus, SPB Weather, and PocketInformant. I'm really impressed with SPB's products, and I like PocketInformant too although it's taken some getting used to. I've also installed a free app called Smartkeys that makes the right softkey double as an "OK" button-- highly recommended.

Second, the hardware. Battery life, even with WiFi and Bluetooth off, has generally been poor. I started yesterday with a fully charged battery; after a total of about 15 min of phone calls and a day worth of DirectPush, I was down to 20% (the first warning threshold) by about 6pm. I've gotten in the habit of turning on flight mode overnight, and that helps some, but not enough. The camera is decent, and I like having the three additional side buttons (I have one mapped to PocketInformant so I get one-button calendar access), plus the two softkeys, plus the red/green buttons, plus the dedicated mail and IE buttons.

The screen is excellent, and I like the ability to switch between portrait and landscape mode. Overall, though, the phone feels a bit slow. It's not entirely clear how much performance is affected by the homebrew AKU2 ROM I'm using; consensus seems to be that it's actually faster than the factory ROM, but I don't have any basis for comparison.

Windows Mobile 5.0 has been quite stable. Occasionally when I press the "mail" button, Pocket Outlook launches and updates the softkeys but doesn't display the message list. This is a little bothersome, but closing Outlook and IE generally fixes it. (Speaking of Outlook: I complained that there was no way to move between messages, but that was just me not knowing to use the 5-way navigator by moving left/right).

There are still some things I miss from Palm OS. For one thing, Palm OS has the concept of numeric fields, so when you go to enter something like a phone number, the keypad automatically goes into numeric mode. Applications can leverage this, so entering things like flight numbers or birthdays is easy. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent concept in WM. The Palm text entry engine does a better job of correcting some kinds of shorthand entries (e.g. "dont" turns automatically into "don't"); although WM will suggest words, I haven't figured out how to edit the list of suggestions or turn the feature off.

How is the MDA as a phone? Decent. T-Mobile's network coverage isn't as good as Verizon's in the areas I've tested (around Toledo and at CVG and JFK). The phone worked fairly well on the Orange and Bouygtel networks in France, although incoming calls didn't always make the phone ring on my end. Sound quality isn't as good on the Treo 650, and the speaker volume for ringtones and alerts isn't loud enough. (Part of the problem is that Voice Command adds an audio announcement, which it mixes over the ringtone audio, reducing its volume further). When the phone's in its holster on my belt, it's very difficult to hear it ring if there's any kind of environmental noise.

EDGE data speeds are acceptable; by comparison, all I have here in Toledo is Verizon's 1xRTT, which feels about the same.

Overall, I like the form factor of the device quite a bit, but I'm not satisfied enough with T-Mobile's network to switch.

Next up: evaluating the Verizon Treo 700w that I got in yesterday. So far, after a little fiddling with it, I like it a lot.

Update: PhoneScoop just posted their review of the MDA. Their conclusion: it's great if you're using Exchange, but only mediocre otherwise.

Today marks the end of my first week carrying the Verizon Treo 700w as my primary phone. I haven't traveled with it much, which means it hasn't been subjected to the true acid tests that I usually use to judge a smartphone's worth. However, the Treo has been remarkably stable, and it remains considerably faster than the MDA I last tested.

Audio and call quality have been excellent. The Treo line has always had a very good speed-dial implementation, and that's also true of the 700w; it's simple to peck in a few letters of the name you want to call (well, as long as it's not a company name!) and dial it. Palm has obviously spent a good bit of effort on small touches, too; for example, if you turn on the device PIN lock, you can enter your PIN using the number keys on the keyboard without having to first touch the Option key. Palm also includes a Today plug-in for Google searches, which is handy.

When I was in Detroit this weekend, I got to use the 700w on an EvDO network. Subjective performance was excellent. I didn't do any speed tests, but I did tell Outlook to pull down several large attachments that people had sent me and was pleased with the sync performance. Overall, I think it's fair to expect EvDO speeds to beat EDGE speeds consistently, by a factor of 4-5x in some cases.

I used the camera to shoot some pictures and video over the weekend. Not bad, but not super-impressive. I shot two short 30-sec clips at a concert this weekend; at the end of each clip, the phone gave me the spinning Windows busy cursor for a very long time, and now I can't find the videos. I haven't taken the time to re-test in a better-lit, less distracting environment.

Of course, the 700w isn't without its flaws. It refuses to recognize the same 2GB mini-SD card that the MDA happily used. I suspect it's because of the card's size, not because it's a mini-SD card in an SD adapter. The card doesn't work in my Treo 650 either. The MDA has a few advantages, too. I really like the Communications Manager software that HTC includes; because it's mapped to a button, it's easy to quickly turn Bluetooth, wi-fi, EAS, and/or the phone on or off. The MDA has two additional buttons on the right side that can be mapped to different applications; the Treo simulates this by letting you bind app launches to the four primary buttons, plus a different set of bindings when the Option key is held down. This is a little awkward; I think I'd rather have the extra buttons along the device edge. The built-in wi-fi is useful, too, although I'm not sure the tradeoff in battery life is worth it for my typical usage patterns.

Overall, though, I'm very pleased with the 700w; it's a strong contender for the not-exactly-coveted title of "most likely to be hanging on Paul's right hip".

Update: I just saw that Verizon said they're going to allow EvDO phone owners to tether their phones as modems. This is a pretty good deal, since it would let me drop my existing aircard subscription and move over to using a tethered phone.

Wow, looks like RIM is starting to feel the love from Exchange ActiveSync. They're now offering a "free" Express version of BES; it supports up to 15 users, and the first user license doesn't cost anything. In total, BES Express supports up to 15 users, with users 2-15 costing you US$99 each. So, a fully loaded 15-user server costs you $1405, compared with $1099 for the "Small Business Edition" of BES (which then requires CALs @ $99). This is not quite "free", especially since you're still paying the RIM device tax. Having said that, it's an interesting move by RIM to capture a market segment that has historically balked at paying the Big Bucks for the full-blown version of BES.

Yesterday was my first full day toting around a Verizion Treo 700w as my primary phone. A few quick thoughts:

• The screen is only 240 x 240. I don't know why Palm did this, given that the Treo 650 is 320 x 320. I really miss the extra 80 pixels from the MDA (240 x 320), particularly with PocketInformant.
• Verizon's network quality is waaaay better than T-Mobile's, at least in my area.
• The device I got from Verizon didn't include the MSFP update. However, after I downloaded it, Palm's packaged installer made it very easy to update the phone. Oddly, I was expecting to see the Starfield intermediate CA certificate after the installation, but I had to manually install it before DirectPush would work.
• Battery life seems to be slightly better than the MDA; from a full charge, overnight the device ran down to about 50%.
• I much prefer the 700w's full-length stylus to the little bitty collapsible pen that comes with the MDA.

Expect a more detailed review next week, once I get some more time logged with the 700w.

Breathless press release (titled "Spammers Use Bullying and Extortion to Intimidate Members of the Blue Community to Give up Fight Against Spam") from Blue Security, complaining that "spam terrorists" are attacking their users by-- you guessed it-- sending spam. The difference is that the spammers are threatening to send even more spam to BlueFrog users unless they opt out. I don't know that I agree that it's bullying or extortion, but I am certain that it's not surprising.

The US Senate committe on homeland security and governmental affairs released its report on its investigation of the US government response to Hurricane Katrina. This should be required reading for anyone involved in messaging or collaboration systems planning. It's not very pleasant, but it does set out, quite clearly, where they think the problems lay.

Called out for special positive mention: the US Coast Guard. As a Marine, I am honor bound to make fun of the other armed services whenever possible. However, I'll suspend that rule in the case of the Coast Guard.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Windows IT Pro is now accepting session proposals for the Fall 2006 Exchange Connections conference. We're heading to Las Vegas for the premier Exchange technical conference, and we'd like to hear from you! We expect the fall event to have a healthy dose of Exchange 12 content, plus our continued emphasis on real-world solutions for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000/2003 administrators. This year, I'm co-chairing the show along with Kieran McCorry and Kevin Laahs, both of HP.

If you're interested in speaking at the show, send your abstracts to me by March 21. We want proposals for regular 75-minute sessions as well as 1/2 day and full day pre-conference and post-conference sessions. Note that we have a limited number of speaking slots, and all participants must be able to present a minimum of three 75-minute sessions.

• Send a minimum of 3 session proposals (4 or 5 is ideal for discussion purposes)
• Include a short bio with your session proposals; if you have prior speaking experience, please include it
• Include any additional pre- or post-con session proposals, if applicable

Please adhere to the March 21 deadline as we need to make speaker and session selections right away.

The Lazy Admin has a great piece on the use of MSH profiles with Monad. If you're exploring Monad, you should check it out, since profiles are the primary customization method for your interactive shell sessions.

Sweet! I just noticed this article on the Exchange team blog-- RSA's SecurID product can now be made to support Direct Push. This is a big win, because many organizations that want to deploy Direct Push also want strong 2-factor authentication.

Actually, I blogged about this on Monday morning, but my local copy of Ecto ate the post and just spit it back out this morning.

Terry Myerson drops science on public folders in Exchange 12 over at the Exchange team blog. High points: public folders will be supported until at least 2016, new apps should use the .NET framework and Windows SharePoint Services v3, and with Outlook 2007 + Exchange 12, you don't need PFs for free/busy. (Interestingly, I don't think that last tidbit has been publicly disclosed before Terry's post).

Wow, I love Monad. That's all I have to say about that.

Somehow I missed this, but MS last week announced the impending availability of a Windows Mobile version of Office Communicator. This may be the app that gets me to carry a Windows Mobile 5.0 device full-time, because having in-pocket access to presence, VoIP, and extended presence data for my contacts would be incredibly valuable. I'll post more once I get the bits.

I'm working on my Exchange Connections presentation on Monad. There's already a good bit of information out there (including the official Monad team blog), but I'm interested in knowing what you want to know about Monad and Exchange. Leave feedback in the comments, and whenever possible I'll work the answers into my presentation.

I've been married for nearly 15 years. During that time, I have never taken a vacation wherein I didn't do some kind of work. Sad but true! Actually, "sad" isn't quite the right word; the freedom to work from the road has let me spend a lot more time traveling with my family than if I had a job that required physical presence in a defined location. However, I'm breaking the mold: for the next seven days, I'll be cruising the Caribbean with no laptop, and thus no email. I will have my trusty Treo, but it only works in 3 of the places we're going to, and I'm mostly taking it so we can call the kids to see how they're doing. I've already turned in my columns for next week, along with some other stuff that needed doing, so I'm free as a bird until 2/13. See you then!

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.

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’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!

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.

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.

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.

I just sent off three session proposals for TechEd 2006. I didn't bother to submit anything last year, and-- big surprise-- didn't speak. It was nice to take a break and attend without having to speak, but I missed it, so this year I'm back to my normal MO. I'll also be speaking at Exchange Connections 2006 and the newly added Exchange Connections Europe-- more info on those coming soon!

I'm delighted to announce that Microsoft has released updated versions of two of its key security guides: the Threats and Countermeasures Guide 2.0 and the Windows Server 2003 Security Guide 2.0. Devin and I put in a lot of hours updating these two guides to reflect updated settings in XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1, and there's some very useful new information therein.

Normally I wouldn't mention this here, but it has security relevance. Don recently started blogging. Why do you care? Because he's an attorney who works for a really large software company in western Washington. In that capacity, he's written some amazing stuff that I hope shows up in his blog over time.

I had the opportunity to work with Microsoft's Cliff Reeves earlier this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it-- Cliff is scary smart, quite personable, and really "gets" the collaboration space. I urged him to start a blog, and whaddya know? he did! Check it out at http://cliffreeves.typepad.com/dyermaker/.

I just attended a Live Meeting hosted by Microsoft's Nicole Allen and Mike Lee. Nicole is well known in the Exchange community as being an expert on Exchange performance analysis, and her presentation covered some of the guts of the Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA). If you haven't used ExPTA, you're missing out; it's a terrific tool for analyzing the performance of your Exchange server and identifying problems, including problems experienced (or caused) by individual users. Mike Lee also did a similar presentation on the Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA). (For a good tutorial on what ExDRA does, see Marc Grote's article here.)

The interesting thing to me is the degree of investment that Microsoft is putting into these free add-on tools for Exchange. They fill a void that no third party vendor has effectively exploited, and customers love them because they greatly simplify the process of finding current or latent problems with an Exchange configuration. Between ExBPA, ExDRA, and ExPTA, Microsoft is assembling quite a formidable set of analysis and troubleshooting tools.

I meant to blog this, but with all the other things that've been going on, I forgot. Exchange Server 2003 has passed the evaluation process for receiving the Common Criteria security evaluation at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4. There's a good article at the Exchange team blog that covers the certification process and what CC certification means. Interestingly, I haven't found any evidence that any version of Domino is CC-certified, but I probably just wasn't using the right search terms (I note that IBM's talked a lot about the EAL-3 version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9).

It's a closed private beta, but there's some good information at their beta 1 preview site: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/preview. Expect more information after the first of the year...

The OCS 10g documentation says you create SMTP domains by logging in to the web mail client and using the Administration tab. It also says that you won't see that tab unless the account you use has either domain or system admin privileges. However, it doesn't say that "domain administrator" accounts can't actually create or remove domain objects; you have to have "system administrator" for that.

Need a good laugh? Go to this article and check out the targeted ads. Obviously Google is channeling the feelings of people who've worked with OCS.

The folks at SearchExchange have been kind enough to turn chapter 2 of my current ebook, The Definitive Guide to Exchange Disaster Recovery and Availability, into a short "10 tips in 10 minutes" article. Check it out here, or get the entire book (well, the first 6 chapters; I just turned in the final chapter yesterday) here.

My Jasjar wasn't really dead, it was just playing dead. I let the battery run down completely, then plugged it in to my Thinkpad and tried the firmware update again. This time, it worked like it's supposed to. John and I had fun playing around with it at the office; it flawlessly plays video that was encoded for his iPaq hw6315. I have several TiVo-to-Go shows on my laptop that I want to transcode to watch on the device, but WMP10 obstinately refuses to recognize the Jasjar, and since I'm on an airplane I can't check the Internets to see what the likely problem is.

I'm also having problems with ActiveSync 4.0, but that's nothing new. Every version of ActiveSync I've ever used has been troublesome. Come to think of it, so has every version of the Palm OS sync software (man, the stories I could tell about their Mac products…) Maybe that helps explain why Nokia just dropped US$430 million on IntelliSync.

Jim McBee has posted the slides for his (excellent) presentations at Exchange Connections. Get them here. Now, maybe I should do the same...

Breaking news: Exchange 12 will be 64-bit only. I have a lot more detail to post on this, but they're about to close the forward boarding door-- more when I land in Cincinnati in an hour or so. Here's a link to the umbrella press release from IT Forum.

Why the change? x64 technology is already widely deployed, and using it with Exchange reduces the I/O count dramatically-- by up to a factor of 4. This is huge, since IOPS are much more expensive than RAM or CPU. (If you don't believe me, try pricing 16GB of DRAM and a dual Opteron server compared to an EMC SAN and get back to me).

One objection I anticipate hearing is that this will strand customers who aren't on x64 hardware. I'm resistant to this argument, though, because even low-end servers now often include x64-capable CPUs, and this trend is only going to accelerate between now and the time Exchange 12 ships next year. Organizations that are planning to move to Exchange 12 after it ships can easily buy x64 hardware any time between now and the time they upgrade, usually without any increase in cost. Of course, I expect to hear criticism of this move because some customers won't be prepared to move to x64, but the fact is that there will always be customers-- for any product-- who don't want to, or cannot, upgrade when the manufacturer wants them to. Sure, there will be Exchange customers who will cling to their existing versions, but that has always been (and will always be) true for Exchange, Notes, Workplace, OCS, SAP, and any other software in this class.

The big news here, to me, is that Exchange is once again breaking ground in delivering a new technology-- and in this case, it's one that has the potential to radically alter the scalability and cost factors we're used to working with. I can't wait to get my hands on some E12 bits and start testing!

This week's UPDATE column, posted here because I don't have time to write a separate entry on this right now

One of my favorite things about IT conferences like Exchange Connections is going to the exhibit floor to talk to vendors and see their products. Sometimes large vendors like HP and Symantec have interesting things to say (like Symantec's announcement of a new version and pricing strategy of their Exchange security products), but for my money the real goodies are usually found in the booths of smaller vendors. They tend to be more enthusiastic about their products, and more engaging when discussing them. I'll do a broader review of some of the cool things I saw here next week, but with my deadline looming I had to pick one thing to write about, and it's… RSS.

Now, you may wonder what RSS has to do with Exchange. Over the last year I've mentioned RSS a few times, but it's always been as a client-side technology that enables individual users to find the information sources they want and display them in a web browser or a rich client like Outlook. However, there are some problems with client-side RSS use:

• you have to install an RSS client on each desktop; this is a non-starter for organizations that are trying to reduce the number of desktop touches. It also encourages end users to install and manage their own software, another hot-button issue that many firms are trying to clamp down on.
• users make duplicate requests; if you have 500 users, and 200 of them are making hourly requests for the latest content for a particular RSS feed, you're using excess bandwidth to pull the same data over and over. (Of course, the owners of the servers providing the RSS feed might take issue with getting a large number of requests from your organization, which is why heavily-trafficed sites often include a throttling feature that will block requests from IP addresses that are making requests too often.)
• users are left on their own to find the information sources they need. This is an advantage insofar as it allows users to make their own choices, but it makes it difficult to effectively share and consolidate useful information.

NewsGator Technologies has been making client-side aggregators for several years; their NewsGator for Outlook plug-in is my primary aggregator. I run it in a VM to let it collect RSS data that is then published to a tree of folders in my Exchange mailbox; that way, I can access it through OWA, Outlook, Entourage, or even an IMAP client. This addresses the first two of the problems I mention above, but it doesn't do anything about the third, and it doesn't scale well.

Enter a new product that NewsGator is showing on the expo floor: NewsGator Enterprise Server. It's a slick piece of work that effectively addresses all three of these problems by collecting and consolidating feed data in a centralized SQL Server database, then publishing it to users' mailboxes via WebDAV. This eliminates the need to license or install individual client plugins, and it makes the collected RSS data available to any client that can access an Exchange mailbox through IMAP, WebDAV, or MAPI.

This functionality in itself is very useful, but NewsGator architect Lane Mohler surprised me by showing me two other features. First, NewsGator Enterprise Server lets you specify default feed sets for individual mailboxes, or for sets of mailboxes as defined by Active Directory groups or OUs. For example, you can define a default set of feeds for users in your sales organization, and those feeds automatically appear in those users' mailboxes. Add a new employee, and she automatically gets access to whatever content you've identified as most valuable for people in that position. This neatly eliminates the problem of helping new users find the right set of resources when starting a new task or position.

The other cool new feature is called clippings. It addresses the problem of sharing relevant information by allowing any user to select an individual article and add it to their clipping set—to which other users can subscribe. I think of this like a librarian-in-a-box. Say you have someone in your company whose job it is to find articles about the company or its competitors and share them with appropriate groups. They probably do this by mailing URLs or articles to people, but the same task is more easily accomplished by using clippings; as the librarian finds relevant articles, he can add them as a clippings that are then automatically published to the appropriate users and groups.

What really gets me excited about the potential of NewsGator Enterprise Server is that it works with any kind of RSS feed, not just blogs. You can produce RSS feeds from SharePoint data or other back-end systems, making it easy to slip notification or status data automatically into users' mailboxes—a very cool potential that I expect other vendors to exploit.

I got a reader question asking whether you can install Exchange 2003 SP2 on Small Business Server 2003. On first reflection, I couldn't see why not; a quick query to Susan Bradley (SBS MVP and mistress of all SBS knowledge) netted a link to this article by Vlad Mazek, which explains the installation procedure in great detail.

It's live! Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This is great news, because SP2 adds some very welcome message hygiene, mobility, and management features. I'm working on an article on the mobility features now, and as soon as that's done I've got plans for a lengthy post exploring Sender ID support.

Update: here's a list of the bugs that are fixed.

It's live! Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This is great news, because SP2 adds some very welcome message hygiene, mobility, and management features. I'm working on an article on the mobility features now, and as soon as that's done I've got plans for a lengthy post exploring Sender ID support.

Exchange Connections is only a couple of weeks away, so I thought I'd post my final speaking schedule. Because Donald Livengood from HP has had to cancel, I've picked up his three sessions, leaving me a total of five:

• Tuesday @ 2:15p: Deploying Rights Management Server with Lessons Learned


• Wednesday @ 10a: Exchange Security: Tips and Tricks


• Wednesday @ 2:15p: Multi-Forest Deployments


• Wednesday @ 4p: Layered Anti-Spam with Exchange


• Thursday @ 11:45a: Fun With Global Settings, Message Limits, Recipient Policies, and Connectors

Thursday at 2pm, I'll be busy collapsing from exhaustion.

(A shout out to Jim McBee, who graciously agreed to take my place on the Exchange 5.5 migration panel with Kieran McCorry and Missy Koslosky; it's scheduled at the same time as Don's RMS session.)

It's official-- from a Microsoft press release:

Today Microsoft also announced plans to release Microsoft Antigen anti-virus and anti-spam security software for messaging and collaboration servers based on the technology from recently acquired Sybari Software Inc. Adding to the defense-in-depth strategy inherent in Microsoft Antigen, Microsoft will add its own anti-virus scan engine. When it is available, customers of the Microsoft Sybari product line will benefit from the addition of the Microsoft anti-virus scan engine at no additional charge throughout the length of their contracts. In addition, Microsoft Antigen for Exchange recently completed Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle review process, which has been shown to achieve measurably improved levels of security for numerous Microsoft software solutions. Microsoft Antigen for Exchange is scheduled to be available in beta to customers in the first half of 2006.

Wow, this is great-- a new Microsoft white paper on the recommended best practices for using the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) with Exchange 2003. This is long overdue. VSS is a terrific backup mechanism when properly implemented. If you're at all interested in VSS, check it out. (Hat tip: Ross Smith)

I'm at the Microsoft MVP summit in Redmond this week; today and tomorow are the "heavy" days that focus on specific technologies. Yesterday we had some executive keynotes in the morning, followed by some platform technology sessions. I got to see Jensen Harris' very cool presentation of the new Office "12" user experience (which I think wasidentical to what he showed at the PDC). I also got my first detailed look at the new Monad shell. Jeffrey Snover did the demo; there's a video of a similar demo here. I was blown away by Monad's elegance and simplicity; although Jeff didn't show any Exchange functionality, it's easy to see how features like the "-whatif" switch (which runs your script and shows that the output would be, but without committing any writes) could be useful. More interesting (at least to me) is how composable Monad is; you really can combine a wide range of cmdlets to take complex actions. I'm looking forward to learning more details about this today.

I'm not making this up. From this morning's email, an announcement from SANS of an upcoming Exchange security webcast. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A Microsoft Exchange Server is often found as one of the most important collaborative assets to current organizations of all sizes. With so much dependency on a reliable e-mail and collaboration system, many organizations are faced with the problem of how to secure those communications. This webcast will introduce listeners to Exchange messaging protocols and discuss strategies to secure those communications. This webcast will focus on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Miles Stevenson has spent the last five years working as a Linux network administrator. He worked in both commercial and government sectors specializing in low-cost Linux solutions. He currently works as a full time network administrator for the SANS Institute and directs the SANS Assessment program.

Now, I don't mean any personal disrespect to Mr. Stevenson. However, I don't understand what in his background as a Linux admin qualifies him to talk about securing Exchange. Securing any enterprise messaging system requires a fair bit of specialized knowledge, including a good understanding of the underlying OS. I wouldn't expect an Exchange administrator to be able to talk knowledgeably about Linux security, for example. I'm curious about what exactly will be covered in the webcast, but I'll be on a flight when it's being presented-- if you monitor it, leave a comment here and let me know what you thought about it.

See, I told you the Entourage blog was about to spring back to life. Today's entry: the details on the Exchange hotfixes suggested (but not required) for using Entourage 2004 SP2 with Exchange 2000 and Exchange Server 2003.

Today Microsoft announced that it was releasing Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office. Apart from the usual bug fixes to all of the Office apps, the big news here is that SP2 makes some major-- and welcome-- changes to Entourage's Exchange support.

There's a long list of tasty new Exchange goodness in the SP2 release, including:

• A new model for calendaring and address books. Previous versions couldn't support calendar or contact public folders; this release does. In order to enable that support, the dev team changed the way calendar data is stored and managed. Now you'll have a calendar on your local machine, plus a calendar for each Exchange account, plus any calendar public folders you have. For most Exchange users, this will be a huge improvement. For the small number of users who'd defined multiple Exchange accounts in the same Entourage identity, you'll notice that now Entourage doesn't automatically sync events from every calendar to every other calendar.
• Much, much better sync performance with Exchange accounts. (They also fixed that annoying bug where the Progress window would pop up even when you'd previously closed it.) Public folder browse performance is greatly improved too.
• Support for setting permissions on Exchange items. That's right-- you can now grant permissions on any folders in your mailbox, just like you can in Outlook. You can also open other users' shared folders, provided you have permission to do so.
• You can create private calendar and contact items.
• There's much better support for delegation, including the ability to assign other users as delegates.

There are also some less obvious, but perhaps more welcome, changes. For example, Entourage now honors the Thread-Index and Thread-Topic headers that Outlook uses. That means that conversations with Outlook users will be properly threaded. Entourage also includes a new Conversation view type that properly threads mail messages-- a feature that's long overdue (though you could simulate it by creating your own custom view). You can also do a "get info" on any folder to see how much space it's taking up on the Exchange server-- something I use all the time, given the mailbox limits applied to some of my accounts.

SP2 is available for download from Microsoft's Mac website; as far as I know, it will update either the RTM or SP1 versions of the Office suite, and you'll need to install it separately on each machine unless you're using a software distribution system. Microsoft has also promised to make it available through their automatic update mechanism for Mac Office, but it doesn't seem to have shown up there yet.

Update: Gerod reminded me that you need an Exchange hotfix to enable sharing and delegation to work; I'd forgotten all about that. (Also updated the links to point to live content)

Update: John Welch has tons of screen shots in his article on SP2.

Did you know that there's a blog maintained by the Entourage team at Microsoft's Mac business unit? Me neither. But they do, and a little bird tells me that they're going to start updating it much more regularly. Drop by and add it to your aggregator if you use or support Entourage.

Cool stuff from the PDC: the developer roadmap for E12 was unveiled at PDC today. Terry Myerson has a post on it at the Exchange team blog, or you can just go straight to the PowerPoint deck from the session. I've got a lot of catching up to do, since the Cookbook depends on WMI and CDOEXM.

Let's say you wanted to set every calendar in your organization to grant all users "reviewer" rights. This makes it easy to see detailed calendar data instead of just pure free/busy information. There's no direct way to do this through CDOEXM or WMI, but Glen Scales has come up with a solution that uses the Exchange 5.5 acl.dll. Check it out here.

I actually had real work to do this week, so I couldn't attend the PDC. That's too bad, because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there. For example, MS today took the wraps off Windows Workflow Services, their platform for workflow integration. There are some interesting touches that I think will help distinguish their offering from their competitors, including integration with Visual Studio and a marketplace for workflow actions (which MS is calling "activities".) When I get some time, I'll have to dig into this and see what's what.

In related news, MS also started talking about changes to InfoPath (hint: no more requirement for a client-side application) and their new Office server platforms. It's very interesting that they're focusing on BI and content management as first-class tasks in the new release; we'll have to wait and see what capabilities they're able to get in for the 1.0 release.

There's a fascinating article in the most recent issue of RISKS Digest about anomalies and Byzantine failures in flight control systems. I can't explain it nearly as well as Peter Ladkin, who wrote it, so I won't try. Although Exchange and Windows aren't generally vulnerable to Byzantine faults, it's a fascinating area of study in security-critical systems: how do you design systems that keep working when their inputs are lying?

I’ve been heads-down on some deadline-critical work, so I hadn't followed the Notes/Dominio 7 release as closely as I evidently should have. I woke this morning to find out that— oops— IBM isn't shipping DB2 support in Notes 7. See Ed Brill’s page for his take on it, including the news that you can apply for access to the DB2 functionality. I have to wonder whether there are secret criteria for the application process; I guess I'll find out when I apply. It's too bad that this feature didn't make the cut, although IBM had a tough decision: slip to keep the feature or ship without it. Given the customer uncertainty over the impact of moving to DB2 as part of Workplace, I'm sure they would have liked to ship this feature on schedule.

Interestingly, the reason Ed cites for not shipping the feature is that not enough customers were testing it. Microsoft has worked long and hard to build a real-world customer testing program, the Technology Adoption Program (or TAP). TAP customers run pre-release builds of Exchange in production, with full support from PSS. Of course, MS also dogfoods new releases in their own environment; between the TAP and internal MS users, my recollection is that there were about 150,000 mailboxes running live on Exchange 2003 during the latter part of its dev cycle. I expect to see the same thing-- probably with bigger numbers-- for Exchange 12. Perhaps IBM should consider a similar approach.

Pace this ZDNet story, which describes how MessageOne has seen a spike in workload with the unwanted arrival of Katrina in the New Orleans-Biloxi-Gulfport-Pensacola strip. The article makes an excellent point: the time to get a recovery or continuance solution in place is before the bad weather starts. Just like flood insurance, if you wait too long you won't be able to get protection in time.

All I can say is "wow!" There are a ton of new features and enhancements-- very impressive for a point release. Please let me know if you find anything that doesn't work properly.

Wonderful news: Microsoft's Jesper Johansson is blogging. (You may remember him as the guy who said it's OK to write down passwords). Check it.

Microsoft is making a "community technology preview" (CTP) of Exchange Server 2003 service pack 2. This is pretty cool. Get it from this link (which should be live shortly). I'm particularly interested to see how people put the Sender ID tools to use.

Update: the Exchange team blog has a list of FAQs about the CTP. Note well that the CTP build isn't supported by PSS and shouldn't be run on production servers.

Great news: CIS has finally released their benchmark for Exchange 2003. It's a fairly comprehensive assessment and hardening guide for Exchange Server 2003 (see these FAQs for more details). It was developed by CIS with input from NSA, MITRE, Microsoft, and various parts of the Exchange community. I think it will be of great benefit to most organizations now running Exchange (of course, I should have asked them to include the book in the bibliography :) )

Devin Ganger, my cow-orker at 3sharp and coauthor of the Exchange Server Cookbook, is on the scoreboard again-- this time with an ebook on discovery, compliance, archival, and retention. The first chapter's now available, so go check it out.

I've been asked several times about ways to disable the use of removable storage devices to protect against pod slurping and related attacks. XP SP2 has a way to prevent writing to USB devices, but there's another solution that's described in this MVP-contributed KB article.

From an article I'm working on, the difference between high availability and business continuance succinctly expressed:

Availability measures how much use we get out of a system before it fails, or between failures. Business continuance (BC) is different; it means being able to continue business operations (possibly with some degraded capacity) while a recovery operation is in progress. A simple example might help: if your building has an automatic emergency generator, that's HA. If you have to bring in your own generator from home, that's BC.

Last year, I wrote about US v. Councilman, a court case in which the initial ruling seemed to indicate that it was OK to intercept others' email under certain conditions. Yesterday the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a new ruling, essentially reversing the old one. Councilman was indicted in 2001 for violating the US federal law covering wiretapping because he was using procmail to copy inbound messages to hosted users on his server. The case was originally dismissed based on Councilman's claim that the messages he copied were in "electronic storage" (which has a narrow meaning under the 1968 wiretap law), and that what he did wasn't technically "interception" as defined in the law. The government appealed, and now the Court of Appeals is siding with them. Read their ruling for yourself; after I have time to dig into it a bit more, I'll have more to say (bearing in mind, of course, that I'm not a lawyer and don't give legal advice.)

Finally! Microsoft's released Microsoft Messenger:mac 5.0, which can use both the MSN Messenger service and Live Communications Server 2005. It fully supports TLS and Kerberos (although you'll need to read this reskit paper to turn Kerberos on). It also supports PIC for LCS if you're using it. In my tests over the last few months, I've found it very stable. It just works. If you're using a Mac, give it a try. (now, if we could only get a new version of the suck-a-delic Windows Media Player for Mac...)

See above: how much would you pay for a solution that actively prevents people from using "reply-all" to mass-distribution mails? (RMS does lots of other neat stuff, too, that I'll be writing about in the future.)

Here's an interesting tidbit: Scalix announced today that they're going to ship a wireless solution for their messaging product, based on Notify's product. Pricing and availability weren't announced; from a functionality standpoint, Notify has a pretty nice solution in terms of the range of devices and OTA methods they support. However, this may add significantly to Scalix' "flyaway" cost, making them potentially less attractive compared to Exchange 2003. No word yet either on whether Scalix will require device or mobile CALs in addition to mailbox CALs. Developing...

Bruce Schneier is a smart guy, but he also has a strong anti-Microsoft bias. That's why it's no surprise to see this article, in which he lambasts Microsoft for "building in security bypasses". What's he talking about? A quote from Microsoft's Martin Taylor:

For example, this new feature tool we have would allow me to tunnel directly using HTTP into my corporate Exchange server without having to go through the whole VPN (virtual private network) process, bypassing the need to use a smart card. It's such a huge time-saver, for me at least, compared to how long it takes me now.

Of course, that's our friend RPC-over-HTTPS. I think Schneier missed the point because he misunderstands the intent of the feature, which is to allow mail-only access from remote systems. It's true that VPNs allow for secure remote access to many different types of resource, often using multi-factor authentication. It's also true that many VPN systems (particularly the clients) are unstable and difficult to use, particularly from locations like hotels and airports where the network provider may not be clueful. The RPC tunneling feature allows secure access to email only without a VPN. This is actually a security benefit.

Why? Think of what happens when you connect a remote computer via VPN: you're allowing it unrestricted access to your entire corporate network. That means that when Joe Executive's home machine connects via VPN it has free roam of the network. That places a mighty high premium on ensuring that the remote machine is uncompromised, hence the interest in network access protection (but that's a solution for another day). As an admin, if I have users who only need email, I'm perfectly happy for them to use RPC-over-HTTPS instead of VPN because then I know that their machines are very unlikely to be able to cause damage to other machines on my intranet, no matter how crap-infested they may be. Couple RPC tunneling with an application-layer RPC scanner (like the one in ISA Server 2004) and you're better off than you would be with a pure VPN solution.

Some of the comments on Schneier's post make good points about the tradeoff between usability and security, including one guy who asks why VPNs are so hard to use. That's for another post, unfortunately.

The MS SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 teams have a hysterical site called "Escape from Yesterworld" that casts IT development as something out of Flash Gordon. The overall site design is brilliant, and there are some extremely amusing video clips there, including:

• Evil Wears a Cape
• I.T. From Ages Past
• Repetitive Tasks of Doom
• Change Orders of Death
• Terror on Two Wings

Well worth a look-- I give it two thumbs up.

Yesterday I wrote about Simon Butler's quest to prevent individual users from sending messages via MAPI. In related news, the Exchange team blog has a great post today explaining how Exchange 2003 SP2 gives us the ability to block individual users from using MAPI. The good news: because the MAPI blocking is added to the existing ProtocolSettings mechanism for blocking other protocols, you can use the same script to block or allow multiple protocols at once. The bad news: as with Simon's original question, this method doesn't stop existing connections; it only blocks new ones. Still, this is a valuable new capability to have.

Wow, this article made my head hurt. David Berlind of ZDNet documented all the stuff he had to do to get his XV6600 to work via Bluetooth as a modem for his laptop. I admit that I never bothered to try this while I had a loaner XV6600, fearing that it would be too hard to be worthwhile. Here's Berlind's conclusion:

OK, now that we're done, and some of you now have the best step by step you'll ever find for getting a DUN connection working with Bluetooth, what does it tell you that takes nearly 40 distinctly separate screen shots or photos to document something that should be a lot simpler?

Exchange MVP Simon Butler posed what seems like a simple question: how do you stop a user from sending mail? The answer is deceptively complex; we've been debating this on an MVP list for a few days now.

Say you have a MAPI user. You disable the associated Active Directory account, either by disabling the account or by changing the password. In either case, the user can still submit mail to the information store! In the case of a password change, the user will be asked to authenticate again, but if she cancels the password dialog, she can still send-- she just can't receive new mail! That might be a problem in case of an employee who's leaving (voluntarily or not), although a measure of physical access control will help.

You can kill the MAPI session, but that doesn't do anything to stop the user from reconnecting from the client side, at which point you're back to square 1: the user can still send mail. (This doesn't seem to be true if the user quits and relaunches the client after you kill their session, though).

For other protocols, it's easy to prevent users from connecting and sending mail. For example, for IMAP, POP, or HTTP connections, you can just remove the user's ability to use those protocols by using the Exchange Features tab in AD Users and Computers.

If you want to block all users, you can do that too; KB 288894 describes how to limit MAPI connections to a particular version of Outlook (so just set the regkey to deny from the current version (which I think is 11.0.6352.0) backwards. For HTTP, you can either set an IP address restriction on the Exchange vdir (thanks, KC!) or stop the w3svc, although this will have other effects. For that matter, if you want to prevent all client access, stopping store.exe will do the trick nicely at the cost of a service interruption.

Perhaps MS will fix this in Exchange 12.

I leveraged McDonald's wireless service when I was in rural Louisiana, but it looks like I'll have a tougher time getting connected while I'm at Sturgis. The nearest McD locations to Hill City, where we're staying, are in Rapid City, and none have Wi-Fi. Verizon's coverage map shows no coverage for Hill City, although the surrounding areas have digital service-- hopefully I'll be able to use my aircard. There's a local ISP, RapidNet, that may be able to help, too.

Interesting press release this morning from Blue Security, touting their new "Do Not Intrude Registry". The basic concept is simple: you sign up for their service and install an agent on your local computer. Blue creates honeypot mailboxes, which it then monitors. If spammers spam those mailboxes with messages that don't comply with the CAN-SPAM law, Blue asks the spammers to stop. If they don't, the Blue agent (which they call a Blue Frog, after the blue poison arrow frog) starts spamming the spammers by posting junk data to their order form. This is no big deal if only one agent does it-- but the agents are cooperative, so if the spammer sends out 10,000 messages, they get 10,000 junk order submissions.

The PR calls this "ethical and effective". I disagree on both counts; it's nothing more than a botnet in disguise. If it's wrong for J. Random Attacker to mount a DDoS against a website they don't like, it's wrong for Blue to mount DDoSes against spammers. Despite the fancy language deployed by Blue's CEO in this InformationWeek article, it's pretty clear that this is a clear-cut DDoS approach-- Blue is trying to hit the spammers where it hurts by degrading their operational capacity to take orders.

I don't condone spammers, but descending to their level isn't an ethical approach. In a remarkable coincidence, most of the sentiment on /. seems to agree that this is a bad idea.

Update: but don't take my word for it; legendary guru John Levine has weighed in with his thoughts (including the interesting fact that Blue tried to get sponsorship from a number of anti-spam orgs, all of whom rejected the idea).

I missed this in all the hubbub here at el rancho, but Alexander Nikolayev posted a terrific treatment of the Exchange 2003 SP2 anti-spam process at the Exchange team blog. He covers how the new SPF/Sender ID filtering process works in conjunction with the existing filtering features. Exchange 2003 SP2 is the only spam filter that Microsoft's using for their 90,000+ worldwide mailboxes; I think that's a pretty strong endorsement of its capabilities.

Just got the press release: Microsoft is buying FrontBridge, a hosted message hygiene service provider. This is primarily interesting because of FrontBridge's strength in compliance solutions; they have a broad range of services built around compliance for email and IM. Their hosted anti-spam services got good props from eWeek, but I think the combination of their data centers (which promise a 99.999% uptime SLA) and their compliance services opens the door for MS to diversify beyond Windows OneCare into a broader scope of direct service provision. I can't wait to see what part they play in the promised Exchange 12 updates for better compliance and message hygiene.

Unless you read the "Book of SP1" very closely, you might have missed out on the fact that Windows 2003 SP1 enables auditing of metabase object access. The IIS documentation for the feature is of little help, since it's missing some steps. This can be very handy for Exchange administrators, given how much heavy lifting the IIS core components do. IIS MVP Ken Schaefer has written a simple explanation of how to configure metabase auditing here.

Here's an interesting development: IBM made a Notes-related acquisition, buying PureEdge. PureEdge makes a set of XML-based forms tools-- not too dissimilar from another familiar XML tool, InfoPath. Could it be that IBM is feeling the pain of having a relatively poor XML story in Notes and Domino? Are they trying to play catch-up? Maybe.

Microsoft is widely reported to be preparing a server-based version of InfoPath, which would give them a pretty complete story for form management on the client, the server, and the back-end (via WSS, SPS, and BizTalk). Looks like form-based application development will become another front in the IBM-MS platform battle. I'll be interested to see how (or if) IBM integrates the new solutions into its products; clearly it's too late for Domino 7.x, so I'd expect these to be part of a future Workplace technology release in some form.

Ever get tired of trying to explain (or, worse, remember) the difference? Check these handy diagrams: RAID-10 and RAID-0+1.

Update: edited to fix a bad link for the first diagram (thanks, Devin!)

Got an email today from Symantec touting their new "Symantec Disaster Recovery Strategies" conference. It's in Cancun, in October. The email says:

Learn from the experts who best know VERITAS technology, while enjoying beautiful Cancun! It's the perfect combination of work and play.

Training sessions run from 8:00 to noon; the rest of the day is free to "meet in small discussion groups, meet one on one with the instructor, or absorb what you have learned while relaxing by the pool." Now this is the kind of conference I could get into! I mean, TechEd and Exchange Connections are draining because there's so much, y'know, work stuff going on. It's hard! Thank goodness Symantec is going to help out by dialing back the pace a bit.

I thought of making fun of their list of covered topics by adding "Hangover Recovery Planning", "High Golf Availability Design", and "Maximizing Your Return on Bikini Watching", but that would just be unfair-- people might think I'm bitter at not being asked to speak :)

[ personal to Devin: no, you can't go. ]

Now I've heard everything: this article describes (with a straight face, I'm sure) how to set up a Linux box running VMware to use Postfix as the SMTP front-end and Exchange 5.5 as the mailbox store. Why you'd want to do this is beyond me. For an encore, I hear the author's going to write an article on how to run Lotus Notes 4.0 on a PlayStation Portable.

David Ross of Microsoft has posted a long, and extremely interesting, paper on analyzing browser-based malware. I recommend reading it even if you only have a passing interest in the subject; there's a lot of good stuff therein.

John Denker has written a superb essay on why ID "theft" shouldn't be a problem, and how we already have all the tools to prevent it from being one. Excerpt:

it shouldn’t matter if somebody knows who I am. Suppose somebody can describe me -- so what? Suppose somebody knows my date of birth, social security number, and great-great-grandmother’s maiden name -- so what?

It’s only a problem if somebody uses that identifying information to spoof the authorization for some transaction.

And that is precisely where the problem lies. Any system that lets identifying information serve as authorization is so nonsensical that it is hardly worth discussing. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He goes on to draw the distinction between entity authenticaiton and transaction authentication, and goes on to propose a couple of schemes for breaking these into two separate mechanisms instead of the conflated mess we now have. Well worth a read for anyone interested in security.

Ironically, my last two UPDATE columns have been on mobility topics-- and now I'm somewhere with no mobile access!

So here I am in Farmerville, Louisiana. What's there? Not much (rimshot). Seriously, I'm here with my family visiting the beautiful Lake D'Arbonne State Park for our annual family reunion-style get-together. Whoever the State of Louisiana hired to build this place did a terrific job; the scenery is beautiful, the cabins are clean, spacious, and comfortable, and the wildlife is abundant. One thing's missing, though: connectivity. Ideally, I wouldn't have to work this week, but I do, so I've been arranging my schedule to work when everyone else is asleep. The problem is getting information to and from the people I work with.

Last year, we stayed in the same place, and I noticed that my Verizon cellphone worked fine. I figured that my aircard would give me data service. Problem #1: Alltel is actually the local network provider, as I found when I noticed the "Extended Roaming" indicator on my Treo. No aircard, and no data service on the Treo. The local public library has a few Internet terminals, but they're a) unstable b) locked down and c) on a network that won't allow me to plug in my laptop. Last year, I was able to cadge a few minutes from the nice lady who owns the local Radio Shack franchise, but that clearly wasn't a scalable solution. I didn't think she'd welcome seeing me twice a day every day, no matter how many batteries I bought.

The solution came from an unexpected quarter. I asked the lifeguards at the park pool, the folks at the public library, and the staff at the Radio Shack whether there were any public Internet points or cafes nearby. No one had a clue. While racking my brain to think of local businesses from which I could beg bandwidth, I remembered the McDonald's at the corner of La-2 and Bernice Highway-- a mere five miles from the park. A quick call to Devin netted me the information I sought: the local McD's did in fact have Wayport WiFi. Last night I rolled in, opened the laptop, and downloaded the 400+ messages that accumulated since I got here on Saturday. Today I made a grocery store run and stopped off for a Quarter Pounder and some email; I'll be heading back later tonight for another delivery.

I guess that means that I have to officially retract all the crap I gave McDonald's about their food. It's still not my favorite, but I'm willing to put up with a lot for the ability to keep my customers happy by delivering my work on time. It says a lot about their franchise consistency that even a small town like Farmerville rates WiFi in the store.

Microsoft today released version 2.0 of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. Among its many other new features, it can scan for Office security updates (among other products), it works with WSUS, and it presents more data on potential vulnerabilities. Go get it now.

From this morning's Wall Street Journal: Microsoft settles their antitrust dispute with IBM by paying them $775 million; in addition, MS is giving IBM "credit" of $75 million towards deployment of MS software at IBM. This essentially resolves all of IBM's claims of harm to OS/2 and the SmartSuite products, but it still leaves open potential claims by IBM for harm to their server software. It does set the clock for claiming damages forward, though, to June 30, 2002. Interesting...

I've decided to take the plunge into podcasting with a new series of podcasts for Windows IT Pro. The idea was hatched more or less out of the blue while I was sitting at TechEd with Karen Forster and Amy Eisenberg, so I offered to do a trial run of podcasts to see what kind of reader, er, listener reaction we got. I'm trying to do one 'cast a week on average from now until September, at which point we'll see what kind of listener numbers I can post. (In a transparent attempt to raise those numbers, I registered my podcast feed at Apple's new podcast directory; maybe that'll help).

Buy.com is selling the Verizon version of the Treo 650 for $175 to new customers; it's really $399, then you get $225 back via mail-in rebates. Still, that's a good deal for the Treo. Notably, palmOne hasn't released a firmware update for the VZW model, although there are updates for both the Sprint and unlocked-GSM versions that they sell.

The Exchange team just released version 2.1 of the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA). There's a lengthy list of improvements over at the Exchange team blog. My favorite new feature: the rule that warns you if only a single GC is present.

Amazon is now shipping the Exchange Server Cookbook. The book is now ranked at 8,930 (not bad for a debut title), and it's holding steady at #17 on the "computer early adopters" sub-list. Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered! If you haven't ordered your copy yet, now's a good time :)

Even though the the DC circuit Court of Appeals struck down the original broadcast flag rules, the entertainment industry is still trying to clamp down on the devices we all use. I got an "action alert" email from EFF asking people to call Senators on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that owns technical issues. Apparently the forces of darkness are trying to sneak a broadcast flag amendment into an appropriations vote. If you value your ability to use devices like iPods and TiVos, call or email your Senator right now. It only takes a minute to do, and the subcommittee markup is at 1400 EDT today, with a full committee vote on Thursday-- not a lot of time.

Now here's an interesting development: VERITAS announced yesterday that IBM has agreed to resell VERITAS' Cluster Server and Storage Foundation products for Linux and for Windows. It'll be interesting to see what impact this has on the adoption of Storage Foundation in the Windows market; it's a very capable product that has been hampered by VERITAS' difficulty in effectively selling non-backup WIndows products.

Wow, this is unexpected. Verity, which makes both the UltraSeek and K2 Enterprise search tools, announced today that they're making one-year licenses for UltraSeek free for collections of less than 25,000 documents. If you have more than 25,000 documents, you can buy a four-year license for US$75,000; while this sounds expensive as all get-out, it's considerably cheaper than their original pricing. UltraSeek's strength is that it's designed to be an install-and-forget search product that delivers a user experience not dissimilar from Google's Internet search; Verity is throwing in access to their classification engine and their extension API, both of which used to be extra-cost options. This is an interesting move, and one which I think will help solidify their presence in this space by getting them into some doors they otherwise wouldn't have been able to cross. The missing piece is still desktop search, where Google and Microsoft have significant leads that Verity will be hard-pressed to match-- we'll have to wait and see what happens.

Clusters are like nuclear weapons: they're expensive; they're dangerous if misdeployed; people who don't have them frequently envy those who do, and they offer some key advantages that aren't easily matched by other technologies. (Also, they can cause significant amounts of fallout.)

David Berlind asks "Who broke the Apple news?" He points out that the Wall Street Journal wasn't the first to break the story, as Steve Jobs claimed during his WWDC keynote. However, Berlind credits C|Net's June 3 story. However, more than a month beforehand, Paul Thurrott broke the story in this April 26 column, although he didn't cite sources until May 23rd-- the same day the WSJ printed their story. I'm disappointed to see the widespread lack of recognition for Thurrott, because he was the original person to break the story. And no, saying that David Coursey predicted this in August 2002 doesn't count as prior art, since that was a prediction and not a report of the actual transition.

{ed: updated to add a trackback to Berlind's original article}

From the "sounds dirty, but isn't" department, the newest security threat to corporate America: pod slurping. Abe Usher wrote a small executable that can be run from an iPod connected to a PC. When run, slurp will find and copy all of the document files it sees in subdirectories of c:\documents and settings. I hate it when that happens.

Scoble's raving about how sexy the new Lenovo Thinkpad X41 is. He's right, but here's the weird thing: where's Lenovo? In Ballmer's keynote yesterday, the X41 was on stage for a total of about 90 seconds. Instead of showing it, it got a brief mention and then Ballmer took it off-stage. The script surrounding its appearance sounded like a bad TV commercial. This would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase what makes the X41 special, or at least to include it in a demo of some kind. We've had a great deal of success including the Tablet in our line-of-business demos; for example, BJ Holtgrewe could have showed his stuff on a Tablet and then disconnected it to roam around the stage, just to highlight his claims about what Maestro and the Outlook managed-code support in Visual Studio could do. I know that IBM's former Thinkpad marketing folks now work for Lenovo, but suddenly they seem to have gone tone-deaf. What's up with that?

Update: I spent a few minutes playing with an X41 Tablet at IBM's booth. Terrific form factor, and it has the same solid feel as my T41 (and its predecessor T30, and the T20 I had before that, and the 600E I had before that). I think IBM's going to sell a lot of these.

Opening riff: Samantha Bee interviewing people in the audience. Medium-funny. We all want to give information workers a wedgie!

Paul Flessner onstage, "interviewed" by Bee. "This morning, he's the Techie Show's special senior connected systems correspondent."

Flessner: IT's a tough job. Budget's always cut. Clinton imitation: "I feel your pain." Bee: "Can you honestly echo his quote that he didn't inhale?" Big laughs. Funny story about accidentally powering down a rack of 3380s.

Now Flessner's presentation starts. "You might be asking yourself, what's a connected system?" Interesting slide showing progression of connectivity from first telegraph msg to first transoceanic cables to radio and TV to ICs and the Internet to the 2000 release of .NET.

Talking about the change in business application architecture from mainframe (monolithic, multi-function) to mini (monolithic, multi-function, with separate client). Wrong factoring for large-scale async applications. Refactor multiple functions of monolithic apps into cloud of web services, each offering well-defined independent services that are atomic and don't share context or state. Clouds of composite applications that federate data ("Federated data-- I'm not advocating it, but it's sort of a fact of life") and identity. "I'm not saying that you have to throw out your existing systems and rewrite... but it is something to think about. Think hard about breaking down into atomic services."

Three pillars: highest developer productivity, mission critical abilities, better business decisions. Have to enable both data and process.

Update: SQL Server 2005: integrated with VS and .NET to deliver integrated debugging / development. "No one in the world who wants to ship SQL Server 2005 more than me." Develop and debug code on client, midtier, and back-end from directly within VS. CLR now deeply embedded in SQL Server. Service broker (async queuing and messaging), cache sync, native XML database support. [ed: nothing new here that I can see, and I don't know much about SQL Server 2005]

Update: BizTalk Server 2006. Integrated with SQL and VS 2005, one-click deployment. Big win: simplified setup [ed: that's one of the biggest pains with BizTalk 2003-- it's extremely difficult to set up and get going] "You're going to get a lot of stuff for free in terms of ?? or SQL Server".

Announcing: RFID infrastructure from Microsoft. [ed: I got it wrong yesterday-- I thought the demo was supposed to be yesterday-- no demo yet, though] Partnership between Symbol, Printronix, and MS. No timeframe; "you should sort of expect it in the 2006 timeframe."

Update: Visual Studio and VS Team System. [ed: this is super cool and is MS' attempt to kick Rational in the butt] Load testing, profiling, test coverage, other QA tools integrated into a "more sophisticated and more scalable" source code control service. "We're super excited about it... A lot of partners already plugging in and extending this".

50-75% code reduction for most scenarios of web dev and smart client dev. Better perf and offline experience for web apps; ClickOnce for smart client apps. CacheSync provides local caching of back-end data under developer control. "It will be difficult to buy a non-64-bit machine in, say, 24 months."

Demo: Brian Keller, PM for Visual Studio. His mom's in the audience! Demoing app showing counts of attendees in various locations via RFID. Now showing graph of number of attendees vs number of proctors in hands-on labs. [ed: cool, but scary; this isn't really anonymous even though they keep saying it is] VS 2005 supports smart tags [ed: great feature!] Large library of "code snippets" "that you don't have to develop or test". Demoing RFID monitoring of a piece of equipment as it moves around.

[ed: I see something that looks like a BattleBot on stage] Sure enough, that's Flessner's missing hardware. It runs on the .NET Compact Framework. The 'bot is delivering a Portable Media Center. "First RFID raffle ever". [ed: I didn't win]

Announcing: $50K Connected Systems Developer Competition. No real details.

Video featuring Xerox application developers. [ed: Borrring.]

Update: Samantha Bee again demoing the SQL Server 2005 Technical Benefits Translator. First benefit (availability): "Downtime is for suckers" [ed: my new email signature!] Second benefit (security): "Hey, hackers, bite me!" Third (scalability): "SQL Server 2005 is like spandex pants." "No matter how big you get, they still fit!"

Update: Flessner's back. Safe synchronous database mirroring or async replication. Online indexing, fine-grained online undo/repairs.

Talking about security now. "I apologize for [Slammer] again today." Showing critical security bulletin count of SQL vs Oracle. 2002: 11 for MS vs 20 for Oracle; 2003: 2 vs 13; 2004: 1 vs 74; 2005: 0 vs 2. [ed: source for this is vendor sites, osvdb, and Secunia]

Key security measures: surface area reduction, enhanced security (native encryption, cert mgmt, password policy enforcement, auditing & authZ). SQL Best Practices Analyzer ([ed: great! the Exchange BPA is a terrific tool].)

Rockin' TPC numbers: $5.38 TPC-C and $54 TPC-H (1 TB), compared to $6.49 and $119 for SQL 2000. Same hardware for SQL 2000, SQL 2005, and Oracle: Oracle is $8.33 TPC-C and $68 TPC-H. [ed: lots of fine print on this slide detailing the exact HW config and results]

Update: Francois Ajenstat, GPM for SQL Server, coming onstage to demo. Cool moving-bars perfmon application showing SQL 2000 vs SQL 2005 on identical HW. 64-bit version of SQL 2005 on Win 2003 x64. [ed: No surprise: much better perf due to much larger cache.] Here comes the BattleBot; it's attacking the network switch that connects the SQL Server 2005 32-bit demo machine. [ed: it's all pyro, no actual metal was bent] Failover worked well, though.

Update: Samantha Bee again with the head of "None of Your Business". "We follow the IBM/Oracle model... You pay to put information into a database, and if you really need it back, you pay to see it again."

Update: Back to Flessner. "Business activity monitoring is to business what BI is to data." Integrates SQL reporting services and "Office Scorecard Accelerator". Integrate, then analyze, then report. Announcement: SQL Server Reporting Services will be available in all SQL 2005 editions.

Demo: Donald Farmer, GPM for SQL Server. Stopwatch demo: Farmer has 8 minutes to do some reporting. Data mining over the output of a conditional split. [ed: Lots of clicking, so I can't follow step by step.] Prediction value of data seems low-- 0.26 or thereabouts. Showing wizard for creating report based on analysis. Flessner: "Kind of ugly, isn't it?" Farmer: "It does look like a report done in 5 minutes, doesn't it? Typical real-world scenario: he asked me to clean his dirty data, I did it in half the estimated time, and he's still not happy." Lots of applause and laughter.

Now showing visual report builder to prettify the report appearance.

Announcing: SQL Server 2005 launches week of November 7. BizTalk 2006 CTP starts now; SQL Server 2005 CTP starts June. Free Standard Edition of SQL Server Standard Edition for all TechEd attendees.

Gartner revenue market share numbers 2004: IBM 34.1%, Oracle 33.7%, Microsoft 20%. "sort of an option to port to Linux; haven't discussed that with Bill lately". IDC's unit share numbers: IBM has 7%, Oracle has 25%, Microsoft has 41%. "We took share" from IBM and Oracle. "How does IBM have the #1 revenue share and the lowest unit share? Let's take a look." Enterprise unit share: 9% IBM, 29% Oracle, 34% Microsoft.

Pricing: base product, 1 CPU, base price for enterprise edition of base product. Oracle $40K, IBM $25K, Microsoft $25K. Upcharges for manageability, availablity, clustering, BI, and multi-core. Final price for dual-core with all options: $232K for Oracle, $330K for IBM on AIX (they don't charge for multi-core on x86/x64).

Announcing: SQL Server Migration Assistant. Automates Oracle-to-SQL Server migration. Claimes to reduce manual effort by over 80%. Contest: most exciting Oracle conversion wins a custom chopper.