Good news: I have tag clouds working on my blog, about five years after the rest of the Internet got them working.
Bad news: now I have to go back and retag a thousand-plus posts if I want the cloud to be useful.
Recently in General Tech Stuff Category
Windows users have more security options, and that's just the way it is. Or is it?
Let's start with the obvious: I love BitLocker and I cannot lie. Despite its faults, it remains a great example of a real-world security feature that delivers immediate value. It's fully supported by the OS manufacturer, meets government security standards, and doesn't have to rely on skanky hacks to work its magic.
Windows laptop users can also take advantage of Seagate's Momentus FDE line of disk drives. These disks, sometimes called self-encrypting disks or just SEDs, perform hardware encryption, and they are qualified by the US National Security Agency as meeting NSTISSP #11. Unfortunately, these drives require support in the BIOS. Since Apple's laptops all use EFI instead of the standard x86/x64 BIOS, you can't just plop a Momentus FDE into your Mac and expect it to work.
The only solution I've found to get an SED to work in a modern Mac laptop is from WinMagic. Their SecureDoc product is essentially a full-volume encryption tool that competes directly with BitLocker, as well as with other FVE products from PGP, PointSec, and so on. The big difference: the Mac version of SecureDoc supports Momentus FDE disks. Naturally I had to try it.
Installation is simple: you run an installer, which adds a couple of kernel drivers and modifies the boot loader. If (and only if) it detects an unlocked Momentus FDE as the boot volume, it will ask whether you want to use hardware or software encryption. (The installer also tells you that it will change the system's hibernation mode, but let's not get ahead of ourselves yet…)
When you're done, you must reboot, at which point you see the new (and quite ugly) SecureDoc login screen. When you log in here, the SecureDoc bootloader unlocks the FDE disk and the normal Mac OS X boot cycle proceeds.
The docs ask that you turn off pagefile encryption by unchecking the "Use secure virtual memory" option in the General pane of the Security preferences tool. This makes sense: there's no reason to ask the OS to encrypt the page file if the disk on which it lives is already encrypted. You must also turn off the "Put hard drive to sleep whenever possible" checkbox, as the OS doesn't deal well with having the disk go to sleep (and thus get locked) while you're using it.
In my test install, I ran into an odd problem: the machine would freeze when waking from sleep. The cursor and keyboard would work normally, but I'd get the spinning rainbow pizza of death. After doing some digging, and with the help of WinMagic's tech support folks, I determined that the system's hibernation mode wasn't properly set by the installer. (Page 4 of this document is the only place I've found the different hibernation mode codes explained.) Uninstalling the SecureDoc software, manually setting the hibernation mode with the pmset tool, and reinstalling it fixed the problem and it has worked flawlessly since.
The standalone version of SecureDoc doesn't have the same set of management or control features that BitLocker does. Of course, that's because WinMagic wants you to buy their server-based toolset, which uses a group policy-like mechanism to enforce whatever encryption policies you choose. Without having tested either the server tool or the Windows version, I'm not ready to pick a winner between BitLocker and SecureDoc, but for the Mac it's a low-impact solution that does what it says, and I'm happy with it so far.
A thoughtful post from my pal Bo Williams on his decision that he wants to weigh less than 300 lbs. I am right there, except that 200 is my personal high-water mark (and one, frankly, that I'm already over). I was holding steady at about 190 for a good while, but not long after Dad died I put on around 10 lbs. Not for any reason, mind you; it just sort of happened. Since then I've hovered right around 205, which is a bit more of me to love than I think there should be.
In the back of my mind lurk two things. First is the shadow of Dad's diabetes. At his funeral, I was sitting around a table with a first cousin, two aunts, and two uncles... all of whom are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. The last time I had my bloodwork done (in September), my glucose was 94; the cutoff for being considered pre-diabetic is 100. I have a huge weakness for sweets, and that's something I need to really work on. Apart from that, my lipid levels are all pretty good, so I'm not immediately worried about them.
Second is what my kids see: they see me making essentially no daily effort to exercise. In the past I've been regular about running on our treadmill (which, sadly, is now gone), but with the dawn of a new year it's time for me to get back in the groove. Accordingly, today I went and signed us up at the local Anytime Fitness. Arlene, David, and I now have 24/7/365 access to a really nicely-equipped gym less than 2 miles from our house.
I plan to couple that with a return to logging my food intake, which worked pretty well the last time I tried it. Seven years ago I said my target was 181, and this time I really mean it!
Ahh, the joys of the internets. Today's treat for your delectation: this piece by Daniel Eran Dilger in AppleInsider about Snow Leopard's Exchange support. Sadly, it's riddled with factual inaccuracies.
In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape's web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That's what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.
I think this misstates what actually happened. Microsoft wasn't trying to push IIS by tying IE to it. Instead, they were trying to prevent Netscape, and more broadly browser-based apps, from throwing Windows off the desktop 15 years later, Microsoft is still fighting that same battle, although against different opponents. For a web server to be useful, it must communicate with many different clients. For a browser to be useful, it must communicate with many different servers. That's the whole rationale behind the use of HTTP and HTML, for crying out loud.
Now we move on from matters of interpretation to matters of actual fact.
Apple's support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies. Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients. Apple did not license Microsoft's Windows-only "Exchange Active Sync" software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.
Unfortunately, this is just plain wrong in several ways.
- Apple doesn't use WebDAV for Snow Leopard. Instead, they use Exchange Web Services, a SOAP-based interface that delivers almost all of the functionality in the now-ancient MAPI stack. Microsoft shipped WebDAV support in Exchange 2000 in the apparent hope that they'd be able to do away with MAPI as the primary Outlook/Exchange protocol. Turns out that WebDAV-- an open standard that Microsoft adapted in the name of interoperability-- turned out to be a spectacularly bad choice from a performance and functionality standpoint. Unfortunately, Entourage used DAV. This limited Entourage's functionality (but more on that later.>
- Exchange ActiveSync isn't a "Windows-only" protocol. It's a well-described sync standard that can be licensed by device makers who want to talk to Exchange (Palm, Apple, SonyEricsson, and Nokia all have), or that can be licensed by server makers who want EAS devices to talk to their servers (IBM Lotus is the best example here.)
- Snow Leopard doesn't use Exchange ActiveSync.
On to another matter of interpretation:
This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard's support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don't use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.
Snow Leopard's support for Exchange only works with, well, Exchange. It certainly doesn't work with Gmail or Yahoo. It's questionable how well it even works with Snow Leopard Server. I'm reserving judgement until we get our 10.6 server set up at work so I can test it first hand.
Now, to jump back to something at the beginning of the article. Dilger says:
Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again, after a decade of giving enterprise Mac users a third rate alternative in Entourage, but Microsoft's efforts to win back Mac clients may come too late to prevent the significant erosion of one of the primary reasons companies have to pay for Office on the Mac.
It's ironic that Dilger labels Entourage as "third rate" given how many Entourage features are missing from Snow Leopard's clients. However, Snow Leopard's client implementation is nowhere near the functionality of what's currently in Entourage, and I don't think that's likely to change when Microsoft ships their Mac version of Outlook.
Given that I'm in Palo Alto, and that probably half of my coworkers use Macs, it's no surprise that I installed Snow Leopard today. I'm not going to review the OS, or even the Exchange capability, but here are a few notes based on my long-time Entourage use (and not a little time spent with Outlook 2010 over the past few months). Herewith my thoughts:
- The first thing I noticed: Mail.app is smokin' fast compared to Entourage EWS. I mean, we're talking lightning. EWS has much improved sync performance compared to DAV sync, but Mail.app leaves it in the dust when it comes to scrolling, searching, and message rendering. I haven't tried to compare the two programs' sync speed (and probably won't, since it's mostly relevant when you set up a new account).
- Speaking of setup: I was able to set up 4 Exchange accounts in about 10 seconds each: enter e-mail address and password, then let Autodiscover do the rest. EWS Autodiscover works well most of the time, but occasionally it will fail to detect an account.
- By default, Mail creates a single unified Inbox view-- exactly what I use in Entourage (and what I wish for in Outlook 2010). However, nowhere can I find where Mail tells me how many messages are in a folder, something I like to keep track of.
- I like it that Mail.app uses the same sounds for sent and received mail that the iPhone does. On the other hand, I dislike the fact that you can't change these sounds (on either platform). C'mon, Apple.
- Ironically, older versions of Mail would hide some Exchange folders when you connected because Mail couldn't handle them. Guess what? This version fails to hide some folders, such as "Conversation Action Settings" and "Quick Step Settings", that Outlook 2010 creates as ostensibly hidden folders in your mailbox root. Oops.
- Entourage seems to do a better job of masking temporary connectivity problems. When Mail.app decides that one of my servers is unreachable, it grays out that server's entire folder tree and puts the little tilde-looking icon next to the account name. By contrast, Entourage will discreetly add "(Not Connected)" to the account name and leave it at that.
- iCal… well, what can I say? I still don't like it after all these years. Yes, it syncs with my Exchange calendars now, but its visual display is ugly compared to Entourage (especially for overlapping events), it's lacking in features, and the task support appears to have been hastily bolted on.
- I've never been a user of the Address Book app. Given the way this version works, I'm not about to start. Too much wasted white space and too many missing features. For example, want to see someone's management chain? Too bad, Address Book doesn't show that. Feel like searching the GAL? Sorry, no can do (at least not that I can find.)
There are other problems, too-- no support for setting your out-of-office status, for example. In terms of fit and finish, there are lots of little grace notes that Entourage gets right but that Apple stumbled with. To show just one example, take a look at these two screen shots, one for each program.
IMHO, Entourage does a better job all around. It tells me that my machine and my appointment are in different time zones. It clearly shows the important data about when my test meeting's invitees are available. Once you type in an invitee's name, there's no way to delete the event in iCal unless you remove all invitees first. Attempting to close the window gives you a chance to edit or send the invite, but not get rid of it altogether. (Bonus: thought it was interesting that Entourage could get and display Atalla's status (OOF, in this case) but that iCal couldn't, even though I took the screen shots on the same machine and more or less at the same time.)
More broadly I don't like going back to the world of having three separate apps for PIM functions. It reminds me of Sidekick for DOS. I much prefer the Outlook/Entourage model of having several different (but related) data types in one place. What makes this worse is that there's relatively little integration among the Snow Leopard apps. For example, if you're looking at a contact in Address Book and want to send that person a mail message-- too bad. There's no way to do so. You can, however, right-click an e-mail address in Mail to open that address' contact card.
Still more broadly, these applications are not very flexible or customizable compared to Entourage. For example, let's say you want your message reading pane on the right. Too bad! There's no way in Mail.app to customize it; you need WideMail or something like it, of which there is no Snow Leopard version (yet).
So, Snow Leopard delivers what Apple promised: basic Exchange integration. There are so many things that they've left out, though, that I remain disappointed, and I'm thinking that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit has a huge lead already as they move into full-scale development of Outlook for Mac
Great news from Michael Atalla on the Exchange team blog: the release candidate for Exchange 2010 is now available for download. The RC is feature complete, meaning that everything that will be in the final build has been implemented, though there may still be bugs. I can say that based on my experience with Exchange 2010 in the TAP, and a user of the Outlook Live service, it's pretty darn solid. Check it out!
I know, I know. I've complained in the past about the limited value of netbooks, and now... well, confession time: I bought one, a Gateway LT3103U. I'm going to be using my MacBook Pro as my primary machine, which means I want to leave it plugged in to its monitor etc. at home. Because I'll be commuting by Caltrain I wanted something small and portable to use for light writing, surfing, and so on.
I asked a large social alias at Microsoft for recommendations and got back a dozen or so. Some recommendations were based on price, some on battery life, and some on overall price/performance. I don't need ultra-long battery life, and while I won't say price was no object, I didn't feel like it was the most important factor.
Why the LT3103U? In a word, the screen. It's a beautiful, clear, sharp 1366 x 768. I experimented with a few 1024 x 600 screens at my local {Best Buy, Costco} but they were just too darn small. The Gateway also has a pretty nice full-size keyboard. It's no Lenovo, but it's miles better than most of the ones I tested. Performance with Win 7 is quite nice. Would an Atom N270 be faster? Maybe, but on the other hand I'd have to suffer the squinty little screens common on those devices. (Here's an LT3103U review for your consideration.)
I found instructions to make a bootable Win 7 USB stick and built a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 stick. It worked flawlessly, and I commend the instructions to your attention. I don't know how long the install took because I started it right before bed, but it was done when I got up :)
Chris Moates had notes on getting Win 7 drivers set up for the LT3103U. I didn't burn the Gateway driver DVD (I don't have a USB burner), so I just ran Windows Update on a wired connection. It found the correct ATI and wireless drivers with no problem, so all my hardware is fully functional (although I haven't tested multitouch; that may require the Synaptics touchpad driver).
Now I need to install Windows Live Writer on it and see how it blogs :)
Update: I took it back to Best Buy. It was a delightful little machine, but it was just too small-- the keyboard and screen are both better suited to someone with Arlene's hand size than mine.
If you've ever taken a Microsoft certification exam, you might wonder where they come from. Do storks bring them? Are they made by elves?
Not quite. They're developed by teams of subject matter experts (SMEs). Some of these SMEs work for MIcrosoft, and some come from the broader IT community. The exam development process is too long and boring to talk about in depth; there are several phases to it, starting with "hey, kids, let's put on an exam" and culminating with the rollout of the finished exam.
Along the way, there are usually beta opportunities, where the nearly-finished test is made available to a limited pool of test users who can give feedback to the test development team (i.e. "hey, question 45 is too vague!" or "there's no correct answer to question 15.") For the first time that I know of, Microsoft has opened a public call for SMEs who want to volunteer to work on exam development and to get early access to exam betas. If you're at all interested, visit this site to get directions for signing up. (Hint: it involves Microsoft's Connect web site!)
Bah. This is getting tiresome.
Update: thanks to the server gods, posts made with the MT interface (or scheduled for later posting) now tweet like they're supposed to. All hail Brian and Greg!
Ethan McConnell has a long post on the Exchange team blog covering how to set up the Windows Mobile emulators for testing various Exchange features. Early last month he snuck in an update: a link to the Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images. If you're interested in the differences between WM 6.1 and 6.5, this is probably the best way to satisfy your curiosity for the time being; I don't think there are any actual WM 6.5 devices shipping yet.
[ Update: rewritten because the original's links were bad. I deleted it, and now people who clicked on the original link are getting 500'd ]
Arlene and I upgraded our iPhones to the 3GS model last night, and David got a 3G 8GB to replace his ooold Nokia flip. Tom is awaiting the arrival of his iPod Touch. With that in mind I wanted to link to a few apps that I frequently use. This isn't a complete or exhaustive list, but it's a start.
- The Scriptures, a free app that renders the standard works of the LDS Church (Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants), complete with footnotes and a really helpful search feature.
- The Mormon Channel, which provides a number of LDS Church-sponsored audio and information feeds, including full text of Church magazines, scriptures, and content from General Conference sessions. Interestingly, this is a community-developed app-- I'm signing up to work on it. (It's free.)
- The Weather Channel: all the local forecasts you could possibly want, supported by ads. There's an ad-free Max version for $4 that adds beach forecasts, radar maps, and some other stuff
- feX for Facebook: syncs your Facebook friends list with your iPhone address book (and thus, by extension, with Exchange or whatever you're using on the back end). This is the fastest way to get pictures of your contacts, not to mention their birthdays and so on. It's well worth the $0.99 cost.
- TweetDeck: a great free Twitter client. It's supposed to be able to sync with the desktop version, but I haven't gotten it to work properly yet.
- Blog with iBlogger is $10. However, it's by far the best blogging client I've found for the iPhone. It handles multiple blogs with aplomb and can easily post text and photos. I haven't tried posting any videos yet, though.
- Shazam, a free app that identifies songs for you then lets you quickly buy them from iTunes. Perfect for places where they often play music you don't recognize.
- iPhlix for remotely controlling my Netflix queue (including adding and removing items; well worth its $3 price) and its partner in crime, the free U-verse TV remote control app. Between these two I can remotely record or request shows or movies no matter where I am (e.g. in the back of an airplane somewhere).
Monday was my first full day of TechEd. It was pretty uneventful; I worked a shift in the Technical Learning Center at the "Anywhere Access" booth, along with Microsoft's Adam Glick. We got quite a few questions about general Exchange 2010 features, but not that many that were specific to the booth area. (This pattern would prove to repeat itself over the next few days). After my booth shift was over, I attended some MVP deep-dive technical sessions that Robin Martin-Emerson, our MVP lead, had arranged with the product team. The most interesting one to me was the one that covered the detailed process of moving from on-premises Exchange to the Exchange Online service. I'll have more to say about that in a future post.
After the MVP sessions ended, I went back to the hotel and did some preparation work for my sessions, and went to an MVP dinner with Rajesh Jha (Microsoft's corporate VP in charge of Exchange) and a number of members of his team. Dinner was good (the Palm is supposedly famous as a celebrity hangout), but the conversation was better-- we had a number of spirited conversations about topics as diverse as mixed martial arts, baseball, and LA traffic. All in all, a pretty good day; the cab ride home (six MVPs, one cab) was a great finish.
Actually, I'm a day late-- I should have posted this last night, but I was too tired! I had an uneventful flight from DTW-LAX on a crowded but bearable NW A320, then a remarkably expensive yet reasonably safe taxi ride to the Sheraton Los Angeles downtown.
I'm in Los Angeles for TechEd 2009, where I'm presenting and working in the Exchange booth. Today I've got a couple of phone meetings with my 3Sharp posse, then a session in the "Anywhere Access" section of the Exchange booth from 1115 to 1445. Following that, I plan to attend a set of MVP deep-dive sessions that the product group is putting on, then I'll be able to take a short break before having dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team.
Tomorrow things heat up: I have booth duty (this time in the "Protection and Compliance" area) from 0930 to 1230, followed by a session (UNC01-INT) from 1445-1600 in the Interactive Theater "Yellow 1" area on Microsoft's Exchange Online offering. I plan to do a bunch of demos there, so if you're interested in how Exchange Online works, stop by!
Wednesday I have booth duty again (0930-1230 in "Deployment and Management"), after which I'm doing a session (UNC304) on OCS 2007 R2 deployment and management. That should be fun, but I'll be watching the clock (and trying hard to finish on time, something I rarely do) in order to make my flight home.
If you're in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello!
Missy has been pretty busy lately. Apart from working incredibly hard on some very cool Exchange 14-related stuff, she recently completed two white papers. The first one examines the interplay between continuous cluster replication (CCR) and direct attached storage, in an attempt to answer the question of whether you have to use SANs for efficient and safe CCR deployment. The second examines the pros and cons of CCR versus single copy cluster (SCC) deployment. Both of them are worth reading if you're interested in using CCR with Exchange.
Long-time Outlook MVP Sue Mosher (who is a really interesting person besides!) wrote Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming: Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
I'm excited to be at this year's MVP Summit. (In fact, I'm in an Exchange 14-themed session right now). The summit team has their own blog, and lots of other MVPs are blogging about it. I have a huge backlog of blog entries to write, but I won't be blogging much about the specific sessions because they're under NDA. Too bad, because there are some E14 features that totally rock my socks off.
In January 2004, I posted a note about Wayne Hale, the NASA deputy program manager for shuttle operations. He was taking responsibility for the Columbia disaster. Five years later, he's still stirring things up. Godspeed, Mr. Hale.
We always have a fairly eclectic assortment of speakers at Perrysburg Rotary. This Friday, though, we're actually having a technology demo of sorts. Cheryl Outly from BlueWater Technologies is coming to talk about some of their technologies. The best intro, though, is this YouTube video-- check it out and you'll see why I'm excited about hearing Cheryl speak.
Great news from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit: they'll be releasing a version of Entourage that uses Exchange Web Services. This is great news because WebDAV, the protocol that previous versions of Entourage have used, doesn't provide full support for every type of Exchange data item. The Exchange Web Services (EWS) version of Entourage will support full synchronization of tasks, notes, and categories with servers running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or later. This should please some of the folks who have been lamenting the lack of Exchange sync functionality in Entourage. The best part: they'll release this as a free update to Entourage later this year.
Last week I was able to have a very enjoyable visit with Woody Windischman. He was passing through Toledo, so we met at the friendly neighborhood Waffle House. We chatted about SharePoint (or, more accurately, I listened), the ins and outs of being an independent contractor, and the publishing biz. He had just received his author copies of Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
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've been having frustrating problems with my Buckeye Express Internet service. Overall, Buckeye has done a good job. Their service has been pretty reliable (except that outages often kill phone and Internet service at the same time), and I like buying from a locally-owned company. Unfortunately, the Internet connection's quality has been pretty variable. I'm supposed to get 12Mbps down and 1 Mbps down; in practice, I rarely see more than 7Mbps down and about 900Kbps up. The bigger problem is illustrated here:
Notice that one peak around the 5000ms mark-- that's where something is inserting arbitrary TCP pauses. These pauses don't follow any pattern that I can tell, but they wreak havoc both on my Mitel 5340/Teleworker and my Communicator Phone Experience devices. Every time one of these pauses hits, I get a noise on my phone like someone dropping 5lbs of lead shot into a galvanized trash can; it happens often enough to render that connection unusable.
The upstream jitter graph shows a similarly sad tale. It's bad enough that I have 142ms of jitter, but it's worse that it's so variable. Most VoIP systems can compensate for jitter, but only if it remains predictable.
I called Buckeye to come out and fix it, but I don't think the problem is something that can be resolved with a truck roll (although my local pedestal is out of spec, so they're fixing it.) When AT&T announced that they were coming to Toledo, I eagerly hit their web site to find out if they offer service in Perrysburg… and they do. Their offering doesn't yet include voice, but they have 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up Internet service and a really slick-looking DVR setup that provides centralized DVR service for the whole house. I got in touch with Amanda Harris, the general manager for U-Verse in Ohio, and asked her some questions about the service; I'll blog more about her answers later.
Perhaps more importantly, they offer free installation and a money-back service guarantee, so I scheduled them for an install. The installer came by this morning, did a quick walkthrough of the house to see what connections need to go where, and is now hooking our signal up at the VDSL pedestal. By day's end, I should be in a position to do a back-to-back shootout of U-Verse vs Buckeye on the Internet front.
On the TV front, things are a little more complicated. The living room TiVo HD won't work with U-Verse, so we'll have to mothball it for the time being. However, the bedroom doesn't have a DVR at all, so it will gain one. U-Verse in Ohio supports two simultaneous HD streams, so you can record two HD programs and watch up to 5 different HD or SD programs on 5 different TVs (not that we'll ever have that many). We'll also get some channels, like BYU-TV, that we don't now get-- at the cost of the familiar and easy-to-use TiVo interface. We'll have to see how that plays off.
I'd write more, but the AT&T truck just pulled up again...
If you use a computer-- at work, at home, at school-- you should be reading The Risk Factor, a blog on computer-related risks operated by the fine folks who bring us the IEEE Spectrum. There's a ton of fascinating stuff there, like this and this. The Risk Factor is like a gateway drug, though. After reading it for a while, you'll be ready for the hard stuff.
If you use a computer-- at work, at home, at school-- you should be reading The Risk Factor, a blog on computer-related risks operated by the fine folks who bring us the IEEE Spectrum. There's a ton of fascinating stuff there, like this and this. The Risk Factor is like a gateway drug, though. After reading it for a while, you'll be ready for the hard stuff.
Apparently every time I upgrade MovableType, my comments break. Thanks to Josh and Devin for pointing this out. ETA for a fix: before week's end, hopefully.
Update: still broken.
Apparently every time I upgrade MovableType, my comments break. Thanks to Josh and Devin for pointing this out. ETA for a fix: before week's end, hopefully.
Update: still broken.
This has taken me shamefully long to post, but 3Sharp's own EricaT has just had four white papers on enterprise content management published on Microsoft's web site:
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Management
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 Records Management
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 Workflow
If you're interested in using MOSS for ECM, you should definitely check these out.
I can't wait for this: Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows Mobile 6.1. This should be a huge improvement to the Windows Mobile browser. I am a bit curious about how Microsoft will distribute it. Hopefully I'll be able to get it on my Treo without buying an entirely new device.
I can't wait for this: Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows Mobile 6.1. This should be a huge improvement to the Windows Mobile browser. I am a bit curious about how Microsoft will distribute it. Hopefully I'll be able to get it on my Treo without buying an entirely new device.
This year, my attendance at Exchange Connections was shorter than usual-- I arrived Tuesday afternoon, presented most of the day on Wednesday, and then had to head up to 3Sharp in Redmond for a day of meetings with customers and our new PR agency, Hardy Communications.
The flight from Detroit to Vegas was uneventful, unless you count the guy two rows behind me who was snoring like a Poulan. I was actually concerned for his health. I didn't see any signs of the Delta takeover; the FAs were as friendly as they ever are on NWA. Unfortunately, just before boarding I discovered that I'd forgotten my headphones and my iPhone sync cable. Sadly, that meant I was forced to work for the entire flight! (Arlene sent the missing gear to me, so I was equipped before my flight to Seattle).
This was a two-laptop trip: I brought both my T61 running Windows Server 2008 and my MacBook Pro. The MBP gave me a solid 3.5 hours of fairly heavy activity. For the few minutes I was using the T61, Windows' battery estimator gave me an estimated life of 2:21. That's not great, but part of the problem is that I've only ever had the big IBM/Lenovo battery, not the smaller conformal one. I'll have to do a more even comparison in the future. (Also: my Win2008 installation won't let me hibernate, which is a big pain in the butt sometimes).
My first session on Exchange Online went well, including some cool demos. The questions I got were pretty good, though there were a few I couldn't answer. (My favorite: will Exchange Online support the BlackBerry? Yeah, when pigs fly!)
PowerShell 101 was, as always, a blast. It's such a fun presentation to give because I enjoy seeing people "get it" as they start to internalize all the stuff they can do with the Exchange Management Shell.
Apart from that, I didn't see or do much. My room at THE Hotel smelled like smoke; I had a good lunch with my Windows IT Pro peeps at Border Grill, and now I'm heading to Seattle.
Update: I forgot to mention that the Society of Exploration Geophysicists was in town for their 78th annual convention. Fun crowd! The geophysicists tended to be well-dressed and very talkative, with lots of hallway groupings, and a surprising number of women.
In my first attempt, I included a picture. That crashed my entire phone. This is attempt #2. Nothing fancy!
Mobile Blogging from here.
Mobile Blogging from here.
It looks like I've got MovableType successfully upgraded, and I installed the latest beta version of Media Manager too. That lets me do things like this:
I'm hopeful that, in time, I'll figure out enough of the new Media Manager styles and tags so I can get back to having a to-be-read queue in my right-hand sidebar.
I'm glad to be able to talk about this finally! AppAssure has just released a free tool called Exchange Observer (registration required for download). This tool will automatically inspect your Exchange topology to find all Exchange 2003-hosted storage groups and databases, then give you a nifty tree view showing the status of each database. This is a simple, low-impact way to monitor all the servers in your org. Give it a try.
This morning I'm supposed to be shooting a short web video for Penton on desktop data management for Exchange. I expected one guy with a camera, but now my office has three people (plus me): a camera operator, the teleprompter operator, and the audio guy. They have more equipment than I can shake a mouse at, so things are pretty snug in my office. The last time I did something like this was when I shot a segment for an episode of Mike Nash's Security 360 series; that was shot by a crew from Microsoft Studios at 3Sharp's old Redmond office. Having all this infrastructure in my house is a bit disconcerting. I've been cleaning my office for the last week in preparation, so hopefully the finished video will reflect my efforts. (Don't laugh; you should have seen it before the cleaning!) Perhaps the funniest part is that my kids now think I'll be famous because I'm going to be on TV. They don't get the whole sponsored-web-video thing yet, I guess.
In all the busy-ness of my day job, I somehow managed not to notice that David Gerhardt and Kevin Martin are writing a book, Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007
I was recently in Seattle for meetings with my partners (protip: the Bell Harbor Convention Center is an awesome meeting venue). During that time, my team landed a project that requires use of a Mac, so I made the (easy) decision to hand my first-generation MacBook Pro (2.16GHz, 2GB of RAM, plus a 250GB drive I added earlier this year) to Tim and replace it with a new machine. I used it all day yesterday and quite a bit last night, and now I'm using it on my flight home. Here are my first impressions:
- Despite its odd "chiclet" look, the keyboard has a great tactile feel-- it's much less mushy than my old MBP, and it compares favorably with Lenovo's keyboards (still the best IMHO). Apple has changed around the function key behavior, meaning that I finally have keyboard shortcuts for iTunes control. Interestingly, the cursor arrows still work as paging keys when you hold down "Fn" but they don't have the labels on them. I sort of miss the small "Enter" button to the right of the space bar, but I'm getting used to it.
- I love the new trackpad, except that it's a bit noisy. I already used tap-to-click on my prior machine, so the noise isn't a huge deal. I didn't have any trouble adapting to the click-and-drag behavior of clicking with my thumb on the pad's bottom edge and then dragging with a finger. The multitouch behavior is handy, when I actually remember that it exists and use it.
- Screen brightness and quality is outstanding. In my limited testing so far, I haven't had any problem with the glossy screen finish.
- Battery life is a HUGE improvement over my old machine. I will easily get 4 hours out of this battery on my default workload (mostly Word, some Ecto, and an occasional TV show in iTunes).
- The body structure is a major improvement over the old machine. The screen hinge isn't floppy, so the screen stays put even with my hardcore typing style, and the perimeter of the case on the bottom half has no flex or give.
- The Migration Assistant did a flawless job of moving about 85GB of data to the new machine over an Ethernet connection. John was quite envious of this feature.
- It's easier for me to open the lid since there is no longer a release button. (I still prefer Lenovo's slide-to-unlock mechanism, though)
Right now I'm sitting in a classroom in Redmond, auditing the UM material so I can be qualified to teach it. I had a thought a little while ago: the $18,500 tuition seems awfully steep, but if you amortize it across the 18 training days, that's a hair more than $1000/day. Divide that by the 11- to 12-hour class days, and you come out with an hourly rate of, say, $90. That's cheaper than hiring many kinds of professionals; there's no way you could hire the caliber of instructors available here (say, Ross Smith IV or Tim McMichael) for that little.
Of course, this estimate ignores the cost of travel, and the time you actually have to invest in the class, but it helps to put the seemingly huge expense in perspective.
I've noticed something over the last few days: many of the web pages I load now show Meijer ads in place of their "normal" banner ads. This seems unusual, given that Meijer is such a regional company. This might be a case of cookie-based ad targeting, or it might be Buckeye experimenting with deep packet inspection for ad insertion. I surely hope it's the former, and not the latter.
Update: duh, I should have looked more carefully at the ads; they all say "Ads by Google" at the bottom. Mystery solved.
So, Jim has ratted me out: he noticed that I'm scheduled to give an Exchange 14-related session at Exchange Connections in November. In a probably-feeble attempt to avoid the wrath of Microsoft's NDA police, the truth is, I submitted that session proposal nearly six months ago. At that time, I had the expectation that I'd be free to talk about Exchange 14 by November. However, the product is still under NDA, and probably still will be by then, so I'll be presenting another session instead, topic TBD. Sorry to disappoint...
Cue the tiny violins: a federal judge ruled that Oracle "destroyed or failed to preserve Chief Executive Larry Ellison's e-mail files sought as evidence in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2001 against the software maker." The alleged destruction (or failure, depending on how you look at it) happened in 2006-- well after Oracle touted archiving features in Oracle Collaboration Suite. Ooops.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column highlighting Microsoft's announcement of their Exchange 2007 virtualization strategy. I just found out that the team that owns the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) has announced their virtualization policy... and it's a good one! Basically, they'll support ISA and TMG on virtualization solutions that are part of the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP)-- including Hyper-V.
The full document is here. Here's the money graf:
… if a hardware virtualization platform is listed as "validated" with the SVVP (not “under evaluation”), Microsoft ISA Server and Forefront TMG will be supported for production use on that platform within the limits prescribed in the Microsoft Product Support Lifecycle, Non-Microsoft hardware virtualization policies and the system requirements for that product version and edition.
This will make both ISA and TMG much more palatable to a wide variety of customers, particularly in the SMB space. I'm looking forward to redeploying ISA (which I haven't been using for a few years) now that it won't cost me a server's worth of electricity to use.
Update: this VMware press release says that VMware ESX has passed the SVVP. This is huge news given that it essentially means Microsoft is now supporting Exchange, ISA, and TMG on the most widely deployed virtualization platforms-- welcome air cover for all the folks who have been doing it for a while now :)
I've recently been spending time programming again. This has been a welcome return to my roots, and it's certainly reminded me of the pleasure that comes from building good code. Of course, every pleasure has its obverse, and I was reminded of that today because I spent all day beating my head against what appeared to be a bug in NSXMLNode. You're supposed to be able to use the nodesForXPath: method to do an XPath query against an XML tree. I'd written some code that sent an Autodiscover request to Exchange and parsed the returned data (which looks like this), but my code never found any EwsUrl nodes, even though they were plainly visible.
I tried the xpath command-line tool, and it did what I expected; "xpath ~/Desktop/EWS.xml //EwsUrl" returned both nodes. Apple's own XMLBrowser sample (in /Developer/Examples/Foundation/XMLBrowser) didn't work properly either, but the XMLMate plug-in for TextMate did. I looked carefully at the Autodiscover sample in the Exchange 2007 SP1 SDK and found that everything looked OK. Then I went back to my main reference for this stuff. On page 780, I finally found the answer in a subtle clue: the book's sample was using an XPath query that included the namespace! I modified my code to look like this:
NSXMLNode *rSpace = [NSXMLNode namespaceWithName: @"r"
stringValue:@"http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/responseschema/2006a"];
[[adResponse rootElement] addNamespace:rSpace];
NSArray *idList = [responseRoot nodesForXPath:@"//r:EwsUrl" error:&err];
That solved the problem. So, lesson learned: always make sure that you've registered the correct namespace when using nodesForXPath!
I've been wanting to blog about this for a while, but we had to keep the lid on until today. Microsoft just announced the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), primarily developed by 3Sharp. PKS is a completely integrated kit that lets you use SharePoint as an enterprise-scale podcasting aggregator and management system. You can publish your own internal podcasts, plus you can catch and redistribute podcasts from other sources. Wherever their origin, the podcasts you manage with PKS can be rated by users, tagged using tag clouds, and played back using Silverlight so that you don't need a separate podcasting device or application. We've already implemented PKS internally and will shortly be rolling out a PKS portal stuffed full of tasty IT Pro content-- check our web site for updates.
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
Excellent! Amazon dropped the price on the Amazon Kindle, which I'm still using quite a bit. (David has been trying to steal it to read that free Star Wars book I downloaded, too). The price is now $359, so I e-mailed them to ask for a price credit-- which they promptly issued. That $40 will buy me at least four more books, O happy day.
Interestingly, the Kindle has drawn quite a few comments from people who have seen me using it. My waitress at breakfast wanted to know where she could buy one, and both of the flight attendants on my DTW-YYZ flight noticed it (and, sadly, made me turn it off for takeoff and landing).
Excellent! Amazon dropped the price on the Amazon Kindle, which I'm still using quite a bit. (David has been trying to steal it to read that free Star Wars book I downloaded, too). The price is now $359, so I e-mailed them to ask for a price credit-- which they promptly issued. That $40 will buy me at least four more books, O happy day.
Interestingly, the Kindle has drawn quite a few comments from people who have seen me using it. My waitress at breakfast wanted to know where she could buy one, and both of the flight attendants on my DTW-YYZ flight noticed it (and, sadly, made me turn it off for takeoff and landing).
This is very cool: Erica Sadun, a fellow Georgia Tech graduate, has a new book coming out on iPhone development: . She's been very active in answering questions on the iPhone development mailing list, so I'm looking forward to seeing the book.
Executive summary: I love, love, love this device.
It has been exceptionally useful to be able to read multiple things from the same device. When I bought an iPod, I was able to stop carrying multiple CDs around with me, and I was enchanted with the variety of musical choice that gave me, no matter where I was. I have the same feeling about the Kindle; now I can do exactly the same with books. I have probably 25 books and magazines loaded on it right now, and so everywhere I went-- the plane, the train, the taxi, the hotel restaurant, the bus stop-- I had something interesting to read, all in a single small package.
The screen quality is fantastic. It is extremely readable, and the ability to adjust font sizes is a nice bonus. The page-flicker effect is barely noticeable to me now.
As for content, I couldn't buy anything from Amazon because there's no Whispernet service in the UK. I was able to hit up manybooks.net, the Baen Free Library, and fictionwise.com to add a number of free and purchased items through the USB disk mode, though. While waiting for lunch, for example, I was reading the first part of Joe Haldeman's new novel "Marsbound" in either Asimov's or Analog (they run together in my mind).
Bad points: yes, there are a few. The device itself feels a little plasticy, and the "next page" button on the right edge of the Kindle feels downright flimsy. The included case is pretty much worthless, as the Kindle won't really stay in it when it's opened. I found to my dismay that trying to charge the Kindle via USB actually drains the battery. I also noticed that two titles I'd bought, Snow Crash and Count Zero, aren't actually on the device-- apparently they didn't get downloaded yet, so I couldn't read them.
Executive summary: I love, love, love this device.
It has been exceptionally useful to be able to read multiple things from the same device. When I bought an iPod, I was able to stop carrying multiple CDs around with me, and I was enchanted with the variety of musical choice that gave me, no matter where I was. I have the same feeling about the Kindle; now I can do exactly the same with books. I have probably 25 books and magazines loaded on it right now, and so everywhere I went-- the plane, the train, the taxi, the hotel restaurant, the bus stop-- I had something interesting to read, all in a single small package.
The screen quality is fantastic. It is extremely readable, and the ability to adjust font sizes is a nice bonus. The page-flicker effect is barely noticeable to me now.
As for content, I couldn't buy anything from Amazon because there's no Whispernet service in the UK. I was able to hit up manybooks.net, the Baen Free Library, and fictionwise.com to add a number of free and purchased items through the USB disk mode, though. While waiting for lunch, for example, I was reading the first part of Joe Haldeman's new novel "Marsbound" in either Asimov's or Analog (they run together in my mind).
Bad points: yes, there are a few. The device itself feels a little plasticy, and the "next page" button on the right edge of the Kindle feels downright flimsy. The included case is pretty much worthless, as the Kindle won't really stay in it when it's opened. I found to my dismay that trying to charge the Kindle via USB actually drains the battery. I also noticed that two titles I'd bought, Snow Crash and Count Zero, aren't actually on the device-- apparently they didn't get downloaded yet, so I couldn't read them.
Boom shaka laka! According to this press release, Microsoft is releasing SP1 for Office 2008 at noon PDT today. It should be up on Mactopia shortly.
Well, nothing yet, because it doesn't get here until tomorrow. Amazon sent me a mail telling me that I can start ordering content, though, and it will be automatically delivered as soon as I unbox and boot the Kindle. With that in mind, here's what I'm putting on it:
- Snow Crash
: I've been wanting a copy of this for a while because I no longer have one
- A Fighter's Heart
: looks like a really interesting tour of the MMA circuit
- Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
: I can't wait to have a searchable electronic copy of this!
- All of Cory Doctorow's fiction
- The two books of the Lost Fleet series that I haven't yet read: Courageous and Dauntless
- Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal: hey, it's free, and the boys will enjoy reading it.
- Count Zero: another oldie-but-goodie. I had my hand on this the other day at Books-a-Million.
That's enough to get me started, I reckon.
Heaven help me. I just ordered an Amazon Kindle, the electronic book device. Given how much I travel, and how much everyone in the family reads, it seems like it would be a really good deal. I have some qualms, though, like the fact that I can't resell (or loan) books once they're bought. However, I routinely spend $15-30 per trip on paperbacks to read, and I love the idea of being able to grab a new book on demand. I'll give it a try. Expect a full review once I've had a chance to play with it some.
My friend Jason Buffington (XBL: DarkJediHunter) is now famous after writing this review of SceneIt! for Xbox.com. We loves us some SceneIt here, and I encourage you to check it out if you like family games or movies.
One of the tough things about the MVP Summit is that practically everything there is covered under NDA. That makes it hard to adequately convey how cool some of the stuff we saw and learned was. Suffice it to say that it's going to be an exciting year in the unified communications world, and I've got lots of article topics queued up for the future!
My summit attendance pattern is a little atypical: I usually skip all of the executive keynotes, so this year's organization was perfect-- the keynotes were on the last day instead of the first. Monday had some open/birds-of-a-feather sessions, so I used that time to fly in and hit the office, where I spent some time planning the details of how we're using (and customizing) Microsoft CRM. CRM makes me frustrated because I know so little about how to use it, and I'm not a professional salesman. However, I'm excited about better automating our sales process, as well as some of the UC integration features that we can deliver.
Tuesday and Wednesday were all deep technical days. I can't say much about those, except that they were awesome. Thanks to the Exchange and OCS product teams for coming to talk to us!
Thursday was executive keynote day. I skipped the keynotes and flew home on the Wednesday red-eye, but after reading the transcript of Steve Ballmer's talk it doesn't look like I missed anything.
Wow.
My mind is being blown by some of the things the Exchange team is showing us. One of the best things about being an Exchange MVP is that we have a really good rapport with the product group. Some groups have bad intra-group relationships, and others have friction between the product group and the MVPs. In this case, though, the product team does a stellar job of soliciting and accepting feedback, and it's been to both our benefits. Can't wait to talk about some of the things they're showing!
(and funny side note: the space bar on my MacBook Pro is sticking, so I keep typing compound words like "keeptyping" and "productplan". This makes me feel vaguely German.)
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'm in coach on a Delta flight from Cincinnati to Seattle. Delta recently started a new food-for-sale program called EATS. The folks over at FlyerTalk seem to like it pretty well. I had Chik-Fil-A in CVG, and I'm headed to a lunch meeting, so I didn't want a full meal, but I did buy a Clif Mojo bar. It's pretty good-- sort of like a light pretzel with some peanut chunks. However, I'm a little disconcerted by the label, which has a blazon proclaiming "70% organic". What does that mean? Is the other 30% inorganic? Did I just get my RDA of aluminum and silicon? Should I have only eaten the first 2/3rds of the bar and left the remaining 33% behind to make sure I didn't eat anything unhealthy?
Eileen Brown of Microsoft was kind enough to organize a bloggers' lunch at INTERACT 2008 today. There was a good crowd, including some folks I knew and many that I hadn't previously met. I got there late and had to leave early, but in between, we got a great presentation on the inner workings of the Exchange team blog, plus a panel discussion with several senior Microsoft folks from the Unified Communications Group. As a closing surprise, we got permission to talk about a previously unannounced product that has heretofore been under deep NDA: the Mac business unit at Microsoft is close to releasing a new version of Mac Messenger, version 7.0, that adds some impressive new functionality.
Like earlier versions, the new Messenger release can simultaneously connect to the Windows Live Messenger service and corporate IM networks. In this case, Messenger adds support for OCS 2007 using the same enhanced presence model that Office Communicator uses. Better yet, it supports voice and video with other OCS users! I've been using this feature for a while and it rocks. Combine it with OCS' ability to federate contacts across multiple organizations, and it rocks even more. Voice and video quality in my tests has been excellent, and the OCS support carries on Messenger's tradition of providing a very Mac-ish user experience. I hope to get permission to post some screenshots in the next day or two; more news when there is news.
This week, I'm getting ready to attend INTERACT2008, Microsoft's new community event for unified communications. I think of it as a replacement for the long-departed and much-missed Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), but it's not really the same thing. INTERACT is more focused, with a much higher technical session level. Press aren't invited, but MVPs and other community influencers are. There should be a large presence from Microsoft's engineering teams, which is always good. The whole event is structured around trying to reinforce the growing MS UC&C community and help it grow-- a worthwhile goal.
I'm presenting two sessions and proctoring a hands-on lab. The sessions are both on UC development: one on the APIs you can use across various parts of Microsoft's UC product line, and one on Exchange Web Services. The hands-on lab is really cool: it's a distillation of the two days' worth of labs that 3Sharp built as part of the UC Metro project for Microsoft. If you come do the labs, you'll be getting the same training that Microsoft provides its ISV partners. If you're going to be at INTERACT, drop me a line and let me know.
Technorati Tags: 3sharp, Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
I knew it was coming, but I missed the formal announcement. Microsoft has the details here, along with this handy feature comparison chart. Notable improvements in 6.1 include support for System Center Mobile Device Manager, cut-and-paste support for non-touchscreen devices, Exchange account auto-discovery, and a revamped home screen interface for non-touchscreen devices. There's a list of devices that will receive the upgrade. Sadly, my Treo 750 isn't on it, so no SCMDM love for me.
Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile
Apparently IBM has been suspended from participation in any contracts with the US federal government. Declan McCullough has the story here. It appears that the suspension is unusual in that IBM hasn't had a chance to respond to the original charges. More news as it develops.
The latest release of the iPhone SDK includes a version of Interface Builder that understands Cocoa Touch objects.
Fortunately, Muthu Arumugam has a solution. It didn't work at first because I had created my first nib as a view, not as a window. (I understand that it was also in the release notes for IB, which I will go back and read as penance.)
The latest release of the iPhone SDK includes a version of Interface Builder that understands Cocoa Touch objects.
Fortunately, Muthu Arumugam has a solution. It didn't work at first because I had created my first nib as a view, not as a window. (I understand that it was also in the release notes for IB, which I will go back and read as penance.)
Microsoft has posted a very useful document called "Certificate Use in Exchange 2007 Server" that outlines pretty much everything you need to know about how Exchange 2007 uses certificates. In particular, it nicely explains the use of subject alternative name (SAN) certificates. Check it out.
Here's how much I like the GN 9350
The 9350 is a lightweight wireless headset that features two connections: a USB plug that enables it to work with Communicator or other computer applications, plus a conventional headset connector. Two buttons on the headset base let you switch back and forth between modes. This allows you to quickly switch between a regular desk phone and applications like Skype, Mac Messenger, or Office Communicator.
Audio quality is excellent, as is range. My base unit is on my desk, in the northeast corner of the second floor. I can talk on the phone from anywhere in the yard, or even in the southwest corner of the basement. I particularly like this feature for long phone calls, as it means I can grab a diet Coke when I need one. (Sadly, there's no mute button on the headset itself, so ix-nay on wearing it into the athroom-bay.) I easily get a full 9 hours of battery life, and the battery is replaceable so you can keep a spare on hand.
The 9350 features two headbands: one goes over the top of the head, and the other wraps around the back. I prefer the wraparound, but I appreciate that I got to make the choice. There's also an optional remote handset lifter, the RHL-1000. I haven't bought one because it's only useful if you're close enough to the phone to hear it ring, which generally I'm not.
At an MSRP of $299, this is an expensive piece of equipment (though you can find refurb units at Hello Direct for $199 or so). However, it's made a huge difference in my ability to talk for long periods on the phone, which has ultimately made me quite a bit more productive. I give it two thumbs up.
I'm inaugurating a new feature here: the Tech Toy of the Week. Heaven knows I have enough of them to post a short weely review of one of them.
This week: the Speck line of cases for laptops. In particular, the SeeThru cases, which are essentially plastic clamshells that snap around your laptop to protect the actual case from abrasions and dirt. I have the clear SeeThru for my MacBook Pro (see some example photos here) and it works very well. Minor annoyance: the clear color shows dirt. I should probably have gotten the red one instead; the colored ones look great with the monochrome silver color scheme of the MBP. Speck also makes lots of other cases for laptops (notably the Sony Vaio series), iPods, and iPhones. Check 'em out.
Craig Hockenberry is a smart guy. He's been around for a while, and has an impressive track record in the Mac software world. I don't, but that's not going to stop me from arguing with him about background apps on the iPhone. His argument has two parts.
Part 1 (here) essentially says that gackground apps will kill the battery life and usability of the iPhone by allowing application developers to willy-nilly make network connections, thus keeping the device radios on more than needed (or wanted).
Part 2 (here) says that even if we could magically solve the problems he describes in part 1, the user experience on the device would quickly get out of hand.
Why don't I agree with part 1? I have experienced just the opposite with Windows Mobile. There's a great deal of institutional knowledge around exactly these two problems in the Windows Mobile world. I get better battery life with my Treo 750 running Windows Mobile 6 than I do with my iPhone, despite the fact that the Treo has an HSDPA radio. This is despite the fact that I run a number of always-on apps on my Treo, including Communicator Mobile and Outlook Mobile with Direct Push enabled. If you take a look at the Direct Push protocol, you'll see that it's designed to keep a connection alive while still allowing the radio to go dormant when there's not actually any information to transfer. The same thing is true of the UC AJAX protocol that Communicator Mobile uses. This is not a new idea, and Microsoft's not the first to implement it. Craig's argument-- that ill-behaved or poorly written applications will kill your battery faster than Eliot Spitzer's political career-- is true. However, that's not necessarily an argument in favor of blocking background applications. Let people ship background applications, then let the market decide which ones should survive based on their performance. (Note to Craig and others: remember, when we get that Exchange ActiveSync support we've all been jonesing for... it's a persistent network connection!)
I give Craig's arguments in part 2 a little more credence. The iPhone offers a lovely UI, as pleasant to look at and touch as any other well-designed, well-engineered artifact (whether a Glock, an engine block, or a summer frock.) It is a bit painful to think of having all sorts of buzzing, boinging, and screen flashing horning in on SJ's Zen-like user experience. However, Apple has already solved this problem, at least in part: look at the way that the SMS, phone, and e-mail applications notify users of available data by using a number superimposed on the application icon. This paradigm works well for some sorts of applications. For others, the solution isn't to ban applications from posting notifications-- Craig rightly points out that several different notification-brokering APIs exist on the desktop Mac platform. So where's the API for the iPhone? Where's the mobile equivalent of Growl, or (better yet) a supported framework from Apple? That's essentially what WM has, and it allows application developers to post notifications that the user can control. My Treo makes one distinct sound for a new SMS, one for a new e-mail (well, actually, two: for high-priority e-mails, Voice Command reads me the subject line), and one for a device or calendar alarm. Simple, powerful, and easy to customize. Given how good a job Apple has done with almost every other aspect of the iPhone UI, it sure seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
I'm personally very disappointed by Apple's decision not to allow background apps. I was planning on using UC AJAX to build an OCS client for the iPhone, but I probably won't bother if there's no way to background applications; a foreground-only IM client would be pretty worthless. I do have a few other projects in mind, though...
Craig Hockenberry is a smart guy. He's been around for a while, and has an impressive track record in the Mac software world. I don't, but that's not going to stop me from arguing with him about background apps on the iPhone. His argument has two parts.
Part 1 (here) essentially says that gackground apps will kill the battery life and usability of the iPhone by allowing application developers to willy-nilly make network connections, thus keeping the device radios on more than needed (or wanted).
Part 2 (here) says that even if we could magically solve the problems he describes in part 1, the user experience on the device would quickly get out of hand.
Why don't I agree with part 1? I have experienced just the opposite with Windows Mobile. There's a great deal of institutional knowledge around exactly these two problems in the Windows Mobile world. I get better battery life with my Treo 750 running Windows Mobile 6 than I do with my iPhone, despite the fact that the Treo has an HSDPA radio. This is despite the fact that I run a number of always-on apps on my Treo, including Communicator Mobile and Outlook Mobile with Direct Push enabled. If you take a look at the Direct Push protocol, you'll see that it's designed to keep a connection alive while still allowing the radio to go dormant when there's not actually any information to transfer. The same thing is true of the UC AJAX protocol that Communicator Mobile uses. This is not a new idea, and Microsoft's not the first to implement it. Craig's argument-- that ill-behaved or poorly written applications will kill your battery faster than Eliot Spitzer's political career-- is true. However, that's not necessarily an argument in favor of blocking background applications. Let people ship background applications, then let the market decide which ones should survive based on their performance. (Note to Craig and others: remember, when we get that Exchange ActiveSync support we've all been jonesing for... it's a persistent network connection!)
I give Craig's arguments in part 2 a little more credence. The iPhone offers a lovely UI, as pleasant to look at and touch as any other well-designed, well-engineered artifact (whether a Glock, an engine block, or a summer frock.) It is a bit painful to think of having all sorts of buzzing, boinging, and screen flashing horning in on SJ's Zen-like user experience. However, Apple has already solved this problem, at least in part: look at the way that the SMS, phone, and e-mail applications notify users of available data by using a number superimposed on the application icon. This paradigm works well for some sorts of applications. For others, the solution isn't to ban applications from posting notifications-- Craig rightly points out that several different notification-brokering APIs exist on the desktop Mac platform. So where's the API for the iPhone? Where's the mobile equivalent of Growl, or (better yet) a supported framework from Apple? That's essentially what WM has, and it allows application developers to post notifications that the user can control. My Treo makes one distinct sound for a new SMS, one for a new e-mail (well, actually, two: for high-priority e-mails, Voice Command reads me the subject line), and one for a device or calendar alarm. Simple, powerful, and easy to customize. Given how good a job Apple has done with almost every other aspect of the iPhone UI, it sure seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
I'm personally very disappointed by Apple's decision not to allow background apps. I was planning on using UC AJAX to build an OCS client for the iPhone, but I probably won't bother if there's no way to background applications; a foreground-only IM client would be pretty worthless. I do have a few other projects in mind, though...
Finally, they admit it: Microsoft licenses Exchange ActiveSync to Apple for use in the iPhone. (For a play-by-play of the announcement, see Engadget.) This is great news for both Apple and the Exchange team, but much less so for the Windows Mobile team. I suspect that they have a few aces up their sleeve, though. First is SCMDM, which ups the ante for mobile device management by adding Group Policy Object support for Windows Mobile devices. When you can domain-join a mobile device and push policy to it using the same tools you use for desktops and servers, that's the dream scenario for managed enterprises. The iPhone software update won't support SCMDM's policy extensions, and I'm betting that it won't implement 100% of the Exchange 2007 version of Exchange ActiveSync policies either. Of course, the Windows Mobile team has their own set of surprises planned for their next release. We'll have to wait and see.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, iPhone, Windows Mobile
While working on the UC Metro project, we ran into a really odd situation, and I wanted to blog about it so that hopefully others can avoid the problem.
We created a sample application using WPF. The test machine we were using had UAC turned off because we also had to run some debugging tools that wouldn't run with UAC. Our sample application worked great, but when we turned on UAC it would require elevation, and then fail. We couldn't figure out why, so Mike Jensen (one of our super smart programmers) created a new project with the same name and started subtracting files, one by one. Same problem.
Then Mike decided to try changing the project name, which had previously been "WpfDispatchBaseApplication". Voila! It worked perfectly with UAC on. It turns out that there are some magic words that will trigger a UAC elevation prompt if Vista sees them in the application name. See here for an example: "update" is one of the magic terms. This is by design, and you can fix it in two ways: include an application manifest, or don't use any magic words. We decided that "Litware Service Call Manager" better reflected what the sample app was actually doing, so we stuck with it, but from now on we'll use manifests... even for our samples.
Great post by Michael Howard today:
A few years ago I spoke to some senior technical people from a large financial organization about software security. After visiting Microsoft they were off to visit another operating system vendor. I won't name names. The financial company was very interested in our early results, and they were encouraged by what they saw because of the SDL. I asked the most senior guy in the room to ask the other company one very simple question, "What are they doing to improve the security of their product? And by that I mean, what are they doing to reduce the chance security vulnerabilities will creep into the product in the first place? And they cannot use the word ‘Microsoft' in the reply." Two weeks later, the guy phoned me and said...
I won't tell you what they said; for that, you'll need to read Michael's article. I promise that it's worth your time.
From Steve Riley's blog, news of a new IPsec diagnostic tool that you can use to troubleshoot IPsec configuration problems. I haven't tried it yet, but I definitely plan to in my copious free time.
I frequently need to paste unformatted text into Word, and it has long irked me that there's no easy single-keystroke way to do this. However, Michel Bintener has a great solution:
...place the following AppleScript into ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items and assign it an easy-to-remember shortcut (I named mine "Paste without formatting\cV"; that way, I only need to hit Ctrl+V to paste the clipboard contents in plain text):
tell application "Microsoft Word"
paste special (text object of selection) data type paste text
end tell
It turns out that there are some server products that Microsoft won't support on Windows Server 2008. The full list is in KB 948680. No real surprises (OK, I admit to being a little surprised that OCS 2007 was on the list). Guess all those sites running Host Integration Server are out of luck....
W00t. Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 were released to manufacturing today.
Microsoft's Amir Haque has a great summary of the new features in Entourage 2008-- it's in two parts here and here. IMHO part 2 is more interesting because it focuses on Exchange integration. In fact, until I read this I didn't know that Entourage 2008 supported message classification or managed folders on Exchange 2007.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mac OS X
Well, first off, it makes me sad how much I suck at playing drums, but that's another topic entirely.
All five of us have been enjoying rocking out with Rock Band. I've particularly enjoyed letting the boys hear some rock tracks that predate their birth (interestingly, they loved the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", which of course came out when I was 3). I'm about halfway done with the track list on medium guitar, and I've started making a few forays into "hard". Unfortunately, the strum bar on our guitar failed this afternoon, just as I was trying to master "Enter Sandman
I have often been accused of having little to no personal style, and my blog is now in the same boat. This is a combination of my upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 and some oddities of my hosting environment. I'll fix it eventually. Thanks for not piling on.
If it’s October, that must mean it’s time for... spring?!
Normal people are just starting to enjoy the autumn, but the Exchange Connections staff is preparing for our Spring 2008 show (April 20-24, 2008 in sunny Orlando!) As part of that process, I’m issuing a call for session proposals.
A few ground rules:
- You need to submit at least 3 abstracts, but I encourage you to submit more than 3 to give us more flexibility in choosing sessions.
- Speakers will be chosen within a few weeks of the closing date, which is currently 10/19.
- All selected speakers will have their travel expenses (air + hotel) reimbursed; in addition you’ll be paid a stipend of $400 per talk.
What kind of talks should you propose? Anything having to do with Exchange (including DR, security, migration, and best practices), Live Communications Server/Office Communications Server, or related topics. The more technical, the better! (If you plan to repeat sessions from a previous event, please make sure you update the title and abstract to reflect the latest in the Exchange world.)
Please, no vendor “pimp sessions”. If you work for a software or hardware vendor, feel free to propose technical sessions that aren’t focused on your product. If you work for a PR firm, your principals are welcome to submit technical sessions.
To submit sessions, please e-mail me and I'll send you the instructions. We're using a SharePoint-based tool that takes much of the work out of the submission process. Please do not e-mail me abstracts!
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, ExchConn, OCS 2007
Want to make your iPhone's mail client fall over dead? Try opening a Word 2007 attachment. Works every time.
Technorati Tags: iPhone
So, I wrote an UPDATE column (URL forthcoming) on the good and bad of using an iPhone with an Exchange server. I was limited by space there, so consider this article a sidebar that goes in to more detail on specific things i liked, and disliked, about the iPhone+Exchange mail experience compared to the iPhone+IMAP one.
- The iPhone doesn't expunge deleted messages properly. This is so 1985. There's absolutely no excuse for Apple to have bobbled this, and I certainly hope they fix it soon (although there are workarounds).
- It's wonderful to not have to worry about how much storage space to allocate to mail. With 8GB of space on the phone, I can easily have the full contents of my primary accounts, with subfolders. On the other hand, there's no way to specify which folders you want to sync. I'll call this one a tie.
- There's no search tool on the iPhone-- at all! If you don't know exactly which message you want, too bad. You also can't search across applications, something I miss in both WM and the iPhone after using it on Palm OS. By contrast, WM6 has the ability to use the server-side search catalog that Exchange maintains, and you can easily pull messages with search hits down to your device. Advantage: WM6.
- It's much easier to navigate between folders and accounts on WM6. The iPhone requires multiple screen taps, and there's no way to collapse folders. Advantage: WM6.
- The iPhone doesn't do multiple selection, so you can't delete or move messages en masse.
- no flagging on the iPhone. In fact, almost none of the message metadata you'd expect to be preserved (like forwarded/replied-to) is preserved. Only read/unread status is kept.
- The iPhone screen makes reading most HTML mail a pleasure. The rendering is quite good overall. Viagra spam has never looked so crisp or appealing.
- You can choose to check your accounts manually, or at intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes. That's it. No separate schedules for separate accounts, and no other intervals. Big advantage WM6.
- The iPhone has limited support for reading Word and PDF attachments, but you can't edit or create them. Big advantage: WM6.
Technorati Tags: iPhone
My iPhone still won't reliably delete IMAP messages. There's no way to tell the phone to empty its deleted items cache, and because I'm not using IMAP with either of my Exchange accounts on other machines, there's no way to do it from there either. However, the folks at Fresh Logic have written a tool called expunge that looks like it might work. I'm going to give it a try.
Technorati Tags: iPhone
Dave Winer has a nifty idea: turn a news feed with RSS into a river of news. Think of an essentially endless web page, where the newest news articles are always on top. This is a perfect format for mobile devices, and in fact the iPhone provides a terrific browsing experience for Winer's two river-oriented sites: the NY Times river and the BBC river. If you have an iPhone (or, what the heck; even if you don't), give them a try. I think you'll like what Dave's done.
Technorati Tags: puppy
According to iTunes, I have 2879 items taking up 14.21GB in my iTunes library. Sadly, this is about five times as much free space as I have on my iPhone, which spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for my plan to ditch my existing iPod. However, I hit on a useful strategy. I already have a playlist called "Never Played", currently at about 2056 items. This is a little misleading, since I've actually played many of those songs between flattening my iPod, moving my music library, and so on. However, I now have a new rule. I have to listen only to that playlist. Any time I get the urge to skip a song, or find a song that I haven't heard and don't like, IT MUST GO. We'll see how well this works to weed out stuff I wouldn't listen to anyway.
Well, this is a pain in the butt: by default, when you create an IMAP or Exchange account on the iPhone, messages you delete aren't ever actually purged from the server. The effect of this is that messages you delete on the iPhone don't disappear from your Outlook/Entourage/Exchange ActiveSync/whatever mailbox, leading to angst if you're trying to keep a tidy inbox.
The fix is simple, once you know it exists: Tap Settings > Mail, select the IMAP account, tap Advanced, then select the purge interval from the "Deleted Messages" group. (Apple has a cursory document on it here). The problem is that the shortest interval is 1 day-- so when you remove a message on the iPhone, it will take 24hr to disappear from your other clients. This is a pretty poor "feature" and I'm disappointed that Apple didn't take the time to implement proper deleted item purging as they do in Mail.app. Boo hiss.
Update: another annoyance is that the iPhone insists on creating its own Deleted Items folder in the Inbox. That's just wrong. I suspect this can be fixed by modifying the server path prefix, but that shouldn't be necessary. The whole point of having a defined account type for Exchange is to avoid this kind of problem (that's why the iPhone correctly hides other folders, like Calendar and Contacts).
My main man jbuff, a lead PM on the Microsoft DPM team, has finally started a blog. Drop by and show him the love if you're at all interested in data protection or continuous backup.
You're probably familiar with the idea that, for most companies, a relatively small percentage of customers generates a large percentage of revenue. This is particularly true for industries, like airlines, where pricing is highly variable. Looks like the same thing is true for mobile operators. Sprint Nextel has an innovative solution: find the customers who are costing you the most in support, then fire them. I wonder if this model will ever catch on in the software industry?
So last week I went to TechEd 2007, primarily to present a session on how Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FFSE) works. I arrived Monday night after an uneventful flight (the kind I prefer), got to the hotel, and went to bed. The next morning, I had breakfast with Anne Grubb and Amy Eisenberg of Windows IT Pro. It's hard to believe that I've been writing for them for nearly ten years! I spent the rest of the day on Tuesday attending a series of MVP deep-dive technical briefings put on by the Exchange and OCS development teams. There's some really exciting stuff happening with both of those products; you'll be seeing the fruits sooner than you expect.
Wednesday I had breakfast with an old friend, Ed Woodrick of Dell, then I went to prep for my session. As usual, the room I was in was waaaay too big; it probably seated close to 1200 people, and I had 252 in attendance. No, I didn't count them; Microsoft uses an RFID-based system to track session attendance. This year John wasn't presenting so I didn't have a chance to beat him; that's too bad, because my session scored 7.81, a personal best.
The bad news is that I was in the security track, which ended up taking the top overall score. Of the 10 sessions rated most highly by attendees, security sessions took 5 of the top 6, so clearly I've got some room to improve (although let's get real; I have no realistic hope of outscoring someone like Steve Riley or Mark Russinovich unless I start passing out $20 bills during my sessions!)
From my friend and fellow Exchange MVP Andy David, a handy field guide to spotting attendees at TechEd (and Exchange Connections), plus a few additions from Andy Webb, Tony Murray, and Melissa Travers:
- The Clothes Horse: Puts on the official Teched T-Shirt as soon as he registers. Wears a different vendor shirt every day, even at the attendee party.
- The Vendor Whore: Visits every booth and allows his badge to be swiped. Flashes and glows all week. Thinks the booth babes like him.
- The Wanderer: Moves from session to session., never staying for more than 20 minutes. Rates each presenter poorly.
- The Yes Man: Concurs with everything the presenter says, nodding his head in agreement, shaking his head "No" when told that is something you shouldn't do. Raises his hand whenever asked.
- The Continental: Wears male Capri pants every day.
- The Nodder: Dozes through each session.
- The Tapper: Breaks out his laptop at the beginning of each session and reads email, IMs and browses the web. Never looks up and leaves 5 minutes before the session ends.
- The Carpet Hugger. Similar behavior to The Tapper, except this species heads directly for the floor against the wall and the nearest power outlet to power up his laptop to do his work.
- The Shutter Bug: Takes pictures of every session, every vendor, every booth babe and then posts to a blog that no one ever visits.
- The IT Guy: Wears vendor shirts from previous Techeds to every session and events, including the elusive "IT Hero" Hawaiian shirt. Takes the first bus back to his hotel once the free beer runs out.
- The Inquisitor: Makes his move to the microphone half-way through a session. Looks annoyed when asked to wait till the end. Asks a question without an answer.
- The Attendee: Usually only seen at the attendee party. Typically female, they look like they would rather be anywhere else but there.
- The Tropical Breeze - The Hawaiian shirt wearing, flip flop sporting retrosexual male who makes the rounds to every party (invited or not) until the free beer and the free food run out. And occasionally attends a late afternoon session.
- The Gadget Kid. More holsters than Dirty Harry. No visible social skills and hasn't actually spoken since the age of 12, but has well developed thumbs.
- The Assassin hunts daily for that one choice piece of product information, contact, meetup, product team intro that couldn't be found any other place or time. Is satisfied if the week produces at least 4 hits.
- The Sycophant won't ask a question at the microphone, but will badger a speaker for 20min after a session and follow them down the hall until stopped by security at the speaker lounge.
Technorati Tags: ExchConn
I'll be at TechEd 2007 in Orlando from today until Wednesday. I'm presenting Wednesday afternoon (2pm, SEC323, about how Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange works). I also have a ton of things to see and people to meet; my first stop will probably be the TLC to see the Tanjay, Catalina, and RoundTable devices that MS will be showing off. See you there!
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
A great tip from my friend Liam Colvin:
I don’t know if you’re like me but I was experiencing slowness (like a 20-30 second delay) when opening an Explorer window to view files. You might have found this before me, but it took me some time fiddling with settings to figure it out. I was trying all the usual ways to determine what was causing the delay in opening the explorer window: anti-virus, explorer extensions, etc – and nothing worked, very frustrating. I looked extensively internally and searched the Internet, and the best I could find were issues with copying files down from servers causing delays due to SMB issues (there is a hotfix out there for that, by the way - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770/en-us). I finally found it after carefully reviewing the behavior of Explorer when it opened by monitoring the Explorer process with Filemon. I noticed that when Explorer went to open a folder (from a shortcut, for example), it parsed all the files in the root of the directory. Urk! This clearly took a long time. I looked at the Folder Options under Control Panel and noticed the very first setting under the View tab: Always show Icons, never Thumbnails. It was not checked. I realized that Vista must read each file when opening the folder for a thumbnail and/or creates one. When I checked the Always show Icons, never Thumbnails, it reduced the time required to open each folder to 3 or 4 seconds.
What do you do with an old PC? Most of us just give it away; if you're mindful of privacy issues, you might format the disk first. There have been lots of recent cases where organizations have failed to properly clean disks of confidential information before decommissioning the disks and selling or giving them away. The BitLocker Drive Encryption feature of Windows Vista can help solve this, though-- when you decommission an encrypted volume, you can remove the keys (as detailed in this column) and render the volume permanently unreadable. Sweet!
Microsoft updated their BitLocker FAQ, which now answers every question you've ever had about BitLocker (plus some you probably haven't.)
So Jim McBee and I are together again, this time in the Big Apple, for the upcoming Exchange 2007 roadshow. I just got some mail from one of the roadshow managers at Windows IT Pro:
I am looking forward to meeting/seeing you both in New York for the Exchange event next Tuesday! I have been asked to tell you that while we are doing all we can to make sure you have all you need for your presentations, please make a backup plan in case something goes wrong with the phone line or Internet connection during your presentations. If you have a canned demo that would be great, but if you don't, please consider a backup plan, preferably one that does not involve strings of four-letter words
My backup plan is that we all go out and take in a Broadway show. Jim said his backup plan involves a puppet show. I guess that means we're all covered.
Well, maybe not a facelift, but it did get a new name: the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I only found out about this because of a press release I got from Cemaphore touting the fact that they're the first to license it. So, MAPI is dead as a name, but I suspect it'll be a loooong time before those four letters are expurgated from all of the existing MS documentation and support materials.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
So, Eric Lai quoted me in another Computerworld article, this one on slow Outlook performance. However, he left out a couple of important parts of what I actually said. I told him that I've had problems with one particular Exchange account (I use three) on one of the several machines that I use Outlook 2007 on. The machine in question happens to be a Windows Vista (x86) machine that I bought in January, flattened, and did clean installs of Vista and Office on. Other Exchange profiles on the same machine work fine. The same Exchange account on Outlook 2007 on my XP machines work fine. Removing and recreating the profile on the Vista machine doesn't solve the problem, hence my comment about there being something I don't understand about the problem in this case. The Exchange server in question doesn't belong to me, so I can't run any of my usual troubleshooting tools on it.
I was also careful to point out to Eric that I'm not an Outlook MVP, and that he should speak to some Outlook MVPs for his story. That's too bad, as I'm sure they would have been able to give a better perspective on that actual performance issues involved.
I just stopped at the Verizon store adjacent to my hotel in Seattle and grabbed a USB720 EVDO modem
As I learn more about Dance Dance Revolution Universe
Yes, it's that time of year again: time to submit session proposals for Exchange Connections! Our fall show is from 5-8 November in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This year the submission process is slightly different. If you're interested in speaking, visit http://www.deeptraining.com/devconnections/abstracts/ to submit your abstracts. Please do not mail them to me.
A few ground rules:
- You need to submit at least 3 abstracts, but I encourage you to submit more than 3 to give us more flexibility in choosing sessions.
- Speakers will be chosen within a few weeks of the closing date, which is currently 3/10.
- All selected speakers will have their travel expenses (air + hotel) reimbursed and in addition will be paid a stipend of $400 per talk.
What kind of talks should you propose? Anything having to do with Exchange (including DR, security, migration, and best practices), Live Communications Server/Office Communications Server, or related topics. The more technical, the better! (If you plan to repeat sessions from a previous event, please make sure you update the title and abstract to reflect the latest in the Exchange world.)
Please, no vendor “pimp sessions”. If you work for a software or hardware vendor, feel free to propose technical sessions that aren’t focused on your product. If you work for a PR firm, please feel free to have your principals submit technical sessions.
If you have any problems with the submission process, or any questions, please feel free to ping me. Otherwise, fire up those browsers and get busy!
Update: I changed the stipend info; it's $500 if you've presented at more than 5 events, and $400 otherwise.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, ExchConn
In last week's UPDATE, I mentioned the need to patch all your Exchange clients, not excluding Windows Mobile. The process for doing this by hand is pretty tedious. Thankfully, Microsoft today released an all-in-one DST update that contains a single CAB file (plus instructions) that will update your device to have correct time zone information. You need to install the CAB file after you update your Exchange mailbox's calendar; once it's installed, you'll need to change the time zone on your device manually to make Windows Mobile notice the change. Then you'll need to change it back.
Via this post on Kirk's blog, I found this terrific collection of customizations you can apply to the standard Cocoa text editing engine. The article is quite detailed, and it's tough sledding if you're not already an experienced Mac user. However, it features some nifty customizations, including the ability to use incremental search for Cocoa text fields. Good stuff.
T-Mobile has a pretty sweet deal: free T-Mobile wi-fi service for Windows Vista users from now until April 30. Go here from your Vista machine to sign up.
So, you can probably tell I'm working on a BitLocker-related project by now...
One drawback to storing BitLocker recovery passwords in Active Directory is that there's no good way to retrieve the recovery password when you need it, or so I thought. I suggested to the BitLocker team that they consider writing an extension to AD Users & Computers to make it easy for authorized admins to get a recovery password for a given computer-- turns out they'd already done it and were deep into the signoff process!
The tool is officially documented in KB 928202. It's an AD U&C extension that makes the BitLocker recovery information visible; you need to get it from PSS, but it's a free call, so why not?
BitLocker allows you to store your recovery password in a file, in Active Directory, or on paper. However, Microsoft's Troy Larsen has another, extremely valuable, suggestion:
You might also consider saving a copy of the recovery password to your cell phone—then you will have it when you are a 1000 miles from home and discover that your two year old took your dongle off the desk when you were packing. Not that that sort of thing ever happens.
Wow, so many uses for this: a desktop 3-D printer for around $2500. You can't yet use one of these to print out parts for a second copy, but we're not that far off.
I recently needed to move 3 OST files from one disk to another, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how. A quick search netted this article, which explained it all: you have to disable cached Exchange mode and block offline use for the OST, then move it. Clear as mud.
So, a couple of weeks ago I bought a refurbished Mac Pro from Apple. It came with a single 250GB SATA drive, with 3 open SATA bays. I had Devin send me two of our spare 250GB SATA drives from a previous project, with the intention that I would create a striped RAID set to hold my VMware Fusion virtual machines.
I popped the two disks in, rebooted the computer, and fired up Disk Utility. After formatting the two disks, I attempted to create a RAID array, but Disk Utility wouldn't see the second disk. In the process of fooling around, I created a mirrored array and added the first new drive to it, but I couldn't add the second drive. In frustration, I did a low-level format on drive #2; when the format completed, I was able to add it to the new volume, so I copied my files over to it and went about my business.
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X
Continue reading Sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart.
I have long been complaining about Microsoft's inconsistent use of the word "cluster", which has a specific meaning: a set of interconnected computers that can share work and have at least some redundancy and failover capabilities. The Windows network load balancing folks call their solutions "clusters", as do the Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) team. This is needlessly confusing to customers. Thankfully, I noticed that the Exchange team is doing something about it-- if you check out the Exchange 2007 docs, they are now (properly IMHO) labeling their clusters as "failover clusters" to disambiguate clustering-for-redundancy from clustering-for-load-balancing. Yay!
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
From an anonymous source commenting on the new Apple iPhone:
I’m looking forward to the iPhone Shuffle which calls one of your contacts at random every time you hit Send.
The iPhone looks seriously shiny, but because it doesn't support HSDPA I don't think I want one-- I've gotten too used to Verizon's excellent local EvDO coverage. The better an "Internet communicator" the iPhone turns out to be, the more painful its lack of HSDPA will be. (Update: David Pogue sure drank the Kool-Aid.)
As for the Apple TV: meh. I'm not that excited about it, given that it looks like a way to pay $20 for a DRM-encrusted sub-DVD-resolution movie that requires a Mac to play it back. I'd rather have an HD DVD of the movie, or, failing that, I can rip it to my ReadyNAS and stream it through the Xbox 360. Or so I'm told; that doesn't actually work for me yet... perhaps that's the Apple TV's appeal.
I've been playing with the beta of VMware Fusion on my Mac Pro. Why? I've been delighted with Parallels, but I need to be able to host 64-bit Windows VMs in order to run native Exchange 2007 machines. VMware handles this quite nicely so far, and I've been able to run my work XP VM under Parallels while simultaneously installing Windows x64 under VMware-- a nifty trick. However, I discovered that if you want to copy a VMware VM, you have to manually edit the VMX file, then generate a new UUID for the machine. It's not hard, but if you don't edit the VMX file by hand, the Fusion application will endlessly prompt you for the location of the VM disk image. It doesn't hurt anything, but it also doesn't work. That's what I get for using beta software, I guess.
Parallels, though, isn't sitting still. I love coherence mode, and I look forward to testing the direct disc burning features in their latest beta. My experience has been a bit different from Tom Yeager's in that I find Parallels' video performance perfectly acceptable on both the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro. Visio, Office 2007, and Office 2003 all work faster under Parallels than the PowerPC builds of Mac Office do under Rosetta.
Technorati Tags: Mac, Virtualization
This is pretty cool: Autonet is launching a new service/gadget that provides seamless Internet connectivity as a hotspot in your car. I'm betting that they use cellular data, but they don't say whose. I've contacted their PR person for more details.
Continue reading Turn your car into a wi-fi hotspot.
I wish I'd thought of this; Martin "MC" Brown has a great tip for improving the performance of Parallels virtual machines running under Mac OS X. I'll be trying this as soon as I can shut down my VM.
I've been using Vista daily for a while now, and on balance I like it quite a bit. However, there are some things that irritate the dickens out of me, mostly because I haven't figured out to escape them. I'm going to keep a running list in the hope that either people will suggest solutions, or that I'll attract enough other people who have the same problems to gain critical mass.
- My new #1: turning off offline file sync for an existing folder. It's possible, but what a hassle!
- Connecting and disconecting VPNs. I like the way XP and Mac OS X both do it: you get an icon in the system bar, and you can directly click it to disconnect. With XP, to connect I can hit Ctrl+Esc, T (for "Connect to"), <return> and be connected to my primary VPN. In Vista, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent, except for putting a shortcut on the desktop.
- Bonus annoyance: after you close a connection, you get a dialog telling you it was closed, which you must dismiss.
- The center scroll feature of the TrackPoint doesn't work. Update: this was because I didn't have the correct driver. Lenovo will be releasing full versions of all their Vista drivers at the end of January; the prerelease versions I have work quite well.
- There's not yet a working version of Verizon Access Manager, so I can't use the spiffy integrated EvDO modem. Update: still no love on this. I've seen reports
- I'm having fits with one particular client's VPN implementation; I can usually connect, but I can't reach most of the internal sites I need. If I connect at the same time from my XP machine, the connection is rock-solid, so it's clearly a Vista oddity. Update: Turns out this is a Vista bug, slated for a QFE sometime in the future.
So, via this article from Computerworld, confirmation that McAfee's SiteAdvisor FAQ did say that it included anti-phishing features, as I said it did the day our phishing tool report was released. I am pleased to see them owning up to it, and I look forward to seeing how the new and improved Site Advisor Plus does in a head-to-head test.
Update: Sandi says it better than I could, since she's a disinterested third party.
Technorati Tags: phishing
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).
Sneak King is hysterical! The boys and I had a great time playing it last night. The basic premise: it's an Xbox 360 game in which you are the Burger King, and your job is to sneak around and surprise people by handing them Burger King food (or, as the package puts it, you "silently unleash your hot sandwiches on unsuspecting civilians".) For $4, plus a value meal that I enjoyed for lunch, we've definitely gotten our money's worth of entertainment.
Dr. Lorrie Cranor of CMU and her team have recently released a new version of their own anti-phishing analysis. It makes for interesting reading, as its methodology is slightly different from 3Sharp's (and quite different from the Firefox team's methdodology). Cranor's team used an automated system to feed phish in and record the tool responses, which is much more scalable than the human-driven system that 3Sharp and Firefox both used; there are a few other methodological improvements detailed in the study as well. (Interestingly, they too chose to include SiteAdvisor, which scored very poorly.)
Table 4 of the study is the big burrito; it lists both false positive and catch rates for the ten technologies they tested. SpoofGuard had the best catch rate, but it also scored a whopping 38% false positive rate... oops. EarthLink came in second, followed by Netcraft, Google, IE7, and Cloudmark.
What does this mean? I'm not sure. The CMU study used a data feed only from Phishtank, which means its results should line up with what the Firefox team found. However, CMU didn't test Firefox 2.0, so there's no way to make a direct comparison. The URLs they tested were gathered over a 3-day period, which IMHO is too short to give a good baseline. However, I like the automated testbed that CMU used, and the discussion of toolbar exploits is really interesting stuff that I hope all the toolbar vendors are paying careful attention to.
Very cool news: six airlines (including Delta) will offer in-seat iPod docks that will charge the iPod
and allow the iPod to play video on the in-seat video screen! This is super cool for those (like Jim and I) who have to fly long-haul routes, though Jim does it a lot more than I do. This will definitely influence where I choose to fly (when I get a choice, that is.)
So, the fine folks at Mozilla have released their own anti-phishing study comparing the anti-phishing features of Firefox 2.0 with IE 7. Unsurprisingly, they claim that Firefox beats IE7 handily, which is the opposite of what we found in 3Sharp's report.
First off, I'm glad the Firefox team is doing this kind of testing. I always want to see as much data (and as much data about the data) as possible. That's why I I like to read both Car and Driver and Road & Track to see how well their data agree-- or where they don't agree.
Anyway, reviewing the study didn't take long, as it's only 3 pages. (Interestingly, SmartWare, the company that authored the study, doesn't seem to be distributing it; the only copy I could find is at the Washington Post. It's not available yet from Mozilla, either. Go figure.) Here are my initial thoughts:
- They didn't make any attempt to score false positives. This is a critical omission, because a filter that produces significant numbers of false positives will quickly train users to ignore its legitimate warnings. (Interestingly, PhishTank's own FAQ agrees with me). IMHO any study that doesn't include false positive data is meaningless.
- Speaking of "doesn't include", the report only looked at IE and Firefox. I would have liked to see some other products (note: not SiteAdvisor) included to give a broader basis of comparison.
- The Firefox report mentions that IE can warn or block, but it doesn't credit IE with any actual warnings. This is a significant omission, although we can't tell how significant because...
- The Firefox report doesn't include any information about the actual URLs used. They promise to publish this data "soon", but without that there's no way to gauge the quality of their data. (I understand that they'll publish the data later today; it'll be interesting to see the raw stuff.) Of course, we published all our URL data in our report.
- Speaking of data: the Firefox team used 1040 phish from Phishtank, a community filtering system, gathered over a two-week period. That's a good number of phish, but the study period was awfully short, and the phish all came from one source. We used multiple sources, including honeypots and user reports, to generate the phish list we used.
- Because they used a community-generated feed of phish, there's no way to tell which of the phish had also (or already) been reported to other systems that may have fed into the "Ask Google" or Microsoft data feeds. By contrast, we took great pains to try to find phish that we knew hadn't been submitted to Microsoft's URL reputation service.
So, my personal opinion is that this study isn't as rigorous as the 3Sharp study or the one done by Dr. Lorrie Cranor et al of Carnegie Mellon. Both our studies found that the version of the Google Toolbar available at the time lagged other products, sometimes by a wide margin. Some of the difference in Mozilla's results and the ones we and CMU obtained are due to updates in the tool, but some are no doubt due to differences in methodology as well, and those are very difficult to discount.
Update: looks like Sandi independently came up with many of the same objections.
As part of some testing we're doing, I've been running some lengthy command scripts. I don't want to sit and wait for them to finish, and I don't want to get an e-mail when they're done because my e-mail app isn't open. I asked a group of smart friends and here are the two best answers.
First, you can use the echo command to echo a beep. Try it: open up a Windows command prompt and type "echo ^G" (where the "^G" is displayed after you press Ctrl+G). Voila-- a beep.
Second, you can use the very helpful color command. Try this:
dir && color E2 && pause && color
This will print a directory, turn the entire screen yellow, and pause. It's impossible to miss this visual effect as long as any part of the window is open-- especially if you're using Vista. Two thumbs up!
I'm working on a project that requires me to spend a lot of time working with Vista's BitLocker feature. That meant I needed a new computer. Sure, BitLocker runs on a wide range of machines, but its TPM mode requires a machine that has a supported TPM. The ThinkPad T60p has an upgradable BIOS, and word has it that there's a BIOS upgrade that enables full BitLocker support for TPM, so I took the plunge and ordered one. It arrived last week, the day before I left for Vegas, but I didn't have time to work with it last week. Today, while I was busy doing other things, I downloaded and installed the RC2 build. The installation went flawlessly, and I was easily able to join my home domain and install Office. I haven't yet enabled BitLocker, though I did create the required "small" (~ 1.5GB) system partition that it requires. I'll be occasionally writing more about Vista as I get more experience with it.
I've been using Office 2007 since before beta 2, and I've been very pleased with it. The ribbon interface makes Excel usable at long last; Word's new document comparison features rock, and Outlook is a major improvement (the To-Do Bar alone would sell me an upgrade). Unfortunately, I'm starting to work on a project that requires me to use a set of custom content management tools, and they only work with Word 2003. I could always build a VM that has the older version, but that would introduce its own set of complications (like needing another Windows XP license). So, until the tool is updated to work with Word 2007, I'm removing Office 2007 and reinstalling Office 2003 on my two laptops (one's physical, the other's a VM on my MacBook Pro).
Earlier this year, I moved all my blog content from e2ksecurity.com here. At the time, I followed what I thought were NewsGator's instructions to redirect my RSS feed so that e2ksecurity subscribers would automatically be redirected. Turns out we had a failure to communicate, and those subscribers haven't been seeing updates. However, thanks to the fine folks at NewsGator support we got the problem ironed out: my web server needed to issue a 301 (permanent redirect) for the RSS feed file instead of redirecting everything. So, welcome back!
This is going to suck: Robert McLaws took Ed Bott's analysis of the new Vista end-user license agreement (EULA) further, claiming that the new Windows Vista bans you from installing some editions of Vista on virtual hardware, including Microsoft's own Virtual PC (and, of course, Parallels). Ed says, "not so". Robert's asked MS for a clarification; we'll see what they come back with.
Last night I had a long conversation with my friend Chris Miller about EVDO; he's a Nextel user and is thinking about switching his company's service to another carrier. At the time, my Treo 700w was showing 1xRTT service, as it usually does in the Perrysburg area. This morning, when I was letting the phone sync after being turned off overnight, I noticed that I was now getting an EVDO service icon-- so apparently Verizon has quietly turned on EVDO in at least parts of the Toledo metro area. It may be because I live close to the VZW store at Levis Commons, but I'm not going to complain.
Update: my house is back to 1xRTT, but when I drove into Maumee there's EVDO coverage at least as far north as the corner of Conant and Illinois.
Still catching up on my blog backlog...
Virtual Server comes in very, very handy at 3Sharp, because much of the work we do involves building VMs for various tasks. However, I've never really cared for its management interface. I'm not a big fan of web-based management interfaces for system management, and the VS interface is kinda blah (though the VMRC client is handy). I just found these two articles describing the PowerShell support that's coming in the next release of Virtual Server. I'm looking forward to being able to better manage VMs using PowerShell, and to tide me over, there are some tasty improvements in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (but what a terrible product name!)
Technorati Tags: PowerShell
I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but this integrated development environment (IDE) for PowerShell looks extremely cool. Having a debugger, syntax highlighting, and Intellisense for PowerShell would be really handy for building, say, a PowerShell version of the cookbook...
w00t! Microsoft just released PowerShell release candidate 2. That's good news for almost everyone-- I say "almost" because I'm working on a PowerShell poster for Windows IT Pro and now I have to go back and study the changes with a fine-tooth comb to see which ones I need to incorporate. (Remember, the current Exchange 2007 beta build requires PowerShell RC0; I'm not sure what will happen if you install RC2 on top of a working Exchange 2007 install, but I'm not gonna try it.)
I recently spoke with my editors at Windows IT Pro, Anne Grubb and Amy Eisenberg. We were talking about future topic ideas, and I suggested a few things that I'd love to see the mgaazine cover in more depth.
One example: which Linux distro is the "best" replacement for Windows? e.g. if you wanted to replace your mom's Windows desktop with Linux, which version would cause the least upset? Many distros include Windows-like features, some of which induce subtle feelings of wrongness because they're almost-but-not-quite exact copies. Others are radically different.
Continue reading Which Linux best replaces Windows?.
The current version of Entourage doesn't provide any way to set out-of-office status on an Exchange server. That's not a huge problem, since you can use Outlook Web Access (or even Outlook) to change your OOF status and message. However, I just found this nifty app that lets you natively set your OOF status and message from your Mac desktop. Unfortunately, I haven't yet gotten it to work-- good thing I'm not going out of the office for a while.
I was trying to install an antivirus program on my Parallels VM, and when the install finished I found that my VM was unbootable.
The answer: re-enable the Windows Installer service as detailed here. I was then able to remove the misbehaving AV program and get back to normal.
Wow, this is a big surprise: Microsoft just announced that they're buying Winternals, makers of a number of very useful free and commercial tools.
Doc Searls got his Treo 700p to tether via USB with his Mac. I wonder if I can do the same thing with my 700w?
So, I bought a Quantum DLT-V4 tape drive to replace my dead ADIC FastStor robot. I was surprised and pleased to find that the DLT-V4 came with a bundled copy of BackupExec 10d. However, when I followed the instructions to register the BackupExec license code, I got a snippy mail from Symantec telling me that the license code had already been used. Following instructions (mistake #1), I contacted Symantec Customer Care (sic). They weren't open at the time, so I called them again on Monday; this time, I got an automated message telling me to go to their web site. So I did. That netted me a response telling me to call Quantum.
Today, I finally called Quantum, who had me go back to the Symantec site. When my first registration attempt failed, they had me change the license code from QTM-P1-xxxxxxx to QTM-CC-xxxxxxx. That did the trick, and I now have a working BackupExec serial number. Too bad it was so hard to get.
Pando is a brand-new tool for moving large files instead of e-mailing them. You sign up for their service (which is free), then use their small application (available for Mac OS X and Windows) to create Pando Packages. Under the hood, Pando uses BitTorrent to upload the files to their server; the recipient of the email gets a small file that tells their local Pando application which files to get and from where. So far, it works great; I was able to move about 60MB of files to one of my editors at Penton with no trouble; I'm looking forward to trying it with some of the other folks I work with to see how it handles larger file loads.
Matt Michie explains how to use PowerShell over SSH-- very cool, given that there won't be secure remoting in the version of PowerShell that should RTM later this year.
I meant to mention this, but I forgot-- Zenprise won the "Best of TechEd 2006" award from Windows IT Pro for their Zenprise 2.0 product. (Thankfully Bharat has a better memory than I do.) Altiris won the best-of-show award for their Software Virtualization Solution; Quest bagged an award for Spotlight on SQL Server, and Neverfail won for their SharePoint HA product. Maybe next year I'll be able to stick around for the actual awards!
Now this is pretty cool: Greg Enslow, one of our 3sharp hotshots, just mailed me to let me know that the Creative Commons add-in we built for Office applications is now live. The add-in lets you choose a Creative Commons license for your intellectual property, then it automatically fetches the relevant license text and adds it to the document. You can see an example here. This is a pretty neat use of Office as a development platform because it illustrates the process of pulling external content and inserting it-- honoring document formatting-- as part of the document object. Check it out.
A couple of weeks ago, I offhandedly mentioned that Verizon has a tethering plan for their phones. They do; it's called "BroadbandAccess Connect". However, it's not yet available for the Treo 700w or the xv6700 (and I bet it's not available for the Motorola Q, either). Brenda Raney of Verizon was kind enough to tell me that "plans are in the works to have that capability on both devices before year-end."
I've decided to roll the content from e2ksecurity.com in here so I don't have to keep two blogs up to date-- that's turned out to be more trouble than it's worth. So, welcome to those of you who've been reading e2ksecurity.com-- hope you like it here!
I'll be cleaning things up, consolidating categories, and so on for the next few days; please pardon the construction noise and dust.
Apple has a very funny series of new ads highlighting the differences between Windows PCs (although they never use the word "Windows") and Macs.
Educause and the National Cyber Security Alliance just posted the winning videos in its Computer Security Awareness Video Contest. Some of them are pretty funny (here's my current favorite), and all of them are generally appropriate for most non-technical audiences. Try 'em, you might like 'em.
W00t! Barry Eisler, one of my favorite authors, now has a blog. It's funky fresh. Go read it.
They say it's "scheduled maintenance" but I find that hard to believe; no one schedules maintenance for the middle of a workday.
Sweet! Apple released software called "Boot Camp" to allow the new Intel Macs to dual-boot into XP. Yes, I know someone else already released the details of how to do this, but Apple's announcement is significant because it means that they'll support this as a feature. That sure makes the MacBook look more attractive to me-- if only there was an ExpressCard-size version of the Verizon aircard I use...
So, Paul Thurrott asks if it's odd that Microsoft is promoting Telestream's Flip4Mac QT codec for WMV playback (I wrote about that earlier this week). Short answer: no, it's not odd at all. The Mac version of Windows Media Player has always been a poor stepchild. It doesn't play all current WMV formats; it can't dynamically load new codecs, its UI is poor, and it's got more bugs than a Tennessee anthill. As I understand it, it was never owned by the Mac Business Unit at MS, which has a great track record of producing Mac-specific versions of MS tools (witness the RDP client or MSN Messenger). It was owned by the Windows Media group, which probably has negative interest in doing anything that makes things better or easier for Mac users-- after all, Apple is their #1 competitor in the digital media format war.
In that light, this isn't an odd move at all: some smart folks at Microsoft realized that they could save money and make themselves look better by licensing Telestream's excellent product instead of foisting WMP Mac on users. I'm a little surprised they're not touting it more, actually; I found out when I got a press release from Telestream, well in advance of hearing about it from MS.
Flip4Mac has been making Windows Media codecs for QuickTime for a while now. They work as advertised: download them, and you can play WMV files in your QuickTime applications. They also make some other products that provide QT/WMV import and export. Microsoft cut a deal with them, and now you can get the Flip4Mac WMV playback codecs, for free, from them directly. This is particularly nice because of the low quality and functionality of the Mac version of Windows Media Player; I hope it means that WMP for Mac will die, and that the engineering effort behind it will be redirected to other Mac projects.
This is great news: Google finally released Google Earth (their 3-D map program) for the Mac. Get it here. The coolest thing I've found for it so far is a real-time 3-D flight tracker-- check out FBOweb and watch flights into ORD, JFK, BOS, or ATL in real-time, with altitude and speed.
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.
Update: there's some great stuff at AppleIntelFAQ.com that partially answers my question about dual-booting. Dave Schroeder also commented at Macintouch that side-by-side Windows solutions will be available in "weeks/months", and that XP won't install on the MacBook Pro because XP lacks EFI support-- but that Vista might install. Now that would be worth trying.
I wore contacts once upon a time-- when I was about 13. My old pal Dr. Otis J. Bourg prescribed a set; as I recall, they were stiff little circles of plastic that required a draconian regime of toxic chemicals to keep them from turning into encrusted eye-ruiners. The regime wasn't a big problem because I kept losing them, so after a few weeks my experiment was over.
Enter my current eye doctor, Mike Zysik. He's been telling me that there are now silicone hydrogel lenses that are much more comfortable than the old ones. I tried a pair, and whaddya know? He was right. They are very comfortable. Unfortunately, I have funny eyes: one's farsighted with an astigmatism, and the other is nearsighted. The hydrogels aren't made in the same range of prescriptions that regular glasses' lenses are, so we couldn't exactly match my prescription. Turns out that for my left eye, I need a toric lens, which meant switching to another brand and lens material. The lenses I have now are not nearly as comfortable as the originals, but with them in I can see as well-- or better-- as I do with my glasses, at least until the lenses dry out. I've asked Mike if he has any other potential lens types to try, but I'll probably stick with these for six months or so and see how they work over the long term.
This is pretty neat: an OS X driver for using the Xbox 360 controller with Mac games. I'll have to give it a try, assuming I can pry myself away from the Xbox 360 to try it.
Turns out that Nikon has a recall for some models of the battery used in Arlene's camera. I just stumbled across the info on the recall today; hopefully the replacement, non-exploding, battery will get here before the holiday fu gets into full swing.
All my music is on my Mac. All Arlene's music is on her Mac. I wanted to be able to stream both computers' iTunes libraries to the Xbox 360, but-- wouldn't you know it? the 360 doesn't support Apple's iTunes protocol, and iTunes doesn't support the Windows Media Connect (WMC) protocol.
My first thought was to use Virtual PC with an XP Professional image; install WMC, use Virtual PC's "shared folder" feature, and point WMC at it. However, as I learned from wmcplayer.com, WMC requires that the Network Service pseudo-account have access to the shared folder. Apparently, Virtual PC applies some other ACL to the shared folder, so WMC wouldn't share music from the shared folder.Attempt #2 was more successful: I moved my iTunes music library to superman, my Windows Server 2003 file server, and pointed an alias in my Music folder to it. Then I told WMC to share \\superman\music, and boom! I was in business. I'm not sure how well this will work long-term, because I bet iTunes will dislike living on an SMB volume. For now, though, it's great to be able to listen to my (non-DRM'd) music on the Xbox.
Herewith a few tips for scoring Xbox 360 units this holiday season. There are some out there, but it’s a merry chase indeed. (Major Nelson has already posted some stuff along these lines, but Scoble hasn't so this may still be useful to the Xbox seekers out there..)
First, shipments. I’m not on the Xbox team, so I don’t have any inside information. It’s pretty obvious that they’re running the factories at full throttle, but that still doesn’t translate into enough units to flood every retail shelf in North America with as many units as people want to buy. If you trust the public numbers (~3 million units worldwide within 90 days of launch), it should be clear that even large numbers of units don’t translate to total market penetration. WalMart alone has over 3,700 stores in the US; if they got 10 units/store/week, that would be 37,000 units/week just for them— and they’re only one of a dozen or so tier-1 retailers whose doors people are banging on.
There’s a lot of bad information out there being spread by the retailers, which is a shame. Granted, most people know that you can’t always trust the floor staff at most stores for accurate information on anything, but the number of times I’ve been told “we won’t have any 360s until March” when calling or visiting local retailers is astonishing. I’m sure the Xbox retail interface team is doing everything they can to get the word out, but they’re fighting an uphill battle.
First, brick and mortar. I got one from our local Sams’ Club at launch. I didn’t preorder, but I did stand out in the 20° weather for two hours before they opened the doors. There are lots of anecdotal reports of small shipments to mass market retailers, but given the eBay frenzy, IMHO the odds of you getting a unit from a B&M are small; it’s too tempting for the employees to buy them and then flip them.
- The Canadian chain of BestBuy stores will be selling units (min 10/store) on 12/9. This may help if, like me, you’re near Canada. (See the banner ad they’ve been running.)
- The US chain of BestBuy stores supposedly will have a relaunch on 12/18. Anecdotal reports indicate that stores already have them in stock but aren’t allowed to sell them until then— they’re supposedly building inventory. (BestBuy got spanked for requiring some customers to buy their 360s in bundles, but they've apologized, sort of.)
- On FatWallet, I saw a claim that WalMart would be getting between 3 and 9 units per store each week from now until Christmas. I’m sure they’re not distributed evenly between stores, as WalMart has excellent data showing where various SKUs are selling well, but this may help if you’re in a rural area or have friends who work there.
Tactics vary. Some people recommend going to the store first thing in the morning; this may work if you happen to arrive the morning after a shipment, and if the employees haven’t skua’d all the units themselves. Some retailers only get shipments overnight, while others get them at unpredictable times during the day.
(nb. I keep seeing reports that Target stores are a good place to get units. The local Target stores in NW Ohio don’t have any, and haven’t; I suspect the employees are buying them up as soon as they get off the truck. Most other retailers (e.g. GameStop, EBGames) haven’t gotten enough units to clear their pre-order list yet, although some of them are selling systems online even when their B&M stores can’t get any. )
Second, online stores often have small quantities of Xbox 360s in stock at unpredictable times. By using a tool like Webmon, you can fairly easily monitor Amazon, eToys, and other major online retailers to get immediate notification when systems are available. Amazon, for instance, has been selling a few dozen units per day, but unless you’re using a site monitoring tool (or hanging out all day at FatWallet or your preferred equivalent) you have no hope of finding one via this method.
Suggestion: make sure you’ve already got registered accounts at whatever sites you monitor so that, should you find one, you can buy it quickly. I’ve successfully ordered systems from Amazon and eToys; Barnes and Noble, Dell, JC Penney, and Kmart were all accepting orders within the past week for immediate shipment, though I don’t know if all the orders they accepted will actually be fulfilled. Of course, not all vendors who take orders will actually be able to ship them; I ordered a system from CompUSA, then got a notice today that my order was now on backorder until January. Oops.
Finally, there’s eBay. Yes, there are lots of consoles and bundles for sale there. Caveat emptor, but if you want one badly enough, this may be your best route. It appears that prices for a Premium system are still $700-900, with Core systems going from $450-600. There’s a good deal of price variability. Your best bet: find auctions that end in the middle of the night, then keep a very close eye on them to keep from getting sniped in the end.
Happy hunting!
Update: fixed a few errors in the original post and to note that some retailers that take orders can't or won't fill them before Christmas.
I flew in to SAN Tuesday, just in time to do my (or, more properly, Don Livengood's) session on Rights Management Server. That was a fun session, since I get excited about what RMS can do in terms of making it easier to give iWorkers control over what happens to the work they produce. Lots of good questions. In fact, I was able to share the little-known fact that you can use RMS with Lotus Notes-- 'tis true. More details later. After my session, I had dinner with the staff of Windows IT Pro and several of my fellow authors at Bella Luna. If you happen to go there, try the pear ravioli-- I promise you won't be disappointed.
Yesterday was my big day: I did a webcast for MailFrontier at 9, followed by back-to-back-to-back sessions. All three sessions went well, especially the Exchange security session. Scott Schnoll was kind enough to drop by and demo the new SP2 mobility and remote wipe features. I'm waiting for my JasJar to arrive so I can get some hands-on experience using the EFP (formerly known as the Mobility and Security Feature Pack). I also spent some more time on the show floor, where I had some great conversations with the folks at Cemaphore and a few others. More details when I have more time to write up my impressions. I also had dinner with the Zenprise management team to do some advisory board stuff; oddly enough, we ate at Aqua Blu, which is next door to Bella Luna. I was exhausted after all the talking, so it was nice to get back to the hotel and sit in an absolutely silent room for a while.
Today I have a single session, on connectors and the metabase, then it's home (via SLC and DTW). Interestingly, DL now flies Embraer 170s from SLC-DTW with 6 F seats, so I'm hopeful that I'll score an upgrade. Ill get home late, but earlier than I would if I took the redeye-- and that's a good thing.
It's been a great show so far, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to meet so many readers. The added perspective I gain from talking to admins in all sizes of organization (including the four or five people migrating from Notes that I met yesterday) really helps flesh out my understanding of the issues admins face on a daily basis.
My hosting provider reports that their hosts-- or, more precisely, my blogs-- have been under a comment spamming attack. They've disabled my comments executable until further notice; I'll probably have to either rename it or figure out some way to prevent drive-by comment spams before they're willing to turn it back on.
Update: we've applied some prophylactic changes that will hopefully tamp down the spammers. Comments are now back on.
OK, I admit it; I'm jonesin'.
I've been holding off replacing my 3G 15GB iPod with a newer model. I want more storage space so I can pull pictures from Arlene's camera without having to carry my laptop around (important for our Hawaii trip), and I want to be able to watch and output video. There are Windows Media devices that do this, but so what. Accordingly, I've been waiting to see what Apple's had up its sleeve. The new iPods look good, but it's not clear whether you can transcode video for playback on the iPod yet. Warren Stone reported being able to use Forty-Two DVD-VXPlus to get content into iTunes, but no word on whether that content will work with an iPod.
The other question is whether iTunes itself will transcode, as WMP 10 does. I've heard that the videos and shows for sale on the iTunes Music Store are full-res, but I can't seem to order one at the moment to test it.
Update: this post seems to indicate that the TV episodes for sale are 320x240, and this guy links to a description of how to transcode ReplayTV video to iTunes. There's a similar thread here for TiVos but there's nothing in it so far.
Update: Mark Pilgrim has two guides: one on ripping legally purchased DVDs to the iPod, and one for, er, other content.
Update: Dennis points out that the new iPods don't accept Apple's iPod remote. I use the remote all the time on airplanes and when running, so this is a major flaw IMHO.
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.
BoingBoing has a long profile by Charles Platt of Sam Cohen, the man who invented the neutron bomb. It's on my reading list, though I won't get to it for a while. (I downloaded the PDF file, just to be on the safe side).
Betty's told me several times that she can't leave comments here, so I'm trying to get to the bottom of the problem. Please leave a comment on this post so I can wring the bugs out of my commenting code. Thanks!
This is very cool: a pedometer app that uses Google Maps. Double-click to set your starting point, then double-click to add waypoints. The app automatically tallies your total distance. Of course, you could also use this to plan bike or motorcycle rides, runs, or pretty much any other distance-based activity. Neat!
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 :)
Well, not really, but some guy got the x86 version of Mac OS X to run on his Toshiba M200. John, you should try this when you get a few free minutes.
This week I had to choose between going to TechEd and attending Apple's WWDC. The big WWDC news: Apple will start shipping x86 Macintoshes next year. Wow.
Update: Edited to change the shipping date; Apple is shipping x86 machines starting next year. Also, I've seen several questions in various places asking whether Apple will allow running Mac OS X on other vendors' hardware. Phil Schiller says "heck no" in this interview.
I'm delighted to announce that the Exchange Server Cookbook (which I cowrote with Missy Koslosky, Devin Ganger, and Tom Meunier) is now available from Amazon! It should ship sometime next month... and yes, that is a baboon on the cover.
A couple of weeks ago, AnandTech held a shootout comparing the Dell 2005FPW and the Apple 20" Cinema Display. The reviewer found that the two were largely identical, which isn't surprising since they use the same LCD panel. I don't have a Cinema (and never will, as long as it costs $790+), but I got a 2005FPW this week for about $400, and it rocks. 1680 x 1050 is nice enough, but the display is clear, crisp, sharp, and much brighter than my Samsung 170MP (which in turn was brighter than the old KDS monitor that I bought at Sams' Club back in 2000). Adding the two, my desktop is 2920 x 1024-- just enough for the profusion of windows I always have open.
Week before last, I posted about a problem I was having making Spotlight index SMB volumes. It turns out that Spotlight is indexing the volume just fine, as you can see by using the mdls command to check whether a given file has been indexed. Part of the problem was a misunderstanding on my part: the Spotlight database actually lives in /private/var/db/Spotlight-V100, although there's a separate .Spotlight-V100 directory in each local volume. That directory wasn't present on my SMB volumes, which confused me. It turns out that the real problem is that the Spotlight menu bar extension doesn't search catalogs from network volumes, and neither does the mdfind utility! I might not have figured this out on my own, but this thread at Apple was very instructive.
To test, I created a text file at the root of my SMB directory with the string "Zarahemla" in it. Neither the menu bar nor mdfind would find that file, but the Finder's Find utility did the trick once I told it explicitly to look at /Volumes/work. I can live with this limitation for the time being. A bonus limitation is that indexing is turned off when the volume's unmounted, so I'll have to remember to turn it on each time I remount the volume. C'mon, Apple, fix this in 10.4.2.
Now that I have Tiger installed, I wanted to make Spotlight index the SMB volumes on my Windows Server 2003 file servers. Nope; there's no way in the user interface to tell Tiger what you want it to index. You can exclude certain items (and it looks like you should, at a minimum, exclude the Microsoft User Data folder to keep Spotlight from hammering your Entourage database), but you can't add items... unless you use the command line. Google was useless, but a quick Feedster query turned up these instructions, which I'm now testing (the key is to use the mdutil command to enable the volume for indexing).
Update: these instructions turn on indexing, but no results are ever returned. Ooops.
Devin just got his first OS X machine. I thought I'd make a list of a few helpful tools he might want or need. In no particular order:
- TextWrangler, a powerful but easy-to-use text editor, plus it's free!
- GraphicConverter, a useful tool for editing and converting various graphic file formats.
- WeatherPop: put weather and forecast information right in your menu bar (free for the basic version!)
- ChangeDesktop: automatically updates your desktop background with a random picture, plus it's free
- Huevos: hit a hotkey to search any number of search engines, or customize your own.
- LaunchBar: terrific keyboard application launcher. Not free, but well worth it.
Hitachi has a very funny Flash video called Get Perpendicular that explains their new perpendicular recording technology. If you ever laughed at a Schoolhouse Rock cartoon, go see this now. Great for kids: Matt just asked if we could get a season pass for it.
I can't wait to get one of these! IBM and Sanyo are showing a prototype fuel-cell laptop power station. You put in methanol and get out electricity and water vapor.
I just set up a new radio: an Icom IC-706 Mk II-G. This is a huge improvement over my previous station, which consisted of a single Alinco handie-talkie. The new radio covers VHF, UHF, and HF, so I can use it for ARES traffic and for long-distance communications (once I get an antenna set up, anyway). I still have to mount the control unit to my desk and set up a better speaker; eventually I want to hook the rig to my computer and start running MacLogger with it.
So far, I have to give my new BuckeyeTel service mixed reviews. The good: the phone service works well, with clear audio. I like having voice mail, and I love not paying for long distance or giving SBC any money. The bad: there are several minor annoyances that they're still working on. For example, if I forward my desk phone to my cell, the caller ID on the cell phone shows the number of my desk phone instead of the real number. Every forwarded call thus appears to be from me, which isn't too helpful.
More seriously, my download speeds have fallen to almost zero-- really. My most recent speed test shows 21 kbps down, 43 kbps up. In other words, I'm getting roughly 1/3 the speed of a dial-up modem connection. The last time that happened, two Buckeye techs came out, fiddled with the cable pedestal and my internal wiring, and replaced the modem, which ended up fixing the problem. I called last night and was put on the tier-2 support queue, but so far they haven't called me back. That's not exactly the kind of support I expect for a commercial account. At least my phone's working.
Update: after switching NICs in my ISA Server box, and doing several different variation of voodoo tricks suggested by Buckeye, things are somewhat better.
My installer arrived about 5:30pm. He left about 8pm. In the interim, he got my office phone line working (but not the jack upstairs in Arlene's office). In fairness, I have unusual, and poorly installed, phone wiring, and he was both diligent and patient. The phone service itself seems to work as advertised. However, something (maybe the new Arris Touchstone cable modem/NID?) has sent my download speeds right into the toilet. The best speed I've seen since the installer left is 1046 down/224 up. This is on a line that's rated at 5000 down/512 up. Something's amiss, but I don't know what yet and I'm too busy writing a paper to spend any more time on it-- there's always tomorrow (which, coincidentally, is when my installer is due back to get the other jack on the air).
In my continuing quest to try every single communication service I can find (well, not really, but it sure seems that way), today the BuckeyeTel installer should be here to port my existing office line over to their service. I now pay SBC about $100/month for two lines, plus some features on the first line; Buckeye offers a $40 all-you-can-eat plan that includes long distance (bye bye, Qwest), voice mail, and a bunch of other features that I'm now paying extra for. Actually, it's $44 since I no longer have cable, but who's counting.
They're not officially offering service in Perrysburg yet, but they have a "friends and family" program, and Jason was kind enough to hook me up. I've generally been pretty pleased with their other services, and although I have no beef with the quality of SBC's phone service, their customer service has been spotty, and their prices... well, let's not go there. Now, if I could just get Vonage to port over my home phone number I'd be in business.
Don't want an iPod? No problem; for $30 you can play MP3 files in your car, using any USB memory stick. Where can you get this magical device? How about (drum roll).... WalMart! Yep, the VR3 MP3 FM modulator (link) takes files off a flash drive and plays them. No word on whether it works well or not, but it's a cool, and cheap, idea.
After mulling it over, I decided to sign up for Amazon Prime; after seeing Omar's analysis, I figured that I too was already spending more than $6.58/month on Amazon shipping, and that I could use Amazon to order a couple of Valentine's Day gifts for Arlene. Unfortunately, I couldn't sign up! I completed the initial signup process and got a confirmation mail, but there's no evidence that I'm signed up on their site. When I click the Prime link in the "manage your account" section, I get an error message. I called them to report the problem, and they acknowledge that they're having a "technical issue" with new Prime subscriptions. Oops. That means it's off to do my V-day shopping the old-fashioned way...
Julie and Paul kindly gave me an iPod dock for Christmas. I was all excited about hooking it up, until I noticed the sticker on the box that said "only for iPods with the Click Wheel". Mine's a third-generation unit (it has the row of 4 buttons under the screen), so I went hunting for a dock that would work with a 3G and struck out-- except for eBay. I couldn't find anyone else who actually sold the correct Apple part number for the third-generation dock. After a little more experimentation, I found that the 3G iPod fits just fine in the "Click Wheel" dock, provided you use the little plastic cover marked "20GB". This may not work for every 3G unit, but I'm happily charging mine as I write this. Thanks, Julie and Paul!
Update: so, I was obviously on Dristan when I wrote the above. The iPod fits in the dock, but it's a little too thick to actually engage the dock connector all the way; thus, it wouldn't charge. I ended up getting a dock/remote/case combo on eBay, so live is good.
When I was about David's age, my mom taught English at Vanderbilt Catholic High School in Houma. She gave me a wonderful science fiction anthology that was actually an English textbook. I don't know if it was used at VCHS as a textbook (I rather doubt it) but it had some wonderful stories. I lost it a long time ago and have occasionally tried to find another copy, but I couldn't remember the title. Back in 1993, I asked readers of the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup to help identify a few of the stories that I did remember, and that gave me a few author/title combinations. This morning, I had to idea to search for the title of one story, Fritz Leiber's "X Marks the Pedwalk". That led me to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (hosted by Texas A&M), the SF equivalent of the IMDB. From there, it was only about two minutes' work to find the book: Leo P. Kelley's Themes in Science Fiction-- and then about 90 seconds later, a used copy was in my Amazon.com shopping cart. Yay for the Internet!
Hey, Bob, two notes on your recent journal entries. Actually, these pertain to the 3 other people who read this blog, too.
First, please start using RSS. It's so much easier for you, and it's incomparably better for your readers. I monitor about 200 RSS feeds, which are automatically fed into an Outlook folder by NewsGator. That gives me powerful searching and aggregation, flagging, an easy way to mail selected items to people, access via Outlook, Outlook Web Access, NNTP, or IMAP, and tons of other features. I could go on rhapsodizing, but a better idea is for you to snag an RSS client and start experimenting with it. Publishing static HTML pages for daily journals is no longer the best way to do it, and I'll be happy to help you and Dr Pournelle move forward in any way I can.
Second, family history. Arlene and I just took a terrific class at church on how to use the free Personal Ancestral FIle software to organize your genealogical data. This is an ideal way to capture the data you already have; PAF lets you intermix pictures, text notes, source data (e.g. where you found out that your great-great-uncle Fred was a horse thief), and family history data. It has a wealth of capabilities that I'm ill-equipped to explain, but one thing I do know is that it can automatically print a book with pages for each family member, including photos and text as appropriate. Really slick. You might also poke around on FamilySearch.org; I was easily able to find Dirk Volkertsen and his wife. By all means, you should capture as much of this information as you can and post it. I promise you that it will be worthwhile, and that you'll find out things about your family you wouldn't have otherwise suspected.
Julie and Paul kindly gave me an iPod dock for Christmas. I was all excited about hooking it up, until I noticed the sticker on the box that said "only for iPods with the Click Wheel". Mine's a third-generation unit (it has the row of 4 buttons under the screen), so I went hunting for a dock that would work with a 3G and struck out-- except for eBay. I couldn't find anyone else who actually sold the correct Apple part number for the third-generation dock. After a little more experimentation, I found that the 3G iPod fits just fine in the "Click Wheel" dock, provided you use the little plastic cover marked "20GB". This may not work for every 3G unit, but I'm happily charging mine as I write this. Thanks, Julie and Paul!
A simple idea, brilliantly executed: Cooking for Engineers. (Special for Julie: the lead article at the moment is a test recipe for giblet-pan gravy. Mmmm, giblets....) The preparation diagrams are very, very useful, at least to a cooking n00b like me.
I have re-enabled comments, with the added requirement that you use TypeKey (which, fortunately, is free). As soon as I can get MT-Blacklist to work properly, I'll enable unregistered comments, but for now you'll need to sign in before commenting. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Well, the move isn't 100% complete; I still have to install MT-Blacklist, tweak the CSS, and do a few other things of that nature. However, I'm well on schedule to give pair the boot by month's end.
Amazon is offering the Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone for a net payment of $25, e.g. you get a new phone plus $25. I played with one of these for a few minutes at the AT&T store in Ann Arbor last week, and it's a very impressive device. The screen is brilliant and crisp, and the phone is much smaller and lighter than my trusty 7135. It also features Bluetooth, which would be extremely useful for wireless headsets and for tying to my laptop. (It also has some other cool features, like Windows Media Player 10, that I probably wouldn't use). I have a few concerns, though.
First, I'm very used to entering text with a stylus; I've had a Palm for about seven years now. I don't do a lot of text entry-- mostly just appointments and such, so I think (but am not sure) that I'd be OK with using T9 on the phone keypad, but I won't really know that until I have a chance to try it.
Second, I've been very satisfied with Verizon's wireless coverage, both here and when I travel. I don't know how good AT&T's local coverage is, because I don't know anyone here who has it, but (at least to me) it doesn't matter how good the phone is if I can't make or receive calls when I want to.
Next, it would mean going back to Outlook for syncing, instead of Entourage. That's a problem because I often use Entourage to create notes and tasks while working, and Entourage can't sync them with my Exchange server. That might be a deal-breaker. There are at least two Mac sync utilities for Windows Mobile devices: Missing Sync (which explicitly says it doesn't support the SMT5600) and PocketMac (which, I've been told, has stability and support difficulties).
Finally, I'd have to replace some of the applications I now use. This probably isn't a big deal, since most of them are games, but there are a few (like TikTok and Directory Assistant) don't seem to have Windows Mobile counterparts. I'm also comfortable with the way DateBk5 integrates calendar and to-do data, and I don't know if the mobile version of Outlook has similar features. In fact, it's not even clear to me if you can install third-party apps on these devices; it seems to vary by carrier.
So, if you're reading this and a) you use AT&T, b) you have an SMT5600, or c) you work for the MacBU, feel free to leave comments answering the above points :)
Update 1: turns out that Windows Mobile doesn't natively support Outlook notes anyway. There's at least one third-party app (SmartphoneNotes) that does, but I don't know if it works on the AT&T phones. Update 2: Two of my 3sharp coworkers wrote to say that AT&T coverage in our Redmond office is poor, so that's a minus. On the other hand, the Windows IT Pro people want an article on Exchange ActiveSync, for which I need a device, so it looks like I'll get one and take advantage of AT&T's 30-day trial period. I found solutions for managing tasks and notes on the Smartphone, so if I can resolve the sync difficulties I should be golden.
Thanks to the brain surgeons at SIxApart and Pair Networks, my MovableType upgrade has quickly gone off into the weeds.
- Pair's resource limits are killing the mt-upgrade30 script before it can finish, so there are no comments.
- All my comments disappeared because the upgrade script can't put them in the new format
- MT-Blacklist doesn't work, in no small part because of its terrible documentation, but also because Pair doesn't give enough detail in their error logs for me to figure out what's broken
- Some part of the upgrade ate all my CSS, so my layouts have reverted to standard.
I'll get it fixed eventually. In the meantime, please be patient.
Now I know what Thomas is going to want for Christmas: a hyopallergenic cat. Allerca is busy "working to produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats". They're trying to suppress the gene that expresses a protein called Fel d 1, which is actually what most cat-allergic people react to. It turns out that different breeds of cat produce different amounts of Fel d 1, but I don't know which breeds make the least (or most; this page lists a few breeds, none of which I've ever heard of). I did find one cite that said that female cats make much less than males do-- good to know.
Anyway, Allerca will sell you a hypoallergenic cat-- assuming they figure out how to suppress the gene-- for a mere $3,500, with a $250 deposit due now. Perhaps Thomas would rather have something else.
This is extremely cool! Worldwind is a live, 3D Earth globe with satellite and topographic data, backed by an extensive place names database. The zooming and panning effects are pretty neat on my laptop; tonight I'll hook it up to the projector and show the boys. (Not coincidentally, it's also a great example of what a Windows smart client should be).
As I mentioned on the other blog, Mac Office 2004 SP1 released today.
Excellent! Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2004. I haven't found a list of fixes yet, and I'm away from my Mac so I can't download it to try it out. It's supposed to be available via the Microsoft AutoUpdate tool or directly from the MS Mac page.
PalmOne hasn't announced it yet, but the new Treo 650 might very well be my ideal phone: it has the 320x320 screen I've been lusting after since Arlene got her Tungsten E, plus a thumb keyboard, plus Bluetooth, plus a camera. Best of all, it has Exchange ActiveSync. Various sources differ on which carriers will support it when it ships; Engadget says that Verizon will carry it, and over at TreoCentral there are several posts on Sprint and T-Mobile availability.
Continue reading Time for a new phone? Outlook unclear.
Jon Udell has a very, very cool bookmarklet: click a button while visiting Amazon (or any other page that contains an ISBN in its URL) and automatically request the book from your local public library. (Way Public Library uses iPac as their catalog system, so that's the button to pick on Jon's page). What a great piece of work!
Last night, my inbound connectivity failed. As near as I can tell, the last inbound message spotted by the mail filter was at 2348, so let's say the outage started around then. This morning, I called Buckeye as soon as I got up and noticed the outage. "No, Perrysburg is up. I'd have noticed a lot of calls if it were down," said the support tech. He promised to call me back by 0830, which of course he didn't do. When I called them back at 0915, lo and behold: Perrysburg is down, with no ETA for a fix. I called my sales rep to see whether this is expected support practice. I'm definitely wondering if I should go back to Speakeasy, even though it is twice as expensive.
Update: they did fix it about five minutes ago, and Mark was kind enough to call me and let me know that it had been fixed. Apparently the Perrysburg router failed.
So, to my dismay I found out that Buckeye doesn't support voice-over-IP. I plugged in my Vonage box and got nothing but dead air, so I called their tech support and got the bad news. Apparently they're testing it at a limited number of sites, and I'm asking them to add me to the test group. This may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that Buckeye Telesystem is an ILEC here in town, or that they've partnered with VoEx. Still, I really don't like the idea that my service provider is filtering the protocols I can use. Their job is to sell me connectivity, not to decide how I use that connectivity. This isn't a problem I ever had with Speakeasy, so perhaps I was hasty to switch away from them.
Update: As I noted in the comments, Buckeye does support Vonage. The problem was with my Vonage hardware (and, of course, with their technician making stuff up). I had a very pleasant conversation with Corinne Jensen of Buckeye Telesystem. She told me that what they're actually testing is residential voice service, not using VoIP, to compete with SBC. I said "sign me up!" but it's only available to employees at present. So, now it's all good.
You'd think that I would have learned my lesson after my earlier post about free Xboxes, but nooo...
Lately I've been getting 5-10 spams a week for freeipods.com. The claim is that you can get a completely free iPod Mini (or 20GB, or 250 iTunes Music Store songs) for free. The deal is supposedly that you sign up with their service and complete one of their "offers", ranging from the onerous (signing up for a GM Card credit card) to the simple (registering at eBay and bidding on something). Once you've done that, you have to get five friends or family members to complete one of the offers, and voila! goodies for you. I was reading Engadget the other day and saw that, lo and behold, freeipods.com is actually legit. What really confirmed it for me was seeing the conga line on FlyerTalk, plus this article.
Naturally, I signed up-- I mean, who wouldn't? My 15GB iPod is nice but has no headphones, dock, or remote, and the newer units are cooler :) This falls squarely into the "why not" category. Now all I need is some referrals. The process is very simple:
- Drop by the freeipods site
- Sign up for one of the offers. The eBay offer is free and doesn't require a credit card or other obnoxiousness. I signed up for AOL for Broadband because AOL, although annoying, is reputable, and I know they'll cancel my free trial account when I ask them to.
- You'll get your own referral link. Get five of your friends, relatives, blog readers, or random street people to sign up using your referral link. (Feel free to post your referral link in the comments, too!)
- Wait for the UPS man to bring your iPod.
This is the best description I've ever seen of Apple's product development cycle.
Busy few days here at the ranch. I got a DCT6100 from Buckeye for their HD service, had them come out and install a cable modem (3.5Mb/s down, 384Kb/s up, at half the cost of my 1.1Mb/s up/down SDSL from Speakeasy), and just got done flattening and rebuilding my firewall box with ISA Server 2004. The most remarkable aspect of these changes is that so far, they've all gone flawlessly (except for a bad cable box, which was easy enough to fix). The boys and I are looking forward to watching Robbie Knievel's big jump in HD on Saturday.
Update: this morning, no Internet when I awoke. Turns out that, contrary to the installer's advice, the NIC connected to the cable modem must not be set to DHCP. Oops.
Penton Media owns two of the magazines I regularly write for: Windows & .NET Magazine and the Exchange and Outlook Administrator newsletter. While at the grain elevator yesterday, I learned that Penton also publishes Occupational Hazards. Now there's my kind of magazine!
I have two Gmail invitations available. Who wants 'em?
I've got to draw a bunch of diagrams for a document I'm working on. Normally, I'd use Visio, but the machine I normally use for Windows Office stuff is down, and RDP'ing to my laptop is deathly slow for some reason. I thought I'd try ConceptDraw on the Mac, since it claims to be able to import and export Visio drawings. My experience so far has been mixed: the one diagram I drew with ConceptDraw looks fine when I export it to a PNG, but it's in grayscale when I use their converter to turn it into a Visio file. That won't do; as an extra penalty, the objects are slightly different sizes. I've observed the same problem when converting Visio drawings to ConceptDraw, so I guess this may not be as seamless a solution as I'd hoped.
Update: another problem: ConceptDraw won't export a graphics file to an SMB volume, meaning I can't put the PNG-format file I need for Word into the share where all the rest of my files are. That's also not good.
Richard Seaman has some astonishingly good pictures of SpaceShipOne on his photoblog.
This week is Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference, and they're pulling out all the stops to introduce Mac OS X "Tiger". Here's a snapshot that arrived in my mailbox earlier today.
I have Vonage and generally like it pretty well. Call quality is generally good, and their web-based dashboard is a slick way to keep track of missed calls, voicemails, and so on. However, a question from a former co-worker got me to thinking-- he asked how Vonage handles 911 calls. The answer is a little scary-- they route 911 calls to the local public safety answering point (PSAP) if you tell Vonage where their phone box is (so they have the physical address) and if you activate that line for 911. Fair enough, I suppose. The scary part is that your 911 call goes to the standard number at the PSAP, not the dedicated 911 lines that are answered 24/7. In Perrysburg's case, that means that the call would go to the police non-emergency number. Since we're a small city, that's probably OK because the call volume is fairly low, but for a larger city that might not be so great. Vonage explains all this in their terms of service, but not as prominently as I might like. For us, it's OK because we've also got two wired lines and two cellphones in the house, but this would definitely be a showstopper for using Vonage as a single-phone solution.
Continue reading Vonage and 911.
W00t. Thanks to my friends over at BackupBrain, I now have a gmail account. It's too early to tell if the search features are useful, since I don't have a corpus of mail there.
Alex Salkever of BusinessWeek covered the AirPort Express in his column, but there were a few things in it that I found puzzling.
First, and biggest, he wrote:
A new piece of software, AirTunes, promises seamless synching between a computer -- PC or Mac -- and any Wi-Fi-ready speakers within range via the Express router... Alternatively, you can buy a wireless connection kit and plug a stereo directly into an Express to connect it to a desktop with a Wi-Fi card.
Actually, the AirPort Express (or the “AirPortable”, as I’ve taken to calling it) has two audio outputs built in: a digital output for S/PDIF and a mini-jack. If you have conventional powered speakers, you just plug ‘em in. You can use the S/PDIF output to plug the unit in to your stereo or A/V receiver, too. Apple does sell a connection kit, but it’s nothing more than some (overpriced) Monster audio cables. While there may be vendors selling “Wi-Fi-ready speakers” (I couldn't find any but admittedly I didn't look very hard) I’m not sure that’s the target device Apple has in mind.
Another nit: AirTunes doesn’t synch anything to anywhere. It merely encrypts and streams the currently playing iTunes selection and sends it, using Rendezvous, to the selected AirPort Express. Saying “seamless synching” implies that your music library is synced to the Express device.
Next, the article doesn't mention one of the really cool features of the Express device: it can extend the range of an existing AirPort Extreme base station by acting as a wireless bridge (similar to the trusty Linksys WET-11). This is a killer feature, since a) it's trivial to grow your network range by plugging one in and b) it only works with AirPort Extreme base stations-- thus helping to justify their inflated price.
Apple's new AirPort Express gadget is very cool (hey, maybe I'll get one for Fathers' Day.. hmm..) However, I can't tell if it works with generic 802.11g base stations or only with AirPort Extreme units. I have a Linksys 802.11g station now and would prefer not to replace it just so I can use one of these.
Yesterday's paper had a big ad for a Toshiba "S810" tablet, along with a prominent splash that said to visit bestbuy.com/ToshibaS810. That's a dead link, of course; a little Googling reveals that they probably meant the M205-S810, which is identical to my M200 except that it comes with an external DVD-R/CD-RW drive (well, and it's $250 less than what I paid, but who's counting?) This is kind of an embarrassing mistake to make, though-- I wonder if the "S810" labeling was national or just in our region?
I just got a press release from the fine folks at Scaled Composites. Their SpaceShipOne vehicle is scheduled for its attempt at the X Prize on June 21! I'll be at Camp Bloch, or else I'd be on a plane to the desert (with, of course, press credentials). An excerpt from the FAQ:
Q: Are cameras permitted?
A: Yes.Q: Who is invited?
A: Everyone, especially children. They will want to tell their children that they were there to see the event that triggered the industry of private space tourism.Q: Are pets allowed?
A: Only in accordance with strict leash laws.
Update: I'm a moron. This isn't an X Prize attempt because it's not carrying enough mass. I suspect that it's preparation for a prize attempt, though: if they can launch on 6/21 and then show a quick enough turnaround that should indicate that they're ready for a full-up attempt.
Omar Shahine (who just moved to Hotmail, woo hoo!) posted a great tip for the Toshiba M200: tell Windows that you're using a 120 dot-per-inch screen. It works great, although the ugly resampled icons in the QuickLaunch bar take a little getting used to.
This is a very cool little applet: it shows you which of your Xbox Live friends are online at any given time, and it can optionally alert you when someone's playing a particular game. Now I can find out the best times to, er, take a break. Yeah, that's the ticket. (Additionally, it uses the .NET Framework, so maybe that'll be enough to get the author some Scoble-style link-lovin'). Note that it still has a few minor bugs, but it's still quite cool.
Woo hoo! Burt Rutan does it again: 'SpaceShipOne' becomes first privately funded vehicle to break through earth's atmosphere. It's about time. My money's on him to win the X Prize. Private spaceflight can't possibly come soon enough to suit me.
Today I'm headed for the world's largest geek fest: the Dayton Hamvention. Hopefully radio lust won't get the better of me...
I'm speaking today at Enterprise Messaging Decisions 2004. This is actually my first day trip in a while. When I lived in Huntsville, it was possible to fly out at 0530 or 0630, change planes in Atlanta, and make it to pretty much anywhere by noon-- enough time for a meeting or presentation-- and then get home again around 11pm. In Toledo, that's just not happening because of Delta's flight schedule ex Cincinnati. So, since EMD is in Chicago, I'm going to drive-- should be fun. Here's the slide deck.
Wow, this is really cool: a new version of iTunes! Besides an RSS feed of the top 10 songs in the iTunes Music Store, there are a ton of new features:
- You can authorize your songs for playback on five machines, not just three
- You can rip CDs using a new lossless codec
- You can see playlists from radio stations, in your area or elsewhere. (Note to Apple and XM: this would be a killer feature for XM Radio, too!)
- a spiffy new "Party Shuffle" mode that improves over the standard shuffle mode by letting you see what songs will be played in what order
Oh yes, one other thing: a converter that can change Windows Media .wma files into Apple's AAC format. Very, very cool. More details here (and while you're at it, check out Jim Heid's newest edition of The Macintosh iLife).
I'm on several lists of press people, thanks to my magazine columns. That means I get lots of press releases, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Today's is probably the most interesting one I've ever gotten: turns out that 26-30 April is National Battery Check Week (the 6th annual celebration, no less!) The press release calls it "a national call-to-action that encourages consumers to check the rechargeable batteries that power their cordless products, and if they can no longer hold a charge, to recycle them". This is undoubtedly a great idea, given what's in the batteries: cadmium, nickel, lithium, and so on, none of which you want in your bloodstream or organs. Home Depot, Lowe's, and other major retailers have put out battery-recycling boxes; the press release also mentions that ReCellular is working with them on a nationwide effort to recycle old cellphones, which are then refurbished and resold (a portion of the profits go to charity).
The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation is behind this celebration of portable electrical goodness; oddly, their home page makes no mention of what should by rights be a national holiday. On the other hand, they do have a picture of Richard Karn on their page, so it's not a total waste of electrons. They also have commercials and a school lesson plan that you can download. Who would have guessed there was so much recycling goodness just a few clicks away? (Note to the flacks who sent me the release: next time, send it before the week starts, would ya?)
TechEdBloggers.net is back again this year. I enjoyed last year's edition; it was cool to see TechEd through the perspective of other speakers and attendees, especially folks who got to go to some of the many sessions I missed out on. To keep things simple, I'm going to post all of my TechEd-related stuff over at Exchange Security, but if anything interesting or exciting happens I'll back-link it here.
You've heard of weather radios before, but this is way cooler. A small company called WxWorx has a really cool weather radio: it uses the XM Radio satellite system (which I'm listening to right now) to download real-time NEXRAD radar and a host of other data, including stuff for pilots (METARs, PIREPs, winds aloft, SIGMETS/AIRMETS, etc) and boaters (buoy data, wave height and direction, etc.). Both varieties integrate with GPS units, so you can get a real-time plot of weather over a terrain map, route chart, maritime chart, or topo map. Very slick. All you need is a laptop or Tablet PC, their XM data receiver, and $50/month.
This is very cool: Skype for Wifi-enabled Pocket PCs. It only works with WiFi-enabled devices; if you only have GPRS, you can use IM but you can't make voice calls. However, when it's working, it more or less gives you a free WiFi-based cell phone. Pretty slick.
The University of Louisiana-Lafayette has a team in the DARPA Grand Challenge: Team CajunBot. The goal: build a vehicle that can drive itself, with no human intervention, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. (Be sure to check out Clotile, their mascot). Their team journal is here-- I'll be following it regularly.
Edward Tufte has a terrific new information visualization concept: sparklines, small word-like graphs that compress data into easily readable trends without using measurement units. This makes me want to write some code.
I finally got my Vonage kit the other day, so I installed it and started using it. My first impression: wow! Setup was very easy, and the web-based interface works well, making it easy to see call details and change settings. I have a two-line desk phone, so I unplugged my business line (which forwards to my cell) to use the Vonage adapter instead. Call quality has been quite good, with an occasional pop or crackle. Because I have an integrated DSL modem/router, I can't install the Vonage box as the first "upstream" device. Doing so allows the box to do quality-of-service metering to reserve enough bandwidth for phone calls. I'll have to live with it. On the other hand, I love having a Redmond phone number, and the money we'll save from having calls between me and people in Redmond will quickly outweigh the $15/month. So, call me (425/818-0484), and let me know if you're interested in signing up for Vonage-- if I refer you, we each get a free month of service.
I sent my Fossil Abacus watch in to get the fix for its worrisome susceptibility to static. I mailed it via Priority Mail on 2/23, and I got it back a week later-- not bad, considering that it had to be mailed out and UPS Ground-ed back. I apparently got a new watch, since I had to re-register it. The little nicks and scratches on the old watch were gone. An overnight charge and I was back in business! (Except for one minor nit: I got a bunch of stale news flashes from 2/17, 2/18, and 2/20). I'm impressed with how fast and easy the return & repair process was, especially for a $129 piece of consumer electronics. For most gadgets in that price range, it'd probably be easier to just get a new one from Best Buy than to jump through the manufacturer's hoops.
After seeing Scoble point it out, I found this very cool article at Jeff Sandquist's blog. Imagine playing golf with a bunch of MS and vendor folks… on the Xbox. What a great idea! (Personally, I'm waiting for a similar group to play a game I actually can compete at, but that's a minor quibble.)
This is an extremely cool feature of the Motorola MPx-200:
The Automatic profile switches between the Normal profile and the Meeting profile when the calendar indicates that the current time is busy.
In other words: your phone will automatically know not to ring during a meeting! How cool is that?
I just signed up for Vonage's voice-over-IP service. Why? For $15 a month, I am now a local call to Redmond; I spend more than that on combined cell airtime and long distance service (not to mention the cost of having coworkers call me). Until I get the little box they use to do the VoIP conversion, I have my new number forwarded to my cell phone, but in a week or so I should be live. (And no, Mossberg's favorable column had nothing to do with it!)
Ever wonder how to make your own custom "page not found" page appear? Dave Taylor has a tutorial that gives some examples, some of which are pretty funny.
I'm testing Ecto (née Kung-Log) to see how it works. So far, it's quite slick.
It's not often that I just can't parse an article in the Wall Street Journal. However, I was baffled by an article in yesterday's edition about a company named Culturecom. The article, by Evan Ramstad, claims that Culturecom has "found a way to put Asian characters in a position to command binary code... because instructions inside chips are written in English, Asian-language input and output must contain layers of translation". I'm not sure what Mr. Ramstad is getting at; from looking at Culturecom's page, it looks like Culturecom has an x86-compatible CPU that includes a Chinese-language character generator. Given Culturecom's previous announcements, this seems likely. While an impressive feat, this isn't the same as making the CPU start executing instructions in Pinyin or ideograms. I'd love to know if I've missed a detail, though; the article doesn't help, since it doesn't make any mention of whether Culturecom has also ported compilers, editors, debuggers, and so on to use the new CPU. I've asked Mr. Ramstad to comment; maybe he can shed some light on what's really up with this.
The Exchange team now has a group blog: You Had Me at EHLO. Recommended reading.
I am totally infatuated with my new XM PCR-- a little XM radio receiver that plugs into the USB port on your computer. I've liked the idea of satellite radio since I first heard about it, but I spend very little time in the car, so there's not much point in buying a car unit. This, however, puts the music where I can listen to it: in my office.
There's a Mac control program called MacXM that lets you change channels, see a song list, and even set filters so you get alerts when selected songs are playing, no matter what channel you're on. (Plus, I now have the source code!) This might be a neat vehicle for me to brush up on my dormant programming skills, except that MacXM already does everything I want to do.
Audio quality is excellent, even though the antenna is looking out of my basement window. Since my Mac doesn't have a line-in port, I had to order a Griffin iMic; until it gets here, I can listen to the computer or the radio, but not both. I can also use AudioHijack to record an XM stream as an MP3 file; combine that with filters, and you've got an easy way to record songs or programs, even with a timer. That will probably come in handy.
The radio was only $49; at that price, I'm delighted! My only complaint is that XM doesn't seem to carry NPR, although Sirius has it on their service. On the other hand, Sirius doesn't sell a computer-controlled radio, so there you go.
Very cool news: Microsoft is releasing the source code for Allegiance, their multi-player space combat game. The game is a few years old, but it's still cool, and it's exciting to imagine how the game might be extended.
I've been so busy with evaluating my second-least-favorite software product that I haven't had time to post here much. A few notes:
- Betty and Julie snuck into town to surprise Mom on her birthday. Boy, was she surprised! It was great to see them both, too.
- Steve McConnell has an update to his seminal book on software craftsmanship, Code Complete. If I was still a developer, I'd be badgering my teammates to read the new version, since it's online now. Amazon doesn't list the updated edition yet.
- The Exchange Cookbook project is slowly gathering steam. I set up a web site for it, but there's no real content there yet. I hope to get O'Reilly's permission to post draft chapters and scripts there as we go along.
- Thomas wants me to tell his best jokes to all my friends. So, here goes. Q: When do astronauts eat?
A: At launchtime
Thanks to an indirect tip from Scoble, I found this cool page of presentation tips. Even though they're awfully tech-y, they're valuable for even non-technical presenters. Case in point: I once had to extemporize about 15 minutes of my presentation when the big video projector died. I was able to because I'd thoroughly prepared; the alternative would have been for the audience to throw spitballs and chatter among themselves while we all waited for the AV guy to get it fixed. John, take particular note since you'll be showing code at TechEd.
On the one hand, Shel Israel writes an interesting account of his VIP tour of the Computer Museum in Santa Clara. On the other, Scott Knaster points to a very cool new site, Folklore.org, for people to post their first-hand stories of involvement with development of new technologies. The first story posted, natch, is about Andy Hertzfeld's involvement with the design of the original Apple Macintosh. Great reading. Now, if we can just figure out some way to get lots more stories preserved there, David and I will have something fun to read together. I'd particularly like to see Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky (Palm Pilot), Dave Cutler and some folks from his team (Windows NT 3.1), and anyone from the TiVo team post their stories.
Last week, I tried to clean up some of the Toshiba-supplied junque on my M200. For example, at boot the system loads a half-dozen or so programs that have no discernible value for me (like the Panasonic DVD-RAM driver). I started uninstalling things and quickly found that I'd broken the ability to switch between the external and internal display ports. I was able to fix that (about an hour before I went on stage on Tuesday), but I also noticed that the "rotate" button wasn't working: when I flipped the screen, it would automatically rotate, but pressing the button that's supposed to rotate the screen in 90-degree increments didn't work. The button itself worked physically (e.g. I could make other things happen with it), but it wouldn't do what I wanted. I fiddled, and reinstalled drivers, and finally yelled for help on an internal Microsoft email list for tablet users. (Of course, I can't actually join the list because it's only for employees, not contractors... bah.) Anyway, the response I got included a forwarded note from a Toshiba support engineer, and it unveiled the mystery:
When in tablet mode and the unit is rotated, the system will NOT automatically reorient the display. This requires that the Tablet Rotation Button be utilized (see graphic). By first orienting the display as desired, then pressing and holding the Display Rotation Button for 1-2 seconds, the display will change to match the new orientation.
So, the trick is to turn the computer to the orientation you want, and then press the button. Works every time. I was pressing the button and then turning the unit. I was expecting to be able to mash the button repeatedly to change to the desired orientation. This is poorly documented at best, especially since its contrary (but superior) to the way the rotate button works on other devices, like the Acer C1xx series.
In no particular order, a few SPOT features I'd like to see:
- Make weather for my custom cities appear in the "glance" channel.
- When I set up a travel date, make my home city weather appear in the "my cities" page on the weather channel. After all, MSN knows where my normal home city is.
- Add the ability to send IMs to the watch from the Mac MSN Messenger client. Several folks I know at MS have made this same suggestion to both the SPOT and Mac Messenger teams, but it's apparently rather a lot of work, so I don't know if this is going to happen.
- Provide better management of downloaded watch faces (lots of people have asked for this)
- Allow me to get alerts for flight delays on the watch. I'd pay extra for this.
- Offer a premium newswire service, with e.g. business news from Dow Jones. I'd pay extra for this, provided that the latency was still acceptable.
If you've got specific features you'd like to see added or change, list them in the comments, and I'll forward it on to the SPOT team.
Toshiba's been touting the fact that the M200 has a dual-axis accelerometer that lets the computer sense what physical orientation you have it in. I couldn't figure out how to enable the sensor, but it turns out that you need to download a tool from Toshiba to enable it.
A weird experience last night: while I was at Elder-Beerman, my watch went totally dead. It spontaneously revived about 15 minutes later. A couple of folks on SPOTstop have reported the same problem, but no consensus on a cause yet. It only seems to affect the Fossil Abacus watch, which I bought in large part because of its $129 price-- the next-closest watch is $50 more, but maybe they spent that $50 on better ESD shielding. At this rate, the watch won't survive long enough for Thomas to inherit it when I die.
And, as long as I'm pointing out the inexplicable: for some reason, I don't get weather for any city other than Toledo, even though I have New Orleans and Seattle listed as cities for which I want weather. The weather updates for Toledo arrive like they should (and boy, is it good to know that it's 10 outside with a stiff wind), so this may just be a temporary glitch. Omar Shahine of Microsoft has a good review of MSN Direct's performance in the Bay Area; it's worth a read too.
Robbie Allen, who wrote the Active Directory Cookbook and is the editor for the Exchange Cookbook, also has a blog.
Mike Wendland blogs about whining from Ambient Devices: they want Microsoft to open the DirectBand network (which MSN Direct and SPOT use) to anyone who wants to transmit over it. Ambient makes some (actually rather cool) devices that receive data over a variety of existing networks (including pager and GPRS). However, they don't like it that, after spending tons of money on building DirectBand, Microsoft isn't eager to let them use it. Fancy that. Alan Reiter calls DirectBand a walled garden, and perhaps it is, but there's no alternative technology that meets the price, size, and power consumption constraints that MS faced-- given those limits, it was FM subcarrier or nothing, and I don't think it's fair to criticize them for not opening the network they built to J. Random Competitor.
From the "they'll have to catch me first" department, Mike Strock points out this article on Gizmodo. Since SPOT watches have an FM radio receiver, they're verboten for inflight use.
Here's a move I didn't expect: Microsoft has released version 3.5 of its Services for UNIX (SFU) package, for free. SFU won an award at LinuxWorld 2003, and it's obviously in contention to win at this year's show. SFU 3.5 includes an NFS server (cluster-aware and capable of running on Windows Server 2003), a gateway, and a client, plus a NIS/NIS+ synchronization server. My favorite feature, though, is the Interix subsystem, which includes ksh, csh, pthreads support, and the full GNU SDK. You get all of the standard UNIX commands, for Windows, for free. Get it now.
Just arrived from Amazon: Lissoir's Understanding WMI Scripting and Microsoft's Windows 2000 Scripting Guide.
This is a big week for technology here at la casa. First, we have MacWorld San Franscisco, during which Steve Jobs announced... nothing much. Sure, the new mini iPod is cool, but for $50 more you get four (or more) times the storage by stepping up to the $299 15GB model. The new versions of the iLife apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, and iMovie) may or may not be worth $49, since at this point no one knows if they'll be downloadable for previous purchasers. Frankly, I'm about ready to dump iPhoto because it's slow and because it can't print properly to Arlene's Kodak photo printer dock. Let's just say the jury is out. None of the other rumored announcements came to pass.
Next up: the 8 January press conference in which TiVo is expected to announce their new combined HDTV satellite receiver/TiVo unit. Since it already won an award this is a pretty safe bet, but I'm ready to preorder one and switch to DirecTV.
The third item: Microsoft's SPOT watches will finally go on sale. Arlene tried to give me one for Christmas, but there was no way to buy one. Now, at last, there will be. With a little luck, I'll be able to grab one in the MS company store this week.
This is very cool: a PocketPC Phone that folds up, sort of like a Tablet PC. It addresses my big beef with the Smartphone models from Motorola and Samsung-- no touch screen-- by folding up and over like the Clie UX series. Pretty sweet.
This is pretty cool: people have figured out how to use GM's OnStar hardware as a standalone GPS receiver. (See this site for some samples). To me, the real value of the OnStar service are its emergency-notification features, but having free driving directions and so forth would sure be handy too. It almost makes me willing to consider buying a GM product. Almost, I said.
I got my M200 yesterday, courtesy of CDW. I didn't get a chance to play with it much, and I forgot the AC adapter in Redmond, so my time with it has been limited. However, I've used it enough to form a few first impressions:
- The screen is not as sharp or crisp as the screen on my T30 or T40, nor is it as sharp as the 1024x768 screen on my old PowerBook G3. Compounding the problem, Toshiba ships the unit with a default wallpaper with lots of light colors and subtle gradations that a) makes the screen look worse and b) is ugly in se. Having said that, the extra resolution is quite nice.
- The keyboard has an excellent, snappy feel to it. Some of the key arrangements are odd (e.g. the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed relative to the Thinkpads, and the tilde is next to the space bar instead of up next to the 1). This will take some getting used to.
- The built-in 802.11b has a hardware on/off switch-- a little slider on the left-hand side of the case. Nice feature for those of us who travel on airplanes.
- Perceived speed is quite good; even though this machine has a Pentium M 1.5 and my Thinkpad has a 1.6 (with more RAM), it boots faster.
- Toshiba installs a bunch of crap on the default desktop (including demo versions of TabletPlanner and Zinio, the Office XP Tablet Pack, etc). However, they also include the full version of OneNote, WinDVD, and a drag-and-drop CD burning tool (these last two are superfluous for me since this machine doesn't have an optical drive). IT does make the desktop look awfully cluttered.
- There are three little rubber feet at the frontmost edge of the palmrest. These are obviously here to keep screen marks off, which is nice. IBM solves this problem by recessing the screen into a frame that acts as a standoff; Apple doesn't attempt to solve it (bah). It's too early to tell if the feet will annoy me after typing.
I'm going to use this machine to write the last chapter of my book (once, that is, the AC adapter arrives), so I should be able to log some serious hours on it for the next two weeks. More later.
Some time ago, I posted about my misadventure in ordering a T40 without wireless connectivity. Shortly after I wrote that entry, I ordered one of IBM's tri-mode cards from CDW, since they were expected to ship in early September. September came and went without a card. So did October and November. Finally, last week, I got four cards (one for each T40) and eagerly installed it. However, I forgot the crucial step of attaching the leads for the built-in antenna, so after I put everything back together, I found that my signal reception was really poor. At first I fumed. "Stupid IBM," I muttered. "All this time and they ship me a card that doesn't work." Once I discovered my error, I was still fuming (at myself), but I have to admit to being impressed that the card got a signal at all with no antenna. It works great now, and it's nice to have both PC Card slots back (since one of them is more-or-less permanently occupied by my smartcard reader). However, IBM's Access Connections software still doesn't work right; every time it launches, it tells me that my wireless driver is bad. So it goes.
What a coincidence: David Pogue and Walt Mossberg both have columns about Windows Mobile smartphones today.
Mossberg (who rather seems to have it in for MS lately) says:
Neither phone [the MPx-200 and the Samsung i600] is anywhere near as good as the Treo 600. Unlike the Treo, they lack keyboards for entering large amounts of text, so I can't recommend them for serious e-mail users.
Pogue, for his part, is a bit more friendly:
The MPx200 itself ($300) is a gorgeous flip phone, clad in shiny black plastic that resembles the lacquer of a Montblanc fountain pen. You can recharge the battery either by plugging its cradle into a wall or, when you're traveling light, by connecting its U.S.B. cord to your laptop - a terrific touch. Either the cable or the cradle can also synchronize the phone's address book, calendar and e-mail stash with Microsoft Outlook on a Windows PC. The two-way updating is effortless; just connecting the MPx200 fires up the ActiveSync software automatically.
Both columns miss some key points, though. Pogue seems to have missed the fact that the Windows Powered smartphones aren't supposed to be PDAs... they're phones first and foremost, but they also happen to synchronize with your Outlook data. Most people will use this functionality to get mobile access to contacts, tasks, and emails. Both columns make the point that-- without a touchscreen or thumb-board-- these phones are inferior for heavy email use, but that's not what they're designed for. For an average email user, either of these phones would be fine, and I don't think either column made that point clear.
There are a few other errors and omissions in both articles (Pogue para 5: Verizon was an American company last time I checked, their Vodafone partnership notwithstanding; Mossberg para 16: Verizon has unlimited data plans, but they also has an unlimited "Express Network" plan that counts voice and data minutes as equal). Neither points out that the MPx-200 can be had for free (with activation, natch) from Amazon, probably because an upgraded MPx-220, with camera and Bluetooth, is due early next year. Pogue doesn't mention the difference in size and weight between the Samsung and Motorola phones; it's substantial, with my preference being toward the Samsung (although I still love the form factor of my 7135).
Puzzlingly, Pogue doesn't mention the slow caller-ID problem that Mossberg centered his column criticism around; I've never heard any reports of this from the many MPx-200 users I know at Microsoft. It'll be interesting to see what the root cause turns out to be.
Now, I need one of these phones for the chapter on OMA/EAS security for my forthcoming book. I think an MPx-200 will fill the bill.
Update: Mossberg was kind enough to write me a note (although it was sort of testy) pointing out a couple of errors in my original post. He says that the "people in charge of the phone software" admit that the caller ID problem is real, but I reiterate that none of the real-world users I know of have complained of it. Then again, I haven't asked them. At least he wrote back; that's what Scoble calls having a conversation.
Update 2: David Pogue wrote me a nice note politely taking issue with a couple of points. We agree that some folks won't want a phone without a touch screen, and we (now) agree that yes, Verizon counts as a US phone company. Now, off to figure out whether there's a market for a Missing Manual book on smartphones.
Taking advantage of my generous partners (and the vendor's 30-day return policy), I just ordered a new Toshiba M200. It's fairly vanilla; the only changes I made were changing RAM to a single 512MB stick (vice 2 x 256) and a 60GB 5400-RPM drive. Adding Bluetooth apparently adds 21-28 days to ship time, and there's no longer an 802.11g option (funny, I still don't have a g card for my ThinkPad-- conspiracy?) I can add more RAM for less money by avoiding Toshiba altogether, so that's what I'm doing. My previous Tablet experiences were colored by the slow speed and limited RAM of the Acer C102, but this unit should have neither of those problems. Next up: a face-off between the T40 and the M200, both of which have approximately equal specs.
I signed up for my 60-day trial of Apple's .Mac service today. We'll see if it's worth a hoot or not. In the meantime, you can now reach me at perobichaux@mac.com, although I don't expect to be checking mail there very much. (I would like to experiment with iChat, though-- Tim, give me a yell!)
Update: without having posted my address anywhere other than this blog, I got my first piece of .Mac spam last night. That didn't take long.
Mike wonders who's using dual displays. I am, and I love it. With a combined 2560 x 1024 desktop, I have enough room for multiple RDP sessions, Safari windows, Word documents, PowerPoint slide decks, and other miscellanea, and the addition of Expos makes it even better because I can quickly pick exactly the window I need.
TabletPCCorner has a review of the new Toshiba M200. (It's in French, which fortunately I read). It has a faster processor and disk than my current laptop, with the same screen resolution (1400 x 1050, albeit in a 12.1" screen), plus integrated a/b/g wireless and Bluetooth. What's not to like? Well, apart from the weight; this thing weighs more than a pound more than the Acer Tablet I had before, and its weight was just about right. Apart from that, it's quite a powerful machine-- the only question is when Toshiba will start shipping them.
Update: I was all set to complain about the gap between Toshiba's specs and what you could actually order. When I first went to their web site last week, you couldn't build custom configurations. Now you can. The tab for my dream machine: $4,639. Dang! That's more my current laptop plus my previous Tablet; it's within spitting distance of the combined price of the last two laptops I bought. Back to the drawing board.
Over at PVRblog, there's a mention of this device, which handles streamed audio and video from a PC to a home theater... wirelessly! It doesn't use 802.11g, but no doubt somebody will make one that does soon. There's also the extremely cool HomePod, which can play songs in Apple's AAC format and comes with a developer kit that lets you write your own applications that run on it.
 | One of the new features in Panther is that Mail and the Address Book can be synchronized with Exchange 2000. Even though I'm a very happy Entourage user, I don't have enough licenses of Office for all my Macs, so I wanted to give this a try on the Cube upstairs. |
| I followed the instructions and put in my full OWA URL in the appropriate field. Guess what? Nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that my URL was truncated from http://serverName/exchange/paul to just serverName. I went hunting at Apple's support site and soon found out what the problem was: I had installed iSync 1.3 when it was released, so when I installed Panther it didn't get re-installed, and I didn't get the missing library required to sync with Exchange. This post on the Apple support site told me how to fix it. Once I installed the missing library, I was able to initiate and complete a sync between my Exchange account and my local Address Book. This would have been really cool, except that all of the people now in my address book show up backwards: "Garret & Tiffany Anderson", for example, are listed as "Anderson Garret & Tiffany". If that were just how the names were displayed, it would be OK, but noooo; the conduit has switched the first and last names, apparently because Apple never thought to distinguish between the "file as" field and the real name. Oooops. A quick application of the "Swap First Name/Last Name" command seems to have fixed it. Oh, and as for the truncation of whatever you put in the address field: according to this article, this is more or less by design; the bug is that the Mail help file tells you to put in a complete URL. Oooops again. As a worse side effect, since Apple makes the assumption that every user is in the same domain, if you have multiple domains, you have to modify OWA to use a default domain (see MS KB article 290341) because iSync is too stupid to know that domain\username won't look too good in the OWA URL. This also means that the synchronization will break if you've renamed your OWA virtual directory. Oooops yet again. I think I'll stick with Entourage, thankyouverymuch. Now, for my next trick, I'm going to delve into why the Active Directory plug-in doesn't work with my fairly simple AD topology. | |
 | Beta software? What beta software? Hey, why can't I open any email? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? So, it looks like I'll be reinstalling Exchange on my basement server this morning. Then I get to go to the dentist. Maybe I can get an IRS audit notice and win the trifecta. Actually, it could be worse; when I first noticed that the information store had stopped, I feared some kind of hardware failure. Good thing I discovered this morning that my tape drive hasn't been doing its job lately. I don't have time for this kind of infrastructure work right now, but it has to be done. Sigh. |
... what part of "Thou shalt not steal" does Apple not understand?
Update: as usual, Daring Fireball has a contrary opinion.
I installed Panther on the cube upstairs. It's stunning. So, I'm going for broke and installing it on my main machine downstairs.
This is so cool: "Microsoft expands 'shared source' effort". That means that some MVPs will now have partial access to some parts of the Windows source code. What a learning experience! I'm stoked; I just hope Exchange MVPs qualify.
Bill Gates is reported to have said that the Longhorn project will cost more than the entire Apollo program. That's scary. (Hat tip: Christian). It makes me fervently wish for the kind of program described in Benford's The Mars Race: a privately backed prize fund for a manned mission to Mars. The X Prize is a great start, and its eventual success will hopefully spur the creation of bigger prizes for bigger explorations.
After being seriously tempted by the Kameleon, I ultimately rejected it because there's no way to add buttons, and its macro programmability is limited. Instead, I (somewhat reluctantly) bought a Home Theater Master MX-500, which is butt ugly but remarkably easy to program. So far, I have it doing everything I want to except for the one-button macros; once that's programmed, someone (like, oh, Betty) can just press the "DVD" button to turn on and switch around the appropriate components. Mmmm, macros...
In other news, Amazon has a promo: if you order Krikorian's TiVo Hacks and Keegan's Hacking the TiVo together, you get both books for about $38. Since I love books, I bought both of 'em. All I need now is enough time to actually perform the surgery.
Thanks to John, I am now running MTBlacklist, a plugin that blocks comment spam. Lots of other people have been looking for solutions to this problem, and although this may only be a temporary fix, it's a welcome one. Thanks, Jay!
One thing I learned from my dear mother: always clean up when you're expecting company. The Toledo Blade is supposed to be running Karin Kowalski's story on area bloggers tomorrow, and I want to be ready for the ten or fifteen visitors I expect to drop by-- thus the new layout. Expect some bugs; I probably won't get it all fixed before the paper hits tomorrow.
Update: I would be remiss in not acknowledging that my layout mostly came from PVRblog, and that Doug hooked me up with the initial template.
Despite what Ogden Nash has to say, I just preordered my copy of Mac OS X 10.3, code-named Panther.
On the one hand, the charming Kasia says she loves her new Powerbook's packaging and the aesthetics of the OOBE (out-of-box experience). Then on the other (sort of), we have this column from the San Francisco Chronicle, which I guess is intending to praise the same thing but takes a slightly different tack:
Oh right like you even care.Like careful sexy product design even matters and as if you give a twit for packaging and aesthetics and user experience anymore in this overly plastic bloatedly excessive landfill wasteland Wal-Mart dystopia we call proud capitalist gimme gimme gimme America.
And OK maybe every now and then you sigh and give in and buy yourself a new tech gadget, because you're just that kind of consumer lackey and not really expecting much anyway but who the hell cares it's just one more hunk of tech landfill but what can you do.
Me, I think my Powerbook would be much more aesthetically pleasing if it would boot.
Microsoft has a cool new IPsec white paper, cowritten with Foundstone, describing how IPsec is used to harden Microsoft's own internal network: "Using Microsoft Windows IPSec to Help Secure an Internal Corporate Network Server." From the abstract:
This paper describes how to configure Microsoft Windows 2000 IPSec and Windows XP IPSec to help secure an internal corporate network server against network-based attacks from untrusted computers. You can significantly enhance the ability of a server to defend against such attacks by requiring IPSec-authenticated, signed, and encrypted communication between computers. This paper describes the security threats to, and the benefits of using IPSec on, an internal corporate network server and uses a scenario to describe the process of IPSec policy design for an internal corporate network. Although the focus of this paper is Windows 2000 and Windows XP IPSec, it also provides information about IPSec functionality enhancements in Windows 2000 service packs and in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family.
When you combine it with the material in the Windows 2003 hardening and threats/countermeasures guides, you can really do some nifty stuff to harden your network.
There's been a lot of misreporting of Verizon's new 1xEV-DO service; the WSJ yesterday called it "Wi-Fi you can tote around." THis is way wrong, since WiFi offers 1Mbps up to 11Mbps for 802.11b, with faster speeds for 802.11g and 802.11a and 1xEV-DO seems to top out around 200Kbps or so. However, this is still a nice improvement over Verizon's existing 1xRTT ("Express Network") service, which tops out at 144Kbps. Alan Reiter has some speed tests of 1xEV-DO, and they look pretty promising.
News today that Disney is launching a new service called Moviebeam that uses a Samsung set-top box, datacasting over PBS or ABC broadcast stations, and a simple PVR-style package to allow movies on demand, sort of. Your box automatically receives movie streams from the local datacasting station, and when you want to watch one, you order it up on the remote, at which point you have 24hrs to watch it. See the stories at cnet and the WSJ for more details.
Of course, this isn't a direct attack on TiVo et al, but it's pretty clearly a shot across the bow. They're obviously aiming squarely at the video rental market, but it would be fairly simple for Disney to expand the Samsung box's capabilities, perhaps by integrating it with a PVR. Interestingly, Disney has arranged to carry films by a number of other major distributors; this is more inclusive than I'd suspected them of being. ABC is one of the networks that doesn't have an investment in any PVR vendors (or technology, AFAIK), so this might be their opening move to enter the market.
Steve Crandall asks whether air cars will ever catch on. Maybe not, but Ford is working on a hydraulic power assist system that promises improved performance, better fuel economy, and lower emissions. To simplify, braking energy is used to compress hydraulic fluid and transfer it to a high-pressure accumulator. On launch, the pressurized fluid is used to apply torque to the driveshaft, giving ponderous vehicles like the E-series van or the F350 Super Duty a nice push off the line. Supposedly, we'll start to see these appearing in fleet vehicles in the first half of 2004.
Considering how much we use it, it's a little surprising that our TiVo (a Sony SVR2000, bought in June 2000) hasn't fallen over and died. Jeremy's upgrade plaint the other day helped me decide to upgrade it. I'm still vacillating over whether to add a network card or not. I think I'll hold off, but I did order a nifty drive bracket after seeing it on PVRBlogs. This should make for a neater installation than the duct tape I originally planned to use.
The PVR Blog has everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about personal video recorders, including TiVos and the Dish Network series. Well-written, nicely designed, lots of good information.
The MS Exchange Blog is a group blog written by three knowledgeable Exchange administrators. They have already amassed quite a bit of Exchange 2003 content, and I only expect things to get better.
Tara points out that you can now get a $50 rebate on a Series2 TiVo. This is a pretty good deal, e.g. Amazon has 'em for $299 for the 80-hour unit (after rebate) or $199 for the 40-hour unit. Me, I'm waiting for the HDTiVo; in the meantime, I think I'm going to stuff another disk drive into mine to add some recording capacity. Interestingly, there are now 3 separate books on TiVo hacking: Krikorian's TiVo Hacks (O'Reilly), von Hagen's Hacking the TiVo (Premier Press; includes a bootable CD), and Keegan's Hacking the TiVo (Wiley, not yet published).
The actual tools you need for the upgrade are freely available. In fact, I think I have a spare 40GB drive on the shelf over my head. Hmmm.
This is very cool: from Glenn's WiFi News:
[Speakeasy's] newest set of services includes a $49 deal that gets you all the Wi-Fi gear and support you need to get set up at home. For a short time a while back Speakeasy was giving away the gear for new customers, but that was a shortlived promotion. Speakeasy is also offering what it calls personal technology assistant which means you can talk to the same help desk person when you have a problem, instead of explaining your situation over and over to a new person each time you call.
This is especially cool because it covers new and existing customers. See, John, if you'd switched to Speakeasy when I told you to last year, you'd have an Xbox and WiFi now.
According to this story, Skype has launched their peer-to-peer Internet telephony application. It supposedly combines excellent call quality with seamless configuration and an IM-like interface. Lots of folks are raving about it (try doing a search for "skype" here), but I haven't been able to register yet. As atog says, be sure to read the EULA.
Update: John and I had our first Skype conversation a short while ago. Once I plugged my T40 directly into the DSL modem (bypassing ISA), it worked great-- no setup or configuration required. Audio quality was good, although I had better reports from John when I moved across the room and continued speaking. I also talked to the world-famous and internationally known Martin Tuip, and everything worked just as well. I've queried the boffins to see if they know why ISA's blocking Skype traffic, but once I get that fixed I expect to be using it quite a bit.
Update: Skype should work with the way I have ISA configured, but it doesn't. Mailing Skype support, unsurprisingly, has gotten me nowhere. For a free app with 240,000+ users, I wouldn't expect a large support budget. So, plan B is to break out my old Linksys box and use it to front-end my laptop instead of ISA.
I had the Rhapsody client installed on my laptop, and I liked it fairly well; it had lots of channels, and the client had a good interface that presented a great deal of artist and album information. However, it wasn't very useful when I wasn't using my laptop, so I decided to fire up iTunes instead. Shazam! None of the built-in radio stations work, but a quick trip over to Shoutcast brought me more stations than I could listen to in a very, very long time. Now I can give my existing playlists a bit of a rest.
On Saturday, I took my Acer C102 Tablet PC back whence it came. I bought it in late July, so it had almost a month (including two trips to Redmond and one to Salt Lake) to win me over. The bottom line is that it's not enough of a laptop for my needs. When in Redmond, I made a point to take it with me to every meeting I attended-- but I never used it! The relatively slow CPU and limited RAM had a lot to do with it, too, as did the fact that I can type way faster (and more legibly; just ask my high school English teachers) than I can write. I still think the Tablet PC form factor has a lot of potential, especially as more customized applications like Classroom Presenter and TabletPlanner come out, and I would have liked to try using the Tablet as a presentation machine. However, all was not lost; my spiffy new ThinkPad T40 is almost as thin as the C102, and it's hella fast, with great battery life and 1GB (expandable to 2GB) of RAM. I guess I'll keep tabs on the Tablet world and see how it's doing next summer; by then, there should be machines with better screen resolution and more CPU horsepower.
Famous last words: "I want one just like that." We're hiring someone new, so I decided to order a new T40 and give my not-so-old T30 to the new guy. This is a time-honored tradition, since John did it with his T30. I asked Peter to order me one just like John's, never dreaming that it meant "no wireless". Of course, John a) doesn't travel much b) doesn't have a WLAN at home, and c) doesn't have a WLAN at work. Of course he didn't order a machine with built-in wireless. I, on the other hand, use it heavily, so now I am facing a dilemma:
- Violate my warranty and slap in an IBM wireless card, which means I could run 802.11a/b (there's an a/b/g card on their website, but I can't find it for sale separately)
- Void the warranty and install my own card
- Try to get CDW to help me out in some way
- Suck it up and use my old Cisco PC Card adapter.
Scoble pointed out this very cool new Tablet PC application: Classroom Presenter. It's like Powerpoint, at least superficially, but it can operate in a mode where the instructor can step through the slides while attendees, or students, or whatever-you-want-to-call-'em can see the same slides on their laptops or palmtops. This is a terrific solution for large conferences or presentations in the tech industry. For example, at MGB about 15% of the attendees to our class were not native English speakers, and many of them were frustrated by the pace of slide advances. We gave them printed copies of the slides, but that wouldn't be feasible at someplace like TechEd. The downside is that the clients have to run a separate application (although it supports Tablet PC ink, too). I may give this a try here at el rancho and see whether it's worth using in the kinds of environments I teach in.
I'm starting to accumulate some hours on my Tablet PC, and that's got me thinking about whether I'm going to keep it, upgrade it to a newer model, or return it. I haven't used my ThinkPad in a couple of weeks, but I had to fire it up yesterday to read some DVDs. I was struck by how huge it seems compared to the TravelMate. However, that led me to think more about what I need in a machine, versus what is cool and desirable-seeming. I work in three different modes: writing / editing, doing "lab stuff", and everything else.
In writing/editing mode, I want a great keyboard and as much screen resolution as I can get. My main work machine has a pair of 1280x1024 LCDs, which is just perfect-- I can have Word, lots of browser windows, and an RDC session or two open at once. The ThinkPad weighs in at a respectable 1400x1050, which is big enough to display two facing pages in Word. The Tablet has a measly 1024x768 screen, and the brightness, sharpness, and clarity of the Acer LCD is mediocre compared to the Samsung, KDS, IBM, and Apple screens I normally use. I've also had a hard time adjusting to the Tablet PC's keyboard, which is supposed to be 90% of the size of a full-size unit. It's not. The ThinkPad keyboard, by contrast, has a terrific feel and good key spacing. I've tried composing email on the Tablet, but I can type so much faster than I write that it's pretty much a losing proposition.
For doing "lab stuff", I need a machine powerful enough to run Virtual PC or VMware. The Tablet ain't it; its processor speed and RAM are too limited to run one VM, much less two or three. I don't have to do this often, but when I do, there's no substitute.
Third is "everything else". For example, working on airplanes: the Tablet clearly wins here, since it's tiny compared to the ThinkPad. Even though the smaller keyboard slows me down, I can still get decent work done (more so because the machine actually fits on the tray table!) I really like using the Tablet PC for marking up documents in Word, for which I use the pen and Word's comment featureFor that size bonus, I have to give up about 20% of battery life and the built-in DVD/CD-RW of the 'Pad. That would normally be a decent trade, although while in SLC I did wish for a DVD player (and yes, I know I can rip DVDs to ISO format and watch them using a software player; I just didn't bother before I got on the airplane.)
What about the coolness factor? Clearly the Tablet PC wins here; I love doing the New York Times crossword puzzle on the Tablet, and FranklinCovey's TabletPlanner shows promise. Lots of Tablet PC enthusiasts talk about how they take their tablets to meetings, take notes in ink, etc. This may be cool, but I don't go to very many meetings, so it's not compelling for me.
Bottom line: I'll hang onto it for another month or so before I make my final decision; after all, the more powerful Centrino machines are dropping in price, and maybe IBM will eventually release their 12" (and hopefully higher-resolution) tablet sometime this summer.
Not that I plan to watch it, but Bravo is planning a Left West Wing marathon on Sunday, 8/17. You may wish to TiVo accordingly. (hat tip: Gartenberg).
Thanks to a tip from the world-famous Dan Fernandez, I joined the Artima Buzz; in fact, I'm now the only blog in the Windows category, although I don't expect that to last for long. During my browsing, I found Kimber Staken's blog, which has a lot of interesting Mac OS X and Tablet PC stuff (here's my current favorite).
I've found the perfect house for us: an old missile silo. Arlene won't have much gardening room, but think of the food storage possibilities!
That would be, at a minimum, Julie and Mike. After seeing this post on SmartphoneSource, I ordered a headset, travel charger, car charger, and battery for the whopping sum of $62-- that's less than the battery alone from Verizon (if they had any, which they don't.) Everything except the battery arrived yesterday, but I knew the battery was backordered, so no worries there. Everything I got is genuine Kyocera gear and works like it's supposed to. I'm delighted, and I highly recommend Dan's Cellular.
I just found this review of a new SanDisk combination flash memory/wireless card. Must... resist... credit... card....
Actually, resisting isn't so hard; from the manufacturer's site, it looks like the card won't ship until next week, and won't have Palm OS drivers until the fall sometime.
This guy has an interesting blog, but I'm a little concerned that he named his Tablet "Bonnie".
Scoble has some comments on tablets. He correctly points out that many customers are waiting for Centrino-based tablets from HP, IBM, and so on, instead of buying lesser-known brands like Acer. My Acer experience so far has been terrific: I bought a 9-month-old demo unit, sent it in for warranty service on Monday, and am expecting it back tomorrow (it's already shipped) with everything fixed. That's the same speed and accuracy of service I've gotten in the past from Apple and IBM. I do like the idea of a faster Centrino-based tablet, but so far the proc speed of the C102 has been acceptable, especially on a price/performance basis.
I've been idly considering buying a Tablet PC for a while. I went to Sams' yesterday to look for toilet paper and paper towels, and I ended up with an Acer TravelMate C102 tablet. This is one of the original Tablet PCs; it has a Pentium-III 800 CPU, a 20 (or maybe 30, I forget) GB drive, and 256MB of RAM. It also had lots of scratches on the case and a little sign saying "last one-- $1168". At that price, and given Sams' 6-month return policy, that seemed like a pretty good deal. (It turns out that the listed price of $1499 is actually more than what other Sams' sell the same unit for $1387). Anyway, once I got it home, I was able to bring it right up, install the 27 security patches that WU recommended, and start tableting.
For now, it's hard to tell whether I'll keep it. Microsoft Reader is terrific (especially since MS is giving away three free full-length books each week). I love the size and form factor, realizing that this isn't a replacement for my trusty ThinkPad. On the other hand... this unit is practically obsolete by tablet standards; for another $500 I could get a newer unit with a much faster CPU and more RAM (the C102 I have is limited to a max of 256MB). The keyboard has a terribly sticky space bar, and the rotating latch on which the screen pivots is very loose. Those should be fixable under warranty, though, so I'm going to keep this one for a month or so and see if I use it enough to justify keeping it. If so, then I'll decide whether to keep it or buy a more powerful version.
Dad's GPS-to-laptop cable suffered a bit of a failure: the DB-9 connector on the PC end pulled right off. I searched valiantly at Google for "GPS III cable pinout", only to find lots of chatter about using GPS III or III+ units for APRS. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. In a fit of despair, I went to Garmin's site and found a FAQ on PC wiring. That in turn linked to a PDF wiring diagram. I'm posting this in hopes that Google will index it so that the next person with a salt-rotted cable will be able to quickly find what they need.
I've tweaked the site layout to accomodate the presence of Google AdSense ads. I think they're unobtrusive, and when you click on them you help support the cost of maintaining this site. There are still a few browser-specific bugs in my CSS layout, which I'll gradually eliminate as I get better with CSS. Thanks for your patience!
So, thanks to Julie's inspiration, I now have Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever as my phone's ring tone. Bring on the fireworks. This process was relatively straightforward:
- Install Kyocera's MP3 maker, which takes an MP3 file and produces a .pdb file.
- Move the Sousa file out of my iTunes Music folder and put it back in my shared folder where it's supposed to be
- Sync the shared folder with my ThinkPad
- Run the MP3 utility, producing a file named "stars.mp3.pdb"
- Helpfully rename the file and copy it onto my SD card.
- Struggle with figuring out why the file doesn't appear (hint: it doesn't appreciate being renamed to "stars.pdb" vice "stars.mp3.pdb")
- Say "to hell with it" and sync the phone normally
- Soft reset
- Profit! (no, wait, that comes later)
- Notice that the ringtone appears in Prefs Phone where it belongs.
- Crank up the volume and enjoy.
This is extremely nifty. From Dave Farber's IP list:
With today's release of AIM4.6b1.1131, the capability has been added to
allow AIM users to send SMS messages to mobile phones. All you do is type
the message you want to send as an SMS into a new IM window and change the
screenname field to +16175551212. Replace 6175551212 with the phone number of the SMS-capable mobile phone. The "+1" is the country code, which is required; however, I don't think AOL supports non-US numbers yet, but they
do plan to.To utilize this cool feature in iChat, simply type Shift-Command-N for a "New Chat with Person," and enter the phone number in the above format. When you send the message, you'll receive confirmation from AOL that it was sent. Pretty neat!
I tested this and it works like a charm. Finally, a use for iChat :)
Update: As Mike Wendland and I found out, it does matter if you enter the "+1" before the phone number.
I got some interesting statistics on TechEd today. Based on the number of people who physically attended each session, messaging and development tools/technologies had almost exactly the same number of attendees-- within 2%-- even though there were twice as many dev sessions as messaging sessions. That's completely opposite to what I would have expected. Interestingly, the security and web servics tracks had about th same number of attendees and sessions, but security attendees turned in twice as many evaluations. I guess the web services folks were too busy blogging :)
Happily, the security track got the best overall rating (7.5, w00t!), thanks in large measure to the redoubtable Steve Riley-- he placed two sessions in the top 10 overall. However, he was humbled by Kimberly Tripp, whoever she is, who got 4 on SQL-- guess I'd better hit one of her sessions next year.)
For those of you who couldn't make it to TechEd this year, here's the presentation that Andy Webb and I did. (In fairness, I should give props to Rob Howard, from whom I got the idea to post my deck.)
In years past, all the TechEd and MEC evaluations have been done on paper forms that were scanned. This gave quick results (last year at MEC, I had my numbers in less than an hour after the session), but if you couldn't coax attendees into filling out the form, too bad for you. This year, Microsoft extended the process to allow attendees to fill out online evals up to a week after the show. (Denise describes it here). Accordingly, my numbers weren't fully baked until last night, but now I have the final scores (n=61): overall score was 7.9/9.0, with speaker scores of 8.3 (knowledge) and 8.1 (presentation skills), and a "how does this apply to your work?" rating of 8.0. I'm delighted! These numbers are good enough that I don't have to go to TechEd China or Malaysia! (That's a joke, although with MGB looming I'm happy to not have any more extended travel right now).
Among all the other TechEd bloggers, I was delighted to see that Denise Smith has a blog. For those who don't know her, Denise does an incredible job each year juggling the myriad demands of various speakers and track owners. If she posts enough juicy behind-the-scenes details, she'll no doubt be the star of next year's blogger meeting.
The TechEd speaker support folks worked some magic over the weekend and found me a hotel room. This might not sound like a big deal, but when faced between the choice of sleeping on a park bench near the Dallas convention center or having a room, I vote for the latter. As I write this, I'm in the air; after I arrive, I have to hit the speaker's lounge and make a few changes to my slides, then I'm free until rehersal at 7:30. After that, the magazine folks have scheduled a dinner at Landry's, but it'll be an early night-- I have a challenging presentation tomorrow and I want to be fresh.
Update: the bloggers' meeting was really cool. I only caught the first 20 minutes or so, thanks to one phone call from home and my session rehearsal, but I enjoyed what I saw. I was particularly aware of being one of the only non-developers there-- I guess I'm the token systems/admin guy. This is a bit of a reversal for me, since my degree's in CS and my first career was writing code. Perhaps I should get back into it.
Lots of cool stuff on the show floor, but nothing I can report on; I didn't attend any sessions, either. You'll have to get your meaningful news elsewhere. Though I did have a great dinner with Paul Thurrott, Michele Crockett, Kim Paulsen, and a bunch of other cool folks from the mag, it was all gossip and no news :)
This is pretty cool: an aggregated site (or wiki) of bloggers who are speaking at or attending TechEd. I just added myself, but my blog isn't there yet. Dan Fernandez listed his session picks; I already listed mine over here. I arrive midday Monday and will hit the bloggers meeting, have dinner with the Windows & .NET Magazine folks, and speak on Tuesday afternoon. In between, I may actually get to go to a session, but more likely I'll catch up with various vendors, friends, customers, and potential customers.
All right, here's the link: Stickers For Hackers. Now please send me my free sticker. (Hat tip: J-Dawg.)
This has many cool applications. I don't know what they are, though.
So, this is my first real opportunity to test Outlook 2003's cached mode on a real road trip; I'm in Seattle for an Exchange 2003 airlift. I use Outlook 2003 for three accounts: my home account, my work account, and my Microsoft account. The first two are homed on the same server (for the time being), fronted by ISA Server so I can access them without a VPN. The third requires me to VPN in to Microsoft; at least, it did before I enabled RPC over HTTP yesterday.
I made sure to let Outlook catch up my MS mailbox before I left, with the happy result that I could plow through the 2500+ unread messages in it while flying to Seattle, but I ignored the other two to give cached mode a fair trial. When I arrived at the hotel, I plugged in my laptop, signed on to the in-room broadband connection ,and ttweaked my HOSTS file to point to the external IP of the mail server. While unpacking, I let my personal account sync; while brushing my teeth and sleeping, I let the work account catch up. When I awoke, I had a full inbox, which for me is the equivalent of having the morning paper waiting on the front step when I get up. I was able to blitz through the accumulated mail and get right to work. I left the hotel and went over to the convention center for breakfast and registration. After registering, I was able to plug in to a network drop, quickly pick up new mail in all three accounts, and enter the keynote session. Throughout the day, I could pop in and out to send queued replies and pick up new messages with a minimum of disruption. If only synchronizing offline files worked as well as this does! Big kudos to the Outlook team for building something that "just works".
This is really cool: a useful, well-implemented, legal, reasonably priced way to buy and download music. It supports mobile devices, CD burning, and lots of other stuff. At $0.99/song or $9.99/album, I'm planning on fleshing out my collection. bbum has some good technical details on how the system works. Windows users, eat your heart out. Wait... I'm a Windows user too. Curses! Cognitive dissonance!
Update: Actually, this might turn out to be a problem. I normally listen to my music in three ways: on my desktop Mac, on my Windows XP laptop, or in the car. The Mac and car are no problem, but music from the Apple Store is encoded with AAC, not MPEG-3. There's no AAC codec for Windows, and apparently burning AAC to CD and re-ripping to MP3 produces crappy quality. This might be a problem, at least until Apple ships an AAC codec for Windows.
Update again: I've bought a half-dozen or so tracks from the store. The experience has been flawless so far, and it's nice to be able to fill in some of the holes in my collection.
The Sony home theater-in-a-box that I bought last week worked well, but it only had two digital audio inputs. Since Buckeye is about to start their HD beta test, and since a little bird told me that my odds of being selected were quite good, I wanted a receiver that could accomodate the Xbox, DVD player, and an HD settop box, so it was back to Best Buy. I found a good deal on a open-box Pioneer VSX-D811S, a much nicer receiver than I would otherwise have bought. It has component video switching and some other nifty features, along with support for 7.1 surround. I also picked up some open-box Sony speakers. Everything works great... but that's not my point.
Yesterday, I got a real dose of home theater. From my chair on the back deck, I could hear: David and Thomas playing baseball next door (complete with the occasional ping of the aluminum bat when somebody got a hit), a couple of lawn mowers, an F-16 flying overhead, a train, one each lawn mower and weed eater, lots of birds, the occasional Harley ripping past on River Road, Matthew squealing with delight as he climbed through the deck railing to get a golf ball, and my neighbor's dog. That's my kind of home theater: live, glorious, surround sound; full-motion, high-definition video, and Scent-O-Vision.
Microsoft's Developer Network website has started a set of RSS feeds. This is huge news if you're a Windows or ASP.NET developer, since it means that you can get up-to-date content with much less hassle. If you're using an aggregator, you're in luck. If you're not, well, you should be.
I got a (form) letter from Tim O'Reilly yesterday; he's the head of O'Reilly & Associates. Tim is a very bright guy who has done a lot to help build the Internet's knowledge infrastructure. Much of what he's done has been cultural, and the letter falls into that category.
O'Reilly is asking its authors to put their books under the Founders' Copyright. He believes that the existing copyright system has deviated from the Founding Fathers' intent: that the interests of authors be counterbalanced with the public good. It's hard to argue with him, when you see that companies like Disney are able to protect their works, basically, in perpetuity, even though many of those works are based on public-domain works themselves. (If you're wondering why you should care, see this FAQ; it does a better job explaining than I could. This article is also pretty good).
Anyway, Tim's asking that O'Reilly authors agree to have their books fall under the Founders' Copyright. For those authors who agree, O'Reilly will release their books into the public domain (under the "Creative Commons" reuse license) after 14 years have passed. This doesn't harm the authors in any meaningful way, given that in 14 years almost none of O'Reilly's current books (and definitely none of mine!) will be of anything but historical interest. The practical value of releasing that content to the public is pretty small too, but the symbolic value is large. That's why I'm going to sign the agreement.
One minor kibitz: the agreement O'Reilly sent us has three choices: put the book under Founders' Copyright, leave the copyright alone and have the book taken out of print (which is what would happen normally), or leave the copyright alone, but give the author a chance to find another publisher when ORA decides to take the book out of print. Most publishers now allow the copyright to revert to the author when the book goes out of print. (Some even put the copyright in the author's name-- the publisher gets an exclusive perpetual license to use the work, until they decide they don't want it any more.) I'm a little disappointed that Tim didn't offer authors the option of having the copyright returned to them.
When I get around to it, I'll probably be putting both this blog and E2K Security under the Creative Commons license.
John was admiring my KungTunes-driven "what's playing" list. It turns out that there's an equivalent for Windows Media Player. That means that there's almost certainly one for WinAmp, but I'm too lazy to look for it.
I just found NewsGator, which aggregates RSS feeds directly into Outlook! How cool. I'm going to have to try it and see how it works with Outlook 11. This could be big.
If you read more than one or two blogs, and you're not using an aggregator, you're missing out. See, most of the software used to publish weblogs is designed to support RSS, a protocol that allows syndication. (For those just joining us: syndication is republishing someone else's content, as when your crappy local paper publishes someone else's weather data.) Anyway, the advantage of aggregators is that they gather up all the weblogs you're interested in and put them in a single interface, so you can skim through them quickly. Mainstream news sources (including the NYT, Christian Science Monitor, and others) have syndicated feeds, too. I currently have about 50 blogs in my subscription list.
On the Mac, I use NetNewsWire. On the PC, I've heard good things about Syndirella and NewzCrawler, though I haven't tried either of them.
Now, word up to DefenseTech, Bob Thompson, The Bloviator, and JohnP: your blogging software doesn't support RSS. Please upgrade. That is all. (I was going to add Charlie Stross to the list, but even though there's no link for it, pasting his URL into NetNewsWire does the trick.)
Personal to Julie: add the "syndicate" div to your template, OK? I had to find the URL by hand.
So, I finally found out how to make my blog reflect what I'm listening to: Kung-Tunes is a small background application that asks iTunes what's playing, formats the result using a template I specify, and uploads it using scp. Worthless, but nifty.
So, while I was in Seattle, McDonald's announced that it's going to start offering wireless access in its stores. This is interesting insofar as it shows how WiFi is spreading beyond traditional geek havens. However, last night while driving home from the airport, I stopped for gas. Turns out that T/A Travel Centers, a large network of truck stops, is adding WiFi access too. (They're still rolling it out, and I have a call in to their project leader to get more details). I already favor the Monroe T/A because it has the nearest Popeye's, so this is an extra bonus.
This provides terrific proof that the market for widespread WiFi is still growing rapidly. I love the idea that I can combine fueling and emailing, even though I can get email on a handheld. Of course, I could go off on a lengthy digression about how stupid it is that most major airports (which, as you may have noticed, are often filled with impatient laptop-toting connectivity junkies) don't have WiFi but that truck stops and fast-food restaurants do, but I'll spare you.
Now, to teach my 8-year-old how to pump gas so I can stay inside and use the laptop...
I'm not a coffee drinker, but I can certainly see how thismight come in handy.
Mike Masnick writes this cautionary tale: How I Accidentally Became a Porn Spammer. Be sure you have some spam filtering, or you too may end up as a p0rn kingpin.
Computerworldrecently reported that Slammer was the work of a terrorist group. As it turns out, a reporter had squatted on a terror group's domain name and taken the site over-- he was the one who made the claim. Computerworld has retracted the original story and posted an explanation. The reporter in question, Brian McWilliams, has done a couple of other slimy things, too, as described in the . Keep this in mind the next time you see a mass-media story about anything having to do with computer security (and, beware of security shops like Mi2g.com that fall for this kind of hoax-- would you trust them to provide accurate data if they're taken in by something like this?)
At long last, the book's sample chapters finally arrived. If you're interested in security for Exchange Server, go check 'em out. (And if you're not interested but still have $35 to spare, buy the book anyway!)
Microsoft Press finally has the book's page up! There's supposed to be a sample chapter, but it's not up yet.
Here's a great user interface. One wonders how it could be productively applied to computers.
This is neat: a site that allows you to register the GPS coordinates of your web server so you can locate other nearby sites. Try it by clicking:
Followup: I discovered my evil twin, a fellow Mac lover who's actually (shudder) an Oracle DBA, just up the road in Detroit. Of course, since he and I both left out the minus sign in our longitude tag, we both show up in Southwest Asia. Guess I'd better fix that (my companion site is correct, so it has many more neighbors).
My friend Bob Thompson had an interesting post last week that set me to thinking. He complained about the relative difficulty and clunkiness of CD burning under Linux, compared to Windows. Predictably, he got feedback from a Linux person, taking issue with his comments. Bob went on to say:
Mr. Dobbins is very smart, very skilled, and very experienced with Linux. He is, in fact, an expert. He's also a good guy, always willing to help, and a true proponent of Linux. But, drawing an analogy, Roland has a rotary-wing pilot's license, and I have only a normal driver's license. I'm driving around in an old junker, and am interested in upgrading to a better car. Roland, meanwhile, is singing the praises of helicopters.I don't doubt that the view from a helicopter is better, or that it can get me where I want to go faster and easier. But I don't want to invest the time and effort necessary to get a rotary-wing pilot's license. I just want to continue using my regular old driver's license, but in a better car. I want to be able to sit down in the new car, and have all the controls and instruments in more or less the same locations that I'm used to. I want to be able to turn the key, put the new car in gear, and drive off. I don't want to have to build the engine from parts, or to assemble the new car before I use it.
This is a great analogy (of course, Bob's a professional writer-- I expect no less.) However, he didn't take it to its logical conclusion: cars are general-purpose vehicles that can use a widely deployed infrastructure of gas stations, roads, repair shops, and auto parts stores. Helicopters require more infrastructure; the infrastructure is simultaneously much more complex and much less widely distributed. While it's certainly true that helicopters can do things that cars cannot, it's also true that the cost of doing these things (in both equipment and time) is high. The science-fiction writers of the 1940s and 1950s confidently predicted that we'd all have personal helicopters to get around in, but most of us don't. Why not? Entry barriers: cost, time, and infrastructure.
On the desktop, the parallel is pretty clear. The Linux-copter suffers from the same three barriers. "Cost" might seem like an odd barrier, since Linux doesn't cost anything. However, there is a cost associated with using it, one that Mac users will immediately recognize: the cost of not being able to do stuff. Want to run your small business' accounting on Linux? Too bad. Want to manage your dental office? Sorry. Games for the kids? Forget it.
The "time" barrier is more subtle, but just as real. The question I like to ask about OSes that seek to supplant Windows on the desktop is "can my mom use it?" She's a smart lady, but she doesn't have any interest in being a helicopter pilot; she just wants to use her computer for email, digital photos, and the like. She can do that easily with Windows or Mac OS X without investing a great deal of time to learn how. a) she doesn't have time to learn how to make Linux do what she wants and b) if she did, she would spend it doing something she actually enjoys. In fact, I don't have time to maintain a desktop Linux machine for her, and I'm a (student) helicopter pilot!
The Linux-copter can do things that an ordinary Windows-mobile can't: it can operate without payment to Microsoft, it can be made to run on all sorts of bizarre hardware, it can be limitlessly reconfigured. However, getting it to do so is an adventure, sort of like building your own kit helicopter), and that doesn't seem likely to change dramatically in the next two to three years.
According to this article, IBM is busy working on stackable, interchangable, redundant computer storage systems that snap together like Legos and store terabytes of data, with redundancy inside each "brick" as well as between "bricks". I want one (even the water-cooling requirement doesn't put me off).
I have several Windows 2000 Advanced Server machines here. All of them have Terminal Services installed; that way, I can log into them without having to have a separate (or shared) keyboard and monitor for each box. On hurricane, my primary work machine, I've been wanting to enable the Windows offline files feature, which I use on my laptops. However, the tab that's supposed to let you enable them never showed up. I chalked this up to a "feature" of Advanced Server, until last week, when hurricane suddenly began telling me that my file server was offline and that it was using locally cached files. That told me that the offline files feature (which Microsoft internally calles CSC, for client-side caching) was somehow turned on.
Much research ensued, with the result that I finally found the answer to why CSC wouldn't work: it's disabled on machines running Terminal Services. Since I installed TS when I installed the OS, I never got any UI warnings. However, after I removed TS, I could turn on CSC on hurricane. I let it synchronize and turned it off again. I now have to decide: do I want the convenience of Terminal Services, or the guaranteed data availability of CSC?
Dori points out that Amazon has the very cool Ericsson T68i phone on sale for a whopping $24.99-- that's $250 off the regular price. I ordered one of these for my wife on Monday, with one-day express shipping. Did it ship Monday? No. Did it ship Tuesday? Nope. It finally shipped late yesterday, so it should arrive today.
I wanted to write a long rant about how ordering from Amazon has become frustrating because of their bizarre shipping date prediction algorithm; you order an item that says "usually ships in 1-2 days" but-- whether you use Super Saver shipping or not-- it takes longer. However, this is nonproductive in two ways: it takes time away from making license plates, and it may discourage people from using my Amazon affiliate link. So, never mind.
Big news: the Wall Street Journal has discovered that automatic profiling algorithms sometimes don't work! Oh, the horror! This story, which has been making the rounds like wildfire (apparently driven by the Beavis-and-Butthead-like meme that calling a straight person gay is high humor) points out that TiVo's "suggestions" feature sometimes gets things wrong.
Any parent could have pointed this out, of course. Our TiVo is permanently confused by being asked to record three distinctly different sets of shows:
- Stuff I like (including Alias and 24); formerly including The X-Files and The Simpsons
- Arlene's favorites (ranging from Boston Public and Smallville to Simply Quilting)
- Shows we tape for the kids (including Sesame Street, Liberty's Kids, and Justice League)
- Occasional events, usually church-related, like the 1940 biopic about Brigham Young or the semi-annual General Conference broadcasts.
Fortunately, with liberal use of the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons, we've been able to weed out most of its bad decisions (like recording the Weather Channel and NASA Channel, which we often have on as background noise). This sometimes backfires, though:
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
What happens when programming langauges get together?
For a conference focused on connectivity, it's been hard to come by. Last night and this morning, the in-room Internet at the hotel has been down, and my desktop phone was broken to boot.
Yesterday afternoon, John and I went over to the convention center so I could register and pick up my AT&T phone. The phone had sporadic trouble connecting to AT&T's GPRS service, but we got that fixed. My initial experience with it has been good, although I'm a little disappointed at how few web sites have layouts that are usable on PocketPCs-- I thought given MS' mad market share push that more sites would be trying. I'm now equipped with two phones, two MEC speaker shirts, and a variety of tchotkes from the product hall. More to follow!
There are some interesting products on display on the show floor. All of the security products are conveniently grouped into a security ghetto, which makes finding them easy. Authenex has an cool USB token that allows two-factor authentication with ISA Server. CipherTrust is here with their IronMail device, and FaceTime has their IM security products out too.
As a bonus, I had a good talk with one of the reps from Groove. He explained away some of the gripes I've been having and demonstrated a few features that I didn't know Groove had.
After my two session rehearsals, I went to the reception sponsored by the fine folks at Simpler-Webb. I saw lots of people I know, and met some I didn't-- a very congenial group! Today's agenda involves breakfast (eventually, when the restaurant opens); the first session (for me, anyway; I never bother with the keynotes) is at 1300 PDT. Y'all are all welcome to call my AT&T phone at 714-306 7913.
I was going to write regular MEC updates and post them here, so I included a link to this site from this week's UPDATE newsletter. Unfortunately, Penton's editorial policy doesn't allow links to outside sites. I guess they were afraid I'd link to a weird cult page or something. So, I'm still going to post updates, but they'll only be here. Tell your friends! (Don't forget to check out the book cover, too.)
Two pieces of good news on the book front. First, the book now has a cover design (which I cannot post until my DSL provider does some tweaking on their end)! Bear in mind that this is only a draft, so Microsoft might change it at any time. Second, Microsoft Press is going to pass out two draft chapters to all 5,000+ MEC attendees. I'm hoping that will generate some good word-of-mouth buzz. Now, back to writing...
AT&T Wireless is sponsoring a promotion called "Geek for a Week" at the 2002 MEC. The deal is that if you sign up, and if they pick you, you get to use one of their spiffy new PocketPC Phone Edition phones. I was fortunate enough to be selected for this, so I'll be picking up the unit on Monday after I arrive in Anaheim. I'll be reporting on the phone, and on how it stacks up to my venerable Kyocera Smartphone, from the MEC.
Today is the last day for Speakeasy's DSL promotion-- buy a DSL line, get a free Xbox or Playstation2.
Office XP Service Pack 2 has been released. It contains a whole pile of bug fixes for Outlook. It's available from Microsoft's Office update page.
I've been using Groove for several projects recently. I bought their client software. Now I find out that the only way to get support for it is to buy a $2500 "support pack" that allows me to ask 10 support questions via e-mail. Shyeah, right.
People complain about Microsoft for a variety of reasons, but even their low-end products have competent free tech support. I once spent two hours on the phone with a PictureIt! support rep identifying a bug with the HP PhotoSmart printer driver. For the $40 they got from me for the program, Microsoft probably spent four times that for one support call. Their pay-for-support program is excellent as well.
When I have time, I'm building up a longer rant about Groove's frustrating potential: it does some things really well, but it's missing some basics.
I just signed a contract to write the weekly Exchange UPDATE column for my pals at Exchange & Outlook Administrator. I'm really excited by the opportunity, although Jerry Cochran (the previous editor) is leaving me some mighty big shoes to fill. If you have suggestions for topics, I'd love to hear them.
I needed the ISBN number for a book that I knew I had on my printer desk, about 18" behind my chair. Almost without thinking about it, I opened a new IE window and headed to Amazon before I realized that I had the actual dead-trees book right here. Would this be evidence that the 'net has thoroughly pervaded my work life?
I've been meaning to supplement the book review engine on this site with better links to Amazon, using Adam Kalsey's MTAmazon plugin. Brad Choate has an interesting application of the plugin on his site. I haven't figured out yet exactly how I'm going to make this work, but it should be an interesting project for any free time I accidentally happen to get between now and the time the book's finished.
Wireless networks are great. It follows, then, that a wireless networks between two cars on the Interstate must be greater still.
In a shocking revelation, Simson Garfinkel points out that Starbucks is charging for wireless Internet access in its stores! Oh, the horror! He says:
Starbucks, the king of the $4 coffee, wanted me to pay for a service that should be too cheap to meter.
Well, duh. Consider the fact that Starbucks is a demonic corporate monster bent on world domination, and this probably won't be too surprising. Simson does make a few good points about the fact that for most of us, it's cheaper just to set up a WiFi access point and let people share it than it would be to set up an elaborate billing infrastructure.
Julie asks how I like MovableType as a blogging tool. I started blogging the old-school way: HTML by hand, posted manually. Eventually I graduated to Dreamweaver, which gave me some site management and link-checking tools (see my old travel diaries for a sample.) This approach has its champions, notably Bob Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. However, the bad news is that this approach ties you to a particular tool (see Bob's many rants about FrontPage).
In the new world, we can use tools like MovableType that provide content management. These tools keep track of the posts, sorting and ordering them. The better ones apply styles to keep everything looking consistent; the best, like MT and Radio Userland, support protocols (like XMLRPC) that allow blogging tools to work together. I can drive MT from any web browser, or I can use purpose-built tools like BlogApp or BlogBuddy to quickly post items with better editing tools than Internet Explorer provides.
Overall, I like MT quite a lot. It's very stable, it has an attractive interface, and I can use it from any browser-equipped machine. (Note, alas, that you don't get all of the editing bells & whistles on Mac browsers; I'm not sure why this is yet.) Even better, it is inexpensive and very well-supported (not that I've needed any support yet). Once I get it set up properly, so that I can use BlogApp, it'll be even better. Honorable mention goes to Radio Userland, which does all kinds of cool stuff that I don't fully understand yet. Radio has a slick desktop client, which you are free not to use, and a powerful macro language. However, for my relatively modest needs MT is just the ticket. I give it two thumbs up.
I'm going to be updating this blog to the new version of MoveableType in the next day or so. That may cause a bit of downtime, so don't be alarmed. Along the way, I have some cool new features I'm planning on implementing, too; you'll notice when the upgrade is finished.
A clever fellow got some useful help building his new computer. I guess it's time to go raid David's Lego stash...
One of the key pieces missing from Mac OS X, at least for me, has been a client that I can use with Microsoft's Terminal Services (TS). With TS, you can remotely log on to a Windows machine and operate it just as though you were sitting in front of it. Since I travel frequently, TS has been an invaluable tool, but it's required me to use a Windows machine. Now Microsoft's Mac business unit has released a Terminal Services client for Mac OS X! It's missing some features that the Windows XP client has, but so what? It's a lot better than nothing.
On Saturday, sometime after 3pm CDT, my DSL connection went down. My ISP has been super-reliable, which is why I use them. The problem appeared to be with the DSLAM , the gadget that takes a consumer DSL line and terminates it in the telephone company's central office. The link is back up now; evidently BellSouth or API Digital fixed it overnight. Good for them. If you sent mail over the weekend and it didn't go through, now you know why. Of course, since this blog is hosted by my web service provider, it wasn't affected by the outage.
My pal Tyler Regas has been working on PDAHandyman, but I've only recently gotten around to visiting it. Nice site! I am certain that he'd like to hear from all you Linux folks who are using Sharp's cool-but-IMHO-impractical Linux handheld. Personally, I have a Treo pricing rant that I'm saving up to send his way.
For some reason, this month has been an unusually tough one for various components of my geek lifestyle. By extension, this has made it a tough month for me, as I've had to spend an inordinate amount of time in voice-mail hell. Here's the rundown on what broke and how hard it was to get fixed:
- The plastic case on my ThinkPad has cracked in such a way that the back part of the case, just above the row of Insert/Home keys, is pulling away, threatening to spill the keyboard out onto the floor. I called IBM, spent about 2 minutes on hold, and got a case number. The shipping box will get here tomorrow, so I expect to have the machine back next week sometime. I give their support phone system a 4; it was easy and quick to get to someone who could help me.
- My PowerMac G4 Cube suffered a failed DC-to-DC converter, so it's at the Apple body & fender shop. Apple's phone support is legendarily bad, so I just took it to MacResource so they could fix it.
- The paddle to our bread machine mysteriously disappeared. I suspect my four-year-old's involvement, but there's no evidence to prove it, and he's at Grandma's this week. Sunbeam gets a -1 for their phone support process; first you call a number that says "Press 2 for breadmakers", followed by a choice that says "Press 1 to order parts". When you pick that option, the service center you get connected to doesn't sell breadmaker parts. Ooops.
- cyclone, my primary Exchange & file server, has two disks in it. One of them started making an awful clunk, click while I was backing it up this morning. I'm heading to Gigaparts to get a replacement drive. No phone calls required!
- My Siemens 2420 phone system is "fencing" (clipping audio in a predictable pattern), but only sometimes. I suspected 802.11a interference, but it still occasionally does it even when all my wireless gear is off.
Granted, these aren't major catastrophes. Thank goodness the air conditioning and refrigerator still work, both cars are running, and the septic tank isn't plugged. Everything else is small potatoes.
Bob Thompson said:
The Inquirer reports that Microsoft may release WinXP SP1 sooner than expected, possibly as soon as the end of this month. As was the case with Win2000 SP1, the first SP is going to be huge, perhaps 120 MB. It sounds like there are a lot of bugs to be fixed.
This isn't entirely fair. SP1 does include a ton of bug fixes; if it didn't, the screaming penguins would be complaining that MS doesn't fix their bugs. However, as part of the Strategic Technology Protection Program (that's "get secure, stay secure" to you & I), MS is including new security functionality as part of service packs. There are a wealth of new SP1 features, including some significant enhancements to the way IPsec works and rollups that result from the Windows division's security push. Of course, SP1 also includes changes to the OS that are required by the consent degree in the Microsoft antitrust case. Bob was too polite to point this out.
So, the blogosphere has exploded in volume, right? There are thousands of people, ranging from professional journalists to various unsavory types, creating blogs with a wide variety of tools-- so how come I still have to copy-and-paste HTML to bring in archived content? I'm slowly porting over some content, including (eventually) my Travel Diaries.
The MoveableType installation went flawlessly. Well, almost; my hosting provider does something a little funny with user home directories, and that took me a bit of time to figure out. It probably would have been simpler if I'd read the manual, but where's the fun in that?
This is a test.
Continue reading Testing, testing, 1-2-3.
