Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

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.

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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.”