Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

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 320×240, 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.

Well, not really, but today Microsoft announced the pricing for the Xbox 360. $299 for the base unit, or $399 for the console plus a controller, the hard drive, some cables, and some other goodies. Time to start scouring the sofa cushions for loose change…

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.

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.