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.
Category Archives: General Tech Stuff
Wayne Hale five years later
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Musings
Rotary program with BlueWater Technologies
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.
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Entourage to get Exchange Web Services support
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Woody’s SharePoint Designer book
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
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Filed under Friends & Family, General Tech Stuff
Helicopter ground resonance
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.
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Filed under General Stuff, General Tech Stuff
U-Verse vs Buckeye Express
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…
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, HDTV and Home Theater
IEEE Spectrum Risks blog
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Security
Comments broken, again
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Enterprise Content Management white papers
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.
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Internet Explorer Mobile 6
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.
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Exchange Connections fall 2008
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
test iBlogger post
In my first attempt, I included a picture. That crashed my entire phone. This is attempt #2. Nothing fancy!
Mobile Blogging from here.Comments Off on test iBlogger post
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Paul's Down-Home Page 