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
Category Archives: General Tech Stuff
Two new 3Sharp authors
Comments Off on Two new 3Sharp authors
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
First impressions of the new MacBook Pro
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)
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Reviews
Microsoft Certified Master Exchange pricing
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.
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Who’s spamming me with Meijer ads?
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.
Comments Off on Who’s spamming me with Meijer ads?
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Musings
No Exchange 14 for you
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…
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Oracle failed to produce CEO’s e-mail
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.
Comments Off on Oracle failed to produce CEO’s e-mail
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Oops!, Security
ISA and TMG announce virtualization plans
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 🙂
Comments Off on ISA and TMG announce virtualization plans
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Security
HOWTO parse Autodiscover with Cocoa
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!
Comments Off on HOWTO parse Autodiscover with Cocoa
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
HOWTO rename a project in Xcode
Geez, I never would have figured this out on my own. Xcode has its strengths, but it’s certainly a much different beast than Visual Studio, which I still prefer. Anyway, if you want to rename an Xcode project, you can’t just change the project name in the Finder; you have to modify a bunch of the project metadata too. See these steps for complete details.
Comments Off on HOWTO rename a project in Xcode
Filed under General Tech Stuff
HOWTO make NSURLConnection ignore bad certificates
I’m working on a demo application that uses Exchange Web Services from Cocoa, Apple’s object-oriented OS framework. Cocoa is a really interesting environment, with a lot of very cool capabilities. One thing it can’t do, though, is give your application a way to examine a returned certificate that the framework thinks is bad. The certificate might appear to be bad because it’s expired or invalid, or merely because it’s self-signed (or issued by another untrusted CA). Because many Exchange servers will have self-signed certificates, the demo app won’t work on them without a way to finesse this problem. Because it’s just a demo application, I didn’t want to require the user to add the self-signed certificate to their certificate trust list, and I didn’t want to turn off certificate checking completely (if that’s even possible).
The answer, which I found here, is to override a private, unsupported, category method, allowsAnyHTTPSCertificateForHost. Just call it with the FQDN of the host whose certificate errors you want to ignore and you’re golden.
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Podcasting Kit for SharePoint goes live!
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.
Comments Off on Podcasting Kit for SharePoint goes live!
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Amazon puts MP3 albums on sale
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
Comments Off on Amazon puts MP3 albums on sale
Filed under General Stuff, General Tech Stuff
Amazon drops Kindle price, gives me my $40 back
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).
Comments Off on Amazon drops Kindle price, gives me my $40 back
Filed under General Tech Stuff
New iPhone development book
This is very cool: Erica Sadun, a fellow Georgia Tech graduate, has a new book coming out on iPhone development: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=robichaassocia&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0321555457&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr. She’s been very active in answering questions on the iPhone development mailing list, so I’m looking forward to seeing the book.
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Kindle experience so far
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.
Comments Off on Kindle experience so far
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Paul's Down-Home Page 
