Category Archives: Musings

Ironically, my last two UPDATE columns have been on mobility topics– and now I’m somewhere with no mobile access!
So here I am in Farmerville, Louisiana. What’s there? Not much (rimshot). Seriously, I’m here with my family visiting the beautiful Lake D’Arbonne State Park for our annual family reunion-style get-together. Whoever the State of Louisiana hired to build this place did a terrific job; the scenery is beautiful, the cabins are clean, spacious, and comfortable, and the wildlife is abundant. One thing’s missing, though: connectivity. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to work this week, but I do, so I’ve been arranging my schedule to work when everyone else is asleep. The problem is getting information to and from the people I work with.
Last year, we stayed in the same place, and I noticed that my Verizon cellphone worked fine. I figured that my aircard would give me data service. Problem #1: Alltel is actually the local network provider, as I found when I noticed the “Extended Roaming” indicator on my Treo. No aircard, and no data service on the Treo. The local public library has a few Internet terminals, but they’re a) unstable b) locked down and c) on a network that won’t allow me to plug in my laptop. Last year, I was able to cadge a few minutes from the nice lady who owns the local Radio Shack franchise, but that clearly wasn’t a scalable solution. I didn’t think she’d welcome seeing me twice a day every day, no matter how many batteries I bought.
The solution came from an unexpected quarter. I asked the lifeguards at the park pool, the folks at the public library, and the staff at the Radio Shack whether there were any public Internet points or cafes nearby. No one had a clue. While racking my brain to think of local businesses from which I could beg bandwidth, I remembered the McDonald’s at the corner of La-2 and Bernice Highway– a mere five miles from the park. A quick call to Devin netted me the information I sought: the local McD’s did in fact have Wayport WiFi. Last night I rolled in, opened the laptop, and downloaded the 400+ messages that accumulated since I got here on Saturday. Today I made a grocery store run and stopped off for a Quarter Pounder and some email; I’ll be heading back later tonight for another delivery.
I guess that means that I have to officially retract all the crap I gave McDonald’s about their food. It’s still not my favorite, but I’m willing to put up with a lot for the ability to keep my customers happy by delivering my work on time. It says a lot about their franchise consistency that even a small town like Farmerville rates WiFi in the store.

Microsoft today released version 2.0 of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. Among its many other new features, it can scan for Office security updates (among other products), it works with WSUS, and it presents more data on potential vulnerabilities. Go get it now.

From this morning’s Wall Street Journal: Microsoft settles their antitrust dispute with IBM by paying them $775 million; in addition, MS is giving IBM “credit” of $75 million towards deployment of MS software at IBM. This essentially resolves all of IBM’s claims of harm to OS/2 and the SmartSuite products, but it still leaves open potential claims by IBM for harm to their server software. It does set the clock for claiming damages forward, though, to June 30, 2002. Interesting…

I’ve decided to take the plunge into podcasting with a new series of podcasts for Windows IT Pro. The idea was hatched more or less out of the blue while I was sitting at TechEd with Karen Forster and Amy Eisenberg, so I offered to do a trial run of podcasts to see what kind of reader, er, listener reaction we got. I’m trying to do one ‘cast a week on average from now until September, at which point we’ll see what kind of listener numbers I can post. (In a transparent attempt to raise those numbers, I registered my podcast feed at Apple’s new podcast directory; maybe that’ll help).

Buy.com is selling the Verizon version of the Treo 650 for $175 to new customers; it’s really $399, then you get $225 back via mail-in rebates. Still, that’s a good deal for the Treo. Notably, palmOne hasn’t released a firmware update for the VZW model, although there are updates for both the Sprint and unlocked-GSM versions that they sell.

The Exchange team just released version 2.1 of the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA). There’s a lengthy list of improvements over at the Exchange team blog. My favorite new feature: the rule that warns you if only a single GC is present.

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 🙂

Even though the the DC circuit Court of Appeals struck down the original broadcast flag rules, the entertainment industry is still trying to clamp down on the devices we all use. I got an “action alert” email from EFF asking people to call Senators on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that owns technical issues. Apparently the forces of darkness are trying to sneak a broadcast flag amendment into an appropriations vote. If you value your ability to use devices like iPods and TiVos, call or email your Senator right now. It only takes a minute to do, and the subcommittee markup is at 1400 EDT today, with a full committee vote on Thursday– not a lot of time.

Now here’s an interesting development: VERITAS announced yesterday that IBM has agreed to resell VERITAS’ Cluster Server and Storage Foundation products for Linux and for Windows. It’ll be interesting to see what impact this has on the adoption of Storage Foundation in the Windows market; it’s a very capable product that has been hampered by VERITAS’ difficulty in effectively selling non-backup WIndows products.

Wow, this is unexpected. Verity, which makes both the UltraSeek and K2 Enterprise search tools, announced today that they’re making one-year licenses for UltraSeek free for collections of less than 25,000 documents. If you have more than 25,000 documents, you can buy a four-year license for US$75,000; while this sounds expensive as all get-out, it’s considerably cheaper than their original pricing. UltraSeek’s strength is that it’s designed to be an install-and-forget search product that delivers a user experience not dissimilar from Google’s Internet search; Verity is throwing in access to their classification engine and their extension API, both of which used to be extra-cost options. This is an interesting move, and one which I think will help solidify their presence in this space by getting them into some doors they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to cross. The missing piece is still desktop search, where Google and Microsoft have significant leads that Verity will be hard-pressed to match– we’ll have to wait and see what happens.