Amazon sale on Eytmotics ER-6i
I lost the ER-4ps that I got for Christmas, so I bought some ER-6is to see how they sounded. They sound almost as good and they were hella cheap(er). Now Amazon has the ER-6i on sale for $89, which is a terrific deal. If you’ve been wanting a set of these but have balked at the price, well, balk no longer.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
The anti-jet-lag diet
This is pretty neat: biologists at the Argonne National Laboratory have developed a diet (or, more precisely, a mix of foods) that helps prevent jet lag when traveling over long distances, either west-east or east-west. Now they’ve licensed it to antijetlagdiet.com, which will prepare a customized meal plan based on your departure and arrival cities and times. The diet involves timed intake of carbs and protein, avoidance of caffeine and alcohol, and alternating fast and feast days. I think I’ll give it a try next time I have to travel a long distance– it just might work.
With friends like this…
You know Microsoft has to love it when the CEO of Intel publicly trashes Windows security:
Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter’s computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, “If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else.”
Filed under Smackdown!
MS’ position on software replication
I’d previously written about MS’ support position on VERITAS Storage Foundation for Exchange. Sometime between then and now, MS released a KB article (895847) that sets out their support policy for hardware and software replication solutions. It outlines support boundaries for three important categories: asynchronous software replication, synchronous hardware replication in a geographically dispersed cluster, and sync hardware replication not in a dispersed cluster. Well worth a read if you’re interested in this category of products.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Apology to Dave Whitney
I wrote a column last week on the public folder management improvements in Exchange 2003 SP2. As a guide, I used Dave Whitney’s post on the improvements, since none of the other SP2 documentation has been made public. Unfortunately, I didn’t include a link to his original article in my column. I always do this when I link to the Exchange blog, because it’s a terrific resource, but this time I plum forgot. This is unfair to Dave, who wrote the original post, so I’m posting this apology. Sorry, Dave; it won’t happen again.
Exchange Cookbook: now on Amazon
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.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Exchange Cookbook: now on Amazon
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
HOVs and motorcycles
From today’s “I didn’t know that” file: motorcycles are legal in HOV lanes in all 50 states. The Federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991, which provided for HOV lanes, requires any state that wants to ban motorcycle use of HOVs to certify that motorcycles present a hazard in HOV lanes. According to NHTSA, motorcycles are actually slightly safer in HOV lanes than regular vehicles are.
Apparently ISTEA also calls for restricting HOV use to vehicles that are at 50% or more of carrying capacity, e.g. a one-person motorcycle is at 100% capacity, as is a Miata with two people in it. However, if two people are in my seven-passenger minivan, that’s apparently still OK with most states— go figure.
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Filed under Musings
Dell 2005FPW: I’m in love
A couple of weeks ago, AnandTech held a shootout comparing the Dell 2005FPW and the Apple 20″ Cinema Display. The reviewer found that the two were largely identical, which isn’t surprising since they use the same LCD panel. I don’t have a Cinema (and never will, as long as it costs $790+), but I got a 2005FPW this week for about $400, and it rocks. 1680 x 1050 is nice enough, but the display is clear, crisp, sharp, and much brighter than my Samsung 170MP (which in turn was brighter than the old KDS monitor that I bought at Sams’ Club back in 2000). Adding the two, my desktop is 2920 x 1024– just enough for the profusion of windows I always have open.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Reviews
Entourage and RPC-over-HTTP
“Does Entourage use RPC-over-HTTP?” I’ve run across this question several times in the public newsgroups, on mailing lists, and in direct conversation. Now Mike Wendland’s asking, so I figured I’d write a long answer and just refer to it in the future.
In the beginning, there was MAPI, the Mail Application Programming Interface. Microsoft Mail (remember that?) used MAPI, as did the long-forgotten Windows Messaging and Exchange Client applications. When the Outlook team began working on Outlook, it used MAPI also. MAPI communication between client and server are actually implemented using remote procedure calls (RPCs) that travel over the Windows RPC subsystem, which uses TCP ports 135 and 443 and UDP ports 137 and 139. Because early versions of Windows had a number of RPC-related security vulnerabilities, admins quickly learned to block these ports from the Internet, meaning that you had to dial in or establish a VPN session to get your mail with Outlook from outside the corporate network.
In the meantime, lots of other applications started tunneling their data over the standard HTTP port, TCP port 80. This has the advantage (for users) of letting these applications run without special permissions or changes to the firewall. With Outlook 2003, Microsoft implemented RPC-over-HTTP tunneling so that you can establish a native Outlook MAPI session from outside the firewall without using the default RPC ports. This is good from a security and convenience standpoint. Why security? Think about it: if you establish a VPN session, you’re trusting the remote machine to be clean, and you’re trusting the remote user not to do anything malicious on your network. With RPC-over-HTTP, all the remote user can do is get mail, so you don’t have to worry that they’re going to screw up anything else.
Entourage for Mac OS X doesn’t use RPC-over-HTTP. Instead, it uses WebDAV, an XML-based technology that travels over HTTP connections. It has nothing to do with MAPI or with RPCs, and it works with Exchange 2000 and Exchange Server 2003– RPC-over-HTTP requires Exchange Server 2003 running on Windows Server 2003.
Both technologies have the same effect: an outside user can establish a connection to the Exchange server using HTTP (which had better be protected with SSL) to talk to the server.
Now, on to Mike’s specific question: Apple Mail 2 supports Exchange accounts using WebDAV, so if your employer supports WebDAV and is running Exchange 2000 or later, you should be good to go. You’ll probably need to enter the same server name that you use for Outlook Web Access to get Mail to find the right server. Good luck!
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Secure Messaging reviewed, at least partly
Michael Murphy, a TechNet presenter for Microsoft, has been reading Secure Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. So far, I like his approach to reviewing the book; he’s posted an article that describes his reaction to the first two chapters, including an explanation of what’s in them. One of the best parts of writing a security-focused book was that I had the luxury of including background material to help Exchange admins get the right vocabulary and mindset to talk security with real security folks. This makes my book very different from other Exchange books, since they normally have to cover so many topics that they can’t provide much depth in any one area. In fact, the first five chapters are broad enough to be of interest to admins running any messaging or collaboration software on Windows– so all you Notes folks who secretly read my blog, go get a copy 🙂
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Filed under General Stuff, Reviews
Indexing SMB volumes with Spotlight, redux
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.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Morgan Stanley fumbles e-disclosure, gets hammered
Ouch! This story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal details how problems with Morgan Stanley’s e-discovery process are going to end up costing them a lot: perhaps $360 million, or even more. The judge in the case labeled their actions as bad faith, and that’s going to cost them.
Morgan Stanley is in serious trouble because of the way it mishandled an increasingly critical matter for companies: handing over email and other documents in legal battles. Lawsuits these days require companies to comb through electronic archives and are sometimes won or lost based on how the litigants perform these tasks. Morgan Stanley kept uncovering new backup tapes, couldn’t perform full searches because of technology glitches and gave material to the other side that was sometimes incomplete or late.
The Morgan Stanley folks made a number of poor decisions and mistakes– ones that you should be sure not to duplicate in your own environment.
Update: this WSJ story says that the jury hit Morgan Stanley for $604 million. As the story also points out, the jury was instructed by the judge to put the burden of proof on Morgan Stanley, not the other way around, so it’s reasonable to expect that this will be appealed, and that it might be overturned. Still, $604 million is a high price tag.
Update: the WSJ just reported that the jury awarded Perelman another $850 million in punitive damages. That brings Morgan Stanley’s total tab to $1.45 billion.
Company Man (Finder)
Spellbinding. I couldn’t put it down. Stop reading my blog and go read this instead.
What, you’re still here? OK. Here’s the deal. Nick Conover is the CEO of a large office-furniture company. Someone’s stalking his family. He kills the stalker, more or less unintentionally, and suddenly finds himself pursued by a dogged homicide detective (who, in a welcome reversal, is a devout Christian and portrayed sympathetically as such), under attack by rivals at work, estranged from his teenage son, and involved with a, er, somewhat unstable woman– the daughter of the man he killed. Finder’s storytelling ability is amazing; his characters are richly drawn, and overall this was a terrific book. Highly recommended.
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Filed under Reviews
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