This is the best description I’ve ever seen of Apple’s product development cycle.
Infrastructure
Busy few days here at the ranch. I got a DCT6100 from Buckeye for their HD service, had them come out and install a cable modem (3.5Mb/s down, 384Kb/s up, at half the cost of my 1.1Mb/s up/down SDSL from Speakeasy), and just got done flattening and rebuilding my firewall box with ISA Server 2004. The most remarkable aspect of these changes is that so far, they’ve all gone flawlessly (except for a bad cable box, which was easy enough to fix). The boys and I are looking forward to watching Robbie Knievel’s big jump in HD on Saturday.
Update: this morning, no Internet when I awoke. Turns out that, contrary to the installer’s advice, the NIC connected to the cable modem must not be set to DHCP. Oops.
Comments Off on Infrastructure
Filed under General Tech Stuff, HDTV and Home Theater
Microsoft support for VERITAS Storage Foundation
Man, am I glad to see this: an official statement on MS’ support position for VERITAS Storage Foundation. The bottom line is very simple:
To be very clear: Microsoft will provide support for Microsoft Exchange issues if you run Exchange on a VERITAS Storage Foundation platform. However, Microsoft will only troubleshoot and attempt to resolve Exchange-specific issues up to the point that the source of the problem can be reasonably attributed to an issue or incompatibility with VERITAS software. This same principle also applies to other third party products.
Comments Off on Microsoft support for VERITAS Storage Foundation
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
New 15GB iPod: $125
I was in BestBuy yesterday browsing around, and noticed a scratch-and-dent tag on a boxed, on-the-shelf iPod. The tag said “scratches on display; missing headphones and software”. I got them to open the box; sure enough, the screen was badly scratched, and the headphones were missing. There was no price tag, so I was able to talk them down from their original offer of $150. Thus my new iPod (which also came with about 9GB of preloaded music, thankyouverymuch). If I can replace the screen faceplate, I may flip it on eBay, but then again I may not. Yay for returns!
Comments Off on New 15GB iPod: $125
Filed under General Stuff
Hampton Inn, Franklin KY
Wonderful! Clean, pleasant hotel with a friendly, attentive staff. Great pillows and a curved shower-curtain rod round out the experience (and the free in-room wireless didn’t hurt any either). I’ve stayed at $200/night hotels that weren’t this nice (like the Sheraton Four Seasons in Newark, bah!) Highly recommended.
Comments Off on Hampton Inn, Franklin KY
Filed under Reviews
LANL has a little email problem
Inaugurating a new category for security mistakes, we have this story from Computerworld. Seems that the Los Alamos National Laboratory has had a little email security problem, on top of their other recent problems:
In the latest incident, lab spokesman Kevin Roark late yesterday confirmed a Los Angeles Times report that the lab recently discovered new incidents of classified information being sent through a nonclassified e-mail system.
“We have had occurrences recently, yes,” Roark said. “We have had them in the past. It’s anticipated we will have them in the future.”
In the Company of Soldiers (Atkinson)
Rick Atkinson has written a solid book based on his experience as an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army during the Iraq war. As a number of Amazon reviewers pointed out, this isn’t the same kind of book as The March Up (which I’ve also read); Atkinson’s book is mostly about Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st. Petraeus comes across as a complicated and nuanced figure, and there’s no question that Atkinson has painted a rich picture of what it’s like to be responsible for 17,000 troops and several billion dollars of equipment in combat. However, ultimately I found the book unfulfilling. There’s little discussion of tactics, and the lowest- ranking person Atkinson seems to have talked to is a major. The grunts who make up the 101st are given short shrift, and that’s too bad. If you want to see Atkinson at his best, read his Pulitzer Prize winner, An Army at Dawn, instead.
Comments Off on In the Company of Soldiers (Atkinson)
Filed under Reviews
Black (Whitcomb)
Chris Whitcomb’s first book, Cold Zero, was a memoir of (part of) his time on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. I found it fascinating, and part of that was because of Whitcomb’s clear, direct prose style. Now his first novel, Black, is out. Frankly, the nonfiction book was better. In Black, Whitcomb’s protagonist is Jeremy Waller, a young FBI agent who joins HRT and ends up involved in a bizarre antiterrorist mission that is much different than it seems. Along with Waller, we have a risk-loving corporate executive who may or may not be a CIA operative, a megalomaniac multibillionaire who may or may not be a traitor, and a wealth of technical detail that may or may not be accurate (in fairness, Whitcomb does a pretty good job with the technology). There are a couple of last-minute plot twists that are regrettably predictable, and the ending is anticlimactic. I think Whitcomb can do better.
Comments Off on Black (Whitcomb)
Filed under Reviews
RSS feeds from public folders
Thanks to fellow MVP Glen Scales, it’s now trivial to create an RSS feed from a public folder. This is very, very cool. Why? Well, for starters, we keep a public folder of security bulletins and alerts from various sources– presto! it’s an RSS feed. Many of my cow orkers who don’t pay attention to public folders nonetheless will read anything that shows up in their aggregator.
Comments Off on RSS feeds from public folders
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
It’s NAP time
No, not that kind of NAP: in this case, Network Access Protection (NAP) Is Microsoft’s name for the network quarantine feature they’re shipping in Windows Server 2003 R2. The NAP white paper makes for an interesting read, but the NAP FAQ might be a better place to start. In brief, NAP works by allowing administrators to set policies (like “system must have version X of antivirus product Y”) or (“system must have patches A, B, and C from Windows Update”).
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
The magazine I could be writing for
Penton Media owns two of the magazines I regularly write for: Windows & .NET Magazine and the Exchange and Outlook Administrator newsletter. While at the grain elevator yesterday, I learned that Penton also publishes Occupational Hazards. Now there’s my kind of magazine!
Comments Off on The magazine I could be writing for
Filed under General Tech Stuff
My day at work yesterday
Yesterday, I volunteered to work a shift at our local church grain elevator. Yes, that’s right; the LDS church actually owns about 25 grain elevators in various places. The grain stored there is an important part of our humanitarian assistance / welfare program , which even our detractors admit does a lot of good. Anyway, the elevator here is actually in Latty, Ohio, about 80 miles away. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. My friend Chris and I drove out, signed in, and started working. I had hoped to get to pressure-wash their diesel switch engine, but the super diesel-powered high-temperature pressure washer was missing a fitting, so instead we went down in the conveyor area and started stripping paint off the various pipes, enclosures, and other stuff. While we were there, a total of about 20 grain trucks came to deliver; at an average 800 bushels apiece, that’s 16,000 bushels, or about 1.3% of the elevator’s total capacity. We could hear the grain shushing by on the conveyors as we worked. A couple of other folks from our ward were doing other work, including clearing brush and cutting grass.
Why is all this necessary? There’s one full-time employee at the elevator, and all of the rest of the work (e.g. most of the maintenance) is done by volunteers. I think that’s pretty neat, and it definitely made for a nice change of pace from my regular job. As a bonus, even small acts of service are worthwhile.
Comments Off on My day at work yesterday
Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Can ISPs read your email?
Following up on yesterday’s post on Councilman, I found this interesting article at GigaLaw: “Do ISPs’ Policies Allow Them to Monitor E-mail?” At issue: whether ISPs can/should/do have the same kind of “we can monitor you” language in their user agreements as many corporations do in their acceptable use policies.
Filed under General Stuff
The difference between “legal” and “right”
Last week’s column concerned the Councilman decision, in which a US Federal district court seems to say that intercepting email is OK if you’re an Internet service provider. I got a couple of reader emails asking what that meant for private organizations who may or may not want to read employee email. The bottom line, according to my non-lawyerly understanding: the Councilman decision means nothing in that context. Why? Councilman concerned an ISP, not a private company. If your employees have to agree to an acceptable use policy that says you can monitor their email, or if you otherwise put them on notice (e.g. by a statement on your OWA front page), the prevailing legal consensus seems to be that you’re in good legal shape if you do need to monitor email. However, you still need to tread very carefully. If you really want more details, a) ask your legal department or b) buy my book and read Chapter 20, which was written by an actual lawyer with real legal expertise in the field.
Comments Off on The difference between “legal” and “right”
Filed under General Stuff
Mozilla vulnerability timeline
Via my inbox, I found a very interesting blog post that outlines the timeline for fixing the recent shell: vulnerability in Mozilla. I tip my hat to the Mozilla team for their speedy response.. except that they forgot a couple of important things.
Filed under General Stuff
