Duff Wilson of the Seattle Times has a nifty guide on how to find information on people: “Who is John Doe, and where to get the paper on him“. It’s missing a lot of commercial services, but it’s still interesting.
MSDN Product Feedback Center
This is really cool: a new web-based engine for tracking product bugs and feedback for Microsoft products. It will eventually replace BetaPlace (and not a moment too soon IMHO). You and I can now report bugs, not to mention being able to find existing bugs and “vote” for them to raise their priority/visibility. This doesn’t have any direct impact on Exchange, yet, but it’s safe to bet that when Exchange Edge Services hits beta that this will be the feedback mechanism for it.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
An open letter from a Marine
From Blackfive, an open letter from a Marine to the sadists who kidnapped Marine Cpl Wassef Hassoun:
When you raise that sword over your head I want you to remember one thing. Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun is not alone as he kneels before you. Every Marine who has ever worn the uniform is there with him, and when you strike him you are striking all of us. If you think the Marines were tough on you when they were cleaning out Fallujah a few weeks ago you haven’t seen anything yet. If you want to know what it feels like to have the Wrath of God called down upon you then go ahead and do it. We are not Turkish truck drivers, or Pakistani laborers, or independent contractors hoping to find work in your country. We are the United States Marines, and we will be coming for you.
His family is asking for prayers. I think the terrorists who kidnapped Cpl Hassoun should be praying, too.
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Filed under Musings
Apple’s posters at the WWDC
This week is Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference, and they’re pulling out all the stops to introduce Mac OS X “Tiger”. Here’s a snapshot that arrived in my mailbox earlier today.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Toledo local satellite channels
Finally, we’re getting locals! Dish turned on their Toledo locals last week sometime, and DirecTV has announced that they’ll deliver them as soon as they get FCC approval to move the DIRECTV5 satellite to 72.5°. Of course, this might take a while, especially since DirecTV is already in trouble with the FCC for moving DIRECTV3 without permission. Still, I’m hopeful that this will happen before the fall TV season starts, since most of the shows I want to TiVo are local broadcasts.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Random notes from my recent trip
I just got back from a long trip: TOL-ATL-MLU, followed by a short stay and family visit at Lake D’Arbonne State Park, followed by MLU-DFW-SEA, a few days of work, and a return to the park, thence home. A few notes in no particular order:
- Whoever set up the state park at Lake D’Arbonne should get a raise. It’s beautiful: secluded, quiet, with clean, well-maintained, well-equipped cabins. Bonus points for not putting TVs in the cabins.
- It was wonderful to see my sister and my grandparents, neither of whom I get to see that often. The food and company were both great.
- Seattle consistently has the rudest TSA staff of any airport I’ve ever been in. Ruder than Detroit, ruder than Newark.
- In this month’s issue of Delta Sky, there are profiles of several Delta employees, including Phil Bartholomew. He’s the best DL flight attendant I’ve ever seen: super courteous and very much on the ball. In the same magazine, there’s a big ad from Sykes congratulating Delta on their 75 years of success. I noticed that the one reservation/ticket agent included in the profiles works for a city ticket office in Rio; I wonder how the current (and former!) US-based reservations employees feel about Sykes’ ad.
- I’ve taken probably 200 or 250 trips with a laptop since I graduated from college. I’ve left my laptop behind twice. This was one of those trips. Fortunately, I left it at the park cabin, where Mom was able to toss it in her car for her return trip to Ohio. Rookie mistake!
- Delta gets bonus points for putting a Crown Room Club in their satellite terminal at DFW, but they lose them again for having it close at 9:30pm when the last bank of flights leaves after that. C’mon, guys: if there are departing flights scheduled to leave, have the club open. It’s not that hard to figure out.
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Filed under Travel
Ken Jennings keeps rolling
Wow. 16 consecutive wins, $512,959. Awesome! Ken’s success is having a trickle-down effect, too: since Sunday, I’ve been getting about three times as many readers as usual. Since I (temporarily) have lots more readers, a quick plug: Spirit of America and SmileTrain are worthy charities if you’re in a giving mood.
Update: w00t! Ken now has 18 wins and $601,760 in the bank. I’m finally home, so I’ll be watching tonight.
Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Alexandria gets Mormon-ized
On the way to camp, I spotted the building for what I assume is the Farmerville branch. Once we got there, my grandmother brought a cool newspaper article to Camp Bloch: the Alexandria Town Talk did a full-page piece on the LDS missionaries assigned to the Alexandria ward. Pretty neat. Right now, our whole family is waiting to hear where our friend Jacob will go on his mission– it’s been 4 1/2 weeks since his papers went in, and we’re all eager to hear the news. It probably, alas, won’t be Alexandria.
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Ken Jennings: Mormon superstar
Courtesy of this article in the Salt Lake Trib, I now know that Ken Jennings, who has run his streak of Jeopardy wins to 12 (total winnings: $410K, so far!) as of last night, is a BYU graduate, a returned missionary, and a software engineer. Note to self: avoid going on Jeopardy to avoid unfavorable comparisons…
Update: I missed Tuesday’s show, but as of Monday Ken was still going strong. I’ll definitely be watching tonight.
Update: Ken is rocking on! He scored win #17 tonight.
Update: Ken is still winning big (although last night he almost didn’t make it to Final Jeopardy). The New York Post reports that Jeopardy’s ratings are up 12+% since Ken’s run began, but why trust them?
Filed under Musings
IMF archive reviewing
Over at the real Exchange blog, Neil posted a note about a cool web-based tool for reviewing messages archived by the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. Written by Daryl Maunder, the tool is simple to install (create a new IIS virtual directory on your Exchange server, copy the tool files to it, and voila!) and works well. In the comments to that post, the tireless KC Lemson noted another filter, this one a C# tool written by James Webster of the Exchange team. Both work well; I currently prefer Webster’s tool because it shows both the message and the contents of the P2 recipient data, using a sort of preview pane arrangement; I also like the fact that it’s open-source. Maunder’s web-based tool is cool too because you can access it from other machines on your LAN (or via VPN). Either tool is an improvement over the minimal functionality the IMF itself provides for reviewing archived messages– try them both and see which you prefer. (Note to both authors: please, please implement a way to select multiple messages for action– that would be a big help.)
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Vonage and 911
I have Vonage and generally like it pretty well. Call quality is generally good, and their web-based dashboard is a slick way to keep track of missed calls, voicemails, and so on. However, a question from a former co-worker got me to thinking– he asked how Vonage handles 911 calls. The answer is a little scary– they route 911 calls to the local public safety answering point (PSAP) if you tell Vonage where their phone box is (so they have the physical address) and if you activate that line for 911. Fair enough, I suppose. The scary part is that your 911 call goes to the standard number at the PSAP, not the dedicated 911 lines that are answered 24/7. In Perrysburg’s case, that means that the call would go to the police non-emergency number. Since we’re a small city, that’s probably OK because the call volume is fairly low, but for a larger city that might not be so great. Vonage explains all this in their terms of service, but not as prominently as I might like. For us, it’s OK because we’ve also got two wired lines and two cellphones in the house, but this would definitely be a showstopper for using Vonage as a single-phone solution.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Real Live Preacher on writing
This is how I know that Real Live Preacher is a real published writer: his first book hit the shelves, and now he’s wondering…
Writing is nice and all, but it’s no shop-vac, if you know what I mean.
If you think about it, I wrote some words and traded them for a shop-vac. Is this allowed? Did the guy who pays $200 for an essay and I do something wrong or immoral? Would we want to live in a world where that kind of behavior is commonplace?
How can writing be compared to something real, like a shop-vac?
Other than the fact that they both suck at times. Bada-Boom, Thank you. I’ll be here till Thursday!
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
The OWAAdmin tool
This week’s column was on the very cool OWAAdmin tool. I neglected to mention that Tosh Meston, one of the developers on the OWA team, mentioned it in his blog– sorry, Tosh.
This tool, which you can install on any Microsoft IIS server that runs version 1.1 of the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET, lets you remotely administer your OWA servers from anywhere in the organization. Although OWA offers quite a few features, the process of controlling OWA servers has always been a hassle because it depends on the creation of registry keys or values. Every Windows administrator knows how to do that, I know; the problem arises when you want to make configuration changes to multiple machines. Doing so manually is a bother and is even harder when you factor in common security settings that restrict or prevent remote registry access. You can always create your own Administrative Template file and attach it to a Group Policy Object (GPO), but only if you have the proper permissions in Active Directory (AD). Exchange administrators are often dependent on some other person or group to make directory changes.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
PFDAVAdmin for setting public folder permissions
You might consider this an error from the book, but it’s really more of an omission: I never mentioned that you can use PFDAVAdmin to view, modify, and set public folder permissions, including fixing the “invalid windows handle ID” error that we all know and love. The MS Exchange Blog has a good overview piece, and I made PFDAVAdmin the topic of this week’s UPDATE column,
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
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