Tough choice for a Sunday night: do my taxes, or watch The Ten Commandments in HD. Hmmm.
Update: it’s not in HD. Drat.
Render unto Caesar
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater, Spiritual Nourishment
Windows &.NET Magazine adds RSS feeds
This is really cool: Windows &.NET Magazine now has a page of RSS feeds. The Exchange feed is my favorite.
Update: the feeds occasionally time out, and they seem to only have five items in each category. They also don’t include the Exchange UPDATE newsletter. Dang.
Update again: the Exchange feed hasn’t been updated since my original post, which I take as a bad sign. I’ve emailed my editors to see what’s up.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Oracle’s patch issuance policy: bad
All right, I’ve had it. I am tired of waiting for “real” media to pick up on this story.
Oracle won’t give its customers security patches unless they buy a support agreement. This is flat-out wrong. It holds customers hostage in a particular nasty and egregious way: if you don’t buy support, you can’t get the patches you need to protect against vulnerabilities in products you’ve bought and paid for even if they’re still current.
If Microsoft did this, they’d be (rightly) pilloried. As it is, you can get any security patch for any supported product for free, either as part of a service pack or by directly calling Microsoft PSS. Microsoft has even extended the end-of-support date for Windows 98 and Windows NT so that customers can continue to get support (and patches) for them.
Of course, very few large Oracle customers run in production without support, as you would expect from such a large, complex group of products. Perhaps their customers don’t care that they can’t get patches without support because they all have it. I still think it’s wrong.
(n.b. I don’t know what IBM and Novell do in this scenario, but I aim to find out. Stay tuned.)
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Filed under Smackdown!
More on iSCSI and Exchange
My column this week (which I can’t link to right now, thanks to a bug at the Windows &.NET web site) was on iSCSI and Exchange. A helpful MS PR person wrote to point out an error: there’s not actually a separate “certified for Exchange logo”. If an iSCSI device has the “Designed for Windows” logo, it’s supported for use with Exchange.
Update: it turns out that the Windows Catalog uses the “Designed for Windows XP” logo for iSCSI devices. Even though the column, and the press release which inspired it, talk about the “Designed for Windows” logo, those products listed in the catalog are certified for use with Exchange 2003.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Automatic conversion of distribution groups to security groups
In a recent post to NTBugTraq, Rene points out what he calls a “problem” with Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003: under some circumstances, Exchange will convert a distribution group to a security group.
Regular users with no rights to modify ad security groups have the ability to change a distribution list to a security group.
Steps to recreate problem.
1: User opens a mailbox with Outlook 2000 / XP / 2003
2: Navigates to mailbox permissions
3: Add distribution list from Gal access as contributor.
4: Save changes
Once the user adds the distribution list Exchange will convert the distribution list to a like security group.
As another reader correctly noted, this behavior is by design, and it’s controlled by the msExchDisableUDGConversion attribute on the Exchange organization object. In Exchange 5.5, you could apply public folder permissions by assigning DLs. That doesn’t work in Exchange 2000 and later, since a distribution group doesn’t have a SID and thus cannot be used for permission assignment. Normally this conversion only takes place during an upgrade from Exchange 5.5 (a process described in chapter 10 of the Exchange 2000 resource kit). The default attribute value of 0 lets the conversion take place at any time; a value of 1 only allows conversions requested by the store (not by clients; this setting would fix Rene’s problem). A value of 2 disallows all such conversions (but as described in this webcast, this value isn’t recommended.) Kieran McCorry has a good article that talks more about the conversion process, why it’s necessary, and how to control it.
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Filed under Security
Our new line of business
Peter, John, and I have been talking about diversifying the range of services we offer. I think this bid would be a good place to start.
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Filed under Musings
Work ethic
What happened to the drive? What happened to the desire? Where are all the people out there working to make a better world for their children, not just making a house payment for their children?
Some of us are here (but we can’t hire you because you’d have to move to Seattle and Mom would kill me.)
Interestingly enough, part of our priesthood lesson on self-reliance yesterday dealt with this very topic. Consider the man who visited a stone quarry and asked three stone cutters what they were doing. “Cutting stone,” said the first one. “Earning a living for my family,” said the second. “Helping to build a glorious cathedral,” said the third. What a great difference in attitude between the three– even though all three of them are right and correct, only one has looked beyond his to-do list to see the greater purpose in his daily labor. I’m not exactly building a cathedral, but I can help build up my family, my community, and my country by doing good work and trying to live what I believe in instead of just coasting through the day checking off items on my (regrettably long) to-do list.
Now, back to work.
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Disney day 5: EPCOT and Cirque du Soleil
It’s true; EPCOT really does stand for “every person comes out tired”. This has always been my favorite park, mostly because there are so many gadgets and so much techno-stuff– but also because of the pervasive spirit of optimism that pervades both halves of the park. When we arrived, we headed straight for Test Track and got FASTPASS tickets for it. While Matthew and I strolled around people-watching (and eating popsicles, of course), everyone else went to Ellen’s Energy Adventure, which broke down mid-ride on our last visit. It got good reviews this time; Mom and I traded groups, so they went to bird-watch while the rest of us rode Test Track. David loved it as much as he did last time, and Arlene and Thomas both were impressed (although it didn’t make GM look so good when our car got stuck three times, once in the “cold climate” test room). We puttered around for a while afterwards until it was time for our Mission: SPACE fastpasses. How was it? It’s so good that I am prepared to forgive HP for their long history of writing crappy Mac software for their products. Thomas and I rode (David chickened out at the last minute), and you should have seen the look on his face! He got to be the mission pilot and was enormously proud of his accomplishment. The ride itself was really slick: very immersive, with a terrific blast-off sequence that gives realistic G-loadings and buffetings. IMHO, Walt himself would have approved (although this story about Disney freaks points out how many of them talk about what Walt would, and would not, have liked– eek! am I crossing the line and becoming a Disneytrekkie? Let’s hope not.)
While Tom and I were riding, everyone else headed over to the World Showcase. I’d never been there before, and it was quite enjoyable, even though I didn’t do anything more than stroll through the pavilions. We had lunch at a surprisingly good Japanese yakitori restaurant, then walked around a bit more until it was time to go. Arlene and I had set a hard departure time of 1530 because we had tickets to the 1800 performance of Cirque du Soleil‘s La Nouba. What a show! I’d never seen Cirque before, but I’d heard a lot about the athletic skill and design of their performances, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s hard to summarize it, so I won’t try– but if you go to Orlando, see the show if you have time. It’s well worth the (rather expensive) ticket price, and there’s not a bad seat in the house. While we were doing that, Mom and the boys ate at Downtown Disney, and then to bed. Pictures:
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Filed under Travel
Cue the fight song
I’m almost ready to forgive WTOL; their broadcast of the Georgia Tech-Kansas game today was flawless (especially the 5.1 surround!), and so was the outcome. What a great second half. I vividly remember the last time Tech went to the Final Four, since I was just finishing my degree. Now they’re back in. Sweetness. (Personal to all Duke fansr: I was rooting for Xavier to beat Duke, and now I’m rooting for Duke to lose. I’m just sayin’.)
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
From Microsoft to stand-up
Scott Oseychik, formerly of Microsoft’s customer problem response team, has moved on to new things: he’s now a stand-up comedian. No, really. I have no idea if he’s funny or not, but he was very helpful in explaining the intricacies of the Exchange 2000 and 2003 transport engines when I was writing about them. I wish him luck (and I’ll go see him if he’s in Detroit, Toledo, or the surrounding area!)
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Thanks for nothing, WTOL
Last night, I was all set to watch the Georgia Tech-Nevada game. I had the bedroom TV connected, the TiVo in place, and a freshly plumped pillow. Unfortunately, our local CBS station cut away at the tipoff of the Duke game, so I didn’t get to see the other three quarters of the Duke game. It’s almost enough to get me to sign up for DirecTV’s “Mega March Madness” package, which has (or, I should say, had) all of the games. Stupid local affiliates. I emailed them to complain, but I’m sure they did it for sound marketing reasons… after all, Illinois is only a few states away from here. Feh.
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Filed under Musings
Work for the Exchange team
Want a job working for the Exchange team in Redmond? They’re having a hiring spree fair in late April in Seattle. See the jobsblog or send your resume here.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Banning social software in the workplace
I wrote about a security problem with Plaxo a couple of weeks ago. It’s since been fixed, but now I’m starting to hear that companies are barring their employees from using Plaxo, LinkedIn, and other social software. Why? Several reasons. The biggest seems to be that these services enable wholesale exporting of your contact database, which makes it easy for you to find out which of your existing contacts already use the service. This has two problems, though. First, it runs afoul of European Union data privacy laws; many multinational companies in the US have already been working hard to make their internal operations conform to EU regulations because they have EU operations and employees who live and work in the EU. Microsoft, AT&T, General Motors, and American Express come to mind. The other reason, of course, is that companies don’t like the idea of a third party getting unrestricted access to a significant portion of their internal contact data. Imagine the bonanza for a clever Sun salesman who managed to steal all of the contact data for an IBM sales rep, for example. This is precisely why very few companies expose even shadow copies of their master directories to the outside world: there’s too much risk in doing so, and the reward is fairly limited.
Will these bans work? Beats me. Services like LinkedIn and Plaxo have to reach a certain degree of critical mass before they become useful, but it’s difficult to see how such bans can be efficiently enforced. Interestingly, the one ban I’ve actually seen in written form doesn’t say anything about “personal” social software like Orkut and Friendster.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Light-transmitting concrete
This is very cool: concrete with embedded optical fibers that transmit light. It’s not transparent (see this picture), but it’s still pretty neat.
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Filed under FAIL
Get $100 free from Citibank
There must be a catch somewhere. Amazon sent me a flyer for a Citibank promotion. If you open a new regular checking account with a $1500 deposit, then use their online bill payment service to pay two bills online within 60 days of opening the account, they give you $100 cash. Sign up with offer code “CCY2”. I assume that it’s one per customer, but I may try opening one account for each member of our household (not that Matthew really needs a checking account, but hey, $100 is $100.)
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Filed under Musings
