2003-11-07 · 16:00

WiebeTech: good folks

This is sort of a reverse smackdown; normally I post complaints in this category, and that’s what this started as, until it was happily resolved. I use a WiebeTech FireWire DriveDock, a little pod that snaps into the back of any IDE hard disk or optical drive and makes it visible with FireWire. This is a great way to speed up running VMware or Virtual PC on my ThinkPad, since its internal disk is pretty slow. I was running out of space on the 40GB drive I had plugged into the dock, so I bought a 120GB WD1200 and found that it wouldn’t start– the motor would start and give a little torque kick, but then it would shut down again. I thought the drive was bad, but it tested OK, so I emailed WiebeTech’s support alias asking them for suggestions on how to fix the problem. About two hours later, I got a response:

Hello Paul,
As you have witnessed first hand, Western Digital has changed the power requirements of their newer drives. To compensate for this, we have a device
that plugs in-between the DOCK and the drive, called a Power Filter. Send me
your WiebeTECH Invoice number and/or shipping information, and I will be
happy to send one out to you.

Problem identified and solved, politely and at no cost to me. If only every company were so responsive! I’ve been recommending Wiebe’s products for a while because they work well, but I’m really pleased by their attitude toward customer service.

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Filed under Smackdown!

2003-11-06 · 20:07

House proud… well, view proud

An acquaintance of mine is a translator and author who lives in France. He posted some pictures of the view from his yard. Wow. They’re even better than John’s frosted leaves.

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Filed under Friends & Family

2003-11-05 · 10:53

Aelita releases CDO fix tool

I had a nice meeting with some technical folks from Aelita this morning. Among other things, I learned that they’ve released a free tool to help automate finding and fixing the CDO heap corruption problem (described in KB article 823343) that can occur when Outlook 2003 clients access mailboxes that are later used by CDO-based utilities or tools.

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Filed under General Stuff, Musings

2003-11-04 · 18:32

Leave your tools at home

This morning, the TSA people pulled me out of the X-ray line and asked if they could search my bag. “Sure,” I said, knowing there was nothing in there. “It looks like there’s a wrench in there,” said one of them. To shorten the story as much as possible: yes, there was a wrench in the pocket of my trousers. I’d picked it up to safeguard it from Matt The Tool Bandit; when I took them off after my dinner date with Arlene, I folded them neatly to be packed and packed them. Lo and behold, they took my wrench, all 5″ of it. I guess they thought a 7/16″ box/open-end qualifies as a banned item. At least it wasn’t one of my good ones.

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Filed under Travel

2003-11-04 · 04:59

Antenna experimentation

So far I’ve tried three antennas for local HDTV reception, none of which has worked very well. My goal is to be able to get Fox and ABC without moving the antenna; if I get CBS or NBC, that would be nice but I rarely watch either of them. The local PBS affiliates aren’t broadcasting HD yet. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

  • The Zenith Silver Sensor is highly directional but butt-ugly. That wasn’t a big problem, because it’s also fairly small. The real problem was its inability to get a signal from more than one station at a time. If you look at the Antennaweb map of my location, the locals are clustered between 59°-68° magnetic from me, but this antenna was so directional that I had to move it to get channels whose towers are fairly close to one another. Rejected.
  • the Jensen TV920, a flat bar-style amplified antenna. It got zero channels with the amplifier off; when I turned it on, I could pick up NBC and CBS. Its shape made it impossible to rotate in the spot I had available for it. Rejected.
  • The Terk TV42, which clips onto an 18″ satellite dish and uses a diplexer to send the OTA signal over the satellite cable. Even though the AVS Forum HD boards are full of “don’t buy Terk” advice, I had high hopes for this because it was an outside antenna that would be mounted above the roofline. However, once I got it wired correctly (a small adventure in itself), I found two things: it would only get Fox, and it screwed up my satellite signal, apparently by blocking the current sent to the LNB to switch it between horizontal and vertical polarization. Rejected.

I have two more candidates in mind, both from this review. We’ll see if they work any better; if not, it’s time to put the beam up in the attic.
Update (29 February): I’m finally ditching my Radio Shack indoor unit in favor of an attic antenna, either a small omni or a Yagi with a rotator.

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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater

2003-11-02 · 21:27

What John wants for Christmas

Over at PVRblog, there’s a mention of this device, which handles streamed audio and video from a PC to a home theater… wirelessly! It doesn’t use 802.11g, but no doubt somebody will make one that does soon. There’s also the extremely cool HomePod, which can play songs in Apple’s AAC format and comes with a developer kit that lets you write your own applications that run on it.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-11-02 · 21:13

Mac OS X 10.3 and Exchange

Over on the other blog I discuss some pitfalls in getting Panther to synchronize contacts with Exchange 2000/2003 via WebDAV. It mostly works…

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Filed under General Stuff, Musings

2003-11-02 · 20:24

Getting Panther Mail to sync with Exchange

One of the new features in Panther is that Mail and the Address Book can be synchronized with Exchange 2000. Even though I’m a very happy Entourage user, I don’t have enough licenses of Office for all my Macs, so I wanted to give this a try on the Cube upstairs.
I followed the instructions and put in my full OWA URL in the appropriate field. Guess what? Nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that my URL was truncated from http://serverName/exchange/paul to just serverName.

I went hunting at Apple’s support site and soon found out what the problem was: I had installed iSync 1.3 when it was released, so when I installed Panther it didn’t get re-installed, and I didn’t get the missing library required to sync with Exchange. This post on the Apple support site told me how to fix it. Once I installed the missing library, I was able to initiate and complete a sync between my Exchange account and my local Address Book.

This would have been really cool, except that all of the people now in my address book show up backwards: “Garret & Tiffany Anderson”, for example, are listed as “Anderson Garret & Tiffany”. If that were just how the names were displayed, it would be OK, but noooo; the conduit has switched the first and last names, apparently because Apple never thought to distinguish between the “file as” field and the real name. Oooops. A quick application of the “Swap First Name/Last Name” command seems to have fixed it.

Oh, and as for the truncation of whatever you put in the address field: according to this article, this is more or less by design; the bug is that the Mail help file tells you to put in a complete URL. Oooops again. As a worse side effect, since Apple makes the assumption that every user is in the same domain, if you have multiple domains, you have to modify OWA to use a default domain (see MS KB article 290341) because iSync is too stupid to know that domain\username won’t look too good in the OWA URL. This also means that the synchronization will break if you’ve renamed your OWA virtual directory. Oooops yet again. I think I’ll stick with Entourage, thankyouverymuch. Now, for my next trick, I’m going to delve into why the Active Directory plug-in doesn’t work with my fairly simple AD topology.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-10-30 · 10:12

What not to pack

From this AP story:

An alligator was captured inside the baggage hold of an airliner on Monday after escaping from its crate. The young alligator, just 4 to 5 feet long, remained inside a burlap bag with its mouth bound shut, American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner said. Officers captured it with a looped device and put it back in its crate with three other gators shipped from Miami, officials said. Authorities were looking into how the reptile got out.

Forget that; I’m much more interested in how the reptile got in. (Hat tip: Dave Taylor‘s Pearls mailing list).

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Filed under FAIL

2003-10-30 · 09:34

Counterparts (Rush)

OK, so it’s an old album. It still rocks. Great work music.

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Filed under Reviews

2003-10-29 · 11:20

Beta? What beta?

Beta software? What beta software? Hey, why can’t I open any email? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
So, it looks like I’ll be reinstalling Exchange on my basement server this morning. Then I get to go to the dentist. Maybe I can get an IRS audit notice and win the trifecta. Actually, it could be worse; when I first noticed that the information store had stopped, I feared some kind of hardware failure. Good thing I discovered this morning that my tape drive hasn’t been doing its job lately. I don’t have time for this kind of infrastructure work right now, but it has to be done. Sigh.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-10-28 · 19:25

Mike Howard’s got blog

I’m not normally one to post the same thing on both blogs, but this deserves double posting: Michael Howard (author of Writing Secure Code) has a blog, in which he discusses all sorts of tasty security stuff. (Too bad gotdotnet doesn’t support trackbacks.)

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Filed under Security

2003-10-28 · 19:24

Mike Howard’s got blog

I’m not normally one to post the same thing on both blogs, but this deserves double posting: Michael Howard (author of Writing Secure Code) has a blog, in which he discusses all sorts of tasty security stuff. (Too bad gotdotnet doesn’t support trackbacks.)

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Filed under General Stuff

2003-10-27 · 16:31

WWHF?

I got a message today from a gentleman identifying himself as a colonel in the USMCR, currently attached to US Marine Corps Forces Europe. In the message, the colonel asked me to point out the existence of the Wounded Warrior Hospital Fund. From their site:

The Wounded Warrior Hospital Fund, was created to purchase  quality-of-life items for those Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines wounded or injured  in Iraq and Afghanistan and evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany.

I haven’t done any deep background investigations, but their site appears legit, and I know the need is pressing, so I made a contribution. No matter your feelings toward the war, I ask that you at least drop by the site and see what they’re about.

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Filed under Musings

2003-10-27 · 11:19

Speaking of hard teachings

… what part of “Thou shalt not steal” does Apple not understand?
Update: as usual, Daring Fireball has a contrary opinion.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff