Considering how much we use it, it’s a little surprising that our TiVo (a Sony SVR2000, bought in June 2000) hasn’t fallen over and died. Jeremy’s upgrade plaint the other day helped me decide to upgrade it. I’m still vacillating over whether to add a network card or not. I think I’ll hold off, but I did order a nifty drive bracket after seeing it on PVRBlogs. This should make for a neater installation than the duct tape I originally planned to use.
Unbelievable
It turns out that NASA engineers really were sounding the alarm about potential damage to Columbia; it’s just that their managers were actively resisting, or passively ignoring, their claims. I saw a lot of boneheaded, turf-protecting, politically-motivated decisions when I worked at a NASA subcontractor, but nothing like this. My favorite part of the story is this:
Since the accident, Mr. Rocha said, engineers and other colleagues have thanked him enthusiastically for speaking up, saying things like, “I can’t imagine what it was like to be in your shoes.” His immediate supervisor has been supportive as well, he said, But from management, he said: “Silence. No talk. No reference to it. Nothing.”
Except, that is, from the highest-up higher-up. One day Mr. Rocha read an interview with the NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe, who wondered aloud why engineers had not raised the alarm through the agency’s safety reporting system. This time, Mr. Rocha broke the rules: he wrote an e-mail message directly to Mr. O’Keefe, saying he would be happy to explain what really happened.
Within a day, he heard from Mr. O’Keefe, who then dispatched the NASA general counsel, Paul G. Pastorek, to interview him and report back. In a recent interview, Mr. O’Keefe said Mr. Rocha’s experience underscored the need to seek the dissenting viewpoint and ask, “Are we talking ourselves into this answer?”
Indeed.
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Filed under Smackdown!
“Save SkyMiles” ad in USA Today
Those wacky folks at SaveSkyMiles are at it again; they posted this ad in the Atlanta-region edition of USA Today. It basically says “hey, DL employees, we’re sorry your management doesn’t get it, but we’re leaving. We still love you, though”.
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Filed under Travel
Blade interview follow-up
Yesterday I finally spoke with Karin Kowalski, the Blade writer who’s doing a piece on local bloggers. She had done her homework well, which is always nice; one persistent meme in the blogger community is that most journalists are technophobic idiots. Some probably are, but people like Karin, Mike Wendland (who moved his site without me noticing), and Dan Gillmore help put the lie to that. It’ll be interesting to see the story when it comes out.
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Filed under Musings
Two new technical blogs
The PVR Blog has everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about personal video recorders, including TiVos and the Dish Network series. Well-written, nicely designed, lots of good information.
The MS Exchange Blog is a group blog written by three knowledgeable Exchange administrators. They have already amassed quite a bit of Exchange 2003 content, and I only expect things to get better.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Excellent Exchange-related blog
While perusing the PVRBlog, I came across an excellent Exchange blog maintained by William Lefkovics, Neil Hobson, and Chris Meirick. It has a ton of good content and is more regularly maintained than my site. It now has pride of place in my RSS aggregator. Keep up the good work, guys!
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Orlando now, Vegas later
From this week’s Exchange UPDATE:
Attend Exchange Connections, Win a Free Vacation
Learn the latest tech tips and tricks from gurus like Tony Redmond, Sue Mosher, Paul Robichaux, and the Microsoft Exchange Team. Receive free access to concurrently running Windows & .NET Magazine Connections. Plus, you’ll have a chance to win a 5-day Las Vegas vacation with airfare for two. Register now online, or call 800-505-1201 or 203- 268-3204.
It should be a good show, and I look forward to meeting y’all there!
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Filed under General Stuff
Number portability, Verizon-style
I’m happy with Verizon’s cell service; they have a robust and wide-ranging network, and I have only rarely had problems making or receiving calls (and most of those were in Alabama; go figure). I’m excited to see them accepting number portability, which is of great value to consumers but (probably) negative value to wireless phone companies. Now even more good news: VZW will provide number portability for landline numbers, too. According to this press release, Verizon customers will be able to take a Verizon landline number and turn it into a cell number. This is super cool, and I hope that Ameritech SBC offers a similar capability– I’d ditch my second landline, pass the number to my cell phone, and replace it with Vonage.
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Filed under Musings
Gimme an H! Gimme a D! etc.
The installer from Digital Dish left a short while ago, after having hung a new dish pointed at the 61.5° satellite. This is hopefully temporary, until Dish starts shipping their “superdish” antenna. He also installed the 6000u receiver and we tested it to verify that I get the HD feed properly. It looks great, slightly crisper than the Buckeye DCT-5100.
I bought two antennas (more on that later) so I could find out which one worked best and looked least dorky, but I’ll have to wait a few days to hook them up; the installer didn’t have any of the 8VSB modules, so I still can’t get over-the-air HD. Dish is offering a free 8VSB module to any subscriber who owns a 6000, which is a great deal for those who haven’t already bought one yet– just call them and ask for one, preferably waiting until after mine’s shipped so they don’t run out. Hopefully mine will arrive in time for Thursday’s Threat Matrix, or at least in time for college football on Saturday.
The installer, alas, made one major faux pas: he forgot to reconnect the new receiver’s S-Video and audio out, so no one could watch standard TV. That would have caused some consternation, but luckily I caught it before anyone wanted to watch TV.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Book update
I haven’t been working on the book much lately. The first 9 chapters are done, leaving me with 13 more to either revise or write from scratch (plus one that’s being written by a Real Live Attorney). However, I’ve been so busy with work (including a really cool Exchange planning guide for the MSA series) that I haven’t had any spare time to work on it. If you doubt me, consider this: I haven’t even turned on the Xbox in two weeks, so you know I must be busy. It now looks like the book will ship sometime after the first of the new year, or about a year after the first version.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
ISA vs DMZ
From a reader at a major whiskey maker (really!):
I purchased Secure Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 at a Microsoft Windows 2003 conference in Cincinnati. The reason I purchased this book was for Chapter 14 Securing Outlook Web Access. I had been explaining to my boss that the traditional way of implementing Exchange 2000 (OWA) on a DMZ was not as secure as I would like, since you have to open several ports from the DMZ to the internal network. After explaining what I had found in your book and researching information on Microsoft’s website and others I convinced him and our corporate office this was the way to go. In June I implement your solution of Publishing OWA with ISA Server to secure our OWA server. This September we were audited by our internal auditors and they are telling us this is not as secure as the traditional way of placing Exchange 2000 (OWA) server on the DMZ. They could not give us a reason way, so I want to challenge them that this is more secure before I am force to change to the traditional way. I need information stating this method of securing Exchange OWA is more secure.
Tell your auditors to get off the glue. When you put an Exchange server of any stripe in the DMZ, you’ve created two problems. First, you’re putting a domain member in the DMZ, and if someone compromises it they may have a springboard to compromise other machines inside the perimeter. Second, to make Exchange work you’ve got to open a ton of ports. DMZ configurations can be made secure, but the whole point behind ISA is that it gives you strong security by reverse proxying so you don’t have to open anything in the DMZ.
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Filed under General Stuff
Blade on blogs
In my “info” mailbox, I got a query from a Toledo Blade reporter working on a story about local blogs. I told her to call me any time. If any of you have comments for the Blade, feel free to leave ’em here 🙂
Filed under Musings
Buckeye Institute blog
This site is pretty neat: it’s subtitled “Up to the Minute Analysis of Ohio Public Policy”, and it delivers the goods. I haven’t read enough of the analysis to see if the author has any obvious biases, but I did note that searching for “concealed” (as in, “concealed carry”) turned up no hits. That tells me something right there; the ongoing CCW permit fight is certainly a public policy issue.
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Filed under Musings
Delta relents, somewhat
There’s been a lot of complaining about Delta‘s decision to downgrade the benefits offered to their most frequent flyers. I voted with my feet at the beginning of this year and have accumulated almost enough miles on NW for their midtier elite program, which gives me unlimited free upgrades on any fare class.
Today I got some mail from Delta announcing changes to their Platinum Medallion benefits for next year. (See a summary of the changes here.) The resumption of unlimited upgrades is nice, but it’s limited to the most expensive (Y, B, and M-class) fares. No thanks.
On the other hand, with Continental’s recent decision to backstab their elites, can NW be far behind? One speculation is that CO and NW are aligning the details of their FF programs with Delta, which means that it may be in my best interest to spend a couple hundred bucks on a mileage run to Singapore or Tokyo to make sure I hit NW’s top tier– if CO and NW both slave their upgrades to DL’s program, I’ll be in trouble as a midtier member.
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Filed under Travel
TiVo with rebate, now with 200% more hack
Tara points out that you can now get a $50 rebate on a Series2 TiVo. This is a pretty good deal, e.g. Amazon has ’em for $299 for the 80-hour unit (after rebate) or $199 for the 40-hour unit. Me, I’m waiting for the HDTiVo; in the meantime, I think I’m going to stuff another disk drive into mine to add some recording capacity. Interestingly, there are now 3 separate books on TiVo hacking: Krikorian’s TiVo Hacks (O’Reilly), von Hagen’s Hacking the TiVo (Premier Press; includes a bootable CD), and Keegan’s Hacking the TiVo (Wiley, not yet published).
The actual tools you need for the upgrade are freely available. In fact, I think I have a spare 40GB drive on the shelf over my head. Hmmm.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
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