It’s entirely possible that everyone in the SF world already knew about this, but it was news to me: Robert Heinlein, dead these sixteen years, has a new book forthcoming: For Us, The Living. The full story of its emergence is here. You can order a copy from Amazon (via a link that benefits the Heinlein Society). I’ve ordered mine. (Hat tip: my sharp-eyed and well-connected brother Tim).
The Exchange library
Microsoft maintains a page of Exchange 2003 documentation here. There are some very cool things here, not least of which is the little “freshness” icon that indicates when each paper or article was revised and how long it’s valid. There’s not an impressive volume of documentation there (yet… just wait until you see what’s planned), but what is there is quite good. My current favorite is the S/MIME quick-start document.
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Filed under General Stuff
There is no conspiracy
Tom Clancy has a new book, Teeth of the Tiger, out. It’s not a very good book, IMO, although it’s better than his last two pieces of crap, err, novels. However, I notice that Amazon doesn’t have any user reviews! This, for a book whose current sales rank is now 4, and which has been shipping since 8/11 or so. I find that suspicious. Given how many readers (if, perhaps, no longer fans) Clancy has, one would expect a torrent of reviews on such a hot-selling book, but there are none. That makes me wonder why there aren’t any reviews, and none of the possible answers (incompetence, systems failure, reviewer latency, desire to keep sales up by failing to post bad reviews) are good for Amazon.
Update: BN.com does have reviews listed on their page for the book. Of course, BN also has reviews for John Grisham’s latest, as yet unreleased, book, so maybe they aren’t the most reliable source. I just sent email to Amazon to ask where the reviews were for Clancy’s book; we’ll see what they say.
Update: I got a return email from Amazon’s “community service” team. They claim that the review problem was a temporary technical glitch; indeed, there are now 219 reviews averaging 3 stars. (The number of reviews hasn’t changed since late Thursday, which seems a little unusual.)
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Filed under Smackdown!
Red Thunder (Varley)
Somewhere, Robert A. Heinlein is smiling. John Varley, whom many of the current generation of sci-fi readers probably don’t know about, has returned with a pitch-perfect Heinlein juvenile, Red Thunder. Calling it a “juvenile” isn’t a slam; it’s a reminder of the time years ago when authors like Heinlein wrote books that were nominally “young adult” in scope but had enough sophistication for adults. (Stephen Barnes is still doing it, bless his heart!) The plot of Red Thunder is simple: idiot-savant Cajun inventor discovers a new physical principle that can be turned into a high-acceleration space drive. A group of plucky mixed-race kidscreative young adults pair up with a disgraced former astronaut, and the team is off to Mars to rescue the American crew of the Ares (and, not incidentally, to beat the Chinese to Mars’ surface). In large measure, the book is predictable, but Varley’s such a good writer, and obviously takes such joy in his stories and characters, that it’s never boring.
If RAH were still alive, this is very well a book he might have written, with a few caveats. Varley is known for larding his work with lots of bad language and graphic sex. I was disappointed to find that in what would otherwise have been a terrific book for young adults; I thoroughly enjoyed it, and when David’s older he’ll probably enjoy it too. (Bonus: there are tons of in-jokes and references to Heinlein’s books… the protagonist is named Manny, for instance.)
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Filed under Reviews
Great article on patching
CSO (“the magazine for the chief security officer”) has a terrific, and well-balanced, article on the difficulty, and necessity, of patch management. I highly recommend it.
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Filed under General Stuff
New craft gallery
This is what I should have done in the first place: set up a gallery for Arlene’s craft pictures. Here it is.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Home theater blog
Thanks to my pal Rod Montgomery, I now know about the Oasis Home Theater Blog. Now, where did Arlene hide the checkbook….
Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Word for the day: “low spousal acceptance”
So that’s what they call it. From this story in the New York Times:
Because of wiring problems and general aesthetic concerns, the right and left rear speakers in a surround-sound system suffer from what those in the home-electronics business call low spousal acceptance, which means that at least one household decision-maker vetoes their installation.
So, by that criterion, not only do my rear-channel speakers suffer from LSA, but so do the HD TV set (which also suffers from “low Aunt B acceptance”) and the Xbox (partially compensated by high child acceptance). Fortunately, the TiVo has high spousal acceptance, which sort of makes up for the other two– at least until I get an HDTiVo, if and when they ship.
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Filed under Musings
Foiled again!
My evil plan to get a Google search rank of #1 for “Stampin’ Up!” has been foiled so far, not least because they maintain their own site for demonstrators: stampinup.net. Unfortuantely, the page throws an error when you load it. They’re apparently offering sites for their demonstrators (example), which I guess makes good business sense. I’ll have to find some other way to achieve world stampin’ domination.
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Filed under Musings
SPEWS/Osirusoft RBL goes away
According to this Slashdot article, the SPEWS real-time block list is no longer operational. A comment-free version of the same basic story is here. The article points to a lot of discussion on news.admin.net-abuse.email, too, which amkes for interesting reading. Osirusoft shut down SPEWS after being the target of an ongoing distributed-denial-of-service (DDos) attack. The manner in which it was shut down caused lots of bounces (including for my friend Bob Thompson and Kent State University, among others). The problem is that when Joe Jared, Osirusoft operator, shut down his service, he did so by telling the server to blacklist every IP address. Sites that rely solely on SPEWS thus dropped all their incoming mail on the floor.
What does this mean to you, the Exchange administrator? As Andy Lester points out, outsourcing your spam protection completely to a third party puts your mail service at the mercy of that third party. Exchange 2003 includes RBL support, and it’s a useful adjunct to heuristic or keyword-based filters. However, RBLs themselves don’t provide a complete solution, and you should choose your RBL provider carefully to make sure that a) they provide support for their service and b) they have the resources to stick out this kind of attack.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Adios, Tablet PC
On Saturday, I took my Acer C102 Tablet PC back whence it came. I bought it in late July, so it had almost a month (including two trips to Redmond and one to Salt Lake) to win me over. The bottom line is that it’s not enough of a laptop for my needs. When in Redmond, I made a point to take it with me to every meeting I attended– but I never used it! The relatively slow CPU and limited RAM had a lot to do with it, too, as did the fact that I can type way faster (and more legibly; just ask my high school English teachers) than I can write. I still think the Tablet PC form factor has a lot of potential, especially as more customized applications like Classroom Presenter and TabletPlanner come out, and I would have liked to try using the Tablet as a presentation machine. However, all was not lost; my spiffy new ThinkPad T40 is almost as thin as the C102, and it’s hella fast, with great battery life and 1GB (expandable to 2GB) of RAM. I guess I’ll keep tabs on the Tablet world and see how it’s doing next summer; by then, there should be machines with better screen resolution and more CPU horsepower.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Several more cards
Wow, my wife’s creativity is endless! I can’t believe no one is posting comments. I guess my techno-nerd stylings have scared away all readers with a taste for rubber stamps and crafty scrapbook stuff. (Hey, maybe if I write “Stampin’ Up!” ten or so times this page will rise to the top of Google’s search. Worth a try, eh? Stampin’ Up !Stampin’ Up! Stampin’ Up! Stampin’ Up! Stampin’ Up! Stampin’ Up!) Note: the cards themselves are here now.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Be careful what you ask for
Famous last words: “I want one just like that.” We’re hiring someone new, so I decided to order a new T40 and give my not-so-old T30 to the new guy. This is a time-honored tradition, since John did it with his T30. I asked Peter to order me one just like John’s, never dreaming that it meant “no wireless”. Of course, John a) doesn’t travel much b) doesn’t have a WLAN at home, and c) doesn’t have a WLAN at work. Of course he didn’t order a machine with built-in wireless. I, on the other hand, use it heavily, so now I am facing a dilemma:
- Violate my warranty and slap in an IBM wireless card, which means I could run 802.11a/b (there’s an a/b/g card on their website, but I can’t find it for sale separately)
- Void the warranty and install my own card
- Try to get CDW to help me out in some way
- Suck it up and use my old Cisco PC Card adapter.
In the meantime, a word of advice: spec your own darn notebook. Update: Turns out that IBM sells a combo a/b/g card (part #31P9701 or 91P7301, depending on who you ask) so all I need to do is snag one of those somehow.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Need a TiVo? Get one for $90
Everyone should heed High Priestess Julie: get a TiVo. Now, for a pittance, you too can join the TiVolution. (Personal to John: this has your name written all over it.)
Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
More cards
And another one… actually, it’s now in the gallery.
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Filed under Friends & Family
