They say you never forget your first time. I remember mine: I was about six, wearing some blue pajamas. All of a sudden, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, I started throwing up. Matt underwent a similar experience last week, after getting his Hib and DTaP shots; according to the literature the doc gave us, this happens in about 2% of cases. The poor little guy was completely baffled: he kept throwing up even when there was nothing left in his stomach, and I could tell that he was upset as much by the vomiting’s unpredictability as his inability to do anything about it. About midnight, he stopped, and he and I spent the rest of the night snuggled on the living-room floor, with a stack of clean-up towels nearby. Fortunately, he was back to normal the next day, although all of us are battling a low-level stomach-cramping, generally-yucky bug of some kind.
Year-end wrapup
Wow, long time no post! I have a ton of stuff to write about, so it’s going to be trickling out over the next few days. We had a terrific family Christmas, with plenty of snow. Stay tuned for further posts over the next couple of days.
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What’s in the preacher’s pants?
Wow. This guy is good! My favorite so far:
I’m clanking around the room like some kind of futuristic, preaching, freak robot.
(Note: I own a pair of the pants in question.)
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Outlook 11: butt-saver or security risk?
I had a network account, from a certain large software company, used for my work for them. Due to an administrative snafu, it was disabled and won’t be re-enabled until the manager returns after the holidays. I needed a message that had been sent to that account? What to do?
In my case, it was simple: I fired up Outlook 11 and got the message out of my client-side cache. This really isn’t a new feature; Outlook’s had PST and OST files for a long while. However, Outlook 11’s synchronization is seamless and automatic. As an end user, that’s great. As an administrator, though, it makes me wonder: what can I do to prevent or restrict the use of cached content? I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft has some ideas in this direction, and that we’ll be seeing them emerge in future betas of Outlook 11.
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Some Mac OS X musings
I like OS X a lot. It runs well on the modest hardware I have for it (a G4/450 Cube), and it’s been very stable. I love having the ability to pop open a UNIX command line while still getting usable versions of Office. There are still some features OS X doesn’t have that Windows XP does (including offline files and 802.11 auto-discovery), but on the other hand X has some features missing from XP (like Rendezvous). However, there is one thing I’m very unhappy about in OS X.
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Terminal Services and offline files
I have several Windows 2000 Advanced Server machines here. All of them have Terminal Services installed; that way, I can log into them without having to have a separate (or shared) keyboard and monitor for each box. On hurricane, my primary work machine, I’ve been wanting to enable the Windows offline files feature, which I use on my laptops. However, the tab that’s supposed to let you enable them never showed up. I chalked this up to a “feature” of Advanced Server, until last week, when hurricane suddenly began telling me that my file server was offline and that it was using locally cached files. That told me that the offline files feature (which Microsoft internally calles CSC, for client-side caching) was somehow turned on.
Much research ensued, with the result that I finally found the answer to why CSC wouldn’t work: it’s disabled on machines running Terminal Services. Since I installed TS when I installed the OS, I never got any UI warnings. However, after I removed TS, I could turn on CSC on hurricane. I let it synchronize and turned it off again. I now have to decide: do I want the convenience of Terminal Services, or the guaranteed data availability of CSC?
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Who needs snow?
Even if you have no snow you can still go sledding! Check out Toboggan Run (courtesy of Inluminent.)
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Trent Lott
OK, so he’s a racist pig. (No, really: I think he is.) Although I’d be delighted if the President would run him out of town, he might still be able to save himself by letting everyone know that he really is sensitive to minorities.
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Find the common thread
What do Whoopi Goldberg, Philip Johnson, and Suzanne Farrell have in common? Apparently, me. They’re the results I got from the “find your mentor” page.
Update: according to this page, I am also Hal C. Clement, an underappreciated science-fiction writer. I’ve heard of him, but I don’t think I’ve ever read any of his stuff.
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Security templates
If you apply the security templates from Microsoft’s Exchange 2000 security operations guide, remember that these templates are additive. You must first apply the correct templates from the W2K security operations guide.
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Today’s connection
I was writing a column, and the next thing I knew, I was researching the history of nursery rhymes. How’d that happen? Well, I was writing about how to be prepared for hardware or software failures: keep your product keys handy, make sure you know where your support contracts are, and so forth. I included the well-known rhyme “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe, the horse was lost…” My editor asked for a citation, and the best I could find was that it was attributed to Ben Franklin because he published it in the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Who knows what bizarre connection will arise from my current work on the Orapig?
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Let the free market rule
I fly on Delta a lot. Accordingly, they have given me “elite” status, which means I usually get to sit up in the first-class cabin. This is good, especially since Delta has by far the least-comfortable coach cabin configuration: 3 x 3 seating in coach, with a 31″ distance between rows of seats (compared to 34″ on American or United). 3″ doesn’t sound like much, but for a long drink of water like me, that extra kneeroom makes all the difference. Recently, though, DL decided to revamp their frequent flyer program. In short, they are deeply cutting benefits for their most frequent flyers, and they’re changing the qualification requirements to boot. The requirements change doesn’t affect me, because I normally don’t fly on the most-discounted fares, but darn if I’m going to pay business fares and then sit in the back!
So, I faxed American and Northwest, telling them that whoever gives me the best status level gets all my business in 2003. We’ll see what happens.
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VNC update
In a recent column (12/10/02), I more-or-less dismissed VNC as a useful remote access tool. Two readers wrote in to correct me. First, VNC now has a new home, with a slightly more up-to-date version. However, they’ve dropped the Macintosh version; boo hiss. Second, there’s an allegedly optimized version called TightVNC, based on, and interoperable with, the original version. TightVNC has a Java version, so I guess that’s what Mac users are supposed to use. I haven’t tested either of these, but if you’re allergic to Terminal Services they might be worth a look.
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AV scanning on connector servers
A reader asks:
Should I do AVAPI virus scanning on connector servers?
It doesn’t matter. AVAPI only scans the Exchange information store, so running it on your connector servers won’t do any good. Instead, you need an SMTP virus scanner like Trend‘s VirusWall or Nemx’ Power Tools.
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Enterprise credibility
Yeah, like the starship Enterprise. In today’s WSJ, my buddy Gary Bloom is quoted more-or-less saying that Linux is going to storm the datacenter and nip Microsoft in the bud. The article says “Big computing shops haven’t yet put a lot of Linux into their holy-of-holies data centers, says Bloom. But that could change next year, when outfits such as Veritas have their entire product lines available on Linux.”
Right. So, Veritas has mostly been unable to sell its suite of products for Windows– which are actually quite good– because a) no one’s heard of them and b) they’re quite expensive. This despite the efforts of folks like my friend Joe Hand, the world’s greatest evangelist. At the same time, they’re going to sell a ton of products in the Linux space, which is a much smaller market space that has a proven resistance to paying actual money for software.
“We bring enterprise credibility to Linux,” said Bloom, “just like we did for Sun.”
Gary, Linux already has enterprise credibility, and it has nothing to do with you (or /., for that matter.) It’s a useful tool for some applications, just like Windows, Mac OS X, and even dinosaur iron.
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