- I took part of a day this week to open a business bank account, get Alabama license plates, and get my concealed carry pistol permit. Surprisingly, the trip to the credit union took the most time by far. The DMV and sheriff’s office were both quick and the people there could not have been more pleasant. Now it’s a race to see whether my driver’s license or my license plate arrive first.
- In possibly-related news, I am excited that Last Resort Guns is about to open their new range… at the end of my street. (Well, across a 4-lane road, but still!) I bought a membership, so a couple of days a week I’ll probably eat a sandwich as I walk to the range, get some practice in, and then walk home again. Sounds like a great lunch hour.
- Got my complex endorsement and checkout in the Piper Arrow this past week. Sadly, of the club’s two Arrows, one is grounded and the other has a broken autopilot, so I’ll probably stick with the 182 for my long trips until that’s fixed… or until I get checked out in the 182RG, which is next on my list.
- I also shot my first practice ILS approach under the hood. Wow. Lots to learn. I blew right through the glideslope because I was busy managing power and tracking my heading. Can’t do that.
- Monday marked the start of my fifth week of my coached fitness program, and brought with it a completely new set of workout routines. Ouch. However, over the past month I have gotten much stronger; my bench, deadlift, and squats have all improved and I am starting to see some actual hypertrophy in my upper body, so that’s all good.
- Heading to Perrysburg again this weekend to run the Rotary River Run 5K. Since I haven’t run a race since Memorial Day, and haven’t been running much, I am not looking for great results.
- I just noticed that Exchange 2013 Unleashed (which I haven’t read, and which I hope is better than the 2010 version) is available from Amazon as a rental book. Ouch.
Thursday trivia #98
Filed under Friends & Family, General Stuff, Musings
New header picture: Alpine, TX
It was time for a new header; my old one was from a 2010 trip to Alaska I took with the boys. This one is a roadside shot from Texas Highway 118 outside Alpine, Texas. I shot it with the camera on my Nokia 920, and it hasn’t been retouched or processed in any way. What you see is what I saw looking at it– an amazing picture from an amazing trip. I should’ve shot a panorama, though; maybe next time.
Filed under General Stuff
Keeping up: Office 365 OnRamp changes
Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and UM (colloquially known as “the book”) is now in production! I’ve reviewed all the page proofs, corrected the few composition and layout mistakes I found, and returned the proofs to the editorial staff so they can turn PDFs into paper. It’s pretty exciting, although thanks to my tardiness the book won’t be ready in time to be sold at Exchange Connections (about which, more tomorrow.) However, I’ve been assured that Tony’s book on Mailbox and HA will be available there.
About a month ago, I wrote this in the Office 365 chapter:
One of the difficulties inherent in writing about cloud services is that they can change rapidly and often. The screen shots of Office 365 in this chapter reflect its appearance and function as of late 2013, but it’s likely that some of the underlying Office 365 code will change, so don’t be surprised if what you see on screen doesn’t exactly match what you read here.
As if to reinforce that point, today Microsoft has changed the OnRamp tool that you use to assess your organizational readiness for Office 365. The readiness review portion of the tool seems to have disappeared, leaving the checklist portion (which is similar in intent to the Exchange Deployment Assistant, another topic covered in the chapter). I haven’t found where the readiness review went, but I’m fairly sure it still exists somewhere in the maze of Office 365 tools.
The moral of this story? Although Microsoft likes to mock Google’s habit of suddenly introducing changes to end users without warning, they are starting to develop the same habit, except it mostly affects administrators. I hope this particular change was just a slip and not a harbinger of the way toolset changes will be handled in the future. (The secondary moral: man, it’s going to be a challenge to keep up with Office 365 updates in anything I write in the future!)
Filed under UC&C
Speed, time, and cost
Recently I had the opportunity to fly down to Louisiana to see my mom, grandmother, and uncles. This was an easy trip: straight-line, it’s 411 miles from airport to airport. It took me 3:12 to get down there and 3:00 to get back. Why the difference? In a word, wind. In the northern hemisphere (and, more particularly, in the US, since that’s where I’m flying), prevailing winds tend to follow predictable patterns: west-to-east for much of the country, and (in general) onshore in coastal areas. The strength and direction of winds aloft vary, of course. For example, the definition of a frontal boundary (the line demarcating where a cold or warm front actually starts or ends) is an area where the wind suddenly changes direction and speed. It’s generally true that you’ll face headwinds when flying from east to west and tailwinds when flying from west to east, but the strength and direction of the winds can change quite a bit as you move across different types of terrain, through different weather systems, and so on.
astute readers can figure out exactly where I was when this picture was taken
In the picture above, the “GS” number in the lower right shows that I had a groundspeed of 148 knots. Since one knot is 1.14 statute miles/hour, that’s just over 170mph. That seems pretty good, considering that it’s more than double the speed limit on any of the roads that link Huntsville and Alexandria (and triple, or more, the speed limit for the West Monroe-Alexandria leg). The 128kts average groundspeed I had going westbound still equates to 147mph. Although a 20-knot difference is nothing to sneeze at, the practical impact is that it saved me… exactly 12 minutes, mostly because the winds kept changing.
That brings up the question of fuel usage. Every powered airplane has a set of performance charts that show you, for a given altitude and power setting, how fast you can go in still air (and remember, airspeed isn’t the same as groundspeed; that’s a topic for another post) and how much fuel you’ll burn while doing so. Book fuel burn for the Cessna 182P is between 12 and 14 gallons per hour, depending on your altitude and power setting. Most rental aircraft are rented “wet”; that is, the hourly rental rate includes gas and oil. In a rental, you therefore have an incentive to configure the engine for best speed even if you burn a couple more gph. When it’s your airplane (or when it’s a “dry” rental) you’re paying for the fuel, so you get to choose: would you rather burn more gph or get there a little later?
The correct answer is “it depends.” Aviation gasoline costs anywhere from $5 to $7/gallon in the US. (Why so much? Why the variance? Those are topics for another post too.) Suppose I can cruise at 130kts for 12gph, or 150kts for 15gph. That extra speed is going to cost me, let’s say, $18/hour. For a 411nm trip, that means I can get there in about 3 hours 9 minutes for just under 38 gallons (so, call it $228). On the other hand, at 150kts I could get there in only 2 hours 44 minutes, but it would cost me 41 gallons of fuel, or $246. In my case, since I was renting a plane, I went pedal to the metal, adjusting the engine for max speed rather than best fuel efficiency.
Now, this is an oversimplification, of course. It ignores the time spent climbing and descending (you burn more fuel in the climb, and less in a descent, but not enough to equal what you burned climbing), it assumes that ATC doesn’t reroute you anyplace inconvenient, and so on; it’s a good enough estimate for our purposes.
Let’s compare, now, the cost/mile of flying versus driving. I drive a 2005 Nissan Altima that gets 30mpg on the highway. Bing Maps says the fastest road route is 514 statute miles. So, that’ll cost me about $60 in gas, as opposed to $384 for the airplane rental. I’m leaving out all the other fixed and variable costs of the car; if I wanted this to be more precise I’d compare the cost of driving a rental car from here to there, but who would do that if they didn’t have to? Anyway, flying is considerably more expensive until you figure the time savings. Bing calls this an 8-hour trip, assuming no stops for fuel, food, or bathroom breaks. I can make it in a hair over 3 in the plane, though I have to take my own food. As with the car, that price stays the same whether I fly solo or with passengers (or cargo, such as the excellent banana pudding I brought back– thanks, Mom!)
Clearly I could come up with a business rationale that values my time at what Dell bills customers for it, or what I bill for it on standalone projects, but the right way to think about it, I think, is that the time I gain is priceless: being able to get to see family and friends, or attend important events, or just get out of town for a trip, is important, and the airplane gives me the flexibility to go farther, faster, more often than I could in a car, for considerably less money (usually) than it would take to fly commercial.
For another time: does it make sense to spend more money to rent or buy a faster airplane? It depends.
Filed under aviation
Thursday trivia #97
- Bo has introduced me to several great local restaurants– yesterday we’d planned on lunching at My Old San Juan, a local Puerto Rican place, but they’re in between owners again, so we went to Saigon instead. Dee-licious and great company.
- One of our lunchtime topics was the fact that some people perceive general aviation as super risky. I thought this article by Mac McClellan on that very topic was interesting. Pilots, by definition, accept the risk in exactly the way Mac states, but how do we reduce that risk? He makes a good point about motorcycles that I won’t repeat here; go read the article.
- A really interesting story about Fed pressure on Microsoft to implement a backdoor in BitLocker.
- “Not every tech problem is an IT problem. Some of them are HR problems.” So sayeth my friend (and fellow MVP) Ben Schorr, and boy, is that ever true.
- Being more careful about what I eat has led me to discover some pretty great new recipes. For example, this fantastic flat iron steak was dinner Monday night. Next up: Alton Brown frittatas.
- I am really encouraged as I watch the new Last Resort Guns facility take shape on County Line Road. I just applied (i.e. bought) a one-year family membership to the range; since it is literally right at the end of my street I expect to get plenty of use out of it.
- I’m not even remotely interested in the new iPhones. Maybe that will change after I get iOS 7 on my existing iOS devices.
- Here’s a fascinating question: is Silicon Valley a non-state actor? I agree with Tom Ricks on this: I think it is.
- Aviate, navigate, communicate: not just for aviation any more; it’s now a business metaphor.
- I am super glad that it’s football season! Last weekend’s Saints and LSU games were great, and this week I also get to look forward to Alabama crushing Johnny Football. Life is good.
Filed under Friends & Family, General Stuff, Musings
Do mailbox quotas matter to Outlook and OWA?
Great question from my main homie Brian Hill:
Is there a backend DB reason for setting quotas at a certain size? I have found several links (like this one) discussing the need to set quotas due to the way the Outlook client handles large numbers of messages or OST files, but for someone who uses OWA, does any of this apply?
Short answer: no.
Somewhat longer answer: no.
The quota mechanism in Exchange is an outgrowth of those dark times when a large Exchange server might host a couple hundred users on an 8GB disk drive. Because storage was so expensive, Microsoft’s customers demanded a way to clamp down on mailbox size, so we got the trinity of quota limits: prohibit send, prohibit send and receive, and warn. These have been with us for a while and persist, essentially unchanged, in Exchange 2013, although it is now common to see quotas of 5GB or more on a single mailbox.
Outlook has never had a formal quota mechanism of its own, apart from the former limit of 2GB on PST files imposed by the 32-bit offsets used as pointers in the original PST file format. This limit was enforced in part by a dialog that would tell you that your PST file was full and in part by bugs in various versions of Outlook that would occasionally corrupt your PST file as it approached the 2GB size limit. Outlook 2007 and later pretty much extinguished those bugs, and the Unicode PST file format doesn’t have the 2GB limit any longer. Outlook 2010 and 2013 set a soft limit on Unicode PSTs of 50GB, but you can increase the limit if you need to.
Outlook’s performance is driven not by the size of the PST file itself (thought experiment: imagine a PST with a single 10GB item in it as opposed to one with 1 million 100KB messages) but by the number of items in any given folder. Microsoft has long recommended that you keep Outlook item counts to a maximum of around 5,000 items per folder (see KB 905803 for one example of this guidance). However, Outlook 2010 and 2013, when used with Exchange 2010 or 2013, can handle substantially more items without performance degradation: the Exchange 2010 documentation says 100,000 items per folder is acceptable, though there’s no published guidance for Exchange 2013. There’s still no hard limit, though. The reasons why the number of items (and the number of associated stored views) are well enumerated in this 2009 article covering Exchange 2007. Some of the mechanics described in that article have changed in later versions of Exchange but the basic truth remains: the more views you have, and/or the more items that are found or selected by those views, the longer it will take Exchange to process them.
If you’re wondering whether your users’ complaints of poor Outlook performance are related to high item counts, one way to find out is to use a script like this to look for folders with high item counts.
Circling back to the original question: there is a performance impact with high item count folders in OWA, but there’s no quota mechanism for dealing with it. If you have a user who reports persistently poor OWA performance on particular folders, high item counts are one possible culprit worth investigating. Of course, if OWA performance is poor across multiple folders that don’t have lots of items, or across multiple users, you might want to seek other causes.
Filed under UC&C
The Perrysburg Express
The boys and I had been discussing where we should go on vacation. As usual, they wanted to go someplace exotic, like on a cruise. I counteroffered with a trip to our former home in Perrysburg, reasoning that it was an easy flight and that they’d like to visit friends. It turned out to be a great trip and a good example of the utility of personal aviation. The plan was for David, Tom, and I to fly to Ohio, where Matt would join us, then we’d all fly back together.
We left on a Sunday mid afternoon, loaded up our rental 182 with full fuel and our bags, and departed HUA for Bowling Green, Kentucky, 158nm to the north. There were some rainstorms moving from west to east near Nashville, so we had to dodge them a bit, but between guidance from ATC and the onboard weather data provided by my Stratus/Foreflight combination, that was no problem. It’s worth pointing out that the value of datalink weather in the cockpit is not for real-time storm avoidance. It’s to see where storms were the last time the weather data was updated and to plan routes so that you stay well away from potential trouble spots.
Anyway, the flight to KBWG was uneventful; when we landed, we called a taxi to take us to the National Corvette Museum, which I hadn’t previously visited. I think it’s fair to say that my jaw was at least partially agape the entire time. There are some spectacular cars there, and their memorabilia collection is excellent. Our lunch at the museum cafe wasn’t bad either. In fact, my only gripe with the entire stop was the taxi service; if you plan a trip through the Bowling Green airport be forewarned that taxis there are hard to come by and (at least for the two we had) decrepit nearly to the point of unsafeness.
From Bowling Green, our route of flight took us another 340nm to the northeast to the Wood County airport (1G0), coincidentally located in Bowling Green. As with many other county-owned airports, the Wood County airport is clean, modern, small, and lightly used, although Bowling Green State University has a flying club there and there’s a small FBO on the field. By the time we arrived, the building had closed but thankfully the vending and restroom areas are open so we could clean up a bit. Our friends Matt and Anita were kind enough to come get us, since there’s no good way to get a rental car in Bowling Green, Ohio on a Sunday evening; we had a great visit on the way to the hotel, the first of several.
The trip itself was marvelous. We went to a Mud Hens game, ate at all our favorite restaurants (yay for Mr. Freeze!), and saw many of our friends. I was shocked to see how much the “little” kids I used to teach in Sunday school had grown, and likewise I could tell that my adult friend were surprised to see David, Tom, and Matt in their 2013 editions. Perrysburg and the surrounding area didn’t seem to have changed that much. In fact, when we visited Imagination Station, the former COSI, it was surprising how little it had changed.
take me out to the ball game… (not shown: chili dogs, scoreboard showing Mud Hens’ loss)
just because I love sunflowers– this was taken next to the parking garage across the street from the science museum
On the trip back, we had too much stuff– Matt had brought 2 weeks worth of luggage with him back from Vermont, and we were already close to the weight limit on the 182, so we shipped some bags back via UPS. The 182 is a forgiving airplane but that’s no excuse for overloading it or loading it outside its acceptable center of gravity (CG) range, as difficult as that might be to do. For trips with all four of us, it looks like we’ll need a bigger plane, or to pack lighter.
On our return flight we planned a fuel step at the Springfield-Lebanon airport in Kentucky. As with 1G0, this airport seemed scarcely used. The very friendly attendant gave us the keys to a crew car and said “oh, I’ll be gone by the time y’all get back from dinner, so just leave the keys here on the counter”. True to her word, when we returned from an excellent lunch at Mordecai’s, she was gone, so we parked the car, fueled the plane, and departed again for the 220nm leg back to Redstone. Here’s how the flight went on the way back:
see, naps do make the trip go faster
As a pilot and a father, that’s exactly what I’m aiming for: to make flights with my family so routine and uneventful that the kids fall asleep, get bored, and even quarrel a bit, just as they would in the car.. with the added bonus that a trip that would have taken 8+ hours each way in the car took less than half that. That’s one of the best parts of personal aviation: it’s a time machine, enabling you to go places in less time and thus making trips feasible that would otherwise be impossible. What’s not to love?
Filed under aviation
Thursday trivia #96
- Apparently people with lots of self-control are happier. Makes perfect sense to me.
- Butterscotch pudding popsicles? Yes please.
- Or maybe key lime pie popsicles would be better.
- I need to do a longer post on my progress so far with the coached fitness program I started a couple of weeks ago. So far, however, I am noticeably stronger (my best deadlift is now 245!), with better muscle definition. Despite eating like a horse on workout days, I’ve lost about 8 pounds so far.
- Apropos of fitness: I loooove Fitocracy. What a great community. On the other hand, my local gym (1Fit) is almost always deserted; this is good for lifting, but not so good for community purposes.
- I am starting transition training to the 182RG, meanwhile looking around for a weekend prep course for my instrument written. I’ve also decided to write a book (a short one, I hope) about the process of getting an instrument rating. It’s going to be self-published through Amazon. Stay tuned.
Filed under aviation, Friends & Family, Musings
Microsoft Certified Systems Master certification now dead
I received a very unwelcome e-mail late last night:
Microsoft will no longer offer Masters and Architect level training rotations and will be retiring the Masters level certification exams as of October 1, 2013. The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there’s a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.
This is terrible news, both for the community of existing MCM/MCSM holders but also for the broader Exchange community. It is a clear sign of how Microsoft values the skills of on-premises administrators of all its products (because all the MCSM certifications are going away, not just the one for Exchange). If all your messaging, directory, communications, and database services come from the cloud (or so I imagine the thinking goes), you don’t need to spend money on advanced certifications for your administrators who work on those technologies.
This is also an unfair punishment for candidates who attended the training rotation but have yet to take the exam, or those who were signed up for the already-scheduled upgrade rotations, and those who were signed up for future rotations. Now they’re stuck unless they can take, and pass, the certification exams before October 1… which is pretty much impossible. It greatly devalues the certification, of course, for those who already have it. Employers and potential clients can look at “MCM” on a resume and form their own value judgement about its worth given that Microsoft has dropped it. I’m not quite ready to consign MCM status to the same pile as CNE, but it’s pretty close.
The manner of the announcement was exceptionally poor in my opinion, too: a mass e-mail sent out just after midnight Central time last night. Who announces news late on Friday nights? People who are trying to minimize it, that’s who. Predictably, and with justification, the MCM community lists are blowing up with angry reaction, but, completely unsurprisingly, no one from Microsoft is taking part, or defending their position, in these discussions.
As a longtime MCM/MCSM instructor, I have seen firsthand the incredible growth and learning that takes place during the MCM rotations. Perhaps more importantly, the community of architects, support experts, and engineers who earned the MCM has been a terrific resource for learning and sharing throughout their respective product spaces; MCMs have been an extremely valuable connection between the real world of large-scale enterprise deployments and the product group.
In my opinion, this move is a poorly-advised and ill-timed slap in the face from Microsoft, and I believe it will work to their detriment.
Why I love working for Dell, Tuesday edition
I’m just shy of my three-month anniversary with Dell. So far I love it because, among other reasons…
…They match charitable donations dollar for dollar. I just dropped some cash to the Captain Jason Dahl scholarship fund, and if you are so inclined I encourage you to do the same. If you don’t want any of the prizes, I’ll be happy to take them off your hands.
…I have an actual LAPTOP DOCK again. You know, one of those handy things that lets you simply snap your laptop into it to attach it to external devices. This dock drives two monitors, and it has a ton of USB ports. I sorely missed real docking stations with my MacBook Pro.
…No one finds anything remarkable about sentences such as “Well, we can provision support out of either Guadalajara or Morocco” or “That shouldn’t be more than another dozen servers” or “For 63,000 mailboxes, we would need…”
…My teammates are highly distributed. On one project, I’m working with two Australians (one in Austin, one in Pleasanton), a West Virginian, two Texans, and a bunch of other people whose location I don’t know because it doesn’t matter where they are.
Filed under Musings
Thursday trivia #95
Wow, it’s been one day shy of three months since my last Thursday trivia! Time flies indeed. I should be able to post these more regularly now that my summertime madness has died down a bit.
- The book is content complete, and now I am working my way through technical edits and adding new material where needed. Expect another post on that shortly.
- My oldest son just started his freshman year… of college. Boy howdy, that makes me feel old.
- This week’s project: build a building-block Exchange design suitable for use at a customer with operations in some countries (notably Israel, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkey) where they are not legally allowed to use HA or DR services that migrate data from the home country to outside. For example, if you have mailboxes in Israel, you can’t have a stretched DAG to the UK, as that would violate local law. Fun times, and certainly educational.
- I have started a group strength training and fitness program coached by John Romaniello. So far it’s been awesome; I love the workouts and the adjustment to my eating habits has been manageable so far. If you’re on Fitocracy, follow me here. I still have to measure my current body fat percentage, but don’t expect any before/after until I get much further into the program.
- From the TMI department: resting pulse rate 52, total cholesterol 136, blood glucose 92. Looks like I am good to go for another year.
- I just booked my flights for IT/Dev Connections! Now I need to finish building my slide decks and demos.
- One of the fun things about being back in Huntsville is discovering new restaurants and rediscovering old ones. Bo has given me some very valuable tips, but I am going to have to cut back to make sure I stay on my nutrition plan.
- Speaking of Bo: if you’re not reading his series on marriage, and you are, or want to be, married, you should probably read it. It’s been very thought-provoking so far.
- FOOTBALL SEASON APPROACHETH. I am excited.
Advice on communication
From a recent post to The Listserve (which you should join if you haven’t already), sent by someone who makes a living teaching rhetoric and communications:
…don’t get hung up on assuming the intent of the person communicating with you. What I mean is, it is impossible to know for sure what a person intended to mean when they say something to us. When I think of the missteps I make in everyday communication it is often because I assume why someone said something to me, I take offense at them for the purpose behind what they said. In reality, I can never know the intent behind their statement unless they tell me. Try and avoid making assumptions about the meaning of, and purpose behind, someone’s statement and see how it changes the flow of your communication.
This is valuable advice which I am determined to follow more closely. Now that my job entails working with a diverse set of customers, being a better communicator is increasingly important.
Having said that, remember that what is said is only part of what is communicated; there is also what is left unsaid, as well whether the communication is responsive, or not, to what you say. When you consider the totality of the communication, it may be possible to derive more information about intent– or it may equally be possible to make a wrong assumption. This is especially true of people who are avoidant, or who have personal, business, or political motives that lead them to conceal, evade, or avoid communicating clearly.
I’m reminded of RF test equipment such as signal generators. You use these devices to generate a particular waveform, which you then feed in to your transmitter or receiver so you can measure the output for distortion, clipping, and so on. You can measure how closely what you put in conforms to what you get out. Sadly we don’t have anything like that for human communication, apart from adaptive listening, which is a fascinating topic in itself but requires both parties to be actively engaged in the communication.
Always something new to learn…
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Microsoft releases new OWA apps for iPhone, iPad
Well, this is gonna be fun: Microsoft just released a new native mail/calendar/contacts app (which they’re calling “OWA”) for the iPhone and iPad. A few quick notes:
- It is only supported with Office 365 wave 15 mailboxes. It may, or may not, work against on-premises Exchange 2013 mailboxes. (Update 130716 1509: Microsoft has in fact committed to on-prem support, but haven’t said when.)
- It is a native app, with separate versions for iPhone (iPhone 4 and later) and iPad (iPad 2 and later). Both versions require iOS 6. Making a native app rather than just a bound web control means that the app can include some other cool features.. including gesture controls and voice control.
- It supports Information Rights Management (and, yay, reading signed S/MIME messages). Oh, and it supports delegate access too. Oh, and online Personal Archives… and shared calendars, too!
- No support for public folders, I’m afraid.
- It uses Exchange Web Services, not EAS; to the Exchange CAS and mailbox roles, OWA on a device looks almost exactly like OWA in a browser.
- VOTING BUTTON SUPPORT YES REALLY WOO HOO.
- It has full offline functionality, powered by a local sqlite database.
- When you request a remote wipe, the wipe request removes the app and all the data from its device but leaves the rest of the device untouched. This is a huge feature.
Of course, I’ll have full coverage of the app (and how to administer and manage it) in the clients chapter of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. Until then, grab the client and play with it! I was able to download, install, and use it on my iPad3 without any trouble, but the App Store refused to allow me to download it to an iPhone 4. Stay tuned…
