- My heart goes out to all those in Oklahoma affected by the May 20 tornado. If you can help, please do.
- Microsoft releases lots of documentation on how they do things for their internal network. Here’s an example: two papers on best practices for securing Active Directory.
- I am delighted to report that a whole bunch of my students from the Navy school I helped run in Pensacola have been promoted to IT2. Well done.
- You could pay $817 for this book on Amazon, or you could read the PDF for free: Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. Very well worth a look if you’re at all curious about programming. (Old guy note: I learned to program in Z80 assembly about… well, a long time ago.) It’s less than 50 pages.
- Speaking of programming: this guy got a lot of press by writing a Wall Street Journal editorial saying that he’ll only hire people with some fundamental knowledge of programming: “Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.”
- The boys and I saw Star Trek Into Darkness the other day. It was good, but I preferred the 2009 Star Trek better. I have high hopes for Man of Steel, though.
- TechEd North America starts in less than two weeks! I’m putting the finishing touches on my slide deck and demos. If you’re there, stop by my session or the Ask the Experts booth and say “hi”.
Thursday trivia #94
Filed under General Stuff
Gun collecting, state by state
From my homeboy Pat Richard on Facebook, original source unknown:
You may have heard on the news about a southern California man put under 72-hour psychiatric observation when it was found he owned 100 guns and allegedly had (by rough estimate) 100,000 rounds of ammunition stored in his home. The house also featured a secret escape tunnel.
My favorite quote from the dimwit television reporter: “Wow! He has about a quarter million machine gun bullets.” The headline referred to it as a “massive weapons cache!”
By southern California standards someone owning 100,000 rounds would be called “mentally unstable.” Just imagine if he lived elsewhere:
In Arizona, he’d be called “an avid gun collector.”
In Arkansas, he’d be called “a novice gun collector.”
In Utah, he’d be called “moderately well prepared,” but they’d probably reserve judgment until they made sure that he had a corresponding quantity of stored food.
In Texas and Montana, he’d be called “the neighborhood ‘Go-To’ guy.”
In Alabama, he’d be called “a likely gubernatorial candidate.”
In Louisiana, he’d be called “an eligible bachelor.”
In North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina he would be called “a deer hunting buddy.”
And, in Georgia, he’s just “Bubba” who’s a little short on ammo.
Filed under General Stuff
PIREP: my first “real” cross-country
Last weekend I took my first “real” cross-country flight. Executive summary: this is the one of the major reason I got a pilot’s license: fast travel, on my schedule, to do things that otherwise would be prohibitive. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine, but one with a practical side.
I recently earned my high-performance endorsement and got checked out in the Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity (RAFA) Cessna 182. This plane is bigger and faster than the Cessna 172 I’ve been flying. RAFA’s C182 is an older model, and the interior shows it, but it is mechanically in great condition, and it’s nicely equipped with a moving-map GPS and a decent autopilot. It can travel at up to about 145 knots, and its endurance is about 5 hours when fully fueled… longer than mine!
All of my XC time so far has been within California (with the exception of two short legs in the Mobile/Pensacola area early on in my training). The longest leg I’ve flown so far was Palo Alto-Bakersfield and back, a distance of about 220 miles. However, all of my flying so far has been casual. This was my first “real” XC: I had a defined mission, a longer distance, a time window to hit, and all my sons aboard. I’d aborted a previously planned trip on a similar route because the weather was just awful, so I was eager to make this trip if possible.
We’d planned to depart sometime Saturday morning. The forecast was for IFR until around 11am, gradually clearing. Sure enough, the morning started with IFR here in Huntsville, with low IFR (meaning even worse weather) further to the west along our planned route: direct from Redstone Arsenal Army Air Field (KHUA) to Jackson, Mississippi (KJAN) and then on to Alexandria (KAEX). By about 1pm it had cleared enough for us to head to the airport, but actually getting there took 3 tries as various kids remembered that they forgot important things such as contact lenses.
By the time we got to KHUA, visibility had improved to around 5mi but ceilings were still 3500′, which is low but manageable. I’d planned the flight to take place at 6500′, but that wasn’t gonna happen; however, the forecast called for higher ceilings further west, and I had a brand-new Stratus aboard for inflight weather, so we fueled and launched. After takeoff, we turned west on course and climbed to 2500′, where there were a few light bumps but nothing too serious. I noticed right off that the Stratus was connected but not displaying GPS or ADS-B data. Turning the iPad’s WiFi off and back on fixed it; it did this periodically throughout the trip, so I’ll have to figure out what’s going on. About halfway to KJAN were were able to climb up to 4500′, and things smoothed out considerably. There was a line of storms about 45nm to the south of our course, but they were moving NNE fast enough so that they were never a factor. Being able to see radar and METARs for en route airports on this leg was absolutely invaluable. At every point I had a good picture of what my options looked like if I needed them. Here’s what the Stratus data looks like when displayed in ForeFlight; The airplane icon displays our position from the Stratus onboard GPS; the green and blue dots represent airport weather results (tapping on the dot displays the detailed information), and the weather radar data is just like you’d see from a NEXRAD display.
We landed at Jackson, taxiied to Atlantic Aviation, parked, and went inside. Nice FBO, friendly people… but key learning #1: check fuel prices beforehand! I am used to flying out-and-back legs from a single FBO, where I rent wet, and it didn’t occur to me that there might be dramatic price differences. After filling up at $6.90/gallon (with a club rental reimbursement rate of $5.11/gal), I now know better.
After a quick snack and a pee break, we loaded back up and took off for Alexandria. We were able to stay at 3000′ until about Vicksburg, when we asked for higher. Our arrival and descent into KAEX was smooth, but I had a sterile cockpit problem: the kids were bantering and I got distracted enough to begin an approach to runway 36 when I was cleared to runway 32. I caught the mistake in time, went around, and was lucky to have an understanding controller, but key learning #2: shut your passengers up as part of your descent checklist.
We parked at Million Air. They treated us like we’d rolled up in a Gulfstream. I am now a huge fan. Unlimited soft drinks, popcorn, and soft serve ice cream? Why, yes, thank you. We needed it because, like a doofus, I’d neglected to pack any water for the flight. Key learning #3: if you pack snacks, pack drinks too, duh.
Our visit with the family was superb; we had a feast of BBQ chicken, got some great visiting time in with my mom, grandmother, uncle, and cousins, then got a good night’s sleep. Sunday we just relaxed and visited, at least until the 32 pounds of boiled crawfish arrived. After a delightful meal underneath a big tree in the backyard, it was time to head back to Million Air.
I’d planned a single leg back, without the Jackson stop, but on preflight noticed that the oil was lower than I’d like, and none of the Alexandria-area FBOs had 15W50. That necessitated another stop, and since I was familiar with Jackson I planned to stop there. (Key learning #4: carry spare oil. ) This worked out OK because the kids all needed a bathroom stop. I had filled up with fuel at Million Air ($4.81/gal), so I didn’t buy any fuel at Atlantic… so they charged me $20 for stopping by. I don’t think I’ll be back.
Coming back we were able to fly at 3500′ to just east of Alexandria, then 7500′ from there on out. Great, smooth ride with a beautiful view of the Mississippi River crossing, the flooded bottomlands near it, and all sorts of farm and agriculture happening beneath us. I started teaching David how to work the radios, and he did a creditable job (although I think there are some guys at Memphis Center wondering what kind of aircraft a “Skyliner” is).
I used the return legs to get some practice in driving the 530W and the autopilot; I am used to flying a G1000/GFC700 172 so the knobology is quite different. This particular 182 doesn’t have electric trim so I had to do a bit of trim wheel judo to keep the autopilot happy in altitude hold mode but it was good practice. While I love hand-flying, learning to use an autopilot effectively, in the right modes at the right times, is critical to safe single-pilot IFR operations, so I want to start getting better at it ASAP.
The eastern approach to KHUA crosses several restricted areas (some for drone flights, some over propellant storage areas), so we had to turn north, fly past the Decatur airport, then remain north of I-565 until we passed Huntsville International. We landed, refueled, hit Taco Bell, and poof! A trip for the books.
The 182 burned about 13gph and gave me an average groundspeed of 133kts over 7.5hrs on the meter. While this isn’t exactly exciting compared to faster aircraft, it beats the hell out of driving, and it let the four of us deliver a great Mothers’ Day surprise. The kids enjoyed the visit and tolerated the cramped quarters pretty well, so we’ll be doing this run again soon.
Filed under aviation
Exchange 2013 Inside Out enters “early release” period
 |
Lately I have been busy working on Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. More precisely, I’ve been dividing my time between performing technical review on Tony’s book, Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability, and writing new content for my book. It’s all Exchange, all the time! To be more precise, right now I am about 55% done with the book: the chapters on unified messaging, Lync integration, message hygiene, client management, and mobile device management are done, and I’m working on the transport chapter now. That leaves me with chapters on CAS, load balancing, and Office 365 yet to do– certainly enough to keep me busy! |
Microsoft Press is offering an early access program for these books (and a number of others). If you buy the ebook now, you get immediate access to the parts of the book that have been completed (meaning they’ve been through at least the first part of the editorial pipeline), with access to the remaining chapters as they’re finished. When the entire book is released in its final form, you get an electronic copy of it as well. I’m excited to see Microsoft Press offering early access to the book, because all signs point to gathering interest in the practical aspects of deploying Exchange 2013– something both books talk about quite a bit. We are targeting the final version to cover SP1 when it’s released, so there will be updates to the early access versions as well.
Now, back to writing!
Filed under General Stuff, UC&C
Taking pictures in the air
Last week, Doug Mahugh posted this great blog entry on taking pictures from commercial airplanes. He’s done some excellent work. I don’t usually take my real camera on commercial flights, but I think I’m going to have to start. In the meantime, here are two of my favorite airborne pics. I have some other great ones but my iPhoto library is so disorganized that finding them would take more time than I can spare at the moment.
the business end of a B-17
en route to Petaluma; that’s Alcatraz in the foreground
Filed under aviation
Thursday trivia #93
Wow, lots of catching up to do. I’ve been writing a weekly set of notes for students at Acuitus’ school for veterans, and that’s taken all my Thursday material for the most part. It just dawned on me that I could have been posting those notes here too. Oops.
- If you’re feeling handy, why not build your own working digital computer out of paperclips? That’s how they did it back in 1967.
- Steve Sinofsky ran the Office and Windows divisions at Microsoft. Every article he writes is worth reading carefully, but especially this one: Using meetings to be more effective.
- If you don’t have two-factor authentication enabled, you really should. Why? It can save your bacon. Here’s how to do it for Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, and Facebook.
- Really interesting paper, “Marching Towards the Sweet Spot: Options for the US Marine Corps in a Time of Austerity“
- I now have my FAA high-performance endorsement (which doesn’t mean what you probably think it does) and am checked out in the flying club’s Cessna 182. Time for some more flying!
Filed under General Stuff
PC reliability: Apple, Dell, and lessons for servers?
Via Ed Bott, a fascinating article on real-world robustness from Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs: Want the most reliable Windows PC? Buy a Mac (or maybe a Dell). You should read the article, which outlines a report issued by Soluto, a cloud-based PC health and service monitoring company. Their report analyzes data reported to their service by customers to attempt to answer the question of which manufacturer’s PCs are the most reliable. Apple’s 13″ MacBook Pro comes out on top, with Acer’s Aspire E1-571 coming in second and Dell’s XPS 13 in third. In fact, out of the top 10, Apple has two spots, Acer has two spots, and Dell has five. Ed points out that it’s odd that Hewlett-Packard doesn’t have any entries in the list, and that Lenovo (which I have long considered the gold standard for laptops not made by Apple) only has one.
The report, and Ed’s column, speculate on why the results came out this way. I don’t know enough about the PC laptop world to have a good feel for how many of the models on their list are consumer-targeted versus business-targeted, although they do include cost figures that help provide some clues. There’s no doubt that the amount of random crap that PC vendors shovel on to their machines makes a big difference in the results, although I have to suspect that the quality of vendor-provided drivers makes a bigger difference. Graphics drivers are especially critical, since they run in kernel mode and can easily crash the entire machine; the bundled crapware included by many vendors strikes me as more of an annoyance than a reliability hazard (at least in terms of unwanted reboots or crashes.)
The results raise the interesting question of whether there are similar results for servers. Given that servers from major vendors such as Dell and H-P come with very clean Windows installs, I wouldn’t expect to see driver issues play a major part in server reliability. My intuition is that the basic hardware designs from tier 1 vendors are all roughly equal in reliability, and that components such as SAN HBAs or RAID controllers probably have a bigger negative impact on overall reliability than the servers themselves– but I don’t have data to back that up. I’m sure that server vendors do, and equally sure that they guard it jealously.
More broadly, it’s fascinating that we can even have this discussion.
First of all, the rise of cloud-based services like Soluto (and Microsoft’s own Windows Intune) means that now we have data that can tell us fascinating things. I remember that during the development period of Windows 2003, Microsoft spent a great deal of effort persuading customers to send them crash dumps for analysis. The analysis revealed that the top two causes of server failures were badly behaving drivers and administrator errors. There’s not much we can do about problem #2, but Microsoft attacked the first problem in a number of ways, including restructuring how drivers are loaded and introducing driver signing as a means of weeding out unstable or buggy drivers. But that was a huge engineering effort led by a single vendor, using data that only they had– and Microsoft certainly didn’t embarrass or praise any particular OEM based on the number of crashes their hardware and drivers had.
Second, Microsoft’s ongoing effort to turn itself into a software + services + devices company (or whatever they’re calling it this week) means that they are able to gather a huge wealth of data about usage and behavior. We’ve seen them use that data to design the Office fluent interface, redesign the Xbox 360 dashboard multiple times, and push a consistent visual design language across Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Xbox 360, and apps for other platforms such as Xbox SmartGlass. It’s interesting to think about the kind of data they are gathering from operating Office 365, and what kind of patterns that might reveal. I can imagine that Microsoft would like to encourage Exchange 2013 customers to share data gathered by Managed Availability, but there are challenges in persuading customers to allow that data collection, so we’ll have to see what happens.
To the cloud…
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Blacklist blacklist blacklist: the forbidden word
I just got chapter 6 of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging back from Microsoft Press. Like most other major publishers, Microsoft Press has a strict process to try to catch potentially offensive, libelous, slanderous, or sensitive terms before they appear in print. In this particular chapter, the editors requested many changes because of the odd vocabulary associated with message hygiene. For example, it’s OK to say “spam” to mean “an unwanted commercial e-mail message,” but it’s not OK to say “ham” to mean “a legitimate or desired commercial e-mail message” because in some book markets, ham is either unheard of or regarded as offensive.
However, they also busted me for using “blacklist,” as in “real-time blacklist.” This is the accepted term of art for a DNS-based system that allows an e-mail server to look up IP addresses of senders in real time to decide if they appear on a list of known or suspected spammers. Apparently “blacklist” is an offensive word in some contexts, although I’m having a hard time figuring out where or why.
Imagine my surprise when I fired up my Xbox tonight and saw this:
Now, to be clear, I get it– Microsoft Press is not the same as IEB, Microsoft’s behemoth of a business unit. I’m sure they have different rules or something. And my editor, bless her heart, is only enforcing the rules forced on her by some clique of zampolits…but seriously?! Xbox LIVE has tens of millions of worldwide customers who are seeing this forbidden word. On the other hand, my book, if I am very lucky, may sell as many as 25,000 copies (that would make it a runaway hit by computer book standards), and yet I can’t use a well-known and commonly accepted term in context.
Sheesh…
Exchange OWA IM integration and Lync trusted application pools
I am a bit ashamed to say that I wasted most of a day on this, but I’m posting this in the hopes that I can help someone else avoid the same mistake I made.
I just spent about five hours troubleshooting why I couldn’t get Exchange 2013 Outlook Web App to display IM and presence data from a Lync 2013 standard edition server. I had carefully followed the integration steps in the documentation, including the part that says this:
If you have installed the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging Call Router service and the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service on the same computer then there is no need to create a trusted application pool for Outlook Web App. (This assumes that the server in question is hosting a SipName UM dial plan.
So, having read that, I didn’t set up a trusted application pool or trusted application… and IM didn’t work.
I fussed with certificates. I read a ton of documentation. I swore. I drank too much diet Coke. I ran OCSLogger and found errors about an unknown peer. “AHA!” I thought. “There must be an error in the docs and you really do need to create a trusted application pool.”
So I created the pool and the trusted app. Two quick lines of PowerShell, a quick login to OWA, and voila:
As much as I would like to claim that it was a documentation error, this was pure fail on my part: the problem was that my Exchange 2013 server doesn’t host a SIP dial plan, so Lync doesn’t automatically add it to the Lync known servers table. It will have a SIP dial plan when I get to the next section of this chapter, but that’s a post for another day.
So, in summary: yes, you do need to create a trusted application pool and application for your Exchange servers even if they are multi-role unless they are hosting a SIP dial plan.
Now, time for another diet Coke…
Palo Alto-Petaluma and back
Tuesday afternoon I was working and decided to check out LiveATC.net, a web site that plays air traffic control audio for a huge range of airports worldwide. Soon enough I had fired up the Palo Alto tower, which led to looking out the window, which led to me reserving an airplane for a quick flight to Petaluma. Why there? It was just over 50nm away from Palo Alto, meaning that I could log the flight as cross-country time towards my instrument rating.
I got to the airport, preflighted the airplane, and enjoyed a smooth takeoff; departure had me do a right 45° departure and head towards the Oakland airport. I got on the radio with NORCAL Approach, who routed me over the runway 29 numbers at Oakland International and then cleared me further to the north. The sun was lowering in the western sky, which gave me a few pretty nice photo opportunities:
Approaching KOAK rwy 29 from the south; the numbers are just out of frame on the lower right
the city of San Francisco; that’s the Bay Bridge in the foreground
the Golden Gate Bridge, with bonus freighter
Both bridges, plus shafts of light through the city fog (you might need to see the full-size version to see them)
The Petaluma airport was easy to see, and I had a good landing on runway 29. Sadly, the diner there closes at 3pm, and I got there about 7:30pm. So, my key learning for this flight: verify the status of your proposed dinner destination before takeoff. I got out, stretched my legs, and fired the plane back up to return to Palo Alto; the night view was absolutely stunning, but I didn’t take any pictures.. maybe next time. Since it was dark, I went ahead and shot 3 landings to update my night currency; my last landing was a power-off, short-field squeaker that would have pleased even my picky CFI.
An evening well spent…
Filed under aviation
MEC 2014: Austin, 31 March-2 April 2014
This is pretty darn exciting: Microsoft has announced the official date and time of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in 2014. It will be held in Austin, home of at least one of the original MECs (the first one, maybe? I wasn’t there so I’m not sure) from 31 March to 2 April 2014.
I am sure that nothing bad will come of Microsoft’s decision to include April Fool’s Day as part of the conference. Nope, not at all.
On a personal note, I am excited that the conference will be in Austin. It’s one of my favorite cities, and I’ll be making side trips to see family (Hi, Lee Anne!) and friends while there. I also believe that we should have an Exchange-themed visit to the Salt Lick BBQ. Stay tuned for details!
Filed under UC&C
Paul's Down-Home Page 