2013-03-15 · 13:48

Loading PowerShell snap-ins from a script

So I wanted to launch an Exchange Management Shell (EMS) script to do some stuff for a project at work. Normally this would be straightforward, but because of the way our virtualized lab environment works, it took me some fiddling to get it working.

What I needed to do was something like this:

c:\windows\system32\powershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command "someStuff"

That worked fine as long as all I wanted to do was run basic PowerShell cmdlets. Once I started trying to run EMS cmdlets, things got considerably more complex because I needed a full EMS environment. First I had to deal with the fact that EMS, when it starts, tries to perform a CRL check. On a non-Internet-connected system, it will take 5 minutes or so to time out. I had completely forgotten this, so I spent some time fooling around with various combinations of RAM and virtual CPUs trying to figure out what the holdup was. Luckily Jeff Guillet set me straight when he pointed me to this article, helpfully titled “Configuring Exchange Servers Without Internet Access.” That cut the startup time waaaaay down.

However, I was still having a problem: my scripts wouldn’t run. They were complaining that “No snap-ins have been registered for Windows PowerShell version 2”. What the heck? Off to Bing I went, whereupon I found that most of the people reporting similar problems were trying to launch PowerShell.exe and load snap-ins from web-based applications. That puzzled me, so I did some more digging. Running my script from the PowerShell session that appears when you click the icon in the quick launch bar seemed to work OK. Directly running the executable by its path (i.e. %windir%\system32\powershell\v1.0\powershell.exe) worked OK too… but it didn’t work when I did the same thing from my script launcher.

Back to Bing I went. On about the fifth page of results, I found this gem at StackExchange. The first answer got me pointed in the right direction. I had completely forgotten about file system virtualization, the Windows security feature that, as a side effect, helps erase the distinction between x64 and x86 binaries by automatically loading the proper executable even when you supply the “wrong” path. In my case, I wanted the x64 version of PowerShell, but that’s not always what I was getting because my script launcher is a 32-bit x86 process. When it launched PowerShell.exe from any path, I was getting the x86 version, which can’t load x64 snap-ins and thus couldn’t run EMS.

The solution? All I had to do was read a bit further down in the StackExchange article to see this MSDN article on developing applications for SharePoint Foundation, which points out that you must use %windir%\sysnative as the path when running PowerShell scripts after a Visual Studio build. Why? Because Visual Studio is a 32-bit application, but the SharePoint snap-in is x64 and must be run from an x64 PowerShell session… just like Exchange.

Armed with that knowledge, I modified my scripts to run PowerShell using sysnative vice the “real” path and poof! Problem solved. (Thanks also to Michael B. Smith for some bonus assistance.)

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2013-03-15 · 00:01

The secret to emergency landings

Rule #1 in aviation, as recounted to me by my first flight instructor: Don’t hit anything.

Rule #2, of course, is If you have to hit something, pick the softest object you can find and hit it as gently as possible while going as slowly as possible.

It turns out that both of these rules are surprisingly applicable to the art of making good off-airport emergency landings.

First, I should distinguish between a forced landing (one in which you have no choice, usually because the engine has quit) and a precautionary landing. The latter are undertaken when something is wrong and you need to get on the ground ASAP, but where the issue isn’t yet a full-blown emergency such as an in-flight fire or a dead powerplant.

Forced landings are where rule #2 really comes into effect. There are really only two tasks in conducting a successful forced landing. First you find someplace to land, and then you land there. This, of course, obscures much of the real complexity of getting the job done, but it’s easy to let the other tasks you have to perform along the way overshadow these two major requirements.

What’s a good place to land? Well, it has to be within range of your aircraft, and ideally it will be a nice, flat, unoccupied, soft surface with no obstacles or bumps. The odds of finding something like that varies greatly according to where you are. For example, in the area around the Palo Alto airport, you have water to the east, with marshes and power lines to the immediate north and south of the runway, in a heavily urbanized area. On the other hand, out of Madison County Executive you have lots of nice soft farm fields. One key trick is to always be looking around while en route and thinking “OK, if I needed to land, where’s a good spot?” This is both a good habit and a fun game to play, especially in unfamiliar terrain.

“…then you land there” is the more challenging part. During my primary training, one of my major obstacles was my lack of airspeed discipline. Each airplane has a characteristic best-glide speed: maintain that speed and you will get the maximum forward motion per foot of vertical descent. If you go slower or faster than that speed, you’ll get less gliding distance. While your instinctive reaction might be to look around for a landing site, the very first thing you should do is grab the trim wheel, get some nose-up trim in place to reduce the control force required, and slow the airplane to its best-glide speed. Do that and then you’ll have more time to find an ideal landing spot. You have to use that time to do other things, like run through the emergency landing checklist, call Mayday, and so on, but those are all optional… maintaining the best-glide speed is not.

The other problem I had was my approach to the selected landing spot. Ideally you want to pick a spot and arrive abreast of it at about 1000′ above the terrain. In the diagram below, you want to be at the position labeled “2”. At that point, you’re in exactly the same position you’d be in if you were performing a normal landing, and one of the things you practice all the time is power-off landings from exactly that position. For some reason, though, it just didn’t sink in that I needed to approach the landing spot as though I were entering a traffic pattern; I was perpetually too close to, or too far away from, my selected landing spot.

airport traffic pattern

airport traffic pattern; diagram courtesy http://www.cfidarren.com

Why it took me so long to figure out, I don’t know. Once my instructor pointed that out to me, though, my emergency landings improved about 1000%. That’s what I would describe as the secret, at least for me: pick a spot and then navigate to it, at best-glide speed, just as though I was planning a landing on an ordinary runway. Doing that made all the difference in the world. Now I just have to keep following rule #1 and I’ll be in good shape!

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2013-03-14 · 04:15

Thursday trivia #90

  • Had my first sample of Vietnamese food yesterday, courtesy of (and thanks to!) Bo Williams. The food and company were both top-notch. For the record, I had the clay pot.
  • Damnit, Google. Why couldn’t you have killed Orkut, or one of the other worthless services you offer, instead of Google Reader?
  • This morning two of the newspresenters on WAAY-TV were handling a large snake. Is it ratings week, or has the Bay Area just changed my tastes in TV news?
  • Just wrapped chapter 6 (Exchange 2013 message hygiene) of the book and sent it off for review. Now I’m working on chapter 4, the client chapter. Lots to say about Outlook and the all-new Exchange 2013 version of OWA.
  • Two more books added to my reading queue: The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (think: the opposite of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink) and Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care (which claims, among other things, that most catheterizations and other invasive procedures don’t actually improve survival outcomes). Finding time to read them, of course, is a completely different matter.
  • Apropos of which, my reading lately has focused on the study guides for my instrument flight rating…

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2013-03-01 · 11:52

Going NORDO

You may not realize it, but the commercial airliners we fly on have redundancy for virtually every onboard system. This, of course, is no accident—it’s a popular saying that the history of aviation improvements is written in blood, so the reason why we have redundant electrical systems, pressurization, and so on is because in the past, single points of failure have caused catastrophic accidents.

Even light airplanes often have more redundancy than the casual observer might suspect. For example, the engine ignition system in piston airplanes has two redundant magnetos, wired so that each magneto is independently providing spark to both cylinders. If one mag fails, no worries; you’ve got another one.

Luckily, the same is true with radios, as I found out on a recent night flight. My mission: leave Palo Alto, fly up to Napa to pick up my cousin, and continue on to Willows for dinner. I was in a fairly new G1000-equipped 172, one that I hadn’t flown before. When I listened to the ATIS broadcast on COM1 during my preflight, I noticed quite a bit of audio clipping, but I wrote it off as due to my position on the airfield– behind a large metal hanger with an electrical box that causes an audible squeal in the audio system as you taxi past it. I preflighted, started, and called ground; I could hear them OK, so I taxied to the runup area. Runup was normal, and then I switched to the tower frequency and called them for a takeoff clearance.

Silence.

I called them again.

More silence.

That’s odd, I thought. Even a busy controller will usually respond after a second call, and I’m the only guy out here anyway. A few seconds later the controller answered but his audio was unintelligible. I tried a couple more times, then switched back to ground and told them I was taxiing back to parking. When I got there, I started playing with the squelch controls on the audio panel while listening to the ATIS frequency and eventually got a squelch level that gave me clean audio… or so I thought.

Taxi back, runup, and takeoff were uneventful. I was talking to Norcal Approach the entire time; they vectored me over the San Mateo bridge, then over the runway 29 numbers at KOAK, then past the Nimitz Freeway, then VFR direct to the Napa airport. The trip was gorgeous, and I made a good landing at KAPC. Sadly I had forgotten my spare headset, and the local FBO didn’t have one, so Chris and I decided to have dinner in Napa instead of flying to Willows. We had a great visit while devouring burgers at Gott’s (where I had the best milkshake ever), then I dropped him back at the airport and got ready to fly back.

In the meantime, the Napa control tower had closed. This isn’t uncommon; many airports are towered only during part of the day. The normal procedure is to use the tower frequency (or another freq, if designated) to announce your position and intentions to any other aircraft in the area. I did so and had an uneventful takeoff. As I turned back towards the Bay Area, I tuned in the Norcal Approach frequency and called them.

Silence.

Uh oh, that’s not good, I thought. I knew I hadn’t gotten the frequency wrong because I used the G1000 to enter it directly from the airport  diagram, but I looked it up anyway and tried again.

Silence.

By this time I was getting uncomfortably close to controlled airspace, and I didn’t want to enter it without being in radio communication with ATC, so I started a nice, gentle standard-rate turn to keep me out of trouble while I troubleshot.

First I tried calling Flight Watch, the nationwide FAA enroute advisory service that uses the same frequency, 122.0 MHz, everywhere. No joy.

Next I switched over to COM2 and called Flight Watch again. “Four Lima Bravo, we could hear you a minute ago but you couldn’t hear us. How copy?”

Bingo! My primary radio had gone dead.

While this was a little disconcerting, it wasn’t a problem; I had another completely functional radio, so I switched back to Norcal’s frequency, called them, got cleared along my route, and went about my business. If my secondary radio had failed too, I wasn’t without options; I could have changed my transponder code to 7600 to indicate that I was NORDO, then I would have flown a route and altitude to keep me away from Oakland and SFO. In this case, that basically means about 1500′ straight down the middle of the Bay. The Palo Alto tower was closed by the time of my arrival, so I would have had to be very careful about entering the traffic pattern (and as it turned out there were a couple of other planes working the pattern there).

Although this wasn’t an emergency by any stretch, I was glad to have that second radio. Operating in busy controlled airspace at night is not a good time to be muzzled. It might be time for me to pick up a handheld nav/comm radio to keep in my flight bag as a backup. (Of course, then I’d need a bigger flight bag…)

 

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2013-02-25 · 20:39

Why you should keep multiple backups

I spent the weekend a) in Huntsville with the boys and b) in a fog of cold medication. In fact, I called in sick to work today, which is really unusual for me. A coworker e-mailed me to ask for a couple of documents I’d written, and when I saw her e-mail (I called in sick, not dead, so I was still checking e-mail), I couldn’t find the files in SkyDrive on my Surface Pro. “Oh,” I thought. “I must have checked them in to our SharePoint site.”

Nope.

“Maybe they’re on my work desktop.” A quick RDP connection and… nope.

Now I was beginning to freak out a bit. I knew I had written these documents. I knew right where I’d left them. But they were nowhere to be found.

I went back to my MacBook Pro, which is sort-of my desktop now.… nope.

Then the fog lifted, oh so briefly, and I figured out what had happened.

For some reason, about a month ago, the SkyDrive client for OS X started pegging the CPU at random intervals. It was still syncing, most of the time, but when it started burning the CPU it would kick the MacBook Pro’s fans into turbo mode, so I started shutting the app off until I explicitly wanted it to sync. (This reminded me of the ancient technology known as Groove, but let us never speak of it again.) Eventually I got tired of this and started troubleshooting the problem. The easiest solution was to remove and reinstall the app, so I did. Before doing so, I made a backup copy of the entire SkyDrive folder, renamed it to “Old SkyDrive,” and let the newly installed app resync from the cloud. Then I deleted the old copy.

Fast-forward to today. I realized what had happened: the documents had been in the old SkyDrive folder, they never got synced, and now they were gone.

But wait! I do regular backups to Time Machine when I’m in Mountain View. I looked in Time Machine… nope.

“Oh, that’s right,” I muttered. “I created those files and ‘fixed’ SkyDrive last time I was in Huntsville.”

But wait! I also use CrashPlan! I fired up the app… nope.

Then I noticed the little “Show deleted files” checkbox. I checked it, typed in the name of the files I wanted, and in 90 seconds had all of them restored to my local disk.

So, the moral of the story is: a) make backups and then b) make backups of your backups. Oh, and go easy on the Benadryl.

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2013-02-22 · 05:30

Drone strikes on criminals

For my first Flying Fridays post, I want to return to a favorite topic: drones. My first-ever published work was an article for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) on some research work done there on unmanned aerial vehicles. I sure wish I’d kept a copy (their archives were no help, sadly). Ever since then I’ve had an abiding interest in the mechanics, ethics, and practical use of unmanned aircraft.

Anyway, here’s a little snippet from the New York Times this week:

China considered using a drone strike in a mountainous region of Southeast Asia to kill a Myanmar drug lord wanted in the killings of 13 Chinese sailors, but decided instead to capture him alive, according to an influential state-run newspaper.

Sound familiar? To put this in context: the publicly-disclosed criteria for droning a US citizen are that it must be infeasible for US or allied forces to capture or kill the target; the target must be a “senior member” of Al-Qaeda, and the target must pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the US. Non-citizens are subject to a different set of rules, detailed in this handy flowchart. In either case, the US government explicitly reserves the right to use unmanned aircraft to kill people who have acted against US interests.. and now the Chinese are copying us.

Thought experiment: imagine a search-and-replace of “Al-Qaeda” in the above paragraph with some other criminal or terrorist organization. Suppose a nearby country (say, Mexico, or Venezuela) becomes a base for violent, criminal-but-not-terrorist, attacks on US citizens. Internal governance is too weak to allow the local authorities to arrest the bad guys. Do you drone them? In other words, could this policy conceivably extend to pre-emptive strikes on drug lords or other violent criminals?

If so, who’s next? If not, why not, given the current legal framework?

If you think this is an unrealistic scenario,  here’s a question to ponder. Law enforcement agencies can, and have, used manned aircraft carrying snipers to fire on suspects. What practical difference is there between an FBI HRT helicopter carrying a sniper and an armed FBI HRT drone? If it’s OK for US to stage armed counternarcotics missions into, e.g.  Honduras and shoot people, why wouldn’t it be OK to just send a drone instead?

(nb. I am not arguing that it is a good idea for the US to be doing these things, merely positing a logical extension of our current policies.)

Meanwhile, the FAA is still trying to figure out how to integrate drones safely into the National Airspace System. There’s a ton of interesting commentary on this AVweb opinion piece that I commend to your attention; there seems to be an emerging consensus in the aviation world that mixing drones and manned aircraft is a recipe for disaster because current unmanned aerial systems (UAS) don’t implement the see-and-avoid behavior drilled into human pilots from day 1. Large, remotely-operated drones such as those operated by Customs and Border Protection are relatively safe: they are large (and thus somewhat easier to see), have elaborate command-and-control systems, operate in predictable areas, and generally fly at medium to high altitudes. What I’m more worried about are smaller, less-visible, less-well-equipped drones (such as the kind operated by police departments in Houston, Dallas, and various other locales). Small drones offer so much potential utility for surveying, traffic monitoring and control, crop monitoring, aerial application, and burrito delivery that their arrival is inevitable; I just don’t want to have to play dodge-a-drone when I fly.

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2013-02-22 · 04:30

Welcome to Flying Fridays!

One of my goals for 2013 is to continue my aviation education and skill-building. Another is to do more writing (and photography) on aviation-related topics. To do this, I’m kicking off a new habit: Flying Fridays. While it would be great if I could guarantee that I’d get to fly every Friday, that’s not likely to happen right now. I can, however, guarantee that I’ll have a new blog post every Friday on an aviation-related topic. This might be as simple as a trip report or a tip on how to use a particular feature of an app or avionics device, or it might be more involved. With that in mind, I’d love to hear what my readers are interested in knowing about aviation. I’ve gotten several private e-mails asking questions about various aspects of my flight training, and I’m happy to write about that, or any other topic that catches your interest– leave me a comment here or send e-mail and I’ll add it to my queue.

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2013-02-21 · 17:10

Thursday trivia #89

  • I spent Sunday with my extended tribe in Seattle– I had coffee with Tim and Julie, then lunch with my old friend John Peltonen of 3Sharp (who looks just like he did the last time I saw him– no aging at all!), then an afternoon get-together with several Exchange MVPs, including Jeff Guillet, Tony Redmond, Michael van Horenbeeck, Steve Goodman, Paul Cunningham, Sigi Jagott, Brian Desmond, and Clint Boessen. Then Tony and I had a very productive meeting with Karen Szall, our editor at Microsoft Press. (On that note I think there will be some interesting news coming from MS Press in the near future… stay tuned!)
  • I couldn’t stay for the MVP Summit because I needed to be back in California to help kick off the second class of students for the school we’re doing for the Veterans’ Administration. My first week teaching is next week and I’m looking forward to it; I’ve been in bug-fixing mode for a while and look forward to more classroom time.
  • I’m still loving the Surface Pro. I was able to find a Surface 128GB at the Best Buy in Issaquah, and Windows Easy Transfer worked flawlessly to move over all of my settings and accounts. It didn’t transfer purchased apps from the Microsoft Store, but it turns out that swiping down from the top of the screen while in the store app reveals a link that will download all your previous purchases.
  • Fascinating article in the New York Times about the junk food industry and the science and technology used to make junk food addictive. It’s interesting to consider this in light of the LDS Church’s “Word of Wisdom“, which says that the famous Mormon dietary law was given “in consequence ofevils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days.” Purposely making unhealthy foods addictive sure sounds like “evils and designs” to me.
  • I haven’t flown much lately, but this weekend I’ll be doing my rental checkout at the Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity, where my instructor is an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist. It’s also about time for me to start learning how to fly the Cessna 182 (and its retractable-gear sibling, the 182RG). After that, once the book is finished, it’s instrument-rating time!

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2013-02-14 · 04:20

Thursday trivia #88

  • Happy birthday to the one and only Julie A. Robichaux! My dear sister is a terrific writer who can tear a strip off of a miscreant or write a sweet paen to motherhood and apple pie, sometimes in the same post, while making it look easy. I’m grateful that her rapier wit, good looks, and artistic sense help raise the family average of same above my own mediocre levels.
  • In the third quarter of calendar 2012, Huntsville was the #1 airport in the nation… for airfare, with an average fare of $522. When I only pay $500 for a trip SFO-HSV I consider myself lucky.
  • Surface Pro observation du jour: thé Staples in Madison, Alabama has gotten “tons of phone calls” about the Surface Pro 128, and has run out of stock every day on the 64GB model– as soon as they get one or two in, they sell them again. “I could have sold 10 or more on Saturday,” said the manager to me tonight. Anecdotes, of course, but if a smallish city like Huntsville has strong demand…
  • Got to do a presentation to a group of MVPs this week on how to get into the publishing business. It was fun– thanks for coming, y’all!
  • This article is a decent summary of why I fear the upcoming merger between American and US Airways. I prefer to fly Delta when I can, but American’s schedule from the Bay Area to Huntsville is better, so I often fly them… but if they descend to US Airways’ service level, I won’t.
  • Speaking of publishing: the first two book chapters are in Microsoft’s hands, and I’m busily working away on the third. I’ve also edited the first two of Tony’s chapters. More to follow.
  • Nice to see the Toledo Blade in the news again.
  • Right after I posted my thoughts on auto-kill-drone-scary-things, I saw this article about the “domestic drone industry” pressuring the FAA. Good luck with that, guys; the FAA doesn’t pressure all that well.

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2013-02-13 · 20:54

An offer for Tim Cook

[note to readers: I encourage you to repost, retweet, and otherwise spread this offer. It’s legit; I am happy to help Apple in any way that I can. Since I don’t have any Apple execs on speed dial, perhaps social media will get this to the right folks. ]

Dear Mr. Cook:

We’ve never met. You’ve almost certainly never heard of me. But I’m going to make you an offer that I hope you’ll accept: I want to help you quit making such a mess of the world’s Exchange servers. More to the point, I want to help the iOS Exchange ActiveSync team clean up their act so we don’t have any more serious EAS bugs in iOS. The meeting hijacking bug was bad enough, but the latest bug? the one that results in Exchange servers running out of transaction log space? That’s bad for everyone. It makes your engineers look sloppy. It makes Exchange administrators into the bad guys because they have to block their users’ iOS devices.

These bugs make everyone lose: you, Microsoft, and your mutual users. They’re bad for business. Let’s fix them.

You might wonder why some dude you’ve never heard of is making you this offer. It’s because I’m a long-time Apple customer (got my first Mac in 1984 and first iPhone on launch day) and I’ve been working with Exchange for more than 15 years. As a stockholder, and fan, of both companies, I want to see you both succeed. Before there was any official announcement about the iOS SDK, I was bugging John Geleynse to let 3Sharp, my former company, help implement Exchange ActiveSync on the phone. He was a sly devil and wouldn’t even confirm that there would be an EAS client for the phone, but the writing was on the wall– the market power of Exchange Server, and the overwhelming prevalence of EAS, made that a foregone conclusion.

I’m an experienced developer and a ten-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Exchange Server. I have experience training developers in Exchange Web Services, and I know EAS well; in fact, I was an expert source of evidence in the recent Google/Motorola vs Microsoft case in the UK. As a long-time member of the Exchange community, I can help your developers get in touch with experts in every aspect of Exchange they might want to know about, too.

It’s pretty clear that your EAS client team doesn’t know how Exchange client throttling works, how to retry EAS errors gently, or all the intricacies of recurring meeting management (and how the server’s business logic works). If they did, the client wouldn’t behave the way it has. They could learn it by trial and error… but look where that’s gotten us.

I’m in Mountain View, right up the road. Seriously. Have your people call my people.

Peace and Exchange 4eva,
-Paul

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2013-02-13 · 19:53

Coming soon: do-it-yourself armed drones

I recently finished Daniel Suarez’s excellent thriller Kill Decision. The major plot point: parties unknown have been releasing autonomous, armed drones that are killing people in a variety of ways. The drones are capable of insect-level intelligence and swarming behavior, and of autonomously finding human targets and bombing or shooting them. Suarez asks a fairly provocative question: would America’s love affair with drones change if other countries, or criminal syndicates, or even individuals had them and used them as freely in the US as we use them elsewhere? Great plot, well-written, and solid characterizations– by far the best of his books so far. Highly recommended.

Anyway, with that in mind, I saw an article on the Lawfare blog about a guy who equipped an inexpensive commercial drone with a paintball marker. This video shows it in action, hitting targets easily while maneuvering slowly. The video’s a little fear-monger-y, but the narrator is right: “it seems inevitable” that these drones will be used in ways the manufacturer didn’t anticipate.  I sent the video to a couple of coworkers, one of whom asked “I wonder how hard it is to shoot accurately with it?” That got me to thinking… so off the top of my head, I jotted down a few factors that would affect the accuracy of a firearm-equipped drone. Note that here I’m talking about an autonomous UAV, not a remotely-piloted, man-in-the-loop drone. 

  • What’s it for? What kind of range and endurance do you need? It would be easy to build a sort of launch rack that would launch a drone to check out a target that triggered a tripwire, motion detector, etc. It’d be a little harder to build one that could autonomously navigate, but definitely doable– as Paul proved with his Charlie-following project. See also: the Burrito Bomber, which can follow waypoints and then deliver a payload on target.  Drones to sneak into somewhere and snipe a single target would have different range/payload requirements than a patrol or incident-reponse drone. This drives the weight of the drone (since more range requires more fuel).
  • What’s it packing? The purpose of the drone dictates what kind of firearm you want it to carry. Some of Suarez’s drones had short-barrelled .38 pistols, which are plenty good enough to kill from close range but wouldn’t be very accurate past around 35 feet or so. A longer barrel and a heavier round would provide better accuracy, at the cost of weight and size.
  • How much range do you need? A sniper drone that can shoot targets from 1500yds is definitely feasible— use a .50 Barrett, for example. It would be heavy and range-limited, though, unless you wanted to make it bigger. In general, heavier bullets are more stable and give you better accuracy, but they’re heavier to carry and shoot.
  • How stable is the drone? A light drone that’s sensitive to wind, etc. will be harder-pressed to make accurate shots. Gyrostabilizing the gun platform would help, but it would add a weight and cost penalty (including for power for the gyros, plus the gyros themselves). The bigger the drone, the more sensors, power, and ammo you can carry… but the more noise, infrared, and visual signature it creates. A small sneaky drone may be a better deal than a large, more powerful one.
  • What can you see? In other words, what kind of sensors do you have for aiming? How good is their resolution and range? Do they have to be automated? If so, you need to be able to either fire at the centroid of the target or track interesting parts, like wheels of a truck or a person’s head), using machine vision. 
  • Where are you pointing the gun, and how accurate can you be? What kind of angular resolution does the gun-pointing system have? If you’re willing to slow to a dead hover, or nearly so, you can be very accurate (as in the video above). If you want to go faster, you’ll have a more challenging set of requirements– you have to be able to point the gun while the drone’s moving, and changing its aim point means fighting inertia in a way you don’t have to worry about in a hover.

There are lots of other more subtle considerations, I’m sure; these are just what I came up with in 5 minutes. Any engineer, pilot, or armorer could come up with a couple dozen more without too much effort. Of course, you could just buy a pre made system like this one from Autocopter. Isn’t it great to know they’ll lease you as many UAVs as you need? Just for a ballpark figure, Autocopter quotes an 8Kg payload on their smallest drones– figure 3Kg for a cut-down M4 and that leaves you a reasonable 5Kg for sensors, guidance, navigation, and control.

What could you do with such drones? The mind boggles. Imagine that, say, your favorite Mexican drug cartel cooked up a bunch of these in their machine shops and used them to guard the pot farms they run in national forests. Or say the white-supremacy militia guys in Idaho built some for sovereign defense. Or suppose you built 100 or so of them, staged them inside an empty 18-wheeler with a tarp over the top, then launched them into Candlestick Park during a 49ers game. There are all sorts of movie-plot-worthy applications for these drones, to say nothing of the ones Suarez wrote about.

Meanwhile, the February 2013 NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) newsletter is full of safety reports filed after drones got into airspace where they weren’t supposed to be… and these were piloted, unarmed drones. How careful do you think these hypothetical armed drones would be about respecting the National Airspace System? I think I’ll be extra careful when flying around… that smudge on the windscreen might turn out to be an armed autonomous drone.

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2013-02-12 · 14:45

Surface Pro first impressions

Saturday morning I decided, more or less on the spur of the moment, to try to grab a Surface Pro and try it out. This follows a well-established pattern; I wasn’t going to buy an Xbox 360 when it first came out, or an iPhone, and yet somehow on launch day I ended up with both of those. Anyway…

After some fruitless searching, Tom and I found a local Staples that had a 64GB Surface Pro. This was no mean trick because Huntsville doesn’t have a Microsoft Store (I know, right?) and the local Best Buys got zero stock. In fact, as far as I could tell there were none shipped to stores in Memphis, Nashville, Birmingham, or Atlanta. I’m betting that at least the Atlanta region got a handful but those sold out. Anyway, my local Staples stores apparently got 1 64GB unit apiece, so I went out and grabbed one. Total cost with the Type Cover and sales tax was $1111.

This isn’t a review; it’s more a collection of observations, since I don’t have time at the moment to string together a coherent narrative instead of just giving you factoids and observations. Thus this post is worth what you’ve paid for it 🙂

The hardware build quality is superb. It’s true that the device is thicker and heavier than an iPad, but it’s much lighter and smaller than my 15″ MacBook Pro. I was able to comfortably use it on my lap while on the sofa. One thing I didn’t expect: the Type Cover flexes more than I thought it would. I guess I hit the keys hard or something. This was a little disconcerting at first. The kickstand works very well, and I’ve gotten used to the odd feel of having the Type Cover folded around the back of the unit.

Setup was simple: I signed in with my Microsoft account and it synced all of my profile information. SkyDrive works beautifully, as do all the other Microsoft services (notably Xbox LIVE). I’m glad to have multiple accounts on the device, because the kids cannot get enough of playing with it. They’re used to the iPad and don’t think of it as remarkable, but all of them are fascinated by the Surface. David’s used it for two homework assignments– in preference to his Win7 laptop; Tom is fascinated by the pen interface; and Matt likes that he can play all the Flash-based games that don’t work on the iPad.

The Surface Pro is fast. It boots fast, apps run fast, and the UI performance is “fast and fluid,” to coin a phrase. It does have a fan, and in a silent room you can hear it when it kicks in, but it’s not obtrusive– it’s quieter than the fans in my MBP, for example. 

Battery life? Haven’t tested it, don’t much care. If I want to just browse and watch, I’ll use the iPad, with its excellent battery life. The Surface Pro is an adjunct to, and replacement for, my “real” laptop, which means a 4-5 hour battery life will suit me just fine. I do want to see whether I can charge it with my external 10Ah battery (the excellent RAVPower Dynamo), though I’ll need an adapter.

Setting up VPN access to my office network was trivial. Lync MX won’t work until I get some more server-side plumbing set up. I tried to sign in to the desktop version of Lync 2013 and couldn’t because I didn’t have the necessary server certificate– but going to the Windows Server CA page with IE 10 resulted in a message from the server telling me that my browser couldn’t be used to request a certificate, even though all I wanted to do was download the CA chain. I’ll have to look into this.

And speaking of desktop access: I was easily able to turn on RDP access and hit the tablet from my Mac, but there’s a bug in CoRD that makes the cursor sometimes disappear. I haven’t tried Microsoft’s (lame and poorly maintained) RDP client, nor have I tried RDP from a Windows machine. Just to see what would happen, I plugged the cable from my desktop monitor into the Surface Pro’s mini-Display Port and immediately got a beautiful, mirrored 1920 x 1080 desktop, as expected. 

As many other reviewers have noted it’s a little disorienting at first to have two separate environments: desktop and Metro. However, since I can alt-Tab to switch between apps, in practice that has been absolutely no problem for me. The lack of a Start menu is a bit aggravating, but again, there’s an easy solution: tap the Windows key and start typing. Problem solved.

One night, I sat on the sofa using Word 2013 on the Surface Pro to revise a book chapter. This worked very well; I much prefer the UI of Word 2013 to Word 2011 on the Mac. I didn’t try using any pen input as part of my editing workflow, although that’s on my to-do list.

The smaller physical size of the Surface Pro compared to the MBP is a great asset; I’m looking forward to using it on commercial flights. The Ars Technica review shows the Surface as having a larger footprint than the MBP, but that ignores the fact that you have to open the MBP to use it, and when you do, the screen won’t be at 90° to the bottom– it’ll be tilted further back, which is where the footprint problem comes from. In that configuration the MBP screen impinges on the seatback space, which is how laptops get broken by reclining seats.

I tried running Outlook 2013, flipping out the kickstand, and using the Surface as a calendar display sitting next to my main screen. It’s a fantastic size to use as an adjunct display like that; I could have multiple browser windows (American, Delta, and kayak.com) plastered all over my man 2560 x 1440 desktop and still have glance-able calendar access.

Bottom line: I’m well pleased with the Surface Pro so far and will be swapping out my 64GB unit for a 128GB unit as soon as I can find one in stock.

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2013-02-12 · 14:16

Exchange 2010 SP3 released

It’s here! 

 Microsoft today released Service Pack 3 for Exchange 2010 (available from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36768).

SP3 enables full coexistence between Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013, plus it adds a couple of new features, such as Windows Server 2012 support. See the full feature list here.

After you’ve upgraded allof your 2010 servers to SP3, you will be able to install Exchange 2013 in your forest. Opinions differ on whether you should– for example, fellow MVPs Tony Redmond, Michael B. Smith, and Jason Sherry all agree that you should wait. For my part, I’m OK with deploying 2013 into production; it does have some rough edges, but I think CU1 is right around the corner, so adding 2013 in your environment now is certainly defensible.

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2013-02-07 · 17:54

Thursday trivia #87

  • My Kickstarter record of late hasn’t been so great. I’m still waiting for the Pebble I ordered, and today I got a notice from the Honey Badger BBQ sauce folks that said “DO NOT CONSUME ANY OF YOUR SAUCE; IMMEDIATELY DISPOSE OF YOUR SAUCE.” Oh well.
  • Lots to say about the Surface Pro; I just need to collect and organize my thoughts first. I want one, I think. But with the next generation Intel CPUs promising dramatically lower power usage, I might wait.
  • I’m not going to the MVP Summit this year; too much work and too little time. I have to be in Seattle the day before the seminar starts, so I may drop in for a short while on Monday though– hit me up if you want to meet.
  • Ross Anderson’s seminal Security Engineering is now available online for free. You should read it (yes, even you, Mom.)
  • Lots of events coming up! Next up: I’m doing a three-session webcast on Exchange 2013 at the end of the month. I’ve just sent off session proposals for TechEd North America and TechEd Europe, too.
  • The first chapter of my book has gone off to Microsoft Press for editing; the second chapter, on mobile device management, has gone off to my crack team of volunteer reviewers. Onward…

Bonus fun fact: even FedEx isn’t immune to the charms of Mardi Gras.

fedex

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2013-02-07 · 16:30

Excessive transaction log growth with iOS 6.1 devices

Well, it appears that Apple has done it again: reports are starting to surface of runaway transaction log growth when mobile devices running iOS 6.1 synchronize with Exchange Server. Tony has a good synopsis here.

Those of you who have been administering Exchange for a while may think this sounds familiar– that’s because there was a very similar problem with Microsoft Entourage back in the day, as detailed by Jeremy Kelly here. Remarkably, a couple of years later, we got the same bug in a slightly different guise, as described in KB 935848. In both cases, the problem was that the client was too stupid to detect certain types of failures, so it would keep retrying the failed operation, which would keep failing. This endless loop quickly resulted in large volumes of transaction log files on the Exchange server.

Luckily, Exchange 2010 and 2013 include throttling to prevent misbehaving clients from using up an excessive share of resources. However, the throttling controls available regulate EAS based on the amount of time user requests take, the number of concurrent connections, or the number of device partnerships. None of these parameters are useful in preventing the iOS 6.1-related problem; it’s not that the individual requests take up an excessive amount of time, it’s that there are so many requests that they generate an excessive log volume. (This video may provide a useful explanation for the phenomenon.)

Exchange 2013 includes the ability to specifically block misbehaving Exchange ActiveSync devices based on “suspicious” behavior. I will have a lot more to say about that in the near future, although that spiffy feature doesn’t help anyone now suffering the problem. For now, all we can do is the following:

  • Block iOS 6.1 devices using an Exchange ActiveSync device access rule
  • Discourage your users from upgrading, although I expect this to be an ineffective strategy
  • If you have a support relationship with Apple, report this problem to them. If you’re a developer, file a RADAR issue. If you have enterprise technical support with Apple, use it. I’ve seen reports that the ordinary consumer-level technical support (i.e. the $49 pay-per-incident support, as well as AppleCare) doesn’t have any way to report this particular problem in an actionable way.

Thoughts for another time: the rapid adoption rate of iOS devices has many benefits for users, including largely avoiding the fragmentation problems that plague Android with issues (like this “smishing” fix that virtually no one has). However, when Apple ships a buggy update, which is common, that rapid adoption multiplies the pain of the bug.

Update 1535 CST 8 Feb: Ina Fried at AllThingsD is reporting that Vodafone is telling iPhone 4S users not to upgrade to iOS 6.1.

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