- I always thought of nutria as being primarily a Louisiana problem, but it turns out they’re elsewhere– including the Delmarva Peninsula. Even the New York Times says so.
- Batman tonight! David and I are headed to see all 3 movies, back to back. (Don’t tell anyone but I may take a nap toward the middle of Batman Begins.)
- This is a really interesting article about the design process behind how Microsoft supports touch in Office 2013, but I agree with what Gruber said: users don’t care about design, they care about efficacy.
- So AT&T now has a shared data plan… that would actually cost me more than what I pay now for the same amount of data on the same devices: 10GB on 3 smartphones and 1 dumb phone (that currently has no data) would cost me $240, a $35 increase. Thanks, guys, but no thanks.
- Tony weighs in on the multi-mailbox search licensing changes. I hope Microsoft takes the opportunity in Exchange 2013 to fix all of the scripts that count ECALS, etc., including the one that gathers data for the organizational health summary. Still no word, of course, on Exchange 2013 licensing. Experience suggests that license terms and requirements will be one of the very last things Microsoft discloses.
- How to sell an airplane. First, of course, you have to buy one.
- The McLaren dealership was every bit what I hoped it would be, at least as far as cars are concerned. What beauties.
- Oshkosh is next week, but I can’t go. I have high hopes for next year though.
Thursday trivia #66
Filed under Musings
Exchange 2013 preview ships
Yay! Microsoft has released the preview version (which us normal humans might refer to as a beta) of Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Office 2013, and Lync 2013.
I don’t have time to write a full summary of all the changes, but a few highlights:
- One big piece of news: there are now only two server roles: client access and mailbox. (Raise your hand if that reminds you of the Exchange 2000/2003 front-end/back-end split.) CAS now has a new service, Front-End Transport, that doesn’t do what you probably think. In addition, the RPC Client Access service (RCA) is now gone.
- MAPI may not officially be dead, but the fact that Outlook 2013 can use Exchange ActiveSync sure makes it look that way.
- The new Exchange Administration Center (EAC) is going to be polarizing; some admins will love it, while others will hate it.
- No more multi-master replication for public folders. You should read this FAQ if you’re a public folder aficionado.
- This is the first release of Exchange or SharePoint that really enables the “better together” story. In-place discovery searches and site mailboxes (about which, more later) will really make a huge difference in how SharePoint and Exchange are used for data management.
- “By default, malware filtering is enabled in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Preview.” Yay!
- Not a ton of unified messaging changes, but a few welcome ones, including better Voice Mail Preview accuracy and some UI improvements.
There’s a list of “what’s new in this release” items, of course. Keep in mind, though, that Microsoft frequently adds features between preview releases and RTM, so there may well be additional features, or changes to existing features, between this release and the final release later this year.
Download and enjoy!
Filed under UC&C
Licensing change for Exchange multi-mailbox search
Microsoft today announced that you no longer need an enterprise client access license (ECAL) to use the multi-mailbox search feature. This is a welcome change, of course, since it means that it is now OK to run multi-mailbox searches against mailboxes that are licensed with a standard CAL. In essence, Microsoft is giving standard CAL holders something for free that formerly cost money. ECAL holders, of course, aren’t getting anything extra out of the deal, but I’d argue that the other ECAL features (including legal hold and the Personal Archive feature) probably make up for that.
The interesting question to me is: why this change at all, and why now? It’s common for Microsoft to adjust licensing terms with new releases of Exchange, so my guess is that we’ll see some differences in how the data loss prevention (DLP) and information management features of Exchange 2013 are licensed and which specific mix of CALs you need to use them.
Stay tuned…
On re-kerberizing services on Mac OS X Server
Wow, this week has been a productive one for finding new and interesting blog topics, mostly based on things that broke!
As much as I rely on Apple hardware and software for my work and personal life, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give them a free pass on issues like cost (note to self: update the laptop price comparison with the latest models) or capability. I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike Apple’s sloppy approach to system administration on OS X Server. The logging is poor, with log entries scattered all over the place; the documentation is hit-or-miss (both in terms of coverage and quality), and there can be a wide range of behavior between different tools– some give you lots of detail (or at least more verbose messages on demand), while others don’t.
Our primary OS X server is bound to our Active Directory domain, and the services on it are “kerberized” so that users can use their AD accounts, via Kerberos, to ssh into the machine, log in to the wiki, and so on. After a bit of initial flailing around, this has worked steadily for a year or so.
We have recently been working to set up single sign-on (SSO) for Subversion on Mac OS X. This has proved challenging for lots of reasons that are too tedious to go into here (and speaking of tedious: please don’t bother telling me we should be using Git instead, kthxbai). As part of that process, someone accidentally deleted the machine account that the OS X server had been using and replaced it with a user account, with the same name, for use with a manually-kerberized service.
In the Windows world, deleting a computer’s account causes all sorts of fairly immediate breakage. To OS X’s credit, it didn’t seem to be bothered that the computer account was gone.. I mean, it didn’t log any errors or anything, so it must have been happy, right? (That’s sarcasm, in case you were wondering.) The server kept right on working, except that the previously-kerberized services would no longer accept AD credentials.
The fix for this seemed straightforward: first, remove the OS X server from the domain, then add it back. This would re-establish its machine account. That step went swimmingly, although we first had to rename the user account that was created for SSO.
The only problem was that after doing this, single sign-on still didn’t work.
It turns out that when you remove an OS X server from AD, the services are essentially un-kerberized. This seems like it would be easy to fix with the “Kerberize” button in Server Manager... except that it’s apparently broken, or something, given that no combination of inputs would be accepted. So, my next attempt was to use sso_util from the command line, which also didn’t work; I got a nondescript message telling me that there was a communications error, and that was it.
The correct answer, at least on Snow Leopard: use dsconfigad -enablesso. You can be excused for not knowing that, because if you go to Apple’s own documentation, it says to run a command called “disconfigad,” whatever the hell that is. Once I ran that command, Kerberos logons for the wiki, ssh, and console logon immediately started working, yay. Now with any luck I won’t have to fool with this stupid server for another year or so.
Comments Off on On re-kerberizing services on Mac OS X Server
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Stalking the wily ADAccess event 2112
Timing is everything.
A week ago, I got a late-night phone call about a problem with an Exchange server that seemed to be related to an expired certificate; the admin had replaced the expired cert on one member of a two-node DAG, but not the other. He noticed the errors in the event log when troubleshooting a seemingly unrelated problem, installed the new cert, and then boom! Bad stuff started happening. Problem was, the reported problem was that inbound SMTP from a hosted filtering service that doesn’t use TLS wasn’t flowing, so it didn’t seem likely that certificate expiration would be involved. By the time he called me, he had installed the new certificate and rebooted the affected server, and all seemed to be well.
Fast forward to Sunday night. I’d planned to patch these same servers to get them on to Exchange 2010 SP2 UR3, in part because I’d noticed a worrisome number of events generated by the MSExchange ADAccess service, chiefly event ID 2112:
Process MSEXCHANGEADTOPOLOGYSERVICE.EXE (PID=8356). The Exchange computer HQ-EX02.blahblah does not have Audit Security Privilege on the domain controller HQ-DC01.blahblah. This domain controller will not be used by Exchange Active Directory Provider.
This was immediately followed by MSExchange ADAccess event ID 2102 with the rather ominous message that
Process MSEXCHANGEADTOPOLOGYSERVICE.EXE (PID=8356). All Domain Controller Servers in use are not responding:
However, the event ID 2080 logged by ADAccess indicated that all but 1 of the GCs were up and providing necessary services, including indicating that their SACL allowed Exchange the necessary access. I couldn’t puzzle it out in the time I had allotted, so I decided to take a backup (see rule #3) and wait to tackle the patching until I could be physically present. That turned out to be a very, very good idea.
Last night, I sat down to patch the affected systems. I began with the passive DAG node, updating it to SP2 and then installing UR3. I half-thought that this process might resolve the cause of the errors (see rule #2), but after a reboot I noticed they were still being logged. I suspected that the reported 2102 errors might be bogus, since I knew all of the involved GCs were running and available. As I started to dig around, I learned that this error often appears when there’s a problem with permissions; to be more specific, this SCOM article asserts that the problem is that the Exchange server(s) don’t have the SeSecurityPrivilege user right on the domain controllers. However, I was still a little skeptical. I checked the default DC GPO and, sure enough, the permissions were present, so I moved on to do some further investigation.
Another possible cause is that the Exchange servers’ computer accounts aren’t in the Exchange Servers group, or that permissions on that group were jacked up somehow, but they appeared to be fine so I discounted that as a likely cause.
Along the way I noticed that the FBA service wouldn’t start, but its error message was meaningless– all I got from the service control manager was a service-specifc error code that resisted my best attempts to Bing it. Without that service, of course, you can’t use OWA with FBA mode, which would be a problem so I made a mental note to dig into that later.
A little more searching turned up this article, which is dangerously wrong: it suggests adding the Exchange computer accounts to the Domain Admins security group. Please, please, don’t do this; not only does it not fix the problem, it can cause all sorts of other tomfoolery that you don’t want to have to deal with.
Still more digging revealed two common problems that were present on this server: the active NIC wasn’t first in the binding order and IPv6 was disabled on the two enabled NICs. Now, you and I both know that IPv6 isn’t required to run Exchange.. but Microsoft does not support disabling or removing IPv6 on Windows servers. And you know what they say about what “unsupported” means! So, I enabled IPv6 on the two adapters and got the binding order sorted out, then bounced the AD topology service and…
… voila! Everything seemed to be working normally, so I ran some tests to verify that *over was working as it should, then started patching the DAG primary– only to have setup fail partway through. Upon reboot, w3svc was caught in an endless loop of trying to load some of the in-proc OWA DLLs; it kept trying endlessly until I power-cycled the server. The problem with this is that the Active Manager service was starting, so the current active node would try to sync with it before mounting its copy of the DAG databases, but it never got an answer! Net result, no mounted databases on either server, and an unhappy expression on my face as the clock ticked past 11pm.
I put the primary member server in safe mode, then set the Exchange and w3svc services to manual star and rebooted it. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to pin down exactly what happened, I ran setup in recovery mode; it installed the binaries, after which the services restarted normally. I did a switchover back to the original primary node, verified mail flow, and went home. Life was good.
Until, that is, this morning, when I got an e-mail: “OWA is down.” I checked the servers and, sure enough, the errors were back and the FBA service was again refusing to start. After some creative swearing, I once again started digging around in the guts of the server. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a legitimate permissions problem of some kind.
At that point, I found this article, which pointed out something critical about GPOs: you have to check the effective policy, not just the one defined in the default policy. Sure enough, when I used RSoP to check the effective policy on the DCs, the Exchange servers did not have SeSecurityPrivilege on the DCs because there was a separate GPO to control audit logging permissions, and it had recently been changed to remove the Exchange Servers group. That was easy to fix: I added the Exchange Servers group to the GPO, ran gpudate, rebooted the passive node, and found that the services all started normally and ran without error. A quick switchover let me restart the topology service on the primary DAG member, after which it too ran without errors. End result: problem solved.
It’s still not entirely clear to me why that particular service needs to have the SeSecurityPrivilege right assigned. I’m trying to find that out and will update this post once I do. In the meantime, if you have similar symptoms, check to verify that the effective policy is correct.
Filed under UC&C
Long solo cross-country, 4 July
What better way to celebrate Independence Day than to exercise my Constitutional right of free travel? That’s right: “free” as in “not encumbered by TSA or any of their baloney.”
The FAA requires that private pilots know how to plan and safely execute what they call “cross-country” flights. I’d already flown one with Andy from Palo Alto to Columbia, but the FAA requires that private pilots plan and carry out a cross-country flight of at least 150nm total distance, with one leg being at least 50nm and landings at 3 separate airports.
Andy had originally asked me to plan a flight from Palo Alto (KPAO) to Paso Robles (KPRB) to Salinas (KSNS) and back to KPAO. The first leg to Paso Robles is 129nm, so the total trip distance would meet all the FAA’s requirements. In my earlier post I gave a quick summary of what it means to construct a VFR flight plan; here’s a slightly more detailed list:
- Puled out a bunch of paper charts: my San Francisco and Los Angeles sectional charts and my San Franciscoterminal chart. Sectional charts are large-scale charts that show terrain features, airports, roads, navigation aids, and other useful items at 1:500,000 scale. Terminal charts show a smaller area at double the scale, so they’re great for navigation planning in urban areas.
- Used the paper charts to plot a direct route of flight, using a straightedge and a Sharpie marker to lay out my course. Paper charts cost about $9 each, so you might wonder why I’d be willing to deface them with a Sharpie. The truth is, they expire after about 5 months, so you may as well mark on them.
- Used the route of flight to identify checkpoints– visual features on the ground that I can look at to tell where I am and what my progress along the course is. There are some well-known visual checkpoints already marked on the sectionals. For example, VPSUN is the golf course at Sunol, while VPMOR is the LDS temple in Oakland. You can use these as reporting points; for example, I can call the Palo Alto tower and say “Palo Alto, Cessna One Niner One Tango Golf, overhead Leslie Salt, landing Palo Alto with Juliet.” That doesn’t mean Juliet’s in the airplane; rather, it means that I’m reporting being overhead the Leslie Salt Company’s salt refinery with ATIS information— a radio broadcast telling me what the current airport weather and runway conditions are– Juliet.
- Measured the distance between checkpoints and put that into my navigation log.
- Got a weather forecast showing the projected winds aloft and used those to calculate the amount of wind correction necessary for each leg.
- Used the wind and airspeed data to figure out how long each leg would take to fly, or, in other words, the ETA to go between each pair of checkpoints
- Used the ETA data to estimate fuel consumption for each leg
- Reviewed the airport data, including which runways exist, whether they were open or closed, any restrictions on their use, what the standard traffic patterns and altitudes were, and so on.
After doing all that, I reviewed the weather forecast and saw that Salinas and Monterey were both fogged in. That didn’t bode well for my planned route, but I went to the airport anyway to meet with Andy and discuss my flight plan. Student pilots have to have an instructor’s logbook endorsement to legally do the long cross-country, you see, so meeting with him was a precondition to taking off. I reviewed the route of flight with him and pointed out some alternate options given that I couldn’t overfly the fog areas. He suggested a completely different route: over the hills to Tracy (KTCY), then down to Los Baños (KLSN), then to KPRB, and then back either direct (if the fog was gone) or by reversing that route. I replanned the route, got his endorsement, and went to check out the airplane I’d reserved… except that it was gone.
OK, OK, I exaggerate… a bit. The automated scheduling system that Advantage uses expects that you’ll sign out the airplane at the scheduled time. If you don’t do so within 30 minutes of your scheduled time, the system puts the airplane back in the available pool. I had an 0800 reservation, but at 0830 I was still meeting with Andy, so the plane became available and someone else grabbed it. Luckily there was another G1000-equipped 172 available at noon, so I took it instead.
Before I took off, I asked Palo Alto ground control for VFR flight following. This is essentially radar surveillance; air traffic control assigns you a unique transponder code that identifies your aircraft on radar. ATC will issue traffic and safety advisories, notifying you of other aircraft in your vicinity and so on. As you leave each bubble of radar surveillance, ATC hands you off to the next one. For my flight, I started out with Palo Alto and was handed off to NORCAL Approach, the TRACON (or terminal radar approach control center) that owns the airspace over most of northern California. I stayed with NORCAL until I got to an area outside their control, at which point they handed me over to Oakland Center, the air route traffic control center (ARTCC) that provides radar services outside of TRACON-controlled areas.
Anyway, one of the benefits of flight following is that you get traffic advisory calls. I got several on my route towards Tracy; that airspace is heavily traveled as people fly into and out of Palo Alto, Hayward, San Carlos, and the other airports in the area. My favorite call? That’s easy: “Cessna Two Hotel Golf, traffic your 1 o’clock, 2 miles, 5000 feet northbound, flight of two F-18. Hobo 51, traffic your 11-o’clock, 2 miles, 3000 feet eastbound, Cessna 172.” Sure enough, there went two F-18s zipping past, too fast for me to unlimber the camera and get a picture.
The flight itself was great! Good visibility on the outbound leg; I took off from Palo Alto, made a right Dunbarton, overflew Sunol, overflew the Livermore area, and headed to Tracy. AsHere’s what the Tracy airport looks like from 5500′ up; it looks small from the ground, but those two runways are 4000′ each.
My route of flight from metropolitan Tracy (!) down to Los Baños took me roughly along Interstate 5. To the west there are all kinds of interesting hills; to the east there are a string of smallish towns, plus lots and lots of cultivated land. From the air, the patchwork of different shades of green is absolutely gorgeous.
that salad you’re eating? it probably came from the Central Valley
My approach and landing at Los Baños were uneventful, with a good landing on their runway. The Los Baños airport is uncontrolled, meaning there’s no control tower or radar service. Each aircraft is required to vigorously “see and avoid,” of course, but there’s also a radio frequency on which aircraft in the vicinity announce their location and intentions. So you call to tell anyone listening that you’re approaching the airport, where you’re going, and where you are… i.e. “Los Baños traffic, Cessna Two Hotel Golf, 5 miles north of the field, two thousand five hundred, entering the pattern for landing runway 32”, or whatever. Then you call again when you get closer; meanwhile, other aircraft, if any, are making their own calls. I landed well, taxied back on the parallel taxiway, waited a minute for another aircraft to take off and clear the pattern, and took off to the south.
The route of flight that Andy and I had planned called for me to go from KLSN to New Coalingua airport, then turn southwest for Paso Robles.. so that’s what I did, being careful to stay out of the Lemoore military operating areas (MOAs). Andy warned me that I’d know when I was getting close to New Coalingua because I’d be able to smell Harris Ranch. I thought he was pulling my leg, but, sure enough, I could smell the stockyards from more than a mile up and several miles lateral distance. I made the turn before C80 and found Paso Robles right where it was supposed to be. I landed, taxied in to a parking spot, and went inside to find out if they had any food, having neglected to pack anything. They didn’t, but the kind folks at Paso Robles Jet Center loaned me a crew car so I could drive into town and eat at Margie’s Diner. As advertised, the diner had extremely large portions, which suited me just fine. I had a delicious grilled ham-and-cheese and two large diet Pepsis; meanwhile, the line crew refueled my plane so that when I got there (after a brief encounter with the airport’s resident cat) I was ready to go. I took off and headed to the northwest, towards Salinas, but there was a huge layer of haze that looked like it covered pretty much my entire route of flight.
Haze, of course, diminishes visibility rather than eliminating it. It wouldn’t have been legal for me to overfly an area of fog that obscured the ground completely, whereas I could have legally flown over the haze. However, “legal” and “prudent” don’t always mean the same thing, so I elected to go back the way that I came, mostly. Instead of going back to C80, I cut the corner by flying to the Priest VOR, then to the Panoche VOR, then telling the G1000 to take me back towards Tracy and thence to Palo Alto. On the way back, I practiced using the GFC700 autopilot in the airplane a bit. This might seem contradictory– why use the autopilot at all as a student? There are several good reasons. First, I want to know how every piece of equipment in the airplane works so that I can get the most utility from it. Second, for instrument flying the autopilot is a tremendous aid because it can keep the aircraft pointed in the right direction at the right altitude while the pilot aviates, navigates, and communicates. Third, one of the things you’re required to demonstrate on the FAA check ride is what the FAA calls “lost procedures”– in other words, what do you do if you get lost? I want the option to be able to tell the autopilot to keep the wings level and altitude steady while I’m rooting around looking for charts or whatever. Fourth, it’s cool. Anyway, I spent some time refreshing my knowledge of how to set up the autopilot to track a heading and maintain an altitude. There are many more sophisticated things it can do that I haven’t started exploring yet, like fly a profile such that you end up at a specific altitude over a specific point on the ground. That will come with time.
Coming back I had a great view of the San Luis reservoir, near Los Baños; see below.
There was a bit of haze, but off to the west I could still see heavy haze on my original planned route, and I was perfectly happy to see it over there instead of underneath me. My approach through the hills and the east side of the Bay went well, and I nailed the landing back at Palo Alto. 4.0 hours of pilot-in-command and solo cross-country time for the books!
Filed under aviation, California
The case of the stolen stereo
So last Thursday, some knucklehead broke into my car and stole my stereo, my flight headset, and a few other small items. This post is about the process of replacing and/or repairing those losses, so you can consider it somewhat in the nature of a review.
The car was in the “secure” [sic] parking area at my apartment complex. However, it’s fairly easy to get into the parking area, so generally I lock the car. I left the driver’s rear window open about 2″, and that was apparently sufficient for the thief to get in. Another nearby car was burgled by the expedient of a brick thrown through the window (the owner had left spare keys in the ashtray so he lost the whole car!), so I suppose it’s a good thing that I’d left the window open.
I immediately called the Mountain View police non-emergency number; they told me to file a report online, which I did. That part of the process was painless and quick; the CopLogic system that MVPD uses worked well.
Next stop: insurance company. I use USAA for car insurance, and their online claim system worked just as well as CopLogic. I was able to file the claim in less than 10 minutes and got a call back from an adjuster about two hours later. She explained that in California, only items that are powered by the vehicle (or could be) are covered by auto insurance. Your GPS? Covered. Your laptop? Covered. Stereo? Covered. Headset? Nope. She punched a few buttons and told me that I’d be hearing from a company called Premier Services, and that I could get the dash repaired anywhere I liked but, OBTW, there was a USAA-approved shop right up the road in Palo Alto.
Sure enough, I got a call from Premier about an hour later. When I bought this car in December of 2009, I removed the factory stereo and replaced it with a Pioneer AVIC U310BT, the lowest-end Pioneer that had navigation and an iPod/iPhone input. It cost me about $400, plus cables and adapters and so on. I installed it myself, so my total cost including cables, etc., was probably about $550 or so. Pioneer discontinued that model, so the replacement cost they’re offering is substantially more, meaning I can buy something a little nicer. Off to Crutchfield I went, where I ordered a JVC KW-NT500HDT receiver. I’ve been buying from Crutchfield for nearly 20 years and have never had anything less than a great experience with them, so their recommendation of this particular deck carried a lot of weight. The Pioneer unit I had was slow and buggy, and Pioneer’s customer support is terrible, so I wasn’t about to buy another one.
I’m not sure why the thief took my headset, given that it’s only useful for flying in planes– maybe he thought it was a cool set of DJ headphones or something. The headset in question was a Pilot USA PA-1771T Liberty that I bought from Pilot USA as a refurb last year. It isn’t the most comfortable or fanciest headset, but it did a good enough job of providing active noise reduction (ANR) and was reasonably comfortable. I’d planned to treat myself to a newer, nicer ANR headset after I got my actual license, thinking that I’d consign the Liberty to passenger use. Rather than lay out the big bucks for a Bose or Lightspeed, though, I remembered how happy I’ve been with passive noise blocking for music on commercial airplanes, and I decided to try an in-ear headset instead. At first I was leaning towards the Clarity Aloft, but a little research at Aviation Consumer led me towards the Quiet Technologies Halo, which is nearly $200 cheaper than the Clarity. I promptly ordered one, asking on the order form whether it could be shipped faster. Sure enough, about two hours later I got a phone call from Quiet Tech offering me better shipping and a discount because the owner felt sorry for me. Wow.
Next came the body shop. USAA pointed me at Mathews Carlsen in Palo Alto, although they took pains to emphasize that I could use any body shop I liked. I drove to Mathews Carlsen Friday morning and walked out again in 10 minutes, estimate in hand.
Saturday I had planned to install the stereo myself, but I decided against it– I didn’t know what the thieves might have broken or otherwise jacked up when they pulled the old unit and I wasn’t at all interested in spending my time finding out. Luckily I found Custom Audio, which is about a mile from my apartment. I was there about 10 minutes after they opened on Saturday, and about three hours later I had a flawlessly-working stereo.
Over the weekend, I found out that the thieves also snagged my Contour HD camera, and that they’d managed to break the remote trunk release. A quick Monday call to USAA elicited the information that they needed a purchase receipt for the camera and an updated police report. MVPD makes it possible to edit police reports online, so I did, then uploaded the PDF of the report and the camera receipt to USAA’s web site. By Thursday, I’d received a payment from them for all of my expenses (exclusive of my deductible.)
Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to try my new headset yet; it hadn’t arrived by the time of my planned cross-country, but I’ll be testing it tomorrow night.
There are still a few things left to fix; Mathews Carlsen hasn’t gotten the replacement dash parts yet, so the dash isn’t back together, and I still need to get the remote trunk release fixed. However, I am delighted with how easy USAA made it to file and handle a claim, as well as with the speed of their payment. Crutchfield came through, as always, and I am happy with the job that Custom Audio did for me as well. All things considered, this was about as hassle-free an episode as you can reasonably expect.
(Side note: my apartment complex management company is now putting surveillance cameras in the parking area. Yay!)
Filed under General Stuff
Thursday trivia #65
- “7 Minutes of Terror.” Just go watch it.
- Fantastic paper detailing the process of designing and prototyping the F-22. Its subtitle: “An aerospace melodrama, for adults only.” Highly recommended.
- Don McGowan, an acquaintance of mine who happens to be Pikachu’s lawyer, just started a new blog: The Legal Minimum, subtitled “a plain-English overview of legal issues that affect creatives and creators, as understood by someone who works in the business.” If you are a creative or creator, you should be reading it.
- A good question: does Google have any social skills at all?
- From the “I hate it when that happens” department: two Mirage 2000s go supersonic over the Brazilian Supreme Court building. Hijinks ensue.
- This is a pretty good explanation of the TSA PreCheck program, which I am going to interview for on the 31st. I hope it helps.
- A beautiful story of a wrong redressed, and of pride in one’s country.
Filed under Musings
RIP Exchange UPDATE
I am sad to report that I just got an e-mail from the lovely and talented Amy Eisenberg, executive editor at Windows IT Pro, letting me know that they are ending the publication of the Exchange UPDATE newsletter that I’ve been writing since 2002.
The original UPDATE was delivered only via e-mail, and it was advertising-supported so that it made money for the magazine. Over time, the market shifted, with a much greater emphasis placed on delivery via RSS and a sea change in how advertisers spend (and how media outlets package and sell advertising.) Because of these changes, it doesn’t make sense for Penton to continue to publish Exchange UPDATE, so it has been moved to the great folder in the sky (and, no, I’m not talking about SkyDrive.) It’s a business decision, and not one lightly taken, but I understand the reasoning and don’t bear the magazine folks any ill will.
On the contrary– writing the UPDATE has been a terrific growth opportunity over the last 10 (!) years. When I first started writing it, I took over from the redoubtable Jerry Cochran, who had recently moved to a new role at Microsoft. At first I found the demands of writing a weekly column on Exchange to be almost insurmountable, but I soon came to realize that there’s always something going on in the Exchange world to write about. Companies introduce new products or leave the market altogether; Microsoft ships or delays products; interesting people create interesting things. This cycle will go on, of course, and I’ll still be writing about it here and for Windows IT Pro. Don’t be surprised if you also see some of my writing in new outlets as well, either…
Thursday trivia #63
- From the department of giant robots: an industrial robot with an industrial laser. I know what I want for Christmas.
- They don’t make ’em like these guys anymore: Watson’s Whizzers.
- Knolling: something I’d like to do with my toolbox. I wouldn’t dare attempt it with my desks at work or home.
- This interactive chart of the top 10 causes of death in the US from 1900-2010 is absolutely engrossing. The killers of yore– tuberculosis, influenza, “gastrointestinal infections”– have been supplanted by heart disease, cancer, and airway diseases.
- What I hope everyone who reads this blog understands: the military has people whose job it is to plan for every imaginable contingency, from Plan Orange to Plan Red to Iraq. So this article shouldn’t surprise you too much. Don’t take the fact that we have contingency plans for attacking Iran as evidence that anyone in the military wants to do so, or thinks it’s a good idea.
Filed under Musings
A strong recommendation for TripIt Pro
I travel a good bit: not as many as some folks I know (such as Scott Schnoll, Tony Redmond, or other members of the far-flung Exchange tribe), nor as much as I used to, but at least a couple of times a month I’m on a plane heading somewhere– often to Huntsville to see my sons.
On my last trip I had a bit of hassle occasioned by a crew availability issue. The problem: I have to be at my office all day (long story), so I need as late a flight as possible on Friday. That means the 2:20p departure from SFO to Dallas, then a connection on to Huntsville.. but with only a 40-minute connection time, any serious delay ex-SFO means I’m going to be stuck.
I thus decided to try TripIt Pro. I have happily used their free service for several years; it’s the best way that I’ve found to organize and keep track of travel itineraries. All I have to do is forward confirmation mails to plans@tripit.com and they magically appear in my mobile client, neatly sorted by trip and time. The Pro service costs $49 a year, but it offers several interesting features, including an alert service that promises to notify you of delays and the ability to notify you if the fare for a trip decreases.
This morning, I called American at about 9:45a to request an upgrade for my 2:20p flight. I got that done with no problem. By the time I got back to my desk, here’s what I saw in my inbox:
Sure enough, due to SFO weather (which was delaying inbound aircraft), my outbound flight was delayed by long enough to make me miss the Huntsville connection. The “Alternate Flights” link showed me all of my flight options, and I was able to call American and get an agent to rebook me to an earlier flight. Notably, at no time did American themselves send me a notification of the delay– no text message, no e-mail, no nothing. This is despite the fact that I’m signed up for, and usually receive, flight status updates from AA.
While I admire the potential of getting a notification telling me “oh, your fare decreased,” the notification feature just saved my bacon for this trip– well worth the $50. If you travel more than a few times a year, I strongly encourage you to look into TripIt Pro (which has a 30-day free trial). I am now a convert.
Thursday trivia #62
- Why are the Chinese investing heavily in commercial real estate in and around Toledo? (And no, the answer is not “because no one else wants to.”)
- Got to take nephew Charlie to Fry’s Electronics for the first time yesterday. It was the quintessential Fry’s experience: wide-eyed wonder on the part of the first-time visitor coupled with surly-to-indifferent service from the floor staff, mixed in with a hearty helping of inaccurate information. (The cashier we had, bless her heart, solved the problem for us, though.)
- The NTSB wants you to know that in-cockpit NEXRAD weather may not be as timely as pilots think it is. OK, fine. I’d still rather have old NEXRAD than none at all.
- I’m very interested in Microsoft’s Surface products, but the timing of the introduction seems a little odd. Press reports say that no one was allowed to use the Touch Cover, one of the signature Surface features. That makes me think that it wasn’t ready for public handling– so why not wait until it was ready? One of the unique things that Apple’s done with their product introductions, and that Microsoft could easily copy, is having the product ready to ship the minute it’s announced. Imagine the impact of the Surface announcement if Microsoft had said “here it is, here’s what it costs, and you can buy one today” instead of “here it is; stand by for further details.”
- If you wonder why Pixar’s films are so successful, wonder no more– this list of “story basics” neatly captures the things they think about when crafting stories– and make no mistake, the stories are what make their films so good, not the technology.
- Switzerland as one giant booby trap. With fondue.
- Dick Collins’ writing is always thought-provoking, but never more so than here: “The ultimate responsibility: thoughts on family flying“.
In which I dispute Tony Redmond re Windows Phone upgrades
Microsoft just wrapped up the keynote for their Windows Phone Developer Summit. Following as it does on the heels of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, comparisons are inevitable… so let me succumb to the inevitable:
- At WWDC, Apple announced iOS 6 and talked more about the forthcoming “Mountain Lion” release of OS X, which follows OS X “Lion”‘s lead by incorporating a number of iOS-like features. Many observers believe that Apple’s long-term plan is to provide as much of a unified core between iOS, OS X, and AppleTV as possible.
- At WPDS, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 (“Apollo”), which will share a common core with Windows 8– thereby beating Apple to the core OS-integration punch. They also highlighted some nifty new Apollo features that will depend on their hardware device partners, including new higher-resolution screens and support for NFC.
As they normally do, Apple was mostly quiet about the device upgrade path for iOS 6. Microsoft, on the other hand, was up front about the fact that current Windows Phone devices won’t be getting Apollo. Tony has a beef with this approach:
I think this is a brain-dead decision that looks pretty feeble when compared against Apple’s record of making sure that new releases of their O/S run on older versions of iPhones. For example, the iPhone 3GS that I used before making the now-lamentable decision to try Windows Phone 7.5, upgraded smoothly from iOS 3 to iOS5 over the time I owned the phone.
This is clearly a situation where Apple is right… well, except that they’re not.
It is true that iOS 6 will run on older devices. For example, my not-yet-two-year-old iPhone 4 will run iOS 6, as will all models of the iPad; even the relatively ancient 3GS will get the upgrade.
However, there are a number of iOS 6 features that will not work on anything older than an iPhone 4S. Among these: FaceTime over 3G and turn-by-turn directions in the mapping app, two features that exist either as App Store apps or hacks that can be applied to jailbroken devices.
Apple hasn’t said why they won’t ship these features for iPhone 4 users. It might be due to technical limitations (though I doubt it in the case of turn-by-turn directions), but I suspect it’s more likely to be as a tactic to drive sales of new devices. After all, Apple’s profit on iOS devices come from the hardware (and to a lesser extent, the attach rate of purchases from the App Store).
Microsoft, on the other hand, makes no profit on WP hardware except to the extent that they collect a license fee per handset. That raises the question of what Microsoft should have done with Apollo. You could argue, as Tony does, that at least the shiny new Lumia 900 should get the upgrade, and that ideally older devices should as well. But this approach poses some really interesting tradeoffs for Microsoft. They get to choose between two options, to wit:
- spending a large amount of money and engineering time to get Apollo running on older WP7 devices, such as the HTC Surround or the original Samsung Focus, from which they will never derive any additional revenue and for which carriers may decide not to give their customers the upgrade anyway? or
- spending money and effort on polishing Apollo to take full advantage of new hardware, sales of which will drive carrier efforts and directly put cash in Microsoft’s coffers?
I don’t think that Microsoft’s choice was a very difficult one. If you look at the list of Apollo features, some of them (such as NFC, new resolution support, on-device BitLocker encryption, and the new DirectX) require upgraded hardware. Some of them (such as deep VoIP integration, which I dearly wish Apple would copy, the new Nokia map experience, and support for native C++ code) do not, and could feasibly be backported, but only to the extent that they don’t depend on the new Windows 8 common kernel. Some of the new features, in fact, are actually apps, which means that Microsoft could potentially ship them as separate standalone updates in the future.
When Tony says
After all, we’re dealing with software here and surely a few IF… THEN… ELSE conditions could be incorporated into the code to support older devices?
I’m reminded of our earlier discussion about the pros and cons of requiring an Active Directory version update for Exchange 15, in particular the observation that the test burden of software changes is a lifelong obligation. Adding a feature isn’t always hard, but once it’s added you must test it on every device and configuration for as long as you support that feature– and that is even more true here when you consider the size of the WP test matrix, which contains dozens of devices and dozens of carriers. If I were Terry Myerson, the corporate VP at Microsoft who owns Windows Phone, I wouldn’t spend the money on backporting the core, even if it were technically possible. It doesn’t make sense as an investment, nor is the ongoing cost burden supportable.
(nb. Myerson, you may recall, is the fellow who made the at-the-time extremely unpopular decision that Exchange 2007 would require x64 hardware. This was widely hailed as being an arrogant and ignorant move on Microsoft’s part, but it was actually one made for solid technical reasons, and in retrospect it has proven to be the right decision; the scalability and performance benefits of that move have been critical improvements to Exchange 2007, 2010, and 15.)
While Tony thinks of Microsoft’s move as being a “sad and arrogant indication” of Microsoft’s contempt for its mobile customers[1], I instead see it as a realistic acceptance of the fact that even the mighty Microsoft has limits on what they can feasibly accomplish. They are fighting hard to stay relevant in the mobile device market, and they’ve apparently decided that their effort is better spent on net-new development work. Based on my outsider’s view, I can’t disagree.
Having said that: yes, I’m disappointed that my two-year-old HTC Mozart (and the Lumia 800 I’m going out to buy this afternoon for a project) won’t get the Apollo upgrade.. but no more so than I am that my iPhone 4 won’t get the full flavor of iOS 6. In fact, I am probably more likely to buy a new device to run Apollo than I am to buy a new device for iOS 6. Why? Look at the delta in features; absent some major new hardware improvement, or some as-yet-hidden iOS 6 features, it doesn’t make sense to shell out for a new device just to get Siri, turn-by-turn maps, and FaceTime over 3G. But at the end of the day, this is a business decision, not one that Windows Phone customers should take personally.
[1] You know who really has contempt for their mobile customers? The carriers. Yeah, that’s right; the same ones who do things like block Windows Phone and Android updates. Of course, you can argue that as an OS manufacturer that doesn’t make its own devices, Microsoft’s customers are the carriers, not consumers. Apple’s in a different space because they sell devices both through carriers and direct-to-consumer, as do Google and the increasingly-irrelevant RIM.
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Musings, UC&C
Airwork, 4 June
There’s an old saw in aviation: to be a successful pilot, all you have to do is make sure that your lifetime total of takeoffs and landings match. With that in mind, student pilots spend a fair amount of time practicing various kinds of takeoffs and landings to become proficient. In this particular session, we worked on soft-field takeoffs and landings.
One thing that many non-pilots assume is that airplanes can take off or land pretty much anywhere. This is true for some values of “airplanes” and “pretty much anywhere.” It’s true that almost any reasonably level surface of sufficient length can be used as a landing strip, but some airplanes are much better suited to what we call unimproved strips– those that aren’t paved– than others. If you watch almost any TV show involving Alaska, for example, you’ll see lots of video of airplanes landing on grass strips, dirt, gravel or sandbars in rivers, snow, and ice. Some of these airplanes will have tricycle gear (meaning a nose wheel and two main gear located under the fuselage), while others will be taildraggers (which use a steerable wheel under the tail, along with two main gear). Some will have skis, while others will have big bush tires. But what about your everyday, run-of-the-mill Cessna or Piper? It turns out that they can operate just fine from many kinds of unimproved runway, including grass and dirt strips. More to the point, though, in case of a precautionary or forced landing, it’s really important to know how to take off and land safely on soft-surfaced runways, so we practice it.
For a soft-field takeoff or landing in a tricycle-gear airplane, one key is to try to keep the nose wheel off the ground as much as possible by keeping the yoke back. As airspeed increases, keeping the yoke back raises the nose, lessening the load on the nose wheel and reducing the chance that it will dig in to the surface and flip the plane over. As you land, keeping the yoke back allows you to convert forward airspeed into lift, which has the beneficial effect of slowing the airplane down quickly without using brakes and while keeping the nose wheel out of the mud, or whatever is on the surface.
To accomplish a good soft-field takeoff, there are a few other things to do. First, momentum is your friend. Once you begin to turn onto the runway, you don’t stop to line up (provided, of course, that ATC hasn’t told you to “line up and wait,” which means that they’ve cleared you to line up on the departure end of the runway and wait for clearance to actually take off while another aircraft lands), and you control your taxi speed such that you don’t have to use the brakes as you turn to align with the runway. As you’re completing your turn, you advance the power smoothly to takeoff power while keeping the yoke back. Once you gain sufficient speed to take off, you add enough up-elevator to leave the runway surface and then immediately push forward so that you don’t climb.
“Wait, what?” I can hear you asking.
Flying machines can benefit from something known as ground effect. This is what makes hovercraft work; an airfoil moving within a certain distance off the ground will generate a sort of cushion of air that provides additional lift and reduced drag, beyond what the airfoil generates on its own. You might remember from a previous discussion that every airplane has a characteristic speed at which it climbs best— it gains the most altitude for each foot of forward motion at that speed. The goal of keeping the aircraft in ground effect is to keep it off the muddy/sticky/grassy surface– which would just slow it down– and allow it to accelerate to best-climb speed as quickly as possible, while surfing the cushion of ground-effect air. This takes some getting used to because your learned reaction to leaving the ground is to put in enough pitch to climb at the desired speed. Instead of doing that, you have to force the aircraft to stay close to the ground until it’s time to climb. This is easy to do; it just requires some extra thought. Once you’ve reached best-climb speed, you can trim the aircraft to maintain that speed, retract the flaps (if you added any), and transition to a normal climb.
Soft-field landings are all about speed. If you’re landing on a soft field it’s a good bet that the field is also shorter than you might like, so you’ll want to slow down your approach. Even if the field is long, though, you’ll still carry 5-10 knots less speed into the approach. For short-field approaches in the 172, I fly 70 knots with the first 10° of flaps, then I slow to 65 knots with 20° flaps and 60 knots with full flaps. If you do it right, you’ll end up in your landing flare doing no more than about 40 knots. Think of what this means in practical terms: if you’re landing on a plowed field (let’s say) because of an engine failure, if you can cut your touchdown speed by 20 knots, you’ve reduced the kinetic energy you’re carrying by a large amount, given that kinetic energy changes as the square of velocity (remember good ol’ KE = 1/2mv^2!)
Short-field takeoffs and landings are different beasts; here the goal is to take off or land within the minimum distance possible, perhaps including clearing an obstacle on the approach or departure. For example, the airfield at Milton, Florida (2R4) is a great place to practice short-field work because there are trees several hundred feet from each end of the runway. These don’t present any real danger, but they make a great target; in a short-field approach, you fly a steeper than usual descent to clear any obstacles, then land a bit firmer than usual– your goal is to avoid any unnecessary float, because float translates to additional distance flown down the runway. You may not have any additional distance to spare. Because it’s late, and I’m sleepy, rather than go on about short-field work I’ll leave this AOPA Flight Training article for those who are interested; it’s pretty good.
Filed under aviation
Thursday trivia #61
- I’m a robot guy– I am fascinated by industrial robots, but it hadn’t occurred to me to use them for photography and videography. Luckily there are other, more imaginative, people out there. This video is stunning– watch it in HD.
- Did you know the Chinese were thinking about building a manned space station? Yep. (For another time: this ties in neatly with the premise of James Fallows’ China Airborne, which is on my reading list.) Why would they do this? The Union of Concerned Scientists explains. (The full report is much more interesting than the summary.)
- I am not much interested in History-with-a-capital-H, but I do love the unveiling of a good story through diligent research into primary sources. Here’s a great example: an exploration of secrecy and leaks in the IVY MIKE H-bomb test. This discussion is, of course, applicable to the recent flapping about the (probably unlawful and certainly ill-advised) series of leaks from the White House about US intelligence and military programs, sources, and procedures.
- Oh, Apple. After doing such a good job of staving off device fragmentation, now you’re introducing it in spades with iOS 6. Many of the new features won’t work on older devices, including some that don’t seem to have any technical requirements that should prevent them from working. I’m not going to upgrade to a new phone just to get turn-by-turn maps, etc, though.
Filed under General Stuff
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