2011-12-08 · 12:09

An Exchange UM IPv6 conundrum

Sometimes it happens that there are two distinct and opposite facts presented at the same time… and only one of them can be correct. Here’s a great example:

  • The Exchange 2010 SP2 help topic “Understanding IPv6 Support in Exchange 2010” says that Exchange “Unified Messaging doesn’t support IPv6 in any version of Exchange 2010.”
  • The Windows IPv6 FAQ says that you should leave IPv6 enabled and present: “From Microsoft’s perspective, IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows operating system and it is enabled and included in standard Windows service and application testing during the operating system development process.”

I take this to mean that, from the Windows team’s perspective, IPv6 is expected to be present and functional. From the Exchange viewpoint, UM doesn’t use IPv6 and thus doesn’t care whether or not it is present. I’m not sure that this is 100% correct, but neither the Windows team nor the Exchange team has said anything publicly to clarify the situation. In the meantime, my advice is to leave IPv6 alone; having it enabled doesn’t seem to interfere with the normal function of Exchange 2010 UM.

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2011-12-08 · 05:13

Thursday trivia #44

Welcome to week 10 of my extended visit to Pensacola! Presented for your consideration:

  • This excellent article summarizes what happened to Air France flight 447. My only quibble is that the author doesn’t explain what it means to be in “climb” or “TOGA” very well. Both of those refer to thrust lever positions– marked by detents in the thrust levers– that you can select. When you select TOGA, you’re commanding full power from the engine; when you select “climb”, you’re enabling the auto-throttle (which you can then manually enable or disable). From what I understand about the A320/A330/A340 series, one of the checklist items you’d want to verify in a situation like that of AF447 is that the thrust levers are in the “climb” detent and and that auto-throttles are enabled.
  • Newt Gingrich? Really?
  • “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” — Plato
  • The same personality traits that make someone a good pilot may also make them more prone to struggle with depression.
  • I hope this guy isn’t right; I’d hate to see big-deck carriers go away given how important they are to our national defense.
  • Yet another security flaw confirms why I don’t use or recommend Android devices.

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2011-11-30 · 07:50

Overthinking problem solving

One of the really interesting things about my work here in Pensacola is that I get exposure to a wide range of problem-solving strategies. Our goal, of course, is to teach students how to solve problems using logical, repeatable steps; when they get here many of them have never had to solve any kind of complex problem (or, really, any kind of problem at all involving computers, radios, etc.) so they don’t have a good conceptual framework on how to do it.

Other students come in with the standard-issue trial-and-error methodology already in place: if something’s broken, I’ll just keep making changes until I fix it. This can be a pretty dangerous mindset. It’s one thing to solve your own problems on your own computer this way, but following the same strategy on a network that all 5,000 people aboard your aircraft carrier depend on isn’t likely to have happy results.

To supplant this process, we start with the basics:

  • Did you verify the problem? Is the problem you saw the same as the problem that was reported? This is important because users’ problem reports are often imprecise or even flat-out wrong. Even when the problem description is precise, a non-technical user may report related symptoms, not the real underlying problem.
  • Once you think you know what the problem is, how could you tell if that was really the problem? This is pretty straightforward: before you start trying to fix the problem, what are you going to do to identify the true root cause?
  • Once you’ve identified the problem, how could you fix it? Some problems only have one solution; others have many. Before you try to fix anything, you should be able to identify candidate solutions that might solve the problem and select the appropriate one
  • As you take steps to fix the problem, what tests can you perform to see if your fix is doing what you want? For multi-step solutions, checking your progress along the way is important.
  • Did you verify the solution? This is critical, and it’s something students have to be trained to do because most people don’t do it, or if they do, don’t do it in depth.

As students make the transition from ad-hoc problem solving to a more systematic approach, one of the things that some of them tend to do is overthink the problem and/or the solution. This is natural because so much of the material they’re learning is completely new. The natural tendency is to dive in and try to apply all the detailed knowledge you’ve just gotten, but sometimes the problem is simpler than you think.

Our students have a term for this: “to nuc” a problem is to overthink something or go into too much detail. The term comes from the term “nuc,” used to refer to someone trained in the Navy’s nuclear power program. Nucs are legendary for being extremely well-trained, being able to master all the minutiae of nuclear reactor operations, and being somewhat nerdy. So when a student says that she nuc’d a problem, that means that she was looking too deeply for the cause or solution to the problem. This is a really hard problem to guard against, and I don’t have a good repeatable solution for it yet, other than asking them “are you nucing this?” when they seem to be diving too deep.

This is just one of the many fascinating issues that you run into when you’re teaching people using a revolutionary method. Doing what’s never been done before is hard sometimes…

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2011-11-20 · 17:58

ATOP part 2: flying the A320

I woke up at 0300. Not on purpose; sometimes that just happens. I couldn’t go back to sleep because I was so excited. I was going to fly a jet transport, I thought. Is it time to go yet? The time passed faster than I expected, and soon I was in my rental car (Dodge Avenger; underpowered and buzzy; smelled like a porta-john) headed for JetBlue University.

IMG 0406

the place looks a bit different in the early dawn: welcoming and yet a bit foreboding

Our syllabus for the morning was simple: each of us would fly four takeoffs and four landings around the pattern at MCO: two from the captain’s seat on the left and two as the first officer (FO).  The first takeoff would be with a warmed-up airplane positioned at the end of runway 36L; we would take off, fly an instrument approach to runway 36R (as shown below), do a touch-and-go, then circle back and shoot the approach to 36R again, this time landing to a full stop.

MCO approach to 36R

Do you know what all this stuff means? Yeah, me neither.

jetBlue, like most other commercial air carriers, has a distinct policy about who does what in the cockpit, but it’s actually not broken down into captain/first officer. Instead, there’s a pilot flying (PF) and a pilot monitoring (PM). The PM (often, but not always, the FO) handles radio calls and checklist items, while the PF actually flies the plane. The PM is in charge of things like calling out airspeed and altitude milestones, plus executing tasks the captain sets for him. For example, the PM’s job is to call out when the aircraft has reached its rotation speed– the speed at which it can be lifted off the runway. Once the aircraft is aloft, the captain may direct the PM to do things like adjust the wing flaps, retract the gear, and so on. We kept it simple; the captain would fly and the FO would be the PM. That meant I’d get two hops in: one paired with Dexter and the other paired with Steve. We’d also briefed having one other crew in the cab with us as observers; the other three pilots would be outside watching the training videos required for our high-altitude endorsement.

IMG 0407

Blue Simsation, here we come (FFS stands for “full flight simulator”, not the other FFS)

First we met in a briefing room; each sim has one. Real jetBlue crews meet here to go over their flight plan and brief weather, routes, and so on. We used it as a place to hang out while we exchanged crews. The actual simulator cab can accommodate at least seven people; at one point we had one crew flying, one crew observing, two instructors, and one guy who didn’t get out before the simulator’s motion controls were activated (at which point the drawbridge goes up and you can’t easily leave.)

Then it was time to board the sim. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it looks exactly like an A320 cockpit (with a few minor exceptions, like the console that the instructor uses to position the plane, cause failures, and so on.) I was too excited to remember to take a picture of the empty cab so you could see what it looked like with people in it.

I don’t remember in what order we flew, and I’m sure . I do remember the sensations and sights of flying the A320 sim, though, and I will remember them until I die. The visual presentation is incredibly accurate, as are the motion cues. When you line up on the departure runway and advance the throttles, what you see, hear, and feel is as close to the real thing as you can imagine. In the picture below you can clearly see that the sun is beginning to rise in the east, and that it’s a relatively clear Florida morning.

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Thanos and Adam flying into a dawn sky

This shot is a little blurry because I had the flash turned off, but it shows what Thanos’ approach to the runway looked like.

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jetBlue 426, cleared to land runway 36R

For my first leg, I flew as PM with Dexter as the PF. As you can see from the video I will post soon (as soon as I edit out all the pauses), he did a very creditable job despite me missing a few radio calls. One thing that the video doesn’t capture well is that we occasionally had to pause the simulator to figure out why the airplane was doing something we didn’t expect. This was almost always the result of either the PM or PF failing to push a button or change modes on the flight management system (FMS). As Phil explained, flying as an airline pilot is as much about managing, programming, and monitoring the FMS as it is about airmanship. In the A320 (and its bigger siblings the A330 and A340 as well), if you have the FMS correctly programmed with your flight plan, Fifi will do much of the work for you, including tuning the navigation radios, locating and capturing the instrument landing system (ILS) navigation markers, and generally helping you focus on the big picture of safely flying the plane by taking away many of the minutiae.

Flying as PM was fun, but being the actual pilot of this beast was something else altogether. This was the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life: flying a 169,000lb aircraft at speeds just under 250 knots is not something most people will ever get to do, even when it’s simulated. My first landing was decent, my second was superb, my third was mediocre (stupid crosswinds!), and my fourth was decent. All were exhilarating, though. There are many, many differences in systems and control behavior between the lowly Cessna 172 I normally fly and the A320, but the same skills apply to both: precise control movements, attention to detail, and a feel for what the aircraft is doing. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I had two very experienced instructors with me!

I have to give props to Adam and John, who I would say flew the two best approaches and landings. John had to deal with an APU fire on one approach, followed by terrible weather on the next two, while Adam (if I remember correctly) did the best job of planting Fifi right on the runway centerline, crosswinds notwithstanding.

For the last landing of the day, Wayne and Phil set Steve up for a category IIIB autolanding. In this mode, the aircraft can navigate to touchdown entirely by itself, including reducing thrust and applying brakes after landing. Wayne set us up with a very low cloud ceiling, and Steve engaged the autopilot and armed it for approach mode. We then watched nervously as Fifi executed a flawless ILS approach and landing. This video shows an actual cat-IIIB approach in an A320, and you’ll notice that a) you can’t see anything outside and b) it’s very hard to spot any differences between the sim and the actual aircraft.

Overall the ATOP experience was superb. I had a great time, met some interesting people, and learned an incredible amount about the A320, with which I am now completely infatuated. I think one look at the big stupid grin on my face below says it all:

DSC 0466

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2011-11-20 · 02:13

ATOP part 1: in which Paul meets Fifi

I wanted to do something unique for my birthday this year. I have enough things already, and I didn’t really fancy buying myself anything in particular. Instead, I thought I’d rather have some kind of unique experience.

Several months ago, a friend of mine at Microsoft mentioned ATOP, the Airline Training Orientation Program. It’s run by Wayne Phillips, a pilot and FAA inspector from Michigan, and its mission is to give pilots of all experience levels exposure to airline training. The upshot: pay a fee, and you get to attend a 12-hour ground school, then fly a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 simulator for an hour… an hour which you can log as simulator time in your pilot’s logbook.

When Rich first told me about the program, I didn’t know when I’d be in Pensacola so I couldn’t commit to a date. However, right before I left Mountain View I got an email from ATOP announcing their dates for the next six months– and one of them was right after my birthday. Problem solved.

I quickly signed up for the open date, a session training on the A320 (nicknamed “Fifi” by its pilots), booked a flight on Delta PNS-ATL-MCO (using miles, of course), and started reading up on the A320. The ATOP folks supply attendees with about 300 pages of A320 or B737 documentation, mostly garnered from line pilots at Delta, JetBlue, American, and Continental. I started reading and quickly learned more than I thought possible about the A320 systems, but certainly less than I’d actually need to fly the darn thing.

Logbook and papers in hand, I flew from PNS to ATL, had a quick snack at Popeye’s in Terminal B (where the same bald-headed manager has ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove for at least the last 10 years), and continued on to MCO. My flight was uneventful, but sadly I wasn’t on an A320; instead I had two fairly decrepit old DC-9s.

After laying up at a nearby hotel (the Country Inn and Suites; not too bad, especially at the ATOP discount rate), I met the other attendees in the lobby bright and early Saturday morning. There were six other folks in the class: Steve’s retired and on his fourth ATOP class. Thanos is a Greek dentist and pilot from Florida. Adam is a private pilot who works for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. John and Johnny are aviation students from Jackson University, and Dexter’s a student as well. I wasn’t the oldest (that would be Steve, who’s just about to turn 70), but I was the second-oldest.

After a quick bus ride we arrived at JetBlue University, the training facility where JetBlue trains all of its pilots, flight attendants, and gate agents. The facility itself is new, large, and fancy. There’s a swimming pool for practicing with life rafts, for example, and a trainer for flight attendants to practice evacuations using the emergency slides.

IMG 0392

the emergency egress trainer, which moves side to side and back and forth– in two axes

There are two types of training devices that you can use for flight training. One is (surprise) known as a flight training device. It’s a replica of the cockpit, with instruments and controls that work like the real thing, but without the visual aids that a full simulator provides. The FTD isn’t much to look at– sort of like a disembodied airplane cockpit. There’s a control console (not visible below) that the instructor can use to set up various conditions… say, an engine fire or hydraulic failure.

IMG 0395

one of JetBlue’s A320 FTDs. Displays and controls work as they do in the real airplane, with a few minor exceptions (e.g. you can’t turn on the windshield wipers)

We also toured the simulator hall. Each of JetBlue’s simulators is a full flight simulator at level D according to the FAA’s definition: full-motion, wide field of view, with sound. The sims themselves are mighty beasts; I doubt you could fit one in my apartment. Each has a name (the one below is “Varsity Blue,” but there are others, like “Welcome to the School of Blue”) and an FAA registration number– when you log simulator time in one of these, you log the sim’s registration number just like you would log time in an actual aircraft.

IMG 0398

One of JetBlue’s full-motion, Level D flight simulators for the A320

You enter the sim through the bridge in the lower part of the picture, then they pull it up and lock the door. This isn’t so the pilots inside can’t escape; it’s so the simulator can move freely, but escape-proofing is a nice side benefit. Inside, the conventional cockpit layout is forward, and there are comfy chairs for an observer and the simulator controller. You can’t really tell from this picture, but the visual presentation is stunning– it’s exactly what you’d see from inside a real aircraft during all phases of flight. In this picture, the sim is parked at a gate in Orlando, so most of what you see is concrete and terminal building.

IMG 0401

a view from inside the simulator; because of the narrow field of view of my camera you can’t see the side windows but there’s stuff happening there too

Note that all the aircraft screens are blank, just like they would be if you were taking the first flight of the day in an aircraft that was parked overnight. Good thing that we learned how to start a cold aircraft! Phil mentioned that most Airbus operators leave the aircraft powered overnight; with 150+ computers in the aircraft, the chances of something getting stuck or failing to boot properly from a cold shutdown are high enough that leaving some systems powered up makes more sense.

After the tour, we made our way to the classroom, which is festooned with posters of the A320’s flight controls, overhead console, and center pedestal. Each of us got a set of these for reference, and then Wayne started in on ground school. We went over each system in some detail. For example, I can now tell you how the packs (really PACKs, or pneumatic air cycle kits) work and how to control them. The thing that surprised me the most about the training is how automated the A320 really is, and how many mundane tasks it automates away in normal operation. If you do something out of sequence, or fail to set something up properly,  the aircraft will tell you. Wayne described the A320 as a “lights-out” aircraft: during normal operation, almost none of the buttons on the center pedestal or overhead console will be lit. We covered all of the major systems: electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, engine, and so on, learning how each works, how to control it, and what to do when things go wrong.

For lunch, we ordered in pizza, and what was supposed to be a working lunch turned into a fascinating career discussion. Wayne and Phil both believe that the job market for pilots will steadily improve over the next ten or so years because of the demographics of the current pilot base. Phil even mentioned that JetBlue had just hired a 59-year-old pilot, which certainly gave me hope that a career as a professional pilot isn’t off the table for me just yet.

After lunch we had more systems training, plus a bonus. Just because I could, I also signed up for the high-altitude endorsement. The FAA requires (in FAR 61.31.(g)) that you receive special training in high-altitude operations before operating a pressurized aircraft that can climb above FL250 (that’s 25,000 feet for those of you following along at home). This training consists of some ground school covering high-altitude physiology, including hypoxia, some time in a cockpit procedures trainer (CPT), colloquially known as a “wooden Indian”, and some time practicing emergency descents in the FTD. The CPT is basically a paper cockpit mockup– you can learn where things are and “chair-fly” your way through learning procedures. We each took a turn going through the profile we’ll fly in the simulator on Sunday: a takeoff from Orlando International, a series of maneuvers around the traffic pattern, a touch-and-go-landing, another lap around the pattern, and another landing.

IMG 0402

from left to right: John, Phil, and Johnny in the CPT. Phil took the time to explain the control flows to us until we had them all down pat.

After we finished in the CPT, it was on to the FTD for emergency descents. Wayne set us up at FL350, then simulated an explosive decompression, at which point the fun started. We used the standard JetBlue emergency descent checklist, which only has 10 steps on it. First you don your oxygen mask, then you determine a new, lower altitude, tell the airplane to go there (optionally hitting the “expedite” button), call air traffic control, and make sure not to fly into any surrounding terrain. Once you set the commanded altitude, Fifi automatically deploys speed brakes, changes engine thrust, and adjusts the aircraft pitch and trim to maintain the correct rate of descent. It’s spooky to see the trim wheels move on their own.

Interestingly (to me, anyway), the engine thrust is controlled by a system known as autothrust, not auto-throttles. The thrust levers don’t move at all, but the autothrust system will change the engine power output as needed to maintain the correct speed during climb, cruise, and descent. Set the speed you want and off you go. As with other aspects of the A320, the flight control laws will try to keep you from doing anything stupid. For example, the FAA prohibits speeds over 250 knots under 10,000 feet, so the autothrust system won’t exceed that. During an emergency descent, it will automatically throttle the engines back to idle, and so on.

By the time we finished our runs through the FTD, it was about 7:15– so we’d been on the grounds training for nearly 12 hours. The JetBlue shuttle bus took us back to the hotel, I walked over to Friday’s for dinner, and hit the bed, tired as can be.

Tomorrow (or, really, later today) is the big adventure: two hours flying Fifi. (I originally signed up for one hour but bought a second hour after one of the registrants had to cancel due to illness– after all, it’s a birthday present.) More to come.. in the meantime, read lots more about Fifi from Captain Dave or Karlene.

 

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2011-11-18 · 23:58

Attached (Levine and Heller)

I am not a big fan of self-help books. The ones I’ve encountered tend to either be vapid and vague or so full of jargon as to be worthless. Perhaps it’s the influence of too much Nietzsche, but I generally believe that most people can solve their own life problems if they make a genuine effort to do so. (Of course, that’s not always true for things like clinical depression.) Clearly there are lots of biological influences that shape our brains and bodies, and thus our perceptions and actions, but that’s not the only explanation.

So when a friend of mine suggested I read Levine and Haller’s Attached, I was skeptical. The subtitle, “The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find– and Keep– Love”, didn’t ease my skepticism any. Usually when something is described as a “new science” it’s anything but. However, I am determined to be more introspective going forward, and to better understand myself as a person, so I figured I’d give the book a try. After all, I could always get a good laugh if it was worthless.

Reading the book, however, changed my mind completely. Heller and Levine present a well-reasoned case, backed by Actual Science, that there are biological attachment mechanisms that in large measure govern how we relate to others. They focus on romantic attachment, but much of what they say can be applied to familial or even work relationships. According to them, human attachment behavior falls into three categories: secure people are easily able to form stable, lasting relationships with good emotional intimacy; avoidant people unconsciously seek to create distance when an intimate partner starts getting too close, and anxious people continually try to increase intimacy with their partner by drawing them closer. The avoidant and anxious attachment types both engage in what the authors call “protest behavior”– in essence, acting out. Avoidants do things like belittling their partner or recounting how great their ex was, while anxious types act clingy, attempt to incite jealousy, and so on.

The book is loaded with anecdotes about various behavior, good and bad, of couples who participated in Levine and Heller’s research. Most of these are pretty obvious; it’s easy to identify who’s stable, who’s anxious, and who’s avoidant in each vignette. However, they offer some concrete and actionable strategies for identifying your own attachment type, dealing with people of other types, and understanding the attachment style of your partner. They present these strategies as a means for those who are dating to pick suitable partners (e.g. anxious and avoidant people generally make a terrible pairing) and for those who are already paired to better understand their partners’ styles and how to interact with them.

I enjoyed the anecdotes; more importantly, I found the analysis of each attachment type to be well-reasoned, and I could certainly identify my own style based on the questionnaires in the book. Reading the book helped me make sense of a number of things that I hadn’t fully understood before, so it met my goal of equipping me with a bit more self-knowledge. In that light, it was money well-spent. Recommended if you’re into self-help books; if not you might prefer to get it from the library and read the first few chapters before deciding.

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2011-11-17 · 01:24

Thursday trivia #43

  • The heads (that’s toilets for all you landlubbers) aboard the USS George H.W. Bush are apparently malfunctioning. The jokes write themselves. (Bonus: it’s different on submarines.)
  • Your Latin phrase of the week: res nullius, meaning literally “no man’s property.” Examples include wild animals, driftwood on the beach, and abandoned property. See also: finders keepers. At first I thought it was a declaration, e.g. “I am my own man”, but it actually means a thing that can be claimed by anyone.
  • I don’t particularly like being awake at 0300 after previously being asleep.
  • Here in Pensacola there’s actual weather: the temperature changes from day to day, there are varying levels of overcast, and sometimes it rains. This is a bit of a change from the Bay Area.
  • This documentary (subtitled “Flight of the Frenchies”) is visually stunning, and well worth the $6 to download and watch in HD. It almost makes me want to go skylining… almost, but not quite.
  • Even though I don’t always understand all the chemistry vocabulary, the “things I won’t work with” series over at In the Pipeline is fun reading. Here’s an example: hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane.
  • Is it Angry Birds? Is it science? It’s both: physics of the yellow Angry Bird.

Off to have more cough medicine and, hopefully, a nap before work.

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2011-11-16 · 03:29

Syncing Outlook for Mac calendars, and when “Outlook” isn’t Outlook

Although I’ve been working with Outlook for Mac for quite some time, there are lots of its features that I don’t use. Because all my mailboxes are hosted on Exchange, for example, I don’t ever use any of the IMAP functionality. In the same vein, because all my calendar and contact data live on an Exchange server, I haven’t had to fiddle with calendar sync for some time. I used to sync my calendar with various Palm devices back in the day using Entourage, Outlook’s predecessor, but it was always a painful and error-fraught process, and I was happy to move to an all-Exchange, all-Exchange ActiveSync environment.

A friend and fellow MVP mailed me with a Mac Outlook calendar sync question, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of what the right answer was. Accordingly, I dragged a third MVP into the fray: Mac/Windows interop expert William Smith. He came up with a workable solution, and as a bonus he wrote a detailed tutorial on how to set up calendar sync.

That got me to thinking about the differences in the Outlook brand between Mac and Windows. The functional differences have been discussed at length elsewhere (like on Steve Goodman’s excellent feature comparison table.) As Steve points out, the Mac version of Outlook feels much like Entourage. Although the user interface has been revamped, and is much more pleasant as a result, many of the same issues that plagued Entourage are still around. For example, I’m running Outlook with 3 Exchange accounts on a MacBook Pro with a 2GHz quad-core i7 and 8GB of RAM. This is a snappy machine… and yet Outlook still frequently takes leisurely breaks to show me the spinning rainbow when I click on messages, and it often gets confused about exactly which messages are, or are not, part of a given conversation.

That’s not to say it’s more or less buggy than Windows Outlook, which of course has its own set of issues. I use both on a daily basis. There are some things that Mac Outlook does better; for example, I love having a single unified inbox for all my accounts, and the integration of Outlook with other apps (like iPhoto) is better than it is, in general, with Windows counterparts. On the other hand, I find it much easier to work with the schedule and calendar views in Windows Outlook; I really like the Outlook Social Connector, and the “Ignore Conversation” and QuickSteps features are both super valuable for plowing through large volumes of mail.

I find Apple’s Mail.app weird and unsatisfying: it doesn’t include all the data I want (like calendar and contact info), and it doesn’t do many of the familiar things that I expect from the Outlook family. That would be OK if Mail provided a better experience than Outlook but in my judgement it doesn’t– I’d rather use Windows Outlook in a VM than the native mail app. In that light, rebranding the Mac client as Outlook has been a success: Outlook users on either platform will find familiar things to like (and perhaps to gripe about) on the other platform. Throw OWA into the mix and overall I’d say that Microsoft has done a good job of building consistency between the platforms.

There are still some major differences between platforms. For example, Outlook 2011 has little to no SharePoint integration; it lacks proper conversation threading (plus the aforementioned QuickSteps and “Ignore Conversation”); it doesn’t integrate properly with Exchange UM, there’s no Personal Archive access, and it doesn’t support VBA (although its AppleScript support is quite extensive, and much improved from Entourage).

Most users, of course, will use whatever version of Outlook happens to run on their preferred platform. That’s natural enough. Overall I’m quite satisfied with Outlook 2010 (well, except that for some reason 64-bit Office Communicator hates it). I’m hoping that the Mac Office team can address some of the performance and behavior issues in Outlook 2011 in the forthcoming Service Pack 2. I’m not as concerned about missing features, as those will come in time, and the Mac team has the benefit of seeing what features in Outlook 2010 are actually worth porting and which ones are not.

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2011-11-10 · 12:35

Thursday trivia #42

How fitting: this is the last Thursday on which I’ll be 42. Today’s trivia:

  • Today is the 236th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Happy birthday and Semper Fidelis!
  • Today is the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast episode of Sesame Street. I thought about making a rude Elmo joke but in honor of their anniversary, I will merely say that I’m very much looking forward to watching Being Elmo.
  • Today is also the 36th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. To celebrate, I will refrain from listening to any Gordon Lightfoot today.
  • Fellow MVP Paul Cunningham put together a nifty script to remind you that it’s time to back up your Exchange databases. I commend it to your attention.
  • I only have this to say about Joe Paterno: what a shame that his career ended this way, and what a shame that the victims suffered unnecessarily because of the silence– and collusion– of those who knew but didn’t act.
  • If I were going to buy a drone, this would be my first choice.

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2011-10-29 · 08:10

2011 Exchange Maestro wrap-up

Greetings from high over Nebraska, where I’m aboard a Delta flight to San Francisco for a well-deserved day of rest at home (and, hopefully, a visit to In-N-Out) before heading to Vegas for Exchange Connections and then back to Pensacola.

My first visit to Connecticut was, I’d say, quite the success. We had a good-sized group of attendees, and they asked excellent and focused questions throughout. As a presenter it’s always rewarding when the audience asks questions that indicate not only that they’re listening but that they’re thinking and this group did so particularly well. That kind of back-and-forth increases the value of the workshop for everyone, and we had a lot of it.

For a first, Tony and I hit all of our timing marks until the third day! (As you might expect, I ran long on the UM content; my natural enthusiasm got the best of me.) This left the attendees more time than usual for labs, which they used to their full advantage. We didn’t have any major equipment or logistical problems; the sponsor presentations from Hewlett-Packard and BinaryTree were quite well done.

In a side note, I’m glad to report that Tony now knows what “homeboy” means in American English after discussing my PC price advantage post. He and Brian both disagreed strenuously with my assessment of the build quality of H-P’s EliteBook line, and Tony further questioned why I spec’d a 17″ EliteBook given its inconvenient size for truly mobile use– I did so because I wanted the closest match for CPU speed. In any event my admission that there still seems to be a price premium at the higher end of the configuration scale stands. Having said that, I’ve no plans to switch away from my MacBook Pro.

As of right now, we don’t currently have plans to do any Maestro events in 2012. I’m certainly open to the possibility, but we’ve had a hard time finding the optimum way to market these events and get the word out. One possibility is that we’ll work more closely with consulting and systems integration firms to go directly to their customers, and we have a few other potential tricks up our sleeves. Stay tuned for more details!

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2011-10-28 · 05:23

The Apple price premium for laptops

This post goes out to two of my homeboys: Brian Desmond and Brian Hill. It was sparked by a discussion that Brian, Tony Redmond, and I had at breakfast this morning about laptops; more specifically, Brian D claimed that buyers who opted for Apple laptops were doomed to pay a premium price relative to the PC laptop world. I decided to spec out a few different machines from Apple, Dell, Lenovo, and H-P to see whether this is actually true.

A few rules: I wanted to keep the configurations as close as possible. Although I only buy (and highly recommend) refurbished machines from Apple, I stuck with new hardware from each vendor. Although it might have been cheaper to buy from third parties, I used Apple’s MSRP for RAM expansion.

I started with Apple’s online store. A current-generation MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz quad-i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200rpm disk, a 1080p camera, and a 1680 x 1050 15.4″ display costs $2549. Full specs are here. One spec of note: 0.95″ thick and 5.6 lbs. (OK, so that was two specs. So sue me.) You can drive an additional 2560 x 1920 display by using the built-in Thunderbolt port.

Then I went to Lenovo’s online store. There’s currently a special on the W520 line. I configured a W520 with a 2.5GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 1920 x 1080 15.6″ display, a 500GB 7200 RPM disk, and a 720p camera. MSRP for this configuration is $2990– so the MacBook Pro wins! Not really, because Lenovo’s sale price is $2059. The W520 can accommodate up to 32GB of RAM and drive two external monitors, so those are points in its favor as well, plus you can swap its DVD drive for a second hard disk (though you can do this on the MacBook Pro via third-party kits). The W520 is about 1.4″ thick and weighs 5.7 lbs in its default configuration. At this price point, the Lenovo has an advantage: $500 less for a higher-resolution display (but see my note on that below), more expandability, and a better graphics subsystem. (Oh, and a color-calibrated display, if you care, which I don’t.)

What about H-P? The EliteBook 8760w line only seems to have quad-core processors if you spring for the 17.3″ display, which is waaaay too big for many people, me included. Leaving that aside, you could have a 1920 x 1080 panel for $2499 with a 2.7GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB disk. No camera, no external monitor support (that I can see on the specs page, anyway), and a 7.6lb weight. There are various other combinations of (slower) CPUs and GPUs, but this seems like the best value offering from H-P. So: significantly heavier than the MBP, with a faster CPU and a higher-res display but a smaller disk for the same price. I’m going to give the nod to Apple on this one because of build quality (see below.)

For Dell, I priced a Precision Workstation M4600, their 15″-class machine. MSRP on this configuration is $2934, but Dell’s selling it for $2154. For that price, you get a 1920 x 1080 panel, a quad i7 (with 8MB cache, unlike the 6MB cache on the Mac, H-P, and Lenovo machines), 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200 RPM disk, and AMD’s integrated graphics (though Nvidia graphics are available for a couple hundred bucks more.) Interestingly, Dell offers a secondary SSD and a touch display as factory options. I’ve got to give Dell the price advantage here as well.

Now, about display resolution: for my poor eyes, 1920 x 1080 in a 15″ panel is too many pixels. Great for watching movies, but the high DPI means that I can’t read text at standard font sizes. I’m happy to admit that the higher-resolution panels are a point against Apple. I don’t know enough about the specs of the various graphics adapters involved to be able to authoritatively say which one is better for normal use (obviously the fancy Nvidia adapters would be more useful for CAD, etc.)

Battery life? All I can say is this: on my MBP I routinely get 4 solid hours of writing code from one battery charge, and I’ve gotten 6+ hours when just doing e-mail and web browsing. Apple claims a life of 7+ hours for light browsing. I don’t have enough data to evaluate the battery life claims of the other vendors.

Of course, there are other factors involved, too, besides the machine configuration. The Dell and H-P laptops I’ve used in the past were squeaky, plastic-y, festooned with stickers, and cheap-feeling, with displays that wobbled, flexing cases, and poor build quality. Lenovo’s build quality is excellent, with a great keyboard, a case that doesn’t flex or squeak under pressure, and good durability. I think Apple’s build quality is better, though; the aluminum unibody construction on the MacBook Pro means that there’s absolutely no flex in the case. The keyboard is as good as Lenovo’s (plus it’s backlit), and the overall industrial design is top-notch, as you’d expect from Apple. There are lots of little touches, like the magnetic power adapter, that set Apple’s hardware apart.

So, bottom line: yes, Dell and Lenovo will sell you less expensive laptops with specs equal to or better than Apple’s. H-P apparently won’t. Is the price premium worth the Apple features and industrial design? For some people, probably; for others, probably not. For now, though, it looks like the two Brians are right. Darn it.

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2011-10-27 · 19:59

Thursday trivia #41

I’ve been in Pensacola working at the US Navy’s IT A-school. Short summary: you should be very proud of the dedication and work ethic of the members of your Navy. Now I’m in Greenwich teaching the final Exchange Maestro event for 2011, thence to Mountain View for a night in my own bed, then to Vegas for the Exchange Connections show and then, finally, back to Pensacola.

With all this teaching and travel going on, my blogging of late has been limited; without further ado, this week’s trivia edition:

  • No one seems to know what the actual average mailbox size is for Exchange mailboxes. In fact, most organizations don’t seem to know what their own averages are, much less what the industry-wide average is.
  • Steve Yegge is the kind of guy I’d like to work with.
  • Really, New York Times? An article on how to be hip and Mormon on the front page of your Thursday style section? Who exactly do you think the audience is for this? I’m guessing that the overlap between would-be Mormon hipsters and NYT readers is probably pretty small.
  • This year’s Marine Corps birthday message.
  • Hopefully this year I’ll make it to the MVP Summit. Well, next year, I mean.
  • The more I run, the better I like running. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

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2011-10-16 · 10:39

A tricky UM routing problem

A colleague who earned his Exchange 2010 last year recently contacted me with a bit of an odd UM question. Here’s the basic scenario: Steve Secretary answers the phone for Betty Bosswoman. This was set up in Cisco Call Manager such that Steve’s phone has two extensions: 1000 (Betty’s extension) and 1001 (Steve’s extension). When someone calls Betty, both phones ring, and Steve can answer it as necessary. Sometimes Steve would answer the phone and the caller would ask for Betty’s voicemail; Steve could oblige by doing a blind transfer to Betty’s extension and the call would be routed to the voicemail system.

Things were all fine with this configuration until the advent of Exchange UM. Call answering and delivery worked fine until Steve tried to transfer a call to Betty’s voicemail, now hosted on Exchange UM. The caller whose call was transferred was getting Steve’s voicemail.. not at all the right result.

This was happening because when the call was transferred, CUCM was emitting a diversion header that indicated that the call was being sent to Steve. Why? Because Steve had Betty’s extension assigned as a secondary extension! Remember, Exchange UM uses the SIP diversion information to determine where the call’s from, who it’s to, and why Exchange is getting it. If any of these three data are incorrect or missing, Exchange will fall back to assuming that the call is to the voicemail pilot number, and you’ll hear “Welcome to Microsoft Exchange. Please enter your mailbox extension” (or whatever; the exact phrase escapes me) instead of the correct greeting.

My interlocutor wanted to know if there was a way to change this behavior on the Exchange side. Sadly there isn’t– whatever diversion header information is provided, Exchange will consume. There’s no way to rewrite, edit, or otherwise control the diversion data on the Exchange side, nor can you create rules or filters that modify the actions that Exchange takes. That’s what the call coverage map on the PBX is for, see?

Anyway, after a little head scratching, some consultation with a CUCM engineer, and the sacrifice of a chicken, it was discovered that CUCM had a way to modify the extension information sent as part of a blind transfer. The change was made so that transferring a call from Steve’s phone emitted Betty’s extension instead, and the problem was solved. Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what change was made, or I’d document it here. Such are the perils of not being a CUCM guy…

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2011-10-11 · 11:16

E-mail and defamation

So LegalZoom (which I recommend if you need a will or other basic legal document) sent me an interesting newsletter the other day. Headlined “Can You Be Sued for Sending an Email?”, it covers the case of Sandals Resorts vs Google. Basically, Sandals filed suit to force Google to disclose information about a Gmail user who wrote an e-mail they didn’t like. Google won, Sandals lost, and LegalZoom’s asking a valid question.

(Disclaimer: as though you didn’t know this, I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)

The first facile answer that comes to mind is “of course you can be sued for an e-mail you write.” Under the American system of jurisprudence, anyone can sue anyone for anything. I’ve been harassed and threatened with lawsuits by a crazy person who objected to something I wrote on my blog about his business; so could you be. That’s part of the price of admission to a nation where you get the benefits of a stable, well-established judicial system based on adversarial law. It doesn’t mean that such a suit would be valid, just that the potential exists for it to be filed.

A little more nuanced answer requires us to dig into the facts of this particular case: Sandals didn’t sue the person who wrote the e-mail, they asked Google to find out who that person was. Google declined, and the fight was on. Anonymity is often an effective defense against bearing the consequences of what you say in e-mail… but don’t count on it. Some e-mail providers are more, shall we say, flexible than others when asked to provide information about who created an e-mail; they may do so based on a subpoena or merely upon a written request. If you use an e-mail service that you don’t run yourself, it would be worth your time to find out what kind of privacy and disclosure policies your provider follows. In this case, Google did the right thing and resisted the discovery request.

A still more nuanced answer: in this particular case, Sandals claimed that the e-mail in question was libelous, defamed their business, and caused them financial injury. The judge ruled against them on several points. The most interesting ones are these: first, because the plaintiff didn’t prove any actual financial injury, they couldn’t claim that the alleged defamation had actually harmed them. Second, the judge found that the e-mail was clearly an expression of opinion, and would be very likely perceived as such by the recipients. Defamation and libel require that the offender present their claims as fact. It’s OK for me to say “It’s my opinion that Oracle makes crappy software”; couched as an opinion, my statement cannot be construed as libelous or defamatory. If I instead claimed that Larry Ellison eats small children, and presented that claim as fact, that might be defamatory (unless I could prove that it was true, not that I’m planning on trying.)

The New York Law Journal review of the case is worth reading in depth if this sort of thing interests you, in part because it explains what you must do to write e-mails that don’t meet the legal standard for defamation (hint: overblown rhetorical language helps). It’s also fairly entertaining in its own right.

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2011-10-10 · 17:45

A few pictures from Fleet Week 2011

The boys and I made a pilgrimage to Fleet Week 2011 in San Francisco this past weekend. Selected photos are here. We drove to Pier 30 and parked, where we started with a tour of the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6), which was well-provisioned with a nice selection of Marine vehicles and aircraft. Among other things, the boys got to check out a HiMARS truck, where thanks to Marine Cpl. Lamb from the great state of Tennessee the boys got to see a cellphone video he took of a fire mission in Afghanistan; a V-22, an AH-1Z Cobra (which I hadn’t seen before), and a variety of crew-served and individual weapons. The boys also got to hear an unusual call on the 1MC: “Man down, man down, man down on the flight deck!” A visitor tripped over a tiedown chain, so the Navy surged a bunch of corpsman to make sure he wasn’t hurt. They liked that quite a bit.

A quick taxi ride took us over to Marina Green for the airshow proper.

Having learned my lesson from last year, I’d rented a Sigma 50-500mm lens from LensRentals.com. I figured that this lens, which was every bit as big and heavy as advertised, would do a better job of capturing the action than my own 70-300. Sure enough, it did, but with a couple of caveats. It turns out that it’s a lot harder to take pictures of fast-moving aircraft with a telephoto lens than you might think. This problem was compounded by the fact that autofocus on the Sigma is fairly slow. Accordingly, I had a hard time getting pictures that were both well-framed and well-focused. However, some of them came out quite well.. I deleted the others, that being the major advantage of a digital camera. Tom and I between us took almost 600 pictures, about 150 of which were good enough to make the initial cut. I’ve posted a few of the better ones on my Flickr “airplanes” set.

Side note about LensRentals.com: I could not have been more pleased with their prices or service. I will definitely use them again, possibly for the Veterans’ Day airshow that the Blue Angels traditionally put on at NAS Pensacola. I recommend them highly.

The taxi ride on the way back might have been the highlight of the show: we had the same crazy, gravel-voiced, wrong-side-of-the-road-driving-on driver who scared the stuffing out of us last year. The odds against getting the same driver two years in a row must have been very high but… well, there it was. We survived, barely, and the four of us laughed uncontrollably for several minutes after exiting the cab. Whether the laughter was from relief at our survival or amusement at running into the same guy two years running, I couldn’t say.

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