2011-08-21 · 10:28

Microsoft is loosely coupled

Something that Tony wrote about the other day got my mental wheels spinning. He wrote a pointed explanation of the seemingly inexplicable fact that IE9 and the Exchange Management Console don’t work together. This is no fault of the Exchange team; the EMC is built on top of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) core, and it’s the MMC that has a problem with IE9.

Tony pointed out that the problem in this case is due to poor coordination between two different teams. That’s true, but it’s actually a symptom of a deeper problem that Microsoft has: it’s made up of a bunch of loosely coupled business units. Each unit has its own business challenges, its own resource constraints, and its own strategy for winning in the marketplace. That seems reasonable on its face; after all, the challenges, constraints, and strategies for the Xbox team aren’t at all like the ones for the Exchange team, and both are different from the Dynamics CRM team.

The real problem arises when these items collide, or even when they fail to align. The IE9-MMC problem is one example. It certainly looks like the IE9 team released with an incompatibility that should have been fixed before release. Did their schedule constraints drive that release? Maybe. That leads to the bigger question of what Microsoft’s strategy is with IE– how does it drive revenue for Microsoft, or prevent them from losing revenue? Given that their biggest browser competitors, Chrome and Firefox, are both free, it’s not clear to me what strategic importance IE has.

Then consider the alignment of the Windows Phone 7 team and the Bing business unit. Bing is very tightly integrated into WP7; this would seem to put the lie to my claim that many of Microsoft’s problems are due to loose coupling. Au contraire; this case proves it. The WP7 release schedule (and market constraints) are almost completely decoupled from Bing. The desire to get tight integration between Bing services and the OS led the WP7 team to take a dependency on Bing that has resulted in new Bing features being released first for iOS. That’s not 100% accurate, as there are some technical constraints around the first release of the WP7 SDK that played a role too, but it’s a close enough approximation. Or consider PhotoSynth, not yet available for WP7 because the SDK doesn’t yet support the features it needs.

Exchange and Outlook have been down this road before. If you think back to the ill-fated Local Information Store (code-named “Rosebud”) in Office XP, you’ll see the same pattern at work: the release schedules and business objectives of the Office and Exchange team weren’t in alignment, and that led to schedule slips and feature cuts on both sides. Each time Exchange or Office release a new version, both sides have to coordinate to ensure that their “better together” strategy continues to bear fruit. “Better together” is one of the few clearly articulated and executed strategies that Microsoft has had over the last few years; in fact, it’s expanded to draw Lync in as well. Of course, the Lync team has had its own challenges, as witness the continuing lack of mobile Lync clients for iOS, Android, and WP7, or the lack for that matter of a desktop Linux client.

It’s a tough problem to solve.

Leave a comment

Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C

2011-08-20 · 16:21

AutoSlash and why you should be using it

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you probably know about travel sites that focus on airfare and hotels. Priceline, of course, has become a pop-culture icon (thanks to good ol’ Mr. Shatner), and Kayak, which I’ve used since before its official launch, has been advertising heavily too. Then there’s Expedia, Hotels.com, and a host of others.

Most of the innovation in this space has focused on air travel. This makes sense, given that it’s probably the biggest travel expense most of us are likely to run into. The now-familiar matrix map is just one example; for another, check out Hipmunk‘s unique method of showing flights based on the degree of agony they cause.

However, I haven’t been pleased with the state of car rental bookings until now. Each rental company has their own site, and they all tend to be brittle, ugly, and hard to navigate. Enter AutoSlash, a car rental search engine that has a simple, clean layout for booking cars. “Big deal,” you say. “I don’t mind clumsy web sites if they save me a few bucks.” That’s the real value of AutoSlash: once you book a reservation, their engine continues to search for a better deal. For example, I just reserved a car for an upcoming trip. I got a better rate from AutoSlash than using the super-discount code I normally use with Avis. About 15 minutes later, I got an e-mail from AutoSlash that said:

We found a better rate on your upcoming Hertz rental in Seattle on 9/17/2011 (AutoSlash Trip ID: XXXXXXXXX).
You were originally booked at $132.61, and the price has now dropped to $110.19. We’ve automatically re-booked your rental at the lower rate. You’ve saved $22.42 without even lifting a finger!

So, let’s recap: with zero effort on my part, these guys saved me enough money to buy myself dinner and a movie! There are other sites, like Yapta, that purport to do the same thing for airfares, but there the complication is that airlines typically charge a stiff change fee. In fairness, Yapta, FareCompare, and their ilk are great for tracking fares to see how much they cost before you buy, or checking historical price records, but they don’t often save you any actual money. Orbitz does something similar for hotel bookings, but (at least with Marriott and Hilton) you often get better deals booking directly with the hotel property instead of using a search site, so I’ve never actually gotten any money back from them.

AutoSlash is how I’ll be doing my rental car bookings from now on. Because it’s free, I encourage you to try it too. (I’m just a happy customer; they’re not paying me or anything.)

1 Comment

Filed under Travel

2011-08-11 · 08:14

Thursday trivia #37

  • From the “I get e-mail” department:

    Good Afternoon Paul-

    GIS technology is playing an important role to help improve the wine industry by taking the guesswork out of where to plant vineyards for peak production.

    The wine industry’s reliance of GIS technology has increased the need for GIS professionals. A typical vineyard worker or winemaker often has three to 20 actual jobs, one of which may be executing GIS tasks.

    As more organizations around the world use geographic information systems, earning a bachelor’s degree online in GIS will prepare students to enter and/or move up in this rapidly growing field.

    American Sentinel University’s accredited associate and bachelor’s online degrees in GIS are designed to position students for success in this important field.

  • Apparently squirrels cause 17% of the damage to fiber-optic cables nationwide.
  • Looks like LinkedIn is raiding its users’ privacy too, just like Facebook. Here’s how to turn the feature off.
  • It’s been 9 months since the Lync 2010 launch. Microsoft has still not released any public details about their Lync clients for iOS (although I understand that select customers are being briefed under NDA). This is ridiculous, as third parties are starting to release their own clients.
  • Tony has a good summary of the preparation for our final (for now) Exchange Maestro workshop.
  • Not a surprise: “The kind of risk-seeking behavior that motivates certain people to fly personal aircraft may also make them effective corporate leaders, according to a new study co-authored by professors from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oregon.”

1 Comment

Filed under Musings

2011-08-09 · 15:29

Advice to Exchange ActiveSync developers

Now the folks at Apple, Google, and other ISVs who develop Exchange ActiveSync clients no longer have excuses for bugs and misfeatures in their clients. Why? Because Katarzyna Puchala of Microsoft (already one of my favorite Microsofties thanks to her work as part of the Exchange unified messaging team) has posted three very detailed articles on how clients should behave when synchronizing with Exchange servers:

That means, third parties, that there are no longer any credible excuses for why your clients do things like randomly delete meeting requests, or fail to work with EAS autodiscover. Sadly these articles come after the release of OS X Lion, and past the point at which EAS bugs are likely to meet the release bar for iOS 5… but I can always hope that the first service release for each of those operating systems will include fixes to make their EAS implementations act right.

Leave a comment

Filed under UC&C

Tagged as , , ,

2011-07-28 · 09:05

Thursday trivia #36

  • I’m really identifying with Walter White during the first part of Breaking Bad‘s third season. Well, except for the part about cooking meth, that is.
  • It’s kind of amazing how many in-cockpit technologies pilots now have access to. 15 years ago, you could only get in-cockpit weather if your airplane was big enough to accomodate an (expensive) radar. Now we have
    terrain and traffic avoidance, satellite weather, GPS, synthetic vision.. all packaged in beautiful glass. it’s a great time to be a pilot. (Oh, and this.)
  • This is an eye-opening reminder of one of the benefits we enjoy here in the US– not everyone has the luxury of sprawl.
  • Think you have a good vocabulary? Prove it. (The results are fascinating.)
  • Remember the International Earth Rotation Service? They’re baaaaaack.
  • I’m a bit disappointed in this year’s Year’s Best Science Fiction. Perhaps the second half will be better than the first.

Leave a comment

Filed under Musings

2011-07-24 · 11:11

Apple and customer service

Apple gets a lot of flak from the technology press and a certain segment of users. Their complaints range from the fact that Steve Jobs comes across as an arrogant jerk to Apple’s refusal to support Flash on its mobile devices to its walled-garden model for apps on the iTunes App Store.

I’m perfectly prepared to cede many of these points. Yes, Jobs seems arrogant, which is why I haven’t invited him over for dinner. Yes, Apple hardware isn’t always as expandable as competing products; no, you can’t run Flash on iOS devices. (Of course, running Flash means you’d be much more likely to need that expandable battery that Apple won’t provide.)

Having said that, I am a huge Apple fan. Let me share a few stories, and you might see why that is. I’ll note the fan reasons, or FRs, in line.

Story #1: I have an iPhone 4 that I bought last year. Its home button was only working intermittently, so I took it to the Apple Store in Huntsville. I made an appointment using the Apple Store app (FR 1: you can schedule service appointments online at any time, and the service hours are generous, not just 8-5) (FR 2: every Apple store has access to all your purchase and maintenance records, so you can take any product to any store for service.) They looked up the phone and determined that I was out of warranty by one day. FR 3: they replaced the phone anyway.

Story #2: the week after I got my phone fixed, it fell from my pocket onto the kitchen floor, cracking the screen. Thankfully I’d purchased an extended warranty from SquareTrade, but to activate the warranty I needed a copy of my purchase receipt and the replacement work order for the warranty replacement. I went to the Apple Store at Oakridge to get the work order. When I explained why I needed it… they replaced my phone! Broken screens are not, of course, Apple’s problem, and they were under no obligation to do this, but I was certainly delighted by their doing so. Call that FR 4, with a big fat asterisk next to it.

Story #3: my MacBook Pro’s optical drive had been failing to ingest disks properly, so I took it to the Apple Store at Valley Fair to have it checked out. The Genius Bar folks determined that the drive needed replacement. I dropped it off about 4:30pm on Saturday and was given a 1-3 business day repair window. At 10:45am Sunday, they called: the laptop was ready for pickup. FR 5: under promising and over delivering.

These anecdotes don’t mean that Apple’s perfect; they’re not. They don’t speak to the design or implementation of Apple products, which often have flaws (yes, Mac OS X Server, I’m looking at you.) They ignore all the hullabaloo about Apple’s policies, corporate behavior, and so on. But they point out why I am a satisfied Apple customer: Apple provides a degree and level of customer service that very few other companies match. Notice I didn’t say “can match”; Apple-style service is well within the reach of Microsoft, Samsung, Sony and other consumer electronics companies that have similar retail models.

4 Comments

Filed under General Tech Stuff

Tagged as ,

2011-07-18 · 09:58

My comments to the FCC on LightSquared

There’s been quite a debate raging recently between two powerful interest groups. No, I’m not talking about the budget; I’m talking about GPS. A company called LightSquared is about to roll out a nationwide wireless Internet system, apparently in partnership with Sprint. This sounds great… except that the frequency band LightSquared is planning on using overlaps part of the spectrum allocated for GPS use. In practice, that means that LightSquared transmitters work as fairly effective GPS jammers.

There’s no question about whether LightSpeed’s equipment interferes with GPS– it does, as their own tests prove. Their attitude is that the interference is partly due to the GPS industry’s failure to provide adequate filtering, although they don’t explain how the cost of this filtering would be borne, nor how it would work with the highly sensitive GPS receivers used in commercial and general aviation aircraft.

GPS is so widely used that any interference with it would have a huge impact on the people and companies that depend on it. Check out the member list of the “Coalition to Save Our GPS” and you’ll see what I mean: the aviation industry, farmers, surveyors, and city and county governments are all well-represented.

Here are my comments to the FCC. You can file your own if you’re so inclined:

When GPS was originally introduced, only visionaries thought it would be used beyond defense applications. Now it’s a critical part of our country’s economic fabric. It’s used to deliver precision timing, location, and navigation services to a huge range of users, including farmers, pilots, ambulance drivers, and telecommunications systems. Every day, GPS helps enable life-saving emergency services, efficient transport of goods and people, economical production of food, and hundreds of other vital activities.

Personally, my family and I depend on GPS signals to safely navigate the National Airspace System, both as passengers aboard commercial aircraft and while flying general aviation aircraft. We use it for navigation and location services when traveling. We depend on it in case of emergencies that require police, fire, or EMS response. In all of these cases, unavailability or degradation of GPS signals could potentially be quite dangerous, and even fatal.

LightSquared’s proposed frequency plan puts GPS at risk. For that reason I urge the FCC to deny their request to use the current proposed frequency range. GPS and LightSpeed’s current design are fundamentally incompatible. Although making high-speed wireless Internet service available over broad geographic areas is highly desirable, enabling the current GPS system to continue to work safely and reliably is even more reliable given how many industries and activities depend on it.

1 Comment

Filed under General Tech Stuff

Tagged as ,

2011-07-11 · 07:25

Returning to Huntsville

This weekend was my first visit back to Huntsville in many years– I think the last time I was there was in 2005 or so. I will be visiting there regularly to see the boys, and eventually relocating there, so I was quite curious about what had become of the place.

I was scheduled to fly AA SFO-DFW-HSV, arriving about 10pm. AA was kind enough to match my Delta Platinum Medallion status and make me an AAdvantage Platinum, the equivalent of Delta’s Gold Medallion. Unlike DL, which gives their elite members unlimited access to upgrades, on AA Platinum and Gold elites have to buy 500-mile upgrade coupons– so a 1000-mile flight needs two coupons, a 1501-mile flight needs 4, and so on. I elected to request upgrades for the SFO-DFW and DFW-SFO legs, since the DFW-HSV leg is short enough not to bother with.

My flight ex SFO left 25 minutes late, with no announcements or explanation. Surprisingly, the aircraft I was on, a 757, didn’t have onboard Wi-Fi. That’s something Delta has led me to expect on pretty much every flight; even on what must be a heavily traveled route with lots of business customers, AA didn’t provide Wi-Fi equipment. Luckily, though, the plane did have in-seat power, using a standard 3-prong outlet, so I was able to plug in and get some work done en route.

Unfortunately, my flight DFW-HSV was delayed by an hour, so I didn’t get to pick the boys up until nearly 11:30pm. I had in mind that we’d make a tradition out of going straight to Dairy Queen each time I picked the boys up for a visit, but unfortunately I forgot to inform the local DQ, which closes at 10pm sharp. Luckily we went to Sonic instead. Thus began a great weekend. We ate well and thoroughly enjoyed each others’ company (well, except for a few minor fraternal disputes, but those are par for the course.)

One of the highlights of the trip for me was a return visit to the US Space and Rocket Center, one of my all-time favorite museums. They have completely redesigned the place since my last visit; there’s a beautiful new building that houses the Saturn V that used to be out on the back lawn, rusting away. It’s been repainted and refreshed and now occupies a place of honor in the main hall– as it should. We saw “Legends of Flight” (needs moar 787) at the IMAX theater and “Sea Rex” (not bad; fairly educational, though the 3-D effects made the picture a bit dim) at the 3-D theater in the new building.

Another highlight was the huge thunderstorm system that swept through Madison Sunday night. As I was driving the boys back to their mom’s house we were marveling at the lightning strikes, which were frequent, violent, and intense. The rain was so heavy that I had to slow down to below 20mph. This morning I learned that the storm had claimed a casualty in the form of one of Bo’s neighbors. That tempered my enjoyment quite a bit, but it was still quite a dramatic show– something we just don’t get in the Bay Area, along with good BBQ, Dairy Queen, and decent rock radio stations (why does Huntsville have 2 while the huge SF market has none? beats me!)

We made it out to KMDQ to have a look around; I got my first look at a G1000-equipped Cessna 172 (which rents for only $140/hour– considerably less than at KPAO!) I learned that, payload considerations aside, there’s no way to shoehorn me and the 3 boys into a 172, and I saw some really interesting “for sale” notices on the bulletin board. More on that another time.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a trip report if I didn’t talk about food. I was surprised to see which restaurants had survived since I moved away and which hadn’t. No more Green Hills Grille, for example, and Tim’s Cajun Kitchen was closed when we went there (turns out they’re still operating, just not on Sunday evenings). Kings Buffet in Madison lives on, as does Ivey’s. Even Tai Pan (formerly known as “Tight Pants”), my old standby Chinese place near Intergraph, is still there. The rest of the area has grown tremendously overall, too; the airport was booming when I left this morning, and there’s all sorts of new construction, including Bridge Street, a swank open-air shopping center near Research Park, and a ton of new defense contractors sprouting around various parts of town. More on the military-industrial aspect of Huntsville another time; for now suffice to say that drone wars are apparently quite good for business.

I’ll be heading back in a couple of weeks to see the boys again; this time I’ll do a bit more research to look for some specific places I remember.

4 Comments

Filed under Travel

Tagged as

2011-07-10 · 07:46

DC day 4

[OK, so I am terribly delinquent about not posting this, y’know, within a month of the actual trip. So sue me.]

Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. What a day!

Here’s what we did: the Capitol tour, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, and the Library of Congress. That’s a pretty full schedule. A few brief notes because I’m too tired to write a long post rhapsodizing about it all.

First, the Capitol: it’s quite imposing, but the tour was wonderful. The Great Hall is amazing, and the statuary gallery is quite striking as well. Unfortunately, our elected servants were taking an extended vacation so we didn’t get to tour the House or Senate chambers, but the building and grounds were well worth seeing.

I loved the Library of Congress. David thought it would be like a public library, only bigger, so he was somewhat disappointed that he couldn’t just waltz in and pick out an arbitrary book to read. However, there are a ton of interactive exhibits, including one that traced the development of the Gulf Coast under Spanish and French rule; that was worth a good look. The interactives are all computerized touch-screen kiosks that are very well done.

For lunch, we went to the National Museum of the American Indian. This was surprisingly interesting, although I was a bit saddened to see that there wasn’t much in the way of buffalo-related displays, although they did have a really nifty collection of Native American art . However, the Mitsitam Cafe there was probably the best place we ate all week. I had a pulled buffalo sandwich that was superb, and everything everyone else had– wild salmon, a buffalo burger, and I-forget-what-else– was well-prepared and tasty. (In fact we went back to the cafe later in the week for another lunch.) The cafe was packed, which is a pretty good indicator that we weren’t the only ones who liked it.

After our lunch it was time for the National Air and Space Museum. What a fantastic place! I’d been to the Udvar-Hazy Center before, which is excellent in its own right, but getting to see artifacts like the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis literally sent chills up my spine. They even have UAVs now, as you can see from the photostream. David and I flew in a 2-man F-4 Phantom simulator and had a blast, scoring the highest number of kills for the day (a whopping, not really, 7.) Like all the other Smithsonian museums, NASM closes at 5pm, so we left and went back to the hotel for a swim.

For dinner, we walked over to the waterfront area just south of L’Enfant Plaza. There are a number of seafood stands there, and I’d heard it was a good place to eat. It would have been, too, had it not started to thunderstorm. We sought refuge inside Phillips Seafood Buffet, one of the only restaurants to actually offer indoor seating. The seafood was delicious, and I’m pretty sure, given the quantity we all ate, that we represented a net loss to the restaurant despite the stiff prices.

Then it was time to head back to the hotel (thankfully, it had stopped raining) for a little TV and rack time. We had to rest up for Thursday, which was going to pack a 1-2 punch.

Leave a comment

Filed under Friends & Family, Travel

Tagged as

2011-06-30 · 14:19

Volume encryption and Exchange

Computer security’s a complex and fairly arcane topic, but it’s become a mainstay of press coverage in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. There’s one area of security that gets comparatively little press, though: encrypted stored data so that an attacker who has physical access to the data and can copy it can’t read it.

This encryption of “data at rest” is of particular interest to Exchange admins because the Exchange public folder and mailbox databases can easily be mounted and inspected through a variety of methods. Thus an attacker who can connect to your server and steal the databases may end up being able to read every message that users in those databases have sent or received. (Of course, Exchange already supports TLS, IPsec, and other methods of encrypting data in transit, so I’m going to skip over them here.)

This risk is exacerbated by Exchange 2010’s support for DAGs. Why? DAS, that’s why. If your Exchange database is on a SAN, or a RAID array, an attacker who steals a single drive probably won’t end up with anything useful. On the other hand, if you subscribe to the one-disk-per-database DAS model, an attacker who steals a drive may get an entire, completely usable, database in her pocket.

Of course, strong physical security is a good way to mitigate this risk. Gates, guards, and guns FTW! Not everyone can apply a high level of physical security to their servers, though, and some of us like to have defense in depth anyway.

Enter disk encryption.

There are four primary methods for encrypting data at rest on a disk. The goal of all these solutions is to protect stored data on disk, not to protect messages in transit, provide non-repudation, or improve your golf game.

First, consider two solutions that we can’t really use with Exchange:

  •  third-party full-volume encryption (FVE) products. These solutions, such as TrueCrypt and PGP,  typically work by installing a Windows driver that handles volume encryption. They encrypt the entire disk volume, which means that they may also need a custom boot loader. The individual vendors may claim their solutions are supported, and they may be right.. but not by Microsoft, and not for Exchange. These solutions can be very useful for desktops and mobile PCs, but avoid them on your Exchange servers.
  • the Encrypting File System (EFS) , the Old Faithful of Windows-related encryption technology. EFS has been part of Windows for a long time now and is very mature. EFS has the advantage of being tightly integrated with Windows and taking automatic advantage of group policies, the Windows PKI, and other technologies. There’s one small fly in the ointment, though: it’s not supported for use with Exchange.

Next up, we have self-encrypting disks (SEDs). Over time, hardware always wins. Software functions that can be assimilated into hardware generally  will be. Think of how we used to do floating-point math in software, for example… or polygon fills, or SSL handshaking, or any number of other operations that can now be performed directly by hardware. Encryption’s no different. Vendors such as Seagate and Hitachi offer disk drives that incorporate encryption as part of the drive controller.  You plug the drive in, and from the minute it’s initialized the data on it are encrypted by the drive controller. Key management is an issue for SEDs, though. If you store the key on the drive, it goes with the drive and is thus available to an attacker. To prevent the drive from being reused in another server after being stolen, there’s usually an authentication step that must take place, either via a BIOS password or a boot loader. You can also use a controller, such as LSI’s SafeStore line, to provide more advanced key management.

Then there’s BitLocker, Microsoft’s FVE solution. It’s designed to be used with computers that have a TPM for securely storing the volume encryption key and performing boot-time measurement to prevent tampering. One weakness of software-only FVE systems is that it’s very difficult to detect when the boot chain has been tampered with in some manner; the TPM allows BitLocker to measure boot-time parameters and compare them with stored values from the TPM. (That’s why in its default configuration, a BitLocker-protected machine won’t boot with a CD-R or DVD-R in the boot drive– changing the boot source represents a change to the boot parameters.) BitLocker has a number of other interesting security features that I don’t have space to go into here, although the Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs does a good job of explaining them.

One important aspect of BitLocker is that’s it’s fully supported for use with DAG members (see the bottom part of this Exchange team blog post). In fact, it’s supported for use on Exchange 2007 databases as well. That automatically makes it my preferred solution. It’s true that BitLocker imposes a very small performance penalty (on the order of 3-5%) compared to SEDs, but it’s also true that BitLocker is disk-agnostic and can be used to protect all the volumes on a server, irrespective of their type.

One additional, and very useful, feature of both SEDs and BitLocker is that they provide essentially instant secure drive erasure for decommissioning drives. If you instruct an SED to erase its onboard encryption key, or remove a BitLocker-protected volume from the machine to which it’s sealed, the drive is no longer decryptable. At that point, the encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise. As described here, this benefit is attracting a great deal of attention because it reduces the risk of inadvertently leaking sensitive data when removing drives from service for repair or reuse.

If you’re not currently encrypting your Exchange data on disk, I believe you should strongly consider doing so. BitLocker and SEDs both provide solid protection against theft or unauthorized access to machines that are shut down (though admittedly this doesn’t help Exchange much), and given the potential cost of lost data, the cost of deploying them may be money well spent.

8 Comments

Filed under UC&C

2011-06-29 · 17:15

Thursday trivia #35

  • As a private pilot in the US, you can get an instrument flight rating that allows you to fly in all sorts of undesirable weather. This rating is an outgrowth of techniques developed starting in the 1930s. I didn’t know this, but most other countries don’t have a private IFR rating at all; if you want to fly in bad weather, you need a pan-European air transport pilot (ATP) rating, which is very expensive. Thus France’s announcement that they would provide one is kind of a big deal, especially since IFR-rated US pilots can get an endorsement allowing them to fly IFR in France. That means I have until next summer to get rated because…
  • Next summer I want to take the boys to Normandy for the anniversary of D-Day. My friend Ron, an Army Ranger who served a mission in Switzerland and is fluent in French, took his sons this summer and has had some remarkable stories to tell. Gotta go before we run out of veterans. Being able to tour the area by air would be the icing on the cake, so to speak.
  • And speaking of cake: ordering groceries directly from your phone? It’s like the future… a tasty, tasty future.
  • And speaking of future: I found my jetpack. It’s water-powered, but still, I’d love to try this out.
  • And speaking of trying things out: did you know that Amazon has a site called SmallParts.com that bills itself as “the hardware store for researchers and developers”? Happy shopping!

1 Comment

Filed under Musings

2011-06-16 · 13:12

Thursday trivia #34

  • Apparently Bellefonte #1, a never-finished nuclear plant in northern Alabama, may be rising from the dead. I’ve seen it often while driving the road between Huntsville and Atlanta; hard to imagine that TVA will make worthwhile out of this zombie. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn’t think much of their proposal.)
  • As many of my friends in Redmond are discovering today, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you have inside your buildings if you have single points of failure outside the building.
  • I love summer, not least because it brings tons of books by my favorite authors. On tap: new books from Clancy, Silva, and a bunch of others that I’m too lazy to look up at the moment. Bonus: it’s also time for the latest Year’s Best Science Fiction.
  • Do you know the story behind the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera? My dad had one of these and it was an amazing piece of equipment. Check it out.
  • Lots of people are just now catching on to what Microsoft has been pushing for a while: the death of the phone number. You don’t have to know Amazon’s IP address to use their service; why should you have to know my phone number to call me?
  • If you are at all interested in the mobile device market, you should be reading this. His free analysis is so good I can only imagine what his paid stuff is like.
  • “In a newly published study, three University of Oklahoma researchers report there is a higher rate of accidental deaths among whites (but not nonwhites) in the American South and West — regions where a “culture of honor” makes backing down from a challenge problematic for many males.” Well, duh. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that none of those three researchers is actually from the American South or West or they’d’ve known this already.

2 Comments

Filed under Musings

2011-06-16 · 09:46

Quick Exchange 2010 Licensing Survey

I recently wrote an Exchange UPDATE column on licensing. After I did so, I was contacted by someone from Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR agency, offering to put me in touch with a product team spokesperson who could help answer my questions.

Yesterday I spoke to the spokesperson, and I was a bit surprised by what I learned. I’d venture to guess that many others will be surprised too. (I won’t spoil the surprise yet, though.)

If you’re an Exchange administrator, please take this short (9-question) survey on Exchange licensing. I’m using it as research for a couple of upcoming UPDATE columns, and the more survey responses I get the better.

http://954812.polldaddy.com/s/exchange-server-licensing-survey

Leave a comment

Filed under UC&C

2011-06-09 · 23:14

The Conversation Action Settings folder

I recently got a query from a Mac-using coworker:

When looking at my email account, I see an extra folder called Conversation Action Settings. Is this something I can safely dispose of?

If you’re used to using Outlook on Windows, you may never have seen this folder. In fact, you might not have seen it if you are a WIn Outlook user, because it’s only present on Exchange 2010 mailboxes. Outlook 2007 doesn’t display it, but Outlook 2011 for Mac OS X does, as does Apple’s Mail.app. This has engendered a lot of discussion about what the folder is and whether it’s safe to get rid of it.

So let me answer those points in reverse order. Yes, it’s safe to remove the folder… but if you do so, it’s just going to come back again. I expect that Apple will update Mail.app in Mac OS X “Lion” to hide the folder; they’ve done similar work to hide other Exchange/Outlook-specific folders in the past.

It’s arguably more interesting to talk about what’s in the folder in the first place. The Conversation Actions folder holds (drum roll)… conversation actions. These actions tell Exchange 2010 (and compatible clients, which for now means “OWA 2010” and “Outlook 2010”) what to do with message items under specific circumstances.

One action is the now-famous “ignore” button (see Clint Boessen’s description if you’re not hip to this very useful feature.) When you hit the mute button, Outlook creates a conversation action that automatically moves messages in the target thread to your Deleted Items folder. It can do this because Exchange 2010 automatically tags incoming messages with a conversation ID. Related messages (like replies or forwards of an existing message) get the same conversation ID. It uses a variety of heuristics to do this, and in general they work well to keep related messages together even when people do things like change the subject line mid-thread.

The other data items stored in this folder are Outlook 2010 Quick Steps. I love this feature and use it heavily; in fact, it’s one of the things I miss most when I’m using OWA 2010 and Outlook 2011.

If you’re not using a client that supports these features, then there won’t be anything in the Conversation Action Settings folder. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does Exchange, so if you delete the folder expect to see it come back.

There’s more on conversation actions, and some other interesting Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 features, in this article.

1 Comment

Filed under UC&C

Tagged as ,

2011-05-30 · 08:43

Legoland

Lego's version of the famous Houmas House

Lego’s version of the famous Houmas House

Legoland was 100% worth the trip!

We drove down from Morgan Hill on Friday, taking the I-5 route. Because of construction at CA-58, we were a bit delayed en route, so we stopped overnight at the Rodeway Inn in Castaic, CA. It was a bit dingy, but given that we arrived after midnight I was prepared to relax my standards a bit.

Saturday morning we got up bright and early and made a beeline for Legoland. We arrived shortly after the park opened, and it was surprisingly crowded. Legoland’s crowd skews pretty young; there were lots of under-6-year-olds.

Our first stop was the aquarium. We’re undoubtedly spoiled, but I found it mediocre. Had it not been included in our ticket price I might have been disappointed.

The park, however, was well worth the price of admission. The models are jaw-dropping (see my Flickr stream for a few examples from Miniland, the model city area.) The rides are clever and well-designed, although the lines were long because there’s no equivalent to Disney’s FastPass system.

The boys’ favorite was probably the large, well-appointed water park. I sat in the sun and relaxed while they shivered in the water and claimed that they weren’t cold (the lazy river’s heated, however.)

A note about Legoland food: mediocre and expensive. Take your own if you can.

We closed the joint down, which was easy given that it closes at 6. Our hotel, Carlsbad by the Sea, was delightful; clean, beautifully landscaped, and well located. Breakfast the next morning was included, too, always a plus.

I’m posting this from iBlogger on my phone, so this update is too short to capture the full flavor. Suffice it to say that I highly recommend Legoland.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Leave a comment

Filed under California, Travel