2010-05-13 · 08:12

Thursday trivia #10

Wooo! Double digits at last!

  • This week’s edition of “jobs I’m glad I don’t have”: this.
  • Sunday is the laser’s 50th birthday. I was thinking about throwing a party, but it turns out that there’s alredy a year-long LaserFest. There are even some laser-themed parties conferences like this.
  • A couple of weeks ago I made fun of the snow in Vermont. This week I’m making fun of the snow in Colorado, through which my magazine editors are currently suffering. I will be laughing out loud when I’m at the beach on Saturday.
  • I am really impressed with OOO Gameprom‘s Pinball HD for the iPad. It’s the most fun I’ve had for $3 in a long while.
  • Miller-McCune has a terrific web site. “Who?” you ask. My reaction exactly. I’d never heard of them until I stumbled across a mention on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which I read faithfully. If you like The Atlantic you’ll like Miller-McCune. For a sample, check out this article on invasive weeds and the iPhone.

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2010-05-10 · 11:08

My recommended Exchange 2010 book

From the reader mailbag:

Can you recommend books or training on Exchange 2010?

Why yes, I can!

My current favorite Exchange 2010 book is from Jim McBee and David Elfassy: Mastering Exchange Server 2010. It’s a solid overview of the key features and technologies in Exchange 2010, although I’d like to see a second edition with more coverage of DAGs.

As for training, I don’t have much to say on that topic at the moment, but I hope to in a few weeks.

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2010-05-06 · 18:40

Morgan Hill superintendent’s statement on the Flag Four

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Good evening. This is Dr. Wesley Smith, Superintendent of the Morgan Hill Unified School District.

The Morgan Hill Unified School District does not prohibit nor do we discourage wearing patriotic clothing. The incident on May 5 at Live Oak High School is extremely unfortunate. While campus safety is our primary concern and administrators made decisions yesterday in an attempt to ensure campus safety, students should not, and will not, be disciplined for wearing patriotic clothing. This situation and our response are under review.

We know that this is an emotionally charged topic. We would ask you to encourage your students to be safe and focus on their academics while in school. If conversations and/or activities are necessary to express their feelings on this issue, we will find appropriate venues that do not disturb student learning or jeopardize the safety of our students. Furthermore, we encourage everyone to demonstrate respect for each other, open communication, and responsibility.

Thank you for your support and understanding.

in other words, the assistant principal who caused this mess just got pitched under the bus, and Dr. Smith would really appreciate it if all y’all stayed in school instead of going downtown chanting “We want respect!” while offering none to your adopted nation.

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2010-05-06 · 15:36

“Insufficient permissions” error when adding servers to a DAG

I’ve been busily building out a shiny new Exchange 2010 setup at work, with Windows Server 2008 R2 as the base OS. I spent some time this morning puzzling over why I couldn’t add a second server to a DAG. It turns out that the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group doesn’t have the needed permissions under R2; to fix it, you have to add that group to the Administrators group. I found this out by poring over many a dreary Google search result, but if I had looked here first I would have found the solution faster.

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2010-05-06 · 10:00

Thursday trivia #9

  • After years of white-box hardware, it’s a real treat to be building an infrastructure with name-brand hardware– y’know, the kind with warranties and stuff.
  • I love Pandora. I love it even more in the car, and I love it most of all during KQED’s incredibly long pledge drives.
  • Nadyne makes a good point: PowerPoint is what you make of it.
  • This is pretty hard to stomach. It’s always OK to wear the American flag in America. Period, full stop. I guess the best thing I can say about it is that at least it wasn’t at David’s high school.
  • Most people don’t realize the complexity or scale of our modern oil exploration system; they think it’s magic or something. It’s not. Here’s a good place to learn more about the current spill, and what may have led up to it.
  • I really miss Jon Penny’s Black Belt Academy. There’s certainly nothing like it in Morgan Hill.
  • When I am rich and famous, here’s the first thing I’m going to buy.

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2010-04-30 · 10:01

Exchange and the Customer Experience Improvement Program

One of the things I like most about Microsoft’s approach to software engineering is their focus on making data-driven decisions. For example, if you remember the advent of Windows 2003, you may remember that MS spent a ton of time analyzing crash causes for Windows 2000. They found that a large percentage (I want to say ~ 60%, but I might be making that up) were caused by faulty drivers– so they introduced the concept of signed drivers, and the ability for admins to disallow unsigned drivers.

For a more recent example, take a look at the Office 2007 ribbon. Love it or hate it, the ribbon came about because we told MS that’s what we wanted, through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). CEIP allows you to choose to send usage data to Microsoft so they can get anonymized data about how their programs are being used.

The Exchange component teams want to start making more use of CEIP data opportunity to improve customer experience and drive E15 planning by gathering data in several high impact areas. Microsoft’s David Espinoza listed some of the data items CEIP could potentially gather:

  • How many users have turned on SMS notification?
  • How many NDRs are generated, for what reason?
  • How much latency exists between the time a user sends an SMS message and the time the phone picks it up from the Outbox?
  • What are the most frequently observed cmdlet errors?
  • What Exchange Server roles are the most often installed in virtualized (VMWare, Hyper-V) environments?

As you can see, none of these are particularly sensitive (or even that interesting) for a particular site. However, in the aggregate, data items like this give Microsoft a great deal of insight into what features customers are using, how well they’re working, and where they could be improved.

Microsoft is asking everyone running Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 to turn on CEIP, so I thought I’d help spread the word. The actual process is simple; you can enable CEIP on individual servers or for the entire organization with a simple Exchange Management Shell cmdlet. Give it a try!

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2010-04-29 · 08:55

Thursday trivia #8

  • I’m delighted to see that Cub Scouts can earn a video game merit badge thingy. I know what Matthew and I will be doing this weekend!
  • Favorite license plate of the week: "MPG LOL" on a V-8 Mustang.
  • Not only do my blog comments not work very well, but all the commenting action is on Facebook anyway.
  • The Windows Phone 7 e-mail experience looks pretty darn hot, especially compared to what we have now on iPhone. The competition between these two will be fun to watch!
  • I can’t possibly explain how glad I am that I don’t live someplace where it is still snowing at this time of year (oh, hi, Julie; didn’t see you over there.)

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2010-04-28 · 22:36

Exchange Connections Fall 2010 call for sessions

My co-chairs and I are working on assembling this year’s Exchange Connections content, which we’ll be presenting November 1-4 in Las Vegas at good ol’ Mandalay Bay. That’s why I’m posting this call for sessions!

Everything you should need to know is in this document.

The deadline for session proposals is May 6 – hurry, hurry, as usual! Although the deadline is May 6, the sooner you can send in session proposals, the better the odds are we’ll be able to choose your sessions. I’ll try and respond to your submissions on the same business day with any thoughts or requests or tweaks. The conference has a brochure to get out pretty much ASAP if we’re going to get people to show up, so time is – as always – of the essence.

Note that we’ll be co-located, as usual, with dedicated conferences for Visual Studio, ASP.NET, Windows, SharePoint, and goodness knows what else – so for these proposals, stick strictly with Exchange and OCS topics.

If you want to submit sessions, see the call for sessions. If you have questions, you can ask them here or via e-mail.

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2010-04-28 · 08:32

Arizona immigration law: calm down already

I’m not seeing the nuances of the Arizona bill correctly reported very much, and I fear that this is distorting the debate.

The new state law (full text here) has two salient points. First, it criminalizes being in the state if you’re in violation of US immigration law. It’s a fair argument to say that if the federal government were enforcing our existing immigration laws that the situation in Arizona today would be very different, but that’s a topic for another post.

Second, the new law requires (sort of) that law enforcement officers who are already in “lawful contact” with someone to make a “reasonable attempt” to verify the person’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in violation of state or federal immigration law. There are exemptions, of course, and word has already gone out that some law enforcement agencies won’t enforce the new law anyway. This is not, of course, the same thing as giving the polizei power to detain and interrogate every brown person in the state.

In fact, it seems remarkably similar to a number of other laws that we more or less accept as a matter of course. One example: various state bans on driving while using cell phones, while not wearing seat belts, etc. In many states, the police cannot stop you solely because you have a phone clamped to your ear or because your seat belt is off. However, if they have another legitimate cause to stop you, you can be cited for the “real” offense as well as for the secondary one. It seems as though the Arizona law is much closer to these laws than to an open invitation to scrutinize every non-Caucasian they see.

I don’t see the Arizona law as much different than the existing and well-understood case law that defines when the police may ask someone to present ID. Can a random cop ask you for ID when you’re just walking down the street, minding your own business? Generally not. Can they require you to present ID as part of other types of interaction? Sure.

Rather than label Arizonans as Nazis, or call for a worldwide boycott, or whatever, I’d really like to see the people who are complaining about the law propose some workable alternatives… other than "ignore the problem and hope it goes away."

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2010-04-27 · 09:15

More things Apple needs to fix for Exchange e-mail on the iPhone

Via Twitter, I found this post pointing out 3 things Apple needs to fix to make its Exchange e-mail client more useful, from the perspective of a BlackBerry user. Their selections:

  • flagging messages for follow-up. Yes!
  • Jump scrolling to the top or bottom of a message. Safari already implements this (see the second item here), and I was surprised to notice that Mail.app doesn’t.
  • Showing message priority/importance. I’m not convinced that this is critical, though it would be nice to have.

However, there are a lot of other things that Apple also needs to do. I’ve written about some of them before, but my list has changed a bit with the announcements of the iPhone 4.0 software release. Here are the things I would most like to see; these do not seem to be present in 4.0 yet:

  • Full support for offline mode. I never want to see a message telling me that the message couldn’t be moved to the trash, or that the server can’t be contacted. Give me a subtle icon to indicate when I’m disconnected, then just handle it.
  • Proper use of the Exchange ActiveSync smart reply and forward operations.
  • Mark reply and forward operations properly so that other clients (like Entourage and Outlook) show the message history properly. I think using the correct EAS smart verbs will fix this as well.
  • Show the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders exactly as they exist on the server. Every item I send or delete should show up in the correct location on all clients, no matter which client actually did the processing. (While you’re at it, do this for Mail.app on Mac OS X, too).
  • Allow us to change the sort order used to display messages.
  • Leave the existing 4.0 "all inboxes" and conversation views alone– they work great as they are currently implemented.

I’m in a good mood (it’s Taco Salad Tuesday!), so I’m not going to take the time to write a list of all the calendaring features I wish Apple would fix, as that would ruin my mood and give me strong urges to punch something. Another day.

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2010-04-22 · 09:04

Thursday trivia #7

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2010-04-19 · 21:19

Don’t buy from Airsplat.com

Long story short: their customer support is poor, they don’t stand behind their products, and they aren’t honest about either.

I bought two electric Airsoft rifles for Dave and Tom for Christmas. Tom’s was fine; David’s was poorly designed and built. I got an RMA for it the day after Christmas, then had to fight with them for months before getting a partial refund. First they ignored me, then they claimed that the rifle had been damaged in return shipping (but couldn’t produce a UPS claim), then they claimed that it was damaged before shipping.

I eventually had to dispute the charge with my bank. The whole thing was a big hassle and not worth the few bucks that I might have saved by buying from them instead of a more reputable vendor.

Avoid them.

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2010-04-19 · 11:40

An interesting debugging tale

I had quite the merry chase running down a problem at work this morning: a Windows 7 workstation on which VMware Server 2.0 could neither be removed nor installed. (Side note: yes, I know VMware Server 2 isn’t officially supported on Win7.)

The first clue was the Windows installer error message saying that the installer couldn’t read the "UNKNOWN\Components\{GUID}" registry key. UNKNOWN, huh? You’d think that the installer would know what keys it was trying to read.

I started by doing a little binging to find anything relevant. VMware KB article 1308 described the steps to take to manually remove a failed install so I followed its steps… twice, just to be on the safe side (well, and because I skipped a couple of steps the first time). No luck.

Next, I fired up one of my favorite-ever troubleshooting tools, Process Monitor. It told me that the failure was actually happening when the installer tried to get write access to a subkey of HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18. I’d never even heard of that particular key, so off to bing I went. It’s actually owned by the LocalSystem account, except that in this case it wasn’t– the permissions on the key that VMware wanted (and its subkeys) were all out of whack.Resetting the permissions manually didn’t work because the parent key was still (correctly) owned by LocalSystem. So, I fired up psexec to open an interactive session with regedit owned by LocalSystem, set the correct ownership on the key and its subkeys, and ran install again.

This time it got further before failing; there was another key under that subtree that also had wrong permissions. Fortunately I’d left regedit running, so a quick ownership change and another reinstall and boom! back in business.

How’d this happen in the first place? Well, as much as I like to bash VMware (and boy, do I ever), this wasn’t their fault. As near as I can tell, the problem arose because this machine was originally built with a 160GB SSD as the boot volume and a 1TB drive as the data volume. Our app performs better on an SSD, but it also has a lot of data, so the better configuration would have been to have the 1TB drive be the boot volume. Someone tried to reconfigure the machine by imaging the SSD, putting the image on the 1TB drive, and changing the boot configuration. However, when they did so, they neglected to notice that the LocalSystem token changed, so the permissions on some entries in the registry were wrong. I think they’re all fixed now.

Not a bad way to start a Monday morning– but only because I fixed the problem.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2010-04-15 · 08:02

Thursday trivia #6

 

  • So far, I’ve only gotten two questions using formspring.me. This is probably a good thing.
  • If I had put the iPhone 4.0 developer build on my iPhone, I might be torn between two emotions: pleasure at the improvements and abject horror at the abyssal drop in battery life.
  • I think I may tackle getting my Certified Ethical Hacker certification. It sounds like fun.
  • Today’s net weight: down 4 lbs, to 201.2. Yay me.
  • This morning on NPR I heard the tail end of this story. One lobbyist said “During the day, who watches TV? Well, now I do! Seriously, I’ve watched more Ellen DeGeneres in the last month on these devices.” So: good reason not to get one.
  • Our taxes are paid. I expect the sore feeling to go away in October or so. I support the idea of doing away with withholding so that the amount of taxes we actually pay becomes more visible. That would do more to change people’s opinion of what the US government should and shouldn’t do than practically anything else.

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Filed under General Stuff

2010-04-09 · 08:43

Exchange ActiveSync remote wipe and firing people

Darn it, Dr. J beat me to the punch:

Remote wipe in Exchange ActiveSync is only useful when a user loses his or her device, and even then, it is lacking since you cannot reach out to the device and wipe it. Remote wipe in Exchange ActiveSync is utterly useless when people are terminated from their employer.

In the case where you fire an employee and want to remove your organization’s confidential data from it, there’s a big ol’ hole that Jesper describes quite well. There are various mitigations that might seem to apply, but most of them revolve around preventing someone from connecting in the first place, or in blocking their ability to connect after you fire them or whatever. For example, you could use client certificates so that only devices with certificates could connect, but then only as long as the client cert remains valid. That doesn’t solve the wipe problem, though.

A related problem: the current device wipe implementation on most phones resets everything and completely erases the phone back to its factory state. Users lose all their apps, personal data, and so on: not a great experience for them (though one school of thought says that you just fired them, so who cares?)

It seems like it would be reasonable to do two things. First, allow sending the EAS wipe message to a device even if it fails to authenticate. If the device has an existing sync relationship, and it tries (but fails) to authenticate, just send the pending wipe message to it anyway. Second, give admins the choice of whether the wipe message requires a complete wipe or only deleting data that came from the organization originating the wipe message in the first place.

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