My main man jbuff, a lead PM on the Microsoft DPM team, has finally started a blog. Drop by and show him the love if you’re at all interested in data protection or continuous backup.
Jason Buffington starts blogging
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Filed under Friends & Family, General Tech Stuff
Happy birthday, dear
Today is my dear wife Arlene‘s birthday! Today, like every day, I’m reminded of how lucky the boys and I are to have her. Many happy returns (and let there be gluten-free cake!)
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iPhone eye for the Windows Mobile guy: part 1
With all the hype surrounding the iPhone, I thought I’d stick my oar in the water and talk about iPhone from the perspective of someone who depends on Windows Mobile devices to get my daily work done. Over the last couple of years, I’ve chronicled my experiences with various Windows Mobile devices, including the Treo 700w. Despite its flaws, I’ve come to depend on the Treo to help me stay organized and in touch when I’m traveling or otherwise out of the office. I’ve recently replaced the 700w with a pre-release device from a major OEM running Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, and it’s a major improvement over WM5. In particular, the new Exchange 2007 support features (HTML mail and message flagging chief among them) really give me a productivity boost.
Originally I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone, but once I got my hands on one my resolve weakened, and quickly. I ordered one from AT&T on July 4th and had it in my hands on the 6th. I added it as an additional line on my existing AT&T plan, and I was off to the races. (And no, I don’t think the iPhone plan price is excessive; as for the device price, I’m betting I’ll get more than $600 worth of value from the device over its lifetime.)
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing an irregular series of posts on various aspects of the iPhone vs the other device I’m using. There’s a lot of good in both platforms; likewise, each of them has some shortcomings. Which one will win? That’s a misleading question, as there are too many different dimensions of use to pick a single winner. Stay tuned to see how it comes out!
Technorati Tags: iPhone
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Filed under UC&C
John demos Open XML and our new solution
John is on the road again; this time he’s at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, showing off a very cool new solution we’ve built for a major international relief organization. The solution uses Z5’s extremely cool Nomad hardware platform, which is enough to make it cool in a doomsday sort of way. Perhaps Z5 will let me borrow one as part of our family emergency preparedness plan.
Technorati Tags: 3sharp
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Filed under UC&C
Customer segmentation in action
You’re probably familiar with the idea that, for most companies, a relatively small percentage of customers generates a large percentage of revenue. This is particularly true for industries, like airlines, where pricing is highly variable. Looks like the same thing is true for mobile operators. Sprint Nextel has an innovative solution: find the customers who are costing you the most in support, then fire them. I wonder if this model will ever catch on in the software industry?
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Ohhh, that hurts: iPhone admin
Man, what was Apple thinking? Turns out all iPhone applications run as effective UID 0. What a boneheaded decision, at least from a security point of view. Too bad Steve Jobs didn’t hire me when he had the chance.
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Filed under Security
Shopping carts have cooties
Yes, it’s true: up to 60% of shopping carts have coliform bacteria. Yikes! I think I’ll be bagging my fresh fruits from now on, thankyouverymuch. And wearing a biohazard suit, too.
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Great explanation of Exchange 2007 certificate management
The Exchange team blog has a wonderful explanation of the ins and outs of Exchange 2007 certificate management and issuance, including a guide to using the elusive SAN certificate. Go read it now.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
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Turning off the “leave a message” prompt in Exchange 2007 UM
So, I’ve been using (and loving!) Exchange 2007 UM at two sites: my home and our office. At the office, we’ve all noticed an annoying behavior in the default auto-attendant: after you specify the name of the person you’re calling, it asks you to press 1 to leave a voice message. If you ignore that prompt, it says “Okay, dialing…” and does its thing. We couldn’t find a way to turn it off, until I noticed this unobtrusive checkbox in the UM auto attendant properties dialog:
It turns out that, in this context, “Allow callers to send voice messages” really means “annoy callers with prompts to leave voice messages instead of putting them through and then letting them leave a VM if the called party doesn’t answer”. Unchecking that box provided exactly the behavior we were looking for.
Technorati Tags: 3sharp, Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging
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River of Gods (McDonald)
by Ian McDonald
Wow.
Just wow.
I’m not a good enough reviewer to list all the reasons why this is such a terrific book. McDonald has created a fantastically textured, deeply detailed vision of a future India, then populated it with vivid characters. The SF components of the book are very much secondary, and the plotting, dialogue, characterization, and descriptions are so rich that I found the book literally impossible to put down. I read the entire flight between Atlanta and Seattle, drove to my hotel, and read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Fantastic, and very highly recommended.
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Happy Monday!
Want to get your week off to a great start? Try an 0830 appointment with your doctor, then top it off with a 1000 visit to the dentist. After that, the rest of the week is guaranteed to be a breeze!
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In Secret Service: A Novel (Silver)
by Mitch Silver
I really wanted to like this book. Silver had a great idea: write a thriller set around the idea of a previously-undiscovered Ian Fleming manuscript. The manuscript turns out to reveal the existence of a Nazi traitor in the British royal family, and it becomes the property of an American professor whose father was Fleming’s friend during World War II. As a literary device, this framing works well. Unfortunately, neither of the stories is particularly compelling. The professor is neither heroine nor anti-heroine, and her encounters with the people who are trying to reclaim and conceal the manuscript are unconvincing. The story told in the Fleming manuscript itself is slow-moving and turgid, full of anecdotes that will probably enthrall people with a good background knowledge of the British royals but which lack interest for the rest of us. A good first effort, but not particularly recommended.
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Former Marine kills bear with log
The headline says it all. Semper Fi.
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Back from TechEd
So last week I went to TechEd 2007, primarily to present a session on how Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FFSE) works. I arrived Monday night after an uneventful flight (the kind I prefer), got to the hotel, and went to bed. The next morning, I had breakfast with Anne Grubb and Amy Eisenberg of Windows IT Pro. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing for them for nearly ten years! I spent the rest of the day on Tuesday attending a series of MVP deep-dive technical briefings put on by the Exchange and OCS development teams. There’s some really exciting stuff happening with both of those products; you’ll be seeing the fruits sooner than you expect.
Wednesday I had breakfast with an old friend, Ed Woodrick of Dell, then I went to prep for my session. As usual, the room I was in was waaaay too big; it probably seated close to 1200 people, and I had 252 in attendance. No, I didn’t count them; Microsoft uses an RFID-based system to track session attendance. This year John wasn’t presenting so I didn’t have a chance to beat him; that’s too bad, because my session scored 7.81, a personal best.
The bad news is that I was in the security track, which ended up taking the top overall score. Of the 10 sessions rated most highly by attendees, security sessions took 5 of the top 6, so clearly I’ve got some room to improve (although let’s get real; I have no realistic hope of outscoring someone like Steve Riley or Mark Russinovich unless I start passing out $20 bills during my sessions!)
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FDA cracks down on cadaver harvesting
Finally. The FDA is getting more aggressive about regulating companies that harvest useful tissue from cadavers. I still recommend reading Body Brokers if you want to know more about the industry (provided you have a strong stomach!)
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