2005-12-19 · 06:49

More Xbox 360 streaming

So, last week I wrote about trying to get my iTunes music onto my Xbox 360. I noted that using Windows Media Connect on Virtual PC seemed to work OK, but I noticed something odd: only about 1/3 of my song library showed up on the device. It turns out that the 360 can’t stream AAC files (protected or unprotected), and– wouldn’t you know it– that’s the default format I’ve been using. This is odd, and frustrating, given that the 360 can play AAC files just fine from an iPod, so clearly it’s got an AAC codec installed.

I discovered this while trying to set up a Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) computer to stream videos to the 360. After an evening of fiddling, I still can’t make the MCE and 360 work together; each reports that it sees the other, but I can’t stream any content. However, I learned that if you install the 3ivx filter pack, then Windows Media Player (and, by extension, Windows Media Connect) can see and play unprotected AAC files. At least that much is now working.

Update: no, this still isn’t working. WMC won’t show AAC files, so neither the Xbox 360 nor the LRM-519 I have in the bedroom will see two-thirds of my accumulated music connection. Frustrating.

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2005-12-19 · 05:57

Imperial Grunts (Kaplan)

by Robert D. Kaplan

People who know me know that I have a special interest in the US military; in addition to my own service, I have many friends and acquaintances who served, or are serving, and I care deeply about how our military is equipped, trained, organized, and used as an instrument of US policy and power projection.
Kaplan has written a remarkable, and important, book about the US military around the world, but rather than focusing on three- and four-star generals (cf. Atkinson’s biography of David Petraeus, or on the dry details of an individual campaign or battle (cf. The March Up), Kaplan writes about the troops he meets while deployed with the First Marine Division and various Special Forces units. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a war book; it’s a book about the remarkable ways in which individual US military members are forging US policy. My favorite example is probably Tom Wilhelm, one of the US military advisors to Mongolia; Kaplan’s profile of himin the Atlantic was excerpted from the book, but there are many other examples from places like Basilan, Lamu Island (which I’d never heard of), Fallujah, and northern Afghanistan.
Kaplan puts the work done by these “iron grunts” in perspective. The US, he says, has already built an empire; like the last days of the British empire, it’s one focused as much on imperial power projection through the distribution of information, technology, and ideas as on pure military force. Kaplan frequently cites precedent for US engagement in various places from our previous engagement in “small wars” like the US pacification of the Philippines, the settlement of the American West, and the US Marine involvement in Central America at the start of the 20th century. Kaplan puts these in the context of empire building by peoples as disparate as the Ethiopians, the Romans, and the series of Khans.
Kaplan writes with a vigorous style that does an excellent job of conveying the no-baloney straightforwardness of the people he meets and talks to. He is direct and clear, both in his explanations and his opinions. His writing is also suffused with a clear appreciation for the work done, and sacrifices made, by these soldiers and Marines for their country. He does this without shying away from pointing out what America has done wrong in the past, or could improve upon in the future, and that’s part of what makes this such a remarkable book.
If I could give this book six stars, I would; I’m eagerly looking forward to the next volume.

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2005-12-19 · 05:47

Don starts blogging

Normally I wouldn’t mention this here, but it has security relevance. Don recently started blogging. Why do you care? Because he’s an attorney who works for a really large software company in western Washington. In that capacity, he’s written some amazing stuff that I hope shows up in his blog over time.

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2005-12-15 · 16:05

Cliff Reeves blogs

I had the opportunity to work with Microsoft’s Cliff Reeves earlier this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it– Cliff is scary smart, quite personable, and really “gets” the collaboration space. I urged him to start a blog, and whaddya know? he did! Check it out at http://cliffreeves.typepad.com/dyermaker/.

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2005-12-14 · 11:51

Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer

I just attended a Live Meeting hosted by Microsoft’s Nicole Allen and Mike Lee. Nicole is well known in the Exchange community as being an expert on Exchange performance analysis, and her presentation covered some of the guts of the Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA). If you haven’t used ExPTA, you’re missing out; it’s a terrific tool for analyzing the performance of your Exchange server and identifying problems, including problems experienced (or caused) by individual users. Mike Lee also did a similar presentation on the Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA). (For a good tutorial on what ExDRA does, see Marc Grote’s article here.)

The interesting thing to me is the degree of investment that Microsoft is putting into these free add-on tools for Exchange. They fill a void that no third party vendor has effectively exploited, and customers love them because they greatly simplify the process of finding current or latent problems with an Exchange configuration. Between ExBPA, ExDRA, and ExPTA, Microsoft is assembling quite a formidable set of analysis and troubleshooting tools.

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2005-12-14 · 11:38

Exchange 2003 gets Common Criteria certification

I meant to blog this, but with all the other things that’ve been going on, I forgot. Exchange Server 2003 has passed the evaluation process for receiving the Common Criteria security evaluation at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4. There’s a good article at the Exchange team blog that covers the certification process and what CC certification means. Interestingly, I haven’t found any evidence that any version of Domino is CC-certified, but I probably just wasn’t using the right search terms (I note that IBM’s talked a lot about the EAL-3 version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9).

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2005-12-14 · 11:30

Microsoft releases Exchange 12 beta 1

It’s a closed private beta, but there’s some good information at their beta 1 preview site: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/preview. Expect more information after the first of the year…

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2005-12-13 · 11:20

This year’s corporate holiday gifts

In 2003, I blogged about why 3sharp chose to make donations to SmileTrain in lieu of giving our key customers some kind of food gift or tchotcke. This year, the same reasoning applies, in spades– instead of a transient goodie of some kind, we chose to make donations in our customers’ names to the New Orleans chapter of Habitat for Humanity. I haven’t figured out what I want to do for my own customers, but I think something similar is probably the best way to both thank them for their support and to do something worthwhile.

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2005-12-13 · 09:08

Nikon battery recall

Turns out that Nikon has a recall for some models of the battery used in Arlene’s camera. I just stumbled across the info on the recall today; hopefully the replacement, non-exploding, battery will get here before the holiday fu gets into full swing.</pP

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2005-12-12 · 16:24

Why I want a corn-burning furnace

Last winter, I was out on a teamup with the missionaries and we went to visit a family whose house was heated by a corn-burning stove. That’s right; it burned dried corn kernels. It worked great, too; it was probably 80° in their family room. That’s nice to consider when it’s 10° outside. My interest was recently rekindled by this WSJ article that talks about corn-fueled heating. Here’s the kicker:

Calculating the new post-Katrina prices, [Penn State professor Dennis Buffington] figures that to make a million British thermal units of heat it takes $22.64 of heating oil, $33.80 of propane or $16.47 of natural gas. But burning corn can do the job for $8.75. “The truth, in my opinion, is that corn is such a good deal that the data don’t need to be hyped,” he concludes.

The idea of being able to cut a $300/month winter heating bill to $75 or so is awfully attractive. Oh, and the exhaust smells faintly of popcorn.

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2005-12-12 · 13:33

Streaming iTunes to the Xbox 360

All my music is on my Mac. All Arlene’s music is on her Mac. I wanted to be able to stream both computers’ iTunes libraries to the Xbox 360, but– wouldn’t you know it? the 360 doesn’t support Apple’s iTunes protocol, and iTunes doesn’t support the Windows Media Connect (WMC) protocol.


My first thought was to use Virtual PC with an XP Professional image; install WMC, use Virtual PC’s “shared folder” feature, and point WMC at it. However, as I learned from wmcplayer.com, WMC requires that the Network Service pseudo-account have access to the shared folder. Apparently, Virtual PC applies some other ACL to the shared folder, so WMC wouldn’t share music from the shared folder.

Attempt #2 was more successful: I moved my iTunes music library to superman, my Windows Server 2003 file server, and pointed an alias in my Music folder to it. Then I told WMC to share \\superman\music, and boom! I was in business. I’m not sure how well this will work long-term, because I bet iTunes will dislike living on an SMB volume. For now, though, it’s great to be able to listen to my (non-DRM’d) music on the Xbox.

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2005-12-09 · 13:53

Protect Your Windows Network (Johansson & Riley)

Steve Riley is a security stud. Jesper Johansson is practically a legend. The two of them wrote a book, Protect Your Windows Network. Is it any good? Devin sure thought so; see his review.

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2005-12-07 · 12:21

Lengthen Your Stride (Kimball)

by Edward L. Kimball, Spencer W. Kimball

As an adult convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I don’t know much about church history, or about the men who served as presidents of the church before 1997. I’ve been trying to remedy that by studying the lives of the prophets, so when I was at Deseret Book in Seattle I grabbed this book, which chronicles the latter part of the life of Spencer W. Kimball. It’s a companion volume to an earlier, more comprehensive biography whose title I can’t remember.
Overall, I enjoyed this book more for the picture it gave of Kimball’s tenure as president of the church than for any one insight or vignette. The tone of the book is relentlessly positive, but I think that’s in large measure due to the nature of Kimball’s presidency– he presided during a time when the church was growing and stable, and when the 1978 revelation on granting the priesthood to all worthy men occurred, it represented a magnificent sea change that illuminated the church to a significant degree. If you’re not Mormon, you might not find this book all that interesting because it focuses on a number of “inside baseball” issues that aren’t very interesting to non-members. On the other hand, members– especially those who weren’t members during Kimball’s presidency– will find much to enjoy, even cherish, here.
(Orson Scott Card has a more detailed review of this book, in the guise of a comparison with Prince & Wright’s biography of David O. McKay.)

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2005-12-07 · 12:08

How to buy an Xbox 360 for Christmas

Herewith a few tips for scoring Xbox 360 units this holiday season. There are some out there, but it’s a merry chase indeed. (Major Nelson has already posted some stuff along these lines, but Scoble hasn’t so this may still be useful to the Xbox seekers out there..)

First, shipments. I’m not on the Xbox team, so I don’t have any inside information. It’s pretty obvious that they’re running the factories at full throttle, but that still doesn’t translate into enough units to flood every retail shelf in North America with as many units as people want to buy. If you trust the public numbers (~3 million units worldwide within 90 days of launch), it should be clear that even large numbers of units don’t translate to total market penetration. WalMart alone has over 3,700 stores in the US; if they got 10 units/store/week, that would be 37,000 units/week just for them— and they’re only one of a dozen or so tier-1 retailers whose doors people are banging on.

There’s a lot of bad information out there being spread by the retailers, which is a shame. Granted, most people know that you can’t always trust the floor staff at most stores for accurate information on anything, but the number of times I’ve been told “we won’t have any 360s until March” when calling or visiting local retailers is astonishing. I’m sure the Xbox retail interface team is doing everything they can to get the word out, but they’re fighting an uphill battle.

First, brick and mortar. I got one from our local Sams’ Club at launch. I didn’t preorder, but I did stand out in the 20° weather for two hours before they opened the doors. There are lots of anecdotal reports of small shipments to mass market retailers, but given the eBay frenzy, IMHO the odds of you getting a unit from a B&M are small; it’s too tempting for the employees to buy them and then flip them.

  • The Canadian chain of BestBuy stores will be selling units (min 10/store) on 12/9. This may help if, like me, you’re near Canada. (See the banner ad they’ve been running.)
  • The US chain of BestBuy stores supposedly will have a relaunch on 12/18. Anecdotal reports indicate that stores already have them in stock but aren’t allowed to sell them until then— they’re supposedly building inventory. (BestBuy got spanked for requiring some customers to buy their 360s in bundles, but they’ve apologized, sort of.)
  • On FatWallet, I saw a claim that WalMart would be getting between 3 and 9 units per store each week from now until Christmas. I’m sure they’re not distributed evenly between stores, as WalMart has excellent data showing where various SKUs are selling well, but this may help if you’re in a rural area or have friends who work there.

Tactics vary. Some people recommend going to the store first thing in the morning; this may work if you happen to arrive the morning after a shipment, and if the employees haven’t skua’d all the units themselves. Some retailers only get shipments overnight, while others get them at unpredictable times during the day.

(nb. I keep seeing reports that Target stores are a good place to get units. The local Target stores in NW Ohio don’t have any, and haven’t; I suspect the employees are buying them up as soon as they get off the truck. Most other retailers (e.g. GameStop, EBGames) haven’t gotten enough units to clear their pre-order list yet, although some of them are selling systems online even when their B&M stores can’t get any. )

Second, online stores often have small quantities of Xbox 360s in stock at unpredictable times. By using a tool like Webmon, you can fairly easily monitor Amazon, eToys, and other major online retailers to get immediate notification when systems are available. Amazon, for instance, has been selling a few dozen units per day, but unless you’re using a site monitoring tool (or hanging out all day at FatWallet or your preferred equivalent) you have no hope of finding one via this method.

Suggestion: make sure you’ve already got registered accounts at whatever sites you monitor so that, should you find one, you can buy it quickly. I’ve successfully ordered systems from Amazon and eToys; Barnes and Noble, Dell, JC Penney, and Kmart were all accepting orders within the past week for immediate shipment, though I don’t know if all the orders they accepted will actually be fulfilled. Of course, not all vendors who take orders will actually be able to ship them; I ordered a system from CompUSA, then got a notice today that my order was now on backorder until January. Oops.

Finally, there’s eBay. Yes, there are lots of consoles and bundles for sale there. Caveat emptor, but if you want one badly enough, this may be your best route. It appears that prices for a Premium system are still $700-900, with Core systems going from $450-600. There’s a good deal of price variability. Your best bet: find auctions that end in the middle of the night, then keep a very close eye on them to keep from getting sniped in the end.

Happy hunting!

Update: fixed a few errors in the original post and to note that some retailers that take orders can’t or won’t fill them before Christmas.

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2005-12-05 · 10:29

Creating secondary SMTP domains in Oracle

The OCS 10g documentation says you create SMTP domains by logging in to the web mail client and using the Administration tab. It also says that you won’t see that tab unless the account you use has either domain or system admin privileges. However, it doesn’t say that “domain administrator” accounts can’t actually create or remove domain objects; you have to have “system administrator” for that.

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