Saturday, October 25, 2008
done with iTunes
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I'll keep using it to sync my shuffle, but at work - where I listen to music most - I can't take it anymore. iTunes using 350 MBs of RAM? No thanks.
And the constant reminders to upgrade - sheesh! I don't need enhancements to the iTunes store. I merely have a shuffle. I actually dread buying nicer Apple hardware. Were I to get an iPod touch, I'd need to plan for running the latest version of iTunes. Surely that's a huge RAM upgrade. Screw you, Apple. Your music jukebox used to be the best. Now it sucks.
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
ms access 2007 and the network mdb file
Before I start, I want to clear the air - I know all about using front-end and back-end MDB files. I co-wrote a high-availability EDI app for a prominent paper industry manufacturer in Access, with integration into Sterling Commerce's Gentran EDI server. That application would simply have not worked without an FE/BE design. I'm also not talking about all the little spots where you can specify exclusive open access. I'm assuming you know about those already, or your diligent Google searching wouldn't have brought you here.
But what I want to post about, in order that it helps others, is using just a plain ol' .mdb file on a network share. The problem is when someone has it open, and anyone else goes to open it, it doesn't do anything at all. Double click, no response.
The problem is Access 2007. Don't believe me? Have multiple machines open the file, machines where Access 2007 has never been installed. Access 2003 will handle this just fine.
Still don't believe? Convert the file to .accdb, and have multiple Access 2007 computers open it. No problem!
Access 2007 does something different when it opens a file, and it can't see the 'shared' mode for opening when you do it across the network. I've seen a few posts that mention solving this by installing Access on the file server itself, but I don't like that idea. Not for my file server.
Do try this at home. There's your explanation, in spite of the compatibility between Access 2007 & previous versions. Unless a patch comes out and fixes it.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
also, this guy
fire! death! nudity! elgan!
Check out what Mike Elgan says about the term cloud computing:
"And
I'm sure I'll get hate mail from some of them telling me that, no,
'cloud computing' is a meaningful and useful term. It doesn't matter if
these 'cloud computing' experts disagree with me."
That's right, one blanket statement to respond to anyone with a different opinion. Beautiful.
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Server Config Template
One of the things I really enjoy doing is documentation. Other people - not so much.
I was tidying up a server configuration template I use, and decided to share. This is Creative Commons Non Commercial Share Alike licensed. Enjoy.
Server Configuration.dot - Word Template
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Monday, July 07, 2008
Panedia is really cool
Aaron Spence emailed me about a year ago to tell me about panedia:
At some point in the last year or so you left feedback on my site http://pano.com.au/wallpaper.html
regarding my free panoramic wallpaper, thanks. You may be interested
to know I've now built a wallpaper site specialising in multi monitor
wallpapers.
http://wallpaper.panedia.com
I wrote about it then, because, well, they were cool wallpapers. I found him mentioning a maps subdomain on Twitter (via FriendFeed), and it's really cool. Not sure what they're going to do with it, but it looks like a killer way to blow an hour without even realizing it. Gorgeous stuff.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Live @ Edu World
I spent the last two days at the Microsoft campus in Bellevue? Redmond? for the first Live @ Edu World conference. Live @ Edu is Microsoft's offer of free mail services for students, no ads, no fees, and yes to college rebranding.
Although some of the Microsoft presenters were a bit shaky, by the time Brad Goldstein started talking in real detail about the new Admin Panel, things got interesting. In particular, there's now two offerings:
* college rebranded Live Mail / Hotmail
* college rebranded Exchange Labs -
(basically hosted next-gen Exchange, with 10 GB mail boxes!)
The Exchange Labs part is interesting for a few reasons.
First, the Labs part means that it's a newer, edgier flavor of Exchange than is available for on site installations. Stuff the Exchange team is playing with, but - big but here - stable. Mkay?
Second, the Exchange Devs are adminning the hosting. Oh, it's supposedly hosted out of the same data centers as Live Mail is, but when you call support on it you're talking straight to the devs. That means your feature requests go right to those who can code them. Nifty.
Third, I heard from more than one attendee the rumor that Live Mail was going to be phased out in favor of the OWA/Exchange Labs action. I don't see that being a particularly believable path, as Live Mail is pretty entrenched. Remember what happened when the Live services first came out, and Microsoft attempted to drop 'Hotmail' in favor of just Windows Live Mail?
A couple other things worth noting. Angus Logan, a general manager of the Live developer platform, announced rather scatteredly that the APIs for Live were opening up. Meaning that at some point we'll be able to program a shell extension for Skydrive? Please? Bueller?
There was also a little room where three members of an unnamed team were asking what we'd like to see in a Learning Management Software, or LMS. They denied that Microsoft was entering the space, but it was all coy smiles.
I enjoyed the presentation by UW & Penn U about how they implemented the mail system. Penn U's Chris Mustazza did a good presentation and was interesting to talk to before & afterwards, as well. I also chatted with Jen Gay from Drexel - she's as interested as I am in doing something useful with Skydrive & Office Live Workspaces, the hosted Sharepoint service on Live now.
One last bit. They had a Surface table there. I got to spend about 30 minutes alone playing with it. While it was fun, I came away from it with the distinct impression that it's a solution searching for a problem. Navigation is pretty intuitive, like the iPhone. Touch gestures, etc. But it's definitely jerkier than the iPhone. Let me repeat that a different way, using the quote feature -
An in-development touch-interface product the size of a coffee table doesn't work as smooth as the touch-interface iPhone that shipped almost two years ago.
-- Ralph Hogaboom, on Microsoft's Surface Table Computer
Don't get me wrong, it's neat tech. But I almost forgot about it as soon as I left it. The only thing I got from it was bragging rights for touching one.
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Friday, June 13, 2008
Death by log files
Our school uses a fairly niche proxy
server for securing access to a bunch of online periodicals - stuff
students can use for research. It's a simple little server, the kind of
set-it-and-forget-it stuff that just keeps working.
So when I
logged in the other day to review the log file, I was surprised - this
server (EZProxy) creates ezproxy.log, but never clears it. I had events
going back to 2006, before I worked here. Someone set it and forgot it,
and now there was a text file that was over 114 MBs.
You should
never have a text file this big. It took Notepad a really long time to
open it, and it hurt the server. Something had to be done to fix this,
before the log file became useless, threatened the proxy server
system's stability, or both.
Obviously, starting with a batch file kicked off from a scheduled task is one clean way to do it.
net stop ezproxy
move c:\ezproxy\ezproxy.log "c:\ezproxy\ezproxy-log-%date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.txt"
net start ezproxy
This
stops the service using the log file, and renames the file with a date
stamp of YYYYMMDD. Then it restarts the service, which automatically
creates a new log file.
Then, I set a scheduled task to kick it off at 1 am on the first day of every month. That should take care of that.
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008
This is not a beautiful mess
Sometimes it just hurts my head that Microsoft puts out so little thought to a consistent, friendly desktop environment.
 Compare the tabs in Internet Explorer to those in Visual Web Developer. Or the menu options in Live Messenger to, well, anything else. Or the Office ribbon - hey, I love that thing, but it just doesn't mesh with the rest of the mess.
And the Add Font dialog box is circa Windows 3.1? When does that get updated?
Some Tuesdays my heart just hurts. Such a mess.
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Friday, May 23, 2008
Xobni really is nice
I've been using Xobni in Outlook for a couple weeks now, and - like Launchy - am starting to find it invisibly valuable. You know, like I just assume its there as part of my regular workflow. Only to be jarred conscious of its absense on another machine.
Xobni is an email analyzer, operating as a plug in in Outlook 2003 & 2007. I rely on its search constantly. If you haven't tried it, give it a go. Search is the best part, but the amalgamation of so many bits of useful info make it nice.
xobni.com
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Newegg
I don't have purchasing power here, but I did at my last employer. I once added up all the sales orders I'd placed at just one vendor, Newegg.com, for the company throughout one year - it totalled over $20,000. So it's fair to say I have some experience ordering from Newegg.
A little over a month ago, I saw they had a video contest. So I entered - as of today, I'm on the main page. I dare say I fancy my video the best. That's Jasmine Dickhoff in my video, and she really does work at Casa Mia & is the youngest ever member of Hoquiam's city council. Not too shabby :)
http://promotions.newegg.com/videocontest/view/index.html
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Monday, May 19, 2008
No Better Than This
Some Mondays, it doesn't get any better than this.
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Thursday, May 01, 2008
Windows Live Mesh
Joel Spolsky does a fabulous job of explaining the problems with Live Mesh, Microsoft's recently announced cloud computing platform. And blasting Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, along the way.
It's been interesting to see the reaction to Ozzie. He kinda came out of nowhere when Groove got bought, and next thing I know he's taking over Bill Gates' position? What, exactly, does he do?
Apparently syncing software. Read Joel's post first. Then read the announcement on dev.live.com.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Live @ EDU update
 Last summer, we tested Microsoft's Live @ Edu platform, which turned into our Fall quarter launch of Chokermail. Basically, it's a rebranded Windows Live account. With any Passport Passport.NET Hotmail Windows Live account, however, participants get access to many of the web-based tools that frame the Live initiative. Here's a few you might not know about.
* Skydrive. Launched last year, Microsoft offers 5 GBs shared space with your account. That dwarfs the 10 MBs offered on our Novell servers for student accounts on campus. Plus, you can access it at home.
* Office Live Workspace. Sharepoint on the web, basically. Not too shabby, but you benefit the most when you also install the little Office 2k3/2k7 add-in to open from the HTTP location.
* Calendar. In beta now, a snazzy new calendar to complement your Chokermail.
Of course, we continue to offer Chokermail email, Spaces, and Instant Messenger. And if you're interested but have questions regarding these three services I outlined above, let me know or stop by. I'm happy to answer any questions you've got.
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Thursday, April 17, 2008
bring it on
Joel Spolsky used to work for Microsoft, as a PM for the Excel team. He now runs a company called Fog Creek Software, and blogs fairly regularly. He's got a bit of that Raymond Chen "Why Microsoft Did XYZ" in him that makes for happy geek reading.
But when he announces a new product, I take notice. I remember seeing his posts about Copilot, his remote assistance software. Basically, they were to take VNC and do some grooming and offer it as a cheap service. He had his summer interns build it a few years ago, and I've used it quite a few times now.
It flat-out rocks.
So I read with happy-happy-joy-joy that he's working on a new project. It looks designed to take on the experts-exchange.com results that pop up in Google, and for which the Google Cache is working less and less reliably. I really like where Joel is headed with this, as I am one of those lame part-time coders who does the hit-or-miss snippets found online. This could be great.
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Monday, April 14, 2008
Dual screen wallpaper
I don't know how long Panedia's been at it, but I check nearly every day for a new dual-screen wallpaper. They're pretty, and they keep my desktop feeling nice. Worth a go if you're rolling the dual screen setup at work or at home.
http://wallpaper.panedia.com/
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Ad-Hoc Green Committee Ride Share @ GHC
Our college has had a green committee for about half a year as far as I can tell. I signed on by email to our campus operations manager, and from what I can tell this involves participating in the weekly sustainability tips sent out to the campus.
I've had this idea for a project I'd like to contribute to the college called GHC Ride Finder. Initially, this would be open only to staff & faculty, but eventually would be available for students to coordinate rides with each other as well.
Image courtesy * Jerry * on Flickr.
Ride finder would use one of those glossy, gorgeous web 2.0 interfaces that puts usability first. It would ask a series of questions in order to connect riders with drivers to get people to and from the college.
Are you: Looking for a ride, or do you Want to share a ride?
Where do you live? Monte, North Aberdeen, West Aberdeen, East Hoquiam, North Hoquiam, Elma, Central Park, Raymond, McCleary?
What day(s) are you interested in rides?
When do you need to leave, and when do you need to return?
We found $result matches for these days. Are you ready to email this/these contacts to arrange a ride share?
I'm pretty interested in exploring this. I could make it using ASP, but I've been putting off learning ASP.NET for too many years now. Also, I'm not seeking permission to do this on work time. This would be a private labor of love. I think I'll get started tomorrow at lunch time - I just spent this lunch writing my idea down here :)
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Monday, April 07, 2008
Thank you for calling Aruba Support, my name is Senthil how can I help you today?
 One thing I like about Aruba is how they treat international support
staff, specifically the Indian tech support at the other end of the
1-800 number.
The first way I notice this is the names I am given.
"Hello,
my name is Senthil with Aruba support. How can I help you today?" It's
a thick accent, but it's refreshing. I can't stand it when someone
tells me his name is "Bob" and the name sounds unfamiliar, even to him.
Another
cool thing is the accessibility of each support person. I get their
email address for direct contact. This tells me that Aruba trusts its
staff, and gives ownership of their indivual cases, not altogether
uncommon in tech support but welcome nonetheless.
There's still
some barriers, the accent being one. It's sometimes difficult for me to
understand what's being said. But that's well documented in ranting
forums and blog posts. For now, it's good enough to keep me happy.
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Spring Break
GHC's spring break has been nice and quiet this year. The previous weekend (week, really) was the oddest mix of sun/slattering rain/hail. The cold blue sky is a welcome change.
Behind the 200 building, the 800 building on the left looking up to the 300 on the right
Although the breaks between quarters are a nice respite from a 'production' environment, there's still staff here. I updated the firmware on three major campus switches last Saturday, not something I could do during the week. When I worked at the Port Townsend Paper Mill, once a year we'd do our Down. A Down is when the mill is not making paper. All the big machinery is serviced, oiled, etc. It's a tightly scheduled time of cleaning out equipment that must run flawlessly for another 364 more days. This is a big deal for a company that measures uptime as directly making money. A Down was a big deal.
At the college, production time is measured differently. In fact, rebooting the mail server during regular business hours has happened three or four times in the past year, unheard of at the mill. Although we had some unplanned outages at Skookum, it was fairly unheard of there, as well.
I'm planning on doing some automation of the student email system, mapping out more of our infrastructure to help contain bandwidth costs & document it, and work on wireless at our extension campuses. It's a welcome break.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
ORDB and the Mysterious Production of Spam
One of the ways people protect against spam is to keep track of where it's coming from. That sounds simple enough, but it's a tremendous job. One of these lists has been dead for a long while now, but mysteriously came back to life yesterday morning. When it did, it claimed everything was spam. At GHC, that meant that somewhere around a third of all incoming email was being returned as though it was coming from a spammer.
We get attacks, hundreds of attacks, on our mail server(s) every hour. Sophisticated software called bots, zombies, or scripts running on thousands of remote computers all over the world is constantly trying the locks on the doors of our servers. Checking passwors, sneaking around. Spam is a really big problem, even leading some to claim that Email is Fundamentally Broken. That was back in 2003. There's loads more spammers today.
Real Time Block Lists, or RBLs, are one way to fight it. A RBL is just such a list of mail servers that send spam. Let's say someone sets up an email server, say, in France. This might be a mom and pop business, maybe a garden & pet store like Marshall's here in Aberdeen. But this person isn't a full time IT person, they happened to know a bit about computers, and they got shoehorned into the position. This actually happens pretty often.
So they misconfigure the server, and it is possible for anyone to send email through it. Anyone in the world. Again, this is not uncommon.
Then a spammer finds it, through the bots and zombies and scripts that are constantly looking for ways to send spam. And they start using it.
Someone is eventually going to report that server to the RBL companies. Report them as what's called an Open Relay, a mail server that is promiscious. It sends mail for anybody.
Once they're on the list, and they try sending mail to someone at GHC.edu, that email first has to approach our mail server. It does this by EHLO or HELO, identifying where it is from and to whom it is addressed.
The mail server reads where the email originated and compares that to any listings from the RBL. If there's a match, the message is returned. Mail from open relays is probably spam, and so it's declined. If this was a legitimate email, the sender might call you. "I tried to email you and it came back." The returned mail usually states why. "... reason: 550 5.7.1 134.121.x.x has been blocked by ORDB ..." Once human interaction is involved, the sender can find the misconfiguration, fix it, and apply to get the RBL listing removed.
The problem for us was that one of our RBLs, ORDB, went offline a long time ago. But that listing wasn't removed from our spam filters, because we didn't know it went offline. The ORDB was a volunteer organization, who called in quits at the end of 2006. While its unclear why they started responding to each request as "Yes, that email is from an open relay," the effect was significant. "Ralph, give me a call," my boss' voice said on the answering machine (I was home sick). "We have a serious email problem." Awhile later, the same boss identified the ORDB listing and removed it. Problem solved, email flows again. That leaves us with two RBLs.
Both Slashdot & ITWire reported on this today. And the beat goes on.
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