Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

I hope your battery life is better than our first tester.  We hit a whopping four hours of battery life, with the screen on a middle backlight setting, no WiFi or Bluetooth, and OMA set to sync every 20 minutes.  We have a new one coming, so I'll let you know how it goes.  Other than that, its a great device.  We don't have our Exchange 2003 SP2 envirionment up to 100% in the lab yet, so I'm dying to see how DirectPush works.

Tim

For those of you waiting on the device, it looks like Tuesday is the day.

BlackBerry 8700c gets a price: $299.99 from Cingular - Engadget - www.engadget.com

MSFN - Windows "Monad" Shell Beta 2 (for .NET Framework 2.0 RC/RTM) x86

Windows "Monad" Shell is a new interactive command-line and task-based scripting technology in Windows that enables administrators to more efficiently and securely automate and control system management tasks on both desktops and servers. "Monad" Shell provides powerful task-based control (via built-in command line tools and utilities) and a powerful scripting language that enables comprehensive scripted control of the Windows operating system and applications.

Microsoft is taking on Adobe head-on with XPS, a new electronic paper format that is clearly targeted at Adobe’s PDF standard.  It looks like Microsoft will be including creation support in the Office 12 applications with a viewer coming shortly thereafter.

On Microsoft Publisher and more : Save as XPS in Office “12”

What is XPS?
XPS, or the XML Paper Specification, is Microsoft’s new electronic paper format for exchanging documents in their final forms. This Office feature provides a one-way export from Office client applications to an application- and platform-independent, paginated format. More information on XPS is available on Andy Simonds’ blog and at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/.

If you have opted to use server shares for your Distribution Points instead of the default DP, be aware of this issue.  If the name of the share begins with SMS and ends with $ and SMS is in the comment field, SMS won’t distribute software to it.  It will, instead, distribute to its default share.

Package distribution to a custom shared folder does not work in Systems Management Server 2003

When you use a custom shared folder as a distribution point in Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, SMS 2003 Distribution Manager may not distribute packages to the custom shared folder. Additionally, the following error status message may appear in Status Message Viewer:
SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 2346 SMS Distribution Manager failed to distribute package PackageName.
Possible cause: The specified share is a hidden SMS share. Solution: Specify a different share name on the Data Access tab of the Package Properties dialog box in the SMS Administrator console.

We recently had a CD-RW drive in one of our G4s die.  The Mac was running Panther, so we didn’t think too much about what drive to buy.  We typically buy Pioneer DVD+-RW drives, which is what Apple uses in the PowerMac line.  Unfortuantely, we purchased a drive that was newer than the drivers in Panther. 

Since we’re not ready to migrate to Tiger, we went looking for other solutions.  We found Patchburn, which updates MacOS with support for more drives that included by default.  We haven’t had any problems with the system, so it seems to be a great solution to the problem.

Patchburn Homepage

PatchBurn is a tool to patch existing CD/DVD-drivers (under Mac-OS X 10.2.x) or to generate and install new device profiles (under Mac-OS 10.3.x and later)
It allows many, otherwise unsupported burners to be used directly with Mac-OS X, iTunes and DiscBurner.

No comment.

BlackBerry Cool » Need a Halloween Costume … Become a Blackberry?

I have no love for Oracle.  I spent a week installing Oracle at a location my company acquired because they were using an ancient version.  I saw hieroglyphs in there I think.  Anyway, a couple of researchers presented some flaws they found, as well as a utility they used to uncover passwords.

Oracle password system comes under fire | CNET News.com

Wright and Cid identified several vulnerabilities, including a weak hashing mechanism and a lack of case preservation--all passwords are converted to uppercase characters before calculating the hash.
"By exploiting these weaknesses, an adversary with limited resources can mount an attack that would reveal the plain text password from the hash for a known user," Wright and Cid wrote in their paper.

This should keep you busy for a while.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

Back to my point about corporate communication, Tim Oliveri, Google’s Product Marketing Manager, posted a short response to the flood of speculation about Google Base.  Nothing new to say really, but at least they said something.  It beats a dead air.

Official Google Blog: Rumor of the day

I ran into this today, but there wasn’t much good information out there for it.  When installing Office 2003 Service Pack 2, one of our users got error 1328. 

The text of the error is Error 1328. Error applying patch to file TMP. It has probably been updated by other means, and can no longer be modified by this patch. For more information contact your patch vendor.

I tried a detect and repair as well as a reinstall, but no luck.  Then I remembered that I was using the client version of the installer.  I downloaded the Full File upgrade and everything went very smoothly.  I can assume that there was something wrong with the MSO cache, but I’m not sure what.  If you know more about this error, feel free to let me know.

My manager loves articles like this, so he sends them every time he gets a chance.  The basic formula is ‘You’re trying to do action x and the system does the exact opposite’.  

Make sure the account you run your SharePoint install with has Log in as a batch job and Log on as a service user rights.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is removed when you try to install SharePoint Portal Server 2003

SYMPTOMS
When you try to install Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is uninstalled. Additionally, the Setup.exe process uses 100 percent of CPU resources.