October 2005 - Posts

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.

I love Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.  I link to it quite often if I mention something in passing and don’t want to explain it.  I also reference it quite a bit.  LifeHacker posted an article about Wikipedia that includes a tutorial on contributing to it.  It also answers some common questions about the process of writing for it and what controls exist to protect users from bad information.

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.

After my last post about it, I was looking at IceRocket.  I remembered Mark Cuban posting about it when he got involved with them, but I had never used it.  I’m pretty impressed.  It had my last flurry of posts indexed up to about fifteen minutes ago.  I don’t know how often they crawl, so it might have been good luck. At any rate, check it out if you think about it.

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’m a bit of a junkie when it comes to who is reading my blog and where the referrals are coming from.  I was just looking at my referral log and saw a hit that came in from the IceRocket Blog search engine.  Much to my surprise, it was a search for the exact dollar amount my blog was worth, $564.64.  How odd is that?  I’m not complaining though.  I have a reader! 

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.

Star Wars: Kids | Revenge of the Halloween Masks

Need a costume for Halloween but you're just not sure which Star Wars character you'd like to be? Download and print these Revenge of the Sith masks created especially for starwars.com by Star Wars illustrators and artists.

Those of you who use TypePad probably know that performance hasn’t been very good over the past few weeks.  Mena Trott posted a detailed explanation of the problem, as well as some light at the end of the tunnel.  They’re in the middle of a datacenter move and things aren’t going as well as planned.

Can you imagine what things would be like if everyone was honest about their service problems?  I’m having some problems with Rod’s favorite cellular network, but it’s hard to get a straight answer.  Wouldn’t it be better if companies would just tell us when they’re having issues with their service?  I’m sure part of it, if not all, is purely economic.  If Cingular posted a status page that said half the towers are down in my area, they would have a flood of people asking for a refund for their service that they didn’t really get.  As it stands now, they just have to point fingers at everything outside of their network.

We get the same treatment from so many sources, so we’ve come to accept it to a certain extent.   

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Ben and Mena Trott say they are sorry

If you’re a Blackberry junkie, or a Google Maps junkie, you might want to check this out. It can do all of the basic map manipulation functions, like zoom and move, as well as switch to satellite mode.

BlackBerry Cool » New Blackberry Google Maps Software

I didn’t realize that the new version of the .NET framework also shipped today.  Just something else to add to the pile of things I don’t have time to deploy!

MSFN - Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 Final

Shel Israel posted that he believes blogging, at this point, is like e-mail was before it was a standard part of our everyday lives.  It seems like a good analogy, at least on the surface.  The lager portion of his post reflects on the idea that people who are thinking of starting a blog are unsure of what they’ll talk about.  I certainly have struggled with that.

My original e-mail to Rod about blogging here said that I wanted to share my day-to-day problems and solutions.  I slipped away from that at some point.  I was feeling a bit uninspired by my normal operations, mainly because I didn’t think they were particularly worthy of sharing with the world.  I don’t want to go into things outside of technology here, so it was at a bit of a crossroads.

I have come to realize that even some of the minutia of daily admin life can be blogworthy.  Not everything, mind you.  Most people don’t care about the fact that I added two columns to a report today.  I don’t blame them.  It wasn’t all that interesting to me either.  I’m trying to get back on track, though.  I’ll be spending more quality time writing posts, so you should see more coming soon.

Who knows, I might even catch Chris’s blog worth

Naked Conversations: Why Starting a Blog is Like Starting Email

Microsoft released the redistributable version of VSTO 2005 today.  For those of you unaware of the technology, it allows developers to create Office documents that keep code and data seperate by interfacing with an external database.  Its one of the technologies behind Microsoft’s smart client implementation.  You can read more about VSTO here.

Download details: VSTO 2005 Redistributable Package

My blog is worth $564.64.  I’ll take cash, money orders, and cashier’s checks.

How much is your blog worth?

I get the most interesting e-mail some times.  My manager just sent me this link a few minutes ago.  If you search for two locations, such as Atlanta and San Diego (my trip to MMS this year), Google lets you shop for flights.  Pretty basic, but it lets you enter dates and it feeds them to the links it provides.

John Battelle's Searchblog: New Google Travel Teaser

I read about these breifly on the Training and Certification page at Microsoft.com.  The changes to the developer certifications look good.  They identify what specialty the certification is in, such as web or Windows development.  It looks like their is a more defined structure to the MCP cert, which has become the Technology Specialist certification.  Looks like fun!

MSFN - Microsoft Learning Launches a New Generation of Certifications

Microsoft Corp. today announced a new three-tiered certification program that provides valuable training and credentials for IT professionals and developers. The new certifications, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, Microsoft Certified IT Professional or Professional Developer, and Microsoft Certified Architect, map closely to Microsoft’s technology road map and better reflect the changing IT environment and the needs of individuals and organizations.

The first credentials will be offered for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, which will be available next month, to help Microsoft customers and partners more readily and rapidly adopt these new technologies. Partners will also be able to take advantage of a new level of integration between Microsoft Learning and the Microsoft Partner Program, which will let them apply Microsoft Certified Professional certifications toward multiple Microsoft Solution Competencies.

Katy posted a great entry about organizing your DVD collection, including software to use.  I have a ton of DVDs, so I find the idea very interesting.  I started, but never actually finished cataloging all of mine.  I spend too much time reading about getting organized to actually do something about it.

Flipping Heck! - A blog by an angry Web Developer

The main thing thing to consider when deciding on how you're going to organise your collection is how it will be stored. If you're putting them in boxes then it may be better to organise by Genre rather than Alphabetically, if you're using slotted shelves then sorting Alphabetically could be a pain as you'd have to move each DVD down a notch if you buy a new one starting with "A".

We need a MyITForum Frappr! group.  Think Flickr + Google Maps.  It might be interesting.

Frappr!

Interesting.  NumSum is a sharable, web-based spreadsheet application.  It has limited functionality, but does include the most commonly used spreadsheet functions.  There is a code generator to add a created spreadsheet to a web page, so you could include one in a blog post.  You can also flag them as private, so you could theoretically maintain any data you wanted in there.

Num Sum: web spreadsheets

John posted about this earlier, but I found a post linking a screenshot of the front page.  This should be a bit more than just a classified service though.  I’m expecting there to be some level of premium advertising that will be available later on, but for now, I’m guessing we will here comparisons to Craigslist.

You have to give it to Google, they know how to make a splash.

Google Base Was Sort of Live

Quoting from Dirson’s screenshot of the login screen:
“Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.”

John posted an interesting response to the iPod with video.  The first thing to remember is that the video functionality is essentially free when compared to the last generation iPod.  The price is exactly the same. 

Don’t get too hung up on the video aspect of it.  It is still primarily a music player.  It just happens to have some decent video playback capability.  Your point about the size is valid.  Apple isn’t pushing any feature length content either, so that may be a bit of recognition on their part.  A screen that size is more geared toward movie trailers and music videos.   TV shows are pushing the limits of comfort in my opinion.

I don't get it...

You pay $300 for 30 GB, and $400 for 60 GB. Is it the price? I can get a 3.7” PMC for slightly more, so it must be the price.

ArsTechnica posted a nice tour of MSH.  It isn’t too in-depth, but its a good starting point for those of you who are interested.

A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell : Page 1

This is a moderately technical overview and it contains content that may be difficult for nonprogrammers to grasp, so those of you that don't have a background in software development may want to skip around and ignore some of the technical details. Rest assured, there is plenty of content here for regular users and system administrators as well as coders. The code samples are instructive by themselves, so if you get really bored, perusal of the examples will illuminate many of the features of MSH and save you some time.

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