Tinker's Folly

Great post on Facebook Cookies

2011-12-15T11:07:00.002-05:00

User had a problem today with FB 'forgetting' her machine when she logged in each day. Needless to say this same issue also affected her Citrix environment for hosted applications (something work related:-).

A random search turned up this:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/facebook-fixes-logout-issue-explains-cookies

And she got a helpful pop up from FB itself "seeing this message often?"
In IE, "delete browsing history on exit" was checked. It is not clear to me that
that means cookies (darned confusing MS nomenclature again...) But sure enough
uncheck it and the cookies persist.

And away we go, into the sunset!

Windows 8 first impressions

2011-09-15T09:56:00.014-04:00

We downloaded Windows 8 and loaded it up in a Virtualbox (generates a HAL error in VMWare). Good impressions from VirtualBox - first time I've used it...

As to Windows 8 - it seems pretty polished for a developer pre-release.

The main things for a traditional environment considering future use:

Yes the keyboard and mouse work. But the start menu does not have a programs list.

Yes there is still a desktop, but you have to go looking for it.

The Vista era control panel stuff is still there. 8 seems much like Win 7, except program launching seems to be handled from the Metro interface (but perhaps only for Metro aware programs). The Metro side says 'Start'. So perhaps the tiles are like program icons in the (old) Start Menu? The Start menu is accessed by going down into the left bottom corner, like in a 1 pixel by 1 pixel area. There are no program groups under the Start menu, at least on the demo. There were none after installing a Win32 application, either.

Win32 (x86) apps still run - good for compatibility perhaps bad for security (perhaps larger attack surface)

This means that launching legacy programs will take you to shortcuts on the desktop - unless things change. That's a little confusing. It's kind of like saying "hey, I hear you don't use Widgets? Well guess what, now they're right in front on you ALL THE TIME! You'll use them now!"

We were able to put the machine up on the domain. Yay. Better for testing apps!

Start Menu

Cemetery software never dies...

Strange effect, log out with a Silverlight video running. Can't log back in, the keyboard seems to be remapped. ("b" = "Enter") Onscreen keyboard acts the same...
Not sure how to duplicate that one!

User Profiles and Virtualism

2011-03-30T11:44:00.004-04:00

We are in deep annoyance with Roaming Profiles. So we looked for alternatives and came up with RES Workspace Composer. A very capable product, with a nice user interface. But it requires a server backend, and here the complexity was simply too much for our small environment. Sigh.

Along the way I have stumbled into AppSense which looks good but also requires a server backend, and LiquidWare's profile unity - apparently some polish on an OpenSource tool called ScriptStart Community. These tools store the profile information in the file system.
The older tool is not upwards compatible beyond W2K3 and XP. I found out about it from a blog entry on using Roaming Profiles with a Samba server: Windows User Profiles with a Samba Server

Another odd issue is how profiles tend to grow in size. Helge at Sepago has written some very helpful articles on this, liked here: User Profile Design

Interesting stuff!

IE 9 First Impressions

2011-03-02T22:14:00.002-05:00

IE 9 First Impressions:

Much cleaner than IE 8 (the ask me a million times browser)
No more 'accelerators' (you want to do WHAT?)
No more '20 questions'

However, it gives a Javascript VOID when pressing a simple submit button in blogger.

It's a lot better, but that means now I HAVE to load Chrome and IE9 to get through
life. Feh. Well, it was a nice try.

Tivo Disk and Tableau Imager

2011-03-02T21:48:00.007-05:00

Drop Box

As part of this week's SANS 408 course, I have been looking for a hard drive to grab an image from. The several drives I brought to the class were clean.

Looking for an old hard drive to try mounting on my Write Blocker to grab an image...
Let's try the old Tivo! Cool, it mounts, but of course windows does recognize its Linux goodnesss...
But, even so FTK Imager can grab an image from the disk.

That's an improvement over the others so far. So an exercise for exploration, really.

My old Seagate (486 era) drive causes an error in FTK imager (byte offset).
The Tivo is unrecognized.

Perhaps the higher end commercial tools recognize these different types of drive formats?
But if not there is quite an opportunity to make software that can handle all these weird old formats.
(Non-IDE drives, what do you do with those?)

What about archival applications?

Start a Small everything movement - From 43 things...

2010-08-10T22:43:00.002-04:00

p1ng

Start a small everything movement

How to start a movement to re-purpose consumerism towards a no waste society

Modern economics is based on economic growth. Economic growth is based on making products that are designed to fail (aka planned obsolescence), and as a result are designed to waste resources and energy. Consumer spending is tied to marketing which effectively distorts our wants and needs towards products which do not fulfill our basic needs (in the aggregate).

So called ‘Green’ products are still creating waste. For example buying a new hybrid car creates more waste (due to the additional manufacturing of the new vehicle) than maintaining an older car.

Could there be an entire industry of higher priced ‘lifetime’ products? Could these products be manufactured locally, in small facilities that pay real wages? Engineering would still be centralized in this model, as information is cheap to ship. But the ecological cost of shipping products from overseas would be used rather than pure financial cost in justifying sourcing decisions.

Sounds like a book :-)

What they don't tell you about installing Windows 7 from a Flash Drive

2010-07-13T15:44:00.004-04:00

Installing Windows from a USB drive is supposed to be faster than installing from a CD/DVD.

To load a Windows ISO file onto a USB drive requires formatting the drive, two out of three online descriptions of the process require formatting the drive as NTFS.

USB flash drives by default are set to 'optimize for quick removal' in Win XP (properties, policy tab) - which means you can't format the drive as NTFS.

Change the mode to 'optimize for performance' to allow formatting the drive as NTFS.

>>Details

This default causes the Microsoft Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to fail to format the usb drive as bootable. And when I tried to boot my PC I got the error message "NTLDR is missing".

When using the Microsoft Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to create a bootable flash drive - there is no indication that the formatting failed - it just doesn't boot properly.

But changing the properties of the drive first seems to do the trick...

Two days later... Apparently when I try to format a drive it may require loading bootsect.exe into the directory of the ISO Tool. Here is where I found it:

http://grandstreamdreams.blogspot.com/2009/11/sexy-usb-boots-win-pe-style.html

Thanks for the posting!

BES Express upgrade from BES 4.1

2010-05-10T18:46:00.000-04:00

The good the bad and the ugly:

No upgrade path for the free version.

Good: It's FREE! A nice new version of BES, administer via a web browser. You can downgrade your data plan to use a simple data plan instead of a BES data plan from your carrier - but you lose over the air activation. The web site says the downloaded software includes one free tech support call (which you'll probably need :-).
Bad: Product confusion - BB Tech support thought there was no wipe handheld feature, but they researched it and found the feature... Under manage users, you need to click on the PIN number to show the feature.
Ugly: Takes an entire day to install and then you'll want to call BlackBerry to resolve the issues you have left. But reading and following the docs is the hardest part. Ugly: Users requested that I load some back email to the devices and there is a feature limited to 14 days and 200 messages. I didn't get that to work properly.

Having a VM with the 4.1 BES installed on it, I went through the following process to upgrade my installation:

Create a snapshot of the existing machine.
Check the requirements documents. Note that 9/10 of the requirements are the same between 4.1.6 and 5.0. Had some confusion over the CDO version 1.21 - the install document recommends installing a new file version that is not applicable to Exchange 2003. In this case the existing CDO file version 6.5.7654.12 is the correct one. The requirements doc leads me to believe that I need 1.5GB RAM for my base configuration - 8 users. But it continues to run fine with 700MB RAM, on Windows Server 2003 SP2.
Remove BES, Remove SQL Express.
Walk through the installation process.
BES Express is up and I can access it - Yay!
Troubleshoot remaining issues: Set an activation password and enter it on the device, the email is sent and I can see it in OWA. However the BES is not picking it up. Turns out that while I was uninstalling BES 4.1.6 - the email account information for my BESAdmin account was removed from Active Directory. Set up the account for Exchange access and made sure it was not hidden from the GAL. Then checked the ability to manage a user's mailbox using c:\program files\research in motion\blackberry enterprise server\iemstest.
Create a user, delete the user and can't re-create the user. Had to debug the download from corporate directory feature (the BESAdmin account issue). Also the user interface is confusing - if you delete a user and are trying to recreate it - the best thing to try is to go under create user, and search with no entries. You may get back a list of entries in the Global Address List. Check the user in that list. If you try to create a user who is already in the 'Corporate Directory' which has been imported from GAL - then you will get an error message.
Voila! All is running.

Numbered Policy Docs and MS Word

2009-12-22T09:35:00.001-05:00

In the BLAME THE TOOL category, stands Microsoft Word 2007.

Now, I got over the sticker shock, and I got everyone trained up on Office.
Were' getting along with the annoying Ribbon interface. But Word's numbering, styles and numbered lists are the most pain I have willingly subjected myself to in a long time. (That's saying something since I just shoveled out from a blizzard.)

I've spent a few days writing policies now, computer security stuff. But I have spent more time trying to get Word to do anything useful. And this is the end. I need another tool. Html alone will do an easier job for this.

The emperor has no clothes. Maybe the answer is to write this stuff with GoogleDocs.

I just can't believe Word 2007 is so totally lame after so long. The numbering interface is just awful. Touch one thing and everything else in the doc is screwed up. EEEEEEEVVILLLL,

Intel DG31DL Power Settings

2009-07-07T15:49:00.001-04:00

This motherboard is pretty easy to set up for WOL, but it came from the shop with S1 standby mode enabled. We really want S3 standby mode. My Kill-a-Watt meter shows the following on this average core duo machine:

On	S5 (Off)	S3 (Sleep)	S1 (Sleep)
67 Watts	6.03 Watts	7.37 Watts	40.2 Watts

So trolling throughthe BIOS we find:

On Board LAN is on

Wake on LAN from S5 is Power On

EIST (speed step) is enabled for additional power savings

Suspend state is S3

The 'Wake system from S5' option is a clock based startup feature (disabled)

Back in the windows NIC adaptor properties:

The power management tab is showing, so WOL is enabled in the BIOS.

Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power is checked

(wake on lan still seems to work anyway)

Allow the device to bring the computer out of standby is checked.

Only allow management stations to bring the computer out of standby is checked.

(wake on lan still is tested to work)

A couple more settings in Windows:

Here on the advanced tab we can check that only "Magic Packet" is selected and not "Directed Packet" which tends to bring the machine out of standby any time it receives a broadcast packet.

This is the Wake on Link setting. It's disabled. Strange idea. Suppose you could boot 100 or 1,000 PCs by just turning on your network hub this way.

Intel D865GLC

2009-07-07T13:38:00.000-04:00

Had trouble finding documentation on how to set up Wake On LAN with an Intel motherboard. We've got a few different motherboards so I will try to document them here.

Here are some BIOS settings to take advantage of WOL and standby mode on the Intel D865GLC motherboard...

BIOS Screen:

Plug and Play OS needs to be enabled.

This enables the power management tab in the NIC driver settings under windows.

OnBoard LAN enabled

The Power management settings are hidden under ACPI:

We are using the S3 sleep mode.

And Wake on LAN is set to Power On.

We want to disable USB Boot for security reasons...

If there is an option to wake the PC from USB, that may be used to allow the mouse to wake the PC from S3 sleep mode. But sometimes it causes the PC to come out of sleep mode when that was not desired. This BIOS does not have that option...

Now we just have to set the NIC power management settings in Windows.

Note you get the power management tab in the adaptor properties.

It's hidden unless you turn Wake on LAN on in the BIOS under ACPI.

We turn on Wake on Magic Packet and disable directed packet. (Leaving directed packet on causes our PCs to boot themselves as soon at the NIC receives a broadcast packet. About 30 seconds after shutdown...)

That should do it. Now test from a management station or magic packet software to be sure it works.

CITRIX Customer Service? What's that?

2009-04-28T16:35:00.000-04:00

Amazing to me that the largest growing trend in Customer service today is having the agent hang up on you and close the case.

Citrix support is awful. I understand why they steer you to a reseller.

They've renamed the products such that no-one understands what they do.

And then, the (admittedly very nice sounding) customer service person just hangs up on me.

I'd believe this was random telephone line issue. But I logged a case last week and they have never contacted me to resolve it at all. This time the agent closed the case after he hung up on me (I checked online).

This just rankles. Idiots.

The product works. But the support contract is worthless.

I won't be recommending Citrix anytime soon. Sassin frassin robots!

Micro-Lending as a Stimulus

2009-01-26T02:29:00.000-05:00

The president is continuing to implement an economic stimulus program. A program of epic proportions. But from what we hear on the news, much of this money will not have an effect on the economy for years to come. What could perhaps help would be a government sponsored program of Micro-Lending.

These loans would come in two sizes:
Small personal loans to individuals, from $100 - $1000. The idea is to create a simple way for individuals to make a very small loan, one that is smaller than those normally offered by banks.

Larger 'micro loans' to businesses, from $1000 - $10000. Here the idea is to provide cash for small businesses to establish themselves, or invest as seed money in a new product idea.

Rather than run the program directly, the government could choose a banking provider to administrate the loan program. The program would be implemented in line with economic research on micro-lending, particularly to establish the needed scale of the program and to use guidelines in place in existing micro-lending programs to prevent abuse.

Government itself would provide the seed money to establish the program. But the program would ultimately be self-funded based on revenue from the lending activity.

Don't delay the DTV Conversion

2009-01-26T02:01:00.000-05:00

It seems odd to me that some are saying members of the public are not aware of the upcoming DTV conversion. If you watch TV in the US, you have been inundated with messages about upgrading your television to receive the new digital signals for months now.

A coupon program has been running for months to provide discounts on equipment needed to receive the new signals. Some members of congress argue that we should delay the February deadline because the coupon program ran out of funds. We all knew it would run out of funds eventually. So why is it that congress doesn't just increase the funds available for coupons? That makes more sense than delaying a transition that has been well communicated already, and creating confusion in the process.

Come on people, get back to work on something more meaningful than this red herring!

---

Update: the delay turned out to be a good thing. Massachusetts really had minor troubles wiht the transition, but apparently there were many areas of the country which benefitted from the delay and the additional coupons made available.

Virtualization: A threat to the O/S?

2009-01-04T17:31:00.000-05:00

Some recent press has referred to virtualization and browser based applications as a threat to the operating system. As an IT Manager - having lived through a few technology waves - I think the arguments that are being made are unrealistic.

Today's Windows machines have Flash ROM that contains the BIOS code, the low level functions that are required to start a machine and figure out where the actual boot code resides. When they boot up they generaly flail around until they access a boot image - which most often is on a hard drive (but could be on a network drive, or a CD).

If we go to the extreme of providing a Hypervisor on the machine, then we can run virtual machines (various O/S') on top of the Hypervisor without loading Windows or Linux first.
This is great for flexibility, but you'll notice that it doesn't reduce your licensing costs with Microsoft or whomever. It also doesn't reduce the security vulnerability of your box - in fact it increases the threat surface by the number of VMs that are running at once! You might be able to use a snapshot to restore quickly if you are compromised, but that's the only security benefit.

The problem is that virtualizing an O/S just brings you more of the same. All the software related management costs come along with each instantiated machine, along with some additional complexity due to running VMs.

But there is an opportunity here for a different kind of virtualization to make an impact.
A couple examples might make this clear.

1) Take a look at how BitTorrent streams files to multiple recipients. The network traffic is comprised of tiny slices of the file that come to you from many different directions. The BT application breaks the files into slices for shipment and at the client reassembles them into a recognizable file. What is created is close to an internet SAN - but a fairly slow one.

2) SETI at home, and other applications, make use of compute time on internet connected
computers. This "free" CPU resource is used to solve very large problems.

Now what if network speeds reach the point where we can store the boot image for our PCs in the "cloud". Perhaps you would keep a local cached copy of the boot image and refresh it every time you start up the machine. We might be able to produce an O/S that is never "installed" on a PC. The machine could simply run BOOTP - if there were a server waiting to provide the software load.

Well... Of course replacing everyone's home PC with a BOOTP loaded machine is impractical - much as it means that now Verizon and Comcast will have to get in the O/S provisioning business. And there is the little problem of loading the OS down in the clear via TFTP.
Yikes!

But what could happen is that we could create a storage network that runs on the excess capacity of other machines that share their bandwidth. Then, home machines would run a modified BOOTP over something like Bittorrent. The boot loader comes over the wire.

Well - how is this better than what we have today?

I think anything you load at boot time like this would have to be fairly small.
It could be about as complicated as Mac OS 6 - a basic stable OS, but with a browser
built in. But if the OS is not affected by loading programs, and everything is run in a browser
window, then we can reduce the threat of infection to software on the machine (since that would be replaced at each boot)

Need a lot of refinement, of course, but I can see where this might be headed!

Letter to the president-elect

2008-12-29T03:25:00.000-05:00

Dear President-elect Obama,

Its the end of a challenging year for the United States and the world.

And like many, I am writing to you with a wish list for the new administration.

Let me suggest something a little different...

1) Encourage Americans to save their money rather than spend it.

The recent expansion of the economy was fueled by spending on credit. And many of those gains are now being lost, homeowners literaly losing their homes, in part because of an excess of credit.

We have heard some people talk about spending to boost the economy, but what we realy need to do is to encourage the development of a nation of savers.

More than that, we need to encourage investment in small business. To a degree, the downward pressure on real wages has been caused by massive consolidation of retail, banking and service industries. Small business is the backbone of the American economy. We need to do whatever we can to encourage small business. And we need to stop relying on big business as the partner of government to the disadvantage of small businesses.

2) Stop using the tax code as a political instrument.

The Federal tax code is too complicated and inefficient. Congress continues to use the tax code as a policy instrument to suit political fashion. Others have said that tax breaks have become the political equivalent of crack cocaine. So in the interest of transparency, and efficient government, have the GAO estimate what people really pay today (with all the breaks); and change the system so there is a graduated tax and no deductions. Eliminate all tax breaks and remove tax policy from the political spectrum. Much as it will hurt my own family, stop providing a tax incentive to families with children.

If you want to implement a policy change, just do it directly instead of manipulating the tax code.

For example, if you want to continue to subsidize families with children, write them checks.

Or, set up a discount program to promote alternative energy, like the current program with TV converter boxes.

3) Simplify health care.

Simplify health care and ensure that everyone has access to it.

Don't enact a system like we have here in Massachusetts, which attempts to cover everyone while protecting private insurers. HMO's and health insurers exist to deny coverage, not to provide it. We pay a greatly inflated price for health care because of the burden of insurance and inefficient billing practises. If we intend to provide health coverage for everyone, then what is the point of playing the averages from one pool of subscribers against another? Business will be much better off without the burden of providing and complying with increasingly out of control health coverage costs. More than that, people should have the ability to control their coverage, rather than employers and there should be no price difference for an individual outside of a pool to receive coverage.

4) Do something simple about immigration.

Create an expanded program for migrant farm workers. Eliminate the competition for H1-B visas between the tech sector and the agricultural sector by creating a seperate program for farm workers. Find a policy that can normalize the number of immigrants over the long term, recognizing that we all share some responsibility for the current situation, and protecting the families that have grown here.

That's my wish list for the new administration.

Good luck!

Tell Me is telling me something

2008-10-28T12:45:00.000-04:00

How many prompts does it take to get to a sales person at Verizon?

The nice sounding voice sounds like the voice of Tell Me, the same automated system

that is behind the free toll free directory.

She isn't much help when the menu requires 6 prompts to get a human.

I give up and try "agent" and end up in the tech support queue.

At last, they transfer me to the right department.

The website doesn't have the details I need... Have to talk to a person, who is

hidden behind the great wall of automation.

The actual people are nice, when you get to talk to them.

Comcast has more humans. Maybe I shouldn't switch after all...

How to reduce spam?

2008-09-26T14:51:00.001-04:00

Roger Grimes wrote an interesting article in InfoWorld today, regarding how the domain registration system and large ISPs are not doing enough to fight spam.

Article here:

Helping spammers do a better job

http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3673515/250581110/141365/0/

One reader brought back the idea that we should charge for email to reduce spam. I wrote a response on one scenario to make it happen:

ICANN was set up to prevent overly harsh or biased regulation of domain registration. That does mean than anyone with a credit card can become a domain squatter, or a porn star. That is the price of free speech.
We all wanted domain registration to be managed by a non governmental, non-partisan entity. That means ICANN has very little recourse to fight bad behavior.

So lets say that we should place a fee on sending email. Make it much smaller, like 1/2 cent, or .1 cent per message. Who would collect the fee? Would the message be a 'bonded' message?

I could envision national post offices offering a 'bonded' email service. And then spam filters would be engineered to whitelist the 'bonded sender' messages. The messages don't need to run through postal service machines, they just need to be authenticated against postal service machines.

Probably we would end up with traditional email running alongside 'bonded' email as the market for it develops.

This is entirely technically feasible. It is a business case to develop and deploy.
AOL offers 'bonded' email, Microsoft enhances Outlook to offer 'bonded' email, gmail offers 'bonded email', etc.

It replaces revenue the postal service is losing, the messages do not transit the postal service (i.e. they are not exposed to added snooping by the government), and it helps to ensure the sender is legitimate. (Or at least paid to spam us all)

Computers scanned at Customs? Boycott the studios...

2008-09-18T13:01:00.000-04:00

I wrote this in response to a discussion on TechRepublic.

The original video on TechRepublic

The Comments Thread

Customs Issues (Boycott the studios!)

I think its a stretch to hire, train and equip overloaded customs agents with the ability to inspect computer files. I don't agree with the direction of this law, but I believe the point of it is that there is no requirement for a court order to search files. In the current environment it would be used to inspect computers when the agent saw a need.

Its downfall lies in the future when some neanderthal politician declares that a port scanner is an illegal tool.

The modern day equivalent of bringing someone in for having a carpenter's toolbox in the car.

Let's say customs implements automated scanning software to find 'illegal' files, the customs agent has no knowledge what the files are, she just runs a scan. "Ahem. Sir, please stand over there..." And your teenager gets stopped for Beyonce videos...

Then they will let her in, but make a record of all the potentially illegal media on her PC. The studios fight to gain access to that. Someone stores the log file in perpetuity.

In response, average people will start running installations that have a 'vanilla' Windows installation - leaving the rest of the disk encrypted with the real juice hidden from a casual scan. There is lots of software already heading in this direction. People want it so that they can hide their internet porn from family members and law enforcement.

Keyloggers are being sold today for spouses to spy on each other online. And of course the studios are the porn industry. "Give 'em what they want."

Not too far a stretch to see this having the effect that the government is encouraging individuals to learn how to be espionage agents.

There really are three choices.
1) Give up all your electronics.
2) Live with arbitrary laws that exist only to make big companies money. (But at the end of the day you know cancer is a bigger worry than Disney and even Microsoft...)
3) Become Ted Kazinsky (without the bombs, please).

Myself, I am heading towards #1 from #2. I would rather stop listening to music than jump through hoops to get it onto my MP3 player without copy protection.

I am reluctant to fund the studios that are lobbying for these restrictive laws.

Besides, that leaves us a few bucks to send to our local college radio stations. College radio plays what they like - not controlled by the studios 'idea' of what will sell...

2008 Write-in candidtate!

2008-09-18T12:57:00.001-04:00

Dear Socks,

Al Gore has left us for the Ozone layer...
Would you consider the presidency for 2008?

The electorate is polarized, Hillary (R-e-member Hillary?);
Huckabee, McCain, Obama. Ron Paul - another guy with two first names!

Socks! Come back to us!
We recall the economic prosperity of the Socks era...

Pre- 9/11... Pre 01/20/2009

Come back to us, all is forgiven! (Even that spot on the carpet...)

A PV on every porch!

2008-09-18T12:44:00.000-04:00

Today we face an 'economic slowdown' due to the lack of regulation in the mortgage industry.

Recent news stories have discussed the cost of phantom power drain on the US electrical grid.

So - here's a proposal for everyone: get a cash bonus for installing enough PV electrical generation capacity on your roof to offset the power drain from the average house.

The idea is not without ecological detractors... Here is my post on the metafilter:
http://ask.metafilter.com/82689/Average-geek-home-power-drain

Oh!, The pain, the pain...

2008-09-18T12:42:00.000-04:00

Dr. Smith from the old "Lost in Space" had a tagline "Oh, the pain... The pain!"

The ultimate whiner. But this is what comes to mind when I think of Office 2007 installations. Its enough to consider early retirement! The main thing I _thought_ would be difficult with the new Office was the redesigned user interface. I work on a campus - we have people at all levels of skill. I was worried about training them up - because everyone in the software universe seems to think that training is not an issue. (Everyone I talk to who has Office 2007 says that they don't know where anything is!)

Guess what? The user interface is not a problem. We will get through this. I think. Training is next week...

What concerns me now is deployment. Leaving aside the fact that security concerns have broken any of the built in deployment stuff in Active Directory...

Annoyance #1 Office Professional Plus takes 1/2 hour to install! What a pig! The setup routine claims that it will uninstall previous versions. Not true. It doesn't uninstall Office 97. Ugly mess it makes. Oh well, time to go. Wife over shoulder, New Year's eve. And don't suggest Open Office. Talk about a pig. Almost as bad...

Office 2007 Install Pain

2008-09-18T12:40:00.000-04:00

More tips n' tricks here... We've been running Office 2007 since the spring now...

Training: Our on-site office training was - awesome!
I was learning tricks I had never used before from previous versions. Well worth the effort.
Train people the same day as their installation. A great suggestion from our training partners. They get back to their desk and have to use the training right away.
Customized classes for different levels of students. All day MS Office overview for the 'information workers'. Half day classes for the folks who drive trucks around, prune trees, grow things in our greenhouse.
A few high end trainings sessions for the remainder.
In total we trained 55 users over the course of four days, leaving Friday for in depth training sessions that were optional.
Mandatory Training. Excellent idea. We're paying to have someone come on site. To get the greatest value out of the training we need to insist that employees attend.
Expectations: Don't expect the 'troubled trainees' to learn anything more than the basics...
Training got them up to speed, but can't help them remember what a style is, or to use tables instead of spaces to line up text.
Implementation:
We spent a lot of money to get the pricey 'corporate' version of Office 2007, because it includes the "administrative" install feature that Office 97 included at no charge in the OEM release of the software. The customization utility is buggy and the results are pretty messy. The customization utility crashes when selecting certain settings.
(Save frequently!) And then the transforms don't seem to take effect anyway.
Were I to do this again, I might go with shrinkwrap or OEM software.
We couldn't seriously consider Software Assurance (aka highway robbery).
The savings could easily pay for a KBOX to do the roll-out...
At the end of the project, I discovered that the Office 2003 Resource Kit has a tool that properly removes Office 97. Office 97 never seems to uninstall cleanly otherwise.
We have many buggy machines as a result of incomplete removal of Office 97.
Removing Office '97 when the installer can't find the source...
Also, in case you're trying to update the installation source for an administrative install of Office 97 - so you can run the uninstall later once the administrative share has changed location... Look for a file ending in ".STM" on the C drive, there's a line in there that seems to do the trick.

Exchange 2003 DST Updates Crib Sheet

2007-03-01T07:17:00.000-05:00

Update OS patches on servers
1. Taking care regarding security patches to Exchange and their effect on BES, or any other 3rd party email connector. http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=912918.
Update OS patches on clients. WSUS is your friend!
Use time zone edit tool (tzedit) on non-supported machines (Win NT)
1. Tell everyone NOT to update their calendars once the patches are installed on the clients.
Patch the exchange server
Patch BES server with the exchange server patch (Exchange System Manager on BES server)
1. There are no patches required for the Blackberry Enterprise Server itself.
2. Get and install Blackberry Handheld patches.
Run the Exchange Calendar Update Tool (from a client machine or virutal machine)
1. The tool has two parts, a GUI shell msextmzcfg.exe and the command line tool MsExTmz.exe. You need to get the LegacyDSN for the Exchange server to run the tool. It was found using adsi and checking the Exchange server object in Active Directory. Ours is: ServerDN=/o=COMPANY/ou=ADMINGROUP/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SERVERNAME
2. Run the GUI tool, which will step you through the process of creating batch files for the command line tool. 1st extract the list of mailboxes, then create batch files to update calendar entries in each. The GUI steps you all the way through this.
3. You have a choice of updating recurring appointments. You will want to do this if your users have scheduled all day appointments that are now starting an hour into the previous day. We said "yes".
4. Make sure to locate the executeable for Outlook. Outlook 11 is in a different directory than Outlook 12.
5. Download and install the Office Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool, and specify its location.
Given all of the above, the Exchange time zone update tool creates a batch file in a directory with the server's name. Run the batch file to update each mailbox using the client side Outlook update tool. This is a single threaded operation.
1. Microsoft provides a downloadable virtual machine to facilitate multiple mailboxes to be updated at the same time. Scaling will require a serious evaluation of practical update speeds. (50 mailboxes with modest calendar usage took about 20 minutes in a single thread)
1. Check the log files that the batch process produced.
2. Remind everyone to check their calendar entries for the two target date ranges.
3. Let everyone start updating their calendars.

The Microsoft Way - All Hail Vista!

2007-03-01T06:30:00.000-05:00

Sound of trumpets...
But wait? The king is wearing no clothes?

I presented a technology vision for our modest non-profit to the Powers that Be (PTB)

The PTB were unimpressed.

I am unimpressed myself, with the Microsoft environment.
(They were just unimpressed with me, I think :-)

Vista doesn't go where I need it to go. There is a lot of smoke around manageability,but we're still talking about a system that is at its core not centrally managed. There's an Active Directory, and its a good thing its "Active" because it has to scurry around and customize a bazillion mystery settings on each desktop to make them all play nice.

The whole thing strikes me as a reactively designed house of cards.
Mega-Customer X "I want to turn menus blue on Tuesday"
Microsoft "Set the registry value adsfasdfasfdsf to 1"

The recent DST update showed exactly how kludgey the whole thing is.
Good news: Yes there is a centrally administered update for Exchange.
Bad news: How does it work? It generates a batch file that is run on a client, impersonating each user and correcting their calendar items. Total kludge. And slow as heck. Single threaded (eeeeeeeeeeeeewww!) Microsoft addressed that by releasing a Virtual machine, so you can run the kludgey batch file on more "virtual processors"

Just STOP people!

So... Where does my meandering rant go?
The new version of MS Office has a "server" vision. Yes it is no longer good enough to put files in the file system, files now need a Sharepoint server.... And perhaps we'll get there, too, but it won't happen because anyone I am trying to sell it to will "get" the vision.

More glazed eyes than an iguana convention...

Ah, well, back to looking at "open source" for document management :-)

Take control of stress...

2007-02-28T22:22:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of things you can do about stress…

Meditation is great, though sometimes people just start stressing about meditation:

“I am supposed to be meditating.. Oh *x%x!! , I’m screwing it up!!!”

I think as you grow older sometimes you just slow down a bit also. Always remember that if things stink right now, they will change soon.

Sometimes it helps to distract yourself from whatever is bothering you. Like, go to a movie, or go for a walk.

Working out is good, but it helps to find a gym where everything is low key. (Not a new stress-inducer) Sometimes after a workout is a good time to meditate.

Always take your lunch out of the office.

Yoga and Tai Chi are great, also Tae Kwon Doe is really relaxing – after you’re done kicking things…

See more progress on: List 10 tips from things I have learned the hard way for the next generation

Kettle Calls the Kettle Black?

2007-02-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

So... The San Francisco Chronicle quotes a study that says internet data center power consumption amounts to 1.2 percent of all US energy consumption. (See David Margulius, Infoworld.com, 2/26/07)

As Margulius says, this doesn't account for how much energy is used by the US
computer infrastructure aside from internet data centers.

Here is a abstract from a report issued in 2000 by the US DOE:
The major consumer electronics in U.S. homes accounted for over 10 percent of U.S. residential electricity consumption, which is comparable to the electricity consumed by refrigerators or lighting. We attribute 3.6 percent to video products, 3.3 percent to home office equipment, and 1.8 percent to audio products. Televisions use more energy than any other single product category, but computer energy use now ranks second and is likely to continue growing. In all, consumer electronics consumed 110 THw in the U.S. in 1999, over 60 percent of which was consumed while the products were not in use.

The energystar website gives some interesting factoids...
The article "How Small Devices are Having a Big Impact on U.S. Utility Bills" focuses on what the increasing integration of electronics does to energy consumption.

In 2005 "Electronics products accounted for about 13% [0.585 quads] of total home electric consumption [4.5 quads]; almost three times the level in 1980"

By 2015 "Electronics products alone will account for 18% [0.972 quads] of total home electric consumption [5.4 quads]."

Yikes! Just under one fifth of all home electricity consumption will be consumed to run home electronics.

(1 quad = 1 quadrillion British Thermal Units [Btu] = 1.06 exajoules [1x10¹⁸ joules].)

So what's the total run up here?

Back to the Chronicle:

"According to the study, servers and the infrastructure used to maintain these machines use about 45 billion kilowatt hours a year.

The United States consumed 3,661 billion kilowatt hours, or nearly $300 billion, in 2005."

Home electronics consumed about 0.585 quads...

OK, now to do a lot of conversion and then I wonder - what about office electronics?

It seems like this is still a big number, though the point of the Chronicle article is that it is not as high as anticipated.

More later...