So, Jim has ratted me out: he noticed that I'm scheduled to give an Exchange 14-related session at Exchange Connections in November. In a probably-feeble attempt to avoid the wrath of Microsoft's NDA police, the truth is, I submitted that session proposal nearly six months ago. At that time, I had the expectation that I'd be free to talk about Exchange 14 by November. However, the product is still under NDA, and probably still will be by then, so I'll be presenting another session instead, topic TBD. Sorry to disappoint...
It's hard to believe it's been two weeks since my last posting here (and, at that, it was a short rumination on vegetables.) Since my last post, a lot has happened:
Of course, it wasn't all drudgery; I watched the LSU-Auburn game with Mom, Arlene, and the boys, played a bit of Rock Band 2, and so on. I hope to get back on a more regular posting schedule. There are certainly a lot of developments in the unified communications world to talk about!
From the "I knew it" department: eating vegetables makes your brain shrink.
I grew up in Louisiana. In a state where people are buried above ground to keep their corpses from floating off, basements aren't very common. My grandparents live in Alexandria, in the central part of the state. Their house had a basement, the entrance to which was a 3' x 6' trap door behind the wet bar. Entering the basement was always a big event. There were all sorts of wonderful things down there: mysterious jars of cannery products, stacks of yellowed old newspapers, piles of ancient National Geographic back issues, and so on. That's what I thought a basement should be like: rare, mysterious, a little scary, but ultimately familiar.
When my parents moved to Perrysburg, the house they bought had a big unfinished basement. Dad quickly filled it with woodworking tools, a huge L-shaped workbench, and a small finished office stuffed with every kind of ham radio you can imagine. Many of the tools in the basement were familiar: there was the old red air compressor that I'd used for hundreds of hours while refinishing and repainting cars, and the ancient Zenith Transoceanic that we used to listen to the BBC and WWV while out at the fishing camp he built way down on the bayou. There was scrap wood, and an old dresser from my boyhood that had repurposed for component storage, and a bookshelf full of solvents and cleaners and various other hazards. In short, it was a familiar place for both of us, filled with things we understood and knew the measure of. We spent probably a hundred hours building a bed for David (a project which, truth be told, would have taken him maybe 15 hours had he done it without my inexpert help).
Of course, the basement was more than a workshop; it was somewhat of a gathering place. Julie, Tim, Arlene, and I would go down there at Christmas time to wrap presents, safe from the running feet and peeping eyes of the kids. Traditionally we'd go out shopping with the old man on Christmas Eve and come back laden with his selections, which of course he wasn't going to wrap himself. The boys would go downstairs and sit on his lap while he twiddled radio knobs, asking questions so fast that he couldn't finish the answer to one before the next one popped out.
Now, a year after his death, the basement is mostly empty. The woodworking tools are gone, parceled out to people with the knowledge and space to use them. The remaining radios sit silent. The workbench is mostly clean, although both the air compressor and the Zenith remain. I took the tools and supplies that I could use, knowing that as I maintain and use them that I'm preserving some small part of the things he taught me. It's a lonely place now, and one that I avoid. I miss him terribly sometimes, but never more so when I go down those steps, past the framed pictures of Tim and I in dress blues, under the "I (heart) my truck" license plate, and into that basement: no longer mysterious, no longer even familiar.
Great article on the Exchange team blog from mobility guy Adam Glick: it's all about how to block classes of devices that you don't want connecting to your Exchange server. You can already turn Exchange ActiveSync on and off for individual users, and you can allow or deny individual devices for those users. However, those solutions are best if you want to block a known-bad user or a known-bad device. If you want to block, say, all iPhones (or all BlackBerry devices, or all Nokias, or whatever), Adam outlines an easy solution for doing so.
I've written about phone number normalization a bit before, but OCS MVP Jeff Schertz has a more detailed how-to guide. It's interesting that the documentation for LCS on this topic was poor, and it didn't get any better for OCS 2007. Maybe it'll improve for R2?
Fellow Exchange MVP Jason Sherry has written a very useful script that will gather a bunch of information about your transaction logs, including how many of them you have across your servers and the rate of growth in log creation. This is a great way to keep tabs on what your logs are doing.
Cue the tiny violins: a federal judge ruled that Oracle "destroyed or failed to preserve Chief Executive Larry Ellison's e-mail files sought as evidence in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2001 against the software maker." The alleged destruction (or failure, depending on how you look at it) happened in 2006-- well after Oracle touted archiving features in Oracle Collaboration Suite. Ooops.
Via USA Today, this note on the Huntsville airport: not only is HSV expanding, but they've got contingency plans for a "sudden-growth scenario" like the arrival of a low-cost carrier. On the other hand, TOL has lost all its Delta service, meaning that I'll be making the drive to DTW much more often (well, at least until the DL-NW merger). This is probably a pretty good symbol of the overall difference between the local economies in both cities.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column highlighting Microsoft's announcement of their Exchange 2007 virtualization strategy. I just found out that the team that owns the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) has announced their virtualization policy... and it's a good one! Basically, they'll support ISA and TMG on virtualization solutions that are part of the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP)-- including Hyper-V.
The full document is here. Here's the money graf:
This will make both ISA and TMG much more palatable to a wide variety of customers, particularly in the SMB space. I'm looking forward to redeploying ISA (which I haven't been using for a few years) now that it won't cost me a server's worth of electricity to use.
Update: this VMware press release says that VMware ESX has passed the SVVP. This is huge news given that it essentially means Microsoft is now supporting Exchange, ISA, and TMG on the most widely deployed virtualization platforms-- welcome air cover for all the folks who have been doing it for a while now :)
I recently needed a case for my iPhone 3G. I had a CaseLogic slip case for my original iPhone, and it was a solid "OK": a little clunky, a little ugly, but enough to get the job done. I wanted something with less bulk. On the advice of a few iPhone-toting friends, I decided to try the Switcheasy Capsule Rebel. Verdict: I love it. It looks great, and it provides an excellent tactile feel. It doesn't feel slippery, slimy, or slick. Highly recommended.
Wow! This puts Arlene's complaints about my snoring in a whole new light. Apparently, heavy snoring is a risk factor for carotid atherosclerosis, as measured by an Austrian research team. Better keep an eye on that (or an ear!)
It's always fun to joust with my friend Bob Thompson, who is perhaps the most libertarian libertarian I know. Sadly, I think he's flat-out wrong about food allergy warnings. I admit to being biased; my wife is gluten-intolerant and I have other relatives (and friends) who suffer from various kinds of nut allergy.
The problem with the current labeling standard is this: there is no standard. Quick: what's the difference between "may contain", "made in the same factory with", and "produced on the same equipment with"? If I have three products with those labels, how can I tell which one(s) (if any) are OK to bring home? The existing US law, FALCPA, requires manufacturers to label products that contain certain allergens. Manufacturers have voluntarily been adding "may contain"-style warnings to reduce their liability-- but there's no standard for doing so, and this is resulting in a lot of needless hassle for the producers and consumers.
On the gluten-free front, there is an existing EU standard for deciding which products may be labeled as "gluten-free", based solely on measured gluten content in the final product. The FDA is in the process of adopting it, which I think is great: it gives people a tangible indicator of whether something is safe to eat, or not, irrespective of where and how it was produced. Until then, I don't see how standardizing on a labeling phrase could possibly be a bad thing. In fact, if I'm going to have the government spending money on regulations, better they should do it for food safety than on firearms or political contributions.
[ taking a cue from the LDS Young Men's blog, I decided to start keeping a blog of our notable mutual and young men's activities. No pictures yet, though! ]
Last night, we had a great activity for the young men and young women in our ward. (Note to non-Mormon readers: when we do a combined activity for the YM and YW together, it's called "mutual night" or a "mutual activity", or even a "combined activity".) The weather was forecast to be good, so our YW president invited another local ward to join us for a rousing game of Gold Rush, a game that pits "bandits" armed with squirt guns against "miners" who are trying to collect gold from a field. Get squirted, and you have to drop your gold. Tag a bandit, and he goes to jail and has to sing a song to get out again.
We had six or seven bandits and probably around 40-50 kids. Some of them were a little timid at first, but everyone got into the game after a short while. We saw some groups of kids who would cooperate to evade the bandits, while others relied on their superior running speed to get to the bank before getting squirted. There's not that much strategy on the bandits' part (apart from not running out of water in your squirt gun). It was a blast!
I got some mail yesterday from Google about their recent Google Apps service outage. Here it is, along with my editorial comments.
Well-deserved public commentary, at that, mostly focused on the question of why Google thinks that Google Apps is an enterprise-grade service. Three outages in a nine-day period is not confidence-building.
Notice what's missing here: any commitment to a particular level of availability, or any information about the cause of the outage, or any information about how they applied "focused discipline" to keep it from happening again.
So let me get this straight: in exchange for three days of outages (in fairness, not three complete outages), you're going to give me a credit for $25/user. That's not a bad start, but I daresay for most Google Apps customers it's only a small fraction of their lost productivity. Not to mention that I might not want a service credit in the first place.
Positive steps, but note that there's no definite delivery date. Note also the weasel language around how "assuring you" is the useful thing to do. No, fixing the problem is the useful thing to do, followed closely by timely and informative status reports. Just look at what Twitter does, then do the opposite. (Actually, for a decent model, check out how the Xbox Live service folks handle outages.)
This is more like it! However, my business always requires this detailed information. Who says so? I do. I'm betting that Google will closely control this information, and that they will only provide it if they think your business requires such information.
Translated: "if you take heat for our outages, we'll be happy to get on the phone and help spin the problem so we don't lose your account."
While tech editing an article by Tony Redmond on Exchange transport back pressure, I wanted to look up the value of a setting in EdgeTransport.exe.config. Here's the best guide I've found to the settings in that file.
This is a pretty sweet deal: Amazon will sell you a Kindle for $259 if you apply for (and qualify for, it must be said) their Amazon-branded credit card from Chase. See details here. (Bonus link: James Fallows on how to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore).
Yay! We finally have a supported version of Exchange System Manager that runs on Vista. Get it here.
I've decided to give Twitter a try. So far, I'm following Chris, Ed Brill, Erica, and Al Tompkins. Follow me here.
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