Illuminatea

This holiday weekend, I finally accomplished a task I've been meaning to do for a while: I got rid of my email. More precisely, I'm no longer hosting my email domains on my own server here in the house like I have been for the past eight years. I've finally made the switch to hosted email. With all of the free email domains out there, this may ...

I don't remember which day it was two weeks ago that I discovered that my web server was no longer accepting queries, but I do remember the distinct annoyance I felt when I got home from work, made my way through the back room to the computer rack, logged on to the management console, and saw that the server was powered off. That's nothing to the ...

Steph alerted me to the existence of a very cool product -- a dock for Macbook Pro laptops that stands them vertically. This has two advantages: saves desktop space and promotes better cooling. Macbook Pro machines are industrious heat generators and you have to be really careful about what kind of surface you leave them on. I've found that mine ...

Stupid website, but it gives me a chance to taunt my co-worker Kevin. This morning I got a puzzled e-mail from him, asking me why this picture of me in Sydney from February (yes, that's Sydney, Australia; we were there for training for work) was the most-viewed picture in his online galleries (warning, probably not a worksafe gallery). I have no ...

Email clients need to be more intelligent. For example, I can appreciate the Request Read Receipt feature that Outlook/Exchange and other email systems offer; it makes sense in a corporate environment, or when sending correspondence with business partners. However, all bets are off once you starting emailing the Internet in general. Why, oh why, ...

The speaker just said, and I quote, ''regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward.'' That's, um, well, interesting. And wrong.

I've been using Mac OS X for a couple of years now and I just today learned about Quicksilver, thanks to an offhand comment in a friend's blog. Holy crap -- Quicksilver is so incredibly scrumptious and I'm not even running it yet! Haven't even downloaded it -- I've only got 10.3 on my Mac mini and the Macbook Pro is on 10.4. Apparently, I can't ...

Okay, I have a question for you Mac users out there.Say you've got a Macbook Pro with an 80GB hard drive. Due to the accumulation of data, including a 30GB Boot Camp partition, you'd really like to upgrade the hard drive. Let's also say you can (or have) acquired a compatible hard drive 160GB or larger. What software would you need to move your ...

Apple sells gift cards that can be redeemed online or in their physical stores. So far, so good. Apple sells gift certificates for iTunes -- both phsycial and email versions. So far, so good. A friend got me a $50 Apple Gift Card for Christmas. So far, awesome. Apple won't allow my to use my Gift Card to buy songs off iTunes. ...

I refer you all now to the truth about switching, a nice little blog post that is refreshingly clear of hype and hyperbole. Now that we're all on the same page, on to my additional commentary. Too true. It's a lot more friendly, though, than it used to be. I credit the steady barrage of laptops with the ubiquitous Apple logo on TV and ...

I wrote up a posting yesterday for my work blog about the recently proposed SAFETY Act, a lovely bit of proposed legislation from some Republican Representatives who basically are handing the Attorney General's office an open license on the Internet. Rather than duplicate it here, I'll just link you. And lest you think this is a sad, ...

Big conference, lots of geeks. With two laptops and a Windows Mobile cellphone, I'm not at all unusual here. The conference organizers have wisely established free Wi-Fi for us all. Well, guys, that's a great start, but how about you give us some bandwidth? I've had faster connections over my old 300 baud modem.  

...in my last post when I said this was the year of the outage. About the time Steph and I tried to get the domain controller back online, we had a completely unrelated bit of breakage take down the blog server for another several weeks. Finally tracked it down and fixed it this weekend, and in the process fixed more of the cruft on the ...

It's been an awfully long time since I last posted, hasn't it? As you may have guessed by now, it is because of, yet again, another computer outage at home. In this case, my Windows domain controller hard drive died. Dead. Kaput. Spins No More. Dances With Boat Anchors. It's an old IBM Deskstar hard drive, which I'd somehow ...

While I'm waiting for the last test to finish up (late night at work, but sometimes that's what you do), I upgraded to Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 1. SP1 was just released Monday. So far, so good. My Mac is sure being awfully slow, though. 

I just discovered an amusing typo in a technical document. Instead of a section on prerequisites, it has a section on perquisites. Okay, so it's not earth-shaking, but I got a much-needed chuckle. Now off to brew a pot of peppermint herbal tea to share with my office mate. 

Oy vey. We've been Slashdotted. Let's see if our T-1 and web server can hold up. 

Today, my company released a report comparing several anti-phishing technologies, including a beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. I note this because I was one of the researchers and authors of the report. Needless to say, we're already catching a lot of flack in the press because we scored IE7 the highest of the various ...

Boy howdy, that was quite an excessively long break.That'll teach me to patch my servers! You see, back in late August, I was being a good server admin and making sure all of my servers had the latest patches on them. The last server I updated was my blog server (hosting the web server plus the database that holds my Community Server install as ...

''My computer can beat up your computer.'' What a load of horse hockey. I've long been tired of the whole PC vs. Mac vs. Intel vs. AMD vs. RISC vs. Windows vs. UNIX vs. Linux rat race, and was finally motivated to sum my precise feelings yesterday when commenting on a friend's computer plans: Computers are tools, not religious icons or penis ...

The current project I'm on at work? I've decided it needs a new name. I'm henceforth calling it Operation Zeno's Paradox. You know you're in trouble when you've finally found a solution to a roadblock that is keeping you from finishing a major portion of your project, serendipity has dropped a convenient piece of hardware in your lap with ...

I've reached another milestone on my personal plan for world domination: my first tech magazine article has been published. I talk more about it over on my work blog.

I should have known, from first thing yesterday morning, what kind of day it was going to be. Starting with sleeping through the alarm I'd set so I could get up and get a headstart to a long day, right through trying to change the roll of toilet paper and ending up by dropping the fresh roll into the toilet bowl, I had signs it was going to be a ...

When I did my last round of server and desktop deployments here at the house[1], I tried to set up each of my servers (Windows Server 2003) with at least 256MB of RAM and each of the desktops (Windows XP Pro) with 512MB. That may sound backwards, but I was working with what I could scrounge and frankly, the desktops in this house do a lot ...

Today, I did something I'd never done before. It was risky and a bit scary, and I don't recommend it as a general procedure for everyone. Yes, I upgrade my new Window Mobile Pocket PC. What made it risky was that I upgraded it to the ROM images that didn't come from my manufacturer, but rather from that of a similar device. In fact, there are ...

Dang. I just pulled off something tonight that makes me wonder if Apple wasn't in fact smoking crack when they decided to drop the PowerPC processor in favor of moving to Pentiums. My little Mac mini -- 512MB of RAM, 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 CPU, was able to effortlessly (and I mean without a single slip, skip, hesitation, or bobble) do all of the ...

Back last year, I got my first Mac. I've been using it for the better part of a year now and am pretty happy with it overall. I'm using Microsoft Entourage for my email/calendar software instead Apple's mail and calendar software, since I need to interact with not one, not two, but three separate Exchange accounts and Entourage (unlike Outlook) ...

Chapter 3 of my DCAR ebook is now online, details on my work blog. If you need to read about these things, enjoy.

If you're wondering what I'm going to be up to this spring, wonder no more! Get thee hence to the Looking forward to Exchange Connections Spring 2006 post on my work blog and find out!

Both kids woke up with an excess of phlegm, so we kept them home from school today. Sounds like a good day for them to work on updating their web sites and blogs, especially since I just handed out the URLs to the members of my family. In other news, Microsoft has produced printed versions of one of the solutions I worked on in 2004, the Windows ...