Pick D

I’ve got this nice warm feeling inside after someone managed to put a smile on my face, once again. Time hasn’t even made a scratch.

That’s a prayer answered. Thank you, God.

Fingers

1. You absolutely have to take a look at Caffeine, if you’re into doing presentations or screening movies. A screensaver, even if it’s mesmerizing flurry or the beautiful iA Web Trend Map, is not good.
2. Someone at 37 signals has a take on why he uses Mac OS X as his client and Linux on his servers. I’ve been asked this question a lot over the past year plus I’ve owned my Mac, and I usually point to security problems and OS instabilities on Windows. Just to shock and awe those who’ve never met a Mac, I bring out the flashy Keynote presentation I keep around just for this purpose – but frankly, I don’t use all those fancy effects and transitions in my real presentations. I believe that presentations is about the speaker and the message, and not necessarily in that order.
3. Write a program, fix a problem, in a language that you don’t know – and stand to win an ipod nano. Give it a try – this is different from Cisco trying to steal your idea.
4. The eye-fi wireless SD card is absolutely amazing. I dare to say that it’s the first of its kind – if it’s not, it’s the best marketing I’ve seen. The use case they outline, a live photo stream at a function, is mind blowing. I would absolutely love that Now, since it looks like this isn’t some repackaged made-in-China OEM product, let’s wait for the generic versions to appear. I want.

I shall now do my first iTunes shuffly meme.

IF YOUR LIFE WERE A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?

So, here’s how it works:
Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, iPaq etc)
Put it on shuffle
Press play
For every question, type the song that’s playing
When you go to a new question, press the next button
Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool.

01 – OPENING CREDITS: F.I.R – 飛行部落
02 – WAKING UP: David of Haas – Wonder of Wonders
03 – FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL: Hillsongs – King of Love
04 – FALLING IN LOVE: Vangelis – La Petite Fille De La Mer
05 – FIGHT SONG: Jewel – Haunted
06 – BREAKING UP: Keane – We Might As Well Be Strangers
07 – PROM: Nicci Berry – Down By The Glenside
08 – LIFE: Jewel – Innocence maintained
09 – MENTAL BREAKDOWN: Rihanna – Shut Up And Drive
10 – DRIVING: Enya – Exile
11 – FLASHBACK: Alice Deejay – Everything Begins With An E
12 – WEDDING: Joe Hisaishi – The Magical Door
13 – BIRTH OF CHILD: Rob Costlow – Woods of Chaos
14 – FINAL BATTLE: Disney (Aladdin) – The Cave Of Wonders
15 – DEATH SCENE: Savage Garden – I Want You
16 – FUNERAL SONG: Kelly Clarkson – Because Of You
17 – END CREDITS: Rob Costlow – Bliss

Curiously:

18 – [insert text]: John Michael Talbot – Lamb Of God

I wonder why nobody thought of Party Shuffle. 

Em Reflections

I suppose there’s knowledge, which is hard skill, that manifests itself in the form of certificates and grades, then there’s soft skill, which isn’t based on knowledge.

I think that hard skill is useful to a certain extent – let’s extend it to the field of IT, since this Exchange saga is on hold.

Throughout the course of this 2-week attachment, I’ve picked up a barrel of info (and a few good practices) on Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003, mosty from the Internet. The 2400: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 coursebook threw in a bit of confusion.

I’ve grasped enough ASP to tweak iisadmpwd and Outlook Web Access’ logon form. IIS has caused enough pain to make me promise myself to avoid it in the future. The Security Configuration Wizard has scared me badly. It’s probably what bureaucrats call a ‘learning experience/journey’. But, there are more interesting things that were seen.

One thing that the people involved in this project managed to overlook until nearly the end was how to get mail into mailboxes from the internet. Being able to receive mail is arguably a higher priority than aesthetics – yet it slipped under the radar. You might be reminded to do this by a flowchart or checklist during implementation, but if you’re not following recipes down to the gram, being able to imagine how things move around is really useful.

Knowing how SMTP, your security appliance and firewall work won’t fix this – you have to factor in DNS and MX records. Bonus brownie points for creating SPF records. This is taking a look at the big picture, instead of the bigger picture. If you zoom too far out, you might miss the fact that there’s a road leading to the airstrip.

On the other hand, troubleshooting doesn’t have to be about memorising those charts you find in a Dummies® book. Troubleshooting can be about using your existing, basic knowledge – concepts of SMTP, policy routing, firewall rules, packet sniffing – to figure out how things (don’t) work. You might not have to acquire new knowledge – even basic understanding of electricity (you need to create a circuit) can be applied to, say, networking. If the cable is fraying, the wires inside might be just as tortured. If you don’t crimp your modular plug on your network cable properly, you’ll get a loose connection, which might intermittently break the circuit. Granted, this area of reasoning doesn’t bring you into stuff like near/far end crosstalk, which requires more hard knowledge to diagnose.

A jack of all trades is a master of none. Meanwhile, I’ll meddle with whatever fancies me.

Exchange Woes II

If you have opened all the MS prescribed ports between the Exchange 2003 Frontend and Backend server, but have problems logging in at the console or on Outlook Web Access – try opening port 445 (SMB over TCP) to the domain controller. If that doesn’t help fix your problem, make a bigger any-port hole in your firewall, and see what connections are open during/after a login attempt.

As for mass modification of users, you can try dsmod as mentioned earlier. If you’d like to do it the CSV/LDIF way, try this short perl hack (http://pastebin.com/f4d2446ed) that takes a CSV file and outputs a corresponding modify LDIF file, by yours truly. This is a nice alternative to all the trouble you need to go through to get CDOEXM and VBScript talking to each other.

Three hours, and I wasn’t awake enough to read a perl intro. It would have been faster if I hadn’t spent half an hour realising that there’s a difference between curly and curved brackets.

In this two weeks, I daresay I’ve learnt something very important – throwing Microsoft products at any problem you run across is not a very effective use of human and physical resources. I stick to the opinion that Exchange was and is overkill for this particular application/service.

Exchange Woes

Stay far, far away from the beast variously known as Exchange, Outlook, Outlook [Web|Mobile] Access, ActiveSync, or Windows Server. If the word ‘ISA’ pops up somewhere in the job description, run.

Rant after the jump.