If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Dear Symantec,

I really like the Corporate Edition of your software. It works great - when it works. Why, oh why, is it that even a minor upgrade never seems to work, even though the README is followed precisely? Tonight finds me not watching baseball but rather working with your software trying to make it work again.

Maybe some R&D dollars spent on upgrading software would be a good idea. I know one customer who would appreciate it.

So I played with the Google Apps stuff, and it’s pretty cool.  It makes online collaboration for small groups very easy.  Very easy.  A small company with few technical resources can host mail, documents, calendars, and more for nothing.  There are paid options as well, but I didn’t fool with those.

I was hoping to kill a couple birds with this stone (figuratively, of course).  First, I would have liked to have my wife’s email all web based and in a Gmail interface so that I wouldn’t have to deal with her Outlook .pst file.  Second, I was hoping to get a system where her calendar and mine could work together.

The first goal can be done, but I don’t need Google Apps for it.  Gmail will let you send mail from your non-Gmail address, and it will POP your email for you, so you can get all of your mail in their interface.

The second goal won’t work for what I need (as far as I could tell).  I can get a calendar we can share…that’s not the problem.  The problem is that my laptop syncs my Outlook calendar with Verizon, which syncs with my PDA phone.  I can’t go without that.  If there’s a way that I can get a Google Calendar to either replicate to Outlook (preferred) or to get it to sync with Verizon’s wireless sync service, I could possibly make the move.

I could go back and kill bird #1, but my wife uses her calendar too, and she’d be mad if I took it away just so I won’t have to deal with .pst files.

So we didn’t solve any problems, but I learned a little bit from it.  And I’m even more amazed at the awesomeness that is Google.

I’ve read recently about how Google will host your domain and give you certain services (for small groups) for free.  They’ll make your email work in the Gmail interface, give you calendar sharing between users with Google Calendar, online document collaboration through Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and even more stuff.  And apparently it’s free.

I’m going to check it out over the next few days, but I was wondering if any of you have used Google for this.  I haven’t heard many reviews about it, just the fact that it’s there, so if you’ve used it, let me know.  I’d love to hear thoughts on it.

I’ll post later with thoughts about how awesome (or not) I think it is.

When you take a new job in IT, you’ve got an awkward time between the moment you finally feel competent enough to run your new network and the moment the first thing goes wrong and you actually have to respond to an outage.

Yesterday just before lunch I was brought up to speed on the infrastructure at our data center in Atlanta.  I’ve been there before (I have some of my own stuff there), but Aaron’s stuff was Aaron’s stuff, and I didn’t care about it.  Now it’s my stuff, and I have to keep it running.

So yesterday the awkward time began.  I left here feeling like I knew a little bit about the infrastructure and got here this morning ready to plow through some new stuff we’re doing.  The email came through announcing that Aaron would be out sick today, and I pressed on with the tasks at hand.

Then the awkward time ended, almost 24 hours after it began.  Aaron called to tell me we had a server down.  So I spent the day troubleshooting and repairing a server.  Then there was some other stuff that went wrong that we had to fix.  Fun times.  This server is all ready to go back into our nice little rack down at the data center, and I’ll be down there tonight to get that taken care of.

All this going wrong on a day that Aaron was sick…I wonder if he planned this.

Dell has outsourced their online tech support to idiots. Here is a conversation I had with one of their online tech support people. This is verbatim. I didn’t change a thing.

Ramon Thank you for patiently waiting. You have reached Dell Hardware Warranty Chat Support. My name is Ramon and I will be assisting you today. In order for me to help you, can you provide details about the issue you’re having?

Me I’m running virtual pc on my latitude, and the virtual machine doesnt have usb drivers installed (so I can’t use usb devices with the virtual machine). support.dell.com didn’t have the drivers for usb. can you point me to them?

Ramon I understand how you are feeling and I will do my best to help solve the problem. Is this a new or existing case?

Me new

Ramon To ensure we are working with the correct system, are you chatting about the LATD620 listed on your account?

Me yes

Ramon Are you chatting on the system with the problem?

Me yes

Ramon Ron did the usb work fine before the virtual pc?

Me it works fine in windows xp (not virtual pc) but my virtual machine doesn’t recognize any usb devices.

Ramon Ron what is virtual pc?

Me just assume usb isn’t working on my latd620. can you give me the drivers?

Ramon Ron what is virtual pc?

Me if you’re unsure of what virtual pc is, you’re likely not qualified for this support call. please escalate the issue.

Ramon Ron the usb drive is the chipset driver.

Me ok. thank you.

Ramon If it works for your operating system then it should work virtual pc.

What really gets me is that he has no clue what Virtual PC is (since he asked twice) and he can speak so confidently about what will or will not work inside Virtual PC.

*sigh*

I’m a network guy, and my career path, influenced by so many, would likely have been very different if I never knew my friend Ethan.

Ethan lives up where it’s cold all the time, and he’s a Red Sox fan, but I still appreciate him. He got me interested in networks, switches, routers…all the infrastructure stuff that I love to do. It was my interest in what he taught me (added to the fact that 40 hours per week of programming would be dull beyond belief) that caused me to lean my career toward network administration.

So I like Ethan. I wouldn’t name my next kid (no, Mom, we aren’t) after him, but he’s a great guy.

Back in 2000, I completed my MCSE certification. The day I passed the final test, I sent Ethan an email to tell him. His response was so fun to read, I printed it. Today while going through my home office, I found that copy of Ethan’s email. I enjoyed reading it so much, that I decided to post it here.

Welcome to the ranks of Redmond. You are now an enforcing member of a sadistic empire that will possibly, someday, rule the world. Your talents will be used and abused, but you’ll accept that, because you’ll know it’s for the best. You know that someday the whole world will bow the knee to Lord High Master and Dictator of the Known World, Herr Gates. You’ll feel a little guilty if that happens, but you’ll justify it in your mind because, luckily, you were on the winning side. After the empire is set up, and power consolidation begins, you’ll be forced to perform distasteful acts that will plague your conscience - the formatting of an innocent Linux machine, torching an Apple manufacturing plant, chanting at the ceremonial burning of all things Sun, but…your side won, so you’ll know it’s okay. The merciless slaughter of the OS children at Be, Inc. will make sense, somehow, because you were just doing what you were told.

So welcome. A warm, hearty, slap-on-the-back welcome. Millions of beknighted hordes crusading for a common cause simply must be right…right?

But beware. In pockets of rebellion everywhere, there rises a penguin. A mighty, inspiring bastion of freedom, power, and independence…you’ll be told that the penguin doesn’t matter - that it can’t compete to the wares of your master. But it does matter - and how it compares! Oh yes, the penguin matters very much. You will fear. And you will quake. And your confidence will be shaken when the upstart can’t be squashed under the sheer immensity of your master.

Watch your back, young recruit. Although the way you have chosen seems the best way now, broad is the path that leadeth to destruction. Look to the horizon - you can see the head of an enormous penguin breaking through the clouds, stepping forth with fervor and confidence. It’s a force that cannot be ignored.

/Ethan

I’ve been intrigued by the Wordpress permalink system for quite some time.  I knew it used Apache’s mod_rewrite module, but I never understood it - not even a little bit.

I’ve been working on an update for my church’s podcast site.  Last year I wanted to know how podcasting worked, so I setup a podcast for our church’s sermons.  It worked, and it gained a little popularity at the church, so I decided it was time for a face lift on the site.

One of the things I wanted to incorporate into the site was a “permalink” type of structure, allowing a dynamically-built info page about each sermon.  This is, as you might suspect, one of my Google experiments, and using permalinks like that makes the site “bigger” when viewed through the eyes of a search bot.

So I found this tutorial on mod_rewrite, spent about an hour reading and playing with it, and got the mod_rewrite capabilities working fairly quickly.  Using RewriteRule lines in a .htaccess file is complex, but it’s not too much of a stretch for somebody with a little programming background.  If you’ve got a web server to experiment on, it’s a neat thing to know how to do.
Anyway, this post has 3 main purposes:

1. Help me remember where that tutorial was, so I can figure out other mod_rewrite stuff at a later time.
2. Pimp our church’s podcast site.
3. Provide content here, since it’s been a long week, and I haven’t had time to post anything else.

Have a good Saturday.

A few nights ago, in a frustrated rage, I posted some not-so-nice things about Microsoft and IE7. I still agree with what I wrote, but I’ve learned a little bit about customer service.

My blog ranks well in search engines. I’m no SEO guru, but if I post something, there is usually somebody who will find it through Google. I know that, and quite honestly, it’s why I get up on my soap box most of the time. This time, my plan backfired.

Typically, this user who would find me would find my frustrations with IE7 would post something negative about IE7 (or about me) and move on, continuing his search for an answer to his problem. Microsoft ruined my scheme.

Dean (who works for Microsoft [he has a @microsoft.com email address]), does regular searches on Technorati for people who are blogging about IE7. My blog showed up, and he helped me find the solution to my problem.

Microsoft has succeeded in 3 areas:

1. A customer who didn’t ask for help got the help he needed. This is huge, because (typically) a company can only help people who ask for help. Now Microsoft is listening to customers and responding to what they say.
2. All of the people who find that post (while searching about trouble with unsigned ActiveX controls) will see my frustrations, will see Microsoft’s proactive response, and will have a solution to their problem. Microsoft comes away looking like the superhero. And, in this case, they are.
3. They fixed my problem without getting into the “better browser” war with me. I’m certainly not going to change my stance on the awesomeness that is Firefox, and Dean would have just added to my frustration if he had tried to argue for IE7. Instead, he just offered a solution.

This led me to realize how easy it is for companies to listen for chatter about their products:

1. Do a search on Technorati.
2. Click the RSS link.
3. *Poof* now it’s in Google Reader, and can be easily monitored by the support staff.

Kudos to Microsoft on this one. This is excellent customer service.

[And, for the record, Firefox is still the better browser.]

This is an upgrade weekend at the office. They’re migrating from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. The upgrade went fine, but there was an error with Reporting Services 2005 that said:

SQL Server setup has encountered the following problem: [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server] Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.ConfigurationInfo’ with unique index ‘IX_ConfigurationInfo’.. To continue, correct the problem, and then run SQL Server setup again.

Um, yeah. I have no idea what that means.

A guy I work with was here with our DBA, but he had to leave. So I came up to the office, and we started searching for a resolution to this error. Unfortunately, it’s not documented by anybody except this guy, who said the problem had something to do with EnableClientPrinting. Whatever that means. Here’s the quote (in case that link goes bad):

Turns out we got this because we had added an EnableClientPrinting entry to disable the print button in SQL 2000 after the SP2 bug that broke printing. Removing this entry prior to runing the upgrade made everything run smoothly.

Our DBA sat on hold with Microsoft - on hold, before talking to a technician - for 5 hours. That’s 300 minutes, if you’re keeping score. That would be bad if it was free, but it wasn’t. This is after she gave them a credit card number for a $500 per-incident support case. It only breaks out to $100/hour, so maybe that’s not so bad.

Anyway, things are looking up. I’ve gotten some routine maintenance taken care of, and she’s got some guy on the phone who seems to be pretty helpful. They’re working through the Report Server configuration now. Hopefully this means we’ll be out of here soon.

Lesson learned: when you need Microsoft’s per-incident support, be ready to wait. Next time I’ll just request a callback to my cell phone, and we’ll go up the road for food until the call comes. The people on the other end of the line seem helpful, but getting them on the phone isn’t as easy as it should be - especially at $500 per call.

I’m a Firefox user. I’m proud to say that. I’m enlightened enough in my internet experience that I’ve migrated from the seventh circle of hell to a little slice of heaven. I made the change a while back and I haven’t missed the torture for even a second. My life is better because of Firefox.

There are still web sites, however, that require the Internet Explorer browser. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Tonight I was trying to use one of these sites for the first time since I got my new Vista laptop.

Since it’s Windows Vista, there’s no choice on keeping IE6. (Version 6, though completely evil in all its ways, is still not as much of a burden as the 7.0 version.) You’re given IE7 at the start, and you just have to deal with it.

So I go to this site that needs to install an Active X control. Granted, installing Active X controls is usually about as wise as letting your children play with rattlesnakes, but this is an internal server at the office that I administer, so it’s not such a big deal.

IE determines that the control is from an “Unknown Publisher” and won’t install. That makes sense.

Let’s see…security settings….where are they?…oh…there…

So I turned off protected mode, and I set the security on IE to “medium” (there’s not a “low” now…it’s medium, medium-high, or high…they don’t admit to low security on anything, which just cracks me up.)

I tried to add the site to the trusted sites list, but you can only trust https sites, because (apparently) there is no unencrypted content on the internet (or any intranet) worth trusting. I’m glad to know that…

The Active X control wouldn’t install.

So I decide I’ll try Firefox, which has a nifty extension installed called “IE Tab.” It lets me view any web page with IE’s engine but within the awesomeness of Firefox. It, however, still won’t let this control install.

I understand Microsoft’s approach to protecting users from themselves. It makes sense. But come on. There has to be a check box somewhere that reads “I know what I’m doing, and I really am not just saying that, and I know that if I mess up my computer by doing something stupid, I’m not allowed to blame Microsoft for their poor product development.” I’m so sick of dealing with these products.

At this point, I’m ready to stop using web sites that require IE. I’m ready to ditch the whole operating system. I’d even drop Office (which I actually like) and pick up something like Open Office. I’d even refrain from doing business with Redmond-based companies simply on a matter of principal.

There wasn’t much of a world of computing before Microsoft, but I’m willing to bet that a world without Microsoft would be a more secure, less stressful, and more user-friendly world.