Ed's Blog

Nerd Alert: Sync iPhone Contacts & Calendars Over The Air

Ed — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:40:00 GMT

I just finished upgrading my infrastructure to Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Exchange Server 2010 because... actually, I don't exactly remember why I embarked on this task, but I've found two advantages:

I can handle my own outgoing email. I have a forwarded email address in a domain that I no longer own, and I've had to rely on other email providers for my outgoing mail. If I used Gmail, I'd get the little "on behalf of" addition on my messages. Now that it's all under my control, I have reliable outgoing email (as long as my internet connection is reliable).
My personal contacts and calendar are stored in Exchange; now that I can sync with multiple Exchange servers on my iPhone, I can keep my personal contacts and calendar on my phone. If I lose my phone, I can wipe my contacts remotely in Outlook Web Access!

Hmm, I don't remember why I started rebuilding everything, but I remember why I finished... I went to sync my contacts in iTunes and I saw a popup ad for MobileMe. I'm not paying $99 a year for that!

Exchange 2003 Resource Booking From Outlook 2010

Ed — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:22:00 GMT

I happened to open up my calendar to reschedule a meeting and I noticed that none of my meetings were listed on the room schedules. The friendly administrators at my client site told me that nothing's changed; therefore, I deduced, the issue was in Outlook 2010.

A quick search turned up a knowledge base article that tells me that "by default, Outlook 2010 does not implement the direct booking code that is used in earlier versions of Outlook. Instead, a meeting request is sent to the resource mailbox in the same manner in which a meeting request is sent to regular meeting attendees." Great! So I have to modify the registry to make Outlook work the way it used to work!

This entire Office 2010 release seems to push users and administrators alike to push to later technologies -- a lot of 2003 features are being phased out! Don't get me started on PowerPoint...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982774

Customer Disservice

Ed — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:20:00 GMT

It's actually easy for me to boycott @MacaroniGrill since it's constituted 8 of my meals in just under three weeks and I could use a break. Perhaps you restaurant types can offer your inside information to help me justify or invalidate my claim.

Background

We went to Macaroni Grill for lunch today. I think we had a pretty new server, soft-spoken to the point that everyone at the table engaged in separate conversations as they didn't realize that he was suggesting specials. For our beverage service, we ordered three iced teas and one water. After some time, our server returned with a tray which held four filled glasses arranged in a roughly square pattern. Balancing the tray in the palm of one hand, our server first served my iced tea, which was located on the half of the tray that was closer to his body. He then decided to serve the glass of water, which was also located on the half of the tray that was closer to his body. At this point, (this is for you physics junkies) the mass of the tray and its contents at the far side of the tray greatly exceeded the mass that was closer to our waiter's body. The acceleration of gravity, which I believe was roughly constant at our location, resulted in the contents of the tray falling onto my lap.

Fortunately, I live quite close to this location, so I was able to go home to change my pants and return in only 20 minutes (by the way, I don't recommend walking outside in freezing temperatures with soaking wet pants). As I rejoined my party, I wondered whether the server or the management would contribute anything for this inconvenience. Free appetizer, free entree, heck, I forgot my $4 off coupon at work and maybe they could still give me that discount. I was a little displeased that no one came by, but I figure that they might have forgotten. However, upon providing us with the check, the server apologized and said that they took $2 off the price of my iced tea. I wish they'd just forgotten about it.

Options

I don't know how often drinks are spilled in people's laps (our server said that it happens every couple of months), but stuff happens. I'm not upset that this happened, but I'm upset that the restaurant, our server, and I missed out on a fantastic opportunity to make a lot of money. Here are the scenarios that I'd expect:

Restaurant comps the entire meal. Restaurant probably loses, given that it's $70 worth of lost revenue, and really, the only inconvenience that the rest of my party endured was having to move to another table. I win because I get a free meal and the server wins because he's probably going to get a $50+ tip. This is probably not part of Macaroni Grill corporate policy because servers would be intentionally dumping trays into people's laps just to collect huge pity tips.
Restaurant comps my meal or an appetizer, or gives me one of those $10 coupons that they give me every time I place a catering order. Where was this option? Everybody wins. I win because I get a free meal. The restaurant wins because I get to blabber about my positive experience with Macaroni Grill until everyone gets sick of hearing it. The server wins because he'll get another few bucks thrown on top of the tip.
Restaurant does nothing. This has happened to me a few times. In some cases, the disservice was bad enough that we stopped going to those places, but we didn't really put up a fuss about it. Today wasn't a big deal, and I'm sure that all of this would have blown over without any issues.
Restaurant gives me the iced tea for free. Guess what!? You don't have to pay for the stuff that we dropped on you!!! @($! Who wins here? The server got a lousy tip (15%, which I guess might be good enough that some people don't know they've been stiffed, but that's a discussion for another post); the restaurant loses my business, because now I'm going to Carrabba's or the Olive Garden; I lose because I probably spent more than $2 for gas and laundry and now I need to find another reliable caterer for my office meetings.
Restaurant cranks the cheese grater and dumps the contents on our heads. As long as they don't charge us for the cheese, that's fine, right?!?

Conclusion

I'm forced to add Macaroni Grill to my boycott list because I think that there was plenty of opportunity not only to keep me from leaving cheesed off, but for me to leave blissfully happy with many positive recommendations about this restaurant. Am I being too harsh?

Does Pair Programming Work?

Ed — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:35:00 GMT

Does pair programming work? I stayed up past my bedtime last night discussing this very subject with some of my colleagues. When I was asked this question, I was quick to respond with "I've seen it done, and no, it doesn't work." When someone else agreed with me and cited reasons which had nothing to do with my "pair programming" experience, I realized that the activities that I've been exposed to don't quite fit the definition of pair programming.

From Wikipedia, which is probably closer to correct than I was, pair programming involves:

two programmers working together at one workstation.
one types in code
the other reviews each line of code as it is typed in
the two programmers switch roles frequently

It sounds like pair programming is an exercise in balanced effort, but I have yet to witness the appropriate 50/50 (or even 40/60) split between the two developers. Most often, I've seen the 100/0 split. I've seen senior software developers pair work with junior developers at one workstation (bullet 1: check). The senior developer types in code (bullet 2: check). The junior developer stares blankly at the screen or sometimes counts the ceiling tiles while the other guy does all of the work (bullet 3: uhh, check?). Given that the senior developer just did all of the work, there's no need to switch roles! (in lieu of bullet 4, the senior developer wonders why the young apprentice isn't learning anything.)

I tend to fall on the opposite side of the scale in my mentoring strategy, where I refuse to do someone else's work and instead I ask a series of leading questions which [eventually] lead to the answer. In this equitable 0/100 scenario, I think that my developers learn a lot, but from their feedback, I'm pretty sure that it's annoying ("Why don't you just tell me the %#$* answer instead of asking me questions all day?"). @robertohernandez argues that it's not completely 0/100 because I still spent time helping someone, but it's a lot more impressive if I exaggerate the statistics.

Does pair programming work? I've seen some people call what they do "pair programming" but it wasn't pair programming, or perhaps it was pair programming executed badly. I still don't know if it works, but I've talked to a few dozen people who have tried it, and one of them says it works really well.

Microsoft Money to Quicken Migration: "Great" Software?

Ed — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:09:00 GMT

Microsoft announced that they were discontinuing Microsoft Money and I just switched over to Quicken. I made a rookie mistake when I assumed that Quicken, being the market share leader, would have the superior product.

Given that I use a Microsoft operating system and I use the Microsoft Office suite almost daily, I've grown quite accustomed to how things should work. When I see something that looks like a list view, I expect to be able to click and drag to change the order of my columns. If I do a find and replace, I don't expect it to lock up my application for 20 minutes (what the heck is taking so long?!?).

I think that far too often, people assume that software is great because it's the only thing that's out there. But there's room for improvement. Infragistics Quince is a great source for UI patterns that work: http://quince.infragistics.com/.

Fix Adobe PDF Preview Handler on 64-Bit Windows Systems

Ed — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:01:00 GMT

A while ago, I noticed that my Adobe PDF previews in Outlook 2007 weren't working, but I didn't notice until today that they stopped working right around the time that I upgraded to Windows 7 x64. A quick search came up with a quick-and-easy registry fix:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/adobe_pdf_x64_fix/index.html

Who Won the Blue Iguana Free Lunch?

Ed — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:57:00 GMT

It might be fixed, but I'm not complaining.

At many establishments, they have those fish bowls where you can drop in your business card for a chance to win a free lunch. I've never been selected for any of these drawings until July, when I won a free lunch at The Blue Iguana, a local restaurant in Fair Lakes.

I can see why this sort of promotion might be worthwhile for both the restaurant and me. Although the coupon was for $25, I went to lunch with eight people. I'm fairly certain that the restaurant would have at least broken even. For me, eating lunch was already in the budget, so that left me with extra money to spend foolishly. Also, that month's particular list of three winners and their respective companies was published in a local paper, which was enough for the partners of Excella Consulting to notice my free lunch in a Google Alert.

My benefits didn't really stop with one free lunch, however. The managers at Blue Iguana introduced theirselves when I presented my coupon, and I've been enjoying more personalized service since then. In turn, the improved level of service has motivated me to return, not only for lunches, but on the occasional night out, and to host a few company or client happy hours here and there -- again, I'm fairly certain that the restaurant gained far more business from me than the cost of the $25 coupon.

I was a little bit surprised to see today that I've won a free lunch for the second consecutive month... but not really. I question how "random" the drawing might be, and I notice that, all of a sudden, there are four winners when in past months there have only been three.

Again, I have no complaint about this sequence of events, but my streak seems suspicious. If you wish to discuss this further, you can find me at the Blue Iguana.

Intermittent Network Connectivity On A Virtual Machine

Ed — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:17:00 GMT

We ran into an interesting problem on a development PC that was converted using the physical-to-virtual (P2V) wizard in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). The first sign of trouble was that some logins produced a 'local policy of this system does not permit you to logon interactively' message. At first, we thought that group policy might be causing issues, but even after removing domain policies, the issues continued.

On Monday, all sorts of network problems cropped up. The local OS seemed to be running fine, but any network connectivity was sporadic at best. In fact, when connecting using Remote Desktop Connection, the connection would disconnect and reconnect every few seconds, making any action difficult (especially since, when reconnecting, we must reauthenticate, and more often than not, such action produced the 'local policy of this system...' error).

Running a continuous ping to the VM, the sys admin noted that we were indeed losing the occasional packet. In response to DHCP client failures in the Event Log, the sys admin decided to change the VM's IP to a static IP. This in itself did not solve the problem, and we were left confused... until he noticed that the continuous ping was still receiving ping responses... on the old IP. As it turns out, the P2V wizard assigns the physical MAC address of the machine as a static MAC on the virtual machine. This makes sense for a replacement scenario, but in our case, the physical machine was re-imaged and returned to the pool. On Monday morning, when everyone got to work and powered on their physical machines, we had two machines with an identical MAC address.

Duplicate Best Bets In SharePoint 2007: An item with the same key has already been added.

Ed — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:34:00 GMT

In the distant past, I ran into issues when I tried to add duplicate best bets entries in MOSS 2007. A Microsoft Hotfix (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939077) took care of that particular issue, although it caused some Advanced Search headaches... that's another post.

I ran into another strange issue when I decided to try mailto: URLs for my best bets. I created the first with no problems. After I created a second best bet with a similar but different address, I received the dreaded "item with the same key has already been added" error on the best bets popup.

No problem... I'll just remove the best bet. Except when I clicked Remove, I received an "item with the same key has already been added" error. No problem... I'll try deleting the keyword. Except when I went to the keywords list, I received an "item with the same key has already been added" error instead of the keywords list.

I ended up going to the SSP database itself, where I found my entry in the MSSBestBets table. I removed the mailto: URL and replaced it with a normal http:// URL, and I was then able to edit my keywords and best bets normally.

It could be that mailto: URLs aren't completely working in best bets, or it could be that my email addresses are similar and they both have hyphens and underscores... either way, the keys that are generated for my particular best bets are obviously not unique.

I don't think that anyone advises manually editing a SharePoint database, and I'm not going to be the first to advise anyone to do this... but now I know how to edit my keywords and best bets. I can manually edit my duplicate mailto: URL, make my changes on my site collection, and then put my "duplicate" mailto: URL back in the database.

SharePoint Web Parts with AJAX and WCF on an SSD

Ed — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:26:00 GMT

Inspired by @sahilmalik, I spent most of my Sunday re-architecting a custom web part for Excella Consulting's intranet. I had originally planned on doing some "light" development work to try out my spiffy new SSD, but given that my development environment ran so quickly, I made enough progress that my ad-hoc plans expanded.

Virtual Machine Performance on an SSD

I originally glanced at solid state disks after @andrejpk reported that Windows 7 ran "obscenely fast" on his. I was compelled to purchase after I became frustrated with my work laptop -- it's a Dell Latitude D630 and it still runs Windows XP, but with a 3 year-old installation, it was taking me almost 15 minutes to get from a cold start to having interactivity with Outlook and Visual Studio. After mirroring the 7200 rpm drive onto my SSD, I'm now up and running in 90 seconds. Everything on the XP system is running something like 10x faster.

For my development work today, I started from scratch and built a Microsoft Virtual PC image with Windows Server 2003 R2, MOSS 2007 web front end (I put the DB on a physical server), and Visual Studio 2008 with WSSBuilder. I only allocated 1GB of memory for the image, but it ran fast -- I honestly couldn't tell much difference between a typical desktop experience and the VPC experience. I'm sure that I'd eventually get disgruntled if I loaded up SQL Server and a whole bunch of other apps, but for the lightweight work I was doing, it was extraordinarily pleasant. It turns out that you can install MOSS from scratch in less than an hour!

The rest of my experience is rather unoriginal, i.e. I merely borrowed concepts from about 20 different sources. I'd like to come back (eventually) and fill in the details, but it will probably look like a long list of links, many of which are on http://blah.winsmarts.com. So, until then, the highlights:

AJAX Update Panels In SharePoint

I've actually had the urge to AJAX-enable the intranet for a couple of years. I came back from TechEd 2008 with the full intention to do so, as it seems like a logical first improvement before throwing Silverlight on there. Of course, here I am, over a year later, and I'm just getting around to it. The configuration of ASP.NET AJAX is really quite simple -- for .NET 2.0 it's just a matter of adding in a few web.config sections. I did run into some issues with SharePoint's form wrapper, so I did have to remove the return from return _spFormOnSubmitWrapper(). This particular issue is fairly well-documented, so I didn't have much trouble throwing in some ASP UpdatePanel controls on my web part.

WSSBuilder vs. VSeWSS

I was going to try VSeWSS 1.3 on my host machine, but I found out rather quickly that you can't install it on a machine that doesn't have SharePoint on it. I ended up installing WSSBuilder on my host machine, and since I already had it on the desktop, I used that on my VM. My original web part was built on an old Visual Studio template for SharePoint, but WSSBuilder is much easier to work with. I hear that VSeWSS is pretty much the same thing...

WCF In SharePoint

I spent the bulk of my day (after software installation) converting my old web part code that uses the SharePoint object model into a more modular WCF-based implementation. It's kind of a shame that SharePoint doesn't include WCF out of the box, but now that I have it working, I'm rather pleased at how well it works. Making my web part talk to WCF wasn't as quick as I'd hoped, but my difficulties really boiled down to two categories:

After getting my web part to work with a dummy WCF service, I spent far too long a time dealing with service crashes that all stemmed from my inability to access SPContext.Current. I had diligently created a custom binding configuration to pass NTLM credentials... but it worked so much better when I actually specified the custom binding configuration on my endpoint. Oops.
I spent a bit of time dealing with inefficiencies that I created from some new deployment processes. For instance, I changed the service to require ASP.NET compatibility when I wired up the NTLM credentials. Since the WCF Service Host doesn't run ASP.NET, I couldn't automatically generate my proxy classes. I fumbled around for a while before I created a new dummy service so that I could easily change contracts and regenerate the proxy. I also lost a bit of time from deploying my DLLs to the GAC. I found that I have a tendency to forget that my old assemblies are cached and then I'll try a few new "fixes" and break a few more things before I realize that I'm looking at the wrong assembly.

WCF is still quite spiffy. As a bonus, since my service is written in .NET 3.5, I was able to replace a few hundred lines of C# code with a few dozen lines of Linq. And it runs so much faster!

So, that's one day come and gone... now I should probably try opening Expression Blend. Or finish painting the guest bedroom.

FAQs About My Head Trauma

Ed — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:04:00 GMT

I've received a few questions following my recent status update regarding my recent encounter with a brick wall. I certainly feel blessed to hear from so many people who are either (a) concerned for my well-being, or (b) are curious to know what kind of bone-headed activity I was doing.

To provide you with some context, the front door of my house is one story above ground with stairs leading up to it. Underneath the stairs, I have a small storage area which, among other things, houses a water spigot for my garden hose. This storage area is fashioned out of concrete and brick, with access provided via an arched entryway. This entryway is approximately 5 feet tall at its highest point.

The incident in question occurred on a lovely Sunday afternoon after I'd fed and watered the plants which surround my driveway. It was a rather sunny day - pleasant, but still warm enough to produce a sweat. I'm about 5'10" and therefore I have to bend over when I walk into the storage area. At the time of the incident, I had decided to turn off the water spigot using the following steps, which, might I add, had worked successfully in the past:

Bend Over
Walk Into Storage Area
Turn Off Water Spigot
Back Out Of Storage Area
Stand Up

Unfortunately, my plan did not account for some variables and, instinctually, I executed the following alternate plan:

Bend Over
Walk Into Storage Area
Get Sweat In Eyes
Try To Rub Sweat Out Of Eyes
Stand Up

I will again point out that (a) I'm 5'10", (b) the highest point of the entryway is 5 feet tall, (c) the entryway is fashioned out of brick and concrete, and (d) 5'0" < 5'10".

FAQ

Did you lose consciousness?

No.

Did it hurt?

Yes.

Did you see a doctor?

I spoke with one. I'm supposed to take it easy and ensure that the symptoms do not worsen.

Do you have a concussion?

I'm pretty sure I do. I was a bit confused (a little bit more than usual) yesterday, although still alert. I had some weird moments, e.g. forgetting the order in which I put on clothing. I've been told that this symptom is characteristic of a blow to the top of the head.

Isn't sleeping with a concussion bad?

Apparently that's a myth. I was told to get plenty of rest, including sleep.

Do you have a subdural hematoma?

I hope not. I have no symptoms other than a headache and I'll take action if I notice any other symptoms.

Can I have your stereo?

No!

Will you ever use a garden hose again?

In time.

$81,000 Credit Card Debt

Ed — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:03:00 GMT

I'm watching On The Money on CNBC, and someone just called in to ask about their $81,000 credit card debt and how to correct it before her retirement in 5 years, perhaps putting her $400 per month of extra income towards it. Are these people serious? If they've accumulated that much debt, then how much have they saved? And what ever happened to mathematics in our educational system?

Scrobbling... last.fm vs. Pandora

Ed — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:18:00 GMT

After a rather unfortunate music binge late last night, I woke up to find myself penniless and with a collection of songs that I really should have previewed before I bought them (@)$%! one-click ordering).

I've resurrected my last.fm and Pandora accounts with the idea that I can listen to some of these impulse purchases before I actually buy them. So far, last.fm has the edge because it's produced more tracks that meet my [low] quality standards. However, Pandora's web interface tells me specific reasons why it picked should-have-liked-but-didn't songs ("laid back female vocals"), which is enough of a reason that I'm switching over just to see if it comes up with anything good.

Blog, Resurrected

Ed — Sun, 24 May 2009 06:52:00 GMT

After a hard drive crash, I decided that I didn't need to restore my rarely-updated, rarely-viewed blog. Since then, I've run into many technical issues, consumer alerts, and miscellaneous life events that deserved to be journalled. Considering this, I've (a) re-created my blog and (b) conveniently forgotten every single thing that I've wanted to blog about in the last year or so.

Oh well, now we'll have to wait until something interesting happens...