steve.clarke.weblog

Everyone is talking about Notepad2. I'll chime in and say that I've become an overnight fan as well.

I like how TextPad adds itself to the explorer context menu, so last night I took a few minutes to figure out how to add Notepad2 to the context menu. Here's my registry snippet. Download this file, edit it to point to the location of your Notepad2.exe, and and double-click it to add it to your registry. Standard disclaimers apply... It's not my fault if this bit of code hoses your system - all I can say is it didn't hose mine. :)

Here's what it adds to your registry:

If anyone knows of a better way to do this, please let me know in comments below.

Posted by Steve at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview just showed up on Microsoft Downloads. I'm still downloading, so I can't comment on what's new/fixed yet.

Update:
Ok, I've had a chance to take a very quick look at it. I had a minor error on install. It couldn't find one of the files. I ended up hitting "Ignore". OneNote works, but I'm sure there's some functionality broken by that missing file.

Here's what's obviously new:

The moment Microsoft released yesterday's security bulletins our IS Team went into high gear applying patches to all our systems internally and externally - as we have always done. (We aren't currently using SUS so we pull our updates down like everyone else - Windows Update.) We had trouble on some systems with having to run a system check several times before it would correctly display the patches that needed to be applied. I attribute this to heavy server load on the Windows Update servers.

Wonderful!!!

Really. That's a great thing. I've never ever seen performance problems on the Windows Update site before. This tells me one thing. People are finally beginning to take these things seriously and responding immediately to install updates. Good stuff.

Posted by Steve at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I did so many SharePoint Portal Server installs last week that I actually dreamed on Friday night that I was the SharePoint Single Sign-on Service account.

Posted by Steve at 02:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft has so many webcasts happening in a given month that it's mind boggling. But guess what? I rarely watch any of them. The main reason: They're so poorly organized.

Here are a few suggestions on how to make your webcasts of much greater benefit to users:

I have a dual monitor setup.

I'm never going back.

I didn't realize what all the fuss was about, but now I see that there are sooo many scenarios where dual monitor makes my life much easier -- especially given that I have major problems with short-term memory. I can remember complex technical information for years, but can't hold much more than 3 words/characters in my head for a few seconds.

Here are some scenarios that I've found invaluable already:

I remember using the DOS version of PC Anywhere in the early 90's to access the point of sale computer at the retail computer store where I worked. I think it was over a 2400 baud modem, which I quickly upgraded to 14.4 as soon as the cost dropped below $500. I couldn't have imagined then the scenario that I'm using today to work remotely.

Today I'm upgrading a regular Windows Server 2003 computer to Active Directory using DCPromo. The server is on a very locked down DMZ subnet in our Data Center. I'm at home using a broadband connection from the local cable company. I don'th have any access to the DMZ from home, but the office firewall can access the DMZ via Windows Remote Desktop. To do the DCPromo, I'll need the Windows Server 2003 CD which, of course, is not in the CD tray. I don't want to have to drive to the data center (which is only 7 minutes away, but still...) to put the CD in the tray, but I do have a copy of the ISO on a file share on the corporate LAN. Here's how I got it to work.

My laptop is connected to my Linksys router via 802.11b wireless. I have a VPN connection established to the corporate LAN. Using the VPN connection I've connected to one of our LAN servers using Remote Desktop. From the LAN server, I've connected to the server sitting on the DMZ segment, also using Remote Desktop. To access the ISO of Windows Server 2003, I've configured a VPN connection on the DMZ server back into the corporate LAN and copied it from the file share. Then I've used a Virtual CD tool to virtually mount the ISO and point Windows to Z: drive to get the files it needs.

Voila! The server is now a Domain Controller. And I'm still sitting in my comfy chair drinking coffee and listening to my 80s MP3 collection streaming via Shoutcast over wireless from my wife's workstation downstairs, while my son plays with his animal collection behind me.

As much as we might gripe about computers being hard to use and buggy, we sure have come a long way. Take a few minutes today to think about how good we have it compared to even 10 years ago.

Posted by Steve at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft, today, officially released Services for Unix 3.5 -- for free. I've been a longtime user of Cygwin, but haven't been using it as much lately. PuTTY has replaced my Cygwin SSH shell, and l haven't done any perl programming in a long, long time (thankfully). I'll do my normal couple days of toying with SFU, installing a bunch of add-ons like the bash shell, then letting it idle until I get command line withdrawal again. In any case, I'm supposed to be beta testing the Longhorn Command Shell -- now there's a cool command line!

Updated the add-ons link.

Posted by Steve at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft announced today that its releasing Windows source code to eligible MVPs through the Most Valuable Professional Source Licensing Program (MVPSLP).

"I'm a huge fan of the MVPs. They do a great deal to help Microsoft customers. Giving them access to one of our most valuable assets, Windows source code, is a testimonial to how much we value this dedicated group of people," said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft. "Giving them access to the source code will help MVPs do even more for technical communities around the world and will thus strengthen support for everyone using the Windows platform."

Read about it here.

Posted by Steve at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The remainder of the Office System 2003 is now available on MSDN Subscriber downloads. This includes final release of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Project 2003. It's going to be a fun weekend. :)

Posted by Steve at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 is now available for download to MSDN Subscribers.

400MB. Get it now.

Posted by Steve at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I occasionally visit the Microsoft Webcast site and always find a ton of content that I want to view. Today I thought, "There should be a RSS feed for this." 20 Google seconds later voila! Unfortunately, it's just the upcoming webcasts feed -- I prefer to view the archived webcasts so I can watch at my own time and pace, but it'll do.

Posted by Steve at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our lead software architect, Jared Rypkema has started a blog. I see that he's already posting on a topic that's near and dear to his heart -- ADO.NET and data access layers.
Jared is the guy that helped me through my Slashdot withdrawal (over a month clean and sober; not a single trip back to old /.) and is always an open ear for my non-stop ranting. Welcome aboard, Jared!

Posted by Steve at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don Box on being a programmer:

In general, I would be very hesitant to encourage anyone to pursue this career path. Like writing a book, the only people who should do it are those who can't not do it.

If you can't not program and you live in the St. John's area, contact me. I'd like to talk.

Posted by Steve at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I installed Clemens Vasters' dasBlog tonight on one of our internal web servers. I'd like to try a corporate weblog to see if we can set a little more group creative thinking and collaboration going.

We're a .NET shop so I wanted to use something we were comfortable extending. The first thing I want to add is the ability for multiple users to post.

I'll try to post here on how the experiment works. If successful, I think we'll look at creating a weblog module for our Sharepoint install. That would be cool.

Posted by Steve at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Microsoft Knowledge Base is next to useless, by the way, but EventID.Net has saved my backside many many times.

Oh, and KBAlertz now has RSS feeds. Just click the icon on the corresponding alert page.

Posted by Steve at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Mads Haugbø Nissen] Windows Server 2003 Gains on Linux

I've been using Netcraft for years to probe web servers for the OS and HTTP server info. Their information is regarded as quite accurate. Oh, and I just noticed they have a RSS feed. Subscribed.

Oh again, I noticed the article on 2 million hosts running FreeBSD. This reminds me that I love FreeBSD (think /usr/ports). I personally tolerate Linux, but don't particularly like it. Though we primarily use Microsoft OSes, when we do use Open Source, we generally install Red Hat Linux. I've been trying to get our admins to switch to FreeBSD, but we have too much invested in Linux now. I guess it's either .dll hell or RPM hell for the foreseeable future. :)

Posted by Steve at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...try working for yourself. [neopoleon]

:)

Posted by Steve at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I discovered Summaries.com a few days ago and was very intrigued by the concept:

"Summaries.Com e-mails subscribers an 8-page executive summary of a new business book every week."

One of my single biggest frustrations in life is that there's not enough time on Earth to read everything I want to read, nor is there enough strength in my eyes or brain. Another problem is that I can't scan books - I'm terrified that if I skip over even a single paragraph I'll miss an important piece of info.

I signed up for a 4 week trial. This should get me closer to my goal to absorb as much information as humanly possible.

Posted by Steve at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I read Eric Kidd's The Missing Future blog entry on the weekend, it just didn't sit right at all with me. I was tempted to write a response, but my brain was already hurting from too much work-related writing. When I read Joshua Allen's respose, I thought I was pretty much off the hook for responding, though I still had a couple of thoughts that I considered throwing into the pot.

Well, now, after reading Krzysztof Kowalczyk's response, I know there's nothing left to say. Case closed. Excellent article, and from an apparently non Microsoft-camp guy to boot.

Ok, I do have one thing left to say. I believe that we are on the brink of seeing some of the most incredible software breakthroughs ever. I believe that there's a definite lack of vision right now just due to so many new technologies being thrown at us over the past 3-5 years. Once a critical mass of developers gets a good grip on these technologies we're going to start doing things never dreamed possible.

Posted by Steve at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember my entry on drive-time learning last month? I was wishing that Microsoft would start releasing some of its content as audio CDs that I could listen to in my vehicle. Well, guess what just showed up in this month's Microsoft Certified Partner package? Microsoft DriveTime audio CDs!

Ok, I admitted in my previous entry that I'm sure I didn't invent the term or concept of drive-time learning (I know I must've heard it somewhere else), but does anyone know if Microsoft has done this type of CD before? We've been a partner for about 2 years, but this is the first time I've seen audio CDs from MS.

Am I delusional to think that my idea might have trickled back to someone in the Microsoft content group?

Posted by Steve at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thanks to Phil Scott for pointing out O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf RSS feed!

Posted by Steve at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a very busy few days since I last posted an entry here. I've been head down in work - reams and reams of reading, and writing my app for the Pocket PC. I don't have much to report, but here a a few items of interest that I've come across recently:

Sean and Scott posted an interesting entry regarding the seemingly halted developmet status of Internet Explorer.

"With no significant features for nearly two years now except security patches it does give one pause. Not simply because its a shame that the product has essentially ceased development but that once the browser war was over Microsoft stopped innovating with Internet Explorer."
[...]
"Why don't we have tabs, RSS aggregators, bookmark sync utilities, mouse gestures, popup blockers."

I have to agree. Even though IE has a dominant (to say the least) market share, more and more people, especially developers are using Mozilla and MozillaFirebird (formerly Phoenix).

I'm using MozillaFirebird a significant amount now, specifically to use features that aren't included in IE; namely tabs and popup blockers. The browser load time is great, the footprint is small, I don't have to install all the crap that Mozilla base forces on me, it renders HTML almost exactly like IE and - the most important feature - it supports Alt-D to jump to the address bar (I wouldn't and couldn't use the browser until it supported this feature; the key combo is just too engrained in me).

I remember the thrill of waiting to see whether Microsoft or Netscape was going to be the first to release a beta of a new major version; the excitement of installing early alphas and betas just to check out the new features of each browser.

Now I'm going to the MozillaFirebird site at least once a week to download the latest nightly build. I can't remember the last time I was on the Microsoft Internet Explorer home page (before this post). Does Microsoft care about IE? Is there anyone working on new features? Are they planning something that will completely obsolete it (unlikely)?

Is IE is headed the way of the dinosaur Visual Source Safe, where all you see on the product home page is another service pack?

Posted by Steve at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... brain hurts from too much proposal writing ... no end in sight ... pray for my sanity ...

<flop>

Posted by Steve at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_preview_2003.asp

I haven't had a chance to read it all yet.

Posted by Steve at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok, I admit it. I allowed a Slashdot article to get me riled up again, even after my post yesterday.

This time they pointed to a story on Yahoo! called "Is There Any Reason To Buy Microsoft Anymore?" I won't comment on the reasons why I disagree with the basis of the article; the problem I have with the story is in this statement:

"Almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices."

I agree with the fact that there are lots of alternatives. That's fine.
I agree with the comment about the mystifying licensing (at times).

But to suggest that if you buy anything besides Microsoft software that you won't have any ongoing security concerns?

I see this myth spread surprisingly often by technology journalists. You'd think that if you buy Linux or Oracle or any other ABM (Anything But Microsoft) software you can just throw away your firewall and never touch your systems again. This is a dangerous myth to propagate because no software is secure. Explain the almost daily emails I get from Red Hat pointing me to security patches. Of course I get my share of security alerts from Microsoft as well, but that's not the point...

The point is this; all software has security issues and if you're not aware that there will always be "ongoing security concerns" with any software you use, you shouldn't be in the business.

Buy ABM software, but don't do it because you want to avoid security issues.

Posted by Steve at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You gotta love it when MS Word document authors accidentally leave their reviewer notes in the final version. Here's a gem I came across in a document from Microsoft's Certified Partner website today:

Hey now! I resemble that last comment.

Posted by Steve at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another few tidbits on Longhorn.

The article says that Microsoft intends to slash of the number of Win32 API calls from 70,000 to 8,000 for this release.

Posted by Steve at 09:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Thurrot's WinInfo site has a new article up on the graphics subsystem in Longhorn - the next consumer version of Windows:

"In a pre-show demonstration of the Longhorn graphics subsystem at the WinHEC trade show in New Orleans Monday night, I saw for the first time some of the advanced video effects that Microsoft will enable in the next Windows version. [...] The change is startling."

There's only one image in the article, but there should be more coming over the next few days.

The full article is here.

Posted by Steve at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found out about .NET Rocks! recently.

This is something that I've wanted for a while - Drive-time Learning (I can't remember where I heard that phrase, but I'm sure I didn't coin it).

I'm impressed with the amount of video-based training material from Microsoft; seminars, webcasts, MSDN TV, The .NET Show*, Certified Partner content, and more. However, my number one frustration is that I just cannot find the time to take advantage of this content. It all requires that I be in front of a computer; and therein lies the problem. If I'm in front of a computer it's difficult to have the focus necessary to watch or listen to an entire presentation. Multi-tasking operating systems and the Internet allow me to be too distracted.

What I've often wished for is an audio-only version of the same content; and I mean a standard audio CD format that I can listen to in my vehicle - the only place that I can really focus. To listen to the .NET Rocks! shows, I've been downloading the MP3, converting it to a .WAV file, splitting it into tracks of 3 minutes a-piece, and burning to audio CDs**. I work about 7 minutes from my house, but the amount of information I can consume in even this short drive is amazing. I can get about 30 minutes of listening time per day just going to work in the morning, driving home for lunch, back to work, and back home at the end of the day.

I would like to see the Microsoft content done this way. I don't need a bunch of slides to keep my attention - the audio usually suffices. If additional material is needed (such as diagrams), package it separately so I can quickly scan it at my computer before or after listening.

In the meantime, I'd like to find some tools for converting existing content into audio. The main problem is that they use a bunch of different formats to archive them and don't always link to downloadable, but rather streaming media.

Does anyone know of any useful tools to convert Windows Media streams into .WAV files or CD Audio recordable content?

*I saw this comment today from Kevin Dente after I began writing this post: "I appreciate Microsoft's general strategy of carpet-bombing developer's with technical information [...] but does anyone actually have time to watch an hour and a half video on IIS 6?".

**In case you're interested, here's a detailed breakdown of how I convert the .NET Rocks! show into multi-track audio CD format:

<geekmode status="on">

Woohoo! http://www.msdn.com now maps to http://msdn.microsoft.com.

Fewer letters to type in the address bar.

</geekmode>

I guess I should have said ultrageekmode, since I'm usually in geek mode anyway. :)

Posted by Steve at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When will computers be smart enough to understand the context of what I write or say? Search engines are great for finding things where simple keywords suffice, but very difficult for finding answers to technical problems where people use various ways of phrasing the same things. Case in point:

I'm having a problem with Visual Studio.NET 2003 where every time I access the MSDN help library I'm asked for the VS.NET install CD - which I dutifully provide. It then proceeds to go into an endless install loop of goodness knows what.

Now what keywords do I use to search for a possible solution?

If I were to phrase this problem in english to, say, a friend I would say:
"Every time I access the MSDN help library I'm asked for the Visual Studio.NET install CD. When I insert the CD, it goes into an endless install loop."

If my friend knew the answer, they would immediately be able to provide the right solution, even if they wouldn't have phrased it that way at all if they were the one describing the problem.

Now, how do I give that to Google hoping that I find someone else phrasing the same problem in a close enough way...

Some information is starting to emerge on the next versions of Messenger, both Windows Messenger 5.0 and MSN Messenger 6.0.

Key things of note:

Here's another interesting article from Eric Sink on sneaking seemingly small features into the software development process. Do we have another Joel Spolsky in the making? :)

On another note, looks like I'm not the only one that noticed that BillG was using a paper notepad instead of a Tablet PC.

Posted by Steve at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I mentioned a few days ago that my laptop was due for a reinstall and that I would try Windows Server 2003 as my laptop operating system. Well I did just that on Thursday night. Things were going just swell until I was in a meeting on Friday morning. The built-in wireless adapter really drains battery power and my battery was running down fast. Rather than disrupt the meeting by grabbing my adapter, I decided to change the wireless adapter driver to support "power save" mode. The default mode was power save off, so I simply switched it on. Bad idea.

My network connection went down - no way to renew the DHCP address. Tried everything. Turned power save mode back on. Still no go. "Ok, I'll just switch to (uggh) a wired connection." Same problem there! "Wha?? That stupid setting must have messed up my DHCP config." Rebooted, unistalled network adapters, performed voodoo ceremony on my laptop, sacrificed a chicken, still no luck. So I figured, "Just run system restore and restore to last known good config" - it wasn't there. Server version, remember.

Anyway, I didn't hear much of what happened in the meeting for the next 2 1/2 hours. I was too busy scrambling to get my connection back. I'm completely out of commission if I don't have a network connection. (What'd we ever do before networking?)

As soon as the meeting finished I tried overinstalling Windows Server 2003 - that took several hours. Wow! It worked - my network connection was back up; but my screen wouldn't go above 640x480. I rebooted. Excellent, got my 1024x768 resolution back up. What the... network connection broken again. ARRRRRRRGH.

I finally decide that someone has ordained that now is not the time to run a server OS on my laptop and humbly submitted to the will of Bill. I flattened the laptop and reinstalled Windows XP Pro. Bliss again, at last.

While I was at it, I decided to finally upgrade Janice's home desktop machine to brand new hardware. I spent all of Friday night and Saturday morning rebuilding both systems.

While the problem started shortly after my fresh install of Windows Server 2003, I don't blame the problem on the OS. I believe I would've had the same problem with the driver on XP, since the driver is the same one and the core OS is pretty much the same. I'm not about to try changing the setting on XP now to test it though. :) I moved back to XP because after a day of computer wrestling I needed to retreat back to a known safe harbour.

Anyway, things are grand now. My love/hate relationship with computers has swung toward love again.

Posted by Steve at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmmm... Even though I'm using SpamNet* for my spam filtering now, when I reinstalled Outlook 2003 over the weekend, I decide to give the "new and improved" built-in junk mail filter from Microsoft a try to see if it really has improved. I set the threshold to agressively scan for spam and told it to put suspected spam in the "Junk E-mail" folder. When I looked in the folder this morning, lo and behold there was a Microsoft Security Bulletin filtered as spam! This seems to go against their Trustworthy Computing initiative in a bad way. My line of business requires that we act immediately on all security bulletins; missing one security bulletin is a very serious issue. Thankfully, I have other sources of being notified of security issues.

I'll be submitting a report to the Office 2003 Beta team to see what they have to say about this. I guess Microsoft should build something into their filtering algorithm to at least say that anything coming from their security email address is on the "white list".

* I mentioned SpamNet in a previous posting. Since that time, version 1.0 has been officially released. With the release they've now implemented a monthly fee of $4.99 USD to use the service. I kind of expected that they might charge for the product at some point and, to be honest, I'm glad. I've found that totally free spam filtering solutions eventually run into the problem of such huge demand on the service that it either becomes uselessly slow, or just folds for financial reasons. I think they've done the right thing by pricing the service at a reasonable rate - I'll easily save that amount in the amount of time it used to take to filter out spam manually. Based on the success I've had in using SpamNet, I'm going to be signing up as soon as the 30 day trial is out.

Posted by Steve at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Brad Wilson says (to Microsoft):

Can you please fix your search so you don't make me go off to Google to search you? If need be, buy a Google search appliance and integrate it in. Eating your own dogfood is an interesting policy, until you make me eat it too. :-p

I agree. Microsoft has said in recent days that they intend to produce a better search engine than Google (don't remember where I saw that). I guess one quick way would be to buy Google. :)

Aaaaaaaanyway... in the meantime, here are a couple of tips for searching Microsoft related material:

To search the www.microsoft.com site from Google, search for site:www.microsoft.com {search query}.
To search the msdn.microsoft.com site from Google, search for site:msdn.microsoft.com {search query}.

And have you noticed how difficult Microsoft's recent product naming schemes have made it to search for those products and related material? For example, how you search for .NET? In Google that will bring you up all kinds of sites in the .net root domain - not what you wanted, I'm sure. How do you search for C#?

Here's a great way, using Google, to narrow your search down to just Microsoft-related material:
http://www.google.ca/microsoft.html

(Incidentally, they have similar for Mac, Linux, and BSD)

I learned all this and more from a book I purchased over the weekend called Google Hacks.

Posted by Steve at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Windows Server 2003 (and Visual Studio .NET 2003) shipped today. The release candidates that we've been using for months now have been rock solid performers.

One of Microsoft's best decisions was for them to finally ditch the Windows 9x codebase and move all of their development forward on the NT code. Personally, I've never ever run any version of Windows 9x (nor would I ever). I started using Windows NT 3.5* back in '94 and have never looked back.

My laptop is due for a reinstall any day now (I install so many different pieces of beta code that things get really crufty after about 6 months), so I'm going to make the switch to WS 2003. From all the reports I've seen, it runs even faster than XP and can be made to take the XP look and feel by simply enabling the Theme service.

* see here for some cool NT history

Posted by Steve at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been threatening to purchase another PDA again soon. I never use my old Casio Windows CE device that I bought when I was at Comdex '99, and I've sworn to not buy another until they came up with a good combo of a PDA and cell phone.

BUT, I've been looking at the new Toshiba Pocket PC based devices with built in wireless and wondering if...

Nah. I just don't need it...

Posted by Steve at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Came across this link on another weblog:

Database changes

Keeping all of our databases updated is becoming a pretty intensive task, and I dont't see it getting any easier. Martin Fowler's article on Evolutionary Database Design has some good techniques. How does everyone else manage their database changes?

Posted by Steve at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm still watching the Microsoft site for the Virtual Server (MVS) beta. They recently purchased Connectix to get this technology to embed in Windows Server 2003.

It was supposed to have been released for preview on the 15th, but so far no signs of it. I don't know where it's supposed to be uploaded - the Connectix site? MSDN Subscriber Downloads? Microsoft.com? Anyway, I'll keep checking them all.

UPDATE 04/17: Still no sign of it. :(

Posted by Steve at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)