Onion Slices

Ah, to begin the explanation!

I’ve been in the market for what I consider a mid-range device for quite a while with my main focus being on the host of eBook readers that are on the market. I’ve also looked heavily at a netbook for my needs, but…

I like idea of the eBook readers because I like the:

·         Fairly flat form-factor. It’s easy to sit in the bathroom, on a bus, in a car, in bed, whatever with a device that I can hold in one hand and comfortably interact with using the other hand (I’ve tried and have been uncomfortable with a netbook sized device)

·         I am liking the direction that the cost of books is going. I really hate the idea of paying $7.99 for an eBook when the cost of the paperback is the same (a whole host of reasons for this).

·         There is a great deal to be said for a device that is simple and designed to do one task and do it well. I am a design snob and I like my products to be useful, not just NEW and SHINEY!

I like the idea of a netbook device because:

·         While I like the idea of a single-purpose device, I am a contact-switching addict. I would love to be able to stop in the middle of a chapter, hop over and see what mail or tweets I’ve gathered and then go back to reading. Doing it on one device would be nice.

·         The nature of the eInk screen of the eBook readers imposes some pretty hard limits on the kind of media that I can consume using the device. It’s much harder to imagine that I would want to read a text-book or comic on it.

·         The idea of 3G connectivity in addition to WiFi is extremely attractive to me. I tend to use my smartphone constantly to look things up, check those mails and tweets, find information that I want, when I want it. I’ve taken to looking up books and music and games while I’m standing in the store to find out if I really want to get them (it’s useless to do this at home since there is no way to know ahead of time what a store is stocking on the shelves in a reasonable manner).

The main reasons why I think that the new iPad is going to be the right device for me:

·         Just to get this one out of the way, I have to admit that I have LOVED every Apple product that I’ve ever used. Sure I’ve had some issues with them, but the level of comfort I gain from using them warms what little soul I have. Now, on to the more technical reasons…

·         I like the form-factor. I’ve used a Kindle that I borrowed and I have to say that I’m comfortable with a flat pad sitting comfortably in my hands. It’s not too small (the screen will be much bigger than the Kindle) and with the wide bezel, I can hold on to it without worrying about obscuring some part of the screen like I had to with my iPhone

·         The battery life is a huge draw! The little netbook that I have right now doesn’t last more than 2 hours on a charge. It really reminds me of when the PSP came out and they advertised the UMD movies. You could barely squeak out a movie on one charge! I know many people are looking at the advertised battery life with some incredulity, but honestly, they said 8 hours on the MacBooks, and they were RIGHT, so I am not going to doubt them now.

·         I like the idea of a stripped-down OS (or a beefed up iPhone OS). I don’t want to run tasks in the background. I don’t need to be able to RDP into a server and then compose a symphony using some open source freeware. These are tasks that I would use a computer for, and so, I will do them using a computer. I want to be able to “consume media” as the media outlets are describing it, and I think the OS that they developed for the iPhone got that right (this is what I meant about flash… Flash is a bloated beast of crap and I hate Adobe like people seem to hate Apple or Microsoft. Meh, it happens!).

·         The main complaint that I was worried about was whether or not I would have to sign up with AT&T to get 3G coverage. Now that it has been announced that the 3G model will be month-to-month based, I have a great deal more confidence in using the tablet’s 3G. Also knowing that any other carrier that offers the microSIM (or whatever) can give me service means that I have the option to move if I don’t like it.

In summary, I have to say that I miss my iPhone and I think this iPad will be a happy medium-tier device. I was EXTREMELY happy with my iPhone as a product, as my phone, and as a device to use for basic network connectivity (I didn’t do much media watching on it because I couldn’t see the small screen comfortably and I rarely went anywhere that I needed to). I got rid of my iPhone because of a dislike of the AT&T service in my apartment (Julie and I couldn’t make or receive calls in our apartment). This is a chance for me to get back into the Apple arena and use a product that I KNOW is aimed at ME as a consumer, without having to deal with contracts and other pains.

P.S. Yes, I WILL be purchasing the AppleCare Protection Plan. Things break, it happens.

P.S.S. I often lamented the netbook because I wanted one very much but I just couldn’t see a real place for it, since I was usually in front of a laptop or in the car. Now that I’ve moved to doing more things like cooking and sewing, it would be helpful to have the recipe or plans where I can glance at them. This coupled with video and music means I don’t need a TV in my kitchen or sewing room like my mom did (:

P.S.S.S. I have a lot to say on this subject simply because everyone I seem to see is pointing out flaws and telling the world how horrible a product this is. Honestly, there is no way I could have envisioned a product like this, as few at 5 years ago. I really do think that this is going to lead to a change in several industries. I keep thinking about Orison Scott Card in the Ender’s Game novels where the students carried around touch-enabled desks to do their work on. We have rapidly reached the point at where bigger monitors, bigger TVs, bigger laptops are just too cumbersome and expensive to maintain. Small, well designed and working is where the future is.

Posted via web from Tim Robichaux’s Site

So, recently I learned a valuable lesson about cooking!

For dinner one night (Sunday, to be precise), Julie and I were lying around trying to decide what we wanted to eat. I hadn’t been to the store to get anything special and we had a pound of ground beef thawed, so I suggested Hamburger Helper. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite foods, and I love to just absolutely devour it. Julie and I have stopped eating it as often as I would like, picking healthier and more balanced options.

As I got set up to make dinner, I went to pour the measure of milk required and found that I was short by more than two cups. Looking in the fridge, I decided that I would be a valiant experimenter and grabbed some of Julie’s soymilk. Being bright, I looked at the bottle and since it was a different color than the Vanilla flavored bottles she had recently bought, I figured I was in the clear. Sadly, to my surprise, when I poured the milk, I found out that it was of the VERY VANILLA style, and that’s why the bottle was different, not because it was un-vanilla.

Well, since I didn’t want to toss out dinner, I forged ahead, thinking, “Well, I like lots of vanilla things! How bad can it be?”

Dear reader, I am here to tell you that it can be VERY bad indeed. For some STRANGE reason, vanilla flavor and Stroganoff flavored Hamburger Helper just DO NOT go well together. For one of the very rare times in our marriage, we had made a meal (and I’m using the royal we) that neither of us wanted ANYTHING to do with.

This coupled with the loss of hot water has me really wondering what’s going to be in store for the rest of the week.

P.S. No other meats were harmed in the making of that meal. I’ve learned my lesson and next time I would rather have it made with water than that evil bean juice…

Posted via web from Tim Robichaux’s Site

What do you do to get reliable service? Do you hire the best IT people on the market? Do you spend millions of dollars on the cutting edge hardware running the most cutting edge software?

Honestly, if you’re like most people, you will have a “good enough” system in place. This doesn’t mean that you have a solution that is held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but it does mean that there could always be an improvement somewhere in there. If you want to improve things like e-mail, collaboration or communication, Microsoft actually has quite a nice offering available!

What is BPOS?

BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Suite and consists of a set of tools that allow a business to move some high maintenance services off-premise to be hosted in the “cloud.” What this means to the customer it that they have an option to have certain Microsoft products hosted by Microsoft and then they can consume that software as a service. This concept of “Software as a Service” is a really big deal at Microsoft right now, and it’s all over the business world. Virtualizing what used to be a desktop application and consuming it as a web page is the new way to enable workers to be productive on almost any hardware, almost anywhere.

What Software as a Service can I get?

The major components of the BPOS offerings are the normal server-based platform products that Microsoft offers for business productivity:

·         Exchange Online – You get to have your e-mail hosted on an Exchange 2007 cluster with full accessibility via Outlook Anywhere, Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync. Right now each user starts off with a default of 5GB of mailbox storage space, but that may increase in the near future (you can increase it to 25GB right now, but 5 is the default).

·         SharePoint Online – Using SharePoint, you get to take advantage of the rich collaboration tools such as document, calendar and task sharing; user based permissions; and workflow content management features.

·         Office Live Meeting – Each user will have the ability to install the LiveMeeting client and create and participate in LiveMeeting events.

·         Office Communications Online – One of my favorite features of the BPOS offering is that each company gets to use Microsoft Office Communications Server. With this product you have fully integrated IM and presence capabilities without having to install and configure a pretty complex product.

·         Grab-bag of features from Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – With this added bonus, you get virus and spam filtering using Microsoft’s Forefront products.

In addition to those things, there are options that you can purchase to increase what you get out of the service from Archiving and Encryption of e-mail to Desktop Management using System Center Online Desktop Manager.

I’m a BIG company, is this offering right for me?

That is one of the beauties of the offerings provided by Microsoft Online Services! The service that I have been describing is aimed at smaller business (below 3000 seats). For our larger customers, there is another offering called BPOS-D with the “D” standing for Dedicated. This means that instead of being hosted in a multi-tenant environment, a specific set of servers will be set aside, just for you.

I’ll be posting more information about how the service works and some of the issues that companies have had to deal with in more posts in a whole BPOS series. Tune in for more!

Posted via web from Cohesive Logic Knowledge Base

I’ve been looking around for some good ways to flesh out an Exchange lab to test some migration scenarios. I’ve gotten a lot of good advice from people on good ways to do this, but I really wanted something simple and elegant. Here’s what I settled on:

The Concept

Ed Crowley, MVP and all-around good guy (I suspect, since I’ve never actually met the guy), suggested that I just simply use a script to build a bunch of RFC-822 formatted files with the *.eml extension and then dump them in the Transport folder. This will cause Exchange 2007 to look at them and deliver them to the mailbox that they need to go to. I remember using some hackery like this back when I was manually looking at spam on an Exchange 2003 box. I would gather up all the false positives and resubmit them to the dumpster for delivery. The real benefit of this method is that I can use PowerShell to generate those files a LOT more quickly than I can figure out a script to generate the actual SMTP submission.

The Script

Once I did the research on what the RFC-822 format actually requires, here’s the PowerShell script I wrote to generate mail messages for the three test mailboxes:

<#

This is a script to generat a bunch of *.eml files and dump them in the transport directory of Exchange

Tim Robichaux

1/14/2010

EMLGenerationScript.ps1

#>

$Users = @();

$Users = “TimTest1″,”TimTest2″,”TimTest3″;

$Body = “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam id mauris sit amet nisl <snip> rutrum tempus, enim nisi sed.”;

foreach ($User in $Users) {

$Counter = 1;

While ($Counter -lt 100){

$To = “To: ” + $User + “@testdomain.com”;

$From = “From: ” + “tim@testdomain.com“;

$Subject = “Subject: ” + “This is test message `#$Counter”;

$GUID = [system.guid]::newguid();

echo $From $To $Subject “`n” $Body | out-file “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\Pickup\$GUID.eml” -Encoding ASCII;

$Counter += 1;

}

}

The Outcome

It looks like the server that I’m populating is a VM, so I’ve totally swamped the transport service as it’s taking quite a while to deliver the messages. Another interesting thing is that it looks like it’s delivering them based on the order of the GUID, rather than the timestamp, so they’re showing up in all sorts of odd order.

I have to label this project as a success so far. I wanted to be able to generate some content quickly and I have to say that the hour I’ve spent getting this straight was worth it, balanced on the time it would have taken to populate messages by hand.

Lessons Learned and Future Revisions

There are a couple of really important things I learned from this. First off, the cmdlet “out-file” defaults to the system default. This means that if you are using it for generating some raw text, you have to explicitly set “ASCII” or whatever you need. I’ve run into this gottcha before, but it’s no less frustrating. Another thing that I learned from this is that older versions of PowerShell don’t always like comments and things like that. It’s often quite confusing about what you can do on a given system with the version of PowerShell that’s installed.

In future revisions, I want to build this into a user account generation script so that at the time of generation, I create the user, generate the mailbox and then populate it. Another thing that I would like to do is set up an array or pool of “From” addresses to give a little bit variety. Also a nice feature would be to add a “-FromFile” switch that would allow me to populate a bunch of the variables from a config file.

Posted via web from Cohesive Logic Knowledge Base