joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Information about joeware mixed with wild and crazy opinions...

4/25/2008

Why I don’t Like Verizon

by @ 12:51 am. Filed under general

Recently my work cell phone died and I had to get another one, instead of just getting a new phone on the current service (ATT then Cingular then ATT again), I decided to try Verizon as I heard good things about its connectivity.

I am absolutely willing to admit that I was stupid, I should have looked into it more. Alternately when I received it I should have returned it immediately.

Verizon is set up in such a way that you can’t use SIM cards which means you can’t buy an unlocked phone (which are becoming more and more available) and use it with their service. This is sad because I have multiple unlocked Sony Ericsson phones that I adore. When I questioned the “tech” at Verizon about it he was absolutely floored that switching SIMs between phones so you could use different phones without the Service Provider’s approval was even possible…

Anyway, it is something about CDMA versus GSM or some such network nonsense that honestly and truly I really do not have the time nor inclination to care about. I just want a phone service that works and not be bound and gagged by that service provider.

What does this mean… It means that I will be telling everyone I know to stay away from them.

Can ya hear me now?

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Active Directory Limits

by @ 12:39 am. Filed under tech

This is a nice article on Active Directory Limits

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/d2fc40d8-50ba-450c-959b-28fd7e31b9961033.mspx?mfr=true

 

Summary

Max Objects – 231 minus 255 or ~2.15 Billion or 2,147,483,394

Max SIDs – 230 or ~1 billion or 1,073,741,824

Max Group Membership for Security Principal – 1015 groups

Max FQDN Length – 64 characters

Max File Name Length – 260 characters [1]

Max OU Name Length – 64 characters

Max Group Policies applied – 999

Max Number of Directory Operations per LDAP Transaction – 5000[2]

(Recommended) Max Number of Domains – 800 (Windows 2000), 1200 (Windows Server 2003 FFL-2)

(Recommended) Max Number of Domain Controllers in a Domain – 1200[3]

 

 

 

 

[1] This is a bit tricky as this limitation is in the Win32 subsystem, not in NTFS which has something like a 64k limit. You can get around this limit if the tools you use use unicode path format with \\?\

[2] Wow, I have never been even close to that… I expect you would be close to if not over bumping the Max LDAP Packet size of 10MB (default)

[3] If over 800 DCs and using ADI-DNS, see KB267855.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

4/24/2008

Where do cats hide their watches at?

by @ 11:53 pm. Filed under general

Alternate title – Who taught my cat how to tell time???

My gorgeous black cat Trouble whom I have mentioned before, the President and CEO of joeware, at some point has learned how to tell time. I don’t know how she did it, I don’t even let her look at books because I don’t need a cat revolution on my hands as she realizes she gets the short end of the stick on the decision making process in the household. Last thing I need is her reading the Art of War or something… Regardless, she has figured out how to determine when it is 4PM every day.

I say this because everyday “around” 4PM I try to get my act together and walk away from work for a short break to give her a little snack. The little snack is one spoonful of Friskies canned cat food[1]. As a general food item, she has hard cat food, I can’t recall the kind at the moment, but it is a really good kind in a white bag that I only can remember when I see the bag and sometimes not even then because I only have to buy it every few months and I put it in a plastic bin as soon as I get it home… Anyway, she gets a little spoonful of the wet stuff once a day around 4PM.

Some days I get involved with work and forget for a little while that I need to do that. I am not doing it on purpose to piss her off or anything, I just get tied up; you techies out there understand… there are times when you get in a groove and if you disturb it you know you will have to spend 3 hours trying to get back to where you are right now.

Well if it gets to being about 15-30 minutes too late… she comes looking for me and she isn’t generally happy about having to go out of her way to do that… Initially she may lightly feign niceness but I know she is feigning because I will hear her stomp down the stairs first and I know how hard it is for a cat to actually stomp… then I will hear her jump against the door to my office and the door will pop all the way open, and she will sashay (left right shake) up to me purring and uttering one or two little demure meows.

If I jump up immediately and run to get her snack all is good. She sees me get up, she runs to the door and then stays about 4 feet in front of me stopping and looking back at regularly spaced intervals the whole way to make sure I don’t get lost on the way until we reach the kitchen where she walks up to her little paper plate that I put her snack on, pops a squat, and then looks over her shoulder expectantly at me… Woe is me if I try to make a quick detour to the bathroom before getting her snack…

If not… well then she starts head bumping my legs or standing up on her two back legs and extends her claws into my thighs with a little bark like meow of “Listen Mr… do I have to get rough with you??? I don’t want to do it, but if you make me do it, its on your own head…“. That is almost always enough to get me going but if I am exceptionally tied up then she jumps into my lap, whaps me in the face with her tail repeatedly and starts putting her paws on the keyboard because she seems to know that that will absolutely get my attention… And let’s face the facts… she is right.

I don’t know who trained who in this situation but I really do want to know who taught my cat how to tell time and where in the world does she hide her watch at?

TheLife

 

[1] She is particularly fond of the Salmon and Mixed Grill flavors.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Oh… very pretty…

by @ 12:20 am. Filed under general

challenger

Rating 3.00 out of 5

4/23/2008

In case you ever wonder why I don’t like to store my data on someone else’s system….

by @ 11:13 pm. Filed under tech

Here is yet another reason why….

http://www.betanews.com/article/Bringing_down_the_cloud_HPs_Upline_down_for_a_third_of_its_life/1208893272

 

HP has not officially cited the reason for the service’s suspension, but in a comment to TechCrunch last Friday, member Ridz may have proven to have experienced Upline’s fatal flaw: His application was connecting him to another member’s account.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

4/22/2008

Take the jobs… take the stress too…

by @ 12:48 am. Filed under general

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-india-stress_nu_goeringapr20,1,7771719.story

Indians may have taken over three-quarters of the world’s call-center jobs, but they’ve also taken on the stresses of those jobs: weight gain, depression, boredom and, often, relationship troubles.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

MVP Summit 2008 Humour

by @ 12:33 am. Filed under humour

I wanted to share a little humour from the MSFT MVP Summit. Most of the summit is NDA material (i.e. I signed one or more pieces of paper saying I wouldn’t Disclose the information gained in the NDA sessions under legal penalty) but the Executive sessions which in general I find almost a complete waste of time are not only not NDA, but they bring the press in… So this is something I can and will share

First… Ray Ozzy executive speech… I don’t recall it, I woke up in my own drool on the floor with a slamming headache. Boring doesn’t begin to describe it and if I ever hear about Sharepoint and Groove again it will be too soon. Oh wait, it kept getting brought up in Steve’s session as well because of MVPs asking about it. Ugh.

General comment… Steve Ballmer was amazing as always, if you ever have a chance to see him speak, do it. He blows Tony Robbins out of the water. Hopefully Ray will never have to follow Steve, I feel bad if he ever does.

Second… Steve said Vista is a work in progress. I like his frank and brutal honesty. My personal comment on Vista… For some people it works great, for some people it doesn’t work great. For all of you who says it works great, don’t think the people who say it doesn’t work great for them are idiots, they may actually know what they are talking about. For all of you who says it doesn’t work great, don’t think the people who say it does work great for them are idiots, they may actually know what they are talking about… See where I am coming from? Me… I have different opinions on any given day based on what I am doing and have done in the last day. Overall I can take it or leave it. I am an OS agnostic for the most part. Whatever works is my motto. I won’t think you are an idiot for not using the OS I choose to use. I will think you are an idiot if you rant about me not using the OS you use.

Third… Steve said MSFT was a solid third in the internet search business. Ask Jeeves may have an issue with that but I agree. Steve mentioned they were working to aquire Yahoo and then did something funny… He asked how many people use Live Search… A smattering of folks raised their hands. He then asked how many people used Yahoo… And I don’t know what he was expecting the answer to be but me being a technical person and seeing what technical people use on a regular basis, was not surprised to see that it appeared not a single person raised their hand. I mean seriously, I looked across a room of about 2000 people and there was dead silence except some twittering (by which I mean laughing, not whatever else has highjacked that term) and no raised hands. Steve then said, ok let’s try that again… who uses Yahoo?? Same response… He cracks a little joke about offering $31 a share for it and then he paces on the stage for a few seconds and just sort of looked around and then slowllllllllyyyyy, finalllllllllllyyyyy asked the question everyone was waiting to put their hands up for… Who uses Google? There was a rousing cheer and hands up everywhere. So then a comment from me here…. you ask yourself, how do the results of that room change if the Yahoo purchase goes through… answer… it doesn’t. But I know a lot of non-technical people who use Yahoo exclusively and actually dislike Google so it isn’t the techies MSFT is going after by buying Yahoo, it is everyone else which is, in all honesty, the larger audience.

Fourth… Steve said something that I don’t think anyone at MSFT was expecting. It shocked me into coughing up part of my drink. I didn’t think it was a great idea but I expect it will be utilized… And all of my MSFT friends pay attention… Some random MVP whose name I refuse to recall said that he sent an email to a Microsoft Employee and…. shame…. didn’t get a response… Steve said it made him angry that the guy didn’t get a response and told the whole group… If you ever email anyone at MSFT and they don’t respond, forward the email to me. I’ll bet if we do that a couple of times the responses will come a lot faster and easier…

My thoughts on that, if you really want to piss someone off, send the email you sent to them to their bosses bosses bosses boss. You ping a CEO with an email about an unreturned email and if there is any action on that it will likely be someone coming down really hard on someone else and that just isn’t going to endear you to anyone… If you already have a combative relationship with the party in question, hey go for it. I did it once several years ago, I thought the Exchange Dev team was being particularly obtuse about not fixing a serious issue and I sent Steve an email with the special MVP header on it and sure enough, a short time later Exchange Dev was fixing the issue. It went into Exchange 2003 SP2 and was the changes made to DSACCESS for getting DSACCESS to try and give user’s a GC that was a DC in their own domain. Its not a full proof fix but it is night and day better than what was there.

 

Anyway, if you want to read the Steve Ballmer session, you can find it here –> http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/steve/2008/04-17MVP.mspx

 

I would love to post a video link but I don’t see one on the MSFT site.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

4/21/2008

Another fun Spoof on Microsoft – the Microsoft oPhone.

by @ 11:53 pm. Filed under humour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazA77xcf0A

Rating 3.00 out of 5

I-pod PRO 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription

by @ 11:51 pm. Filed under humour

Alternate title – Why marketing annoys me…

 

I know this is a spoof video, but we all know how true this would be if MSFT sold the iPod. And it is no dis on the developers or inventors, it is entirely about MS Legal and MS Marketing.

 

Rating 3.00 out of 5

4/18/2008

Hexadecimal

by @ 12:01 pm. Filed under tech

I learned this week that maybe one or more of my friends may have trouble with Hexadecimal… So to help out, I went and found this wikipedia article…

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal

 

🙂

Rating 3.00 out of 5

[joeware – never stop exploring… :) is proudly powered by WordPress.]