Finally, I found an article about How SharePoint Works! I installed SharePoint Portal Server a few weeks back at work. And for the past couple weeks, I’ve just kind of stared dumb-founded at it. There are several blogs out there about SharePoint and tons of information on MS’ site, but I couldn’t find a “getting started” guide, or a “what the heck the beast is that you just installed” guide. The one mentioned above comes close, though - it gives me a really good idea of how it all works, so I can then understand it. A few hours of fiddling has also helped.

It looks like SharePoint can be an immensely powerful product for a business that is still using network file shares and email for storing and communicating information…

Were you a fan of ”Back to the Future”? Well who wasn’t, but if you were hardcore you can pick up a DeLorean on eBay, complete with the flux capacitor! Now all I need is the kicking ectomobile from GhostBusters!

I don’t know why I do these things…The least they could do is provide XHTML 4.0 compliant syntax in their code.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I frequently look at how long ago Administrator passwords have been changed. I think I stumbled upon the longest one I’ve ever come across today:

2003 days, 3 hours, 47 minutes, 20 seconds

I went to the MS Security Summit last week in Chicago. It was really beneficial from a recruiting perspective ;) Some of the tracks were interesting, but also seemed like sales pitches for ISA, Exchange, and IIS Server. What can you expect from a MS Security Summit, though? MS has been getting very impressive lately with their technology. One thing that caught my attention was RPC over HTTP(S) for Exchange server. This feature lets you access your Outlook email over the web transparently - by that I mean you don’t have to use a Outlook Web Access or some other form of webmail. Nice feature, but the concept of RPC over HTTP scares me a little.

What’s the deal with all the bulbous vehicles lately? I saw commercials during the Cubs home opener today for both the new Infiniti SUV and the new Dodge Durango - they were ugly, bulbous vehicles reminiscent of the ‘94 Ford F-Series trucks that Ford revamped a few years later so they didn’t look like marshmallows. I am sorely dissappointed with vehicle designs lately…

In other news, Bill Murray’s opening pitch was the play of the game for the Cubs today - that should tell you how poorly they played. Too bad - hope the rest of the season goes better.

I also had a problem setting up Distributed File Services (DFS) on Windows Server 2003 as well. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing and it didn’t look like things were replicating, and all of a sudden a folder similar to “FolderName_NTFRS_<xxxxxxxx>” appeared. MS has a knowledge base article about that, but that didn’t help me. I eventually blew most of it away and started from scratch - being patient waiting for DFS replication to occur helped quite a bit.

I was having an issue on a Windows Server 2003 box today with the properties dialog hanging, not showing, or just plaing missing when I try to obtain the properties for a directory. This only seemed to effect the directories on a network share, however. In addition, explorer.exe would consume 100% of the CPU usage indefinitely.

After an hour or so of digging around on the internet and trying various googles, I finally came across an article about Missing properties dialog from Explorer on Google Groups. Turns out the poster was right and the culprit is Internet Explorer. Re-installing it via the following command had the problem fixed after a reboot:

rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %windir%\inf\ie.inf

I’m glad standard system functions rely on an Internet browser.

After the recent power outage, my raid disks on my Linux box felt the need to rebuild. It’s currently at about five days:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

md2 : active raid1 md1[1] md0[0] 107467072 blocks [2/2] [UU] [>....................] resync = 2.1% (2323636/107467072) finish=6876.4min speed=252K/sec You have: 6876.4min You want: days * 4.7752778

Ouch - looks like it’s going well, though - I love raid!

Somebody at work (who happens to be selling it…) lent me his iBook and I’ve been using it constantly ever since. I’ve been waiting to get one for several years, but never got my hands on one for an extended period of time. This could put me over the edge. I already downloaded Romeo, which lets me control several applications using my bluetooth phone - it’s pretty schwag to say the least. You can even configure it to turn on your screensaver when your bluetooth phone goes out of range and turn it back off when you get back in range - that’s one of the simplest, yet most amazing features!

I like it so far, but I think it may be tough for me to get used to. For example, I’m a keyboard kind of guy so I’ve been trying to figure out all the OS X shortcuts without, of course, reading any docs. Not easy, so I may dive into that fairly soon. I want to try AppleScript to, because the documentation behind it is awesome.

Hrm…powerbook, new bike…powerbook, new bike…