Do you want the red pill or the blue one?
If you are tired of paying big bucks to get a SSL signed by a trusted root certificate authority there is good news out there. Here is a link to more information: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20091010/microsoft-free-root-certificate-authority-windows/
This ties in with a previous post regarding self-signed certificates and Exchange 2007. Now you can get a free SSL and not get the certificate errors in IE.
Let me start this post out by saying that I own an iPod touch and I love it. I can’t pull myself to buy a Zune (even though everyone that gets their hands on one says its a better media device than the iPod) simply because I have a number of apps that are must have (including the Kindle app). So why would I create a post titled this? The answer is simple: Apple must move to a model that allows on demand streaming of content. I want to be able to access my content on demand when a strong enough pipe is available and be able to upload content to my device in case it won’t be available. The Internet is King and anything that plays in this old school model will eventually die on the vine. For anyone that thinks Apple is a futuristic innovator, please post a comment and tell me why this isn’t possible yet via iTunes? If you have any programming skills you know that this is a joke to develop. User logs in, said user account is tied to a listing of content, stream that content from the web if it isn’t on the device. I have to say that I don’t like the idea of a Zune Pass type model as I usually purchase a number of songs and listen to them until I know the words by heart. For anyone like me we don’t want to pay $15 per month to access the same songs over and over again. I am sure you are saying that I might just as well install the content on the iPod and move on but there are many cases where I want access to my content from a device other than my iPod. For example, I am at a party at a friends house, why can’t I fire up a web app, access my content and go? I shouldn’t need one of my “select” devices to listen to content I have already purchased.
If you are using Exchange 2007 and didn’t get a 3rd party certificate you will start seeing certificate errors on your clients one year after your install stating that the certificate has expired. The solution is simple in that you can create a new self signed certificate (for another year). The process to renew the certificate is as follows:
Start the Exchange Management Console and type in the following cmdlet to get the current certificate: get-exchangecertificate -domain “myserver.mydomain.com” | fl
This will return a number of pieces of information about the certificate including the thumb print. Right click and select the Mark option to mark text to copy, high light the thumb print value and hit the Enter key to copy it. To create a new certificate using the existing one to “clone” enter the following cmdlet: get-exchangecertificate -thumbprint “thethumbprintreturnedinthepreviouscommand” | new-exchangecertificate
This will prompt you to overwrite any existing certificate so enter Y to do so. The command will return the thumb print of the new certificate. Check out the new certificate by entering the command get-exchangecertificate -thumbprint “newthumbprint” | fl
Once you are sure all is well go ahead and delete the old certification using the command: remove-exchangecertificate -thumbprint “oldcertificatethumbprint”
One thing to note is that in some cases IIS will be running and will be using the old certificate. In this case you need to set IIS to use this new certificate by calling this command: enable-exchangecertificate -thumbprint “certificatethumbprint” -services IIS
I have a wonderful Skydrive (http://skydrive.live.com) account that I use religiously. The problem with this is that I want to store files to this directly from Office 2007 applications (click the Save button and one option is Skydrive). So you can imagine my excitement when I caught wind that the latest release of Windows Live had the ability to save Offices files right from the menu. I installed Windows Live and then the excitement disappeared. The location this is saving to is Office Live Workspace. This is not Skydrive but some other storage location. Why not have a single storage location for all my files? The confusion gets worse in that when I log into my Skydrive account and click on a Office document I am now greeted by the wonderful Technical Preview of Office Web Applications. This is great but what about the documents I saved directly out of Office 207 to Office Live Workspace. Hopefully Microsoft has a strategy here that takes this confusion away so I can help family/friends/co-workers use this awesome technology without the confusion. Right now users save one copy to their local system, then upload it to Skydrive thus creating sync issues. When they are in the “cloud” the system should be smart enough to know that it needs to be synced when connectivity is available. Hint to Microsoft: The KISS method: Keep It Simple Stupid.
If you thought my last post that talked about how Twitter is turning to the ad market was unfounded, read this: http://www.betanews.com/article/You-saw-this-coming-Revised-Twitter-terms-of-service-enables-ads/1252687628
Did a presentation yesterday to a local company (can’t say the name of the company as many of you will know them as a national branded company) on a wide array of technology topics. What amazed me with this company is the wide array of staff they had at the meeting and the extremely varied level of open mindedness. One thing I took away from the meeting, I know the person I never ever want to be marked as. You know this person immediately as they project themselves as: “I know everything and this meeting is a complete waste of my time”. For those that know me personally they will attest that I’m a confident person but their is a major difference between confidence and being a rude, narrow minded individual. I approach every person and meeting with the hope of taking something away from the encounter. How can a company keep someone like this on their payroll? The amazing thing is that this person was high up in their marketing arm! A close minded marketing person, WOW! What group was the most open minded? Technology (pat yourself on the back if you are a technology person and are open minded). One of my statements was simple: Don’t focus so hard on a single technology that you lose focus on the ever changing landscape that is technology. The system in particular was Twitter. For a company that can generate a following on a site such as Twitter I say kudos to them. My issue with it is that this is what percentage of your customers? When the group was questioned as to how many actively used Twitter beyond what they were doing as a company: ONE. Do you really think there is a market out there that has blanket coverage on Twitter? Many people have just found email and you as a company are going to move forward and leave them in the dust? Companies need to build relationships and advance technology to support customers that want to move, but not lose customers that are on the back end of the technology spectrum. My analogy: the pond is full of lilly pads and you as a company need to stand on the lilly pads that support you and once one starts to sink move a foot to another one. Another comment that went in one ear and out the other was how Twitter is becoming a search engine of sorts. I don’t think I need to tell you the response. Sorry but the facts are the facts. You have a business that charges what for their service? You have the search market that is estimated at $1 billion for each percentage point of the market. Boy, I wonder what a company like Twitter is changing their home page to be more like Google for? Time to wake up!
On a positive note this companies technical staff were excellent! Kudos!
Has anyone else had enough of Apple and their joke for press conferences! If any other company did a press conference for completely non-innovative things like this they would be laughed out of the market but not Apple. Can anyone say follow like sheep Apple fanboys. On another note I heard Leo call Snow Leopard by its real name: Snow Job. Another non-innovative joke of an upgrade. The comment was that the upgrade was so cheap. Well it had better be because there is nothing there (even Microsoft knows enough to make enough visual changes to make the customer feel good about the price and pain they just paid to upgrade). This upgrade should have been better than cheap, it should have been free! Don’t take my word for it, drop the cash, perform the painfully long upgrade process (oh didn’t Apple make some smart comment in the past about upgrade times in Windows) and then get really ticked when you realize you have just been had.
Why will Apple’s dominance in the phone market be short lived? Two words: closed system. There really doesn’t need to be anymore said. The world will no longer put up with a closed system like what is provided by Apple. Think Apple isn’t a closed system? Try to load OS X on a non-Apple system or try to take your content from iTunes over to Zune (easily). Better yet, who controls the applications you can install on your iPhone? What will allow Apple to hold on for a while will be innovation. I will also inject that this will be short lived as Apple doesn’t hold the purse strings to new and innovative ideas, companies that are agile and creative do and this bleeding edge spirit leaves a company over time.It is really interesting to hear some major media players target Apple as the evil empire now instead of their long time evil player Microsoft.
I’m a big fan of using Group Policy to redirect folders to cut down roaming profile sizes and think Microsoft has done a pretty good job. My only complaint is that a very important folder cannot be set to “follow the Documents folder”. This folder is the Downloads folder. If you download a huge number of files you are going to want to be careful of this and look at creating a folder to redirect users files to. I watched my login times skyrocket due to the large files I downloaded (6GB+). I would like someone to explain to me why you would have the Pictures and Videos folders follow the Documents folder and not have this same setting on Downloads? Come on Microsoft this is a huge mistake! With the scenario I am looking at I will need to create yet another folder structure for my users to store these files. Currently I have a folder for profiles, one for documents and one for application data. If Microsoft was really serious about this they would make a check box that states: make everything that isn’t part of a registry setting that is in the profile be redirected and not move it on login.
If you have numerous user name/password combination’s for accounts and web sites you access you need to take a look at Password Safe. A free download from: http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ makes it even easier to consider. This application takes password storage to new levels with functions such as auto-type. With this you can locate your cursor on the user name field of your web site, click the auto-type button on the Password Safe window and it will enter your user name and password and log you in. This makes things very nice if you have any shoulder surfers in that they see zero key strokes. Another nice feature is that you can enter your web addresses and by right clicking on them within Password Safe and selecting “Browse to URL + autotype” you don’t have to type a thing making this application a plus for efficiency. Finally, once the password database is unlocked you can right click on the entry in the task bar, go to Recent Entry History and launch from there.
