Orlando: Andre Rieu

Posted: 11:05 am
April 20, 2006
Misc
Comments Off on Orlando: Andre Rieu

Untitled document

It has been a long while since I acted like a boss around here so today I am just going to walk away from everything for the day and go hang out with Andre Rieu . I'm a big fan of classical music and it, at times, is the reason I don't kill most people I deal with. I grew up in Europe (and the communist part thereof) where Christmas and New Year were not celebrated as much as the annual Johann Strauss concert from the Vienna Philharmonic. I have not missed a single one since 1980 and through the magic of "There is nothing on TV" I stumbled onto a PBS show featuring Andre Rieu. Few years later, Andre is in Orlando and Katie got us the tickets to the concert.

P.S. Johann Strauss ? I'm sure many of my Mule & Chickenfest audience will be puzzled so here you go. It is virtually impossible that you have not heard at least one of his pieces.

SBS 2003 R2 Blog Week

Posted: 11:01 pm
April 19, 2006
Beta
Comments Off on SBS 2003 R2 Blog Week

Untitled document

So here I sit getting ready for my tour and I realized one thing – I have not been on the road in 2006. I have not given this great State of Florida a chance to beat me up about what SBS 2003 R2 is and is not, whats in it and what was left on the chopping room floor, when it will come out, how it will come out, etc. Now as is common with the roadshow, a large chunk of partners simply does not follow the news coming out of Microsoft and SBS MVP's. The reach is 10% at best. This means I will be standing in front of TS2 as usual, reciting long URL's from my head about where you can get info on R2, why things work the way they do, how to take advantage of the opportunities… the usual Vlad stuff.

Well, you know what? Not this time. This time I'm going to be prepared for you and only give away one URL: vladville.com.

Over the next seven (7) days I intend to blog about everything that the Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) team has told us about R2. One post per day, giving you a chance to ask along the way and let me get the answers. I'll break it into as much detail as humanly possible and try to give someone (who cares) a real primer on SBS R2 and how to take advantage of it. Here is the post summary:

The Seven Days of SBS R2

Day 1: R2 – What is it? Partner Opportunity?
Day 2: Windows Software Upgrade Services
Day 3: SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition
Day 4: Expanded CAL's
Day 5: Questions & Answers from the SBS World
Day 6: SBS 2003 R2 Resources
Day 7: The BIG Surprise

Sound fair enough? Let's hope so. Comments on each post will be open for Q&A and Day 7… well, lets just say… you'll want to tune in for that one.

Palm 700w Gets MSFP

Posted: 7:58 pm
April 19, 2006
Mobility
2 Comments

Untitled document

Good news for the Treo/Palm fans, your beloved Windows Mobile 5 device finally gets MSFP/AKU2 rom. Yes, you can finally get Push Mail with your device. More at the Engadget Mobile but suffice to say you'll want to get your rom here.

As Engadget warns, make sure you backup your device because rom upgrades tend to wipe your device clean. Hopefully you run Exchange 🙂

How is this interesting? Well, 700w in spite of being the worst WM5 phone available, is likely the second best selling one (behind Sprint's 6700 which already had MSFP) and will hopefully give more people a reason to get with Windows Mobile 5 and reduce the number of times I have to disappoint customers by saying "No, we do not offer Blackberry. Oh, you're willing to pay? $5k for 5 users. Not interested, why, what ever made you change your mind?"  

On The Road With Technet

Posted: 10:55 am
April 19, 2006
Events
18 Comments

Untitled document

I will be spending a lot of time on the road with Microsoft Technet seminars over the following quarter. I'm presenting the content on SMTP security and answering the usual Exchange & SBS questions as they come up. I'm bringing a little surprise, 70-282 vouchers, Windows 2003 Server Enterprise R2 giveaways and all the other usual stuff. I'm co-presenting with Blain Barton on the Technet side and helping JJ Antequino with the TS2 – I do not know as of yet whats happening with the TS2 pubs but I will check. Anything you'd like to know or have me bring along?  Here are the dates: 

4/25 – Boca Raton

4/27 – Tampa

5/09 – Sarasota 

5/11 – Fort Lauderdale

5/23 – Miami

5/25 – Orlando

6/06 – Gainesville

6/08 – Jacksonville 

Technet , TS2 and other Microsoft SST events (Connections, MSDN) are absolutely free but you need to register for them. Go to www.Microsoft.com/events – I look forward to seeing you out there!

MSFP Availability and WM5 Lags

Posted: 10:08 am
April 18, 2006
Mobility
6 Comments

Jason Langridge has an excellent writeup on the availability of WM5. As you can tell by the summary this all but confirms that we in USA live in the third world of mobility – only one of those devices (Sprint 6700) is on sale in retail US; Other WM5 devices available in the retail channels are just rebranded HTC devices so you could pirate and apply one of the iMate roms but legally… its looking very sad to be on Windows Mobility in USA. In a related story, Palm 700w which is by popular aclaim the worst WM5 phone on the market, has promised MSFP release later this month (April).

  Orange
  SPV M5000
  SPV C600
  SPV M600 – in ROM by default!
  

  O2
  O2 XDA Mini S
  

  Sprint PPC 6700

  i-mate  all updates via www.clubimate.com
  SP5 and SP5m
  K-Jam
  JasJar

  QTEK all updates via www.myqtek.com
  9000
  9100

  Symbol MC70 – in ROM
  Gigabye – G-Smart – in ROM

In related news, Mike Calligaro of the Windows Mobile Blog explains why WM5 is slower than previous PocketPC systems. This is something that many have experienced since upgrading WM5. For those of you that have not met me in person but still struggle with a slow WM5 I only have one word for you. XCPUScalar (remember to kiss your warranty goodbye).   

Vlad @ SMB Nation East

Posted: 1:54 pm
April 17, 2006
Events, Vladville
7 Comments

Due to some peer pressure from Chris, I will be at the SMB Nation East conference in New York City May 4th – 7th. I actually have nothing better to do on the 7th (flight leaves around 9PM so if you're going and got a day to kill in The City let me know). Also, if anybody is getting to JFK around noon I could use a ride out to Islandia… or at the very least tips on how to get there. Staying at Hyatt Wind Song.

Vladville is Back

Posted: 11:00 am
April 17, 2006
Misc, System Admin, Vladville
13 Comments

Woohoo, bigger and better than ever. Over the weekend I finally threw away Google's Blogger service and ported all of my posts and comments over to my own servers. The upside is that there are a whole lot more features and things I can do with Vladville now that I could not do with Blogger. The downside: spam. I feel its a good tradeoff and I am sure it will be easier to handle than all the downtime and mistakes Blogger used to make.

So here it is – fully powered by WordPress on CentOS Linux 4.3. There is still a Windows 2003 box behind the SBS Show for media streaming but that will soon either disappear or be upgraded, I have not fully decided how I'll be streaming future media content off Vladville – but you can bet there will be a LOT!

The move was very simple. Porting the Vladville theme to WordPress was less than amusing but after seeing what this can do I will be changing the theme again to something more Web 2.0ish. I would like to thank my friend Pablo Averbuj for helping me out yesterday with Apache Rewrites. You see, Blogger publishes the Atom XML as /rss/vladville.xml – its something thats in thousands and thousands of RSS feeds out there. Well, WordPress publishes feeds as /feed/rss2 or /?feed=rss. Since there was no way to do an internal redirect that would work here is the actual Rewrite rule Pablo came up with:

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss/vladville.xml /index.php?feed=rss2 [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

The interesting rule is the one that is matching requests to /rss/vladville.xml and redirecting them to /index.php?feed=rss2. We tried this over and over and over again and could not get it to do internal redirection. Finally Pablo threw in a P in there (for proxy) and it works. What more can you ask for?  Here is an interesting conversation we had after we decided it was good enough:

Pablo: So you're returning RSS2 but aren't they expecting Atom?

Vlad: Yes.

Pablo: Eh, F em if they can't take a joke 🙂

So if your feed is broken happy belated April Fools day. For different feeds from Vladville (if its broken) use the following:

http://www.vladville.com/feed/rss2

http://www.vladville.com/feed/atom

That ought to do it! 

Vladville Maintenance Window

Posted: 12:50 pm
April 14, 2006
Vladville
Comments Off on Vladville Maintenance Window

Just a note on the maintenance window this weekend; Vladville, SBS Show and other sites may not be available as I move the content and back-end systems to WordPress. The current Vladville runs on Blogger, Windows Server 2003 and LAMP front-end. Needless to say is neither as affordable nor as stable nor as flexible as I would like it. So please pardon the dust. I expect everything to be back in one piece by Monday. The interesting part will be porting of the current hacked-up template over to WordPress.

Neat way to offer Remote Assistance

Posted: 9:57 am
April 14, 2006
System Admin
14 Comments

Untitled document Now this is very cool. One of my partners, Travis Creighton, posted this on a mailing list and it is very cool. You know how the Remote Assistance game works, right? You have to ask them to go into Help & Support center, request assistance, mail it to you, etc? Well, Travis found a way to get into the box without making the user create a request:

I found how to bring up the "Offer Remote Assistance" app w/o navigating to the "Server Management" app. (I know…I'm breaking the 70-282 rules.) The sweet thing is that I can use this URL on my XP workstation and not have to first connect to the server in order to 'offer' Remote Assistance. And without this URL, I had to talk them through sending me an invite. Here is the jewel (copy and paste it all on the same line):

hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,

C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/UnSolicitedRCUI.htm

Neat, eh?

Update 4/21/2006: Thanks Charlie, the URI has been fixed; I moved my blog to a different platform over the weekend and it mangled the spacing in the blog during the post import. The one above should work now without a problem but remember to eliminate any spaces and paste it all on the same line..

SBS R2 Executive Chat

Posted: 2:03 pm
April 13, 2006
IT Business
1 Comment

Had the opportunity to chat with SBS R2 developers, PM's, GM's, and other associated R2 owners about what will be new in R2 and how things are changing. The attendance was pretty good and the answers were fairly direct, in spite of some poking and prodding questions from the peanut gallery. Here are the transcripts of the chat: Expert Responses Guest Chat Comments closed, I figure if you had a comment or a question you would have attended this public chat with the SBS R2 executives. For further transcripts and the chance to speak to other Microsoft Executives about software initiatives check out Technet Chats.