Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

The first glimpse of the next BlackBerry 8700c device is out and there are some big news behind it, namely: “Look for RIM to become the next company to blame its demise on the success of Microsoft.”

No, this is not Deja vu, this is another example of a company with an excellent product not recognizing its competition and sticking firmly on its ground without a bit of innovation. Yes, that may work great if you’re making staplers, but if you’re in the business of making gadgets for the corporate America you better add some of the features they are asking. Yes, mobile email is great, RIM, koodos on that. But guess what, a $10 cell phone can now get mobile email and instant messaging and pictures and sms and ringtones and… well, you’ve got the same brick with poor voice from 2000 except you added a color screen. Congratulations, the museum of obsolescene is on the right.

Perhaps thats a harsh evaluation of the situation with BlackBerry, but not everyone can be Apple. You cannot sit still while your competitors are blowing you out of the water and ride out your virtual monopoly on name alone. It is no secret that virtually everyone you see out there with a Blackberry also has another cell phone on them to make phone calls. They walk around with their mobile email gadget and their cell phone – so when they go back to the phone store and ask to see whats new — will they get another brick or will they get a PocketPC or SmartPhone that can do what BlackBerry does (and better) and only have to carry a single device? I guess time will tell, but I’m taking out my BlackBerry showel.

According to a post from Neowin there is a new ring at AOL: “Ding – you’ve got rootkits!”; Just a reminder that EVERYTHING connected to the Internet needs to have anti-virus, anti-spam protection. Just because “that computer over there, oh it never gets used, lets not worry about security there” doesn’t get used until your daughter visits the office (famous Cisco commercial where his daughter nukes the network by installing a game) doesn’t mean you can let it just slide.

So if you did get hit by the AIM worm, its time to download some free AV software and free antispyware package or more for that system.

I hope you got the dig from the subject line, Microsoft is innovating symbolic linking into Windows Vista. This means you can link different objects without the presence of .lnk files – which helps on file shares when you want to quickly bounce people to the other directory instead of a readme pointer. Despite being very overdue, I’m glad to see this innovated into Vista. Now get to work on MSH!

In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link). So then you ask how is that different from a short-cut (the .lnk file)? Well, a shortcut will only work when used from within the Windows shell, it is a construct of the shell, and other apps don’t understand short-cuts. To other apps, short-cuts look just like a file. With symbolic links, this concept is taken and is implemented within the file system. Apps when they open a symbolic link will now open the target by default (i.e. what the link points to), unless they explicitly ask for the symbolic link itself to be opened. Note symbolic links are an NTFS feature.

Now why is this relevant to the SMB2 protocol? This is because, for symbolic links to behave correctly, they should be interpreted on the client side of a file sharing protocol (otherwise this can lead to security holes). SMB2 understands the concept of symbolic links and evaluates the links on the client. This is the support that is added in SMB2.

Its out, get it while its hot! Here is what they talked about:

• Damian joins the podcast (that’s Spanish for “yes”)
• CRM 3.0 Beta is out (link)
• MOM on SBS?
• Audiovox SMT5600 with Activesync, mobility, certs, and everything
• Weekly cricketcast
• Susan Bradley asks about repartitioning domain controllers
• ISA 14709’s due to disk performance issues
• SharePoint alerts not working
• When you’re done here, check out the podcast at http://www.vladville.com
• Exchange SP2 new Public Folder Permissions Wizard

They even gave me a plug so you know its worth the download. As a matter of fact, the new audio hardware they got is awesome and it sounds great, beats our $20 setup. Check it out.

I got to sleep last night, a welcome change of pace from the disaster recovery that has been going on in South Florida. I would like to share a picture that I believe sums up the state of things down here:

Caption, courtesy of my friend Pablo: i love the fact it’s right over a gas station, “last photograph ever taken by photographer”

As Pablo so eloquently points out, you don’t get to be stupid just because you went through a hurricane and you have no cell signal. Step away from the live wire about to tip over into a pool of fuel.

But driving around South Florida and talking to everyone about what is going on really got me motivated to write an extended D&R article for small business. I think there will be a catchy title, something along the lines “Would you sell your business for $300” because this is precisely how much it would have cost to keep some of these guys online, in touch with their customers. My business is to never, ever, ever go down, but I’ve worked in places that have gone down, often and frequently, and I learned that customers are willing to tollerate incompetence so long as they know what is going on. In disasters, people fear uncertainty, not the actual problems they face. So there will be a beefy guide for the small business on here in about a month about how to do something sensible that will keep you around and no, it won’t involve a tape.

So stay tuned.

Speaking of tuned, the SBS Show will be recorded tomorrow and this time we are going world-wide. This will be a two-parter on diaster recovery: first one covering the value of community for business and education, second one (next weekend) covering the value of disaster recovery when you really need a friend.

I got to sleep last night, a welcome change of pace from the disaster recovery that has been going on in South Florida. I would like to share a picture that I believe sums up the state of things down here:

Caption, courtesy of my friend Pablo: i love the fact it’s right over a gas station, “last photograph ever taken by photographer”

As Pablo so eloquently points out, you don’t get to be stupid just because you went through a hurricane and you have no cell signal. Step away from the live wire about to tip over into a pool of fuel.

But driving around South Florida and talking to everyone about what is going on really got me motivated to write an extended D&R article for small business. I think there will be a catchy title, something along the lines “Would you sell your business for $300” because this is precisely how much it would have cost to keep some of these guys online, in touch with their customers. My business is to never, ever, ever go down, but I’ve worked in places that have gone down, often and frequently, and I learned that customers are willing to tollerate incompetence so long as they know what is going on. In disasters, people fear uncertainty, not the actual problems they face. So there will be a beefy guide for the small business on here in about a month about how to do something sensible that will keep you around and no, it won’t involve a tape.

So stay tuned.

Speaking of tuned, the SBS Show will be recorded tomorrow and this time we are going world-wide. This will be a two-parter on diaster recovery: first one covering the value of community for business and education, second one (next weekend) covering the value of disaster recovery when you really need a friend.

To all those of you who emailed me asking about my flu, thank you for your concern, I made it just fine. It was not a flu at all, it was a case of too many Hooters wings (or rather, too much grease accompanied by a wing or two) that took me out of comission. Playing the wedding planner for the SBS roadshow, trying to manage the D&R requests nearly statewide and figure out logistics for some other things at the same time didn’t leave much room for the blog.

But I’m back so there will be more stuff on Exchange SP2 stuff soon, thank you for your patience. Another show this weekend, and I’re going world-wide this time, Omaha, Alabama and Kent (UK) will be here along with Florida. But first things first:

SBS Roadshow: Microsoft takes to the road again
The presentation tonight was quite remarkable. They took so much input, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my group show that much respect for Microsoft in my entire life. They listened, took notes, opened up… it was kind of like hanging out in the parking lot after SBS shows, except with Sr. Microsoft people and it really gave the group a whole new dimension. This is not that far out of the norm, Orlando is pretty respectful of Microsoft (much more so than any place I’ve ever been to) but they also go far beyond and above the call of duty to show a good face here.

The event was exactly as promised – Senior Microsoft people, taking feedback on SBS and everything involved with it from SharePoint to WSUS, partner program, competencies, etc.

SBS Show
First of all, thank you to everyone for the very kind feedback. We’ve had 805 downloads at this point, which is roughly 8x as much as I had expected. So whoever had that faulty browser that kept on crashing and reloading the mp3 all of the 804 times, please hug your browser for me. 🙂

We are doing another one this weekend, and yes, we’re going global. I wanted to keep it in the SEC (Southeastern Conference) last week since Chris was so kind to help me test audio and phone stuff about 50 times to get it right. He’s coming back this weekend. We have a surprise (actually two very attractive surprises) for this show which will be all about the many communities that exist on the Internet and in your neck of the woods, whereever you may be. There are folks out there that enjoy to help people and not just for techie things – there are support communities for business initiatives, managed services, certification, small business, big business.. no matter where in the IT business you are, or how far up and down the business management chain you may be, there are people that want to help you – and we’ll talk to some of them.

If you have anything interesting please drop me an email or post a comment to this article and we’ll work it in. Look for it this weekend.

This came from a friend in West Palm Beach, they took the back end of Wilma:

WOW…. there is a mess down here! My home took a beating, but not as bad as some of my neighbors and co-workers. Of course I don’t have power, but I am writing you from my office in Lake Worth. Luckily we have a generator here, and since we do so much business with Bellsouth, they were nice enough to put a generator on their slick cabinet. So my office is up and running, but most of it is running in Houston. We have employees from Ft. Lauderdale to the Acreage, and only 1 place has power. The corner of Okeechobee and Jog seems to have power. At least the people north of the intersection are the lucky ones. They say they don’t have cable yet though.

My car took a hit, and so did my wife’s. We have some very stupid people on my road and they had their garbage on sidewalk. Well it’s not their anymore.. After watching a few pieces
ricochet off my truck, and cut through my neighbors screen porch it, a lot of their stuff is in a pool across the street! We have a nice ding in the garage door (hopefully it will work), and our pack patio is ruined. We lost all our trees except for the tree that holds my daughter’s swing. she was on it while we were out cleaning. We don’t have a generator @ the house so we are “camping” out. Thank God that it is cool out, and it was not like it was last year. We had no power for 4 days, and my wife was 9 months pregnant!. Needless to say, my daughter is a little over a year, and she has been through 2 hurricanes! I have lived in FL for almost 10 years, and have had 3… Time to move again?

Good luck to everyone out there!

Over 6 million people in Florida are still out of power, majority in South Florida which is serviced by FPL, the Florida Plunder and Loot power company. My girlfriend works for EOC and apparently none of the nukes were damaged – two in Port St. Lucie and Turkey Lake in Everglades. So at least the generation facilities are live. Power poles however, thats another story. It could be weeks before most places are restored, during the last outage (Katrina) it took up to 7 days to restore 90% of service. South Florida is officially a disaster zone.

Wilma made a landfall south of Naples today and quickly moved across the Everglades National Park to deal a big strike to Miami, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. At the writing of this message the local power company, Florida Plunder & Loot (FPL), has suffered massive failure in its powergrid and regions from Key west up through West Palm Beach are affected.

Click on the graph to the left to check out the barometer for Deerfield Beach, the extreme north tip of Broward County. At the moment over 5 million people are without power but thankfully the temperature is down which will prevent deaths usually experienced during heat waves.