Status - Technical Advice

Recycling in place

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:57:00 -0700

Green IT is one of the new industry buzzwords that has come along with a recession, an environmentally-minded president, and an increasing awareness that "green" is economical. More efficient allocation in resources leads to a better bottom line. Virtualization is making such allocation increasingly easier for businesses of all sizes to adopt. At the same time, recycling options for old hardware are expanding, and the necessity of procuring new hardware is diminishing, or at least extending out on a longer timeline.

There is an interesting article on MIT's Technology Review today about a project which has used the lightweight OS code base developed for the XO laptop to run older desktop PCs with better performance than would be possible for "modern" operating systems such as OS X or Windows.

A lot of people forget that the catch phrase for the green movement is just "Recycle"... it's actually "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle" and it's intended to be interpreted in that order. Start off using less, make better use of what you do have, and only then, if neither of those actions are applicable, should you actually recycle equipment.

Many organizations are locked into patterns of reliance on the latest and greatest operating systems, although the functionality of those systems is arguably equivalent to older software in many situations (even on the newest and fastest hardware). These organizations have bought into the industry-approved upgrade cycle and don't see the use for older hardware that can't run their standard software.

The thing is, though, much of that standard software can be run in some way, even using older hardware, if one can reconsider how and where it is being run and look at it from a strictly functional perspective.

The answer, of course, is to use a terminal services environment, with a single powerful server handling the heavy lifting of software operation, and the older machines as dumb terminals. This isn't perceived as practical for many organizations because they still insist on maintaining smart client operating systems on those desktops, even when their primary use is as terminals. From a certain perspective, this makes sense; if you are a Windows shop, and you want centralized management, then you reduce your costs by maintaining a single Windows version across your platforms. It's nonsensical, however, when those platforms are simply used to access web or terminal services; client management is only a serious issue when expensive and complex clients need to be maintained for desktop operations. A cheap dumb terminal is fire and forget: drop it in place, run it into the ground, replace it with another if it fries. There is nothing to get infected, stolen, or corrupted... what difference does client management make?

My old favorite for re-purposing older machines into dumb terminals was the PXES Universal Linux thin client boot disk. I see that the project has since gone mainstream, however, and has non-competes with other providers; they are now recommending a project called cult, which looks similar but which I haven't had a chance to try out yet. Cult, PXES, or similar open-source thin-client distributions allow old hardware to be repurposed as a terminal client as easily as popping a CDROM in the drive and turning on the power.

The old machine can be configured to boot directly to an RDP based terminal session; the user logs in and runs everything without even knowing the difference between the Windows login they have just made and the conventional, but more expensive, thick-client version they are already used to. In most cases, the boot time is faster than anything possible with a modern smart-client PC, even running on the oldest hardware. What a deal... use old hardware, improve performance and your user experience at the same time!

Of course, if you are willing to look at web-based alternatives to your Windows applications, it gets even easier. There's no need to set up a Terminal Server when someone else has already procured and configured the servers for you (as have all SaaS providers). In those cases, a lightweight, specialized distribution such as xPUD, Xubuntu, or Damn Small Linux can either be installed to an old, small hard drive, or booted just like cult from a CD or USB stick, putting the user at a rudimentary desktop with web access in a matter of seconds. All the heavy lifting other operating systems do is unnecessary when all your processing is happening on the other end of an Internet connection. Firefox is a safe, stable browser to run on a lightweight, impenetrable, disposable Linux platform to access those services. When Google finally releases Chrome for Linux, a browser specially built for running web-based applications, the case will be even easier to make.

So hold off on your trip to the local recycling facility; slide a fresh CD into the drive and simply recycle your machines in place.

Lazy or just new media?

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:40:00 -0700

Steve Rubel suggested a few weeks ago that the technology blogging community has gotten lazy and inbred, rehashing one another's ideas and putting up quick, short, thoughtless posts instead of well-written, well-researched, insightful pieces. He calls the resulting conglomeration "The Lazysphere" and has this to say about it:

The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing. The Attention Crash is another factor at work here. People don't have as much time to think.

It may be that comments and responses to his post disprove it, or perhaps they simply reflect those accused pulling up their pants and acting as if nothing is amiss, but either way they amount to fine reading and an interesting snapshot of the various perspectives on the matter.

I have my own perspective, as well, evolving from the slight guilty feeling I got reading the post. Although I believe he hasn't covered the motives adequately, I certainly feel at times as though I contribute to the phenomena more than combat it. The only thing is, I'm not sure if it's good, bad as Rubel suggest, or simply the inevitable evolution of the medium.

There are certainly times when I spot interesting news and slap up a post without putting the time or research it deserves into it. The motivation, however, is not to get dugg or boosted up Techmeme, or Googled; there are a more complex variety of factors at work, some of which are "selfish" in that same light, others of which simply seem to be implicit to blogging.

First, and perhaps foremost, is the money. That's not an issue on this blog, which is simply information for clients and others interested in the business of IT management. I am, however, paid to author another blog and there is a minimum weekly posting requirement which I am insufficiently blessed with new ideas to fill wholly from that font. But the posts have to go up nonetheless, and so if someone else spots something interesting, it becomes my fodder as well.

Here is where I am not sure this is such a terrible thing. I am, perhaps, failing to come up with anything new and original, but I am at least commenting on and offering a different perspective to the original material. This has always struck me as a strength of the system, not a deficiency. Blogging is closer to conversation than journalism; every line in a conversation need not be brilliant in order for the discussion as a whole to elicit new and interesting information.

Which brings me to the second factor, which is timeliness. Conversations fall apart if too much time passes between lines. Whether this is a function of Techmeme or not, the fact is that if you don't put your opinion out there early, it's not going to be a part of that conversation. Witness this post, nearly a month later; it's better than even money that no one who participated in that original discussion around Rubel's post will read this, let alone reply to it, including Rubel himself. If this is simply a fact of conversations, and blogging is seen largely as a conversation, then it seems silly to chastise people for it.

The third factor is an outgrowth of the second, which is simply, time. Although I get paid to blog, it's not paying the mortgage; I think that's true for most bloggers, and so this is something we do in our spare time. Spare time, at least for me, is in pretty short supply. And to be honest, my most original thinking goes to paying clients... I'm not afraid to share what I am thinking with readers and the public, but if there is competitive advantage to be had in a thought, it's likely to go into a discrete e-mail, rather than a public post. And then there is the pressure to post sufficiently frequently to not look dead. I think I barely meet that requirement here as it is, and I'm certainly not doing it with posts matching the caliber of those deep-thinkers and prolific posters on Rubel's "Thinkers" list.

Although these points may sound somewhat defensive, I don't necessarily disagree with the core point, which is that a lot of blog posts seem redundant and ill-conceived to me, too. I, too, admire and envy those on Rubel's list, and would that all of us were more like them. I think my point is not that I think Rubel's accusation is necessarily wrong, but perhaps that it's inevitable, and in some ways it may even be desirable.

That said, I'll try to raise my own level of discourse as well (which doesn't mean every post will be a gem; sometimes I just want to point out stuff that is interesting, not comment on it, just as Steve does with his link posts... which, in fact, comprise the majority of his blog posts as well).

When off the shelf software really is software as a service

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:06:00 -0700

So the whole Microsoft WGA fiasco last week got me thinking--if one of the major arguments for using client-side installed packaged software applications is that they will work for you whether you have Internet connectivity or not, then what exactly is up with leashing those applications and their functionality to the Internet anyway? Isn't this the worst of both worlds--bulky, difficult to update, easily superseded, expensive software that has the same risk of disappearing when the provider's server goes down as does the lightweight, frequently updated, and easily upgraded Software as a Service (SaaS) competition?

Windows Genuine Advantage is a concept (and a name--how many lies can you pack into three words?) that bugs me anyway and so it's easy to pick on, and frankly the outage wasn't all that severe as such things go. But as Gartner analyst Michael Silver says in the above article, "A system that's not totally reliable really should not be so punitive." And he has hit the nail on the head--it's not just this recent server problem that makes it unreliable, either, it has a history of false positives and generally problematic side-effects, and yet Microsoft has been upping the ante for failing to pass the check steadily over the past couple of years. Although they have begun to get into the SaaS (or "Software plus Services" as they like to term the offerings) market of late, and have demonstrated in the past a startling capacity for turning the company quickly on its axis to pursue new opportunities, they currently have quite a lot riding on making their traditional applications an attractive competitor to newer, more nimble SaaS offerings. It wouldn't seem on the face of things to be in their best interest to make those traditional applications less and less compelling by harnessing them to some of the same complexities and challenges that SaaS faces.

I would like to think that someone over there in Redmond has run the numbers on all this, and found that the reduction in piracy from WGA implementation will save them more than the alienation of existing customers and the inconvenience of the implementation will convince people to seek out alternatives from their competitors, but I suspect that isn't the case. Instead, it seems like they are simply coasting on their market position (which may be a viable, if short-term, strategy) and doing what they think they can get away with as the de facto standard maker. But issues like this are exactly the sort of thing that will chip away at that position.

In a larger sense--although this is probably a topic for another article--one has to wonder if Bill's impending departure, and current detachment, is causing the company to lose focus, and to make mistakes which it might not have under his more attentive guidance.

For the moment, however, it simply serves as another question you have to ask yourself when you are selecting line of business software--are traditional off-the-shelf software packages really any more dependable than their Internet-based alternatives anymore?

Follow-up on iPhone for business post

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:52:00 -0700

The post a couple of weeks ago on the idea of using iPhones for business applications provoked some interesting follow-up thoughts that I thought I would put up for some point/counter-point action:

Without going into detail on the selection of the relatively slow and encumbered EDGE mobile networking solution for Internet access away from WiFi locations, it's been pointed out that OWA on Safari isn't really a practical alternative to dedicated mail apps when web access is so slow. Of course, there are ways to use the built-in mail app with Exchange, but it's true that we were proposing OWA as the primary solution.

There have also been a number of complaints about the typing speed using touchscreen keyboard, most recently illustrated by a study comparing more conventional QWERTY micro-keyboards of the sort on Blackberry devices by User Centric out of Chicago. Larry Dignan has a good commentary on the study up on his blog now at ZDNet.

There have also been some performance problems, with various people reporting system freezes and in some cases UI issues that prevent such basic functionality as being able to answer an incoming call. And of course, with complex devices come crashes.

Then too there have been complaints about the oddly recessed miniplug jack that effectively presents some third-party headsets from jacking in. That's not a big deal for some users but there are executives we know who have their favorite mobile headset effectively surgically implanted on one ear, and as a matter of comfort and preference, it's not really practical for them to make a change in that department.

For the most part these (with the possible exception of the EDGE network speed issue) are 1.0 release problems which have a good opportunity to be corrected, and as was mentioned in the original article, we're not going to recommend something that just came out without getting a better picture of these real-world performance issues. But just as we would wait to see how they play out, they also give Apple an opportunity to come up with fixes.

iPhone for business?

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:09:00 -0700

We've been kicking around the idea of adding iPhones to our recommended SMB mobile networking solutions bin lately. As mentioned here previously, it seems clear that a lot of corporate power-users are going to be looking for ways to take their iPhones and make use of them for work, and although they have been marketed and oriented as a consumer device, and though conventional wisdom seems to be against it we're starting to think that it may not be such a terrible idea (the all-seeing, all-knowing wisdom the the Gartner Group notwithstanding).

The InfoWorld article cites all the things you'd expect it to cite: you can't replace the battery, you can't use third-party apps on it, you can't develop your own apps for it, there's no enterprise mail support. "Heck, it doesn't run Windows," you can practically hear them say, "how can you possibly use it for business?"

But it occurred to us that we've generally been recommending that people not tinker with their devices anyway--who wants a lawyer billing $300 an hour changing their own phone battery? And we also encourage people to stick with stock and web-based applications, having found that in-house software development and niche apps tend to be expensive and troubled... frankly, anyone who is developing custom apps for mobile devices instead of building the functionality out to web apps is probably who is crazy here. And the same goes for the e-mail... we hear people gripe about OWA on Safari all the time but we've had good luck with it personally.

In fact, we're already starting to see web development aimed specifically at the iPhone--and a business web-app, natch. And if OWA doesn't work for you, well, pretty soon you'll have other options for that, too.

Other than the price tag, in fact, Apple seems to have nailed the sort of next-gen handheld device that we might have hoped for to recommend to SMB customers looking for flexible, reliable, easy-to-use mobile devices. We realized that many of the objections people have leveled at the iPhone are based on comparisons to Windows mobile or Palm devices... but our experience with those devices in corporate environments has always been that they are complex and error-prone--hardly the gold standard for mobile information access that some of the critics are seeming to insinuate.

Anyway, as with any new product, we're not ready to pile all onto the bandwagon yet... we want to see how things play out in the real world with the thing, whether it delivers everything that's promised. But we're definitely interested, and we'd like to hear other opinions--so what do you think about the idea?

Best Buy acquiring Speakeasy

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:15:00 -0700

I hadn't even gotten my coffee down yet this morning when this disturbing missive showed up in my mailbox:

I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and top consumer electronics retailer in North America. This is a significant milestone for our company as our new relationship will help us realize our goals of becoming the No. 1 provider of voice and data solutions to small businesses. It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

Speakeasy will be an important part of the Best Buy For Business service that delivers simple, reliable, and affordable technology solutions to small businesses. Speakeasy?s array of broadband voice, data and managed services offerings will be the focal point of the Best Buy For Business communications solutions.

This agreement is a major step forward for our company. While our business remains strong, our relationship with Best Buy provides us with additional resources and brand recognition, and opens new opportunities to dramatically accelerate our growth.

Best Buy, like Speakeasy, is known for its high level of customer service. Our reputation as a trusted provider of voice and data services with stellar customer service will not change. Our values are similar too -- Best Buy shares our customer passion, respect for individuals, and drive to do the right thing while achieving results.
You will continue to work with your partner sales managers and the excellent service and support you expect will continue uninterrupted.
Best Regards,
Bruce Chatterley
President & CEO, Speakeasy, Inc.

I particularly got a kick out of the line "Best Buy, like Speakeasy, is known for its high level of customer service." In fact, quite the opposite is the case, and one only has to do a quick Google search for "Geek Squad sucks" to see what they have done to the customer service abilities of their last major hands-on technical acquisition. Every time a merger or acquisition occurs, the company being acquired has to swear up and down that all the things that made them great--and Speakeasy has been great, at times, and solidly reliable the rest of the time--won't change one iota, but so far as I can tell they nearly always do.

I've been recommending Speakeasy to clients for some time now where there has been a good fit between their plans and the client's requirements, even in cases where they have been more expensive than the lackluster competition (big telcos and Covad are generally the other options--all of whom are a crapshoot at best and a nightmare at worse when it comes to service and reliability). The question now is, what do I do going forward? Speakeasy is great, Best Buy is atrocious, this is hardly a chocolate and peanut-butter moment... whose corporate culture and ethos will win out?

I'll be cheering for Speakeasy, but dreading Best Buy. And I don't think I'll be able to continue recommending Speakeasy solutions, at least until I've had a chance to see how this change in ownership affects their service for current clients. In the meantime, if anyone has any other recommendations on national (US) broadband providers, I am all ears.

Duplicating Virtual Machines using Sysprep

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:19:00 -0700

I got really excited when I read that headline initially, then deflated a bit after I looked into it further. For some reason, I had thought the author was talking about taking virtual machines (basically, computers running inside of a program on another computer, something like VMWare or VirtualPC or Parallels) and duplicating the images out to real physical machines. That's something I've been wanting to do for some time but have never had any success with (tried it with Norton Ghost and VMware some time ago and haven't since).

So when I saw this blog entry and this blog entry over at Technet Blogs I was unaccountably filled with joy--finally, a way to prep client machine images without having to be on-site and in the way of the client, or to remove hardware from their site to build or deploy images.

But alas, they are just talking about duplicating machines inside the virtualization software.

I've never had a problem with this functionality simply using the built-in tools for cloning in VMWare although I suppose there are certain theoretical issues you could run into. I imagine that's why I assumed they were talking about physical machines--why go to the extra trouble of duplicating virtual machines outside the tools provided for the task already?

But they got me thinking at the same time--could you use Sysprep and some sort of disk duplication software to move virtual images onto physical machines?

If anyone's done it, drop me a line. If I have some spare time sometime I will give it a go myself and let you know what happens.

Build or buy?

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:02:19 -0700

Software, that is. With astonishing regularity, the proposition has come up with another of my clients again, currently served by an old, unsuited line of business application and dissatisfied with the other choices they've seen so far for replacing it.

They had actually been moving toward a Application Service Provider solution, a web-based, off-site, hosted application that seemed to offer what they were looking for but as they move down the implementation road it has proven less adaptable than they were hoping and their worry now is that the problems they've found so far are just the tip of the iceberg as far as the application itself and the company managing it goes.

It's smart to perform that sort of due diligence before moving to a managed solution--you are, after all, placing a great deal of confidence there in trusting an ASP with data and service vital to your day-to-day business operations--and since I wasn't familiar with and hadn't originally recommended the ASP in question, I had recommended they do so but I was hoping that it would all work out. An off-site solution is ideal for this particular business model and they are in an ideal position to implement and benefit from it, poised on the cusp of real growth and still nimble enough to make the switch before sinking significant money into their own infrastructure.

But with this setback and a pressing need to get a replacement up and running, they're talking about developing and running software in-house.

I've touched on this before, as it's something that nearly every client comes to sooner or later... they can't find the perfect application, and they think "hey, we know about these problems better than anyone, let's build it ourselves!" And I've mentioned how that's almost always a mistake, that it's never that simple.

In this case, though, it may be more realistic, which makes it a stickier decision. The client already has an experienced web development team in-house (and my assumption is they would be creating a web-based application) and at least one employee who has become something of an expert on the data structure and flow in the business (the heart of almost any line of business application). They look at the ASP costs and the going rate for programmers, and the economics start to make some sense.

I am not so sure, however. What they are missing is an experienced project manager, anyone who has managed this sort of application development before. As Paul Dorsey identifies in his seminal paper on systems project failures, one of the three keys to completing a successful project is "Solid technical leadership by someone who has successfully completed a similar project." It's easy to discount that value if you've never been through a project of this sort before--all you think you need is a couple of smart coders and a DB guy, and they can surely figure it all out just from talking with other staff, right? But there is far more to the process and if you don't have anyone guiding it who has done so before, it's a real crap shoot how to navigate it.

Beyond that, there is the question of the cost of running and maintaining the system after it's complete--that's a cost that would go with any Off The Shelf software replacement too, of course, but disappears with an ASP. It's difficult to quantify, but it's real--having to deal with all the server quirks and database problems in-house distracts from core business and creates friction.

There are really two discussions here, one about developing the software in-house, the other about running it there, and there are two separate cost models associated with those. Either of them make sense when compared to the ASP fixed costs alone, but when you put them together I'm not so sure.

They haven't asked me to look at the issue specifically, so I don't have the numbers and haven't put the work into making a solid recommendation in the matter, but off-hand, I think it would probably be a mistake.

In the end, the textbook answer is that it makes sense to develop in-house when doing so will give you a key technical competitive business advantage over your competition at a cost that doesn't obviate the additional revenue from that business advantage... but that's a difficult equation to navigate in situations like these.

Problems with non-Windows wireless configuration in Active Directory domains

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:34:22 -0700

I ran into this again this morning; using a third-party wireless configuration utility in a managed AD domain environment causes nothing but problems.

I first noticed it about a year ago, when I ran into some problems remotely managing wireless laptops when the users were logged out. I could get a management console up for them when the users were logged in, but not when they were logged out, though the laptops were up and running and the wireless cards powered on. I eventually traced the problem back to the Linksys combination driver/configuration utility. Without a user logged in, the driver would not maintain a network connection. I don't know off the top of my head why this is, although I imagine it probably relates to the profile settings and the security context the driver gets loaded into.

At any rate, it proved to be a significant problem--not only because those laptops could not be remotely managed without a user present, but also because many of the automated management tasks slated for after-hours would not complete without a network connection... backups, WSUS patch pushes, anti-virus updates.

I fixed the issue by removing the crap Linksys wireless manager and just using the built-in Windows Wireless Zero Configuration, which keeps the connection as long as the laptop is on even if no one is logged in.

This morning, I ran into an even more insidious effect. This time it was with a new Dell, who apparently ships now with the Intel configuration utility as the default wireless connection manager. The company staff had been trying to add it to the local SBS 2003 domain using the Connect Computer wizard, which has some quirks (namely, you must have DNS set to point to only the SBS AD controller, and you must not have more than one network connection enabled--not just connected, but enabled, a non-default state for most new laptops which have both wireless and wired connectors enabled even if one or the other isn't connected) but is generally pretty solid. I went out on-site to troubleshoot it and found that they'd been running into the multiple network connections enabled problem. Easy fix--disable one of the connections (I wish the error message was a little more clear, I could have walked them through it easily). I disabled the LAN connection arbitrarily, and plugged in the WPA key and ran through the wizard over the wireless connection without any problem.

The problem came after reboot... it wouldn't let me log in with any domain account, saying the domain couldn't be found. The wireless card indicator was lit, so it took me a minute to realize what was going on--the Intel utility wasn't actually able to establish a wireless connection without a user being logged in. But I couldn't log in because the wizard had already joined the laptop to the domain, and it couldn't reach the domain to authenticate any account. And I couldn't just plug it in to the Ethernet connector, because that had needed to be disabled for the wizard to work!

It could have been quite an ugly morning, except the guy who had done the initial setup remembered the name he had used when prompted during the install process, and I was able to log in locally and re-enable the LAN connector to complete the setup and get the necessary credentials cached client-side. Now, the user will be able to log in on the cached credentials and the wireless will connect afterward and he'll never notice the problem. But unless he's plugged in, he won't be getting patches, AV updates, or anything else while logged out (and policy is to log out when not using the machine, for security reasons).

I didn't have time to perform a lobotomy on the Intel wireless manager and revert back to Windows Zero Configuration, but I imagine it would work as well as it did with the Linksys cards. I prefer stock drivers and OS-based managers to all the poorly written, crap-laden junk that ships with most peripherals (printers are a great case in point these days) but what I'm wondering is if other people find this to be a problem, and if so, do they have another, easier solution, and if not, why do Dell and other major business laptop manufacturers switch away from perfectly good default settings to this sort of crud?

Probably because few reviewers bother to consider such real-world functionality. I just happened to run across this article reviewing WiFi clients today while researching an unrelated matter, and although they spend a lot of time with signal strength comparisons and looking at the interface and features of the various wireless cards, they never both to do any in-depth real world tests on them. There's a fundamental misunderstanding of real business requirements, particularly in the SMB market. Before all else, stuff just has to work and has to let other stuff work, or all the features in the world are a waste.

Microsoft to the rescue

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 09:26:27 -0700

So, I had another blog entry I was working on yesterday, but I ran into some problems and realized that the problems are actually more interesting than the entry (although actually they aren't that interesting either, which possibly doesn't say much about the original entry).

I keep entries I'm working on in a plain old RTF file that I either work on with Abiword or TextEdit depending on whether or not I'm on my desktop or Powerbook. The one file has all the entries in it, all jumbled together and terribly disorganized in various states of editing. It's the source of the next week or so worth of entries, at least, and represents a middling amount of work.

A problem I have from time to time with TextEdit is that, trying to paste a URL in to it, if it's an RTF file rather than plain text, it actually inserts the hyperlink instead of the text. For this purpose, I need the URL text, because I'm just going to paste it into s here and have to turn it into a hyperlink at this point anyway. So, while I'm working on the original entry, I paste a URL in, and it puts in the link. It's not a huge deal but it interrupts workflow and train of thought as I have to go in and change the document to plain text and re-paste the URL. Somehow in this process, I switched from RTF to plain text and told it to save the file to the original document, which is RTF. It objected but I over-rode it, being in a hurry.

My mistake. Something happened to render the file all but invisible. Using TextEdit, I could see it as plain text, but any attempt to copy and paste out of it was unsuccessful--nothing would paste! I couldn't resave the file in any other format, all came up blank. Abiword could open it but showed no text. Some text editors refused to open it entirely, others would pull it up, but again, show just a blank page.

Finally, I open it in vi and I see what's happened. Somehow, a control character of some sort has been inserted between every single letter in the document, and this is giving both the editors and the copy/paste function fits.

Now, there is probably a way to search and replace control characters in vi, but it wasn't obvious in any of the examples I Googled. None of the other hyper-functional, snazzy, open-source text editors that I have laying around in my distribution would even recognize the text, let alone allow me to manipulate it (all you emacs people can stuff it, I didn't even try that bloated monstrosity).

In my desperation, I fired up a VMWare session of Windows XP and gave it a shot with the humble included Windows Notepad software. And you know what? The sucker worked. Opened the file right up, exposed the control characters, and did a comprehensive two-step search and replace to restore the file to full working order.

OneCare to rule them all

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:32:35 -0700

Microsoft is releasing it's Live OneCare security subscription service tomorrow and I thought I'd go over it briefly. Conceptually, it's something I've been hoping to see for quite some time--a bundled service offering from a single provider that covers most of the major threats to the average PC: spyware, malware, viruses, and bugs. At $50 for up to three PCs per year, it doesn't sound like a half bad deal, either.

And for home users, or very small offices, maybe it's not. But disappointingly, it doesn't make any attempt to address the mainstream SMB market, which is chronically underserved when it comes to comprehensive, centralized threat protection. The offering doesn't have any sort of integration with current server products such as WSUS, with which it overlaps. Nor is there any option for centralized logging or reporting, which is crucial for efficient management in the SMB environment--having to individually check up on and manage PCs is a tremendous time sink to the understaffed SMB IT department. And most of the decent package solutions that address those concerns are enterprise grade software with the corresponding cost and licensing structure, making them impractical for many smaller companies. And there is even some concern that OneCare will serve to further purge the market of the few reasonable alternatives currently available.

For most of my clients, I'm currently "rolling my own" desktop security solutions using free Open Source software. It's not ideal but on the other hand, neither is anything else I've found (McAfee and Symantec solutions, the prevailing answer for SMBs for desktop AV/AS, have been nothing but trouble in SBS2K3 environments) and if you're not going to find a good solution, you may as well at least get a cheap one. But I think there is definitely a market out there for a reasonably priced, centrally managed security solution--if anyone out there knows about one I haven't run across, feel free to mention it, I'm open to suggestions! OneCare pretty clearly isn't going to be it.

Intellectual Property Indemnification

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 19 May 2006 08:40:17 -0700

One of Microsoft's big arguments as to why you should use their software instead of Linux or other free solutions is something called intellectual property indemnification. Software is made up of patentable processes (lamentably) and thus bits and pieces are protected from unlicensed use within the programs and operating systems you run on your PC. From time to time, someone who will have written a particular piece of software and patented it will find that for one reason or another, that bit has slipped into a package that someone else is selling without a suitable licensing and royalty agreement. This results in an intellectual property claim, often followed by a messy court battle.

Microsoft happily indemnifies their clients against claims of this sort made against software purchased from them, and they like to point out that anything you get for free is not so protected--in other words, you and you alone will be on the hook if you are found to be using software that some hippy cooked up in a basement using patented parts of other people's work.

But over the last few months, what we've seen is that indemnification ain't so wonderful after all. And yesterday, Symantec slapped Microsoft with a lawsuit over the upcoming Vista operating system which may delay its release even further or cripple the functionality when it does come out. I'm just taking a random stab here, but I'm going to bet that one or the other of these most recent incidents will have some impact on you; most hits here are from Internet Explorer, most of you are probably looking forward to Vista.

In the meantime, how many individual end-users are being sued for using open source software? Uno.

So, is indemnification such a great deal if the practical effect is that you may be forced into compliance with mandatory patches that break your current systems? If it delays your roll-out plans because software has to stay in the shop longer to be re-engineered before release? Do you go with the warm fuzzies of Microsoft's assurance and bankroll, or do you play the odds?