http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beastie-boys-co-founder-adam-yauch-dead-at-48-20120504

Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, designed Lync in such a way that if members of two organizations deploy Lync and try to schedule meetings with each other, Lync will use federation in order negotiate authentication between the two domains.  This is great if you have a federated relationship with all your partners that you want to hold meetings with.  But what if you want to do ad hoc meetings with unauthenticated guests?  Microsoft gives you two choices.  One is to allow automatic discovery of federated partners, where the Lync servers will negotiate with each other based on published DNS and other settings, and the other is to log into the meeting using the Silverlight client.

There’s just one problem.

If you have the Lync desktop client on your PC and you try to visit an external meeting link, such as https://lync.contoso.com/meet/username/EJHFSN and you are not a part of the Contoso organization and you do not have federation set up or do not allow automatic discovery of federated partners, it will fail with a useless numeric error code that means absolutely nothing.  Since the desktop client does not allow you log on anonymously, it will never fallback to guest logon, even if the meeting organizer has it enabled for the meeting.

[ Read entire post ]

I just finished watching the Elfen Lied anime, which is based on a fairly long running manga.  The anime was only 13 episodes long, with one 30 minute OVA being produced afterwards.  This anime has been out for a while, so I’m a bit late to the party in commenting on it, but it was such a shocking series, I felt it deserved its own post.

The anime opens with Lucy, a young girl with horns, pink hair, and strange powers, fully nude walking through a building that looks like a cross between a bomb shelter and insane asylum.  As she walks down the hallways, she is ripping guards and scientists to shreds using powers that are explained later in the series.  Blood, bones, guts, and organs splatter everywhere.  This scene sets the tone for the rest of the anime.  I’ve read critics of the series decry this portrayal as over-the-top and gratuitous or simply sex and violence fan service. 

If that’s all you watch and then turn it off, I would agree.  But as you continue to watch the first episode, the mystery of what Lucy is, what that facility she was in is, and how that all relates to the college aged teens she meets who take her in to help her, is absolutely engrossing.  That scene is not the end of the extreme violence and nudity.

[ Read entire post ]

I recently had a disk failure that I was using for my Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM) protection groups.  Unfortunately, it wasn't a recoverable error so I had to remove the disk from the pool and reallocate the affected data sources.  DPM is supposed to error out the data sources when it can't perform the backup, but I've found this is not always the case.  Only about 25% of the data sources that were on that disk ever errored out.  The rest had the happy green "OK."  Looking through the protection groups, I noticed that any data source that was no longer protected would still show the correct last recovery point from when it last succeeded (which was days ago).  When I tried to run a manual express full backup at that point, I would get an error that stated that the disk was missing and it could not perform the backup.  However, it still showed the green "OK" symbol next to the data source.

I have several hundred protected data sources and I couldn't go through them one by one, so I whipped up a PowerShell script to show me stale DPM data.  Basically, it enumerates all the data sources and compares the latest recovery point date with 24 hours ago.  If it's older than that, it outputs the protected resource so I can removed it and add it back to the protection group with a fresh volume.

[ Read entire post ]

I'm a big fan of MS DPM and have been using it for years.  The one place where it really suffers, though, is the management console.  Even in DPM 2010, there are very few things you can do in a batch sequence, which is a common need for DPM administrators.

From time to time, your server may get a large amount of inconsistent replicas.  This is usually due to something outside of DPM's control.  For example, one DPM server I manage is a VM.  If the host server suspends the VM, then resumes and the target server it was backing up before suspend is suddenly offline (such as during a reboot cycle from updates), you can get inconsistent replicas.  There are numerous other scenarios, but you get the drift.  When this happens, the management console forces you to right click on every single alert individually and select "Run a synchronization job with consistent check."  (You can also just wait for the next automatic consistency check interval, but that's not always ideal.)

[ Read entire post ]

House Democrats are forcing the Republicans to admit with their vote that they just want tax breaks for the rich.  The Democrats are trying a (sneaky or awesome, depending on your political preference) procedural move to force the hand of Republicans.  Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner is turning a brighter shade of orange.   Are Democrats finally learning how to play politics the same way as Republicans?  I hope so.  I'm basically an o-bot, it seems, by Liberal Intertubez Blog Commenting Standards, but I am oh-so-very-glad to see some hardball being played after several days of the media reporting that Obama apologized for not being more accommodating to the guys who got our country into the mess it's in.

So will the Republicans vote against tax cuts because the uber wealthy aren't getting their (unfair) share?  A lot of them will, is my prediction, but we'll see.  Either way, the media headlines will emphasize the delicate fee fees of the Republicans being hurt, and not the fact that (some?) Republicans vote against tax breaks for the middle class.  Just you wait and see.  Extra credit for lazy reporting for anybody in the media refers to this bill as a "tax hike" (on the wealthy) by Democrats.

[ Read entire post ]

My new pet peeve is when technology pundits that use the phrase (or a variation thereof), "designing for 1985" when talking about traditional mouse/keyboard input modalities.  This is usually said as a derogatory comment to Microsoft, but also includes other companies that have not yet jumped headfirst into the latest fad of iPad computing (if you can call running applets on a multimedia presentation device "computing.")

I think touch screens a la cell phones and slate devices have their place and can be awesome, but just, for a minute, try imagining typing a long document on an iPad compared to basically any traditional computer setup.  The very thought of it is tiring to me.  I need a nap.  My point is that mouse+kb has been successful for so long because when you know how to type (probably not many tech magazine writers know how without staring at the keyboard and pecking with their index fingers, unfortunately), the keyboard is incredibly fast for input.  And for situations that you can't use the keyboard, the mouse is still faster than touch screens.  With a mouse you can quickly jump from one part of the screen to the other and precisely zero in with just the smallest flick of your wrist.  Touch screens require your arm and hand actually extend to each of the affected areas on the screen.  When you have two or three monitors, having to touch for all direct-contact input with controls on the screen would actually be quite slow, even if it is satisfying in a "I feel like I'm on Star Trek" kind of way.

[ Read entire post ]

Now that the 2010 election is over, I think it's safe to say that Americans have clearly spoken: nobody on the Socialist Party ticket won.  Clearly this means America is a center-right country.  At the same time, Obama should have used the bully pulpit more, because progressive voters are fragile creatures who would rather let their opponents win and go scorched earth than support a moderate on their own ticket.

Yea, also, to, this is all stupid and wrong.  I can say this because I have as much knowledge and credentials as most of the lip-flapping sputter coming out of the beltway media.  I posted the following comment on Balloon Juice (one of the only sane political blogs on the intertubes), but had to share it here to.

Regarding this article.

[ Read entire post ]

The winningest site for those of us on the left that understand that governing this country is more than just a bully pulpit and getting angry: http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

NOW GET OUT AND VOTE!

A while back I created the SCHANNEL.ADM administrative template to allow SCHANNEL ciphers and protocols to be configured in a GPO and pushed out to all servers in a domain.  Basically, in any Windows Server version before 2008, the SSL 2.0 protocol was enabled, and so were a bunch of weak ciphers, like 40-bit RC2 or 56-bit DES.

Well, recently one of the sites I manage began failing a HackerSafe test for ciphers and it seems I missed a few ciphers in my template.  Why HackerSafe only discovered this now instead of years ago is anybody's guess.  It is run by McAfee now, so I wouldn't bet the farm on their audits…  But I digress.

I updated the template on my website for download.  In addition to having  a few more ciphers, I also put in the description "(Recommend Disabled)" next to all the weak ciphers.

Remember that these values are not fully managed policy entries and if you delete your GPO, the affected server will not automatically revert to default values – you will be left to clean up the registry.

[ Read entire post ]