March 2006 - Posts
Everyone has something to complain about with their job, that's why they call it "work". However, mine job is pretty nice as far as jobs go. I get to do all kinds of development here as one of the only two developers on staff. Application dev, web work, graphics, whatever. I also fill out the IT side of things by helping out with Active Directory, Exchange management, etc. Lots of interesting stuff. Some of thing things I want to do coming down the pipe are really exciting. I keep dreaming about how to do the data mining / ad hoc reporting / scorecards app the right way.
I also have some pretty great perks. I work at a company who's business it is to sell CDs, DVDs, video games, and more. We have bands and artists come to the office every once in a while to play for us. Record label reps occasionally have free tickets to movies and concerts. I managed to get my Xbox 360 buy buying it internally when the only other option seemed to be paying a big premium on Ebay. And then there are the promos and free CDs. All I have to do is wander around and I'm suddenly swimming in free music. We've got guitars hanging up in our break room. Pretty much everyone with an office has their own stereo system and CD changer - including me!
Today I just got a CD I've really been waiting for.
Show Your Bones from the
Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I've loved this band since I heard their track Maps on the
radio. I sought out a bunch of live recordings that never seem to get erased from my MP3 player. The newest CD is excellent and totally worth checking out. Buy it
here and you'll send some cash to my company.
Why have I been so quiet on the blog front lately? I'm going to say that it is because I've been working hard for you! This does of course ignore the hours I've poured into playing my Xbox 360 (I've nearly got COD2 beat on Veteran level). Anyway, here is a quick blast about some of the things that I have been slaving away at:
- The second annual Atlanta Code Camp - this time we're serious. We're almost to the point where we're going to take speaker applications and once we get to the registration portion, we'll be allowing HUGE numbers of people register as we've got a bigger venue this year.
- Atlanta MS Pros and FreeTraining123.com - Did you like the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! presentation that we gave last year? Would you like to see a similar presentation, but with an even MORE popular technology? We're still a few months away on this, but it's going to be BIG. I'll post more details AS(a)P.
- INETA - working for INETA could easily be a full time job. I'm glad Brendon and I share this Vice President post or I'd be a drooling mess in some corner, totally overwhelmed with all the minutia. How's this help you? How about if I told you that we were working with INETA to create a webcast of some popular material seen here in the Atlanta area then then distributing it around the country to all the needy user groups?
Oh, I'm sure there is more stuff going on. Let's see. Xbox 360... Full time job... Wedding at the end of April... Xbox 360... Selling a house... Xbox 360...
Anyway - I'm still here, fighting to deny my own existance. It doesn't seem to be helping in the slightest. I'm still busy. Not that anyone reading this is going to believe me as I've just posted something to the blog at 11:47 am on a Thursday. Shouldn't I be working on something right about now?
I'm not talking about the Xbox 360 this time. No, I'm talking about my new most favoritest coffee machine ever. This think kicks butt. It uses little discs to prepare coffee, tea, hot chocolate, espresso, lattes, etc. By reading the barcode on the disc, the machine knows exactly how much water and how hot the water should be. An added benefit is that the beverage is designed to flow from the disc directly to the cup withouth touching the machine, meaning that you can switch back and forth between beverage types as frequently and quickly as it's little heater can make hot water for you. The beverages all taste great (well, the ones I've tried so far) and are a fairly low cost (ex, $0.44 / hot chocolate, less for most coffee, more for cappucino and lattes). It's an ingenious system and of all the bridal shower/wedding gifts I anticipate receiving, this will probably be the most used aside from my new set of pots and pans.
Drawback - beverages must be ordered online, but at least I'm not tied to a single manufacturer.
I also have one of those coffee machines that grinds the beans and makes a fresh pot for you (all of which can be controlled by timer) but I don't drink enough coffee to warrant using that. So, unless I have guests, that one stays in storage and my single cup machine rules the hot beverage roost.
Every once in a while I feel the need to check for something in the Microsoft
Usenet groups. Every time I'm rooting around in there I'm struck by how much great information goes through there that I never see. I also see tons of questions I know the answers to and could provide help. My problem is that I don't reliably check these groups so most of this passes me by. I was stumbling around the net one day and I found that
Google Groups has that little orange XML icon at the bottom of their group feeds. This means you can use your favorite RSS reader to keep up with news groups all in the same window. This isn't a problem on my laptop where I use
JetBrain's Omea (capable of retrieving NNTP and RSS) but at work I use a
lite browser-based reader. This little revelation enables me to keep up at work.
INETA is going to have another user group leadership summit before TechEd this year. Make sure you attend the meeting and meet other user group leaders from around the world!
For more information check out the special INETA newsletter this month.
—Brendon Schwartz
INETA is starting a series of webcasts to help user group leaders with best practices called INETA Live!
Learn how to organize your very own code camp by attending the INETA Live! webcast on March 22, 2006.
Register to attend the event
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032291526&Culture=en-US
—Brendon Schwartz
Matt emailed me yesterday and told me to look at his Muglet. Well as some of you know I don’t let javascript run much less activeX controls, but he told me I really needed to for this one. Glen is the one that let us know about it and he always seems to find this great stuff.
Check out the Muglets I know about right now and add your own to the comments.
Brendon – http://muglets.com/MS-1LDP-B
Matt – http://muglets.com/MS-1KFN-B
Glen – http://b.muglets.com/MS-1KF9-B
— Brendon Schwartz
I went out yesterday and grabbed one of the first copies of
Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior from Best Buy. This game looks simply amazing and promises to be the first game to really do something that the classic Xbox and PS2 couldn't accomplish (including picture in picture action). Of course, yesterday was Kim's birthday so I didn't even take the disc out of the box. Tonight however, is a different story!
Due to a sudden loss of venue, the VB User Group (and the Atlanta FoxPro Group) is suspending future meetings until a new meeting location has been secured. If anyone knows of a free meeting area complete with projector and screen that can accommodate up to 20 people, please let me know.
Kim and I went out to a local restaurant -
Aqua Blue. I've got to agree with the review on
CitySearch, the inspiration outpaces the execution at this beautifully decorated eatery. The decor and the people inside are all gorgous, but I've had better food for cheaper prices elsewhere. Still, I'd give this place at least one more chance.
As her birthday present, I gave Kim a copy of Max Barry's new book,
Company, and a small box of
fancy chocolates. Kim's a voracious reader - it makes me jealous that I'm not devoting any time to reading novels for fun. I used to love to read and now I just don't make the time for it anymore. Oh well...
What's a customer relationship managment system and why is it important for a business that has customer-facing employees? If you even need to ask this question, you definitely need to read the
overview for Microsoft's CRM product called
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I'd actually hoped to have a presentation given at the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals that would cover CRM and Microsoft's solution (which is by no means the only solution on the market) but the presentation scheduled for this April has unfortunately fallen through due to scheduling conflicts.
However, despite the lack of a quality CRM presentation for the user group audience, Microsoft is bringing the
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Launch Tour to Atlanta. Here's a bit of the marketing fluff I received in an e-mail alerting me to this free event:
Microsoft CRM 3.0 is the only
CRM solution that's embedded in Outlook, giving you powerful new CRM
capabilities in a native experience that helps ensure everyone can make the most
of it.
|
| Microsoft CRM
3.0 lets you: |
| • |
Cultivate
and manage customer relationships more easily, from one place. |
| • |
Improve
productivity by simplifying and automating key processes. |
| • |
Map to your unique
business with intuitive customization tools. |
| • |
Deploy on your
terms, hosted or on-site, with the option to switch later. | |
March 23rd, at the DoubleTree Hotel on Holcomb Bridge Rd. from 8:30am to 11:30am
register here
I came in this morning to hear my workstation cranking away at nothing. The disks were really churning and nothing was running, not even a screensaver. So I decided to figure out what was causing this problem once and for all. I checked Task Manager to see what my CPU use and I/O Reads and I/O Writes looked like, but nothing really stood out. So I took things up to the next level and checked out ProcessExplorer from SysInternals. I LOVE this tool and I've used it several times to help me out. This particular time I looked at I/O Reads, I/O Writes, and I/O Deltas. Sorting by the I/O Deltas, I could see that the program responsible for the most disk access was $sys$DRMService.exe. I'd previously read about the
Sony rootkit on
Mark Russinovitch's blog, so I knew what I had and what to do about it, but I looked back at his blog entry to see what he did next. Just for kicks, I fired up FileMon to look at the actual file system usage and watch in horror as $sys$DRMService.exe scanned my entire drive, reading each file nearly a dozen times! Mark wasn't kidding - this really was an example of crappy programming! I'm not bothering with screenshots b/c
Mark's post is the end-all and be-all on this particular topic. Still, I wasn't eager to try his twelve step removal process, so I decided to give
Sony's uninstaller a chance and to my surprise, it worked! My disks stopped churning and the cloaked directory was gone.
In a side note, I just wanted to point out how alarming this really is. The problem is this - I put an old copy of CD in my system, and it installed this software without my knowledge. I run an otherwise clean machine will all the latest in patches from both Microsoft AND my antivirus company, yet neither one prevented this installation or even warned me that I could be opening myself up to problems. It has been
confirmed that there are viruses out in the wild that take advantage of the Sony rootkit to work their way into machines, and yet I still had this vunerability on my machine, despite my own personal due diligence. If I'd not actually heard the machine churning away and possessed the knowledge and wherewithall to remove the stupid thing, I'd possibly be opening up my corporate network to some serious security problems. The average user (and in my company, that means only 4 out of nearly 200 machines shouldn't be considered "average users") would have no idea that there was a problem, or if there was a problem they'd have no idea how to find and fix it.
We need to enter an environment where we can run as least priviledged users, where the OS refuses to install or change ANYTHING without the informed user's express permission. An environment where companys such as Sony thinks ahead about these kinds of problems before releasing code which will incur at least six class-action lawsuits and investigation from several government agencies.
Coming to Atlanta's Cobb Galleria on April 13th, 2006 is the Microsoft Security Summit 2006 on a five city tour. This entirely free event lasts from 8:30am to 5:30pm and contains sessions for IT Professionals and Developers. Being a developer, I'm more interested in those topics, which include:
- Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
- Help Protect your Applications: Military Strategies tha Can be Applied to Applications
- Application Development Principles and Best Practices
- Creating Reliable and Robust Applications with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005
- Microsoft Xtended: Microsoft's Vision for Computing, featuring Windows Vista, Office 12, Internet Explorer 7, and IIS7
If you're interested, please register at
http://www.ustechsregister.com/securitymatters
In that I'm pimping all things Xbox 360 these days, have you seen the commercial voted in the
top 10 by AdWeek? Go
here to watch it.
This time I can’t blame the photographer if I look bad:
More Posts
Next page »