So, I’m thinking about doing a podcast about interesting IT jobs… not just IT jobs, but IT jobs of soldiers in the field at interesting companies.
I’ve had to fortune in my career to meet some interesting characters at large companies – characters that deserve some recognition and deserve to be heard. I’ve already lined up at least one possibility at Microsoft, we’ll see if I can pull off something with an Apple employee. This also goes for NASA folk and others.
So this morning, I decided to try to get to the bottom of what causes iChat AV to fail with my router. I was testing with my stepfather who also has a WRT54GS router (by Linksys).
I read on the Apple site that some routers break when using UPnP, but in general, they have a list of ports to forward. Since I’m planning on multiple Macs in the house, forwarding ports to a single system isn’t going to work for me. I disabled UPnP, then used a remote assistance session on my PC to do the same on my stepfather’s router. Then I returned to the Mac, fired up iChat, and bang, what do you know… that resolved it… without forwarding any ports. I can now have an iChat session with my Mac to my stepfather’s PC without issue.
I was pretty depressed to hear that Apple went ahead and proclaimed October as the month of Leopard. I was really hoping for June, but alas… I can understand if they need time.
I was listening to Macbreak Weekly tonight while exercising and I listened to the panel bring up the merits of the 8-core Mac Pro and… well, it just seems like for me, that’s just money not very well spent. I should set my sights back down to the 4-core level because I just won’t be pushing the machine that hard. With that in mind, I could do two Macs like we wished for $6,400. That’s probably way more reasonable in this day and age.
Apparently, I should listen to podcasts more often.
Time: 29:05
Calories cannibalized: 230
Method: XLGlider
I’m just now starting to get into the powerful hacks that OS X offers via Automator and Applescript, but I just ran across this one that is just so sexy it’s not even funny.
There’s plenty of positive Apple spin to go around these days. It seems like every day that I look, there are prominent Windows journalists making the switch to Mac and encouraging others to do so. There’s a “vibe” in the air of change. Windows news sites that I frequent daily have not been the source of much excitement since Vista’s release. There is a very positive stock market buzz about Apple as well. There is so much that bodes well for Apple right now that it seems dreadfully easy for them to capitalize.
Time: 23:34
Calories decimated: 190.8
Method: XLGlider
I should also point out that during teleconferences today, I walked around my desk and lifted the dumbells about 100 times to keep moving.
It’s catching up to me though.
Time: 26:05
Calories destroyed: 222.2
Method: XLGlider
Surprise, Jennifer!
So, in the last entry I mentioned that a lot of people use the delegation feature in Exchange when their workflow and business processes could benefit from the use of sharing permissions instead. Why would it be useful for you to implement this workaround? Let’s clarify a little bit.
Many companies today are finding the RPC over HTTPs (a.k.a. Outlook Anywhere in 2007) scenario to be quite an interesting deployment method. I’m here to tell you, battle scarred and worn… I’ve deployed RPC over HTTPs as the primary topology for an Exchange environment. We’re talking 80% of the population. It presents some unique challenges, but we won’t go into all of those here and now. Ask me later sometime about non-paged pool memory and I’ll share horror stories with you.
There’s a monster post on the Exchange blog about problems with assigning delegates and/or updating distribution list memberships from the Outlook client.
I can say that we’ve definitely suffered from some of the goofy issues in this article. One item they do not cover is that as a general rule, you should not be assigning more than 4 delegates to your mailbox if you can help it. All too often, people use the delegation feature to work through a business process that can be solved with simple sharing permissions.
