Rules for blogging…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Back in February, I blogged about the dangers of blogging without your employer’s consent. My current employer does not appear to support blogging as an information sharing tool; however when I joined the company I asked if there were any specific guidelines regarding blogging other than the confidentially obligations as part of my employment terms and conditions (i.e. is it specifically prohibited). No response suggests to me that a) there are no specific guidelines and b) it is not specifically prohibited.

As my original post suggested, such grey areas can be problematic and as my blog seems to be building a reasonable following now, I’m reluctant to stop. For any IT (or PR) managers out there who want to allow blogging but are unsure how to keep it in check, below are some guidelines (reused with permission) from a previous employer:

Policy, guidelines and instructions for using blogs.company.com

This page includes policy, guidelines and instructions for using blogs.company.com

General Rules:

  • Take care not to disclose any other information that is confidential or proprietary to company or to any other third party, including project and client names. Consult the blogmaster if you are unsure.
  • Since blogs.company.com is a public space, please be as respectful to the company, our employees, our customers, our partners and affiliates, and others (including our competitors).
  • Be especially careful about releasing partner information which is covered by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Again, if in doubt ask.
  • No profanity, no politics, no personal information.
  • We may ask you to stop if we believe it is necessary or advisable to ensure compliance with securities regulations or other laws.
  • Company reserves the right to remove any information which it believes contravenes these rules, any laws, our customer and partner relationships and agreements or shows us in an unfavourable light.

Guidance:

  • Be passionate about what you write, or don’t write it!
  • Publish as fact only that which you know to be true.
  • If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
  • Publicly correct any misinformation.
  • Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
  • Disclose any conflict of interest.
  • Note questionable and biased sources.
  • Post regularly; even if this is only once a month. Quality is better then quantity.
  • Don’t post too quickly. Take your time; spell and grammar check.
  • Once you start, don’t stop.
  • Keep it relevant.
  • Measure your effectiveness by seeing who is linking to you and who is visiting.
  • Monitor other blogs.

Guidelines for accessibility:

  • Do not use in-line font formatting – colour, size, etc. All control of font and paragraph styles should be done in the style sheet. If you are pasting formatted text in from elsewhere, go to the HTML tab and strip out any <font> tags.
  • All images must have an alt attribute. If the image is there just to look pretty, you may set the tag to null (i.e. alt=""); if however, the image has meaning (e.g. it’s a header or is not described in the text) then the tag must be descriptive. If in Internet Explorer (IE) you want to suppress the alt attribute from being displayed as a tool tip on mouse hover, simply set the title attribute to null which will override the alt text.
  • Do not use colour alone to communicate something.
  • Do not use the same text to refer to different resources on the same page (e.g. “Click here for more” at the end of every paragraph) and furthermore, make sure the link text makes sense when taken out of context (e.g. “Click here for more about .NET”).
  • Use ‘proper’ XHTML in the way it was intended to be used – i.e. don’t use markup that is intended to communicate structure for formatting. If you want something to be big and bold, don’t use the <h1> tag unless it really is a heading. Similarly if you want something to be italicised and indented, don’t use <blockquote> unless the text really is a quote. If something is a list, use the list tags to format it. Finally, use <p> to mark paragraphs, and not <br />.

For more information contact blogmaster@company.com.

iPod Nano – I want one!!!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back I bought an iPod Mini and became an iTunes convert! Now Apple have replaced the iPod Mini with a similar (but pencil-thin), flash-based device (presumably because the miniature hard drives were sometimes hard to get hold of in sufficient numbers) called the iPod Nano. Like recent full-size iPods, the Nano has a colour screen for viewing album artwork and as my new company car has a 3.5mm jack for MP3 player input to the audio system I won’t need my iTrip any more…

The trouble is, it’s really hard to justify replacing one excellent (nearly new) device with another one that’s functionally similar but smaller and with a colour display (oh yes, and just as expensive). Maybe one day they’ll be able to bring a 60Gb flash-based iPod to market (that I could fit all of my music on) for about £100. Now that would be cool.

10,000 feet view of Microsoft Active Directory

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Non-technical colleagues, and friends who work with Microsoft products but outside of a corporate environment often ask me “what is Active Directory” (AD). As I’ve blogged a few 10,000 feet views of Microsoft technologies, I thought I’d produce one for AD.

At the Microsoft Technical Roadshow event last May, Paul Brombley (a messaging technology specialist for Microsoft UK) gave a presentation on Exchange and the Active Directory which included an “AD 101”. As I thought it was an excellent overview I haven’t re-invented the wheel and the following is taken from my notes from that presentation, with a few items added from my own experience.

Active Directory is basically a distributed database. It is hierarchical, with a permissions model, includes a common set of objects and is integrated with Windows Security as the primary means of authentication (and hence authorisation).

AD makes use of DNS as a name service. AD cannot be implemented without DNS although it does not require a Microsoft DNS service – in fact, any DNS server supporting SRV records (RFC 2782) and dynamic DNS updates (RFC 2136) can be used to support Active Directory although there are advantages to using the Windows DNS Server (e.g. AD-integrated DNS zones).

This reliance on DNS is apparent when the logical structure of AD is examined. As for Windows NT, domains can be linked using trust relationships. The main differences with AD are that instead of using NetBIOS names, DNS is the naming service for AD domain (with NetBIOS and WINS only supported for legacy purposes) and that default trusts are two-way transitive Kerberos trusts.

Each AD server is called a domain controller (DC) and all DCs can authenticate users.

Each domain must have at least one DC. One or more domains sharing a common schema are referred to as a forest. If these domains also have a contiguous namespace then they are called a tree, and each forest may contain multiple trees; however the first domain in the forest is always the forest root domain. These concepts are illustrated in the Windows 2000 Advanced Server help documentation: understanding domain trees and forests.

DCs replicate data using a multiple master model (although there are five roles known as operations masters, or FSMOs, which dictate the master server for certain operations at domain or forest level – for more information, see Daniel Petri’s description of the FSMO roles).

There are four naming contexts (NCs) which make up AD:

  • The schema NC contains a schema of object definitions. This is common throughout the entire directory and can be changed by a domain administrator running with local system privileges – hence the reason why a forest is a security boundary and not a domain (as is commonly misconceived). The schema NC is replicated between all domain controllers.
  • The configuration NC contains details of the replication technologies, domains and servers. This is replicated to all DCs within a forest.
  • The domain NC contains objects such as users, groups and contacts. This is replicated to all DCs within a domain; however a DC can also have an additional role of a global catalog (GC) server. The GC is a subset of each domain NC in the forest, merged to form a single view of the objects in the directory (albeit without all attributes). Applications such as Microsoft Exchange make heavy use of GC servers, e.g. to create a global address list.
  • The application NC is new to Windows Server 2003 AD and contains volatile application information. This is held on specific DCs within the forest.

An AD site is a group of servers with good connectivity (generally LAN connected). A site can span domains and a domain can cross a number of sites.

In addition to my earlier post on new features in Windows Server 2003 AD include:

  • Schema deactivation, whereby certain attributes (not those added by Exchange) can be blanked out (although they are not deleted and remain present in the database).
  • Group membership replication improvements, whereby only deltas are replicated (with Windows 2000 sometimes the replication took longer than the 15 minute replication interval).
  • Domain renaming (with restrictions).
  • Application naming context (discussed above).

(Some of these features require the domain or forest to be running at Windows Server 2003 domain or forest functional level).

So, that’s AD in a nutshell. For further reading, check out Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 Active Directory pages or Active Directory forestry: investigating and managing objects and attributes for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 by John Craddock and Sally Storey.

Comparing Intel processors

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve spent most of today comparing a variety of PC workstation specifications from various manufacturers. This isn’t normally a level of detail I get involved in so I found the Intel processor product numbers information particularly useful for comparing features between the various CPU types, particularly the discover processor technologies multimedia presentation.

One method of opening strange attachments from trusted sources

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Whilst I was on holiday last week, a professional photographer friend of ours sent me a list of gear that he is selling now that he has switched from Nikon to Canon (come on Nikon, can we have a full-frame image sensor in a digital SLR please…). Unfortunately, he is a Macintosh user and the attachment arrived in Microsoft Outlook as a a .DAT file. Not having a clue what application he had created this list in, I opened it with Notepad and found the words Microsoft Excel Worksheet contained within all of the binary garbage. I opened the file again (this time in Excel) and hey presto – a list of equipment for sale!