Message hygiene principles for Microsoft Exchange Server

Whilst researching my post on the Microsoft Exchange intelligent message filter a couple of months back, I came across the following message hygiene architectural principles, which Microsoft promotes as best practice:

  • Anti-spam filtering must be performed before anti-virus filtering.
  • Anti-spam filtering should be performed for inbound mail only.
  • Anti-spam filtering should remove messages (cf. quarantining messages).
  • Anti-virus filtering must scan both inbound and outbound mail.
  • Anti-virus filtering must be mail-direction aware.
  • Anti-virus filtering must block messages that it cannot scan.
  • Anti-virus and anti-spam filtering system must integrate with Exchange Server.

Catching up on events by listening to podcasts

Maybe it’s a sign of getting older but, along with new tastes for full-bodied red wine and extra mature cheddar cheese, talk radio (mostly BBC Radio 4) has joined my list of preferences; and as I regularly spend approximately 12 to 15 hours of my working week driving around south-east England this is a perfect opportunity to catch up on the modern equivalent of talk radio – podcasts.

Podcasting (and the various derivatives thereof) have really caught on over the last year or so (helped by Apple’s bundling of podcatching capabilities within iTunes) and were the main reason I bought an iPod last year, although it’s probably worth mentioning that you don’t need an iPod – any digital media player will do – the main requirement is to be able to receive new podcasts via an RSS feed and synchronise with the digital media player. My iPod is connected to the car stereo via a 3.5mm headphone jack but other options include the Griffin iTrip and burning MP3 CDs to listen to via the normal CD player.

Much of the available content originates from the United States but there is some British content too – many “old media” companies have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon and even the BBC has some content available for download. I highly recommend The Now Show but many popular radio shows now have podcast derivatives and even BBC News has got in on the event with audio and video podcasts.

It’s not just broadcast media that is using podcasting to reach new audiences though – forward-thinking organisations have recognised the power of the corporate podcast (e.g. First Direct); and when Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 last November they released a 45 minute audio download to complement the launch events, featuring information from their developer and platform group experts.

As a techie, podcasting is a great way to keep up-to-date with industry news and the UK trade weekly IT Week now has a short podcast discussing two or three of the week’s top stories. The TWiT network also has several podcasts that I listen to routinely – including This Week in Tech, Inside the Net and MacBreak Weekly – and last week this list was extended with a new Windows Weekly podcast featuring well-known Microsoft commentator Paul Thurrott. Other tech podcasts that I listen to include The iLifeZone.

If, like me, you are suffering from e-mail, blog and paper-based information overload, then I recommend podcasting as an alternative method for catching up on events.

Some tips for grabbing screenshots

Coming from a Windows background, I’m used to grabbing a copy of the entire screen using the PrtSc key or the current window with Alt+PrtSc. When I first bought my Mac, I couldn’t work out how to do this without using the Grab application (which seems a little cumbersome for a simple screen shot) until Alex explained to me that, like so many things in OS X, there is some arcane keyboard shortcut that feels like it will induce a permanent strain on my fingers to do the job for me (I used to think the Ctrl-Alt-Del three finger salute was bad enough). I keep forgetting the keystrokes, so I’m blogging them here:

  • Command+Shift+3 – capture entire screen and save as a file
  • Command+Control+Shift+3 – capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
  • Command+Shift+4 – capture dragged area and save as a file
  • Command+Control+Shift+4 – capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
  • Command+Shift+4 then Space – capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
  • Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space – capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard.

For more on this, see the O’Reilly description of OS X screenshot secrets, which also links to a really useful hack to take a screenshot from DVD Player in OS X – simply type screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png in a terminal window, then hit Space and click on the DVD Player window to avoid the annoying restriction illustrated in the error message below.

Error when attempt to screen grab from DVD Player

Useful widgets

I’ve spent quite a bit of time this weekend just playing around with my Mac and now I’m hooked on dashboard widgets. Initially dismissed as a gimmick, these are similar to Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) and the sidebar gadgets in Windows Vista. Basically each widget is a tiny application with a particular function in mind. So, here are the ones that I’m currently finding particularly useful:

  • I’ve already written about Amazon album art but it’s been great for downloading the artwork that even iTunes 7 misses:
    Amazon Album Art widget
  • Wikipedia is a tremendously useful resource – although I could fire up a browser it’s sometimes handy to call up an article directly from the dashboard:
    Wikipedia widget
  • AirPort Radar can be used to enable/disable the wireless interface but its most useful feature is reporting all the available wireless networks and their channel numbers:
    AirPort Radar widget AirPort Radar widget
  • iStat Pro gives a single view of my system’s vital statistics:
    iStat Pro widget
  • Dashalytics hooks into my Google Analytics account and gives an instant view of web site visits and page views over the last day, week and year:
    Dashalytics widget
  • I use the BBC Weather widget in place of the standard one (because it recognises the town where I live)… oh well, looks as though things may brighten up in a day or two:
    BBC Weather widget
  • Meanwhile the BBC Radio widget lets me choose from many local and national stations, updating the logo accordingly:
    BBC Radio widget

Of course, some widgets promise much but are let down by reliability issues, or by poor interface design; however there are a growing number of widgets to choose from (Apple maintains an index of the most popular widgets – 2291 of them at the time of writing). I’ve just downloaded some more to try (including one for Blogger) – let’s see where this goes. Something tells me that widgets/gadgets (depending on your operating system of choice) could soon be big business – and if you’re yet to be convinced just imagine what will happen once these HTML/CSS/JavaScript applets cross over to become common on mobile phones and other handheld devices – after all, a few years ago we’d have laughed at the idea of selling ringtones at £3 a pop to mobile phone users.

Filling the gaps in iTunes album art

I’m not normally that bothered about iTunes updates, but iTunes 7 is a big improvement.

Two of the new features are gapless playback (thank you Apple) – touted as a big boon for classical music lovers but also pretty good for people like me who listen to dance mixes (I may be a 34 year-old family man but there’s an Ibizan clubber trying to escape from inside me) – and automatic download of album art, including a cover browser view to flip through albums jukebox style.

Unfortunately the iTunes album art service obviously has some holes, because most of my collection is still lacking album art. Short of scanning CD inlays and applying the artwork to the tracks manually, there’s not a great deal that can be done, but Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) users can make use of an Amazon Album Art Widget.

Amazon Album Art widget

This handy utility searches Amazon‘s Austrian, Canadian, French, German, Japanese, UK or US sites and finds one or more matches for the currently playing song, which than then be applied as artwork for selected tracks, the currently playing track or the currently playing album. As most of my CDs are from UK or Australian sources (and I suspect iTunes is very US focused) this is doing a great job of filling in the gaps, even if the quality of Amazon’s album art sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. Of course, much of my collection will have long since been deleted from catalogues, but I guess I’m now getting up towards the 80% mark on artwork completeness, which vastly improves the view of my cover browser.

It’s time to practice safe computing – whatever the operating system

I recently switched my primary home computer to a Mac but I also use Windows and Linux. I don’t consider myself to be a member of the Mac community, or the Linux community, or the Windows community – because (based on many forum posts and blog comments that I read) all of these “communities” are full of people with bigoted views that generally boil down to “my OS is better than your OS” or “Duh… but why would you want to use that?”.

Based largely on Apple’s advertising though, one of the things that I did assume with Mac OS X was that I’d be secure by default. Nope. It turns out that’s not true as there is an obscure flaw in Mac OS X (surely not?!) whereby a malformed installer package can elevate its privileges in Mac OS X and become root. After running Windows for 16 years I’m used to these sort of flaws but surely His Jobsness’ wonderful creation is above such things!

Frankly I don’t care that Mac OS X is flawed. So is Linux. So is Windows. So is anything with many millions of lines of code – open or closed source – but I thought better of Apple because I believed that they would keep me safe by default. It’s well known that running Windows XP as anything less than a Power User is difficult and that’s one of the many improvements in Windows Vista. All the Linux installers that I’ve used recently suggested that I create a non-root user as well as root but the OS X installer is happy for me to breeze along and create a single administrator account without a word of further advice. I appreciate that an OS X administrator is not equal to root but nevertheless it’s a higher level of access than should be used for daily computing and because I didn’t know any better (I’m just a dumb switcher) I didn’t create a standard user account (until today).

I read a lot of Mac and Linux zealots singing the praises of their operating systems and saying how Windoze is a haven for spyware and viruses. Well, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee – as Mac OS X gains in popularity (I heard something about the new MacBooks having a 12% share of all new laptop sales recently) then Mac users will have to start thinking about spyware, viruses and the like. Now is the time to practice safe computing – whatever the operating system – with most users running as administrators then that could quickly become a major issue.

Dubiously named projects

I once worked on a customer project where the outgoing IT Director (for whom this was to be his swansong) wanted the project to be named Cuba (a rival organisation’s project was Havana so this had to be bigger – what’s bigger than the city… the whole island!). This was later given an associated acronym of Common User Based Architecture – it was basically their Year 2000 desktop and server upgrade project – but we knew it the S**** H****** Information Technology Experience (where SH was the IT Director’s initials). Then a few weeks back, I was working with a guy who turned out to be working on the same customer account at the same time but for a competitor, who apparently referred to Project Cuba as Can’t Upgrade Bugger All!

Another colleague recalled some similarly dubious acronyms – he once had to support a system called Customer Requests And Problems and a common term used in one of his previous organisations was Failed Under Continuous Testing.

I’d love to hear from anybody else with poorly named projects/products – leave a comment on this post if you have some you’d like to share!

Wireless woes (with the doorbell!)

A few weeks back, we had new windows and doors fitted to our house. As no-one could ever find the old doorbell and I didn’t want to drill holes in the frame of our pristine new plastic to mount the button in a more obvious location, I picked up a wireless doorchime kit from B&Q yesterday.

Our new doorbell is set to play a simple “ding dong” but sometimes it’s been playing a “Westminster” chime, seemingly randomly. Very strange. I had been concerned that we could experience interference either with or from our wireless network, DECT phones, microwave oven (hopefully not) or baby monitor but everything else seems to be working as expected.

One possible cause for concern was that the instructions said that the device was not suitable for PVCu doors because the metal inside the door would affect the signal range. Well, clearly it works from across the street as it turns out that a neighbour’s button is setting off our chime! Strangely, our button doesn’t seem to set off their chime but thankfully I can change the frequency that we are using – and I thought keeping up a reliable WiFi connection from the office to the living room was hard enough.

Just give me a length of copper cable… at least I know where that starts and ends!

It seems such a shame to dump all this perfectly serviceable IT

I was flicking through the copy of IT Week that arrived on my doormat a few minutes ago and Martin Courtney’s article on unwanted but serviceable IT equipment (eBay rejects worthless WiFi) struck a chord with me (as someone who has many items of old IT equipment in the garage).

Anyone prepared to make me an offer for a couple of old PCs, a 14″ CRT monitor, some 802.11b WiFi kit, 512MB of nearly new RAM from a Mac Mini, a perfectly good HP iPAQ that never gets used, or an APC UPS in need of a new battery? No? Thought not.

Installing OpenOffice.org on Fedora Core 5

Fedora logo OpenOffice logo

Installing OpenOffice.org is a fairly straightforward operation but it may involve some research for Linux newbies (I still count myself to be one) – this is what worked for me on Fedora Core 5 (after downloading the latest version of OpenOffice.org and unpacking the contents of the GZipped archive):

su –
cd RPMs
rpm -ivh *.rpm

cd desktop-integration/
rpm -ivh openoffice.org-redhat-menus-2.0.3-2.noarch.rpm

After logging out and in again (or by starting a new GUI instance from another console session using startx — :1), the icons should appear on the GNOME Applications menu (in the Office group). Note the use of the Red Hat desktop integration, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to be fine on Fedora too.