Wikimedia

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I often link to Wikipedia as I think it’s one of the best “for further reading” information sources on the Internet; however today I stumbled across Wiktionary – a sister project which provides a online dictionary and thesaurus (although I must confess that at the time of writing the thesaurus category is currently slightly limited and I do tend to use Microsoft Word for that feature).

I think that the wiki paradigm has a tremendous potential for information sharing (one which many companies seem totally blind to at present) and it turns out that the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole load of similar open content projects.

I’ll end this post with something I picked up from Wikiquote:

“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones”.

[Linus Torvalds (at the 1991 launch of his Linux operating system)]

Apologies for the recent lack of blog posts

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I few minutes back I published some rules for blogging and one of the guidance notes was to post regularly. That particular guidance could be interpreted a number of ways (once a week; daily; fast and frequent; or just whenever there is time) and this blog tends to fall into the latter category but even so, regular readers might have noticed the output level drop recently. This is down to a number of things including a recent holiday; returning to work to find a greatly increased workload; and a 10-month old son with a cold (the result of which is a lack of sleep for his parents, directly impacting upon my desire to spend my evenings writing blog posts, even if it does seem to be affecting my Google PageRank).

Even if the quantity of posts has dropped slightly, I hope the quality is still there, so if you keep reading, I’ll keep blogging (but it might sometimes be a few days between posts).

Before I sign off, thanks to everyone who has left a comment against a post. As I highlighted recently when I added the rules for comments, I don’t have time to respond to every request for help; however, I do read all of the comments and it’s always good to hear when something I’ve written has been useful for someone else out there in cyberspace.

Rules for blogging…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

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

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

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

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

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!

New features for the MSN toolbar

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week, Paul Thurrott reported in the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update that MSN have begun beta testing of an add-on for the MSN toolbar called roaming favorites, allowing users to manage, search, and access Internet Explorer (IE) favorites whatever PC is in use, as long as it has the MSN toolbar installed (favorites are synchronised with to a central server, accessed from anywhere on the Internet using a Passport logon).

It sounds great (I’ve been thinking of writing a set of scripts to do this for me for some time now as I use at least 3 PCs and start.com didn’t really work out for me as a kind of web-based home page), but I do wish it didn’t rely on the MSN toolbar – why can’t it be a feature within IE7 (for once, one which Microsoft might have thought up themselves).

Meanwhile, in a separate update, Thurrott reports that another piece of new functionality that is intended for IE7 will also be available for IE6 users (again in the MSN Toolbar) – Microsoft’s phishing filter, a feature that helps protect users from scam websites.

Both features sound great, but I’d much rather them available as a download for all Windows XP users without needing the MSN toolbar. On the other hand, it’s only a matter of time before Google (my preferred toolbar) integrates a similar feature…

Vodafone VSPAM

Posted on By Mark Wilson

VodafoneWhen I got my new company mobile a few weeks back, I turned it on and immediately received a couple of spam SMS messages inviting me to call a premium rate number. Of course, I deleted them, but I might not have if I’d known about Vodafone‘s VSPAM initiative.

“When an unsolicited text message is received a Vodafone customer can forward it, free of charge, directly to 87726 or VSPAM on their mobile keypad. Vodafone will then collate a consolidated report of all the unsolicited text messages reported by its customers, which it plans to send directly to mobile messaging regulators… previously customers were advised to contact the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS) directly… [who] can take regulatory action against parties running such services. ICSTIS has prosecuted several service providers so far and it intends to ‘name and shame’ the operators who currently support the service providers running these premium rate services.”

[Vodafone press release, 21 August 2003]

Even though this initiative is two years old, I’ve not come across it before, so I’m blogging it here for anyone who is interested.

Useful mobile handset commands

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Have you ever been asked to type out some obscure code on your mobile handset to retrieve some information for a support representative? Here are some of the useful codes I’ve found (tested on Nokia handsets using the two largest UK networks: a Nokia 6021 connected to Vodafone; and a Nokia 6600 connected to Orange):

  • *#06# – display the IMEI of the handset (does not require send to process). IMEI number analysis will show details of the handset manufacturer, type and production date (although strangely, my Nokia 6021 is recorded as having been produced two days after I received it!) as well as handset approval information and IMEI number break down.
  • **21*number# – divert all calls to number (call forwarding).
  • *43# – activate call waiting.
  • #43# – cancel call waiting.
  • 141number – temporarily withhold caller line identification (CLI) information when calling number.

These ones might be useful for Vodafone users (none of them worked for my handset connected to Orange):

  • *#100# – obtain own number (returned in local format, e.g. 07812345678). Number analysis will give a whole host of useful information about a number including the number range, country/operator/network (for mobile numbers – although my personal number which has been transferred between networks still shows the operator as Vodafone Ltd even though it’s been connected to Orange for over a year now), number break-down, network technology type (for mobile numbers), and dialling format information.
  • *#104# – obtain voice mailbox number (a response of 447812345678 VF-GMLRE relates to a voice mailbox number of +44-7812345678).
  • *#147# – display number of last caller, along with time and date (e.g. 01234567890 08:00 30AUG05).
  • *61*mailboxnumber*10*duration# – set the ring duration before diverting to voice mail (where mailboxnumber is in international format, e.g. +447812345678, and duration is between 5 and 30).
  • *#1345# – check pay as you talk balance.
  • ##0021# – cancel call forwarding.
  • 1210 – cancel all voicemail diverts.
  • 1211 – reset all voicemail diverts to the standard setting (divert if switched off, engaged, or out of coverage).
  • 1212 – send all calls to voicemail (e.g. when abroad and receiving calls could cost you money!).
  • 1213 – remove the all calls divert (1212).
  • 1471 – voice equivalent of *#147#, with call return options.
  • 21212 – record a personal greeting.

Another useful Vodafone number to know is for checking call rates when abroad. Text from country (e.g. from France) to 4636 and the reply will detail the cost to make a call from country, the cost to receive a call from country, the cost of sending an SMS message from country to a UK number and the name of the Vodafone preferred rate network for country (e.g. SFR in France).

If anyone has some more useful codes (not numbers for information services), please leave a comment on this post including the handset type and network on which the codes have been tested (no requests for handset unlocking codes please).

Other useful links

Area code information
International dialing instructions