One of the cool things about Exchange 2007 is the new Web service interface into the store. In theory, having mailboxes and contents exposed via Web services makes it a lot easier for developers and casual dabblers to use Web service-aware tools to interact with Exchange content.
Two weeks ago, I wanted to perform a quick experiment by seeing if I could use Exchange Web Services (EWS) in a SharePoint page to make an always up-to-date extension list for our office. Now, I know this information is stored in Active Directory as attributes on the User objects, but I didn’t see a quick, easy way to configure a SharePoint web part to perform an LDAP or AD query. Instead, I opened up SharePoint Designer and pointed it toward our EWS instance, and what I found surprised me.
Does anyone out there in reader land have any clue why SharePoint Designer insists that an EWS instance isn’t “a valid description of an XML Web service”?
https://exchange.server.fqdn/ews/Services.wsdl
I can browse to it manually, enter my credentials, and get a bunch of XML that sure looks like valid WSDL — but SharePoint Designer’s integrated WSDL parser can’t seem to make heads or tails of it. I could easily consume other types of Web services, and looking at their WSDL, it looks like it’s making use of a lot fewer XML namespaces; their XML structure seems quite a bit simpler than Exchange is generating.
I tried contacting the official SharePoint team blog and was basically told, “Go away, kid. Call support.” I’ve not had a lot of spare time recently to pursue this, but I’m pursuing some other avenues to see if I can’t get to the bottom of this. Stay tuned!
All Hell is breaking loose in the Seattle area today because it’s snowing.
Hello, people. We get a lot of rain here. This is the Pacific Northwest. There are real, honest-to-goodness volcanic mountains here (remember that lovely “view” thing you keep talking about to jack up your real estate?). Part of this means that during what is nominally known as “springtime” we get highly variable weather, including flurries of snow. This winter has been an unusually cold and wet winter, so the chances of us getting snow at the end of March are in fact higher (that is, 100%).
Here at work, we have big fat flakes mixed with rain, but the snow is not (yet) sticking like it is elsewhere in the Puget Sound (like the roads home, oh joy…) This led me to the following observation to a cow-orker: “It’s not really snow, it’s just rain with 64-bit extensions.”
This has not been one of the best weeks I’ve had. That’s not to say it’s been all fire and brimstone — it hasn’t been an Old Testament kind of week — but the victories and good things have been few and far between. One of them happened last night; I passed a needed certification test on my first try.
I just got word that my grandmother died. This is a call I’ve been expecting and would suck, except for the fact that she’s been on the decline for a long time, including pretty severe memory loss. My immediate reaction was, “Thank goodness, it’s finally over.” A year or two ago, I was planning on driving down to see her (even though I knew that she wouldn’t recognize me or remember who I was) and was pretty much told flat-out by my family not to bother. This was after several years of not making time to get down to see her before everything had slipped away, or writing letters on a regular basis.
So, yeah, I’m glad that her decline (and, at the end, physical suffering) has come to an end, and I’m glad that the family members who’ve invested such dedication into her these past several years may finally have a chance to get some semblance of normalcy back in their life, but I also feel more than a little guilty for being so short-sighted. I have awesome memories of spending time with this woman back when I was a kid — she was fun, full of fire and life, and the only one I know who played multi-hand Solitaire (or Uno) to draw blood. Yet I don’t grieve for her now…because that woman already died many years ago. What left us today was her shell.
I don’t know how I should be reacting right now.
For the record, Aly & AJ’s Potential Breakup Song is one hell of an earworm, but it sounds really good on my work desktop’s speaker/subwoofer. I’ve got it cranked up loud before anyone else gets here.
I have finally found out what is more annoying than getting your ass kicked online by a nine year-old kid — getting your ass kicked by an eighteen year-old girl who keeps giggling over voice chat every time she gets a kill. I mean, damn, girl’s got skills, but does she really have to be quite so vicious about it?
Dear Big-Ass Bank,
Many years ago, we switched our accounts to you from one of your competitors because they had crappy customer service and you did not. In fact, your customer service rocked our socks off. Sadly, it has become clear that you’re more interested in trying to grab customers from other banks than you are in retaining your existing customers. In fact, you are consistently engaging in extremely short-sighted “cost-cutting” practices while other banks are rejecting those same practices because they lose customers.
As an example, your phone menus. I should not have to be the Amazing Kreskin to figure out how to get to live human with my question that does not fit into any of your carefully thought-out categories. I can accept having to type in my account number before I get to that live human, but what the fuck is this “Telephone Access Code” you’re now requesting? How come I didn’t get a nifty brochure in the mail telling me all about it and how it would help keep my personal information safe from big bad identity thieves? Please don’t expect me to believe that you care about the environment, because you don’t hesitate to send me all sorts of paper and brochures about other items.
And since I’ve brought up identity theft, I have to say that while I appreciate the thoughtful tips you printed on the back of the paper that my new debit card came with, I feel compelled to point out that it does no fucking good when you insist on using Social Security numbers as default settings for access codes, PINs, and pretty much any other type of verification question you think up. Come on, seriously people — the SSN is one of the main targets for identity theft precisely because you idiots (and your fellow idiots in the financial verticals) insist on misuing the SSN as identification. Have you ever even looked at a SSN card? It says right on there in big fat type that the SSN is not to be used for identification purposes.
No, I don’t care if everybody else does it. No, I especially don’t care if it’s convenient. I’m the customer here, not you; your convenience is second to my security. By misusing the SSN this way, you and other banks (and the credit agencies, and insurance companies, and pretty much everyone else who feels obliged to collect my personal data) have guaranteed that bad people want to steal that number — it’s the key that makes comprehensive identity theft even possible. Congratulations, you scallawags — you’ve made it more convenient for the bad guys to get to my financial data than you have for me.
Thanks for nothing, bank. Please be assured that we will be looking over our options. It’s clearly time for us to part ways; this relationship is no longer working for us. And yes, it’s totally you — not us.
Sincerely,
Devin L. Ganger
Because of a fun new project I’m working on, I’ve been starting to get my hands dirty with Windows Server 2008 and the beta version of Hyper-V this week. So far, I’m impressed — Microsoft has clearly put a lot of work into virtualization and this product appears to be much smoother than Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (MSVS) or Virtual PC 2007 (VPC). Big wins include:
- Better virtualization. Even when I was starting up a baseline Windows Server 2003 virtual machine to prepare it (strip off the old MSVS VM additions and install the corresponding Hyper-V Integration Services), the VM was very speedy and responsive. The host is a dual-core Athlon64 workstation with 8GB of RAM and two SATA hard drives (one for the OS, one for the virtual machine images). No metrics, but the bare VM booted and felt snappier than it did under MSVS.
- Built-in snapshot facility that makes use of VSS. You can take snapshots of running VMs. I can’t wait to see the DPM agent upgraded to provide Hyper-V support.
- Better networking support. It’s a lot less painful to get multiple networks and interfaces working properly, and by adding RRAS to the host OS you can get some sophisticated networking going. The VMs now support real Gigabit Ethernet speeds and it appears to support VLAN tagging, which will make a few folks happy.
- MUCH better administrative UI than MSVS — not that this is hard. I’ve never been a fan of web-based UI (unless they’re built on AJAX, and even then, most of them are less than impressive). Going back to an MMC application is just fine with me.
However, there are still a few things that either haven’t been adequately addressed or (worse) took an active step backwards from MSVS:
- The best feature, bar none, of MSVS was the Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC). This little app was built on top of the same ActiveX control that the web-based console used, but had so much nice functionality built into it. For example, did you know that under VMRC, you had a virtual KVM switch — just by pressing Host + Left or Host + Right, you could cycle through all of the VMs running on the currently connected host machine? I LOVED that feature; it kept my desk uncluttered when I was working with six VMs at a time, unless they were running on different hosts. The new Virtual Machine Connection application seems to be locked into a single VM-per-instance model, which sucks.
- Speaking of the Virtual Machine Connection application, who named this? We already have the VMC (virtual machine configuration) acronym in use with Microsoft virtualization. This is just a pointless, confusing name change just for the sake of changing things.
- And let’s not forget that we’ve taken away the Host key — to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to the guest VM, we have to type Ctrl-Alt-End, which neatly prevents that key mapping from being used on the machine running the client. At the very least, Microsoft, give us the option to use the old VMRC key behavior. Some of us liked it a lot.
- There still seems to be no way to pass hardware on the host through to a guest VM. This is essential for full virtualization support — being able to pass USB peripherals or SCSI controllers and chains through to VMs and have them appear as hardware in the guest VM would be VERY useful in a lot of situations. Without this capability, using Hyper-V for high-end enterprise virtualization is a joke. Heck, I can do this in Parallels on Mac OS X — plug in a USB headset and it will ask you if it should be joined to the host Mac machine or the Windows guest VM. Hyper-V (and the eventual Virtual PC version that uses Hyper-V technology) should be able to do this too.
Flaws aside, Hyper-V looks like it’s going to be a major step forward. This is good, as we use a lot of virtual machines here, so having a stable and easy-to-use VM solution is important for me.
We found out today that Alaric has a second set of armpits.
No, it’s true. You and I would call them “elbow joints” but in Alaric’s world, they’re “second armpits.”
Bet you didn’t know that.
A couple months back, I was able to work with Quest Software on a new whitepaper for Exchange 2007 migrations. As you probably already know, Reader, Quest makes some of the slickest migration software on the market. They also make Quest Archive Manager, which offers (of course!) email archiving capabilities. Quest’s notion, and the one I explored in this whitepaper, is that by deploying an archival solution such as Quest Archive Manager, you can actually reduce the risks you’ll face during messaging migration. The paper is specifically about migrating to Exchange 2007; while I didn’t focus on the details of Exchange migration, I do cover some of the possible risks you face during a migration to Exchange 2007.
If you’re interested in reading the whitepaper, you can get it for free from Quest; you simply need to register your email address with them.
E. Gary Gygax died yesterday at the age of 69.
They say that anything you do more than once is tradition. I guess that mine is to offer the words written by Annie Lennox, Howard Shore and Fran Walsh, as sung by Annie Lennox, at the end of The Return of the King:
Lay down your sweet and weary head
Night is falling; you’ve come to journey’s end
Sleep now and dream of the ones who came before
They are calling from across the distant shore
Why do you weep? What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see all of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms, you’re only sleeping
What can you see on the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea a pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home.
And all will turn to silver glass
A light on the water; all souls pass
Hope fades into the world of night
Through shadows falling out of memory and time
Don’t say “We have come now to the end”
White shores are calling; you and I will meet again
And you’ll be here in my arms, just sleeping
What can you see on the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea a pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home.
And all will turn to silver glass
A light on the water; Grey ships pass into the West
As I have no words of my own, perhaps this image will do:
![[A tribute to Gary Gygax: dice and candles, PNG, 640x480]](http://www.thecabal.org/~devin/images/tribute_160_120.png)
in 160×120
in 320×240
in 640×480
in 800×600
in 1024×768
in 1280×1024
Feel free to download and use it; just please don’t remove the copyright notice. Also, please feel free to share with others; please, though, just link them here instead of simply passing the files on. If you download it, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d leave me a quick comment.
I came across an interesting article yesterday on a new form of spam: using webmail providers’ Out-of-Office features to do a new type of backscatter spam. This is an excellent example of how unsecured messaging does not mix well with automated message generation capabilities. Any good Web developer can tell you that it’s a bad decision to blindly accept and process untrusted input, and yet SMTP bots (that’s what OOF functionality is at its core) do precisely that, thanks to the lack of a standard for verifying the authenticity of the sending identity and the integrity of the end-to-end message route. This is nothing new; this is the same variety of vulnerability that backscatter spam has been exploiting for years: target the NDR/bounce generation mechanism to do the dirty work for the spammers and send the paylod to the victim.
This new form of attack just underscores my growing conviction that our current system of email is going to be gradually supplanted by a variety of mechanisms for communicating with people outside of our organizations. There’s too big of a disconnect between “enterprise” features that business want from email and the inherent limitations of the current store-and-forward mechanism SMTP is built upon. And no, I’m not one of those people who thinks that pay-per-email schemes are the answer; what works well for physical, tangible products becomes quickly unworkable for virtual communications.
I don’t think there’s going to be One True Successor for SMTP, nor do I see SMTP going completely away any time soon (just as Usenet, despite all predictions, still manages to hang on for certain applications and communities). Dependable synchronous communications modes such as instant messaging, voice, and video will, I think, begin taking up a lot more of the message trafrfic currently carried by email. By avoiding store-and-forward asynchronous mechanisms, you reduce the opportunities that attackers and spammers have to forge and inject illegitimate communications into your users’ workspaces. Allowing users to decide which communications mode is best for them helps alleviate the pressure on email systems.
