I had the opportunity to play around with generating word documents last week. At first I looked at what I had used before (the Office PIA).
I quickly remembered that it was not very easy to work with because most of it is based on COM interop anyways. Further-more, I stumbled across a little MSDN article that stated that the Office PIA should not be used to generate documents from a server; it suggested that it only be used in desktop application environments where a user is controlling the application itself. I imagine that is because the Office PIA really only invokes the Word application and tells the Word application what to do in real-time (or something like that)… and that makes sense to me. Can you imagine a web server that gets even 100 users spawning each of their own processes of word.exe to generate a doc?! Production… Nightmare… (more…)
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I have an IIS7 machine that is redirecting traffic for a tomcat application on our network. It was working fine until I realized that the webdav module of the application wasn’t authenticating. However, the un-proxy’d URL works just fine, so I figured it had to have something to do with IIS proxying the request.
As it turns out, I was right. A huge amount of digging led me to find that basic authentication can’t be turned on in the website that is proxying requests for other applications that use basic authentication. It seems that IIS gets confused thinking that it should authenticate on the host machine, rather than the machine that it is proxying requests to.
Once I turned off basic authentication on the IIS website, basic authentcation passed without any problems to the application being proxied. Hopefully I never need to use basic authentication on the website that is proxying for these other applications though, or I will be out of luck.
Flying on the airplane the other day I was trying to think of some cool ideas for software that would already have been developed 10k times over… Then it dawned on me; Bill Gates had it easy.
Back in the early 80′s, it seems to me that it was rather easy to come up with a unique (truly unique) idea in personal computers. One could argue that because graphical user interfaces weren’t common that it would be hard to imagine something so futuristic as google… But, never-the-less, it seems to me that there was SOOO much room for brilliant software inventions.
Now, when you try to think “what could I make that no else has?” you’re left stuck with ideas like
- Eye scanner (with some AI) that detects rapid eye movement in combination with mouse clicks to eventually replace mouse-clicks with simply looking at the screen
- Windows modification that changes the position of shadows and the over-all ambiance of windows, buttons, etc. based on the location of sun-light within the room.
- AI-based program that monitors general interests over time and displays news-worthy events based on established interests.
- THE LIST GOES ON…
WTF! Not only have all of those ideas probably already have been thought of by someone at MIT, but I couldn’t imagine the education I would need to accomplish them, much less the time or funding. (more…)
When I originally started using Crowd, I set it up with an internal directory… A type of directory that is proprietary to the Crowd application. Ideally, I would have set it up with an AD/LDAP directory, but at the time I did not have one setup. Now, of course, I have one setup and want to migrate away from the old (proprietary) directory to the new LDAP directory. Confluence and JIRA are both using Crowd for authentication/SSO and of course migrating from one directory to another is not as easy as I had originally thought it would be.
Atlassian Support recommended that I use the Alias feature in Crowd.. The problem with that though, is that it only provides a synchronization of passwords. The users would still have to continue using their old username to login to Confluence and JIRA. I believe the reason Atlassian chose to do this is because there are many “behind-the-scenes” references to a username. This must be so that users can freely be added and removed from Confluence/JIRA without directly affecting the integrity of Confluence pages and JIRA issues. However, this provides a problem for me, because in my scenario I no longer can afford to manage users that have two separate usernames.
I ended up creating a set of SQL scripts to migrate my users from the old (proprietary) directory, to the new (LDAP) directory. It is a very manual process and not one that I take lightly. Ultimately, I have to migrate one user at a time and it involves notifying the user that they cannot use Confluence or JIRA, restarting Confluence and JIRA a number of times and updating a number of tables in the Confluence and JIRA databases. Here I will outline the process in which I have followed to accomplish this and will also provide the SQL scripts for download. I make no guarantee that this migration process will work for anyone else, but thought I would at least share it just in case. (more…)
This last week I was working a lot with MySQL databases… Trying to upgrade Confluence and JIRA. In the process of doing so I ended up having to backup and restore the MySQL databases a number of times to try and get the upgrades to work correctly (in my dev environment of course). However, I ran into an odd issue which (for the longest while) stumped both Atlassian Support and myself…
What was happening, was that whenever I would attempt to upgrade Confluence or JIRA, it would fail saying it could not create a table. The error from the MySQL driver was not very specific at first and I could NOT figure out why the error was occurring. Eventually I found some logs saying that the table already existed. Of course, I restored the database and performed a “show tables” and did see the table in the list. (more…)
The other day I checked out the FTP logs on my server and found that there had been thousands of hits on random usernames like “Administrator”, “Anonymous” and “Guest”. I figured surely there was something built into Windows Server 2003’s IIS that supported brute force prevention, but sadly I came up with nothing.
However, I did discover someone has made some custom code that goes through the IIS FTP logs and determines who brute-force hackers are, and subsequently adds them to the the block list. (more…)
A while back when I was using Outlook 2007, the contacts from Outlook would show up in Skype with a different icon so that I knew they were Skype contacts. This worked really well for me because I keep all my contacts in Exchange and Outlook (synch’d to google) and it made it very easy to simply double-click on someone’s name in Skype and have them dial their phone number that was stored in Exchange/Outlook. Best of all, any updates I would make on my phone to contacts would automatically get synch’d up with Outlook and as a result, Skype as well.
However, when I upgrade to Outlook 2010 it didn’t seem to work any more. Regardless of the Skype settings, Outlook would not pick up my Outlook contacts. Finally, I found the reason:
The reason was because I had installed the web-installer version of Outlook 2010. When you purchase Outlook 2010, they give you the option to do a quick install via their web-installer (which downloads the Outlook files necessary based on what installation options you select) or they give you the option to download the entire Outlook 2010 package at once. Aparently the two different installation options (web-install versus full download) get registered differently after you install; I guess they are technically different versions. Skype was not smart enough to recognize that I had the web-installer version of Outlook and therefore did not look for Outlook contacts. Once I downloaded the full version of Outlook 2010 and installed it contacts started showing up right away.
Note to Skype: Fix this. It’s annoying.
I’ve been working out of home for 4+ years now. When I tell this to people I get mixed responses; some say “wow that must be nice” while other says “wow I bet that’s tough”.
When they say “nice” they are referring to:
- Not having to commute
- Simply walking upstairs to make lunch
- Within reason, being available for the unexpected
When they say “tough” they are referring to:
- Not having a separation between work and home.
- Potentially distracted from work during the day
- Never leaving the house
Personally, I love it. I find that distractions are usually minimized a great deal (at least far more than sitting in an office). Think of how many times in a day you get someone peering over your shoulder to ask you a question, or how often you walk to the bathroom and get side-tracked on the way there. I suppose it also makes a big difference that I enjoy what I do, though.
Yesterday I called up Microsoft Support to discuss the calendaring sharing issue I am experiencing. At first I was directed to Exchange support. They quickly established that it wasn’t an exchange problem because the calendar sharing permissions work fine in OWA and Outlook 2010. So, they forwarded me to Outlook support (the next day, when Outlook support was open).
The lady that called me from Outlook support immediately began asking me questions about my exchange environment. When I got around to the fact that our exchange server was a VM using VMWare Server 2, she immediately started to back out of troubleshooting by saying that Exchange is supported in an virtual environment. She showed me a MS KnowledgeBase article that indicated the Exchange 2007 wasn’t supported in in virtual environments.
“But this is Exchange 2010″, I say. At which point she tried to tell me that they were practically the same thing and that the article also includes Exchange 2010. After I pointed out that the article is obviously very knowledgable in what it is referring to (it even points out the service packs that don’t support virtualization in exchange 2007), she put me on hold.
For the most part, navigating the Exchange Management Console has been very intuitive. The location of the Send Connectors, the Receive Connectors, the Mailboxes; they all make sense and are (within reason) easy to find. One seriously lacking administration feature is permissions. There is no built-in permissions-editing tool in the EMC.
Here I’ll show you a few things I found.
1) A tool which, in concept, is useful, but in practice, is dreadful.
2) A script that I made, which sets default permissions for calendars in all mailboxes.
3) A problem I found with sharing permissions in Outlook 2007.
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