Exchange 2010 Beta

A couple days ago Daniel Shapiro offered 10 people Virtual Servers hosted by Rack Force.  I jumped on the offer, as I’ve been wanting to migrate this website to it’s own privately hosted server.  It really came down to never having the time to test out hosts, so this was a perfect opportunity.  Shortly thereafter I found out Exchange 2010 hit beta, and I wanted to run it through it’s paces.

After installing Active Directory, I installed the beta, which went really smooth.  Given that it went smooth, I decided to update the DNS MX records for syfuhs.net to point to this server.

One thing I didn’t realize is you have to set up Receive Connectors and Send Connectors.  The wording is kinda misleading, so I ended up setting my first Send Connector to only route mail going to syfuhs.net from syfuhs.net.  Not so useful.  The Receive connector was the same way.  However, this is all similar to Exchange 2007.

Now some pictures:

image Outlook Web Access

image Exchange Management Console

image

 IIS Manager Hosting Outlook Web Access

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Consultation to Salary – Theoretical Head Banging Meets the Real World

A few weeks ago, six or so, I was offered a position as a Software Developer for the Woodbine Entertainment Group.  The position looked appealing so I accepted the job offer.  I am in a probationary period for the next four months and a bit.  Anything I say can be grounds for firing me.  Never liked that part about non-contract jobs.  Ah well.

Woodbine is an interesting company.  I knew very little about it until I got word of the job.  Seems I was the only one in Canada who didn’t know the company.  My grandmother, who moved to California 50 years ago, knew about the company.  Even used to bet there – well, the Woodbine Race Track, before it moved.  It has an interesting history.

It is migrating to be a Microsoft shop, from a more Novell focused infrastructure.  We are working towards standardizing on .NET for our custom applications.

The one thing that caught my eye with Woodbine is that the company is the technology leader for Horse Racing.  Not just in Canada, but throughout the world.  Our services can let you place a bet live, on a track in Australia, and see results immediately.  Can you imagine the infrastructure required for such a feat?  It’s sweet!  The business-people behind this are really keen on letting technology do it’s thing, so we can make money.  Lots of money.  See our Annual Reports on that.  Check back for latest numbers.

Now, some of you may have noticed that our Corporate Portal is written in what looks to be Classic ASP.  For all intensive purposes, it is.  Archive.org shows the portal went live in 2001, and had a major rebuild in 2003.  Since then incremental changes have taken place, most of which have been built using ASP.NET.  We are working on the new portal.  All I can say at the moment is: it’s going to be awesome.  So awesome that a new word will need to created to contain all of its awesomeness.  HorsePlayer Interactive is pretty amazing, but I’d like to think this new site will be just that much more awesomer.  Yes, I said awesomer.

As for the nature of this site, it won’t change.  I’ll still post my thoughts and experiences.  I might need to change stories a little to protect the innocent, but it’s all in good fun.  I may be forced to post details of how horse racing actually works, because I’m still not sure I get all the facets of it.  In time.

More to follow.

Proper Podcasting Equipment

I am not a podcaster.  I do not think I have the voice for continued listening.  However, I am a sound guy, and I am anal about it.  I did a search online to find out what equipment is necessary for podcasting and every time I came back with:

  • Microphone
  • Pre-amp
  • Digital Recorder
  • PC Editing Software

For each item on this list I have heard some very disturbing suggestions for what type/brand to use.  I thought I would dispel some myths about each piece of hardware.

Microphone

Behringer is not a professional product line.  They say they are; they are NOT.  I said it, and I will say it again: Behringer does not make professional equipment.  No way, no how.  They market the products as professional equipment that all the big stars use, but in actual fact the equipment would never make it on a tour.  It can’t.  It’s not stable enough, and it’s not reliable enough.  It WILL break.

Enough ranting about that.  There are two main types of Microphones you will be dealing with when podcasting.  Dynamic and Condenser.  They both have their merits.  Dynamic microphones are usually cheaper because they are easier to make.  The sound quality is theoretically lesser than a Condenser Mic.  And a Dynamic Mic does not need an external power source.

Sound quality is always an issue when recording.  However, a podcast is 99% vocal.  At least on the recording side it is.  On the frequency spectrum vocals range between 80 Hz and 1100Hz.  You do not need a super-ultra-fantastic microphone for this job.  In some cases you do, but generally if that were the case you wouldn’t be reading this article – you would be talking to an audio recording professional.

You also have your choice between a Cardioid and an Omni-directional Mic.  An Omni-directional microphone will pick up sound from 360 degrees.  It’s great for dealing with multiple people talking at once, but horrible if you are talking in a loud environment.  A Cardioid (pronounced: car-dee-oid) microphone is directional.  It will pick up sound from a single direction, and is excellent if you are the only person talking in a very noisy environment.

My two cents: go talk to a sound guy directly and tell them what you are doing.  They will understand.  Brand-wise I like Shure and Sennheisser.  By all means contact me if you want more help.

Pre-amp

A pre-amp will do one of two things, but first I need to explain how a microphone works.  Essentially a microphone works by producing a very small electrical signal that is a representation of the sound hitting a membrane within the microphone capsule.  Different types of microphones (electret, condenser, dynamic, piezoelectric etc) capture and translate the frequency patterns differently.  The important thing to know is that the electrical signal coming out of the microphone is extremely low.

The voltage is so low that most recorders cannot handle the voltage.  They need more.  A pre-amp takes care of this problem.  It amplifies the signal just enough so the recorder can use it properly.  In some cases microphones need voltage going to them before they can actually produce a signal.  Condenser microphones are notorious for this.  The required voltage is called Phantom Power.  It’s a long winded explanation of what actually happens with the phantom power, but for all intensive purposes, the pre-amp will usually take care of the phantom power too.  This is definitely something you need to talk to a sound guy directly about.

Digital Recorder

I never got into digital recording, but just from basic analog to digital conversion theory, here are some thoughts:

  1. Get a recorder that converts to a lossless format.  .Wav files are the most standard.  When recording you want the highest possible quality available.
  2. Get a recorder that has a balanced audio input.  XLR is balanced.  Get a microphone that outputs through XLR, and a pre-amp that takes XLR and outputs XLR.  You will end up with better quality.  Balanced connections do wonders for interference.  It won’t remove interference already in the system, but it will prevent any other from getting in.
  3. Get one that is durable.  You will drop it.  You just will.

PC Editing Software

For editing the podcast you want a piece of software that can handle multiple tracks.  This allows you to layer chunks of audio without losing data.  It also gives you more wiggle room to move parts around.  I like Adobe Audition.  There are many others out there though.

Microsoft and the Antitrust Browser...A Decade in the Making

It seems just like yesterday that some government was telling Microsoft that the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was unbecoming of an industry leader, because it screwed other web browsers out of market share.

The European Union has made a decision stating Microsoft cannot bundle Internet Explorer with Windows anymore, if they want to sell in any European countries.  This decision was the result of Opera Software ASA, the people behind the Opera browser.  The complaints are two-fold.

  1. Market share is nearly seized completely by IE because it comes preinstalled with Windows, which is the dominant operating system.
  2. Because the majority of browsers are IE, websites need to conform to IE’s html rendering which is “non-standard”.

I’d agree with the first statement, but I find it bogus.  Regardless of whether or not IE has dominant market share, you still need a browser.  How would you get your hands on the installation files for the new browser?  Certainly not by downloading it from the internet…  You can get the software from the store.  Not likely.  That just means one more piece of software to worry about.  You can have the browser company mail it to you.  Is Firefox a company?  Do they have offices?  Seriously?  WTF?  Oooh, or maybe Microsoft can have a basic version of a web browser, that all it does is go to one specific site.  The site then has a list of all available web browsers on the market, which you can then download.  I’m actually at a loss to say for once.

With regards to the second point, Internet Explorer certainly does not have a great track record for sticking to HTML standards.  But I have to say Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc, don’t conform either.  None of them conform to the HTML standards completely.  With that being said, Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to be ACID 2 compliant, meaning it is compliant at least as much as everyone else.  In other words, it shows the face:

AcidTest2[1]

I’m going to keep an eye out for news from the EU, because I suspect they will overturn the ruling in some way or another.  Some people say Internet Explorer is only to be used to download Firefox.  Now that it’s not there, how the hell do you plan on downloading Firefox, eh?

What Makes us Want to Program? Part 2

In my previous post I started talking about part of my personal history with software development, and when QBasic got me hooked.  I ended the post talking about the move to Canada.  We arrived in Canada literally a week (7 days exactly) before Grade 9 started.  After getting enrolled in school, I tried to find something to keep my mind occupied.  It was either that or contemplate what Grade 9 would be like for someone who used to live 3000 miles away in another country.  And winter.  Still 4 months away, but definitely something I didn’t want to think about.  Being that we moved to a house in the country, I couldn’t just walk around town either.  Mental occupation was harder than I thought.

So what does a 14 year old boy, new to the country, living in the middle of nowhere, do to keep himself from going crazy?  Install Linux of course!  I needed something to keep my interest, as well as to keep the gears in my head moving.  If memory serves, I started out with a vanilla copy of Red Hat Linux.  It was pretty easy to install, but being new to the OS architecture, the device mapping was a little confusing.  After a couple months of studying the Linux architecture, I started writing shell scripts, and even delved into the source code.  After testing some minor modifications to different components I started to learn the basis for the C/C++ languages.  Imagine that, a 14 year old kid understanding the basis for C++.

While trying to keep my mind still occupied, I came across an interesting find: The National Security Agency’s Security Enhanced Linux Kernel.  If compiled and installed wrong, you will destroy the build.  Learned that the hard way…  And seeing as I couldn’t find a proper driver for my modem anyway, I gave up on Linux and moved back to XP.  Not that the internet was all that useful anyway; I was connecting at 28.8 half the time.

Going back to the image in Part 1, I met an interesting character in school.  He turned out to be one of my best friends, and fellow developers, Greg. We started working on some odd projects here and there in VB, until I was tasked with building a web store.  Since I had never actually brought HTML and Dev together, I was a little nervous about what I was getting myself into.  Going with what I knew well, I started in ASP with VB code.  This was not ASP.NET.  Earlier, I had said I never found VB all that intuitive as a language.  The syntax never really made sense to me.  So my friend suggested I take a look at PHP as an alternative.  I liked it.

PHP had the flow of C, and the usefulness of VB.  With PHP I got the store finished and launched.  The site worked great.  I was 15.

Once the first spring of my existence in Canada rolled around, a couple friends and I decided to start a band.  We sucked.  But seeing as one of the other members was Greg, we had an awesome website.  We had media streaming, custom modified forums, and full site statistics.  The statistics were built around the forum.  The site pulled data from recent posts, recent events, and recent user logins, and compared the data to the media streams.  We could see who was doing what.  Mind you, there was only about 50 people who loitered around the site, but the site was a great proof of concept for what we could do.

Following the demise of the band, Greg and I were invited to a Microsoft hosted event.  It was here that I fell in love with ASP.NET.  Which I will discuss in Part 3.

TorontoSql.com, TorontoSql.net, TorontoSql.org just registered

Boredom is a bad thing!  Especially when you are putting off work.  So what do I do to waste my time?  Check out local user groups.  The websites at least.  A few days ago I posted a few links to some promising groups.  To my disappointment there really aren't that many Microsoft oriented user groups in Toronto.  I wouldn't call it a bad thing.  More of an opportunity.
 
I have determined that TorontoSql.com, TorontoSql.net, and TorontoSql.org were not registered.  So for $30 I registered all three of them.  Now I have to put them to good use.  Currently they are pointed to www.syfuhs.net, until I find a proper home.
 
More to come on that front! 

Toronto and Area User Groups of Interest

Since moving to Toronto I have been looking for user groups that I think I could benefit from.  So far I have found a couple of interest:
 
TSQL.CA - Toronto SQL Server User Group - http://www.tsql.ca/Default.aspx?base
Toronto .NET User Group - http://www.torontoug.net/
ISSA Toronto (Information System Security Association) - http://www.issa-toronto.org/ 
 
I'm still looking, but these look promising.