I’ve had a miserable experience with RSS feeds in Outlook. There are feeds (suc as those from teh Stack Overflow Trilogy sites) that I just know should update at least every few minutes, yet Outlook often takes an hour or more to show any changes. Today after an email exchange with Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror) I think I’ve finally figured out what is going on.
Right, here’s what I think is happening. When a feed is added to Outlook, the default settings (which are hidden under the ‘Advanced’ button) are to use the publisher update recommendations.The publisher of the feed can specify a Time To Live setting, this is the time that content is expected to remain cached before it is refreshed. Outlook interprets this setting as the minimum update interval. Outlook will not check a feed for new content more often than this minimum interval.
The <ttl> element is optional and some feeds (such as those from teh Stack Trilogy) don’t contain it. When Outlook doesn’t find a <ttl>, everything defaults to 60 minutes. So in this default situation, Outlook will check for updates at most once per hour.
To avoid this default one-hour situation, it is necessary to instruct Outlook to ignore the publisher’s recommendations (even though the publisher hasn’t made any explicit recommendations, the absence of a recommendation implies a 60-minute update cycle by default). To do this, when adding the feed to Outlook, click the Advanced button and uncheck the box outlined in red in the screen shot above. Note the yellow highlighted text indicates that the publisher has not specified an update policy.
Unticking that box does allow faster updates, but there is another wrinkle. We;ve removed the minimum interval, but the default settings for the Send & Receive Groups is 30 minutes. So even when the minimum TTL is lowered to 5 minutes, Outlook still will not even try to check more often than every 30 minutes; this is the default setting of the default Send & Receive Group. So, to get full control, it is necessary to uncheck the “Use publisher’s recommendation” box, AND to create a custom Send & Receive group (or modify the settings of the default group). I don’t recommend modifying the default group.
So, create a new Send & Receive group and in its properties, select the RSS feeds that you want to update at the higher rate.
The screen shot above shows my Server Fault RSS feed being prepared for updates every 5 minutes.
This will be of interest mainly to astronomy enthusiasts…
Competition: Win Visual Studio Professional 2008/2010
Thanks to my friends at Microsoft, I have been allocated one copy of Visual Studio Professional 2008 or 2010 to give away as a prize to the ASCOM community, a current estimated retail value of £700 / $800. I’ve decided to offer it to the person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers at the end of 28th February 2010.
Rules
- The person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers, as adjudicated by me, at 23.59 UTC 28th February 2010, will be the winner.
- In the event of a tie, the winner will be selected based on the highest number of ‘badges’. If there is still no outright winner, then the winner shall be selected from amongst those tied for first place by random draw.
- If the winner cannot be contacted within 7 days, then their prize shall be forfeit and shall pass to the person with the next highest reputation, and so on.
- The winner will receive an individual not-for-resale license for Visual Studio Professional (or equivalent) Edition.
- The winner may elect to receive Visual Studio 2008 immediately, or wait to receive Visual Studio 2010 after its launch date of April 12th 2010.
- The prize is kindly donated by Microsoft UK and is subject to variation in content and delivery date at their discretion.
- Administrators and moderators of ASCOM Answers (i.e. those with a diamond after their name) shall not be eligible.
How Do I Enter?
Simple. Visit http://answers.ascom-standards.org and create a non-anonymous login (I suggest using your Yahoo ID – simply click the Yahoo button when asked to log in). Start asking and answering questions, commenting and voting.
The normal rules apply on ASCOM Answers. Posts must relate to ASCOM or Astronomy and are subject to moderation and editing by other users.
Strategies for Increasing Your Reputation
Reputation is earned by posting questions, answers and comments and by voting on other people’s content. Your peers, members of the ASCOM community, get to vote on your content, so quality and relevance really counts. Here are some ideas for how to maximize your reputation.
- Think of a problem you’ve recently resolved with your astronomy gear. Create a new question that describes the problem, and then answer your own question by providing the solution that you found.
- Look back in the ASCOM-Talk message archives. Pick a question and enter it into ASCOM Answers. If you can find the answer, then add that, too.
- Same as (2) but find questions from other astronomy related forums and mailing lists.
- Pick an existing question on ASCOM Answers that has multiple answers. Create a new answer that incorporates all of the existing answers, corrects any mistakes, and expands upon the content. Format everything so that it looks really great. Then stand back as your new super-answer gets voted up and becomes the de-facto correct answer.
- Vote on other people’s questions and answers. Best practice when casting a vote is to leave a comment explaining why you voted the way you did.
Dos and Don’ts
Remember, everything on ASCOM Answers is in question-and-answer format. Here are some general dos and don’ts:
- DON’T put answers into the question section. Always split your content into a question (or problem description) and then submit your question. Then answer it (provide the solution) in the separate answer section beneath the original question.
- DO answer your own question – this is OK and specifically allowed.
- DO stay on-topic (Astronomy). If you don’t, your posts may be moderated, voted down or deleted.
- DO answer other people’s questions, even if there is already an answer. Your answer may be better.
- DON’T ask further questions in the answers section. If you need to ask for clarification or further information, add a comment to the original question.
- DO tag your questions with up to 5 tags, so that others can find them more easily.
- DO try to re-use existing tags in preference to creating new ones.
- DO accept a ‘best answer’ to your questions, by clicking the check-mark next to the answer. If you answered your own question, then you can still accept your answer as the ‘best answer’ but only after 48 hours have elapsed (this is to prevent people from ‘gaming’ the system).
- DO format your content carefully. Content that is both accurate a visually appealing is more likely to get voted up. The site uses something called MarkDown, which is a common-sense easy-to-use method of formatting plain text content. You don’t need to know and HTML – but if you do, some basic HTML tags are supported too. There’s a full help page provided on the site.
- DO read the FAQ.
Good luck!
This amazing free report by Imperva presents an analysis of over 32 million compromised user passwords, obtained in the Rockyou.com breach.
The report lists the top 20 passwords used, and here they are:
Is your password in the list? If so, I’d consider changing it PDQ.
So many people buy the very cheapest add-ons for their computer, or just buy the first thing they see on the shelves. Let me tell you, there is a lot of nasty rubbish out there. It all looks good in the box, but when you get it home and plug it in, things don’t go so well. We’ve all been there – devices that don’t work after you resume from standby, blue screens when unplugging USB connectors.
My advice: don’t waste your time and money on cheap rubbish. When buying computer add-ons, first visit the Windows 7 Compatibility web site and see which devices meet the standards recommended by Microsoft. When you buy a device from this list, you might pay slightly more, but you can be highly confident that it will work well and will not cause compatibility problems with your other hardware and software.
Software and hardware bearing the “compatible with Windows 7” logo, shown here, has passed stringent tests at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) and guarantees you:
So please, only buy software and hardware that bears the Compatible with Windows 7 logo. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on the web site:
I’ve always jokingly said that my favourite computer game is Microsoft Office. Well, I think Microsoft must have heard me, because now, you can play Ribbon Hero and have fun while you learn how to become an Office power user.
They say that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work another day in your life. So it has to be worth brightening up those mundane tasks with a bit of fun! Remember when games used to have a ‘boss key’ that you could hit when your boss was approaching, to instantly hide the game? Ribbon Hero really stands all that on its head. Maybe you WANT your boss to see you playing this?
“Hey look boss, on-the-job training for free!”.
“Well done Smithers, have a pay rise”.
Those canny people at Office Labs have produced another winner. But wait… it gets better. By linking Ribbon Hero to your facebook account, you can publish your scores online and compete with your friends.
What a wonderful idea. Oh no! David is beating me in his sleep! Must… earn… more… points… :)
This last week has been a troubled time for me emotionally. Partly through unfortunate circumstance and partly through stupidity, I’ve made some massive blunders in my relationships with several people. Some of the people are close to me, others I have never met and yet I’ve managed to alienate them and just make an ass of myself. Then, something happened to one of those people I’ve alienated that is so life changing that I feel mortified that I’ve been so stupid. It puts everything into perspective. Partly, the series of events is just bad luck and bad timing, but that will be no consolation. To those people, if you are reading this, I’m sorry. Know that I always had the best of intentions, I care about you and I hope you’ll forgive me.
Happy New Year to all my readers, I hope the new year and the new decade bring good times for you.
I love snow. Yesterday and today we’ve had a good covering of lovely fluffy powder snow across South Wales, there’s about 5 inches on my driveway right now, and with the predicted deep freeze tonight, it’ll probably stay awhile. I took the opportunity to break out my snowshoes and go out to play. I got some funny looks from the passers-by, I suppose not many of them have seen snowshoes before. Good times.
One thing I’ve been impressed with during the snow season is Ben Marsh’s UK Snow Map. Its the sort of thing that, once you see it, the idea is blindingly obvious and you wish you;d thought of it yourself. The map is a mashup between Twitter and Google Maps. When it snows, people tweet #uksnow plus the first half of their postcode and a rating out of 10 representing how heavy the snow is. Example:
#uksnow CF45 5/10
Ben’s snow map takes all those tweets and just diplays them on the map. I’ve found myself checking it constantly over the last week or so. Nice work, @benmarsh.
Successful information technology requires vision and strategy. People sometimes ask me why I work exclusively with Microsoft products, when there are free alternatives available. There are many reasons, and one big one is because Microsoft has the vision and strategy that others lack. When I use technology, I want to use products from a company that knows where it’s headed, 1, 5, 10 years from now.
Which brings me nicely to the Future Vision series produced by Microsoft Office Labs. These videos set out a vision of the future, envisioning how computing might be ten years from now in 2019. They are deliberately far fetched, but they are inspiring and in the few months they’ve been available, some of the pieces have already come onto the market. For example, I’ve seen a demonstration of a video projector the size of a cell phone and a plastic, transparent flat screen display. The more I watch these videos, the more realistic they become. So take a glimpse of what business computing might be like ten years from now (click on the image to view the video).
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| Productivity | Healthcare | Manufacturing |
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| Banking | Retail | Future Vision Montage |
So, in a few days we start a new decade. Could this be how we end it? I’m going to stick my neck out and make some predictions: I believe that 2010 will see the death of the magnetic moving-head hard drive, the death of the Mouse as the primary input tool and the emergence of ultra-thin, flexible, lightweight displays. Let’s see if any of my predictions come true. Happy New Year!
Well, at least not paper ones. My colleague Richard Tubb covers some of the reasons that I agree with completely. I haven’t sent Christmas Cards for a lot longer than Richard, though, so I’m not going to get away with his ‘Internet’ explanation. It’s a personal choice, one that is hard to justify sometimes to others who don’t understand it. In fact, lately I have discovered Jacqui Lawson’s excellent e-card service, which lets me send greetings online all-year round for a modest fee. I find that a much more acceptable choice and latterly I’ve been sending ‘cards’ that way.
I have always felt that Christmas cards were an inexcusable waste of time, money and effort. They work in some circumstances, for people you don’t expect to see over the festive season, but the practice of turning up at work and simply handing out cards to the people you see every day puzzles me. For one thing, it’s an order n-squared proposition. Every person in the country would end up handing out hundreds of cards! No wonder that 40 million cards a day are sent in the run-up to Christmas. Just think about that, 40 million a day. That's a rat race that I would rather not take part in.
The other aspect of my choice is that I don’t really celebrate Christmas as such. I enjoy the festivities and time spent with friends and family, but I’m not religious so Christmas has no religious meaning for me. In fact, I think the religious meaning has been long lost for most people. I am far more inclined to think of the Christmas holiday as a mid-winter festival, the longest night and the shortest day, the returning of the sun after the Winter Solstice.
So please don’t be offended if you don’t get a (paper) card from me, and don’t waste your money sending me one. I would rather get a phone call from you or see you in person. I think you’ll start to see in the coming years that I’m a trend-setter, ahead of my time, but for now please let me have the benefit of the doubt.
Everything You Do is Marketing
I see lots of individuals and worse, businesses who project a shoddy half-assed online persona. Businesses should really understand this: everything you do says something about your company. Your online presence is perhaps the biggest piece of marketing you’ll ever do. Just because it costs almost nothing, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay it any attention. It’s at least as important as your business card – would you give out a shoddy-looking business card? I don’t think so.
Some people, particularly Baby Boomers and older, shy away from the web, fearing invasion of privacy or that people might say bad things about them. Again, understand this: the Internet is like oxygen to Generation X and Y. The Internet will happen, whether you like it or not. People are talking about you and your company, even if you are not there to see it. If you don’t take control of your online presence, you’re letting other people control it for you. It’s important to be proactive online. The way to get positive things said about you is to be positive and publish positive content. And remember: everything you do is marketing. Never say anything online that you wouldn't say face-to-face with a customer. Never say anything online about a person or organisation that you wouldn’t say to them directly.
So, when you sign up for an online service, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever – put some effort into it! Make sure your avatar (the image of you or your company logo) appears correctly on the site. If you can’t make it look good, design a new image specifically for online use. Make sure your profile is completed and that you say something about your company. Wherever you get the opportunity, make sure there is a link back to your company web site or blog. This is the number one way you will get Google Page Rank. Please, check your spelling and grammar.
Examples of Bad Online Personae
 | Twitter: pointless mangled logo image. No attention to detail? I wonder if this company’s customer service is this slap-dash? |
 | Facebook – pointless mangled logo image. Do these IT consultants really know what they are doing? |
 | LinkedIn – no avatar image. Too lazy? Would I give this person a job? |
 | LinkedIn – Billy No-Mates. No connections? Really? What’s wrong with this guy? |
Two of the above are real-world acquaintances and I know that in reality they are well respected and/or professional, but their online persona tells a different story. There’s really no excuse. I know we’re all busy, but marketing is important, and make no mistake, this is marketing. It is a mistake not to get these things right just because they cost nothing!
It’s easy to get this stuff right. If you have no copywriting or graphic design skills, hire someone to do it for you. You can ask my company, TiGra Networks, for advice on your online presence, we’ll be only too happy to help or to put you in touch with someone who can.
I picked up this video from @SpaceFellowship onTwitter. It shows the entire universe as we know it today, correctly scaled according to the latest scientific knowledge.
http://spacefellowship.com/2009/12/18/video-of-the-known-universe/
Yahoo groups have been the home of ASCOM and astronomy support for many years now and there has not been any realistic alternative. However, Yahoo has its problems: advertising, mangled emails and a truly awful search facility. It’s difficult, at best, to find even information that you know is in there. The result is that we end up seeing the same old questions again and again. It’s a big waste of time, for both users and developers.
Now, there is something radically new and better: ASCOM Answers
http://answers.ascom-standards.org/
This new site is based on a radically different question-and-answer technology. We think it will revolutionise the way we do technical support and will become _the_ one stop shop for astronomy information and answers. Yahoo groups like ASCOM-Talk will not go away; the ASCOM Answers site will run in parallel with Yahoo groups. Yahoo groups are great for supporting threaded discussion, ASCOM Answers will excel at asking specific questions and getting problems solved. Some element of discussion is supported, but that’s not the main objective. ASCOM Answers is geared towards technical support, problem solving and finding answers to questions.
ASCOM Answers is a community driven web site. Anyone can ask or answer questions without even needing to create a login. Over time, you’ll accrue reputation points and as your reputation builds, you’ll have more and more control over the site’s content. Now is your chance to become an early adopter and build up your reputation! Below is the full FAQ from the site. Please try it out. Next time you have a question or a problem with an ASCOM program or driver, or with astronomy in general, please try ASCOM Answers first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of questions can I ask here?
Astronomy questions, of course! As long as your question is:
· Related to astronomy, the installation, configuration or use of an ASCOM driver or program
· detailed and specific
· written clearly and simply
· of interest to at least one other person somewhere
... it is welcome here. No question is too trivial or too "newbie". Oh yes, and it should be about Astronomy, ASCOM programs and drivers.
Please look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) before you ask. If you end up asking a question that has been asked before, that is OK and deliberately allowed. Other users will hopefully edit in links to related or similar questions to help future visitors find their way.
It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question.
What kind of questions should I not ask here?
Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion (use ASCOM-Talk for that). This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
Vote!
The quality of information we gather depends on you voting on it. You can vote on questions, answers and comments. please vote liberally. Voting is key to making the site work well and helping us emphasize good/correct information. If you find something you like, or has correct information, vote it up. If you find something that is wrong, unclear or out of date, you can vote it down, but even better you can edit the content or create your own better answer. That way, the best, most up-to-date information appears at the top and those who contribute good information gain reputation based on votes from their peers.
Be nice.
Treat others with the same respect you'd want them to treat you. We're all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.
Be honest.
Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, vote it down. Insert comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Even better — edit and improve the information! Provide stronger, faster, superior answers of your own!
Do I have to log in or create an account?
Nope. You can answer and ask questions to your heart's content as an anonymous user, much like Wikipedia. However, there are some things you won't be able to do on the site without registering. But it's easy to register if you want to. All you need is an OpenID account. Hint: If you have a Yahoo ID, then you already have an OpenID. Just click on the Yahoo button on the login page.
What is reputation?
Reputation is completely optional. Normal use of this site — that is, asking and answering questions — does not require any reputation whatsoever.
Remember, ASCOM Answers is run by you! If you want to help run the site, you'll need reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the ASCOM community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing other users that you know what you're talking about.
Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers: you gain 10 reputation points. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down: you lose 2 reputation points. You can earn up to 200 reputation per day, but no more. (Note that votes for any posts marked "community wiki" do not generate reputation.)
Amass enough reputation points and ASCOM Answers will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:
| 15 | Vote up |
| 15 | Flag offensive |
| 50 | Leave comments |
| 100 | Vote down (costs 1 rep), edit community wiki posts |
| 250 | Vote to close or reopen your questions, create new tags |
| 500 | Retag questions |
| 2000 | Edit other people's posts |
| 3000 | Vote to close or reopen any questions |
| 10000 | Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools |
At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run ASCOM Answers - The community does.
What if I don't get a good answer?
In order to get good answers, you have to put some effort into the question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question and get more people interested in it.
If, after two days, you still don't have an answer you like, you can offer a bounty. Slice off a bit of your own hard-earned reputation -- anywhere from 50 to 500 -- and attach it to the question as a bounty. We'll even throw in 50 reputation to sweeten the deal. The bountied question will appear with a special icon in all question lists, and it will also be visible on the home page Featured tab.
Once initiated, the bounty period lasts seven days. If you mark an accepted answer, your bounty is awarded to the answerer (do note that accepted bounty answers are permanent and cannot be changed). If you do not accept an answer in seven days, the top voted answer will automatically become the accepted answer, and half your bounty will be awarded to that answer. You will always give up the amount of reputation specified in the bounty, so if you start a bounty, be sure to follow up and accept the best answer!
Of course, bounty awards, like all accepted answers, are immune to the daily reputation cap and community wiki mode.
Other people can edit my stuff?!
Like Wikipedia, this site is collaboratively edited. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your questions and answers being edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.
For some time I’ve been following the progress of the Stack Overflow Trilogy of web sites (StackOverflow, ServerFault and SuperUser). Now, anyone can set up their own site, based on the same engine. The new service is called StackExchange, it’s provided by Fog Creek Software and it’s currently in beta.
A project that I’m involved with, ASCOM (Astronomy Common Object Model) was crying out for a better way to do technical support. For the last 12 years, ASCOM has used a Yahoo group for discussion and support. While Yahoo Groups got some things very right, it does leave a lot to be desired. In particular, the search feature is truly awful, and that from a company that specialises in search! The result is that the same old questions keep coming up over and over, because it’s too darned difficult to search the previous questions. It’s a big waste of time, for both the end users and the developers providing the support.
So, we decided to try out a Q&A site based on StackExchange. The new site, called ASCOM Answers, is at http://answers.ascom-standards.org and went public today. Time will now tell if this will be a success, but if it works even a tiny fraction as well as StackOverflow, then it should be successful.
Currently StackExchange is in beta and any sites created are free during the beta period. So, if your organization has a technical support need and (critically) you already have a community of users to bring to the party, then you too could benefit from one of these sites. Try it out now, while it’s still free!
I’ve recently being doing a server migration from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008, using Microsoft’s migration method. I ran into a problem where the SBS08 install finished with an error. I didn't make a note of the exact wording, but the general gist was “I couldn't DCPROMO myself to a domain controller”. This was a bit startling, having run the SBS Best Practices Analyzer on the old server and received a clean bill of health I had not anticipated any problems. The SBS answer file generator also worked fine with no complaints.
There were a few AD authentication errors in the event logs of the old server but they turned out to be a bit of a red herring, the real clue was in the SBS setup log, which revealed that the Directory Services Restore Mode Password was not complex enough, which was causing DCPROMO to fail. This password is of course encoded in the SBS Answer File and is generated from the old system.
The solution, having wasted a big chunk of a day on it, was simply to log into the old system as Administrator, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, change the password to something complex, then re-run the answer file tool to generate a new answer file.
Unfortunately the setup cannot be resumed from this failure and must be restarted from scratch. Wave goodbye to another hour or two! I couldn't find any mention of this issue in any documentation and SBS BPA didn't pick it up either. So this is one to watch out for when doing SBS migrations – make sure the old Administrator password is complex (at least 8 characters and containing upper/lower case, numbers and punctuation).
As a geek, it’s hard to avoid getting into conversations that end up in religious wars about which technology is best.
The Sinclair ZX-Spectrum has 48K of RAM and a Z80 processor!
Ah yes, but the BBC Micro has a real keyboard and polyphonic sound generator!
You get the idea. Programming languages are a hot favourite source of ignition in the powder keg of geekdom. The next time I get drawn into an argument, erm, discussion about which language is best, I’m going to try my best to keep a straight face and state, dead pan, that I’m switching to Whitespace.
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