January 2008 - Posts
I've spent most of today at the London Hilton attending Microsoft's partner pre-launch for servers & tools. Grace and I were lucky enough to get a front row seat just 6ft away from Bill Gates as he gave the keynote speech and held a Q&A session with Scott Dodds. I don't usually go in for this celebrity worship thing, but Bill Gates has always been someone I've been aware of, looked up to and respected for his achievements so this was quite a special event and it was good to finally see the man in person. Rumour has it that he was off to talk to Gordon Brown after speaking to us.
It was nice running into some friends and colleagues representing small business partners, people like Vijay, Gareth, Richard and Mostyn. We had a chance to catch up with David Overton, Matt McSpirit, Scott Dodds and Bruce Lynn all from Microsoft.
Bill Gates seems to have a crystal ball and can talk about the future like he's already seen it. Love him or hate him, he's led Microsoft from nothing to a giant multinational corporation that churns out ever more innovative software and - importantly for me - indirectly provides me with my livelihood. The tag line of today's event was "Heroes Happen Here" but for me, Bill Gates is the hero for creating Microsoft and welcoming me as a Microsoft Partner. Although Bill is formally retiring from working full time at Microsoft, he assures us that he is still going to be involved in several key areas of the company's products so his influence will not be going away altogether.
The Microsoft Events team worked their usual magic, so thanks to you all for pulling off a superb event.
Poor Mike - perhaps he should have used PowerGUI. I have been catching up with Mike Ormond's blog today. Mike posts lots of stuff that will be interesting to software developers and if you're a Visual Studio user, even just a hobbyist, it's well worth checking out. Mike mentioned that Windows Powershell has a steep learning curve and yes, it does. It is quite easy to grasp the basic concepts but the command lines quickly get cryptic.
I wonder if Mike would have found it easier if he'd used PowerGUI, which is an IDE for Windows Powershell. With the complex things you can do in Powershell, its worth giving yourself a headstart with a graphical user interface for editing and testing Powershell scripts. Here's a video on Channel 9 with Jeffrey Snover discussing PowerGUI with Dimitry Sotnikov, respective architects of Windows Powershell and PowerGUI.
There is a nice video introduction to PowerGUI here.
I'm not implying that the Framework needs to be debugged - but now, if you need to understand what the .NET Framework is doing, you can single step into the source code! For instructions on how to enable this feature, please see:
Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code
As you can see from the screen clipping, you can set breakpoints and single step inside the .NET Framework! Speaking for myself, I know there have been occasions when the documentation didn't adequately explain something and now I'll be able to go straight to the source code for a definitive answer. I'm sure this will also be a valuable educational tool. The .NET Framework contains a lot of complex algorithms and data structures and scholars of software engineering will now be able to see how Microsoft does things. It should also help to "keep Microsoft honest" - knowing that their source is on display should be a big incentive to follow best practice.
Thanks to Mike Ormond for signposting me to Shaun's article.
Paul from Accendo Solutions has an article about how he recently used the Small Business Specialist Community to great effect on a job that would have been otherwise difficult to accomplish. Small business partners from around the UK came together to help Paul roll out his solution, giving him the reach of a large IT company. Thanks for thinking of us, Paul!
Paulie’s Technical Memoirs » Blog Archive » An SBSC Success story
I was watching the Bill Gates keynote at CES the other day when one of the presenters gave a demo of Windows Live Photo Gallery stitching together a mosaic of images into a single panorama. I have a few panoramic images so I thought I'd give it a go, and I am so impressed with it! I decided to give it a really hard challenge and threw one of my astronomical images at it. This image is a 22-frame mosaic of the full moon, incidentally it was taken from San Jose, California on 4 September 2001 and was the last full moon before 9/11. The next full moon after this shone down on a very different political climate.
The 22 original images were taken with my 12" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a specialist electrically cooled astronomical CCD camera. The left hand image below is a composite thumbnail of the original images. It is difficult to see on the thumbnail, but there is quite a variation in background level and contrast across the images. The frames themselves are each 1530x1020x16-bit greyscale TIFF files. This is quite a difficult image to stitch by hand because it is almost impossible to balance the different levels and contrasts across the whole image and still get a seamless join.
So I fed the 22 original frames to Live Photo Gallery and it chewed up the images and spat out this:
Make sure you click on the image to see it full size. When the image opens in Internet Explorer, IE will automatically reduce the image to fit the window. The full size image is 4573x4041 pixels, so zoom in and look at those craters! The registration is better than my previous attempt but the levels in centre are a bit darker than they should be. This was a difficult image to get right and I'm really impressed how well Windows Live Photo Gallery has done with it - especially considering it was a one-click operation! Amazing.
I received the following email today, which is clearly a rather crude hoax:
From: <deleted>@hotmail.co.uk
To: <24 MSN/Hotmail addresses removed to protect privacy>
Subject: PLEASE READ
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:48:22 +0000
Hey it is tara and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the interruption but msn is closing down. this is because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the name (eg making up lots of different accounts for just one person), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep your
account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. This is no joke, we will be shutting down the servers. Send it on, thanks. WHO EVER
DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND YOU WILL COST 10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU NOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL.
GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION. It's no joke if you don't believe me then go to the site
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1189119.stm ) and see for yourself.
Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your msn dude
will become blue. please copy and paste don't forward cos people dont read them.
You might think that forwarding this email is harmless, but let’s look at that. This was forwarded to 24 people. If they all forward to 24 people too, that’s 576 emails, then if they all forward to another 24 people each, that’s a total of 13,824 email messages. If you look at the addresses sent to, they are all MSN or Hotmail addresses. So, somewhere in MSN is a poor email server that is suddenly overloaded with nearly 14,000 messages, email will be delayed and the server might even crash. What you just did, by forwarding that harmless looking email, was to allow a prankster to persuade you to launch an attack on MSN without you even realising it. This is what we call a “Denial of Service Attack” in the trade. It was an attack on MSN/Hotmail. I know from experience that my own email server can send about 100 emails per minute, so those 13,824 emails could take over 2 hours to deliver – in the worst case, someone’s email could be delayed by 2 hours just as a result of this one attack. Now, I wasn't the originator of the email, so how many people are already forwarding it? There could be many, many more copies of it out there, and there could be other hoax email messages circulating too. Are you starting to see the problem? In the extreme, this is how companies get taken offline.
![clip_image002[4]](http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/tim_long/WindowsLiveWriter/WhyYouShouldntForwardChainEmail_CC46/clip_image002%5B4%5D_thumb.jpg)
The web link in this message that is supposed to corroborate the message is (unusually) genuine but actually dates back to 2001:
What To Look For
There are usually clues in the message that it is a hoax and this one is no exception. This email is benign but sometimes they can be more sinister so you really need to be careful with these messages, especially if they ask you to visit a web site, download or open an attached file. They are almost always trying to trick you into doing something that you probably shouldn’t. You will not be doing your friends any favours by forwarding such content.
Does it seem likely that the message actually came from the claimed source? Take a look at the grammar. It’s full of mistakes and slang. Would the directors of MSN really send out a message that reflects badly on their company? I wouldn't send an email like this on behalf of TiGra Networks and I suspect neither would any self-respecting company director.
Next, is the message content verifiable? At first sight, it appears to be genuine and links to a reputable and respected news web site - but the link to BBC News dates from 2001 and is only obliquely related to the message. It does not, in fact, support the assertion that "MSN is closing down". 
So the message is self-repudiating.
Do links actually go where they appear to? One thing to watch out for, when asked to visit a web page, is to check that the link actually goes where it appears to go. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 both have new security features to protect you from this type of trick. Outlook 2007 will block access to the link. If you use an older version of a different email reader, sometimes if you hover the mouse over the link you will see a "tool tip" popup window that shows the real destination of the link, like the one shown to the right. Typically, fraudulent links will contain an IP address (a group of four numbers seperated by full-stops). If the link is different to the actual destination address, don't go there!
Here is the Golden Clue: “SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST”. Alarms bells should be going off in your head whenever you see this. MSN, like all companies, has its own customer list. If they need to get a message to everyone, they can just send it directly, themselves. Why would they ask YOU to forward the message to everyone?
What To Do
Sometimes these attacks are quite subtle and either make you feel good about yourself because you seem to be helping others or afraid that something bad may happen if you don’t act. This one does both. That’s called Social Engineering. In fact, you’ll be allowing someone to manipulate you into doing their dirty work for them. You will never profit from it, you will not help those you forward it to and no good will ever come of it – even if the original intent was genuine, chain email still does more harm than good. In the extreme, you might end up looking like a bit of a fool, so when people ask me, I always recommend this simple strategy, no matter what the content of the message:
Never forward chain letters, always file in the recycle bin.
If you can't follow that advice and for whatever reason, you have a burning need to forward a chain email, then at the very minimum verify the content of the message before forwarding it. Usually, a very cursory investigation will reveal the message as a hoax. You can visit the Urban Legends web site as one useful source of background checks.
Further Reading
Visit the excellent Get Safe Online web site, take their Safety Test and subscribe to the Blog for plenty of sound advice. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed to receive more hints and tips from TiGra Networks - the small business IT specialists. We also have some useful links on our web site. The Urban Legends web site is the de facto standard for debunking Internet hoaxes.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin.
I've had fun migrating one particular company to a new server recently. It started out before Christmas as a simple redeployment swing migration, but what I didn't know when I started the job is that the old server had already been hastily recovered from a previous box whose motherboard had died. The swing migration started off well until the migration DC was introduced into the domain. The Active Directory, which was obviously holding together by string and chewing gum, suddenly gave up completely. I ended up in a situation where Active Directory thought that the migration DC was authoritative, so it replicated in the wrong direction and deleted itself in the process. What a nightmare! So then I had to start from scratch with a clean install on the new server. The new server came preinstalled with OEM SBS 2003 R2, which I had already flattened in anticipation of doing the swing migration (the OEM R2 install is already too far along to do a swing so you have to flatten and reinstall). No problem, insert media, boot from CD, away we go. Can't find the RAID controller. Need a RAID driver on floppy. Don't have a driver floppy - the drivers are supplied on a CD-ROM with a utility to build a driver floppy. Build a driver floppy on another computer. Prepare to install RAID driver during setup... The server has no floppy drive. Arrrrghh!
Digression: Doesn't Microsoft know that no-one uses floppies any more? How is it that Server 2003 can't read drivers from a CD-ROM or flash drive?
Trivia digression: Did you know that you would need a stack of floppy disks about 12 metres tall to equal the storage capacity of a single 4Gb USB flash drive?
Anyway, back to the nightmare migration. Need a driver on floppy. The server has no floppy drive. Server manufacturers have noticed that no-one uses floppy drives and have started to not install them. So we wait 3 days while I order a USB floppy drive, complete the clean install then begin the task of re-joining all the computers to the new domain and migrating the user data into the right places. Of course nothing is where it is supposed to be on the old server so this takes ages to get right and results in some stressed and confused users. Panic ensues while we put a part-functional server online and begin restoring user mailboxes, etc.
Note to Richard: THIS is why I missed the SBS-WoE Christmas dinner. Thanks for being so understanding.
Time moves forward and people are returning to work after the holiday, and the point of this story. Suddenly I'm getting phone calls from agitated users accusing me of "losing all their email addresses". I check in the backup copy of their mailbox and it looks like they never HAD any contacts. After a while I figure out what they mean.
When you create a new email in Outlook, you can type an email address into the To: box. Outlook remembers that address in an auto-complete history buffer, so next time you start to type it, Outlook can smugly pop the address there for you. A lot of users who can't touch-type never notice this feature because they are always busy looking at their keyboards so they don't notice what Outlook is doing. 
These users are different. They have been using the auto-complete history list as their permanent storage for email addresses! Some of them have history lists going back several years! What a fragile way to store email addresses! The users now want me to "put everything back as it was" so they can recover their email addresses, which I might have been able to do using System Restore or something, but then I would have had to re-join them all to the domain (again) and it would have taken hours. But the users certainly need their email history recovered and I can understand their frustration.
I came up with a different solution. LinkedIn to the rescue! I used the LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook (temporarily configured to my own LinkedIn account) to scan all existing emails both in exchange and in the archive store and automatically create Outlook contacts.
After a bit of re-education, the users are basically happy with that, though they have to make an effort to create contacts in future instead of relying on the auto-complete history.
Now that Microsoft CRM 4.0 (codename "Titan") has been released, I thought it was time to take it for a test drive. I've loaded up Windows Server 2008 RC1 on my virtual server and installed Titan on it. After just a few hours of tinkering, there are a few new features that are immediately apparent.
The first of these is duplicate detection. Microsoft's CRM product was often criticised for not having any built-in duplicate detection. The company's defence was along the lines of "we don't need duplicate detection because all the data should be validated at the point of entry". Honestly, no-one was impressed with that line. Microsoft has taken the criticism on the chin, however, and Titan is armed to the teeth with "de-dupe" features. I can see this being a very useful feature for keeping that sacred database clean and tidy.
Duplicate detection immediately detects when you create a potential duplicate and pops up a warning that lets you review the other record(s), as in the example here when I edited an existing record to give it a duplicate email address. At this stage however, there is no option to merge the records.
A second line of defence runs duplicate detection jobs in the background which can run on a schedule and can send an email when duplicates are detected. Users may create their own de-dupe jobs that will operate just on a subset of the database, get a copy of the results in their Workspace page and can then review and merge or delete duplicate entries, as shown in the screen clipping here. Obsolete records are deactivated and left in the database for subsequent review or deletion. In the settings pages there is a host of options for creating duplicate detection rules and jobs, plus other data management tasks such as bulk record deletion. I always wondered if CRM databases would just grow and grow as there never seemed to be any way of cleaning old junk from the database - now there is. Another nice feature here is that you can create Data Maps, which aid with importing and exporting data. For example, one could create a data map to make it easy for users to import their contacts from Outlook or another personal organizer program.
As a part-time developer I've noticed a lot of interesting changes happening around workflow lately, beginning with the release of the .Net Framework 3.0 and the 2007 Office SharePoint Server which was the first product to make use of it. CRM 4.0 now hosts this same workflow engine. Creating workflows is much more user friendly now and the process is available to end users - in CRM 3.0 creating workflows required use of the Workflow Manager and was really in the realm of the system administrator. The workflow editor (shown left) is now built right into the user interface enabling users to get as sophisticated as they like with their own data. 
The simple workflow I created here runs when new contacts are created and if the credit limit has not been set, sets it to £500. It then waits for 3 months before automatically increasing it to £1000 unless the record owner has already set it higher. Simple to do right in the web application. Users can also see which workflows are currently active on any given record, something which again needed special software and privileged access in version 3.
The final neat feature that I want to cover is many-to-many relationships, something that was absent from previous versions and I felt was a severe limitation. To illustrate many-to-many relationships, consider that you want to track your contacts' hobbies. So you create a list of possible hobbies, say Golf, Astronomy, Power-Kiting, Skiing, etc. Now in your contact details, you can add a list of hobbies that the person enjoys. You can open a contact and view the list of hobbies or you can open a hobby and see which of your contacts likes that activity. You could also search for contacts who like Golf and Skiing, for example. In CRM 3.0, this was difficult or impossible to do. It was easy to add one-to-many and many-to-one relationships, so for example you could easily include one hobby per contact, but without getting down and dirty in code it was pretty much impossible to do this many-to-many thing. In CRM 4.0, this is easy to do once again from within the user interface and Microsoft has plugged this serious limitation.
With many of the serious limitations of version 3.0 now gone, I think Microsoft has a world-beating product here.