Rants

Recently, PC Mag ran an article titled OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do. I’ve always been a big fan of Open Office and have found it a nice alternative to shelling out the major bucks for the Office suite from Microsoft.

Here’s the run down of the list.

1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
2. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
5. Save files in Office formats by default.
6. Automate actions easily.
7. Fix those single quotes.

Looking through the list, #1 seems like a good one, #2 is very useful when digging through old files, #3 wait…what the f*ck?!?

With my recent project, I had to do some research for the bits that make up the msRTCSIP-OptionFlags field in Active Directory for OCS users. There were certain operations that are not 100% supported by HMC so often times you have to fill in the gaps. The definition of this field is as follows:

This attribute specifies the different options that are enabled for the user or contact object. This attribute is a bit-mask value of type integer. Each option is represented by a bit. This attribute is marked for Global Catalog replication.

People like this really scare me:

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told nationally syndicated talk host Bill Press this morning that the recent flips of liberal Talk stations in several markets were a “disservice to the public.”

Stabenow said that, in the day of the Fairness Doctrine, “you had to have balance,” and continued, “I think something that requires that in a market with owners that have multiple stations that they have got to have balance — there has to be some community interest — balance, you know, standard that says both sides have to be heard.”

I’ve been doing quite a bit of side work for friends and family putting together some low traffic ‘business card’ sites. I used to do a lot of custom programming for each of these where I would put up the site and then have a CMS on the back end so they could log in and update the content.

This worked out for a while and I had a pretty basic CMS built that I could plug in where needed. But, as with everything, the feature set that I needed kept growing and I was pretty short on time to implement the features that I needed.

Not many people are aware of this. But “Microsoft Office Communicator hotfixes are not part of Windows Update, so it is important to find and deploy them through other means.” (source)

I’m completely baffled on how this happened. In the Mac Messenger version, the update is handled by the standard office update. Someone on the Windows side completely dropped the ball. And I’m willing to bet that there are a _lot_ of admins out there that don’t know that this is the case.