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Scotty Factor

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:00:27 +0000

If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you do some sort of project work within your job. My blog doesn’t attact a lot of people outside of IT and the typical IT guy is working on project X, Y or Z and sometimes all 3 at the same time. If this isn’t you, I’ll save you some time and you can stop reading now.

Ok, so you are working with your boss and he/she has assigned you a project. Maybe its mapped out with all of the details or if you are like me, you will typically get a broad project goal and its your job to come up with the milestones and timeline.

Powershell Error checking

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:36:38 +0000

Being a programmer by trade, I get thrown into many projects that aren’t always my forte, but I can figure them out and get them working the way that I want.

I’ve been messing with powershell for a while now with VMware, but never really getting into big time scripting with it. Its mainly be something to use to accomplish some various tasks on mutliple hosts. Very little error checking in the scripts since I’m watching them was they run. If I want to put them into a scheduled task or automate them from a web page, more error checking is needed.

HMC CreateFolder

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:38:39 +0000

Today I had the chance to get back to some code for CreateFolder which creates a public folder within our Exchange 2007 environment support by Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration frame work. I’ve been highly critical of Microsoft’s code before, and today has taken that to a new level.

Here is what I’m dealing with. First, let’s go to the documentation on TechNet:

Pretty clear that we have a few required parameters and a few optional ones to set some quotas. These optional parameters are what will soon drive me to uncontrollable rage.

When to kill a product

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:00:50 +0000

I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested.

But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.

Shipping Code

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:00:40 +0000

As a programmer, I have had the joy of seeing a lot of my code ship with various projects in my career. One thing that I have found is, no matter how much I have tested, no matter how solid I feel about the code, there is always that moment of anxiety right before it ships. Its a natural feeling as a programmer to have these. You constantly strive for perfection but in the back of your mind you know that you’re a human who makes mistakes.

3 Rules

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:00:05 +0000

There are 3 basic rules to software programming. Most people don’t know them. Or if they do, they probably don’t know how to properly articulate them. So I’m going to spell out the 3 rules for you. This was talked about a lot at my last job early on when dealing with problems and support issues. Just about everything came back to one of these 3 rules, and unfortunately, rule 3 was more popular than even we believed.

Cryptogram #1 – Solution

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:00:42 +0000

So, its been a few days, did you figure out the solution to our first cryptogram?

This one I thought was pretty easy if you are a geek. And seeing as my blog is pretty tech related, I figured that a lot of people would get this one. Maybe its just me, but when I see certain encoded lines, I can pretty much guess that they are encoded with base64. Maybe I’ve been around email too long.

Cryptogram #1

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:00:11 +0000

So I’m experimenting with a little contest to see how smart my 3 readers actually are. Every couple of weeks I’m going to post a puzzle. They’ll be pretty easy to start off with and get increasingly more difficult as time goes by and I have time.

Without further ado, here is the first cryptogram.

V2l0aCBmYWl0aCBhbmQgaG9wZSwgdGhlIGRyZWFtIGJlZ2lucyBhbmV3

Good luck!

For each cryptogram, the solution will be posted the following Monday.

Update: Answers are posted on Wednesday, not Mondays.

A device attached to the system is not functioning

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:19:02 +0000

As you’ve read before, I’ve had a variety of battles with the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration framework from Microsoft.

Today was another day for battle. And an interesting battle it was.

So here is the situation that I was running into. Within my code in the customer portal, I have a notification that is sent out that has a full back trace of what happened on the system, what was inputted and what was the error message that was returned. I of coarse try to give the user a friendly version of the error message to the screen before sending off this plethora of valuable detail. Out of this pile of data, I find the following error message has been returned:

One Character == World of Suck

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:00:23 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.

Background

A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do. So, we decided to roll our own. It wasn’t that hard to reverse engineer what was being set for users, groups and contacts. There were a few obstacles of coarse but we were able to get a pretty good provisioning system setup. However, this too had its faults. Sure we had total control over the code and could update things as we needed. But we were still working in a void. We really didn’t know _everything_ that was happening on the system that needed to actually happen. Plain and simple, we were missing things. Not to mention future services would require the same amount of dev time reverse engineering what needed to be set. That’s not a scalable solution.

BESUserAdminClient.exe find issues

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:00:36 +0000

For our Hosted Exchange 2007 environment, we offer a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that allows users to connect their crackberries and have the full functionality that one expects with these devices.

Various automation scripts have been put in place that make it easy for the user to see who has BlackBerry enabled for their account, add additional users and so on. Today, we discovered a rather annoying feature that exposed a bug in our code. Not a horrible bug, but one that did affect the user and their experience with the customer portal.

No server restart?

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:00:23 +0000

I follow quite a few blogs of various people that make headlines and have a coding background. One person in particular that somehow made the list many moons ago that I have failed to remove is Leah Culver. I think it was her ties to the midwest and the fact that she seems to be putting her ass out there with Pownce (which has since had to close its doors).

In her latest post, she talks about writing a plugin for Django. If you are unfamiliar with django, it is a web framework written in python which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern (source).

7 things you didn’t know you could do with OpenOffice 3

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:18:17 +0000

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.

Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
Turn off the blinking light bulb.
Save files in Office formats by default.
Automate actions easily.
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?!?

Ugly Code

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:49:58 +0000

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.

The need for speed

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:00:16 +0000

As I’ve written before, the main engine that we are using to provision users on our Exchange system is Microsoft‘s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) framework.

I’ve had a few issues with it and various hoops that I have had to jump through. Many of which I have not had a chance to document on this blog. Those will hopefully come out in the coming months.

Today, I was dealing with a speed issue that we have been having in our customer portal that hits HMC. The page is pretty basic, it gives a listing of all the users, the name, login address, what package they are assigned and then some actions that can be taken on the user such as edit, delete, disable. This is all in house code that shows this information with calls being made to HMC to get the data.

Hacking WordPress

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:32:31 +0000

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.

XCode Errors

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:03:03 +0000

By trade, I’m a PHP/C programmer and rarely have time to really work on some fun stuff at home. But recently, I have been trying to spend some more time working on some fun projects and getting my hands dirty with XCode and the iPhone SDK.

I recently downloaded the latest and greatest version of XCode and overwrote the beta versions I had been running with before. The installation went fine and I decided I would load up one of the demo apps to make sure that everything was indeed still working as I expected.

Safari / Firefox lockup issues.

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:37:34 +0000

This weekend, I finally got around to installing the final iPhone SDK. Everything installed great and I figured that I would get around to playing with it sometime this week. Unfortunately, both my wife and I noticed that Safari would start to lock up more often and Firefox would do the same thing for me.

I of coarse did very little to debug this figuring that it might be bad ram. Well, last night I went to run XCode to start messing around with some new code and I got a rather cryptic error upon launching the system.

Adventures in HMC

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:38:46 +0000

As many of my close friends know, I have been working on a project that is a roll out of a new Exchange 2007 platform for LightEdge Solutions. This has been an exciting project for me and one that has had many challenges. Over the next several months I will be sharing some of the challenges that we have run into with the rollout and HMC 4.5 (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration) and how we have worked around them.

Damn French!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:26:41 +0000

For the most part, I like France. Its a nice place to visit, most of the people that I’ve met have been fairly nice, at least the ones that have come over here to study and visit. Heck, I even got engaged over there back in 1999.

However, today re-affirmed why most people hate the french. We have a few domains that are registered with a registrar that is based out of Paris France. We bought the company that used this registrar so this is some of the cleanup that just hasn’t happened over the years.

Sloppy Documentation (HMC 4.x)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:25:57 +0000

At work, I have a project that has been going on for a month or two. It originally started out as replacing our Hosted Exchange 2003 environment with a new fancy Exchange 2007 environment and add on extra features. To provision this, we have decided to abandon our own provisioning system due to various issues with documentation (or lack there of it) from Microsoft. So, we have decided to drink the Kool-Aid and are rolling with their HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration). At first we were going to roll with the 4.0 version but a consultant stated that HMC 4.5 was expected to be out on 6/13. As it turns out, it was released yesterday.

A storm is coming…

Wed, 07 May 2008 04:41:01 +0000

Do you ever get to a point where you know that you are about to go on wicked run, but aren’t sure where it is you are going to go?

I’m at that point. The last time this happened I programmed for 16 of 24 hours and came up with a pop3 proxy that could check for spam, viruses, apply certain actions based on the results and do various account verification and logging. This was just a proof of concept all written in PHP.

Time to get a smartphone

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:25:23 +0000

So last night I was attending the wedding of my boss. It was a nice intimate setting and we were all getting a bit lit up from the fine wine and beer selection. At one point, one of the engineers comes over to me and states that he thinks that the database server is having an issue.

Well, this sucks.

Now, I haven’t received a call yet but he had just missed a call from our 24/7 NOC. This wasn’t looking good. Everyone who could respond to this was all at the wedding…and already well on their way to a hang over.