Me, side-by-side with Douglas Adams

Me, side-by-side with Douglas Adams
Originally uploaded by fullerbecker

What happens if you search the iTunes store for Towel?

You find Douglas Adams, and you find me!

Use Outlook 2007 to make collaborating between organizations easier – share your free/busy times

Folks who use Outlook and Exchange together are used to being able to use Outlook's free/busy times to tell when other people in their organization are available to meet. But what happens when a vendor or business partner from outside your organization is trying to find a time to meet with you?

Typically for me, it used to be: find a bunch of available times; write them down and email them to the vendor; then the vendor checks on their end with the folks they need to bring and picks one, but by then, I've been scheduled for three more meetings and that free time isn't free any longer – so like they say on the shampoo bottle, "lather, rinse, repeat." What a waste of time!

With Outlook 2007* there's a better way!

Dear vendor, you can see my calendar at this link: https://calendars.office.microsoft.com/en-us/pubcal/viewer.aspx?path=%2fpubcalstorage%2fdnlhhqlz1065262%2fBecker_Dan_Calendar.ics Please schedule the meeting for a time I'm available.

[Go ahead and click that link – you'll see my actual availability!]

How did I do that?

Outlook 2007 makes it very easy to share your calendar online with people outside your company, using Outlook 2007.

Interested? Well good! Microsoft has written up just what you need to do to make it happen: Publish a calendar on Office Online

I strongly suggest you use the option to publish Availability only to minimize the risk of information disclosure.

You can also choose whether to share your calendar information only with specific people, or just publish it for the whole Internet to see. (I'm sure you can guess which is the more secure approach – but you will have to make the calculation about convenience vs. security of your schedule. Since I've blogged, twittered, etc. for quite a while, I'm obviously somewhat comfortable with the Internet knowing quite a bit about me. Your tolerance for that may differ.)

If you want to restrict access to your calendar to only invited people, you need to sign up for a Windows Live ID account.

I hope this tip will make collaborating across organizational boundaries a bit easier for you.

*Yes, you used to be able to do this with earlier versions of Outlook back when Microsoft ran a public free/busy server – but that was shut down years ago. But this one works 'out of the box' with Outlook just by following the instructions, no need to install any extra software.** Easy-peasy!

**And yes, there are a gazillion other ways to do this, and using Outlook and Exchange is SOOOOO 20^th century, get with the web2.0 wave, blah blah blah. Ok, if you know that already, then this blog post is not for you! It's for folks who still need to use Outlook & Exchange but also need to collaborate outside their organizational boundaries.

 

 

Now Firefox 3.5 compatible: Seattle Public Library LibX Edition

LibX is an open-source project that creates browser extensions that give you one-click access to the online card catalog from your own library.  See a book you're interested in on Amazon, or anywhere on the Internet for that matter? LibX makes checking to see whether it's available via your library - and if so, reserving it - as easy as pie!

But a LibX "edition" needs to be set up for each library. And the great folks behind LibX have made it easy to do that! So a while back, I made a Seattle Public Library LibX edition.

And now it's updated for Firefox 3.5 compatibility.

If you have already installed the Seattle Public Library edition of LibX, the next time you launch Firefox, it should automatically prompt you that an update is available to install.

Otherwise, go ahead and install Seattle Public Library LibX now! (There is a version for Internet Explorer, too. Sorry, there's no LibX for Chrome or Safari.)

And if you are reading this but don't get your books from SPL, check to see if there is a LibX edition for your library. If there isn't, you should make one with LibX Edition Builder! It's a great way for geeks to support their local library.

Even with @comcastcares, Comcast Triple Play is not a basket you should put all your connectivity eggs in

@comcastcares For 3rd weekday in a row, cannot call toll free #'s "all circuits are busy". Getting ready to cancel. Pls help!10:06 AM Jun 2nd from web

ComcastBonnie@doofusdan the all circuits busy thing is a regional issue they're trying to hash out :/9:31 AM Jun 2nd from web in reply to doofusdan

Comcast isn't delivering on the fundamentals of having the dial tone actually work, or having Internet access. And that's what I want from a telephone and Internet service provider: dial tone and Internet. And that is what Comcast hasn't been able to deliver to me lately.


Based on my experience, I recommend that if you are looking at Comcast Triple Play, don't. They aren't reliable enough to use for both ISP and telco. If you use Comcast for one, use another provider for the other. That way when Comcast's service is down you can at least use the other one.

I think it's great that Comcast has folks on twitter trying to help out. They've helped me before. But I'd prefer not to need to ask for help at all - I just want my phone & ISP to work. Is that too much to ask? For Comcast apparently it is.

Here's an email I'm sending to them. I hope this will help get my problem resolved now but I really do not want to stay as a pure Comcast customer any longer.  And I recommend you don't do so either.

Typo occurred, too

Typo occurred, too
Originally uploaded by fullerbecker

Can you be a little more specific?

This Old Space Telescope

Watching the Hubble repairs live is at once fascinating, restful, and inspiring.  And boring. But great to be watching with a quiet house and a cuppa coffee to wake up gently on a beautiful Saturday before starting a day that promises to end in happy exhaustion.

(I'm watching on UW2.TV as I write this, it's one of my favorite TV stations and it carries lots of NASA.TV.  There are a gazillion places to see it - just search for STS-125 spacewalk - I'm watching the third one right now)

From the mission description:

...pieces of those instruments have failed in past years – not the entire instrument, but specific pieces inside of them. The crew will replace only the pieces that have failed.

But those instruments were never designed to be repaired in space. In fact, they were specifically designed not to come apart.

“When we first looked at it, we were going ‘well, maybe, maybe not,’” Ceccacci said.

Since then, the team has come up with a plan for the work that Ceccacci believes will be very successful. But it won’t be easy – the repair of the spectrograph, for instance, requires the spacewalkers to remove more than 100 screws to access a computer card they will pull out and replace.

The Hubble Space Telescope is seen in March 2002 with its new solar arrays after the completion of STS-109, the third Hubble servicing mission. Image: NASA

Hubble is going to be replaced, and this is the last maintenance Hubble will receive. Scott Berkun perceptively describes the importance of giving up the old to make way for the new.

They know that in order to build whatever will replace the Hubble, they have to let go of Hubble, even if that means letting it die, so they can have the funds and resources to invest in the next thing (It’s called the Webb telescope and it’s made from Beryllium - sounds like Star Trek).

More on the Webb Telescope's mirror from Technology Review. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope site is authoritative.

Great software writing can be Mercurial

Cross-pollination works. For example, I think infrastructure groups can usefully adopt several developer tools and mindsets. (I've talked about this before.) One of these is automated build & test systems. Another one - and the necessary foundation for automated builds - is revision/version control.

And I'm usually interested in comparing different approaches to solving a problem I'm familiar with. I find seeing the differences in the approaches gives me a better understanding of the underlying problem; it helps to abstract what is perhaps an implementation artifact and what is inherent to the domain.

So when I spotted on TouchCode's Google Code wiki that Google Code is now supporting yet another version control system, Mercurial, I was intrigued enough to go learn more about Mercurial, how it differs from and tries to improve upon Subversion and Git.

Did I mention that I'm easily distracted by bright, shiny knowledge? There's a rule I follow strictly: when I am playing, I'm allowed to shoot off into completely random digressions if I want to!

Conveniently, Mercurial: The Definitive Guide is available online, Free. Thanks, Bryan O'Sullivan!

What a delightful surprise to see it looks like the makings of a good software book, too! From the Preface:

Technical storytelling

A few years ago, when I wanted to explain why I believed that distributed revision control is important, the field was then so new that there was almost no published literature to refer people to.

Although at that time I spent some time working on the internals of Mercurial itself, I switched to writing this book because that seemed like the most effective way to help the software to reach a wide audience, along with the idea that revision control ought to be distributed in nature. I publish the book online under a liberal license for the same reason: to get the word out.

There's a familiar rhythm to a good software book that closely resembles telling a story: What is this thing? Why does it matter? How will it help me? How do I use it? In this book, I try to answer those questions for distributed revision control in general, and for Mercurial in particular.

And right off the bat, a great explanation that I'm going to point lots of people to in the future:

Why use revision control?

There are a number of reasons why you or your team might want to use an automated revision control tool for a project.

• It will track the history and evolution of your project, so you don't have to. For every change, you'll have a log of who made it; why they made it; when they made it; and what the change was.
  
  
• When you're working with other people, revision control software makes it easier for you to collaborate. For example, when people more or less simultaneously make potentially incompatible changes, the software will help you to identify and resolve those conflicts.
  
  
• It can help you to recover from mistakes. If you make a change that later turns out to be in error, you can revert to an earlier version of one or more files. In fact, a really good revision control tool will even help you to efficiently figure out exactly when a problem was introduced (see the section called “Finding the source of a bug” for details).
  
• It will help you to work simultaneously on, and manage the drift between, multiple versions of your project.

Most of these reasons are equally valid—at least in theory—whether you're working on a project by yourself, or with a hundred other people. 

All cool so far, right? But check out what Bryan did  - this is so self-referential, I just love it to pieces:

About the Example Code

This book takes an unusual approach to code samples. Every example is “live”—each one is actually the result of a shell script that executes the Mercurial commands you see. Every time an image of the book is built from its sources, all the example scripts are automatically run, and their current results compared against their expected results.

The advantage of this approach is that the examples are always accurate; they describe exactly the behavior of the version of Mercurial that's mentioned at the front of the book. If I update the version of Mercurial that I'm documenting, and the output of some command changes, the build fails.

Anyway, I'm still reading, and I think I may well give Hg a shot for my next project.

An actual reason to install iPhone OS 3 while it's in beta

App Store submissions are now being reviewed on iPhone OS 3.0
Originally uploaded by fullerbecker

Apple says "App Store submissions are now being reviewed on iPhone OS 3.0" so of course I'd really best test it myself before submitting, eh?

(No, I'm not anywhere near finished yet - I've only had about 1 hr to spend on it since the class.)

Warning kids - I would not be doing this if I didn't have alternate devices and full backup of my iTunes library available in case of beta FAIL.

Instantwatcher.com: a great way to find stuff to Watch Instantly on Netflix

instantwatcher.com - Movies and TV to Watch Instantly on Netflix:

"Who is this website for?

It's for Netflix users who want to traverse and explore Netflix's catalog of streaming titles more efficiently and painlessly. All the information and cross-links on this website are limited to Watch Instantly titles so you don't have to waste time sifting through a bunch of DVD-only titles to find the ones that you can start watching right away.

You can also play or queue these titles directly from this website.

Can I use this website for free?

Yes. But you do have to have a Netflix membership to make full use of this website."

HP Mini 2140 is much better netbook with Windows 7 than with XP

"Windows 7 is the next version of the Windows client operating system. This version incorporates hundreds of improvements based on your feedback"

And it shows.

I recommend the Windows 7 Release Candidate, as long as you're cool with RTFM'ing. Go read the Windows 7 Release Candidate FAQ, then download & install.