Merry Christmas!
Posted on December 25, 2010, under General.
Luke 2:1-14 (NLT)
The Birth of Jesus
2 At that time the Roman emperor, Augustus, decreed that a census should be taken throughout the Roman Empire. 2 (This was the first census taken when Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 All returned to their own ancestral towns to register for this census. 4 And because Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David’s ancient home. He traveled there from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. 5 He took with him Mary, his fiancée, who was now obviously pregnant.
6 And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. 7 She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.
The Shepherds and Angels
8 That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. 9 Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, 10 but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11 The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! 12 And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in highest heaven,
and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”
[1] Tyndale House Publishers. (2004). Holy Bible : New Living Translation. (2nd ed.). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers.
Love the Beast
Posted on December 1, 2010, under Entertainment.
I am not that much of a gear-head myself, but I love the spirit of the movie Eric Bana made in "Love the Beast" – comradery, passion, drive, challenges, family, idealism, and just pure enjoyment. It’s a great story.
Clever Microsoft Ad
Posted on November 18, 2010, under Technology.
SPS2010 – October CU Issues
Posted on November 7, 2010, under SharePoint.
The SharePoint Team blog posted a notice Friday (11/5), that there was an issue with the SPS2010 October CU, and to not install it. Cryptically, they said if you have installed it, to contact Microsoft Support.
Later in the day, they posted a follow-up, detailing which packages were affected (SharePoint Server Package 2394320 and Project Server Package 2394322), and steps for a workaround.
It appears that the main issue is that the User Profile Service Application loses the assigned permissions during the install of the CU. The post walks you through resetting the permissions.
Microsoft Junk E-mail Reporting Add-in for Outlook
Microsoft has released a Junk E-mail Reporting Add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 which allows you to easily report spam back to Microsoft for analysis. Reporting the spam back to Microsoft helps them improve their junk e-mail filtering technologies.
After I installed the plugin on my home machine, I saw a new button on e-mails to Report Junk:
When you click the Report Junk button, you are prompted to confirm you want to report the selected e-mail as spam. Once you click yes:
- The original e-mail is moved to the Junk E-mail folder
- An e-mail is sent from your account to abuse@messaging.microsoft.com, with the original junk e-mail forwarded as an attachment. The e-mail also includes the e-mail header information to allow for analysis on where the junk e-mail originated from.
- You will receive a confirmation e-mail from abuse@messaging.microsoft.com, saying Microsoft has received your submission and will analyze the content to look at adjusting their filtering rules.
Microsoft update problems; Yay for my backup plans!
Posted on August 2, 2010, under Technology.
Microsoft released a critical security patch (MS10-046) that hosed my Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit machine. After the patch installed, I click the button to reboot, but it never finished. It froze on the screen that said, "Preparing To Configure Windows. Please Do Not Turn Off Your Computer." Even the little spinner had froze. I finally powered down the machine, but I couldn’t get Windows to boot even in Safe Mode.
I did have a plan though. I booted up my Windows 7 emergency System Repair Disc, and attempted to go back to a previous System Restore Point. Every time I tried though, I received a failure error of 0×80070057. (*Spoiler Alert* After I restored my computer, I realized I had turned off Systems Restore for all my drives. Sheesh, not sure why I did that. Probably to save disk space. Lesson learned.)
That left me with one option to get Windows back up and running without too much pain. In the menu of the System Repair Disk, I selected System Image Recovery, since I had scheduled weekly full backups of my system. (You do too, right?)
After successfully running the system image restoration process, a few of my files were now a week or so out of date. When I logged in, up popped my Carbonite client. It had recognized that my system had just gone through a recovery, and gave me options on restoring my files that were either out of date or missing. I selected the files to restore, and now my system is back up and running! Sweet!
The change I will be making to my backup strategy is enabling System Restore Points on my C: drive.
Summary:
- Create a Windows System Repair Disc
- Enable System Restore Points on the System drive (C:)
- Schedule weekly System Image backups
- Purchase a Carbonite subscription, and use the recommended backup settings
- Be a little skeptical of emergency patches
Free FamilyShield filtering from OpenDNS
Posted on July 11, 2010, under Security, Technology.
I have been using the OpenDNS domain filtering in my house for over a year, and have been very happy with the service. They have made it even easier to use for households looking to protect kids, by rolling out FamilyShield filtering. Without even needing to sign up for an account, you can use their service for free to block the following categories of web sites:
- Pornography
- Phishing
- Malware
- Proxy and anonymizer (for the “street smart” kiddos)
You can easily set up the service by following the walk-through instructions on configuring your router or computer’s DNS servers.
Zune – Reserved Space fixed with a device restart
This last year, my 8GB Zune has been acting up a little when it comes to the Reserved Space on the device. Every so often I would receive a message that my Zune was full, only to see that Reserved Space was using over 1 GB of storage.
In the past, I would go through the not-too-painful-but-still-tedious process of reformatting and re-syncing all of the content.
I just discovered that I can simply restart the Zune, and when I connect it back up to my computer, everything is back to normal. I guess we still live under the principle of “when in doubt, reboot.”
Web Browsers – Trackable without cookies
Posted on May 18, 2010, under Security, Technology.
Interesting proof of concept by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to show how the fingerprint of your web browser makes you trackable, even without the use of cookies:
SharePoint/Office 2010 RTM Downloads
Posted on April 22, 2010, under SharePoint.
The following are available on TechNet and MSDN:
- Project Professional 2010 (x64) – (English) 272 (MB)
- Project Professional 2010 (x86) – (English) 235 (MB)
- Project Standard 2010 (x64) – (English) 245 (MB)
- Project Standard 2010 (x86) – (English) 223 (MB)
- Office Professional Plus 2010 (x64) – (English) 718 (MB)
- Office Professional Plus 2010 (x86) – (English) 650 (MB)
- SharePoint Server 2010 (x64) – DVD (English) 723 (MB)
- Visio 2010 (x64) – (English) 343 (MB)
- Visio 2010 (x86) – (English) 293 (MB)
