Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

I was reading another site today that had pictures and one of them was a picture with a caption along the lines of "Me and a friend of mine at a SuperDrag show", and I originally thought "Huh, that must be an old picture."

After searching around online, I'm guessing it was from the Chicago Metro show of the Superdrag reunion tour.

I won't be able to make any of the shows so I've become comfortably bummed.
Yet another great guitar rock band of the 90s destroyed by major labels.

They might not realize it yet, but with the internet these days, record labels are obsolete.

I'd buy all my music online if it were available in a lossless format like FLAC.

MP3 and AAC don't cut it unless they are very high bitrates. I'm not an audiophile, but I can still hear "underwater cymbal shimmer" on drums with 192 kbit/s MP3s on laptop speakers. It is the same reason I haven't subscribed to satellite radio. Don't get me started on dynamic range compression on most new records, or the lack of use of stereo panning in new recordings, with the exception of the guitar solos in Tarantula's by the Smashing Pumpkins on their latest album.

On certain things, I am a grumpy old man in a new technology world, believe it or not.
I like vinyl albums and tube amps, for more than just guitar, too.

Never heard of Twitter? I'm not sure of the best way to describe it other than semi-instant messaging on your mobile phone. It is a handy way to blast out your 'status' or 'what you are up to' to a group of people with a simple text message.

I am sure their website explains it better, but anyway, there is now an Outlook plug-in so that you can Twitter from within Outlook. It is called OutTwit.

Pretty neat. I just wish I knew more people that used Twitter.

As noted here, there is a fix/workaround for this issue if you have run into it.

You can read about the specifics of the problem in KB 941820.

Forefront Server Security Management Console allows administrators to easily manage Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint and Microsoft Antigen, providing a web-based console to centralize configuration and operation, automate the download and distribution of signature and scan engine updates, and generate comprehensive reports.

Through integration with Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server, Forefront Server Security Management Console helps maintain reliability and performance of messaging and collaboration protection.

Download the trial version here, and the user guide here.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 VoIP Test Set enables you to simulate a SIP endpoint to test connectivity.

Emulation options include the following:

Client emulation - To emulate a Microsoft Office Communicator client, you specify a SIP-enabled user account to register with Office Communications Server. This can be useful for troubleshooting problems with incoming or outgoing Enterprise Voice calls.

Server emulation - You can use VoIP Test Set to emulate a Mediation Server or a gateway. To emulate a server, you specify the IP address, port number, and other settings of the server to be emulated. This can be useful for emulating components during the setup of the Office Communications Server 2007 infrastructure to verify the functionality of components that have already been deployed.

Download it here.

Download virtualization cookbooks to help you deploy solutions today.

Cookbooks offered:
Backup and Recovery using Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Edition

Branch Office - System Center Virtual Machine Manager with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

High Availability with Virtual Server Host Clustering

Hosted Backup - System Center DPM 2007 with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

Offsite Backup - System Center DPM 2007 with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP 1

Onsite Backup - System Center DPM 2007 with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP 1

System Center DPM 2007 with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP 1 and System Center VMM

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 with System Center VMM

Mobile User Access of Applications - Terminal Server running on virtual machines using Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP 1

Quick Migration with Virtual Server Host Clustering on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP 1

Download them here.

Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer (VMMCA) is a diagnostic tool that verifies configuration settings and minimum system requirements for your computer that are important to running Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). VMMCA scans your environment and reports common configuration issues and suggests best practices. You can run VMMCA before or after installing VMM.

Note: Runs on 64-bit only, but can scan 32-bit and 64-bit computers.

Download it here.

Just a quick shoutout before people reboot their servers and find that their Sharepoint sites won't start up. Read about the workaround here, until an updated patch is released.

I don't have anything to add to this, other than wanting to get the information out there.

A common issue in VoIP deployments is that administrators find out about problems with audio quality only after a user reports a problem. The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool simulates audio traffic so that you can proactively identify and resolve audio issues.

Download it from here.

This hotfix package fixes the following issues:
1. Error message in Communicator 2007: "An error occurred while trying to start the conference" or "This message was not delivered to all participants"
2. The text alignment in an e-mail message may be incorrect in Communicator 2007
3. The Russian language name is spelled incorrectly in the list of available languages in Communicator 2007
4. The telephone number in a Communicator 2007 pop-up window for an incoming call has an incorrect text direction when the language is set to Arabic or to Hebrew
5. A new policy is available to specify the Contacts store that Communicator 2007 uses
6. Unrecognizable characters appear in the date field of the display on a Unified Communications device that is used with Communicator 2007
7. The transport option is not automatically set to TLS when you click "Manual configuration" in "Advanced Connection Settings" in Communicator 2007
8. Menu items are truncated in the Hebrew version of Communicator 2007
9. Communicator 2007 crashes when the SipCompression registry entry is set to PING mode and the Transport registry entry is set to TLS
10. You may be prompted to restart the computer when you try to start Communicator 2007
11. Communicator 2007 crashes when you start it by using the presence control
12. After the computer resumes from hibernation or from standby, Communicator 2007 may consume 100% of CPU usage - I have experienced this one quite a bit!
13. Communicator 2007 presence icons do not change in Outlook 2007 after you disconnect a computer from the network
14. Presence status does not change from "In a Meeting" to "Available" in Communicator 2007
15. Certain icons may be mirrored incorrectly in the call conversation window in the Arabic version or in the Hebrew version of Communicator 2007

Read more about it here.

Download it here.

I don't remember where I found it but this is a great site for finding cell phone towers near your home or business. Punch in an address and it shows a Google map of results. I have no idea who runs it but it is a cool site.

For example, I didn't know there were this many towers around us:

After 3 years of suffering with 1xRTT for a home internet connection, EVDO Rev A finally went live on our local cell tower. For the past few months, our phones had been flipping back and forth between EVDO and 1xRTT but could never sustain a connection on the faster network.

That changed sometime in the past few weeks and thankfully, I was able to run down and grab an EVDO Rev A card to replace my aging and dying Motorola V265 which had faithfully pushed packets since 2004, 24x7x365.




I had been looking into Wilson repeaters and power boosters to get the distant EVDO signal but now it looks like I don't need to go through that mess. The speed difference between EVDO Rev A and 1xRTT is amazing.

I did connect an external antenna up to the Novatel U720 and it boosted my reception quite a bit. The Thinkpad 240 that I use as a router only has one USB port, so I used a powered USB hub to plug both cables from the USB modem in. The modem can operate off of just one USB port but I need all the signal fidelity I can get, so I am using the booster for 1 amp of powered goodness.

3 years of waiting for better than ISDN speeds at our house is finally over!

Exam 71-400: TS: Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager, Configuring
Registration begins: October 4, 2007
Beta exam period runs: October 4, 2007– October 26, 2007
Please use the following promotional code when registering for the exam: TSCCM

The promo code makes it free, except for your time.

Read more about it on Trika's blog here.

Very informative post here.

The most interesting for WSv/Viridian/Hypervisor in Windows 2008, is the fact that the IDE virtual driver is "better" than the SCSI counterpart, which is the opposite of what the case was with Virtual Server.

The part of the blog post relating to WSv's IDE driver:

The IDE controller remains an emulated device, but with a couple of differences to the IDE controller in Virtual Server. It is now 48-bit LBA capable . This allows you to connect large VHDs up to 2040GB to it. The second difference is a filter driver we insert into the storage stack inside the guest which effectively bypasses the emulation path for IDE, making it much higher performance. In fact, for I/O paths, the IDE controller with the filter driver performs equivalently to the SCSI controller in Windows Server virtualization. You can also attach pass-through disk storage to IDE, which was not possible in Virtual Server.

A simple, but noteworthy cut and paste from here.

Details:
We just released a .NET Framework 2.0 CLR update that we recommend be applied to every Exchange 2007 server. It is more urgent to install this update on Client Access servers with multiple protocols, but we recommend installing the update on all Exchange 2007 servers.

We are also integrating this update in .NET Framework 2.0 SP1, but I don’t have any ETA for that release.

More information about this update can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

You can download this hotfix from here. We recommend that you make a full backup of the server before installing this update, and once again after successful installation of this update.