Thomas Brunt, who runs one of the best FrontPage Webmaster sites, has started a site dedicated to the new Expression Web Designer at http://www.firstexpression.com/. The site is just getting started, but there’s a large community from his other site, which means this one will be very content rich soon.
Month: July 2006
MySpace: New Home for Dumbest Criminals
MySpace.com is attracting its share of tech-savvy criminals who are brazen (or dumb) enough to brag about their criminal exploits online. Needless to say, law enforcement officers are finding MySpace.com to be a true goldmine of information for closing out criminal investigations.
Full story at: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=103009GRG8Z6. It’s a good laugh.
Update: Part 2 at http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=111003KKYNW3
July BADNUG Meeting: Custom Server Controls, Part 2
Join us as Tony Casale of Comunifax presents the second half of his talk on Custom Server Controls in ASP.NET 2.0. In the first half of Tony’s talk, we saw how powerful custom server controls are, and how finely we can control output and formatting. This session will finish covering the design and programming of these controls.
Summer Slam V
Developers, leave your code at the office; DBAs, forget Oracle and SQL for
one night; CIOs, you can worry about the information technology audit tomorrow.
It’s time for Pittsburgh user groups to unite! For the fifth consecutive year
the summer socials of many Pittsburgh user groups — including PittJUG, Pgh.NET,
PghOUG and PSSUG — combine for a unique night of networking and fun.
Learn about the benefits and challenges of each technology through
informal conversations with peers. Enjoy free appetizers, raffle prizes and a
cash bar. Other participating user groups include GPEP, IRMAP, ISSA, PES, PMI’s
IT SIG, PGHMUG, PRKMC, STC, WPEAF and WSUG. Attend and interact with your peers
to learn the meaning of each acronym. Sponsored by Advanticom, DQE Communications, GoldenGate Software, Google,
Microsoft, Prithvi Information Solutions, Schneider Downs, Sprint Nextel
and Summa Technologies.
Please RSVP to Council Events or 412.918.4229.
ASP.NET 2.0 UrlRewriting Fix
There is a bug in the URL Rewriting engine of ASP.NET 2.0 which leads to
search engines dropping (or not indexing) sites using URL Rewriting. While
not specific to Community Server, it maniftested itself more so in CS
communities at first. Here, Scott Watermasysk presents a workaround.
Links to the original problem are included.
Full story at http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2006/07/17/ASPNET-20-UrlRewriting-Fix.aspx
Latest Site Finished: AVETS – Allegheny Veterinary Emergency Trauma & Specialty
I’m pleased to say I’ve finished my latest site—AVETS, Allegheny Veterinary Emergency Trauma & Specialty. It’s a simple site, using JavaScript pop-out menus and master pages, plus some forms that use system.net.mail. Design by Lynn Capestrani at Capestrani Consulting.
verizon treo 700w imap deleting problem
This is one from the SE referrals in my logs.
There does seem to be a problem deleting messages when an account is set up as IMAP. The “empty deleted items” option doesn’t seem to delete the messages from the server, and they come back with the next sync. I’m not sure of the technical details, but in Outlook, deleting messages from an IMAP account is a two-step process—first, the delete, then the Purge Deleted Messages. The empty deleted items on the Treo seems to be only the first step.
I have no problems deleting messages when I reconfigured the accounts as POP3 accounts.
<update 2006–07–30>
If you want your IMAP to work properly, look into FlexMail. FlexMail is a complete replacement for Pocket Outlook, and then some. IMHO, FlexMail handles IMAP accounts better than desktop Outlook does. In addition to properly deleting items in IMAP accounts, FlexMail will perform POP before SMTP, which is a requirement to send e-mail on many hosts. Pocket Outlook does not have this option.
If you sync to an Exchange server, set that up in Pocket Outlook and let FlexMail automatically import the settings. If you have POP2 or IMAP accounts alreadey set up in Pocket Outlook, just delete them and set them up again in FlexMail, since there are more settings for these accounts than are available in Pocket Outlook.
Free Sharpcast Sync Service: One to Watch
Walt Mossberg has a review today
of Sharpcast sync service.
What sets this service apart is that no only will it sync with PCs, it will sync
with your cell phone. Specifically, Walt used a Treo 700w for his
tests.
Now, a small Silicon Valley start-up called Sharpcast is introducing an
impressive, free service that synchronizes data among PCs, phones and a Web
site at lightning speeds. I tested Sharpcast for several weeks, and found that
it works really well.
The service is limited to photos right now, which means it’s more mashed
potatoes than gravy:
With Sharpcast Photos, any change you make to an album of
photos on one of your devices is replicated within seconds on your other
devices. If you add a photo to an album on your PC, it shows up within seconds
on your phone and on your Sharpcast Web page. If you rotate a photo on the
phone, the same photo is rotated within seconds on the PC and Web page. If you
delete a photo on the Web page, it’s immediately deleted on the PC and the
phone. And if you take a photo with the camera on your Sharpcast-enabled
phone, it will show up in seconds on your PC and your Web
page.
It’s not a huge leap from instant replication of modified photos to instant
replication of spreadsheets, Word docs, etc.
You can also share your albums with other Sharpcast users, and receive
shared albums from them.
Sharing = collaboration. MS’s next version of SharePoint will be mobile
enabled, but there’s a large buy-in and overhead, not to mention connectivity
issues. Instead of sharing a photo album, imaging sharing a project
folder. By the time your plane lands, you have the updated files on your
phone, and will get them as soon as you connect your laptop to the
Internet. Sweet! And, probably with less overhead.
Planned improvements include sync of contacts, appointments, etc. Not
such a huge issue for me, since we have an Exchange server, but very useful for
a lot of people I know.
Full story at http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060713.html.
The possibilities are exciting–this is definately a company to watch in the
near future.
What Happpens When You Remote Wipe a Treo 700w?
When you install the MSFP on your Treo 700w, you can use Exchange 2003 SP2 to
enforce security policies on the PDA functions. One policy includes an
access PIN, which locks the phone after a certain period of inactivity (5 min
doesn’t seem bad in testing, but you might want to make it longer in
real life). This policy seems to be a must for the remote wipe to work
correctly. Additionally, in case the phone is ever lost, you can send a
command from Exchange to the phone to wipe it clean of data the next time it
tries to sync.
As a proof of concept, my phone was wiped 7 or 8 times yesterday.
Here’s a short overview of what happens:
- The phone retains full functionality. Whomever finds the phone is
free to make all the calls they want if you don’t have a PIN policy.
This means that if you do get the phone back, you don’t need to go through
that Verizon configuration procedure again. - Even if you enforce a PIN policy on the PDA functions, the phone can still
recive calls. The ringing phone can be answered without entering the
PIN, but no caller ID information is displayed. Calls cannot be made
from the phone until the PIN is entered. You can set the PIN policy to
wipe a device after a certain number of failures, too. - The phone basically undergoes a hard reset. Any aftermarket software
that was installed is removed. Any data stored in system memory is
lost. All configured e-mail accounts (be they POP3 or Exchange) are
deleted, as is all the e-mail. All contacts, appointments, tasks, etc
are removed. Registry settings are removed. The MSFP is
retained. - Custom ringtones and other add-ons are also removed. I have to find
that WAV of the Monday Night Football theme again. - Data stored on a storage card is not lost. Don’t
put confidential/incriminating information on the storage card, or at least
don’t leave the cards in your phone all the time. There is an option to
store e-mail attachments on the card, and it appears these are removed when
the e-mail is wiped. - If you get the phone back, or get a new one, your contacts, tasks, etc.
will be restored with the next ActiveSync. You will probably have to
reinstall the software yourself. Make sure you keep good records of your
registration codes.
The Remote Wipe will not function if the device doesn’t have MSFP
installed. The Remote Wipe functionality is an Exchange plug-in,
apparently something you need to download separately from SP2, but I’m not the
Exchange admin.
The PIN policy (called the password policy in most of the forums) seems to be
key in getting the wipe to work. If you don’t set this policy, then the
user is prompted to apply a security setting when the wipe is triggered.
Choosing No means the device isn’t wiped, and this is a very common thing in the
forums. Also key is that the phone is sync’d directlty to a Windows
2003/Exchange 2003 SP2 server. Our bastion Windows 2000 server
doesn’t pass out the policies to the phone, but the phone can be sync’d against
the bastion server, and the wipe is passed through the server as well. But
we had to sync against the Win 2K3 server once (and probably every time we want
to upgrade the policies).