Archives: 2007 June

We know that Microsoft is expecting a little baby Cougar. Is it possible that we’ve just been tipped off to its name and due date?
Today I got a promotional e-mail from Dell that was pushing Software Assurance. Included there, without fanfare, was this bit of what was news to me:
“Windows Small Business Server 2008 will [...]

I recently switched to a VoIP service (much more on that later) that can send me my voicemail as e-mail. Cool. But when I try to open them on my Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC, all I get is this error:
“Cannot play back the audio stream: the audio format is not supported.”
A fuller explanation of this [...]

Suppose Joe leaves the company and is replaced by Jane. Joe had a company-owned Pocket PC that Jane will now use. What do you do?
You wouldn’t think this would be so much of a challenge, but the steps are actually hidden pretty well. The answer was posted at Experts Exchange. Scroll all the way to [...]

Problem: Remote user reports he is unable to connect to shared network drive over PPTP VPN.
Troubleshooting:

Tried connecting to VPN from my computer. Could not connect. Conclusion: remote user is neither stupid nor crazy.
Tried to telnet to server over port 1723. Could not connect.
Checked firewall logs for dropped connections on port 1723. None there.
Disabled VPN access [...]

Better late than never, right? Almost four years after the launch of SBS 2003, Microsoft has created a central source of technical information about the product. Good idea, but I’m not sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. For example, I  tried doing a search for business contact manager to see if it would bring [...]

One of my clients cannot upgrade to Office 2007 because they use some software that tightly integrates with Office 2003, and this software is not Office 2007-ready (at least not yet). Sometime later this summer, they will no longer be able to get Office 2003 preinstalled on the computers they buy from Dell. Instead, they’ll [...]

Linux fans, say what you will about Microsoft’s recent follies with regard to Daylight Savings Time, but at least they acknowledge that DST exists. Today I was configuring a Linux-based NAS device. To get it to work properly on my network, I had to make sure that its clock was synchronized with my server. It [...]

Here’s an extremely handy tip from Andy Parkes that will save some time when renaming computers on a network. That is, it will save time in theory. In practice, if you’re anything like me, you’ll spend more time trying to remember where you saved that time-saving trick than you would actually spend just doing it [...]

All of a sudden, Windows Live Writer was dead. When I tried to post something, I got:
Network Connection Error
Error attempting to connect to weblog at:
http://davidschrag.com/schlog/xmlrpc.php
The remote server returned an error: (406) Not Acceptable.
I did some research and found this suggestion at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/121259?replies=4:
create an empty text file.
put this in it:
IfModule mod_security.c
SecFilterEngine Off
/IfModule
[Ed. note: The first and [...]

I think there are about 200 people who would agree that this photo pretty well sums up how I spent my time at last month’s conference:

Anyone want to suggest a caption?
Here’s another potentially amusing one: