Starting in October and running into mid-December, MSDN will have a whole slew of Infopath webcasts going on. One of Office 2003's best kept secrets (and that is not necessarily a good thing), this program provides a powerful front end to designing, creating and using XML forms.

Title	Presenter	Date	Time
Best Practices for Designing InfoPath Forms	Scott Roberts	Tuesday, October 05, 2004	9:00 AM-10:30 AM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259531&Culture=en-US
User Roles in InfoPath 2003	Josh Bertsch	Tuesday, October 12, 2004	9:00 AM-10:30 AM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259537&Culture=en-US
Building Advanced Dynamic Solutions in InfoPath 2003	Jun Jin	Tuesday, October 19, 2004	9:00 AM-10:30 AM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259110&Culture=en-US
Business Logic in InfoPath 2003	Yuet (Emily) Ching and Prachi Bora	Tuesday, October 26, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259112&Culture=en-US
Using Managed Code and Visual Studio to Build Solutions	Willson Raj David	Tuesday, November 02, 2004	1:00 PM-2:00 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259539&Culture=en-US
InfoPath in End-to-End Enterprise Solutions: Integrating InfoPath with Siebel and SAP	Hagen Green	Monday, November 08, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259542&Culture=en-US
Digital Signatures in InfoPath 2003	Mihaela Cristina Cris	Monday, November 15, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259544&Culture=en-US
Creating Custom Controls for InfoPath SP-1	Andrew Ma	Monday, November 29, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259546&Culture=en-US
Programming Workflow into InfoPath Solutions: Using InfoPath with BizTalk Server 2004 and Human Workflow Services	Rick Severson	Monday, December 06, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259548&Culture=en-US
Database Connectivity in InfoPath Through ADO.NET DataSet Support	Mikhail Vassiliev	Tuesday, December 14, 2004	11:00 AM-12:30 PM
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032259550&Culture=en-US

All times are Pacific Daylight Time (UTC–07:00) until Oct 31, and Pacific Standard Time (UTC–08:00) on and after Oct 31st.

Last week while I was out, Microsoft released a new tool on their downloads site called SSL Diagnostics Version 1.0, which aids in quickly identifying configuration problems in the IIS metabase, certificates, or certificate stores.

x86 and ia64 versions are available. The download contains a document called the SSL FAQ that is a great resource for people wanting to learn about SSL from the beginning, as well.

Recommended for anyone who might need to deal with web servers, certification authorities or SSL certificates for any reason.

Microsoft's TechNet has released a useful set of step-by-step guides to help people learn, understand, plan, deploy, configure and maintain Active Directory infrastructures on Windows 2003 domains.

From the AD Step-by-Step Guides page, the following individual titles are available (see the main page for more information about each):

• Installing Windows Server 2003 as a Domain Controller
• Installing a Windows XP Professional Workstation and Connecting It to a Domain
• Setting Up Additional Domain Controllers
• Managing Active Directory
• Understanding the Group Policy Feature Set
• Using the Group Policy Management Console
• Enforcing Strong Password Policies
• Using the Delegation of Control Wizard
• User Data Management and User Settings Management through Group Policy
• Configuring a Dial-Up Remote Access Server
• Building a Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network Connection
• Using the Encrypting File System
• Digitally Signed and Encrypted E-Mail
• Active Directory Sites and Services
• Active Directory Bulk Import and Export

My first real job, and the profession for which I went to college, was photojournalism. One of my heros of the trade, Eddie Adams, died Sunday from Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS).

I've since moved on to other work, a decision I sometimes ponder when I am feeling especially creative without an outlet. But the extreme importance of the trade, which Eddie Adams personified, has stuck with me over the years.

Adams was probably most famous for his picture of a Viet Cong officer being shot in the head in the streets of Saigon, Vietnam in 1968. But his contributions to photojournalism and bringing the world closer to all of us went much further than that. He covered 13 wars, worked many years for the Associated Press and Time-Life, and photographed presidents and other heads of state during his extensive and colorful career.

In his own unique way he took the trade as seriously as anyone, realizing the power and responsibility of the lens and film. Writing about the famous picture from Saigon in '68 in Time Magazine, Adams said:

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

If a picture was worth a thousand words, Eddie Adams' images are worth a million. He taught new photographers the trade, and passed his talents and values on to many.

I never met Eddie Adams personally, so I can't say I knew him, but I can say that he helped me to better know myself when I was learning the trade and craft of photojpournalism. Thank you, Eddie Adams, for always making me think, and for making life a little more real while you were here with us.

You may have seen the Robosapien toy robot for sale at your local Frys or other electronics store. It's fun to play with and remarkably more advanced than anything that was made when I was a kid. Our local store sells it for about $68.

Well, some guys over in Germany that are studying robotics decided it would be fun to make the Robosapien robot autonomous - in other words, program it so it could do something on its own, using its own "senses," if you will. They successfully hacked their little robot with a Pocket PC, Microsoft Embedded C++, an IR remote control program for the Pocket PC, and a CF-card camera. Now it will "watch" for an orange pole, and if it "sees" it in its field of view, it will run toward the pole. Pretty darn cool.

But even better than just showing they can do it, they have released their Robosapien API so that you, too can play with robotic hacks. You're not limited to making mad dashes at orange poles - that is just the default program that ships with the API. You can write your own instruction sets for your autonomous robot, and make it interact with whatever it can "see."

I am starting to think I need to pick up one of these, find that old Pocket PC that's lying around here somewhere, and see what can be done. It looks like they had to chop off the lower arms and part of the original robot's feet - probably for weight reasons - which is too bad. Their notes also state that the weight and center of gravity/balance are important to allowing the robot to move correctly under its own power. So, a really light-weight PocketPC would certainly be a good place to start. :-)

(via Engadget)

"You are unknown to me.
Your camera's memory card was in a taxi; I have it now.
I am going to post one of your pictures each day.
I will also narrate as if I were you.
Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life."

This is (Ooops... better make that “was”) one of the more interesting/strange blogs I have seen in some time. The author found a digital camera card in a taxi, thought of an idea, and the rest is (ongoing and made-up) history. The blog, "I Found Some of Your Life," merges the real-world with a made-up one. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this site compensates for the pictures with it's fictional guess-at-a-story commentary. You should start with the introduction entry and then work your way though the chronology, to get the full effect.

I can't wait til the owner discovers there's a web site with his pictures on it. That should be very interesting. (EDIT: Not sure exactly what happened, but apparently someone got wind and was not too happy)

From the introduction entry describing the blog and how it got started:

In my possession is one (1) memory card from a digital camera. This memory card was found in a taxi in New York City. I have no idea who the owner of the camera is.

The pictures on the memory card were taken over the course of exactly one (1) year in this person's life, starting July Twenty-Fifth, Two Thousand and Three (07-25-03) and ending July Twenty-Fourth, Two Thousand and Four (07-24-04).

I am going to post one (1) picture here each day. As there are two hundred and twenty-seven (227) pictures, there will be two hundred and twenty-seven (227) posts. The pictures will appear in chronological order according to the timestamp accompanying each image.

As the images add up, I will attempt to assemble an identity for this unknown person. Each day's new picture will be a fresh addition to this photographic life-documentation. Only with the unveiling of the final picture (the two hundred and twenty-seventh (227th)) will we finally have a full understanding of this person's life over the past year - at least as far as these pictures will allow us to infer.

Further, in an attempt to present this pictorial information in a more personal manner, and also to better allow for some artistic license, I am going to pretend that I am the owner of the camera. I'll call me Jordan, because that's the name on my birthday cake (you'll see).

Enjoy.

In the random blog post department:

Over on Channel 9 there's a picture of a Windows 2006 box. Well, okay it's not the real Windows box, but it's cool.

So are some of the typical Channel 9 comments (cool that is)...

Dave Bowman : Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL : Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman : Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL : I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman : What's the problem?
HAL : I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman : What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL : You forgot to recompile the kernel with the new pod bay door drivers.
Dave Bowman : Doesn't Linux support plug and play?
HAL : Not yet, in the next release.

I'm on vacation, sitting at Powell's City of Books (9am-11pm every day of the year, which makes it 14/7/365 I guess?), in the coffee shop with my requisite dose of caffeine, using my wireless laptop to access the Internet for free. Here in Portland, we have this terrific thing called the Personal Telco Project, which self-describes itself as:

We are a volunteer group of Portlanders who believe that 802.11 (wireless networking, or "Wi-Fi") technology is both cool and empowering.  We started out by turning our own houses and apartments into wireless hot spots (also referred to as "nodes"), and then set about building these nodes in public locations such as parks and coffee shops.  Currently we have over 100 active nodes, and we eventually would like to cover the entire city of Portland, Oregon with even more.

So while my friend who is visiting from Germany (who happens to be a real book-freak - in the nicest sense of the word “freak” of course!) searches every aisle of books here in the largest independant bookstore in the world, I am able to take a load off my back, check email, avoid the VPN to work (:)) and send GMAIL invitations to the first six of umpteen people who correctly answered a trivia question and earned gmail invitations. To the rest of you, I have put you on my waiting list and will send your invites when I get them - thanks for playing!

Powell's Books, for those who have not experienced it, is an amazing place. New and used books by the hundreds of thousands line the shelvces of this full city block of bookstore. My favorite room in the whole place is on the top floor, just off of what they call the Pearl Room.

Behind a wood door and darker than the rest of the place is the Rare Book Room. This room is home to many first-of-the-first books (as in first edition, first printing). Old books sit on the shelves, and the most rare among them sit in the middle of each rack with a simple glass loked sliding door on each. If you ask, the attendant librarian will open the glass to show you a book that interests you.

These are not reading books though, unlesss you are filthy rich. My favorite book in the room (at least right now) is the original British first edition and printing of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein. It's not like I can afford to buy it, or even touch it: That book is for sale for $25,000. But it is fun to look at.

Should you be a Tolkein fan, and want to invest in something a little more in the “gold” range rather than “platinum,” there is a 1st/1st 3-book set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a little worn but in decent shape with dust jackets. This can be yours for $6,000. If you're more of an old-but-not-expensive person (read: early books but not necessarily original), a second-edition set in similar condition is available in sleeves for $600 - quite a difference in price.

I sit here looking at paper books and typing on an electronic keybord, sending my words to a digital storage where others can see them. While there is something exciting about the digital lifestyle, so is there something quite relaxing and seemingly more “real” about the book I can hold in my hand, the cover I can feel and the pages I can turn. The smell of old books is noticibly different from the smell of a laptop or computer monitor. It's earthy and feels more like it came from somewhere real, rather than from somewhere pretend. I like that, and I think in a way we all need that.

Darron Devlin has released updated versions of his OneNote power toys, OneNoteImageWriter and WebPageToOneNote. From his web site:

OneNoteImageWriter

Version 1.0.0.5

This PowerToy is a virtual printer that enables the import of document images into Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 sections. Any program that is capable of printing can send a document to the OneNote Image Writer just as it would when printing to a physical device. The printed document is converted into a document image that can be used as a foreground or background image on a OneNote page. Details and Download

WebPageToOneNote

Version 1.0.0.4

This PowerToys adds a WebPageToOneNote button to the Standard Buttons toolbar in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later. Click this button to copy an image of the entire current web page (WYSIWYG) to a new page in OneNote. The new page is created in a WebImageCaptures section in your notebook. Details and Download

via BetaNews.com:

Security firm Secunia has issued a "highly critical" advisory that details 10 separate vulnerabilities found in Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird. The flaws can be exploited remotely, allowing an attacker to compromise a system and expose sensitive data. Mozilla users are urged to upgrade to the latest releases of each application, which contain the necessary fixes.

This follows a JPEG vulnerability annmouncement (MS04-028) from Microsoft, as well. If you are running any of these programs, be sure to get the latest versions - these are serious vulnerabilities in all the apps, just as important to patch as where there's a vulnerability discovered in Windows or IE.

Cory over at SANS commented on the situation, too.

Just released on GotDotNet: MacawSharePointSkinner, a server HttpModule that allows you to modify the look and feel of SharePoint sites without having to change the core site layout. (found via Mark Harrison) You should also be able to use it to modify non-SharePoint ASP.NET web sites. It looks very promising for certain situations (probably not all - as my friend commented, why would you want to do customization work and then change your changes? Plus ASP.NET 2.0 will include skinning right in the package). Where SharePoint is involved, however, this could be useful since certain customizations can be quite a bit of redundant work.

From the MacawSharePointSkinner documentation:

MacawSharePointSkinner is a tool designed to enable non-intrusive modifications to the visual and functional design of SharePoint. The tool can be used for both Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and for Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Actually, it can be used for any web site utilizing the ASP.NET technology.

One of the major issues that we encounter in the implementation of SharePoint within organizations is that organizations want modifications to the visual and functional design that are almost impossible to implement without a major overhaul of the standard files and templates provided with SharePoint. SharePoint is constructed as a kind of standard product that is best used out of the box. Some design can be applied by specifying themes (for team sites) or by modifying CSS stylesheets (for the portal). The possibilities here are limited however, and changes to the actual HTML that is rendered results in changes to hundreds of the standard files.

When implementing customer requested visual modifications, one of the big problems that we encountered in making extensive modifications to the files and templates delivered with SharePoint was that the rendering of the same HTML is implemented differently by different pages. Some pages contain the actual HTML that is outputted and can be easily modified. Other pages contain server controls that do the rendering of the same HTML. These pages are almost impossible to modify. Another problem is that modifications must often be made to hundreds of pages.

The approach that MacawSharePointSkinner takes is that it lets SharePoint render the final HTML, and just before this HTML is sent to the browser MacawSharePointSkinner makes the needed modifications to this HTML. This is done in such a way that no modifications are needed to the internal files of SharePoint, so it is non-intrusive. Another advantage is that it will survive service packs (although the output HTML may change in a service pack!) and template modifications.

Interesting. Get it here. If anyone makes any screenshots of interesting implemetations of this, I would be interested in seeing them.

I'll gladly be taking the rest of the week off work, to spend some time with a friend visiting from Germany, Florian. He's the lead programmer on Admin Mod for Half Life, a server add-on for people who run Half Life and HL-Mod (anyone ever heard of CounterStrike?) game servers. I used to be the documentation and PR guy on the project back in the day, but a good guy names Dave has pretty much assumed the documentation role and does a great job with it, and PR is not exactly necessary anymore :-). So, I pretty much just hang out these days. We will be spending some time seeing the sites and cooking on the grill at least once, before heading up to Seattle to visit with Alfred, who originally wrote Admin Mod and now works at Valve Software, the company that created Half Life. He's been pretty busy lately. It will be the first time the three of us have met up in one place at the same time.

It's going to be a good week. :-)

Here are some great ideas people have given for things to do while Florian is here. I think we will pick and choose a few items from this list and a couple other ideas that were passed along:

• The Gorge and Multnomah Falls, then
• Hop over the bridge while out that way and eat at Skamania Lodge.
• Drive him up the Clackamas River to Ripplebrook ranger station so he can see what the Cascade Range looks like.
• McMenamins
• Do an Oregon winery tour through Newberg, McMinnville etc.
• Take him up to Timberline Lodge so he can see Mt Hood and the lodge has great eating.
• The giant sturgeon at Bonneville Dam.
• Visit Tillamook and take a tour of the ice creamery.
• Drive south down I-5 and go to the coast at Florence (hwy 126) and drive up 101 to Newport. 101 goes along the ocean most of the way and the views are awesome.
• Then take him Salmon fishing on a day charter out of Newport.
• End of the Oregon Trail museum in Oregon City.
• Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville.
• Silver Falls State Park (east of Salem).
• With kids, AC Gilbert Museum in Salem and Enchanted Forest in Salem.
• Portland Chinese Garden
• Powell's Books
• Harvey's Comedy Club
• OMSI

Pulling this out of the cave that is my blog comments:

I've completed a real-use test of the Nikon D70 with the Seagate ST1 hard drive. I'm not a hardware tester, but I decided I'd just load it up and push it a bit and see what happened.

I shot 1365 pictures at full jpeg resolution, continuous fire mode for long sessions. This required the hard drive to run continuously for several minutes at a time. The camera showed 451 images left to go (free space remaining) when I reached the point where all 1365 images had been recorded.

At that point my camera's battery died - Now, before anyone goes off on a rant, it's important to note that it was not fully charged to start with (I had charged the camera battery a month before and used it some since then), and that I intentionally shot groups of of 100-300 continuous-fire images at a time in this test, with auto-focus on and the reflex mirror down in normal operating mode. Also, the LCD display on the back of the camera was not disabled, as I used it to view some of the images between the continuous-fire sessions (like watching a slow frame rate movie - that night be a fun project some other time, heheh). In other words, I was running it in full-battery-killer mode, on a partially charged battery.

With the Seagate drive in the Nikon D70 (in continuous-shot mode, recording in fine resolution JPEG mode at the largest image size setting: 3008x2000 pixels), the camera does its standard thing, buffering the first 9 shots with rapid fire of about 2 frames per second, then slowing down its frame rate to allow the media to store the data (about a frame per second). Time required to spin up the drive and display an image on the camera's screen when I push PLAY on the camera from a dead stop is right at two seconds.

Disk space used on the ST1 drive by the 1365 images: 3.15 GB (3,388,802,794 bytes)

Time required to copy all 3.15GB of files to my laptop hard drive using a Sandisk USB2 CF I/II card reader (as measured using the nifty stopwatch feature on the Rio Carbon, of course): 10 minutes, 1 second.

This Seagate drive is nice, and my surviving Rio Carbon is awesome, too. It seems plenty fast enough for me. Unfortunately I don't have a Sandisk 2 Ultra or similar to compare it to, but I have seen others comment its close to that speed. Anyone have more specific experience there?

Off-topic Rio Carbon thought of the day: If you're not an Audible.com subscriber, your should become one and listen to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction." Freakin' hilarious. I listened to the whole thing on my Carbon while commuting. I have also downloaded "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Unabridged" (as read by Adams himself) and "Getting Things Done," which is also great stuff.

Related Links:

• Seagate ST1 Series Technology Whitepaper [PDF - seagate.com]
• Seagate ST1 Series Product Overview [PDF - seagate.com]
• Picture of the Seagate ST1 Drive internals [JPEG - seagate.com]
• Rio Carbon product onfo [WEB - rioaudio.com]
• Nikon D70 product page [WEB - nikonusa.com]
• Nikon D70 flash tour [WEB - nikonslr.com]
• Related posts on this site:
  • Rio Carbon Limited Edition - 5GB of pure MP3/WMA coolness
  • Carbon Cannibal: Breaking it down for the hard drive
  • Slashdotted - Yay for dasBlog and Stormhosts

Want Gmail? Go here and follow the instructions.

Sorry, all taken - will update when I have more. :-)

Wow, the hits just went through the /. roof. My article with pics on breaking down the Rio Carbon got posted on slashdot.org [link]. I have changed the pics in the article to make them smaller (clicking the smaller version now loads the larger image), as the bandwidth was challenging the NIC in the server. Good thing I didn't do what someone thought I did. I also made some changes to my fat-fingered apostrophes to settle down the grammar-police crowd. :)

My blogging software, dasBlog (a .net-based app running on Windows 2003 by the way, hehehe), has held up quite well under the /. traffic load. I'll put together stats and post them for other dasBlog users, once this all dies down. My service provider, Stormhosts, held up very well, too.

Number of unique *.slashdot.org web sessions on Saturday: 20,358

The graphs of bandwidth used are pretty interesting - note the trafffic before the spike is for all web sites on that shared web server - after that it's pretty much all mine:

Here are some numbers showing unique user sessions per hour - meaning it's how many actual visitors hit the site per hour. Saturday is usually pretty darn slow day, but not this time, and the number/size of of images on the page being loaded was a real challenge:

6am  57
7am  65
8am  54
9am  68
10am 74
11am 102
12pm 3321
1pm  5069
2pm  3360
3pm  2661
4pm  2196
5pm  1721
6pm  1477
7pm  1279
8pm  1239
9pm  1157
10pm 1063
11pm 702

Some more numbers...

                    11SEP04    Daily Avg
Sessions             26,030        1,792
Pageviews            52,522        4,280

Hits                639,524        8,754 
Bytes Transferred  13.49 GB    175.35 MB

Note that RSS was about four to five times my Saturday normal at 4,426 sessions (about twice a normal weekday count), but at a very light bandwidth requirement. Score one more for RSS. Quick, someone write a manifesto! ;-)

So anyhow, I would like to formally apologize to my service provider, Stormhosts. Well, not really apologize per se - more like shoot them a big HAHAHA! ;-) Good test for your systems I guess eh? Their systems held up very nicely, and when I emailed them just in case alert as soon as I knew what was about to happen**, they got right on IM with me. We watched the performance counters together. Great service from those guys, as always. Recommended.

** Mandatory educational content: Many sites over time have fallen victim to the Slashdot Effect, a term used to describe the very common and overwhelming onslaught of sudden traffic to a web site and the resulting failure of said server. It's typical for web servers to simply choke under the load. At some point, I don't remember when, slashdot started releasing new items to their subscriber base for a short while before they release it to their general public web site. This informal early warning system allows just enough time for their notably large number of subscribers to hammer your server, with just enough time left over for you to panic and send an email to your personal web site's unsuspecting service provider that reads something like “HOLY CRAP LOOK OUT!” The slashdot subscriber visits that precede the general onslaught generally include such friendly comments left on a blog as, “What a really cool/lame story. Oh, and by the way - you're about to get slashdotted.”