Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Student computing committee meeting. Chatted with Susie about the ERF. ERF work. Posted new homepage news for Susie. Minor web edits. Built an online survey to gather data about wireless at UCSF. Chatted with student HW. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: An investment opportunity will be profitable for you. Emergency paper-to-PDF scans for Robin C. Computer maintenance: Installed KeePass 1.0.7 for all office computers. Set up an admin account for Chris to use when he's away from the office. Upgraded Alyssa's computer from Acrobat 6.0.5 to Acrobat 8. Archived e-mail. Yesterday I clicked the link for the "online ethics briefing" that the university wants us to review, saw that it was over 50 pages long, and thought, "Ugh! I don't have time for this right now," and closed the window. Key cabinet followup. Helped student MM connect a Motorola Q to our UCSF Microsoft Exchange server using these steps:

On the Motorola Q:

  1. Select Home > Start > ActiveSync.
  2. Follow instructions that appear on the screen to connect using the following settings:
    server = exchange.ucsf.edu
    username = [username only, example: alincoln]
    domain = campus

The screen says (I think) "Synchronizing..." for a long time with a spinning icon. It takes a while and then you should see everything like your e-mail and calendar okay. This setup process was not as easy as synching a Windows Mobile device to a Windows XP computer, but at least it worked which is more than I can say for Palm users.

Here's a list of problems that I believe are unresolved in Outlook 2003 and/or Outlook Web Access (OWA) on Exchange Server 2003, which is what UCSF is using right now. I believe at least some of these are previously undocumented or poorly documented on the web.

  1. OWA does not have junk email filtering parity with the Outlook desktop client. (UCSF uses Barracuda server-side anti-spam filtering which significantly mitigates the problem, however.)
  2. OWA is unable to set calendar items private. People who use only OWA cannot add private items to their calendar. People who use Outlook in the office and OWA from home cannot add private items to their calendar from home.
  3. Various problems with expanding distribution lists ("Cannot perform the requested operation. The command selected is not valid for this recipient. The operation failed." and "The operation failed." and "Cannot perform the requested operation. The command selected is not valid for this recipient. The list was not fully expanded." and "There was an error while expanding the list. The list was not fully expanded.") see September 9, 2005 for details.
  4. In Outlook 2003, the list of bccd names in a sent e-mail message appears on screen but not on printout. This problem is very frustrating because you have information you want to share—you can see it on the screen—but Outlook will not let you share it or record it on paper. Unintuitive and time-consuming workaround: take multiple screen snapshots and composite them in Photoshop.
  5. OWA has no easy, intuitive way to view shared calendars. People can actually view them, but they have to know the URL and manually type it in—this is inconvenient and time-consuming. They could also click a predefined link, but then someone else has to create the page or shortcut with the link—an undue administrative burden.
  6. Work day hours do not appear correctly to other users: January 5, 2006. This means that people cannot accurately share information about their work schedules to enable others to accurately schedule meetings. A workaround exists, but it is clumsy and clutters one's schedule unnecessarily.
  7. OWA has no easy, intuitive way to let users see how much space they are using on the server. Ironically, the people who use only OWA are the ones who most need this information since they cannot archive their messages offline.
  8. Outlook 2003 can only show multiple calendars side by side rather than combined into one. Outlook 2007 resolves this problem, but that's not a solution for OWA users. I do not know how Entourage behaves.
  9. OWA prefers IE/Win. Other web service providers have shown that it's possible to create browser-agnostic and platform-agnostic web apps, so this is not an engineering problem. I believe that Microsoft is clearly strong-arming Exchange customers into using IE and Windows—controlling our behavior and way of working—by providing a significantly reduced feature set for all other browsers and platforms. I think that this behavior should not be rewarded and am open to suggestions on what actions we might take to that end. For me, this is the sorest point, the clearest statement from Microsoft that says, "You bought Exchange. Now we own you."
  10. error message In Outlook 2003, when attempting to move many items from one folder to another, a dialog box appears: "Creating a new item from the selected items could take some time. Are you sure you want to create a new item from these [number] items?" (Yes) (No). The problem occurs only when you have certain different object types in the selection of items you want to move. Instead of simply moving the items as you'd expect, Outlook thinks you want to combine the items into a new message. A workaround exists, but it is unintuitive and time-consuming. See May 17, 2005 for details. This problem still occurs in Outlook 2007.
  11. HTML e-mail messages forwarded from OWA/non-IE6Win fail to retain the HTML layout and formatting.

I realize that Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007 in December 2006, and this new product addresses at least one of my concerns (overlay mode for calendars in Outlook 2007 is very useful), but I don't believe our e-mail server administration unit has money right now for an upgrade (i.e., for the past 4 years no one planned a budget to fund an upgrade when it became available) and so it will likely be 2010 or 2011 before we migrate from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007. (You think I'm kidding, I know.) Tried on clothes I bought recently. Found a stain on one item and will have Patrick exchange it. Lately I've been having a problem with logging in as admin to our OS X laptops which have been joined to the campus domain. When I try, I get this error: You are unable to log in to the user account "[name of account]" at this time (OK). I know I've been able to log in as domain admin to these laptops before. I do not know what has changed to cause this problem. I still do not know how to resolve this. Erik W asked me if I could boot from the OS X cd and change the admin password but I haven't had a chance to try this yet. Recently I received the error "Can't access volume Drive D (D:), error -1102 (drive missing/unavailable)" from Retrospect 6.5 for Windows. I think I got this message because the account that Retrospect was running under really could not see the D: drive. I logged out, logged back in as domain admin, changed permissions on the drive so that that user could read the drive, logged out, logged back in as that user, and restarted Retrospect—all was well. Recently I resolved the problem presented by the error message, "You do not have sufficient privileges to run the Sophos Anti-Virus main application...". I found the answer on antivirus.bridgew.edu, but it was hard to find, so I'm duplicating it here. The solution is to run services.msc and set the Sophos Anti-Virus service to log on as Local System account:

  1. Open the Control Panel (classic), then open Administrative Tools, then open Services.
  2. In the list of services, find and open the entry for the Sophos Anti-Virus service.
  3. Select the Log On tab.
  4. Select the Local System account.
  5. Select Apply, then select OK.
  6. Restart the computer.

Dinner at home with Patrick: butterflied pork chops, steamed carrots, bread and Smart Balance. I am watching you on Twitter. You know who you are. Reminds me of a shell script called ou which I wrote around 1988 or 1989 while at UC Santa Cruz—it gave geeks a way to tell other geeks where they are or were or were going to be. Someone else later wrote something much better (Jon Luini perhaps?) which suited me just fine. I no longer have the code for it, so I presume if anyone besides me remembers it at all that's all that's left of it.