I encountered very annoying behavior of GMail (and Google Apps mail in general). Popup with “Copyright 2002-2009 google inc" pops up every 60 seconds while I am logged on…

Turned out it is related to Google Talk – only solution is to make Google Talk able to reconnect again (you get this issue when your google talk keeps trying to reconnect). As far as I know, this happens only on Internet Explorer.

There are few different solutions. I am using client that can handle GTalk also (both IMO and Meebo supports it), so I simply logged off from GTalk. Another working solution appears to be to switch your browser to compatibility mode.

Also switching to basic HTML (bottom of the GMail page). Simply try all these solutions and the one that will reconnect or logoff your GTalk should solve this issue.

Martin

I logged into LinkedIn today after a while and I was greeted by below screen:

Reason? Username and password is no longer considered enough secure as a result of recent news about Facebook leak.

Few days ago, “huge” announcements of security bug in Facebook was published (see BBC for example). Let me put it straight, people, THINK!

The whole security non-sense is only about “I decided to publish public information”.

Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

Ok, important question is, what does it mean, collecting data?

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

So the security bug allows you to see link of user profile, his name and unique ID.

Facebook said it was already public information

Exactly – therefore I don’t understand what is all this about.

But Simon Davies from the watchdog Privacy International told BBC News that Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

"Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it," he said

Ok, so next time I will try to change my status, Facebook should reject it and tell me that cannot share my information. Or I should upload my pictures directly to the Facebook’s recycle bin.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the risk of publishing too many information to social networks, however that doesn’t have anything to do with provider (like Facebook). I don’t like Facebook personally, however I also don’t like such security non-senses like this announcements (reminds me of “Powershell virus” few years ago).

Martin Zugec

Hi all,

my new business cards just arrived, enjoy! Obviously, I really love Powershell

Martin

As you maybe know, I have decided to start my new career as freelancer and one of first important decisions I had to make was regarding groupware (understand – mail + calendar + contacts).

In last few years, I got extremely used to combination of Exchange + Outlook + Windows Mobile. Synchronization of emails is nice, however what is extremely important for me is ability to synchronize calendar and contacts. I love the fact that I can add meeting to my Outlook and my mobile will let me know what, when and where.

As I said, I am starting as freelancer, therefore I started one-man consultancy company. I considered few different scenarios:

1.) Hosting my own Exchange server
2.) Microsoft BPOS
3.) 3rd party Exchange hosting
4.) Google Apps

Above options are based on my preferences (1 is most preferred, 4 is least preferred).

However, soon I realized that each of them got disadvantages.

Hosting my own Exchange server

Of course, most flexible solution, however not cheapest. I will need to have server at home running 24/7 and of course downtimes of my providers could affect my business. Economical? Not really (electricity etc). Easy too use? Also not

Microsoft BPOS

BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) is Microsoft set of services. It is part of global MS strategy regarding cloud computing (Azure = PaaS, BPOS = SaaS, IaaS is not covered yet). It costs $5 per account (monthly), which is very interesting and cheap. My problem however was that you had to buy at least 5 accounts (which is ok for small company, however not for freelancer).

3rd party Exchange hosting

Same as BPOS, however more expensive and not covered by big company (like MS). Advantage is that (for some providers), Outlook license is included ($10 per account per month).

Google Apps

Originally, this was not really an option for me. But surprise, surprise, Google won this fight What you get as part of Google Apps? Email, calendar, contacts, documents and sites.

There are two editions – Standard and Premium. Most important difference for me is that Premium is paid service, it offers 25GB mailbox, support for Outlook client (!) and of course support & SLA. Standard is available for free on other hand.

What is very nice is that Google Apps supports Windows Mobile natively (!). All you need to do is to specify m.google.com as address of your Exchange server and you will get push notifications. Registration and usage is very simple – Google still follows minimalism approach.

Martin Zugec

This small webpage is perfect in case you plan to do something with Group policy objects:

http://gps.cloudapp.net/

Just wanted to share

Martin

Ok, we all know modules in Powershell 2.0 are very cool… For me, probably the best of all newly introduced concepts is namespace support.

To make long story short – if I import function Get-Command from module SCCM, I can access it using namespace – SCCM\Get-Command.

Looks really pretty, is secured and you can use consistent function names in different modules, which is perfect from usability perspective.

You don’t need to use namespaces if you don’t want to however. So you can either use SCCM\Get-Command OR Get-Command.

Problem is that when you use Import-Module, last one always wins. So my SCCM\Get-Command still works fine, however of course it will overwrite Get-Command.

I think this is extremely dangerous behavior. If you also thing it should be changed, please vote here. My proposal is that Import-Module should get switch that will identify that all exported objects are accessible by specifying namespace also.

As a workaround, you can use following code:

Get-Command -CommandType cmdlet | ForEach-Object {Set-Alias -Name $_.Name -Value "$($_.PSSnapIn)\$($_.Name)"}

Insert this code at beginning of your script and it will take care that you won’t be able to accidentally overwrite existing cmdlets (aliases always wins).

Martin

In case you are fighting with connections strings, I found very interesting site today. It can help you to build syntax not only for well-known DBs (like SQL), but also to more exotic ones.

http://www.connectionstrings.com/

Martin

For years, I was trying over and over to get used to Microsoft Forums… I appeared there few times, however abandoned it after a while.

Major reason was that I either had to use web interface or Outlook Express to access it – web interface was not really user-friendly and NNTP was usually blocked at proxy servers, so I always left MS forums pretty soon…

Ok, I am sure that everyone around knows about this and is using it for many years, but I just discovered one really nice feature at Microsoft Forums – it supports RSS feeds

I am not sure when this feature was added, but FINALLY I can start being active at MS forums

Martin

Today I needed small function to determine what is the number of current week (usually referred as WeekOfMonth).

Code is very simple in fact:

Function Get-WeekOfMonth ([datetime]$Date = $(Get-Date)) {
	[int]$Day = $Date.Day
	Return [math]::Ceiling($Day / 7)
}

Martin

I was reading very interesting post from Jeffrey Hicks called PowerShell Picasso today and I must say that I agree with him 99%.

If you know the way I script, then you have probably noticed that it is hybrid code between PowerShell and .NET. For example I don’t like ForEach-Object cmdlet – from my perspective, it makes code much LESS readable. I would compare it to question sentence in English and in Spanish. In Spanish, every question sentence begins with question mark (for example ¿Cómo estás?) and you immediately know it is going to be the question.

For same reason, I always use ForEach ($X in $Y) {…}. I find it much easier to undestand $X. than $_… If I have a quick peek at code, using $Service.Status immediately tells me what I need, while $_.Status requires me to read preceding code to understand what type of object is $_. Organizing code to blocks is my preferred method (while many Powershell guys organize code to sentences ).

Second side effect is that by using .NET syntax, people much quickly adopt the fact that Powershell is based on .NET object and is object-oriented language. Later on, these administrators can read and understand MSDN documentation or examples that are written in C#. To summarize it, my point is that for many people, Powershell can be used as entry point to .NET world (.NET for Administrators).

I fully agree with rest of the Jeffrey’s article. “Problem” as I see it is that most people use Posh in interactive mode – and there is huge difference in writing few functions for yourself and trying to build complex framework out of Powershell (just checked – my framework currently consists of almost 4000 files, even though it is based on modules). In case you don’t think about readability of your code, you will get lost when you will need to write the complex modules (thousands of lines).

Martin