Since August 18th 2010, Martin is blogging on the website of his consultancy company zetConsultants zetConsultants.com/blog

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

Hello again, Frank-Peter here.

The other day, one of my PowerShell training participants stumbled upon an issue with foreach: if you try to run a foreach loop against an empty variable whose type isn’t array the loop will execute the code once. This can be demonstrated easily either in PowerShell 1.0 or 2.0 with the $null variable:

PS C:\Test> foreach ($element in $null) {write-host "element: $element"}
element:
PS C:\Test>

In that case I’d expect that foreach doesn’t execute any code meaning that foreach should treat an empty or undefined non-array variable as same as an empty array variable (like shown below):

PS C:\Test> foreach ($element in @()) {write-host "element: $element"}
PS C:\Test>

So take care

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

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

Surprisingly, official release of PowerShell 2.0 RTM for W2k3\XP\Vista was very silent, even official PowerShell blog didn’t mention it…. NOW we can finally start to ship all cool ideas that we delayed until v2 is officially RTMd

Anyway, you can find it as part of Windows Management Framework.

Martin

according to Wikipedia, brain drain is

is a large emigration of individuals with technical skills or knowledge, normally due to conflict, lack of opportunity, political instability, or health risks. Brain drain is usually regarded as an economic cost, since emigrants usually take with them the fraction of value of their training sponsored by the government.

Brain drain is very common in IT world – in general, we change companies every 3 years on average. Most companies try to fight with this using money (or benefits), however I don’t think it is best approach – there is always someone who is willing to pay more and that’s also reason why many internal employees becomes consultants or freelancers.

Based on my experiences, most IT guys are changing jobs because of money OR because they are too bored and are stuck with repetitive tasks. You can solve money problem – but what to do with boring jobs?

If you want to keep your IT brains in your company, good way to do so is to use their geek disadvantages – technical guys (well, at least good ones ) love gadgets and loves to play. Building automated environment can be considered gadget in fact – it is a child of IT people and they take care of it and try to improve it over and over again. Automation is win-win situation – business can save money in many scenarios and it keeps IT guys happy about what they are doing.

Many people are afraid to automate – they think they could loose their jobs if they do so. In real life, it depends. If you are forced to automate by business, it’s usually done in order to save some money – to get rid of some employees. If YOU are the one that is pushing automation, story is different. If business knows that you need 2 days to install new server, they usually don’t know that you spend 1 hour installing new server and then rest of time improving your automation techniques (so next time you need half an hour to install server and got even more time for automation ).

If you got solid automation strategy, sooner or later you end up with very robust solution and your people will take different approach to new problems (not discussing how, but discussing what would be the best way). The bigger and more advanced is your automation platform, the harder it is for you employees to leave and start from scratch somewhere else (especially in case they are not sure if they will be allowed to automate at new job and that maybe they will need to do all those boring repetitive tasks again).

Of course there are employees that doesn’t like automation at all and prefer to do everything manually, but be honest – are these people truly your biggest asset, or can you easily replace them if you need so?

Martin