I have been talking to Ariel last month, asking for a Microspotting T-Shirt since I had mentioned her earlier on my blog.

I have been on holiday in the meantime… but the T-Shirt had arrived and was waiting for me in my letterbox in the office !! How cool is that???

So today I am walking around the Rome office in it… and I am looking at people’s faces: you need to understand that Italian dress code is more or less the opposite of how people usually dress in Redmond… Italy is historically more formal, and it would be the norm to dress fancy… one would definitely look BAD here if he would show up in sandals in the office… and VERY bad going on sandals to a customer…

After that, I took a different approach: I kept sending the mail on the SAME server as the backup, and using IMAP I could DRAG-and-DROP the backup attachment from the mailbox on one server to the mailbox on another server (=GMail). They did not mark me as a spammer that way, of course.
So that worked for a while, but then I got tired of doing this manually.

So the following ruby script is the way I automated the "move offsite" part of that backup.
For completeness, I will give the due credits about who set me on the right track: I started off by this example by Ryan.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
begin_ = Time.now

#includes
require 'net/imap'

##Source Info
$SRCSERVER="mail.muscetta.com"
$SRCPORT=143
$SRCSSL=false
$SRCUSERNAME="daniele"
$SRCPASSWORD=""
$SRCFOLDER="INBOX.Backups"

##Destination Info
$DSTSERVER="imap.gmail.com"
$DSTPORT=993
$DSTSSL=true
$DSTUSERNAME="muscetta@gmail.com"
$DSTPASSWORD=""
$DSTFOLDER="Backup"

#connect to source
puts "connecting to source server #{$SRCSERVER}... nn"
srcimap = Net::IMAP.new($SRCSERVER,$SRCPORT,$SRCSSL)
srcimap.login($SRCUSERNAME, $SRCPASSWORD)
srcimap.select($SRCFOLDER)

#connect to destination
puts "connecting to destination server #{$DSTSERVER}... nn"
dstimap = Net::IMAP.new($DSTSERVER,$DSTPORT,$DSTSSL)
dstimap.login($DSTUSERNAME, $DSTPASSWORD)
dstimap.select($DSTFOLDER)

# Loop through all messages in the source folder.
uids = srcimap.uid_search(['ALL'])
if uids.length > 0
	$count = uids.length
	puts "found #{$count} messages to move... nn"

	srcimap.uid_fetch(uids, ['ENVELOPE']).each do |data|
		mid = data.attr['ENVELOPE'].message_id

		# Download the full message body from the source folder.
		puts "reading message... #{mid}"
		msg = srcimap.uid_fetch(data.attr['UID'], ['RFC822', 'FLAGS', 'INTERNALDATE']).first

		# Append the message to the destination folder, preserving flags and internal timestamp.
		puts "copying message #{mid} to destination..."
		dstimap.append($DSTFOLDER, msg.attr['RFC822'], msg.attr['FLAGS'], msg.attr['INTERNALDATE'])

		#delete the msg
		puts "deleting messsage #{mid}..."
		srcimap.uid_store(data.attr['UID'], '+FLAGS', [  eleted])
		srcimap.expunge

	end

	#disconnect
	dstimap.close
	srcimap.close
end

total_time = Time.now - begin_
puts "Done. RunTime: #{total_time} sec. nn"

"[...] Technology, when it evolves around people's actual needs rather than the needs of the designer, that's when it starts to work [...]"

DAISY is a technology that promises to revolutionize the reading experience for people who have print disabilities like blindness or dyslexia. DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) XML is a universal standard format for reading and publishing digital talking books, and allows for new ways to deliver information quickly and efficiently using high quality synthetic speech or human voice. Microsoft, The DAISY Consortium (www.daisy.org) and Sonata Software have worked together to build a "Save as DAISY XML" add-in for Microsoft Office Word. This free, downloadable XML-based add-in, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy, makes it possible for Microsoft Office Word (including XP, 2003 and 2007) users to convert Open XML-based content into DAISY XML.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/DAISY/default.mspx

"[...] What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It's hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. [...]"

In fact, being made by Microsoft people or not, the list of open source software on CodePlex keeps growing too. Mentioning CodePlex and interviews, another interesting one is that of Sara Ford, Program Manager for CodePlex posted on Microspotting. But Microspotting is awesome in general. My favorite quote by her:

"[...] Hey. My name is Ariel and I'm the person you thought would never work at MSFT [...]".

In fact, just as I do, she is running that blog on WordPress, posting her photos on Flickr, using a RSS feed on Feedburner and in general using a bunch of things that are out there that might be seen as "competing" with what Microsoft makes. In fact, this attitude towards other products and vendors on the market is what I am mainly interested in. Should we only use flagship products? Sure, when they help us, but not necessarily. Who cares? People's blogs are not, as someone would like them to be, a coordinated marketing effort. This is about real people, real geeks, who just want to share and communicate personal ideas and thoughts. I had a blog before being at Microsoft, after all. Obviously I had exposure to competing products. My server was running LAMP on Novell Netware in 2002 – after which I moved it to Linux. It is not a big deal. And if I try to put things in perspective, in fact, this is turning out to be an advantage. I am saying this, as the latest news about interoperability comes from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit): and that is the announcement that System Center Operations Manager will monitor Linux natively. I find this to be extremely exciting, and a step in the right direction… to say it all I am LOVING this!!! But at the same time I see some other colleagues in technical support that are worrying and being scared by this – "if we do monitor Linux and Unix, we are supposed to have at least some knowledge on those systems", they are asking. Right. We probably do. At the moment there are probably only a limited number of people that actually can do that, at least in my division. But this is because in the past they must have sacrificed their own curiosity to become "experts" in some very narrow and "specialized" thing. Here we go. On the opposite, I kept using Linux – even when other "old school" employees would call me names. All of a sudden, someone else realizes my advantage.  …but a lot of geeks already understood the power of exploration, and won't stop defining people by easy labels. Another cool quote I read the other day is what Jimmy Schementi has written in his Flickr profile:

"[...] I try to do everything, and sometimes I get lucky and get good at something [...]".

Reading on his blog it looks like he also gave up on trying to write a Twitter plugin for MSNLive Messenger (or maybe he never tried, but at least I wanted to do that, instead) and wrote it for Pidgin instead.  Why did he do that ? I don't know, I suppose because it was quicker/easier – and there were API's and code samples to start from.

The bottom line, for me, is that geeks are interested in figuring out cool things (no matter what language or technology they use) and eventually communicating them. They tend to be pioneers of technologies. They try out new stuff. Open Source development is a lot about agility and "trying out" new things. Another passage of Brad's interview says:

"[...] That's true–the open source projects I contribute to tend to be the "by developer, for developer" kind, although I also consume things that are less about development [...] Like one tool that I've used forever is the GIMP graphics editor, which I love a lot".

That holds true, when you consider that a lot of these things are not really mainstream. Tools made "by developer, for developer" are usually a sort of experimental ground. Like Twitter. Every geek is talking about Twitter these days, but you can't really say that it is mainstream. Twitter has quite a bunch of interesting aspects, though, and that's why geeks are on it. Twitter lets me keep up-to-date quicker and better (and with a personal, conversational touch) even better than RSS feeds and blogs do. Also, there are a lot of Microsofties on Twitter. And the cool thing is that yo can really talk to everybody, at any level. Not just everybody "gets" blogs, social networks, and microblogging. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be on top of the tech news, or use experimental technologies. So in a way stuff like Twitter is "by geeks, for geeks" (not really just for developers – there's a lot of "media" people on Twitter). Pretty much in the same way, a lot of people I work with (at direct contact, everyday) only found out about LinkedIN during this year (2008!). I joined Orkut and LinkedIN in 2004. Orkut was in private beta, back then. A lot of this stuff never becomes mainstream, some does. But it is cool to discover it when it gets born. How long did it take for Social Networking to become mainstream? So long that when it is mainstream for others, I have seen it for so long that I am even getting tired of it.

For some reason, geeks love to be pioneers. This is well expressed in a digression by Chris Pratley:

"[...] some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we're not actually normal – you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress. [...]"

But I have been digressing, too, all along. As usual.

Installed moonlight on Ubuntu from source by following these instructions (there are some typo's but they are understandable and correctable).

All in all, even being still under heavy development, what Miguel de Icaza has achieved (with moonlight, just like with mono) is amazing.

After I posted the above picture on Flickr, John Montgomery was amazed to see PopFly (his creature) working on moonlight, and he linked to me from his blog.

"I have not posted in a while" …well you certainly will have read tons of posts beginning this way, right?
But that's the truth. One of the reasons is that you can follow very well a lot of what I do and write elsewhere on the Internet by using my lifestream RSS feed, which includes much more than just what I post on this blog. Our minds are not stuck on one subject matter only, but our thoughs just go around in many different directions. I mentioned the integrated feed/lifestream in a previous post, but I found that the concept gets explained very well by Yongfook in this post:

"[...] We interact with various websites and create content on them – why should I then have to come to my own website and reconstruct, repost or repackage the same content? It already exists out there on the internet, and it’s grabbable and usable. This is not to say I think conventional blogging is dead. I do however think it is evolving. The pace at which we consume and create content – photos, videos, links etc – is getting faster, more frequent. If we wanted to republish everything manually on our blogs, we’d just run out of time. [...]"

So at least even if this SITE does not get updated often you can see I have quite a busy digital public life on the web.

Very interesting to also read this post by Scott Hanselman on the subject. He rather just focuses on twitter/microblogging as an evolved form of blogging which was getting boring and time-consuming to people:

"[...] The rise of blogs brought conversations on the 'net more out in the open. Blogging enabled conversation via essay, but as blogs have matured, posts have gotten longer and longer and threads more difficult to follow. Now, most posts are jumping off points for the more interesting conversations that inevitably move to the comments. [...]"

He then goes into more detailed/structured analysis of what you can or could do with Twitter. While his analysis is pretty good about the many ways you could use Twitter as a broadcasting tool (and in fact loads of companies do already), I rather use it as public instant messaging. Or maybe not just. I don't actually know and to be honest I am not too much into classifying things, really. For example, if classifying what this blog is… I really am not sure I know myself what this blog is. It has been very funny when other people have tried to classify it… one said it was about "programming" (that would be nice, if I really was a better developer!), other people said it was "personal", other thought it was just about "IT" in general… Heck, there is no classification possible I am afraid. Therefore, not knowing what this blog is, I at least think that I know what this blog is NOT:

• it isn't a marketing blog
• I am not here trying to sell anything
• I am not promoting anything, anyone, or any brand
• It isn't just focused on one subject, on one area of interest

…and so are all my other "expressions" on the Net. Just me. Sprinkles of me all around. No special industrial plan for it. Just be myself. You might like me sometimes. You might hate me. You might not care at all. It's all good, anyway. Sorry for wasting your time.

I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest "we want to interoperate" fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).

Anyway, what do you think ?

I just created an account for myself on the site… as you know I like PowerShell, so even if I usually prefer writing stuff in english, I will try to hang out there and see how can I contribute to it.

After all, I am italian…

The last few months have been very busy with work. As much as I enjoyed them anyway, and learned a lot in the process and from the people I worked with, I now really want to enjoy these few coming days of Christmas holidays and RELAX and spend some quality time with my family and friends.

So I wish the same for all of you: that you may spend a Merry, relaxing Christmas, and have a great start for a grand, brilliant new year!

As a side note, having been very busy I have blogged a lot less. Blogging implies that I already have a sort-of-well-formed thought, that should span a few lines or paragraphs, otherwise I don't find it worth it. That does not mean I don't have small ideas or other things I like to share when I come up with them. That is why I am using microblogging and Social Networking a lot lately, so I remind you that even if this blog's builtin feed only includes the REAL FEW blog posts, then I also have another (very "chatty") feed that you can use to "follow me" and that one includes all of the following combined feeds: my status messages from Facebook, my Twitter messages, my pictures on Flickr, the stuff I read somewhere else and then share on Facebook, the places I visit and mark on 43Places and the goals I achieve, want to achieve, or I simply talk about on 43Things, as well as the REAL posts on this blog. It is my implementation of what has been called a "lifestream" by other bloggers.

Doha, Qatar | Commercial Road, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Last week I have been to Doha, Qatar, visiting a customer site and learning from a colleague how to deliver my first "official" MOM Health Check. I have spent most of my time working on Microsoft Operations Manager, of course, but I also did manage to walk around a bit on my late afternoons and evenings and see some stuff. So, as I usually do in these cases, I took a ton of pictures.

I found an interesting place, filled with contrasts between old and new, tradition and competition, ancient and modern.
It's a living place that is certainly working hard to get over the oil business model and attract richness in different ways.

John Lockerbie spotted my photos on Flickrs and asked me permission to use some of the, so they have been now republished on his very interesting page about Islamic Urban design and architeture and the one about islamic society.
They both are an interesting read, and most of his site is.

This is much more sysadmin-oriented than what was availble before (that remais of course still relevant, but more from a Management Pack developer's point of view, who wants to know how things work "behind the hood").

In the end it turns out that I did not have to wait or be worried, since the cat was already out of the bag!!!

[As a side note, it happens a lot of times that stuff gets public much earlier than when I actually read that internally. In those internal communication it very often is still considered "confidential" when the whole world is speaking about it.... I don't get this whole "confidentiality" thing in these days of porous membranes...]

Scott Guthrie writes:

"[...] One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. [...] VS 2008 will include support to automatically retrieve the appropriate .NET Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means that the source code for the ASP.NET GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes above do not have to already be installed on the machine before we started the debugger. Instead, when we use F11 to step into their implementation VS can automatically download the source files from Microsoft and open it within the IDE. [...]"

WOW. This is so cool, and a further step in the right direction.

Thanks to Alessandro for having picked this up, as I read it on his blog, and I thought it was an information worth spreading!!!

Some months ago Christian discovered a hack to change your Facebook status. Some other people also used it and extended it. I also ported it to C# and made a winform using its unofficial method.
Suddenly after, Facebook asked us to take down the code, as it violated their terms of service.

It has taken a while, some struggles, but now they finally recognized the need for federated status, and implemented a user.setStatus API.

Twitter is the first to pick it up, so now you can update twitter and have your status propagate in Facebook!

Well done, guys!

When I'll have some time I might think of rewriting my app using the SUPPORTED method, maybe finally writing that Live Messenger plugin… it would be nice
When I'll have time…

5° Festival Romano di Giocoleria, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This weekend we have been at the 5th roman festival of juggling, organized by the "C.S.A. La Torre".
You will find a bunch more photos here.

For this reason, I had to pull down the code of the small application I had previously released, which was "logging" into the mobile web application "pretending" to be a mobile browser and change your status. Big deal!!!

I am quite sure there are a lot of people writing "official" applications (that is using the "platform API" and so on) that are collecting A LOT of information about users who install their applications. They are being sent the info about the visitors by facebook, they are storing them, they might do whatever they please with (study it, sell it to spammers, to marketers, to making-money-assholes) and nobody will ever notice because it is on their servers and nobody can check that.

But a script that changes your status from remote – since this is not a functionality they CHOSE to expose in their API – then THAT is a big issue. Doh!
It's just plain ridiculous, but that's it.

Sure, the terms of service for app developers say a bit more in this regard:

[...]
4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;

5) You may store and use indefinitely any Facebook Properties that are explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; provided, however, that except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any such Facebook Properties: (a) if Facebook ceases to explicitly identify the same as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; (b) upon notice from Facebook (including if we notify you that a particular Facebook User has requested that their information be made inaccessible to that Facebook Platform Application); or (c) upon any termination of this Agreement or of your use of or participation in Facebook Platform;
[...]
You will not directly or indirectly sell, export, re-export, transfer, divert, or otherwise dispose of any Facebook Properties to any country (or national thereof) without obtaining any required prior authorizations from the appropriate government authorities;
[...]

Are we sure everybody is playing by these rules, when every facebook "application" really runs on the developer'server ? How do you know that they are really storing only what you want them to store, and deleting what you want them to delete ? Everybody knows how difficult it is to really "delete" digital content once it has come into existance… who knows how many copies of this database/social graph are floating around ?

Of course that is not an issue because people don't talk about it enough. But a script that changes your status – now, THAT is a very terrible thing.

I just don't get this "politically correctness". It must be me.

Oh, no… look! It's not only me!
I had read this post of Dare, but I problably had overlooked the last bit of it…. because he did point out this Hypocrisy going on:

[...]
Or (5) the information returned by FQL about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address) so it is pretty useless as a way to utilize one’s friends list with applications besides Facebook since there is no way to cross-reference your friends using any personally identifiable association that would exist in another service.

When it comes to contact lists (i.e. the social graph), Facebook is a roach motel. Lots of information about user relationships goes in but there’s no way for users or applications to get it out easily. Whenever an application like FacebookSync comes along which helps users do this, it is quickly shut down for violating their Terms of Use. Hypocrisy? Indeed.
[...]

He then insists in a more recent post in calling things by their name:

[...]
I will point out that 9 times out of 10 when you hear geeks talking about social network portability or similar buzzwords they are really talking about sending people spam because someone they know joined some social networking site. I also wonder how many people realize that these fly-by-night social networking sites that they happily hand over their log-in credentials to so they can spam their friends also share the list of email addresses thus obtained with services that resell to spammers?
[...]
how do you prevent badly behaved applications like Quechup from taking control away from your users? At the end of the day your users might end up thinking you sold their email addresses to spammers when in truth it was the insecure practices of the people who they’d shared their email addresses with that got them in that mess. This is one of the few reasons I can understand why Facebook takes such a hypocritical approach.
[...]

Thanks, Dare, for mentioning Hypocrisy. Thanks for calling things by their name. I do understand their approach, I just don't agree with it.

I did pull my small application off the Internet because I have a family to mantain and I don't want to have legal troubles with Facebook. Sorry to all those that found it handy. No, I cannot even give that to you per email. It's gone. I am sorry. For the freedom of speech, especially, I am sorry.

I will change my status more often on Twitter.

Sure, gapingvoid has got 700+ users in 3 days, I know. But hey, he's famous, and I don't see the point of cluttering my already busy Facebook profile with a cartoon. I do read him and generally like his cartoons, and I am in the "friends of the blue monster" group (so to say I like him).

But I prefer reading him in my "normal" aggregator.

I think Facebook apps should rather "inject social objects" (where did I read this definition? sorry I cant recall it or I would appropiately link to you… I swear).

There are of course other similar applications that just pull comics in your profile (like Dilbert, Garfield, etc) but again – I think this is all stuff that YOU are interested in, and thus should just go into your aggregator – so YOU can read it; on the opposite your profile in Facebook should talk about YOU and things YOU are doing, for example. Occasionally they can be YOUR posts or they can even be someone else's posts that you read and want to share/let other people see (that's why I pull in my Google Reader's shared items for example – things I read and want you too to see). If this includes importing other social objects/information from other social networks, like the music you are listening to on last.FM, or the photos you published on Flickr, then it is fine. That's why I wrote an app that shows the things you want to do, pulled in from 43things.com and one that shows the places you want to visit pulled in from 43places.com. Because I felt those social objects from another network were missing. In fact a user commented "[...] Glad someone finally took a step forward to create this, though [...]".

But of course what I wrote about which kind of applications you should or shouldn't have in your profile, remember that this is just my personal opinion rant, and everybody is free to put whatever stuff he/she likes onto his/her profile, in the end :-)

The complete story of the Lemmings
www.dmadesign.org/Lem_1.htm

(read from Jeff Atwood on twitter, where I also discover that it can now be played online)

Copying the advice by Small Potato, I made a different page for the 'Photos' category/tag on this blog. It has been a bit trickier than I first thought, because he keeps his picture uploaded into wordpress itself, while I had to write a small plugin using a regular expression to extract the "IMG SRC" portion of the post content. This way I also experimented with WordPress templates, plugins and structure a bit more than I had done before… and I am even more convinced than before that it can easily be used as a CMS rather than *just* a bloging software.

They are very simple: you enter your user name and they connect to their REST web service, extract the information about your places and/or goals, and show them as a list in a box in your profile.

I don't know why I did not blog about them before… maybe I thought they were too simple ? Well, they are, but, seriously: who cares?

[...] Just as you change your profile picture to keep with the times, we're updating the look of orkut. The change isn't live yet, but starting soon, we will start rolling-out the new look. [...]

this is what is written on Orkut blog.

…shouldn't they rather think of providing an API instead than just a new look (which does not look that different from the old one) ?

[...] Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion) [...]

Tafiti, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

www.tafiti.com/#p=0&q=%22Daniele%20Muscetta%22

Try it out.

Searching for myself on Yahoo Image Search, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Here I start a quick comparison of what search engines actually find about me.
I am glad to read that Live Search can find Jimi Hendrix's face, and Google can spot those portraits of Paris Hilton.
Unfortunately I am not as famous as them, so not enough people have tagged me. Not on "normal" web pages or newspaper.

Yahoo did a great/smart thing buying Flickr.
It gets people doing the TAGGING for them.
So the results are accurate for pretty much everything.

Ok granted. All of these pictures are coming out of Flickr.
But while that is a limitation, it is also its power.

This is also why I was able to search for "blackberries" the other day and find the thing I was searching for, that is FRUIT that grows spontaneously in the woods, rather than a bunch of stupid mobile telephones.
try: images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=blackberry+OR+fruit

Doing the same search on Google:

Ok this is not all from flickr anymore, they actually have the rest of the web in their database. Most of them are pictures I made – granted. But only one OF me, and definitely not the first one. Ninth position.

try the blackberry serch images.google.com/images?svnum=10&q=blackberry+OR+fruit

And now Live Search:

Same as Google: images from everywhere. Less images than Google. Most of them made by me (not all). An actual picture of myself is in 9th position.

my blackberry search here finds a lot of fruit…

strangely enough, there's an IPhone among them!!!!

Windows Live ID Team has published on the web the SDK that lets you liveID (or "passport")-enable your applications!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676633.aspx

There are even code samples in six different languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby e Perl! You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91761

Wow! Having time, it would be cool to write a WordPress plugin using Passport authentication to authenticate/identify users that want to comment… mumble mumble…..

Interoperability. Wow.

More info at the Live ID starting Page: http://dev.live.com/blogs/liveid/archive/2006/05/18/8.aspx

Anyway, the post goes about Microsoft Surface. Which is something really cool. Eileen goes saying that she's worried if her cat would jump on the touch-screen table doing some damage to her information / data /accounts…. when I first saw the technology presented, I actually thought sort of the same thing…. what about my son going to the table with his hands dirty of chocolate paste ?? I have blogged in the past about the danger he poses…

Since kids these days do use the computers, having to replace keyboards because they are full of biscuits'crumbles or because they spilled fruit juice on them is quite common. Just less expensive than the special touch-screen, at the moment….

lol! Anshu is so much right!!!! I agree with his conclusion 100%!!!!

I keep finding way too many software that claim to interact with Web 2.0 sites or services, and connect here or there…. still forgetting one basic simple rule, that is: letting people use a proxy.

Most programmers for some reasons just assume that since they are directly connected to the internet, everybody is. Which isn't always the case. Most companies have proxies and will only let you out to port 80 – by using their proxy.

…which in turn is one of the reasons why most applications now "talk" and tunnel whatever application protocol on top of HTTP… still a lot of softwares simply "forget" or don't care proving a simple checkbox "use proxy", which will translate in two or three extra lines of code… three lines which I personally usually include in my projects, when I am not even a *developer*!! (but that might explain why I *think* of it… I come from a security and networking background )

I thought of writing this post after having read this post by Saqib Ullah.

Anyway. I keep finding this thing over and over again. Both in simple, hobbyist, sample and/or in complex, big, expensive enterprise software. Last time I got pissed off about a piece of code missing this feature was some days ago when testing http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit. The previous time was during Windows Vista beta-testing (I had found a similar issue in beta2, and had it fixed for RC1.)

Actually, I am being polite saying it is "missing a feature". To be honest I think missing this "feature" would have to be considered a bug: every piece of software using HTTP *should* include the possibility to pass thorugh proxy (also, don't forget about  AUTHENTICATED proxies), or the purpose of using HTTP in the first place is defeated!!

Developers!!! You have to remember people ARE behind proxies !!!!!

Scoble Spam ?, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

In reply to Dare….. he's Hijacked my news feed too!!!!

Facebook StateTray, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This is a Screenshot of the small application I first described in my previous blog post.

It is a simple Windows Form that lets you change your status on Facebook without having to browse to the site. It does not rely on Facebook's API (as they won't let you change your status, at least to date) but is really uses a hack on the Facebook mobile pages. It is based on PHP code posted by Christian Flickinger, ported to C# (.Net 2.0) by me.

When you pull down the form you get to see the settings:

Those can be stored in an XML file, that gets loaded automatically every time the program starts.
Beware that password ARE displayed and stored in clear text.

The idea so far is that you run it on your PC and you just keep it resized so it does not show the "dangerous" bits.
You can keep it minimized on the tray in windows, pop it up when you need to update your status, write your new status and click "change" – it will freeze for a couple of seconds while updates your status, since it uses synchronous calls – then you can minimize it again.

UPDATED –  September 1st 2007: I have been asked by Facebook to pull down the source code from the Net, as it violates their terms of service (I had not realized that). Apologies to all.

What I had in mind was a simple program that would run on my PC, maybe minimized in the system tray, that would let me update my status in a click, thorugh the day, without having to log on to the website. Most of the day I am busy working, and I don't really have time to go surf and check Facebook… but I like the possibility for people to hear how I am doing. Changing the status would keep them up to date, and would keep my profile current.

As I figured out afterwards, their API does not yet let you change your status yet.

There are other people asking for this possibility… but then I went further searching on the Internet, and I found this blog: http://www.nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/. 

I just hacked together a small WinForm written in C# that reimplements this idea.

I indeed would like to thank Christian for the idea, and my friend and colleague Pierluigi for his precious help with the regular expressions

At the moment it has terrible things such as hardcoded passwords in it, but as soon as I will have time to polish the code a bit, I will post it.

One more thing I would like to do with it is turning it from a standalone application into a Live Messenger Add-In, so that it synchronizes my messenger status with the one of Facebook. When I will have time for that.

PopFly lets you create mashups and even custom blocks, and I liked that too. But you have to use fancy-shiny Silverlight (which is very cool indeed, but probably not *always* necesary) and you can only create blocks using Javascript. Sure, as someone as already written, the meaning of AJAX is "javascript now works". I can understand (even if I don't know them for sure) the reasons behind certain choices. But I find it limiting. Maybe it is because I don't like Javascript. It must be it. 

Facebook, instead, empowers you to inject code into their social networking framework. Any code. In whatever language you like. They started it in PHP, but you can plug-in whatever you like: Java, Ruby, Perl…. you can even have your application running on your own server, still providing a seamless experience inside of facebook. This opens up to millions of possibilities, and I got fascinated by that.

At the same time, the paranoid part of myself has been thinking to the security implications of it. This open platform is cool, but it also sounds like a framework for cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. Sure, you can "report" an application made by a third party that does something weird… but who will really notice if all that happens under the hood is that your cookies get stolen (and someone accesses your bank account) ? Will you figure it out it has happenend because you wanted to see the "dancing pigs" loaded in your profile ? Or will you figure it out at all ?

This said, I set aside my fear for a while and I delved into coding. What I did learn in the last couple of years, having slowly moved away from security engagements, is to relax. When I was working costantly with security I was a lot more paranoid. Now I case much less, and I live a lot more.

So I developed a couple of quick and simple apps running from this very server into Facebook, and I started using thePHP5 library they provide, so to be able to follow the examples first and figure out how it was working.

Now I also want to take a look at the .NET library for facebook when I have time. It sounds cool.

I could not attend, as it turns out I am the only guy in Rome, among all of them.
That is strange. What is also strange is being all of a sudden in a list of *Microsoft* bloggers. I had never thought of myself like a *Microsoft* Blogger. Sure enough I work at Microsoft, but as my disclaimer says it clear "The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in anyway.". I just feel like I am myself. And I also have a blog. MUSCETTA.COM has been online for 5 years now, and I have only been working for Microsoft for less than three years now.
For sure, I do blog about technology, also Microsoft technology. Of course, I also talk and write and blog about NON-Microsoft technology. In the past I did try to get an official blog (which I called a "corporate blog") but then I preferred to keep using my own domain, just because a lot of what you find here is often personal, politically incorrect and even – yes, I am gonna write it – open source.

Don't get me wrong, I love being at this company, because there's a lot of brilliant people and you cannot find anywhere in any other company such a huge mix of techies that rock so much and are so passionate about what they do! Those other bloggers in that list are this kind of people.

This said, this will stay my random and personal thoughts' basket. I like being in the community, but don't take my word for "official" please. Those you find written here are just my ramblings written from the couch after dinner.

[...] In Sanskrit, "yoga" means "union." Indians believe in a universal mind – brahman – of which we are all a part, and which ponders eternally. Everyone has access to this knowledge.

Knowledge in ancient India was protected by caste lines, not legal or economic ones. The term "intellectual property" was an oxymoron: the intellect could not be anybody's property. [...]

It is on most newspaper today, read on for example at Herald Tribune.

This patent and copyright thing is becoming more and more ridiculous every day.

I particularly enjoyed the following passage:

[...]
Antonio “s4tan” Parata (ap): Hi Rain Forest Puppy, many thanks for this interview. You are considered one of the fathers of web security and the inventor of the SQL injection attack. Anyway in the year 2003 you decided to publicly retire from the security field (to get more infos http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/txt/evolution.txt). Can you briefly sum your decision?

Rain Forest Puppy (rfp): My decision to retire from the public eye was based on a lot of reasons; overall, the amount of resources & energy required to release and maintain advisories and tools was just getting to be too large. It wasn’t fun anymore–and why pursue a hobby if you’re not enjoying it?

Plus, the security industry was becoming commercialized. Advisories and exploits are now bought and sold; performing security research in the first place can land you in legal waters. The intellectual value of the security research performed has been reduced to a single severity rating, which…if not high enough…causes the entire research to be dismissed. I really enjoy security from the intellectual angle; to me, it’s all just a big mental challenge…a puzzle, if you will. So when the creativity and intellectual aspect of it started to fade away, I decided to go with it.
[...]

I do back up this point of view: "why pursue a hobby is you're not enjoying it ?".

Creativity and intellectual aspects of security do still interest me, just the market around changed. That's also part of why I started doing more System Management again – at least I have fun thiking and thinkering, integrating, scripting and composing….

[...] The intellectual value of the security research performed has been reduced to a single severity rating [...] I really enjoy security from the intellectual angle; to me, it’s all just a big mental challenge…a puzzle, if you will [...]

His point is expressed beautifully.

But he does not only talk about the Security community and market, he also has some interesting thoughts on open and closed source software:
 

ap: You are the author of the libwhisker library (http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/lw.asp), widely used to create assessment perl scripts. What do you think about nowadays products related to web application assessment? What about some open source software (like parosproxy or nessus) changed to closed-source?

rfp: I have to choose my words carefully, because I very recently started working for a security software vendor.

Having had open source projects, I will say this: it is very hard to bootstrap a development community, and achieve the same level of polish, quality (as in QA), and implementation thoroughness as a commercial product. This isn’t necessarily because commercial software vendors are better coders; the dynamics are just different.

Open source coders are usually working on their own donated time. That means contributions are often catch-can and best-effort. Open source (when not sponsored by a commercial entity) are typically limited in resources (with time being the critical one).

[...]

All I care about is whether the tool works and/or gets the job done. I’ve spent so much wasted time trying to get a screwdriver to do a hammer’s job, and vice versa. I really don’t care if a tool is open source or commercial; I let the job dictate the tool, and not the other way around. Of course, there are certain artificial restrictions on this (like price limitations), but in general, I think there are some things that currently only exist in free & open source tools, and there are some things that currently only exist in commercial tools.

So use both wisely and get the best of both worlds.

[...]

Read the complete interview here: http://www.ush.it/2007/05/01/interview-with-rain-forest-puppy/

MOM has always been a great tool out of the box because it sort of FORCED you to implement an Incident Management Process to deal with Alerts, as described here:
http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/mom-2005-and-itil-part-1/
In fact, Alerts had to be actually set to "Resolved", and this had to be done manually.

I have now been wondering for a while: "How is OpsMgr2007 going to affect this?" I refer to the fact that now OpsMgr2007 does something customers have been asking for a while: it can auto-resolve alerts as soon as the incident/issue is fixed, by monitoring the state of the component rather than waiting for people to resolve it!

Practically, people were often the bottleneck, due to a missing Incident Management Process. MOM has tried for nearly 8 years to push them to implement one… and I feel that it finally gave up even trying.

All the other stuff described in the other two articles of Ian'serie do still apply.

For Capacity Management nothing substantially changes.
Availability Management is greatly improved, with the generic "availability report" and the state roll-up feature provided by the new Health Service and the new ways object are discovered and instantiated and the way their health models work.

Problem Management can also still be done, and Alert tuning will be still required (but it should be slightly easier now, with the improved "overrides" kind of thing).
Service Level Management can also be done – this will actually be done much better: if the system knows you've fixed the incident and it closes the alert for you, SLA calculations will be done on the REAL down/up-times of services, not on people keeping the Alerts open forever like I have seen in many places.
This means it will be done better, WITHOUT relying on people.

All in all there are substantial changes in OpsMgr2007, most of them are for the good…. but still, I think, I will be missing the fact that people have to actively look at their consoles and manage Alerts the way they were asked to do before. I will miss all the talks I used to do about "you HAVE to manage your Alerts/Incidents", now.

You should have OTHER people talk about YOUR stuff because it is really cool.

Self-promotion does usually the opposite effect on peopple these days.

I am not into this: I just talk about technology when I feel like to, and I talk about other stuff when I want to talk about other stuff. And when I talk about technology it is usually about what interests me at that point, be it Microsoft or not. I talk of MOM as well as of Linux, of C# just as much as of Ruby. It depends what I'm hacking with at that point in time. I like cool technology, it does not matter if it comes from one side or another. I even like to integrate them when it makes sense (and it makes sense a lot of times). But I've already written about this here in the past. So I'll stop this rant here.

The start of the new year according to the traditions of Bengal, being welcomed by bengal and indian immigrants in Rome.
Is a great opportunity for integration.
You don't really see many italians walking around, but there are some who do come and talk.

This is happening in Rome, right now, started last sunday and goes on until the end of the month.

For more information:
www.romamultietnica.it/inside.asp?id=166&idNotizia=842

At the time I looked around but it seemed like no one had something like this already done.
So I wrote a very simple RSS feed generator for MOM Alerts.
I did it quite an amount of time ago, just as an exercise.
Then, after a while, I figured out that the MOM 2005 Resource Kit had been updated to include such a utility!

Wow, I thought, they finally added what I have been thinking for a while. Might it be because I mentioned it on an private Mailing list ? Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares. Of course, if it is included in the resource kit it must be way cooler than the one I made, I though.
I really thought something along these lines, but never actually had the time to try it out.
I think I just sort of assumed it must have been cooler than the one I made, since it was part of an official package, while I am not a developer. So I basically forgot about the one I wrote, dismissing it as being crap without looking too much into it anymore.
Until today.
Today I actually tried to use the alert to RSS tool included in the resource kit, because a customer asked if there was any other way to get notified, other than receiving notification or using the console (or the console notifier).
So I looked at the resource kit's Alert-to-RSS Utility.
My experience with it:
1) it is provided in source code form – which is ok if it was ALSO provided as source. Instead it is ONLY provided as source, and most admins don't have Visual Studio installed or don't know how to compile from the command line;
2) Even when they wanted to compile it, it includes a bug which makes it impossible to compile – solution in this newsgroup discussion;
3) if you don't want to mess about with code since you are using a resource Kit tool (as opposed to something present in the SDK) you can even get it already compiled by someone from somewhere on the net, but that choice is about trust.

Anyway, one way or another, after it is finally set up…. surprise surprise!!!
It does NOT show a LIST of alerts (as I was expecting).
It shows a summary of how many alerts you have. basically it is an RSS feed made of a single item, and this single item tells you how many alerts you have. What is one supposed to do with such a SUMMARY? IMHO, it is useless the way it is. It is even worse than one of those feed that only contains the excerpt of the article, rather than the full article.
Knowing that I have 7 critical errors and 5 warning without actually knowing ANYTHING of them is pointless.
It might be useful for a manager, but not for a sysadmin, at least.

So I thought my version, even if coded crap, might be useful to someone because it gives you a list of alerts (those that are not resolved) and each one of them tells you the description of the alert, the machine tat generated it, and includes links to the actual alert in the web console, so you can click, go there, and start troubleshooting from within your aggregator!
My code does this. Anyway, since I am a crap coder, since I wrote it in only fifteen minutes more than a year ago, and since I don't have time to fix it and make it nicer… it has several issues, and could be improved in a million ways, in particular for the following aspects:

1. is currently depends on the SDK Database views – it could use the MOM Server API's or the webservice instead;
2. it uses SQL Security to connect to the DB – by default MOM does not allow this – it is suggested for the SQL instance hosting "OnePoint" to only use Windows Integrated Authentication.. so to make my code work you have to switch back to Mixed mode, and create a login in SQL that has permission to read the database. This is due to the fact that I've coded this in five minutes and I don't know how to use delegation – if I was able to use delegation, I would… so that the end user accessing IIS would be the one connecting to the DB. If anybody wants to teach me how to do this, I will be most grateful.
3. it could accept parameters as URL variables, so to filter out only events for a specific machine, or a specific resolution state, etc etc
4. At present it uses RSS.Net to generate the feed. It could made independent from it, but I don't really see why, and I quite like that library.

The code is just an ASP.Net page and its codebehind, no need to compile, but of course you need to change a couple of lines to match your webconsole address.
Also, you need to get RSS.NET and copy its library (RSS.Net.dll) in the /bin subfolder of the website directory where you place the RSSFeed generator page. I see that I wrote this with version 0.86, but any version should do, really.

Here is what it will look like:

And here's the code of the page (two files):

Default.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

Default.aspx.cs

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using Rss;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string webconsoleaddress = "http://192.168.0.222:1272/AlertDetail.aspx?v=a&sid=" // must change to match your address

// Inizializza il Feed
RssChannel rssChannel = new RssChannel();
rssChannel.Title = "MOM Alerts"
rssChannel.PubDate = DateTime.Now;
rssChannel.Link = new Uri("http://192.168.0.222:1272/rss/"); // must change to match your address
rssChannel.LastBuildDate = DateTime.Now;
rssChannel.Description = "Contains the latest Alerts"

// query – you might want to change the severity
string mySelectQuery = "SELECT ComputerName, Name, Severity, TimeRaised, RepeatCount, GUID FROM dbo.SDKAlertView WHERE Severity > 10 AND ResolutionState < 255"

// SQL Connection – must change SQL server, user name and password
SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("Data Source=192.168.0.222;Initial Catalog=OnePoint;User ID=rss;Password=rss");
SqlDataReader rdr = null;

try
{
conn.Open();
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(mySelectQuery, conn);
rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (rdr.Read())
{
RssItem rssItem = new RssItem();
string titleField = rdr[1].ToString();
rssItem.Title = titleField;
string url = webconsoleaddress + rdr[5];
rssItem.Link = new Uri(url.ToString());
string description = "<![CDATA[ <p><a xhref=\"" + rssItem.Link + "\">" + rdr[1] + " </a></p><br>" + "<br>Computer: " + rdr[0] + "<br>Repeat Count: " + rdr[4] + "<BR>Original ALert Time: " + rdr[3];
rssItem.Description = description;
rssChannel.Items.Add(rssItem);
}

// Finalizza il feed
RssFeed rssFeed = new RssFeed();
rssFeed.Channels.Add(rssChannel);
Response.ContentType = "text/xml"
Response.ExpiresAbsolute = DateTime.MinValue;
rssFeed.Write(Response.OutputStream);
}
finally
{
if (rdr != null)
{
rdr.Close();
}

if (conn != null)
{
conn.Close();
}
}
}
}

http://abhishek225.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!13469C7B7CE6E911!285.entry

This one is a post regarding my first test writing a cmdlet for PowerShell. After a few days since having change my blog's title to "$daniele.rant | Out-Blog" (where Out-Blog was a fantasy cmdlet name, and the title just meant to mimick PowerShell syntax in a funny way), I stumbled across this wonderful blog post: http://blog.boschin.it/archive/2006/09/21/4375.aspx that describes how to use the assemblies of "Windows Live Writer". Then I saw the light: I could actually implement an "Out-Blog" cmdlet. I am not sure what this could be useful for… but I thought it was funny to experiment with. I followed the HOW TO information on this other blog post to guide me through the coding: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/10/lets_all_write_1.html

The result is the code that follows. you see is pretty much Boschin's code wrapped into a cmdlet class. Nothing fancy. Just a test. I thought someone might find it interesting. It is provided "AS IS", mainly for educational purpose (MINE, only mine…. I'm the one whose education is being improved, not you )

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.Management.Automation;

using WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients;

using WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient;

using WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices;

using WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Settings;

using WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient;

using Microsoft.Win32;

namespace LiveWriterCmdlet

{

[Cmdlet("out", "blog", SupportsShouldProcess=true)]

public sealed class OutBlogCmdlet : Cmdlet

{

[Parameter(Position = 0, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Title

{

get { return _title; }

set { _title = value; }

}

private string _title;

[Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=true,ValueFromPipeline=true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Text

{

get { return _text; }

set { _text = value; }

}

private string _text;

[Parameter(Position = 2, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string BlogApiEndPoint

{

get { return _blogapiendpoint; }

set { _blogapiendpoint = value; }

}

private string _blogapiendpoint;

[Parameter(Position = 3, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string UserName

{

get { return _username; }

set { _username = value; }

}

private string _username;

[Parameter(Position = 4, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Password

{

get { return _password; }

set { _password = value; }

}

private string _password;

[Parameter(Position = 6, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string ProxyAddress

{

get { return _proxyaddress; }

set { _proxyaddress = value; }

}

private string _proxyaddress;

[Parameter(Position = 7, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public int ProxyPort

{

get { return _proxyport; }

set { _proxyport = value; }

}

private int _proxyport;

[Parameter(Position = 8, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public string ProxyUserName

{

get { return _proxyusername; }

set { _proxyusername = value; }

}

private string _proxyusername;

[Parameter(Position = 9, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public string ProxyPassword

{

get { return _proxypassword; }

set { _proxypassword = value; }

}

private string _proxypassword;

[Parameter(Position = 10, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public SwitchParameter Published

{

get { return _published; }

set { _published = value; }

}

private bool _published;

protected override void BeginProcessing()

{

base.BeginProcessing();

ApplicationEnvironment.Initialize();

if ((ProxyAddress != null) | (ProxyAddress != ""))

{

WebProxySettings.ProxyEnabled = true;

WebProxySettings.Hostname = ProxyAddress;

WebProxySettings.Port = ProxyPort;

WebProxySettings.Username = ProxyUserName;

WebProxySettings.Password = ProxyPassword;

}

else

{

WebProxySettings.ProxyEnabled = false;

}

}

protected override void ProcessRecord()

{

if (ShouldProcess(Text))

{

ISettingsPersister persister = new RegistrySettingsPersister(Registry.CurrentUser, @"Software\Windows Live Writer");

IBlogCredentials credentials = new BlogCredentials(new SettingsPersisterHelper(persister));

IBlogCredentialsAccessor credentialsAccessor = new BlogCredentialsAccessor("dummy-value", credentials);

credentials.Username = UserName;

credentials.Password = Password;

MovableTypeClient client = new MovableTypeClient(new Uri(BlogApiEndPoint), credentialsAccessor, PostFormatOptions.Unknown);

BlogPost MyPost = new BlogPost();

MyPost.Title = Title;

MyPost.Contents = Text;

client.NewPost("dummy-value", MyPost, Published);

WriteVerbose("Posted Successfully.");

}

}

}

}

Too much specialization is a pitfall of its own. Have you ever worked on projects where you had "the database guy", "the testing guy", "the web guy", and so forth [...]" – Jeff Atwood

I love this. It "clicks" and "sounds" a lot similar to my "Superior Dedication" tagline. Or at least, to what I mean with it. BTW, Have you noticed that I changed it to a nicer, stronger, les polite one lately ? You didn't ? Well, it used to be touting "Superior Dedication – You notice the difference"; but I just grew even more pissed off at certain claims and a while ago I decided to change it to "Superior Dedication – Specialization is Bullshit". Which has pretty much the same meaning, it just smells stronger.

The previous post I quotes gets crowned by a very nice first comment, attributed to Konrad Lorenz:

"[...] Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing. [...]"

It is nice to see that you are not the only one thinking out of certain schemes. Especially on sundays. It makes you ready for tomorrow, when you'll have to go to work again… when you will be with the customer, and what REALLY counts is not specialization, but dedication, passion and intuition

News of this Microsoft-Novell deal are all over the web.

I'd like to comment by cross-posting: this post in particular hides a pearl of wisdom:

"[...] But what does this mean to the end user?  Probably not very much. 

SLED aficionados will continue to praise Novell while espousing the virtues of free Linux – pretending all the while that Novell is not just as anxious to turn a profit on enterprise versions of their Linux products as Microsoft is to push its Windows wares. 

Others in the Linux camp will criticize Novell as a 'turncoat' to the Linux movement — never mind that everyone pushing their own Linux distribution is desperately trying to make money off of the open source software movement [...]"

But this is something you could see a long time ago. I even fell in the trap at the beginning when I started looking at Novell's move in the Linux and Open Source market…. but they did not fool me for long . In the second article I wrote:

"[...] There are people who might not like this. I even understand it. An I am not referring to Microsoft. I am referring to people who love and advocate free software. This behavior does not look fair. It looks like the competition to Microsoft is trying to use all possible weapons to regain market, using (and abusing) open source software they did not create in the first place. This might be true, but to those who might not agree, being idealistic about linux… I have to say that unfortunately the dream of 'complete freedom' of software has already vanished. Haven't you noticed it already ? It would be great, in theory, but talking of IT is rather obviously talking of a market, rather than of just a hobby. And a market is where companies play. After all, RedHat is charging money for its up2date, while WindowsUpdate is still for free… …you might say that other distributions don't charge people for the updates… but for how long is it really going to last? Companies have stepped in, and they are going to stay. I am not trying in any way to defend their position. I am just making an analysis of this phenomenon. [...]"

And that was already three years ago.

Still you get people insisting on free software, and how companies should use it to stop paying Microsoft. Yeah, right. And to start paying IBM or Novell. They'll always pay someone anyway.

I stepped out of the dream and started working at Microsoft when I realized this.

I also still use FREE-OSS (like Debian or Gentoo Linux Distros) for myself. But companies can't really depend on those. Their mentality requires them to pay someone to do things. And this is not that terrible. It actually keeps the market going and it gives me a job after all. Why should I despise it ?

It's a shame that people don't see things in advance, they sometimes are even hard to figure them out when they are already old. Some other people instead do look around and see things when they are preparing to happen. They are probably those that keep their eye open. Even if not directly related to open source, Roberdan wrote this concept in Italian here:

"[...] ma perchè dicono che ho una visione? perchè sembra che io sappia esattamente come andranno le cose, che veda quello che accadrà tra 1 mese, tra 1 anno o tra 10 anni. Chiaramente dal punto di vista tecnologico, ma anche organizzativo. Avrò quindi poteri soprannaturali?? Sarò un fenomeno paranormale come Alberto Sordi? (e quindi riuscirò a monetizzare questa facoltà mettendomi a fare il santone? ….o SEMPLICEMENTE…

Semplicemente ho gli occhi aperti? una bocca e due orecchie per cui ascolto il doppio di quanto parlo? Un istinto non ancora represso e ingabbiato nei meandri della moderna società del lavoro? Secondo me si.

Volete essere dei visionari? Aprite gli occhi, non fermatevi a guardare la goccia che cade dal vostro naso, non arrendetevi all'evidenza. Scavate. Se non capite fate domande. Se avete dubbi confrontatevi, SE VOLETE CAMBIARE QUALCOSA CAMBIATELO [...]"

It's a shame it is not written in English, but – hey, he was probably referring to an Italian audience. I love Italy, but Italian readers should really move their asses and learn english. He probably thinks different so he addresses them in writing in Italian… as of me, I just don't care anymore (I have probably never done) about those little italians who can't read english. Those who can't read my posts in english are probably also the same people that need to be spoon-fed and told everything, those who can't figure it out themselves. And when they can't figure it out themselves, that usually also means they take themselves too seriously… so why bother ?

Paolo Coelho has written in his last book, "The Zahir":
"[...] One day, I am going to write a travel guide containing only maps, addresses of hotels, and with the rest of the pages blank. That way people will have to make their own itinerary, to discover for themselves restaurants, monuments, and all the magnificent things that every city has, but which are never mentioned because 'the history we have been taught' does not include them under the heading 'Things you must see'. I have been to Zagreb before. And this fountain does not appear in any of the local tourist guides, but it is far more important to me than anything else I saw here – because it is pretty, because I discovered it by chance, and because it is linked to a story in my life [...]".

When reading this last night I have been thinking that he does not need to write such a guide: this is already happening on the web these days. Right now. You don't just buy a tourist guide anymore. The Internet can act as a guide. Other people's comment about places, and their stories, can guide you.
It's not anymore just buying a guide from some publisher, it is being part of the publication as well. And contributing back what you discover.

This is what happens on 43places, for example. See what the are saying over there: http://www.43places.com/entries/view/1239344 - "These are YOUR places" – "If you’re new to 43 Places you may not realize that all the places on this website have been added by users. Once upon a time, all we had were country names and a few major cities. 43 Places is a community effort where users are actively filling up the site with their favorite spots and the places they want to visit.

Along these lines all of us users can also correct and enhance data on 43 Places [...]"

43Places fits perfectly with the example of the tourist guide. But there is more than just a tourist guide. The great news is that the web is becoming an immense platform for sharing stories, experiences, feelings.

Hugh MacLeod describes this aspect (that is: the evolution of the web in the way it lets people and companies interact) on his famous blog: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003358.html
"[...] Dotcom basically built glorified Yellow Pages. You go, you get the info you need, hopefully you buy something en route. The relationship between the user and the website is impersonal, not unlike the realtionship between the Yellow Pages and its readers. They show, you select. They give, you take.

The architecture of Web 2.0, however, is about people giving away their stuff i.e. "sharing". Whether its a well-written blog post, or photos uploaded onto Flickr, or videos uploaded onto YouTube, the act of you giving is every bit as important as people other people receiving. This is why the number of blog readers isn't that much larger than the number of blog writers. Writing is as important as reading. Giving is as important as taking.

Suddenly for the first time in history, the world's most powerful form of media is about giving, not taking. The implications are vast.[...]"

On a side note, I honestly ignore why do you need to UPLOAD photos there and you can't just LINK or REFERENCE photos you've already uploaded on Flickr (isn't it a site they bought ?). So I don't see the effort in any INTEGRATION here. I don't get why. If I had a photo platform like Flickr I would use its Web API to let registered users just "PASS OVER" some pictures from one site to the other.

But, hey…. regardless…..it looks really COOL. It really does. More cool than actually USEFUL (it reminds me of Intrusion Detection Systems… but I digress), but that's how this amount of community things are. It's not useful for your business, but it is good for your heart.

In fact i consider GMail as being one of the best interface for reading mail that exist out there – I love "tagging" (oops: it's called "labelling" in their syntax), speed of search through messages (even tough Outlook 2007 is faster on indexed content, but still you have to buy it and install it on your PC)… I also especially love the way it shows THREADING… so that I moved pretty much EVERY mailing list I read on their account:

(ok, they could do better with the localized version of "Re:" in replies…. in Italian a lot of broken MUA's translate that into "R:" and that isn't understood by GMail and will make it think it is another thread…. but that's a minor issue, and also one that every MUA handling threading has – including "mutt" – the real problem is the broken MUAs sending the "R:" in the first place. But I digress too much….).

I also keep GMail continuosly opened in a browser during the day because a lot of informative mail and that sent by friends goes there. This to say that I do get a lot of their ads (that is – the point of having such an application, for them…). On the contrary, Windows Live Mail reduced its ads to show only one… not to annoy you too much.
But the ads in GMail were not *really* a problem (I don't read them anyway, I just plain IGNORE THEM).

But this week they REALLY pissed me off. They REALLY have. And here is the reason:
I have been using a script for MONTHS to backup my database (the one powering THIS blog) and send it "off-site" to my GMail mailbox. Pretty much something like a lot of other people do, described in various articles and blog posts. Then I was labelling them with a rule, so that I could access my backups easily in case I needed them.

Now I don't know if this violates their terms of use in any way… because I am not really using it as storage with those programs that circulated at one stage that had "reverse engineered" it. Those were bypassing the web interface altogether so people did use it as storage with a program without having to see their ads. That was the issue, I think. In my case, I am just sending MAILS to myself. One per day. I also delete the old ones every now and then, and they are not even huge in sized (attachments of 40 to 50KB so far!!)… anyway, I know a lot of people that store documents and all sort of stuff even in their corporate mailboxes in Outlook (then maybe index them with Windows Desktop Search of Google Desktop to find it back)… I was only doing the same with GMail. I don't see the big issue here….. they might think otherwise…. but from what happens I don't think that's the issue.

Anyway, now it's been three or four days that my backup mail gets rejected. My SMTP Server gets told:

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[66.249.83.27] said:
550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited
550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been
550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review
550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

Now for fuck's sake. You know how much I hate SPAMMERS and what I would like to do with them. But I also know that it does happen to end up in RBLs and such sometimes. Fine. But GIVE ME a way to tell you that I am NOT one! If you go to the link above, all you find is a form where you can specify that mail that ended up in your "junk" folder actually wasn't spam. Yeah, right. In my case it does not even go into my "junk" folder! How am I supposed to give me the original header that arrived to THEM if I only have the one sent by my mailserver ? They just blacklisted my mail server's IP Address! As they say, I even have an SPF record, I always use the same address, etc….
So I tried to fill in the form, the day after I also tried to contact their abuse@google.com and abuse@gmail.com addresses.
Still nothing.
They even tell you (in the automated reply when you contact "abuse":
"[...] For privacy and security reasons, we may not reveal the final outcome of an abuse case to the person who reported it. [...]".
How great. How am I supposed to know if they even READ my complaint ?

You anti-spam people at GMail: "I am NOT a fucking spammer!!!!!". I 'haven't found a better way to tell ya this, you know, than writing it on my blog… this is just RIDICULOUS!

But to date my mails still get dropped. I'll probably have to send my backups somewhere else. At this point they pissed me off so much that I am also seriously considering getting back to use my own mailserver also for receiving and reading my mailing lists. Then I won't get ads there.
Afzetterij!
(I hope you have some dutch guy on board at Google, as "Google Translate" does not translate from/to dutch yet…. )

Edited on October, 8th - While GMail REJECTS those mails (it SAYS it is not accepting them), Hotmail simply DROPS them (that is: it does not even SAY it is not accepting them):

to=, relay=mx4.hotmail.com[65.54.245.104], delay=3, status=sent (250 <20061008061010.GA19807@muscetta.com> Queued mail for delivery)

This way you THINK it is going to be delivered, but it NEVER shows up in your inbox. I don't know who's behaving the worst…

At the end of September I'll have to go to England for work. Not being able anymore to carry a hand luggage, I think I will have to leave my camera home. I cannot afford to get that stolen or broken by sending it as luggage. I'll have finished paying that in 2008… you can imagine I am worried…

I am actually tempted to show up in this T-Shirt to be honest…

"[...] I didn't think subscribing to feeds in a conventional aggregator would ever become used by a widespread percentage of the population. Subscribing to feeds seems cool to geeks because it solves a geek problem; having too many sources of information to keep track of and optimizing how this is done. The average person doesn't think it's cool to be able to keep track of 10 – 20 websites a day using a some tool because they aren't interested in 10 – 20 websites on a daily basis in the first place. [...]"

In fact, this reminds me I am a geek, as I could not stay up to date with the load of things I wanna read, withuot his wonderful RSS Bandit.

This guy is right. Stephan, you really got it – and you described it well too.
I am just crazy about this Flickr thing. It's the HUMAN and collaboration features that make Flickr that cool, addictive and popular. Those really make it emerge over ANY other photo-gallery software or service available.
That is the reason why I use it (and I pay it) even if it has been bought by a competitor of my company, even if I have my own server where I could indipendently publish my galleries at no cost, even if…. [insert random reason here about why I should not be using it]. It is for those "countless stories intertwined" that I like it so much.

Yes it can be circumvented, BUT… there are seveal "but"s I can say; In fact, I have been presenting Windows 2003 R2 to several customers and I got asked this question several times, and I usually explain this in the following way:

first, it would be too heavy of a performance hit to get and check the real "nature" of a file, rather than just its file name.
Also: how would you technically do that ? Checking some headers in the file ? In this case you would need to mantain a database of known file types, keeping it up to date as new versions of that file format appear…
and then what about executables which have been passed through a "packer"
(one of those utility that effectively shrinks them while mantaining them executable) ?
What about encrypted files ? What about… ?? It just doesn't plain work. Just like many other signature-based detection mechanisms (Antivirus or IDS). Or at least, to KEEP working needs to be constantly updated (or be useless).

The file screening thing is not meant to be impossible to circumvent, rather is a way of saying to the user that he/she's not allowed to place that content there, to get notified about that, to get this information TRACKED somewhere possibly….
Of course this can be circumvented. But is not going to be very practicle, especially when your users are USERS and are restricted so that they can't associate new extention to be opened from within their media player as you are suggesting….

Moreover, file screeing is just ONE of many features of the component called "File Server Resource Manager" in Windows 2003 R2. Those features are meant to be used altogether: So, for example, while a user COULD circumvent the restriction and copy ".mp3" files by calling them ".xyz", but then with the useful reporting an admin would very easily spot them by looking at those directory that strangely contain a lot of ".xyz" files that happen to be roughly 5MB in size (all of them)…
In the same way by using the reporting feature you could see those huge ".doc" files are actually divx by looking at the "large files" report – how many pages would you have written to get that Word document up to 700MB ?? It can't be the usual letter Mary writes, it looks a lot more like the size of Encarta… something is then fishy about it.

You get what I mean ? It won't block the user ALL the times, but it will still drastically reduce the user abilty to waste our space, and if implemented with the proper controls and procedures and preocesses (think ITIL) in place, this can still be a valuable tool.

(I also posted this answer as a comment on the above-mentioned blog).

"[...]
For example, in response to "How do I write a batch file that…" some people will say, "First, install ". This doesn't actually solve the problem; it merely replaces it with a different problem.
In particular, if the solution begins with "First, install…" you've pretty much lost out of the gate. Solving a five-minute problem by taking a half hour to download and install a program is a net loss.
[...]
So be careful when you suggest a solution that has a high activation energy. Sure, something could be taken care of by a one-line perl script, but getting perl onto the machine is hardly a one-line endeavor.
[...]"

[...]
I had a dream.
Ho sognato che giravo per la mia città e c'erano tutte bandiere tricolori, gente che dai balconi sventola strilla "Italia Italia".
Sono convinto che sia per il fatto che la nostra Costituzione Repubblicana è stata difesa dall'attacco dei leghisti che con il tricolore si puliscono il culo.
Poi però mi sveglio e mi accorgo che si, la Costituzione è stata difesa, ma le bandiere erano per una partita di pallone. Vinta dar pupone al 94' minuto su rigore.
M'è venuto da piangere.
[...]

Other news of the last few days include what you've already read elsewhere, for example Scoble leaving Microsoft, so I won't go into many details there even because I don't know much about the choice, the person, and the above link surely have already commented better than I could. I only wish Robert the best in his new carrer.

Then I'll take the time to do a bit of shameless self-promotion and talk of one more personal thing to note: some of my pictures of the typical roman pavement (the stones called "sampietrini") have been published on www.sampietrino.it. In particular, I took these five photos.

Only this time the sentence gets applied to Microsoft products, rather than to OSS…… Interesting

It provides several links and things to think about. If you are into .Net, or Ruby, or both, or simply interested about how things can interoperate, give it a read.

Coming to comment spam, I've been dealing quite a lot with the old 'b2' (WordPress's progenitor) at one stage, while I could not be asked to upgrade yet. At one stage I'd even coded my own unofficial fix for it to keep it going and mantain my sanity…

Then with WordPress I've enabled a CAPTCHA plugin which takes care of robots and only lets HUMANS place comments.

But now it's the turn of trackback spamming….
Sure, a lot of people have seen it AGES before me, simply because people DO read THEIR blog more than mine….
In a way, this might mean this is starting to be read – gosh! Who makes you read this ? Are you really THAT bored to get to read me?

Anyway, here's a couple of useful links proposing approaches to tackle comment and trackback spam. They might be useful to you too:
http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/spam/
http://photomatt.net/2005/01/05/trackback-spam/

Also now, I could get some of those plug-ins…. probably. For now I don't have time to test the plug-ins, so I've just hacked my own fix, see if it does. Probably I will have to 'touch' it again, as I might have broken the trackback feature altogether. Well, it will pretty much test itself. Spammers, where are you now ? I'm watching my logs, please try….

[edited: 20th May 2006 - Ok they did send trackbacks tonight and my fix did work ]

So far, just not to loose visibility of the old pictures I've posted there, I've decided to cross-post the photos that are on Flickr to my MSN Space. Check them out there…. (I am still in the process of posting them, as I write this, so that is not complete yet, but it will eventually be).

Today, for the first time in months, I had some time to go through several unread posts in several of the blogs and sites that I keep in my aggregator.
Some random things I found interesting (not all, just some – maybe I should consider sharing links with stuff like delicious os similar….):

Dare's comment of simplicity (I oversimplify it now, but I really like his comments: this is not the first, won't be the last, good good, I enjoy them, I really do). Here is the part I liked most:
"[...] how one should build RESTful applications is actually different from how the Web works. Few web applications support HTTP methods other than GET and POST, few web applications send out the correct MIME types when sending data to clients, many Web applications use cookies for storing application state instead of allowing hypermedia to be the engine of application state (i.e. keeping the state in the URL)
and in a suprisingly large number of cases the markup in documents being transmitted is invalid or malformed in some ways. However the Web still works. [...]"

Scoble (and others) talking of relaxing, simplyfying your life, taking it easy, disconnect, unsubscribe from mailing lists, etc.
Sure, I know what it means. The problem for me is that information IS addictive, so even if I leave the
information flow go for a while (because I'm too busy actually *working*, for example), after a while I feel the urge to catch up. Like today.

Another interesting thing I read today is Jesper Johansson blog post about a discussion on risk management with his son.
Quite amusing, it happens to do some of those discussions with my kids as well, sometimes.
Well, really, so far only with the older one of my two kids, of course, since the younger one IS THE threat/risk himself

Another useful thing I found out today is that some VB.Net books are available for download in PDF format. Nice.

Then I figured out my most excellent colleague Luca Bandinelli had been mentioned by Arpan Shah, so I told him that, and he asked me "why are you looking for my name on the Internet?". No, really, the honest answer to this is that I was already subscribed to Arpan's blog, again.

Coming back home I saw a wonderful rainbow on top of Albano's lake, ranging from one side to the other, but of course I did not have my camera with me
I've heard once in India that seeing a rainbow has to be considered a blessing. Well, in this case this was a HUGE one

On a side note, while dusting my feeds I also found out why I could not get updates on my beloved "Calvin & Hobbes" strip.
Since the original site has apparently asked not to redistribute those strips, I suspect I will have to set up my own copy of phpGrabComics to get that. I probably will.

Well, now I am going to watch this video on MOM, then collapse Night!

I am only figuring out *now* that Joel Spolsky has written (nearly a month ago!) this post.
It's funny because he mentions that Java might be the new Cobol ("[...]is java the new Cobol ?[...]").
Hey! I've already said this! It gets more and more common. Keep having this topic at hand, for example – do you remember those older posts ?

This assertion (Java being the new Cobol) comes out again and again. It must be true, then

Well, Joel in that same post also says he's been travelling quite a while.
Actually, I did as well. This might be the reason I am catching up with blogs now and I only ready his post a month after he's written it!
I have been around too, but not to conferences and pseudo-funny things: I went to customers in other cities either delivering workshops, or projects, and other stuff. It has been quite a lot of going around, anyway, since when this year has started.

I am starting to find some time to enjoy my family a bit more again now, finally, and relaxing a bit!

Oh, and I even turned THIRTY old, this past March.

It's a turning of a decade… sure, I am not *old* (ain't I ?) … but it sounds soooo weird.

What I wanted to write now, instead, is a link to an article I just read and wanted to share, which is quite interesting as it tells a bit of the story of how Flickr has born. Quite interesting.

Especially, the two things I linked here make you think of the "top-down" vs. "bottom-up" kind of approach.

You are .dll
You are dynamic.
You are constantly in danger of bringing down the house, because you don't play well with others.

If you want to take the same test yourself, here you go:
Which File Extension are You?

I don't personally know you, Dare, but I am a voracious reader of your blog, and I respect and estimate you a lot… so I thought I'll comment some of your thoughts here (hope you don't mind, and I hope the trackback works ). I'll do it because your writings often make me think, because I do have similar thoughts, because I feel like writing some more than a comment this time.

1) [...] learn a new programming language: [...]

Sure, why not ?
IronPython interests me too. Of course Python is widely used, a porting on .Net is interesting… but we need to see where it will end up in practice…
This kind of ports are always a bit whacky, IMHO… I read in the release notes: "[...] Most of the standard Python library is not currently implemented, so it is unlikely that many existing Python scripts will run successfully under this release of IronPython 1.0 Beta [...]"
Right, I mean… this cross platform ports of stuff is always deluding in one or another way…. to me, at least.
I was also excited about MONO so I could run my C# (and ASP.Net) stuff on Linux for example… and yeah what they have done IS impressive, as some stuff simply works out of the box (I've got the small standalone application I described on my other blog (the risky one) compiled on Windows, then copied it and I'm running that off my linux server, for example, without much trouble… ) but you always need to be very careful about what references you use in your projects as not everything is implemented and will actually work…
Also, setting up mod_mono on Apache has been a pain and even once it is set up it is nowhere as flexible as using Visual Studio with IIS6….
So this kind of cross-porting is definitely INTERESTING, often in an achademic sense, but we'll see what happens about real usage (and usability) of these solutions….

If you want something really different, though, I would suggest taking a look at Ruby / Rails. It might piss off some more people (see resolution #4), so be warned…

2) [...]Write More Articles: [...]
[...] Looking back on various articles I've written it's clear that since joining MSN and getting a new girlfriend my output has reduced. I only wrote two articles last year compared to a minimum of five or six in previous years. [...]

Sure since I got in Microsoft I have the same. It's not Microsoft's fault, but I've got a couple of ideas about a number of reasons why this happens:

1. Some stuff you do is confidential, so you simply can't talk about it (even though some people on the very blogs.msdn.com seem to be writing about those anyway all the times: "not yet published KB articles", for example IS confidential information last time I checked…. I might be wrong on this one, and I won't link to anyone nor say names to protect the innocents But I've noticed this behavious several times…)
2. Some other stuff would only be your opinion, but working at Microsoft your opinion can be misinterpreted/misquoted/used against you and the company.. so troubles also there. In fact, I was free to just get an idea and blog about it without getting all troubled about who reads that and what would they think about that, and… whatever including what I am saying in this very list. Examples: I was interviewing people in the security community, writing about open source things… all stuff I now think twice before doing. Sometimes even thinking twice is not enough, and I should think three times…
3. Sometimes there might be unwritten rules about WHO has got the authority to blog/write about some topic so people tend to shut up in that case too. But they might be right, when there's people with authority let them speak…
4. Some other times you solved a problem but I feel it is just not interesting enough, and that it more or less IS already documented (this happens in my case, not sure about you). When the documentation IS out there is a very good point. In fact, many times I find a lot more stuff on the public web by using Google or MSN Search on site:microsoft.com rather than by searching on the internal KB. This is actually very good of Microsoft, and there are A LOT of resources out there in the open with pretty much everything you need to know to solve your problems… in general, our documentation rocks, so why bother solving *and writing about) obscure problems ? Some colleague has already done it most of the times!
   Of course this is not always the case, and sometimes stuff are not documented, and in the latter case… well, you can usually go back to #1 in this list…. (I've got specific examples here, but they are confidential…)
5. The TIME element is an interesting thing: at Microsoft I work more than I did in other places. This does not mean Microsoft makes me work too much. I actually enjoy being busy, and my idea about this is that you work more in general when on the vendor side of the IT market. I was working a lot in my previous jobs, then I have been less busy when I passed to the "customer" side or fence for a couple of years, and I was actually getting a little bored, and that's part of why I changed. Being on the vendor side (especially in Services) you are supposed to be the expert and face the customers everyday…. so you need to study more, be prepared.
   Also, I am very busy with my family lately (you might be with your girlfirend just as much, since you mention her ). This issue is of course personal, but since I moved back to my own country I need to do a lot more out of work too to help out my wife while she learns the language…

Some of the above reasons (those related to your work at least) might explain why you decided to move your blog to a private domain from blogs.msdn.com
I have had a private blog (this one) way before even joining Microsoft. Then when I got in, I got the idea that a corporate one would be cool… but then with it comes a big responsibility as you are under a "flagship" site, really. Sure, everybody knows who you are anyway, but it is less… you get what I mean. In fact I feel better writing "at home" (but that would be better said in the "resolution number 4", below…).
Of course some other reasons might be the case for you, I don't know.

3) [...] Come Up With New Career Goals:[...]
[...]When I was in school, my dream was to become a well-known technology guru like Don Box or Scott Meyers then get paid consulting gigs to be the hero that comes in to fix peoples problems and tell them how to build their software. Since then, I've seen a lot of the people who I once idolized end up working in the b0rg cube. In conversations with Don Box, he's mentioned that the life isn't as glamorous as I assumed.[...]"

You know, he's probably right…

"[...] It's going to be time for my mid-year review and discussion with my boss in a couple of weeks. I hope I have a clearer idea where I want to go by then [...]"

That is an issue, I never know what to say in those reviews anyway… I should work on that too…

4) [...] Piss of Less People with my Writing: [...]
[...]Whatever. I've already gotten two angry emails from different folks at work about stuff I've written online and it isn't even the first week of the year. Maybe next year. [...]

Welcome to the club

Oh well, look at the comments you received on your blog about it That should bring your morale up a bit….
That's happening to everybody, especially when you don't conform to just repeating their pre-made speeches and just use your mind and speak out your own ideas.
See the examples I mentioned about refraining from writing some stuff at point #2…

Or in general what does happen might be due to the company that you feel like being a Dinosaur (a question: did Office Marketing campaign influence you, per chance ?) ?

Leaving jokes aside now, though, for what I can see so far, Microsoft luckily is open enough and DOES let you say this stuff enough, doesn't it ?….
…sure, every time I post something like this on the web (or on a public mailing list, or lately even internally) I've got that thrill that says to me: "holy shit, I am going to get fired this time…". But then it has not happenened yet (maybe I haven't pissed them off ENOUGH yet ?).
Let's hope they don't really get worried by people's opinion but the look at a couple of more practical/humane things, like:
1) he's doing his job all right, customers ARE happy (in my case);
2) he's got a family to feed…

Anyway, KEEP UP THE AWESOME WORK !

Has anyone succeeded in doing this ? I did not even get any meaningful reply on Flickr Forum…

All in all, in this case, I tend to partially agree on some points but slightly disagree on others with Joel.

In fact, while I do acknowledge the need of "hardcore" developers to fix and build lower level things and mantain current code (and know WHAT they are doing), there are also many cases where coding in a high level language which abstracts complexity IS actually more efficient and cost effective, not having to reinvent the wheel every time.
So there are a lot of useful and nice programs written by people who DO KNOW what happens under the hood (as good in C as in Assembler), that for simplicity and flexibility run in sandboxes, high level languages, even interpreted ones! An example is Dave Aitel's CANVAS, written in Python. But that's just an example.

But I do agree with En3pY that I don't like Java myself, and I consider it being too "heavy", in general.
Solution on my side, tough, is that you don't need C or assembler to get cleaner, smaller, more efficient code, you just need better languages. An example of this is a situation I have been involved in some time ago: in that case a colleague (that works with a very large customer who has a very large exchange deployment) needed to do some performance testing of this Exchange system. He had done the testing from some Windows IMAP clients, but the customer also wanted to see the same performance values measured from a Linux box accessing the same exchange via the very same IMAP protocol.
So I wrote a nice and sweet Ruby script – and at the same time another colleague developer a similar application (in Java).
Result: 45 kilobytes of .JAR to do the same things I did in 20 lines of Ruby (20 lines – including comments!).

http://lists.immunitysec.com/pipermail/dailydave/2005-December/002747.html

Agree with him or not is up to you, obviously, but I would suggest giving it a read.

I guess it is the result of some HollyWood producer having heard the word "firewall" for the first time, and maybe being told that Dan Brown (who is mainstream these days…) had written Digital Fortress which talks of firewalls, gateways and encryption, and of bypassing the security gate…

I don't usually cross-post many links found elsewhere, but this one… I just had to.
I am a "command-line-guy", when possible. I like command-line power. So I usually hang around with both "Services For Unix" installed, plus a collection of other unix-like external tools and external/add-on CLI commands for doing all sort of things on my laptop….
…waiting for MONAD (http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.MSHWiki). But I've got the beta running.

So this nice port of "dig" was missing in my collection… and I was stuck with nslookup when it came down to solve DNS issues from Windows… now I have a "dig" implementation on Windows too. Awesome. In fact I'd always wondered why does Windows to date only comes with nslookup which is deprecated and considered a "legacy" thing on UNIX ??

It is funny to see how different people at different times get to think the same things. In fact, I would not like to seem arrogant as I never wrote such an accurate analysis, but I used to think myself (and say, mostly as a joke tough) that "Java is the 21st-century's COBOL" – which is pretty much the same thing

And if you don't believe that I actually was already saying so, En3pY can confirm. I can remember having him cracking up laughing when I first said so to him.

But coming back to the point – that was Roberdan's post – I wanted to comment there, but for some reason I am not able to do so (even though it does not seem to be a problem with http://blogs.msdn.com, as I can comment to my blog there… I don't know)… so I will comment here (hoping he sees the pingback). The comment I wanted to write is this that follows (in Italian):

——————————————

Bisognerebbe inoltre menzionare che anche le liste di SharePoint stesso si possono ri-pubblicare in formato RSS per farle fruire ad altri reader. Per il momento questa possibilita' non c'e' nativamente in SharePoint, ma si puo' attivare installando una web part quale "BlogWave"
http://blogs.msdn.com/asanto/archive/2004/08/22/218625.aspx oppure quella messa a disposizione da BlueDogLimited:
http://www.bluedoglimited.com/Downloads/pages/SyndicationGenerator.aspx

Anch'io ho scritto un simile oggetto che genera feed a partire da liste di siti realizzati con SharePoint, qualora non si avesse la possibilita' di installare webparts sul proprio sharepoint, e lo faccio da remoto, estraendo le informazioni dal Web Service si SPS.

Invece per fortuna lo SharePoint "futuro" che uscira', avra' questa possibilita' nativamente:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/17.html#a11176

[Info "borrowed" from: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/ruby_on_rails_10_is_live_with_a_new_site_too.php]

They used to scare us with saying you should not use "pirated" software as it might contain malware… now it looks like legitimate, expensive stuff has that too… awesome….

Here Marcus says also that he does not agree with the approach of De-Perimeterisation (moving the firewall from a centralized position to each host).
I admire him and respect him a lot, but I see that he can't imagine a world wihout firewalls, being one of the fathers of the firewalling technology….
But that's provoking. I mean it's just a tease to say that we don't need firewall at all.
Firewall is still necessary, but it will slowly loose its centrality, that's more the point, IMHO.
Attacks will and DO happen more at the application level only, to the point where you pass THOROUGH a firewall anyway, with those ports that are open everywhere (HTTP anyone ?).
So we should harden the machine and protect them LIKE IF there was no firewall.

I do like the De-Perimeterisation instead, like Steve riley says in the "death of the DMZ" (Italian Article/Translation here – Original Speech here).
Sure, ONLY taking care of the data is not enough, and the problem of Transitive Trust he mentions makes sense.
But again, ask 100 to get 10. If you push it to the extreme limit (=no firewall at all) you maybe get people to HARDEN their machines finally.
Then if you got both (hardening AND firewalls)…. well, that's better.
I think at the end of the day what really counts is INCREASING the security measures TO THE HOST level…. so you don't *just* rely on a firewall like many corporations have been convinced to be able to do for years… while being wide open in the soft center with a crunchy shell….

I like this a lot.
But I like gapingvoid in general.
I like his points of view. I like the way blogging is changing the market, and I am glad of being part of it. I like the freedom and the responsibility of being myself when I talk to people – thus also to customers. For they are people first, and customers later.

This time the blog post of gapingvoid has been linked in a number of places.

I also partially understand Jason's point here:
http://geekswithblogs.net/jolson/archive/2005/05/11/39447.aspx
I will quote part of his post:
"[...]Shame on me for thinking that my personality might be of interest to some people. Shame on me for thinking that character is interesting. Shame on me for thinking that you don't have to be a genius who always contributes priceless thought-turds to ?society? in order to be viewed as ?valuable.?
[...]Personally, I like blogs because of the person BEHIND the blog. Without that transparency, I might as well be reading the encyclopedia all the doo-dah-day.[...]"

I don't know what happened to him, but I suppose I can "feel" that.

Blogging IS about talking to the world directly and from one's point of view.
Even when I represent a company, I am still myself, and not a sales drone.
I am a geek, I like technology (better: I like to "convince" technology that it really HAS to behave MY way, and not the other way around – I've discussed this a number of times, here http://blogs.msdn.com/dmuscett/archive/2005/04/28/412959.aspx and here http://www.muscetta.com/2004/11/10/rant-just-a-rant
But me and technology wasn't the story I wanted to tell.
What was important to me to say is that it is FINE to show yourself as a human being.
I could not lie to people and they know this.
The whole point of sharing a personal space (such a blog) with the Internet (=with the World as a whole) is that of speaking our mind in several different matters and situations.

So for those who keep saying that I should get *specialized* in something, be excellend in *something* and don't do "a bit of everything" as I've always used to do, this is my answer.
Those people know who they are.
I like having opinions.
I like being myself.
I like knowing a bit of everything. Even when my brain seems to leak oil like an old engine that's near to its fusion point….

I like to rant, for one. That's for sure

Here Brooble started with what seems like the first of a serie of posts/articles targeted to small business or home geeky admins who are hosting their own mail server and want to have it redundant in case they're down.

This being a widely known best practice, I mention it here because I liked the style of Brooble in describing how to set this up to people who are not quite as technical as we are, making it simple for them.

Of course my mail (at least for muscetta.com) is already backed up by a friend's server, and so my DNS zones are.

http://www.itvc.net/blackhat05/

in this he makes some very interesting point as security is achieved through procedures and the mind of people; by those analysts watching at those security consoles, and not the consoles themselves.

[...] SIMS don't live up to the hype, because they're missing the essential ingredient that so many other computer security products lack: human intelligence.[...] The key to network security is people, not products. [...]

these are some interesting passages, and I also like very much this other one:

[...] SIMS require vigilance: [...] staffing requires [...] fulltime employees; [...] and [...] personnel with more specialized skills. Even if an organization could find the budget for all of these people, it would be very difficult to hire them in today's job market. And attacks against a single organization don't happen often enough to keep a team of this caliber engaged and interested.[...]

that is of the reasons I stopped being a 'security officer' lately, and I went back to what I've always liked most: working for a vendor.
Being on the *pure* defense side for long is not going to be appreciated by your very bosses – they might even find you're too expensive for you're giving them a very specialized service they don't even partially understand.
So let be it – when I go to this kind of companies and they are customers for me, they pay more for the same sort of job. And the job is less boring, for you study different situations, of different customers, different products in different environments. It keeps me busier and happier.
[...this thing kinda makes sense to me...]

[original text of the interview in english]

I've also interview Jeff Moss – and that's an interview that rocks

[original version of the interview in English]

They must have read the bottom of this !
Yes, they did, and then they wrote me this mail.

http://www.muscetta.org/gustavo.html

Guys, I am sincerely sorry.
The words used are misleading.
I strongly disagree with classist definitions.
But I put it there to link to what Lance told me that in our interview.

I mean: is true that in east europe there is alot of cracker's activity. That's a real information.
But is only PART of the information. Not all is coming from there.
As there is far more SPAM coming from the US for example, just to mention one!

SECOND INFORMATION (no need to blog twice):
I posted a paper about an evolution of the honeytoken concept: the 'honeytag'.
(link to text written in Italian)
http://www.itvc.net/opinion/view.asp?id=281

You can check it out on http://www.honeynet.org/scans/scan30/sub/1/index.html.
There is another mirror here

At first it seemed it was something fantastic.

Now even the average user is starting to notice how dangerous it can be.
I am not going to write a lot of FUD.
I just want to think about which the issues are at the moment.

PCs and their use evolved with a speed that was untough of before.

But in the frenzy of giving the masses "easy to use" graphical interfaces, and functionalities to attract them and create the current addiction to substain the market itself, we forgot to teach the people.
We forgot to build in security other than features, we forgot to let people understand WHAT they were using, and how it worked.
And even how it could misused, so that we could PROTECT ourselves.

I used to be quite drastical in thinking that people should just not use personal computers… what do they need them for?
I just mean thje normal people, those who find it difficult even to operate them, let's keep troubleshooting aside!
I was of the idea that a computer should be user by someone who knows how to use it.
But my retro-thinking was obviously destined to fail, as the IT-revolution was spreading more and more and pcs were moved from the specialist's room to the lounges of the normal "average" people…
'Simple' Computing, GUIs, and a huge amount of features made it accessible to the masses.

The issue with vandals: bad crackers, defacers, virus writers, script kiddies….
The society does not tell our youth the truth.
Our modern society tells kids a 'double message': on one side it condemns these behaviours, one the other side it glorifies them.

Hackers are celebrated in movies.
Breaking things gets subliminally presented as being something COOL, something you have to do, if you want to be like your heroes on telly…

and then the guys who fall in the trap on the media and actually behave this way get busted, condemned, punished, and moreover we are creating more and more restrictive laws to block these things.

Not that you should follow everything you see, of course, but it becomes increasingly challenging and difficult for a parent to counterfight this messages of the media, of the society.

As a parent I am afraid.
How much strenght do we have as parents and educators, against the massive power the media have ?
How much influence do we manage to keep on our kids ?
How many parents ARE actually aware of these issues ? Some don't even know the full story themselves…

[Thanks for the image to the guy I stole it from (who actually found it around as well) - www.networkintrusion.co.uk]

So then we have to hear around abou these terrible criminals… well, there might be those as well. Certainly they are there. But there is also another phenomenon: kids loving the thrill of something illegal, for its own sake.
I don't know how much jail time is going to solve the issue, and how much should we rather watch at teaching values to our young men…
I see it as more of a social issue than – again – the media would like to let us believe….