DCortesi . blog

I woke up at 4:30am today. That’s right, O-dark-30. Why, you might ask? Because I crawled onto my bed and fell asleep at 10:30, all sprawled out on top of the covers. I’ve been doing that a lot this week, but then I’ve been getting up pretty early and heading into work too.

So there it was, 4:30, and I just rolled out of bed and got started on my day. I’m still going now, at 11:30ish, and not feeling like I should be passing out. I managed to get a decent amount accomplished, between preparing and giving a “hacking” presentation at an undisclosed location in Chicago, getting in a good run, doing a massive cleanup job in my room…oh, and doing a good amount of research about SharePoint. …

And now, I think it’s time to properly go to bed for…probably the first time this week. The “stumble into my room and collapse on my bed” method is enjoyable only for a limited time.

This biggest city list is kind of interesting. I live in the 3rd biggest city. What I didn’t know is that Rochester, NY is the 84th largest city! You wouldn’t know it by living there…

The stats on Chicago are pretty interesting too.

I went home last weekend. It was very nice to go back to the woods and relaxed. I climbed trees, and walked, and played some nerf football wit my bro. I primarily went out for a family gathering for a great Uncle who hit 90 - not too bad, if I say so myself! It was great to see old family that I hadn’t seen for who knows how many years. It was a great gathering.

Were you a fan of “Back to the Future“? Well who wasn’t, but if you were hardcore you can pick up a DeLorean on eBay, complete with the flux capacitor! Now all I need is the kicking ectomobile from GhostBusters!

Finally, I found an article about How SharePoint Works! I installed SharePoint Portal Server a few weeks back at work. And for the past couple weeks, I’ve just kind of stared dumb-founded at it. There are several blogs out there about SharePoint and tons of information on MS’ site, but I couldn’t find a “getting started” guide, or a “what the heck the beast is that you just installed” guide. The one mentioned above comes close, though - it gives me a really good idea of how it all works, so I can then understand it. A few hours of fiddling has also helped.

It looks like SharePoint can be an immensely powerful product for a business that is still using network file shares and email for storing and communicating information…

I don’t know why I do these things…The least they could do is provide XHTML 4.0 compliant syntax in their code.

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I frequently look at how long ago Administrator passwords have been changed. I think I stumbled upon the longest one I’ve ever come across today:

2003 days, 3 hours, 47 minutes, 20 seconds

I went to the MS Security Summit last week in Chicago. It was really beneficial from a recruiting perspective Some of the tracks were interesting, but also seemed like sales pitches for ISA, Exchange, and IIS Server. What can you expect from a MS Security Summit, though? MS has been getting very impressive lately with their technology. One thing that caught my attention was RPC over HTTP(S) for Exchange server. This feature lets you access your Outlook email over the web transparently - by that I mean you don’t have to use a Outlook Web Access or some other form of webmail. Nice feature, but the concept of RPC over HTTP scares me a little.

What’s the deal with all the bulbous vehicles lately? I saw commercials during the Cubs home opener today for both the new Infiniti SUV and the new Dodge Durango - they were ugly, bulbous vehicles reminiscent of the ‘94 Ford F-Series trucks that Ford revamped a few years later so they didn’t look like marshmallows. I am sorely dissappointed with vehicle designs lately…

In other news, Bill Murray’s opening pitch was the play of the game for the Cubs today - that should tell you how poorly they played. Too bad - hope the rest of the season goes better.

I also had a problem setting up Distributed File Services (DFS) on Windows Server 2003 as well. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing and it didn’t look like things were replicating, and all of a sudden a folder similar to “FolderName_NTFRS_<xxxxxxxx>” appeared. MS has a knowledge base article about that, but that didn’t help me. I eventually blew most of it away and started from scratch - being patient waiting for DFS replication to occur helped quite a bit.