Kent J. Chen's WebLog

Daily Reading: CIO: I would never talk to my CEO about the cloud

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:51:01 PST

CIO: I would never talk to my CEO about the cloud [via itworldcanada]
”There’s no way I would talk to our CEO about the cloud. For one thing, it’s a bad metaphor. It’s hard to get your hands around, it’s unstable as a weather element…I think it’s a term that should just go away.”
Bell, Telus launch HSPA wireless service [via itworldcanada]
that means, pretty obviously, iPhone is coming to Telus and Bell. Rogers is no longer an exclusive iPhone provider in Canada. Good news to the consumers.
Microsoft COFEE available to individuals too
COFEE, Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is now available to individuals too.
Mark Russinovich on introducing Windows 7 for developers [via Microsoft Press]
iPhone worm attacks jailbroken iPhones with default password [via ars technica]
words to remember, do not jailbreak!
Google buys Admob for $750M and VOIP startup Gizmo5
Exchange Server 2010 now available worldwide [via ars technica]
If you are like me still sticking around with Exchange 2003, you can forget about Exchange 2007 and move on to 2010 instead. :)
How to truly browse without leaving a trace [via how to hide your ip]

Man, that’s a lot of reading for today.

Daily Reading: Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Live 4.0 rumors

Kent J. Chen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:06:00 PST

Week in Microsoft: Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Live 4.0 rumors [via ars technica]
what happened this week in Microsoft, here are a list of them, Windows 7, Windows Live Wave 4, Microsoft Office Accounting, Patch Tuesday, Job Cuts, and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant book [via Microsoft Press]
the book is designed to be a concise and compulsively usable resource for Exchange Server 2010 administrators. This is the readable resource guide that you’ll want on your desk at all times. The book covers everything you need to perform the core administrative tasks for Exchange Server 2010.
An Introduction to Security in Windows 7 [via Technet Magazine]
- Windows Biometric Framework
- Extending Authentication Profiles
- Bitlocker To Go
- UAC Improvements
Microsoft Responded to Sophos windows 7 Vulnerability Claim [via Windows7Hacker]
a fair respond to Sophos Windows 7 vulnerable to 8 out of 10 viruses

Daily Reading: 7 VPN services to anonymize your P2P/Torrent traffic

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:03:25 PST

Neowin's top 5 Windows 7 Features [via Neowin]
no surprise here, they are Libraries, Aero Peek, Jumplists, Superbar, and Aero Snap, listed in descend order.
What if you never backed up your exchange server again? [via TheEmailADMIN]
introduced an new killer High Availability feature in Exchange Server 2010, called the Database Availability Group (DAG).
7 perfect legal ways to get Windows 7 cheap [via ZDNet by Ed Bott]
7 VPN services to anonymize your P2P/Torrent Traffic [via How To Hide Your IP]
a good list of services for those who often use VPN for their P2P downloading.

Quote of the day: what makes you write well

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:12:39 PST

Quote shared by CopyBlogger, about the relationship between any content creator and the people they hope to connect with:

When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons:

Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express.

When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason:

They’re moved by a desire to touch the audience.

~Robert McKee

Good touch.

Twitter finally rolls out Retweet feature

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:56:16 PST

According to Twitter Blog:

We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy.

Yes, finally Twitter decided to roll out this long-waited feature, a feature that should have been around since day 1. I am just fortunate that one of my twitter account @windows7hacker was selected as one of these beta tester, so I was able to see what this feature looks like and how it works and integrates in my twitter page.

First, this notification box appeared in my twitter page, right above the recent tweets from my following twitters.

And then a Retweet button also shows up in each tweets, right next to Reply. If you want to retweet a tweet, simply click it and confirm from the popup box.

Then, the Retweeted tweet will be easily spotted with a Retweet icon. Yes, you can even undo your Retweeted tweed right in the same place.

Unfortunately, I can’t do RT from a search page or saved search page. It would be nice if they do. Hoping they will fix it in the final version.

I also noticed another small feature that they added in this beta version. It shows how many new tweets that have been posted but haven’t been checked since last time I refreshed the page. They even put the number on to the page title so it gets showed on browser tab. Quite nice.

RT (Retweet) is not invented by Twitter, but by people who use Twitter. It’s a creative ways to get good stuff spread out quickly through the network. It’s so efficient and useful and has been used by almost every tweeter. I am glad Twitter finally made the move and started testing it out, even though it’s still in an early phase. It’s going to be a big improvement once it’s officially released.

Daily Reading: Windows 7 sales exceed Vista by 234%, plus 3 more

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:08:00 PST

Will be posting more short posts like this later on to collect some of the good stuff I read online.

Windows 7 sales exceed Vista sales by 234% [via Window 7 Team Blog]
Announcing the launch of Remote Desktop Services Script Center to ease management [via Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team blog]

Top 10 reasons to use Windows Home Server in your SOHO [via Windows Home Server Blog]
William Stanek: Windows 7: Inside Track, Part 5 “Migrations with Windows Easy Transfer” [via Microsoft Press]

Prince of Persia is now on Movie

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:40:00 PST

Finally, it’s done. Being a long time fan of this glorious game, I have no doubt that this will be one of those movies that I am sure I won’t miss. Not sure if there will be episode II, III, or more but let’s just see how it goes this one first.

It was back to 1990 or 1991 when I first played this game on a computer that doesn’t even have Windows. Yes, the very first version of Price of Persia is on MS-Dos. :) I still remember it was a timer set to only 90 minutes for me to rescue the kidnapped Princess. I had to battle through many floors to get to the top to accomplish the mission. Too bad, never succeed. But the whole game has opened my eyes to what a video game could like. I was so addicted to it that I wasted many hours on keeping playing on it in a hope I can rescue the princess one day.

And then time forward to 2003 or 2004, I played a version of The Sands of Time on Nintendo’s Game Cube that I bought main for Super Mario. The game wasn’t as hard as Super Mario the Sunshine but it didn’t disappoint me either. I had played a few times after and enjoyed every second I spent on it.

And now, instead of another adventure on the Game Consoles, the unbeatable Prince has made its way to the much larger screen. Hopefully, it won’t disappoint all the fans out there.

Re-visiting IIS SMTP Service and its folder structure

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:10:00 PST

I had a SMTP server failure early this morning, which reminded me to review how this basic SMTP service that come with IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 works. There is a blog post up on Remote Server Support that explains quite well and clear how SMTP service in Windows 2003 works and what its folder structure looks like. I am going to just be a copy-cat and quoting them below as a reference to myself and anyone who might be interested, in case the original post disappeared one day. :)

IIS SMTP Service Folder Structure

The Mailroot folder will be created automatically after you install and enable the IIS SMTP Service, with the subfolders listed below:

Pickup: The SMTP service processes messages from the Pickup folder as outbound messages or as messages for delivery.
Drop: Incoming messages intended for the local domains are placed in this folder.
Queue: Messages that cannot be delivered immediately are moved by SMTP service to this folder from the Pickup folder.
Badmail: It stores messages that could not be forwarded to the recipient, even after attempts have been made for a predefined number of times. This is the folder sometimes you need to keep your eyes on because these bad mails may eventually fill up your hard drive space.
Mailbox, Route, SortTemp: They are no longer used in IIS 6.

How IIS SMTP service processes mail?

The SMTP service, smtpsvc.dll, runs in-process in the Inetinfo.exe IIS process.
Smtpsvc.dll monitors TCP port 25 for any incoming messages.
It monitors the Pickup folder for all outgoing messages.
SMTP places messages for users that are members of the local domain it manages in the Drop folder for delivery.
If a message has to be sent to a user that is a member of a different or remote domain, an ASP application has to create and place the outgoing message in the Pickup folder. This is done through the ASP application using CDOSYS.
The SMTP service then performs a DNS lookup on the name server so that it can find the SMTP host that manages the remote domain. The port used for this process is port 53. The SMTP service checks for the MX record for the remote domain.
After the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the remote SMTP host is determined, the SMTP service attempts to create a connection with the remote SMTP host to transfer the message for the recipient to it. Port 25 is utilized for the message transfer.
If a connection cannot be established with the remote SMTP host, the SMTP service places the message in the Queue folder.
If a connection can be established with the remote SMTP host but the connection is rejected by the remote SMTP host, the SMTP service forwards the sender of the message a non-delivery report (NDR), and returns the message as well. The message is placed in the Badmail folder if it cannot be returned to the sender.
If a connection can be established with the remote SMTP host and the remote SMTP host accepts the connection, the SMTP service transfers the message to the remote SMTP host.
After the message is received by the remote SMTP host it is sent to the POP3 or IMAP mail server which contains the mailbox of the intended recipient.
The message is downloaded when the client connects to the POP3 or IMAP mail server.

Note that these info are only useful to SMTP Service that come with IIS 6.0. I haven’t had chance working on the latest version yet. So I will update that later.

Again, thanks to Remote Server Support for sharing this useful info.

Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly for a reason

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:48:34 PST

Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly as its default URL shortening provider a few months back, which basically put TinyURL to a very difficult position to survive and throw tr.im out of the business. I had been wondering why Twitter made the change because all in all, it’s just a service that shortens the URL and redirect them to the right place. Why does it all matter? I just didn’t quite understand up until now after I have been using it quite extensively for a while.

It’s not like bit.ly has a shorter domain than TinyURL.com. Otherwise, tr.im would have won the game. It’s the statistical tools that bit.ly offers to tracks the popularity of your shortened links matter the most. Basically, you can track pretty much all links shortened by bit.ly, not only yours but others as well, by simply adding a “+” at the end of the shortened link. For example, http://bit.ly/4qdChv is the shortened link for the twitter contest I am currently running on Windows7hacker.com. If you are interested how many hits I got, simply type in http://bit.ly/4qdChv+ in your address bar. And yes, you can do the same to pretty much all links shortened by bit.ly.

Not only that, if you sign up an account with them you can actually have all shortened links organized within your account. Plus, you get your own API Key that you can use with other application. For example, I use bit.ly as the link shortening service with the API Key in twitterfeed.com so every time when I have a new blog post here it will automatically post a tweet on twitter with bit.ly’s shortened link. So not only do I post tweets automatically but I can also track the detail statistics how many actually clicked and viewed my post.

It also provides a few tools for you to easily shorten the links with capability of posting to Twitter the same time. You can use browser bookmarklet, browser sidebar, or a plugin if you are using Firefox. And you can even use them without signing an account.

No wonder Twitter picked them. It beats TinyURL in almost every aspect. It’s certainly one of the best on the link shortening market.

Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 Released for Vista and XP

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:36:29 PDT

One of the areas in Windows Server 2008 R2 that has been improved quite dramatically is Remote Desktop Services, formally called Terminal Services. It’s playing a new role in Server 2008 to provide an extensible platform for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

In order to fully utilize all features existing in this new Remote Desktop Services, you will need an updated version of RDP client. Windows 7 already has the latest version built in and Microsoft has just released version 7 of RDP client for both Vista and XP.

So what the new features were added to this version of RDP exactly?

Web single sign-on (SSO) and web forms-based authentication
Access to personal virtual desktops by using RD connection broker
Access to virtual desktop pools by using RD connection broker
Status & disconnect system tray icon
RD Gateway-based device redirection enforcement
RD Gateway system and logon messages
RD Gateway background authorization & authentication
RD Gateway idle & session timeouts
NAP remediation with RD Gateway
Windows Media Player redirection
Bidirectional audio
Multiple monitor support
Enhanced video playback.

There are also features that are only available when connecting to Windows 2008 R2 from Windows 7.