Vista!

I was very excited about Vista before it came out in 2006. That quickly waned. My son Matt got a new fire breathing machine last year just as the Core 2 Duo's and Vista were becoming available. It got set up numerous times, with Vista, then XP, then dual boot, etc. but the Vista experience was something I decided I didn't need for myself. I didn't want to upgrade any of my personal machines, and for my work PC I use Server 2003.

We had a nice little laptop in my group that has Vista on it. I've dragged that around the country a bit. Most recently I stuck a 4 GB flash drive on it and ReadyBoost turned the somewhat slow 3.5 pounder (with only 1 GB RAM) into a respectable machine.

A couple days before Christmas I decided to finally build a new PC for my studio. I had two new 400 GB SATA drives (which I RAIDed) from Black Friday shopping. I also had a new 20x DVD burner (also BF). I already had a very nice full tower case I wasn't using, and I pulled the killer Antec power supply out of my old studio PC. I also sucked out another great optical drive and the firewire PCI adapter (the motherboard I bought did not have firewire and I need it for my Canon video camera and for my Edirol FA-101 audio interface). I ended up getting a E6750 Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of 800mHz RAM, and a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard.

I bought Matt a new ATI 3870 chipset video card and took his old one. It's no slouch for what I am doing, but he is a gamer and needs the smoking hot card.

So I stuck everything in the box and turned it on. Keep in mind that is was a fairly ambitious build - lots of stuff. Sometimes when you stick so much in a new box, you end up having to remove lots of stuff to troubleshoot. Not this time. I turned it on and everything worked.

First I installed XP and Office (but not much else). Then I wanted to create a dual boot. I downloaded Vista x64 with SP1 RC1 from MSDN. Since I had created only one partition, it would not load without blowing away XP, so I resized the partition and then installed Vista (64 bit), activating it with my MSDN license.

The bottom line, is that the Vista installation was incredibly easy and trouble-free. Everything just worked as it should. The performance is fantastic - blazing fast. So far, I love 64 bit Vista! I would say that this machine is the best and fastest I have ever used, and the excellent OS is a large part of what makes it so good.

Vail Skiing Report Card

So how did it go?

Sunday - I sucked big time. I was gasping for air the whole day. My "performance package" rented skis were totally alien to me. I was somewhat terrified by the experience. I had some control toward the end of a very short day on greens. Lots of new snow the previous day, but nothing like that mattered. Not good. D+

Monday - Complete turnaround. Everything worked. It was easy to ski like you knew what you were doing. I thoroughly enjoyed everything. I had a little pain in my calf from the boot. Everything was beautifully groomed. Best skiing day of my life. B

Tuesday - I went up the mountain by myself and did exactly one run (albeit a long one). The pain in my calf was unbearable. The skis felt foreign again. There was a little new snow that just made it slippery. Went for a run in the morning - gasping for air the whole time. D

Wednesday - The calf now had a real bruise. I bought some shin guards and got different boots. What a huge help that all was. There was 10+ inches of fresh power of the finest kind all over the mountain, and very little grooming. Skiing in the deep powder is new to me, but it was gloriously fun. Best skiing day of my life (again, and reigning). B+

Thursday - Still feeling OK on the calf front, and the legs feel good too. Explored the mountain a bit more with my companions, and navigated all the way to the back bowls by myself in the late morning. The powder was mostly gone. Towards the end of the day I did an intentional fall with the helmet cam on. On the very last run I charged down a steep part of a well skied over blue run (that was crusty) and I fell fairly spectacularly. How fitting that my first fall was on the last run. B

Something that was different at Vail from the gazillion Holiday Valley (etc.) trips was that I never even saw the inside of a bar while skiing. No drinking until apres. Respect for the mountain! I suppose the next time I ski a lesser place, though, I'll need a drink to help me forget I am not at Vail.

Party scene gets a B- for this trip. Enjoyable, but very reserved - nothing at all as crazy as I prefer (occasionally). I suppose that's about what it should be.

Vail December 2007

I haven't had time to do everything I would have like to do while I am here in Vail, but I have uploaded all my photos and helmet cam videos. I'll add to this post as time permits.

In general, the skiing was better than I imagined. I had some issues the first day with new skis, the altitude and the big mountain, and on the third day I couldn't bear the pain from a bruise on my calf, but otherwise it was outstanding.

I always wondered if I would be able to ski multiple days in a row. No problem!

Slideshow (double-click and open it in another window):



Helmet cams (see what I saw and try the amazing youtube control):

Work Around Shmerkaround - View by Date, Newest First - Use the ID Field

Today I had to do something simple and I couldn't remember if I had done it before or not (it sure seems like I had). I needed to make a document library view that shows the newest documents first.

It seemed to me like this was a simple to do thing but that I had employed some trick in the past. Memory told me I had to use a calculated field. For some reason, I remembered wrong. Or not how to do it. In a document library, the modified field is not available for calculations (or sorting). Since I couldn't calculate on it but I thought I could, I did what we all do, I looked around for an answer. I found lots of bad answers and questions in blogs.

Next I just dug in and improvised, and found a simple solution. The ID field is sequential and thus was usable for a created order and it is sortable. A simple work-around-ish solution.

Heading to Vail! Woo Hoo!

I first went skiing in 1972. BUT, I call myself, "the skier OBVIOUSLY from Ohio." It's not just that I've never skied any real mountains or seldom frequently enough to amass much skill, I don't think I have much natural talent.

No matter. I make up for that with the ability to have as good a time as anyone. On rare occasions, I think I look good doing it. Spectacular, sometimes, until the terrible fall comes. At my age (50) and with my history (worn out body parts from many marathons), I usually can only take one nasty fall per day. I'm not sure I can take more than one day of skiing.

Colorado Ski Report

A week from Saturday (December 8th), I'll be in the Rocky Mountains on a REAL ski trip for the first time. It's very interesting that almost none of the skiers I've met who are on this trip have the kind of humility I've displayed on this page! I met a bunch of them tonight and, although they are a really fun bunch of people, every single one of them is (at least conversationally) twice the skier I am. These are all much more experienced (and older) skiers.

I've experienced something like this before, going on a ski trip by bus with a group much older than me. This group seems just as old and more skilled.

No worries, though. If anything, this is a sociable group. I am sure I will enjoy the trip. Hopefully I will do well on the slopes.

Black Wednesday

Every once in a while in American culture you hear of an event being held for the first time and being proclaimed as a new tradition. I'm not sure what it was that I heard that about recently. It may have been The Christmas Story play (based on the book and movie, the movie having been shot here in Cleveland). Obviously, the idea of a new tradition is absurd. As is trying to CREATE a new tradition. It has to just happen.

Black Wednesday, Thanksgiving Eve, is truly a new(er) American tradition. It is also called "the biggest bar day of the year" (like Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and "the biggest shopping day of the year"). Neither of these days really are what we call them (the biggest), but the are TRADITIONS!

The crazy fun of shopping way too early in the morning for bargains is real. So too is that huge bar night. I partake in both, but more of the shopping than the bar night (I only do that some years). I woke up this morning with a great idea for this year - go see the Lords of the Highway (my favorite Cleveland local band) and do a big time amateur video shoot of the band.

I am no stranger to recording bands (especially the Lords) nor to doing videos. But this time I am going to coordinate a two camera shoot and multichannel audio recording. I previously did a video shoot of a little specialty band The Shrill on a black Wednesday, using my Canon mini DV and doing separate audio on my iRiver H120 (see the blog post about my recording rig). This time we will use two Canon mini DV cameras and two iRivers. I have better audio gear that I could use (an Edirol 10 channel 24 bit 192 kHz fire wire device) but the iRivers will do. We should be able to get one off the board and the other with a room mike. My friend Dale immediately agreed this was a good idea and he will run some of the gear.

It's really nice to have a lot of time off at the holidays and to have my kids coming home from college, and it's great to have a hobby goal for the biggest bar night of the year. I hope it goes well.

Recording Rig Details

My first experience recording a rock concert was with my friend Frank back in 1973 or so. We tried to record pieces of an Electric Light Orchestra/Linda Ronstadt/Beach Boys concert from the 17th row of Public Hall in Cleveland. I wore an army surplus overcoat and carried a good sized cassette machine into the place. It sounded terrible, of course, and it was a major effort.

I don't remember doing much else like that until me and Dale decided to try doing some Lords of the Highway shows with his Sharp mini-disc. We played around with a bunch of different microphones in my basement and settled on a little one that had come from a 80's era GE video camera. We got excellent results from that very first show we recorded at the Lime Spider in Akron. I was encouraged by this but I really wanted something stealthier. I didn't own a mini-disc machine and I wasn't too keen about the compression it uses (although it's pretty good sounding, as compression goes). We also had no way to transfer files - they had to be sent to the analog out.

A couple years ago there were a couple pro audio devices available that did hard disk or flash memory recording - there are more out now - and there were the good old DATs. DATs were too clunky (no way they can be stealth), battery life is poor, etc. The pro audio stuff was too new and expensive and also a bit bulky. I was intrigued by various MP3 players that could record so I started investigating them. What I learned was that they were mostly crap. Mostly, but not entirely. There was one device that stood WAY above all others - the iRiver H120. It could record WAV files and although it was slightly larger than I would have liked, it seemed to meet my requirements.

Upon further investigation I learned about an amazing open source project called Rockbox. The idea behind "Rockbox for the H120" (and H140, H320, etc.) was to fix everything that was wrong with recording on the H120 (there were a number of issues) and enhance those recording capabilities. As a platform, Rockbox also brought along lots of other cool features.

Here's how it works. You get an H120 (or other compatible model - H320, H140). You get directions on creating a boot loader from the Rockbox.org site, and download the latest image to your Rockbox. You can then boot into either Rockbox or the original firmware. That, of course is an over simplification, but the details are on the Rockbox site. The site is a little strange for navigation (like many open source projects) but persevere and you will find everything.

For microphones, I use "Microsound Stereo-Y" electret condensers which can be found on eBay for a little over $20. Some guy makes them. They work fantastic. The iRivers will power the condenser just fine (no box needed).

Unfortunately, iRiver H120's sell for more used than they were new. Because they have become so popular among concert-recorders, the price has risen dramatically. Expect to pay at least $200 for one in good working order (and you know how that goes on eBay, good working order may not be good working order).

What can you do with this? Record incredible audio, and lots of it. At 20 GB, you could record Woodstock on this thing. Battery life is about 7 hours doing wave files with a good battery. MP3 are probably in the 24 hour range. You'll be able to record a whole evening of bands in 44kHz (or 48 kHz) 16 bit wav files. You can continuously stream for hours. It will break up the wav file at just under 2GB for compatibility, but you won't miss a beat. With the H120 you have separate preamp and recording gain controls. You have nice meters that tell you what is happening. The text is small. The recorder streams the audio into memory and only spins up the disc and writes when it needs to. Thus the great battery life. A byproduct of this is you can leave it to pre-roll 30 seconds before you hit record. You hit the record button and the recording actually starts 30 seconds earlier. Is that cool or what.

Let me know if you go out and get one or if you need some help. Enjoy!

SharePoint Site, SSP Profile and Active Directory Users

This post was derived from an email response to a question about how I think things work with respect to users ("people") and Active Directory, SharePoint, our Lotus Notes email, etc. Specifically, there is detail about users who do not yet exist in a site directory. It is based on research, testing and our experiences. In our environment we create profiles for everyone in our Active Directory domain and add email addresses, names and a little organizational information from another SQL database.

When you create an alert (or use other people lookups), you can pick anybody from the Active Directory domain. In any of the SharePoint look-ups you are selecting these from a listing that is BOTH active directory and SharePoint groups, if groups are shown. In our environment, any of those users should have a profile in SharePoint (even the temporary accounts are imported, but many of those do not have email addresses) - the profiles are created and updated by two processes we run daily.

In practice it would be invalid to pick someone to whom you have not granted access to the site. Although the alert setting would be created, nothing would ever be sent to a user that has no rights to a site except for a notice that the alert was created.

People (site collection users) and profiles are not the same thing, but there is synchronization. If you add a user to a site and they were not previously in the site collection, they get added to people on that site collection and I'm not sure when their email address is looked up from the profiles (I think it depends - immediate if you send them a welcome email, and slightly delayed if you don't).

If you try to set up an alert for someone who has not been previously added to a site collection (or for any other reason does not have an email address - like most administrator accounts, many temporary accounts, etc.) you will get the message (trapped error):

The following users do not have e-mail addresses specified: Username, David. Alerts have been created successfully but these users will not receive e-mail notifications until valid e-mail addresses have been provided

Set my e-mail address...
Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services.

Where "Username, David" was my demo user. The "set my email address" won't work for non-administrators and the "troubleshooting" won't be much help, but the main part of the message is correct - the alert is created. If the user has a profile with an email address, the system will set it up in the background and the user WILL get alerts IF there is anything they can access (but clearly the user still needs access to the site). If you had previously added the user to your site, you don't see this message after the email address has been synced.

I thought about prepopulating users in a members list, but I don't think this will be necessary unless we get a lot of site administrators having this problem. Only a someone with "manage alerts" permissions - a site owner - could ever have this problem. If we start seeing this we can look into a having prepopulated "members" list.


Further, it is good to note that there is a timer job to keep the site collection up to date with the profile.

I know this wasn't the best written post, and it may not have wide generic applications. You have to keep in mind that we do not use Exchange, so our Active Directory is pretty weak - it does not even have email addresses, we have to go get those from another database. Another interesting topic to consider would be alternatives to profile creation in advance, and a more standard view of how all this should work (with Exchange and a better AD).

Links of Stuff I Forgot I Did

The search engines are getting very good. They will find me stuff I posted. These are from Yahoo and Google. In retrospect, this is a pretty lame post. I've gone back and edited it so the links are links (not big ugly URL's) and it is still a lame post. I was thinking about completing it - getting lots more things like these. But it's just too lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. Sorry.

Review of a Bob Dylan SACD

Pictures I sent to a Link Wray fan site

And when Link came back a year later

Yes I will attend the party already

Yes, this blog is linked from a Sharepoint blog index

Casio digital horn review (May 24, 2001)

Mentor Top 25 photos

2001 Midiaman 2044 review (I later hated the things)

I forgot I did this site (did it on December 20, 1999)

Telling Ed Brill what to do (not very interesting)

My ebay about me

Me on Beer Advocate

Sennheiser HD455 review (November 27, 2000)

Sansui SP1500 loudspeaker review

Roland P-55 review (January 1, 2001)

Lotusphere photos (January 2002) or here

Thing about the Magical Mystery Tour bus (photo link broken)

How to View a Museum

When I was 35 (in 1992) I went to New York City for the first time. I had gone to run the marathon, but I had the whole day before (October 31st, by the way, Halloween) to walk around and check things out, arriving on an early morning Continental 737 with only three other passengers.

I had made almost no plans other than the race. After I registered for the race (they had an amazingly UN-impressive race festival, after seeing what Revco used to do in Cleveland) I got to my hotel pretty early and so I went walking. Along the way I identified everything, without planning to be sight seeing. I knew I was right around the corner from Times Square. Carnegie Hall was obviously Carnegie Hall. Central Park was right where it should be. I realized that had I come to NY when I was younger I never would have left. Somehow it was already part of my psyche, and this has been the case all of the many times I've been back.

To make a short story extremely long (I NEVER do that!), I ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They had a huge Magritte exhibit. After walking in and seeing the scale of the museum, I decided to take in the Magritte and not much else - that would be enough. The artwork was in concert with me. I was alone, and that was a rarity at that point in my life, with two young children at the time. Wonderful art museum experiences were not new to me, but this one made me realize that this was the perfect way to go to a museum - ALONE.

My patronage of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum goes back to the ground breaking ceremony, where I got to shake hands with Chuck Berry. I have been a Clevelander my entire life. As an adolescent I hung around downtown and took art classes and stuff and I have worked downtown almost continuously since 1984. So I have a lot of history with the Rock Hall, and I go there pretty frequently (probably on average 15-20 times a year - my office and desk look out on the building).

October 19, 2007

Most of my visits are shorter than I would like, but short visits to any museum beat long ones. I have the benefit of frequency of visits. I usually have a target exhibit - either one of the featured, temporary or borrowed ones. Or a targeted film to watch. Two of my favorite places to sit are the induction ceremony videos (they should sell these - I would buy them) and the hall of fame videos. The latter has a very good sound system and nicely edited video. Both of those also tend to be very up-lifting and the hi-fi is very pleasing to my audiophile ears.

So here are the museum conclusions:

1. Go alone
2. Keep visits short
3. Know what you want from the visit - have a target
4. Really try to absorb the exhibits - let them take over the moment

Out of the Box SharePoint and Lotus Notes Integration

*Note: this need a bit of revising. In further tests I found that address data can screw things up for Notes

I should rephrase the title as NEARLY Out of the Box (OOTB). You will see in a bit. I won't claim to have all the answers here about how and why Notes and SharePoint do what they do, but I will document my findings.

First, I don't want to discuss why anyone would want to use either of these products or choose to use them together, nor will I discuss the relative merits of these products and alternatives to them.

Second, the three big areas where my firm needs integration are calendars, contacts and content. This entry concerns the first two of these. It is my belief that you can tackle these independently.

One could treat this as a glass half empty or half full kind of thing - Notes and SharePoint have a surprising amount in common. After all, Lotus and Microsoft engineers were the co-originators of the iCal format, so it shouldn't be surprising that there is support for the standard. Some of this stuff works really well. But I am being overly positive.

It seemed like presenting this information in a matrix might work, and I may still go back and change things around that way. But for now, so as to organize my observations and thoughts, I will just list each of the observations I have made:

1. If you invite a mail enabled SharePoint calendar to a meeting from Notes, the calendar will nicely display the meeting, accept updates, etc. The Sharepoint document also has an ICS file as an attachment (handy, you'd think).
2. Sharepoint contacts lists cannot accept email.
3. OOTB SharePoint contacts and calendars lists have Export Event buttons in their items. Clicking these presents a file download dialog for and iCalendar (ICS) or vCard (VCF) file. There is also an Export Contact selection on the edit menu for contacts. These exports work - more on that later.
4. There is a nice, straightforward iCal Exporter piece out on Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4234). It's one little WSP file and you add the solution and then activate it. From then on all calendars in the site collection will have an Action menu item to export the entire calendar to an ICS file.
5. If you drag and drop an ICS file on a Notes calendar, it will open a dialog with options for "importing" one or more calendar entries.
6. ICS (iCal) files attached to emails can be "viewed" or "opened" in Notes and will act the same as they do with drag and drop.
7. When you choose to import an iCal, Notes creates an entry in the inbox which you then open and add to your calendar.
8. (As far as I can tell) you cannot open a iCal file in Notes by starting with a command line or by simply opening it from the SharePoint site's export download dialog. This really bugs me.
9. You cannot get a hold of that nice ICS file I described in #1 and do anything cool with it from a simple workflow (like mail it to people).
10. As long as you have .VCF associated with Notes, you open a vCard directly into Notes (from either the edit menu or the button inside the contact). You can open vCards just about any way you want in Notes - drag and drop works too.
11. Sharepoint does not accept vCards. I don't understand this. It seems like a glaring omission.

My conclusion is that we are part way there without doing much. Opening iCals in Notes is funky in that it doesn't work from the file system or from the web and files presented inside the Notes client require specific user interaction and result in new calendar items in the inbox. But it works. Inviting a calendar from Notes works very nicely (getting updates and stuff). Contacts work fairly well, but only one at a time. From here comes the hard part - closing the loop and making all this usable.

Tests were done with Notes 6.5.3 clients and MOSS 2007.
A couple references:

This entry explains a lot, but not why you can't just open the file with Notes.
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/using-calendar-standards---ics-and-vcs-files?opendocument&comments

And this is a script for Notes to export.
http://www.lndcentral.com/article.php?story=20060503111031179. This would be easy to try but hard for us to implement (we are always very deliberate with mail template changes). It seemed interesting.

Search and Research

The major references from Microsoft that I have found cover:

• How to do basic setup (file types, how to set which content, etc.)
• Capacity (but in the context of THEIR scale, which is hardly anyone else's at this point - terabyte index for crying out loud)
• Some details - a little minutia, but not necessarily enough to give you all the answers (this is where I am living right now)

I have specific concerns in a couple categories - capacity planning (space, processor, etc.) and functional specifics (what is really indexed). I worry that what limits you set could have a profound influence on the former, you would think. But maybe not.

Our users are concerned about having all content completely full text indexed (it seems redundant - "complete" and "full" - but it's important!). Early on I had lots of questions about meta data vs. attachments, lists vs. libraries, etc. but for now I am strictly concerned with the file content in document libraries. More specifically, how do I balance the maximum upload and search setting and what are the repercussions of incomplete crawls due to size ("The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled") or compressed content (index grow factor - more on this in a bit).

There are two relevant settings, MaxDownloadSize and MaxGrowFactor. It was proposed that we set the MaxDownloadSize and the maximum upload to the same size - 50MB (we had been using a larger maximum upload). MaxDownloadSize and MaxGrowFactor are registry settings on the indexer and the upload size is a Sharepoint central admin setting). The grow factor is a multiple of the original file's size - for a factor of 4, if the original file was 1MB and was compressed, when the indexer's filter uncompresses and starts adding text to the index, it cannot add more than 4 meg.

My tests had two goals - (1) determine the functional ramifications of the settings and (2) find out how storage was impacted. For now I am not interested in how long it takes to complete, network or SQL impact, etc. None of those things are much of an issue for me for the time being.

For my initial tests, I had the default MaxDownloadSize and MaxGrowFactor of 10MB and 4MB respectively. I have a test database that has 50,000 documents in it and a significant amount of content larger than 10 MB. I also created some control content that consisted of large PDF's, some with a text source and some OCRed, and large .DOC and .DOCX files (mostly text, some graphics).

The results were ugly. With PDF's over the 10 MB Maxdownloadsize, no content was indexed (apparently the searchable parts are not in the first 10MB). My word tests are inconsistent and not extensive enough to be conclusive. It seems that sometimes the whole doc could be ignored and sometimes not. Word 2007 documents seem to work well, even when they are too big.

My plan was then to up the MAXDOWNLOADSIZE to 50 MB (and not mess with MaxGrowFactor). But at first I followed the advice of the technet entries below and it did nothing. After several passes at this, I started to look around at services and realized that there must be another registry key. But once I found where I thought it should go, it wasn't there. I now had something different to search and was able to confirm though an entry written by Bill English that you need to add the key for MAXDOWNLOADSIZE for the MOSS search (not WSS, unless you aren't MOSS):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager

Then I added 50 as the decimal value for the Dword key.

Now I could re-run the tests and expect some results, and that's what I got. There were no longer any warnings:

“The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled."

None. This is interesting, because some of my test PDF's didn't show up in the results (I had one that was 1700+ pages, mostly text - 47MB. But most of them did work. It was an arduous test, and what I learned so far is that the settings make it better, but it is still not perfect. We previously had done a lot of this kind of work with Lotus Notes databases. Notes search is very different (and probably superior in most regards, like most things Notes). But Notes also had known issues with some PDF's not searching correctly, and with Notes it is not so easy to install a different ifilter, at least as far as I know.

Incredulously, the database and local index files were actually smaller. Let me explain. The search database was about 30% larger, but there was a significant amount of free space. After a shrink, it was smaller. The local index files on the server were a bit smaller. I felt that I had good controls on the experiment but I don't understand that part of the results. I think we will just be very careful and monitor the growth of the index database.

References:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/01cad765-f754-4d07-9dd9-4c725852a8d91033.mspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA011648411033.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287231

http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/SharePoint%20Server%202007%20Administrators%20Companion%20Wi/Crawling%20Details.aspx

Moving Sites Around - Bad File/Folder Names

As we are a law firm, we frequently have verbose file names and folder names. We have done some training and try to have everyone keep it to a paragraph or two :-) and limit the punctuation, that and we have a little file renaming tool for mass importers to use.

An interesting situation came up when moving a site that had a correspondence folder receiving lots of emails. As the email subject line may include all kinds of illegal characters and be way too long, when Sharepoint creates folder in which to stash the attachments, it seems to do this: display the incorrect name and truncate the actual pointers. Although I really need to research this more, I am in fix mode, so it is just an observation.

These correspondence folders with crazy long names seem to work OK in normal operations. It only becomes a problem when trying to do an export/import (move the site somewhere). The export writes without errors, but the import blows up badly. You end up having to try to rename the folders. This doesn't work well using the UI, but it works OK in Windows Explorer.

The Indians Win It, The Indians Win It, OMYGODTHEINDIANSWINIT

I cried hard today. Almost As hard as I cried when I sat in crappy outfield seats at Jacobs Field with Gayle and Matt and Holly in 1995 and watched the Indians clinch against the Orioles. That was special because in my lifetime (b. 1957) they had never won anything. They've now won the division seven times, but being an Indian FAN has been tough. You have to wait and then savor the win! In case you didn't notice, the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball Team won the American League Central Division Championship this afternoon. Go Tribe!

It happened on a perfect Northeast Ohio September afternoon, capping an outstanding week of beautiful weather. I hope that when the weather turns a little colder for the playoffs in October things don't go sour. The one player that really complained about not being able to play when it got cold has not been a factor since then (Andy Marte - shame on him). I am thrilled for the team. Congratulations!

Today I got a chance to catch some rays and get out and run and ride my bike. And sit (and jump) in front of the TV watching the Indians!

Back in 1997 I had just put in my pool and it had not been open very long so I kept it open throughout the World Series. I remember we all went in the pool even though it snowed during game 5 (heater a blazing). My pool is closed for the season this year (bummer, but a reality around here - too many leaves falling and too few nice days to swim). Lets hope that we'll be watching them in the Series again this year.

While I am on a sports kick, go Buckeyes and Boilermakers! Both my kids Big Ten teams are undefeated. Lets hope they are are still perfect when they meet October 6th. I don't know who to cheer!

Feature Removal from Site Template

This may be useful. I came up with an interesting way to force users to use our templates and prevent use of the out-of the box versions. By removing the "feature" from the site template manifest we can prevent something from showing up on the Create page. We start by hacking the manifest out of the stp file (when we are done, we re-save the stp [cab] file).

< id="00bfea71-7e6d-4186-9ba8-c047ac750105">
< id="00bfea71-de22-43b2-a848-c05709900100">
< id="00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101">

Remove whatever features you like. You can see which are which from a Create page within a site.

In my site, Document Library was removed. This will also remove any customized document library list templates (which I didn't want to happen). But we can get those back with a URL like this on a page:

< href="_layouts/new.aspx?NewPageFilename=CaseLinkDocLib%2Estp&FeatureId={00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101}&ListTemplate=101">New Document Library < /a >

That's generic and will work in any site.

It's a simple enough hack. Is there a better way?

Post Script:
When you RE-save a template, you have to re-apply this hack - all the features go back to the defaults for the site collection.

Famous people, musicians etc. I've met, talked to, etc.

It seemed like this would make for a non-boring topic, and serve as an entry to cue my memory. I'm sure I will never remember everyone, but I will keep trying and add more to the post.

The criteria are for making this list are fluid. I have to remember the meeting. For athletes, the criteria are higher than for musicians (Dave Justice or Sandy Alomar won't make it). Touching or almost meeting (as I did with Lenny Kravitz, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Buddy Guy, Leon Russell or Pete Townsend) doesn't count. Politicians would have to kiss my ass to make my list.

A

B

Adrian Belew - King Crimson, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Bears; at Rock Hall, Beachland twice

Dennis A. Bell - Lords of the Highway; (known them for a long time now)

Chuck Berry - Rock and Roll Pioneer; met at the Rock Hall ground breaking
Selwyn Birchwood - Blues guitarist; 8-10-2016 at Beachland Ballroom
Bill Bruford - Drummer (Yes, King Crimson, etc.) 4-18-2018 at the Rock Hall

C

Michael Carabello - Percussionist-Santana; met at Plahouse Square, Cleveland 11-14-2009

Eric Carmen - Grammy winning singer, song writer; met at party circa 1979

Chris Chew - North Mississippi Allstars; met at Odeon

Deborah Coleman - Blues artist; met at the Beachland
Amy Cook - Singer songwriter; Beachland April 6, 2014
Larry Coryell - Jazz guitarist; Nighttown May 3, 2014

D

James Dashner - Author (Maze Runner); 9-29-2016 at Cuyahoga County Library, Parma
Rick Derringer - guitarist-producer, The McCoys, Edgar Winter, etc. 10-26-2012 Rock Hall
Cody Dickinson - North Mississippi Allstars; son of Jim; met at Odeon 2000

Luther Dickinson - North Mississippi Allstars and Black Crowes; son of Jim; met at Odeon
Donovan Leitch - Singer, songwriter, poet; at Rock Hall Library 9-10-2013
Geoff Downes - keyboard for Yes, The Buggles, Asia - 10-9-2012 Rock Hall

Andy Dunlop - Lead guitarist of Travis; met at the Beachland 10-29-2009

E

F

Bob Feller - Hall of Fame baseball pitcher; met at several Drug Mart signings

Ray Fosse -  Catcher; Cleveland Indians first ever draft pick; Cleveland Stadium

G

H

Jimmy Hall - Lead singer Wet Willie, Jeff Beck; Hard Rock Rocksino May 15, 2015
Fran Healy - Lead singer of Travis; a really, really nice guy. Beachland 10-29-2009

Nona Hendryx - Singer; met at Playhouse Square, Cleveland 11-14-2009

Toots Hibbert - Reggae pioneer; met at the Rock Hall
Taylor Hicks - singer, American Idol winner; at Palace Theater, Cleveland May 20, 2010
Steve Howe - guitarist from Yes, Asia - 10-9-2012 at Rock Hall

I

J

Kristine Jackson - Cleveland blues singer songwriter. 2-22-2015 Beachland.
Glyn Johns - recording engineer (Stones, Who, etc.) - 11-15-2014 at Rock Hall Library
Stanley Jordan - jazz guitarist and pianist - 3-22-2013 at Nighttown
Steve Jordan - drummer and more, Keith Richards - 10-26-2012 at Rock Hall
Kevin Junior - of Chamber Strings - 9-6-2014@Cleveland House of Blues (opened for Paul Weller)

K

Jorma Kaukonen - lead guitar Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane; Rock Hall 11-12-2009

Bobby Keys - Sax player Rolling Stones, etc.; shook hands at concert; again 10-17-2012 at Rock Hall

Al Kooper - Seminal rocker, producer; met at the Beachland

Eddie Kramer - Engineer, producer of Hendrix and so many more; met at Rock Hall

L

Bert Lams - California Guitar Trio - 2/21/2006 - at Beachland

David Lawrence - Split Lip Rayfield; met at the Beachland
Albert Lee - Guitar legend. 2-22-2015 at the Beachland
Mike Love - Beachboys; 9/28/2016 at the Rock Hall

M

Pat Martino - Jazz Guitarist, Nighttown, Cleveland Heights, 4-17-2015
Glen Matlock - Sex Pistols, Rock Hall 3/18/2014

John Mayall - Blues legend; talked to him at Peabody's (but didn't see him play!)

Mike McCartney - Performer, photographer, brother of Paul McCartney, met at Rock Hall 6-26-2008

Country Joe McDonald - ... and the Fish; met at Playhouse Square, Cleveland 11-14-2009

Roger McGuinn - The Byrds, met at the Rock Hall

Scott McKeon - blues guitarist - 11/2007 - Wilberts

Sylvan Mizrahi - rocker Sylvain Sylvain IS the New York Dolls; Rock Hall 3/18/2014

Hideyo Moriya - California Guitar Trio - 2/21/2006 - at Beachland

N

O

Mark O'Donnell - Tony Award winning writer; school days, was good friend of my sister

Steve O'Donnell - Emmy Award winning writer; school days, was good friend of my sister

P

Carl Palmer - drummer Emerson Lake and Palmer, Asia - 10-9-2012 at Rock Hall

Les Paul - Guitarist (invented solid body guitar); met at the Rock Hall

Billy Preston - Famous rock pianist; Beatles, Stones, etc.; met at Rock Hall

Q

R

Paul Richards - California Guitar Trio - 2/21/2006 - at Beachland

Robbie Robertson - The Band; met at the Rock Hall

Gregg Rolie - Santana and Journey; met at Playhouse Square, Cleveland 11-14-2009

S

Glen Schwartz - Guitarist; in the Beachland parking lot.
Frank Shorter - Olympic Gold Medal winning marathon runner, met in Pittsburgh 2000

John Simon - Famous producer, pianist; met at Rock Hall

Eric and Julie Slick - Drummer and bassist; met at Rock Hall and Beachland

Sylvan Sylvain - see Sylvain Mizrahi

Patti Smith - Punk rock poet; met at Rock Hall (barely counts - spoke to her in crowd)

JD Souther - Singer songwriter; 12-10-2011 at Nighttown, Cleveland Hts.

Kasim Sulton - Bassist(Todd Rundgren, Meat Loaf) keyboardist, vocalist 9-26-2009 at Rock Hall

Patrick Sweany - Rock and soul artist; met at the Beachland, Mahals, Rock Hall

T

Melvin Taylor - Great blues guitarist; met at Wilbert's 12-29-2007

Jim Thome - Hall of Fame baseball player; met at signing at a car dealership

Glenn Tilbrook - Squeeze, singer, songwriter, guitarist - 10-17-2013 at the Beachland

U

V

W

Lucinda Williams - Singer songwriter; met at Playhouse Square, Cleveland 11-14-2009

Edgar Winter - Frankenstein! Met in Tower City; July 1998

Ron Wood - Rolling Stones, Faces; met at the Rock Hall

Bill Wyman - Rolling Stones; met at the Rock Hall

X

Y

Z

Forbidden Broadway, SVU

I went with Gayle to see "Forbidden Broadway, SVU" last night at the Hanna Theater. We had front row seats - practically in the show. It's a very witty send up of all things Broadway. Some old, some new. Very irreverent.

The show consists of four talented singer/dancer/actors, a piano player and a lot of costume changes (a LOT). It's about 90 minutes of non-stop humor.

I was a little worried that I would not get all the jokes. I didn't get them all, but enough of it was obvious enough to be very funny to anyone. Unless you just don't like Broadway style musical stuff, I'd recommend the show to anyone. It will be playing the Hanna until December 2.

Find the Frontier

In 1992, the studio band The Division of Music, created a masterpiece called Find the Frontier. I worked very hard with Mark Adams and Don Mercier in the old "Litterbox Studio" (at my old house) to put it together. The songs were all originals except for one Frank Zappa song ("Lucille Has Messed Up My Mind").

A great deal of effort went into the writing, recording and mixing of this album. It included detailed liner notes and original artwork.

Link: Artwork scans

I don't know how many copies of the album were made. Back in the day, they were on cassettes, and I think something like 120 were done. It was all extremely high quality - metal tape and stuff. Then, when we did CD's, I completely lost track of how many were made. I would guess there are 200+ in circulation (or more likely, in a land fill).

In an effort to spread the joy I still get when hearing this great album, I will push it in a more modern digital media (even though I dislike compressed audio). At first it will be just some links from this blog, but I really think it could use a myspace too. That might bring more new people to the music. Listen and enjoy!



The Golden Fool (Klass) - it's about stupidity
It's The Truth (Klass) - a Taoist 23rd Psalm
Lucille Has Messed Up My Mind (Zappa) - (not originally posted)
Du Hast Recht (Klass) - anti-war at all costs (especially religion) - gimmick: German lyrics
No Dogs Allowed (Adams) - Mark's bizarre dream
Frontier (Mercier) - Donnie's great instrumental
Future Peace (Adams/Klass) - anti-war, anti-hate (wishful thinking)
Nature's Playground (Adams) - captures the feeling of being one with nature

Comments certainly are welcome. Come back and listen again!

Computer Years (as in doggie years)

Doggie years are commonly calculated as 7:1 to human years. Kitty years are less straight forward, as they age rapidly at first and then slow way down.

My thinking is that computers and software can be similarly generalized with respect to their life expectancy. Here's my formula for Computer years:

• 16:1 for the first 5 years
• 3:1 thereafter

That would make a system that is three years old 48, 5 years old would be 80. 10 years old, 95.

Since I have created a few major and minor systems and pieces of software that have lived very long lives, I would like their ages considered with these benchmarks.

Even as many things I have done have lived much longer than I expected (10-11 years in some cases), there also has been an alarmingly high infant mortality rate!

Oh, man, I bought the wrong phone

In late June I picked up new phones for the family. My daughter had been complaining about our aging Samsungs and wanted a "feature phone." We opted for new technology from Samsung and some slight modifications to our AT+T plan.

We got three Samsung "Sync" phones (A707) and one Samsung A727 (for me). All of these phones support 3G and streaming video - true broadband. This is really impressive stuff, but I am currently not paying for these services. They also have cool cameras (2 mega pixels on the Syncs and 1.3 mega pixels on the A727) and some somewhat less cool other stuff, like MP3 players. I bought a mess of 2GB micro SD cards so we all have some pretty good storage available.

We're all happy with these and with our changes to the AT+T plan, but a couple weeks ago Gurpreet Maini showed me what he can do with his Samsung Blackjack. It really is the same technology as the A707 and A727 (and Samsung has subsequently released several more phones in this line), but the blackjack has a fully qwerty keyboard and I think a slightly better display than the A727. The A707 or A727 can also act as a broadband modem. The two coolest things that Gurpreet had going with his Blackjack were running his computer off the 3G wireless broadband (amazing) and the setup he had with his home cable TV so that all the channels to which he subscribes are available to him remotely. I believe he uses something called Slingbox for this, but it might be something else (http://us.slingmedia.com/page/products.html).

On our recent trip to the east coast I was amazed when I was out on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and saw some guy talking on his cell phone, even though we were very far from either shore. I checked and I had 3G signal!

I guess the people who really might think, "Oh man, I bought the wrong phone" might be iPhone buyers. There is no way you could get the kind of bandwidth from the Apple phone. I guess you would have to weigh the alternative of the versatility of each and the major advantages one has in bandwidth and the other in cool user interface. I am still happy with the A727, but technolust is so easy to catch.