Recommendation Letter
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
Hilarious recommendation letter.
http://topherchris.com/post/106795199/recommendation-letter
Tags: tweet
Twitter Experiment
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Projects
I am experimenting a little with auto-tweeting from my blog to Twitter. In general, I dislike when people do this, for the following reasons:
- I get double-exposure to their content. If I am interested enough in someone to follow them on Twitter, and they also have a blog, then 90% of the time I also subscribe to their RSS feed. That means I see their posts in Twitter then also in my feed. That bugs me.
- Tweets are limited to 140 characters, and typically blog posts are longer. That means I see 100 characters plus a link, possibly less in the tweet itself. That’s useless.
At the same time, I find myself tweeting a lot of links, because Twitter is just a more vibrant community than my blog. I get a lot more comments and replies from people there than on my blog. Twitter is a decent place to broadcast stuff, but I don’t like the fact that I can’t easily find the stuff I’ve posted later. Have you tried using Twitter search to find a link you yourself posted in the past? It’s ridiculously bad. I figure if I can just keep it on my own site at least I have more control over the search experience. Another reason I want to do this is to have a centralized place to write stuff, then choose how it’s syndicated. This will let me do that.
In order to address the two issues I have with common auto-tweet solutions, I’ll only be tweeting some of my posts. I am doing this by feeding only posts tagged “tweet” to Twitter via TwitterFeed. In addition, I grabbed a WordPress plug-in that does character counts of posts in the WordPress web UI. This will help me keep my posts that are auto-tweeted short and completely digestible as a complete tweet.
Hopefully this will all come together and work. Let me know what you think.
Tags: twitter, tylerbutler.com
PowerShell for Fun and Profit
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Work
Stefan Goßner has a great post on his blog covering some common problems that people have with Content Deployment in SharePoint. Problem 13 has to do with the default timeout window for Content Deployment jobs. Stefan provides some sample code that you can use to adjust the timeout value, since it’s not exposed through the UI, but I find writing and running sample code on a server a bit of a pain. Instead of writing code, you can actually use PowerShell to do this directly from the PS prompt.
The key to doing this is loading the SharePoint DLLs into your PowerShell environment. You can do this using the System.Reflection.Assembly class. Take a look at this sample script:
param( $newTimeout = 600 )
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c")
$cdconfig = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentConfiguration]::GetInstance()
$cdconfig.RemoteTimeout = $newTimeout
$cdconfig.Update()
"Updated RemoteTimeout to $newTimeout seconds."
In line 3, I load up the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing DLL, then I grab the ContentDeploymentConfiguration (line 5) using the GetInstance() static method. I update the RemoteTimeout property, then call Update(), and we’re done. No code to write and compile.
This example uses the param keyword, which means you can save it as ChangeRemoteTimeout.ps1, then run it like this:
PS C:\> ChangeRemoteTimeout –newTimeout 1200
This is completely optional, of course, but if you find yourself doing this a lot, it might be worth saving it as a reusable script.
You might also want to make changes to some of the options that are exposed through the UI already. Here’s an example:
PS C:\> [System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c")
PS C:\> $cdconfig = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentConfiguration]::GetInstance()
PS C:\> $cdconfig.AcceptIncomingJobs = $true
PS C:\> $cdconfig.RequiresSecureConnection = $false
PS C:\> $cdconfig.Update()
In this case, I’m configuring the farm to accept incoming deployment jobs and not require secure connections. You can also make additional changes to other properties, such as FileMaxSize and RemotePollingInterval using this method. Stefan covers these properties in his Pimp My Content Deployment Job post.
One other note… Using .NET DLLs in PowerShell is generally supported across the board. It’s not limited to the SharePoint DLLs. There’s some pretty exciting stuff you can do here once you start playing around.
Tags: content deployment, powershell, sharepoint
Who Watches the Watchman?
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Cool!, Links
Fascinating piece of technology that I’d never heard of: the watchclock. For fun, read the first part of the article, which describes the scenario and use-case, then try to design a solution before you read further.
Who Watches the Watchman? (via Daring Fireball)
Tags: technology
Science is Fun!
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Cool!
Great xkcd today about what gets kids interested in science.
Wikipedia Walks
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links, Projects
A few years ago I realized that when I would start reading an interesting article on Wikipedia, I would often end up reading 6-8 additional articles that were linked from the original article, then branch out from there, etc. etc. I’d end up in a completely different subject than the one I’d started in, and I learned a lot, plus it was just a ton of fun.
I started calling these Wikipedia Walks. The concept is simple – start at an article you find interesting, then just continue on to any articles linked from the original. Finish when you get bored. To make it more interesting, you should record both the starting article and the ending article, so you can see just how far off the beaten path you’ve gotten.
To start, I’d suggest the article on Game Theory.
Tags: wikipedia walks
Computer Security X-Ray Specs
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
IT security consultant Rich Mogull gives some tips for seeing through the BS in security press releases. It’s aimed at the Mac community, but it has some insightful info that applies across the board. In particular, I like his even-handed evaluation of the relative security of both Windows and OS X:
For many years Mac OS X did have an inherent security advantage over Windows, but to those who understand the technologies within the operating systems, those days are long past.
The latest version of Windows (Vista, not that most people use it) is provably more secure in the lab than the latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Leopard lacks proper implementation of the new anti-exploitation technologies included in Vista, and, based on the number of Apple security patches, experiences about as many vulnerabilities.
When I see articles that defend Mac OS X based on the lack of Mac-specific malicious software, and not on current technical capabilities, cybercrime dynamics, or attack methods, I tend to be dubious.
Five Tips for Reading Mac Security Stories [via Daring Fireball]
Respect Religion
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
Marco Arment on Judaism:
There’s no sales pitch. No recruiting team. Nobody spamming me in the subway, coming to my door, or yelling at me on the street. If I want to learn anything about Judaism, I can just ask the many Jewish people I know.
…
They’re comfortable enough in their beliefs that they don’t need to nag or argue with people who disagree or don’t care.
Religions I respect for strange reasons [via marco.org]
Tags: religion
Office 2010: The Movie
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links, Work
A bit cheesy, but glad to see some news about the next version of Office finally coming out. I wish there were some screenshots or videos in the little movie clip, but it’s early – I’m sure we’ll be releasing that sort of stuff in the future. It’ll be a busy next few months for those of us on the product group, but it’s exciting to finally start telling people about all the cool stuff we’ve built.
Tags: office, sharepoint
Mark Pilgrim on Web Fonts
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
I love Mark Pilgrim.
Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.
Fuck the foundries [via dive into mark].
Tags: design, fonts, typography
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