Well, I've been having fun (not!) wih an incredible crashing Exchange 2003 server. It's cost me a fair bit of sleep through its insistence on shutting down the mailbox stores - and on one occasion leaving them in a Dirty Shutdown state where Recover didn't work - so it was time to Repair, which needless to say takes some time and doesn't necessarily give any guarantee of success. Luckily it worked.

The error messages are annoyingly unhelpful, and it doesn't appear that there's much help out there.  I've been ruling out possible culprits - such as backup and antivirus- and hopefully will be on top of it soon. It would be nice to be more certain though.

Thus endeth the complaining !

We've performed one major and one minor site update during the last month - the major one was to bring the site software up to date and fix a number of bugs, and the minor one was to improve performance.

The major update was pretty traumatic, since it involved resolving a number of issues that had arisen from the move of databases and the original migration from the old site software. We had to rollback from the first attempt, in spite of development of a comprehensive update procedure, and extensive testing. It was easy enough to identify the cause, and modify the procedure accordingly - but it just goes to show that even the most careful testing can be brought undone by missing the most minor of details.

The minor on ...

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2007 will be a better year than 2006 was for me - but I hope it will be a great year for all of you!

So, did you all get the Christmas presents you wanted? A new JASJAM perhaps? Or one of those GPS units Fred is always talking about? Or perhaps just a few minutes peace and quiet from the kids!

How about New Year's resolutions? I don't really subscribe to them myself, but perhaps you have some you'd like to share?

Regardless, warmest wishes for the New Year, and may you and your family have a blast!

You might have noticed a bit of a change to the look of the site. Hopefully it's a change for the better. There's more to come, but we figured that we might as well make a start.

It's made for a bit of reshuffling in how pages are organised, but overall there's very little change to functionality - more than anything this change has to do with looks. Improvements to functionality will come too, but all good things take time.

So what do you think? Do you like the changes? I'd be interested to hear from you!

I took a moment to play with Beta 2 of Exchange Server 2007 recently; it's been out a while, but there's been so much going on that I haven't had a chance. In a word - awesome! I'm really enthusiastic about the improvements and new features - Unified Messaging should make a huge impact on many organisations ... voice access to mailboxes, and especially the voice recognition, is really a great inclusion. Voicemail and fax integration are also great and could really change organisations in a way that I think Live Communications Server also has potential to achieve.

There's a lot of good to be said about it, and I couldn't pretend to have familiarised myself with everything - I haven't even reached the stage of building an XP or Vista VM with Office 2007 to look at the client end. But there are a couple of concerns for me.

The first is that they have dropped support for the Active Directory Users & Computers add-in. There are stated ...

I just found out yesterday that the Sci-Fi Channel is coming to Australia. It's possibly the only thing which can push me over the line to getting Pay-TV. That and the fact that free-to-air is getting so bad.

So can anyone guess what I'm looking forward to?

That's right, the possibility that new Battlestar Galactica episodes might air a lot quicker here than they have to date, and that the show won't get mucked around in the way that Channel 10 has done - especially Ten's latest trick of dumping BSG Season 2 to a very late night time slot with little to no fanfare (thank goodness the Season 2 DVD's were out relatively soon afterwards).

Anyway - I'm happy about the news, and it's quite likely I'll take the lowest package available on Foxtel or Austar, and then add whatever package is necessary to get Sci-Fi. There are other channels that come in the minimum package that I'd be happy to have too, but non ...

I've changed jobs after about 2 1/2 years. This is a significant shift back toward the old consultancy days, but I bring to it a very different attitude from before ... essentially that I've now seen both sides of the fence and therefore can emphathise more with the customer than previously possible.

It's interesting, and I'm still settling in, but the website might actually get some more time from me now - I've even managed to do some much needed software updates, with more to come.

As always, the mods and admins have been doing an awesome job regardless.

Anyway, apart from that, I'd like to highly recommend the Dell Latitude D420 which is my current notebook. I'm running a Centrino Duo model and it absolutely rocks. Except for the inbuilt Intel 3945ABG 802.11a/b/g card which is complete and utter crap - at least in terms of compatibility for the wireless router I currently use (and I believe some others). Luckily I have my trusty old Netge ...

Yes, I'm still doing the blog! I've been very busy (when aren't I) on a very critical project which has kept me very occupied. I'm also making an effort to spend more time with the wife and kids, but it's primarily work that's kept/keeping me away.

It really doesn't help that FredS gave me his copy of Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion for the XBox 360! On top of everything else, I've become addicted to that - admittedly I'm only succeeding in playing one or two hours late at night as a rule, but Fred: not helping mate!!! :-)

The project - well, I can't talk about what it is, but I've been working on the design for 2 years, and it's fairly nerve-wracking to see it all now taking shape (especially with various vendor delays and errors). It's an expensive project by our standards but will really benefit my work place in future.

Other things ... well, the site seems to be settling down with the new software. There are bugs, and I'm still trying to iron ...

It's nice in theory to divert your desk phone to your mobile, and most of the time it's convenient. However it becomes inconvenient, even troublesome, when you want to screen your calls against some vendor/telemarketer who keeps hassling you; the number doesn't get passed on to your mobile so you can't tell if it's someone you want to talk to or not.

Very annoying. So far the best option I have is to just ignore it and wait to see if they leave a message. Not particularly reliable.

What I need is a big red button to detect nuisance callers and obliterate them. Time for a Google search!