Scott Hanselman

OK, this isn't fun or funny any more.  I use the Outlook 2007 extensively. My whole life is in there.

My wife uses Google Calendar, and she has shared her calendar to me as an ICS file. I subscribe her her calendar in Outlook, and it appears as an additional calendar. In the screenshot at right, her calendar appears under Other Calendars. This has really helped us keep our life more organized.

Tomorrow we're going to look at a School for Z at 11am. In the ICS file from Google it says:

DTSTART;TZID=
America/Los_Angeles:20070322T110000
DTEND;TZID=
America/Los_Angeles:20070322T120000

That's pretty unambiguous. 11am to Noon. However, Outlook displays that appointment - seen at right - as occurring from Noon to 1pm. I would have missed it if I didn't know this.

I don't know if this is a Google thing, but I do know I'm not alone as others are reporting this problem and Google has updated some servers, but not others but is trying to fix something as reported on their Calendar Google Group.

This totally sucks. Even though we have updated all our Outlooks and all our Servers here at work, we're still seeing sporadic meeting problems, and most of us have just recreated all recurring meetings. I hope this gets fixed soon, either in Outlook, or on Google's side.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a little teaser for those of you who are diabetic or who have diabetic family members. I've been chatting with a friend about his Rails-based venture, so I took a few hours this weekend and we got this working, round-trip and for real.

Here's a few choice keywords for you as a tease...ClickOnce, Mac Client also, any Glucose Meter (pluggable), Team-based Management of what's important to diabetics. Coming soon. Spread the word to your diabetic friends.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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When working on a non-finance website recently, the client wanted to include the username as the subdomain, to give the user more of a sense of "my site." So, Fred gets https://fred.foo.com as his address.

The client purchased a very expensive (US$500) "Wildcard SSL Certificate" for https://*.foo.com and it works fine.

Some trouble happened when a staging site was introduced. Now we're looking at https://fred.staging.foo.com for the URL.

This works fine in FireFox 2 as seen in this screenshot:

But IE7 really doesn't like it. Your first reaction might be to get mad at IE7, "those jerks! They never follow the spec."

However, according to RFC2818 with emphasis mine (Thanks Eric Lawrence!):

Matching is performed using the matching rules specified by [RFC2459]. If more than one identity of a given type is present in the certificate (e.g., more than one dNSName name, a match in any one of the set is considered acceptable.) Names may contain the wildcard character * which is considered to match any single domain name component or component fragment. E.g., *.a.com matches foo.a.com but not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches foo.com but not bar.com.

When I visit *.foo.com with IE7, it works fine, per spec.

My conclusion here is that FireFox 2 is out of spec with RFC2818. I wonder if this is known by the FireFox team? Am I missing something?

In our case, we'll need to either have wildcard certificate that covers both *.foo.com and *.staging.foo.com (the latter in the SubjectAltName field).  If a CA won’t issue us such a certificate for whatever reason, we'll need to buy two different wildcard certificates ($$), and also host staging.foo.com on a different port or IP address, since the Server Name Indicator TLS extension is not broadly available at this point, and hence you cannot reliably use two different certificates for the same endpoint. Again, thanks to EricL for helping explain this.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Yes, it's got a silly name. Not the LifeCam part, that's pretty cool actually. The VX-6000 part I could do without.

It clips to the top of your flat panel or laptop. The left side has a retractable mechanism that brings the lens in and out. The Microsoft logo lights up when the camera is on - a nice subtle indicator that you're rolling.

It's a 2MP camera, so that means 1600x1190 max actual pixels. It'll interpolate to 7.6MP but don't be fooled, it's all software. That said, it takes a perfectly fine picture of a whiteboard, so I leave it clipped to my laptop all the time in order to document meetings.

The camera has a decent enough microphone built in, a smidge better than the one built into my laptop. As an alternative, there's a LifeChat ZX-6000 that's the same hardware as the Xbox Wireless Communicator. I just picked up a Xbox Wireless Receiver for Windows for $19 that let's me use the Xbox one to chat on the Windows box. Works fantastic as a team and costs me less.

This is a fantastic little camera and I'm happy with the purchase. I particularly like that is has a wide(r) view aspect so you can see more, rather than the fish-eye kind of lense that so many webcams have these days.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I just picked up a few of these super-tiny USB drives as gifts for US$14.50 for 2 gigs it's a heck of a deal, the ones that are smaller than a VERY small stick of gum.

As one of the reviewers on Amazon said: "[If you were] carrying top secret KGB documents on this drive, you could easily swallow it and recover it later with little or no discomfort."

Personally, I've got an OCZ Mini-Kart, but this one is about 40% smaller. When will it end? How much smaller could this possibly be? Probably just the metal contacts by themselves.

The Mini-Kart has been a very good little drive, if a bit slow. The Sony MicroVault is well -thought off also, and is fast enough for ReadyBoost. The KingMax is now available up to 4gb and is also wicked small. Atwood likes the Transcend, but they are a little slow also.

Here's the lineup: 

Be sure to encrypt your drives if you store anything sensitive on them! I discussed this and TrueCrypt in my 2006 New Year's Resolution Post.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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