Simon Barratt

FMC

One question I get from time to time is: "What does FMC do?".  It is quite a complex one to answer.  We do a lot!

Well, Corporate Communications have just released this quick video.  I think they have done a great job at summarising what is a relatively diverse company.

Not bad for a stodgy old chemical company, with a top 20 oldest registered domain name!

WTF???

I can't quite beleive what I read this morning! Shinawatra has decided to fire Sven at the end of the season!

The guy must have his reasons, but I can't guess what. Sven has put out a good first season as the manager. We have played good football to watch and have perfomed better than we have for a long time. The squad has been built to some degree, and I was expecting it to be added to during the summer.

One major milestone achieved this season was the elusive double over our scum neighbours. For City fans everywhere he will be remembered for that alone!

Considering he was so late in becoming the manager last year, I think he forged a new team well, and I was hopeful for more improvement next season. Shinawatra supposedly laid out a 3 year plan as part of his goal to take City global. We might not be ending the season as well as we started it, but have certainly achieved the goal set for the first season.

So who will replace him? Who knows...Mourinho??? hahahahahaha

All the best Sven! Thanks for the season.

Man’s Reach

It never ceases to amaze me how far man's reach can, and will, take us!  With that in mind, it is so exciting to see the next great journey take shape.

Today, two power houses of the 21st century, have announced their intent to colonise Mars!

Virgin and Google have teamed up to make the dream a reality.  For all you budding space travellers read on and sign up to volunteer as a pioneer of space.

Update: Who would of thought??!!  This was nothing more than an April Fools joke! ;-)

Query Based Distribution Groups

One of the features I like in Exchange 2003 that Domino 6.5 was missing, is the Query Based Distribution Groups (QBDG) feature.  This simply allows you to define an LDAP query against AD for email distribution purposes.  This allows you to take advantage of various pieces of data to simplify mailing list maintenance.  It does not completely replace the need for "traditional" mailing lists, but it a good step forward.

However, one side effect of this technology is the inability of he user to know who is going to receive the email. "They have to trust the system"!  Most of the time this is ok, but with some people they need that final confirmation.

You can preview the results in AD Users & Computers, but that is no use to the user.  Here is a method (I am sure there are others)

Using AD Users & Computers copy the LDAP query associated with the QBDG, then open a command line and type/paste the following:

csvde -f xxxx.csv -r "(&(!cn=SystemMailbox{*})(&(&(&(& (mailnickname=*) (| (&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(|(homeMDB=*)(msExchHomeServerName=*))) )))(objectCategory=user)(description=XXXXXXX))))" -l DN,objectClass,description

This uses the csvde command to export the results of the query into a .csv file.  This article provides more detail.

Hopefully, in a future version Microsoft will just allow you to export the result straight from the UI!

Technology

Another 6 pointer!

I had a great conversation with my little boy yesterday.  Basically, it went along the lines of "I reckon City with beat United 2 nil."  He smiled, but didn't think it likely.  He wanted to know where we were playing, I said "Old Trafford" and then he really didn't think it was likely!

But for 92 minutes today I had it spot on!  As you can imagine I was gutted to only end up winning 2-1 in the end!!!!

This result, coupled with this result, concludes the double for this season!!  Not since the 1969/70 season have we done it!  

This Derby was more emotional that usual, as it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Munich Air disaster.  Thankfully all the fans treated the 1 minutes silence with the respect it deserved.  But once down to business City showed discipline to keep United at arms length and worked a few chances, gabbing 2 goals in the first half!

Great Result!

Microsoft RoundTable

I took delivery of the RoundTable device last Friday.  On the surface it looks very eye catchy and garners lots of "what the hell is that?" types of comments!

Installation was straight forward, although the sparsity of documentation is concerning.  I had no idea what the Ethernet cable was for, until I started Googling around for more information.  It turns out you can connect it to you LAN for remote management and also allow the device to auto download firmware updates from Microsoft.

As a speaker phone, it works very well.  Clear and loud!  As a webcam it appears to offer good video quality, and the auto switching to focus on the current speaker seems to work very well.  Not had chance to play with the panoramic view yet, as that requires Live Meeting 2007 to test, which I have not got around to yet.

Now for some weirdness!  Currently it has a strange habit of ringing out every 30-45 minutes for no obvious reason - three quick rings, then silence again.  Very annoying and needs to be fixed asap.  I have a call into MS to see what they say.  I need a solution quick - my colleagues near the conference room are getting a tad annoyed with the ringing - it wakes them up!!!!

Launchy

For those keyboard junkies out there (of which I consider myself a member of) you might want to take a look at Launchy.  This is a very handy application launcher for Windows, that allows you to keep your hands where they are most effective - the keyboard!

It is not quite as powerful as QuickSilver on the Mac, but it is a damn sight better than navigating through the morass of menus, thrown up from the Start button.

Once you have it installed, the default key to activate is Alt-Space, then just type a few letter of the application you want to launch, and off you go.

It does allow you to customise the behaviour and locations that need to be indexed, overall it works pretty well - check it out!

EOL for Digital Broadcasts

In case you don't know, analogue TV broadcasts will come to an end on February 17, 2009 in the USA.  For those of you who still have analogue TVs and receive broadcasts over the air (not FIOS, cable or Satellite) then your TV will just be a very large and heavy paperweight come that date.

To make the transistion a little easier the US goverment is offering a coupon program, worth $40 per coupon (two max per household), to offset the cost of a converter box.  You best hurry though... there are only 22.25 million coupons available in the first phase, followed by 11.25 million in the second phase!

So if you have an older TV knocking about your house, you may want to check this out.  I am hoping it will improve the TV quality on mine.  I figure the digital reception should be good, so the local analogue conversion should end up with a decent picture!

thankful

iPhone Discoveries

I happened across two features in the iPhone in the last few days.  I am not sure whether these have always been available, or if they were added with one of the recent updates - I'm on 1.1.2.

The first is jumping back to the top of a web page in Safari.  There have been quite a few pages I visit, which require vertical scrolling and need to be refreshed (manually).  The only way to do this is to return to the top of the page (with lots of finger flipping) and then press the reload icon.  This is/was a bit of a pain.  However, by accident I found out that just by tapping in the topmost area, the one that shows the wireless network, time and battery power icon, will cause the page to scroll quickly right to the top, presenting the reload button!  I just wish there was an equivalent way to jump to the bottom of the page too!

The other feature, which is probably something I had just not realised before, is the ability to stream audio from the wireless network (AT&T - no unlocking for me!)  There is one podcast in particular (which automagically gets redirected to reader.mac.com/mobile on the iPhone) I listen too, but as I have my iPhone synching media with my home computer and only synch calendar and contact info from my work PC, I can not download the daily podcasts in the office to listen on the train home.  The iPhone recognises the link to the podcast within the RSS entry and makes it clickable.  And, after a few seconds, the podcast begins to play in the QuickTime audio player.  And what's more it worked flawlessly on the train ride home!  I could even fast forward past the advertisements!

Are you amung.us?

Whilst trolling around the blogosphere over the weekend, I stumbled upon a widget that was used to show how many other people are currently reading the same site/page (see the little red on black badge on the left)

Turns out, the provider is another one of those clever named domain types, as made famous by del.icio.us.  This one is called amung.us, and they offer three flavours: whos.amung.us, graphs.amung.us and maps.amung.us.

It seem like they offer a variety of nice widgets, that add indicators of activity to your site.  They even have a nice Firefox plugin, which will show you the current count in the bottom right of the browser window.

Truly simple to activate, and worth a try.  Now I can play a game to see if I can beat two concurrent people in the blog!