MDM for cheapskates

If you’re working in a Microsoft Exchange based company that isn’t quite large enough to support the cost of a full-blown MDM (Mobile Device Management) system, but still want to mail enable your mobile devices, this might interest you.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (SP3) and 2007 will log your ActiveSync capable mobile devices (Apple iPhone and Nokia Mail For Exchange among others) when you use them to sync mail, contacts, etc. You are able to use cmd-lets to wipe the phones should they be lost (or simply need to be reset quickly and easily if the phone changes owner), but for many of us it’s a lot easier to use a UI.

With the sexy name: “Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration Tool“, you can use, you guessed it, a browser to manage the mobile devices in your organization. It’s almost like having a real MDM.

It’s not much, but with the aid of Group Policies and the above mentioned tool, you will have a good portion of control over your mobile devices without having to deal with a full MDM right away.

It needs mentioning that you will have to decide what level of monitoring you require, and how locked in you want your mobile devices to be. ActiveSync in Exchange 2007 is good and Exchange 2010 has taken it a bit further, but at the end of the day you should really consider a 3rd party MDM or take a look at Microsoft System Center and MDM 2008.

A great article on MDM 2008 is available at Windows IT Pro.

Another way to possibly unfreeze iTunes

If you have been using iTunes for any stretch of time, and are an avid podcast listener, you may have experienced iTunes locking/freezing up on you, either momentarily or to the point where you have to force-quit the application.

Asking the Goog revealed a lot of half-baked solutions where people want you to clear out your entire music library and start over. While that does indeed solve the problem for most people (unless their system is truly wrecked), it seemed too invasive to me and I decided there had to be another solution.

It turns out that iTunes will occasionally fudge up the temp download folder either by being stupid or if you quit the iTunes application, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, if you want to resume downloading podcasts, say, the day after.

So, for some of you this might actually work:

Navigate do your iTunes download temp folder and clean it out.

When that’s done, restart iTunes and your downloads should start over.

Note to self: In the future I will probably choose to pause all downloads before I quit the application. It may be in vain, but I’m going to do that from now on.

Bruce Schneier – The security mirage (TED Talks)

The only problem with this video, is that it’s way too short. I would love to hear Bruce talk a lot more about this topic.

Well worth a watch.

Code School – Rails for Zombies

Want to be able to do what all the cool kids are doing?

Development is still a dark art to many, but I’m seeing new and fun attempts at being creative about teaching people how to expand their skill sets. This is definitely one of them.

Rails for Zombies is a fun tutorial that will teach you the basics of Ruby on Rails. Check it out.

Rant: Gaming communities

I’m pretty much done with participating in any kind of gaming community. It can be the most, seemingly, mundane community around a flash game or whatever and you’ll have the forums filled with hating, spitting, ear lashing, beer chugging, crap slinging neanderthals who think they are above and beyond complete awesomeness. If you have an opinion that differs from theirs, you’re either a: Racist, noob, ignorant twat or asshole. Any combination of these regardless of contextual sense is often seen the norm.

Having spent the most part of my “online life” either managing or participating in many communities online, I have yet to get it into my skull just what goes through people’s minds when they sit back and decide: “I’m going to be a complete arse online.”

Rarely have I been the target of the trolls, but having spent more time clicking “report”, “filter”, “block” or similar, I have finally come to the conclusion that my time is better spent doing something else.

It is, after all, about not feeding the trolls. Then again they also exist on blogs. This should be fun.

Granted, there are small havens of serenity and bliss out there in Internet land – at least that’s what I’ve been told.

Game developers: If you’re going to set up a forum for discussing your game, suggest improvements and what not – go ahead and grab yourselves a brass pair and use the +1 moderator bat as soon as you even sense the stink of a giant turd being smooshed all over a thread. User ban, IP ban, allow users to down-vote thread replies into oblivion and so on. Go on. You can do it. You’ll save bandwidth.