Final piece of the Exchange jigsaw
Today’s achievement is that I am syncing my phone – a Palm Treo Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1 – to my Exchange server. This means that my phone and my email, contacts and calendar sync automagically, so that when a new email arrives, it’s also on my phone. If I want to add a contact, I can do it either via Outlook (or Entourage on a Mac) or via the Outlook Web Access client and again, it automagically appears on my phone. Equally, anything I do on my phone – reply to an email, enter a contact, add an appointment to my calendar – registers on the server and is reflected in Outlook, Entourage, OWA etc.
The reason I wasn’t able to do this over the weekend was because the process of getting a secure web server certificate was a little opaque, despite the wizard, in SBS. However, I had another go at the wizard this morning and it informed me – as it hadn’t done before – that I could buy the required certificate from my registrar, GoDaddy. Without it, my phone was refusing to sync, saying it couldn’t verify the kosherness of my server. You can tell web browsers to ignore that, but the phone said no.
Having realised that, it was a matter of minutes to buy the certificate, confirm my identity via an automated series of emails, download and install the certificate on the server. This is where the SBS 08 wizards really do make life easier: apparently it was a pain in the arse in SBS 03.
What this means is that browsers – both on computers and mobile – and any applications that interact with my server recognise that it is trusted and safe. I did ponder, mind you, just how “safe” this kind of “yup, this is me, this is my server, now trust me” automated process really is: if I can do this, so can anyone, including people with malign intentions. Still, the point here is that it was easy – once the wizard belatedly offered me the option to buy the certificate via my registrar. It hadn’t before and I was a bit puzzled.
Four machines, four OSs
This is Alex at work with me yesterday setting up Exchange 07 and SBS 08. We have between us four computers, each running a different OS: my Vista box (running, er, Vista); my MacBook Air (Mac OSX 10.5.5); my server (SBS 08) and Alex’s Eee PC (Xandros Linux). We were managing the router on the MacBook and Alex was doing clever pinging stuff with his Eee PC. The Vista box was up to connect it as a client to the SBS network. Oh, and both the Vista box and the server are plugged into the big monitor.
Alex and the computers. Not shown: gallons of Diet Coke
Up and running
Amazingly, I and Alex got SBS 08 and Exchange 07 up and running yesterday. We are both absolutely delighted about it – and once we’d got around the stuff that was stumping us, which was mostly to do with the arcane Windows networking stuff, it Just Worked.
So I can now sync Outlook with my own Exchange server and I can access my email, calendars and contacts via the web.
There are a couple of wrinkles. First, I need a web server certificate, which I’m going to investigate tomorrow. At the moment my phone won’t sync with the Exchange server because of the absence of that certificate, and you can’t tell it to ignore the lack of it as you can with web browsers.
Second, the networking stuff is a pain in the arse. SBS 08 wants to manage DHCP; however, it doesn’t seem to do it very well and despite its bleatings, I have handed that responsibility back to my router.
When SBS was managing DHCP, the Mac kept dropping the internet connection; nor could it see my NAS drive. Neither the Mac nor the Vista box could see the Airport Express. None of that is acceptable. I’m sure there’s a way round it and I will see if I can track down someone who can help me with that, but for the time being, the networking is being handled again by the router.
Third, we didn’t think SBS’s notifications were very intuitive. There was a certain amount of headscratching as we tried to work out why we couldn’t connect the client Vista machine to the network. We managed it in the end, but one of my reservations about SBS is that it wants to manage too much: I just want an Exchange server up and running. Perhaps I’ve got the wrong Microsoft product as I’m not managing a small office and therefore don’t need a server managing everything for me. I hope to be talking to Mr SBS at Microsoft this week ahead of writing my piece.
What I want is this: a functioning Exchange server. Tick, I’ve got that and I’m very happy about that. I also want a functioning home network, however, and that wasn’t very satisfactory. I think that’s because I’m a bit out of my depth with Windows networking, which is not what you’d call clear and easy to manage. Plus my network is mixed, with a Vista box, a Mac, an Airport Express and a NAS drive. At the moment, that’s a bit borked; I’ve got some fiddling to do with it.
One of Alex’s observations is that the wizards in SBS don’t make it easy to poke around under the hood and see what they’re actually doing. So trying to make it easy can also make it hard: wizards are great when they work, but when they don’t, you’re stuffed.
For example, one of the wizards sets up the router. It reported that it couldn’t open the ports it needed – even after we’d manually opened them (for the record, I’ve got a new router, the Linksys WAG160N, which is very configurable and tweakable).
Other wizards, though, do the job well. If your domain is parked with one of the three registrars SBS can manage, it does all the DNS changes for you, creating the necessary MX records for the Exchange server etc. That was great: suddenly automagically my Outlook Web Access was there for me to log into.
The conclusion is that you can, if you’re confident and knowledgeable, do this yourself. The question, though, is – is it worth it? The answer is “probably not” if you’re a sole trader. It’s expensive: you need new hardware for SBS 08 as it’s a 64-bit OS, so you can’t just buy an old box at a car boot sale as you could if you wanted to run an older version of SBS or a Linux server. As I’ve noted before, it wants 4GB of Ram, a 60GB partition (though it occupies less than that once up and running); and it bleats like a sheep if you don’t have a backup drive attached (note: it won’t back up to a NAS) so you’ve got to add a second hard drive to your server. Backup of course is essential, you’d be mad not to have that second drive, but it does add to the cost.
And there’s the cost of the software: it’s going to be around £600 in the UK with five users. Never mind the time you’ll spend getting it up and running and maintaining it. So unless you’re running a small business on an absolute shoestring, you’re better off handing it over to professionals, I think.
Having said that, there is a warm geeky glow of satisfaction, even though I haven’t entirely succeeded – yet. I’m mostly there and I’ve achieved what I wanted, which was to do my own email hosting and to prove to myself that I could do it.
I’ll be writing a piece about this for the forthcoming Guardian Enterprise supplement. You can read the first one here; there’s a piece about SBS 08 here.
My red chicken curry
One of my favourite Twitter people (“Tweeps”), is Julie Kirby, aka MrsFiddlesticks. Her life is pretty much the antithesis of mine: living in the country, married, children: she describes herseif as a free-range mum and downsizer. I love the snapshots of her life that her tweets provide; and she often makes me hungry by posting pictures of things like her homemade cakes.
She very kindly posted her recipe for marrow and bacon soup on her blog today when I asked her for it, so it seems only polite to post in return one of my made-up dishes that I’ve successfully fed to (ie not poisoned with) a few friends. I made it up, so bear with me. It feeds four.
Nom nom nom
Ingredients: a red onion, some garlic (I use about half a bulb), two chicken breasts (you could use cheaper thighs), small tin of coconut milk, small carton of coconut cream, quite a lot of creme fraiche (I use full fat of all of the above because it’s lower in carbs), Thai fish sauce, chili (I cheat and use the Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients jar stuff, a good teaspoon full, possibly a bit more); and lots of veg. I usually sling in a bunch of spring onions, a couple of red peppers, a leek and of course a couple of sticks of lemon grass, chopped as finely as you can be bothered. And some coriander, chopped.
Fry in some olive oil the chopped onions and garlic in a big heavy frying pan (I’ve got one of those big Le Creuset chaps) until they’re soft. Add the chicken, cut into bitesized chunks, turn up the heat a tiny bit and continue to fry until the chicken is pretty much cooked through.
Dump the small tin of coconut milk on top of it (tip: don’t keep this in the fridge, it solidifies), stir. Add coconut cream (I usually use pretty much all of a small carton) and dollops of creme fraiche as you go. Stir in chillis (either a couple of real ones chopped finely or a big teaspoon of the Waitrose ones in a jar). Add fish sauce (quite a lot) until it all tastes nice and you’ve got about half an inch of depth of sauce. It should look quite red.
Then add the veg and the lemongrass, turn up the heat a bit and let it go *blup* on the cooker for about 10 minutes until the veg are cooked as much as you like. I like ‘em crunchy so I don’t leave it very long. Chuck in the coriander at the very last minute.
It takes about half an hour from start to finish. Enjoy!
More geekery
The server journey continues. My domain has *finally* been transferred to my new registrar but SBS still reports that it can’t access the DNS settings. I suspect this is because I haven’t got them pointing at the registrar’s nameservers: if I do that, I break my existing email so I’m going to leave that until Alex, my tame geek friend who really knows what he’s doing, comes over on Saturday.
I’ve managed to get the server seeing both the Vista box and the MacBook Air and it can log into them and access their public folders. But I haven’t yet let the server take over DHCP and become the domain controller, because I’m a bit out of my depth with it. Again, it’s something I’m going to do with Alex on Saturday.
Alex seems to think that I’m doing OK and that I understand the concepts, so obviously I’m doing something right. However, I feel a bit uncertain about some of the network management that needs to be done and I’d like to do it with someone who really understands Windows networks sitting right next to me.
So next chapter: Saturday afternoon.
This is the point at which I draw the conclusion that really, it’s probably not worth it for an individual businessperson to manage this stuff for themselves. I’ve had a lot of help with expertise/kit/software but when you can buy Exchange hosting for (well, I’ve just seen that my registrar does it for $10 a month) buttons, why bother doing it yourself unless you really are into geeky challenges?
I’m into geeky challenges and I like succeeding at something, so I’d like to pull this off, even if it’s just proof-of-concept.
Dawn Porter’s Free Love on Channel 4
Honestly, I hardly know where to start on this. After having been more than somewhat annoyed at Jamie’s Ministry of Food earlier on Channel 4, in which the undeniably good-hearted Jamie Oliver ended up being the frontman for a film that poked fun at fat people who can’t cook and who were made to feel inadequate for our smug entertainment (yeah, I eat reasonably healthily; see my post here), next up was another programme that treated real people as freaks.
Dawn Porter (described here as “29, gorgeous and single” (Channel 4’s words, not mine, I’ll refrain from passing judgment) went off to find out about polyamory, swinging and free love.
This could have been an interesting programme; in fact, the subject matter is wide enough for a short series as there’s rather more to those very different paradigms (note: swinging is not polyamory; polyamory is not swinging) than you’d ever know from Porter’s film.
She seemed to focus exclusively on earnest Germans, which is hardly representative. And, IMHO, manipulated them and took them for a ride. There are loads of people all over the world who swing, who have relationships that don’t quite tick the Daily Mail boxes of Mum, Dad, two kids, a dog and a cat. Most of them aren’t ageing German hippies who live in communes. I expect you know one or two, though of course, because people who don’t necessarily conform do actually look quite normal, you might not know that.
Her choice of subjects were presented as freaks, with their oil rituals, their group meetings and their communal living. They were painfully honest with her about their ways of living, about their emotions, about their choices. And she exploited them. For me, the most telling part of the film was when a group meeting (btw, did you notice that these kind German people did everything – their meetings, their rituals – in English for her benefit and that of the camera crew?) decided that actually, they didn’t want her taking part in and filming something that’s private.
You could almost see her bottom lip quiver as she could see her film for Channel 4 going, if you’ll pardon the phrase, tits-up. She tried to divide and rule and asked other group members if one objection meant a veto. It looked like it did – she and her crew were not prepared to respect that: they wanted their orgy scene.
And they got it. We were not shown why the kind alternative earnest Gemans agreed in the end, but Channel 4 got its orgy scene. Tastefully lit, but nonetheless a scene of naked oiled writhing bodies. At the end of which she took away a universal truth: that all relationships carry risks. That you can fall out of love, you can be left by your lover, you can leave your lover, in any kind of relationship, whether it’s traditionally monogamous, whether it’s polyamorous, whether you’re a swinging couple.
One of the many disappointing things about this film was that it did the finger-wagging that’s de rigeur when the media explores something the Daily Mail won’t like. It concluded that non-monogamous relationships must by definition be about weirdos who can’t otherwise get a shag/a partner. One woman Porter spent a disproportionate amount of time talking to was clearly not happy with the situation. That’s sad, but she’s just one person. You cannot extrapolate from anecdote; anecdote is not evidence.
There’s not a lot of research on different lifestyles and I’m well aware, having just read Bad Science, Ben Goldacre’s book, that methodology is all, and that I’m at risk of cherrypicking and that what I’m about to link to might not bear close scientific scrutiny.
But in the absence of anything immediately available that I’m aware of, it will do for now (I’d be grateful for anything more up to date if anyone has it). There are some links here (this is a swinging website and it’s not really safe for work, though it’s text-heavy rather than scattered with pictures of naked babes).
For those at work or who don’t want to click the link, the headlines are that some reasonably recent research has found that couples who swing (ie have recreational sex with other people together) tend to be happier. The abstract of the research (safe for work) is here.
I’m sure you could quibble with the methodology: it’s probably a self-selecting group of people who are happy with that lifestyle choice and are up for talking about it. I’m sure it’s not a choice that’s right for many, even most, couples.
Polyamory too comes in all sorts of flavours. When Channel 4 or Five do a documentary such as this one which went out on Five in April 2007, you get people literally sleeping three in a bed. Well, that’s one or two experiences. Again, that’s an example, not something you can or should extrapolate from.
I’ll end by remarking that you never know what goes on in people’s relationships, nor should you judge. But if you’re a TV reporter, I know it’s hard to get across a vast, vast subject with as many paradigms as there are people in non-monogamous relationships, but please don’t manipulate people and treat them as freaks. It makes you look bad, not them.
Quick note to add that Beena (dommebell)’s post is here – she’s articulated her reservations brilliantly. Thanks, Beena!
Crap journalism
I’ve been muttering under my breath recently about the generally poor standard of writing I’ve been noting in pieces I end up subbing, both at the Guardian and at the Sunday Telegraph. I’m not about to come over all misty-eyed for some long-gone golden age of journalism, because there almost certainly wasn’t one.
However, when an email from this outfit saying pretty much what the link says, lands in my inbox suggesting that I might like to subscribe, I start to understand how the internet, which can be a powerful tool for good journalism and research, can also be a vector for really bad journalism.
For those who haven’t got the time or inclination to click the link, Intelligrate Media offers to deliver to me press releases and pre-written copy that I can cut and paste from (their words, not mine), edit or abridge at will.
I’m flabbergasted. Anyone in a hurry, or lazy, or who simply doesn’t have the intellectual or journalistic wherewithal, can use this and pass it off as journalism. It’s not: it’s what Nick Davies of the Guardian defined in his book, Flat Earth News as “churnalism”, ie the witless, brainless repeating of press releases and pretending it’s news.
I’d go further than that: it’s corrosive of decent journalism and if busy/inexperienced/desperate people subscribe to that kind of service, well, it undermines all of us in journalism. I often find myself defending my profession when people say “the papers are full of lies”. I point out the high standards demanded by, for example, the tabloids, before they run with a story about some Z-list celeb’s private life. We can discuss the ethics of that another time; suffice to say at this point that if you’re the reporter writing a piece about Joe Big Brother’s liking for white powder and prostitutes, preferably at the same time, you’d damn well better have several signed affadavits from people who’ve personally flogged Joe Big Brother the white powder and one or three of the commercial-sector companions.
So perhaps it’s “services” (I’d prefer “disservices”) such as Intelligrate Media that’s undermining the quality of writing I’m seeing. There are other reasons, too, but crap like that undermines us all.
Thinner
I love being a bit thinner. I’ve been laying off carbs for the past few months. The motivator was going on holiday to Spain with a bunch of my mates for a wedding; I was going to be sharing a villa with (among others) not one but two ex-boyfriends, plus three of the women in the villa are 10 years or more younger than I am. Not that anyone would point and laugh, they’re an excellent bunch of people, and the two exes are both really good friends, but still, it was time to shift the stone or so that had crept on over the past year or so.
Lizzy – the partner of one of the exes who was going to be in the villa, and who is a little bit older than I am – and I decided to share food diaries, and that’s been an excellent tool for me. Writing down what you eat focuses you on where you’re going wrong and what you’re doing right.
Anyway, I’m now a shade under eight and a half stone (that’s about 53kg or 118lbs), and I’m about a UK size 8 (US size 4); sometimes a 6 on the bottom, sometimes a 10 on top.
I hope it will stay off. I have pretty much reconfigured how I eat – and probably more importantly, how I shop and organise my meals. I make a point of planning my evening meals and shopping accordingly. That means that I don’t come home tired and hungry and end up diving into M&S and buying pasta or simply eating toast. If I know I’m going to be late from work, I make something the evening before that will feed me again the next day, precisely to avoid the tired-and-hungry syndrome. My repertoire isn’t hugely wide but it’s varied enough.
For me, the rules are simple. No stodge (or very rarely, anyway). That means no bread, no pasta, no rice, no biscuits, no puddings. Lots of meat, some eggs, a fair bit of dairy, veg, salad and loads of fruit. I’m big on apples at the moment, particularly crunchy jazz or pink lady apples. It helps that I don’t drink. The aim is simply to keep my sugar intake pretty low, and to make sure that my sugar comes from fruit, not fattening stuff like cakes. I also don’t really eat processed meals.
I haven’t turned into some kind of health nut – I’m perfectly happy to go out for a curry occasionally; and the reason I don’t drink is not through any kind of puritanism. I suffer from migraine and alcohol pretty much inevitably these days sets one off. It’s not worth it for me.
I’m still a sloth. You will not find me in the gym, nor am I likely to be yomping o’er hill and dale. I’m quite capable of staying out all night dancing. But I am a lot more careful about what I eat. And it feels good.
