On the Exchange Team’s blog, an article has been posted about Exchange 2003 DirectPush. An interesting read for all those that need to implement it. They also explain why DirectPush only works over a cellular connection like GPRS and not Wi-Fi.

The thing is, a GPRS radio does not consume power when no data is being sent/received. That is not the case for a Wi-Fi connection. Having to keep the connection going for the heartbeats would drain the battery very rapidly.

I regularly use Pandora to listen to music at work. In Pandora, you create stations based on artists or song titles. That station will then play music of the same style. You can rate the songs that the station plays to finetune the selections.

Now, Pandora has teamed up with Slim Devices to integrate Pandora with the Squeezebox. The Squeezebox allows you to stream music from your pc to your stereo but also allows you to listen to Internet radio stations. Now, Pandora can be listened to as well. With the remote control, you can even rate songs that Pandora plays.

Looks interesting. Maybe I will even replace my Apple Airport Express with it!

Logparser is a great tool to parse logs in many formats. One of the things you can do with Logparser is extracting log entries from the Windows event logs based on certain parameters. The other day, I needed to extract some text from the description of system events with ID 5778. The description looks like:

'PCNAME' tried to determine its site by looking up its IP address ('10.10.10.10') in the Configuration\Sites\Subnets container in the DS. No subnet matched the IP address. Consider adding a subnet object for this IP address.

I want to extract the computername and IP address from each 5778 event and put that in a csv file. With Logparser, this is relatively easy:

logparser "SELECT DISTINCT extract_token(Message
,1,'\'') as name, extract_token(Message,3,'\'') as ip into logfile.csv FROM \\
server\System WHERE EventID=5778 ORDER BY ip ASC" -o:csv

In the above, extract_token is used to extract the computer name and ip address from each event description (between the single quotes).

Give Logparser a try, you will see that it can help in most (if not all) situations when you need to extract data from logs.

In the past, you could use Microsoft's certchk tool to disable certificate checking on a Pocket PC or SmartPhone. Sadly, this tool does not work with Windows Mobile 2005 devices.

I needed to turn off certificate checking on a QTek 9100. Thanks to this post, it was possible. With Total Commander/CE (freeware), I modified the registry as described in the post. I can now use the Pocket PC with test certificates.

By the way, you will also need to disable certificate checking when you use wildcard certificates because Windows Mobile 2005 does not support those.