Microsoft tries to Think Different

I got an email from Microsoft today (Office Insider) that included an article about how to add a calendar to Outlook that would give you the March Madness schedule in Outlook as an example of publicly shared calendars.

Publicly shared calendars are nothing new, they’ve been around for years: Apple created the webcal URI to access iCalendar files using WebDAV (over HTTP) for iCal.

So I figured Microsoft probably wouldn’t have reinvented the wheel here and tried clicking the link in the article to see if it would fire up iCal.

Turns out that the URI in the link was very slightly different than a standard iCalendar, so instead of the normal “webcal://” it starts with “webcals://”, which interestingly enough tried to fire up Outlook (in my Windows virtual machine).

Luckily this URI isn’t yet associated with a particular app, so I was able to click on the “Choose an Application” button and pick the iCal application.

Once iCal is chosen, the dialog box shows both Microsoft Outlook and iCal:

After choosing the iCal application, and clicking “OK”, iCal fires up with a dialog asking you to enter the URL of the calendar you wish to subscribe to, with the URI from the web page showing:

Now clicking “Subscribe” of course doesn’t work, since iCal has no idea what to do with “webcals” as a URL.

So to fix this, you have to modify the URI to be either “webcal://” or “http://”  (turns out “https://” works as well).

So even though the URI is not quite the standard webcal one, it is possible to open as a web calendar with iCal, and the same trick works for Google Calendar. Just copy the URI from the link in the page (webcals://calendars.office.microsoft.com/pubcalstorage/9rc05lhz2204226/2011_NCAA_March_Madness_Calendar_Calendar.ics) by right clicking and copying the link:

Going to my Google calendar, I then click the little “Add” button at the bottom of the “Other Calendars” area, and choose “Add by URL”.

This brings up the dialog box that lets me add the calendar, and I paste in the URL I copied before, and just edit the first part to be “https”:

Since it’s already a public calendar, I didn’t check that box, although I’m thinking that makes it a public calendar on Google, which might make it easy to find with Google.  At any rate, now the calendar shows up for me both on iCal and Google (obviously it would work in Outlook as well had I followed the original link).

Project Managing my Career

I was talking to my friend George Ross the other day about the job search that we both unexpectedly find ourselves in, and it occurred to me that I haven’t been approaching my career management with the same level of commitment to planning that I have when managing projects and programs.

A while ago, I made the conscious decision to pursue program management as a way to round out my skills in heading my career into the domain of technical leadership. I’d spent most of my career as a developer with my referent power derived from keeping one step ahead on the technology curve.

In my early career, I had managers and mentors who saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, which was the ability to lead. Several managers tried to push me into leadership roles, and at first I pushed back, preferring to keep my head down, and learn as much as I could about everything that I could.

Well, you do that long enough, and those opportunities stop happening, so I found myself at a new place in my career where I actually understood the value of managing others. I’d finally realized that even if I was better than the people I managed, multiple people could get more done than I could as an individual. Even if they worked half as quickly as me, as long as there were enough of them, more work would get done and more quickly.

So understanding this, and meeting a few individuals who’d managed to make that transition from technical geek to technical leader, I set my sites on that CTO sort of role.

So I had an goal, and I had an inkling of an idea of how to get there, but still no formal plan. What occurred to me last night was that like any other goal, without a plan to get there, the path wanders, and you may never get there.

That said, I was conscious enough to know I needed to round my skills, and I did set my sight on some intermediate targets. First was to get some management experience, which was what led me to PwC and managing web development there.

The truth is, that I wandered a bit more in my career, not really making direct progress toward anything like the CTO role. I gathered a bit more experience as a technical architect, expanded my skills leading small teams, and learned a lot about being a consultant and managing expectations.  Still, without a plan time marched on.

Image via CrunchBase

I was exposed to solid project management at places like Cisco (which is probably the most project based organization I’ve ever worked at) and the value of true project management. It occurred to me that moving into the project management end of the process would round my skills in a way that being an architect would not. It would also round out my business and soft skills in ways that the more technical role would expose me to.

So having no idea what project management was, I talked to a few of my friends and heard about the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). From watching a few of the better PM’s that I knew go through this certification, I had no doubt that it was a challenging and as real a certification as any I’d come across.

I took a couple of PMP prep classes and studied as much as I could, in order to understand the best practices of project management. I began to understand things that I was doing right, and reasons for things I had not understood before (like what a critical path actually was).

Image via Wikipedia

During the “downturn”, I became more involved with expanding my skills through volunteering and continuous learning. I helped to form a non-profit aimed at getting people jobs, and learned a great deal about interpersonal networking (both virtual and physical).

Continuing that growth in leadership, I’ve joined the board of directors of the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter as Secretary and VP of Operations (officially starting on April 1st, 2011).

Now I’m feeling the skills are getting pretty rounded, and I still don’t have a real plan to get from here to there. So the first step in my plan is to write down that I need a plan. Next I think I’ll need a few good mentors to help me figure out a real plan ….

Where did my space go ?

The other day I got a notification from the Plesk control panel for Carticipate telling me that the user account was about to expire. I logged into Plesk only to find out that the disk on the VPS was full.

Now this was really confusing, since the entire Carticipate system consists of a web2py install, on Linux with a fairly small MySQL database, and the VPS had 20 gigabytes of disk space.

I looked around and found that there were three full backups each about 14Gb, with several incremental backups of a gig or so. Thinking this was the issue, I deleted all but the latest backup.

Well apparently, those backups are stored somewhere not on the server, so that made no difference to the space problem. So I did the next natural thing which was to look for big log files, clear out /tmp, and anything that might be causing the problem. I only managed to clear out a few megabytes of space.

I dug around some more and found a lot of files under the /root directory that seemed to be related to updating Plesk. Since that’s provided as part of my 1and1 VPS service, I called the support number to see whether they could help me figure out where my space had gone. Unfortunately, for the first time, they were not very helpful, suggesting that I needed to research and find out where the big files were on my system.

After some frustrating arguing with the support guy, where I pointed out that I couldn’t get support from Plesk, only they could, I finally gave up and went to my old stand by of Google.

First a quick search to find where the mysterious gigabytes of space were being consumed. First I did a quick “find” command with:

find . -size +20M -exec du -h {} ;

Going to a few of these folders and running “du -hs” gave me the folders that seemed to have a lot of files in them and were eating up a lot of space.

A few more searches on the Parallels site, and found a couple more references telling me that these were both OK to clean out.

The /root/psa folder is where Plesk was configured to download updates, and apparently it doesn’t clean out those folders after the update is successful.

The other folder is where all the dumps from the local backups get placed, and that was the primary problem area. The /var/lib/psa/dumps folder was over 14Gb of the 20Gb, so cleaning that out got me started again.

Looking at the dump directory, it appears to have daily dumps of all of the Plesk stuff going back forever, so this may happen again, but for now, my VPS backup is down to a much more reasonable 2Gb.

Version problems? To the Cloud !

Image via Wikipedia

I was on my way home from a business trip and wanted to print my boarding pass. Most hotels have a PC set up that is primarily for that purpose, and this one was no different.

The PC they provide is set up so that it wipes itself every time somebody logs in, which in theory protects you from somebody eavesdropping and/or stealing your information. The down side to this approach is that you’re stuck with whatever they decide is the right version of software to work with.

The problem (for me) came in because I was flying JetBlue. Now I love JetBlue, but they (for some unknown reason) use Flash in the page to print out your boarding pass.

You’d think this wouldn’t really be much of a problem, since I’m sure they probably have some sophisticated check that will catch if the browser doesn’t have Flash and redirect you.

… Except …

The PC did have Flash loaded, but the JetBlue page wanted a higher version installed than was on the machine. So the browser helpfully asked if I wanted to upgrade, which I said “yes” to, only to find that the generic login doesn’t have install permissions (surprise, surprise).

So I asked the desk to help, but they had even more locked down machines, so I figured I’d just have to punt.

Until I remembered that I had my Mac with me. I went to my room, ran through printing the boarding pass from the JetBlue site straight to PDF. Then I uploaded the PDF to my Google Docs.

Back down to the hotel computer, log into my Google Docs, open the PDF and presto – the boarding pass is printed !

Bottom line is that by relying on Google to connect me, I was able to get what I needed in spite of the software incompatibility. Once again I’m loving the cloud (and Google Apps).

How to Copy a SharePoint Site

I had a bit of a fire drill the other day when a SharePoint site that I had been using needed to be retired. I have moved content around before, but only lists and small numbers of documents, never an entire site.

After some research, and with help from my colleague James Robertson, I now know how to make a copy of a SharePoint site that includes the content on that site. This is useful if you are archiving a site, or need to create a working copy in order to do development and testing.

First of all, it appears that you must be a “Site Collection Admin” to do this task. If you don’t see the link to save the site to a template, you may need to request permissions from your SharePoint administrator.

Step 1 – Go to “Site Settings” from the “Site Actions” menu:

Step 2 – Click on the link that says “Save site as template”:

Step 3 – Name the template and check the “Include Content” check box:

Click the “OK” button

Step 4 – Use the new template by choosing “Create new Site”:

Step 5 – Name your new site and choose the template you created before from the “Select a Template” list (Click the “Custom” tab to see saved templates):

Step 6 – wait for the site to be created:

Step 7 – You should see the new site once it is created:

DONE – Now you have a complete clone of the site (including content, permissions, etc) as it was when the copy started.

Problems with connecting at a hotel …

When traveling and trying to use the hard wire at a hotel, you may find that the provided Ethernet cable won’t work. This is because hotels typically have a very outdated infrastructure and are still running at 10Mbps.

Most new computers are set with network speed set to auto detect, but this relies on the hardware being able to handle that detection, which older, cheaper network boxes aren’t able to do.

In the lower right corner of your screen, you should see your network icon that will look something like:

The network connection is the one that looks like a pair of computer screens ().

The ).

When you are connected to a hard-wire, the tray should look something like:

The icon for the network connection will flash as network activity occurs.

If you don’t see the icon for the Ethernet connection, right click on the one for the Wi-Fi to get the context menu and choose “Open Network Connections”:

This will bring you to the network connections, which will list all of the available network options that have been configured on your machine:

If the connection shows “Limited Connectivity” instead of “Connected”, you most likely don’t have an IP address.

Right clicking on the “Local Area Connection” (or whichever one is associated with your Ethernet card) will give you a similar context menu that should let you check your connection by choosing “Status”.

This will show you a more detailed status of the connection:

You can try clicking the “Repair” button to force the connection to restart, but this typically won’t work in the hotel scenario. So going back to our context menu for the Ethernet connection, choose “Properties”:

This will bring up the property sheet for the connection:

Click on the “Configure” button next to the adapter to get to the settings. This will bring up the properties:

Go to the “Advanced” tab to change the link speed to 10Mbps:

Click “OK” and the adapter should reset and you’ll be good to go.

Facebook Annoyances …

I’ve been busy, so I haven’t logged into Facebook for a while now. I ran into somebody who said to send them a friend request, so I pulled up my Facebook app on my iPhone and ran through the process of logging in there.

I hadn’t used that app for a really long time, and like most iPhone apps, you have to start over once it upgrades, so that didn’t surprise me.

What did catch me by surprise was what happened when I tried logging on from my Mac later that day. First thing that happened was I got an unfamiliar screen that said I had logged in from a location I hadn’t used before:

OK, fine – seems like they’re trying to protect me, so I guess I can deal with this – but why they think I’m logging in from a different location is a bit off. So I’m expecting some sort of confirmation of identity, which would be fine. So next comes the usual Captcha to make sure I’m not a machine:

I type in the phrase, and get to the next screen, where the first surprise happens, apparently to identify myself I’m going to have to recognize people tagged in photos:

I’m a little worried now, since I don’t spend a lot of time looking at photos from my friends, and I’ve seen a LOT of photos from the ones I do know that don’t really look like the person to begin with. But it looks like this is the only option.

So I start trying to identify the photos, and the very first one I see is a picture of a cow and calf … Hmm, this is going to be hard. Obviously none of my friends are cows, so it must be pulling from somebody’s picture album. Of course I only know about 20 people who might post a picture of their livestock, and probably the same number that might think a calf was cute enough to take a picture of.

So I skip that one, and try again – now I get a picture of somebody celebrating. It’s a picture of people in their 20′s, so I’m thinking either an old photo, or one of my younger friends, but I don’t recognize any of them. Two down and no luck. At this point I even try looking at photos on the iPhone (which for some reason still works), no luck, so this is skip number two ….

Next I get what is obviously some sort of a class picture from the 60′s or 70′s – I probably know this person, but how would I know who the picture belongs to ? So it goes, with all 7 pictures being people, places or things I don’t recognize.

Then the next annoyance: after failing, you have to wait an hour to retry, so I can’t even go back in to see if I might get more recognizable pictures.

The next time through I think I recognize one, but still no luck. OK, wait another hour.

Finally on the third try (the one where I started writing this post), I get lucky. Every picture that comes up is an actual person, and I recognize all but one. Luckily for me even the one that has more than one of my friends on it appears to have worked. And I’m back in …

And in this whole process, there is no link to get help, or alternative way to get past this process. What would you do if you had some sort of vision impairment.

FAIL – Facebook … you need to fix this.