Category: Software

Exchange 2013 Upgrade – Part 1

Greg

[sc:software-category ]Exchange 2013 came out late last year and I haven’t had a chance to install it until recently.

I have to admit I just kind of jump feet first in to the upgrade, spun up a Windows Server 2012 VM, assigned some RAM and Disk space and mounted the cd image.

The setup is pretty straight forward from there, a few pre-requisites that you have to manually install (the UC runtime and the Filter Pack) but other than that the setup program does the rest.

Once installed Microsoft has continued down its “Don’t provide GUI tools” path and there is basically no GUI for Exchange Server management.  Instead everything is done through the web UI, which isn’t as robust as the old Windows GUI was.

After poking around a bit I decided to move an admin account from 2010 to 2013, the migration process was straight forward and I logged in to OWA for the admin account.  The first thing I noticed was the fact that it was still the 2010 OWA interface.  After poking around a bit I found a setting that indicated which version to use, but it was read only and I could not alter it.

Doing some research on the net turned up a couple of interesting things:

  • The Exchange 2013 documentation is well… let’s call it thin.  Many of the pages are simply blank and others don’t contain nearly enough information yet.
  • The Exchange Server Deployment Assistant has only just been released and only support new installs, no upgrades so it’s not much help really.
  • Exchange 2013 co-existence with 2007 and 2010 is not yet supported, Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) which is supposed to be released by end of Q1 will bring this support.

And that’s when I stepped back and released I was in quick sand.  The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any issue with leaving 2013 in place at the moment.  2010 is running along just fine and mail is flowing to the admin mailbox I moved over as well.

It does kind of make me wonder why Microsoft released 2013 so early when it’s clearly not yet ready for the majority of deployments, but presumably there was pressure to get it out to support new clients moving from other platforms and to support their hosted hybrid implementations.

CU1 was released last week and I’ve done the install but the lack of documentation for co-existence is a real problem, I’ll post part 2 of the upgrade once the deployment assistant is updated (unless I get adventurous again and just give it a go again ;).

Opera and WebKit

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:software-category ]Opera is moving to WebKit but the question is… is it a good thing?

I’ve used Opera for a long time, in fact I actually bought it way back before it was free software.  With the announcement that they will be discontinuing Presto (their HTML engine) and moving to WebKit a basic question comes up… is Opera still Opera without Presto?

Obviously Opera is more than Presto, the UI Opera has created is by far the best out of the box experience of any of the major browsers.  As long as they can maintain the UI when they swap out Presto then I think it will be successful.  However there are lots of pitfalls that may crop up.  Dragonfly, the developers tool built-in to Opera is an amazing tool that’s made my life quite a bit easier over the years.  Will Dragonfly work with the new renderer and JavaScript engine?  We’ll have to wait to see about that.

On a bigger picture kind of view, the loss of Presto is a pretty big thing.  There were really only 4 major rendering engine’s in general use, Trident (IE), WebKit (Chrome, Safari, etc.), Gecko (Firefox) and Presto.  With the loss of Presto that leaves only 3.  The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ll lose another one for quite a while, Microsoft is firmly behind Trident and is actively moving it forward.  Mozilla simply won’t move from Gecko and they have the money (for now) and developers behind it.  While WebKit is the darling of the industry at the moment.

The next to go will most likely be Gecko, with Firefox loosing market share to Chrome and Mozilla’s reliance on money from Google, it seems unlikely they can hold out for the long-term.  Google will eventually get enough market share with Chrome they don’t need Firefox anymore and will start pulling back their funding.  That would leave just two and it would be Microsoft against EVERYONE else.  Of course, unlike Opera, Mozilla’s will be a slow slide down to oblivion so it won’t happen soon, but maybe within the next 5-10 years (check back then to see if I’m right or not ;).

Of course Microsoft could do a 180 and dump Trident, and they have done weirder things in the past (can anyone say Sidekick?), but that doesn’t seem very likely.

Overall I think it’s a big loss for the Internet but there’s not much we can do about it.  Maybe Opera will open source Presto once they switch over to WebKit, but that doesn’t seem likely, it would just encourage someone to build more competition to Opera.

 

Even More WordPress Plugins

Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first three were:

  1. Happy 1st Birthday JumbleCat! AKA WordPress Plugins!
  2. Total Backup for WordPress
  3. Some More WordPress Plugins

Since then I’ve added quite a few more to JumbleCat.

After The Deadline for Comments

This plugin allows your users to use After the Deadline when writing comments, a nice touch that hopefully improves the quality of the writing!

Automatic Updates/WP Updates Notifier

I’m combining these two as I’ll probably disable WP Updates Notifier soon but I think it’s worth a mention if you don’t want to use Automatic Updates.

First off Automatic Updates does pretty much what it says, when an update to either the WP Core, plugin or theme is available, it automatically installs it.  You can select which of the three you want to do and it sends you a nice little e-mail when it runs so you know something has changed on your site.

Of course for many premium sites that have lots of visitors this may not be the best thing to do as updates can sometimes break things.  In this case I highly recommend WP Updates Notifier as it will send you an e-mail when an update is available, letting you test it before you go ahead and update your production site 🙂

Highlight Search Terms

Another plugin that is aptly named.  If a user searches your site, this plugin highlights the search terms that were found on the page.

PHP Server Info

Anyone who’s run a web server with PHP or done any kind of PHP development knows that php_info() is pretty much a required part debugging.  This plugin adds a menu item to the WordPress admin interface that show’s you the output and nice and clean fashion.

Rich Text Editor For Comments

Much like After the Deadline for Comments, this plugin enhances your users commenting life with the same kind of rich editor found when creating posts etc.   This plugin seems to have disappeared from WordPress.org and the author’s site doesn’t seem to be available right now either.

Always Remember Me

This is a new plugin by Ozh who created the awesome “Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu“.  It auto checks the “Remember Me” during login and extends the remembered timeframe from 2 weeks to 1 year.

Delete Me

This plugin allows a user to delete themselves.  Simple and to the point.

Inactive User Deleter

Finally this plugin allows you to search for users based on various criteria and then delete them in bulk.  Useful if you have a lot of spam users that register.

 

WordPress 3.5 Upgrade

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:wordpress-category ]So WordPress 3.5 was finally released after a few delays and while it doesn’t bring anything new that I need, it does have all the various fixes in it so upgrading is always a high priority on my list.

First things first, WordPress has an amazing update process that’s been rock solid in the past but I’m still paranoid (as everyone should be 😉 and execute a full backup of my site using Total Backup.  I’ve used Total Backup for a while and it’s good, however the lack of scheduling is starting to make me think of looking for another solution (or more likely just adding the functionality myself).

Once the backup was done, the standard update process executed without issue and 3.5 installed.  Everything looked good.

The next day I was editing a post and when to change the scheduled publish time and instead of the time/date selector appearing, nothing happened when I clicked on the “Edit” link.

I have a local installation of WordPress I use to test out new plugins and themes and it wasn’t an issue on that install.

I disabled pretty much all my plugins and that didn’t help.

I pulled down the backup and did a binary file comparison (using Beyond Compare, an awesome app!) between my test site, the production site and the WordPress 3.5 core files, nothing of note.

After some more poking around I finally had a flash of inspiration and realized my test site doesn’t use the same theme as I use on JumbleCat (Arjuna X) so I enabled it.  Eureka!  The test site was broken in the same way.

I went to the theme authors site but the support area they used to have is gone.  Doing a quick search brought me here, which explains that theme uses an old version of the jQuery UI library that conflicts with WordPress 3.5.

The thread suggests replacing the 1.8.10 version of the file with the 1.9.2 version but keeping the original file name.  I don’t like that solution as it could cause other issues with other plugins so instead I did the following:

  • Download version 1.9.2 of jQuery-UI from http://jqueryui.com/
  • Place the new jQuery-UI file in arjuna-x/lib
  • Edited arjuna-x/functions.php, update the reference for jquery-ui-1.8.10 to 1.9.2 version

This makes it all nice and clean and most importantly, functional.

 

Microsoft Surface Pre-Order Update

Greg

[sc:hardware-category ]In a previous post I detailed the ordeal I went through with my pre-order of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet.  At the end of that post I mentioned I was still waiting for my escalation on the $50 promo code and now I can finally relate the rest of the story.

Just as a quick refresher, I pre-order my Surface on Oct 16, 2012 for delivery by the 26.  It didn’t arrive until Oct 30 and Microsoft was dishing out $50 promo codes to those that didn’t receive their orders on the 26th.  I had two problems with the promo code, first it meant I had to purchase something to get it and second it really wasn’t enough.

On the Monday when I was still waiting for the Surface to arrive I had requested an escalation on the promo code and was told I would expect back an answer from their tier 3 group within 72 hours.  I didn’t receive anything and I called in again on the Thursday to follow-up.  Apparently they had sent out an e-mail to me on Wednesday afternoon but it didn’t get to my inbox.

They sent a follow-up e-mail and after a few more days of back and forth on Monday Nov. 5th they offered me a $200 rebate on the purchase.

I probably could have held out for more, but I have to admit the person from tier 3 support was very good and didn’t try to generate false sympathy or any other tricks to get me to cave to the $50 promo code so I decided it satisfied all the issue I had and accepted it.

I have to say that the pre-order experience was terrible and the support after the missed date was worse.  However at the end of the day I did receive the table a few days late but managed to get an almost %40 discount on it so it all worked out.

Will I be buying a pre-order from the Microsoft Store again?  I don’t think so, as there is a new Microsoft store opening soon close to me.