Outlook 2010 + Social Connector + Security Zones

I've not seen many people explore Outlook 2010 and Internet Zones yet. I have a restricted Internet Security Zone so I can run a vulnerable version of Java for testing against specific sites on my main Windows 7 workstation. When loading Outlook 2010, I did find it useful to see a conversation history of people. The trouble was, I got useful information and then an annoying error message saying "check security settings" with no specifics.

I run in High Security for the Internet Zone so I was sure that the error was related to some component of Outlook hitting the Internet Zone. The trouble was finding the content and how it was being rendered. After looking for a bit, I had a dumb idea: Check IE History. Sure enough, I saw plenty of %AppData%\Local\Temp\{GUID}.html files in temp. My default cygwin less warned that it was a binary file. Saving unicode handling errors for another day, I used notepad to view that it was requesting res://C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\1033\\SocialConnectorRes.dll/GIF/#290.

I then loaded the HTML file in IE directly. As far as I can tell, the entire point of loading this page is to pull social network conversations and display a pretty loading page. Still not positive what this connector DLL is doing tbut I hope this helps point someone in the right direction.

Python + Flow-Tools

Getting Flow-Tools 0.68 working on a 64-bit platform was a bit of work. Then I actually wanted to develop a report so I wanted to install

http://www.splintered.net/sw/flow-tools/
http://www.icir.org/robin/flowtools/

I have a penchant for unmaintained software as I'm replacing ipaudit with something else.

Short Summary:

In flow-tools 0.68:

ftlib.h/ftlib.c -> s/u_int32_t/time_t in FlowTools
edit lib/Makefile -> AM_CFLAGS to include -fPIC
make clean
make

In pyflowtools:

python setup.py build_ext -I ~/src/flow-tools-0.68/lib -L ~/src/flow-tools-0.68/lib

Update: 5/7/2010:

Now looking at http://code.google.com/p/flow-tools/ for a maintained 64-bit clean version.

ftlib.h killed the unsigned int defs so I'm here's a working/lightly test patch:

--- pyflowtools-0.3/flowtools.c 2002-05-21 16:54:41.000000000 -0500
+++ pyflowtools-0.3.cmg/flowtools.c 2010-05-07 14:02:53.000000000 -0500
@@ -10,6 +10,11 @@

#define offset( x ) offsetof( struct fts3rec_offsets, x )

+typedef unsigned long long u_int64;
+typedef unsigned int u_int32;
+typedef unsigned short u_int16;
+typedef unsigned char u_int8;
+
/* Define flow attributes */

enum RecordAttrType {

Sometimes you do need elisp

Getting annoyed at incrementing a sid each time I wrote a snort rule. I realized I had forgotten almost all the elisp I knew.

(defun cmg:increment-number-at-point ()
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(let ((num (number-at-point))
(increment 1))
(re-search-backward "\\s-")
(forward-char 1)
(kill-word 1)
(insert (format "%d" (+ num increment))))))

New Years Resolution

My new years resolution is to get more of my media consolidated and get rid of most of my CD cases. To do this, I'm using EAC + mareo to extract to FLAC and MP3s using lame.

EAC was a bit frustrating because they have installed some ebay spyware in the bundle which Forefront dutifully is blocking. I went back to an older beta off CNET and they don't include that silliness anymore. FLAC still seems to be the right choice of lossless. I wish Apple and Microsoft would just adopt it.

I also am going to adopt GTD-style apps and find a system that works for me. Remember the Milk doesn't work well for me because I have to maintain too many lists to get what I can't work on out of my sight. If I have to scrub 12+ lists, I don't get the benefits of focus. Hiveminder is the next one on my todo but I don't like the braindump notation that much. Perhaps the command line tools will win me over.

My other goal is to finally get with the HD generation on TV watching. Currently, juggling the best mix of TV to get Tivo HD (p1), DVD (p1), Hulu (p1), NetFlix (p1), BluRay (p2-3) passed up the TV with a few devices.

Windows 7: Active Directory Users & Computers

I upgraded to Windows 7 and needed to find out how to manage my AD groups & computers again. I recalled it was something simple like adding the snap in to Windows XP but it had been 2+ years since I had performed the console setup.

1. Get RSAT for Windows 7. For whatever reason, Google does a poor job and Bing wants to give you the Vista versions. It's a hefty quarter-gig download
2. Run the installer.
3. Go to Control Panel -> Programs/Features -> Windows Features and turn on the parts of Remote Server administration tools you need (I had to ask people that did this for a living and read the documentation)
   
4. Go into the mmc console and enable the newly enabled snap-ins
   

Now, my OU administrator can create a new group again!

runas /env /profile /user:domain\!ouadmin "C:\windows\syswow64\mmc.exe c:\ad\AD-Tools.msc"

Annoyance: Windows Media

As part of Windows 7, I played with importing a CD. Midway though, I remembered "Yuck!, I remember they import as WMA by default" and swtiched the preferences. Now, in album mode, if you sort by Album name, the WMA criteria is used as a sorting criteria rather than the album name. I guess this works if you've accidentally imported things twice in two different formats but not what I wanted.

Upgrade Notes to OS X 10.6

Upgrading to OS X 10.6 was one of the more difficult upgrades I've done on the mac. I have a macbook air so it was time to dig out my portable DVD player that is nearly useless since it consumes the sole port on the device. Pull it out from my laptop back and realize that the USB connector has been twisted to death and will only power up but not read the drive. Go to borrow one from the office next door and the shielding on that one is nearly toast as well. Fortunately, it works so the DVD finally gets recognized.

Here are my upgrade Notes:

1. Decrypted Internal HD from PGP Disk
2. Ran Mac PGP Uninstall
3. Clicked Install of OS X 10.6 DVD; was told cannot install OS X to Macintosh HD because it was not a bootable partition.
4. Saw Resize hint on macrumors [link]; Tried resizing and failed.
5. Tried Disk Utility in 10.5 and did repair permissions; no real errors.
6. Booted off 10.6 DVD and ran Disk Utility. Found errors and corrected. I probably should have clean booted off disk to start with.
7. Booted into 10.5 off HD; Ran 10.6 Upgrade DVD again; Still Failed
8. Resized Partition down 5G
9. Ran installer again. Success!
10. Resized Drive back in 10.6
11. Encrypted using FileVault while waiting for new PGP release.
    

Net Result: 7G more on my disk! On my MacBook Air, that's 100% more free space.