HTC Apache??

31 07 2005

PocketPCThoughts has an article that allegedly shows the HTC Apache. This is apparently the CDMA version of the new HTC Wizard which is itself the replacement for the HTC Magician (iMate JAM). Phew!

All I can say is that I want one! A JAM sized Pocket PC Phone Edition device with EV-DO support, WiFi and Bluetooth…. outstanding. It doesn’t even look TOO ugly….

Link: The HTC Apache Revealed





Office Guns

28 07 2005

This site is absolutely hilarious!

A site dedicated to creating projectile weapons from common office stationery. Outstanding! Hours of fun for the whole family (office family that is). My favourite is the Super Maul with Laser Sight.

You have to check this site out. Nearly had me in hysterics!

Link: OfficeGuns-Guns Advanced – Super Maul





Been a bit quiet lately :-)

26 07 2005

You may have noticed that I\’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging front lately. I’ve been horrendously busy implementing a meta-directory for a client. This thing is an absolute beast – synchronising an SAP HR system with 3 (yes, 3!) Active Directories plus a bunch of other minor sync tasks. This makes for a hideously complex set of provisioning rules as you might imagine. We’ve been making use of Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server 2003 and been having some interesting experiences. More about this a bit later, I’m not quite up to talking about it yet. I will say that the product is really good and really frustrating all in one go! Really good in that it is incredibly easy to setup and get started and for simple attribute synchronisation between directories it’s great. The really hard yakka comes when you try to do something a little more advanced – like provision Exchange accounts for example. Now at this point you’re probably thinking “that’s sounds really easy. It should be able to do that” And I would agree with you. This is apparently one of it’s core functions. But do you think we can make it play nice. No! We’ve had to park the mailbox provisioning part of the project and come back to it later it’s just gotten too difficult. Now it’s probably something really simple that we’ve just gotten wrong somewhere and we’ll kick ourselves when we figure it out, but from research on the net it appears there’s an enourmous amount of confusion and pain around this very thing. Lot’s of posts with similar problems to ours… Oh well, we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully MS can come up with something that’ll help. The biggest problem is the shocking state of the documentation and examples around the product. MSDN is essentially useless when you’re trying to do more complex things with the product. The descriptions of the API functions are woefully inadequate and the API’s themselves are incredibly confusing. The CreateMailbox API call is overloaded with 6(!) slightly different calls and they all seem to do different things (but there’s nothing to say what those things are!). Sorry, don’t mean to rave on, but it’s hard going trying to decipher a product from the outside in :-)





Pocket PC Access to Sharepoint

15 07 2005

Now this is something I\’ve been wanting and thinking about for a long, long time…

Access to Sharepoint sites from a PDA that’s nicely rendered! Ian has made an awesome start and is working on a generic rendering interface for Sharepoint lists. Can’t wait.

Check it out here: www.wssdemo.com

Here is the link to Ian\’s post: Web Log

This page detects the OS type and redirects to a PDA friendly page that lists the contents of the site. Just a demo at this stage, but hey, this is huge!





CAML Query Builder V2 Revisted

2 07 2005

Since my original post on this topic a while back, I've been in contact with CAML girl about this project. It appears I misread the the description of the various modes that the CAML Query builder works in. I thought it required a component to be installed on the server for this to work. But this is not the case. There is a server component that you can install, but you can also work exclusively through web services mode using only the standard WSS web service. This is very cool. Nothing to install on the server unless you want to! Great!

Apologies to CAML Girl and the rest of the team. :-)

Link: CAML Query Builder V2