Do you find every meeting appointment you receive finds it greedy little butt taking up space on your calendar annoying? So did we and also the guy who posted the question on Experts Exchange.

I wrote this little script that does the trick of terminating them, permanently. You have to comment out the wscript lines and uncomment the item.delete line after you have tested it.

‘Delete Tentative Appts created by someone else
‘That I haven‘t accepted
Set app = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)
name = app.Session.CurrentUser.name
Set nameSpace = app.Application.GetNamespace(”MAPI”)
Set folder = nameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(9) ‘folder path
Set items = folder.items
for each item in items
    if (item.BusyStatus = 1) then
        if(item.Organizer = name) Then
                        ‘Do nothing in this case since the tenative was created by the current user
                else
                        if(item.ResponseStatus=2) then
                                wscript.echo “Name: ” + name
                                wscript.echo item.Organizer
                                wscript.echo item.ResponseStatus
                                ‘item.delete
                        end if
                end if
    end if
next

I’ve been AFB (Away From Blog) for a bit now. We closed on our new home on June 12th. The time since then have been hectic with the movers, moving too much our self, cleaning, moving, removing, decorating, hanging pictures, painting, etc, etc, etc…

We are all pretty much in agreement, this is the last move! We finally have a basement and I plan on finishing myself for relaxation and just the enjoyment of creating something real, not just code!

So now I just have work, work, school, and family to eat up my time!

This is way cool. Not as good as that Hispanic one where I don’t have a clue what they were saying, but still cool!

Found this today while discussing malware and how the kids are destroying home networks from sites such as limeware. The discussion then progressed to overall web security for kids and how a lot of them are clueless about web security.

America’s Digital Goddess has provided this neat checker to test out how conscious your kid is about safety.

I’ve had the BlackBerry 8800 for over nine months now from AT&T. Overall, a far better device than an 8700. That’s as it should be as it is a newer model.

I love this device! It is the best phone and mobile PIM I’ve ever had. The GPS adds a lot of gravy to the mix too. Since I’ve gotten it, I’ve discontinued using an organizer. I do it all using Outlook and BlackBerry. Notes during a phone call? BlackBerry. Appointments? BlackBerry. To do list? BlackBerry. Recording work out information? BlackBerry.

It is just an awesome device for GTD.

Are there some gotchas? Of course. For instance, don’t run every single GPS app at once with other applications open too. It burns battery juice like crazy then. Or the fact that you have to remove the battery sometimes. I bought a case the OtterBox Defender and its awesome! Until you need to take the battery out of your BlackBerry. Then you have to dismantle the case too. Speaker quality is something that just plain sucks. Although, no phone has had a speaker that I like yet. The Bold is supposed to fix this.

In the end, would I buy it again? Absolutely.

Monday was Memorial Day. Having lost three friends and subordinate soldiers over the years to combat casualties, it’s a tough day sometimes. I know that they loved what they were doing and I try to honor them instead of being sad that they are gone. It’s really what they would want.

Then on Tuesday, I had to let another old friend go, this one is electric, but still we’ve been together a long time! My high speed, formerly top of the line DVD player had to be put out to pasture. Its been through multiple remotes, countless lube jobs on the moving parts, but finally the years had taken their toll. It was breaking down, refusing to play some discs at all, and sputtering out and stalling on the slightest smudges or dust on the disc.

I like to keep my discs in pristine conditions and so does my wife. My daughter, well, about to put my discs off limits to her as I find them lying just anywhere. Not to mention the discs we receive through Netflix that are scratched, damaged, dirty, and always full of oily finger prints. Probably the newest vector of diseases in America too!

So, good bye old friend, have fun in the pasture. You were ahead of your time in the features you had as a standard, and still put any player under $100 today to shame. Here’s to you!

Blogging is difficult when you are hitting the grindstone around 19 hours a day! With commute times, day job, night job, and family, blogging just has lost out lately. Especially considering I’ve got two software projects still in the batter phase!

One of the things that have caught my eye lately is the EU’s fine on Microsoft. I’ve blogged about that before and I firmly believe Microsoft should leave Europe alone. I know that is a difficult move, but they are picking on more and more international companies, primarily American, and they need a swift kick across the brain to get them to get real. The EU stinks, pure and simple IMHO.

Also on one of my front burners is Visual Studio 2008. I love this new release and hope to switch over all my projects during the next few months. Don’t know if that is realistic as the BlackBerry plugins are so far for VS2005 only. In addition to VS2008, I also went for Expression Studio. The studio part makes me wonder as its four separate products that all are simular. I’ve only installed Blend so far (toying around with Silverlight). A studio to me is one place where you can do it all, like VS. But, I can work with it!

Silverlight is just so cool. I’m just not sure for my companies to roll out SilverLight pages yet. Sure, some smattering of it here and there as we have a large *nix user base that can’t use it yet. Of course, we also don’t have Flash anywhere so maybe, its just not for us.

When writing code, any code, you have always have to wary of the enemy. Sometimes the enemy is bugs in your code. And we all know what havoc that can cause, but they are usually benign. Usually.

When the code in question is running a website, your enemy is the legions of crackers (they are commonly misidentified as hackers) that are trying to deface popular sites, or high ranking business sites. Over the past few weeks, Russian crackers have been trying to deface the site of my best client. At least they appear to be Russian. They have attacked literally every single piece of code that accepts variables. Every one of them. So far, we are winning. Even to the tune that their last attempt happened a week ago.

I have no false feelings of joy and success that we won this round. They will be back. Back with better tactics, new exploits to search for, new ways of bringing pain. For the wild legions of crackers have moved on to easier prey. The last few years have told me only one thing is certain. That they will be back sooner, rather than later.

Like any General watching his attackers retreat in defeat, my feelings are how can we improve our defenses for the next attack. An attack that will be stronger, faster, more cunning, aiming to not be noticed as soon, how to beat us. While we plan for the next encounter, I am setting my alarms to be notified earlier. They had hammered us with 1 million unsuccessful attempts before it hit our radar. That is 20 times too much for failed attempts. Too low and we get false positives, but 1 million makes me nervous. We will react faster next time. And we are reviewing 100% of the code base to hopefully ensure we have all the gates shut.

I ordered Mobylo!’s Empower HTML Mail Viewer (not deserving of a link thus far) after reading some good comments of it. So after reviewing their site, I ordered it. Well my order is on hold for who knows how long. The site said 15 minutes, but now, hours later, still no Empower. I also ordered Sun Tzu - The Art of War as well. Wonder what he would say about this situation.

More to follow!

EDIT

Ok, they sent the order out two days later. I know, glitches can happen sometimes. When you are a first time customer, glitches are hard to ignore because to you, its the established norm.

One of our companies has a hugely distributed staff. One of their biggest problems has been collaborating with each other to get things done. Email had been the biggest workhorse in the battle, but that adds a ton of complexity to the situation. There were so many multiple versions of documents it took a lot of time to sort out the changes. Read the complete article »