George Washington on Science

I've stumbled across some wonderful quotes from our first President regarding the importance of science.

From his first State of the Union Address in 1790:

Nor am I less persuaded that you will agree with me in opinion that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

From his last State of the Union Address in 1796:

The assembly to which I address myself is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation.

The State of the Economy

A few hours ago, the Senate passed the stimulus package 61-37, largely along party lines. It will now go to conference committee to reconcile it with the version passed by the House. Lest anyone underestimate the magnitude of our current economic woes, here is a rather chilling chart published on the Speaker of the House's blog:

For anyone who is buying into the currently-circulating conservative meme that it was World War II and not the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression, take a look at this:

Sad News: R.I.P. Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan

• Ricardo Montalban passed away today in Los Angeles at the age of 88. No matter how outlandish the role, whether as Captain Kirk's genetically-enhanced nemesis Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Fantasy Island's enigmatic Mr. Roarke, or simply as a pitchman singing the praises of the "soft Corinthian leather" in the Chrysler Cordoba, Montalban always exuded class and panache.
• Patrick McGoohan escaped this world yesterday, also in Los Angeles, at the age of 80. First rising to stardom as secret agent John Drake in Danger Man, he went on to create and star in the iconic series The Prisoner. He would later win two Emmy awards for appearances in Columbo, and his performance as Longshanks was a highlight of Braveheart. Be seeing you, No. 6.
  

Video: Skewed Views of Science

So well put...

Majel Barrett Roddenberry Dead at 76

Full story at Yahoo! News.  Interestingly, she had just finished doing voice recordings for the ship's computer in the upcoming J.J. Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

Time Sinks

Assembler
Magic Pen

The Fantastic Contraption

Entourage Generational-Suffix Bug: Good News & Bad News

As recounted in an earlier post, we've encountered a lovely little bug in Entourage where users whose Display Name ends in a string which can be interpretted as a generational suffix (I, II, III, IV, Jr, Sr, with or without trailing periods) cannot be added to Exchange sharing permissions via Entourage.  PSS has just reported to me that there is a workaround.  I have verified that the workaround indeed works.   The downside is that the workaround requires that the user know the samAccountName of the user whom they wish to add to their sharing permissions.

The workaround is pretty straightforward. In the "Select User" dialog box, click the "Advanced..." button.  In the resulting "Advanced" dialog box, enter the domain name and login name (samAccountName) of the user to be added.

Sometimes Servers Just Need A Stern Talking-To

Here I am giving one of my Exchange servers a piece of my mind.

Photo by Ryan Starck

Fixing the "Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list" Error

This MS Exchange Team Blog article (as well as this follow-up) go into great detail about the history of this notorious error, but erroneously claims that it only occurs in muli-domain environments.  We have the issue here, and we have a single-domain forest.

The short version is that Exchange Server 2003 SP2 introduced changes in the security model for the delegate-setting process which, combined with updates on the client end, result in the following error when a user attempts to modify delegates:

The Delegates settings were not saved correctly. Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list. You do not have sufficient permission to perform this operation on this object.

This error does not occur for all mailbox, and we've found neither rhyme nor reason for when it does, but there is a fix.

• For Outlook 2003 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.
• For Outlook 2007 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.
  

Entourage Issues with the Office:mac 12.1.3 Update

First notice I saw about the issue was here:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/office_1213_update_breaks_sending_exchange_meeting_invitatio.html

 The reported issue is an error -17997 being generated when Entourage users attempt to send meeting invitations. I was unable to reproduce the issue in my own testing, but that was before the following two updates:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems.html

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems_part_2.html

 

It seems that the problem manifests if the Entourage identity contains POP3 and/or IMAP4 accounts in conjunction with the Exchange account, with the non-Exchange accounts added to the identity PRIOR to the Exchange account.  Both updates mention workarounds. MacBU is aware of the issue and is working on an update.

 

The two workarounds mentioned are:

•  Drag the message from the outbox to the drafts folder and sending it from their (a clumsy workaround at best)
  
• Recreate your Entourage identity from scratch, making sure to configure the Exchange account BEFORE configuring any non-Exchange accounts.  Please note that this will force re-synchronization of the local cache data, which can take a considerable amount of time for large mailboxes.  One way to minimize this would be to configure Entourage to only cache partial messages (In the account settings, Options tab, select “Partially receive messages over x KB”).