Laura Hunter laments her iPod Nano battery meltdown.

Fist off, rat's patooties are up 3 7/8 this morning on the CBOE, so don't go selling them short!

I had a classic iPod, and it crapped out after about a year... it wouldn't hold a charge. Replacing it was a crowbar-and-soldering exercise but FOR ONLY $100 I COULD SEND IT BACK TO APPLE to have them put in a new one. I was going to dispose of the piece of crap with a hammer, but I sent it to Tom Dickson instead. Tom rocks.

And they did the same thing with the battery in the Mac Air... if you want a new battery, ya gotta send it back in. I'm throwing my black turtleneck in the trash.

Dave Kearns nailed it on this one. It's the best description of LDAP I've heard.

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/dir/2008/050508id2.html?nlhtident=ts_050708&nladname=050708security:identitymanagemental

I'll be hosting the Active Directory Disaster Recovery BOF (Birds-of-a-Feather) session at TechED this year. Some of the topics I hope to discuss include:

• Using risk analysis to drive AD DR planning
• Putting AD DR in the context of a business continuity plan
• Regulartory compliance and AD DR
• AD data recovery
• AD service recovery
• Changes in Windows Server 2008

And of course I want you all to bring your real-world AD DR war stories... those should be REALLY interesting!

I don't know the time and place yet, but as soon as I find out I'll post the information.

TechNet published my article about Active Directory backup and restore in Windows Server 2008. You can find it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc462796.aspx

I've been working on some PowerShell cmdlets, and I just recently migrated my dev laptop from XP Pro to WS08 x64 (so I can run Hyper-V, natch). All of sudden, my cmdlets weren't being registered, even though the build was working fine and installutil was running with no errors. A half hour of head scratching and a Google search later:

Caution:

The version of the InstallUtil program that you must use varies depending on whether you are installing on a 32-bit or 64-bit platform. To install 32-bit registry information, use: %systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe. To install 64-bit registry information, use: %systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe. Jeez. I feel like going all Nancy Kerrigan on the Framework team: "Whhhhhyyyyyyyy"

NetPro has a brand new website. It's hip, its cool, it's what's happenin'!

Usually, I find these corporate "re-branding" exercises a bit of a crock, but I have to say that I really like what our marketing guys have put together. Visually, the site is cleaner and a little more in your face than our old site... it comes across more like an ad in Wired magazine than the Fortune 500 annual report most software companies put on the web. The content is better organized too... I find it easier to navigate and easier to find things. Some people have griped about the shade of green we used (they refered to it as "Toxic Green"), but I don't get the complaint. For my eye, the green is noticable, but not eye-popping. Every time I see the bull photo though, I keep thinking of Paul Gleason's line in Breakfast Club: "Don't mess with the bull young man, you'll get the horns."

What do you think of the new website? Comments welcome.