The Utah public library system has a nice way to borrow digital books, and yes, there are relatively new titles available.  If you have a 9 digit library card number, you'll need the public access code.  Every website that mentions it says you have to call the library to get it, like it's some sort of secret.  Anyway, for anyone who is searching for it online, here is the one for Lehi:

U2P84043

So, the 14 digit full number would be the prefix above plus your 9 digit library card number.

Enjoy.

Also, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet the other cities in Utah use a similar format (e.g. Springville might be U2P84663, but I can't say for sure).

I recently got into beefing up my home theater, and I got some Pro Maestro banana plugs from Sewell Direct.  It looks like they've come out with a new line of silverback banana plugs that have two screws to maintain the electrical signal and make them more snug.  Here's a cool video:

These instructions have been verified for Exchange 2003.

1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in
2. Under the View menu, choose Advanced Features.  This will give you the Security tab when you open the Distribution List's properties
3. Find the Distribution List, right-click, and choose Properties.
4. Select the Security tab.
5. Highlight the user/group you want to grant "send as" permissions to.
6. In the permissions box below, make sure Send As is checked.
7. Click OK.

For screenshots, visit this great article:  http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Sending-As.html

There are a lot of forum threads that talk about admin permissions in Active Directory, but it took me a while to figure this one out.  Here is what I needed to do.  At my company, we have a team of programmers that need Administrative rights on several servers, but we don't really want them to be Domain Admins.  To give these guys rights, I had to:

1. Log into a Domain Controller.
2. Open Active Directory Users & Groups.
3. Expand the domain node.
4. Click on Computers.
5. Right-click on the server machine and click Manage (this opens the Computer Management console).
6. Go to System Tools -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups.
7. Right-click on Administrators, click Add to Group.
8. Click Add and add your group or user (e.g. YOURDOMAIN\Programmers).

A few days before Labor Day, CityDeals.com, a popular deals website (based in Utah) shut its doors abruptly.  Real answers are hard to find, but the word on the street is that CityDeals has been suffering from cash crunch, mismanagement, and a host of other problems which resulted in them not being able to pay some merchants their share of revenue from gift certificate sales.  Understandably, merchants are upset as well as the consumers who bought the vouchers.  

In the few days since the news broke, the knee-jerk reaction has been for merchants to stop accepting the certificates.  This has left consumers very disgruntled.  I think this is a fatal mistake for these businesses.  Of course, they have a right to be upset and to sue CityDeals to get their money.  However, refusing to accept previously purchased certificates leaves a bad taste in consumers' mouths.  Consumers can't retaliate against CityDeals, so the only one to take it out on is the merchant itself.  I bought a couple of certificates to Marley's, a gourmet slider joint in the Harley Davidson store in Lindon, Utah.  I got them 6 months ago.  I decided to call them today to see if they accept coupons anymore, and they gave me a quick and emphatic NO.  Really?  CityDeals really didn't pay you for certificates purchased 6 months ago?  I have to believe they did, and if so, then this is outright thievery.  

I understand the merchant wanting to resist giving away their merchandise.  However, they are giving away future business and risking a whole lot of negative buzz, especially online since the CityDeals crowd is pretty social media savvy.

What merchants should do about CityDeals

Merchants should accept coupons and do what they can to recover revenue from CityDeals through legal actions or by negotiating with those that are trying to scoop up what remains of that company.  The fact of the matter is that the customers bought the coupons, which were honored by the merchants at the time of purchase.  The merchants were using CityDeals as a marketing venture to gain more exposure.  They certainly got it since coupons were purchased.  It would be a shame if they turned it into negative marketing by refusing the coupons.  

By denying a certificate, they are:

1. Saying that all they care about is the few bucks they can make or lose off of a stranger, instead of caring about the satisfaction of a hopefully repeating customer.
2. Stealing from the customer, since they paid for their service or product in advance.
3. Throwing a tantrum over their poor decision (in hindsight) of trusting a start-up to promote their business.  There is fundamentally no difference between paying a PR firm to promote your business and paying CityDeals to promote your products or services through certificates.

What consumers should do (to be nice)

While consumers should be able to redeem their certificates, it might do some good if they didn't try to redeem all their certificates immediately, similar to a rush on a bank.  If a merchant heavily pushed their CityDeals campaign, a rush of certificates could possibly push some out of business or cause them to lay employees off.  If a consumer has faith in their merchant to continue to accept previously purchased coupons, then they could be nice and just use them as they were originally planning to (date nights for the next month) instead of rushing down to Baskin Robbins and buying $60 worth of ice cream in one shot.

It looks like there is a list being built at jabberman.com/citydeals-merchants that shows which merchants are currently accepting previously purchased CityDeals certificates and which ones aren't.

UPDATE:  According to this article at ksl.com, CityDeals stopped paying merchants in July 2011, which means that any certificate purchased before then was paid up.  So, if the merchant refuses to honor the certificate, then the merchant is flat out stealing from the consumer.

When IIS 7.5 came out, it seemed like Microsoft finally got its act together and made FTP support fully functional and easy to setup.  That assumption was dead wrong.  

The menus and wizards make it seem like a cinch to get an FTP site running, but I banged my head against the wall today trying to get Passive mode working with our firewall.  After following several tutorials, I still could not get a variety of FTP clients to be able to list the contents of a directory.

However, after literally 10 minutes, I got an FTP site working swimmingly using FileZilla Server.  

I love you Microsoft, but I don't like your FTP solution.

According to this article, Amazon will start selling e-books in Germany.  I assume those books will be in German.  This is apparently the third large market the Kindle has entered (U.S., U.K., and now Germany).  I realize that the powers that be at Amazon need to make prudent business decisions, but I personally can't wait until they start publishing content in Russian.  

I would love to be able to take a good Russian novel with me on an airplane, but print books are also difficult to find--plus carrying one is a pain as well, considering how thick some of them are anyway.

I recently had to retrieve members of an Active Directory group so that I could allow users of my software to select groups of Employees to send email to. After searching around and trying to get my LDAP query right, I came up with the following solution:

        public List GetGroupMemberNames(string groupName, bool descendRecursively)
        {
            List names = new List();
            DirectoryEntry root = new DirectoryEntry(@"LDAP://CN=" + groupName + ",CN=Users,DC=mydomain,DC=com");
            object members = root.Invoke("Members", null);
            foreach (object member in (IEnumerable)members)
            {
                // x.Properties["key"] can return a simple object or a PropertyValueCollection.  See implementation below.
                string objectCategory = ActiveDirectory.GetProperty(x.Properties["objectCategory"]);
                string samAccountName = ActiveDirectory.GetProperty(x.Properties["sAMAccountName"]);

                if (Regex.IsMatch(objectCategory, @"CN=Group") && recursive)
                {
                    // recursively descend to get user names from the discovered group
                    List childNames = GetGroupMemberNames(samAccountName, descendRecursively);
                    names.AddRange(childNames);
                }
                else
                {
                    names.Add(samAccountName);
                }
            }

            return names;
        }



        // Returns the ToString() of the object
        // Or, if the object is of type PropertyValueCollection, it returns a comma-separated list of the ToString()
        // of each object
        private static string GetProperty(object obj)
        {
            string str = string.Empty;

            if (obj is PropertyValueCollection)
            {
                foreach (object child in ((PropertyValueCollection)obj))
                {
                    string tempStr = GetProperty(child);
                    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(tempStr))
                    {
                        str += (string.IsNullOrEmpty(str) ? "" : ",") + tempStr;
                    }
                }
            }
            else if (obj != null)
            {
                str = obj.ToString();
            }

            return str;
        }

This code requires that the account under which it is running has adequate permissions to perform the LDAP query in Active Directory. One more thing, the following is a non-comprehensive list of keys you can look for in x.Properties above:

objectCategory,

sAMAccountName,

userPrincipalName,

displayName,

dn,

cn,

givenname,

homedrive,

profilepath,

sn,

objectClass,

name,

description,

mail

Here is a more exhaustive list of Active Directory object attributes.

So, I got an email today inviting me to come back to Audible and get a free audiobook download. I clicked on their ad and tried my old Audible login (I had cancelled my account a while ago because I just didn't buy audiobooks). My usual login didn't work, so I used the "forgot password" link. When I got the email, I clicked on the "click here" link and reset my password. I used a quickie 6 character password and was happy to see the "your password has been reset" message.

Next, I tried to login, but it said my password was incorrect. Hmmm, I supposed I might have typed it in wrong, so I went through the same process again (starting with the Audible email). I used the same 6 character password and did the old watch-every-keystroke-as-I-type. Again, I got the message "your password has been reset". I tried logging in, but it still said my password was incorrect. I was still hungry for a free audiobook, so I decided to try one more time. The third time through, I noticed the bullet list below the password text boxes saying that it needed to be 8 characters or more in length. Ok, being a programmer, I can understand missing some error checking code that makes sure the contents of a text box conform to a certain format. Fine, fine. But I can also understand the gravity of making such a stupid mistake on a password reset form of all places! So I used a longer password. Finally, I was able to login.

This is when I noticed the title graphic with the words "Audible, an Amazon company". Suddenly, a little birdie on my shoulder whispered the thought "maybe you just reset your Amazon password too". Sure enough, I had changed it to some obscure throw-away password that I wasn't really planning on using, since all I wanted from Audible was a free audiobook. Then I felt a little embarrassed, since I surely must have missed the big, ugly Amazon logo somewhere during the password reset process. So I went through it again. No Amazon logo. The only hint that you were changing your Amazon password was the following text (it was in bold, but on the far right of the screen so I didn't see it): Remember, you'll also use this new password on Amazon.com

Since I use my Amazon account a lot, I wanted to change my password back, so I went to Amazon and reset my password. Interestingly, while Audible required the 8 character minimum, Amazon.com did not, even though they show exactly the same password requirements in a bulleted list on each site.

While there is a lot to love about Amazon, it makes me wonder if my credit card information is safe with a company that gives so little TLC to their password management system.

This might seem weird to some, but I would love to have a Kindle app available on my Samsung TV.  The Samsung apps include things like Netflix, HuluPlus, Vudu, etc., but here's why a Kindle app would be great.  Having a new baby in the house requires me to take my turn walking him around at night while my wife gets some sleep.  It would be awesome to be able to walk around and read my latest book on the flat screen instead of trying to hold a Kindle, iPad or iPhone.