If you've got an application that sends messages via your Exchange 2010 server, using SMTP, you might've noticed that things have slowed down a bit. The reason for this is because the Exchange 2010 receive connectors have a “MaxAcknowledgementDelay” setting, that will inform you if the delivery is successful, within a certain time frame. If the timelimit is hit, it then acks the submission. To disable this you can set your receive connector not to use this feature:

If you're having fun with a pre-2007 version of Outlook, or any non-Microsoft product trying to talk MAPI to an Exchange 2010 server you might be interested in knowing that the defaults have now changed in the new version, and it expects traffic to be encrypted. This caught us out today as we'd only tested Outlook 2007 before rolling one of our boxes over to 2010 over the weekend. Two options;

I'm sorry that I couldn't do this to your face, but I'm writing to tell you that it's over. You might not have seen it, but I've tried to be loyal, but the temptations were just too much in the face of your problems, which I'll admit seem quite small and petty to begin with - but they build and they build. I loved using your beta interface, but it's been in beta for quite sometime, and getting less reliable; the SSL issues that happened during June/July/August and the endless “Server Communication Error"s.

Another less-sysadmin-y, more code-y post today. Zend_Form is pretty handy, and takes care of a lot of the hard work in producing and validating forms. Unfortunately the default decorators aren't quite as sane in my opinion, which becomes obvious if you start using fieldsets, or display groups, as ZF refers to them - You'll see your fieldsets getting wrapped in an additional definition list which is basically crap if you ask me.

On the off chance you're intending to do any development with using SqlSrvand ZF, I'd suggest taking a cursory look at ZF-7431before hand. Equally if you're planning on doing any dev with Sqlsrv and plan to migrate to other SQL platforms later, then it could be just as helpful. The fact that SqlSrv will return PHP objects is rather nice, unless you already have existing code that assumes strings are returned, like almost all other database extensions available for PHP.

In that past I've created custom live unix distro CDs for myself and although it worked I found that it was so time consuming and generally such a pain in the bum that it just wasn't worth it. Yesterday I had the need (that nerd need, not because I had to, but because I wanted to) to create a customised CD for the house1. I'd heard good things about RemasterSysand figured now was the time to try it.

I've written about specifying drivers for redirected printersin the past, but it's not something I've had to do for a few months. Last week we had to get a 1500 series HP PSC working on a home workers terminal server session, and it turns out that the “proper” driver isn't correct and doesn't install. Luckily it seems that a lot of the HP PSC's use the same internals as the HP Deskjet series.

I've been playing around with CouchDB for a few nights, inspired by the work of Stuart Langridgeand others at Ubuntu, and also J Chris Anderson. To break myself into the CouchDB world I started poking around at the capabilities, and mostly trying to not think of SQL-isms. Understanding map/reduce and getting your brain out of the SQL world is worth it, if for no other reason than to get a different perspective on data storage.