Brandon Live!

There’s been plenty to write about lately… the most obvious probably being WSUS accidentally installing WDS on unsuspecting machines and Google’s launch of OpenSocial.  Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now, so today I’m going to try and catch up a bit.

I hope that the WSUS issue has already been addressed for everybody affected by it.  But for the record, here’s the post I made in a couple of forums the day it happened:  

Here is my understanding of what happened. No one on the WDS product team knew about this until this morning (I was the first to know, because of an extremely impolite e-mail sent to my personal e-mail account).

• It was a screw-up, and everyone involved is deeply sorry about the trouble this has caused
• It ONLY affects WSUS systems where admins had approved an earlier WDS Update package
• The previous packages only updated existing WDS installations, and wouldn’t install it on new systems
• It was intentional to offer a package that would install WDS on machines without it
• It was NOT intentional for the approval of the previous update to be “inherited” by this package. This was a mistake in the publishing of this package to WSUS.

They have suspended deployment of the WDS package via WSUS while they fix the problem, and provided instructions for how admins can most easily disable and remove the WDS software.Believe me, Microsoft and the WDS team did not intend for this behavior. There was never any secret plan to force WDS onto unsuspecting machines. It was simply an error in the WSUS publishing process, which everyone deeply regrets.

As someone who used to work in IT, I feel the pain of these admins. This is also pretty embarassing for our team even though it could have happened to any group at Microsoft, as the WSUS publishing process is completely out of our control. That said, please don’t think that anyone here is taking this mistake lightly.

Even though our official responses may have appeared slow throughout the day, you can be sure that today was a non-stop fire drill for all involved. Once we identified and understood the problem, it took time to coordinate an official response and go through all the necessary approval processes. Unfortunate as that is, it’s the reality of a business this size, and our guys did their best to push through it and get this handled as best as we could after figuring out what happened.

For any further details, I refer you to the WSUS Blog.

I’ve added a new FAQ page to the site as well as a few FAQ entries to get things started.  I’ll keep adding more as time goes on.  If you have a question you’d like to see answered, post it in the comments or e-mail me.  But just because you ask, doesn’t mean an answer is guaranteed or that it will be timely.

Start++ has a new home!

I know, I know… the Wiki just went up a few days ago. Well, rather than let people get too used to that, I decided to go ahead and set up a real website for Start++ and any other little tools I end up throwing together (I mean, diligently coding to the highest standard of quality!) later on down the road.

It’s just up and stumbling on Community Server, which seems to be working out pretty well so far.

BrandonTools.com

IE7 wasn’t working with my feed before… Turned out this was because a WordPress plug-in I use had an error in its PHP file that was causing debug spew to appear at the bottom of every page, including the RSS/atom feeds!  This led to some invalid XML that most readers just ignored.  But not IE7!  I guess they got tired of taking flack for letting messy mark-up slide.

I also disabled a redundant (and I think slow) plug-in and did some database maintenance/optimization that will hopefully speed up the site a little. 

So tonight I found Google’s “Contact Us” page.  I typed up an inquiry into the problem I’ve been having with their search engine.

I’ll be sure and let you know if I get a response.

Earlier today I added Kanoodle ads to the right-side column of my blog.  They’re contextual, text-based advertisements and I’ve tried to make them fit in the page’s style.

If you see a link that looks interesting, please do check it out =)

On the other hand, if you find them distracting or irrelevant, or have comments about placement - please let me know that as well. 

I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.  So far I haven’t seen any problems and the site actually feels faster.  The new admin features are great, although the new rich text editor for posting seems to lag behind my typing.  Hopefully I can do something about that.  In every other way the editor rocks.  And I can now add categories from the “Write Post” page.  Yay!

I also updated my permalink format.  Maybe now Google won’t ignore my site.

Let me know if you see any problems on the site as I’ve heard there could be a glitch or two as a result of the upgrade.

Update:  Looks like the performance issues in the WYSIWYG editor and the admin pages in general is related to Maxthon.  If I use a “normal” IE window I have no performance problems at all.  Looks like I’ve found a bug for the Maxthon guys to fix in their next release.

Some of you may have noticed that the site was down for a significant part of the weekend. My host had some issues with MySQL that didn’t get resolved until this morning. However things seem to be back in working order.

I’m interested to hear what my readers think of the new layout and theme since moving to this site. Do you have any problems? Suggestions?

Post a comment and let me know.

Today I noticed that a Google bot - which identifies itself as “Some Feed Monger - Google.com/feeds” or something like that - is actually crawling my site. So I did a blogsearch using Google’s blog engine for “Brandonlive” and lo’ and behold, this site actually shows up - albeit a few links down the page.

So I’m wondering… has Google changed their main web search crawler to no longer add blogs? As it stands, this site/domain is entirely WordPress and nothing else - and it’s been completely ignored by Google’s web search crawler thus far.

This is only a theory, but it’s one possible explanation for why Google refuses to index this site (where MSN and Yahoo happily did).

Anyone know something I don’t?