Mike Southby

Like most, I was saddened yesterday to hear the reports of one the Red Arrows tragically crashing and it’s pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging loosing his life at the annual Bournemouth Air Festival.

I think it’s important before I start diversifying to pay a personal tribute to the pilot, whilst the details are still vague the general consensus is that he stayed with his aircraft to the point of no return to ensure that his aircraft did not crash into a populated area killing others; he must have known that in doing so the outcome personally was not going to be a good one, it’s split second selfless decisions like this that define true heroism.  Much respect Jon.

Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging tragically died in a crash following a Red Arrows display in Bournemouth. Photograph: MOD/PA

No doubt at one stage or another in our lives we have all seen the Red Arrows display whether in personal or on the television and there can be no doubt, they are without question one of the finest aerial display teams on the planet.  The pilots flying skills are a testament not only to themselves but to the world class training received by our armed forces.  It’s easy to forget that the pilots serving in the Red Arrows are front line fast jet RAF pilots first and foremost plying their trade with a smile of their faces.

However, given the state of the UK economy and our military activities overseas, especially considering the recent Defence Spending Review, I do have to question the place the Red Arrows have in the RAF; I want to stress though that my feelings are not aimed at the pilots, the crew or anyone associated directly with the team but with the system of decision making at a very high level.

Having a quick glance over the official website the Red Arrows have at their disposal a team of highly skilled and qualified personnel, a fleet of modern fast jet aircraft and a large support mechanism; it’s not just this that factors into my thoughts though, for every resource given to the Red Arrows, there is a resource denied or taken away from the front line, remember the pilots of the Red Arrows are active front line RAF pilots and whilst they are serving with the Red Arrows, they are away from the front line.  I’ve never been in the forces myself but I’m sure if I had of been, I’d have appreciated a few extra aircraft overheard watching my back.

At any given time, the team have the following (not a comprehensive list by any means) at their disposal:

• 9 highly trained, exceptional fast jet pilots.
• 9 experienced aircraft engineers, each working on a specific aircraft alongside it’s pilot.
• A large engineering team and engineering support team.
• Management and base staff, including the base itself of course.
• Public relations team.

On top of this they also have a fleet of BAE Systems Hawk T1 aircraft, including the 9 actual display aircraft I believe this totals 13 aircraft in all.

I haven’t taken the time to look into how much this all costs in any detail and how much we as tax payers contribute to this but let’s be realistic, it’s not cheap.  According to the Red Arrows official website we do not contribute to foreign displays as this cost is met in the most part by sponsors such as BAE, but of course as I mentioned above this is only part of the story; we are still taking front line pilots away from protecting our troops currently serving in dangerous situations, Afghanistan for example.  The material cost of the team is only half the story.

“The benefits of the Red Arrows far outweigh the cost, promoting British interests and acting as an international ambassador for British industry. Further information relating to budgets should be directed to Royal Air Force 22 Group.

The Ministry of Defence considers that British tax payers should not bear the cost of overseas tours. The Red Arrows overseas tours, representing and demonstrating the very best of British excellence, are largely met by sponsors.”

The above is a quote from the FAQ section of the official website, the very fact that they feel the need to mention this tells me that a lot of people must be questioning the costs, especially the cost to us, the British taxpayer.  It’s not what is said that I find the most interesting, it’s what’s not said.  Clearly the powers that be do not want to publicise how much money it costs to run the team.  A little bit of research on Google turned up this freedom of information act request from the beginning of last year which helps to fill in the blanks a little.

I’m certainly not against the Red Arrows, I have seen them on a number of occasions and there is no question they are an awe inspiring sight; but the glory days are gone, it’s time to face hard realities and I wonder if the public purse should be continuing to fund them in their current capacity.  At the very least, why not return the pilots and engineers to front line duties during times of conflict and allow the team to take a break.  I’m not against us displaying what a great nation we are but I don’t think we are in a position to do this as a matter of course any more.  I think questions need to be asked.

I think it’s only right to end this post in a similar way to how it started.  The Red Arrows only recruit pilots who have proved themselves on the front line, all Red Arrow pilots have seen active duty and have put themselves in harms way to preserve our way of life.  The pilot in yesterdays tragic accident was no exception, seeing action in Afghanistan piloting a Harrier GR9 prior to joining the team and it’s for that I feel he should be remembered along with all the other servicemen and women who have lost their lives in conflicts to date.

My condolences go out to his family and friends.

I guess it was only a matter of time before I did something stupid.

I’m always advocating the need to take regular backups and ensure that you keep a copy of all of your important data; in fairness, I usually do and I did it’s just that I forgot to include my iTunes library in my backup routine.  My only saving grace is that I still have all my music on my iPod.

Apple in all of their wisdom has made it surprising difficult to copy data from your iPod into your iTunes library from within iTunes itself, or rather they have made it impossible.  You’d have thought that this would make perfect sense in terms of a feature but alas, no.

All is not lost however, there is of course a way to simply restore your music back into your library from iTunes, just follow this simple guide.

Caveat: I have used a machine that currently does not have iTunes installed to produce this guide; the recovered data was then placed onto an external hard drive before restoring to my main machine with iTunes installed.  I did it this way to ensure that iTunes did not auto sync with my iPod when it was connected and wipe any data, I was just being cautious.  You can of course follow the steps in this guide on the same machine as you currently have your iTunes on, but, you must ensure that iTunes does not automatically sync initially or you face the possibility of overwriting all of your music with nothing.

Notes: I have used a Windows 7 based machine to initially connect my iPod and backup the data (my iPod was originally formatted and used with a Windows machine).  Then, my new main machine which contains my iTunes is a MacBook Pro; if your iTunes is on a Windows based machine some of the following steps will be slightly different i.e. you will not be able to use the OS X specific keyboard shortcuts and will need to find the options using the menus within iTunes itself, other than that the process is identical.

Firstly, on my windows machine:

• Connect your iPod to your computer using the sync cable.
• Navigate to My Computer; you should see your iPod connected as an external drive, double click on the icon.
• Next you need to un-hide hidden folders; Click on Organize followed by Folder and search items.  Click the View tab and check the option to Show hidden files, folder, and drives.
• Click OK to return to the explorer window.
• You should now see a folder called iPod_Control, double click this.
• Copy the entire folder called Music to a backup location of your choice; in my case I copied this to an external drive.
• You can now disconnect your iPod.

Secondly, on my Mac:

• Load iTunes from the dock and navigate to iTunes preferences by pressing ⌘, and clicking on the Advanced tab.
• Check both options to Keep iTunes Media folder organized and Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library.
• Finally you need to import the music in the backup folder into your library, to do this press ⌘o and navigate to the folder containing the backup up data and click Choose.

Once you have done that, iTunes should automatically sort out the files for you and copy them back into your iTunes library.

I came across this issue earlier in the week whilst trying to install the latest version of the Citrix Access Gateway client.  The machine I was working on was a new, fresh off the shelf Windows 7 Acer laptop; albeit 64-bit.  Thinking the problem was related to the Citrix installation itself I headed over to the Citrix forums and found that the issue was actually a generic Windows problem indicating that the VBScript engine currently isn’t registered on the machine where the install (or indeed uninstall) is taking place.

The fix is actually quite simple, just follow these simple steps:

• Click the Start Menu
• Click All Programs
• Click Accessories
• Right click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator

Next, if you are using the 32-bit version of Windows:

• Type the following:
  cd %windir%system32 and press the Enter key and then type
  regsvr32 vbscript.dll and press the Enter key and then type
  regsvr32 jscript.dll and then press the Enter key

Alternatively if you are using the 64-bit version of Windows:

• Type the following:
  cd %windir%syswow64 and press the Enter key and then type
  regsvr32 vbscript.dll and press the Enter key and then type
  regsvr32 jscript.dll and then press the Enter key

That should get you up and running, try to run the installer again and everything should now work as expected.  Enjoy!

I’ve had a number of support queries at work recently relating to NDRs being generated when a user sends meeting invites in Outlook reporting that a mailbox does not exist.  Confusingly, the NDRs relate to an account which not only was not invited to the meeting but also no longer exists within the organisation; an AD search for the mailbox yields no results.  It turns out the reason for this is due to one of the invitees having a delegate whose mailbox has been deleted.  If you have come across this issue before, you’ll know how tricky this can be to resolve.

In order to fully understand why this is happening, it’s important to know what happens behind the scenes when a user gives delegate access to their mailbox, not only will this help you to understand why this problem occurs, but it will also help to understand what actions need to be taken to resolve the problem.

Let’s assume you have an existing mailbox for user A who wishes to make user B a delegate.  When the delegation is made the following takes place:

• The appropriate sharing permissions are placed on the relevant folder in user A’s mailbox, these of course will vary depending on which permissions were set using the delegation tool.
• If the checkbox for forwarding meeting requests is set, a special hidden forwarding rule is created in user A’s mailbox.  As this is a hidden rule, you will not see the rule listed in Outlook.
• User B is added to user A’s publicDelegates attribute (or more commonly known as the send-on-behalf-of field), and user A is added to the publicDelegatesBL attribute of user B; this does not always happen depending on a number of circumstances, for example more recent versions of Outlook or when the person trying to set the delegation is not actually the owner of mailbox A.

So far so good, but let’s assume now that some time has passed and for whatever reason user B leaves your organisation and as such, their mailbox is deleted from within AD.  Further, the System Administrator performing this action would have no idea of user configured delegations and AD itself would not intuitively make them aware of any which is where the fun begins.

Once the mailbox for user B is deleted their publicDelegatesBL entry in AD gets cleared out so there is no easy way to work out who they were actually a delegate for; we can now think of them as an orphaned delegate. Even more problematic, the hidden forwarding rule in mailbox A does not get updated; as with security group membership and other AD functions, you’d have hoped this would take place automatically but as this is a client side feature, unfortunately not.

Assuming that you can narrow down whose mailbox has the orphaned delegation, you can manually fix this issue by the using the MFCMAPI tool to delete the hidden forwarding rule but even this is not without issues as unfortunately if there are other delegates to that mailbox, the forwarding for them would break as well.  So all of those delegates would need to be manually removed and subsequently re-added which would involve logging in manually to the mailboxes in question.  This may be a simple task but as in the situation I was faced with, not so.

As you can see, the reality is that you may not be able to actually resolve this issue.  In one of the situations I was faced with the originating user who received all of the NDRs (there were actually over 30 of them) had sent the meeting invite to a distribution list which itself, contained a number of other distribution lists.  Using the MFCMAPI tool I would have had to of manually logged into somewhere in the region of 500 mailboxes to identify who had the orphaned delegates and then subsequently, had to recreate the delegate rules for the users who I ran the tool on.  Needless to say on balance this was not an option.  The MFCMAPI tool is an option in instances where a single user receives NDRs sending to another user, or small group of users but not when large distribution lists are involved.

So just how do you stop the NDRs?

The reality is that you can’t, however you can create an Outlook rule for the sender to prevent them receiving the NDRs by automatically forwarding the NDR messages (the generated NDR error for this issue is 5.1.1 so by setting this rule you would not stop other NDRs being delivered) directly to their deleted items or even permanently deleting the message at source.

I hope someone will find this useful.  Enjoy.

As an update to my previous post explaining how to install OS X within Windows 7 using VirtualBox, I have now found a simple way of changing the default screen resolution to match your individual needs; it’s actually quite simple:

• Start your OS X virtual machine
• Navigate through Go>Computer>Macintosh HD and then navigate to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
• Right click com.apple.Boot.plist and click Open With and then TextEdit
• Add the following code underneath <string></string>
  <key>Graphics</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>
  (change the above line to suit your needs)
• Click File and then Save As..
• In the Save As box, overtype to ensure it says the following:
  com.apple.Boot.plist
  and change the location to your Desktop.  Also, uncheck the checkbox next to If no extension is provided, use “.txt”
• Click Save
• Close the TextEdit window
• Now, drag the file that you have just saved to your desktop into the SystemConfiguration folder that should still be open
• Click Authenticate
• Click Replace
• You will now need to enter your password, do this and the file will then be replaced
• Close the SystemConfiguration window
• In the VirtualBox console, click Machine and then Reset

When OS X restarts, you will now have your desired resolution!