Larry Osterman - The toughest technical problem that Larry faced | TheChannel9Team

Larry Osterman has worked through tons of tough technical problems in his 20 years here. So, we asked him what the toughest one was that he remembered working on.

Turns out it was the Exchange 2000 ACL model.

What's the toughest problem you've faced?

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bdelahunty

Nov 04, 2004 at 2:30 PM

Larry is cool.
Charles Welcome Change

Nov 04, 2004 at 3:39 PM

Agreed. Larry is also a Microsoft treasure.

Charles
junior882 Developing ASP.NET as posed

Nov 04, 2004 at 11:14 PM

I think what's cool about Larry is that he's excited to see his videos being posted up here at Channel 9 and isn't afraid to admit it. So many people would be "too cool for school", but he's posting to his blog as each video is posted. I love that. Larry, you rule.
Greater Monster Deconstruct! (Jacques Derrida 1930-2004)

Nov 05, 2004 at 3:02 AM

bdelahunty wrote:

Larry is cool.

Hear, hear!!
Larry for CSA/CEO/C-whatever!!!
RedWolves2

Nov 05, 2004 at 6:43 AM

The toughest problem I faced is working with Flash MX 2004.

I blogged it:
http://redwolves2.myftp.org/blog/archive/2004/11/03/469.aspx
Sven Groot Don't worry... I'm a doctor.

Nov 08, 2004 at 3:49 PM

Amen to that. Flash and InstallShield are numbers 1 and 2 respectively of my "worst to use applications ever" list.

I had to do a GUI prototyping assignment of a video surveilance camera annotation system for the Human Computer Interaction course. It was utter hell. I'd probably rather have done it in assembly.
Dr. Shim Inaniloquent monomathical people inlapidate me.

Sep 09, 2005 at 3:22 AM

Yay! The jolly fellow! We need more interviews with him.
Lwatson One ugly mug...

Sep 13, 2005 at 12:23 PM

The toughest thing I can remember doing was getting a Commodore 64, and AIM 65 Data monitoring bit of kit and a Modem and a Voice synth connected to a Battery backup and the phone. With all manner of weather monitoring stuff and power line monitoring sensors so we could create something we called Weather Voice. Back in 1985.

The tricks were getting serial communications to occur between the aim and the C64 on the modem. But we needed to leave enough of the modem intact to allow it to sense a ring and pick up the phone. Then we had to impose the Voice synth output onto the phone line via a hand wound transformer (8 ohm to 300 ohm if I recall correctly)

I remembered I hand crafted the rom firmware in in a cartridge that we wire wrapped together to read the AIMs data and craft a weather report. You could call the thing from anywhere and get the weather up to the minute. BP, Rainfall, Wind Speed and direction, We even had cloud cover sensors with trends. It was pretty cool. Of course I farged the wire wrap job and forgot to reverse the pin connections initially. So I just bent all the firmware roms pins up 180 degrees and inserted the chip into the socket upside down and mirrored. Worked like a charm.

I can say that Database apps in .NET are a hell of alot easier now.

I'll bet Larry has seen some seriously kludged stuff like that as well...