Software

Blogger Buzz: Introducing the Blogger Android App

Blogger Buzz: Introducing Blogger Android App

I finally got around to trying out the Blogger Android App, It became available in the Android Market recently. After trying  a few test posts on a test blog that I have, I have to say it’s a useful tool for those on the run.

The things I like:

1. Being able to switch easily between accounts and blogs. I  only have two Google accounts and the both share the same blogs, but someone with a setup that’s more complex would find this easy to use.
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2. Nice large buttons for publishing, savings as a draft or deleting
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3. It’s nicely integrated with the camera in the phone, so you can take a picture and immediately post it to your blog.
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4. It’s also nicely integrated with the my Android phone’s built in browser. Anytime you’re browsing and something on a page catches your eye, just go to the menu and find the share option and and you are ready to type up that post that you know that everyone wants to read.
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5. It’s very easy to view all of your posts, whether they are published or still in draft form.
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6. Last but but not least, the app is smooth and responsive. That makes it a real pleasure to use.

Once again – you can get it at the Android Market. Try it! I think you will like it.

Dropbox – My Experiences

About 10 or 12 years ago, there were a number of sites selling storage on the web. One of them I used for a while was XDrive.

At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. You could get up to 100 megabytes of storage for free! Courtesy of the Wayback machine at archive. org, here is what XDrive’s web site looked like back in 2000.

Here is what their web site looks like now. As you can see, they’re no longer in business. Myself, I stopped using them and their competitors after a while because in most cases, the interfaces were clumsy and really not all that easy to use. It became more convenient to use a flash or thumb drive, which were starting to get popular and less expensive.

That’s pretty much how I operated over the years. I would see other online storage operations come and go, and I didn’t pay much attention. About a year and half ago, I read about Dropbox and didn’t really think much of it at the time.

Recently, I was reading an article in MaximumPC magazine where they showed how to keep track of your passwords using a combination of the open source password tracker program KeePass and Dropbox.

In working through hows this should work, I decided to sign up for the basic 2Gb free Dropbox account.

Read more…

Microsoft Security Essentials Upgrade

I’ve been using Avast for my anti-virus program for the past few years on the various notebooks and desktops that I use. When I bought the Latitude D620, I decided to load it up with Microsoft Security Essentials, the free successor to Windows OneCare. OneCare never had a good reputation and you actually had to pay for it.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it’s really performed well, working in the background, and updating itself effortlessly. It even fired off a couple of warnings on a couple of admin tools I had on a USB stick when I plugged it on.

So today, I get a pop up telling me to upgrade. These days, I’m a lot more suspicious and decided to check the Microsoft forums to see if there was talk of an upgrade, and there was.

Also, when I brought the program up, there were notifications (see the picture) to upgrade. After upgrading, I had to go through the usual restart. Over all, the process was painless and shouldn’t cause even the least experienced user any problems.

At this point, I have to say that Microsoft has done something right, and after some more testing, I may deploy this to some of my other computers.

Normal Dot Settings – Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word uses a file – normal.dot, for storing settings for Word documents.I had noticed for some time in our network, normal.dot errors when creating new templates for users. It finally got annoying enough that I decided to do something about it.

We have a standard setup, with workstations for users and they have a common drive for templates. It turns out that we had our Word settings for templates wrong. Normal.dot is a read only file and we had user templates pointing to the shared drive, so we would get errors every time we created a new template.

The settings for each user should have user templates pointing to the users My Documents folder on their workstation. The Workgroup templates setting should point to the shared drive where the actual templates are stored. You settings may be slightly different, but this worked for us.

DOS Tricks in XP and Windows 7

The other day, I was helping a user over the phone with an operation involving numerous CSV files that had to be combined. The best way to do this is by good old DOS copy commands. She had the files in a folder on her desktop. I had her open a command prompt and then I stepped her through on how to change directories, drilling down to where that folder was on her desktop.

After we finished, I thought that there might be a more efficient way to do the same thing. I created a folder on my desktop and then opened a command prompt and typed in “cd”, plus a space -

Then I left clicked on the folder on my desktop and dragged it to the command prompt and dropped it there -

As you can see, the whole path to the folder is filled in for you, complete with the quotation marks that people usually forget. All I had to do was hit enter and I was in the folder at the command prompt -

This does not work in Vista, it was disabled by Microsoft. Interestingly, I tried it in Windows 7, and it works just like it did in XP. Go figure.

Woot! Server Migration

I finished our server migration yesterday. We had been running Small Business Server 2003 Standard (OEM – Grrr, don’t get me started, wasn’t my choice). This was migrated to new hardware running Small Business Server 2003 R2 Standard (Not OEM!)  I used Jeff Middleton’s “Swing Migration” fromsbsmigration.com . Well worth the money and very easy to follow.

There are a lot of settings and permissions that need to be brought over, and it is very time consuming using Microsoft‘s standard methods. Since I am the only IT resource in our agency, this was a life saver. When we migrated from Small Business Server 4.5 to Small Business Server 2003 four and half years ago, we hired a consultant to “help” and it was a 2 day marathon.

I Won!

Last Friday, I attended a BBQ hosted at one of the local FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) Lodges. Lots of good food and there was a “bags” tournament. They also raffled off a few items and I won an Electronic Evidence Field CollectionKit, a first responder kit for seizing electronic evidence. Apparently they are produced by a local firm, E-Kit Training and Supply . Needless to say, I will find this useful in my forensic work and I’ll have to see how it works on the next case.

Blackberry Server Move

As part of my job as network administrator, I installed a Blackberry Professional Server a couple of years ago. Blackberry Professional Server is the lightweight version of RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server. Either version of the server allows a business to synchronize their Blackberry devices with an Exchange or Domino server.

In my case, I installed it on our SBS2003 server. SBS2003 is an “all in one” solution for small business that has Exchange server as part of it’s installation. Everything runs on one server. I am planning on moving the SBS2003 to a VMWare server that I am currently running on a new Dell 2950 with 32GB of memory. Lots of room for virtual machines!

In preparation for the move, I had to move the Blackberry Professional Server to it’s own virtual server. The first roadblock I ran into was that the Blackberry Professional Server would not run on the Windows server 64bit virtual machine I had set up. I had to trash that setup and recreate under Windows server 32bit.

I found an excellent writeup in the Crackberry forums for moving a Blackberry Enterprise Server using the “knife-edge” (minimal down time) method:

http://forums.crackberry.com/f50/moving-blackberry-enterprise-server-exchange-new-server-74177/

This guide proved invaluable to me and resulted in a successful move with minimal downtime. The only thing I would change ( and where I had a problem) was instruction number 2 under “Move the database”.

While the instructions were “osql -E”, I had to change it to:

“osql -E -S windowsservername\sqldatabaseinstancename”

in order to get it to work. Other than that, easy-peasy.

Google Voice

I got my Google Voice invitation the other day. As part of the sign up, you are able to pick your own phone number. In my case, I was able to get a phone number in my area code, with an exchange located in my town and the last four numbers match my home address!

Google bought the old Grand Central system and has contracted with Level 3 for the phone numbers. I’m excited about this as Google’s system allows you to route all your phone calls, home, mobile, work, etc., through one phone number.

You can access Google Voice with a mobile app and read your voice mails on line., because Google actually transcribes your voice mails. of course, you can listen to them, just like any other voice mail system. The service I’m looking forward to is call screening and blocking.

http://google.com/voice

Google Apps

Around May 6th, I changed the email over on this domain to Google Apps. I now access my azb.com email through a GMail interface. I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised. As I have been a GMail user since it first came out back in 2005, it was an easy transition. I’m using the free version, which is more than adequate for me.

As with GMail itself, you can set up your domain to be accessed through a POP or IMAP client such as Thunderbird. Since I’ve owned the domain since 1998 and have been using it for email just as long, there is a butt-load of junk mail that comes in everyday. When I first set up the domain under Apps, I turned on the “catch all” in order to see what email came in. If you have a “catch all” turned on, you will receive every email that ends with your domain name.

The result was just as I expected. The first few days, there were several hundred emails every day to just about every made up azb.com email address that the spammers have been using for years. I turned that feature off and just have the one email address that I’ve used since 1998. What’s nice is that Google allows you to alias that one address in case you want to use another email address. All of this mail goes into one email box under the free version of Apps. Since I turned of the catch all, I only receive about 75-100 junk emails a day, which GMail catches and throws in the trash for me. Since I can archive all my email locally through an IMAP client, I have the best of both worlds. Access to my email everywhere, even through the Gmail Blackberry application, and a copy of all emails stored locally on one of my computers at home. Highly recommended.

http://google.com/a