I recently pickep up a Dazzle Video Creator Platinum from Woot. My idea was that I'd take the last few videotapes I own, convert them to MPEG-4, then toss the tapes and the VCR. I had a bit of an adventure getting the software installed and working under Vista. This blog entry helped out a bit. It would be nice if Pinnacle would just allow you to download the full install for their Vista-compatible software, but instead you have to stumble through the install of the XP version, then run a patch install. Once you've got that done, and you've got the Vista driver for the device installed, it works fine. I'm in the middle of converting an old anime VHS tape to MPEG-4 right now. I'm hoping it'll be watchable on my Apple TV when I'm done with it. If it all works out OK, I have a few other random tapes to convert, then I'm done with VHS forever.

Labels: software, Vista

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that's cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven't had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn't turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn't started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn't have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can't buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that's hanging up on one of the updates. I'll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don't know what's wrong with it, and I'd like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don't have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There's a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven't figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There's certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I've been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple's been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There's an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: "I'll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have." I can't help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I'm probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven't written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I've got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I'm going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

Labels: Apple, software, Windows

There's a poll on Lifehacker about text editors. Their top six are Notepad++, Emacs, UltraEdit, TextMate, Vim, and TextPad. I do use TextMate on my Mac, so I agree with that call. It's a nice editor. I *wish* I was proficient with Emacs, just because it would probably come in handy occasionally, and just generally seems like something I should know. I'm amazed that people still use vi/vim. I had to use vi a bit back in college, and never liked it. Under Windows, I have to admit that I'm still using Multi-Edit, which doesn't seem to be a popular choice these days. I've been using Multi-Edit 9, which dates back to 1999. I kept putting off upgrades, since ME 9 did everything I really needed to do. At some point, I realized that I needed an editor with Unicode support, so I installed PSPad. I like PSPad, but not enough to switch over from Multi-Edit, except for those occasional Unicode files.

After poking around on the internet a bit today, I decided to finally upgrade to the most current version of Multi-Edit. It seems like ME is still behind the times a bit. The current version is called "Multi-Edit 2006", and the most recent revision was posted in October 2007. It mostly works in Vista, but there are a couple of problems, mostly with macro recording, from what I can tell by looking at their support forums. And they've got some support for Unicode now, but it doesn't look like it's really full support.

I'm not sure if sticking with Multi-Edit is the right choice in the long run. UltraEdit might be a better choice; they seem to have been updating their product a bit more regularly. They appear to have full Unicode support and Vista compatibility.

Only a true geek could spend so much time worrying about text editors!

Labels: software

My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he's not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We've got his machine set up so that he's using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don't take these kind of things into account. We've found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.

We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.

When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn't been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.

I've been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I'm looking for something with a fairly simple interface that'll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn't get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn't remember where he'd written down his e-mail password, so I couldn't actually get all the way through the setup. We've also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I'm not sure that'll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he'll have found that password and we can play around some more.

Labels: software

We implemented a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) at work last week. I was afraid it would be overly complicated, but it wasn't that bad, and we seem to have it running smoothly now. We're running it on top of Lotus Domino. I've found that the documentation for BES is OK, but if you hit a snag, you're going to need to head out on the internet and do some searching. The best place to find BES information seems to be the BES Admin Corner at BlackBerryForums.com.

CrackBerry.com has some useful stuff in their forums, too. For Domino-specific information, I've found besdomino.blogspot.com and notesberry.org useful.

I've been almost completely ignorant of the BlackBerry platform until now. I've got plenty of experience with Windows Mobile and Palm, going back several years, but I just never had occasion to pick up a BlackBerry. It turns out that they work pretty well! We won't get to keep one in the IT department, unfortunately. We've just got one to use for testing that we'll have to give back at some point. I looked into picking one up myself, but I don't see any way to do that (and hook it up to the BES) for less that $50 per month, and that's a bit much. I guess I should be glad that the company's not making me carry around a BlackBerry 24x7, but it does seem like it would be a useful thing to have.

For now, I can still check my e-mail on my Moto SLVR via RemoMail, which I've blogged about before. And when I'm near a wifi access point, I can always use my iPod Touch.

Labels: software

Well, after deciding not to buy this year's MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They've added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don't use anything else I'll probably get my money's worth out of the two games they added.

And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn't where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I'm hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I'll be happy. I'm basically just looking for the same stuff I've got on my Palm.

Labels: Apple, software

MacHeist has another bundle of Mac software on sale right now. It's a good deal, if you need more than one or two of the included applications. I bought the bundle that they were selling about a year ago. About the only app from that bundle that I'm using regularly is DevonThink, which is pretty useful. I'm not really seeing anything in the current bundle that I'd be likely to use, though, so I guess I'll skip this one.

I have pretty much everything working the way I want it on my new MacBook now. I've got FolderShare working fine now. I've replaced MacStumbler, which doesn't seem to work on Intel Macs, with iStumbler, which works fine. And I found out that my old version of the Transmission BitTorrent client didn't work, so I upgraded to the newest version, which is working fine.

Office 2008 looks interesting, but I don't think I'll bother with it. I hardly ever do any word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac. I do all of that stuff on the PC.

I also paid for VMWare Fusion a couple of weeks ago. (I'd been using the trial version.) I've got a Windows XP virtual machine set up, and it's working reasonably well. I'm mostly just using it when I need remote access to some stuff at work. (I still use pcAnywhere for that, most of the time.)

Labels: Apple, software

I haven't gotten around to blogging in the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic. I'm trying to relax right now, so I thought I'd just write up a few random bits.

I picked up a TomTom One LE GPS unit at Best Buy last week. I don't really need a GPS often. Most of my driving is just back and forth to work. But, it will definitely come in handy once in a while. I used it today to help me find my way to my friend Paul's house in New York. I've been there before, but not recently. The GPS was definitely a help. In particular, there's one point where I need to make a turn onto a side street that's pretty well hidden, until you're right on top of it. The GPS takes care of that nicely by announcing the turn in advance, then again when you're right there. It really makes things easier.

I've been working my way through the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde. I'm on the third book now, Well of Lost Plots. It's starting out quite nicely. I'm really enjoying these books. Lots of fun, weird, stuff.

I installed the trial version of VMware Fusion on my MacBook yesterday, and installed Windows XP into a virtual machine. It works pretty well. It's a little slow, but a lot better than previous virtual machine products that I've used on the Mac. (Of course, this is the first time I've used an Intel Mac, so right there you've got a major advantage.) Oh, and I've got to say, I think it's time for Windows XP SP3. I installed XP with SP2, and had 90 patches to install from Windows Update. Hey Microsoft, isn't that enough patches to warrant a service pack? That's one of the nice things about Apple that we maybe take for granted. OS X 10.4 went from 10.4.0 to 10.4.10, and each of those point releases is cumulative, so you never have too many individual patches to install on a Mac.

Labels: Apple, books, hardware, software

I set up RemoMail on my phone today. Since I got the new Motorola SLVR a while ago, I've been looking around at reasonably affordable and workable ways to read e-mail on the phone. The Mobile Web 2.0 service for which I'm paying Verizon $5/month allows you to check HotMail, AOL, and Yahoo mail pretty easily. I do have a Yahoo account, but I get about 100 spam e-mails per day to that account, and only about 80% of them get filtered properly, so I pretty much gave up on that account. I've also got a HotMail account, but I really don't use that one either. I do use Gmail, and you can check that from Mobile Web by just going to the Gmail site, but it's pretty ugly.

There are a few other ways to check e-mail on the SLVR. One would be to use Verizon's wireless sync software, which looks nice but costs $20/month. RemoMail, on the other hand, only costs $2/month, which is a bit more reasonable.

I looked around for reviews of RemoMail this morning, and I found a few things, but nothing really detailed, so I thought I'd write some stuff up, in case anyone else is interested. First, I should say that everything I write here is specific to RemoMail on the SLVR, via Verizon's "Get It Now" function. It may look and/or behave differently on other phones. That said, here are some observations.

RemoMail allows you to configure up to 7 e-mail accounts. (I've seen indications that other versions of the software allow either 5 or 10 accounts, but the help file for mine states 7.) It can access your mail via POP or IMAP. It also has an interesting feature that allows you to access Domino or Exchange e-mail via what appears to be screen-scraping from the web interface for either product. It has setup options for a number of standard e-mail services (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc), but it seems like these are just consolidating some of the standard things you'd need to fill in for POP access -- it's not actually doing anything different to access, say, Gmail, vs any other POP mail account.

I've set up three e-mail accounts in RemoMail. The first would be my Gmail account. I'm not really enthusiastic about the way this works -- it's just standard POP access, so you get everything that comes in to the mailbox. Even if you've moved something out of your inbox on the web, you'll still see it on RemoMail.

I also set up my .Mac account, using the IMAP option. This works well, since I keep my inbox pretty clean on .Mac, and that's all IMAP is going to look at, unless you tell it to look at another folder.

I set up my work Lotus Domino e-mail account too, and that seems to work well. I mentioned above that the program uses an interesting way to pick up Domino mail. Rather than trying to get to it through IMAP or POP, it instead asks for the URL for your webmail site, and gets to it that way. That's probably a good workaround for people who don't have much control over their Domino server -- most admins will have enabled webmail, but they might not enable IMAP or POP. (I checked the server log on my Domino server, and the program doesn't seem to do anything crazy when it attaches to the webmail page. It just logs on as a user would and apparently parses some info out of the page that comes back.)

RemoMail is not a push e-mail solution; you have to launch the application, and check each of your e-mail accounts separately. Also, it does not appear to store any mail on your device between program sessions. So, basically, this is just a solution for doing a quick scan of your e-mail remotely, and maybe sending some quick replies. When you check an account, the program goes online and pulls down headers for 5 messages. (I think this is configurable from 3 to 10, assuming I understand the options screen correctly.) Then, you can select any individual e-mail and pull down the body text. You can't download or view attachments, and you can only get "100 lines" of text, according to the RemoMail FAQ. The e-mail body is displayed in a nice readable font. There's no support for HTML e-mail, but it seems to do an OK job of displaying the text from an HTML message.

Overall, I'd say it's a good program for occasional use, just to take a quick scan through your e-mail and see if there are any fires you need to put out.

Labels: software

I've been using WinKey to manage system-wide keyboard macros on my Windows XP machines for awhile now. WinKey is a nice little program that simply allows you to launch programs by pressing a key combo involving the Windows key. I use Win-X to launch Firefox, for instance. I've had this running on all my home and work computers for the last several years, so I've really got these macros hard-wired into my brain at this point.

Unfortunately, WinKey doesn't work on Vista (at least *I* can't get it working), and is no longer being developed or supported by Copernic, the company that (at one point) wound up with the rights to it. (They didn't develop it originally, but I don't remember who did.)

I recently came across a program called AutoHotKey, which is a fairly powerful scripting environment for Windows keystroke macros and general automation. It *does* indeed work on Vista, and is being actively developed. And it's open source! You do need to read at least a little bit of the documentation to get it to do what you want, but it's not hard to figure out. For instance, this command:
#x::Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
maps Win-x to launch Firefox.
And you can send keystrokes to the active window quite easily, so, for instance, this little script:
#+T::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yyyy h:mm tt
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
pastes the current date and time into whatever app you're currently using when you press Win-Shift-T.
You can just put all your little macros together in one text file, and put a shortcut to it in your StartUp group, and off you go. Neat!

I've been thinking about keyboard macros on the Mac, too. David Pogue did a column on PC and Mac macro programs a couple of weeks ago. There are a few interesting options on the Mac, but I haven't had time to try any of them out yet.

Labels: software, Windows

I finally got around to installing Office 2007 on my desktop computer today, only about 7 months after I bought it. I installed it on my Vista laptop a while ago, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing it on the desktop XP machine. It seems to have upgraded Outlook fine, without screwing up my mail file in any way. I guess that's the thing I was most afraid of: losing all my e-mail. And it doesn't seem to be significantly slower than Outlook 2003, which is something else I was afraid of.

Labels: software, Windows

My company is setting up a new (small) office in Pennsylvania, and I'm thinking about using some Linux stuff down there. I'm planning on using IPCop for the firewall, and maybe Openfiler for a NAS.

I've been using IPCop in our main office for the last few years, so I've got no doubts about that, and I'm quite familiar with it. I've never used Openfiler though, or any other open source NAS package. I considered putting an old Dell PowerEdge box running Windows 2000 Server down there, but I'm not really enthusiastic about that; it's an old box, and an old OS, and I don't really need all the overhead of a full Windows server. Nor do I want to pop for a Windows 2003 Server. I just need a place to put shared files for a small workgroup. I'm hoping Openfiler works well for that, and is easy to access from a Windows XP client. I've been looking at the Openfiler forums, and I think this thread may prove helpful. I haven't actually gotten around to installing OF on a box yet. I downloaded it Friday afternoon, but I mistakenly downloaded the 64-bit version, and I didn't realize that until after 5pm on Friday, so I left my machine downloading the 32-bit ISO and went home. I'll give it a try on Monday.

Labels: hardware, Linux, software

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That's pretty interesting; I'm curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he's including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I'm using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.

Labels: software, Windows

I mentioned in a blog post about a month ago that I had found a receipt for a copy of OS/2 that I had bought in 1994. Well, I was doing some spring cleaning today, and I found that copy of OS/2, along with several OS/2 books and other old computer books. I threw them all out, sad to say. It's a small apartment I live in, and there's no room to keep outdated software, or books about outdated software, lying around. Goodbye OS/2, dBase IV, Clipper 5.2, Lotus 123 for DOS, and Novell 3.11. I'll miss you. Or not, in some cases.

Labels: software

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I'm up to the letter "B" now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I've been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there's so much stuff in there. In all that time, I've never had a problem with Vault's database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I've always been able to run the program just by taking my c:\vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I'm almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn't cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven't tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

Labels: software, Windows

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it's not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It's going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn't really structured like KeePass either, so there's no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it'll only get worse if I wait, right?

Labels: software, Windows

I've been somewhat obsessed with project management lately. I'm trying to do whatever I can to organize things at work, so I've been playing around with version control systems, wikis, bug tracking systems, project management systems, and stuff like that.

A while back, I implemented CVS, and started using it for the ASP.NET code for our intranet site. This seems to be working OK, and the two other developers involved have gotten used to it and are using it correctly, for the most part. I'm using CVSNT with ViewCvs (now called ViewVc) and TortoiseCVS.

I chose CVS over Subversion because, at the time, it seemed like it would be easier to implement under Windows, and was more widely used. Subversion is starting to look pretty good right now, largely because of Trac, a web-based project manager that integrates with a Subversion repository and allows you to do a bunch of nifty things.

I played around with CvsTrac today, which is a bit like Trac, but works with CVS. It's a nice little system that includes a wiki and a "ticket" system for change requests. I installed the CvsTracNT package, which does a nice clean install on Windows. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the version of CVS that I'm using. It appears that it's assuming a certain structure for the CVSROOT/history file that has been changed in more recent releases. I looked through the CvsTrac code, and I think I see what I'd need to change to fix it, but I'm not sure I want to go through all the grief of figuring out how to rebuild it under Windows on my own.

I've also been playing with stand-alone wikis a bit. My goal would be to set up a wiki that could be used for project documentation and management for a number of our internal systems. I want to set up documentation pages for individual database tables and program modules, for instance, and link and categorize them in a way that makes it easy for me to keep the documentation up to date and see where the interdependencies are, and dig into the change history on stuff.

I tried FlexWiki a while ago. I like a few things about it, including the fact that it's an ASP.NET application, so it fits in with our other stuff well. I didn't like a number of things, though, including the way it formats text, for instance. I'm also not particularly fond of the built-in programming language, WikiTalk. It's nice that you can do some dynamic stuff with it, but I don't want to have to learn a whole new language just for that.

I tried out another ASP.NET wiki system last week. It's called Perspective. I like a lot of things about this one. I like the way it formats text. I like the system of categories and collections. it's got a good text search feature. The one thing I don't like is the one thing that seems to kill every wiki I look at -- the fact that you can't give pages completely arbitrary names. For a wiki to work out for me, I'd really need to be able to name pages after database tables, program function names, and stuff like that. Perspective will change a name like "f_add_user" to "F Add User", which will screw things up a bit for me. I'd also like to be able to set up a category for ongoing notes, where I might want to name a page something like "2006-01-20 4:50pm foo_detail table changes". Perspective (and most other wiki systems, I think) would remove most of the non-alphanumeric characters from that name and replace them with either white space or nothing at all.

Some alternatives I've been looking at include Basecamp, a hosted web-based project manager. The downside on Basecamp is that it costs money. Not much ($25 or $50 a month for the kind of thing I'd be doing), but enough that I'd have to justify the expense to the Powers That Be. I've also noticed that they don't seem to have a decent full-text search capability, so that'd really be a killer. And, of course, being externally hosted, I would have no real control of the data and no opportunity to link things to our CVS server or anything like that.

I'm using OneNote right now for a lot of the stuff I'd like to put into a wiki or project management system. While OneNote works great, it's not that easily sharable; sharing a notebook on the file server works OK, but including the one guy who's working out of his home in Arizona would be a bit difficult. And of course it's not a free product; I'd have to buy a license for everyone I wanted to have access to the notes. Chris Pratley lists some of the features coming in the next version of OneNote in his blog. There's definitely some interesting stuff going on there, but I don't know if I can afford it for my whole team, or if a non-web-based solution would really be right for us.

Lotus Notes has been our company's default collaboration platform for a while now, and there's no good reason why I couldn't use a Notes database of some sort for project management. The TeamRoom template that ships with Notes is a pretty good start for this kind of thing. I may wind up falling back on Notes for this stuff. I have a couple of people internally who can help me customize whatever we need, and we already have full Notes licenses for everybody, so there's no cost issue. Ed Brill has a couple of blog entries talking about Notes and Wikis. He makes a good point, about how wikis are usually doing just a subset of the stuff you can do in Notes. OpenNTF.org has a few templates that might come in handy if I went down this road.

Well, I have now spent about an hour writing up this post. If nothing else, it helped me get some stuff straight in my head, and gave me a chance to consolidate some of the links to all this good stuff in one place.

Labels: software

• NoteTaker from Aquaminds -- nice look and some interesting features.
  
• StickyBrain from Chronos -- lots of features. Can sync with iPod and Palm.
  
• NoteBook from Circus Ponies -- big on outlining and general note-taking. Very colorful.
  
• MacJournal from Mariner -- oriented towards keeping a personal journal and blogging.
  
• Formation from Radical Breeze -- almost like a database program. Custom fields/forms, stuff like that.
  
• Hog Bay Notebook -- appears to be a fairly simple notebook app. Nice-looking, though.
  

All of these are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, I'm still using iOrganize, which isn't as flashy as any of these, but does the job.

Labels: Apple, software

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