Technology

The Friday Before a Holiday

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Twas the friday before a holiday and it seemed like no one wanted to work. A holiday weekend is upon us. The office was kind of dead. I got a bunch of work done. We have at least 3 people starting on Tuesday, and another 2 later in the week. James is keeping busy getting the computers ready. He was out the door right after I said he could go home early. Danny on the other hand seemed to not get the concept of getting out early for a holiday. I thought he felt he was going to miss something if he left.

All in all a good week at work. Busy, but good. I need to tackle some hardware design stuff next week. I didn’t want to think about it after the meeting I had on it Thursday. Just too much to digest. Next week will be interesting…

MailHop Forward

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Now that I am once again messing with my own mail server I need some sort of backup in case my server at home goes down. I used to use DynDNS’s MailHop Backup MX service. It was great. If I lost my server, they would act as my backup mail server and redirect my mail to me when my box came back online.

DynDNS now has a service that will allow me to create alias’ and direct mail from my domain to any mailbox. So my mail mail domain can redirect to any other domain and mailbox I want, or to my gmail account, etc. This is great if I have/want to change my mail setup quickly, or direct mail to different systems. The concept is probably overkill for what I need, but I wanted to give it a try. I needed some sort of mail backup anyway so it was worth the price I paid.

I have been a happy user of DynDNS’s Custom DNS service for almost 2 years. I am a huge fan, they have a good solid track record for me!

iSync Perfection or One Big Mess?

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I switched from using Entourage to iCal/Address Book for syncing my data to/from my Treo 650 on the Mac. I want the slick UI and terrific integration of Address Book & iCal, but I am concerned about some issues. Firstly I rely on Palm/outlook categories on my Treo. Primarily I use them for distinctive rings on the phone. if work calls I get a specific ring. if people I don’t want to call my cell are in a specific category they goto voice mail and don’t ring, etc. Looks like iSync does not keep the categories intact if I make changes to the categories. This sucks. If I create new contacts on my Mac I need to manually assign them categories when the contact goes onto my Palm.

It also looks like some fields don’t carry over either. I don’t see birthday’s that I entered into Outlook now that the contacts are in Address book. I think IM names are also not carried over.

Don’t get me started about my iCal invites not working in Outlook. There is some hackish fix out there but I don’t want to mess around with it.

Why then do I move/try to move to this? The integration between Address Book, iCal, iChat, Mail, etc is fantastic. That I can add a contact to address book and associate that contact to my AIM contact list in iChat is fantastic. The same goes for my jabber contacts. Linking every contact to email in Mail is also great. I can also sync everything using .Mac to my min and powerbook! Top it off with using spotlight to search everything, and I am a happy person. It makes for easy day to day use. The problem is when I want to get that information out into my Treo I run into issues. I don’t even care that I have problems when I import everything from the Treo to Outlook. I don’t want to use outlook anymore. I have had so many problems with it recently that I could live with using it just for an email archive. But at least work in the Treo!!! I am continuing my search of the internet for solutions or work around’s to my little issues. So far, no luck.

More Softphones That Are Cool!

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I got the chance to play with Cisco’s new IP Communicator software. Well it is not that new anymore, but it was new to me. I had used their older IP Softphone software. This is just a new version of their phone-less phone. IP Communicator lets you use your computer as the telephone. The concept is fantastic, and IP Communicator actually works as advertised.

The software emulates the look of a Cisco 7970 IP Phone. You can do 4 way conference calls (we cannot do that on the 7940’s we have). Answering and placing calls is as easy as having a hard phone. Searching the Corporate directory is faster now that you have a real keyboard to search. The call quality was great.

I need to try the software out from a cable modem this weekend. I have it on my Thinkpad to give it a whirl.

Softphone did allot of what I just discussed, but it was a pain to setup and configure. Communicator was simple to do. The only draw backs will be fixed when we move to CCM 3.3.4 or later. The main issue being extension mobility not working.

Travel Essentials

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As I said the other day, I don’t travel anywhere near as much as I used to. Just because I don’t go out of the office that much doesn’t mean that when I do I want to be any less connected. I did a quick overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. I (bored on the train) now write about what I relied on during the trek.

While in transit nothing says keeping in contact with the world like a Blackberry. When you can’t or don’t want to bring out a laptop it is essential. I hate it for everything else, including the stupid direct connect. I find that if I want to hold a conversation I might as well call the person than have a 20 minute conversation on DC. For email nothing beats the Blackberry, yet.

My powerbook was the laptop of choice this trip. My thinkpad is acting funky, and I don’t want to wipe it since I am getting a new one next week. So the powerbook stepped in and performed flawlessly (so far). I used it to watch some tv shows I recorded last week. Checked mail, did work, blogged, etc. All over Wifi!

Without the iPod I would not be sane. It makes train trips, and quiet hotel rooms that much more tolerable. It also is a great portable hard drive to store said TV shows that I watched on my powerbook. I say YES to plug and play!

My Treo is great (always carry it), but this trip it was used as it normally is. Still great, and a must for travel. What I used instead was Extension Mobility on Cisco Call Manager. It is the ability to log into any CCM phone and your extension moves with you. That coupled with the Cisco WIFI cordless phone make working in a different office just like I was in NYC, even when I was running around between 2 floors.

My new Omega X-33 watch was also a must this trip. I use my watch as an alarm wherever I go. I took my timex (broken band and all) along just in case the Omega didn’t do its job. It worked fine. I almost fell out of bed with the loudness of the alarm this morning. First impressions is this watch and I hopefully will have a long friendship!

Lastly I loved my Broadvoice VOIP phone, & Skype. I didn’t use broadvoice this trip, but I used its voice mail. I got all my VM emailed to me so I stayed in touch with everyone. I would never have checked my NYC VM without it. Skype is great since I can use it on my powerbook with my Sony Ericsson HBH-65 bluetooth headset from anywhere I have an internet connection. For this trip it was free calls from the hotel. I didn’t even need my cell phone for it. If I had broadvoice soft-phone I wouldn’t even need skype.

I have talked (praised) most of these items before, but when you use them all together you have a very smooth travel experience. I will most likely be using most if not all of this gear on my next extended trip. Now if only Amtrak could accommodate a nice ON TIME trip and travel would be painless.

The train is approaching Penn now. About an hour and 15 minutes late. So I will wrap this up so I can put the powerbook away. More mobile reviews when I use the stuff and have time to write about them! This post was written on Tuesday afternoon 5-17-05…

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All Consuming Project

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The move downstairs is taking up allot more of my time than I would have liked. I am on my way home now. Kai and Co. will make sure the cubes are finished and the cable work is done right.

Now that the contracts are back, our data center wants to schedule the move of our gear to our new cage. I need to call them tomorrow. Hopefully we can do everything and have ourselves up in the new cage by mid June. Then all we have to worry about is IPCC.

On other notes I am working on getting a DC into VMware, still. I got side tracked since I had to goto Kingston. I will demote one of our DC’s tomorrow and bring it online as a virtual machine.

Still waiting to run the active directory upgrade at our data center. this will enable us to have 2003 domain controllers. This will be helpful for Biztalk 2004.

Storage

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Jayson is pushing an online disk storage system. He is thinking NAS. This will solve a problem we have with one nights tape backup taking so long is that it gets in the way with SQL server db backups for the next day. We just don’t have enough time in the day to run the amount of tape we need. if we backup to a disk array and then to tape weekly we can increase restore time, and backup times. from an engineering standpoint it is a great idea.

We toyed with it last year, but never got to budgeting for it. Now we think we really need it. I have to see if we can get the money for it. Jay is going to do some more research for me and then we will come up with options.

My New Linux Box

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I have not had good luck getting Suse Enterprise Linux 9.0 installed on my new server again. it is not me. I cannot even get to the partitioning screen using text mode. The machine just hangs. As I said before when I try using Suse 9.3 I get told that it cannot find a hard drive. The drive is there fine, but for some reason the software wont find it. instead of messing around with those distributions I am just going to use the older (but totally usable) Suse 9.1. Lets face it I am going to mess up the install and need to do it again. I don’t want a distribution that will cause me headaches to install. With Suse 9.1 I can install it in vmware on my XP desktop and mess with configurations I am thinking of trying on the physical machine. Yes this is for personal use, and yes it may be overkill ot use a test machien. This is what I do. I deploy things. This is the smart way to do it, and it saves me from having to reload the hardware each time (and I anticipate it being many times) I mess up the OS.

So far I have 9.1 on the new box, and I am waiting to configure it. Doing some other stuff right now, but I figured I would take a break to write a bit. Updates later.

Mac Spotlight

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When google came out with Gmail I said so what. I don’t need a free email address with tons of space, I have my own domain. When people said you can use it to search for mail contents, I said I didn’t need that, and I didn’t want google “seeing” everything I got in email. When Microsoft and google both came out with desktop search tools I was skeptical. When Apple came out with spotlight I was just as skeptical.

I tried spotlight out last week when I installed 10.4 on my mini. It seemed cool, but I didn’t think of much use for it right away. The other day I configured Apples mail client to see if it was better than entourage. It has its advantages, and so does entourage. Then I realized that all mail located in my Apple mail client is indexed into spotlight. I was still skeptical until I did my first search. I was looking for a piece of mail in my inbox (1 of 500 messages currently there). I typed the first name of the person sending the mail, and a word I knew was in the subject or body of the message. Spotlight spit back 3 possible answers and sure enough 1 of them was exactly what I was looking for. No need to create folders and sort through my inbox every week or so. All I need to do now is just dump my mail into an offline folder (i use IMAP for online storage) and just run a search when I need something.

Because of the spotlight searching ability I may start using Mail over Entourage. Apparently Entourage is not indexed in spotlight, but they (Microsoft) claim there will be a plug in for the Entourage database at some point that will allow indexing. I for one eagerly await the release of that. Until then you may find me using Mail for mail, and entourage for contacts and calendar. I just wish Mark/space, Apple & Palmone would get sync’ing perfected so I can use iCal and Address book with categories on my mac and have the categories carry over to my palm and then over to my PC when I am at work on Outlook.

Mac Dev Lessons

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I have been playing with Apache, PHP, MySQL & Surgemail on of all machines my Macmini. I was still having issues with the new linux box so I messed around with these programs on the mac. Man most of it was easier than the linux setup, but it was still hard. I found several prebuilt install packages for most of the programs I was playing with.

I learned a few valuable lessons today. First never install anything you don’t know how to uninstall. Doing technology for as long as I have, I should know that by now, but I guess not! Second, I need a setup for testing and messing around and a separate environment where I keep working things like my current website, email, etc.

Right now I actually have my website running on my mini. I don’t want to keep it there, but for now until I sort out my linux issues it will remain. Tomorrow I am going to do mothers day stuff so I probably wont have time to mess with this stuff. Hopefully I will get to some more during the week.