Technology

Got Rid Of Backups

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Several months ago I read that CD-R’s and DVD-R’s won’t last as long as most people orginally thought. The personally recorded disks may only be good for 3-5 years. No one knows. I have been using CD-R’s and more recently DVD-R’s as my only form of backup of my computer data.

I keep everything on the computer now a days so those backup’s are important. Knowing these CD’s “rot” I decided to take all my backups dating back to 1998, and put them back on a hard drive. I then backed up that directory to another hard drive. Drives are cheap so I figure if I keep all my crap on 2 drives I will be safe from problems. Or so I hope. I took some of the really old backups and destroyed the CD’s. I still have my recent DVD’s of backup’s for 2002-2004, but older stuff is getting destroyed since I don’t really need the CD’s with them back on disk. I use a Lacie firewire drive with 200 gig of storage space.

I also decided to buy a new Firewire drive every year for backup’s of crap. I realized that I bought my 200-gig drive less than a year ago and I have only like 50-gig’s left. It is cheaper to buy a new drive than to worry about removing crap off the existing one when it gets filled up.

I still have some more archiving to do, but I am getting things cleaned up virtually and physically before I start packing to move!

Must Have Software

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I have said good things about CallShield before. I will say more good things. It filters calls to my Treo 600. So if XYZ person calls and I don’t want them to call, I can send them to voice mail, or refuse the call or hang up on them right away.

The hang up function is great. I have some old lady who keeps calling me. She is so old and or retarded she keeps dialing my number instead of whoever it is she really wants to get. So I programed my phone to hang up on her. I see in the phone log that she calls like 8 times trying to get through. People are stupid.

The reason I am praising the software again is that she tried to call last night at like 1:30AM. I didn’t know this until this morning since the software worked as advertised. My only problem is that I wont want to switch to another phone since I won’t be able to do this kind of filtering on a normal cell phone.

Snapper Mail 2.0 Update

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OK I am having issues with my snapper mail. Not sure if it is the software or my IMAP server but I cannot connect to one IMAP box I want to get to. I can get to others. Not sure if it is because this box has a ton of mail in it. I am going to empty it out and see if it works then.

Besides that the software seems great. it does the sync between the imap server and my Treo very quick compared to versa mail. I don’t use versa mail because it is so slow. Also because you cannot schedule send and receives.

Snapper Mail

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I just downloaded Snapper Mail 2.0 from their website. It is a beta of the latest Palm mail client. I purchased their version 1.9x back in December. it is great, but it didn’t support IMAP. The enterprise version of the new 2.0 does support this feature. I tried it out yesterday and have 60 more days on the demo. So far it looks awesome.

I switched over to the IMAP server that my company uses, versus the second POP account I setup just for my Treo. Now what I read at work will be read on my Treo, and vice versa. I can see what I am doing on both devices. It is great. I use IMAP mailbox’s at work and personal already so this was a great addition for me. Now I can use my Treo, Mac, Work laptop or anywhere and get the same mail. it is the best thing short of Exchange.

So far I am down with buying this upgrade to an already great product. I want to give it a few more weeks to see if I have any major issues. First looks, look great!!!

Still Building My Laptop

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Sunday I got the OS back on my Thinkpad. Today was spent getting all the other applications on it. Throughout the day I had people come and ask for stuff. I would say, dam I need to install that. I would spend the next 20 minutes doing an install to get 5 seconds of information for someone. Hopefully this will be done soon so I can resume my normal work schedule routine.

Most importantly I still need to put on the VPN and Wireless software on the laptop, so I can be remote when I am in Kingston tomorrow. That is on my agenda for first thing Tuesday.

Product Recovery

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I finally gave into the desire. I just got finished backing up all (i hope) of my data on my IBM Thinkpad T-40. As I write this I am running the IBM rapid restore function. Basically a hidden partition on the hard drive has all the settings and software that the machine had when it was bought. I am just returning it to the factory fresh setup.

I do this every once and a while. I may have done it once or twice before on this particular machine and I have only had it for 11 months. When I had more free time I would do this almost every 2-3 months. Now I don’t have the time, so it is a big pain in the ass to do, but it does wonders for the performance of the box.

I was having issues with the machine freezing up and then begin to work again after 30 seconds or so. I also realized how much crap I had accumulated on the machine. Now I am going to put Windows XP (pro), all the security patches and a few other pieces of software. Everything else I need I will put in a VMWare Virtual Machine. I will put VMWare workstation 4.5 on my machine. I just downloaded the free upgrade from 4.0. I want to keep this laptop as clean as possible. I know deep down that it will never happen in reality, but at least I will try.

I will spend the next week installing the main pieces of software I will need. I will spend the next month after that installing other miscellaneous pieces of software until I am finally happy with the setup.

Whenever I do this I always hope I remembered to back everything up. I almost always forget something. Sometimes important stuff, but usually something stupid, that will just take me time to get again, or I say goodbye forever to it.

CallShield Saga Is Over

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I finally got the Pro version of CallShield working on my Treo 600. Mantragroup makes this cool software call CallShield. I have mentioned it before. I can have distinctive rings on my Treo based off of groups in my address book. I can filter by number, area code, etc. I can also tell the software to go right to voice mail or hang up on someone based off of criteria like #, group, area code, etc. it is really cool.

My problem was that the lite version had a bug that would prevent me from using the distinctive ringer on my Treo 600. It kept rebooting when the ringer would go off. I went through 2 trials of their pro version of the software that worked before I was stuck. The support group was cool. they sent me a key to use the software for an extra week. Then a week goes by and the fix wasn’t in for the lite version. So I email them. Several days go by and they say, hey you have been cool send us your information and proof of purchase and we will upgrade you. I figure great, that was nice of them. I send them the information they require and another week goes by before I hear back from them. In total I bought the product on April 30, and I am finally getting it working without any demo’s today June 2. Not so good.

I do give them high marks for the software being really good. Also they didn’t give me a hard time about the upgrade. it just took a while to get responses back from them.

My bad experiences asside, Call Shield is my new killer app for the Treo 600 along side my Snappermail, & Verichat. This is why I have a smart phone.

Office 2004 For The Mac

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So my initial review of Office 2004 for the Mac is this. It is great. it is just as great as the previous version Office v.x for the Mac. That is the problem. I went out and bought this thing (and I am not regretting upgrading) and it doesn’t have that much new stuff. It is not a quantum leap of enhancements in any way. It is what everyone has been saying about Microsoft office upgrades. It is minor changes, that if you have 2 or 3 versions older product you will appreciate the upgrade. But if you are going from one realize behind to the new release you wont find much difference. That was my problem.

Entourage is nicer than it was in the previous version. Other than that, I don’t see much difference. I still like the product, but for what I do it is very similar to the older version. I will see after a few months if I change my opinion.

Project And Other Servers

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Gus is getting me to start using project server. I got my account today, and I hope to add my quarterly project plan in a few days. it looks cool, but we need to get everyone to use it.

I got the RAID card in for the new machine we will build Subversion on. lets hope that Promise didn’t lie when they said this card supports Suse 9.0. I need to build that with Danny sometime in the next week or so. I then need a new box for Nagios. Danny (who is now our resident Linux expert besides Gus) is saying that Subversion and Nagios may be too CPU intensive to put on the same low end box. We will evaluate the situation and make a decision. We are using a Penguin Computing 1U server we picked up last September. They make decent low end box’s for linux. We are modifying the one of the 2 we have for use with this app.

Missing Sync Is Out

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OK, I am not going to bash Mark / Space or their product the Missing Sync. I actually like the product. I bought it for the Palm and Pocket PC. I am just having issues with limitations the mac has on PIM software. What I mean is that I like outlook. I really do. I use the catigories in the address book, tasks, and calender allot. The problem with that is the Mac equivelant software Address book, and ical does not do cagitories or does not do them in a way they are compatible with what I do in Outlook.

I use outlook at work. I go home to my mac and would like the work to carry over. Instead I get all my categories I do at work getting erased when I go home and sync with my mac. I had to spend 2 hours redoing all the categories on all my address book contacts on Saturday because of this.

For this reason I am on hold with using my mac as a PIM again. I still use the Missing Sync to update Avantogo on my iPaq, but that is it for now. Hopefully Markspace and apple inprove their products to allow me to do this. I don’t think it is a limitation on Mark Space’s side, but on the Apple PIM side. Either way I am not able to do what I want.

To me this is one of the last hurdles for me to get rid of my PC at home for all day to day tasks. The other things I need the PC for are all work related. Come on Apple, make a better PIM, that is compatible with it’s PC cousin’s!!!