IM

Palm Apps

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I may have mentioned this before but the only software I am buying recently is software for my Treo 600. I am finding so many useful things to get, I going out and buying the full versions when the trials are over.

I just bought Verichat. it allows you to chat over GPRS. You can use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. If you are not actively in the program, but logged onto their proxy server and someone sends you an IM, you get a SMS message with the IM. You then can sms back or enter the program and chat. Regular chatting does not use up SMS messages. it rocks.

I also got Call Shield Lite for the Treo 600. It allows me to identify anyone or any group with distinctive rings. It also allows me to hang-up, send to voice mail or answer any call by a number of parameters. you do this by group, person, or phone number. I have someone who keeps calling with a wrong number. I programed the software automatically hang up on them before the phone rings. It is so crazy, how cool this software is.

I am going to buy jabber software so I can use work’s jabber system on the Treo. I haven’t tried that out yet, but it looks good.

Auto Configuration Of Mozilla

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For the past year I have been pushing people at my company to use Mozilla 1.x. The free version of the Netscape Gecko browser engine. I have come full circle with this browser since I originally liked and used netscape 1.x and 2.x but dropped it by version 4.x for IE.

Our customer service reps have been complaining of slow computers for as long as I can remember. At first we thought it was all sorts of issues. We realized it was the reps after we bought brand new Compaq computers early last year.

It turns out that these reps have 10-20 windows open at any time. 80-90% of them are IE windows. A desktop with 256megs or ram ends up needing 300-500 megs of memory. For what these people are doing it is not cost effective to buy more memory, and don’t even think of asking them to close some windows. I won’t go on and on about that, but I am a power user and only have 5-8 windows open at a time. How hard is it to close something you are not using and open it again several hours later when you need it again for 5 minutes??? Answer is people are lazy.

The solution we have is use Mozilla. I found that mozilla with tabbed browsing only costs 18-25 megs of memory for the first browser instance, and 1-2 megs per tabbed window. IE on the other hand uses 18-25 megs per IE window. By using mozilla you could save hundreds of megs of memory on a computer.

The problem we have had with adopting Mozilla is administrative. We needed a way to push out the bookmarks file to every user when we make changes. My company controls our Rep’s bookmarks so they have the most up to date list of sites to use while searching for stuff. I finally found how to create a users.js file in everyone’s mozilla profile that points to a bookmark file outside of the mozilla profile directory. Now we can add a line to our login script that will refresh the bookmarks every time a user logs in. With the users.js file we can also customize any other mozilla security or UI feature, but we have to manually copy the file every time we need to make an update so that becomes problematic. The issue is that mozilla creates a GUID for each profile and uses that as the profile directory name. We cannot script an update to copy files if the directory is different for each user.

The bookmark issue thankfully was the major problem with mozilla. We are now waiting to finish up other profile and desktop changes to begin rolling it out to everyone sometime in April or May

With adoption of Mozilla as our browser my company moves closer to the open source community. We still use Windows XP on the desktop. We have to. Our call center software requires it and that probably wont’ change in the foreseeable future. But we use Open office.org 1.1 for our reps. It saves us almost $400 per computer. We also use Jabber as our chat system. Granted the jabber system we use was purchased and it is a shrink wrapped windows application, but it is based off of the open source jabber standard. The desktop clients are all free.

Because of the reliance on the free open source software, besides the OS (comes with the new computers we get anyway) our call center software, and MSFT CAL’s to access the file server, we have virtually no desktop licenses to buy when we add new computers. Norton AV and Ghost are the only other things that I can think of we purchase and that is only $20-30 per computer. Someone explain to me why a phone rep needs a $400 version of office for email and typing quick text and spread sheets? The new math can’t even explain away that kind of costs.

iChat AV

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So I looked at the Apple iChat AV program yesterday. I have also played with it in the Apple store before. It is really cool. I think I would actually try to use it. The only problem is that it only works with other iChat AV users. I am not buying hardware for a chat system that only like 10 people use, and none of them are people I know. I do want to play with a net cam. It is a dead fad, but I think it was a good idea.

Other Projects

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Other things I am trying to work on are… I just downloaded Connectix (now Microsoft’s) Virtual PC for Windows. I want to see if it is better than VMWare. It was up on MSDN so I decided to give it a try. I also grabbed the beta for SMS 2003. Gets me wondering when they will release it since 2003 is almost up.

My exchange project is not dead yet, but I have no time to do anything on it, so it sits idle. I am also looking at the new Microsoft Chat Server. We currently use a Jabber server from Tipic. I actually like it allot and it was very cheap. I want to see how the Microsoft one measures up.

Besides projects to evaluate new software I am also working on tons of other stuff. I am scheduling an update to our email ticketing system called Mailflow. We currently use version 1.0 and are getting a free upgrade to 2.0. I am attempting to deploy it next week. It is from a company called Visnetic. They make some neat pieces of software.

To conserve bandwidth we are about to start blocking most outbound network ports from our firewall. That will make me a popular guy with the rest of the company! Also we are ordering a private line T-1 between our two offices so we can send VOIP calls between them in greater number than we can over the internet T-1’s we have.

Long Lost Friends

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This week was a week of communicating with people who I have not spoken to in ages. I got an unexpected reply to my change of address email from my friend from college Marty Snyder. I haven’t spoken to him in like 3 years. He is married and expecting a kid. Wow, we are getting old.

I also IM’d my friend Steve. He is buying a house up in Albany. I am need to let him know when I am doing Kingston so I can see him and Jenn (his wife, and also a friend from school) when I am up there.

And I previously mentioned talking to Sean on MSN. For some reason he can use that at work, but not AIM.

I am also sending a really late wedding card to my friend lonnie. So hopefully we can get in touch also. I wasn’t planning on speaking with all these people, but it is a pleasant surprise.

Computer security in the office, I am a hypocrite

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I got an email from my friend Sean today. He is a good friend from college. He does GIS database work out in Las Vegas. I haven’t spoken to him in a while so it was good to here from him. He is online less now a days because they are monitoring web habits and frown on IM use. I of course gave him some tips on getting around the web police. As far as non IT guys go, he is very computer savvy, so I hope he can get on the internet at work without the corporate police getting on his back. Come on sean, IM me. Remember when you are at work, I am home. Gotta love that time difference!

I admit that I am a hypocrite. Things that Sean tells me that his company is doing are things I am either implementing or talking about deploying at my company. Yet I will tell him how to get around the system, while I am forcing it on others! Oddly I don’t seem to care. He is a friend, and I have a job to do!!!

My company is currently looking at proxy server software that will monitor web habits. We also deployed Jabber to all our employee’s. Jabber is an open source standard for IM. We purchased a windows based server from Tipic. Their are plenty of free distributions on linux/unix, but when we did our deployment I was not (still not) a linux expert so we stuck with a windows based product. With jabber we can limit IM access to internal use only. For some of our corporate staff we allow AIM to talk with people outside, but our call center is locked down. I actually love jabber. I think it is awesome and I use it all the time for talking to people in my company, but it is restrictive to some.

So for my friends not working with me I feel compelled to give them advise to get around security blocks a corporate IT staff may impose. For people in my company, I AM the corporate IT police. And yes it is kind of fun to lock stuff down. Not because you screw over people, but because it is a challenge. Restricting access to something always spawns people trying to break your restrictions. That cat and mouse game can be very interesting. Thankfully (or not) the users at my company are not much of a challenge, except for our development staff. And those guys don’t have many restrictions on web use, so they don’t count.

Had a real bad night

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Had a real bad night sleeping last night. Went to bed fine, but for some reason I was unable to stay asleep. So of course by morning I was so tired I slept right through the first 2 alarms. So I over slept for like 40 minutes, but I made up time. Hopefully I shouldn?t be too late to work. This gives me an opportunity to try out writing on the train. The joy?s of having a really light laptop that has a nice keyboard! The train ride to work is about 20-30 minutes depending on if it is express or not. Since I am so late I am on a local and have plenty of time to sit here and write. It is actually kind of nice. Sort of relaxing, but not really.

Today hopefully will be better than yesterday. I am going to show Gus DFS on windows 2000 server. Also have to work on a bunch of other hardware quotes. The big thing this week isn?t even that much more work. It is to convince the entire company to start using jabber, now that we have a jabber server setup. One department wants it really bad, the others are like ?can we still use AIM?. I will see how this shapes up. That jabber is really cool though. I still would like a better client software, but what we have is good enough. After months of goofing around with jabber we found a windows 2000 server based version of it. http://www.tipic.com/ I know open source is great and all, but by purchasing that windows package we saved money in the long run since we didn?t need anyone to come in and setup Linux or spend hours trying to do it ourselves. It took me a few hours on a test box one day, and like 3 hours or less on the production box to get it setup. The only time consuming part was setting up all the users. Once someone takes care of that, we are in business.

I just only hope someone comes out with a better jabber client for the mac. I still don?t understand why I had to start liking an OS that isn?t supported as much as windows. WHY??? For years I used NT 4, with no consumer hardware that worked good on it. So I always had to look for the scsi scanner, the video card that was NT compliant, etc. Then 2000 & XP come out and I am able to buy and use all the ?normal? stuff made for consumers. XP is nice, I like it, but I cant understand why then I tried out this Mac OS X? I think I did it just to check it out, and now I went from a low end ibook to a ultra portable powerbook. Dam Apple. I guess ignorance can be bliss, because I was happy with the windows stuff lying around. But now I am using both, mac and windows. I take my powerbook and leave it on my desk at work now. They keyboard is really nice, so I just use it for chatting, and other stuff during the day. Also gotta say that office for the mac is better than for windows. Not sure why Microsoft did this, but it is. I am using word right now to do this blog, and update it later. Let me tell you that it kicks ass over XP. Of course that still does not make up for half the software I like not working on the mac. Thankfully most of the hardware I want works with it. Gotta thank someone for network printing?

OK, that was enough of my ramblings on mac vs. windows. As you can tell I don?t have an answer to that age old question. I am stuck between both of them. I rely on my powerbook more than every, but I also find myself switching over to my windows box several times a day just because I cant do something on the mac.

The train just entered the tunnel, so that is my queue to finish this up. Maybe I will write more later tonight? Not sure. This blog thing is still new so I am actually making entries. I hope I keep it up. More later?