Microsoft

The Physical & Digital House Cleaning

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Over the past month or so I have been cleaning up my apartment and tossing out old stuff I don’t want or need anymore. It is part of what I call my digital summer cleaning. I have taken old school and medical records I got from my dad that he kept when I was a kid and scanned them into PDF files. I am amazed at how many report cards I found. I scanned a ton of old letters I kept (for some reason that I cannot recall other than I am a pack rat) from friends over the past 15 years. Many of the letters I received I had written on the computer so I actually have a complete back and forth correspondence. it is kind of cool reading some of them. Once everything was scanned into the computer I shredded the old paper documents to save space. My wall unit has so much more room now!

On top of that I cleaned up a lot of the files I had on my computer. When trying to open some old letters I sent back in the mid 90’s I realized that the latest version of Word (2008 on the Mac or 2007 on Windows) wont open old Office formats. I had read about that in the past but never ran into the issue much. It was a real pain. That got me onto another kick I have had, move all my old documents to modern (ISO standards when possible) file formats. I already have several PFS Professional Write files from early middle and HS from my Commodore 64 that I still have but cannot open. I didn’t want to be screwed with other files. To solve that problem I built a Windows XP Virtual Machine (well used a copy of one I setup with SYSPREP) and installed an old Copy of Office 2000 on it. I then opened up as many old file format items I could find and printed them as PDF’s. For the past few years that has been my format of choice for archiving stuff. For things I want to be able to read/write in the future I have been saving stuff in the new Office XML format. I am not a fan of it, but I still don’t really use Open Office that much.

Additional things I have been doing is taking old CD’s & DVD’s I have used to make periodic backups of my data and ripping them back into my computer as ISO files. I am putting them all on one hard drive. Drives are cheap. I have been buying Western Digital My Passport portable 320gb drives for like $80. Over time the DVD’s start to rot. About 5 years ago I had already consolidated my old CD archives onto two DVD’s. Now I am putting all the DVD ISO’s onto one drive. I will still make DVD backups but I want a copy on a hard drive for safe keeping. Since I am so paranoid about data retention I also am continuing my habit of copying most of my data (well the important stuff) onto a hard drive at the end of each year. I am not sure if i am going to recycle the drive i use each year. So far I have, but since drives are getting cheap I might just start accumulating old archives on drives.

All of this clean up and organization would not have been possible without my Fujitsu Scansnap 300M scanner for my Mac, Adobe Acrobat 9 for Mac, Cute PDF writter for Windows, VMware Fusion, my brother P-Touch label maker, and my paper shredder (with cross-weave). Save and secure digital storage brought to me by my Drobo Firewire 800!

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How Some Hardware Companies Can Confuse Their Customers

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I wonder sometimes what Technology companies are thinking sometimes. A few months ago I bought a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 to use when traveling with my Macbook. It is a good portable mouse. I had no real complaints about it. That is why when I needed to use a portable mouse with my Thinkpad T61 I wanted to configure the mouse for use with it. The Thinkpad has bluetooth. That is when my problems started.

It turns out that the Thinkpad does not have the control panel option for Bluetooth even though the driver is installed and working. Some forum searches later and I discovered that this is unfortunately common for SP-2 + installs of Windows XP. I can’t really setup a bluetooth mouse without that control panel applet. I then figured I could download the latest Microsoft drivers and mouse software for the Notebook Mouse 5000. I was hoping that maybe I could configure the mouse using the Microsoft Mouse software. This is when things got interesting. When I went to Microsoft’s Hardware site to download the drivers I couldn’t find the mouse I own in the list. I verified that I have the right mouse type and I still couldn’t find it anywhere on the Drivers & Download page.

I then decided to search the internet for references to drivers for this model mouse. After about 15 minutes searching I found several references to the same problem I was having of not finding the drivers. One of the posts was actually on a Microsoft Forum. The answer blew me away. Yeah, there aren’t any drivers to download. According to someone who seems to be working at Microsoft said that since it is a generic Bluetooth Mouse there is not specific driver set for this model. My response to that is, oh I am sorry that I the end user didn’t know that. How can you expect a consumer to figure that out? You sell someone a product but when you can’t find that product listed on support and download lists it is kind of frustrating. I can understand that I don’t need a driver or special software for the mouse. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to have this model in the list of models to choose from on the support site and when you select it you get a notice about not needing to download anything special for it? Come on Microsoft you can do better than this.

In the end my problem is still not solved since I don’t have any way to pair the mouse to the Thinkpad. Lenovo hasn’t been very helpful either. I am still working on the issue but I thought my little story was odd enough to take a few minutes and write about it

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Photo Albums

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The driving force to get me to try a new web hosting provider that I mentioned in my post “Spoke Too Soon” was to get an easy to use web album management system installed. Not simply using some client side image formatting system like I had been using. Granted my most recent photo layout tool, RapidWeaver was good. It was the latest in a long line of editing tools such as Frontpage, the generic export feature of iPhoto, some php photo album generator, picasa, and more. The ability to have a true photo management system powered by mySQL running on a server sounded great. I stumbled upon Gallery by accident the other day.

Once I looked it over a bit and found a hosting provider that would script the setup in a minute I setup a new hosting account. I was uploading photo’s in 5 minutes. Now I haven’t got everything exactly the way I would like it, but I am working on it.

Now I will continue to use RapidWeaver for my general website creation, but since most of my content is photo albums Gallery will come in handy.

More updates after I get more content into the system.

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Roundup of Useful Mac Applications

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Every few months I go through a phase of looking for new programs that improve my day to day work experience on the computer. Not sure why I do it in phases, but it always seems when I switch to one program I am getting 5 more. Some end up being really cool and I continue to use, and others are just a fad and I forget about them quickly. Below are quick reviews of the several new applications that are all around great apps!

Growl I something that I installed last year but stopped using it when I switched computers. I guess you can call it a unified application notification system. It gives you alerts and events from several apps as a single system. it can get annoying if you have it notify too much stuff, but once I tuned it I got it working great. I like that it tells me the itunes songs I just started playing, or that I have new email and gives a quick flash of who sent it and the subject.

Rapidweaver is a simple but feature filled web-page and site authoring program for the Mac. Since I started using the Mac I full time over Windows XP I have been lacking a good web editor. I used Dreamweaver for basic page edits, but I never liked it. I always ended up going back to my XP box for Frontpage to do web work. Now Frontpage isn’t that good either but I was used to it, and I didn’t find anything better. That was until I saw a review for RapidWeaver. It does have its limits, but for the home page I have, I was able to redo my entire site in RapidWeaver in a few hours. All 300 megs of photos and all. RapidWeaver is not perfect. I all but can’t use it on my Intel iMac (universal binary version coming soon or so they say), so I use it on my Powerbook. That being said this software was worth the money I spent on it!

HandBreak is a free utility that will take a DVD and convert it for use in iTunes or on your iPod (aka makes a Divix or H.264 format). It takes a while to run, but it works great! I can convert a bunch of DVD’s to my iPod and watch them on the way to and from work!

iSquint is another great program that lets me convert media into Divix and H.264 file formats for use in iTunes and my iPod. iSquint takes existing video files such as MPEG-2, or AVI’s and will convert them. iSquint is fast and easy to setup. With it I can take any TV show I record with my DVR and put it on my iPod to watch later or when I am traveling.

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The New Webpage

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Over the past few years I have focused my web presence on my blog. I have a website but I just haven’t been keeping it up. For that matter I have been blogging less, and I know it. I just have been busy and too tired to write when I normally like to. Just as I was writing this post I realized that I missed this blog’s anniversary. March 23 marked my 3rd anniversary blogging. My other website I maintain existed in some form or another since December 1995. Last year marked the first time I truly used no windows computer and maintained my electronic existence on a Mac. This posed a problem that I just ignored. I haven’t found a good web editing / site editing program for the Mac. I had Dreamweaver MX 2004, but I never got into using it. I had always used Frontpage since like 1997. I know it sucks, but it was easy to use for page creation. it was also easy to make site wide changes. With my move to the Mac full time I had not used anything to update my website. With blogging taking up most of my free web time, I ignored the other site.

Today I felt like updating my site and began to backup my existing site. Long drawn out process because of several issues I don’t want to go into. While that was happening I decided to search for a decent Mac web editor. iWeb was too basic. I found on Maczot a link to Rapid Weaver. The demo looked cool, even though you could only make 3 pages. So for $34.95 I gave it a try. I am creating my first photo page now. If it looks good I will start the process of redoing my site using it. I know it will require a total redo of the site, throwing out everything. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Hopefully it works out. I am going to stage the new site on my .mac account to see how it looks and then when I am done, or at least substantially complete I will post it to my main site.

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Website Work

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I updated tons of photo pages on my photo album website. I have compressed down a ton of images to save space. I have also replaced allot of the old iPhoto generated pages with a newer style I am using. I am also creating new index pages so I can update the site easier. Fireworks was bad since links would be broken since it didn’t see the dynamic updates that frontpage did. Now I can move around the structure of my site without having to manually change hundreds of links.

Messing With My Site

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I have been playing with my website today. Really tinkering if you want to call it anything. Jayson messing with apache and other crap on his Linux box got me to mess with my site. I was not as hard core as he has been. I have been using a Windows 2003 box with IIS. I am modifying my site using Frontpage, Fireworks, & Dreamweaver.

The basis for the tinkering is that I want to add more photos to my site. The issue is two fold. One I want to secure some of the photo pages with a password. I am doing that now but each section has its own username and password. That is not effective. The other issue is the organization of the site and how it is presented to the viewer. Right now people enter my site and see a home page built with fireworks. It looks nice, but it is not super easy to update. I want something that can dynamically update as I add content, or change the links.

I still don’t know what I want to do. I want to use Fireworks, but I am having problems updating it. I am playing around with text and tables in Frontpage to have the same affect. it is not the same, but I am not sure if it will do. I will mess with it more later in the week.

My Web Site And Tech Projects

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I finally went out and I am trying Macromedia Flash MX. I have used dreamweaver and fireworks, but never mastered flash. Most of my website (my regular website, not the blog) is done with fireworks, and dreamweaver after I abandoned Frontpage XP last year.

I also updated some pages on my site using fireworks. They were only minor changes, but I haven’t worked on the site (except for the blog) for a while. Long weekends are good like that. I get to do stuff that I don’t normally get time for.

My next home computer project is to setup apache on a linux box (my dad gave me his old dell desktop to use) or on my new iMac. I also want to setup MYSQL on a machine so I can access my personal DB I have from any machine and not just my laptop. I currently have an access DB. Of course I have had this project kicking around since 1999, when I worked at Datastream doing SQL work. Then I was going to make a SQL 7.0 DB. I did, but never used it. This will eventually get done.

This entry was written while listening to American Girls LP by Counting Crows

My website

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If I haven’t blogged enough today, here is more stuff I have going on.

I am working on setting up my photo website on my new Windows 2003 server. it is really my old Windows 2000 server I have cleaned off and installed 2003. I am playing around with both IIS 6.0 and Apache. I am also working on my VMWare project mentioned a few days ago. No luck with moveabletype just yet, so my existing Red Hat server still remains.

Even-though I am using IIS again I am refraining from the temptation of using Front-page server extensions again. It took me forever to get rid of them (probably not really gone, but I like deluding myself) so I don’t want to put them back. I am going to continue to use Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Moving my photo album is taking a while over the 802.11b link. I have over 750 megs of images now. I may go back and re-run the iphoto exports to shrink some of those files, but for now the archive only gets bigger!

Left work on time. Wow!

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So I actually got out of work sort of early yesterday. I hopped on the subway and went to my sisters. My parents came over and we had dinner. The baby is still fun, but she is cranky. Not sure why. I won’t go into theories here. When she isn’t cranky she is awsome. I installed a CD Burner for them so they can make CD’s of all the pictures of morgan. Also they can try and free up hard drive space. They are always getting out of disk errors.

We took Morgan to Barnes & Nobles. My mom got a ton of baby books since she had a discount this week. Mike was working so I didn’t get to see him. His rotation for his residency has crazy hours for the first year.

Keith fixed dan’s Wireless Router. He dropped it and did some damage to it, but according to dan it was dropped after it stopped working. I need to check today and see how it worked out. He called with problems last night, but he was going to call Keith to help him out.

I spoke with my friend jayson for the first time in months on Tuesday. We used to talk like once a day. We both got busy I guess. He had questions about frontpage. I got him setup on his server. I also setup an IIS site on his server for me. Running just apache is not working for me. I don’t have enough time to move my site off of frontpage. So I either can have it run all half asked or put it on an IIS box again. He gave me admin rights and I will probibly setup the site there or in one other spot. That way I don’t need it on a server at home.

Jayson is doing volentier police work in New Orleans. He said he wanted to do it, but I didn’t know he started. It sounds pretty cool. He is one person I don’t want with a badge pulling a gun on me. He will use it if he needs to!