Software

More Nice Palm Software

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I am trying out the 30 day trial on two awesome pieces of Palm software. Both sync with my mac! The first is an upgrade to something that I have had for years, Landware’s Pocket Quicken 2.5. the new version is slicker looking. Not sure if the added features are worth the upgrade, but since I want to use it with Quicken 2005 on my Mac they require the upgrade. If you use quicken to keep track of your finances having this to make quick updates on the road is invaluable. Without it I would have no clue where my money went!

The other program I am using is Splash ID 3.x from Splash Data. It is a Password Safe like utility that has a Windows, Mac, Palm, & Pocket PC clients. I can use the DB on my mac and sync with my palm and then use it on my Windows machine. It is not free like Password Safe, but it works everywhere I need it to, and it has an import/export function. It took me 20 minutes to export my website links, and user names out of my access db and imported them into Splash ID. Now everything is secure and safe!

As it stands now I will be buying both products when their trials wear off!

Quicken Conversion Again

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Over the past 2 years it seems like I keep ying/yanging on where I use quicken. I use the program for my personal finances (what little I have). I have used online checkbooks since like 1994. I love quicken. The problem is if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I need to export each account to a .qif file and import it into Quicken for the Mac. It is a pain in the ass. If you have certain kinds of split items or stock sales it messes up the transactions. Of course I have both, so it took me like 4 hours to clean up and move everything. I was amazed (again, I did this twice before) that I could get it to work at all.

My error last time I converted everything was that I didn’t keep both my mac and windows versions of the file up to date. This time I think I will do a monthly update of my windows version. For some reason I always need to go back to the windows version for some reason. For now I am happily running everything off of my Quicken 2005 for the Mac!

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.

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.

Stuff

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I had to deal with fixing contracts for our cage upgrade. Bob finally signed off on them at like 5pm and I faxed them back to our provider. Now we wait for a completion date.

I also worked on moving AD (active directory) roles around on our servers. This will enable me decommission a server and move it into a virtual machine. We have an old Dell 42xx series server that is just taking up space. It barely runs as it is, so it is a good idea to make it a virtual machine and free up precious rack space. Yup, still loving VMware!

Thursday night I stayed late moving print servers, and FMSO roles around. The testing of the log-on scripts with the printer changes took longer than I hoped so I didn’t get home till like 8:30PM.

Danny was worried about disaster recovery issues with moving more gear to virtual machines. I downloaded the white papers on the subject from vmware and will read them on the train to Kingston Monday. I am off to upstate for 2 days for furniture construction.

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.

IPCC SOW

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We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.

If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.

More news as it develops…

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.

iChat Plus Jabber = Cool

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I never really warmed up to Apples iChat program until this week. I liked AIM. I never really used MSN. So I stuck with AIM. I like AIM (the service, NOT the program) only because I could not find a better program that will get me on AIM (the service not the program). GAIM, Trillian, etc didn’t do it for me.

On the flip side I use Jabber at work. I love it. It is another fantastic tool that Gus turned me onto years ago (wow, it has been years). Well my love of jabber and my use of my Mac had issues since there was no good jabber client for the mac. I have been using PSI for a while now. it is a good tool, but it had some serious quirks that I didn’t like. Actually they drove me crazy, but I had no other tool that came close to it on the Mac. Then came Tiger. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that iChat now supports jabber. After a few minutes of tinkering I figured out how to get my jabber server up on my iChat software. A few customizations with iChat (that I didn’t know I could do before) and now I am thinking differently about iChat.

Now I have another windows program that works as good or better on my Mac! Dare I dream to work completely off the mac without dealing with my Thinkpad crashing all the time? I have to stop myself from getting excited!

Yet More Vmware Stories

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I have spent 2 days working on fixing my active directory test virtual machines. I upgraded to vmware workstation 5.0 hoping to solve some cloning issues. if that doesn’t (didn’t) fix my issue I will use Microsoft sysprep on the virtual machines to resolve the SID problems.

I am also building myself a stable Suse 9.1 VM. The process of upgrading all the VM’s I have to work with workstation 5.0 will also take some time. The Kingston guys finally saw how I can connect to our GSX server today when I was up there. now they want one.

After some initial issues with the Suse 9.1 VM I am on my way to getting this to work. I keep hitting roadblocks with my configuration. it just shows how much I have to learn when it comes to linux.