Software

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.

Visio, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

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Visio is a fantastic piece of software. I have been using ti to update the floor plan of my companies Kingston office. The architect gave me a CAD file of the office when we opened last year. I imported it into visio. Now I am going back and replacing desks and other furniture with Visio objects. I am then labeling all of the cable drops in the office. This way I can print out the file and have a reference of where all the network jacks are throughout the office. I did this for our NYC office when we moved in back in 2002. I haven’t had time to do it for Kingston until now. We are finding it more and more necessary to have this map so I am working on it this week. Visio still rocks, but I don’t see that much of a difference between Visio 2000, 2002, & 2003. I am currently using Visio 2002 standard and it just isn’t that different from Visio 2000.

The New Treo 600

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I finally got my new Treo 600 Tuesday night. It is really cool. I installed most of my programs onto it. My first complaints are as follows: Polyphonic ring tones, can’t they make a regular phone ringer sound also? I have 20 ring tones, and they all suck. I want a normal ring. You can’t find that on the internet, but you can find anything on the top 40. What is going on? Until I find a normal ringer sound, I am going to use really annoying rings as a statement of my dissatisfaction. Hey, I suffer through everyone else’s crappy ring tones.

The second and I think last problem with the phone is the lack of a good case. Palmone doesn’t have one, and no third party company has one either. I have a $400 phone with a crappy case. Give me a belt clip or something!!!

On the plus side, I think the internet connects faster on this Treo vs my 270 using T-Mobile. The screen is much nicer. The speakerphone is great, and of course it is SMALLER than my 270.

I just bought The Missing Sync 2.0 for the Mac. It allows me to use the internet connection on my mac to sync avantgo. It also allows me to mount my SD card on my mac and move files. It is a nice piece of software.

Now I await the IMAP version of snapper mail. Other software wish lists is the distinctive ring tone software that I had on my 270. They don’t make a 600 version of it yet.

The screen protector for the Treo is on order and I have to find a docking cradle. I am buying accessories. This device is a keeper. Until something better comes along anyway!

The Early Train

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Now that Jayson is gone you would think I would leave my house normal time. Think again. Today I got up and ended up on the early train. It is funny because 2 years ago this early train was the normal train I got on, but now to me it is the early one.

Hung out most of the day sunday. I got Quicken to finally work on the Mac. I even figured out most of the online banking issues I was having.

Meet Alison for dinner. We ended up at Chillis. We always try to go there after the movies and never stay since the line is so long. Today we hung out for 30 minutes and got a table. It was a nice low key dinner.

I was going to see my family during the day, but my mom and sister took morgan shopping and they didn’t get back until after I left for my plans, so I missed them. Morgan is walking now. I can’t wait to see her. She is so CUTE!!!

Quicken

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I am a long time quicken user. I have been using it since at least 1995. I have almost every version since then. I have also used Turbo Tax like 3 times. I am a huge fan. The problem I am running into is that I now have Mac’s. I used to only have a PC, so moving my quicken data from one PC to another was as simple as copying the files. Now if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I have to convert it. As simple as Intuit claims it is, it is not so simple.

Back in Oct/Nov 2002 I converted my quicken data to run on my Powerbook. Once converted it was not simple to continue using my PC files. So I just left a copy on my PC and used my Powerbook. In AuGust of 2003 I decided I wanted to have both a PC and a Mac copy of my files. I like having options. I converted everything back to PC format. It takes several hours because out of thousands of transactions at least a few don’t convert. Then you have to spend time figuring out what one didn’t. Once done converting I never did keep updating my Mac version.

Since AuGust I have been running Quicken only on my thinkpad. Now I decided I want it back on my Powerbook. Once again I have to go through the whole conversion process. This time it wasn’t as bad as before, but I still had some problems. Most related to how the two different quicken programs keep investment information. Intuit should get their act together and keep the feature set’s of both products the same. On the plus side I found an error in how I recorded some stock information. That I guess is the silver lining in my whole ordeal.

My last gripe with Quicken for the Mac is that sometimes it has problems moving the file from one machine to another. When I migrated to a new computer last year I couldn’t open my old data file. I had to export the data and create a new file and import the old data. it was a stupid waste of time. Hopefully they fixed the problem in the 2004 version that came pre-installed on my newest Mac.

Work Update

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Here is what has been going on at the time sucking void I call work. Kidding. It may be a time sucking void but I wouldn’t be doing anything else…

Fixing our monitoring system. It seems like I am always doing this, but I am spending time tweaking our monitoring system that listens to all our computer systems and pages us when something is wrong.

Keith just finished setting up the VPN link to our Kingston office. Now we have a dedicated link between our offices for just VOIP traffic. We can use an entire T-1 for voice calls. We hope to get 15-20 calls over it. We will test it this week.

We are busy building and configuring new servers. it feels like we are doing this daily. We deployed 2 new box’s this week. Something to QA stuff on, and a new data-warehouse machine.

My mail migration goes slowly since I am busy doing other things. This is not a problem except we are paying for pop accounts on our current provider still when I would like to offload these users to our own hosted mail system. That is the end result. Hopefully when done I will save a few hundred bucks a month on mail hosting.

Gus has been away on vacation and now CES. He returns Wednesday. The rest of our upper management return Monday. No joke it has been quieter without them in the office. it is not them, it is just there is like 10 less people in the office. Back to normal on monday.

Cool Tech

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i got to use some really cool tech today.  I have been using Net Newswire on my mac for almost a year.  it is a fantastic program.  I use it to see if my favorite blogs have been updated.  I just started using it to see the latest news stories from my favorite news sites.  it makes browsing the web so simple.  I just launch the program and it tells me if each site has a new story.  I can see what I want to read and then I just click on the link and it brings me to the site.  this is nothing new.  RSS has been around for a little while, but it is starting to go more mainstream.  Yahoo now has RSS news feeds for their news sites.

I just finished adding a bunch of RSS feeds to Net News Wire for sites I visit often.  My internet browsing will be cut by like 60% by having all these sites together.  Now what will I do with all that free time???

This entry has been edited to remove WORK content.

This entry was written while listening to Another Postcard from the album "Everything to Everyone" by Barenaked Ladies

Projects Updates

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Finally put into service our first Windows 2003 Active Directory server. I demoted an old 2000 box and transfered its roles to the new server.

Started redirecting call center users in NYC to our new mail server we are using for our Kingston office. The end goal is to have the entire call center on that mail system. Once I get all the alias’s and accounts done I can just delete the old mail accounts and tell everyone they have a new email address. It is a slow process since I need to edit everyones profile when they are not at work. I did about 10 people in 2 days. this rate it will take me a month to get everyone cut over.

We upgrade our Pix firewalls next tuesday to enable us to use a VPN tunnel to send large amounts of VOIP calls between offices. when I mean large amounts I mean more than the 2-3 we can now. Probably like 20 at a time on a dedicated internet T-1.

Other things going on are the guys in Kingston are working on Cisco Softphone setup’s to allow remote agents for our call center. Or to allow us to use the phones from outside the office on our laptops. Also in the works is the ability to move your phone number between desk phones if you need to.

iTunes Rocks

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So I bought some more music on the iTunes store. I am not a huge fan of buying music, but getting it online from apple is flexible (i can burn to disk and use the files anywhere I want, unlike other services) and it is cheaper than buying a CD. I got Barenaked Ladies latest CD. You may have seen some of the songs listed as what I was listening to when writing this blog. It is a decent album. I found 2 songs I liked, but I think there last one (or was it 2 albums ago) was better. They are a band I would like to see in concert. Their music is funny, and they make good music.

This entry was written while listening to California from the album “Rip It Off” by Stroke 9

If I thought I Was Busy Before

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If I thought I was busy at work before, I am in way over my head now. One of the guys on my team left yesterday. We are now short handed. The big problem is the small issues now slowing down getting the bigger projects done.

I have 1 Windows 2003 Server with Active directory done for our nyc office. it is already in production. I need to finish moving stuff off one other server and then move the AD roles to the 2k3 server. Then I can rebuild the other box, and move on in the upgrade cycle.

A major web site for a customer of ours is launching tonight. Thankfully it didn’t require too much time on my teams part, but it ate up resources.

As I mentioned before I am also trying to merge our mail systems for 1 department. I have 2 call centers who are supposed to interact with each other, but they are on 2 different mail systems. We are going to merge our NYC call center people with our Kingston mail system, since the kingston system is newer and it is cheaper to maintain. Then when that is done we will have all our call center people on one mail system and the remainder of the company on another. The good news is the new mail system (Imail 8.0) is awesome. I have been a fan of Imail for years, since like version 5.0 I think. I never used it at work, but have at home or when I hosted my site with someone. So far I am very happy with it.