Saturday, July 19, 2008
This lifehacker's definitive comparison did a pretty good job comparing the most two popular email tools, in a business aspect. The conclusion that Gmail wins though shouldn't be the key point when choosing the email platform.
My point, simply is, for a company with less than 20 users go for a Gmail solution. For any company with more than that, going with Outlook with Exchange is a no brain.
Home user? Always go for Gmail. Or if you really like Outlook, use it with Gmail IMAP configured.
The blackout that happened in Vancouver downtown on Monday morning July 14 lasted 3 days to have everything back in order. Unfortunately, our office is among those who had no power for more than two days. It's totally a disaster. Imagining how damage could be to a business like us that heavily depends on the deadlines. We are fortunate that we got over it by renting two 3000w Honda Gas Generator, having them sitting on the patio providing the enough juice to our servers for one and half days. We are lucky because 1) we have a patio that leads to the open air close to our server room so we can have this giant machine sitting there and running in the open air; 2) the blackout didn't interrupt the telephone line so we still have our ADSL on, or there would be no point to have the generator powering on all the servers.
Looking at the bright side though, we learned and saw what the disaster or emergency situation looks like when it happens. It's such a valuable experience that we need to benefit from it, do more planning, so to be ready or at least not being panic when next one comes, even though it most likely will be something different.
The crisis is over, but the business contingency plan just begins.
Monday, July 14, 2008
After a few days getting update notification SmartFTP forced me to go and updated to the latest version, which pops up every time now when I open it, telling me that the free time is over.
Well, after being "cute" (CuteFTP) , and "smart" (SmartFTP) for many years, it's time to move on to something neither "cute" nor "smart". It turns out, being "zilla" (FileZilla) is not bad at all. After all, life is not just being Cute or Smart. :)
Sunday, July 13, 2008
It all happened all of sudden on Gmail first and the other sites too after I checked more closely. I did a quick Google search and someone mentioned that it's because Firefox 3 somehow screwed up the Windows System fonts, Arial in particular. And it was suggested that in order to fix I need to manually delete or remove the fonts and reinstall it. In my case, the font Arial even went missing and I could find it in Fonts folder at all.
So I downloaded a System Arial font for Windows which fixed the problem perfectly after I manually installed it back into Windows Fonts fold.
It's still interesting though what exactly Firefox 3 did to make it happen and I am also surprised that there were number of people having the same issue.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The new released firmware Version 2.0 offers so much good features that finally lured me enough to go ahead and give it a try, which is where the hassle started.
Apple offers the new firmware 2.0 for free for all iPhone users but charges $9.99 for iPod Touch owners which pissed off most of the owners including myself. I didn't have the intention to do so to get my Touch upgraded so I followed iPod Touch 2.0 Upgrade Download Link and downloaded the restore pack. Once I have the file ready, I fired up iTune, connected my Touch, held down the Shift key and clicked the Update button. So far so good, I got the window pop up asking me where the update pack located. I selected the file and the upgrade progress started, but it failed in the end with the error code "1603". I then ran through a couple of cycles that restored the iPod to 1.1.4 and tried to upgrade again, and still without any luck. I thought maybe Apple did something in their end that eventually prevented owners from upgrading without paying them. So I decided not to waste any time and went and paid the $10 to Apple, wished I can have this installed. And not surprisingly, it still came no luck. I felt I was stupid and wasted my $10.
It turned out I was stupid. There are solutions to this error code, one suggesting recharging the device directly by the charger for 10+ hours, and other suggesting reinstall iTune. But I took the solution suggesting giving a try on another computer. So I tried on my another computer that never had iTune installed. And yes, everything runs perfectly. I finally got my iPod Touch up running in version 2.0.
I am still in the process of resnyc but so far so good. I guess I had to pay Apple something because simply I didn't pay for my Touch.
And for any iPod Touch owners who want to give a try on version 2.0, you can simply download the package either from the link above or better, here. You don't have to pay to get it.
I don't need to do this very often, only when I install a new IP-based device that has static IP address assigned by manufactory but lacks of documentation.
I recently purchased an APC Environment Management Unit due to the temperature issue I am having in our server room. The device looks awesome but I was having the problem finding its IP address. It was mentioned on the quick installation guide that it uses DHCP to get the IP address automatically if there is an available DHCP server on the network but I saw no records related to this new device on the DHCP server assigned addresses pool at all. I was stuck because I only know its MAC address and there is no way for me to find it out without a proper tool handy.
Then my assistant came over and mentioned a shareware tool called CC Get Mac Address which is designed to find MAC address and computer name from IP address. So I downloaded and installed on my Vista. And did a quick scan and magically found out the IP address associated with the MAC address that matches the APC unit. Hula...it turned out that the APC unit has its default IP address 192.168.0.100 assigned by manufactory. And this IP address falls into my DHCP IP address pool.
I believe there are probably a lot tools like this CC Get Mac Address out there on Internet and some of them even comes free. So it would be handy to at least know where to look when situation like this happens.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Time to say good-bye to my first iPod Mini, which I got as a gift 3 years ago. I got my new iPod Touch also as a gift almost a month ago, right before my trip to Shanghai, from one of our vendors though. That's why I don't get my name engraved in the back of the touch this time.
I had to say, it's awesome, has almost everything I wanted. I can surf the web, do the email, listen to the music, watch movies, look pictures, check maps, etc. etc. And now, after I unlock it I have a whole bunch 3rd party applications running on it too, like games, eBooks, view PDFs, etc.
The built-in apps on original Touch already covered most of the areas. If you are not comfortable with your touch being hacked, you still can enjoy a lot of the entertainment from it. But I highly recommend doing so because it simply opens another big door for you and allows you to have a lot more loaded on your toy. If I can't convince a people to buy an iTouch by just the embedded application, I certainly can with all the new cool 3rd party applications. Now, my apps icons are filled up almost two screens. I can hardly be getting bored anymore.
To unlock your iPhone or Touch, simply go to ZiPhone and download the ZiPhone application which unlocks your device and installs the installer package on it. The installer package has tons of applications included, from utilities to games, and from productivities to eBook. And the nice thing is, it checks and gets updated everyday so any new released applications arrives on your thing automatically.
Viewing web on Touch is also a very good. It works especially good, almost near perfect, for Google or any website that has the mobile version. It's just extremely comfortable reading my feeds on Google Reader, checking my email on Gmail, and even viewing the documents or spreadsheet on Google Docs.
iTouch perfectly fits almost all my needs and I don't see the needs to upgrade it to iPhone near in the future. Yes, I can't make the call, I can't be online at all time, I can't text messaging, but all these come with the price. The only thing I miss from iPhone is probably the camera.
Monday, May 26, 2008
AVG released a new version of their flag-ship security products and will discontinue the current 7.5 version by end of May 2008. Starting next month, computer that still has 7.5 version installed will not get updated anymore including the virus definition. So it's vital to get this one upgraded. Fortunately, AVG still offers the free edition for private use only, though it isn't that obvious to find out on its website. Here is the shortcut.
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe
One nice feature in this new version is LinkScanner that scans all links on search engine results page and indicates which links are good and which are dangerous. A very nice way to protect your computer. It works with all major search engine providers on both IE and Firefox.
And yes, of course, this feature eats your bandwidth quite a bit. So to disable if you want to, you can simply check off the option "Enable AVG Search-Shield" on Advanced AVG Settings under LinkScanner tab.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Support from VMware is pretty good. I submitted the support ticket after having encountered two "purple screens", and got reply almost immediately the same day with the request asking me to run a built-in tool called VMware-support on ESX server to collect all log information first.
Since ESX is based on Red Hat Linux, I had to run the diagnose tool right on the server and used WinSCP to download the result file to my laptop and uploaded it to their FTP server. While I was waiting for the news from VMware, I noticed that there were some warning messages popping up during the boot process telling me something about the BIOS, "machine type mismatched" more accurate. I thought it might be the reason causing the "purple screen", so I just went ahead and updated the BIOS for the server, and the server was running fine the rest of day without any further "purple screen". Next day, I got the answer from VMware that proved my thought as the log file I collected specifically pointed that there were hardware incompatible issue on the server.
It turns out, the purple screen shouldn't happen at all if the hardware are all compatible with ESX. Since the ESX server is heavily relied on the hardware layer, it would be good and healthy 1) make sure all hardware are compatible; 2) firmware for the hardware needs to be up-to-date.
Another lesson has to be learned and remembered.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Apparently, settings described in my previous post isn't good enough to make it work, it wasn't quite right indeed. There are a lot more stuff needed to be figured out. Google isn't much helpful in this case, which is a little bit surprise, maybe this case is just so rare.
To recap what I need, I have a simple impersonate set to true web form that collects information and email them into a distribution group that receives email from Authenticated User Only in Exchange. It might be easy when impersonate is set to false because then you can simply set up the user info and get authenticated in Exchange when sending the email. I had it work without any problem in ASP.Net 1.1 but not so easy in 2.0.
It turned out the only way of doing so is:
1. hosting the form on the same server as Exchange,
2. set the deliveryMethod to "PickupDirectoryFromIis" in web.config file.
And then, the permission to do the PickupDirectoryFromIis started confusing me as I have no idea what permission should be granted. For now, I just put whoever needs to use the form to local administrator group, which appears working fine. But that can't be permanent, only temporarily.
Mission still has yet accomplished.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Blue screen is the trademark for Microsoft Windows, so the purple screen is for VMware ESX? Can't believe it failed on me like this.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Stole from PCWorld.ca's one of latest article. Check it out. The Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool from Microsoft and NirSoft's free WirelessKeyView are quite interesting.
The Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool only can be run in IE, as expected. You will have to download and install a special ActiveX before actually running it. I ran and tested my home router to see if it can find out Why can't get my wireless identified in Vista? Unfortunately, it passed all the tests, which at least should have failed in one or two. However, Microsoft provides you a list of Vista-compatible routers you can find on the market after the test was done.
WirelessKeyView is a free tool from NirSoft, that reveals all the WEP/WPA keys stored on the computer and save them to text/html/xml file. It should be quite handy for people like me who often brings my laptop to various places.
By default, in an AD-based network, the domain controller gets its time from the BIOS clock and all computers in the domain including servers synchronize their time with the domain controller. The BIOS clock can be wrong for many reasons so it's a good idea to set up the domain controller, primary one specifically, to synchronize with the external time server. To do so,
First, pick up one or two rock solid SNTP time server. Here is a list that you can look at.
Second, log in to the primary domain controller and synchronize the time server for the domain controller with an external source. In short,
w32time /monitor - to check what has been set up?
w32time /config /manualpeerlist: /syncfromflags:MANUAL - to configure.
w32time /update - to update the time services on the server.
w32time /resync - to re-synchronize with the external time server that was set up earlier.
All other computers in the domain then will get their time synchronized in a timely manner or after the reboot. Or, you can also set up the group policy in AD to force all computers to do so.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
To send emails from web form written in ASP.Net 2.0 to an email address that only receives emails from authenticated users, you need to set defaultCredentials="true" in web.config file with other SMTP settings, see below, or the email sent from the form will just go missing without leaving any trace. For example:
<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
<network host="mailserver" port="25" defaultCredentials="true" />
</smtp>
</mailSettings>
</system.net>
Besides, you might also need to set up security authentication impersonate to true as well in web.config file in order to pass the proper authenticated credential to the mail server.
<authentication mode="Windows" />
<identity impersonate="true" />
<authorization>
<deny users="?" />
</authorization>
For people who don't know how to determine if the email address is set to only receive emails from authenticated users, if you are Microsoft Exchange user, you can easily find out from the following property window.
<update>
please see updated post for more updated information.
</update>
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
This is so damn useful. I can't believe that I wasn't even aware of these shortcuts even existed after I have used remote desktop so much for so many years. Thanks Mark for pointing this out, and sure will save me many days down the road.
