I was browsing the help files at my web host/email provider and found that I could either drop all email with bad addresses(:blackhole:) or bounce the mail(:fail:). From my previous experience with bounced spam I opted for blackhole. I have found zero false-positives so this is a reasonable setting.
Month: January 2005
Rebuilding Eclipse
I finally bit the bullet and downloaded a 3.01 to replace my upgraded 3.0. I had tried to perform a little maintenance a week ago and was not happy with the results. It seemed to be slow and the plugin upgrades did not seem to be upgrading properly. Everything worked but a couple of the plugins were not uninstallable. Experience has shown me that funkiness is best appreciated in music not in software upgrades. Since I have a broadband connection I downloaded a new file of the 3.01 installation and re-installed my plugins. This installation and upgrade process was a lot faster than upgrading the 3.0 installation and everything is working as expected. 🙂
Berry411 Search Tool
Now this is a useful tool! I am still developing my opinion on the userfulness of web access via a webphone. A good webphone application I have used is looking up local vendors. A couple of years ago when we were building the farm I kept an old copy of the Yellow Pages in the car just for this purpose. Recently I went out to get the supplies to fix a broken window. I went to Home Depot and found all the supplies that I needed except for the glass pane. For some reason Home Depot does not sell glass. So as I was walking back to my car I looked up local vendors using Yahoo. It took me several menus to get to the search screen but I finally found a local glass supplier. The Berry 411 Search tool gets me to the answer several screens faster and formats the results better. It provides gives you quick access to yellow pages, white pages, movie times, Google, and Froogle results. Now thats what I call a cool webphone application!
TweakUI and OPIE2
A couple of days ago I got fed up with the Standard shortcuts displayed in most Save As menus and the My Places displayed in the Office 2003 Save As menu. TweakUI fixed the standard menus so that I now see:
- Downloads
- Favorites
- Desktop
- My Documents
- My Computer
OPIE2 did not really work for me so I ended up creating the list manually. It did create smaller icons and more slots but did not fill the slots correctly. 😥
These are the five places I go to a lot on my computer so I wanted my shortcuts to reflect my preferences. I think I have them in ordered by frequency of use. I use a shared directory called Downloads for downloaded programs, non Windows Update patches, and reading material I want to review later. The Favorites link gets me to the projects and company files I am working on. I use the Desktop for temporary items I am working on and other current items that do not have a project directory. My cvs directories are located on my Desktop since tortoisecvs does not create sandboxes on network file shares.
New version of wbloggar is available
One of the blogs I monitor is w.bloggar since it is the home of wbloggar. I started using this tool when I found that RssBandit supported it for blogging news items. I got it to work with wordpress and userland. I kind of wish I could use it with phpwebsite’s article manager. I think it has the right amount of features to make content creation with article manager easier.
ISA log file getting out of control
A while back I followed an article, ISA Server & SQL Server – Brothers in Arms, to store my ISA log data into a SQL server database. I created an Excel spreadsheet to help me parse the data base so I could debug some problems I had encountered. His instructions were good but they did not discuss how to periodically clean out the data. By the time I decided to solve this problem my log file was over 2 GB and over 700,000 rows in the webproxylog. I tried to use the SQL Query Analyzer but I kept getting ODBC timeouts. I had a little more success with OSQL but the key was to delete fewer rows in each query. I started deleting by day. As I succeeded in reducing the table size a bit I went on to deleting by week and finally by month. After I had completed all of this I still had a 2 GB file. So I tried to shrink the database using SQL Enterprise Manager. It did not work so I went into Files option of shrink and ran it. My database was now down to 400 MB. Before the week is out I am putting together a SQL job to delete rows older than 30 days and report the space used in an email back to me. I actually have all the queries ready although I really do not like the format of the spaceused procedure. When it exports to a text file it pads the variable length character fields to their maximum which causes unsightly text wrapping.
AlternaTIFF TIFF Plug-in
AlternaTIFF is a web browser add-on (ActiveX control or plug-in) that displays most of the common types of TIFF image files.
I could not resist to play a little. Once of the solutions offered in the fax viewing problem was to use an alternative tiff viewer, such as, alternaTIFF. This viewer comes as an activex and a plugin. I knew this would be a fast test so I checked it out. First of all this viewer is free. Second and most importantly it is fast and does what it supposed to do in both IE and Firefox. Now that’s cool!
Are faxes not opening right on your SBS 2003?
Are faxes not opening right on your SBS 2003?
If your faxes are not opening right, it’s probably because Quicktime was loaded up. Try uninstalling Quicktime.
I tried to looking for a file association or Quicktime configuration problem. I did not find a problem so I uninstalled. It works correctly. It brings up Microsoft’s Fax and Picture Viewer which is want I wanted.
Upgrading my son’s PC to PC-cillin Internet Security 2005
My son’s virus checking software, NAV 2003, was about to expire so I decided to investigate the options. I decided on changing to PC-cillin Internet Security 2005. It received good reviews and TrendMicro was offering a competitive upgrade. For the price of a NAV upgrade I could add some extra features I was interested in, such as, personal firewall. I really wanted to add a firewall since I have hung my son’s PC outside of the Microsoft ISA firewall so he can play games. Since he is running W2K he was running kind of naked.
Encrypting financial directories
Today I decided to take the plunge to encrypt the directories containing the Quicken and QuickBooks data files. So far I have seen any problems with either program. After playing with various types of disk cleaning programs in that past, I have come around to the thought that the best course of action is to encrypt sensitive data. If encryption can be nearly transparent to a user like me then this should be a very pragmatic decision.