Month: November 2005

Updated Sharepoint intranet site

MVHFH Intranet Sharepoint SiteI have a new sharepoint site on my intranet server, Millcreek Valley HFH Board of Directors. I am the treasurer for a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate so I have a fair amount of documents to keep track of. My original site was getting a little disorganized so I decided to reorganize the site and apply a new theme. So I created a new site using the Board of Directors theme. Then I modified the web page using FrontPage to have a different picture and logo. While I was at it, I did a little more sharepoint cusomization.

  1. I downloaded the links into a spreadsheet and updated the links from a csv file of links that I have.
  2. I created a picture library and added some recent photos.
  3. I loaded and updated the contacts for the board of directors.
  4. I created a document library for my files.
  5. I put my monthly and annual reports and our financial policies into the Finance document library and my accounting spreadsheets and bank statements into the Accounting document library.

I must admit that the site looks pretty cute for just a couple of hours work.

Updated RSSBandit and Notepad++

Over the last couple of weeks I have updated both RSSBandit and Notepad++. They are some of my favorite open source utilities. Most of the changes in the programs are not significant for me but I like to keep at the more recent stable version. I run RSSBandit almost all day. When I have some spare time I will catch up on the news available via RSS. The only feature I might use is the NNTP news reader. Notepad++ is a lean, quick, full featured editor that puts Notepad to shame. I have no issues with installing it on virgin Microsoft installations.

Firefox 1.5

Firefox – Rediscover the web

Firefox 1.5 is now available. It caught me at a good time so I went ahead and downloaded it. I was pretty confident that it would be stable. I cannot say it offers me anything over the previous version. I use Firefox as my main browser since I like tabbed browsing, it appears to be quicker than IE, and it is more stable than IE.

RE: Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML ~ by Carrera, D’Arcus, Eisenberg

Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D’Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship have provide this article for us, comparing OpenDocument Format and Microsoft’s new MS XML format technically, not legally. Groklaw will be doing that separately, but this article addresses interoperability. That is the point of XML, after all, is it not?

[Via GrokLaw]

I couldn’t help but conclude that ODF is much easier to read and convert to XHTML than Microsoft’s format. The problem with this analysis is what does this have to do with print format compatibility. For me that is the bottom line. The closer ODF is to HTML the more difficult I think it will be to achieve an acceptable level of print format compatibility with existing documents in MS Word that are not in HTML format. Many documents convert to HTML without problems. Some documents do not convert very well. Tweaking documents to fix minor formatting problems can be a very time consuming task. You start off trying to change one little thing. The rationale is that it is a simple change and it will be a quick fix. The next thing you know you have blown an hour or more trying to do one little thing and you are calling tech support for help. Oh well!

RE: Mini Opera Browser For The Blackberry

Opera Mini is the mobile version of the popular Opera web browser, which is available for many mobile devices including the Blackberry handhelds. What’s great about Opera Mini is that it uses an inbetween proxy server that strips and formats the regular website, optimizing it for mobile platforms which makes browsing faster and saves on data cost. It has all the regular features expected of a browser, such as bookmarks, browsing history, and ability to split large pages into smaller sections for faster browsing.

Best of all, Opera Mini is free.

To download visit the following site on your Blackberry:

http://mini.opera.com

* Note, users running 4.0+ will have issues installing Opera Mini for the Blackberry, you will get a JAD error. What you need to do is find the link for the ‘Low memory version’ and install that version. We have already contacted Opera regarding this error.

[Via BlackBerry Cool]

The good news is that the browser is real nice and free. The bad news is that it is so slow I have already removed it from my phone! Other people have already commented on the slowness problem on their phones. I had to put wap.voicestream.com in my TCP configuration and download the low memory version to get around the “907 invalid jar” error message. This is a much nicer browser than the built-in browser but on my Blackberry this browser appears to be a work in progress.

Forcing Logoff

In a previous post I thought I had arranged the system to force my son off the computer at 11 o’clock. The problem was that he was playing video games and not doing his homework. Being a smart kid he figured out that he could change the time or time zone and continue to play. I vowed to get back to this problem when I had more time. Today was the day I think I finally fixed his wagon. I got lured into researching this problem when I noticed about twenty audit failures with an ID of 537 in the daily log. A little research showed that my son’s PC was causing the problems. The reason was due to a lack of time synchronization between the domain controller and the workstation. He was changing the time and the workstation’s time was wrong. So I did a little more research and found out I could assign the privelege of changing system time(Windows Settings-Security Settings-Local Policies-User Rights Assignment). To make this work I used the Domain Admins group rather than the Adminstrators group. My son was a member of the Administrators group on his local workstation. To reinforce my point to my son, I modified the GPO to force logoff when his logon time expires. There are still several easy ways to get around these restrictions, such as, playing the games on his laptop but this has its risks and downfalls, too. At least once a quarter he has to get his laptop rebuilt since his laptop has gotten completely mucked up. All of the non-school stuff disappears. My hope is that he will decide that trying to get around these boundaries is too much like work.