Windows only: Freeware utility Windows Installer CleanUp Utility can remove Windows Installer configuration information from applications that refuse to install. Microsoft created the Windows…

Featured Windows Download: Bowl over corrupt installations with Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

I heard of this utility awhile back but quickly forgot about it since I did not have a use for it at the time. Today I have a use for this utility.

I have been using My Yahoo and Yahoo mail since 1997. Every time I think I want to go somewhere else for mail or a different home page, the folks at Yahoo make a nice and welcome change. Recently they have revamped the functionality in both the mail and the My Yahoo page. The mail beta has been out for some time now so I am going to focus my comments on the My Yahoo page changes. Both the mail and My Yahoo pages are in beta so your mileage may vary.

Appearance

Switching over to the new beta was easy and relatively painless. I was pleasantly surprised that my old theme, Stars & Stripes, was not too garish. Although the theme was fun, I decided to change the color by personalizing the page. I tried beige initially but the lack of contrast made it harder on my eyes so I settled on blue. Note: I do not know how to switch back to my old theme.

Some of the things I noticed:

• I prefer the new layout when I use a wide browser window.
• If you add it to a new module to the page and the fonts look fuzzy you need to refresh your screen.
• Switching between pages(e.g. Finance page) is pretty slow. I think this is due to the advertisement.

Modules

The next thing I needed to clean up was the modules. Some of the modules are not supported. Since most of the modules that did not appear were not too important to me, I deleted them.

I added a few new modules. The mail preview is a module I have used in the past and found it almost useless. It kind of works. It has Web 2.0ish preview that is useless for most of my email. I suppose I could use it to delete email if that function was available but I think I will keep a separate window open to my mail. I get way too much low priority mail for this small interface to do me much good.

The Market Summary is a module I have not used in the past. It’s nice although I do not know why I need to know the market summary.

The TV Listings interface benefits from the improvements to the interface. Scrolling to the next hour was quick. I like the new Weather module.

Movie Showtimes and Evite are two modules in appear to be in development. I wonder what the folks are going to do with del.icio.us and Flickr. 

My Yahoo! Blog » Want meaty new modules? You got it.

I think I have found my next phone. Hopefully it will not be priced like an iPhone.

Check this link for more information.
Windows Mobile: HTC Touch Adds Finger Groping to Windows Mobile 6

Hey, this is a great tool for bloggers and now it’s improved! I was using w.bloggar last year. When I tried the original Beta of Windows Live Writer I immediately saw that it had the same Microsoft Look-and-Feel I was familiar with. It is not Microsoft Word but it had most of the features I used in writing blog entries. I was duly impressed. Within a month I had uninstalled w.bloggar. Here are some of its new features:

The Writer team has been working hard on a new release and we’re excited that it is now available for download!

This release incorporates a ton of feedback from our discussion forums and your blogs. Here are some of the new features you’ll find in Beta 2:

New Authoring Capabilities

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

Integration and Compatibility

• SharePoint 2007 support
• New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels

Plus…

• New look and feel
• Available in 6 languages
• Improved accessibility and keyboard support
• Many other frequently requested enhancements!

Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available

Link to Comic for 16 May 2007

I do not know how Scott does it. I am a fan of dashboards but I do realize that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink. Good decision-making is an art. Politics is just one of those key pieces of information we use to make a decision that you cannot put on a dashboard.

Arthur Sulzberger is the owner and chairman of the New York Times. And he has now shocked us all by telling an Israeli newspaper “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”Let me repeat that so you don’t miss the magnitude of that statement! “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”

Update: Here’s a link to what seems to be the original newspaper article.

Sulzberger says the site development costs for the Internet are nothing compared to the huge print investment costs. Furthermore, he said, “…we live in the Internet world…” indicating that the paper is going to have to learn to survive there. It’s the future, and he realizes it.

For fans of e-readers this is especially exciting news. It would seem to accelerate the race for e-reader devices and content systems that can adequately collect and present daily and weekly publications. Clearly, such delivery mechanisms are in their infancy, but with so much at stake so soon, there will surely be a lot of activity and technological advances.We might find that UMPCs and e-ink both gain a lot more traction as this newspaper revolution begins.

From UPI, via a tip from Pride of Lions. Thanks!

Link to NY Times owner – Print version irrelevant or gone in 5 years!

About twenty years ago I was taking a course for my MBA in which we did a competitive analysis of the newspaper industry. We concluded that it was on an irreversible decline when compared to the competitive advantages of the other media. This was before the Internet! I watched with amusement over the years how the newspapers have adapted to the onslaught from the different media services. Local newspapers, local radio, and local TV stations have shown remarkable agility in targeting their advertising market. For local businesses the advertising opportunities offered by local newspapers, local radio, and local TV are still the most cost effective way to market certain products. The price of local advertising has gone down in response to the lower market share but there are certain segments of the population that are not reachable via the Internet. The local media organizations have responded by making their organizations more efficient and agile. As long as there is local advertising revenue and local media is willing to adjust their prices in response to completive pressures, they will continue to find ways to survive another day.

Large “national” newspapers have a more severe problem as they compete more directly with both national TV news and the Internet. As an example I was an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal for many years. It taught me a lot about business. About ten years ago I dropped my printed subscription because the Internet version was more convenient. About two years ago I dropped my online subscription primarily because I could read most of the information it felt was significant from free news sources. The breadth, depth, and quality of the news available via the Internet is truly amazing. National and international news was the domain governed by large “national” newspapers and the major television networks. The news available via the Internet has a significant competitive advantage over these media outlets and has forced these organizations to assume a lesser role. This lesser role along with other demographics has translated into lower subscriptions and advertising revenue. Eventually these organizations will have to re-organize to confront the realities of the smaller advertising market segment they serve.

Printed newspapers will continue to decline with the biggest impact occurring on the large “national” newspapers because of their competition with national TV networks and the Internet. I believe that the “national” newspapers will eventually revert to local newspapers due to cost issues and the competitive advantages of the Internet. First hand reporting on national and international issues by these large organizations will be the first to feel the change in business direction. The need to reduce costs will out weigh the need for first hand reporting. Someone else will have to provide this service. This change will be painful but necessary if they are to survive. Despite these competitive pressures I doubt printed newspapers will disappear any time soon.

Problem: The animated GIF is too large. In my case it was too wide for the sidebar of a blog I was updating.

Solution: Although you can resize the animated GIF using a variety of programs, such as GIMP, and at http://www.gifworks.com/index.php, I found that the highest quality reproduction was made by Photoshop. I used a realtively old version, Photoshop Elements 3.0. After resizing the image, you must tell Photoshop you want to save it as a GIF, check the animate box, and pick a frame delay. The first time I tried it the frame delay was set to 0.2 seconds and the GIF raced through the images.

Link to Keyboard Shortcuts for special characters

Buffalo 500g drive station external USB 2.0 SATA hard drive

Source: Micro Center Online BYOPC Specific Product Information

I took advantage of an After Christmas sale and upgraded my backup drive. The Lacie 250 GB drive was a little bit too small. This drive cost me $170 including two rebates. I also picked up a 1GB USB drive. It cost me $9.99 including two rebates. I am planning on putting together a monowall firewall with an old PC I have. The latest beta version of this firewall will boot from an USB drive.

Seeing this post reminds me of something I’ve noticed lately…. that when it comes to dealing with something mandated by the Government, I’m having to go back to the underlying documents to make my own interpretation of what is really needed for my organization.

Kai talks about the issues but let me bring them up a bit more forcefully…. while these rules DO indeed affect every business, the impact is when you are involved in a federal court case.

….and the last time you and I was involved in such a court case was…..?

….yup… you got it. As long as in the normal course of your business you routinely make backups over the top of the same data, routinely delete emails, routinely… etc etc….. there are no issues whatsoever and no changes you need to make. ONCE you are involved in a federal court case, that’s when you need to reevaluate your process. But for now, it’s business as usual.

My favorite quote was this one… “Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing “virtual shredding” once a lawsuit has been filed,” said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.”

This is probably the best rebuttal to that statement I’ve seen: http://www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=15705

“On the other hand, absent exceptional circumstances, there are no sanctions available for the loss of ESI as the result of the “routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system.”

This exception focuses on the fact that part of normal computer operations are the alteration and deletion of information. The Notes indicated that many steps essential to computer operations may alter or destroy information for reasons wholly unrelated to the litigation. It is recognized that the routine operation includes alteration and overwriting of information, often without the operator’s specific instructions—meaning that there is no direct counterpart in hard-copy documents.

Examples of routine practices that could be considered to come within the scope of the rule are: (1) programs the recycle storage media kept for brief periods against the possibility of disaster that broadly affects computer operations; (2) programs that change metadata to reflect the latest access to electronically stored information; (3) programs that automatically discard information that has not been accessed within a defined period; and (4) database programs that automatically manipulate information without user input.”

Bottom line.. get the facts.. and don’t panic
http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/digitaldiscovery/digdisc_library_4.html

Link to The new email retention rules – getting to the bottom of the facts

This is a good resource on the legal aspects of “computer maintenance” that explores the shared areas between email retention and routine computer maintenance. Both quotes are correct in their own context and highlight the subtlety of discovery rules. The problem is not with the initial request for electronically stored information(ESI) but if the judge agrees that a second broader request is necessary. This request is typically broader in scope and may involve obsolete hardware and software. The link from localtechwire is the best resource of the three links because if explains how the discovery rules are typically interpreted by judges. I stored an Acrobat version of the localwire article for my reading file.

The Columbus, Ohio-based insurance giant had more than 5,000 servers, and 78% of those servers were seeing a peak utilization of less than 50%.

Considering the number of servers it is surprising that someone did not push a virtualization project through earlier.

Woeckener said the company has reduced its Web hosting costs by 50%, hardware and operating system support costs by 50% and data center floor space demands by 80%.

Source: Nationwide Insurance swaps servers for virtualized mainframes

There are so many programming languages available that it can be very difficult to get to know them all well enough to pick the right one for you. On the other hand most men know what kind of woman appeals to them. So here is a handy guide for many of the popular programming languages that describes what kind of women they would be if programming languages were women.

Source: Digital Reality: Comparing Programming Languages in real life

This article is funnier if you are male and have actually suffered while programming some of these languages.

Yesterday I had just finished creating an add-on domain for one of my web sites when the site went down. I waited a little while but it did not come back up. I could not even ping the server. I was pretty sure it was an internal problem that they would resolve pretty quickly so I filed a trouble ticket and went back to work on other stuff. A little while later I cranked up Torpark and tried to reach my web site. Surprise, surprise, Torpark could reach my web site. My web site was really up! That was good news. Since the primary feature of Torpark is its ability to allow you to surf the internet anonymously, I knew that the problem was with my route to my web site. I have a another website with the same provider and I could get to that website so this was quickly becoming a fascinating problem.

I remembered that I had seen a really nice visual trace route program in the past but I couldn’t remember its name. So I googled for visual trace route and found it, VisualRoute. At their website I ran their online version and confirmed that they could get to my website. To confirm that my problem had to do with my IP address, I downloaded VisualRoute. Visualware offers a 15 day trial. The downloaded version told me the last IP address it got to on the route. I checked my other website and it flew right through this router. Hmm..its been a long time so I think I better call them on the phone and see what’s going on.

Just got off the phone. They had banned my IP because I had too many failed password attempts. In a way I am glad they ban IP addresses if they have failed password attempts. However, as a long time system administrator I would like to know when someone is trying to break in so I was puzzled why I was not notified. They said they did not provide that functionality at this time but they would pass the request on.

I guess what I learned from this episode is that Torpark is a quick way to see if your IP address is banned. It is not a tool I plan to use everyday but it is nice to tool to use to get around IP blockades.

A few months ago I got an external USB drive. My plan was to use it to backup my laptop. It came with some software that came with it called Bounceback Express. The software was easy to use and it looked like it would do the job. Bounceback is not complicated. It mirrors my drive. At least I thought the process was simple.

The problem occurred when I needed to free up a lot of disk space on my laptop drive for a long video. My desktop is ancient and underpowered so the dual processor laptop is the best choice. I decided that I could delete the virtual machines I had been working on in VMware Server since I could restore them later using BounceBack. The Vista virtual machine was a real disk hog. I completed the video yesterday so today I decided to restore the virtual machines in between other tasks. Guess what? Neither machine will boot! Both the Vista and Suse 10.1 virtual machines complain that the virtual disk is not a virtual disk. They were when I shut them down so I can only think the backup did not work right. I tried a couple things but to no avail. Smaller virtual machines do not seem to have the problem. My work with Vista and Suse is toast! It is not a big loss since this work is experimental. So I re-installed Vista. I tried compressing the folder containing the Vista virtual machine but that took a real long time! I was curious whether the dual processor would help much. Obviously the dual processor did not help enough. So I tried my favorite free Microsoft utility, Synctoy. Synctoy took less time to copy the directory than the compress but I was more confident that the compress would work. I knew compression worked from all of the VMTN machines I have worked with in the past but I wasn’t sure about a plain Jane copy that Synctoy uses. It should have the same result as BounceBack Express. When I opened the virtual machine from the copied directory, it worked.  I am curious what went wrong with Bounceback but I am already at my curiousity limit. I can realistically expect that I can copy the virtual machine folder back to the laptop drive and it will work. Boy, I sure did not expect to get shot in the foot with a backup program!

Network: Intel Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network
Release Title: Connection, Driver, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Multi Language, Multi System, v.10.5.0.2 (TIC 122640), A06
Release Date: 9/19/2006
Criticality: Urgent
Description: Installer package for driver version 10.5.1.61 and PROSet/Wireless utility version 10.5.0.174 supporting Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection Wireless LAN Mini Card.

I have been checking their site for the Dell version of the updated Intel driver. I have not had any memory issues other people had reported with the previous 10.5 driver but I really wanted to move to the new “stable” version as soon as possible. Considering that the new version was already out I did not want to backtrack to an older stable version.

hResume WordPress Plugin is Available! at hResume Project

I found a RSS feed that mentioned hResume so I started playing around with it. I entered the data from an old resume and then I got intrigued about tagging. When I did search on hResume, I found that there was a WordPress Plugin for hResume. So I uploaded the plugin to my site and re-entered my resume data. Within a couple of minutes I was done.
It looked good except a small formatting problem. Firefox would truncate the last character of the dates. Actually it had problems with all of the right floated selectors. IE would insert a big blank area in the middle column. So I hacked the plugin and commented out the css that told the hresume selector to set the width at 100%. Now all is well.

One of things I found out was that I could add html(e.g. strong) in the hResume fields and pretty up the resume.

I received my replacement battery from Dell this week. I took out the old battery from my laptop, put it in the box the replacement battery came in, and dropped the box in the local USPS mailbox to be returned for recycling. Then I thought, “What if the battery goes boom!” It must be nice for USPS to get the business but there could be consequences.