Stardock: Object Desktop – ObjectDesktop

Stardock: Object Desktop – ObjectDesktop
Object Desktop is a desktop enhancement suite designed to allow users to turbo-charge their Windows experience. It’s like getting the next version of Windows today!

I think I saw PC Mag recommend this so I checked it out. I ended up downloading part of it called Desktopx since it was a free download. I like the weather, clock, noteit, and todo list widgets. I am even running the fish. The cpu and memory usage is minimal but I did find high usage when I was trying to run taskmonitor replacements. Pretty cool! I am almost tempted to waste a lot of time and create my own widgets and objects.

RSSOwl | RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader

RSSOwl | RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader

A few days ago I saw that a new version of RssOwl had been posted. I had tried a previous version it was pretty clutzy compared to the competition so I was curious how much it had changed.

The installation went smooth and my first impression was that it was pretty quick. The user interface is much improved over what I remembered. I made a few changes to the preferences. I created a shortcut key to mark newsfeed as read when closing a tab, and turned on one-click. This got me pretty close to what I am accustomed to in RssBandit. Overall I like RssOwl but I am not ready to drop RssBandit. I do not have an easy way on XP to blog a new item like I can with wbloggar in RssBandit. When I have some time I will try this reader on Linux since RssBandit is not available on that platform.

My wishlist for RssOwl is:

  1. I would like some some type of blog a news item support.
  2. I would like a newspaper style listing of the new postings to a newsfeed.
  3. I would like share a remote subscription list.
  4. It would be nice if I could use FireFox for my default browser especially if I could use JustBlogIt.
  5. I think the icons on the tabs should reflect the favicon.
  6. I get a IE script error on certain pages when I open the page with the internal browser.


Get RSSOwl

Kitten’s Project Blog » Kitten’s Spaminator

Kitten’s Project Blog » Kitten’s Spaminator
Kitten’s Spaminator

I have been annoyed recently by the comment spam I have been receiving so I installed Spaminator. So far I have had no false positives and all of the comment spam has been deleted. Great work!

RE: RSS Bandit v1.3.x (Wolverine) Alpha Installer Available

As promised in the RSS Bandit roadmap, the preview of the next version of RSS Bandit is now available for general download. You can now download it from http://rssbandit.sourceforge.net/ (0 comments)

[Via SourceForge.net: SF.net Project News: RSS Bandit]

I had a small problem with RssBandit that started about the time I was installing RssOwl. Although they do not share any files I started getting an invalid feedlist error popup when I started RssBandit. The error file complained about a System.Xml.Schema.XmlSchemaException which I thought was referring to the feedlist.xml. I would then get another popup complaining about an invalid object reference. I thought if I updated to the latest version of RssBandit the error would probably disappear. The error stayed. Most of the time I wasted on this problem was trying to figure out what was wrong with the feedlist.xml file. Today I traced the error down to the subscription.xml file. When I renamed it and recreated a new one I was okay. I had to be careful with importing of OPML files. I corrupted the subscription file when I tried a large import. I think the large opml had some “bad” entries that caused problems for RssBandit and xml parsing.

How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)

Several people have commented that these instructions really do work. They are right. I also went and updated my registry so IE could do the same thing. You can find the IE speedup at the Registry Explorer site. It is Tweak 11. Now both browsers are non-compliant since they allow more than 4 connections to a web server. Since I am on a broadband connection this should be a minor issue .

More things you can do with a phone line

A couple of months ago I did not take the option of paying for my “free fax phone ” and let the phone number expire. I do not use faxes very often so it did not make sense to pay for a fax line. Since I switched my internet access to the DSL line, my regular phone has available for other duties, such as, part-time fax duty. A couple of years ago I had acquired a second phone number with a distinctive ring. I found the distinctive ring support among the modems I purchased to be practically non-existant so this feature was not very useful since I had a free fax line. Somewhere along the way I remembered that the folks at Command Communications had a box that could probably do a respectable job with distinctive ring. When I looked up their products I found that they were priced at less than $50. So I bought a Commswitch 5500 and set it up on semi-automatic mode for distinctive ring. The semi-automatic mode keeps the Commswitch from picking up the line on regular phone calls. When a fax call comes in other line it gets routed to the fax port where my SBS fax software picks up on the first ring. Hey, it works! I am now playing with routing the fax to Sharepoint database. Routing it via email is another good option.

Droping spam

Since I finally stopped looking at the spam on my Yahoo account for false positives, I decided to stop looking for false positives on my farm account. The farm’s web site has been around for a long time so it was getting a huge amount of spam(1000 spam per day). I had never seen a false positive. Mailwasher made the job of looking for false positives a little more bearable but it was generally a waste of time. The problem was how was I going to delete the spam automagically rather than storing it in the spam folder. The answer was found after a quick search of the web. Someone recommended creating an email filter in cPanel. When I went to the email portion of cPanel, cPanel displayed a hint showing how to drop email identified as spam by spamassassin. That was easy!

Upgrading my SBS server

At the beginning of this month I got curious about upgrading my server. What is a problem to some people is a curious lab test for others. Since the parts are inexpensive I opted to try two different options, add a second cpu and add memory. I guessed that I would get the most bang for my buck by upgrading the memory since my server had a minimum amount of memory for a server, 576K. I ran a baseline test to document my starting point. It complained about the queue length on the one cpu. Cpu utilization was low and the paging was okay.

I bought both parts from Ebay and they arrived last week. I put both the memory and the cpu into the server last week but had to immediately remove the memory. Despite my best efforts to get inexpensive but compatible memory, the memory I bought conflicted with my existing memory. The second cpu worked flawlessly. I was surprised to notice an immediate impact, the login process went much quicker. I ran another baseline test and it said everything was fine. The queue length problem was gone. Exchange and SQL slowness appear to be gone. For the fifty bucks I spent adding a second cpu is a winner. I may still buy an additional 512K but I think I have a new insight on SBS hardware requirements. Memory is still very important but CPU power is much more important than I originally thought. Having two cpu’s is probably a very good idea for something like SBS which runs Exchange and SQL on the same server.

I bought a BlackBerry a few days ago

Actually it is a Christmas gift from my parents. Well, sort of…. Today it was finally working right. It took me a day for T-Mobile to configure my account properly and another day for web access and BlackBerry web client to get worked out. I can know read most of my Yahoo mail. Some HTML mail is not readable. The PIM features are pretty usable.

JDK 1.5 and Java Web Start Problems

I fixed an annoying problem with using the Java Web Start. I was getting this error.

Java Plug-in Fatal Error
Cannot load class sun/plugin/JavaRunTime

I found that if I changed the network settings via the Java Control Panel to explicitly name the proxy server rather than use the browser settings this error went away. My browser uses an automatic configuration script. I tried to post my findings in the developer forum but it croaked at me.

Problems with POP3 leads to more problems

I didn’t realize it until this morning but yesterday my the POP3 process on my server got hung up yesterday evening. I have applied the patch that supposedly fixes this problem but it still occurs occasionally. I find out about this problem when I get an email complaining about low idle time on the server. I got the email but I guess I didn’t read my email last night. Since the server is typically maxed out, this problem causes problems for other processes like backup and virus checking. This morning I found that the backup job and virus checking job were still trying to complete. I have them scheduled to run at different times so that they do not compete for the same resources. Despite the competition they both completed. Whew! What a way to start a Friday!

Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client

Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client

I saw that there is a new version Knoppix so I decided to download it. Since my son’s PC is on the other side of the firewall I decided to try Azureus. I picked since it is consistently is high on the sourceforge list. It took me a few extra minutes to install and startup since I had to install JRE also. I now have it running and it is consistently averaging about 75-80K. That is pretty cool since most of my downloads are typically limited by the download server.

Chart on Effectiveness of Diceware versus Random passwords

This is just an estimate using the formula provided on Diceware. I put this into an Excel spreadsheet to give me an idea of the effectiveness. The random passwords are composed of multiples of 4 symbols. The total number of symbols being 26+26+32+10=92.

Diceware Words Basic Entropy Entropy from adding punctuation Entropy from adding single digit Entropy of random password Effectiveness of Diceware vs. Random

12.9 5.0 3.3 6.5
2 25.8 30.8 34.2 52.2 65%
3 38.8 43.8 47.1 78.3 60%
4 51.7 56.7 60.0 104.4 58%
5 64.6 69.6 72.9 130.5 56%

More Goofing Off with password management

KeePass got me thinking about using more secure passwords and I suffered the consequences today. I went back to the Diceware Passphrase Home Page and played around. He recommends using dice to pick 4 or 5 random words from a list.The combination of words, a random capitalization, and a random punctuation makes a passphrase that is tough to crack but easy to remember. I wondered why there wasn’t a computer verion of his algorithm. The problem is that most computer algorithms for random numbers are not adequate for the security task. I decided to overlook this fault and when I found an easy dice routine written Python. With a little more work I created a Python program that simulated his algorithm using the dice routine. I learned a little about Python along the way.

I am not sure whether I want to commit to much stronger passwords. Although I can create random passwords with KeePass, I know I will not remember them and be reliant on KeePass to fill them in. This requires careful thought about backup and recovery. Windows logins are specially difficult since cut-and-paste is not an option. Hmm….

More additions to PHPwebsite

It looks like the latest version of Article manager is now 3.0. I will check it out in the next couple of days. A new plugin, xwysiwyg, caught my attention. You have to read the comments on the post to find its features.

FEATURES
========
-HtmlArea included 3.0 RC1
-FCKeditor included 2 beta 2
-Some plugins for HtmlArea
-Some Skins for FCK
-Settings for both editors
-Only one PhpWebSite file (wysiwyg.php) is to hack
-Easy install
-For PhpWebSite since 0.9.3-4
-Should work with IE5.5+ , Mozilla1.4+ , Firefox0.10.0+

You can find both of these at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpwebsite-comm/
(section files)

Review of KeePass Password Safe

I have been using Password Safe the last couple of months to help manage my passwords. It has done a fine job. Yesterday I saw another open source password manager was released so I decided to check it out. It is called KeePass and you can find it here. It does everything Password Safe does and a couple of things more. KeePass appears to have better encryption although I am no expert and really don’t care. The feature that caught my interest was the ability to open urls in the web browser and fill the normal username and password fields. It worked for several of the urls I tried. It did not work on all of them. Still it could be minor timesaving feature that may encourage me to use more difficult passwords(i.e. random). I was very pleased that my exported passwords from Password Safe imported into KeePass without a problem.

RE: Needing to use Exmerge to move mailboxes and mail from one server to another?

I’m stealing a newsgroup post from Chris Puckett!

To Obtain Exmerge.exe

  1. To download Exmerge.exe, visit the following Microsoft Web site
  2. This download is a self-extracting executable. Double click Exmerge.exe to extract the files to the location of your choice.
  3. Once the files are extracted copy the exmerge.exe program to the C:Program Filesexchsrvrbin folder.

Preparing the SBS 2003 Server to Run Exmerge

By default in Exchange 2003, organization administrators and domain administrators inherit the Allow permission in addition to the Deny permission for the Receive As permission and the Send As permission.To use ExMerge, the accounts that use this utility must have the Send As permission and the Receive As permission. To grant these permissions to the Administrator account to use ExMerge, follow these steps:

  1. Click “Start”, point to “All Programs”, point to “Microsoft Exchange”, and then click “System Manager”.
  2. In Exchange System Manager, locate the Mailbox Store under “Servers//”
  3. Right-click the Mailbox Store, click “Properties”, click the “Security” tab, and then click “Advanced”.
  4. On the Permissions tab, uncheck the box “Allow inheritable permissions from the parent to propagate to this object and all child objects. Include these with entries explicitly defined here. Click “Apply” and click “Copy” on the security popup.
  5. Remove the Deny entries for the Receive As and Send As permissions on Administrator account, Domain Admins group, and the Enterprise Admins group.
  6. Click Apply. Click Yes on the security popup. Click Yes on the Permissions warning popup.
  7. Make sure that the “Send As” check box and the “Receive As” check box are selected under the “Allow” column in the “Permissions” list for the Administrator account, Domain Admins group, and the Enterprise Admins group. Note Make sure that the “Send As” check box and the “Receive As” are not selected under the “Deny” column in the “Permissions” list.
  8. Click “OK” to close the “Properties” dialog box.

Importing data into the Mailbox Store

  1. Before you import data into a new Exchange store, log on to any mailbox on that Exchange store, and send a test message to every mailbox on the server. If you do not do this, ExMerge.exe will not detect any mailboxes that have not been logged on to or that have not received any mail. This step is necessary only when you run the program using the two-step merge and import data into a Microsoft Exchange Information Store. This is because the program gets the list of mailboxes from the Exchange store, and if no Exchange store object exists for a mailbox, the program will skip that mailbox.
  2. By default in SBS 2003, a 200 MB mailbox store limit is imposed on all mailboxes.If any of the .pst’s you import are greater than 200 MB, only 200 MB worth of data will be imported into the Exchange mailbox and then exmerge will report a failure on that mailbox.You can modify or remove these storage limits prior to running exmerge to avoid this. See article 319583 below for the location of the mailbox store. The location is the same in Exchange 2003 as Exchange 2000. 319583 HOW TO: Configure Storage Limits on Mailboxes in Exchange 2000 http://support.microsoft.com/?id=319583 Or Look on Mariette and Marina’s site
  3. Double-click the C:Program Filesexchsrvrbinexmerge.exe
  4. On the “Welcome to the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Merge Wizard” screen, click Next.
  5. Select “Extract or Import (Two Step Procedure)” and click Next.
  6. Select “Step 2: Import data into an Exchange Server Mailbox”
  7. Type the Exchange Server (SBS) computer name that is found in the Exchange System Manager program and click Next. Note For more information on the data selection criteria available within the Options button refer to the Mailbox Merge Wizard (Exmerge).doc that was extracted from the Exmerge download.
  8. Select the mailboxes that you want to import, or click “Select All”, and then click “Next”.
  9. Select the appropriate mailbox locale and click Next.
  10. On the Target Directory screen, click “Change Folder” and directory in which the program should find the existing .pst files. Click “OK” to accept your selection and click “Next”.
  11. On the Save Settings screen click Next.
  12. The import will begin.
  13. Once it is complete, click Finish.

[Via E-Bitz – SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS “Diva”]

Adding a router/wap to my network

This week I added a Netgear WGR614 router/wap and rerouted my DSL to it. To get it to work I needed to add another LAN card to my SBS server. I had a spare LAN card so it should not have been a problem except ….the LAN card was not supported by W2K3. It is an old but reliable Netgear FA310TX so I started searching the web for help. At Drivers Guide I browsed the list for Netgear LAN drivers and found updated files for W2K, XP, and W2K3. The W2K3 file worked just fine. Once the card was up it got an IP address from the router. I ran the internet configuration wizard and everything was fine except that I really wanted the IP address to be static.

Today I decided to fix this problem so I set a static address for the LAN card going to the router. The SBS DHCP promptly shut down. Huh? The error message said it was shutting down because it found another DHCP server. Yes, the router is another DHCP server but it was serving IP addresses for another scope. I tried several things to no avail. Finally I set the LAN card back to DHCP, set up the first couple of IP addresses in the router’s LAN(DMZ) as static IP addresses, and then turned off DHCP on the router. I went back to the SBS server and set the LAN card as a static IP and ran the internet configuration wizard again. When it was finished I went back to the router and restarted the DHCP server. Now I had a static IP address for the LAN card and two happy DHCP servers.

The most curious side effect of this change over was the disabling the synchronization of the local time services to internet time servers. The first clue I got was repeated emails from the Healthmonitor running on my desktop complaining about  “Time Provider NtpClient: No valid response has been received from domain controller”. I went to the server and found that something had disabled the Windows Time Service! My guess for the likely culprit is the internet configuration wizard I ran when I installed the new LAN card. I changed the service back to automatic and started it. It seemed okay but I wanted to be sure so I tried to force a resync. I got an error message complaining that no time data was available. I checked the registry and it had been changed from NTP to NoSync. I changed this back to NTP and then forced the resync using:

w32tm /resync /rediscover

Now it was synching again. Whew! This was harder than I anticipated.

Ubuntu and new DVD writer

After finishing with the video card I moved on to the new DVD writer I purchased in the same order. I believe it is about time we start offering our farm sales videos on DVD. We hardly use our VHS anymore except to create sales tapes. The installation was pretty straightforward. All the plugs matched the new CD-ROM and I set the Master/Slave jumper to match the exisiting configuration. Then I deleted the demo of Nero Burning before I installed the Roxio Easy CD Creator that came with the CD-ROM. To test it I downloaded the live Ubuntu ISO and copied it to a blank CD. It took me awhile to figure out how to do it since help was not helpful. To burn an ISO you use Record Disc from Image function located in the File menu. The first time I tried it I failed to create a bootable disc. I think that was because I thought it had to be part of a project. Instead of creating a disc image on the CD it copied the ISO onto the disk. Well, that was a waste of time!

I booted Ubuntu and it is slim and slick. It looks nice and is quite usable by a novice like me. I was pleased to see it correctly probed my hardware and the resulting configuration was very quick. At first looks this distribution looks like a tough competitor to Windows.

Adding a new video card for America’s Army

My son has been needing a new video card on his desktop(gaming) PC for a long time. When he tried to run Americas Army, it just would not run. He has a Voodoo3 card with 16 MB and the system requirements is a more recent card with 128 MB. This happened to coincide with a nice sale at TigerDirect on a FX5200. After rebates it costs $20. It was going to be chancy since it is an 8x AGP card and the motherboard supports 2x. So I bought it and it works. Whew! This had the potential of getting expensive.