Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2008

Why McAfee has Completely lost the Plot

(warning... this is rant - I know you're not supposed to blog about things when you're irritated but I've been irritated with McAfee for ages and it's not going away). My irritation with McAfee's Anti-Malware technologies has slowly been building for the past six months. For a start, I find myself disabling their firewall more often than I leave it enabled. The thing constantly tries to chew up 90+ percent of my systems resources. What's the point of having security software if, for usability reasons, you have to constantly turn it off? Whenever I start Lotus Notes 8.0.2, I have to remember to stop the McShield service (from the services part of control panel) before I double-click the icon. If I forget, my PC slows to a crawl and I can make filtered coffee and still get back with plenty of hourglass watching time. It would be easy to blame Notes for this but it performs so well when McAfee is off. In addition, several of my other bits of software perform mu

Finding the Blackberry Bold Call Logs and Combining the SMS's with Mail

I've had quite a few people ask me about the call log on the Blackberry Bold but as yet, I haven't found it. I did get this little tip from Craig Wiseman's blog ; Blackberry Call Log - Can anyone help? http://www.wiseman.la/web/cpwBlog.nsf/dx/blackberry-call-log-please-help Apparently the calls really are there in with your emails but they're almost impossible to see. To see all your calls do the following; Go into your main mailbox Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu Scroll all the way down (past the bottom of the screen) to highlight Search and Click on it. Scroll to the bit at the bottom that says type and click on it Change it from Email to Phone Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu Click Search Your blackberry will now be showing you all of the calls. When you push the Esc/ Back button, it will return to normal. Thanks Craig, not only for helping me to find the calls but also because he highlighted a very useful set of Blackberry featu

How to Lose the Icons on the Front Screen of your Blackberry Bold 9000

So... you've got yourself a nice wallpaper background but those icons on the front screen are spoiling it. Wanna get rid of them? Here's how. A Warning The procedure described below will move your desktop icons around a little, change your existing blackberry wallpaper and move all non-standard applications back to the download folder. If you can't handle this, then don't proceed. Also note; this procedure gets rid of the icons on the front page of the blackberry but it doesn't remove the shaded bar at the top of the screen. PART 1: GETTING THE THEME ONTO YOUR BLACKBERRY First we need to obtain a theme that doesn't contain those icons Here's a link to one on Crackberry.com . I'm not sure if you need to be logged in to get it or not. http://forums.crackberry.com/attachments/f83/6737d1228167408-any-way-make-home-screen-totally-clear-all-icons-com_plazmic_theme_no_icons.zip Download and Unzip the files - there should be an .ALX file in the archive. Nex

Using Ubunutu for Real

Over the years I've made quite a few tests on Ubuntu to see whether it was ready for general consumption. Until now, it's never lasted more than a few hours on the device I've loaded it on because I've either had no time to test it properly or I've become too frustrated with driver setup problems to continue. This time, I loaded it on a laptop which just didn't seem able to run Windows XP. The results were astonishing. The Good For a start, the laptop which has 512 mb of ram runs quite well now. On XP SP2, it took literally about 5 minutes to boot, under Ubuntu, it take about 15 seconds. Google and Firefox Similarly, Firefox was already installed and all of my favourite google apps and bookmarks worked a treat. VPN and Remote Desktop I found some instructions for VPN setup and was remote desktopping onto my work PC within a few hours. Between Remote Desktop (to Windows) and the web apps that run in firefox - and of course Open Office which was also already i

How to Install MySpace on your Blackberry Bold 9000

Obviously these instructions apply to other Blackberry Models too. I've listed all of the steps that I followed but you can probably skip ahead to the second URL (step 5); Note that these instructions assume that you already have a MySpace account. Start the Blackberry browser and go to; http://www.myspace.com/blackberry Click Send to My Blackberry . Fill in your name and your Blackberry email address (it doesn't have to be the same email address you use for Myspace). After this, you can close the window (Don't bother with the link, just exit the browser). Your blackberry inbox will soon receive a new email. It contains the second URL I mentioned earlier. http://www.blackberry.com/email/myspace2 Click the button marked Download . Another download button will appear... Click this one too. A quick Bar Graph will draw and then you can click Ok and close the browser . Look in the Downloads folder for the App. For ease of use, you might want to press the blackberry button on i

How to Erase a Blackberry Bold 9000

Why would you need to do this? Sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes you accidentally restore a bit too much of your CEO's old Blackberry 8800 over the top of his new one (and then you re-activate it on the network). Sometimes your CEO mentions to you that he now has four calendar entries... Yep. It happened to me. Erasing the device without deleting the extra applications allows you to redo the restore and activation tasks properly. The Procedure Press the Blackberry Button Choose Options (Spanner Icon) Choose Security Options Choose General Settings Press the Blackberry Button Choose Wipe Handheld from the Popup Menu Click Ok At the Message: Warning all application data will be lost! Message service and other services will be turned off. Make sure that [_] Include third party applications is deselected Click the Continue button type the word blackberry when prompted and press the Enter key. Wait for about 90 seconds while the blackberry whitescreens and reboots Getting Star

How to load the IBM Lotus Sametime Client onto your Blackberry Bold 9000 (Even if you've only got Blackberry Professional Server)

Blackberry Professional vs Blackberry Enterprise Server One of my greatest disappointments with RIM's recent "downgrade" of the Blackberry Enterprise Server to a Blackberry Professional Server for small business customers was the loss of Lotus Sametime. When I first read about this, I was really miffed. After all, we hadn't yet got around to using Sametime on the blackberry and they were going to block it. The other thing that I couldn't understand was exactly how the version of Blackberry Server affected the use of Sametime anyway. After all, blackberry messenger still works and Google Talk works extremely well on the Blackberry. The Blackberry server has no impact on these applications so why should it affect Lotus Sametime. The answer is I don't know and it doesn't. It certainly doesn't affect Sametime in any way that I can see however perhaps I'm not using all of the features that were once available. Installing Sametime for the Blackberry

How to Get those Cool (free) Games like Ka-Glom, Lingo and CirclePopper on your Blackberry Bold 9000

The Problem The Blackberry bold is going well for me but the one thing that I missed from my 8800 was the game Ka-Glom. It was seriously addictive. In any case, I figured that I could just go to http://mobile.blackberry.com/ and get them again.. right? wrong... It seems that the site doesn't properly recognize the Blackberry Bold and as a result, it doesn't offer any games for it. The Solution The solution was easier than I expected, you just need to know the full path to the JAD files and enter it into your blackberry browser. Be warned though, these games can be addictive and if you install all of them, you'll probably run out of space on your blackberry device. Coping with Change Also, Blackberry change the links sometimes when they reorganize their site. If the links don't work, find some free games there which DO have working links and then try their URLs with the .JAD file names listed below. You can also do a google search for specific files (eg: KaGlom.jad).

How to install Opera Mini Web browser on your blackberry bold 9000

The web browser in the Blackberry Bold is very much improved but I've still found a few places where it doesn't work as expected. When that happens, you want a different browser. You want... Opera Mini. Use the web browser to go to http://mini.opera.com/ Click on the link marked Download Opera Mini . The Blackberry bold is currently downloading the OperaMini 8830 version but I've found it to be very compatible. (Had no problems so far). Choose Download . You might get a message about the applications signature but this isn't a problem, just a scary message. Click Ok . Click Ok when the application has been installed.

How to Retain more than a few Blackberry Messages when you Delete and Recreate Users

The Problem Recently we moved some of our people onto Blackberry Bold. As part of the process, we've had to delete them off the BES Server and re-add them. It's not only their device PINS that have changed. It's also their SIM Cards (as the older cards didn't always support 3G). I discovered that if you do this, email will still route nicely after activation but the number of past message brought over to the device is quite small. You won't be able to get all your messages but you can increase the window backwards from 5 days before activation up to a maximum of 14 days. Here's how to do it. The Procedure On Your BES (or in our Case , Blackberry Professional) Server, Start the BlackBerry Manager . Click on the Tab Marked Home . In the Tasks box (top left corner), Click the link marked Edit Server Properties . A Dialog box will appear. In the left hand panel of this dialog box, click Messaging . Scroll through the right hand panel of the dialog box to find the

Changes to Shift+Alt+Delete (Reset) on the Blackberry Bold 9000

I had been fretting recently about the Shift+Alt+Delete keystroke not working on the Blackberry Bold 9000. For those who don't know about this keystroke, it's essentially the same as removing the battery (ie: a hard reset) but without the hard work associated with it. The blackberry device is very particular about hard resets - and there's often a reason why you need to do one instead of a soft reset (which is just turning the device off and then on again). In any case, the keys still work but now only the right shift key can be used. I've also heard some users complain that they have to do the key combination twice before it takes effect.

Playing eBooks (in the Correct Order) on the Blackberry Bold 9000

The Blackberry Bold 9000 has gotten a bit more serious about how things are stored on it with the new software. The Blackberry folder and its special sub-folders (documents, music, pictures, ringtones, videos, voicenotes) have always been there - well, there are a couple of new ones. Unfortunately now the blackberry media player makes it difficult to play talking books. In particular, it now tends to play everything out of order and it mixes my songs folders up with the talking books folders. Luckily I've found a solution. I've now created two folders above my blackberry folder, one for eBooks and one for Talking Books. I can now point my applications MobiPocket eBook Reader and Mobiola xPlayer at those directories. This means that I can play my talking books using xPlayer and I can play my songs using the Blackberry media player. Even better, I don't have to keep switching from one playlist to another.

How to Install Facebook on your Blackberry Bold 9000

I'm still continuing with the development of a SOE for our corporate Blackberries. Next up, the Facebook application. Sure, I know it's not necessarily "corporate" but I'd rather that IT does a standard install than the users try to do it themselves. Open your blackberry web browser up to http://www.blackberry.com/facebook Choose Download this program . Scroll through the massive legal disclaimer and choose I Accept then click Next. Choose Download and wait for the Bar Graph. You'll be dropped back in your web browser but should find the icon in the downloads folder.

How to Install Google Talk on your Blackberry Bold 9000

If you've got a gmail account, then you really ought to have the Google Chat facility loaded on your blackberry. Here's how; Go to the Browser and enter; http://www.blackberry.com/googletalk Scroll down the page until you find a button marked Download and click it. Choose your language and then click Next Scroll to the end of the terms and conditions and click the option button marked (o) I Accept and then click Next . The application will then start to download. It should take about one minute. At the successful install dialog, click Ok For some reason, the install drops you back in the browser. Click the blackberry button and choose close. You'll find the icon in the downloads folder, though you might want to move it to home.

How to Install the Google Mobile Apps on your Blackberry Bold 9000

Installing the Installer Go to the Browser and enter; http://www.google.com/mobile Scroll down the page until you find a link marked Download Google Mobile App Click on the link to Download and install it. At the end of the install, you can run it automatically. If you don't choose to run it immediately, you can find it later by pressing the blackberry button then scrolling to (and clicking on) the downloads button . The app is marked with a red G Installing and Accessing Components The google app is quite bare looking with greyed out icons for Gmail, maps and news. Go to each greyed out icon and click on it. It will install automatically (unless it's a web application, in which case it will just open). After install, you'll be asked if you want to grant these applications trusted status . If you don't, they won't work so I guess you need to. In terms of application permissions, allowing http to google.com is probably sufficient in most cases. Not general http. T

How to Remove and Insert the Media Card on the Blackberry Bold 9000

Today, I got a new Blackberry Bold 9000, so there's probably going to be a flurry of Blackberry related posts as I try to install stuff on it. The Blackberry Bold seems to ship with a 1GB media card, which really isn't enough for serious use. This procedure allows you to replace the card would one that is of a decent size. Getting the Old Card out and the New One In On the left-hand side of the blackberry about in line with the Q key, there is a small door with a picture of a card on it. This door opens from the bottom (camera side) of the blackberry upwards. Once opened, you should be able to see the card in the slot. Do not attempt to use tweezers to pull the card out as this will damage the blackberry. Instead use a finger or pen push the card in further. The slot is spring-loaded and the card should pop out part way. From here you should be able to grab it, but if not, it's safe to use tweezers at this point. If you find yourself having difficulty at this stage, try

Becoming a Domino Champion in your Organisation

I've recently become aware of one of Australia's large Notes/Domino clients moving to the exchange platform and have been thinking about what that move, in these troubled times says about their corporate direction and their local Notes/Domino support. Such a move could have been forgiven about three years ago when IBM was still floundering in it's Domino roadmap. At the time, it may even have seemed to make good business sense but the computing landscape has changed drastically over the last few years and Google, Apple and IBM have all emerged as leaders, leaving Microsoft behind. Why do People Migrate? So what are the real reasons behind migrations. I suspect that many are due to the defective notion that "nobody ever gets sacked for buying Microsoft" and others are due to belief in Microsoft's FUD (fear, uncertainity and disaster) campaigns. How anyone could actually believe that marketing tripe is beyond me but since there are still people who think tha

Why Microsoft is Losing Relevance in the New Computing World

Disclaimer: I started writing a Domino-related post today but after a good opening paragraph, it tipped into Microsoft territory and got too long. As a result, I decided to cover the Microsoft stuff here and keep the Domino post for later. I've tried to keep this blog relatively non-political (computer politics) but sometimes it just doesn't work. Please forgive me if this comes over as a bit of a rant. If you're a big Microsoft supporter, it's possibly better if you don't read this one. For quite a while now, a lot of systems migrations have been driven by the adage " Nobody ever gets sacked for buying Microsoft ". I've always considered this to be a cowardly practice in the IT world driven by the fact that many mid to high level managers really aren't able to make technology decisions by themselves - and yet, they're often afraid to ask their own people for advice. Once, it may even have made business sense of a sort but the computing

Are those Google Sidebar Tabs annoying you?

Every vendor makes UI mistakes but usually the guys at Google are pretty spot on. Unfortunately their recent idea, to put tabs down the left hand side of the iGoogle interface backfired pretty badly and the forums at Google are still buzzing over the problem. Funnily enough, I asked nicely and after a little while (a couple of weeks), my iGoogle page reverted to normal. I thought that Google had stopped the "experiment" but apparently it's still continuing for some people. In fact, worse; there rumours that it's about to start up again. If you're one of the people affected, you might want to have a look at this; http://manfre.net/project/819/reverting-google-s-personalized-homepage Someone has gotten so frustrated with the whole thing that they've created a GreaseMonkey script to fix it. If anyone from Google is reading; The fact that people are starting to write their own scripts to fix a UI issue is as good an indication as any that the changes are unwan

A Mozilla Add-in to Make Social Bookmarking Easier

The Importance of Social Bookmarking It's taken me quite a while to get my head around how the whole Web 2.0 and Social Networking thing hangs together but I think I've got it now and at some point, I might even blog about it and try to explain it in lay-terms. Not this post though. What I will say though is that Social Bookmarking is one of the most important parts of the whole thing and that it's not enough to presume that every blog you read will have (hopefully) social bookmarking buttons below the post. Shareaholic You need to be able to social bookmark from anywhere on the web. That's where the Shareaholic Add-In for Firefox comes in. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457 This add-in sits on your browser, near the stop, refresh and home buttons and instantly gives you the ability to post pages, links and reviews to a variety of sources including; digg, delicious, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodl

Why do we need Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware on our PCs Anyway?

Ok, before everyone starts jumping on me for this, I'm talking about the need for our individual PCs to be processing this sort of stuff. Recent Issues - Scanning I've been finding myself increasingly turning McAfee's services off in order to do simple tasks without massive interference. It's a well known and demonstrated fact that applications which use a lot of small files, like the new version of the Notes client (the Eclipse version) do not run happily with Anti-Virus. Why? Because everytime they pick up a file to execute it, the Anti-Virus app "snatches it off them for a look". In the days of large applications, the anti-virus would simply scan a massive EXE file once and then move on. That's no longer the case. Last Friday, I was trying to download some things from the IBM site using their "Download Director" facility. McAfee seized the Java applet and took so long to scan it that it kept timing out. In the end, the only way I could dow

Whatever happened to the Notes/Domino 8 Rollout?

The 8.0 Client In previous years, I'd have jumped onto the new Notes/Domino within six months of release. This time however, things have changed. First of all, there's the fact that the whole Notes 8 client is a rewrite using eclipse. It turns the 18+ year old product into a version 1.0 again - at least for a little while. My first attempts with the Version 8 client showed that the system was so slow that I could make coffee faster than it could start - and I mean proper plunged coffee, I quickly realised that you could gain some massive speed improvements by turning off the anti-virus program - great... but is that really a good idea? After a while of having both 7.0.2 and 8.0 on my PC, I found myself using the older client pretty much exclusively. 8.0.2 and Hard Drive Concerns Ok, so there was an 8.0.1 but I blinked and it passed on by. At 8.0.2, I decided to give things another go. First of all, I tried installing the client on my PC. I had almost no space at all left on

Microsoft Unified Communications Assessment

Microsoft, of all people, have released a "Unified Communications" survey tool. If anything, I'd have thought that their suite is dis-unified, since every component likes to run on it's own separate server. Perhaps that's why they're pushing virtualisation now? In any case, I decided to have a go of their survey - answering questions based on our usage of Lotus products. Note that we don't use SameTime at all yet, so I wasn't expecting a great response. I rated at the top end of "Basic". If there's anyone out there who is using the entire Lotus product range, I'd be really interested to see how it rates. The assessment takes about 1 minute - if you're a fast reader. Microsoft Unified Communications Assessment http://www.microsoft.com/australia/business/uc/assessment/assessment.aspx The assessment also comes with a download package containing case studies, whitepapers and other "goodies". IBM, this is one area where

An (Enforced) DRP Exercise on our Archive server (or How to Resize Partitions with Ghost's Help)

Musings on What I'd do about my Partition Problem Yesterday afternoon, I spent a bit of time backing up my work PC so that I could try a few tricks to get the System partition larger. I keep all my data and apps on a different partition but nevertheless, they still like to dump files in the Windows directory on the sysetm partition. In addition, there's the fact that Windows Update keeps wanting to increase it's stranglehold on my C: Drive. I didn't want to do a reformat and reinstall because I would have to reinstall all of my apps too. I also didn't want to do an entire system image because that saves things in a proprietry format. I wanted to be able to get to my files on DVD if and when I wanted to. My Partition Troubles When I first installed Windows XP I figured that 10GB would be sufficient space - especially since I upgraded from Windows NT which had problems recognising system partitions over 10GB. How wrong was I? For the last few weeks, I've been enga

Domino Recovery Tricks - and the Problem with 8.0.2

Installing Domino 8.0.2 Yesterday, we did some tests on Domino 8.0.2. I wasn't expecting any real problems given the ease of the last few Domino upgrades - up to 7.0.2. I guess I was wrong. First of all, the initial attempt at installation failed with one of those non-specific error messages. I rebooted the server and tried again - no problems. I've seen this problem a few times though - it's something to do with the JVM being held open on Windows Server 2003 even though Domino itself has been closed. Upon starting Domino, I chose not to upgrade the designs of the databases. Ideally you should not upgrade the designs until your last production server is on at least the same "major" version - in this case, 8.x. I then did a bit of testing. As usual, I found no problems. Domino is one of the few systems I know which can be upgraded and tested (albeit roughly) in 15 minutes. The Problem Then I found the problem. Our most critical database refused to render web

Domino and Email Reliability

I've just finished filling out a survey questionnaire for Michael Osterman and I noticed that the same sorts of things just keep on cropping up. I can't figure out why these things are "issues" in this day and age. Certainly, they're not problems for us. I was just wondering if people have email problems because of poor implementations, poor policy, low expenditure or because they're on other systems with less resilience than domino. The Problems Discussed The problems mentioned in the survey were as follows; Spam Outbound Confidential Material Archiving and Retrieval System Management Time Mail File Sizes None of these are issues for us. Spam After struggling for a few years with the Symantec Anti-Spam solutions, I finally redirected our mail through a cleansing service. This service runs our mail through several different Anti-Spam solutions. Anything considered spam is sent to spam@myorganisation.com while all other mail goes to it's rightful reci

Using Google Alerts to Keep Tabs on Yourself

You may already have used google alerts to keep an eye on various technologies, companies or other objects of interest but did you ever think of using it to keep tabs on yourself? If you're into social networking or find yourself frequently adding comments to articles around the net, then you probably have a significant web presence. Certainly more than you could handle doing spot checks via Google search. What's great about Google alerts is that it doesn't show you all your web presences, just the new ones - or those recently updated. This makes it easy to see if someone is using your identity or to re-locate a site you put a comment on to check for follow-ups. You might not be able to stop someone from falsely putting comments on sites using your name but at least you'll know about it and you'll be in a position to request its removal or post a follow-up correction. If you have a gmail account, then you already have access to google alerts. How to Set up the Ale

Why IBM & Google share the same vision

There's no doubt that most people with any kind of computing background would agree that the most forward-looking and influential IT company in the world today is Google, some may say Apple but most would say Google. Microsoft, once an industry unto itself no longer holds that coveted position. They didn't so much lose direction as, fail to take the correct turns along the route to today's platforms. While the world is heading towards open source, platform independence and service orientated architecture, Microsoft is more tightly bound to proprietary systems on the windows platform than ever before. A little whinge about IBM's Marketing So where is IBM in all this? Well, to be perfectly frank, they're not in the sweetest of spots even though they deserve to be. Why? Because although in my opinion, IBM's technology is more than a match for Google's, they haven't yet caught the attention of "Joe Public". Their marketing team has the "kil

Article: Running Multiple Versions of the Notes Client

The question "can you run version 8 with older versions of notes?" appears with surprising regularity on the Domino 8 Forums. Today, I noticed that someone had provided a very impressive link to a web page containing a picture showing someone running ... and I quote.... "Notes R5, 6, 7 and 8 Standard running concurrently on one Windows machine, and side by side the Notes Client, Domino Designer and Administrator of each version - no image manipulation (besides scaling), no VMs, no tricks... " It's so impressive that it deserves a referral. Well done guys! http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Running-Notes-R5-6-7-8-concurrently

Why Microsoft and IBM have plenty to fear from Google Chrome but Mozilla does not

Introduction Since the release of Google's new "web browser", Chrome yesterday the web has been buzzing with speculation about how Google will be hurting Mozilla. The funny thing is, that if you read the comic about Google chrome, you'll see that it is being positioned more as an operating system than as a browser. Cloud Computing The idea is that the Web browser will become the operating system of choice for cloud computing . The Google Chrome "browser" has certain advantages over the current generation of browsers, particularly in the area of robustness and multithreading. The browser changes are similar, in a way to the fundamental chanages from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Under Windows 3.1, all applications shared the same address space and one faulty application would result in the dreaded "General Protection Fault" message and would often pull the entire system down. I see that kind of behaviour all the time in Internet Explorer and slight