Real World Computing

I've just discovered that AGDInteractive's remake of the Sierra classic "Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire" is now available for download. The old EGA/VGA Graphics screens have been replaced and the whole thing has been written from the ground up - over an eight year period. It's a free game so if you like adventure games or if, like me, you were quite attached to the old Sierra style games, give it a go. The URL is: http://www.agdinteractive.com/homepage/homepage.html

This tip is "low tech" but something I'm often asked. How can I grab an image from the screen so that I can stick it into a Word Document. I'm sure that there's people out there nodding their heads and saying "ah, yes, the old Print Screen or Alt+PrintScreen trick" - then just paste into word". Well, yes and no. Did you know that if you do a print screen and paste it into Word, Excel, Powerpoint or even Lotus Notes, that the size of your document will grow considerably compared to saving the same image as a JPEG and then importing it? If you have a lot of graphics to insert, then this oversight can lead to serious performance issues, instability and ultimately document corruption. There is a better way. A Quick Note on The Gimp I've selected The GIMP as the package of choice here, not because it's the best but because it's the best FREE application which works across multiple platforms. How To Grab the Image If you're in a web brow...

Well, it's been quite a few days now and I've tried all kinds of different tricks to overcome the Blackberry OS 4.5 rebooting problem on the 8800. I've tried different media cards, different types of handheld erasures, different types of card formatting. Nothing... I can get the device to stop rebooting with the card in but as soon as I try to put any data on the card, *REBOOT* This morning, I found the only solution that works for me. It's called Blackberry OS 4.2.1101 That's right, I downgraded and my problems disappeared immediately. Henceforth, I' m referring to OS 4.5 as Blackberry "Vista" (or Blackberry ME).

In every organisation, there is always one idiot who has to download and install the latest set of patches. Usually this person is the biggest waster of IT time in the business and they're responsible for countless hours of lost productivity while the IT department tries to fix their non-critical "business" gadget. Usually, I can just shake my head in disbelief but this time I can't. This time, the problem is me. It's easy to justify an upgrade and the associated testing as part of my job - usually but as I contemplate wiping my blackberry for about the twentieth time in three weeks, I'm wondering if I'll ever feel comfortable with it again. I solved that pesky reboot problem with a reformat of the MicroSD card and all was well. Unfortuately, one of our staff members asked for a card of their own. I gallantly gave up my trusty 2Gb card - then went out and got myself an 8Gb one. I wasn't sure it would work in the 8800 but I tried anyway. It reported ...

This is a short (and not entirely serious) post to have a quick whinge about the way IBM Lotus Domino licenses are renewed. Techie Blindness So, here I am a SysAdmin for my company wanting to login to IBM Passport Advantage to renew my licensing. As a SysAdmin, I'm happy to be shown C++ code, HTML, you name it - it's all good to me. It's only when non-computing financial terms are mentioned that my eyes start to glaze over. License Reconciliation One of the things that happens every year with our renewals is a process of reconciliation. First of all, I try to work out how many licenses of IBM's software I'm using and how many they think I'm using. This often means that I will want to add a license or two because although I try to anticipate growth (and buy additional licenses in readiness) the truth is that the business changes its mind so quickly that sometimes you install more than you've paid for. Luckily, the extra software usually doesn't get i...

Blackberry OS 4.5 is out now and I've already had to upgrade one device to it because of the profile issue I mentioned in my last post. Now since I did the upgrade on my own PC and I later reconnected my Blackberry, I was prompted to do the upgrade on my device too. I did as requested. Well, I might as well have ended my day there and then because a significant portion of my time from then on went towards various efforts to stabilize the device. You see, my trusty 8800 had started an endless cycle of reboots. Coming up long enough to prompt for a pin, then rebooting again. I tried a whole host of things, reapplying the OS, uninstalling and reinstalling my desktop software and associated Blackberry OS patch. Nothing worked. My call to Telstra provided no joy either. Then I found this on Crackberry.Com . I should have looked there first. Basically, it says that Blackberry OS 4.5 is incompatible with media cards from earlier Blackberry OSes. It's not a new problem either beca...

There's a lot of reasons why you might want to upgrade your blackberry's firmware including the availability of fixes/patches and new features. One reason I didn't expect was to fix a policy issue. The Policy Issue Recently we split our Domino and Blackberry servers. Yes, I know that they shouldn't have been on the one server in the first place but at the time we were a bit tight for licensing. We ended up with Blackberry on a new server, with a completely different name, IP and Notes server name. As a result, We had to wipe all our handhelds and re-activate them on the new server. Since hardware was in short supply, (it's a long story) the original server got wiped and we no longer had any access to the original BES. One of our handhelds unfortunately had a higher security policy. Guess what... those little babies can survive a handheld wipe. In fact, it's a security feature. So, the way out is simple. Fire up the old blackberry server and push a default po...

A few days ago I posted lamenting the loss of Sametime because neither of our production Domino servers could run it (one was way too critical and the other was running Blackberry, which doesn't happily co-exist (without a lot of tweaking thanks very much Lotus Evangelist for the info ). Thanks also to the people who posted and suggested that the licensing model allowed me to install a separate instance of domino provided that it was used for Sametime-only. This seemed a little risky in terms of licensing interpretation, so I took the time to query IBM on it. The response I got from IBM on this issue was nothing short of fantastic. Why was IBM's response so good? In the first instance, I got an admission that they weren't sure and that they'd find out. IMHO, this is a good response because it shows that they're prepared to admit when they aren't sure of something and, more importantly, that they're geared up enough to want to find out. I'd prefer a resp...

"Goodbye Sametime, Though I never knew you at all You had the grace to sound good While those around you crawled..." I'm tossing Sametime, not because it's bad software. I'm sure it's great but because I've spent a little while trying to load the limited edition server for Domino 7.0.2 and my efforts have ended in failure. If I can't demonstrate the software to my boss and his team, then there's very little hope of us adopting it's big brother (The full client). Years ago, when we had a spare server sitting around doing nothing, I loaded the Sametime Limited Use server onto it. The whole thing took minutes. We ran a six month pilot but nobody used it - mostly because no training was provided and because we were all cooped up together in the same office. Nowadays, it's more common for one or more of our people to be working offsite, or from home. This means that Sametime could have some advantages. Today I was ready to set up the softwar...

We recently bought a new server and replaced our trusty old main domino server. Some of my earlier posts covered this topic. Our users were understandably expecting a bit of a performance boost - not that domino had ever under-performed, but hey, if you spend over $20K AU on a new server, you're entitled to expect to see some benefits. Instead, the new server was slower than ever and we spent ages pondering the issue. I've been rather busy of late, so this is the first server at my workplace which I haven't personally been involved in building. We got an outside party to do it. That's my excuse anyway - though admittedly, I doubt that I'd have done much better using my normal server-building routine. Checking for the Cause There are a few places you should check if ever you have a server which is under-performing. Event Viewer You should always have a browse through here to make sure that there are no messages from failed services or drivers. A driver that is...

Following on from my other "when xxx tries to kill you" posts, here's a beauty which just happened to us. Our company leased a multi-function device from a large brand-name company (who shall remain unnamed) and the device worked very well for about a year. During that year we used the device as a colour photocopier, printer and scanner. It had some other brilliant capabilities too, like the ability to OCR a word document and scan things to JPEG or PDF. It could save files on our network shares and could send those files as emails to us both internally and externally via the domino server. It even hooked into our Domino LDAP nicely allowing us to lookup any email address that was in our address books. After about a year, we decided that the device was so good, that we would upgrade to the next model - in fact, that we'd get two of the next model and that we'd be using the device as a fax as well. So the large corporation turned up and swapped out our old devices...