I have been playing around with MAC OS X on my PC, I managed to get a copy that runs on a PC, and once it was installed one thing I did like was the Dock, I mean I liked the whole thing, but the Dock was very useful.

So I did some digging around the net and found RocketDock, I know that there are more out there but this was the one that I installed and it seemed to go on very easily.

Once installed you can put it into your systems startup or just run it as and when you want to.

I then downloaded the Vista Icon Pack for it and changed the Icons so they looked like the windows Icons instead of the default RocketDock icons.

The beauty of this is, to add more icons it is just a simple drag and drop of the Icon onto the Dock.

Also if you do want to change the look and feel of it you can download more skins from the RocketDock Website.

I have been using Google Apps for some time time and I cannot fault it, the space they give you for your email and all the services that you get with it.

However I was just looking around on the net and using MSN and then I thought surely MSN offer the same kind of services and they do it is called Windows Live Community Builder So I thought I would give it ago. So I changed my MX records over from the Google Mail servers to the WLCB server and the change was pretty much instant. I set up a new account for me and away I went. it was that simple. I will post something a bit more informative up later once I have been playing around with it. But I do like the look and feel of Windows Live, Google Mail was very good but the interface I found wasn't that nice.

More to follow.....

OK So I do not usually put rants up here but one thing that really annoys me up here in Edinburgh is the public transport, more specifically the busses.

I have taken up cycling to work as the busses although very frequent don't give change. I have lived in Edinburgh for 6 years now and last April (I think it was) they upped their single bus fair from £1 to £1.10, which isn't a lot, I might add, but if you do not have that extra 10p change and only 20p then tough you loose 10p, same with 50p or more still if you need to catch the bus and you only have a £2 coin then you loose 90p. I mean what is that all about? But it then makes me ask the following questions:

1. What do they do with the extra money they get from not giving change?
2. Do they declare this extra money?

Lothian Busses received UK Best Bus Company of the Year in Jan 2008. I was astonished when I heard this, ok so I do not use other City's public transport that often but I did grow up in Brighton where their bus service I would say is far better than Lothian Busses. They DO give change on Brighton and Hove Busses, even from a £20 note, ok begrudgingly the driver will give you change but never the less they do.

Also I had to wait for over an hour the other day for my bus as I had my little girl with me in her push chair, and get this Lothain Busses can only take on one opened push chair on their busses, again Brighton and Hove Busses are better they can take 5. so how does a bus company that I would say rips of its passengers by not giving change and also makes its passengers wait round for over an hour till a bus comes along with no other push chair on can win UK Bus operator of the Year??.

Along with this only accepting one push chair, if there is a push chair on the bus and some one with a wheel chair gets on that person with the push chair has to get off the bus to allow the wheel chair access... ok I am not having a go at the person in the wheel chair here, but what does that mean for the person with the push chair? do they then have to buy another ticket on the next bus? and what if that next bus already has a push chair on it? I mean come on Lothain Busses surely you have to have considered all these? I am just curious as to why you do not give change and why only one person can get on the bus with a push chair?

You can buy a Day saver ticket on Lothain busses for £2.50 that is a bit cheaper than the B&H Busses £3.20 or so but you are restricted to using that one ticket on Lothian Busses where as the B&H busses I remember using it on Stage Coach and other Bus Operators within the Brighton and Hove region.

I would have soon rather given the award to B&H Busses over Lothain any day considering that you get change with B&H Busses and they can take up to 5 Push Chairs/wheel chairs on one bus

How can they want us to leave the car at home and take the bus when they do not really meet all the needs of all potential passengers?

OK so continuing on from my Mimecast posts, we have started looking at the Marketing Advantage, I think that one of the first comments I got about Mimecast was that it was predominantly a Marketing Tool, well yes it is that but for us it is predominantly an email filtering tool.

Any how we are looking at out sourcing our companies website (shame I know as we have a good team of people in house who maintain it and we have the infrastructure in place), but with the Site going to an external company to host and maintain it then raised the question for our e-bulletin's. Our in house developers have written several web services that connects with our CRM and pulls a list of contact emails and then creates an e-bulletin and then sends it. However with the Site being with a a hosting company , we did not want to have to have to implement something to address the issue of the change over. So we thought we would look at Mimecast and their Marketing Advantage.

So I spoke with the guys at Mimecast and they gave me a demo if how their "broadcasts" work. You can build up a list of templates for your "e-bulleting's" and then import a list of Address from your CRM and then send it out, the beauty of this is that it sends it via a completely separate queue so it does not impact your daily in and out bound traffic, plus if the email for some reason does get flagged as spam it will not black list your main SMTP address.

Along with this feature I then discovered that we can brand our emails, ie put in our Email signatures on Mimecast as opposed to our users managing their own signatures. With Mimecasts integration with AD it can pull out all attributes you specify and create a very descriptive email signature, so I through I would try for the IT Team with in my Company creating a copy of our Business card for our signatures. All you need is some basic HTML knowledge and away you go. I actually cheated and used Dreamweaver to create ours, but anything would probably do.

Once you have got your template built you then need to get it so it fills in the parts from AD. so:

<HTML>
    <BODY>
    <BR>
    <BR>
    <MC type=body>
    <BR>
    <BR>
<table width="325" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" 
style="font-family: Verdana;">
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #CCCCCC; background-color: white;  
font-famil: verdana; color: #000066; text-decoration: none; 
font-size: 9px;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6" width="100%">
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top"; style="padding-left: 5; 
font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana;">
  <span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066;"><mc type='variable' 
source='from' attribute="streetaddress"> <mc type='variable' 
source='from' attribute="l">  <mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute="postalcode">
 <br />
  Tel <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="telephonenumber"> 
Fax <mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute="facsimiletelephonenumber">
  <br />
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="homephone"><br />
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="mobile"><br />
  </span>
  <span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066; text-decoration:none; 
link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">Email 
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute='mail' link='mailto'/> 
  </span><br /> 
  <a href="http://www.company.com" style="font: verdana; 
font-size: 9px; font-weight: bold; color: #000066; 
text-decoration:none; link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">
www.company.com</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="60%" valign="top" style="padding-left: 5; font-size:10px; 
font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><p>
<span style="font: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: #8A184C; 
text-transform:uppercase;"><mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute='name'><br>
  </span><span style="font: verdana; font-size: 9px; 
color: #000066;"><mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute='description'></span></p>
  </td>
<td width="40%" align="right" valign="bottom" style="padding-left: 5;
 font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
  <span class="style1"><mc type=clickimage code=logo></span></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<BR>
<BR>

</body>
</HTML>

So this is what you are presented with:

Mimecast can pull all the above details from within AD so if you are going to implement this then you will need to make sure that your AD is fully up to date.

Also for the DDI what I did was actually put DDI 0123 456 7123 into the field for the Home telephone number as the Telephone Number field was taken up by the main switchboard number.

I set this as Active Stationary for the IT Staff with in the company I work and also put the other bits of the disclaimer under the businesses card, so it works in the same way as it always has done, it will search for a specific phrase in the Disclaimer and then attach/move to the bottom of every email set out of the company (it moves the disclaimer that is already in the email if it is a reply to a reply or something).

Problem: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.

WOW don't you just love those great Microsoft Error messages!?? They are so descriptive of the problem you are experiencing.

This is the first time I have actually seen this error, I have seen several other messages, usually in relation to my PC having its Update settings set through Group Policy or something similar, but usually a re-boot fixes the problem or remove the computer from the domain. But this error a re-boot or remove the computer account from the domain did not fix the problem.

I initially put this down to Windows XP SP3 as that was why I was playing around with this, I had a fresh install of XP with SP2 and then applied SP3 to it. for some reason it then did not want to run the install of updates on it.

Well After looking round the net I found something that suggested to register several DLL's Here is what was suggested on an MS Forum:

Follow these easy steps:
1. Click Start > Run and type regsvr32 wuapi.dll
2. When you receive the message that the DLL has been registered, click OK
and perform the same steps for each of the following commands under Start >
Run:
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

So I thought rather than type regsvr32 and each DLL why not put them in a batch file and run that? so I created a new batch file, called it WinUpd.bat put in each line to register the DLL and then saved and ran the file! worked like a charm. Windows Update actually worked.