October 2008 Entries

imageI have been using XBMC Xbox Media Centre on my xbox for some time now and I was searching the net for an updated build and came across XBMC Atlantis. Basically there is now a build that is available for your computer, whether it be Windows, Linux or MAC.

All you need to do is install on your PC and then run the EXE and that's it you have a media centre. I have to say I was rather impressed with it.

It can be downloaded from here: http://xbmc.org/download/

xbox

This coming weekend we are upgrading our finance system in the office, previous upgrades have been performed on the same server so the server name and instance of SQL stays the same. However this upgrade is on a new server and a different instance of SQL, so all our computers on the Firms network will need to have new System DSN's added to point to the new SQL Server and Databases.

It turns out the the ODBC settings are held in the following registry keys:

HKLM\Software\ODBC\ODBC.INI

in there are all the settings that are displayed in the Data Sources window.

What I did for the roll out was get a freshly cloned PC and delete all the current ODBC Settings and then created the new ones in the Data Sources and then once you have created them export the ODBC.INI key out to a .reg file. this can then be imported in any machine you want to have the new settings. The beauty of this is that it appends to the current settings and it doesn't over write them.

I found the best way to push things like this out are simple start up script in Group Policy. It can either be a batch file for a VBScript.

@ECHO OFF
If Exist C:\Flags\ODBC_Update_Oct08.txt goto ODBC_UPDATED
regedit /s \\server\share\ODBC_Update.reg
ECHo ODBC Updated > C:\Flags\ODBC_Update_Oct08.txt
Exit
:ODBC_Updates
Exit

What this script does it it checks to see if it has been run already and if not then it will run it and put a flag file on the PC to say that it has been run for the next time.

After switching from using Outlook for my email on my computer to using Thunderbird, the one thing I really missed was the calendar function. With having setup Google Apps (having my mail for kemponline stored on Googlemail) I also had the feature of Google Calendars. I had not really used it that much as I did everything in Outlook.

But as I was using Thunderbird I thought I'd give Google Calendar (GCal) it a try. I have seen it with other email clients like Zimbra that you can connect to your GCal using XML or ICS.

First things first was to see if there is a Add-on for Thunderbird for GCal or even just calendars in general. The one that I am using is:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/downloads/file/20424/lightning-0.7-tb-win.xp

you can either download this file and then locate it from the Add-ons in Thunderbird or from with in the Add-ons window click on install and copy and paste the address into there, Thunderbird will go away and then download the Add-on.

image Once installed it will will ask you to restart Thunderbird, once re-started you will be greeted with a new side bar with the date in it.

This Add-on just simple allows Calendar access in Thunderbird, you can add you GCal in to it, however you will not be able to publish to it. In order to publish to your GCal you will nee a provider Add-on. The provider will allow bi-directional input into your GCal.

The provider I used is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/downloads/file/20552/provider_for_google_calendar-0.3.1-tb+sb.xpi again installing like you did with the first Add-on, it too will require Thunderbird to be restarted.

Once Thunderbird has restarted click on the calendar icon in the bottom left corner, then where it says Calendar Name right click and select new calendar, select On the Network and then next

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in the location put the Address of your  Calendar on Google and click next.

To get the address of your calendar go to the settings whilst you are in your GCal

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once in the settings click  the Calendar you want to Access

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Then click on the Green ICAL button, this will then give you the URL of your calendar.

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Copy and paste this into the location and then click next. You will then be prompted for a username and password to access the Calendar.

you will then be able to read and write to your GCal from with in Thunderbird.

If your like me then you probably have a few friends how come to you from time to time to fix problems on their computers, I don't mind this as I'll some times ask for a favour in return, or they'll just by me beer :) always goes down well!

More than often they will call me up and ask me to help them, which is fine as I then will try and use Remote Assistance via msn. But this doesn't always work as people have firewalls or even just their router doesn't allow access, regardless of having enable remote assistance checked on the system properties.

One product that I have come across that seems to work when msn remote assistance doesn't is a product called Teamviewer. This can be downloaded from www.teamviewer.com

What I found with this is that is works like products such as goto meeting and ISLLight. For personal use this product is free, however you can purchase a commercial licence for it and use it on your corporate network.

There are two Modules to Teamviewer

  1. The Support module (the module I use)
  2. The customer module (the module my friends use)

The support module is the full install, where as the customer module is just a simple exe that is downloadable from the Teamviewer webiste or can be emailed as a link from the support module to the customer.

Once your friend with the pc problems has got that running they will need to give you the Session ID and Password that is on the screen

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Once they have told you the details you enter it in your screen:

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once you have entered in the password you will then be presented with your friends desktop:

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you also have the option to re-boot the remote PC and also re-boot into safe mode, upon each reboot it re-launches the Teamviewer client module with the same session ID and password so you can reconnect to the session.

I have to say for a free piece of software I like this product very much and it has been very useful for me on many occasions (especially remote supporting my dad's laptop as I am up here in Edinburgh and he is down in Brighton :))

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Over the last few years I have been using dual screens on my office PC, I find it really useful to do my day to day tasks, have one window open on one screen and then another open on the other.

The only negative thing I have to say about multi desktop is the fact that you can only have one image on both desktops.

The two resolutions I have is 1280 x 1024 and 1680 x 1050. So if I have a wide aspect ratio desktop image set it looks great on the 1680 x 1050 but looks squashed on the 1280 x 1024 and if I have a photo or a normal desktop image that looks great on the 1280 x 1024 resolution but stretched on the 1680 x 1050.

I did some digging round the Internet and found a piece of software that is free :) called Display Fusion. This enables you to set one image across the two monitors (like you can see above) or lets you set one image on one monitor and another on the other monitor. It can be downloaded from here:  http://www.binaryfortress.com/displayfusion/.

There are actually two versions of this software: 1.) the free version, which enables you to set the images as your background or 2.) the Pro version which is $15 (about £8 or £9) which enables other features; such as random images selected from your computer for the background.

I then had a look around to see what images I could find for my desktop and came across these sites:

  1. http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/downloads/date/any/
  2. http://www.dualscreenwallpaper.com/index.php

I am sure that there are plenty more out there, let me know if you know of any!

I use Google screen saver as my default screen saver but there are some products out there that allow you to have dual monitor screen savers too.

I have been using Thunderbird as my default mail client for some time now, I have it running along side Zimbra Desktop (I like some of the features in that such as the Documents etc...). I like the simplicity of Thunderbird and it generally seems stable and fast unlike outlook, and it doesn't slow my PC down at all.

2I was looking online for more themes for Firefox and just thought if Firefox supports themes then surely Tunderbird will have themes so I did a search for them and came across one I liked called icandy Junior, it just makes thunderbird look a bit prettier I know I'm a big girls blouse!

I downloaded my copy from: http://forum.addonsmirror.net/index.php?showtopic=1674. To install it all you need to do is go to the Tools menu and Add-ons, and then select the Themes Tab and Install. brows to the location where download the file.

once installed you need to restart Thunderbird and then once back in select the new theme and restart one more time and that's you.

image I was recently trying to get on to the console's of my Windows Server 20003 servers using RDP, however for some reason it would not connect me to the console, each time I did a start run mstsc /console /v:servername I was logged onto the server with a separate session.

I did a start run mstsc /? to bring up the RDP options and noticed that is now said /admin and not /console.

It appears that this has changed since Service Pack 3 for XP and Service Pack 1 for Vista.

Why would they change this? in the Service Pack upgrades? or at least why would they take the /console option out? if your like me then you have got used to running the mstsc /console /v:servername from a run command. I know it is only slight change but if you did not know it had changed, and then tried to connect to a servers console you would be under the impression that you were connected to the console and not using a remote session.

Good old MS do it again hey!

Windows Server Windows Vista Windows XP Rant

I recently noticed that when I hit reply to an email in Thunderbird it would leave the original email above my reply. No I am not too sure about you but this would seriously annoy me if I received an email like that, as I would not know where to start reading the reply!.

After doing some digging around the settings I eventually found out where it is set:

imageIn the account setting (Tools, Account Settings or right click on the account and properties). Click on Compositions & Addressing. Then set the drop down option for Automatically quote the original message when replying to: Start my reply above the quote.

 

And its as simple as that! You will start composing your replies above the email as opposed below it!

One of the things that I need to do on a monthly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis is pull a list of Mailbox stats on our two Exchange Servers. We only have the two servers, and in the grand scheme of things only a small number of users (250 or so spread across both Exchange Servers). The pain on this process is having to go in to each individual Storage Group and then into each Mailbox Store and then export the Mailboxes list to a CSV file.

However this has now changed, I found a simple VBScript on TechRepublic that uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). All you need to do is run this against you Exchange Server and it will gather various statistics on you server: Mailbox name, Size (in kb) the number of items it contains and its status.

I found the status very helpful as you can see whose mailboxes are above or below set limits, and who's mailbox might be restricted or disabled.

These are the 5 Status values:

  1. Below Limit
  2. Issue Warning
  3. Prohibit Send
  4. No Checking
  5. Mailbox Disabled

The code I got was from this post:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6034303.html#

however I did a little bit of tweaking on it (ok not much) to make it easier to run against multiple servers. In the original script you had to change the server name and the output file name. In my slightly modified version it will prompt you for the server name and output file and then ask you if you want to open the file or not.

'======================================================================== ' ' Date: December 23, 2005 ' Author: Scott Lowe, starting with a sample script downloaded from ' Microsoft ' Modified: Andrew Kemp, 16th October 2008 ' Purpose: Write the name of, size of, number of items in and status ' of each users Exchange mailbox to a CSV file ' Change: cComputerName to the name of an Exchange server ' sOutFile to the name of the file you want to save to ' Output: Displays the name of each Exchange_Mailbox's Size property ' Status: 1: Below Limit ' 2: Issue Warning ' 4: Prohibit Send ' 8: No Checking ' 16: Mailbox Disabled ' '======================================================================== On Error Resume Next Dim cComputerName exchangeserver=inputbox("Please enter the name of the exchange server you want to get the Mailbox Stats for:") cComputerName = exchangeserver Const cWMINameSpace = "root/MicrosoftExchangeV2" Const cWMIInstance = "Exchange_Mailbox" Dim oFSO ' File system object to write to Dim oOutputFile ' Output file object Dim sOutFile ' Name of the output file outputfile=inputbox("Please enter the file name and path of the out put file eg: C:\exchange_server_name.csv") sOutFile = outputfile Dim sWinMgmts ' Connection string for WMI Dim oWMIExchange ' Exchange Namespace WMI object Dim lExchange_Mailboxes ' ExchangeLogons collection Dim oExchange_Mailbox ' A single ExchangeLogon WMI object ' Open the output file for writing Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set oOutputFile = oFSO.opentextfile(sOutFile, 2, True) 'Write a heading into the output file oOutputFile.writeline("Mailbox name,Size (KB),# items,Status") ' Create the object string, indicating WMI (winmgmts), using the ' current user credentials (impersonationLevel=impersonate), ' on the computer specified in the constant cComputerName, and ' using the CIM namespace for the Exchange provider. sWinMgmts = "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!//"& _ cComputerName&"/"&cWMINameSpace Set oWMIExchange = GetObject(sWinMgmts) ' Verify we were able to correctly set the object. If Err.Number <> 0 Then oOutputFile.writeline("ERROR: " & err.number & ", " & err.description) Else ' The Resources that currently exist appear as a list of ' Exchange_Mailbox instances in the Exchange namespace. Set lExchange_Mailboxes = oWMIExchange.InstancesOf(cWMIInstance) ' Were any Exchange_Mailbox Instances returned? If (lExchange_Mailboxes.count > 0) Then ' If yes, do the following: ' Iterate through the list of Exchange_Mailbox objects. For Each oExchange_Mailbox in lExchange_Mailboxes oOutputFile.writeline("""" & _ oExchange_Mailbox.MailboxDisplayName & _ """," & _ oExchange_Mailbox.Size & _ ","& _ oExchange_Mailbox.TotalItems & _ ","& _ oExchange_Mailbox.StorageLimitInfo) Next Else ' If no Exchange_Mailbox instances were returned, ' display that. oOutputFile.writeline("WARNING: No Exchange_Mailbox instances were returned.") End If End If Dim objShell Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") If MsgBox("Would you like to open the out put file now?", vbYesNo) = vbYes then objShell.Run("Excel " & outputfile) End If

VBScript Server Management

With the growth of the web and how people use the web today, the number of web browsers has grown too. The two main ones that I use on a day to day basis are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, However there are more out there that just those two available for Windows and a whole other list I am sure for all other Operating Systems.

I had actually forgotten all about Netscape Navigator till the other day which is what made me think about writing this post. That was a browser I used to use when I was at college years ago, in the days of Windows for Workgroups and Word 6!

The browsers out there that I know of are:

  1. Internet Explorer
  2. Mozilla Firefox
  3. Flock
  4. Apple Safari
  5. Google Chrome
  6. Opra
  7. Netscape

I am sure that there are probably more browsers out there for Windows (but as I said those are the only ones I know of).

Google has made a relatively new presence in the browser market with chrome but the others all have been around for some time.

I started to use Flock a little while ago as I had set up Proxy settings in group policy for Firefox and could not remove it (until i found out how to!) but what I noticed with Flock was it was really good for Facebook! It is also known as the Social Web Browser. (I don't know what it is like for other online networking as I only really use Facebook).

Apple Safari was installed onto my computer along with an Apple update for iTunes, seems like Apple have taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book!

I personally think that there is not one browser that is right for everyone. But who says that you have to restrict yourself to one browser? I have found the more I play around with editing my blog's these the better it is to use more browsers, so you can see how it looks on each of them.

General

As mentioned in one of my previous posts I am quite keen on open source software. I have started using GIMP and paint.net for editing pictures and photos. I am using Zimbra Desktop on one PC and Thunderbird on another. I also find myself using Firefox more now too.

Microsoft do offer some free apps but if you are needing to do some actual work then you will need to pay quite often through the roof for their products (but again I would be out of a job if it wasn't for Microsoft!) To be honest all the integration we do in the office with word would be a lot harder if it was with something like open office.

I have got a computer up and running with Open Source software now and I have to say it works a treat, and it is a lot quicker! I have got Windows XP Pro installed as the OS with SP3 and all the hotfixes so IE 7 etc.. but other than that I have got Open Source software installed:

  1. Open Office
  2. GIMP
  3. Audacity
  4. VLC Player
  5. Mozilla Firefox
  6. Mozilla Thunderbird
  7. Media Coder
  8. Filezilla

The above list of software is all available from http://www.opensourcewindows.org 

However there is another one that I have only recently started looking into and that is TrueCrypt: http://www.truecrypt.org/ this is great if you are wanting to encrypt files/folders and even complete drives.

I have also installed Rocket Dock on my PC and use that as opposed to the start menu.

For my AV I use AVG Free Edition, I have been using it for ages now and to date I still have not had any virus on my PC. The number of friends who use a main stream product like McAfee or Norton and have had viruses is more than what I can count on both hands (and feet), but then again who knows what sites they go to as well!

Open Source

wispa_imageYes it is back! OK so this is a bit of an unusual post on my blog! but I am a big fan of Wispa's! ask any one I work with and they will confirm that I am a VERY bog fan of the chocolate bar.

Wispa was one of those chocolate bars that was here one day and then disappeared and wasn't seen for a good few years then a few months ago it made an appearance on the shelves in shops and then after a couple of months it then disappeared, but now its back! and this time it is for good (so I understand)

Some people have said that they prefer the Aero bar to the Wispa but for me I have to say that it is Cadbury all the way for me :).

Well enjoy your Wispa when you get one! 

Ok so I installed Zimbra on my pc yesterday and I have to say so far I am pleasantly surprised by it. I have not yet got my Google Calendar synced with it but after looking into what is included in it I found the "Documents" tab. This works in the same way as a SharePoint Wiki. You can create your own little library and create new links from pages using the [[link name]] value.

Through further investigation you can then even browse through your "Wiki" through your web browser.

It also gives you a Briefcase tab that I am guessing works as a personal DMS (Document Management System).

But so far I have to say this is a very good application. I think that I will have to try it along side my exchange server in the office.

General