I finally got Live Mesh working on my Mac, my phone, and my fileserver.  I'm waiting on a new laptop for work, so I haven't installed there yet.

I have to say  this is very cool.  At the very basic, it does file sync.  This is what most users will see at first.  I've used several different sync applications, and within a couple of days, I've been quite satisfied with this solution.  One thing to note is that the Windows Mobile client actually does scheduled sync with your Live Mesh desktop in the cloud!

The Windows Mobile and Mac client sync with the cloud.  The Windows client has the ability to sync with the cloud, and to sync peer to peer with other Windows clients.

The interesting thing is that you can sync with other people's Mesh objects, if they invite you.  I can see this replacing Groove and FolderShare when it is release (it's a Technology Preview right now.)

More to come as I play with it.  BTW, there's a SDK as well.

With the new availability of the Mac client, I'm going to try Live Mesh again.  I was able to get logged in to my account, and download the Mac client.  I'm getting an error trying to log in, but I suspect the service is getting hammered right now.

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one getting this error.

On10.net has a good video on Live Mesh, and the Mac client.  If you're interested, it's worth the 10 minutes.

Like all good geeks, I installed Google Chrome the other day.  I like the idea of Chrome (i.e. another major browser to encourage innovation) and I also like some of the major features they have announced.  Having one tab which crashes not take down the browser is a good thing.

Even though the UI is sleek, I find the color scheme to look bizarre with my dark theme.  Maybe we'll be able to modify it with some javascript or css.

I created an application shortcut for Google Reader, just to see what it would do.  It's very interesting.  Basically, it gets its own window, without a tab bar, location bar, or menu bar.  The menu is completely embedded in the control box (the little icon at the top left of the window.)  In this mode, that icon, and the icon in the windows task bar are both the Google Reader icon.  Nice touches.  It does have interesting behavior when clicking links.  These launch a new browser window, but as Carl points out, those tabs live inside the same process as Google Reader.  Any links followed from that tab (in a new tab, window, or incognito window) all live in the same process.  Even if you manually navigate in those tabs, by typing in a URL, they still live in the same process.  This is definitely not what I was expecting.

One other thing I found to be very bizarre is the install location.  Just like Live Mesh, Chrome installed inside my user profile.  I installed it on my work dev machine where I have local Admin privs. so its not a huge deal, but I find the choice to be very strange.

I will continue to play with it, but there are a few things obviously missing which will keep it from being my default browser: Delicious, Ad Block Plus, spell checker, etc.

I finally installed Sugarsync, and it is mostly working as described.  I installed it on the MacBook and our Windows Server 2003 fileserver.  I still need to install it on my work laptop.  The Pocket PC client is next to useless (it only has access to the photo galleries, which it insists on creating, but I have absolutely no use for.)  The Mac client claims to be in beta, and it does feel that way.  None of the options which are supposed to interact with the website work (i.e. Versions and View in Online File Manager).  I've also got a problem where a bunch of files have refused to upload (314 to be exact.)  I'm still playing with it, but am undecided as to whether I will pay when the 45 day trial is over.

While at my parent's this weekend, my mother asked me about setting the font to Bold in Word 2008 for Mac.  She claims to have turned on the Formatting toolbar, but wasn't seeing the ability to Bold her fonts.  Not being a Word expert, and being in a hurry, I pointed out that she should buy a book (which I've told her to do before) or visit the Genius Bar.

This morning, I decided to take a look and see what the options are, in comparison to what you would see on Windows.  Actually, it is quite similar.

Microsoft Word 2000 on Windows XP

Microsoft Word 2008 on Mac OSX Leopard

As you can see, the selection method and resultant toolbars are surprisingly similar.  Honestly, I'm not sure what my mother was doing wrong in turning on the toolbar.

Office 2007's ribbon is quite different, however, I don't believe she has any experience in that area.

Word 2008 does have a Mac specific formatting feature, the Formatting Palette.

The Formatting Palette is a little floating window which contains a number of formatting controls.  It seems to be quite powerful.

Given the two methods for performing the same task in the Mac version, it appears that Microsoft has done a fairly good job of keeping their switchers and Mac-faithful happy.

I've been using FolderShare for quite a while to keep things in sync between my machines.  With the recent addition of the MacBook, I was quite happy to have FolderShare also supported there.  In the Windows world, I've actually been running it on Windows Server 2003, because I rarely log into my desktop, and all of the backups run from the server.  A couple of weeks ago, FolderShare stopped connecting on the server complaining that the version was too old (although we know they haven't really changed the back-end since the ancient Mac version still connects.)  This morning I attempted to update FolderShare on the server and was greeted with this:

Come on Microsoft.  I guess I'll be trying all those other sync apps I've been linking to.

Along with my MacBook, I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion, knowing that someday I'd have a reason to run a Windows app, and today is the day.  Once again, its the lousy Entourage which is failing to meet my needs.  What Ineed to do is forward a complicated HTML message.  Entourage fails miserably.  OWA on either of the browsers on my Mac also fail (although not quite as badly as Entourage.)  Even IE7 on Windows fails to forward it correctly (the images don't come through.)  Now obviously I have access to Windows boxes, and can use them, but I'm using this excuse to set up an XP VM with Office 2003.

A beta invite to Dropbox showed up in my email this morning.  This is another cross-platform file sync utility.  The big difference I see with this one is that it has a specific area where your sync'd files have to live.

I'll check it out.

I've just had one of my FolderShare libraries totally freak out.  It basically deleted every file in the library.  I know that the files were there last night, and I think even earlier today.  Of course there's backups, but it's still a total pain in the behind.

I only wish the FolderShare trash was a little more intelligent (similar to the Windows Recycle Bin.)

One of my favorite browsing techniques is to highlight a selection, right-click and choose Search Google for...  (in Firefox.)  Google Reader appears to have broken this functionality.  On a normal page, after I highlight a given set of text, and right-click, the selection remains selected.  When viewing the Google Reader page, when I right-click, the selection becomes unselected.  I'm awfully certain that this worked a week or so ago.  I haven't yet been able to try it on the Mac.  On windows, I'm using 2.0.0.13.

I now have a very unique set of requirements for a password wallet.  I realistically need something that is file based (as opposed to database based) and runs on Windows, Windows Mobile, and Mac OS X.

It needs to be file based, so I can use FolderShare to keep it in sync between our fileserver, my work PC, and the Mac.

The platforms are obvious.  I still have a Windows based desktop in my home office, and a Windows based laptop for work.  I won't be switching phone platforms for quite a while.

I've been using Ilium Software's eWallet for ages.  It meets all of my requirements, almost.  I actually have it working on the Mac under Darwine, however there are some issues.  Occasionally, the clipboard between X11 and the Mac has stopped working (i.e. things copied in eWallet can't be pasted into a normal Mac app and vise versa.)  It also has this totally bizarre problem where in the card view, all the text is in some bizarre symbol based font.

I went on a big hunt for a cross platform password wallet.  SplashID looked perfect, until reading the fine print.  The only way to move from a desktop platform to a handheld platform is via it's appropriate sync manager.  I don't actually ActiveSync my phone with anything except the Exchange server.  They do have this awful export/import work around, which would mean clear-text versions of my wallet available every time I needed to update it.  It's also not clear if the Mac and Windows versions are file compatible.

The last one that I checked was the open source project Password Safe.  Their tact for cross platform seems to be to go the Java route.  There's an ancient Pocket Pc version (from 2003) but that seems to be dead.  I guess I could attempt to port it to Windows Mobile and Mac OS X, but given my lame coding skills, and lack of time, this seems like a very poor choice.

I've just now seen KeePass which is another open source option, this time with active Windows, Windows Mobile, and OS X versions.  I think I know what I need to test next.  Migrating my data is going to be a bitch.

[update 03-14-2008]
Marc Tassin from Ilium Software sent me an email pointing to their official blog, and their iPhone announcement.  This quote definitely gives me something to think about:
"4. Will you make a Mac version?
I’m not allowed to give you a definite answer on that one yet, but as some technical types might already know, the iPhone and the Mac run very similar software. I’ll leave it at that for now."

I've been using FolderShare for quite a while to keep a select subset of my personal files synchronized between my work laptop and my home environment.  I've blogged about it a few times in the past.  Now that I've added the MacBook, I'm using it there as well to keep an even larger selection of my documents synced from the Windows server to the MacBook.  Microsoft recently announced an update to Foldershare, changing the backend from PHP to ASP.NET.  Unfortunately, there's not a new Mac client, so we're stuck in Rosetta-land. 

Enter Dropbox.  DropBox appears to be similar to FolderShare with a twist, it also syncs to the cloud, S3 to be precise.  Plus it does file revisions.  The DropBox client is written in Python, and runs on Windows and Mac OS X.  One interesting difference between the two is that DropBox is a special folder on your machine, where FolderShare is able to monitor and sync any local folder(s).

I've requested a beta invite for the new DropBox service.

Apparently, H&R Block's programmers don't know about least priviledge.  Yes, their app has an auto-update feature, but so does Firefox, and it runs as a non-administrator just fine.

Here's my work around to run TaxCut as my user account (so the files can be in my My Documents) but still be an Adminstrator:

@echo off

setlocal
set _Admin_=%COMPUTERNAME%\Administrator
set _Group_=Administrators
set _Prog_="C:\Progra~1\TaxCut07\Program\TaxCut.exe /N version.taxcut.com"
set _User_=%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%

if "%1"=="" (
    runas /u:%_Admin_% "%~s0 %_User_%"
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
) else (
    echo Adding user %1 to group %_Group_%...
    net localgroup %_Group_% %1 /ADD
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
    echo.
    echo Starting program in new logon session...
    runas /u:%1 %_Prog_%
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
    echo.
    echo Removing user %1 from group %_Group_%...
    net localgroup %_Group_% %1 /DELETE
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
)
endlocal

The open-source disk encryption leader, TrueCrypt, has shipped their latest version, and is now supporting encryption of a complete Windows system (similar to what PGP does.)  I happily used PGP's full disk encryption on my work laptop for a while, until a policy came out about not using any non-approved encryption on company machines.  I've happily used TrueCrypt for creating encrypted containers, and love it.

The other interesting new feature is a Mac version of the software (without system encryption support.)

Microsoft has posted the RELEASE CANDIDATE of Windows XP SP3 for general download.  If you're dying for some SP3 action, or you just have a death wish, hop on over.  Or wait until next year with the rest of us.

 

Why is Dell's wireless LAN tray utility using 92MB of RAM?  I'm thinking that's a bit excessive.

349,992 K in use for a virus scanner?  I think that's a little much.

My employer is very into the C:/D: partitioning scheme on our laptops (its a side effect of their policy to reimage a machine if it takes IT longer than 30 minutes to fix a problem.)  Yesterday, I went to defrag my drives, and found out that my C: drive had 3% free space.  Oops.

So I started to search for a way to move Outlook's cached copy of my mailbox to my D: drive.  There's a knowledge base article Q896591, which describes a ForcePSTPath and ForceOSTPath, which controls where Outlook creates those files.  I guess I will find out how well they work.

UPDATE: this only seems to take effect for new profiles.  I tried renaming the OST file for an old profile, and it just recreated the file in the same location.  I created a new profile, and it created the file where I specified in the registry entry.

One of my colleagues showed me the Google Photo Screensaver, and I thought it was quite nice, so I wanted to install it.  The unfortunate thing is it is part of the Google Pack, and requires you to install it through the Google Updater, which for some reason isn't Run as friendly.  Oh well.  There are a collection of site pointing to a Google stripped version of it, but I'm a little nervous about that one.

So I got it installed, and the screensaver is pretty good.  The fact that the first four images are the Google logo (on my dual-screen system) is a little annoying, but I can live with it.  I like the fact that you can add multiple sources for the images (that's much better than the XP default one.)  I stuck a bunch of photos from My Pictures, as well as the share on our server where we store our digital photos.  It seems to handle it ok, except it doesn't do such a good job of randomizing.  It seems to select a few subdirectories, and randomizes from within those.

Lifehacker pointed to a Win32 port of Evolution (the Linux Outlook substitute.)  Unfortunately, I can't get it to connect to our Exchange server, which is secured with SSL.  Bummer.  It seems I'm not the only one having problems.

I've had it on my todo list to set up another external way to get to my personal email (via IMAPS/SMTPS) for quite a while.  This morning I had some time to spend on it.  And what a frustrating mess it has been.  I got IMAP working with no issues.  SMTP, however, seems to be broken.

 

If I enable SSL on the SMTP Virtual Server, I receive this message from Outlook Express:

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: 'account name', Server: 'fqdn', Protocol: SMTP, Port: 465, Secure(SSL): Yes, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

A bit of blogging shows quite a few hits for this error, but most seem to be trying to debug the client part of it.  I did however find one posting in TechNet forums of one guy with the same problem I'm having, unfortunately, no one has responded.

What a pain.

Craig Pringle shows us how you can use one of the higher SKUs of Windows Vista and a Wacom digitizer to have a true ink experience, including TIP, flicks, and ink in One Note.  Maybe I should put Vista on my desktop, just for this...

Microsoft/Sysinternals has migrated most (all?) of their utilities onto a MS.com site.  Interstinngly enough, for all the Microsoft look that it has, it still has a Sysinternal feel.  They've updatted several tools, as well as combining a few of my favorites (RegMon and FileMon).  Take a look.  I've already downloaded Process Monitor.

I have Linux box that sits in front of our Exchange server, and does spam and virus scanning on our incoming mail.  Before now, I've just been having it pass all mail through, and then having our Exchange server reject mail for recipients who aren't really in our domain.  This caused our BadMail directory to have tens of thousands of files in there, so I decided to do a little searching to find out if Postfix could check an LDAP directory for its list of valid recipients.  I didn't find that, but I did find an nifty perl script that queries active directory and pulls all the smtp addresses for the domain.   It seems to be working well, so far.  My only issue with the script is that it only works for one OU in Active Directory.  I have two, one for real people, and one for other types of accounts.  I'll have to figure out a good way to modify the script so it pulls from both OUs.

Today the disks on our mail server were full.  After digging in to it, I found that the full online backup of Exchange (the one that would have cleared out the log files) was failing.  I do two other backups (exmerge to generate pst files of the mailboxes and cold backups of the databases), so I wasn't really in any danger of the machine going down, but with 40 GB of old log files, it was quite a mess.  The backup failing was completely my fault.  I wasn't checking the backup logs.  I was (occassionally) checking to see that the backup was getting written, but what I wasn't paying attention to was that the backup was going to a FAT32 volume, and the backup had grown to over 4 GB.  Guess what?  You can't have a file greater that 4GB on a FAT32 volume.

I also had never cleared out the BadMail directory.

This home SysAdmin thing can be a pain in the ass.

This morning I've been having trouble connecting to a wireless hotspot.  I'm able to connect, and I get an IP address (192.168.1.189.)  I get DNS servers (outside the NAT space), but I don't get a default gateway.  I check with another guy who is clearly online, and he had no troubles.  I 'repair' the connection several times.  I reboot.  I ipconfig /release /renew.  I finally noticed that VMWare had created one of its virtual adapters in the 192.168.1.0/24 also.  I start disabling VMWare services.  Still doesn't help.  I finally figured out that you can disable the actual VMWare adapters, and voila, it starts working.

Something to watch out for.

Holy hand grenades, Batman.  Check out this list of indispensable tools that Scott Hanselman has put together.  I'm going to be rebuilding my work machine next month.  I need to do this list for myself, so I'll plan on posting it here.  (by the way. my list is way shorter.)

My work machine's Windows install is in that spiral of death all Windows machines seem to get into, so I'm in the early planning stages of a rebuild.  One of the things I intend to do this time around is to completely encrypt my D: (data) drive.  (I had been thinking about it even before the idea that I might actually have to check my laptop, but now it seems even more prudent.)  Unfortunately, I have 16 GB of applications on my D: drive, that I definitely don't intend to run off an encrypted disk (my company has a standard image, and the C: drive is only 12 GB.  Enter Gnome Partition Editor.  I knew that Knoppix had been able to resize NTFS partitions, but you have to do it at the command line, and isn't necessarily for the faint of heart.  gparted is a LiveCD or LiveUSB Linux image who's only purpose in life is to resize partitions.  Because of this goal, its only a 30 MB download, and its a GUI.  I'll definitely be checking this one out.

Omar Shahine is solving one of my Windows Live Writer gripes for me.  He's adding support for uploading of images from the Writer without FTP to dasBlog for version 1.9.  Come on version 1.9.  Looks like he's also adding a couple of cool plugins.

After writing a few posts with Windows Live Writer, I have a couple of suggestions:

• I should be able to press tab at the end of the Subject line, and have it pop down to the body.
• It needs a way to ping a trackback.  Maybe this needs some support from dasBlog? (I just found the Post Properties button.)
• I want a Publish and New button.  I find the options for what happens after you Publish to be lacking.  It can close, which closes the application window, or it can not close, which publishes, but keeps the post in the editor window.  I want an option to Publish, and give me a new blank editor window.
• I still want something besides FTP upload of images