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"How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows" 2011-12-30
I ran into this problem while doing what I was hoping would be a simple HDD migration of a WinXP system from a smaller IDE HDD to a much larger SATA HDD. I think I used Partclone or some such bootable Linux based system to deal with defining the partitions on the new drive and cloning the boot and data partitions from the old drive over to the new. When I first booted, I think I saw some strange effects, and wasn't sure what to do but eventually determined that I could not boot the second new drive after disconnecting the original IDE drive. It's possible this only happened because I had tried booting the SATA drive (to test) while the IDE one was still installed, but I'm not positive of that. I think the problem had something to do with what this MS KB article describes (with the title of this section).
Once I followed the directions in there, and removed the reference to the IDE drive (still assigned to \DosDevices\C:) and changed the key on the SATA drive from \D: to \C:, shutdown, removed the IDE drive and booted again, things were working fine. It was a bit dicey until I discovered that approach, but then it worked fine. This experience did have me wondering how this should work in normal practice, because I assume people using those simple drive cloning packages (to upgrade an HDD, normally) wouldn't have to go through that extra registry hacking, but it was sufficiently odd I thought I'd attempt to share.
Grandstream GXP2110 and GXP2010 remote rebooting, from script 2011-05-23
For a couple of years, I've been able to reboot my client's Grandstream GXP2010 phones from the command line using a simple Windows batch file (and, more importantly, cURL): 
if "%Model%"=="GXP2110" (
  set LoginURL=cgi-bin/dologin
  set RebootURL=cgi-bin/api-sys_operation?REBOOT
) else (
  set LoginURL=dologin.htm
  set RebootURL=rs.htm
)

curl --cookie-jar cookie.txt -d "P2=[password]&gnkey=0b82"  "http://%Addr%/%LoginURL%" > NUL
curl --cookie cookie.txt "http://%Addr%/%RebootURL%" > NUL
Until we recently bought some GXP2110s, this worked fine, but then I ran into some differences in how one does this for the newer model line. The above script makes the solution pretty self-explanatory I think. Hope someone finds this useful. It of course could be easily adapted to Linux or other scripting environments where you have access to a powerful tool like cURL.
In the above sample, you'll need to replace "[password]" with your administrator (login) password that you use on the normal web interface and also the environment variable "Addr" is assumed to be the host name or IP address of the phone you're rebooting. If you have a mix of phones, you'll need to come up with some way of detecting what model # they are to choose the appropriate URLs.
plmtools 2010-10-30
In January, I bought my first Insteon hardware to start dabbling in home automation. I just got the USB PLM (2413U) and the 2456D3 LampLinc dimmer module to control a lamp. It would've been most convenient for me to control it from Windows, but I couldn't get this working at the beginning of the year with free, simple software, which is all I need at the moment. I ended up running Ubuntu in VirtualBox with plmtools, which worked great. I worked on it a bit more yesterday and today and finally realized there was an FTDI Window driver that made the device available as a serial device (in my case, on COM4). Once I realized this, I attempted again to get plmtools to compile on my WinXP PC. With MinGW32, I had zero success, possibly because of some lack of POSIX support. I read a post somewhere that suggested that Cygwin could handle this, and sure enough, a simple cygwin install and running 'make' in the plmtools source code directory worked. I can now send commands like this to turn my LampLinc on and off:
plmsend -d /dev/ttyS3 -e 0262xxxxxx0F11FF
plmsend -d /dev/ttyS3 -e 0262xxxxxx0F13FF
where the "xxxxxx" part is the 6 byte code that identifies the LampLinc. Also note, that on the "*11FF" command to turn on the device, the "FF" part indicates the brightness level. You can vary that from 00-FF to set lower levels.
Also, if your PLM is not being picked up in Windows (this may happen automatically through Windows update), you may be able to get the FTDI driver to install following these directions and downloading the drivers.
Thunderbird 3.0.6 - No New Mail Sound 2010-07-20
Recently I slowly came to the realization that I was not getting my new mail notification sound in Thunderbird. I'd get the little default system tray popup, but not the sound. When I looked at Tools / Options / General settings, I saw that "Play a sound" and use the "Default system sound for new mail" were set. When I checked in Windows XP whether that sound was properly set (in Sounds and Audio Devices), I found it was and played fine in Windows.
Curious, I Googled on the issue for 10m, and didn't really come up with a solution until I found a post on this page that made mention of the Config Editor value: mail.biff.play_sound.url. Sure enough, when I reviewed that value (Tools / Options / Advanced / Config Editor), I found this: file:///usr/share/sounds/generic.wav, which is clearly a Linux file system reference. Once I blanked that out, and left the original setting to "Default system sound for new mail", I started getting my sound again. All I can conclude is that some Add On update or Thunderbird update incorrectly set that value for me. I should also mention that while that incorrect value was in place, even if I switched to "Use the following sound file" and clicked Browse, nothing would happen. With the fix in place, that Browse button does cause a file browse window to pop up.
PDFCreator - won't print after some XP uptime 2010-02-09
Lately, I've been having problems with PDFCreator (the printer driver, version 0.9.7 -- not the latest as of today, but close) acting up and not actually printing documents after I've had my Windows XP SP3 machine running for some time.
I think it may be related to OpenOffice having been opened, but I'm not positive. And if it is related to that, simply closing OpenOffice does not solve the problem. Opening another browser (different type -- Firefox instead of Chrome, e.g.) also does not help, and even printing a "Test Page" directly from the PDFCreator software does not work.
I think a reboot would always solve the issue, but that's inconvenient when you have 10 different applications open and there's no other reason to reboot. Today I may've discovered a solution to my problem. Open the PDFCreator application (the PDF Print monitor), on my PC this is C:\Program Files\PDFCreator\PDFCreator.exe, and press F2 for "Printer stop", and you should see the printer icon with the green light just below the Printer menu go red. Press F2 again to toggle it back to green. This appeared to solve my problem today and I was immediately able to print again.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) (for IIS 6) 2009-10-21
Ran into an annoying situation for which I was finding abnormally little help via Google. I was enabling the SMTP service that comes with IIS 6 for a customer's webserver so that we could send some simple email notifications from a web application. I had their administrator install the service yet when I went to start the service (one of many many times I tried), it failed with a message something like this:
SMTP Configuration
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this whole experience was that there was absolutely nothing in the Event Viewer (or any other logs that I could find) to assist with this. As often is the case, the solution was extremely simple. The server runs as a service named "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)". On this particular (Windows 2003 Server) PC, when that service was installed as part of the normal Microsoft instructions (which, by the way, mentions nothing about this), the service is Disabled in the Services applet from the Control Panel. Once I set that to Automatic, and then attempt to start, it started fine. Come to think of it, I think I did finally run across one person suggesting that I do that, but since I hadn't been able to identify the Service, I ignored it. I hope this might save someone else the same grief I had with this.
Microsoft! I have a suggestion! When a Service fails to start because it's disabled, put This Service is disabled in an error message, not an unhelpful reference to the Event Viewer.
Annoying XP Printing and Annoying XP Monitor Power Save 2009-09-29
Lately I've been having some annoying problems with printing on my Windows XP Pro workstation. I previously thought it had to do with an older HP printer shared from another PC that I'd connect to. It seems that it had nothing to do with that and probably is a printing issue on my PC. Today when it happened I finally thought to check the Event Viewer, where, in the System log I found a message ending with this:
Win32 error code returned by the print processor: 259 (0x103).
I googled on that phrase a bit and came up with someone suggesting to shut off bidirectional support. When I looked at my printer (PDFCreator "eDoc Printer" in this case), I saw that option was not checked and was disabled, but that made me think to go to the Advanced tab and switch from "Spool print documents so program finishes printing faster" to "Print directly to the printer". As soon as I did that, the next print attempt worked. I'll see if that's a long term effect or not.
Also, I got sick of having my monitors never go into power save mode like they should and finally googled that problem. Luckily, I ran into a forum where people were discussing something called Wizmo, which allows you to, from the command line (or shortcut to a batch file, e.g.), force the monitors to power off among a bunch of other features. It's a free utility and so far has done the trick for me. Thanks to Steve Gibson for authoring and sharing that one!
MozBackup 1.4.9 2009-06-19
I was trying to use MozBackup as part of a small project to migrate a user's Outlook profile (mostly just email) to Thunderbird on another machine. I first tried the dance of getting .PST files to directly import into Thunderbird (or directly w/ some other non-Outlook application's support). This went nowhere fast. I tried a few of the oft-mentioned ones (normally mentioned with the caveat that they don't work) with little success.
Next it was on to getting the .PST file imported into Outlook on a machine where I could actually install Thunderbird, thus doing the native Thunderbird import (which requires Outlook to be installed). I found a machine suitable for this and got the data into Thunderbird. Then I decided to try MozBackup as a cleaner approach to move the profile to the final PC, rather than just trying to copy the actual profile directory which I have done before. Rather frustratingly, I found that the first backup attempt I made did not include the emails, which was pretty much the whole point of the exercise. After much fooling around, I determined that the reason the "Emails" selection was grayed on out the components selection section of MozBackup was because I didn't have an account setup yet (with details on how to fetch email, POP3, SMPT, etc.) on the Thunderbird install because I wasn't even going to use that one. Once I did this, "Emails" became available as an option. I only guessed that was the real problem when I started trying to use the command line version of MozBackup (which seems cool in general) and was getting an error message something like "this profile is corrupt".
Home Roasting Coffee 2009-04-30
A buddy of mine and I were talking a couple of months back about coffee and how much it rocks when he mentioned home roasting coffee. I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of it prior to then, but he pointed me to some resources and I looked into it. He referenced Sweet Maria's, but there are other sources for "green" (unroasted) coffee beans. Sweet Maria's also has plenty of information on various brewing, roasting, grinding, etc. methods.
I finally got around to placing an order for 3 pounds of beans from Sweet Maria's. They arrived a couple of days ago and last night I did my first roast. I simply used a pot and regularly agitated, as suggested on a SM page. I actually varied it a bit based on a howto video I found while Googling. I ended up roasting for about 6 minutes and only scorched a few of the beans that I could see. A few were under roasted too, I'm sure, but overall I was happy with my first go at this. I had my first cup from that batch this morning and it was pretty good. Definitely different from my typical Starbucks beans. I'm looking forward to refining my technique.
Here's the finished product cooling (click for larger version):
Fresh Roasted Coffee Beans
Annoying MS SQL Management Studio mscorlib.tlb message 2009-04-20
I ran into this problem (possibly for the second time since using the new SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, but the first time on this installation of Windows XP Pro) when launching the application; a message pops up like this: The file C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[][][\mscorlib.tlb could not be loaded. An attempt to repair this condition failed because the file could not be found. but I simply press the Ok button and everything continues as normal. It's not an uncommon problem, but the first time I researched it, I was unable to repair the problem.
It turns out you basically run a .Net Framework 2.0 repair operation. I found this helpful MSDN blog entry that describes how to do this possibly without even downloading any installation packages (as I'd started to do based on other Google'd recommendations). Here are two of the command lines (I used the first):
After a reboot (which the above process forced, much to my consternation -- in retrospect I probably would've removed the "/q" option which I assume was what was controlling the "silent" part of this process and run it in interactive mode), the problem was fixed, Management Studio starts without the error message.
Two Online Shopping Cash Rebate Sites 2009-03-23
I discovered a couple of web sites that allow you to earn cash back (accrued in accounts that you keep on those websites, kind of like a credit card rewards program) when shopping online at certain stores. Some of them are ones I use a lot, like Newegg, eBay, Home Depot, etc. The cash back amounts vary from 0.5, 1, 2, 3% all the way up to 10% or 15% (sometimes) for some stores. If you're shopping online a lot, and use any of the stores that these sites index, I think it's probably worth while to try it out. I think they both pay about every 3 months, once you've hit a threshold, but it's only $5 or $10 for each of them.
Signup on both of them is very fast, and you only provide your email address and set a password. I think you'll need to supply a mailing address once the time comes to receive a check (or PayPal from Ebates). It also appears that both sites promise not to sell your information to marketers, etc. The two sites are Ebates.com and The Sweeter Deal. Ebates seems to have higher percentages for the same stores, but when you refer people to it, you only get a one time $5 bonus in your account. On TSD, when you refer people, you actually get a small part of their rewards whenever they make purchases up to at least several levels. So, if you anticipate getting a lot of referrals, I suppose TSD might be a better deal in the long run, otherwise Ebates might work better. I haven't figured out which will be the best for me yet, so I'm planning on trying to use them both.
The way they work is: simply login to the site, lookup the store you're shopping (they also have coupons indexed for a lot of their stores, like many other sites do), and click through to that site. The two sites transmit the fact that you've come from them to the destination store, which then reports back any purchase you eventually make. I've already had a few purchases show up within a few days. So if you'd like to check these out, please click through those above links which would give me a referral. Then try referring your online-shopping friends.
Palm Pre - a non-Windows Mobile OS from Palm keeps the name going 2009-03-20
I heard about Palm's latest entry into the smartphone market (well, I guess it's not quite available yet). It's called the Pre and runs a brand new OS, webOS, which at first glance promises to be a huge improvement over the stagnating PalmOS. Apparently, it will initially only be available through Sprint, which is vaguely annoying for me, a current Verizon customer (why is it that Verizon doesn't seem to get the most interesting phones until long after the other carriers do). The OS itself looks very promising, and a nice competitor for Google's Android, which makes two smartphone OSes that are much more open than the Apple iPhone OS, which has been widely criticized for its proprietary nature.
This looks like a good contender for my next phone. My current Treo 650 is starting to show its age, and I have some applications that would lend themselves nicely to having an WiFi device in my pocket (that doesn't share space with my phone, but is the phone).
Squirrelmail attachment directory: "Could not move/copy..." 2009-03-11
I had a bug report from a client with their Squirrelmail application (what I use for a simple webmail setup at their office -- most people are using Outlook, but occasionally we have some web use). They couldn't upload a file for attachment, getting this error in the process:
Could not move/copy file. File not attached
I quickly tracked this down to a problem well described here. Evidently I or the Gentoo ebuild for Squirrelmail 1.4.17 failed to create my attachments directory, so I created it (and moved the data one) as suggested in the above link. Also had to update the data directory location in config/config.php.
cwRsync & weird behavior with Microsoft Task Scheduler 2009-01-28

Recently, I was working on doing some backup mirrors of large binary files from a central server out to a remote client. The remote client runs Windows XP, and I figured using rsync in some form would be the simplest path for only transferring the difference between the files (that are large, but the difference from day to day and week to week is small).

Luckily I found a win32 package of rsync called cwRsync, which is a helpful repackaging of rsync, w/ ssh (and a nice small ssh client to boot) which avoids having to install cygwin, etc. when all one needs is an rsync client (or server).

Everything was more or less fine (including generate client side certificates for unattended (and more secure) authentication) until I started running a batch containing the rsync commands from the Task Scheduler when no user was logged in. After much frustration (due to not being able to readily see why the process seemed to be hanging when it launched with no user logged in), I finally determined it seemed that ssh was relying on the environment variables HOMEPATH and HOMEDRIVE to locate the .ssh directory containing the key files. For some odd reason, when run with no users logged in, on this particular machine anyway, those two variables are blank. Additionally, the USERPROFILE variable is correctly set.

I don't know why this would happen, but it's annoying. My fix was to simply manually set HOMEPATH and HOMEDRIVE so that when stuck together they equalled the correct directory as shown in USERPROFILE.

OpenMoko: open source phone hardware (and software) 2008-04-23

I came across the OpenMoko project sometime last year, I think it was. It has the potential to be pretty exciting, though progress (as I've been casually observing it) seems disappointingly slow.

The basic concept is to build a completely new platform of hardware, with specs that are roughly similar to Apple's iPhone, but with a completely open software platform (Linux based) vs. the completely proprietary one Apple's implemented that, last I checked, one was expressly forbidden from changing (not that that's stopped everyone, of course).

I like this idea so much that once the second generation hardware is actually available and the software seems like it's at least basically stable, I'd consider ditching my current CDMA-only carrier for a GSM one (I think the OpenMoko phones are only GSM) solely to use the new one. Or at least I'd try it for a month or two in parallel, perhaps.

Of course another benefit of the OpenMoko phones is that while they won't work on CDMA networks (I doubt they'll even be around for too many more years anyway), they will work on any GSM network, so even in the US, one would have at least two or three different choices, unlike Apple's massively unfortunate decision to lock in to AT&T for years.

Ubuntu: great Linux distro 2008-03-29

I'd been hearing good things about Ubuntu over the last year or so (it's been a distro for quite a bit longer than that), and one of my buddies (who got me into Gentoo) mentioned that he was running it on a couple of computers so I figured I'd better give it a shot.

Well, I took the plunge a few weeks back, on my work notebook (ThinkPad T60), which I know was a bit risky, but I figured I tempered the risk by knowing that I'd immediately install VMware Player running the exact same Windows XP image I just had on my ThinkPad under Ubuntu as a fall back. The install went pretty well (I think I had a fair bit of trouble just fooling around with the VMware deal mostly) and I've been up and running on it for some time. First impressions (especially compared with Gentoo) is it's very easy to setup and seems to work pretty great, even with notebook computers (which I gather has been a challenge in the past for Linux distros). I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind digging into their PC's software a bit and who wants to check out Linux (or just a new distro).

The new release, Hardy Heron is scheduled to come out in just under a month now. I'm looking forward to it.

New Launcher product for Windows XP: Enso Launcher 2007-01-25

I just (randomly) found out about this new application called Enso Launcher, that's much like Quicksilver in OS X, which is basically a glorified global launcher program. But it's trainable and pretty slick. It costs $25, but there's a free trial that I'm checking out right now and so far, I'm pretty much sold. Find out more about it here.

I was tipped off to it by the techonology column in the WSJ today. The only downside I see to it right now is that it takes over my Caps Lock key and apparently there's no way to get it back short of closing the launcher (which would rather defeat the purpose of a launcher one needs to always have around).

If you are the type of person who always hates having to context switch from the keyboard (which everyone is naturally using) to the mouse for rote tasks, I'd suggest you check this or something else like it out.

Windows XP - Get rid of the annoying Windows Update restart reminder 2006-09-13

To get rid of the annoying Windows Update "Automatic Updates", "Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?" dialog, read the following:

Sometimes, one just doesn't want to be interrupted until one is finished with one's work. This naturally could've been better handled by MS, but as of yet it apparently hasn't.

Here are two sites (first and second) that I've found that address this issue; they both talk about a few different solutions, including stopping the Windows Update service (which I think is kind of silly and would require you to continually do that [each time this comes up]) but here's the better solution that I like (but have not yet verified works):

Run gpedit.msc (from Start+R) -- this is the Group Policy editor. Under "Local Computer Policy", open the plus on "Administrative Templates", then open "Windows Components" and go down to "Windows Update" and click on it.

Then you probably want to either change the:

No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations

setting to Enable it or (my preference), change the "Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations" timeout from the default to something huge. Apparently 1440 is the largest one can put in there, so that's what my resources suggest.

If one wants to use the stop the service approach, use this:

I ended up doing this because my problem was not immediately solved by those GP changes. Don't know if they will be after a reboot or not.

Windows XP - hanging at shutdown before shutdown menu 2006-09-08

Well, it's only been three months since the last post, right? Guess that's not so impressive in the world of the blogosphere. I see articles in the WSJ about bloggers who just can't let go... even for a vacation of a few days. *cough* Obviously, that's not me.

Anyway, about a week ago I started noticing this highly annoying behavior on my recently-purchased Lenovo ThinkPad T60. I'd choose the menu selection to shutdown the machine (Start Menu / Shut Down) and the machine would basically freeze for about 3 minutes before displaying the normal shutdown menu. The mouse would still move, and one could Ctrl-Alt-Del and get that context menu to pop, but everything else would basically be hosed for around 3 minutes. Then, once I'd choose Shut Down from that menu, it'd also take about twice as long (or more) as it should.

I should also mention, as a side note, that if I'd attempt this shutdown not long after doing a clean boot of the machine, the problem would not exist. I was never able to track down why that happened, but based on later developments (see below), I think it may've had to do with various services fully starting after 30 minutes or more of use.

Finally, I got fed up and thought I'd call Lenovo support. After getting bounced over to Microsoft support by the first Lenovo guy (who I now assume was blowing me off), I got ahold of a guy who actually had one good suggestion that I'd foolishly not pursued yet: check the Event Viewer.

So I did, and I was greeted with dozens (perhaps hundreds) of messages dating back to around 08-28 when I think all of this started which were reported as from Source: ESENT, Category: Logging/Recovery and Event ID: 454. The description was something like this:

wuauclt (3132) Database recovery/restore failed with unexpected error -509.

That wuauclt part is something to do with Windows Update, but I don't think what it was was critically important. I continued the investigation by running all the way back to the first day those appeared and got some more details about an actual path and database file which was perhaps originally corrupted. Those were here:

C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs

After various fooling around, which involved some trial and error with the esentutl.exe utility from Microsoft (which was apparently already installed on my box), I finally threw up my hands and decided I'd try to copy that whole DataStore directory from a working WinXP machine (the whole thing was fairly small).
I did have some concern that might mess things up, but went for it anyway. So I renamed my DataStore directory to hld.DataStore and created a new one. Just before I was about to copy the directory from another machine, I tried loading the Shut Down menu one more time. By this point, it had already been responding very slowly (symptomatically) the previous two time I'd tried it, and this time it only took about 15 seconds to load.

Lo and behold, when I checked the DataStore directory, Windows had created all new files which were apparently not corrupted, and the Shut Down menu now seems to load correctly.

To recap, the fix that seemed to work for me was to basically just delete the DataStore directory and try shutting down the machine again. I'd always recommend doing the rename approach that I outlined above just so one could always get back to where one started.

So that was a simple enough fix, if that did it, but strangely I was not finding that advice anywhere exactly. There wasn't much help in Google for that particular problem.

I hope this might help out others if they should find themselves in a similar situation.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express - Copy Database 2006-06-08
I finally figured out how to copy an existing database to another database on the same server.
I think I've wanted to do that before but was never able to figure it. I don't know if you can do this in earlier versions of MSSQL or not, but in 2005 you can, using the Management Studio tool.
The idea is simple; first, make a backup of the source one, then right click on the "Databases" folder in the Management Studio tool, choose Restore, and enter the name of a new database (or an existing one, in which case you'd have to check the "overwrite database" on the options tab of the same window), and choose the source database halfway down the page. That should do it.
I bother to mention this one because, embarassingly enough, it took my about 30 minutes to figure that out.
Much simpler than using T-SQL or some of the other approaches I've seen.
Getting Things Done 2006-04-11
In the past several months, I started hearing buzz (probably mostly on /.) about a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done (often abbreviate by those in the know as GTD). So I read it.
In general, it's a time management self help kind of book, but I found it refreshingly simple and practical. And like I said, the buzz. I'm not typically drawn towards things that have buzz, but I do give weight to IT-nerdy buzz, because it normally has some validity at least for me.
The above is certainly not to say that this would only apply to those in the IT industry. I think it's mostly geared for modern professionals, and specifically makes suggestions for one's daily personal life.
Check it out, you'll likely be glad you did.
Arrested Development 2005-11-30
Sometimes, when I'm bored, I watch TV. I exercise a bit of discretion when I choose my shows (not always true, of course). Some of those that I watch most frequently are: the Law & Order flavors, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and a few other shows. In the past couple of years, I happened upon a great show, Arrested Development, which airs on FOX.
Unfortunately, I don't have much time to sing the praises of the show, but it is a genuinely funny, well written comedy, that I think would be extremely popular among the 20 - 35 (and perhaps up) demographic.
Note, I said would be. The show has struggled almost from the outset; it was almost not picked up the last couple of seasons and now has seen its 3rd season episode order cut back, which likely means it's in danger of being cancelled.
If you've not yet seen the show, watch one episode and see what you think. If you have, you probably agree with me and should spread the word.
PDFCreator 2005-10-03
If you want to create PDFs from essentially any Windows application (via a printer driver [so anything you can print in Windows could instead end up as a PDF]), check out PDFCreator, an interesting GPL'd project on Sourceforge. (To download the ~8MB installer from Sourceforge's mirror list, go here, and choose the mirror closest to you.)
I've not had much time to test this, but it looks promising, and certainly more straightforward than my former method of using the built-in PostScript printer driver and then the GhostScript tools to convert that .ps file to .pdf.
New article on web vendor (BestBargainPC) to avoid!
GOOGLE NEWS (AGAIN) 2005-08-25
Just a couple of days ago, Google released a beta of their newest offering, Google Talk. Which looks very promising. Yeah, yeah, all you naysayers, it's just another IM client/service, but it also has voice (which I've not yet tested), and (the most attractive part for me), it's based on a completely open chat protocol called Jabber. I've actually been running my own Jabber server for a couple of years for internal corporate (fully secured) chat, and now it looks like Google's going to lead the way in getting all these absurd mutations of chat protocols to standardize on one (we can only hope). I use the Psi Jabber chat client with my own server and heard that you can already tie a Jabber-compliant client into Google Talk, and you can, though it takes a bit of fooling around. See the details here. The key for me turned out to be: Looking forward to what else Google can come up with in this market segment.
Google note 2005-08-19
Cool. I just found out that you can request that Google removes pages from their index when they pertain to your website. You can of course handle this by creating a robots.txt file on your webiste, but if they've already indexed something and it's not fading from the cache fast enough (as is the case on a customer website of mine: DeKroyft-Metz & Co., Inc.), you can request that they expire certain pages. Find more about the details here. I imagine some of the other search engines offer similar services.

Pffh. While researching the above at Google, I also discovered their concept of Sitemaps. They offer this tool (available at Sourceforge), a Python script, that you run on your webserver, tweak with a few configs, and it crawls your site, records last-modified times on the files, and then formats this XML file (have a look at tgice's (currently modest) Sitemap) with all of the pertinent data that a web bot might be interested in. It will then even submit the newly created file directly to Google for you (clearly they intend this to be used on a schedule, or to be easily activated any time you make changes to your site that you'd like to update them on). If this catches on, it'll obviously make their job easier and your Google cache should be much more up to date than normal (especially for those of us with infrequently crawled sites, I'd hope). More info on all of this at Google.
ANNOUNCEMENT 2005-08-13
tgice.com is planning to begin providing technical articles on various issues of interest to all users of PCs, for now relevant to users of Windows (XP, 2000, etc.) and Linux platforms. (Maybe someday I'll get that Apple, but not just yet.)

Here's our first article, published 2005-08-13, on the topic of fixing a problem encountered during a ClamAV upgrade under Gentoo Linux.
A design goal of tgice.com is to create content which rigidly adheres to W3C document standards. We've chosen the W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict document type for now, which is one of the more progressive, leading edge types in mid 2005. The site will be best viewed under the latest Mozilla Firefox browser (mid 2005 version is 1.0.6). I highly recommend you check out this browser if you have not already, on it's own merits, but especially if you've experienced many problems with spyware, viruses and bad website behavior (popup windows, other invasive website tactics) from simply surfing websites. To date, Firefox has a substantially better track record than the most popular (unfortunately) webrowser in the world, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Heh. As you may've gathered, I'm rather a fanboy of Firefox. I will probably soon write an article outlining my experience with Firefox, some of the browser extensions that I regularly use and enjoy, and a bit more about my own software philosophy. (Professionaly, I'm a software engineer and IT jack-of-all-trades at Incode Systems, Inc.)

Some other open source projects in which I'm interested, and have spent some time keeping up with:
OpenOffice, for many people, a potential Microsoft Office killer.
MythTV, a very featureful and stable PVR package (for Linux).
Asterisk, a great open source PBX system.
OpenVPN, SSL based, high security, cross platform VPN server & client.


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last modified: December 30 2011 10:16:30.
page created: 2005-08-13 / Copyright © 2006 - 2011 John L. Lawler, All rights reserved