June 2010 – Absoblogginlutely!

Google voice transcriptions

By Andy on Saturday, June 26, 2010

Now that Google Voice is now out of beta and anyone (in the US) can sign up, I think they need to work on their transcription services next. I think the reason it’s US only is the transcription can’t understand the UK accents as this is the transcription of my Mum’s call to me this morning.

Hello and I’ll give you a call. I’m today and I don’t know if you’re not possible we can. Hey Erin, it’s about when you can. You’ve been sent. That’s 9 that meeting. I think. Okay, okay. Give me a well hi.

I thought it was amusing, but Mum should know better than to call at 9am on a Saturday – it’s my only chance for a lie in so it’s unlikely I’ll be awake to answer the phone 😉

I have donated the voicemail to google to assist in their transcription efforts.

Real Life

Kroger competition now over

By Andy on Saturday, June 26, 2010

Congratulations to Deanna who won the drawing for $30 of Kroger gift cards thanks to the Kroger Family of Stores and General Mills through MyBlogSpark as part of the Pound for Pound challenge. So far I’ve lost 5.5 pounds so I have a way to go to reach my goal but I’m getting there.

Wordpress

WordPress 3 is now out.

By Andy on Thursday, June 17, 2010

I’ve upgraded and if you are seeing this, then the process was the normal easy, couple of clicks upgrade. So far the interface looks cleaner and I’m liking the fact that finally the updates is at the top of the main dashboard menu rather than being buried in a couple of menus and not in the obvious place. It was weird that plugin upgrades were not under the upgrade option in 2.9.2
Let me know if anything isn’t working – I’ll be upgrading the other sites in the next couple of days – it will be interesting to see what is discussed at Wordcamp/Podcamp Ohio on Saturday.

Dell OMSA

OMSA configuration files – finally posted.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I’ve finally got around to uploading and saving the Dell Configuration and Dell alert script files that will assist in obtaining alerts when Dell Servers detect a problem. The script files are pretty self explanatory – the conf.bat file configures the alerts on the server, dellalert.bat gets activated and sends and email to your email address or pager/sms email address.

Note that for easy transfer from client site to client site, it’s probably best to set the mailserver parameter to be the mx record of your mail server (assuming you allow smtp out from client machines) – this way it’s one less thing to change when deploying at client sites.

For more information check out the OMSA configuration section of this blog although the main post with instructions is at Dell Open Manage Server Administrator OMSA Alert Setup Updated.

Download the Configure OMSA Batch File zip file here

Real Life

Kroger $30 Giveaway

By Andy on Tuesday, June 15, 2010

In a somewhat different blog posting (but don’t worry this isn’t going to be a regular event) I have a giveaway for one of my readers.

Kroger is one of the sponsors for the Pound for Pound Challenge – a US wide version of the Biggest Loser. You can go to www.pfpchallenge.com/kroger to sign up and pledge the amount of pounds you will lose by the end of June 2010. For every pound pledged, 14 cents will be donated to Feeding America which is enough to deliver one pound of groceries to a local food bank.

Unfortunately I only heard about it two weeks ago and it expires at the end of the month but I’d like to lose a bit of weight – my target goal is to lose 11 pounds – probably not healthy to do this in 4 weeks but that is my final goal no matter how long it takes me – after that it’s another 10 pounds but that is another story 😉

So far (depending on the time of the day) I think I’ve lost about 4 pounds so I have some way to go 😉

Anyway, as part of the event I will have a $30 gift card to give away to one lucky reader – just leave a comment on this blog post and one lucky winner will be drawn at random on the 26th June (contest closes midnight on Friday). I’ll contact you via email to get your address details so please ensure your email is correct (it will not be displayed on your comment). If you do pledge for the pound for pound challenge then please include this information in your comment but it’s not a strict requirement.

The Kroger Family of Stores gift card, information, and giveaway were all provided by the Kroger Family of Stores and General Mills through MyBlogSpark – a service that provides access to review new products, services and survey entries – and occasionally giveaways to your readers – hence this post. Contest not applicable to family members.

Update Congrats to Deanna who won the competition, replied with her details and the gift cards are on their way.

Wordpress

Podcamp or WordCamp Ohio is next Saturday (June 19th)

By Andy on Saturday, June 12, 2010

I registered for PodcampOhio 3 months ago but for some reason it was not in my calendar so it’s a good job they reminded us about it on the blog.
It will be nice to take the dellmini with me next week instead of having to lug the normal laptop around. The only annoying thing is the mouse movement and smaller keyboard so I’ll have to type slower. I’m debating on loading OneNote onto the machine (restricting me to just one OS for the day or just using Onenote WebApp(but that assumes web access is always available)

If you’re going – don’t forget to say hello.

I guess I should have got my act together and submitted a session on “securely logging into your WordPress blog at conferences without needing an SSL certificate”. The most embarrassing thing is that I worked out how to do this last year before the conference and said my instructions were coming soon!

Dell OneNote

OneNote 2010 webapp now live.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 8, 2010

I’m a big fan of OneNote as it makes it really easy to take notes during meetings and presentations. I was pleased to see that the OneNote Web App is now online, allowing you to save OneNote notebooks to the web (on Microsoft’s SkyDrive) which then means you can edit them in a browser – without needing OneNote on the machine.

I uploaded the OneNote notebook that I made whilst upgrading my Dell Mini10v a couple of weeks to triple boot XP, OSX and Windows7 and was pleased with how things have turned out. I’ll be using this functionality to create an upcoming blog post on how to do the triple boot – having the notebook on the web means I can update and work on the blog post from any computer – I’m not tied to my home desktop which hosted the original notebook.

Note that you do need to “share” the notebook by going to the File/ New/ Web or going to File/Share/ Web as appropriate. Keeping the document in your personal folder means it is kept private – as long as nobody else finds the url.

Thanks to The Office Blog for the heads up and see an Introduction to OneNote Web App for more details.

AntiVirus Trend Work

Preventing Trend Micro from scanning server after the umpteenth time of installation.

By Andy on Wednesday, June 2, 2010

When you have a problem with Trend and have to keep reinstalling it on the server, it gets extremely frustrating waiting for the agent to do a prescan and then fail to complete the install due to “unable to install the client/server security agent.Contact Trend Micro support. Error copying FlowControl.dll”

The problem of flowcontrol.dll can be fixed by deleting the trend micro\Client Security Agent folder after you have uninstalled the software. If you get a problem deleting perficrcperfmonmgr.dll then unregister it with regsvr32 /u perficrcperfmonmgr.dll Wait a few seconds and then rename the Client Security Agent folder to .old. Repeat the installation and the software should install with no problems. (Note that you may have to reboot if the Security Agent service fails to stop)

To prevent the server from rescanning for virus’s (which after all it has been doing in the past and will take a long time on a server), edit the autopcc.ini that can be found in the \\server\ofcscan\autopcc.cfg folder. Change NoPreScan to 1 instead of 0 and then run the autopcc.exe install program.

For what it’s worth, we are looking at using Trend due to some of the features such as the Remote Manager capabilities and the fact that they do seem to listen to their users and resellers. I had a good training session with one of their Technical managers a week ago which was really great. unfortunately the install that sparked this blog post has caused me no end of problems and Symantec would be a much more efficient install in this case.

Month: June 2010