I don’t know if they’ve already had it but I noticed that Dreamhost now has an option in their one click installation routines that has a setting to email you whenever a new version comes out – this is great to ensure that you are aware of any new security patches. As they are one click installations it is very easy to upgrade the software but you do have to bear in mind that they may not have a new version as soon as it is released (although apparently their WordPress 2.5 came out hours after the official release).
Thanks to a tip off from Ed Bott, I have ordered a nice Dell Dimension 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU (Intel Q6600), 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB drive, for $499 although I paid an extra $20 to get Windows XP Pro. I wanted to get the 64 bit version but Dell won’t sell it to me so I’d have buy the media which is going to be expensive or put my Vista or Windows2008 server software on to host my vm’s. Hopefully this machine will have enough processor and memory to allow me to run at least a couple of vm’s at the same time so I can get more experience in W2k8. At this price it was very tempting to buy a few of these machines but I restrained myself to just one. This is going to be used purely for work and training purposes so I should be able to deduct it in my taxes next year too which is an added bonus.
I needed to do a restore of some voicemails on a server and the calculations on how long it was going to take were slightly off as you can see from this screenshot – it actually got as far as 150 days before it reached the data on the file and started the restore off. Typically I have to do this when the voicemail server crashes (due to a power outage when it wasn’t on a reliable UPS). Everytime the server crashes I would have to restore 2 peoples voicemails (out of about 70 voicemail boxes). They are the only two who have their voicemail wiped and Avaya don’t care about the problem. What is weird is that this time the server had a controlled shutdown and not a sudden crash.
I sent the user this screenshot and told them it might take me a while but I’m working on it – they replied saying they didn’t think they had *that* many voicemails!
I’m off to the Heroes Happen Here event in Columbus on Thursday – any other readers going? I’ve not managed to get my hands dirty with the Windows2008 server yet so this event should be interesting and hopefully pretty fun too. The last Microsoft held event was packed which spoilt it a bit but I’m hoping this one won’t be as crowded. It is a sellout which hopefully means they’ve only allowed enough people that they actually have room for this time.
One of the things that annoyed me about Lotus Notes was the inability to easily mark emails as unread once opened. However today I accidentally found out that by pressing the Insert key this will toggle the read/unread state of the email. However, if you have a mixed state of read and unread mails, then all the mails turn to one state which will be the opposite state of the currently selected email.
I asked around in the office and nobody knew this trick – I discovered it by accident when trying to delete an email and I missed the key. The only downside to the trick is if you miss the insert button and hit delete instead – I am not responsible for any sudden outbursts of swearing if this happens!
My taxes are finally filed and I’ve got about 3 times the refund that I got last year which is very nice. Most of this is due to the medical bills that Kristen had last year with her thyroid surgery. One neat trick that I didn’t know is that Giant Eagle can give you a list of prescriptions purchased through them – very useful for the medical bill section of the Tax form – naturally this only works if you get all of your prescriptions from the same place. However I also found out today that Anthem can also provide this information but for ALL prescriptions filled and also for all the co-pays and Dr visits etc. It’s a shame that the US doesn’t have a prescription pre-payment form – in the UK you could buy a certificate that would last a whole year – Kristen’s prescriptions (copays) were $735 last year!
I e-filed my federal taxes but used Ohio’s pdf file to efile (rather than pay Turbotax $18 to do it). I did have to open the pdf with Adobe Reader rather than my default foxitreader. I also found I had to run the pdf twice as the first time it wouldn’t recalculate the entries in the form for some reason.
Hopefully this year I won’t have to wait about 5 or 6 months to get my Ohio refund back like last year.
The very useful post from EHLO has a good walkthrough on how to allow other servers to relay via Exchange2007. At first glance it looks complicated, but it was actually pretty simple. I had tried to authenticate my smtp session from the NT4 IIS smtp session but that didn’t work so I followed up with the document above.
RIM have come up with a fix for the issue of the 8703e reboots. A couple of our guys have installed it and haven’t had any more problems with them rebooting so it looks good.
The handheld OS update (4.2.x) for the 8703 has been posted publicly on the RIM site
The update was released to fix reboots in several markets (Richmond, Chicago, Raleigh, Honolulu, Cleveland, Columbus OH, Norfolk, Knoxville) and will need to be downloaded to a PC and loaded with desktop manager (v3.2 or better suggested). If on a BES, the customer will need to do a new enterprise activation after update.
In addition 4.2 software supports WAV files. The first point of contact for support is Blackberry care 877-654-9111.
Well after being thrown in the deep end I think I have ironed out most of the kinks and I’ve learnt a lot about the various Movable Type tweaks needed. A lot of the old plugins have been ripped out and I’ve discovered that using widgets to include code as needed in the site will make it a lot easier to migrate in future – no need to go hacking around in the template files to remove references to plugins that are not used any more (the chief culprits for this were the scode and comment challenge plugins).
The header image was taken by Tim Perdue and was drastically cropped to give an image of the Columbus skyline. It was hard to find a picture that was sufficiently wide enough to give a recognizable skyline when cropped.
Well the upgrade seems borked somehow – the comment links are broken. I thought I would use the refresh template option to restore the templates back to the factory default (and then edit my changes back in again but when I try to use the Refresh Template option I get the message “Error creating new template: Template with the same name already exists in this blog.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t mention which template has the problem and I can’t see any of the templates that it is trying to replace. A bit of troubleshooting guidance to mention which template would not have gone amiss in the software.
In the end I had to use the “Delete all templates” option, but it was able to backup the templates for me. Doing the refresh option did not work.