Absoblogginlutely!

Windows Live Writer to MovableType

By Andy on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

For some reason, my installation of Windows Liver Writer will not allow me to select any of my other MT blogs (apart from the main one) when I go to set up an account. Instead I get the not useful error message “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 1 Occurred Invalid Login You must correct this error before proceeding.”

I know the password is correct as I’ve just used it to log into the system.

Another annoyance is the version number of WLW. Help/About displays the following version – 1.0 (12.0.1183.516) – nowhere does it mention that this is beta2. As the WLW website also doesn’t tell you which build Beta2 is, it is pretty hard to tell whether you are on the latest version or not.

SBS

Small Business Server 2003 Technical Library

By Andy on Sunday, June 24, 2007

A good source for SBS’ers is going to be the SBS2003 Technical Library. This is actually a subset of the SBS Technical library although there doesn’t seem to be anything else under this heading apart from SBS2003. I guess this will change as SBS2008 gets released. Thanks Peter Gallagher

Sharepoint

Sharepoint What’s New

By Andy on Thursday, June 21, 2007

A useful web part that allows sharepoint users to see What’s New

Extensions Firefox OneNote

Firefox to onenote extension

By Andy on Monday, June 18, 2007

The day I install an old version of the firefox to onenote extension (using the override version check), it was announced that a new version has been released that is marked as compatible with existing firefox versions. You can download the new Firefox to OneNote extension here.

Gmail

gmail issues?

By Andy on Monday, June 18, 2007

Anyone having problems accessing their gmail recently? I can log in, but clicking on an email doesn’t do anything (apart from make it unread) OR I get a warning that a script on this page is taking too long to run,do I wish to continue (when using firefox). The problem occurs on two machines that I’ve used and also occurs in internet explorer (so it is not related to any firefox extensions). Also occurs on two different networks (home and office lan). Just wondered if anyone else was having the same issue – I know it’s not site wide as someone else from the office can access their email account ok.
In the meantime, If you’ve sent me an email – you’ll have to wait for a reply…..
Update I worked out what the problem was – yesterday I followed some instructions on enabling Miranda and gmail so that I could talk to msn users on the blackberry. However I think this was bogging down my contact information in gmail as it tried to get the status updates of my buddies in msn. I actually found that this integration didn’t work very well anyway, so I wanted to remove this setup and promptly found my gmail is back to normal.

Virtual PC

Virtual pc 2007 images incompatible with vmware player

By Andy on Friday, June 15, 2007

I had downloaded the Vista vhd image from microsoft but wanted to use vmware player as I already had that installed on the home pc and vmware tends to be quicker than virtual pc but vmware is unable to convert the image which it has been able to do before. In fact when doing an SBS migration I had to convert from virtual server to vmware when virtual server stopped being able to access the image for some reason.
Anyway, it turns out that 2007 versions of image files are not compatible with the vmware player 🙁

Spyware

Weatherbug alternative

By Andy on Friday, June 15, 2007

It is amazing the number of people who install weatherbug on their machines – I suppose it doesn’t help that major news programs promote it when doing their weather slot (every 3 minutes). In the past weatherbug have had some pretty dodgy adware practises (just search google)- I’m not sure if they still do but thats a good reason not to use it again.
However, several years ago I came across WeatherWatcher as a freeware alternative with no popups, spam of email addresses or anything else dodgy. As I now have a “business need” to replace weatherbug, this will do the trick nicely. As the settings are saved in the registry under HKCU, I think I can even set it up as I like on my machine, and then export the registry key and import it into other local users who will have the same zipcode (or changing the zipcode should be one entry in the exported reg file)

Exchange / Outlook

winmail.dat opener

By Andy on Wednesday, June 13, 2007

I have a customer who keeps sending me stuff from Scalix mail server, but the attachments come out as winmail.dat Rather than asking them to resend the email, I’ve discovered winmail opener from eolsoft that allows you to extract data from winmail.dat – it’s free too so well worth downloading. In the meantime I’ve also asked them to look at setting their mail server up so it doesn’t do this in the first place!

WHS

Windows Home Server RC1 available

By Andy on Tuesday, June 12, 2007

WHS RC1 is now available according to Tom. I vpn’ed into my home network to start the download off over lunchtime. I did find that the webpage said the dvd iso image is too large to download, but it looks like it will download if you click the download button regardless.
I’m looking forward to installing this software as several of my bugs have apparently been fixed. Not sure if I will get time to install tonight though, but watch this space.

Beta Testing Dreamhost MovableType

MovableType4 beta

By Andy on Saturday, June 9, 2007

The first hurdle of installing MovableType beta4 is that the download page does some fancy redirection to push the download to your browser which is not helpful if you have disabled ftp upload up to your dreamhost website and want to download it via wget from within a shell. However there are a couple of sites that point to a direct location that was made public when the beta was first released so you can get it (for now) from sippey. There is a nice tutorial on installing MT4 on dreamhost