Absoblogginlutely!

New blog name?

By Andy on Saturday, August 19, 2006

As part of the reinstall on the new pc I installed picassa2 on the pc and discovered that I’ve lost all the tagging information – grrrrrrr. However, I did find this picture that I had played around with a while ago and was wondering if I should change the blog name –

I actually created this post using WindowsLiveWriter – it works pretty well – I didn’t have to enter any image uploading details (although it would be nice to control where the image is uploaded too and I did have to enter the path to the MovableType cgi file but I think that is because I have removed the RSD data for this blog. Update I’m also not sure why it decided to change the font on me too – the font for this post has been edited back to the default.

OneNote

OneNote Journalling

By Andy on Thursday, August 17, 2006

DailyJournal for OneNote automatically creates new tabs for each day that the journal feature is used in OneNote – great for tracking what has been done on a certain day – yet another weapon in trying to keep my timesheets uptodate.

Backups

ntbackup recovery

By Andy on Thursday, August 17, 2006

nucleus data recovery’s Kernel for BKF looks like a good way of recovering from a backup image that is unreadable with ntbackup. Fortunately I’ve not had to do this yet….
However I have had to use PC Inspector’s File Recovery for digital camera cards and the other day I recommended it to a user whose disk full of ghost images were coming back as unreadable – until this utility was used. Well worth downloading if you have not used it already.

Other Blogs

System Center Essentials

By Andy on Thursday, August 17, 2006

Microsoft have created a new blog for System Center essentials which if I remember correctly is a new management tool that enables you to manage a bunch of servers and stuff, including ones not on your network – ideal for a consulting company to keep track of everybody’s servers. Note that I got this impression from a podcast I listened to so I could be wrong but if I’m right, this will be an awesome utility – hopefully it’s not too expensive.

Exchange / Outlook

Outlook forms.

By Andy on Tuesday, August 15, 2006

I had a user today who logged a ticket saying that everytime she requested a meeting with someone, the recipient was unable to open the meeting request and add it to their calendar. After trying it on their pc I noticed that it asked if I wanted to add the meeting to the timecard application – this was obviously a custom form and sure enough, it was available in the organizational forms – but how to change it back? I was unable to delete the form from the organization and it took me a while to find the real form location. To solve this, go to the folder view in outlook 2003 and right click on the calendar and choose properties. Change the “When posting to this folder” to read IPM.Appointment and it will all work again.

Now if someone could explain why I had two users complain their pc wouldn’t boot today but started ok when I switched them on I’d like to know how to market my magic aura.

404 pages

Tubular 404

By Andy on Sunday, August 13, 2006

It’s been a long time since I posted a funny 404 page, but if you remember the stupid senator and his tubes, then you’ll appreciate the 404 found at Ed Bott’s site
Note that if you link through to the original page you get an annoying mp3 playing so turn the speakers off if you are at work.

Greasemonkey

greasemonkey error fixed.

By Andy on Sunday, August 13, 2006

If you get the error message Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 when trying to install a greasemonkey script then you need to create a gm_scripts directory in your profile directory and then create an empty file called config.xml in this directory. I got the information from iPodWizard.net where someone had the same problem. I must admit that the solution is not very obvious from the error code.
As to the reason it happened? I think it’s because the restore of my firefox profile didn’t include that directory for some reason. It turns out that this is because I restored my profile using mozbackup which doesn’t backup this directory. I’ve requested this feature/bug in the next version.

FriendsInTech

Geek Dinner

By Andy on Friday, August 11, 2006

Kevin was hosting a geek dinner in Cleveland last night as part of the Friends In Tech / In The Trenches network. I asked one of the guys at work, who also listened to the show if he wanted to go to, he said yes, so last night we headed off on a 272 mile round trip for some ribs and some great company. 8 of us turned up, which is pretty small for a geek dinner, but considering we had people from Cleveland, Columbus (and wherever Kevin and Dave come from) it was a pretty good turn out really.
We had a really good time chatting about all sorts of stuff, no user bashing and Kevin sneakily managed to interview all of us for the Trench segment (which means I’ll probably have to think of some new answers). George couldn’t make it so Kevin rang him up and we all wished him a speedy recovery.
I’ve uploaded my photos to zooomr and flickr and tagged them with ClevelandGeekDinner

bookmarking

New del.icio.us usage.

By Andy on Wednesday, August 9, 2006

I discovered this evening that you can now have private bookmarks on del.icio.us. When I was looking at having my bookmarks accessible from any computer that I work on I wasn’t happy with the idea of just anyone accessing those bookmarks. Some of them are personal to me or other people in the family so I didn’t want just anyone accessing them. Some would also be work related and therefore not suitable for publication. However with the new privacy options I can load them all up and mark them up appropriately. Also clipmarks now has an option to automatically post clips to del.icio.us too. I can now be found at del.icio.us and clipmarks (although you won’t see much on the former yet until I go through the bookmarks.)

Work

Slimtimer

By Andy on Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Slimtimer may be a great tool for those of you who need (or like) to keep a track of things that you are doing during the day. A web page app that keeps track of what you are doing automatically (as long as you click to stop or start a task) and gives you nice reports at the end of various time periods. I’m going to try using this for work for the next couple of days to see how it goes and see if it will help keep my time sheet uptodate. Currently I use a paper based system, but it only gives me details when I fill it in (not always by the computer) and this means I can run it from any computer that I have access to. Of course it doesn’t solve the problem of tracking things that happen offline like lunch/travel/ etc but it should hopefully be a start. Thanks to Joe for the information on this one