Ed’s Tech Blog

Mac PowerWhatever Laptop with 4 cores.

Vmware ESX Server w/ OSX, Windows XP as the main OS’s. And at least one linux flavor too.

Also Vmware should dual boot with another small partition of either XP or OSX for times when you ESX Server truly wipes out performance of the hardware. For example, 3D intensive tasks.

Probably put an image of Win2k3, OSX server on there for development.
Next hardware option for workstation laptops:

2 hard drives for:

a. Raid 1

b. Speed: so all these OS images don’t have to share one drive.

I am in charge of 4 different installations of EMC Retrospect 7.5 in Windows Domains and Workgroups.
Not a single one of them works as advertised, even after days on days with tech support.

In case you don’t know, Retrospect is backup and disaster recovery software. Guess what it doesn’t do half the time? Backup data.

Really, it’s the Proactive feature that is completely bug ridden. But everything we wanted it for was based on that feature working as advertised.

Anyway, if you need that feature, use a different vendor. Please, please don’t use EMC Retrospect! Your data will NOT be backed up correctly and your clients will have your head on a stick when disaster strikes.

Any alternative recommendations are welcome.

Microsoft Outlook Signatures. How could they screw up something so simple?

By trying to force Microsoft ’standards’ on users. You can’t use valid HTML in the signatures. You can only use bastardized MS Word HTML. Plus, even simple things like fonts and line spacing are impossible to set/unset in many circumstances. To top it off, MS Word 2003 isn’t truly compatible with it either. The line spacing fiasco immediately comes to mind.
In contrast, Mozilla Thunderbird accepts standards based HTML, and it just plain works.
I understand Microsoft’s unrelenting decision to make Outlook break with all standard linux IMAP email servers because that would cut into their Exchange Server cash cow. But doing the same trick with email signatures? Grow up.

What moron put this together? Complete bitch to swap a hard drive out, and for no good reason.

CVS doesn’t support moving files within a repository. (Great program, but didn’t get architected so well, eh? Programmers will want to move project files around in the future? Never happen!)

As you may know, a CVS ‘move’ means you have to Remove the directory structure and then Add it to the new place. (Deleting your history in the process.)

If you are using Tortoise CVS and you move a huge directory structure over, you may experience the hell of having 100’s of conflicting ‘hidden’ CVS directories throwing errors when you try to add the structure. You can write a script to remove them recursively or remove them by hand, but here’s a simpler hack for windows.

 (Always make a fresh backup before removing or moving lots of files in CVS!)
1. Run the Tortoise Remove command on your directory structure that you want to move. Commit the ‘remove’.
2. In Windows Explorer, move the leftover directory structure to someplace outside of the overal CVS directory hierarchy. This removes all the old hidden CVS directories that were left behind.
3.  Go to Windows Recycle Bin, and you will see all the
files that you removed from CVS using Tortoise. Order these by data deleted. Highlight them all and click ‘Restore’. This moves all those files and folders back into their old structure, but minus the hidden CVS directories.
4. In Windows explorer, copy your new ‘clean’ diretory structure to the desired location. Now click ‘Add Contents’ in Tortoise CVS from the top of that structure. Then click ‘Commit’.

5. You can now delete the old set of hidden CVS folders.

6. Always confirm your ‘Move’ by making a brand new download of the CVS repository, and building the app.

Final Thoughts:

- I think it would be great to build this functionality into Tortoise.
- Use Subversion instead of CVS every time you can. Subversion supports moves natively, is faster, uses less bandwidth, etc.

gwave:
$4/mo

Areacode 415? Yes
Forwarding:  to any number is included. no extra charge.
Voicemail: Included, yes custom greeting.
Voicemail messages: Forwarded as wav files via email
Voicemail alerts:  Voicemail alert via sms and/or email.

skype:
$4/mo

Areacode 415? Yes
Forwarding:  to any number is charged per minute, mobile phones cost more per minute
Voicemail: Custom greeting
Voicemail messages:  Only through skype client
Voicemail alerts:  Only through skype client

There are many more features available for both, but the features I looked at make the decision clear for me.
Winner:

Gizmo/CallWave

Everything is fine with your wireless router or access point for years or months. Then one day it starts to drop connections every 2 hours or so for no apparent reason. The router doesn’t crash and the router doesn’t add an entry into its log when this happens. In fact, nothing has changed in your network. It just doesn’t work all the sudden.

There may be a new wireless device within range that has caused yours to malfunction. It could be the office or home next door. So, login to your router and move it to a new spot on the big three positions of the wireless router spectrum. 1, 6, or 11.
Give it some time and move it again if the first new position doesn’t clear up the dropped connections.