I recently pickep up a Dazzle Video Creator Platinum from Woot. My idea was that I’d take the last few videotapes I own, convert them to MPEG-4, then toss the tapes and the VCR. I had a bit of an adventure getting the software installed and working under Vista. This blog entry helped out a bit. It would be nice if Pinnacle would just allow you to download the full install for their Vista-compatible software, but instead you have to stumble through the install of the XP version, then run a patch install. Once you’ve got that done, and you’ve got the Vista driver for the device installed, it works fine. I’m in the middle of converting an old anime VHS tape to MPEG-4 right now. I’m hoping it’ll be watchable on my Apple TV when I’m done with it. If it all works out OK, I have a few other random tapes to convert, then I’m done with VHS forever.
Category: software
defunct tech magazines
Related to my post about PC Mag yesterday, here’s an article about defunct tech magazines. I have fond memories of a few of the magazines on his list — Byte, in particular. That was a great tech magazine. Looking through the comments after the article, I see mention of Amiga World, which was another great magazine, about a great computer. On a somewhat related topic, the NY Times just started a new gadget blog.
random patching
I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that’s cropped up with Windows in quite a while.
I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven’t had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.
I realized that I hadn’t turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn’t started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.
On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn’t have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can’t buy any new equipment right now.)
I have one Windows 2000 server that’s hanging up on one of the updates. I’ll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I’d like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don’t have the time right now.
I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There’s a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven’t figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There’s certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.
I’ve been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple’s been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There’s an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: “I’ll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have.” I can’t help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I’m probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven’t written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I’ve got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I’m going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!
text editors
There’s a poll on Lifehacker about text editors. Their top six are Notepad++, Emacs, UltraEdit, TextMate, Vim, and TextPad. I do use TextMate on my Mac, so I agree with that call. It’s a nice editor. I *wish* I was proficient with Emacs, just because it would probably come in handy occasionally, and just generally seems like something I should know. I’m amazed that people still use vi/vim. I had to use vi a bit back in college, and never liked it. Under Windows, I have to admit that I’m still using Multi-Edit, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days. I’ve been using Multi-Edit 9, which dates back to 1999. I kept putting off upgrades, since ME 9 did everything I really needed to do. At some point, I realized that I needed an editor with Unicode support, so I installed PSPad. I like PSPad, but not enough to switch over from Multi-Edit, except for those occasional Unicode files.
After poking around on the internet a bit today, I decided to finally upgrade to the most current version of Multi-Edit. It seems like ME is still behind the times a bit. The current version is called “Multi-Edit 2006”, and the most recent revision was posted in October 2007. It mostly works in Vista, but there are a couple of problems, mostly with macro recording, from what I can tell by looking at their support forums. And they’ve got some support for Unicode now, but it doesn’t look like it’s really full support.
I’m not sure if sticking with Multi-Edit is the right choice in the long run. UltraEdit might be a better choice; they seem to have been updating their product a bit more regularly. They appear to have full Unicode support and Vista compatibility.
Only a true geek could spend so much time worrying about text editors!
e-mail clients for my Dad
My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he’s not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We’ve got his machine set up so that he’s using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don’t take these kind of things into account. We’ve found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.
We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.
When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn’t been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.
I’ve been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I’m looking for something with a fairly simple interface that’ll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn’t get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn’t remember where he’d written down his e-mail password, so I couldn’t actually get all the way through the setup. We’ve also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I’m not sure that’ll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he’ll have found that password and we can play around some more.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server
We implemented a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) at work last week. I was afraid it would be overly complicated, but it wasn’t that bad, and we seem to have it running smoothly now. We’re running it on top of Lotus Domino. I’ve found that the documentation for BES is OK, but if you hit a snag, you’re going to need to head out on the internet and do some searching. The best place to find BES information seems to be the BES Admin Corner at BlackBerryForums.com.
CrackBerry.com has some useful stuff in their forums, too. For Domino-specific information, I’ve found besdomino.blogspot.com and notesberry.org useful.
I’ve been almost completely ignorant of the BlackBerry platform until now. I’ve got plenty of experience with Windows Mobile and Palm, going back several years, but I just never had occasion to pick up a BlackBerry. It turns out that they work pretty well! We won’t get to keep one in the IT department, unfortunately. We’ve just got one to use for testing that we’ll have to give back at some point. I looked into picking one up myself, but I don’t see any way to do that (and hook it up to the BES) for less that $50 per month, and that’s a bit much. I guess I should be glad that the company’s not making me carry around a BlackBerry 24×7, but it does seem like it would be a useful thing to have.
For now, I can still check my e-mail on my Moto SLVR via RemoMail, which I’ve blogged about before. And when I’m near a wifi access point, I can always use my iPod Touch.
MacHeist and other Mac stuff
Well, after deciding not to buy this year’s MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They’ve added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don’t use anything else I’ll probably get my money’s worth out of the two games they added.
And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn’t where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I’m hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I’ll be happy. I’m basically just looking for the same stuff I’ve got on my Palm.
Mac software
MacHeist has another bundle of Mac software on sale right now. It’s a good deal, if you need more than one or two of the included applications. I bought the bundle that they were selling about a year ago. About the only app from that bundle that I’m using regularly is DevonThink, which is pretty useful. I’m not really seeing anything in the current bundle that I’d be likely to use, though, so I guess I’ll skip this one.
I have pretty much everything working the way I want it on my new MacBook now. I’ve got FolderShare working fine now. I’ve replaced MacStumbler, which doesn’t seem to work on Intel Macs, with iStumbler, which works fine. And I found out that my old version of the Transmission BitTorrent client didn’t work, so I upgraded to the newest version, which is working fine.
Office 2008 looks interesting, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I hardly ever do any word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac. I do all of that stuff on the PC.
I also paid for VMWare Fusion a couple of weeks ago. (I’d been using the trial version.) I’ve got a Windows XP virtual machine set up, and it’s working reasonably well. I’m mostly just using it when I need remote access to some stuff at work. (I still use pcAnywhere for that, most of the time.)
random stuff
I haven’t gotten around to blogging in the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic. I’m trying to relax right now, so I thought I’d just write up a few random bits.
I picked up a TomTom One LE GPS unit at Best Buy last week. I don’t really need a GPS often. Most of my driving is just back and forth to work. But, it will definitely come in handy once in a while. I used it today to help me find my way to my friend Paul’s house in New York. I’ve been there before, but not recently. The GPS was definitely a help. In particular, there’s one point where I need to make a turn onto a side street that’s pretty well hidden, until you’re right on top of it. The GPS takes care of that nicely by announcing the turn in advance, then again when you’re right there. It really makes things easier.
I’ve been working my way through the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde. I’m on the third book now, Well of Lost Plots. It’s starting out quite nicely. I’m really enjoying these books. Lots of fun, weird, stuff.
I installed the trial version of VMware Fusion on my MacBook yesterday, and installed Windows XP into a virtual machine. It works pretty well. It’s a little slow, but a lot better than previous virtual machine products that I’ve used on the Mac. (Of course, this is the first time I’ve used an Intel Mac, so right there you’ve got a major advantage.) Oh, and I’ve got to say, I think it’s time for Windows XP SP3. I installed XP with SP2, and had 90 patches to install from Windows Update. Hey Microsoft, isn’t that enough patches to warrant a service pack? That’s one of the nice things about Apple that we maybe take for granted. OS X 10.4 went from 10.4.0 to 10.4.10, and each of those point releases is cumulative, so you never have too many individual patches to install on a Mac.
RemoMail
I set up RemoMail on my phone today. Since I got the new Motorola SLVR a while ago, I’ve been looking around at reasonably affordable and workable ways to read e-mail on the phone. The Mobile Web 2.0 service for which I’m paying Verizon $5/month allows you to check HotMail, AOL, and Yahoo mail pretty easily. I do have a Yahoo account, but I get about 100 spam e-mails per day to that account, and only about 80% of them get filtered properly, so I pretty much gave up on that account. I’ve also got a HotMail account, but I really don’t use that one either. I do use Gmail, and you can check that from Mobile Web by just going to the Gmail site, but it’s pretty ugly.
There are a few other ways to check e-mail on the SLVR. One would be to use Verizon’s wireless sync software, which looks nice but costs $20/month. RemoMail, on the other hand, only costs $2/month, which is a bit more reasonable.
I looked around for reviews of RemoMail this morning, and I found a few things, but nothing really detailed, so I thought I’d write some stuff up, in case anyone else is interested. First, I should say that everything I write here is specific to RemoMail on the SLVR, via Verizon’s “Get It Now” function. It may look and/or behave differently on other phones. That said, here are some observations.
RemoMail allows you to configure up to 7 e-mail accounts. (I’ve seen indications that other versions of the software allow either 5 or 10 accounts, but the help file for mine states 7.) It can access your mail via POP or IMAP. It also has an interesting feature that allows you to access Domino or Exchange e-mail via what appears to be screen-scraping from the web interface for either product. It has setup options for a number of standard e-mail services (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc), but it seems like these are just consolidating some of the standard things you’d need to fill in for POP access — it’s not actually doing anything different to access, say, Gmail, vs any other POP mail account.
I’ve set up three e-mail accounts in RemoMail. The first would be my Gmail account. I’m not really enthusiastic about the way this works — it’s just standard POP access, so you get everything that comes in to the mailbox. Even if you’ve moved something out of your inbox on the web, you’ll still see it on RemoMail.
I also set up my .Mac account, using the IMAP option. This works well, since I keep my inbox pretty clean on .Mac, and that’s all IMAP is going to look at, unless you tell it to look at another folder.
I set up my work Lotus Domino e-mail account too, and that seems to work well. I mentioned above that the program uses an interesting way to pick up Domino mail. Rather than trying to get to it through IMAP or POP, it instead asks for the URL for your webmail site, and gets to it that way. That’s probably a good workaround for people who don’t have much control over their Domino server — most admins will have enabled webmail, but they might not enable IMAP or POP. (I checked the server log on my Domino server, and the program doesn’t seem to do anything crazy when it attaches to the webmail page. It just logs on as a user would and apparently parses some info out of the page that comes back.)
RemoMail is not a push e-mail solution; you have to launch the application, and check each of your e-mail accounts separately. Also, it does not appear to store any mail on your device between program sessions. So, basically, this is just a solution for doing a quick scan of your e-mail remotely, and maybe sending some quick replies. When you check an account, the program goes online and pulls down headers for 5 messages. (I think this is configurable from 3 to 10, assuming I understand the options screen correctly.) Then, you can select any individual e-mail and pull down the body text. You can’t download or view attachments, and you can only get “100 lines” of text, according to the RemoMail FAQ. The e-mail body is displayed in a nice readable font. There’s no support for HTML e-mail, but it seems to do an OK job of displaying the text from an HTML message.
Overall, I’d say it’s a good program for occasional use, just to take a quick scan through your e-mail and see if there are any fires you need to put out.