OK, this annoys me all the time because someone will borrow my laptop to watch a DVD in WMP, close the “Now Playing” playlist pane and I can never find how to get it back again. Here’s how you do it:
Click on the drop down arrow under the “Now Playing” tab at the top.
Click on “Show List Pane” and it will come back.
Now I know where to find out how to do it when I forget next time
Before I start this is not intended to be the usual argument between the Microsoft and Linux camps but more a desription of my findings when I had to evaluate the two products for use within our office as the main server. Our office network is currently of the usual standard you’d find in a small 5-10 person company that doesn’t have an in-house IT person:
I know this shouldn’t be the case with me being the in-house IT “professional”, but my main job is to develop and maintain several enterprise quality websites. This leaves me with very little time to devote to my additional role as IT Manager and Sys Admin so up until now as long as everyone good do their job on that particular day and as long as none of the office IT equiptment had smoke and flames billowing out of it then I considered that part of my job a success.
Unfortunately the MD has thrown a spanner in the works by setting us all a set of goals that will allow our company to function at it’s best and also to grow over the next year or so. This is normally fine by me as it’s the kind of mission critical memo that I lovingly file away in the “Deleted Items” folder before getting on with some serious Ajax coding. This time is a little different though as he’s made our bonuses dependant on the goals being acheived. There’s a few bits and bobs in here that I’m not going to include here but for the most part they boil down to:
Now my initial reaction was to head off to Dell and spec up a shinny new server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 to take advantage of the combination of Exchange and SharePoint but after taking into account some of the PCs are running old versions of Office (there may even be an odd Works and Outlook Express installation) and a few Windows XP Home, by the time everything was upgraded to XP Pro and Office 2003/2007 plus the server it was a bill upwards of £2000!
For a small business of 6 employess that is a bit steep by anyones standard so I did the obvious and headed off into the Linux world. I’m not a die hard linux fan by any means. I like it a lot – where it’s appropriate, but I don’t use it on my desktop – I’m on XP Pro. Neither will I use windows all the time – I don’t have a single IIS or SQL installation (L.A.M.P all the way!) but Linux is cheaper if you can do it yourself. That’s where businesses of our size have to find the trade off: you don’t want to be paying a consultant or your IT staff more than it would have cost to get a Windows server up and running.
In the end I weighed up the pros and cons and made the following decision: Linux this time based on the following:
So thats the plan. The moral of this (as usual) long winded rambling and unnecessary story? Find the solution that fits your needs and budget. Time to implement it and then report back!
I’ve recently upgraded to Outlook 2007 and as with the last Office upgrade, I’m glad it was a free download from our hosting provider otherwise I would have been reeeeaaalllllllllly pissed off. There’s some good advancements in it and since it’s a nearly new Microsoft product, a hell of a lot of bugs and problems. Top of the list at the moment is the fact that Outlook won’t exit when I close it.
It’s still running in Task Manager and even downloading emails although it’s not even showing up in the System Tray. This wouldn’t bother me too much except that it’s using 100Mb of my 1Gb of RAM which I sometimes need (for playing Command & Conquer).
After a bit of researching, I found out that it was due to the contact sharing with Skype. I’ve only recently noticed it so I don’t know if it’s an Outlook 2007 thing or part of a Skype update. To turn it off go to:
View > Show Outlook Contacts
and un-tick it. As soon as I did this, Outlook cleanly exited out of Task Manager.
This is a little bit “lower tech” than usual for me but it seems to crop up again and again, either when I set up new PCs for people or just when people are asking me one of the usual computer questions. The question being “What is Hibernate?”.
Well, simply, it makes your PC boot up and shut down a hell of a lot faster than normal. For those of you who aren’t obsessed with having the fastest PC, or just use it for ordering the weekly online shop, it will save you a lot of time and make your PC last longer (it won’t, but you’ll keep it longer because you won’t get so frustrated with it).
So, slightly more technical: how does it do this? Well, when you shutdown, everything it the memory (RAM) is saved as an image on the hard drive and this is then loaded back into the memory when you start up again instead of the PC having to go through and load everything up from scratch. This also includes all your programmes you had open and any documents you were working on.
This is absolutely brilliant for laptop users as anything you were working on when your battery dies is still there when you finally get back to your charger. I wouldn’t recomend on relying on them to be there when you boot up though as it is Windows and a few crashes while restoring everything has caused me a few lost files.
Note: I tend to ramble and build up to the point by painting a wonderful picture in words… Straight onto The Point
I tend to have a slightly complicated setup at work as far as my files go. For the most part, it’s the same as anyone else’s. Email in my email client, documents in My Documents and shared stuff on the central network share. Bu the files I spend most of my time on are stored on another server. The setup is something like this:
There’s a couple of reasons for storing everything on a central Linux box and not on a local drive:
When away from the office I tend to FTP to the production server I want and make any changes, FTP them back and then either email myself a reminder to download them when I get into the office or Remote Desktop in and download them straight away. This has always worked and although it’s a bit of bind, noone likes working on the weekend so it means I don’t fire up my laptop to do little bits of bug fixing or whatever on a quiet Sunday.
This morning though I got an email off the MD saying I could do with a new desktop and he’d a catalogue through with a few offers in. I put the kettle on and headed over to www.dell.co.uk to see which ones he was on about. Unfortunately by the time I’d added the options I wanted (RAM, Dual Screen) it was about twice what it was to begin with. I’m now trying to convince him on a nice single monitor spec but with a 22″ wide screen TFT instead, but that’s a bit off point (I haven’t even got to the point yet, but hey!).
While I was waiting to see if he was willing to re-mortgage his house just to buy me a new PC, I thought I’d have a look at improving the rest of my work setup and that’s when I decided to find out if I could access the network share from home as well. I so couldn’t be bothered with a VPN so after a bit of Googling about other options I decided the easiest optikon was to set up a SSH tunnel and send all SMB (port 139) traffic through that.
The Whole Point Of This
Here’s a step by step guide of how you do this in case you want to access Network Shares accross the Net. If some things are called slightly different things on your machines, don’t worry, that’s just because I couldn’t be bothered to look at what they were called, I’m just doing it from memory.
You should now have access to your remote Network Share from wherever you are! The speed will depend on the internet connections at both ends plus how busy the net inbetween is. For loading up and editing the 12K PHP files I use, it’s perfectly fine. I’ve also copied accross a 22M zip file but was writing this so didn’t see how long it took. I’m now copying across a 540M zip file to see how long that might take (I’m guessing about 20 times faster than doing it through Remote Desktop) [took about 3 and 1/2 hours on 512kb connection].
I haven’t mentioned security here. SSH means that while copying files across you’ll be pretty safe but I’ve gone the whole hog and blocked SSH acess to everywhere but my home IP just to make sure (no, this isn’t my work or home server). It’s up to you how far you go on the security.
* I’m assuming you’ve got a share running, a SSH server running and can open up SSH traffic to it through your firewall as well as all the necessary security/authentication
Sod it! Well after last weeks fiasco I was more than a little pissed off when I turned my laptop on this morning and found out that it was October 5th 2010 and as a result, my Norton 360 subscription had expired…. again.
I did a quick system restore to try and fix it which did nothing (thanks Microsoft) and then a quick removal and reinstall of Norton after deleting some of the registry which did nothing (thanks Symantec).
I really can’t be arsed to do any more than that today so I’m unistalling it and shoving a copy of AVG Free on there (you get a link since you’re the only competent company mentioned so far). I had a realllly half arsed attempt to find out what could be causing the time change as the fact it was Monday morning again is a bit too coincidental. The only thing I had in my Scheduled tasks is the Apple update thing.
I’ve deleted that now since the version of Quicktime I have is annoying enough so I’ll give it a few weeks and see if we end up in the future again. If not, you’re on my list of companies to destroy Apple!
Well I’ve tried looking around the Net to try and find out why the date changed itself for no reason. There’s lots of stuff about it going back in time but that’s all because of dodgy batteries which I knew anyway and doesn’t help me. There’s a few related forum posts saying it might be a virus but I think I’m clean.
I tried searching for things along the lines of “Windows date changed 2010″ to see if anyone had had the exact same problem but all I got was millions of news articles about the next version of windoze which is out in 2010 and is called Windows 7.
Not much use at all. I think I’ll have to leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again soon. I so can’t be arsed to do anything now so work will have to wait till tomorrow – I’m going to play CnC 3 instead.
So, who’s on today’s list? That would be:
So what have these three done? Well I was sitting here typing away on my desktop when I noticed a Norton 360 warning window on my Laptop. It was saying that my subscription had expired which is odd since I’ve only had it few a couple of months. Luckily I had a good idea what the problem was going to be so I had a quick look at the date the laptop was set to.
Yup, it thought it was October 2010. I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens, whether it’s a Windoze “feature” or whether it’s a problem with the Vaio hardware. Every now and again though it just decides it’s October 2010. anyway, I set it to the correct date again, rebooted and Norton still thought it had expired.
Instead of getting on to tech support (I try and avoid them), I decided an reinstall was the way to go so off came Norton 360 and back on it went. Easy enough except that Norton loads the registry with data so it had just remembered my product key and the fact that the clock had been set to 2010 for a few minutes so it had expired.
I downloaded the Norton 360 Removal Tool from the Symantec website which just loaded up and then crashed for me. By this point I was getting really pissed off so I searched the registry for any mention of “Symantec” or “Norton” and deleted the lot. I then did the same on the C drive.
A quick reboot and then on to reinstalling. Since I can’t be arsed to carry piles of CDs around, a lot of my software I’ve got stored as images on the hard drive and then load them with Daemon Tools when I need them so I loaded the Norton 360 image, fired up the setup programme and watched it crash and then ask me to reboot. This I did and when it all loaded up again I found I had no virtual CD drives and as an extra treat, the real DVD writer had gone as well.
Delving it to Device Manager all the CD devices were showing problems loading the drivers. At this point I was thinking I might have been a bit too hasty when deleting chunks of stuff from the registry. Very, very nervously I headed to System Restore hoping that the last restor point was sometime this year. As it turned out it was three days ago and since I hadn’t done much except play Command & Conquer on it over the weekend, I gave that a go.
While I was waiting I noticed that one of the network drives on my desktop was disconnected so I headed into the store room to find out what was going on with my Linux box. For some reason it was turned off and wouldn’t turn back on. A bit of messing and I found that the batteries were no longer charging on the UPS so I just bypassed it. At this point I nearly lost it completely and shoved the thing through the window but then I decided to go for a fag instead (they wonder why a lot of IT people smoke).
After yet another reboot all my CD drives were back, Norton appeared to be installed and it wouldn’t let me uninstall it or run setup because it said another instance of setup was already running. At this point I was considering not bothering with AV and never going on the Internet again. I decided a better plan would be to run the Norton 360 Removal Tool again and see what happened. This time it ran OK and after another reboot, Setup managed to get going again.
Since I haven’t been connected to the internet for most of this and when deleting half the registry, Norton quite happily thinks I’m still subscribed. So after two thirds of the day, I’m back where I was when I first got here this morning, except for a broken UPS I’ll have to dismantle tonight.
Since I don’t fancy going through all this again, I’m going to spend the rest of the day looking around the Net to find out why the date was suddenly changed. In the mean time Norton can do the last fifteen reboots needed to get my laptop up to date again!
I have just looked at today’s date and wasn’t at all shocked to see its the 13th….
I think they must be. Not the Windows Update, the satelites that power Live Local Maps, or whatever its called.
I was a bit bored and having a browse around for a bit and decided to have a look at the map of Ashbourne (where I live) and noticed my old school (map) on there.
This is a bit strange because it was torn down about two years ago to build a new housing estate.
I haven’t wandered past for a while but I think Google is pretty much up to date, whereas MSN/Live/Microsoft (whatever they’re called now) haven’t got a clue! Won’t be using them for directions anyway.
I was just on the Microsoft homepage and noticed a news item saying Silverlight is available for download. Out of curiosity I went for a look around to see what was on the mini-site. In case you didn’t know, Silverlight is Microsofts attemp to get some of Macromedia’s Adobe’s Flash market.
The reason they are going after this area of the software marketplace now is mainly due to the so-called Web 2.0. Major websites such as YouTube, Myspace and a whole host of other major sites are using Flash for their content and that has to annoy Microsoft.
The only problem is that the reason these sites use Flash is because everyone has it, around 98% of people on the internet. Microsoft will have to start from scratch with, erm… 0%. It’s going to be months or maybe a year or so before enough people have the plugin installed so that developers will even consider using it to develop content for their sites.
In my opinion Microsoft has got it wrong again, as they usually do when it comes to the internet. Nobody needs or wants another Rich Internet Application plugin and although I’m sure there’ll be extra functionality for IE users and APIs for .NET and IIS, we already have all this technology in one form or another. There really is no need for this – the internet should be built upon open, cross platform standards, not more propriatry software…. like eBooks maybe.
My bet is that Microsoft will do everything they can to use their Windows monopoly to get as many copies of the plugin out there and then try and use that user-base to pull people into becoming paying customers of various bits of software.