USB Air Conditioning

Can’t afford a portable AC Unit for your desk during those hot summer days? Have a spare USB cable and processor fan around? Build your own air conditioner!

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/778215/usb_air_conditioning/

What’s the difference between Sharepoint Portal Server and Windows Sharepoint Services?

I’ve been working with SharePoint Portal Server this past week and this technote answered a lot of questions I originally had.

Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that you can use to share information, collaborate with other users on documents, and create lists and Web Part pages. You can also use Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 as a development platform to create collaboration applications and information-sharing applications.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is a scalable, enterprise portal server that is built on Windows SharePoint Services 2.0.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;830320

Cisco Training in Framingham this week

For those of you who don’t know, I work for Boston’s fastest growing and most widely referred provider of IT services for small businesses, Thrive Networks.

Anyway, we have are pretty much owned by Staples. Myself and 4 other engineers were hand-picked to go to Staples Corporate Center (no, not the Staples Center) in Framingham (the headquarters) to be trained in Cisco VoIP technology. I am very excited to be apart of this, however not looking forward to the drive to and from Framingham. It’s about 45 minutes, and involves two very busy highways, especially during rush hour. But the building I’m going to is a state of the art facility. It is 130,000 square feet!

I believe it’s from 8:30 to 5 Monday – Friday. That means I’ll be easily leaving here at 7:15 am just to make sure I get there in time. Let’s hope it doesn’t snow this week, however the forecast shows flurries the next three days.

The training is pretty intense. If you’re a Cisco guy (which I can’t wait to get into, this is the first step), here’s the certification overview.

I’m not sure if we’ll be taking part of the exam at the end of the week or if we’ll have to schedule it after a period of time. But I wouldn’t mind going down the Cisco path now that my Exchange 2007 certification is all set (do I smell promotion in the near future?) and grabbing this certification right away. I wouldn’t mind adding “Cisco IP Communications Express Specialist” to the end of my email signature

Vista SP1 due in March, 2008

It’s coming. I sure hope it takes care of these little issues I got going on here.

http://www.crn.com/software/206103959

Glary Utilities – All in one Utilities suite

Wouldn’t it be good if you could have one program that would do several useful things for your computer? Things such as optimizing it, cleaning it, and improving speed, reliability, privacy and security?

If this sounds good to you, then you might want to take Glary Utilities for a test drive. While the name may not sound too exciting, it seems to be a very good, well programmed, well thought out, and most importantly of all, useful piece of software.

Its an all in one utilities suite that has some very useful things that most computer users are sure to find useful at some stage. This includes a disk cleaner for scanning for and removing junk temp files from your computer to free up valuable space. It also has a registry cleaner which so far seems pretty good compared to most ones i’ve tried out, just be careful and try not to delete anything you’re not absolutely sure about. If in doubt, you can make a backup first. Other features enable you to delete empty folders and dead shortcuts.

More features include :

• A startup manager ; for managing which programs run on startup;
• A context menu optimizer; very handy for removing unused options from the context menu;
• Tracks Eraser; Erases web browser tracks, history, cookies etc;
• File Shredder; Deletes files permanently and irrecoverably;
• File Undelete; for attempting to undelete accidentally deleted files;
• File Encrypter and Decrypter; added privacy for sensitive or private files;
• Disk Analysis; shows you the disk space usage of your files and folders;
• Duplicate Files Finder; basic but somewhat effective tool for finding duplicate files, checks by name and file size;
• File Splitter and Joiner; for splitting large files into smaller manageable files, and rejoining them;
• Process Manager; useful tool to see what’s running on your computer, good to know so that you can find dangerous or unnecessary programs;
• Internet Explorer Assistant; for managing or removing browser helper objects.

On top of all this, its available in a totally freeware version. The only difference between the free and paid version seems to be that the “One click maintenance” option can’t be set to run automatically in the free version.

I recommend this to anyone looking for a simple way of maintaining their computer, that works and delivers as promised.

Go check out the homepage here for more info and the download.

Cool Windows Mobile Feature

I’m not sure if they built this into Windows Mobile 6.0 (if not they should).  But you know how Windows Mobile Handhelds don’t pull contacts from the GAL like Blackberries.  Well MS released a free add-on to resolve this.

Here’s the link to the blog:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?p=415

Here’s the link to the MS Site w/ the app:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/global/default.mspx

Def something to implement at clients to make their lives easier.

Outlook 2007 Connection Status for RPC/HTTP problems

Lots of people aren’t aware of this little “trick” and it is very handy when debugging a temperamental RPC over HTTP connection. Normally, the “Connection Status” dialog box only shows up if you launch Outlook with “/rpcdiag”.

If you hold down [Ctrl], and then right click on the Outlook tray icon, with Outlook 2007, “Connection Status” and “Test E-mail AutoConfiguration” appear. E-mail AutoConfiguration testing is handy for Exchange 2007 setups.
Just passing this along as an FYI because whenever I show it to people, 9 times out of 10, they have never seen those options before.

Vista SP1 Release Candidate released

(thanks Slashdot)

Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn’t bother waiting: SP1 won’t solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.

Edit your Outlook AutoComplete files

A fellow engineer at work passed this around the other day. A neat little utility that allows you to edit the contents of an Outlook 2000/XP/2003/2007  AutoComplete (.NK2) file. It’s called NK2.INFO.

It’s free and contains no spyware. It’s updated quite often. It can recover email addresses and names from a corrupted AutoComplete file as well. What more could you ask for?

Windows 2000/XP NK2 default location: drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

Windows Vista NK2 default location:  drive:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

LINK: http://www.nk2.info/

The Best Internet Radio site to date

I’ve been searching for a good Internet radio site; not only for something to listen to, but to discover new music.

I came across this site today. Pandora. Just what is Pandora? Pandora is not quite like any other Internet radio site. It was derived from the Music Genome Project (the MGP captures the essence of music at the fundamental level” using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them). Pandora lets you listen to and discover new music based on deep analysis of the artist or song.

For example, this morning I signed up and typed in “muddy waters”. From there, I got to hear several new (well in this case, old!) artists I have never been subjected to before; all with the same style and feel as Muddy Waters. I heard harmonica-based blues artists such as Elmore James, Lightnin’ Hopkins and a few others. The mix was perfect.

My second query was my new favorite band, the Black Keys. It started out by playing a real obscure (but excellent) Black Keys song, “The Moan”. Next up was Jimmy Page and the Black Crows doing the Led Zeppelin classic “Custard Pie”. Next was Robin Trower’s “Living Out Of Time”. I have never heard that song before, but holy shit, it was incredible. And all of the songs fit so well together. The sound quality is incredible as well.

You can also search by song. Let’s say you want to hear songs that sound like “Rockin’ Is Ma Business” by Alabama Thunderpussy (excellent cover of the Four Horsemen classic). I got tunes by Clutch, Hellraiser, etc. It was awesome.

There are other sites out there that let you customize radio stations, such as Napster (pay service, which I use to download tunes), Slacker, etc. But nothing compares to this. You can rate songs with thumbs up or thumbs down, but sadly, no way to purchase tracks. Oh well, that’s what Napster and Google are for, no?

May I add this a free service? There are a few ads embedded in the page, but no popups. They have a paid-for service that you can play on Sprint phones and some home Internet Radio devices.