Cranium Tales

Google Chrome Says Please Update Me

2010-08-10T21:15:00.001-04:00

I tend to leave my computer up and running with everything I am working on still running so that I can pick up where I left off later that night or the next day. Google developers have a sense of humor when asking me to restart Chrome to make sure that I am running the latest version!

Old school's not cool. Google Chrome is woefully out of date because it hasn't crashed or restarted in a while. Restart to apply update. Why can't all applications just update themselves like that!

Google Chrome: Comparison of web browsers

Microsoft Outlook Opened and Saved Attachments Missing?

2010-08-05T07:45:00.001-04:00

I opened and saved that attached word document, spent hours making revisions only to find out that I didn't save it to a location, I just clicked save... Outlook stores these files and other temporary data in a place called the OLK folder. The location of the folder may vary based on the user logged in, the operating system and version of Outlook. I am using Outlook 2010, so to find the OLK folder, I opened up regedit and browsed to the registry path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Once there the OutlookSecureTempFolder key value is the path to your OLK folder. Substitute the version number for the outlook version you have in the registry path. It should be obvious once you get to the Office key what version you have, but just in case, I have included a table for your reference below.

Good luck!

Outlook	Version Number
Outlook 97	8.0
Outlook 98	8.5
Outlook 2000	9.0
Outlook 2002/XP	10.0
Outlook 2003	11.0
Outlook 2007	12.0
Outlook 2010	14.0

Outlook 2010 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Smiley J

2010-07-06T20:53:00.000-04:00

I came across this article from Lifehacker.com wondering what the heck when I was viewing random J's on my blackberry and Gmail from some people... Now I know, it's a smiley face... how cute :)

HTML 5 Rocks

2010-07-02T22:33:00.000-04:00

A new website put up by Google shows off the latest things that you can do with HTML5... Make sure to check out the slideshow in chrome which demos many of the new features of HTML5.

Liking the latest Chrome UI changes

2010-06-30T06:08:00.000-04:00

If you do not have the dev or beta channel of Chrome, I can understand. There are days when I want to smash my flat panel, but then there are days when I come in to find nice subtle changes that just make sense and enhance my day. Take a look at what is coming down the road for those on the stable release... http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/fresh-coat-of-chrome.html

How to change to the Dev channel of Chrome

How is Google improving chrome plug-in security?

2010-06-28T23:04:00.000-04:00

The Chromium blog details how they are improving plug-in security for Chrome.

The highlights:

Chrome will include the flash plugin in the Chrome installer and use Google auto-update to keep the Adobe flash plug-in on the latest version
Chrome will use Google's own PDF viewer,
The latest API Pepper will allow Chrome to sandbox plug-ins
Try to keep users on the latest versions of all plug-ins

Google's trade floor

2010-06-28T18:14:00.002-04:00

Thought that this was interesting enough to share... Google is venturing into another business that it had no experience in.... financial services...

http://www.unlockwallstreet.com/financial-news/googles-latest-launch-its-own-trading-floor

Server 2008 Hibernation ON by default

2010-05-18T09:53:00.002-04:00

I was investigating an issue today where there was low disk space on one of my VM's. Come to find out, after running SpaceMonger it showed a 4 GB file hiberfil.sys. I remember only seeing this file on laptops when hibernation is turned on. I am not sure why anyone would want hibernation turned on for a server. There was no option to turn off hibernation in the GUI so I had to turn it off using the following command at the command line:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Chrome OS

2009-07-14T13:08:00.004-04:00

Thought that this was an interesting article about the Chrome OS written by an ex-employee at Google.

Ex-Googler says Chrome OS will be a vastly different OS but won’t displace Windows

I think a dual boot situation is the way to go. There are still a number of websites I frequent that still only work with IE. It is disapointing, but it is reality. I thought about it and many of the things I already do are in the 'cloud'.... Gmail & Yahoo mail, searching online, writing things in a word processor or keeping track of things in spreadsheets (Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office) many of the bells and whistles that exist in Office that I use at work, I just do not take advantage of at home because I don't need to, so I use Google Apps. The one thing that I constantly do however, is retouch photographs from my digital camera before sending them to print. So Google would need to get Picasa browser based (which they may be able to do with Google Gears)

Autocomplete Gmail Searching

2009-04-09T08:32:00.001-04:00

Gmail Search Made Easier. Finally... I have been waiting for this since they came out with autocomplete in the google search...

VMware Memory Explained

2009-03-10T12:50:00.003-04:00

VMware has saved me a boatload of both time and money. When trying to figure out the memory utilization on the ESX host I have the other day, both my buddy and I wanted to pull our hair out because none of the numbers seemed to add up. We had the Microsoft Server 2oo3 Task Manager up and we were trying to compare the numbers to what was in the WMware Inftastructure Client and nothing seemed to match up exactly. What was found online, was found in bits and pieces and everything finally made sense, hours later. The result of all of the google searches, reading and head scratching is the image above and the information below. I hope it saves you time and your hair!

Memory Consumed =

Memory Granted – Memory Shared

Host memory usage – Memory Overhead

Memory usage % =

Memory Active / Memory Granted

Guest Memory Usage / Memory Granted

Windows Server Physical Memory (K) Total = Memory Granted to ESX VM

Windows Server Physical Memory (K) Available = Memory Shared

The difference of the two numbers above is equal to the Memory Consumed.

ESX Performance Graphs:

Memory Consumed (total amount used by guest; see Windows Task Mgr)

Memory Active (amount currently being used by guest)

Memory Usage (% of active memory relative to amount granted to guest)

Memory Shared (amount not currently used & available to share with others)

ESX VM Summary General:

Memory: amount configured (granted) for the VM

Memory Overhead: amount required by ESX for housekeeping the VM

ESX VM Summary Resources:

Host memory usage: amount the VM is using from the host

Guest memory usage: amount actively being used by the VM

Gmail Browser title bar tweak

2009-02-26T07:39:00.002-05:00

A great new Gmail Labs feature, that I enabled this morning was Title Tweaks

Changes order of elements in the browser title bar from "Gmail - Inbox (20) - yourname@gmail.com" to "Inbox (20) - yourname@gmail.com - Gmail". This way you are able (most of the time) to see if a new mail has arrived even if Gmail window is minimized.

To turn on this feature, go to settings and then click on the labs tab, or if you already have a labs feature enabled, click the green beaker on the top right of your screen.

Multiple Inboxes - Multiple email accounts

2009-02-20T15:26:00.003-05:00

Manage Several Email Accounts with the multiple inbox labs feature. The gmail blog covers how to do it.

How to Get Silverlight to really work with Google Chrome

2009-02-20T13:39:00.000-05:00

Tim Heuer tells us how to get this working with a hack he created.

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/02/11/moonlight-and-silverlight-detection-google-chrome-user-agent.aspx

Wordpress 2.7 Feed Key Plugin Update

2009-02-20T10:30:00.003-05:00

For users experiencing the following error message in Feed Key v0.2.1:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function members_only_gen_feedkey() in /home/abc3xxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/feed-key.php on line 258

I have posted a fix in the usual place.

Feed-Key v0.2.2 download

Wordpress 2.7 Members Only plugin update

2009-02-18T23:26:00.004-05:00

A fix for users who have changed their home page has been added to the plugin, I have incremented the version to 0.6.7.2

This change fixes the following issue pointed out by Mingo:

When you select to have people go to the "Front Page" when they log in directly from the Login page, they are directed to http://blogurl/wordpress

People (like me) who have moved their front page outside of the /wordpress/ dir receive a 404 error.

You may download the updated version here.

Multiple Inboxes - Move to and Label not working

2009-02-11T13:11:00.000-05:00

Trying to actually work with the multiple inboxes features, it doesn't appear like you can perform any of the actions in the main menu to any of the emails from the main dashboard.

For instance, I have wanted to add a label or Move to a label on one or more emails and it doesn't work. Please make this work google!

Gmail perfection using superstars and multiple inboxes

2009-02-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

So it hit me the other day that I needed more than just staring an email in GMail so that I could follow up because there was no difference when I starred an email that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later and I found two Google Labs projects that have made my life so much easier.

Superstars -

Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature:

(1) Go to the "General" Settings page to choose which superstars you wish to use.

(2) Use either the keyboard shortcut ('s') or click to rotate through your selected superstars.

(3) Use the search operator "has:" to find all messages with your superstar (e.g. "has:red-bang", "has:blue-star"). Learn the name of a superstar by hovering over its image in the "General" Settings page.

Multiple Inboxes -

Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important email at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under Settings.

I have configured superstars with the yellow-star and the red-bang for now. In my Multiple inboxes configuration I have the following

has:red-bang

has:yellow-star AND label:Work-Related

has:yellow-star AND !label:Work-Related

So frigging cool.

Google Analytics for your home's electricity

2009-02-11T00:45:00.004-05:00

Google announced today that they are in the testing phases with an application that can provide your home's electricity usage over time called Google Power Meter. I would love to get a hold of this software... If anyone knows someone at Google that can hook me up with a free beta, I would love to help them test.

WordPress 2.7 FeedKey plugin now working for Comments

2009-02-10T23:30:00.004-05:00

I was asked by a few people to make the changes to the Feed Key plugin for Wordpress so that users could subscribe with a feedKey similar to the changes I made to the Members Only plugin

You can download version 0.2.1 by right clicking and download the updated file here. Once downloaded, replace the feed-key.php file in your existing installation (~/wp-content/plugins/feed-key/).

All this work with WordPress is making me think I should convert over from my blogger account.

Wordpress 2.7 Members Only plugin FeedKey Fix

2009-02-09T22:45:00.004-05:00

After upgrading from Wordpress 2.6 to 2.7, the Feed Key feature of the Members Only plugin I use at another blog was not working. Members Only is a WordPress plugin that requires users to login to your blog in order to read/write. In addition, you can protect your RSS feed as a unique URL is generated for each user.

Every user was getting the following error:

Feed Key is Invalid
The Feed Key you used is invalid. It is either incorrect or has been revoked. Please login to obtain a valid Feed Key.

The feed URL in the version of Members Only that worked with 2.6 changed during the upgrade to 2.7, so a simple URL change solved the problem. I attempted to contact the plugin's author Andrew Hamilton and sent him the updated files, but I have not heard anything from him, so I am posting here for those who can use it.

Along the way, the need arose for a comment feed, so I modified the existing plugin and added the URL needed for the comment feed. This change was also submitted to Andrew.

Right click and download the updated file here. Once downloaded, replace the members-only.php file in your existing installation (~/wp-content/plugins/members-only/).

If you have any questions / comments... let me know!

Updated: URL was fixed.

Find items with Email addresses in Exchange Server

2009-02-04T09:00:00.001-05:00

The other day I was asked to have all emails going to info@domain.com go to a specific user, but when trying to add the email address, I was stopped by the really descriptive error "This e-mail already exists in this organization" In order to find out what objects already have this address, you can run the following querry using CSVDE (CSV Directory Exchange) and it will export all objects to a csv file.

csvde -f output.csv -d "" -r "(&(mailnickname=*)(proxyAddresses=smtp:info@domain.com))" -l name

Windows, open source?

2009-02-03T09:36:00.003-05:00

I could never imagine Microsoft giving away their entire OS for free... Charles Babcock at Information Week however tries to argue to the contrary, saying that in order to compete Windows needs to go open source.

Why do people think Mac's are more secure?

2009-01-30T11:19:00.005-05:00

I just read an article on ZDNet asking the question "Is Mac still the safer bet?" in response to the OSX.Trojan.iServices.B Trojan horse (found in illegally obtained copies of Photoshop for the Mac) stories that have been circulating. I find it disturbing that anyone can think that they are safe with ANY operating system on the Internet, be it Mac, Windows, Linux, you name it. There is plenty of malware and viruses out there for every OS and end user to enjoy. There are always going to be bugs, its just a matter of time before someone finds the next one. No one is safe.

Multiple SQL Server Instances working magically

2009-01-21T08:05:00.004-05:00

Configuring an instance of SQL 2000 to run on an non-standard port or having SQL dynamically assign a port to listen on and not configuring the client to point to that port somehow works and the client connects to the proper port. The standard SQL port (1433) was not listening. So how did the SQL client know what port to connect to?

When an instance of SQL Server uses dynamic port allocation, the connection string that is built at the SQL Server client does not specify the destination TCP/IP port unless the user or the programmer explicitly specifies the port. Therefore, the SQL Server client library queries the server computer on UDP port 1434 to collect the information about the destination instance of SQL Server. When SQL Server returns the information, the SQL Server client library sends the data to the appropriate instance of SQL Server.

But the SQL client also querries 1434 if your client is configured to connect to 1433. If you have 1433 UDP blocked, then it works as advertized. Even if you have manually specified the port your instance should listen on.

If UDP port 1434 is disabled, the SQL Server client cannot dynamically determine the port of the named instance of SQL Server. Therefore, the SQL Server client may not be able to connect to the named instance of SQL Server. In this situation, the SQL Server client must specify the dynamically allocated port where the named instance of SQL Server 2000 is listening.

For more information about how to configure an instance of SQL Server to listen on a specific TCP port or dynamic port, see this Microsoft article