In the spirit of XKCD. Inspiration: This post.

For anyone that follows me for the technical stuff I do, I thought I’d mention I’ve put up a mouse and keyboard hook library on GitHub. It allows a developer to build an app that subscribes to global mouse and keyboard events, process them, optionally cancel them, or potentially record them (Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the use, misuse, legal or otherwise of this code.)

For those of you interested, the project is publicly available here: http://github.com/codelogic/HookLib

-Paul

Meet Jessica, the awesome new manual 2008 Toyota Corolla S that I purchased a few days ago to replace the previous car that’s been getting me around since college. I predict good times ahead!

Instructions are modified from http://blog.migrationwiz.com/2009/06/manually-configure-outlook-for-exchange.html

I’ve been looking around all over for a way to configure multiple exchange accounts to work with Outlook 2010. The official word is that “Outlook 2010″ isn’t supported by BPOS yet, and it’s left at that. One of the fortunate things about working for a company like InterKnowlogy is that we often have the liberty to experiment with and use non-standard or un-supported technology on a regular basis. Here’s the exact steps to setup Outlook 2010 on Windows 7.

Note that you will no longer be using the BPOS client to start outlook, and these instructions are for Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 only.

Server Information (Do this for each BPOS email account)

1. Login to Outlook Web Access.
2. Click on Options in the top right hand corner.
3. Click on About in the navigation bar on the left.
4. Find the entry for Mailbox server name and write it down or record it as you will be using it later.
5. Log out of Outlook Web Access.

Create an Outlook Profile

1. Make sure you have Outlook 2010 installed.
2. Open the Control Panel.
3. Click User Accounts
4. Click Mail.
5. In the window that pops up, click Show Profiles.
6. Click Add.
7. Enter a new name for the profile. i.e. Your email address
8. Click OK.
9. Click Manually configure server settings or additional server types.
10. Click Next.
11. Select Microsoft Exchange.
12. Click Next.
13. Enter the mailbox server name (that you wrote down or copied from the previous section) in the field Microsoft Exchange server.
14. Enter your full name in the field User Name.
15. Click More Settings.
16. If you are prompted with an error that the action cannot be completed, click OK.
17. Click Cancel.
18. Click on the Connection tab.
19. Select Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP.
20. Click Exchange Proxy Settings.
21. Enter the mobile device URL for your region.
22. Make sure the On fast networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP is checked.
23. Click OK.
24. Click OK.
25. Click Check Name.
26. Enter your User Name and Password.
27. Click OK.
    1. IF THERE IS AN ERROR:
    2. Click More Settings.
    3. Click the Security tab.
    4. Make sure Always prompt for logon credentials is checked.
28. Your profile should now have resolved and the correct Microsoft Exchange server should be displayed.
29. Click Next.
30. Click Finish.

Add an Account to Your Outlook Profile

1. If the mail dialog is not open, repeat steps 2-5 under Create an Outlook Profile
2. Select the profile that you want to add an account too.
3. Click Properties.
4. Click E-mail Accounts.
5. Under the E-mail tab, click New.
6. Repeat steps 9-30 under Create an Outlook Profile.
7. Repeat steps 5-6 for each e-mail account you want to add.
8. Open Outlook 2010.
9. Enter credentials for each account and check the remember option(make sure that the Username and password are correct for the account it is asking you for. THEY ARE DIFFERENT)
10. Once Outlook is started…
11. Click File in the top left corner.
12. Click Account Settings.
13. Click Account Settings in the dropdown.
14. For each account under e-mail:
    1. Select the Account.
    2. Click Change.
    3. Click More Settings…
    4. Click the Security tab.
    5. Un-check Always prompt for logon credentials.
    6. Click Ok.
    7. Click Next
    8. Click Finish
15. Click Close

Known Issues

• If you are NOT using the BPOS client anymore you may not get notifications to change your password.
• Calendars will show up with an error of “No Connection” you will have to send a sharing request to see their calendar.

Recently, I’ve been looking for a way to reduce my bandwidth and storage bill for this site. I’m currently hosted through a company called Nearly Free Speech which is a fantastic hosting company for small static or PHP / MySql based sites, and it’s been great to have a hosting provider that I’ve literally never had to worry about. However, given that I regularly upload and distribute a large amount of media around this site I tend to eat through storage and bandwidth pretty quickly, especially now that my site has been around for about 4 – 5 years. As a super cheep hosting provider for small sites, NFS if fantastic for those small start up sites, but prices do increase quite a bit as the site grows. A few months ago I signed up for Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution or S3), which is a simple, flat, ‘blob’ storage system. Amazon itself originally built this system to power the media distribution for its own site, and then opened it up for others to use as well.

The basic concept is quite simple, instead of worrying about complex structures or directories the core service simply assigns a file a huge unique number and a title to the blob of data your uploading. It doesn’t matter what the data is, it could be anything from an image, to a zip file, to an 3GB text document. It doesn’t matter. It’s then possible to distribute that blob around the world so that the data is physically closer to whoever is requesting it. Because it doesn’t matter, most of the programs that use it choose to use the title as a path, which means that it uses the “/” character, making the file appears to be in a directory. In essence, Amazon S3 is a simple flat file server with a simple HTTP layer on top of the storage system for easy access to these objects in web applications. Assuming you’ve allowed public access to the particular file you can request it by performing a get request on your account followed by the title of the file.

However, the biggest original draw was the incredibly cheap storage and bandwidth costs, NearlyFreeSpeech weighs in at around $1.00 / GB down to $0.20 / GB based on the total bandwidth over the life of the account and storage is at $0.01 / MB per month ($10.24 / GB per month). Now, for a super small site, it’s a non-issue and you can’t beat the low end tier for pricing and ease of setup (You can see the full pricing here on the Nearly Free Speech pricing page). Now, consider Amazon’s S3: $0.150 / GB for storage (Until your storing more than 50TB of stuff, when it goes down a cent per GB), and $0.150 / GB of bandwidth. (You can see the full pricing tiers at the amazon web services simple storage page.).

Now, my current bandwidth for the site is about 1.5GB a month and my storage is about 400mb at the moment, for all intents and purposes its not a huge site, but enough that I wanted to see if there was a way I could take down the pricing. I’ve tried several things in the past such as offloading my photos to Flickr (Which I don’t like because it gets blocked occasionally) or SmugMug (Which doesn’t have a good plug-in for inserting photos into a wordpress site, but interestingly they also uses Amazon S3 to host their content). After tinkering around with it for a few months and using it as a host for large downloads, I went looking for and found a plug-in that replaces the core upload / media storage and retrieval functionality with calls to S3, and now that I’ve pushed my uploads folder to be hosted through S3 plus a quick switch in the blog settings and everything is now pulling from Amazon S3. Much cleaner, much nicer, a much less out of my pocket each month.

Sweet!

- Paul Rohde

It’s been a while since I’ve just taken the time to explore and take pictures around where I’m at, I’ve forgotten how much I enjoyed the Photowalks I used to do back in Utah… I may have to go about starting up something here in the near future if my interest keeps up, anybody interested?

Started out a bit basic, flowers, plants. The usual look at the ground, scuff your feet and take the picture.

Then you sit down, look around, and are like “HEY, the grill of this truck is a few inches away from my head. Click.

Of course, signs are obvious targets.

As is anyone else your shooting with.

Then it’s the number above your head.

And finally, having exhausting everything interesting, we start shooting at things on the ground again.

Hope you enjoyed,

- Paul Rohde

I don’t know about you, but I feel lucky to have some of the greatest grandparents ever! I mean, how many of you have a grandfather that started and ran his own electronics business, selling it close to when he retired? Or how about a grandmother that did something like… climbing to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro within the last three years?

Or take my grandfather on my dad’s side who was literally a rocket scientist, or my grandmother on my dads side that has managed to beat my parents onto Facebook? (I’m still trying to convince my parents to get on)

Everybody has a story to tell, and it’s the people around us that have helped guide us to where we are today. Take some time and get to know them better and you may find out some things about yourself and who you are because of it!

Until next time,

- Paul Rohde