Wernerfamily.info

I finally took the plunge and applied updates to my server - this included Wordpress 2.5.1 and some Fedora updates to Gallery2.  Bear with me if any bugs or issues arise with the website.

Regards,

M.

Happy Day! Google finally released a ‘Sync Tool for Google Calendar’! If you recall from my ‘previous post’, I spent lots of time getting Thunderbird to work with MS Exchange and Google Cal - this was supposed to make life easier and promote the use of ‘FOSS’ at the same time. However, I was hitting issues with T-Bird…mainly in the Exchange Task department. So, I reluctantly switched back to Outlook (2k7 btw).

However, with this release, no longer do I have to try buggy software or pay some person for crap software to sync my Outlook calendar to Google Cal! I tried it today, and it works awesome!

Nice work Google - I appreciate the effort in making my life that much simpler.

W00t!

Regards,
M.

‘Linux Wins Pwn2Own Contest’

Sweet - what’s even better than Linux winning is MacOS losing…miserably…to Vista at that. I can’t wait to see the new wave of Mac vs PC commercials; they ought to be good.

A week ago today, I passed the CCNA 2.0 exam! After two years of putting it off and making excuses, I bit the bullet and took the exam. I could have taken it in two parts: the ICND1 exam (640-822) and the ICND2 (640-816) exam. However, that’s double the questions…and since I work hard to work less, I went with the 52 question 640-802 exam.

I took my original CCNA almost 6 years ago to the day, and I definitely see that it has evolved. I wrote ‘previously’ that the RHCT was the most difficult exam I had ever taken…not anymore. While I passed it pretty handily, I did struggle at times.

Anyway, I’m done with it, so now it’s on to bigger and better things -> beer.

Regards,

M.

Good afternoon to all one of you - it’s been a while since I added anything here, but that’s been a function of work and other things going on.

Anyway, I uploaded a bunch of pictures the other day - there are some new ones of Zoe, Gianna, Zoe and Gianna, and of the family in general. I’ve also started scanning in our old 35mm pictures, which currently reside inside a cardboard box in my office. My scanner isn’t great (HP OfficeJet 6200), but it does well enough for me to dust off these old memories and digitize them. ..and it works under Linux, so that makes me happy (more on this later).

I hope everyone is doing well! Take it easy!

M.

Being that ‘Global Knowledge’ uses Microsoft Active Directory to power its domain, I am somewhat “forced” to use Windows on my corporate desktop computer. I’ve accepted this, even if it becomes frustrating at times. Anyway, I thought I’d try Office 2007 the other day - I am getting more and more questions about it these days…and having never used it, I figured what the hell.

Well, I didn’t get far - we don’t have a key for it, so I was only able to try it out. Surprisingly, it felt much quicker than Office 2003. But alas, I had to remove it and go back to Office 2003…and Outlook 2003, which leads me to the point of this post.

Outlook 2003 has become quite slow and bloated on my pc. I have done repair installs, re-installs, and voodoo dances in hopes of making it faster. So, out of frustration, I decided to do a bit of googling.

As I’ve posted in the past, I use ‘Mozilla Thunderbird’ at home for my email. It works nicely, even if the interface leaves something to be desired. I had never heard of people using it to access an Exchange server, mainly because I figured MS would find some way to force Outlook on you. Well, if you have a nice Exchange admin that enables the Exchange IMAP server, you’re in business!

Following ‘this article’, I was able to do the following:
- Access my GK Exchange Email (via IMAP…you can do POP3 as well, but see my notes below)
- Access my GK Contacts via LDAP (enabling autocomplete in address fields)

Great! How about a calendar? There doesn’t seem to be a way for T-Bird/Lightning to access the Exchange calendar, but I have my own work-around. T-Bird seems to be the ONLY mail client that can access Google Calendar read/write. So, I simply enable my Google Cal in T-Bird/Lightning instance, add all my appointments via this instance, and I have synced calendar events at work and around the world. As far as I can see, Lightning will complain about MS event requests, but they still get added. As a failsafe, I also set up a filter to forward any MS event requests to my Gmail account…which DOES accept them without complaining. Then it shows up in my Google Cal, which then propagates down to my work T-Bird instance.

Pretty cool, huh? There are a few minor issues, but nothing huge:

1. You can use IMAP or POP for the Exchange connection…however, if you use Outlook Web Access while away from work, you’ll want to select IMAP. IMAP will leave a copy of the mail in your inbox on the server (like Outlook and Exchange) until you remove it from the inbox; POP access downloads all mail to your local computer, so nothing will show up in OWA.

2. T-Bird uses ‘LDAP’ to access directory services on a network - it defaults to port 389. Exchange, however, uses port 3268. This threw me for a loop until I found ‘this useful post’

3. Your contacts don’t show up in a list like with Outlook - you have to search for a name before it shows up. Small annoyance, but since autocomplete works in emails, I’m fine with it.

All-in-all, I’m pleased with how this has worked out. I’m rid of Outlook (for now), I’m supporting FOSS, and I have a very nice mail system for work. The more MS software I can take off of my work machine, the better!

Regards,

M.

Unless you live under a very well-hidden rock, you know that ‘The Giants Won the Super Bowl!’.

The family was quite stoked by this - again, unless you still remain under that rock, you know that we’re the biggest Giants fans in Raleigh!

Go Big Blue - let’s hope the fame and fortune associated with this victory doesn’t go to our heads…and let’s also hope that Steve Spaguolo doesn’t ‘leave us for the Redskins’.

Regards,

M.

‘Help Me Get an Ipod!’

If you are interested in helping me get an Ipod for Rebekah, please click above or contact me for more details!

Thanks in advance,
M.

Wow, I’m actually keeping up with my blog - two posts within 6 days of each other

More Gallery Updates:

I added a few more albums to the ‘Photo Gallery’…I think it was two or three for each of the girls, with some cute ones of Zoe and her BFF Cassatt.

Also, as far as the Gallery - like I mentioned earlier, I finished tagging all the photos in the gallery. However, in doing this, I realized that the dates for the albums and pictures were off. The album dates are my fault, as I was not aware you could set the date at creation time. On the flip side, the picture dates are a function of the EXIF data (or lack thereof) housed in each picture. While I’m not going to change the date of every single picture, I have been doing so for the albums…and in the process, I’ve found a few pictures/albums that were out of sequence. So, I’m moving things around to be more accurate. Yes, I’m OCD.

Etc:

Not much else has been going on - I did try to start using Kmail again as my PIM, but alas, its Google Calendar support still blows. Despite all that I’ve read online, I still cannot get it to be read-write. Good news though - the Kubuntu incarnation of Kmail renders HTML mail properly! That was a huge issue for me with Kmail. But I really want to get the calendar issue sorted so I can switch back.

I found a new KDE program called ‘BasKet’, which is very similar to ‘Microsoft OneNote’. I’ve heard great things about both of these programs, and what’s really cool about BasKet is that it integrates into Kontact. Hence why I want to sort my calendar issue.

Anyway, have a good one…and GO GIANTS!!!!

M.

At work, I use a Dell D620 laptop running Kubuntu 7.10. It has 4GB RAM and a Core Duo T2400 CPU (not Core2Duo) @ 1.8Ghz. It’s a nice PC - it took a while to get the 1280×800 screen resolution into Linux by default, but hey - it works great!

Anyway, the point of this post - I was converting some MP3 files to Ogg Vorbis this morning, and I was able to to see the value of a dual-core CPU for the first time. I’ve been doing this at home on my desktop machine (AMD64 3000+, 2GB RAM), using SoundKonverter. I regularly noticed that the conversion would take a long time…and it would only do one at a time, even though I had specified 3 at a time. My home PC is by no means slow, but I was surprised at how long the process took.

On my laptop this morning, I was able to run 2 encoding tasks at the same time, with a third in queue - encoding a 16 song list from FLAC to OGG took less than 2 minutes! The total size of the album was around 480MB in FLAC. That’s FAST!!!

So, the benefits of having a dual-core CPU, especially if you do audio/video encoding on a regular basis, are very good - hopefully, I can replace my desktop at some point this year!

Regards,
M.