Category Archives: Tech
Terrible SharePoint Design
I nearly clawed my eyes out this afternoon. We use SharePoint in a few places at work for wikis and sharing documents and I recently inherited one of the sites. I had a simple need to take a list of users (called a group) that was about 60 people long and move 40 of them to a new group. The first problem I ran in to was that there was no way to do this without creating a second group first, adding each user, and then deleting the old ones. Harder than just dragging and dropping or something but I could manage. So I create my group and scribble down 40 names on a piece of paper and go to enter those names. I get an error message. Apparently if that user doesn’t exist at the company anymore it fails (SharePoint is linked up with our contact directory in Exchange/Outlook/Active Directory). The error message tells me that it has not added any new users beyond the one it failed at. Lame, some lazy programmer couldn’t just skip it and add everything else to give me a list of all failed adds at the end? So if the 2nd user in my list of 40 failed the other 38 still had to be added. I had about 6 users that didn’t exist. SO the last thing that really destroyed me is that they don’t tell you the user that actually failed to be added. Instead it is smarter than you since it looked up their login ID and tells you that instead. So if I enter “Joe Pfeiffer” it would say user “v12345″ could not be added. I have no idea who v12345 is since I entered a list of 40 names. So I look up the login ID’s in our web search interface. Someone is not thinking about work flow with this product.
Mac Apps
It seems like a lot more people are getting Mac’s theses days (Pat just got one and Paul from work just got a new one…even my Mom has a temporary one for editing her book). So for fun I thought I’d list a bunch of applications I’ve come to love. I used a Mac for web design all through college but I didn’t switch my primary computer at home to one until a year and a half ago and now I have one at work as well. Most of the applications are free so a quick search should bring them up if you want to download. Anything killer I’m missing?
In the dock:
- Cyberduck (free FTP client)
- Firefox (browser, duh)
- Mail.app (use it occisionally just to download Gmail for offline use/backup)
- Entourage (work email)
- Adium (by far the best chat client)
- iCal (i mainly keep that there so I know the date since i use entourage for a calendar)
- iTunes
- ProTools (for the nowlikephotograph podcast) Continue reading
Computer Things for Free
I am once again on a quest to reduce the amount of junk I have. Here is a list of computer parts from the bin I have been keeping for far too long. If you want any of it let me know, it’s free, just pay postage if you’re outside of Minneapolis or wait until I come visit sometime. Anything not claimed I’m going to give to Goodwill at the end of next week.
- Wireless keyboard (some generic brand, it’s black and the receiver is a PS2 plug)
- 5.25″ removable hard drive cages for swapping drives (2 of them)
- IBM Deskstar 30.7GB hard drive (IDE)
- Western Digital 40.0GB hard drive (IDE)
- 3.5″ beige floppy drive
- ATI Radeon 9200SE 64MB DDR AGP w/ TV Out
- ATI Radeon 7000 32MB DDR AGP w/ TV Out
- Promise Fasttrak TX2 IDE RAID Card
- Philips 5.1 PCI Sound Card
- Firewire PCI card (3-ports), some generic brand
- Netgear FA310TX network card
- D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit network card
- Logitech QuickCam USB camera
- Intel USB camera
- Microsoft PS2 scroll mouse
- Microsoft PS2 natural ergonomic keyboard (white – the first one that came out)
- Logitech MX510 USB Mouse
- Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 USB Mouse
- Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer (Wireless)
- MIDI to 15-pin joystick/sound card cable
- Monster cigarette to firewire adapter (for charging an old school iPod)
- Belkin 2-port KVM switch (USB, no PS2 ports)
I can move my ears…
“The mechanism behind ear movements is sophisticated,” says Bastiaan ter Meulen, who led the ear wiggling study, accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology.
Unlike other facial muscles, ear muscles have their own accessory nucleus, a control area for muscle function, in the brainstem, says ter Meulen, a researcher at Erasmus MC, a university medical centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
“Compared to animals, especially bats and cats, this nucleus is rather small in humans,” he says. (Source)
Firefox 3 Today
The website was down so I ended up navigating to the FTP so I could download it. Seems a little snappier and I like the UI much more on Windows. I can’t wait to get it for the Mac though, the old UI was really ugly so having it look like Safari will be rockin’. The folks at Mozilla are also trying to set a Guiness world record for the most downloaded file in 1-day. Rumor has it that there is no record for this set already so it may not be that difficult. You can download and be counted towards the record at getfirefox.com
I’ve mentioned it before but I highly recommend the Del.icio.us plugin for keeping bookmarks synced across home/work and on the web. Adblock is also a nice extension for blocking ads on webpages, IE Tab for opening a Firefox tab with IE and the meebo extension that makes meebo IM feel like a real chat program. All of them are compatible with Firefox 3.
iJFP.com is Faster and Better
The move is complete and the pages should be loading much more snappily (if that’s a word). What a giant pain it is to move hosting providers but I had so many friends complain they couldn’t get the site to load that I felt I had to. Plus nowlikephotographs.com has had a lot of load serving up podcasts so it was definitely needed. I thought I’d also point out a few additional enhancements that may make reading stuff on here easier. First up, you people with iPhones will now see a specially optimized version of the site. I am yet to see how it looks (or if it even works) but I threw the plugin on over lunch today after hanging out with Paal and his iPhone last night. Second, if you’d like to get emails on comments for a post that you’ve commented on there is a check box on the comment form that is turned on by default now. And last, if you’re really lazy, you can create an account on iJFP that will email you the full content of posts and comments. To sign up for an account visit here.
Switching to a Mac: Email
About two weeks ago I purchased a MacBook Pro to replace my aging Dell 600M that has been acting up for far too long. I was planning on waiting until the fall with a new release of OS X imminent but it was driving me crazy to not have a working laptop. So I thought I’d start posting about my experience in switching from using Windows since the 3.1/95 days. I got my first exposure to a Mac using OS 9 when I worked at Radio K and in IT at the University but this was the first time I owned an actual Mac. First up was getting my email from Outlook 2007 in to Mail.app – the built in Mail program included with OS X. I started off by seeing if Mail.app could import straight .pst files which I have two of – 1 for archived mail older than 6 months and a second for mail newer than that. There were only options for Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, and Microsoft Entourage, no Outlook .pst. I didn’t know anything about standard email file formats so I read up and found out there is a psuedo-industry standard that Mail.app, Thunderbird, and Eudora all use called mbox. Outlook uses .pst which is a propreitary format. While there is some importing capability among Windows mail programs for pst there’s nothing, that’s free at least, that can import pst in to Mail.app. Figuring that if I could convert my .pst to .mbox I’d be ready to just drop it on my Mac and go. I installed Thunderbird on my Windows machine had it import all the pst email in to mbox files. Not bad but each folder creates it’s own mbox file and I am horribly over organized so it resulted in about two dozen files. I threw those files on the MacBook Pro and fired up Mail.app to import. I got about 1/5 of the messages and the rest had missing subject lines and messed up dates. No good. Continue reading
The Weekend of Paal
Today was a fantastic day. Paal flew in to Minneapolis yesterday afternoon so I ducked out of work early to meet him at home. We proceded to geek out and watch the movie Serenity, pick up a case of Fat Tire beer (which came back to the cities today) and buy an HD-DVD player. The night was full of lots of Guitar Hero, eating, drinking and concluded with us falling asleep while watching what I have decided is my favorite movie of all time – The Fountain, in HD-DVD. Good god is that movie great, especially in HD. Today was laid back. We went to Lindy’s, this place up by where I work that has the best burgers that exist (if you can’t tell yet, Paal demands the best of everything apparently). I kept getting phone calls from work which is the downfall of taking a day off and forgetting to put an out of office email reply up but that stopped in the afternoon. After lunch we went over to Mark Lepke’s place to play Wii sports in which I learned Paal bowls like a weak little girl and I can’t golf to save my life. Deep dish pizza (real deep dish that is several inches thick) from a new pizza place downtown for dinner added to our stellar food record today and now Paal is out with some other guys he knows while I work on a paper for school write this post. I’m predicting a good time at the bars followed by some Guitar Hero to conclude the evening. Good times.
HP Trip
I’ve spent the last week here down in Houston, Texas visiting HP for work. Two other engineers and my manager came down early Tuesday morning on a flight that carried Minnesota U.S. Senator Norm Coleman no less. I was even surprised to see Norm flies couch, not first class. It’s probably to make us feel like he’s a people’s man or something. My manager, Lynn, only stayed for a day but the rest of us are here for two weeks. Before I go further I need to point out, especially to Pat, my packing skills of carry on luggage for a two week trip. The picture to prove it is included in this post. Our team at work does this trip every product release so that HP can certify the new release since they are resellers of it. It’s kind of the opposite of what we do normally, certifying HP’s hardware to work with our software. The first week that we just finished was spent testing the normal functionality of NetBackup and this coming week we’re going to be testing out all the new disk-based features. I’m mainly along to test the disk-based stuff but I’ve been learning a lot about running NetBackup in a large tape environment too. HP has set us up with 25 servers, 15 tape drives and 5 tape libraries. The most novel pieces are a 6TB disk array – the Enterprise Virtual Array 8000 and a set of 5 connected HP StorageWorks ESL tape libraries. The testing looks to cover all the latest products they are selling. Continue reading