I’ve been running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 3 for about a week now, and so far, I’ve got to say, I’m pleased with the changes I’ve seen.
I’m running it on an HP Compaq nc6220 and a Dell Latitude D500. I encountered a few bugs in the installer. The first was minor, namely that by default, it wants to try to detect my keyboard layout by having me press a series of keys, rather than simply picking “US English” from a list. The second, somewhat more important bug is that the partitioner failed to properly set up my partitions unless I wiped the drive clean. While I expected this, it did lead to me having to reinstall Windows, which was inconvenient. Such is the life of being an alpha/beta tester!
Right off the bat, the first time you boot, the system announces that an application has recovered from a crash! I found that humorous, as there was no other indication of any sort of crash. This happened on three different installations on three different machines, so it would seem there’s something odd out of the box. Again, such is the life of being an alpha/beta tester!
Another bug I found is that when configuring an MS Exchange account in Evolution, one key piece of information is missing. Namely, the server. That’s right, while setting up my MS Exchange server, I can specify user, password, a bunch of different account options, but no server address! This seems to be a somewhat significant oversight.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Ubuntu team is releasing dozens of updates a day. It is exciting to see the rapid development on the project, as my automatic updates notification has something for me every morning. As I went to bed last night, I installed 102 updates, and this morning, had 37 more ready to go.
Without a doubt, the biggest benefit of the new version is the automatic detection of my laptops’ Intel and Broadcom wireless cards. Finally, no need to dig up firmware from Windows drivers and cut them, or fiddle with NDISwrappers. WPA worked out of the box as well. Hooray!
I was able to install licensed software via the standard Add/Remove application, and did so with Adobe Flash, Sun Java, and a couple of other things that I previously had to download manually, or install via EasyUbuntu or Automatix. I appreciate having these as part of the standard installation methods now, and not having to go out of my way to get them on the system.
All in all, I’m having better luck with Feisty than I ever did with Edgy, and can’t wait for the real release in a couple of months!
Update: 2007-02-14
Today I was successfully (and quite easily) able to install Freemind on Feisty. I had done so in the past on Dapper, but getting the dependancies in order was such a pain I decided just to run it on my Windows machine instead. Under Feisty, with Java installed via the Add/Remove application, all I needed to do was download the libforms-java and freemind-0.8.0 Deb packages from freemind.sourceforge.net and go! The first time I attempted to install the Freemind Deb package, the installer crashed, but I was able to run it again immediately afterward and it was successful.
56 updates this morning!
Why I am "Very Hard To Reach," or "How to Use Voicemail"
Many times over the last several years I have been told that I am “a hard guy to get a hold of,” “very hard to reach,” or “a hard guy to track down.” I admit, if you are a salesperson peddling a product I have no interest in, I won’t always return your call. Actually, I probably won’t return your call. If you call repeatedly, the frequency with which you call will be inversely proportional to the amount of time that elapses before I press “delete” in my voicemail.
Sometimes, these comments come to me by way of clients or customers of mine. Usually they come from former clients or customers of mine, if you get my drift. What these people are really saying is “I do not know how to use voicemail.” I know this to be the case because sometimes I will look back at my caller ID logs and see that someone has called me 4 times in the last two days, and left a number of voicemails that approaches 0, and is certainly nowhere near 4.
I have news to these people who accuse me of being “hard to reach.” I am one of the most accessible people in this state. I have voicemail. I have email. I have a pager. I have a cell phone. I have an answering machine at my house. At one point I had another cell phone in my car. And the only info I ever give out to anyone is mybusiness phone number. Why? Because I check it. When I get a call at the office it forwards the message to my cell phone. If I don’t answer, it goes to my pager. I do not give out my cell phone or pager number to people because they do not need it. Apparently this is one of the reasons I’m “hard to get a hold of.” The fact that I have actually simplified things seems to confuse people though.
If you call the office looking for technical support, and I am not available, my voicemail greeting even tells you how to transfer to technical support so someone can help you more quickly. Of course, this process requires pressing two buttons (sequentially, not simultaneously), and this seems to throw a lot of people off because I regularly receive voicemails from clients who are having technical issues which could be addressed by any of my staff, but for some reason, these requests wind up in my mailbox. Despite the fact that my voicemail has, for years, said, “If you require any technical assistance with a computer, network, or website, press…” People don’t hear that. They also don’t hear the part where I say “I will be out of the office until…” and go ahead and leave messages which go unanswered until I return, at which point they have thrown a conniption because I dared to not be checking my voicemail while I was on vacation or away on business (despite the fact that I clearly stated that I was on vacation or away on business and not checking voicemail). Unbelieveable.
This is right up there with the people who call, listen to an entire voicemail greeting (sometimes as long as a minute), hear the tone, and then hang up! I love getting those 4 second voicemails with nothing more than breath and the *click* of a hangup.
It is clear that these people need a primer on voicemail, and of course, being the helpful guy that I am, I’m happy to help!
Here’s a synopsis:
Pick up the phone
Dial the number of the person you need to reach.
If you reach a voicemail system,
Hang up immediately in a huff, complaining about how hard I am to get a hold of.
Immediately press 0 to get to an operator, then hang up in a huff when you get the operator’s voicemail,complaining about how hard I am to get a hold of.
Call me at home. Despite the fact that your issue is not remotely urgent or even important, and get on my “good side.”
Call my parents’ house, and ask them how to get a hold of me, because at age 35, I love getting a call from my mom telling me that so-and-so is trying to reach me.
Listen to the greeting and follow the instructions given.
When you reach the extension of the intended person, if the person is not available, and you receive his/her voicemail,
Hang up immediately in a huff, complaining about how hard I am to get a hold of.Listen to the greeting and follow the instructions given.
If the voicemail contains information, such as a vacation notice, or instructions on how to get immediate help with your issue,
Hang up immediately in a huff, complaining about how hard I am to get a hold of.Follow the instructions given to receive the help you are seeking.
Leave a brief, descriptive message. State your name, your telephone number, and what it is you need. Note, what you need is NOT a phone call, so do not say “hey Peter, call me.” That’s meaningless. If you leave me a voicemail and all it says is “call me,” be prepared to receive your own *click*, either on your voicemail or answering machine or even live if you answer the phone, because if all you needed was a call, then I’ll happily call you. And hang up. If you need something, tell me what it is, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can with the information, and the cycle of Eternal Phone Tag can be broken!
See how easy that is?
The Problem with Off-Shoring
I work in information technology, providing outsourced IT management and system administration services. Sometimes, as part of my job, I must call on technical support from vendors of hardware and software, such as Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Intuit.
In the last few years, many companies have decided to save money by off-shoring their tech support call centers. While I am a big fan of outsourcing, (mostly because without outsourcing, I’d be out of a job), off-shoring is a different story. My call to Microsoft Technical Support this morning underscores this:
MS: Thank you for calling Microsoft Technical Support. What product do you need assistance with?
Me: Office 2003 Basic Edition
MS: Can I get your first and last name please?
Me: First name is “Peter,” last name is Nikolaidis, “n-i-k-o-l-a-i-d-i-s. ”
MS: Thank you mister “Neekolidees.” Is this the first time you have called Microsoft Technical Support?
Me: No.
MS: Can I have the case number?
Me: I don’t have a case number, this is a new issue.
MS: Okay, can I have the case number so I can look up the issue?
Me: No, this is a new issue.
MS: Okay… if I can have the case number I can look up the issue.
Me: I have NO case number. This is a NEW issue. You asked if I have called you before, and I have, but this is a new issue.
MS: Okay… Sir can I please have the product ID of the product you are using
Me: [Braces for impact] it’s 12345-OEM-67891-01112.
FOR i IN 1 TO 3
MS: Okay Mister Neekolidees, since you gave me a product ID number that has the letters O-E-M in it, you can contact the vendor who sold you the computer for technical support.
Me: I already spoke with Dell and they cannot help me.
NEXT i
MS: Are you having a problem with installation?
Me: [Speaking plainly and clearly, on a good quality telephone connection] No.
MS: Okay Mister Neekolidees, since you are having a problem with installation, I will give you a free incident so that we can get your problem resolved.
Me: … Thank you…
What Do You Want for Christmas?
It\’s that time of year again, and I figured I\’d save everyone who is thinking about getting me a present the trouble. No, not the trouble of getting me a gift. Of course I want gifts! No, I will save you the trouble of thinking of what to get me, you silly person!
Here are some great suggestions that I’m sure I would like:
- A case for my iPod (30GB, black) which allows me to still sync it, but not worry about it being scratched.
- A gift certificate to Borders or Amazon.com.
- DVDs (widescreen editions always):
Superman Returns- Superman II (the Richard Donner Cut)
X-Men 3: The Last Stand- Books:
An iPod dock of some sort that includes speakers.- A ViewSonic Viewdock Monitor.
- A MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Mac Pro. Hey, if you don’t ask…
- Jox Sox! These are great athletic socks which let my smelly, sweaty feet breathe! I have several pairs of the ped size, but could use some larger ones for use with
Slippers.
Okay, scratch the slippers.
How I Cut Myself on Edgy Eft's Bleeding Edge (Twice)
As a loyal Ubuntu user, I was excited when Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft was released last week. I downloaded my ISO via BitTorrent to have available for any new installs, but planned on upgrading my laptop and desktop machines via these four commands at the terminal:
sed -i 's/dapper/edgy/g'/etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
After getting the list of packages to upgrade, I found that a few packages, most notably Beagle, Drivel, Tomboy Notes, and a few Python packages, were held back, blocking my upgrade. I knew that the apps were included in the new release, so I figured maybe they needed to be removed because they weren't in the main repository or some such. Given that, I uninstalled them and re-ran the upgrade commands. The upgrade ran fairly smoothly for several hours as it downloaded hundreds of megabytes of files. While the upgrade was running in the background, I continued to work on my system. The first thing I noticed was some cosmetic changes. The Kate editor had a new splash screen, which I noticed when I used it to edit some files. Thunderbird had a new default font, as did some system menues. After switching to a blank desktop, I realized that the background and default theme had been updated. I thought all of these were pretty cool, as they happened transparently while I was working without so much as a hiccup.
When the upgrade was complete, I was prompted to reboot. I happily rebooted the system.
That's when it got ugly.
Somehow, despite Dapper and Edgy being able to recognize my display and configure it properly (Dapper when booting from CD or the drive, Edgy when booting from the CD), it choked when trying to launch X11. I looked over the diagnostic info in the log, but after a few failed attempts to edit the xorg.conf file to a state of happiness, I decided to back up my home directory and do a clean install of Edgy from CD.
In addition to my ext3 and swap partitions, I have an NTFS and FAT32 partition on this machine. I backed up my home directory to the FAT32 partition, then booted from the Edgy CD and selected the options to install over the now-corrupted Dapper to Edgy upgrade. The clean installation went fairly quickly, but I was not able to find the copy of my home directory that I had backed up!
I booted into Windows and couldn't find the files there either. I ran CHKDSK on the FAT32 partition, which found and corrected errors, but didn't find my files. Deciding that there wasn't anything critical there (well, hoping so, anyway) I booted back into Edgy to see what was new with this release.
That's when I got my next surprise. Suddenly it would not mount my FAT32 or NTFS partitions. The partitions simply did not show up. At this point I was getting concerned that I was having hardware problems, so I ran SpinRite on the drive. It found no problems, but my data didn't come back either. Satisfied that the drive was okay, I booted into Edgy again.
This time, after seeing the Ubuntu splash screen momentarily, the whole display went black, except for a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen. I waited for a couple of minutes, and after no disk activity and no login prompt, cold-booted the system. The same thing happened again. Not sure exactly where the machine was in the boot process when it hung, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del to see what happened. To my surprise, the Gnome login prompt popped up!
Deciding that this was simply too much weirdness for now, I pulled my 6.06 LTS CD off the shelf, booted from it, and kissed Edgy goodbye for now, as I put Dapper back on my laptop. I'm a little disappointed, because some of the enhancements I saw during the brief time I was in Edgy looked nice, but stability is the main reason I wanted to run Linux in the first place, and I decided Dapper's pretty stable, so I'm going back to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake for now, at least on my laptop. I'll write again shortly with an update of how the upgrade went on my two desktops at the office.
UPDATE
My X11 configuration was also trashed on my Dell Dimension 2400 after attempting an in-place upgrade over my previous Dapper installation. Beware!
Why the Microsoft POP3 Connector for Exchange is a Piece of Junk
I’ve used the POP3 Connector for Exchange which comes with Small Business Server since SBS version 4.0 (NT 4, Exchange 5.0). The main limitation I’ve always bumped into was the fact that the POP Connector will check mail only as frequently as every 15 minutes.
While this is normally acceptable, if a user is anxiously awaiting an email, or, as has frequently happened to me, you’re on the phone with someone and they email you a file so you can collaborate with them on it, waiting up to 15 minutes for the file can be a real time-waster.
The second issue, which I’ve never personally cared about, was the inability to leave an email which was downloaded on the server for a period of time. Many of my clients do this as a backup option (in case something gets corrupted or deleted after being downloaded), or as a poor substitute for IMAP, to allow them to receive their mail on multiple computers. Of course, given that they have an Exchange server, this is relatively pointless, but I digress.
Last week, I found the main reason why the POP Connector for Microsoft Exchange should be avoided at all costs. It is summarized in the following Microsoft Knowledgebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842293/
SYMPTOMS
When the Microsoft Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Connector for POP3 Mailboxes component downloads e-mail messages from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) all the following symptoms may occur:
| ? | E-mail messages that are downloaded by the SBS 2003 Connector for POP3 Mailboxes are not successfully delivered to the intended recipients. |
| ? | The Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server-based computer removes the e-mail messages that it was not able to deliver. |
| ? | The senders of these e-mail messages do not receive non-delivery reports from the Exchange 2003 Server-based computer as they typically do if their e-mail messages do not reach the intended recipients. |
To summarize, the POP Connector gets the message, determines that it doesn’t know what to do with the message, and silently throws it away.
Without any warning to the user. Or the server administrator. Or the sender of the original message.
Who was the rocket scientist who came up with this plan of action?!
I’ve been using IGetMail from the folks at Lockstep. It costs $69, and has a free trial. The program allows you to customize the polling schedule to your liking (including poll freqencies of less than every 15 minutes!). It also has more flexible handling of emails than the built in POP Connector, and can be configured to simply delete emails that are corrupted on the server. This feature has saved my clients a lot of troubleshooting time, especially in cases when certain Asian-language spam or a corrupted attachment has managed to really confuse the client and server, which would have caused a client to be unable to receive any email in the past.
If you’re using POP to pull your mail down to an Exchange server, I highly recommend IGetMail as an alternative to the built in POP Connector.
Is anyone else experiencing multiple hard drive failures lately?
In the last month, I’ve had the following run-ins with failing hard drives:
- A local credit union had two teller stations in different offices die, and a third started to act up, but running SpinRite, chkdsk, and defrag seems to have fixed it.
- A local law office lost a drive in their server, as well as an external drive attached to their server. Today, about two weeks later, one of the lawyer’s workstation drives died as well.
- A client’s home PC had a drive failure.
- A client’s main Citrix server lost not one, but two drives in its RAID array.
All of these happened in separate towns (Bethel, Randolph, Rochester,? Rutland, and Woodstock, Vermont), in Dell computers, running a mix Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital hard drives. I’m no stranger to hard drive failures, but having so many fail all in such a short timeframe seems a bit odd. Anyone else experiencing this sort of behavior lately? If so, leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
How to Use Email, Part 4(b): How NOT to Reply to an Email Message – Top Posting
If you don’t know what top-posting is, it is when you reply to someone’s email, and your response comes before the message to which you are replying.
This practice was popularized by Microsoft in their Outlook and Outlook Express email programs, whose default behavior is to include replies above the original message.
Allow me to demonstrate with an example I saw recently:
A: No.
Q: Should I put my response to emails in the top of my reply?
There you have it. Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook, which is probably the most popular email client in the world, defaults to this setting. Obviously this is bad because if anyone wants to jump in to an existing conversation, s/he must scroll down to the first message (which is now conveniently located at the bottom of the email), read down to the bottom of this message, scroll back up to find the top of the immediately preceeding message, scroll down to read it, scroll back up to read the preceeding message, etc. Confusing, time-consuming, and, depending on your client, difficult to do.So please, make an effort and put your replies where they belong: after the thing you’re replying to.
My Ubuntu User Number
Hm. Looks like I’m becoming an Ubuntu fan.
How I Moved my Firefox and Thunderbird Settings from Windows to Mac OS X
I love Firefox and Thunderbird. One of my favorite features of both is that they are available on the three platforms that I use on a daily basis: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
The hardest part in moving your profiles from Windows to Mac (or Mac to Windows) is finding them in the first place. On Windows, I found my Firefox in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
where [username] would be your username.
I located my Thunderbird profile in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles.
Since I have a network, and Windows shares its system drives by default, the easiest way for me to connect the two systems to transfer the files was from my Mac. In Finder, I pressed Command-k and entered the path to my Windows machine’s hard drive, like so:
smb://[computername]/c$
where [computername] is the name of my PC. I was prompted for my Windows username and password, and then my Windows computer’s hard drive showed up on the desktop. From there it was a matter of just drilling down into the folders listed above to the Profiles directory.
Then, on the Mac, I had to locate the appropriate preferences folders. I opened my hard drive, then clicked on my username from the icon bar at the left. From there, I opened Library, Application Support, FireFox, Profiles. There I saw a profile named, in my case, ijawgk1.default. On Windows, the folder was named 9u4pqopm.default. The names are not important. What is important, is that you copy the contents of this folder on Windows into the folder on the Mac. Do not copy the whole folder – open the folder under your Profiles folder, select all files and folders underneath, and then copy all of them to the appropriate folder on the Mac. Restart Firefox or Thunderbird, and voila! You should see all of your customized settings, bookmarks, addresses, extensions, etc. on your Mac.
If you want to move your profile from Mac to Windows, simply reverse the copy, copying the contents of the profile from the Mac to Windows.
If you’re using Linux, you can do the same thing. You just need to know that your profiles are located in ~/.mozilla/firefox and ~/.mozilla-thunderbird.