You can disable everything else but you cannot disable Yahoo Toolbar if you want to install Yahoo Messenger. No problem I thought; I’ll fire up Internet Explorer and disable the toolbar later. Once I started up IE 8 security popups appeared one after another informing me that the toolbar was attempting activities prohibited by my security settings. This is not good, but what was worse was the browser locked solid after I clicked the last. I had to kill the process to get going again. I tried twice more and the same thing happened both times. I had to use Add/Remove Programs to get rid of it in the end.

What gets me is the sheer arrogance of Yahoo, expecting their users to tolerate the major degradation in performance and security just so they can put extra buttons on the browser to go to their services. Another friend of mine once had so many toolbars on his browser one time (Google, Yahoo, AVG & WOW as I recall) that he was browsing through a tiny 2″ high window. The browser took 2 minutes just to load the homepage because there was so much crap loading up in the background.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

One of our favourites is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It’s a strategy game set in the distant future. You build and control an army and battle another army controlled by the computer or another player somewhere on the internet. It was fun until last Monday, when his Necron army so totally humiliated my Space Marine one that I gave up and ran away before he could wipe my army out. 

The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities of DVD+/-R media were useless. Off I went to my local mirror and downloaded the “ia 64 netinst” CD image and I burned it to my last CD-R. I bunged it in the drive and hit the switch and it booted straight into Windows….. I tried a bootable Windows CD and it booted off that fine. Hmmm. So I Googled and found this. apparently if you want to use an E64MT CPU you need the AMD 64 bit install CD, rather than the ia64 one, which only works on Itanium CPUs. I’m off to the shop now to buy more CDs.

Re: Debian Installer on DELL PowerEdge 850/860

RSS was a lifesaver for me. I went out and bought FeedDemon and for a time I was happy. It would fetch all the headlines for me and display them in a list. I could click on the ones that interested me and they’d open up in the built-in browser, and I could mark everything else as read.

A short while I bought a laptop wanted to read my feeds there too. Fortunately FeedDemon had an answer. As well as using an internal database to store your list of feeds and what was read and unread, it could connect to Bloglines, a web based feed reader. Now I could read my feeds using a web browser and on my desktop and laptop PCs where I had FeedDemon installed. It wasn’t 100% perfect. Adding feeds was clunky, and it had issues if more than one location was accessing the data simultaneously (i.e. if I forgot to close FeedDemon on my desktop PC when I was on the road), but it was better than nothing.

Then Google Reader came along. It was entirely web based, and had decent hotkey support, so I could read stuff almost as quickly as with FeedDemon, and a lot faster than the Bloglines clunky interface. It was also 100% bulletproof. Being an AJAX application, activity was communicated back to the server in real time, rather than at the end of the session, so I never had to mark the same headline read twice. I preferred FeedDemon’s way of displaying feeds, where each feed had it’s own folder, and it was easy to go back to read headlines for review, but Google was overall an improvement, but still slower than FeedDemon.

FeedDemon have since been bought by NewsGator, who are another web based feed reader service in the same mould as Bloglines and Google Reader. The software can pull it’s subscribed feeds and read article data from your NewsGator account, so you can install it anywhere and view the same feeds, and what’s marked as read in one location gets marked as read everywhere, and more importantly, it does this reliably, unlike Bloglines. It’ll do nicely for the moment…..

Nick Bradbury: Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

From Web Worker Daily

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

I “upgraded” to Vista a couple of months ago and it’s a crock, but it’s not enough of a crock to make me reinstall XP Pro. Today was the first time I wanted to move a serious chunk of data between my laptop and the desktop. I plugged the cable in and nothing happened. Then I remembered that seeing as I formatted and reinstalled the desktop, I’d need to set n IP address, so I went into the network and sharing center in control panel….. The wireless adapter was there, as was the wired NIC, but no sign of the FireWire interface. I knew the FireWire card was set up because my iPod has been connected since the upgrade, so I checked Google to see if anyone else had the same problem. I found this. Microsoft removed the feature because they have “not identified any customer dependency” on this feature. Bastards!