Office Live Workspace

Microsoft via Live.com came out with Office Live Workspace where we can upload our Word, Excel, Powerpoint docs.  Superb!  Collaboration within the Microsoft environment!  Great! Someone who can beat Google Docs or Zoho -- one better since the formatting will be "perfect" regardless of who edits it.  What is "perfect"?  It's the spaces in between paragraphs and the margins -- they're different in Word and in Google Docs.

I got a problem with Office Live Workspace.  If say, a friend sends you a Word doc to share/collaborate, you got to use IE7 (ick!) to be able to click Edit (I think through an ActiveX control or something), then your computer opens Microsoft Word with the file in question.  Uhh, Google Docs can do real-time editing while we are in middle of a chat and every change is logged as if you're in a Wiki.

Your thoughts?

SyncToy - a great find!

I've always been looking for a good backup program that would fit my needs to create a backup of my computer and my wife's.  After crash and burning with manual backups [takes far too long], Windows backup [takes up too many of my DVDs], and using Subversion [it works, but has to be done manually and I cannot remember everything!].

After some searching I found, SyncToy 2.0 beta.  That moniker is not really a "toy", and the user interface is a little, well, sparse... but does the job real well.  I went out and bought a Western Digital 500GB MyBook at my local Costco.  After the initial backup of say C:\Users\Rob (yes, its Vista -- no more wordy "Documents and Settings" in XP) which was around 21GB, took almost all night the first time.

When you install the program, you would be able to schedule it at any specific time you prefer.  I had mine done in the middle of the day.  SyncToy is so efficient that it didn't bog down my Pentium D computer and this time the backup won't take all day/night.  It scans my computer for changes to the file, then only backs up the changes.  It has a command prompt telling me how much time it saved me by backing up only the changed files rather than the entire thing.  In this snapshot I took, it saved me approximately 13 hours for 21 GB!  It's all scheduled riding on top of Windows Scheduler and it does the job without pestering me or any prompts.  Beautiful....

Now I have a peace of mind regarding my valuable clients' files and pictures of the family.

Vista SP1

No problems. Booted my MicroCenter Pentium-D-with-2GB-RAM computer 3 times during the install... no visible changes, but the best change of all is speeding up the file copy transfers -- works FAST now! Thumbs up Microsoft!

Seeing family on the Signews website...

Was reminiscing my time at CSD (and they're one of the best group of people I've worked with) and was looking to see how much the Signews website had changed. I used to work on the old Signews website when we had full articles on it. Great times... Fancy seeing my wife and son STILL part of the rotating banner at the header! [as of 3/17/08]

SpamHaus & GoDaddy conspiring against video phone users

Yup! SpamHaus and GoDaddy are conspiring against the likes of those who likes to put their videophone IP address in our email signatures.

My email signature looks something like this:

--
phone: 800.900.1000 | http://mywebsite.com | video phone: callhome.homeip.net

I was having trouble emailing my own clients -- two of them in fact -- was getting bounce back emails looking like this:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    elliott@ETismyclient.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 554 The message was rejected because it contains 
prohibited virus or spam content

Upon further investigation, I found they were both using GoDaddy as their email host.

Called GoDaddy... sent the blocked emails to their tech support guy, and lo and behold, the flag was the dynamic DNS address I had set up for my video phone (which is H.323 based by the way). Asked them what vendor they use for spam filtering -- SpamHaus.org.

So -- those with video phones and dynamic DNS -- be WARNED! They're out to getcha!

OK, OK, jokes aside -- I changed my signature and this change works (changing dot to [dot]):

--
phone: 800.900.1000 | http://mywebsite.com | video phone: callhome[dot]homeip[dot]net

There ya see it!