Moments ago I installed the FLOCK browser. According to Ed Dale, it’s better than FireFox. We’ll see. It has some interesting features, including the blog editor that I’m using right now.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Archive for the ‘Tech Talk’ Category
Flocking for the first time
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Well it works on MY computer.
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
This is a story of the worst technical support I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s no wonder everyone complains about the quality of technical support.
As a computer tech with 20+ years of experience, I thought I’d seen and heard it all when it comes to tech support horror stories. I’ve dealt with countless completely clueless “techs” on the phone and mostly managed to keep my cool. I’ve learned to deal with those who follow their scripts without understanding. Usually once all the scripted stuff doesn’t work, you can escalate to 2nd level support and start the real troubleshooting. (more…)
Scan from within Microsoft Word 2007
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008A client recently upgraded to Office 2007 and asked me how to scan an image into a Word document the way she used to in Word 2003. We searched briefly but couldn’t find it. I did some searching online and found a solution on LockerGnome. Here is the an edited version of the post. It worked beautifully for me. (more…)
SATA disk to USB docking station
Saturday, March 29th, 2008This is the coolest thing ever! I needed to recover some data from a customer’s crashed SATA drive and was struggling with it. I happened across the BlacX by ThermalTake. I plugged it in and nothing happened, then I slid a 2 1/2″ SATA drive into it and lo and behold, I was able to access the drive. It support hot-swaps and didn’t require any drivers on my Vista Business computer. This has potential to be a great backup solution - you can easily take a copy of your important data off-site.
I put in the customer’s 3 1/2″ drive and it recognized that, too - even though it was having problems. I ran GetDataBack on it and was able to recover most of her data. (Dell and her local computer shop both told her that the data was just gone and nothing could be done… HA!) At just under $50 this belongs in every computer technician’s toolbox.
THERMALTAKE N0028USU BLACX USB HARD DRIVE DOCK - SATA, 2.5, 3.5 (STORAGE)
Exchange 2007
Friday, December 21st, 2007What a bear! In some ways Exchange 2007 is incredible, in other ways it’s just a pain in the neck. It almost feels like they just gave up and decided to release it before they finished building the user interface. Many things that were done with a GUI interface in Exchange 2003 now require archaic commands using the “PowerShell”. What were they thinking?
Yes - it’s nice having the PowerShell, but it would be nice if you didn’t NEED it for things like moving the public folders, adjusting spam filtering and a few other things that should be a couple of clicks. So far I haven’t even found any help in the PowerShell. I had problems moving public folders - it generated some warnings and some errors, but not much info on how to correct the problem.
Holy crap, that’s a FAST computer!
Friday, October 26th, 2007So the big project is gaining momentum… Last night I was finally ready to install the first server. (There will be 5 new servers in total - an SC860, 2-PowerEdge 2950’s and 2-PowerEdge 2970’s [64-bit].)
I fired up the first 2950, told it to boot from CD and began the Server 2003 install. It got to the part of asking where to install it and gave up the ghost because it couldn’t find a hard drive. Hmmmm…. I rebooted and used the Dell CD where it prepped the drive and gathered information, then it asked for the Server 2003 CD. I gave it the CD and it spit it out. I gave it a DVD and it didn’t like that either.
Dude, you’re getting a Dell!
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007My biggest job as a freelancer started today. The customer ordered the equipment and it’s starting to trickle in. The best thing about being a computer consultant is being paid to play with expensive high tech toys that I can’t afford to buy myself. (OK, so it’s actually work and they’re tools - not toys, but I love my job!)
Backups & Disaster Recovery
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007The Chicago SBS User group held an 8-hour meeting yesterday to talk about disaster recovery. How timely! A customer just ordered a new LTO4 autochanger and Backup Exec. The old backup system is nonfunctional and part of my job is to come up with a disaster recovery plan.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find what I was looking for at the meeting. No offense to any members who happen to read this, but it wasn’t nearly technical enough and it got off into tangents about business continuity and non-profits. I only stayed 3 hours, so maybe I missed the good stuff?
A few hours later I ran across this site about using VMWare for disaster recovery - EXCELLENT!
How to use VMWare for disaster recovery
It doesn’t really apply to my client’s needs, but it sure applies to my own setup. What a great idea!!
BOM, UTF - WTF?!
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007BOM=Byte Order Mark
UTF= Uniform Transformation Format
WTF?! = well, you know…
Whatever happened to just plain old ASCII text?
OK, so UTF is ASCII text, but why in the world would you want HIDDEN characters in your files? Especially if there’s no way to toggle displaying them or not. Thank goodness for good old DOS EDIT.
In my last post I mentioned the problems I had with installing Wordpress on my domain. The culprit was the BOM at the beginning of the wp-config.php file. I edited the file in Microsoft’s Expression Web and it added those weird characters. I fixed it by using “edit” from a DOS prompt. I was able to eliminate those hidden characters and save the file. That allowed the script to work and obviously Wordpress is working now.
I spent about an hour yesterday looking for a way to force Expression Web to NOT use BOM, but no luck. I found a few tutorials that showed how to eliminate it by changing the UTF, but that could come back to bite you as well, as that’s where the language encoding is stored. I guess the short answer is don’t edit PHP files in Expression Web.
Here’s a Wiki article on BOM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark
Here’s one on UTF-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
And finally, here’s the Wiki article on WTF?!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF
Hidden characters in Expression Web files
Monday, October 15th, 2007I tried a few times to install wordpress on my domain - elgincomputerguy.com. I kept getting weird errors. I’d clear the database and start again, but the same thing kept happening.
I finally went to the support forums and found other people having the same problem and one of the suggested answers said that the file must start with “<?php” - any blank lines or spaces will mess it up. That’s when I remembered that I’d edited the file with Microsoft Expression Web and it adds some kind of weird characters at the beginning of every file.
I just found out about that weirdness within Expression Web a couple of months ago. Here’s what the file looked like in notepad:
and here’s how it looks when I go to the DOS prompt and use “edit”:
Isn’t that weird? I love Expression Web - I switched from Dreamweaver several months ago, but this odd behavior makes me have second thoughts. This is the second time it bit me - both times while I was doing PHP. You’d think I would have caught it sooner!
Notice that Notepad doesn’t display the hidden characters. If you create the file in Notepad, they’re not there, but if you do it in Expression Web then open in Notepad, they won’t show, but if you modify the file in Notepad and save it - the hidden characters remain. The only way I know of to get rid of them once they’re in a file is to use the DOS prompt and EDIT.