March 16, 2006
Why Thunderbird Rocks?
Many of the tech cognescenti have (at one time or another) used Thunderbird for email. However, on my most recent attempt to setup and use T-Bird, I found a very cool feature. One can setup blog RSS feed to appear like email messages within T-Bird. One sets it up like an email account (tools -> account settings -> add account) then select "RSS News & Blogs." Name it what you want (i.e. WOU Blogs). It'll be created on the left panel. Right click this and select "Manage Subscriptions" select "add"
use the following format:
http://www.wou.edu/~username/blogs/index.rdf
-WOOT!
Posted by crowej at 1:02 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2005
VTC for UCS Training
For UCS staff, we have a membership to VTC (Virtual Training Company). This is a fairly comprehensive movie-based tutorial system for technical coursework. Programming, Operating Systems, Certifications, Web Design and Applications are all covered to some degree. There's a player that will queue up the movies. I've placed the username and password in i:\vtc.txt. We have 1 concurrent license. It can be used anywhere by anyone. Only one person may use it at a time. So far, this has not been an issue. Please let me know if this does.
To get the player, please point your browser to VTC.com.
Posted by crowej at 2:13 AM | Comments (1)
October 13, 2005
...Viewing Blogs you want in a hurry
Just within the blogs of UCS, there's a plethora of great ideas, cool tips and mind-boggling jargon. How's a person to keep up? Visit 20 some-odd sites?...daily? NO! In the words of Stewie from Family Guy
Victory is Mine!
Using Firefox, you can use the built-in (to the Blog Server)RSS feeds to gather up all of the titles. Just like the pic seen here. When you're on an RSS enabled site, an icon will appear in the lower right of your browser window. Simply click on that and click "Subscribe to RSS 2.0..."
Posted by crowej at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2005
Sophos AntiVirus
When the time came to renew our AntiVirus product, I knew that I would be looking around. Command AntiVirus simply didn't perform well enough to merit using it a second year. Sophos AntiVirus has caught and squashed a number of nasty beasties roaming around on WOU workstations. I pulled two reports that display just how well it's working.
Click here to see the report for this month:Monthly Report
Click here to see the report for the year (Jan to present):
The reports themselves are clickable. If you wish to know more about a particular infection, you can click on the Virus name (title). One of the points in Sophos' favor is the strength of their website.
Posted by crowej at 3:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2005
...Communications Express Tutorials (part 1)
Well, I thought I'd try something a bit different in this blog. I'd like to make these things useful to Campus Users. I've created a number of very short quicktime movies that walk you through HOWTO's in Communications Express. You will need Quicktime version 7 to view (and listen) to these movies. Please make sure that your resolution is at least 1024x768 (or the movies will be too big).
I'm attempting to address both common functionality as well as unique "gotchas"
Click Here to View
How to change your Communications Express passwordClick Here to View
How to get your Personal address book to fill out to, cc and bccClick Here to View
What is a Corporate Directory and how you use it
Posted by crowej at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 5, 2005
...Macintosh Imaging
Ghosting, imaging, cloning...it all boils down to efficiency. Efficiency can be defined in a multitude of ways. I prefer to define it like so:
Efficiency is the art of automating that which is boring, repetitive or banal. This frees up one's time to engage in creative pursuits.
Setting up a "perfect" machine is fun....once. Believe me that the second time it loses it's charm :-). We use a process to clone a "perfect" machine to other machines. This ensures that all necessary programs are loaded and configured identically.
Kudos to Mike Bombich for his excellent site on how to setup a netboot environment. Using his program, Net Restore I'm able to image a Mac simply by having someone netboot (i.e. holding the "N" key). A Mac server has an option 99 on DHCP. When our DHCP server gets the Netboot request it answers "I have no friggin' idea...go ask that guy!" Well that guy is a Mac Server that uses TFTP to "load" a diskless OS (OS X) into RAM. Part of this stateless image has the meat and potatoes that will block-copy the image onto the Mac's Hard Drive.
Whew! There was a nerd alert for a reason.
Anyway, this leads me to having a machine with far less setup time and, more importantly, far less down time should I need to redeploy it.
Stay tuned for more adventures in Nerdland...
Posted by crowej at 12:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 3, 2005
...Remote Desktop
Today's vignette puts the spotlight on Remote Desktop. This cool little program is oft-overlooked, but I hope to change all that. Please read the Q and A
QUESTION: So what's so cool about Remote Desktop?
ANSWER: This just happens to be all that, the chips, and some really good dip.
QUESTION: ?? You didn't really say anything.
ANSWER: Oh, sorry. I got carried away. You see Remote Desktop allows one to sit at one computer and control another computer, like your one at work. You can be in your house and pretend you're at work. What a way to spend an evening!
QUESTION: Wait, you mean anyone can just control my computer - that's horrible.
ANSWER: No, "Speed 2" was horrible, but I see your point...come to think of it the original "Speed" was fairly rotten too. Have you ever looked at the bus jumping scene? They would really have needed a ramp for that to have worked.
QUESTION: Who cares about some dumb movie! Who can control my computer?
ANSWER: Right. Anyone with local administrative privileges are automatically added to the Remote Desktop Users group. Most WOU users are local admins, though some are not. This for most WOU machines, just you and the UCS techs.
QUESTION: Why wouldn't I be and Admin and how do I know?
ANSWER: I'll answer those in reverse order. To determine if you are try this simple test. On your XP machine, double click the clock in the menu bar. If you can change the time, you have admin privileges. If not, you don't.
QUESTION: You said XP machine, what if I have Windows 98?
ANSWER: HA, you're a riot! ...oh, you were serious? Well, Windows 98 is so antiquated (and insecure) that it actually doesn't have any kind of security. If you are on the computer, you can do anything. Also, Remote Desktop is for our XP users only. You '98 folks won't be cursed much longer. You see, we'll be mograting all departments in due course and we won't allow those stinky '98 machines on our new domain. Someone brought up that the '98 folks may still wish to use a computer now and then, so it'll be replaced with a new machine.
QUESTION: And why wouldn't I already be an Admin?
ANSWER: That's actually a prickly question. You see, if a user is not able to make serious system-wide changes, then WOU machines stay in working order a lot longer. They're less susceptible to virus attacks, spyware, monkeying and fiddling. Furthermore, we have some folks on campus that don't realize that buying one copy of a program does not entitle you to install it willy-nilly on whatever computers you'd like. That actually is a violation of law. A law with big teeth. WOU could incur some very heavy fines if we were ever audited. Long story short, I lost this battle so now everyone can be an admin. If you find you're not, please call the Service Request Line at 88925 to get that changed.
QUESTION: Okay, so now I'm an Admin, what's next?
ANSWER: You need to know your IP.
QUESTION: No, I just went.
ANSWER: No, no. Your IP address for the machine you wish to control. Kinda like the address for your house. You can find out your IP address any number of ways. The simplest is to go to http://www.whatismyip.com. It'll display a number starting with 140.211. Take note of that.
QUESTION: So noted...what's next?
ANSWER: Go to your controlling machine. To keep this Q and A short-ish we're just going to cover the scenario of your controlling machine being an XP computer. Go to the "Start" menu. Go to the following:
"All Programs" -> "Accessories" -> "Communications" -> "Remote Desktop Connection"
Where it says computer, type the IP address you got earlier. I'll talk about the setting within Remote Desktop at a later time. My Pizza just got out of the oven; now it needs to get in my belly.
Posted by crowej at 10:12 PM | Comments (5)