Windows 7, Soup’s On!

It takes forever to install.  I had to find SOMETHING fun about the eternal wait. . .

Sorry, but I was really bored!

Bing is a Disease – Literally

Hey, my cohort’s fortune cookie fortune is all I needed as proof…

Perhaps confirming the obvious. . .

Importing Outlook 2007 PST Files to Thunderbird 2.0

Well, it is not the easiest journey.  Especially if you, like me, no longer have access to your Outlook 2007 Media.  But here is a way to pull it off. No guarantees, but hope it saves you some time:

1.0 YOU NEED OUTLOOK
OK, you can try to do it without Outlook using a plug-in, but I couldn’t get that working.  Other than that Thunderbird can’t recognize PST files without Outlook installed.  If you don’t have access to your media you can download the Trial version from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/outlook

When you install Outlook, it will set up a mail account – be sure to set one up, even if it is bogus.  Because with no email profile, Outlook won’t create a PST file…and with no default PST file, you can’t open a DIFFERENT PST file.  Why? Oh, please don’t get me started…

2.0 OUTLOOK MUST BE ACTIVATED
For me, if Outlook wasn’t activated, I couldn’t point it to my PST file.  It would blubber about it being a “reduced functionality mode.” Activation, luckily, cures this.

3.0 OUTLOOK MUST BE YOUR DEFAULT MAIL PROVIDER
You can change it later, but if you already have Thunderbird as your default, then Thunderbird import will fail.  So, when you install Outlook, make sure it is set to be your default mail program (No, I don’t know how to set it after you install).

4.0 REMOVE PST PLUG-IN (IF YOU INSTALLED IT)
If you installed the PST plug-in from Softpedia, uninstall it and restart Thunderbird.  That thing will block Thunderbird’s default import process.

5.0 OK, YOU ARE READY!!
Once you have set the stage by completing the above steps, you can begin the process of importing your PST files to Thunderbird by doing the following:

• In Outlook, you should have a default PST.  To get to YOUR PST, you use the FILE -> DATA FILE MANAGEMENT menu option, click ADD and point it to the PST  you want to use.
• Then you will point to that file, click the SET AS DEFAULT and restart Outlook.
• If you are paranoid, like me, you will then go back into data file management, remove the default PST file and restart Outlook.  Because Thunderbird creates file-based email folders, I want to make sure it didn’t encounter 2 “Inbox” folders – I don’t know how it would handle that. 
• WARNING: If you have nested folders in your PST and any folders have the same name, I’ve read you can encounter problems with Thunderbird’s import. In Outlook, you will want to review your folder names and make sure there are no duplicates.
• Close Outlook, and start Thunderbird
• Use Thunderbird’s Tools -> Import and select “mail”, then select “Outlook” - it SHOULD, with all the above steps completed, begin the process of importing your data. Mine took about 10 minutes, and was about 480MB of data.
• Repeat the above only select “Address Books” and that should bring in your contacts.

I am far from an expert, here.  Just a computer geek that found the learning curve a bit obnoxious, and thought I would share what I found out.  If it didn’t work, you can try Aid4Mail (i didn’t). Good Luck!

The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the whole new buzzword… but what about Dark Cloud Computing? What is it?  WHAT IS IT, YOU SAY? Let me tell you a tale. 

THE GROUND WORK
As the mad dash goes on to reuse components across the enterprise and indeed across multiple enterprises and even the world-wide web itself, there exists a plethora of sick little “anti-methodologies”  that have cropped up.  They call themselves agile, extreme or by whatever buzzword makes them appear to be decent, but it is all LIES I say. LIES!! Let us examine but just a few of the soulless zombieponents out there. . . wandering and sucking the brains of innocent coders who tread in their path:

Code Name: Evolving Protoype
Real Names: Frankenvolver, Gonkulator
This poor mutant starts its diseased technolife as a spreadsheet, a few static html pages, or maybe a toolkit downloaded to help someone learn a thing or two.  Modules are added on piece by piece.  Like plumbing that was never architected – the pipes are wired-up and welded on the fly.  They are split, merged, rerouted, heated, cooled, cracked and duck-taped together.  Intricate arrays of small kitchen funnels, feeding the leaks into thousands of feet worth of Home Depot plastic tubing.  Frankenware is born!  It wanders the code scape, in a slow, plodding fashion – oozing bits and bytes as it slogs through existence.  Changes and add-ons become so complex that one day, while unchecking a checkbox, a user generates a catastrophic error condition that butterfly-effects through the whole system.  Airplanes crash in mid-air collisions, China invests heavily in the US debt and curing the financial crisis, with the exception that a strange beam emanating from Alaska blankets the earth in a putrid ray that brings every soiled diaper ever created to life and seeking human flesh. Behold, the Gonkulator has achieved its end-game.

Code Name: Application Programming Interface
Real Names:  Glueware, The 7-Layer Burrito
This sedentary leech leads a life of obfuscation through feigned reuse. Multiple vendor systems, sporting an API tout how they can be connected to achieve customer’s goals without them having to “pay ridiculous prices” for custom-developed software.  Purchasing 8 or 10 of their favorite titles, customers then hand them over to software developers to “get them working together. It should be easy. They have an API…”  Some of the APIs return morbidly warped SOAP headers, others use XML so strict that forgetting a slash results in an entire service halt requiring a server reboot, while others provide incompatible formats requiring walkers to translate via XSLT into an EDI through a JSON to save as a compressed semaphore file.  The customer starts complaining how they are spending more on the integration than they had to pay for the actual software, and they blame the in-house software developers for being incompetent.  2 vendors are bought out by larger competitors, the entire staff of the original company is right-sized into tent city, and the product now demands a maintenance fee for support it can no longer provide, because it has fired anyone who had any knowledge of the intellectual property that made the sale worth while to the buyer.  As tension mounts, the software engineers thanklessly make the impossible happen – the system is finally stabilized, and even though clicking a button sometimes yields a 40 second wait time before the calendar will pop-up and allow them to enter a date, the customer claims a bitter victory.  2 weeks later, 4 of the vendors release mandatory automatic updates that unwind the whole system and bring it to a screeching halt.  Again the in-house software developers (left in charge of the integration) are blamed for not predicting the future using their Magic 8-Ball.

There are MANY others…
Code Name: Enterprise Service Bus
Real Names: Codestapation, Bloatificus Maximus

Code Name: Data Transformation Services
Real Names: Mayan Calendar Syndrome

ENTER THE DARK CLOUD
Now you can imagine where this probably goes.  These abominations are proliferated -  bolted together at a whole new level by scalable virtualization.  Hosted on farms of 486 processor-based units sporting terabytes of storage exposed through a sea of 100MB hard-drives with 3-prong SAN adaptors; we are able to deliver The Dark Cloud.  Now, creating a user account can take hours instead of minutes.  Diagnosing the source of a problem can take years.  interpreting the results of a logical error can become less accurate than ever before.  And, we will stand tall and call this PROGRESS.

It is a brave new world indeed when we can present users with portlets that have 60% overlapping functionality, scores of buttons and roll-overs, all smooshed into a technicolor CSS nightmare that delivers functionality in the most convoluted fashion possible and routing even the simplest requests through countless levels of auditing that cannot be deciphered for any usable purpose, generating mismatched results, and yielding such rage at work that road-rage becomes child’s play.

All the while, more and more blame is heaped on those inferior “in-house” developers, who in a strange twist of fate are the dying breed that knows the true craft of software development…strangled at the hands of self-appointed experts who fired their actual engineers long ago.

And as irony on top of irony – the customer who glued these mutants together spent 10 times the actual cost to develop an elegant solution, blamed the knowledgeable, and passed all the additional accountability to THEIR customers…

They call this: Progress
Real Names: Devo, Insanity

THE END!! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Story Time…

OK, it was late and I couldn’t sleep. So, I stayed up into the wee hours writing a story.  Why not.  It is called “Story 2912″ and I have no clue what it is about yet.  But hope you like it

Fort Hood, A Profile of One

I read this article by Steve Chapman, cautioning folks to not denounce the Muslim community because of extremists, and I think it bears repeating. 

America has over 900 hate-based organizations.  One of the major categories includes “Christian-based” hate groups that cause violence at abortion clinics, harass non-white ethnicities, and tell gays and lesbians, “God has a place for you in hell.”  Do we say,”Oh man – those Christians are crazy! Better condem the WHOLE lot of them!!”  No.  If I disagree, I don’t disagree with all of Christianity… I disagree with the organization and its members.

If it is not the act of an organization, then it could just be the person has broken  down.  This, IMHO, is what I think happened in Florida and at Fort Hood.  Don’t bother trying to blame the military, the Muslims, the employer, the high school these guys came from or whatever…  these people just went nuts, and need to be held accountable for their actions.

Every group, every race and every politcal party has individuals who go off the deep end. If there is an organization behind the activity, be my guest to condemn the organization; otherwise be prepared to accept the individual as repsonsible for their actions, and leave the blame where it belongs: on the person who made a poor choice!

Cloud-SaaS-ASP-ness

For those who want more than a blurred definition of “Cloud Computing,” might I suggest a healthy read: 8 myths of cloud computing, by Tarak Modi.  Tarak and I go way back. OK, no we don’t, but I did enjoy the article and for those of you who don’t have time for the whole thing… it’s kinda like this:

WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING? (the short version)
ASP and SaaS offer isolated solutions.  The cloud offers an interconnected pool of solutions.  Virtualization offers resources that are abstracted away from their physical hardware.  The cloud offers processing/storage capability across a massive pool of virtualized resources that can be dynamically scaled up and down as needed to match demand.

CAN THE CLOUD “FIX” MY IT PROBLEMS?
Cloud computing is powerful; however, buying a faster, “greener”, cooler car won’t improve your driving skills.  The Cloud is no more a one-size-fits all solution than anything else so don’t get all “snake oil” happy and dump your IT infrastructure so you can play in “the Clouds” like all the other IT boys and girls.

Paging DataTables? Think Twice.

 

This wasn’t my original opinion until I talked with a team member at work.  Funny how I don’t talk DataTables at the beach or while slogging beers at Medieval Times.  Anyway the problem, I thought, was…writing an efficient mechanism for paging through thousands of potential search results in this application I was working on.

Is paging what your users WANT?

But then, my teammate asks,”Have you ever LIKED paging through thousands of search results?” No. Can’t say that I have… In most cases where I have thousands of results, I would rather:

• Crawl under a rock and drink more beer
• Do a more detailed query to lesson the results
• Sort the results based on certain criteria

Prettymuch ANYTHING but be stuck wondering,”Maybe if I click forward to page 57 it will be closer to the data I am looking for.”  So, the cosmic point here is…if you find yourself investing effort figuring out how to present a large amount of data to your users…maybe the FIRST thing to do is step back and make sure that’s what your users WANT to see. 

Cosmic, huh? Yeah, sometimes that 5 watt bulb burns bright for me.

Thinking About Pre-Paid Legal Services?

The web is the weirdest thing on our planet… I got a message via my YouTube channel from someone who knows my buddy Scott, and he was asking about Pre-Paid Legal Services because he was thinking of joining.  I wrote him back and then thought, maybe this should go on the blog for others who might want an opinion:

Yes, I have been a PrePaid subscriber for years. Yes, they truly were an MLM, although these days you can go directly to PPL and join without going through an associate, I think.

Pros: Unlimited phone consultations with attornies who practice the law pertinent to your issue and are licensed in the area where you need them (for example, if I am in CO and doing a real estate transaction in AZ, PPL will put me in contact with a real estate attorney in AZ).

They will review up to a certain number of pages (5 or 10) of contract verbiage to advise you on it, and they will write certain types of letters on your behalf. These are “metered” per month depending on your plan.

There are other benefits and riders you can “bolt on” to the $26/mo base price. It is month-to-month, and you can scale up or down. At one time we had the “small business” rider, which helped with LLC/S-Corp type questions for our business.

Cons: There really is no con as long as customers understand that no attorney is going to take them on as a client without them shelling additional cash out of pocket! I have no idea if the rates are truly discounted compared to street rates, but my focus is to use PPL as information for “self-help” and as a way to avoid actual litigation.

Overall I am a happy customer, but even if you don’t like it, you will be out I think $10 to sign up and $26 for the first month – that’s a pretty cheap “pilot program” and I think you will find it is pretty legit.

Hope this info prooves useful. My rep/reseller is Diane Glass. I do not resell but if you don’t have anyone to “give credit to” and if they still need a “name” be my guest to use hers.

Purple & Green

Maybe there are some places where it is not easy to be green. Here doesn’t seem to be one.

Theodore Roosevelt Island

 

Path next to my infamous bus stop

  

Ugly Condos - Pretty Trees

 

 

Even the bus I rode was green (At least today)