Novell and Micro$oft need to get their act together

Why, when I have to cancel a file transfer on Vista to a Novell drive does it always leave the cancel go?

This happens quite a bit.  I can’t wait for Vista SP1 and version 1 of the Novell client for Vista (rather than a beta).  I finally got smart in this case and put the files to a memory key and then put it on an XP box and uploaded it.

Xerox and Software Freedom Day

I couldn’t find this suggestion anywhere on the web, so I’ll put it here, even though it has nothing to do with Vista.  We had a problem with Xerox duplexing.  It seems that the drivers for the 6200N “work” for the 6200DP, but the N drivers don’t duplex…such an easy solution once you know that’s the problem.  I hope no one else spends much time on figuring that out!

Additionally, here’s a quote from the Software Freedom Day website:

“The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1] is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but with more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technology they are based on.

Transparent and sustainable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms. Think about e-Government systems such as electronic voting. When the systems running our voting is proprietary or closed, it means that we can’t be sure what the software actually does, so how can we trust the results? The issues with the Diebold [2] voting systems in the US is testament [3] to the need for transparent systems that are trustworthy. Think about other software you use everyday that is proprietary software and apply the fact that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing! Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browse history to someone? The most interesting case recently was when Sony purposely added spyware [4] to their music CDs that silently and automatically installed itself onto Microsoft Windows systems to search for piracy breaches. This behaviour has spawned a whole new wave of viruses and is a gross breach of privacy.

So what do I mean by transparent? Well some software gives you access to the source code, such as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which ensures that you can know (or get checked) without any question what exactly a piece of software will do. It avoids nasty surprises, spyware, result rigging and all kinds of issues that we can’t be absolutely sure to avoid in proprietary software. Proprietary software keeps the source code locked away from public scrutiny which means that there is no way to know exactly what the software actually does, and no way to trust it to safeguard your human rights.

Sustainable technologies are also important, and the best example of the issue is proprietary data formats. Why should the generations of today not have access to the love letters, essays and poems of their youth? With many proprietary applications using proprietary data formats, we can’t access the information in other programmes or even future versions of the same programme. When data is stored in data formats based on open standards [5], there is the ability for people everywhere to easily use and implement the standard and have your data accessible by more applications well into the future.

Software Freedom Day is a global initiative with over 200 teams in 80 countries participating. Come along and meet a wide range of people, all working together to help ensure our freedoms are maintained by the technologies of tomorrow. “

• [1] – http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

• [2] – http://safevoting.org/videos/diebold_med.mov

• [3] – http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2433

• [4] – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4400148.stm

• [5] – http://www.openstandards.net/viewOSnet3C.jsp?showModuleName=about

The solution

Ok, the quickest solution for me to the Outlook issue was starting a new profile.  With exchange my rules and alerts were saved.  I’ve got to re-do the filters for IMAP though.  Shouldn’t be a big deal.

More on Outlook 2007 back to 2003

So, it appears in my move from 2007 back to 2003 my Exchange address book access got destroyed and now all I’ve got is those addresses saved in my BlackBerry.  Grrr.

I’m going to remove the email (as well as my IMAP because of problems there) and we’ll see what happens…

Going back to Outlook/Word 2003

Formatting this text is being weird, and I have no idea why…normally works fine.

So, today was the final straw for Outlook 2007.  I couldn’t search.  WTF?
Yeah I couldn’t search a folder or across folders…I couldn’t search.

Oh, there was a search box alright, but it NEVER returned any results.

I have a folder for ”Mark” and I’d search that folder for ”Mark” and it’d return nothing.

So, back to Outlook 2003.

Problem is, Word 2007 can’t apparently be the HTML editor for Outlook 2003,

which means I’m going back to Word 2003 also.

I don’t actually knw if that has fixed the problem yet,

because installing or uninstalling anything in Enterprise Office 2007 takes FOREVER.

I’ll be back to complain more if its not solved, but otherwise assume it solved.

editing the Vista registry

Did anyone get http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips1584.html to work in Vista?

Opera and WordPress

So today I begin testing the Opera browser on Vista.  I’ve been reading lately how Opera kicks Firefoxes tail.  I am a diehard Firefox fan, but have been having trouble with the alpha of 3 (yes, I know, they are alphas), so I’ve decided to give K-Meleon and Opera some goes.  K-Meleon is nice, but I don’t like the way their ”layers” (read: tabs) run together…I guess they don’t really look like tabs, which irritates me (to each their own).  Anyway, Opera is initially impressive with the new tabs opening up screenshots of favorites, which is pretty cool.  The thing I really like about Firefox is the extensions and things such as Google Sync, simply don’t work in Opera or K-Meleon.  This extension is kinda irritating in general because it’s proprietary and just works on 1.5/2.0.  With the supposed memory improvements, I’ll be excited to use it once there’s better extension support.  I know how to change the max version on the extensions, but sometimes they still don’t work (i.e. Foxmarks).  Google Toolbar doesn’t work except in IE or Firefox 2 either.  Very irritating.  At least Opera and K-Meleon are open source.

Refusing Vista

“Microsoft decide they will no longer allow new licenses on pre-installed copies of XP, forcing new PC owners to have Vista…..despite the fact that many don’t want it.” This is mostly a test of importing articles from Digg.

read more | digg story

Not a lot of triumphs thus far

So, this isn’t a Vista issue, but I’ve had to back way from Firefox 3 Alpha 1 for Pandora.  Something about the Flash integration makes Firefox’s memory usage shoot through the roof.  IE 7 seems to be doing a better job.  I never have this problem on campus, only at work, so I don’t know if it’s because of the slower computer here or because of Vista or some combination thereof.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I can’t search message folders in Microsoft Outlook 2007.  2003 does the job fine in XP.  It’s really irritating.  I’m either going to have to make more folders or delete some messages, because this machine is too slow to run a virtual machine.

I’m going to be working fulltime during the summer, so unless I get another job, there should be more updates this summer and hopefully SP1 will work smoothly!