November 2005 - Posts
Want to have some more themes for Sharepoint, well now you can...
http://www.infotechcanada.com/productivity_solutions/themepack.aspx
Nice work guys.
Now, this does seem like an interesting airline ;)
Book whilst the flights are at a great price!
http://www.lynxjet.com/
Thanks to Robert Westfall from the Minasi forum for letting me know about this :)
Add encarta@conversagent.com to your list of buddies in MSN Messenger and you now have a very cool Encarta lookup system. Nice!
We have released Squawkbox 3.0.4 and recommend all upgrade to this version. For support, please use the forums at www.squawkbox.ca
The download mirrors are available on www.squawkbox.ca, but you can download from my site right now.
Download Squawkbox 3.0.4
The MD5 Checksum is:
b7d1845c059794f89602844fcaa16071
I am pretty sure that a lot of you that read this blog will be happy to know that Squawkbox 3.0.4 is currently in beta testing. This release will bring you many cool things like:
- Send aircraft information to all clients, not just pilots. Allows visual ATC clients like tower to display SB aircraft correctly.
- Allow use of .msg command without entering an initial message.
- Fixed crash bug triggered by opening multiple instances of the options dialog (bug 534).
- Fixed several typos in the VIP aircraft.cfg file (bug 544).
- Fixed problem where newly added planes briefly appear at the user's location (bug 556).
- Flight plan dialog items are saved in the registry even if the flight plan is not transmitted or saved.
- Added support for new FSUIPC events triggering private voice PTT (requires FSUIPC 3.50 or greater).
- Added code to check for innapropriate local modifications to equipment.txt that would cause bad data to be transmitted in the PI packet.
- Increased FSUIPC connect timeout from 2 to 4 seconds and require two consecutive failures to trigger a failed connection to FS.
- Upgraded to FSUIPC 3.50.
- Upgraded to Squawkbox 3 Data 2005112100.
- Added major VIP3 update.
So, keep an eye on www.squawkbox.ca for news....
George Best, simply the best football player in the world from the island of Ireland, has died today aged 59. Not bad for the amount of abuse he gave that body.
I am not the biggest football fan in the world, more of a rugby man.... but no one can deny this guys talent. There is a great video of his skill on www.footballclips.net which it well worth the download.
This morning, my mailbox had a couple of links to video clips that I am sure others would be interested in, so here goes…
The first is from an email, it is a great selection of crosswind landings…. Especially the last one!
View Here
The other video you will find on Owen Hewitt’s blog, it is a Christmas house lighting video with a difference. Some people have waaaay too much time on their hands.
View Here
From now on I am recommending to our clients, friends, suppliers that they no longer use UPS as a carrier. Here is the reason.
If you import goods from outside the EU, you have to pay VAT @ 21% on the price of those goods. That part is fair enough. However, when you receive the invoice, there is a section that says "Other charges". This is currently €13.50 per package. Can you Imagine the money they are making with this charge?!
Now, if you call UPS and ask them to explain this charge, they simply fob you off and give you various excuses, none of which make sense. It's a bloody disgrace! One of the reasons I got this time I called was that they charge this fee because they have to pay the revenue first and then collect the money from the person they are delivering to. Ha! Classic! and only in Ireland could this happen....
I called the revenue commissioners in Ireland, who are working directly with UPS offices, and they have informed me that this fee is nothing to do with them. How convenient eh?
So, it seems that the only way to hurt UPS is in the pocket... Either call them on the freephone number 1800 575757 (that costs them money) and complain, or simply stop using them to delivery goods. Tell your suppliers as well.
Edit:
For the record DHL do not have this charge...
Every day I get the same question in my blog mailbox from various sources. So, I thought I would answer it here for everyone to see.
"Nick, when will the next version of Flight Simulator be released?"
Here is my answer:
If indeed there is a new version of Flight Simulator (Which I hope there will be, otherwise there are a lot of people sitting in a building in Redmond doing nothing) then I do not know when it will be released. Even if I did, I could not tell you as I am under a very strict Non Disclosure Agreement as part of the MVP program.
What I will say is that if you ask anyone involved on the program the answer you will get is that the team are always working on the next version. And they are.... very hard.
So, when I know and I am allowed to tell you, you will probably know already :)
Update your bookmarks.. Matthieu Laban, the talented developer who is writing his own flight simulator has moved his blog.
The new blog is here but I am yet to find the RSS Feeds. I am sure Matthieu will post them on the new site. Nice work on the new site Matthieu!
One of the posts on the new blog interests me a lot. Matthieu has written a task manager for Windows Mobile 5.0, which I really need... the KJAM does not like it when you open up Skype :)
Edit: I had to install .NET Compact Framework 2.0 to get the task manager to work.
Steve Lacey has just opened his XBOX 360. Handy for him as he works next door to the Xbox guys ;) Man, I am jealous... It seems that I have to wait a bit longer to get my 360 for two reasons:
1. They are not here yet.
2. I will be divorced if I buy one. (Apparently I do not use the playstation and Xbox 1 enough)
But hey.... maybe it will be worth it
Just take a look!
I LOVE cool add-ons for Outlook. We have yet another simply fantastic one from the guys that brought us Skylook, the popular add-on for Skype.
Waxmail is a free add-on for outlook that allows you to compose easily a voice email directly from outlook. What I really love about it is the compression of the voice message MP3 file that this has achieved. No more typing for me! Expect all emails in voice format from now on.
If you do purchase the licence, which I recommend, then the single line at the bottom of the outgoing Waxmail is gone forever.
Simply brilliant…. Give it a go.
http://www.waxmail.biz/
Wow! That was some move.... Some things are still left to do, but hopefully no more crashing of the blogs....
The next task is to get us moved to Community Server......
With this, you can add ITV, BBC Channels and more to your Sky box. I cannot think why Sky have not simply put them on the Irish Sky listings, probably some licencing agreement that yet again see's us Irish viewers missing out on something.
This was posted over at boards.ie, but just in case it gets pulled or something, here is an adobe acrobat snapshot on the instructions provided by Charles.
I knew we had wind up laptops… but thunderbird puppets as well!
Muhahahaaaaa…. Thanks Norman Blackburn for pointing this out.
Full story here
Since it is late, and I am all SQL'd out, I will not post much on this as I am sure that Susan Bradley will post more. Suffice to say, a load of records are now no longer part of the msmvps.com blog.... 8 Million to be exact.
While we are on the subject of Smart Phones, another issue that I found today was that my Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) was not working correctly. I was getting all the symptoms described in Microsoft's Article 817379
as you can see in that article, for SBS users; it basically says to rerun the wizards. However that did not work for me. I thought back and remembered that I had not used OMA since I migrated using Jeff Middleton's Swing kit a while back. It is either possible that the migration causes this, or some other anomaly had... I contacted PSS (thanks Damien) who took a look deeper for me.
It turns out, that with Exchange Server 2003 SP2, OMA accounts are looked for differently and therefore I was getting this issue. The problem was that the homeMTA property of the user’s accounts was incorrect (looking at a deleted record). The homeMTA setting must, in fact, be the same as the Microsoft MTA setting that is under the configuration\services\exchange side of Active Directory. Once that entry was correct, then OMA was working again.
Of course, this may be a very rare issue... but others may come across it.
Today, my new IMate K-JAM arrived. What a beauty of a Smart phone it is. However, there is a limitation that is going to affect all of us SBSers....
Due to a limitation in Windows Mobile 5.0, the utility that used to allow self signed certificates be trusted no longer works. What this essentially means is that until the Windows Mobile team produce a new tool to allow this, then we have two choices. The first is to go and purchase a certificate, the second is to turn off SSL on activesync. Both of these options suck.
Feel free to go hassle the team about this on their blog post on the subject.
EDIT:
Hang on... just for giggles, I exported the .cer file from the server, then copied to the Mobile. After that, I simply double clicked on it and installed the cert. SSL is working.
However... this REALLY does need to be an easier process.
Hal Bryan has a lovely, and to the point post up on his blog about emails to this address and how they do in fact read them.
I am going to answer one particular section of that post:
User: At the very least ya should make it easier for scenery designers to create time-reactive scenery.
Hal: Since I’m far from a scenery expert, I don’t really have a sense for how hard this is now, but I’m happy to agree with MD anyway and say yes, it would be great if we made it easier.
It will be nice when things become easier, but hey... what’s the fun in finding out how to do it yourself then :) If you take a trip over to SceneryDesign.org you will find a cool tool called MDLTweaker, written by Arno, which will allow you to do exactly this. We are currently testing (from memory, publicly) MDLTweaker II, which will do even cooler things.
Mike Zyskowski and Norah Hogoboom have opened up the blogs, making that a total of Eleven ACES team bloggers! Welcome Z and Norah!
That is a high percentage of bloggers from one team; in fact... it may be unheard of... I must check with the SBS team and ask how many bloggers they have per head. Last I asked, the FS team had 60 people - therefore 18.33% of them are now blogging. Now that is dedication to the community!
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