June 2006 - Posts
Clients often bug me about not being able to shutdown their PC's when they go home at night. Even though they want to work on them that evening...
Well now, thanks to some clever programming by Oliver Sommer (a fellow SBS MVP), you can have this feature embedded into SBS's Remote Web Workplace.
After the easy installation and licencing of the product on the server, the remote web workplace gets some new buttons....
You simply select the computer you wish to work with from the RWW List, and you can either send the Wake on LAN command to that PC, which will power it up, or you can send a Ping to see if it is alive on the network. Pretty cool. (Click the thumbnails below to see screen shots of the button responses.
The link to the site where I got this from does not seem to have an English page, something I hope that Oliver will fix. The software can be trialled for a few days, and I would suggest giving it a go. Users will love this feature.
I see that the IE Team at Microsoft have released Beta 3 of Internet Explorer 7 to the general public.
I have it running here pretty well, it seems to be getting better every time. I would suggest giving it a go.
For any of you that use Dot Net Nuke RSS Feeds, you will know that the built in reader does not display HTML tags correctly. There are plenty of other RSS readers (payware) available out there that work, but here is a MUCH cheaper way of fixing the problem :)
In the file DesktopModules/News/RSS91.xsl, change the line
<xsl:value-of select="description"/>
to
<xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
Credit to the person that found this issue. I could not find the link that I had for this note I took down.
Arno and I had a pretty productive day... it has been a while since we spoke.
Not to double up on the posts, you should have a read of the two posts Arno made to his own blog, linked below. Suffice to say, please vote on the Live-meeting and suggest topics on that thread.
One of the biggest complaints I hear about scenery design and tools is that people cannot understand them or want to make them better... this should be the answer!
Arno's posts are here and here
Bill Gates called me today to offer me a new job as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. I explained how busy I was working with the MVP program on SBS and Flight Simulator that I could not...
Good thing he had Ray as a backup.
Spam really does piss me off. I am getting to the stage where even with Antispam solutions in place, I still get too much. I am considering making it that any freeware service is blocked. The final straw was today when I got a very clever spam that I honestly thought I knew the sender and clicked the link... lets just say that it took me to a very nasty site... one I would not wish anyone to see.
Anyway... enough ranting, because there is one thing that everyone should be made to do in their DNS Setup. That is your SPF Record! It is a simple task to add to your own DNS servers, or for the ISP to add if they look after your domain.
To test if you have a SPF Record, do the following:
1. Go into a command prompt
2. Type "nslookup" and press return
3. Type "set type=txt" and press return
4. Type the domain you wish to check. Try nickwhittome.com as an example of a good record. Press return after typing in the domain.
If you get no TXT Record back, then you should contact your ISP and hassle them to set this up for you! If they do not know what you are talking about, point them to http://www.openspf.org/ which will give them (and you) all the answers.
If everyone implemented this then spam would be much less of a problem!
Just reading this over on Eric's blog, where he tells us that MSN 8 is going to be released next week.
This is great news, and as a beta tester I can tell you that you will love it!
For those Small Business Server 2003 users, you already know and use Sharepoint Services 2 (Your Companyweb). You probably love it and hate it at the same time!
Sharepoint Services 2, whilst "ok", really was missing some key elements to make it a truly impressive portal solution. Fellow MVP Chad Gross loves Sharepoint, but even he admits that the backup of data from it is not a simple task.
You are all going to get a big shock when you install Sharepoint Services 3. It is sweet...!
Granted, it is still in beta, but if you setup a Virtual Server you can test it for yourself on your network, and I suggest you do! (Obviously don't put this on your production server)
You should go and read the FAQ here, the Guide here and watch a demo here.
First, I warn you... if you are offended by the "F" word, don't watch this. If you are not, you will get a great laugh out of this legendary TV Show footage.
Click here
If, like me, you use Skype. You may be interested to know that they have released version 2.5 Public Beta
(I really wish they had a news RSS Feed on Skypes site!)
While we are waiting for the official feeds to start working, I have found a good alternative for those that use RSS religiously as I do.
KBAlertz have updated to include Flight Simulator 2004 now!
Flight Simulator 2004
http://www.kbalertz.com/rss/FlightSimulator2004-CenturyofFlight.xml
For some reason, it is only showing the last 10... but it is a start.