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Showing posts from 2009

Switch your mail reader to Thunderbird....NOW!

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Please don't wait. I'm usually not one to step on a soap-box to promote a product (steps down...) but this is a good one, one which many already know about and use. I used to be a heavy Evolution user. Dunno why I initially made this decision, only that it came installed on my Ubuntu Jaunty install as the default email client with the Gnome UI . I started having some issues with it recently, where the retrieval of my POP3 or sending mail caused it to hang. I read a few bug reports and posts related to clearing out temporary ~/.evolution files, but this really never worked very well, as the issues always reappeared. The last straw was not being able to expunge the Trash bin , and after a little bit of playing, decided I needed to migrate my mail to something else. I figured since I already used Firefox , I might just as well take the Thunderbird plunge. Boy, was I glad I did! It was a snap using these directions, " How To Migrate From Evolution To Thunderbird In Ubunt

Programmatically Change Printer Settings

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Image via Wikipedia I recently had the need to provide printer admin access on an ERP server to ordinary users. Nothing makes me shudder more than elevating a users access on a machine that holds your entire business operation on it's drives... I was able to come up with a solution using CPAU.exe which I've written about here . The scenario: An active label printer and a backup. When one goes down, the other needs to be put into service, but it needs to have the same name as the active one did. The users then also need to be able to "flip a switch" to put the active one back into service. First, I needed the guts of the switching script, which makes use of Microsoft 's prncnfg.vbs script, stored on all Windows boxes in the %windir%\ system32 directory (Called ChangePrinter.cmd) : @ECHO OFF @SET _ONE=ACTIVEPROD @SET _ONE_DOWN=ACTIVEPROD_146 @SET _TWO=BACKUPPROD @SET _HOST=BAPFSVR03 :: PRINTERS RECEIVE ADDRESSES VIA DHCP :: WHEN NO ERROR CONDITIONS E

Indian Seafood Soup

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This afternoon my wife had to work, so dinner was on me. She left me a bag of assorted frozen seafood we bought at Woodman's in Kenosha defrosting in the sink. What to do, what to do... I had a half a vadalia onion left over in the fridge. Image via Wikipedia One yellow bell pepper. One heaping teaspoon of chopped garlic ( from the jar ). One heaping teaspoon of ginger paste. One large tomato. Two heaping teaspoons of lemon grass ( from the jar ). 1/2 Can drained garbanzo ( chickpeas ) beans. 1 15oz can chicken broth . 1 15oz can coconut milk . 2 cans ( use one of the others you emptied ) water. 4 chicken bullion cubes. 1/2 teaspoon red chili pepper . 1 teaspoon ground coriander. 6 green cardomom seeds. 1/2 stick cinnamon. 1 teaspoon yellow curry. 1 teaspoon fish sauce . 2 teaspoons ghee . 2 tablespoons olive oil . Salt to taste. Holy crap, that's allot of ingredients. In large'ish pot, add ghee and oil (oil keeps ghee from burning...it tolerates higher heat). Add cho

Using ImageMagick and Tesseract to sort TIFFs on Windows

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Recently I wrote a post about my search for a TIFF iFilter that would enable me to use VBScript to query a Windows Indexing Services server for file management. I found that since OCR is never always 100% accurate, neither were my attempts at sorting all the inbound EMR faxes we get each day. I did however, find Tesseract , a great product that was originally developed by HP and proprietary, and is now developed by Google and licensed under the Apache License v2, open source . It is one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. It is quite basic, and in the version you obtain from the project page , it only operates from the command line, and without the libtiff library, will only do it's work on un-compressed TIFFs. More information can be found on the project pages , and Wikipedia . Doing some scouring, I aso found a front-end , and ArchivistaBox, a complete document management system . Image via Wikipedia I'm using it in Windows, so I needed to do one of

Traveling via Amtrak

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My wife, son and I recently took a trip to St Louis , to visit her Mom and Dad. We always have a good time, but don't look forward to the drive, as it takes 7 hours or so one way from 'lil old SE Wisconsin . Image via Wikipedia Thankfully, she looked into an older style of travel for our most recent trip to visit G'ma and G'pa; Amtrak . The cost is not much more than it is to drive. Fuel costs driving our mini-van is usually about $120, not to mention the fuel my son expends attempting to break out of his car seat ... The cost for our train ride was $188 with tax. Our son rode for 1/2 price since he is only 3. The trip took nearly the same amount of time, and we could ALL nap on the way down. We were able to bring a small cooler with lunch, play for a couple of hours in the dining car ( coloring books , puzzles, etc.) The only complaint I will lodge is customer service is a bit lacking. Our initial inquiries indicated we had the ability to check a bag, but foun

Automating Repetitive Twitter Tasks Using Linux

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First, I realize this is going to generate some issues for some, since Twitter 's use is primarily for micro-blogging , keeping connected with others, but some have been using it for other various reasons. Image via CrunchBase I think the producing backlinks (which really doesn't work as far as Google is concerned...but I digress) and driving website traffic are two good examples, and these are what I've been investigating with a couple of accounts at Twitter. One of those accounts is @zippydpinhead . I picked on him because I used to read Zippy the Pinhead comic strips in HighTimes magazine in my early 20's and thought it was...*dude*...*funny*...*cough**cough*... I primarily use Ubuntu for my workstation these days, but have used Linux for years on the desktop and in small enterprise. My experiments were first to see if automation worked. Fortunately we have curl and a multitude of posts on the subject floating about the internet. My zippy character posts several

Tweaking Indexing Service

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Image via Wikipedia Looking for methods to exclude files in our Indexing Service repository, I found some information on the MSDN with sparse descriptions of registry values. Fortunately, Microsoft KB article 322896 provides a direct set if instructions.

The Search for a Great Tiff iFilter

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I recently wrote a VBScript utility that queries the contents of an Indexing Service database, finds the indexed Fax documents ( CCITT Group 4 (2d) Tiff's), sorts and moves them to another repository located on a SAN. Option Explicit Dim oCon Dim oCmd Dim oRst Dim sQry Dim sString Dim sScope Dim sAqScan Dim sFile Dim sPath Dim sMoveTo Dim sNum Dim FSO Dim sDate Dim sDosText Dim sDateDir Dim sDateDiff Dim sMonth Dim sDay Dim sYear Dim nCnt '/////////////////////////////////////////// ' ' Create the FSO ' '//////////////////////////////////////////////// Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") '///////////////////////////////////////////////// ' ' Scope, Aquaius scan dir and Query. ' '//////////////////////////////////////////////// sScope = "F:\Incoming Fax\CWHHM\" sAqScan = "F:\Scanned Docs\Aquarius\14CWHHM\" sQry = "Select Path, Filename, Size, Contents " _ & "FRO

Canon ImageRunner Job Accounting Setup

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One of my clients required job accounting for an iR C2550 Canon printer. This is how I did it TM . Step One : Set up printers on server Set up two printers on the server. One will be used for color, the other for B&W. Give them names that differentiate this. On the Security tab of the drivers, ensure that the Manage Printer ACL is not checked. B&W Specific Driver Settings: General Tab , Printing Preferences, Quality Tab, Color Mode is set to Black & White . Advanced Tab, Printing Defaults, Quality Tab, Color Mode is set to Black & White. Device Settings Tab, Job Accounting is checked. Device Settings Tab, Job Accounting, Settings, Allow Password Setting is checked, and 1000 is in the ID field. Password is blank. Do not use Job Accounting for B&W and Confirm Password when Printing are not checked. Color Specific Driver Settings: Quality steps 1 & 2 from above should default to Auto Detect. This should not be changed. Device Settings Tab,

Add Google Analytics code to Efficon Articles module

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My employer, IHBSOnline.com , uses the Efficon Articles 3.x module in DotNetNuke to aid in driving website traffic. Every morning, I troll the news sites , and add News content items to the module. Then I use Twitter to announce these additions. I can easily browse to the posts and see the number of hits these items generate. Image via CrunchBase I also use the iFinity Google Analytics module to track my web traffic . Unfortunately, you can't add this module to any post, since technically, it's not really a page. I played around a bit, and found that I was able to add my code to the DesktopModules/Articles/ArticleDetailsStandard.aspx, and start tracking my posts!

Canon iR C2880 Debian UFR and Postscript drivers

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I've always disliked the fact that I couldn't print to our Canon iR C2880 in color. It's not got the postscript option, which had I known how difficult it would have been for non- Windows PC's to use it, I would have investigated that option. They advertise the fact that the folks at Codehost, Inc. make a product called BrightQ that will print to these machines, but I never got it working well on my SuSE distribution . Image via Wikipedia I just recently updated my desktop from SuSE Linux Desktop Enterprise 10.1 to Ubuntu 9, and I've not been more pleased, but STILL couldn't print in color to our Canon...until now. I found a thread about this subject here where a kind soul named Andy informed the board that Canon Australia released Linux UFR and Postscript drivers in Deb, RPM, and source  (link updated 7/29/2013)! According to the documentation, the following Canon printers are supported: LBP3360 LBP3370 LBP3460 LBP5360 Image via Wikipedia

GFI Faxmaker using IIS SMTP Services

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I've been using GFI Faxmaker since around version 10, but mostly in Exchange environments, and usually trying to get it to work with a variety of analog modems. Image via Wikipedia I have a customer that's moving to a hosted Exchange solution, and we've just moved the last of the users mailboxes off-site. Now came the simple task of pointing the Email2FAXGateway settings to send mail to the hosted servers. We don't use GFI Faxmaker to send, so won't have to resort to any special TextAPI formatting, outlined at GFI's support site. We initially performed a test, sending inbound fax messages directly to the hosted servers, and it seemed to work well, but a few days later noticed there was a problem. I think what was happening was the hosting mail servers performed an RDNS ( reverse DNS ) lookup, which fails, since mail sent out of GFI appears to be coming from faxmaker.com. The solution was to set up IIS SMTP services, and relay all messages to our hosting

John Croson's Bio

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This Bio was written by my employer. I was very flattered... John likes to refer to himself as a “jack of all trades”, but his experience and knowledge of technical and operating systems make him anything but a generalist. John’s background in information systems ranges from development of software , to design and implementation of hardware compatibilities, to key management-related duties, such as cost containment and budgeting, and training. When John started his career in the IT field, he was the Technology Operations Manager for a local art museum in Racine, WI . In that job, he maintained a heterogeneous 2-site environment for this organization while managing various IT-related projects. As he moved further with his career, he provided IT support and development with an IT consulting firm . His accomplishments here included the maintenance, administration and building of a multi-server environment, as well as implementing the related policies and procedures for network securi

Systems and Network Administrator Resume

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John Croson 2121 Taylor Avenue • Racine, WI 53403 • 262-237-8227 • john@croson.us 8 years of cross-platform experience in systems administration including analyzing, designing, installing, maintaining, and repairing hardware, software, peripherals and networks. Superior troubleshooting and technical support abilities with migrations, network connectivity, and security and database applications. Develop exceptional relationships with co-workers, management and end users. Excellent communication and problem solving skills Skills Technical Operating System Network Administration Server Design Internet / Intranet Configuration Hardware / Software Maintenance Security Testing / Patching Backup Solution Processing Technical / User Support VBA Solution Provider Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP Clients Windows NT, 2000, 2003 Server Apple OS 9, OS X Linux Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, FreeBSD Cisco IOS Managerial Software Cost Containment & Budgeti

DNN Site Map gives all pages the same priority

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Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Out of the box, DotNetNuke provides a method of programatically creating a search-engine friendly XML sitemap for easy website submissions to the likes of Google , Yahoo and others that accept that format. This is one of the first things to do in your quest for SEO . What it doesn't do, is accurately give a priority to pages. A priority is used by webmasters to set a level of imporance to a webpage. These numbers range from 0.0 to 1.0. All DotNetNuke sites prior to 5 assign a default value of 0.9 to all pages. Google, and others don't like the fact that all your pages have the same priority, which will likely cause them not to index your site. After doing a bit of research, I found a quick hack in the DotNetNuke forums , that assigns priorities based on page placement in your menu. 1 to your home page , 0.9 to all other first level pages, 0.8 to second level pages, and so on. Just recently I've found another approach outlined

DNN HTML Site Map Module

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Another step towards an SEO site, and providing a user-friendly site map , is to use Derek Trauger's DNN SiteMap Module . It does a fine job. Just have a look here: http://www.ihbsonline.com/Site_Map.aspx .

DotNetNuke SEO

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I've been reading quite a bit lately on improving SEO for our DotNetNuke website , IHBSOnline.com and quickly realized it just isn't enough to throw up a website, add a listing in a couple of search engines and wait for the masses. First off, the DnnFriendlyUrlProvider, while writing friendlier URL's than older versions of DNN, could be better. This is why you need the iFinity FriendlyURL provider. It is free, but keep in mind it is really designed for a single domain site, and presents other issues with some other 3rd party modules. If you fall into that category, I'd suggest you purchase the full version, as it adds additional functionality you'll need and want. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife I've learned that Google and possibly other search engines actually penalize you if you create duplicate content. The duplicate content issue could easily arise if you have a host that responds to both http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com. Yo

Sunbelt VIPRE Enterprise and MY story

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This post was prompted by a couple of off-line inquiries into my experience with a recent VIPRE Enterprise deployment. I should point out that this is NOT my first deployment of anti-virus software . I've rolled out McAfee , Trend, and Symantec server/client solutions. I was probably found because of my activity on Twitter , since I was whining about it one day... In any case, here's my story. My client, a 3 shift manufacturing bakery with 90 clients and 5 servers, was looking to me and another consultant for suggestions for a replacement to Trend CSM, since it was expiring. It was suggested that we try VIPRE. I hadn't used it, did a bit of research, and eventually agreed to that it would be a good fit. It was easy to roll out, and even easier to manage. One issue I immediately called SunBelt about was the Admin UI, and it's inability to list the known vulnerability list without bogging down, and eventually bringing the server to it's knees. NOT a good th

Time Warner Customer Service

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Customer service these days seems to be lacking, when they should be excelling. I was talking about this topic with a co-worker yesterday over lunch. We both agreed that providers of goods and services need to be even more attentive to their customer base these days, especially in light of the fact that the economy is in such a mess. Image via Wikipedia My wife had received a call from our local Time Warner sales staff, suggesting we could save money by purchasing their bundled voice/data/cable package. We looked at the numbers and decided we could. At that time we used Dish Network for TV , Vonage for voice, and Time Warner/ Earthlink for data. It seemed like a no-brainer to her. She pays the bills, and it makes her life easier to pay fewer, especially when a 3 year old is demanding your undevided attention, or the laundry needs to get done, or the house needs to be cleaned, etc, etc, etc.