John Croson's Blog Home

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.