Been meaning to do this for a while - in the process of switching from a Wordpress hosted site to my own server on Joomla with Easyblog....

On the topic on censorship, I'd just like to say █ █████ ████ ███ ████ ██ ████████ █ █████ ████ ███uckin██ ██ ███████████ ██████████ ██ ████ ████ █████ ███████ █??████ ██ █ ██████ █ ██ ███████████ █ ███████ █ ██ ████████ █ ████ █████therless███ ███████ █████ ██ ██ ██████ ███████ ███████ ███ ██ ██ ██ards█████ ██ █████ ███CKING!!!█ ███ ████ ██ ████████ █ █████ ████ ██████ ██ ███████████ ██████████ ██ ████ ████ █████ ███████ ██ght?!...

I love Windows 7. By far, the best Windows O/S ever made. Except for this problem: http://cnanney.com/video/win7-jump-bug/ THIS DRIVES ME BONKERS. When it first started happening, I chalked it up to a minor thing that I could ignore, but it’s now put me over the edge, and apparently it’s STILL a problem in the Windows 8 developer preview. For all the ‘usability’ marketing and PR we see for Windows 7, who invented this ‘feature’? There’s even a comment in the following thread from a Microsoftie that says it is ‘by design’: Windows Explorer expands folders inappropriately, jumping the folder you expand to the bottom of the navigation pane Saying it’s ‘by design’ is developer-speak for “we don’t want to fix it.” This is so annoying, I purchased Xplorer2 – a File Explorer replacement, which is great, except it doesn’t replace everything, and I still want to use the old Explorer for...

I bought a Rocket Stick this summer for occasional use when I needed it – meaning I didn’t want a monthly recurring bill. Seemed like a simple enough plan. So I bought a Rogers Pay-as-you-go Rocket Stick, and proceeded to spend a few hours trying to activate it online – a completely different story, but suffice it to say, there were some not-very-nice things passing over my lips that day. When I did finally get the stick activated, I missed the part about automatically billing me monthly – in fact when I initially tried to buy a month’s time, it told me I couldn’t use my credit card because it was due to expire within 3 months. That should have been a red flag. As it turns out, the 2nd month’s charge failed for some reason and gave me the chance to call Rogers and figure out I had to ‘opt...

I don’t sell or support Trend Micro products any longer (excepting the last few clients still using WFBS until their licenses expire), mostly because Trend has caused me little in the way of a joyful experience supporting their products over the years, and it’s only gotten worse of late. “Worry-Free Business Security” v7 was a complete disaster for me as client after client experienced issues with computer speed, and my company suffered hours of support time patching and babysitting the stuff. Anything BUT “Worry-Free,” IMO. Late last week, I helped a new client with their email – their old cloud filters got turned off unexpectedly, and they needed to get their email back and running quickly. I got their MX record changed and pointed to my company’s cloud filters, and did all the other things needed to get their email flowing again, and a couple hours later, they were back and...

I’ve been a Blackberry user now for about 3 years. Before that I was on Windows Mobile, and before that was using the Kyocera 7035 (Palm). They all did what I wanted them to – email mostly, and with Canadian carriers having been dragged into the 21st century, it’s actually possible to do more with data plans without needing a bank loan. So now I UberTwitter (er, UberSocial), a little Facebooking, and Google search from my Blackberry Bold 9780, but I find myself wanting more. The biggest change going to the Blackberry was the lack of touch screen – a bit of a step backwards from WM and Palm – but the abilities of email and the form-factor outweighed that lack of touch, plus I needed to ‘eat the dog food’ with Blackberry Server and become an expert (which I have) so I can support my clients on Blackberry (which I...

Haven’t posted for a while, and found this worthy…   ...

When it comes to relying on technology for running your business, should you go cheap and sign up with Google? My friend from Calgary thinks not, and I agree. It will cost you more than you save, and earn you less than you’ll make using Microsoft. http://stuartcrawford.com/my-experiences-running-a-business-on-google-apps/...

I’ve been around computers a long time. Not as long as some like Steve Gibson of GRC, but long enough that my first programming experience was on an IBM punch card machine and programs were written and run in Fortan V on a mainframe in downtown Winnipeg from a remote card-reader at my High School (go Westwood!). Grade 11 saw the delivery of the famed Trash-80’s (model III’s) mid-year, and grade 12 we got some model IV’s and Apple IIe’s. Mr. Houck was a pretty smart Comp Sci teacher, and he let a few of us play with these machines any time we wanted. One day in grade 12 he showed me my attendance card with a line through it and he’d written across it “independent study.” I took that to heart (somewhat to his chagrin I’m sure), as from that point on, I walked in an out of his class...

Looks like this just got released in the last day or so. Writing this post with the new/upgraded Live Writer – awesome program. The new Office Live site is pretty nifty as well – moves all docs to SkyDrive (where I was keeping everything anyway), and now has WebApps integrated. Microsoft’s done something really good here, so go get it! http://download.live.com/...

With patch Tuesday last week, I dutifully updated my company’s servers accordingly, and while I was at it, updated BackupAssist to version 6. And then backups started to fail on creating shadow copies of the virtual machines. After some hair pulling over a couple of days, I found some good guidance in troubleshooting the issue here: Diagnosing Failures in Windows Server Backup - (VSS/SPP Errors) Turned out Shadow Copies on my SBS 2008 VM weren’t working and they needed to be reset. Some days you’re the hammer…...

As ‘the cloud’ gets more and more ‘face-time’ with businesses through the media and word-of-mouth (and companies selling ‘the cloud’ exclusively), the perception of potential end-users of ‘the cloud’ is that it is a way to ‘get rid of’ the headaches and associated IT costs in the running of their business. Computers and networks have become central to the running of nearly all businesses in the past 30 years (do you remember the first time you used a computer at work?), and for small businesses, it’s really only been the last 15 – 20 years.  I remember well setting up the first email server and web site for a company I worked at in 1994 – a high-tech firm, no less. I had no experience at the time with mail servers, but I figured it out, and one day soon after, the owner came to me and told me he just...

OK, this is cool…. Simple and Affordable Servers for Small Businesses [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJiV-xwK6h0&hl=en_US&fs=1&hl=en]...

Following up on my previous post about using OpenDNS for home use… OpenDNS has recently released their ‘FamilyShield’ service, which is essentially the same service as OpenDNS Basic – EXCEPT, you don’t have to sign up for an account or figure out all the dynamic IP address updating stuff I explained in my previous post. Check it out here: http://www.opendns.com/familyshield The main difference is the FamilyShield service blocks the same stuff for everyone, and there’s no white-listing or blacklisting capabilities. What this means is if OpenDNS blocks a site you think is legitimate, there’s no way to tell OpenDNS to unblock it. The good news is, it’s easier to set up, as the only requirement is to set your DNS to 208.67.220.123 and 208.67.222.123 – the ‘.123’ part is unique to their FamilyShield service, and will block the same ‘bad stuff’ for anyone using these servers. So it’s kind of ‘big...

Just a quick post today on a pet peeve of mine. I manage a lot of domain names for my clients, and I invariably get phone calls every once in a while asking about a letter someone’s received about renewing their domain. You can ignore these. Read the ‘fine print’… ...

A big congratulations to IT Weapons of Brampton on their 10th anniversary. ITW is a fellow member of Heartland Technology Groups with my company and 8 others across Canada, and in the year I’ve known Ted Garner (ITW’s CEO) & some of his ‘Weapons’ (what other companies call ‘staff’), I’ve become thoroughly impressed. So here’s to another 10 years Ted! Congrats. See Ted’s blog post on their party....

OpenDNS is a free service I highly recommend – both for business and for home use. This post is targeted more at home use, and more specifically parents of computer-using children in their homes. One of the biggest fears for parents when letting their children access the Internet from home is the accessing of inappropriate information (text/pictures/video), whether that access is inadvertent or purposely sought out. As a caveat here, no mechanism is 100% foolproof, and as your children become more savvy than you in the ways of the computer world, they will eventually figure out what is going on. That could take a couple of years, or not. My 10 year-old son has a friend who thinks he knows a lot (and he does), but he was stymied when he was over for a play date and couldn’t get to places he though he should have had free reign over...

OK, this will be my last post on this issue. My last 2 posts talk about a 2nd key Microsoft suggested we use to stop the crashing. Didn’t work for me. One of my clients had their Outlook profile recreated, and the problems came back, so I did what I wrote up in my Redux posts, and found I had to go back to my original fix. Here...

I have no inside information, but just from perusing the interweb when the question came to mind tells me there may never be an R2 of SBS 2008. Why do I think this? Microsoft has in recent times begun shipping new products more quickly – a la Vista & Windows 7; Server 2008/2008 R2. Server 2008 R2 has been out quite a while already. The least they could have done was provide R2 as a license for the member server (I’ve already got 3 installs working this way with separate licensing). Seems pretty silly that a new purchase of SBS Premium doesn’t get you R2 licensing (making SA kind of a must have, even though we’re left guessing). Exchange 2010 is out now. Why would they pass up the opportunity to release a NEW SBS product vs. R2 with only a new Server code base. Office 2010 is imminent. Eric Ligman...

In my last post, you may have noticed the key referenced was for Outlook 2007 (I didn’t because I’d fixed all my workstations with the initial key deletion). When I saw that, I messaged the MS tech I was working with on the issue to ask if both 2003 and 2007 were affected, and indeed they are. Again, the problem seems to be obscure (Microsoft doesn’t even know why it happens at this point), but here’s the ‘official’ answer for 2003: For Outlook 2003 we just have to create the key under 11.0 instead of 12 .0 so the registry path would be HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail...