Hey Apple and AT&T, I would really like to register my complaint about your Apps Store approval process. (ya along with everyone else from what I hear). It would be so great to have Google’s Latitude and Google Voice as an dedicated application and not have to use the web app.
When this user’s contract is up I will be taking a serious look at the Droid.
Come on Apple don’t be the playground snob that will not let the other kids play in your game. Oh I forgot, we are all grown up now and it’s about money. It is always about money however this could very well back fire on Apple.
I tried installing the Office 2010 Beta 64 and got an error. So I thought forget the 64 and install the 32-bit. Not too many people need the 64-bit anyway. I don’t but I thought I should get the experience anyway. I will be uninstalling 64-bit and installing the 32-bit soon. I like that my Outlook profiles stayed in please even after I uninstalled Office 2007.
First off I got this error:
Error: 1935: An error occurred during the installation of assembly competent {659FB0C5-3A28-4A7D-B6FD-322E91478238}. HRESULT: 0×80070005
Then I got Error: 2203.
Really there was a simple fix for both but I think Microsoft will need to make this a little simpler to have the masses installing it.
The fixes were… Well the first thing I should have done right off the bat was right click on the executable and click run as administrator. That being said I would have thought their Office even Beta could be installed without disabling THEIR Anti-Virus. Yes I am running “Microsoft Security Essentials” on my home office computer. I had to disable “Real-Time Protection” in order to get Office 2010 Beta to install.
Well got the Google Chrome OS up and running in a virtual machine. Not much to see just a browser and several online options / applications. I may try a USB thumb drive just to see if I can get a better resolution for the screen. Granted this is only the beginning and they can make a lot of changes during the development. It might be of some use on Netbooks which I am thinking is the market they want to place it in anyway.
Will this be competition for Microsoft? Only time will tell. However, Google has enough money to throw behind Chrome if they really want to. But then again Big Blue had enough money to throw behind OS/2 Wrap and look where that went.
Well I will tell you. It brings all (well not all yet but a lot) of your Google Apps and Service together in one spot. It is nice to have a launching pad and information all on one page.
How do you get there. Well the easiest way is to simply add /dashboard in the address field right after Google.com for example. https://www.google.com/dashboard/ you will be asked to login even if you are already logged in to something like Gmail.
It gives you a lot of information about your account. Here is a quote from their help page. “We focused on Google Account data, because that’s the data that is personally associated with you. Therefore, we want you to have as much access to and control over it as possible.”
You can also see a video about the ins and outs of Google Dashboard.
After installing Exchange 2007 SP1 Management Tools on Windows XP SP3 x86 and Outlook 2007 with SP2 already on, the export-mailbox cmdlet was returning this error:
Export-Mailbox : Error was found for User Name (email@address.com) because: Error occurred in the step: Approving object. An unknown error has occurred., error code: -2147221233
At line:1 char:15 + Export-Mailbox <<<< -Identity User_Alias -PSTFolderPath C:\temp
I was ready to give up and noticed a blog post. The solution seemed too simple to work but it did.
All I had to do was run FixMapi.exe from the command prompt, wow that was easy. I ran the command again and to my surprise it worked.
My favorite documentary of all time. If you are into computers and you have never seen the documentary “The Machine That Changed the World” you need to. It all starts over 150 years ago with a man name Charles Babbage then goes to Germany 100 years later, to the German engineer Konrad Zuse who built the Z1. Then to the US at the University of Pennsylvania, with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert who built the ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer. From there it is clear sailing in this five part documentary on the history of the computer. From the UNIVAC to the transistor to the integrated circuit through the attempts at IA right down to the first PC and the Apple II then on to Windows and the MAC. They even show the 1984 commercial for the first Macintosh. Since the series was made in 1992 it does not cover the World Wide Web but they put together a wonderful documentary that chronicles the history of the computer to that point.
You may ask where can I get this documentary. Jointly produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC, it originally aired in the UK as The Dream Machine before its U.S. premiere in January 1992. Unfortunately it drifted in to oblivion and is not available for purchase or rental anywhere today.
Thankfully Andy Baio, has pieced together this treasure and has made it available. The complete set is available for download as high-quality MP4 downloads via BitTorrent. Please visit his site at Waxy.org and the post about the The Machine That Changed the World because it gives so much more detail than this post.
Why would a company want to switch from physical servers to a virtual server? (Note: Some of the same reasons apply to desktop virtualization but most people run desktop virtualization for very different reasons.)
When you think of virtualization the first thing that comes to mind is you have to buy fewer machines thus you save money. In my opinion this is the least of all the benefits of going virtual. Even if the initial cost was the same to go virtual as physical there are several compelling reasons to go with virtualization.
I think the biggest reason to switch to a virtual environment is the ease of management. You have all your servers in one place and can add a hard drive, increase the memory and other modifications of a virtual machine remotely. If you pair visualization with something like HP’s iLO (Integrated Lights Out) you have a system that is hard to beat. The iLO lets you do 99% of everything you do with a server without being there (Dell has something similar but I feel HP makes the best servers in the world). Put both of these together and you can manage everything from your home office.
Next we have the ability to recover a machine in record time. With the proper backup method you can recover a machine in a matter of hours or even minutes depending on how big it is and the physical hardware you are using. The complexity of the software installed in the machine does not matter because you restore the whole machine in one shot. What is more you do not have to have similar hardware. You can have a virtual machine on a Dell and restore it to an HP without any problem at all.
Then there is the ease of deployment of new virtual machines. You can use an ISO of the OS or have a Template of a standard machine and deploy it within minutes.
Lastly we have the consolidation story which is what normally attracts people’s attention to virtualization in the first place. This is where you can put several servers on one piece of hardware. Is there ever a time when you would not want to go virtual? Yes. There are some applications that take so much CPU or IO resources so it would not be good to put them on a virtual machine. For example Exchange Server that houses many mail boxes would not be a good candidate for virtualization.
Virtualization can fit even a small installation because it has so many benefits.
Virtualization saves money at every turn and can save your whole company if disaster strikes.
If you use Google Docs and MS Office you know they are pretty compatible. But uploading your documents to Google Docs can be a pain. Here is a neat little piece of software that makes it easy. Works with Office 2003 and 2007 and plugs right in the the ribbon bar in 2007. Also the best part as of this writing it is FREE. Check them out at OffiSync
Picking the right strategy for backing up VMware Virtual Machines (in this post we are talking VMware ESX Hosts and VMs) like backing up physical machines can be mind boggling. What is the best choice? This depends on many factors but we are going to focus on one product that has proven itself over the course of time for me.
For this blog post I am talking about backing up a Windows VM running under VMware ESX 3.5 or 4.
esXpress is what I have found to be the best back up software for VMware ESX virtual machines. If you haven’t used esXpress lately you have not used esXpress at all.
If you have used esXpress before you were most likely used to either Full or Delta backups. Well all that has change. Full and Delta are still an option but the DeDuplication appliance (this is just another VM running one your VMware ESX host) is amazing.
First off they use Block-Level Backup instead of file-level. This gives you the ability to back up only the individual blocks inside of a virtual disk (.vmdk file) that have changed since the previous backup and creating a “virtual full” backup every time.
The first few backups are a little slow since they do a lot of verifying on those first few. But after that they fly.
The backup is done to a SMB or a NFS target. The down side to this is you are backing up to a unit that is difficult or impossible to take off site. But wait they thought of that too. The DeDuplication appliance has Samba and you can have a Windows share or a mapped drive with the whole virtual machine files ready to copy off to tape or other removable media. The folder has everthing you need to replace the virtual machine. I am talking the vmdk, and the vmx files. All you would have to do is copy these over the a data store and add it back into inventory and you are ready to go.It assembles these files from a complex folder system on your target backup device. Also it is always checking to make sure it has sound backups.
So far we have talked about backing up the whole machine. What if I only want a single file. Simple all you do is go into the web interface in for the DeDuplication appliance click on FLB on the menu bar and there are all your VMware virtual machines. Simple drill down to the date then the vmdk drive, folder and finally the file you want to restore and it is as easy as that. It will save this or multiple files in a zip file and download it to your workstation and you can copy if from there to anywhere you want.
In a future post we are going to talk about some tips on installing esXpress.
We are going to have posts that deal mostly with Enterprise Technologies. When I have a new find or a fix for an old problem I will post them here and hopefully help out someone with the same issue.
