Foxfire has been touting its 2.0 update for a couple days now. I just downloaded it and ran the install program…when what did I see? A message box saying:
“Foxfire cannot install the Onfolio extension”.
Back to version 1.5 for this webboy. Fortunately, I didn’t see anything in 2.0 that I was dying for.
I’ve been playing with Microsoft Access 2007, the beta, and so far it seems to have improved to a certain extent. The rational and discussion of the development has been well described on Erik Rucker’s blog over at MSDN. Don’t know if this will stay up, because Microsoft has released Office 2007 to manufacturing. But it makes interesting reading, especially if you start from the first posts from October of last year, and work forward.
The development team for Access 12 is about 7 times as large as the one for Access 2003, and this has allowed us to do a lot of work weÂ?ve wanted to do for a long time. Our goals for Access 12 are to make new users more successful, to make existing users more productive, and to enable a whole new type of database application built around Windows SharePoint Services.
A couple items of interest so far.
1. It is backward compatible with Access files for Access 2003 and earlier
2. It has a new file extension for Access 2007 files
3. It will not allow replication if you use a 2007 version of the database file.
4. It has extensive connections to Sharepoint. It allows you to connect to a SharePoint, cache a data table from Sharepoint, and then reconnect and upload your changes. So this is ‘sorta, kinda’ like replication.
5. You can still replicate files that are stored as Access 2003 mdbs.
6. Forms are more attractive in their default state. No more pinched 8 point text.
The one thing holding me back from moving directly is that lack of the runtime, or the Office Extensions, which allow distribution of Access applications to computers which don’t have Access. This customarily appears some months after the release of the parent product. Since general release of Office 2007 isn’t scheduled before January, it could be awhile before developers can transition to 2007.
Welecome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. We feel that non-profit corporations and NGOs deserve the same advantages that technology can bring to for-profit business. To that end, we’ve dedicated ourselves to finding cost-effective ways to bring the benefits of wide-area networks, computer databases, IP videoconferencing and Voice over IP to our clients and friends. Check out our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide.
Something that works beautifully: OneNote shared notebooks. Since I use OneNote on both my desktop workstation and my laptop, I have always been copying the files back and forth between the two machines in a daily ritual, hoping that I always copy the most recent version over the older version. Now, OneNote 2007 has refined the synchronization option so that if you have a shared version of the notebook, each machine will share changes against the shared version.
Each machine maintains its own copy of the notebook file. So, for example, when I take my laptop away from the office, the current version of all of my OneNote notebooks is on my laptop. When I get back, I place the laptop in the docking station, start it up and open OneNote. As soon as OneNote opens it synch any changes with the shared copy on the network server.
So far, no big deal. But what is the big deal, is that the sharing is by page entry. So, if you have changes on both machines, they will be combined in the shared copy. Changes to existing pages will be made and new pages will be added.
There is an exhaustive discussion of synching OneNote on Chris Pratley’s blog which includes a number of different scenarios.
Another day, another hour trying to update my three workstation and 1 server network with Symantec Anti-Virus.
1. It turns out that the when you renew your corporate server, which is called “gold maintenance” you receive a new serial number, different than the one you are “renewing” or “upgrading”. This is the number that must be used for generating the serial license file. I began to suspect a flaw in the renewal process when, after renewing and then going online to generate the license file, I noticed that the expiration date was the same as before, rather than in another year.
2. When communicating with the Symantec management Server software which is installed on the network server, workstations that have been updated with Windows XP service pack 2 will have the workstation firewall installed and turned on by default. This blocks ports used to install the updates from the server. After poking around on the Symantec web site to determine the ports that needed to be open, I found that there at least a half-dozen, depending on the products and versions that you used. It was simpler just to reactivate each anti-virus client on the workstation, after I opened a couple ports, and nothing happened. And I was going to turn off the firewall all together, but then found that is controlled by a group policy.
There are several issues with the renewal process, none of which are obvious:
1. When you want to renew your anti-virus definitions for another year, they don’t say that is what you are doing, they say, you are renewing “gold maintenance”.
2. Although you renew, and pay, you then have to go online and download the product. Or rather, when you start downloading, you don’t download a new license file….you download the product i.e. Symantec Anti-Virus 10.1…not the license file required to activate the product.
3. But you already have the product….you just want to renew! That is another trip to their site to dig around and find the license file generation site. To do this, you need to have the serial number of the upgrade/renewed product.
4. You then get an eMail for the product which contains the renewal license. This gets copied to a shared folder on the server, where it can be used to update clients either from the System Center (if you don’t have local firewalls installed), or from individual clients.
Woof.
The supposedly last national SBIR conference (Small Business Innovation and Research) is happening in Milwaukee WI, November 6-9. The conference will be attended by U.S. federal agencies which engage in extramural research, that is, they pay people outside the agency to develop products and services which can later be bought by the public and the federal government. If you are a small business, you can get a piece of the action, SBIR grants, which in Phase I are typically around $100,000, and in Phase II $750,000. All the biggies are there, NASA, the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Department Homeland Security. The US Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are also included. Why is this of interest to non-profits? Non-profits often partner with for-profit companies. In our telehealth project, for instance, the majority of the money, (more than half) is going toward the non-profit side of the arrangement.
Exchange comes with the Microsoft Small Business Server offering, which is another way that people get into Exchange. Since SBS by design requires that everything run in the same physical server box, there can be performance problems if you are attempting to run anything other than Exchange on the same server. And maybe you will….how about a SQL-Server database back-end, or a SharePoint web server for internal documents and project management. Not to mention, your Active Directory, network security, virus-update and management software, SPAM update and managment software, other centralized workstation management. Oh, and by the way, you are using it probably for file and printer sharing (which is what servers used to be for in the first place). In short, I think the server is too valuable to “waste” on running eMail.
The afternoon events were the MSDN events. These included a discussion and demonstration of ATLAS which is Microsoft’s version of AJAX. There will eventually be a set of extensions added to ASP.NET 2.0 to support all of the AJAX, I mean ATLAS functionality (remember FrontPage Extensions?)
What is promising, is that there will be creater cross-platform ability to run ATLAS applications, as the client side code is basically javascript. The framework is free for the download.
The Microsofties descended on Burlington for the first time in over a year to perform their various stunts, and we gave them a warm and well-attended welcome. Microsoft always seems to be rolling our an update to something or preparing the technical community quote unquote for the newest paradigm shift according to Microsoft. In our case there were half-day sessions for TechNet (meaning mostly network managers), MSDN (meaning developers) and solution providers (meaning mostly vendors, with a smattering of large accounts, such as are available in the BTV area).
The morning TechNet sessions were given over largely to VISTA. Not much new here, except that Release Candidate 1 is indeed available and much more stable than the most recent beta. Current (US only?) testers of R2 can get RC1 from the Vista download web site for a nominal fee of about $10.00.
About a third of the morning session was given over to Microsoft Exchange, which is the email server program that Microsoft offers as the core to OutLook. My own experience with Exchange was almost ten years ago; when I set up a wide area email system using Exchange connectors that worked over dialup. It worked more or less, but then since individual ISPs offered POP mail accounts for peanuts, my advice has always been to use those for any organization under about 50-100 users. The effort of maintaining your own mail server, which has to address issues of backups, email retention, spam control, and virus protection, seems to outweigh any benefit that I can see in doing it yourself. Frankly the costs are too high for smaller shops, you have to be able to spread the cost over dozens of users to justify maintaining your own email system. And if you still want Exchange, you can get a hosted version from Microsoft and others like Intermedia for $5-$10.00 per month per user.
OneNote includes a screen capture tool that allows you to capture any part of the screen and paste it into a note (or anywhere else, for that matter…as it simply copies the screen shot to the clipboard). Once you have pasted a graphic image into OneNote, you can right-click on the image, and if the image has text in it, OneNote will extract the text, and place the text on the clipboard.
So, as a slightly esoteric example…today I’m working on trying to understand the structure of a particular database. I have a table open in Access’ design view. This shows the structure of the data table. I want to copy this structure into OneNote. Here are the steps.
1. I click the ‘clip’ button in OneNote. This causes the screen to change to a grayed out version of the underlying application (in this case Access).
2. I draw from corner to corner, the section of the screen that I want to place in one note. When I click, OneNote copies the selected image to the clipboard, brings back OneNote, and pastes the image within my OneNote page.
Here is the image:
Here is how it looks in OneNote
It even contains a caption saying when the clipping was made.
Now to extract the text, I right-click on the image in OneNote and select ‘Copy Text from Image’. Here is the menu:
And when I’m done, I can paste the just the text.
Field Name Data Type
occupation_skill_id Number
name Text
OneNote appears to be a program which strikes a balance between capability and complexity. It passes the ‘five minute test’, in other words, you can become productive with it almost immediately. But it has considerable depth and capability. Worth a look. The beta version of OneNote 2007 is available for free downloading at www.microsoft.com/downloads as part of the Office 2007 beta program.
Office 2007 beta technical “refresh” will be available September 14th. Includes interface changes, especially to the upper left hand corner. And it is supposed to actually work with the Vista beta.
I’m happy with the current version so far, and am looking forward to the update.
tfnp 