I installed Microsoft Outlook 2013 the other day, along with the rest of Office 2013. I’m only about two years late, right?  Office 2013 offers little over Office 2010, but there is a somewhat cleaner design (OSX 10.7 anyone?) and really nice animations when windows open and close. Forgive me for saying this, but the interface is more Mac-like, even though it came out two years before the recent updates to OSX and IOS 7.

I originally had OutLook eMail synced to my Google Apps email. Then I wanted to also use the Outlook calendar and have changes made there reflected in my Google Apps calendar which is the group calendar that we use in the office. A quick search found the Google Outlook synchronizer, an application that sits outside of Outlook and runs interference between Outlook and Google apps.

The nice thing about this is that that it doesn’t require you to put in all kinds of IMAP information into your Outlook profile…you simply give it your Google Apps eMail address and off it goes and downloads everything from Google Apps, creates a new profile within OutLook, and then uploads everything into mailboxes in Outlook (see screenshot). If it works, it will great. I includes your contact lists, shared calendars, co-workers calendars, notes, and tasks.

The poor mans’s Exchange Server? 

If you use Google Apps in the office, and have Windows computers, you could have this running on each machine, and essentially use Google Apps as a back-end Exchange Server.

Miscellaneous Items

I’ve been upgrading my Dell Optiplex 620, (this of the noisy fan and the overheating case which always needs to have the top left off. ) from Windows XP to Windows 7. I used an image downloaded from the Microsoft licensing web site, and, I think this must be original version of Windows 7 that came out in 2009 or whenever, because it has applied over 150 updates, to the newly installed version, which has taken over four hours to have ready to use. Cripes, haven’t they even heard of version control, or Git?

After casting around for a cloud-based web hosting company,  I’m leaning toward Linode. To start with, their documentation is terrific.

And, speaking of Git if you are trying to get your head around it, here is a great beginner tutorial that describes the theory of Git and doesn’t just give another rundown of all the commands.

Visual Inspiration at Urban Sketchers.

Trello is an uncomplicated way to manage projects. There is an e-Book about Trello, Trello Dojo published by Daniel Root and published by Leanpub

As a professional nerd, occasionally I’ll run into a website, utility, or service that has potential to help the day-to-day lives of people not only the IT field, but in about any line of work. Or, perhaps even people in no line of work. Trello is just that sort of service. Their website describes it: “In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.” Being free, easy to use, and constantly updated, giving Trello a try in your next project or process is a no brainer. You have almost no risk and a lot to gain.

The book comes with pointers to more than a dozen Trello templates; projects that are already set up. There is also discussion of feeding a Trello board with inputs from other sources, such as an RSS feed or eMail. An example of such an application is the Poor Man’s Customer Service tracker, which takes eMails sent to your customer support web address, and automatically creates a Trello card for each issue.

I’ve working on an add-on application for the Shopify e-Commerce web service, that allows you to have a web store completely in the cloud. What we’re trying to do is to have the cart check-out function call a custom application which calculates shipping costs, because we have a slightly idiosyncratic way of dealing with those that isn’t accommodated by the standard Shopify functionality.

Shopify provides an API (Application Programming Interface) to their web site which allows developers to add extra functions to a customer’s web shop. Entry to the API is
provided in several different ways:

• External Apps: Shopify calls an external function hosted at a publicly available web address. Presumably the same app provides functions for multiple customers and shops. There are bunch of these advertised on the Shopify web site. Some are free, some are supported by Shopify and some are built by third-party programmers, who make them available for $5.00 – $60.00 per month.  
• Internal Apps: These are similar to internal apps, but are available for a single store. 
• Embedded Apps: Haven’t quite figured this out yet, but my guess is that somehow this allows an app to be embedded in a single store, and hosted within the Shopify web server, thus obviating the need for a separate web server, and public web address.

I quickly wired up our shipping calculation in PHP. Its about 12 lines of code. The problem has been to try to find how to connect it to our Shopify check-out cart. Along the way, however, I’ve found some interesting tools.

It is a little ironic that some of the best PHP programming tools seem to exist primarly in Windows versions, but that most of the deployment of PHP happens on Linux/Apache web servers.  Ideas:

Notepad++   The favorite of my boss, but as I said to him, “its like writing with a stick in dirt”.  I use it all the time though for general editing of ASCII files.
JetBrains phpStorm I have the thirty-day trial for this, which also runs on the Mac. Looks promising.
CodeLobster for PHP Just found this free PHP editor which also has some support for javascript and CSS.

To create the publicly available web address that will host my app, I got an account with Heroku 

To examine calls to and from web services, I downloaded the the Firefox Plug-in HttpRequester.

To examine the web traffic, I use Fiddler.  To see web traffic in greater context (and to see all the data you’re sending to the NSA…)  I use WireShark.

All of the above are Windows applications. Other suggestions cheerfully accepted.  (For example, on the Mac, WiresShark uses an external Xquartz graphics library, which has to be launched separately. The whole thing seems a little flakey, but it works, all the same.)

With the impending demise of support for Windows XP due in April, one solution I investigated was replacing an entire workstation with a refurbished machine supplied by NewEgg. They had a several Lenovo units for sale for $219, including shipping. These included a 250 megabyte hard drive, a 2.8 or 3.0 dual-core Intel processor, and 4 Gigs of RAM, and Windows Professional 7.

We received the unit promptly, and as I unboxed it, I noticed that it appears to be an IBM-branded unit built by Lenovo of about vintage 2009. This is a little older than I would have hoped, but the Windows 7 setup seems to be going smoothly so far. The unit has a Windows “Microsoft Refurbished” sticker on it which has a valid Windows 7 code. There was also a “Made for Vista” sticker on the case, which I’ve scratched off. Yikes.

So far, main irritation is that the case is so small that there is no room for a full length expansion card. We normally have dual monitors for everyone, so expanding the single VGA motherboard connector may prove to be a challenge. Still, a machine with the hardware specs above, and Windows 7 for a little over $200.00… that is inexpensive. Comparable new machines were in the $600 range.

I’ve had mixed results with refurbs at least with Dell. A couple of Dell SX series went belly up, and one was dead on arrival. A recent Optiplex 620 series seems to overheat. I’ve had two full tower refurbs from Dell which have been just fine, as well as an Inspiron laptop. So, let’s hope the Lenovo, er, IBM is solid.

But back to XP. Isn’t it odd that although Microsoft is trying to entice users to move to the cloud, and subscription-based software, it can’t seem to be in a position to offer a subscription-based support plan for $20.00 or $50.00 a year for XP. John Dvorak outlines a plan here.

I always thought Microsoft was in the business of making money. If you are a shareholder, go to the next meeting and ask the bigwigs why Microsoft is leaving what can amount to billions of dollars on the table regarding Microsoft XP.

Microsoft is too dumb to realize that it can effortlessly monetize Windows XP using the beloved software subscription/rental scheme the company keeps discussing, but apparently has nothing but trouble trying to implement.

I am going to describe a multi-billion dollar idea that Microsoft must consider.

There are still approximately 500 million XP users—an estimated 29 percent of the computers in the world. Many do not want to upgrade to anything new. They are happy campers.

These folks, according to a variety of reports, include many banks and most of the ATM networks. Smart corporate money knows that if you have something that works great for a single application you do not swap it out. You run it until something comes along that would save you enormous amounts of money. This is not happening with banking software.

O’Reilly recently held a 1/2 price sale for electronic versions of some of their newer books. I bit on Mining The Social Web 2nd Edition by Matthew Russell. Having just started the book, I’m not yet in a position to really comment, but I was intrigued by several aspects. Basically the book is about using the Python programming language to access social media sites through their API (application programming interface).

Vagrant can use different virtual machine software, but it just happens that the setup for the iPython Notebook provided uses the command-line version of VirtualBox. Vagrant installs an instance of Ubuntu 12. with all of the provisions for hosting Python and the iPython Notebook, as well as a web server which makes this available on port 8888.  So, the installation sequence for Windows is:
1. Download and install VirtualBox if you haven’t already.
2. Download and install Vagrant.
3. Establish an account on GitHub
4. Download the GitHub client. This includes two applications, the GitHub terminal, and the GitHub GUI Manager.
5. Using Git, “Clone” the GitHub directory for Mining the Social Web Second Edition. This makes a copy of the GitHub directory on your local machine.
6. Start a command line session, and CD to the MTSWSE directory (whatever you’ve named it) Run vagrant up. This starts the creation of the virtual machine, and the full provisioning. It is about a twenty minute process. And, to be sure, given all of the output that it generates, it looks as if a multi-hour job has been automated.

A couple troubleshooting tips. If Vagrant looks like it is installing “the default VM”,  or if you see a reference to PROCESS32 you’ve somehow missed the GitHub part… maybe the directory is wrong? What you should expect to see instead is PROCESS64.

If correct, the provisioning process will end with a line
DEBUG: Exiting. 

The real sign of success is to open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8888
That will bring up the main page of the IPython book..

My favorite error message to date:
DL is deprecated, use FIDDLE.  

The Vagrant documentation refers to another program called Chef. Chef manages the provisioning of servers, and is used especially in cloud,VM and multi-server installations to manage all of the server instances. 

After creating a new mySQL server within an Ubuntu guest OS running on VirtualBox, (how is that for a mouthful?) I wanted to connect to the server with HeidiSQL, my toolbox of choice when dealing with basic SQL operations. I expect that I would have the same problems attempting to connect with similar  client software, such as mySQL Workbench or PHPmyAdmin.

The symptoms of the problem showed up in an error message, generated by HeidiSQL:

Connect Error (2003) Can‘t connect to MySQL server on ‘192.168.219.107‘ (10061)  

So,  more or less in order, I did the following:
1. Create a mySQL user with an identical name and password as the Ubuntu user account. To connect to mySQL, you need to have two valid accounts:  a.) a valid Linux user account,  and b.) a valid mySQL user account. On Ubuntu, these need to be same….because you only get one chance to pass through a name and password when logging into a server from HeidiSQL. This is done by logging into the mySQL client on the Ubuntu box, and performing the following:

Restart the machine.
sudo shutdown -r now 

This reloads everything, including the mySQL daemon so that it listens on the new IP address. 

That’s it. You should be able to log in with Heidi now.

Notes:
1. You could probably leave the default networking setting in place, (it is NAT), and the VM will be assigned a NAT address along the lines of 10.0.2.15.  You’d still probably want to edit the mySQL file to reflect this address, and you might also want to make sure that you forward the mySQL port 3306.  I just haven’t tested this, so that I can’t vouch that it will work.

2. Of course, in a production situation, you’ll want to choose a fixed IP address for the network address. This might involve your main router and firewall, so you may need to discuss this with the sys admins.

Anyway, now that I’ve actually got this thing running…I’ve got to get back to mySQL!

1. With VirtualBox chugging along, I’ve have developed super SysAdmin (systems administrator) powers, and created and destroyed dozens of Linux servers and desktop workstations using both Ubuntu and Red Hat operating systems. 

2. It takes over an hour to format an 8 gigabyte USB thumb drive in Windows 7. A quickformat will take just a couple of seconds. 

3. The Boss took a look at my old Linux books, (copyright 2002) and laughed a mirthless hollow laugh. “Those are really old books”.  I said, “yes, they are, but they happen to describe your really old operating systems.” 

4. The object of all of this virtual goodness is to upgrade the hardware on a currently production server that is around eight-years old. The problem is that the operating system, mySQL and PHP are equally old. Our idea was to transfer the existing production server, on to the new hardware, and then worry about upgrading, as we expect that some of the PHP will need to be rewritten. The problem is similar to the proverbial “change a tire on a car at 70 miles per hour”. To date, I’ve been working on several separate scenarios:

• Shut down the server, and do a bit-copy of the old system to the new system 
• Leave the server running and do a copy to the new system over the network.
• Create a new empty server with the old versions of the OS (Redhat 7) and mySQL (3.23). Dump the mySQL data off the old server and restore to the new server. 

Following up on the previous discussion of running VirtualBox from the command line, the next task is to be able to run a remote VirtualBox session, that is, a virtual machine hosted on a remote computer which may or may not be capable of a graphics display. In this case, the virtual machine is started from the host’s command line using the headless parameter

VboxManage startvm RHDesktop –type headless 
This starts the vm, and automatically by default starts the remote desktop server, to allow you to log into the machine using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop or any other client that uses the RDP protocol. There are at least two quirks regarding the log in with Remote Desktop:

1. When configuring the port for RDP, in VirtualBox settings,  use a port other than the default RDP 3389.
(I used 5000).

2. When connecting to the Virtual Machine using RDP, use  the the IP address of the host for the IP address.  Note that the IP address used is independent of any IP address that is assigned to the guest operating system, either as a fixed address or through NAT, when bridging.

(click on the images to see them full-sized.)

There is a good YouTube Video showing this with Windows hosts and guests.

With my RedHat guest, there seems to be issues with the mouse accurately tracking on the remote desktop.  It will be interesting to see if this is a major problem or not.