Every once in a while something comes along that you just know will not be a flash in the pan and this - for sure - falls into that category.

Xobni is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is amazing. It indexes all your email and displays relevant, contextual information in the Xobni bar no matter what you are doing be it messing with your mail, calendar, tasks, contacts, whatever.

Already with Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 it's hardly necessary to file messages into folders as the native search in Vista is so powerful but this takes it to the next level. Now you can see stuff like how many messages you have sent to a particular person, what dime of day you usually correspond, your recent correspondence, what attachments you have sent back and forth (I LOVE this feature, no more hunting for messages to find attachments!) and much, much more.

And the best thing? It's so intuitive to use! I had almost no learning curve and was able to just reap the benefits. Gotta love that. Nothing worse than some obscure tool for power users only. Except for that power user obviously but hey, it's never going to get much traction if it's insanely complicated.

I heard that as soon as Microsoft saw this they began to incorporate all of the features into the next version of Office. Duh...

Whew... this was a bit of a chore but thank heavens for friends and the Internet.

After finally deciding to get a smart phone, paying the extra monthly charge for a data plan and assuming it would be easy as pie to configure mobile access on my Exchange server I was bummed to find out that this was not the case. Turning on Mobile Access is easy enough. All you have to do is open System Manager, expand Global Settings, right click Mobile Services, select Properties and under the General tab check the two boxes under Outlook Mobile Access.

But every attempt to sync from my phone still failed. After looking up lots of sync errors and reading the same Microsoft KB article over and over, two friend of mine (Mark and Andy) finally found a site that explained it better than Microsoft and told me why everything was not working just because I had turned it on. At issue is the fact that I only have one Exchange server so it's having to perform the role of Front-End server and Back-End server. The Front-End server is the one that usually takes the traffic that is directed to your mailbox, to OWA and to OMA and tells it where to go and on what port. In my case since I had Forms Based Authentication turned on, SSL traffic was already being monopolized by OWA and so OMA was not working. Here is the fix mentioned in the link above with my edits.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MasSync\Parameters] "ExchangeVDir"="exchange-oma"

I found a ton of articles that suggested the problem was my self-signed SSL certificate and how I should go with a trusted (read: commercial and expensive) certificate authority but I'm happy to report that it was not! I just had to export the root cert from my certificate authority, copy it to my Dash using ActiveSync, double click it and it installed beautifully. No certificate errors, no problems.

Okay, so you have a web site or blog and you want to spread the word. You also want to let people easily add the URL of your site to their browser's bookmarks and your RSS feed to the reader of their choice. In the age of the Easy Button you can't expect folks to actually click two or three times to do this, oh no. Now you need to supply them with single click functionality.

Enter AddThis.

Problem solved. No more lists of buttons and hogging precious web page real estate, now you just have one button that let's people add your site or feed to whatever they happen to be using.

I have not had a cell phone (or Handy as some people like to call them) for that long; all my friends had one first. Now that I've had a few I can say without reservation that some are great and some absolutely suck. Not just sorta sucky like a non-intuitive interface or menu, but really sucky like poor reception, crap battery life, cheap construction and outrageously priced accessories. The Motorola PEBL:

that I have right now keeps falling more and more into the later category. These days the only cool thing about it is the small size and rounded corners when closed. I used to have a couple of Nokia phones and loved them. The antenna was awesome and they had the features I wanted. I even had one that was water and shock resistant, had a compass, thermometer and flashlight! It was like a Swiss Army knife and phone combined and was my favorite so far.

Since I did not want to hassle with getting [insert your favorite phone here] and then dealing with T-Mobile to activate it on their network and since a co-worker of mine already has one and I was able to hold it and play with it and since I have been wanting a smart phone for some time now I finally decided to pull the trigger on a Dash:

Oo... ah... But really, what does it get me? For an extra $20/month (unlimited Internet) I will get email, the web, minimalist versions of the most popular Microsoft Office applications and a full keyboard. Oh yeah, and the larger size that goes along with it.

But I'm still excited; like a kid who is about to get a birthday present! We'll see how long the honeymoon lasts with this piece of technology - maybe it's just me that sucks after all.

Shelley: "Have you ever heard of Twitter...?"

Martin: "Yes."

Shelley: "Can you add it to our blog?"

Martin: "Dunno, let me give it a try."

And guess what, it's not that hard. You can now see my tweets on the right hand side of the home page. This is pretty fun, I especially like being able to post (really, really small) updates to the blog from my phone. I was able to do this within minutes of signing up with Twitter. Cuz you know, everyone needs to know what Martin is up to at all times.

Once you try dual displays you'll never go back. That and other universal truths will soon be available in my new book...

Seriously, one thing that has always bugged me is the inability of Windows to natively show you different images on your various displays; or to be able to stretch one image across multiple displays. Well along comes DisplayFusion. Problem solved. Sometimes it's the little things.

Thanks to tech R I V E T for that one.

Here it is, my dream laptop. Until next month anyway...

http://gizmodo.com/346797/ultralight-lenovo-x300-series-thinkpad-leaked

I was just talking to our Lenovo rep today and this unit will be available with a SATA hard drive a few weeks after release which is my preference. SSD is fast and bomber but too still small in my opinion.

The X300 will come with the following:

• A touchpad (also my preference) in addition to the pointer. Don't know why but  I have never liked pointers...
• A 7 mm (down from 9 mm) DVD-RW. It's still the kind with a 'drawer' that ejects and not the ultra thin model you see in the new little Dell XPS or iMac. The smaller size means it is not modular though and so can't be replaced. I'm fine with that, that's what the warranty is for. And who upgrades the optical drive in their laptop anyway.
• 3 USB ports. Thank god, I hate it when manufacturers skimp on the most important port there is.
• integrated webcam and microphone. Nice! Apple and Dell have this as well and it seems like one of the best new things to come along on ages. If you're going to make a portable device, why not make it work with all the stuff people like to use like IM, Skype, etc. without needing to plugs tons of crap in?
• Fingerprint reader. Until you have used this you have no idea just how cool/convenient it is so shut up already.
• A real keyboard. There is a limit to how small I am willing to go and this is it.
• Ditto with the display. This one is 1440x900 and that's plenty not to have to scroll left and right (the worst) or even up and down on most web sites.

Other than using the latest Intel CPU (lower voltage and thus cooler) and Santa Rosa chipset (compatible with 802.11n, etc.) , this looks just like a regular ThinkPad that has been put on a diet.

How much is it? Well, that's the million dollar question now isn't it and the answer is still a couple of weeks away.

Oh sure, there is lots out there that is smaller but Martin don't play that. Stuff like the ASUS Eee PC [That's pronounced "Eek, that's a damn small computer!"] and the Apple MacBook Air [Yikes...! A 4200 rpm HDD?! Better wait until the next version.] is sure cute and Apple rules when it comes to coining terminology like "Thinnovation" and using great songs in their adds but too small and too slow is just that.

So I like to write my dates in the format of day-month-year, is that so bad? It must be the Euro half of my heritage showing its face. Or just that I want to be difficult/different - who knows.

Anyway, with the help of a co-worker (Naasir) I figured out how to do this in ASP. Here is the code:

And here is the Microsoft KB article that showed me how:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306044

Now I can do stuff like always have a current copyright date in the footer which appears at the bottom of all my web pages.

Long story short - I have a computer running Windows Server 2003 and because of problem with a RAID card I had to edit the boot.ini file to see if the issue it had booting up was due to the operating system trying to boot from the single system drive or the RAID array.

I know you can make some changes to the boot.ini file using msconfig but you can't just edit the raw file. Well this way you can.

• Click Start > Run and type sysdm.cpl and click OK.
• Select the Advanced tab and click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
• Under System Startup, click Edit.

This will open the boot.ini file in Notepad and you can type or delete at will!

Here is the Microsoft KB article with a sample of a default Windows 2003 boot.ini and a dual-boot boot.ini file:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;323427

Here is the Microsoft KB article with the above instructions for editing your boot.ini file for Windows XP but it works exactly the same for Windows Server 2003:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;289022

Lastly - here is a default Windows Server 2003 boot.ini file:

For Christmas Cameron got an 4 GB iPod nano and a 4 GB Zune. This is probably the biggest benefit of being a child with divorced parents - you get lots of stuff.

The new 3rd generation nano has a larger screen and can play music videos, TV shows, even movies (if you can tolerate the display size). But most of this kind of content costs money and that's a bit prohibitive to a 13 year old. And to me. :) So how can you download free videos - YouTube in this case - and play them on your iPod? Here's how.

1. Browse to the YouTube video of your choice and copy the URL.
2. Surf on over to this TechCrunch page and paste in the URL and click the Get Video button. You'll probably want to rename the file when you save it as the default name is always "get_video".
3. Download and install SUPER. SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer), in addition to being free, is a media player and encoder. As such it can also convert most any file format to any other. The file you download from YouTube using TechCrunch is FLV (Flash video) and will need to convert it to a format compatible with your iPod.
4. Drag the file onto the SUPER application where it says "DRAG A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILE HERE" and then at the top where it says, "1. Select the Output Container" select "Apple -iPod".
5. Leave all the other settings alone and click the "Encode (Active Files)" button. This will convert your Flash (FLV) file to a MPEG-4 (MP4) file. By default the file will be placed at the root of your C drive.
6. Now simply drag the MP4 to your iPod.
7. In case you can't do this, you will need to enable "Manage music manually" and "Enable disk use". This will allow you to drag and drop any items from your music or video library onto your iPod.

Now get to watching.

Shelley was feeling like poo and watching a movie in bed, Cameron was on the couch and deep into some Jean-Claude van Damme film and I was eating dinner next to a laptop. What better way to pass the time than figure out how to configure a Google custom search engine for our sites. Ta da...!

http://www.criminale.com/search.asp

For any conspiracy theorists out there that are convinced a cash-less society is the first sign of the coming of the apocalypse, I'm sure they would have something to say about Google as well. Give Google access to all your information, all your stats and all your metadata and in return you get a nifty search engine designed just for your site(s).

That said, it's pretty cool...

You can:

• Customize the look and feel of the search and results page (of course).
• Specify what sites you want this custom search engine to index so in our case where we have more than one site and more than one blog, all of them will get crawled.
• Let Google host the results. I chose to host them myself to preserve the criminale.com look and feel of the results by plopping them in my web page template that's just me.
• Link it to your Google AdSense account and (hopefully) make some dough from click-throughs in your search results.
• Add all kinds of refinements, new AdSense channels, key words, inclusions, exclusions and search customizations. I only understood about half of all this but it was fun and edifying to poke around and mess with shit.

How much stuff can you cram into a cyclometer? Cervellum thinks it's a lot.

Not only does this bicycle computer have all the usual stats that everyone (doesn't) need, it also has 'modules' that you can connect to give you heart rate, an optional LCD on the top of your STI lever, a power meter, GPS mapping capability and a REARWARD FACING CAMERA SO YOU CAN SEE WHAT'S BEHIND YOU.

No, really. There is a lens that attaches to your seatpost and the image it picks up can be displayed on the unit's screen; just like some massive RV with no rear window.

I suppose it might be fun to be off the front and not have to look behind you to check on the progress of the pack...

I'm half German so it stands to reason that half of my family is German. And while it's certainly true that most of my German relatives don't even have Internet access much less the time or inclination to read this blog, it still makes me think about language more than maybe some other people. Maybe. Anyway, while I would say that my German is pretty fair, like anything else that you don't use on a regular basis it is rusty. So when I came across this translator on techRivet I thought it was perfect.

Just like Babel Fish or Google Language Tools the Windows Live Translator lets you paste in text and translate it into most languages. The gee wiz functionality for me was that you can add this to your web site with the following code:

I just added this to our blog near the top, right corner. Now my German relatives can continue to not read this with the benefit of translation. Neat.

Too funny...

Having just implemented a permanent 301 redirect on my web server so that users who browse to criminale.com get redirected to www.criminale.com a co-worker shows me this:

It seems some other people think what I found cool to be stupid. That's the neat thing about the web, you can start a movement. And get people involved. You can make things happen. You can sway people's opinion and enlighten their minds. About really, really important stuff.

My only saving grace is that they say:

"...several websites choose to forward traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com for branding reasons and that's just fine with us. As long as they don't simply block all HTTP traffic on the bare domain name, they're OK in our book."

Thank goodness, looks like I'm in the clear. [deadpan]

For 'branding' (like I need that...) and for consistency and because I think it's kinda cool and old school like a classic car or something I wanted everyone that browses to criminale.com to get redirected to www.criminale.com. Here is what I did.

• In IIS, I changed the name of my site to www.criminale.com.
• In Properties > Web Site > Advanced I removed the criminale.com host header.
• I then created a new site called criminale.com and for now pointed it to the same directory as the www.criminale.com site. The only host header for this site is criminale.com.
• In Properties > Home Directory of criminale.com, I selected "A redirection to a URL".
• In the Redirect to: field I put http://www.criminale.com$S$Q. More about that below.
• I also checked the "The exact URL entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" boxes.

All done.

The $S tells IIS to take the subdirectory location e.g. /martin/cycling/training.asp and the $Q grabs the querystring. It seems intuitive not to check the "The exact URL entered above" box but if you don't you get a very different result.

Here is the Microsoft knowledge base article that I used as a guide:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313074

Forget that plastic, wildly inaccurate, hard to calibrate pedometer you are carrying around - just remember where you went and then look up the distance on Gmaps Pedometer when you're done!

All it takes is a couple of clicks (or a few hundred if you went a really long distance) and bingo - you have your distance. Actually, you only have to plot half of your walk/run if you go for and out-and-back route.

You can even export the route as an external link which you can send to your friends to share.

The only bummer is you can only zoom in as far as Google Maps will let you so your route might not be exactly the same as the distance you traveled. But pretty damn close I'll wager.

Nice.

I am always needing to paste in code on my training diary and now it's super easy with the Text Template plug-in. You can name your templates and save them locally and anytime you want to use them there they are.

Nice.

I've got this closet. And it's filled with computers. I keep trying new shit and invariably stuff breaks; like right now.

I just setup a Windows Server 2003 machine and ran the Routing and Remote Access wizard which seemed simple enough but no - for some reason my DHCP server is now no longer handing out IP addresses.

So instead of sitting at the dining table chatting with Shelley and using a laptop on our wireless network I'm cloistered upstairs trying to figure this out. Poop.

Addendum:

Routing and Remote Access only breaks DHCP if you are a moron. Before I had the chance to configure my new server with a static IP address I updated it, patched it, etc. which required lots of reboots.

Turns out I only had 10 IP addresses in my DHCP scope and the duration of each lease was eight hours. So... that meant that my server hogged them all and there were no addresses left for the laptops.

After deleting all the old leases from the DHCP server the laptops we able to get on the network pronto.

Every once in a while something comes along that just works. Like Windows Live Writer.

Released just this month this is a tool that lets you:

• connect to all your web logs no matter what  engine they are using
• edit posts off-line and save them as drafts
• open a post from one blog and post it to another
• easily insert pictures, tables, tags, video, etc., etc.

I found out about this from a friend of mine, Greg O (who is a real web developer unlike me) when I asked him if he knew of anything that would let me take a post from one blog and move it to another.

"You mean like this...?" he said.

Yep, just like that Greg; thanks!

I wrote this post using Windows Live Writer and can see that using a browser will quickly become a thing of the past.

I wanted to add some additional Blogrolls on the home page of our blog and I wanted to be able to name them whatever I wanted. After poking around I found that you can edit this file here:

dasblogce\themes\your_theme\homeTemplate.blogtemplate

All I had to do was this.

• log in to our blog
• under Blogroll, create a new OPML file (called "martin" in my case)
• add an entry to this new file
• in the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file in our theme I added this code:

• save the file

Now, when I refresh my blog home page I can see my Blogroll on the side. In my case I also commented out the original Blogroll entry to hide that.