Friday, May 29, 2009

Mobile Tweeting with Pocketwit

Many months ago I joined the Twitter nation (tthrush, but don't expect much, I mostly lurk) and eventually added a Twitter app to my cell.

At first I tried Twobile, but the interface was a bit lacking and the it could've been little quicker.

I've since settled on Pocketwit, another free client, this time from Google. The interface is elegant and the usability is top notch. If you're using a Windows Mobile phone, I highly recommend trying this out.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Vista and Windows 2008 SP2 Now Available!

The latest service pack for the unified kernel was released yesterday. For the early adopters, get it here!

I'm installing it on my test system, but will be waiting a few weeks to deploy this on my work and home systems. I'd prefer to see what the tech sites and blogosphere have to say about possible issues before subjecting myself to any possible pain.

Assigning Certificates in Exchange 2007

I've wasted too much time in the past looking this information up and still have to dig around for the right command. I don't imagine I'm the only one, so here's what I've gathered together...

When manipulating the certificates at the command line (this article assumes you're running all your commands within an Exchange Management Shell), it's helpful to look up the Thumbprints for the available certificates.

Get-ExchangeCertificate will display those certificates available for use in the local certificate store and to what services they are currently assigned.

Copy the thumbprint string of the certificate you wish to use and paste it into the following command...

Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint 9E101F27C9B07BEE021ECB88ED6B78DD17F6E702-Services IIS, Pop, Imap, Smtp assigns the certificate to all the available services. Mix and match as you need.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Three Free Utilities

Everyone carries around a USB drive these days with a variety of utilities, these three have been very useful in the recent past.

CPU-Z - A great utility to find out what kind of memory is installed in a system. This is especially useful when a system is a plain box with out a service tag or serial number.  And it's really annoying to open a box only to find the memory is without a label.

Magic Jelly Bean - This little gem has been in my toolbox for a long time. It grabs the key codes for popular software installed on a system (Adobe, VMWare, Office) including the OS. This is very useful if you have a disk, but lost your installation key or have lots of keys and don't know which ones were used on a particular system.

Wireless Key View - And finally, this tool grabs the WPA/WEP wireless key(s) from a Windows system (must be using the built-in Windows wireless utility) when you can't see the actual text or log into your wireless router.

And while you're visiting these sites, check out the other free software they have. You'll have your 32GB thumb drive filled up in no time ;)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

It's Linux too

Just back from a long a trip to Panama which was eventful yet fun.

On the first airplane leaving SFO I was watching the spinning hourglass on the entertainment screen in the seat in front of me. The captain then told us the system was experiencing some issues and they would be rebooting it.

So they did, three times. I snapped a pic on the second reboot. It finally started working, but a number of the games were broken and unplayable, plus the media (read mp3 player) was all but useless, since I had to manually advance the playlist after each song finished. By the end of the flight, the music stopped playing altogether.

I only bring this up because everyone seems to gloat and post pictures when a Windows system has to reboot in public. My point being, there isn't a perfect OS and there never will be as long as we humans do the programming. As soon as Skynet is active and creating the programs, it'll be better for all of us ;-)