Archive for the ‘Techie Stuff’ Category

Today i got a call from a customer stating that Outlook 2007 was starting, but giving an error message “A Dialog box is open” trying to open or compose new emails. The problem was that Outlook started on a new user profile, and the usual Outlook/Word dialog that asks you for your Name/Initials was gettign hidden someplace (since word starts silently in outlook).

Solution is to close everything, and start Microsoft Word first. Enter your name and initials, and then you’ll be able to start outlook.

Update
Bill pointed out that if you don’t have the full Office installed, you won’t be able to launch Word. So to fix it, you’ll have to temporarily remove a Microsft Update item number KB946983. Use the control panel to remove this update, start Outlook, then windows will apply the update again at a later time.

Just a note, mainly for myself, on the location to get the Remote Wipe MobilAdmin utilities for Microsoft Exchange. They can be gotten here

I find it useful that the exhcange server can sever relations between a mobile device and the exchange server, especially if you’re about to fire someone and they have their own device syncing in.

Hi,

Haven’t had a chance to nice n up my mail server how to yet, and i’m sure some of you are tying to install thing thing on newer distributions. So, here are my notes about installing the techie mail server, its all rough notes, i know in my head what it is, but the description may not be there. feel free to use as is – no support, no guarantees.

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Just a quick post on how to quickly remove the Dell Utility Partition. I just received some Poweredge T105 boxes (quiet nice actually ,very quiet, very efficient – only 70W power consumption idle with 2 80gb drives). I was bummed to find out that the bios didnt come with a SATA raid option, but oh well.

So to remove partition. Boot up from your XP/2003 CD/DVD, and then go into the Console Recovery mode. Login to your partition , then use “DISKPART” to open up the partition manager, and then simply remove the 55mb partition.

Done.

Hello,I’ve noticed this for a while, but finally blogging it to grab peoples attention. I use a Microsoft PPTP server at the office to connect to using PPTP. From Windows it works perfectly fine and i’m able to remain connected and go about my work. However, from OSX,  it works fine for a while – then if there is no activity on the connection, it kinda drops the connection – but not completely. Pinging anything at the office sometimes gives aping: sendto: No buffer space availableafter a while of pinging, it’ll stop and everything will resume. If after i connect, i leave a ping going this doesnt happen.Wonder whats going on…. 

So, i was working on my new Leopard install on my Macbook Pro and needed to Remote Desktop into a server at my office to start a Scheduled Task.Being a new laptop, i went to www.rdesktop.org, downloaded the source, opened up a new terminal, typed incd Downloadstar -xzf rdesktop* cd rdesktop*./configuremakesudo make installrdesktop servername and i did my work with the scheduled task, apple-w to close and i was done. Hang on a minute. My brain stopped for a second and thought about what had just happened. Did i just run “rdesktop” from the OSX terminal, and go straight into my server? Did Leopard actually spawn X11 for me, and run rdesktop within that ?Wow. Thanks Apple. 

Had an unusual problem with Word 2007 and Vista today which lead to Word freezing up after a document was opened up by double clicking on it.

My suspicions were that an “add-in” had gone crazy and taken over Word and wasn’t letting it complete its start up, and to call them out, i’m pretty sure it was Acrobat Professional with their really bad product.

The fix is relatively simple, its a registry edit of one, or possible two keys depending upon the severity.

Open up Registry Editor (windows key+r, “regedit”, enter) and look for

CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/Word
Rename Addins -> oldAddins

Then restart word, if it works, you’re good to go. If it doesnt, edit this other one as well

CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Word
Rename Data -> oldData
Rename Options -> oldOptions

That should do it!

Hi,

Just an update. TNMailserver 3, is around the corner. This time its based on Fedora 8 and is much easier to install and keep up to date, but works iwth the same charm as the Slackware version. It will also be renamed to “Techie MailServer”

Hi,

I just found this link which i thought i’d share. I’ve been wondering for a while why one of my customers Exchagne 2007 machine has been running very high on memory usage.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;942027

Thats a link to a hotfix that might fix my problem. Will install and report bac.

Good Evening Folks, today i was alerted by my good friend that WM6 had been released for my AT&T Blackjack. So, i went to the update site and downloaded the update. Whilst downloading the update, i noticed a few times it telling methat Vista is not supported for this update, which – is very strange to me. But regardless, i downloaded the update, and then started looking around for resources on how to get this update to work on Vista.

First, let me say a few things about this update process.

Samsung,
It’s now 2008. The vast majority of the devices out there, that support some kind of removable storage, can update them self using a particular type of file on this storage medium. Why on earth do you choose to use such an archaic cabled method ? What’s wrong with you?

Ok, rant over. Now, i found information here on how to do this on Vista, so i got the driver (which i am hosting now temporarily here) and updated the Samsung driver on my Vista machine and proceeded with updating my phone.

After about 5-10 minutes of updating, the phone rebooted, and i was graced with a beautiful looking splash screen, some swooshing sounds, and then the WM6 homepage. Wow, i said, Wow.

Then, as i continued the process as stated by Samsung, i ran into some problems. I couldn’t do the full reset. The phone barked and said “Error reseting”. So i rebooted the phone, and tried again. Same bark, same message. So, i tried the next time – to see the current phone version. To my horror, i found tha the PDA version had been updated, by the Phone version was BLANK. OMFG. What the hell happened? I followed all the steps (albeit ignoring the “don’t try this on Vista” part), and why did this goof up?

So, i tried flashing it again. Same thing.

So, i got brave and thought about it for a second (it was 1am by the way). And thought to myself, ” I wonder if i leave my sim card in the phone during the update, maybe it’ll update then?” Quickly, i tried it. And to my surprise, it worked. Yay!

So, if you are trying this WM6 update on your Blackjack, and the phone version isnt getting set, try it with the Sim card in, it may work.