My daughter has a Toshiba Satellite Laptop and was given a free copy of Microsoft Office 365 as part of her school enrolment.

Unfortunately when she upgraded her laptop to Windows 10, the on-board ethernet adapter stopped working, so she only had WiFi network access.

When we tried to download office using the new “Click to Install” technology, the installation continually failed because the WiFi connection was not fast enough.

Sadly, Office 365 is not available on CD or DVD, so the only way we could install it was as a download.

I am aware that Microsoft offers an offline installation option via the “My Account” option, but this isn’t available for school-based copies of Office, only for store-bought copies.  The school portal only allows a “Click to Install” option.

After trying to fix the on-board ethernet adapter, and scouring the web for Windows 10 drivers, I decided this was a waste of my time, and bought a Comsol USB 3.0 Ehternet Adapter for the laptop.

This turns a USB 3.0 port into a hard-wired ethernet adapter.

I then pluged the laptop into the wired Lan via an RJ45 cable, started the Office 365 download, and hey presto! It worked!

FigJam to me.

Cost of Comsol USB 3.0 Ethernet adapter: $43.88 from Officeworks.

I could have sent the laptop off to Toshiba to get fixed, but considering the effort taking it there, waiting for it to get fixed, bringing it back, I decided it was cheaper to spend $43 on the adapter.

Warning: Make sure you plug it into a USB 3 port on the laptop.  It doesn’t seem to work if you plug it into a USB 2 port.

I hope this helps anyone else with a similar problem.

You can see the latest version here: http://nbe.me/demo
The previous version is here: http://nbe.me/olddemov2
The previous previous version is here: http://nbe.me/olddemo
You can download the source for the page here: http://nbe.me/demo/d.zip

Major items:
1. Each widget has its own “Settings” page which allows you to edit settings. Just click on the “settings” button at the top right of any widget:

2. You can add / edit stocks & shares. If you click on the settings button for the stock widget you get a screen which lets you change the existing stock codes, quantities and buy prices.:

To delete a stock item, click on the red “X” button.
To move a stock item up a line, click on the blue up-arrow (↑)
To move a stock item down a line, click on the blue down-arrow (↓)
To add a stock item, fill in the blanks and click the green “+” button.
To save changes, click on the “SAVE” button.
To cancel changes or close the edit dialog, click on the [x] button at the top right of the window.

3. You can edit the links in the top-bar by clicking on the “*” to the right of the links in the top bar.

4. You can add / edit / remove widgets by clicking on the “Setup” link in the top bar.

To delete a widget, click on the red “X” button.
To move a widget up a line, click on the blue up-arrow (↑)
To move a widget down a line, click on the blue down-arrow (↓)
To add a widget, fill in the blanks and click the green “+” button.
To save changes, click on the “SAVE” button.
To cancel changes or close the edit dialog, click on the [x] button at the top right of the window.
Click “Factory Reset” to clear all your settings and revert back to the original settings that you downloaded from the website.

5. All settings are stored locally on your hard drive using the HTML5 “localStorage” facility. This is like a cookie, only bigger. The page settings were over 4,000 bytes in size, so would not fit in a cookie which officially can’t be larger than about 4,000 bytes. Local storage can be as large as your hard drive, so there are no storage limits, and the security / privacy settings are the same as for cookies.

You can download the source code here:
http://nbe.me/demo/d.zip

If you plan to use the weather widget, please change the “Weather API Key” in the “Setup” screen. Since lots of people are using this start page, the current API key will run out of API calls each day and won’t work. There are instructions on getting your own keys here:
/index.php/diy-replacement-for-igoogle/

As with all previous versions, you don’t need to load this start page on a web server. It will run fine from a folder on your computer. Just unzip the zip file, and click on index.html.

If you plan to put it on a public web server, you might want to password protect it with a htaccess file to protect your privacy.

Please try it out and let me know how you go.

I love iGoogle. It was free, convenient, and worked well. But because it was provided free by Google, it’s their right to pull the pin on it if they want to.

This event made me realize that any free service online may be cancelled. So if you don’t want the inconvenience of losing a free service that you love, you’re best off doing it yourself.

Here’s my modest attempt at writing my own iGoogle replacement page.

You can download the source for the page here: http://nbe.me/demo/d.zip

When you’ve downloaded the zip, you can unzip it to your own hard drive, or put it on a web server somewhere.

Before you start using it, you need two things: A Google API Key, and a Wunderground API Key.

Google API Key

1. Go to https://code.google.com/apis/console
2. If prompted, click on the “Create Project” button
3. Click on the “Services” button and change the status of “Custom Search API” to “ON”. Accept the terms.
4. Click on the “API Access” Link
5. In the “Simple API Access” section, click on “Create new Server key…”
Leave the “IP Address” box blank, and click “Create”
6. Copy the “API key”. This is your “Google Key” that you need to put in your index.html
7. Edit “index.html” and scroll to line 21 or there abouts. It will say something like:

var GoogleKey = “XXaaAaAAaAaAA9A9a9aaaaaAAA99a9aaaaA9AAA“; // Get your Google key here: https://code.google.com/apis/console

8. Replace the red key with your Google API key.
9. Save the index.html file

 Wunderground Key

1. Go to http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/
2. Click on “Sign Up for FREE”
3. Create your free account
4. Activate your membership
5. Login to Wunderground
6. Click on “Explore My Options”.
7. Select “Developer” option ($0) then click “Purchase Key”
8. Complete the questionaire honestly.
9. Click on the “Key Stettings” tab.
10. Copy the “Key ID”. This is your “Weather Key” that you need to put in your index.html
11. Edit “index.html” and scroll to line 23 or there abouts. It will say something like:

var WeatherKey     = “99999999999aaaaa“; // Get your API key here: http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/

12. Replace the red key with your Weather key.
13. Save the index.html file

You might want to change “WeatherCountry” and “WeatherCity” to reflect your home country and city.

Incidentally, the OS only formatted up a 2GB partition on the 3GB drive, leaving a separate 1TB partition unused.  I formatted this up later and added it to the pool.

I encountered several problems, but have overcome them all, and am very happy with the result.

1. WHS provided Drive Extender Technology, but WHS2011 does not.

A cool feature about the original WHS was that you could add extra storage to the box on the fly, and WHS would allocate it to one large storage pool.  So rather than having a bunch of disparate disks of all different sizes, they’d all appear as one huge drive.

This feature was dropped from WHS2011.

That meant if one of my drives filled up, and I wanted to add more storage, it would appear in the system as a separate drive, and I’d have to alter my backup plans to use the new drive.

I got around this problem by installing DriveBender – a WHS2011 add-in which allows me to dynamically manage the size of my storage pools, provides redundancy, and makes managing a bunch of drives a lot easier.  It only cost me $40, which (even for a tight-wad like me) was money well spent.

2. WHS2011 won’t backup a Windows 2008 Server

While the original WHS happily backed up all my servers, the WHS2011 connector would not install on my Windows 2008 server.

When I tried to install it, I got an error saying that the computer is running a version of the Windows Operating System that is not supported.

I got around this problem by loging into the WHS2011 server, and editing this file:

C:\Program Files\Windows Server\Bin\WebApps\Client\Package\supportedOS.xml

I added the following line to the XML:

<OS Architecture=”9″ RequiredProductType=”3″ RequiredSuite=”” ExcludedSuite=”” SPMinor=”” SPMajor=”2″ Build=”6002″ Minor=”0″ Major=”6″ Name=”Windows Server 2008, AMD64″ id=”7″/>

EDIT (January 2013).

For a Windows Server 2008 (service pack 2) machine, I added this line:

<OS id=”10″ Name=”Windows Server 2008 R2, AMD64″ Major=”6″ Minor=”0″ Build=”6002″ SPMajor=”2″ SPMinor=”” ExcludedSuite=”” RequiredSuite=”” RequiredProductType=”3″ Architecture=”9″/>

You can figure out what numbers to use by running the WinVer utility that comes with windows.  I.e. click on START / RUN and type WINVER [enter]

This will say something like:

Microsoft Windows Server:
Version a.b (build cccc: Service Pack d)

Use “a” as the “Major” parameter.
Use “b” as the “Minor” parameter.
Use “cccc” as the “Build” parameter.
Use “d” as the “SPMajor” parameter.

So my version of “Version 6.0 (Build: 6002: Service Pack 2)” translated to :
Major=”6″ Minor=”0″ Build=”6002″ SPMajor=”2″

After adding this line, and rebooting the server, I was able to install the WHS2011 connector on my server, although I received a warning telling me the OS was not on the list of compatible operating systems.

3. Disk Errors caused backups to fail

After a while, the USB drive started to fail.  WHS 2011 reported that the Windows Server Client Computer Backup Service was not running.  I tried to start it manually, but it failed.  The event log gave the following error:
“ReadHeader File: D:\ServerFolders\Client Computer Backups\Commit.dat Error: Unable to complete the requested operation because of either a catastrophic media failure or a data structure corruption on the disk.”

To get around this problem, I used DriveBender to add a second (2TB) USB drive to the pool. I then used DriveBender to remove the faulty (3TB) UDB drive from the pool.  Removing the faulty drive took about 36 hours.  Basically DriveBender had to check the CRC of every file on the drive before copying it.

After removing the faulty drive, I stil received the same error, so I did a “repair” on the backup database, which fixed the problem.

I was then able to reformat and add the original drive back into the pool.

At the same time, I enabled data redundancy on the pool, so that every file added after that was duplicated on a second drive.

4. I could not connect to WHS2011 with Launchpad from one machine

This was the most annoying error of all and took me days to fix.

I had an old XP machine that refused to connect.

Whenever I tried to sign in I’d get the following error:
The server appears to be offline. Do you want to sign in to offline mode?

This happened, even though I could use Dashboard, and was able to access shares on the server from the old XP machine.

I scoured the web for solutions.  Here’s a few I tried to no avail.

1. Uninstall and reinstall the WHS2011.  As well as uninstalling the connector, I deleted all records of the old XP machine from the WHS2011 catalog.  After reinstalling WHS2011 on the old XP machine Launchpad still would not connect to the server.

2. Uninstall and reinstall the .NET 4.0 framework.  I restarted the machine after uninstalling, and even combined the process with uninstalling / reinstalling WHS2011.  No joy.  I still could not connect.

3. Disable my local firewall.  Disable all inter-computer communication restrictions on my Endian firewall.   Basically I was trying to make sure nothing was blocking communications between the old XP machine and the server.  No success.  I still could not connect.

4. Increase the ServicesPipeTimeout setting in the registry.  The idea behind this was that perhaps it was taking a while for Launchpad to connect with the server.  If I increased the timeout, perhaps it might have a better chance of successfully connecting.  No joy.  I still could not connect.

In desperation, I used the Wireshark packet tracer, as well as my Endian Firewalls log files to trace any packets from the old XP machine to the server.  To my great surprise not a single packet was being transmitted.  There were not even any unsuccessful transmissions.  The workstation didn’t even appear to be trying to communicate.  This led me to think that perhaps there was something wrong with the Winsock component on the client workstation.  I.e. something on the local machine was stopping the communication before it even left the local machine.

So I tried listing all the LSP’s installed on the local machine using this command:

netsh winsock show catalog

This showed up something really interesting.  I noticed that there was an old antivirus system (Comodo Antivirus) installed on the workstation.  It wasn’t being used, but it had installed an LSP which was blocking communication between the old XP machine and the server.

I uninstalled Comodo Antivirus from the workstation, rebooted, and BINGO, Launchpad was able to connect.

I now have a fully functional WHS2011 backup solution.  It has redundancy, scalable storage, and works like a charm.  A couple of weeks ago, one of the local machines failed.  I just rebooted that machine from a WHS2011 recovery CD, and it was up and running again in about 90 minutes.

If you’re having problems with WHS2011, I hope this post helps you sort them out.

I have an Endian firewall appliance.

The main error I was getting was 0x80072EFD – unable to connect.

For me, the solution (after hours of heartache) was simple:

Go into Control Panel / Network and Internet / Internet Options / Connections tab / LAN Settings,

UNTICK “Automatically detect settings” and press OK.

Activation then works.

Updates then work perfectly.

Sorry – I’m not sure why this happens. I suspect it’s a bug in Endian version 2.2 which is fixed in later a version, probably relating to the internal Endian Proxy server which in my case is disabled anyway.

I hope this helps someone.

Many thanks to my son, Lachlan, who also had this problem, and figured out how to fix it after several days of heartache.

I took Steve and Harrison on a bike ride this morning, along the North Pine River, up to Lake Samsonvale, and then back along the North Pine Rover.

It was a hoot! A little bit slower than normal, because Harrison is only 9 and his bike is a bit worse for wear. But it was fun all the same.

And I got to try out a new program for my Nokia N95 mobile phone. Nokia Sports Tracker Uses the inbuilt GPS on the phone to record speed and height info. While you’re cycling, your N95 acts like a speedo, and odometer, showing you all the vital stats. But when you get home, you click the button, and upload the data to sports tracker.

The really cool thing is that if you take any photos with the phone on your journey, it will upload and geotag them.

So the map on the left here is where we went. You can drag and zoom it if you want more detail.

But the fun part is that the data is also uploaded to the Sportstracker community. Here’s a link to the data for our ride today. If you tick the “altitude” box, you can see every hill, and how fast we were going.

The thing I like most about this technology is that it adds to the fun of getting out and exercising. At times I’ve found it hard to overcome my inertia to regularly exercise. In regards to exercise, if it makes me think “Oh yeah! I want to do that again!” then I think it’s a great thing.

Oh – and you can use Sports Tracker for running, walking, skiing, rowing – whatever floats your boat.

P.S. I’ve ordered a mounting bracket to attach my phone to my handlebars. Till that arrives, I’m using some of Lilly’s hair ties

In this article about using slideshows in wordpress I showed you how to embed slideshows in WordPress blog posts and sidebars using the Google Ajax Feed API.

I prefer to use this facility to pull in Image feeds from Flickr.

The problem with the images in these feeds is that they’re either too large or too small.

The MediaRSS specification has a <media:thumbnail> tag which lets you have a thumbnail image in your feed. That’s great, but the image size of the thumbnail is 75×75 pixels, which is useless for a nice looking slideshow. It ends up looking terribly blurry with no detail.

The Google Ajax Feeds API tries to get around this by letting you specify a “thumbnailTag” in the slideshow options object. Basically, you set this to “content” to tell the API to look for the image in the “content” section of the feed, rather than the <media:thumnail> section. This is also great, but the problem is that Flickr uses the LARGE (or even worse, ORIGINAL) image size in this section. So you get nice large detailed images in the feed, but they’re so large that they take ages to load, and your slideshow sits there for ages saying “Loading….” while it grabs the huge images and chews up your audiences bandwidth.

So I wrote a simple PHP screen scraping utility which grabs the Flickr feed, and changes the ImageUrl…_L.jpg to ImageUrl….M.jpg – in other words, it modifies the feed to include the medium size image rather than the large size.

Medium sized images are fine for slideshows, and they load quite quickly.

Here’s the PHP code:

<?php
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$uri="";
$first_var = "1";
foreach($_GET as $variable => $value)
{
if ($variable == 'uri')
{
$uri = $uri . $value;
}
else
{
$uri = $uri . "&" . $variable . "=" . $value;
}
}
header("Content-Type: application/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1");
$ch = curl_init() or die(curl_error());
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$uri);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data1=curl_exec($ch) or die(curl_error());
$data1=str_replace("_s.jpg","_m.jpg",$data1);
$data1=str_replace('height="75"', "",$data1);
$data1=str_replace('width="75"', "",$data1);
echo $data1;
echo curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Just save this in a file named FlickrRSS.php in the top folder of your wordpress directory. Then instead of using your flickr RSS feed, pass the feed as a query parameter to the PHP utility.

You’ll need to change the &lt; and &gt; tags in the file to < and >.

So if your feed URL was this:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=YourFlickrUserNumberlang=en-us&format=rss_200

Use this instead
http://YourBlogUrl/FlickrRSS.php?uri=http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=YourFlickrUserNumberlang=en-us&format=rss_200

This will change the <media:thumbnail> tag to point to the lager sized image, so your slideshows will load quickly, and look nicer

This was nothing to do with the outlook security settings.

To fix the problem, I deleted the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder

After I deleted it, I restarted outlook, and my images now appear fine.

There is so much new cool stuff you can do these days.

Here’s just a few:

ShipWatcher – a new website I created that lets you look at the webcams of cruiseships, view their progress on a map, and take photos of ships you like. Every hour ShipWatcher picks webcams that it thinks are “interesting” and take a couple of photos, automatically uploading them to….

Flickr – a fantastic service, from Yahoo that lets you share photos with other people, place them on a map, group them into sets and collections, pool them into groups with other people, and even track the type of camera that took the photo – to help you choose your next camera. I even used Flickr to share some great looking Photo Mosaics that I generated with…

Andrea Mosaic – a clever little utility which lets you generate mosaic pictures like this one I did, from pools of photos that you might have. In fact, if you have large pools of photos, you might be interested in…

Photosynth – amazing new technology from Microsoft that pools photos, organizes them in relation to each other, and lets you view a 3-d model of the real world, by aggregating thousands of photos. This really has to be seen to be beleived. I have a copy of it on my main machine which runs….

VMWare -fantastic software that lets you build “virtual” computers. You can configure a number of different types of computers with different amounts of memory, diskspace, networking abilities, each of which can run a different operating system like Windows XP, Linux, Vista, DOS, and run them all at the same time. You can even get your virtual machine to take a snapshot of itself. Do some risky stuff, and then if you don’t like the result, rollback your machine to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken. Great for demos, when you want the demo to revert back to its previous incarnation when you’re finished. If you have a laptop, copy your virtual machine from your desktop to your laptop, and it’s ready to go. Everything on the laptop is the same as when you last used it on your desktop. So easy to backup too. Just copy the virtual disk (one file). I use VMWare to do all my software development, including a cool web development tool called…

Iron Speed Designer – easy to use software that lets you quickly generate websites based on any existing SQL, Oracle or Access database. I’ve never developed websites before, and Ironspeed made it easy to look like a pro. Great stuff.

It seems things just keep getting better. Life gets easier for us. We can do more, in less time.

BUT. Some things aren’t cool. They make life harder. They suck. Even some things that are cool can suck. For example….

Iron Speed Designer – although a great tool, decided that they didn’t like people using their software inside a virtual machine. Aparently some people were using the flexibility of virtual machine software such as VMWare to defeat the copy protection mechanism. So the folks at Ironspeed decided they’d put a limitation in version 5 of their software that makes it refuse to run on a virtual machine.

You may think “so what?”. But think about what this means. If you’ve got your entire development environment inside a virtual machine. And one of your development tools stops working in that machine. What do you do? Uninstall it and move it to a real machine I suppose.

But I use MS Visual Studio in conjunction with Ironspeed. So I suppose that would have to come out too.

Then, to make it consistent, I suppose all my Visual Studio projects would have to come outside the virtual machine.

And then – what happens if I want to go out of town for a week and take my laptop. How do I easily move all this stuff from desktop to laptop?

The Virtual machine becomes useless. All because Ironspeed doesn’t like you using their products in a virtual machine.

So one software supplier digs their heals in over technological innovation. Where will this end?

I predict one of two things will happen:

1. Ironspeed will see the error of their ways, repent, and their next version will run inside a virtual machine. Probably with some sort of licensing service that runs on a physical machine to police the licensing policy.

2. As more developers start using virtual machines, another software vendor will release an alternatuve web development utility, that does what Ironspeed does – except the new software will run inside a VM.

People who work in the technology industry can’t run away from technological innovation. Or they will end up being people who USED to work in the technology industry. Technology is all about innovation. Anyone who wants to stay in the technology industry needs to embrace innovation, not shun it.

So, here’s my message to Alan Fisher and the great guys at Ironspeed: You guys have a fantastic product. I love it. It’s brilliant and makes my life easier. It’s worth every cent that I paid for it. But if you want me to chose between Ironspeed and my Virtual Environment, then I’ll chose the latter. I want my technological life to be easier, not harder.

Please change your mind.

UPDATE December 2007. The folks at Ironspeed have responded to user requests, and removed the restriction on ISD running in a virtual environment. Fantastic decision, guys. A great product just got even better. Thanks for listening to us!

The other day it stopped working on my development machine (Win XP Pro SP2). Whenever I tried to navigate to the SSL page my browser said it couldn’t find the page.

I spent hours trying to google an answer to this problem.

The thing that finally fixed it was…. (drum roll)… a reboot.

Now here’s the proof that I’ve taken leave of my senses. My colleague had the same problem a few days ago. I helped him resolve it, and even suggested the reboot solution. It worked for him. But today when this problem happened to me, I forgot all about that episode, and wasted time until I came up with the same solution. Again.

I must be getting old.

Incidentally, if you need an SSL certificate for testing purposes, try Microsofts SelfSSL utility. It creates the certificate and installs it for you.

It’s available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=56FC92EE-A71A-4C73-B628-ADE629C89499&displaylang=en or search for “Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Resource Kit Tools”.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Microsoft’s SelfSSL utility will cause MSDE to stop working. It tries to install certificates in the SQL Server which makes it impossible to connect to.