Chrome’s newest and probably most requested feature is the addition of extensions.  Extensions, which were made popular by FireFox, extend the browsers functionality into a variety of areas. My favorite extensions are Xmarks, Google Mail Checker, and StumbleUpon.  Also on the list of new features is auto fill, full page zoom, auto scroll, and a tab drag feature that allows you to compare two tabs in a side by side view.  With these added features, my use of Chrome has increased significantly. But the most important feature it boasts is its speed.

You will need to have access to both a Windows workstation and a Linux workstation with X windows installed, to proceed with this tutorial.  If you do not have a Linux machine handy then download a copy of Virtual Box and build yourself a virtual machine that runs your favorite flavor of Linux. I personally like Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu in that order, but ultimately it doesn’t matter which distro you choose.

To get started, first download and install Xming.  If you don’t already have a SSH client installed, then also download and install PuTTY.

Now open up Xlaunch from start, all programs, Xming. Choose multiple windows for this test and click next. Start no client, then click next. Leave clipboard checked and click next. If you want to save this config then click Save configuration, then click finish.

Now open PuTTY. Type the host name or IP address into the top space provided.  Make sure SSH is selected if not select it. Under Saved sessions type a name to lable this connection, and click save. Now in the menu on the left click SSH. Check Enable compression.  Now click the plus sign next to SSH in the left hand menu. Click X11, and check mark Enable X11 forwarding. On the menu scroll back up to the top and click Session. Click Save once more to keep the settings we just made changes to. Now click Open and log into your linux machine with your user name and password.

After you have successfully logged into your linux machine, type the name of a graphical program you like to use. Examples of such are “firefox”, “kwrite”, and “konqueror”.  If you are unsure what the command is for your app I recommend doing a google search for it.

here are some more gui apps that can be launched.

startkde – opens a full view of the desktop with menus and desktop items. (this one has proved unstable in my tests)

firefox – opens the firefox browser.

ktorrent – opens the ktorrent bittorrent app

konqueror – opens the konqueror web / file browser

most gui apps will open by simply typing the name of the app and pressing enter.

Normally installing a network capable printer is a routine task. Install the drivers, select the port you want to use (tcp/ip), and for the most part go. Yes I’m over simplifying the process, but not by much.  Installing the x9350 though wasn’t even close to this procedure.  First of all I could not simply add the printer through add printers, even as the administrator. I was forced to use the Lexmark installer, which is a bit odd, but not immediately problematic.  However the installer would not see the printer on the network. I could install it just fine with the usb cable, but that defeats the purpose of having it as a network printer, unless I want to chain it to another print server of some form.

So I called Lexmark tech support, and yes, the techs are in India.  And while I have no doubt our Indian IT counterparts are more then qualified to handle support calls, it doesn’t make their accents any easier to understand. Nothing personal, and I don’t mean to knock their abilities, but when I’m already frustrated by an unusual and needlessly difficult printer install, it would certainly make things a bit easier if I could readily understand the person trying to help (Are you listening Lexmark????).  With that said, they were obviously having a hard time understanding me as well, because even after repeating it a number of times and to a number of tech’s, they kept insisting that I was trying to set this up as a wireless printer. I even asked them to remove any instances of wireless anything from my support ticket, though that proved to be about as futile as this printers ability to connect across the WAN.  Finally after stumping a couple of techs I was transferred to network support and got a tech who seemed to speak English as a first language.  She again guided me through the install from start to end, only to achieve the same results I did, no x9350 printer in windows printers.  She put me on hold to consult another IT staffer, who then told her that all network ink jet printers use MAC address as opposed to TCP\IP to simplify the installation and make it easier for the installer to find. MAC addresses are not however route capable and thus I will not be able to use this network printer on our network. Which leaves me at the point I stated at the beginning of this blog post, as I am currently waiting for my RMA to send this printer back to our supplier.

To sum things up, I never was able to use this printer because Lexmark decided to create a port / protocol that is incompatible with the standard tcp/ip port already present in EVERY Operating System. And Lexmark has needlessly hurt their own product by trying to simplify an already easy operation. And for the people who would have difficulties setting up a network printer, those people would have to call tech support anyway, which just makes their attempt at simplifying this process a completely mute point.  I will certainly think twice before purchasing a Lexmark printer in the future, and well given the same amount of time to read reviews etc prior to buying a new printer, I’ll just assume Lexmark does not make a product that will fit our business needs and start my search with their competitors. If I were to give them a score between 1 – 10, Lexmark would have to provide me the points to achieve a positive integer.

The Problem

Microsoft has acknowledged for some time now that IE has not been standards compliant. Most sites have gotten around this by either coding their sites for IE or designing an IE specific website that is displayed when they visit.  Now Microsoft’s position has changed, and for those sites that do not display properly it seems the answer is to change your source code. There are some recommendations for changing your code that makes IE8 use it’s IE7 compatibility mode, which I’ll get to in a second, but again and again the recommendations are that if your site is not displaying properly, the problem lies with your code, not the browser.

To IE 8 Users

Now if you are simply browsing the internet and see that some pages you used to visit are now broken, then you have options. Specifically the options are to use another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. You could also try emailing the webmaster of the website you are having trouble with to see if they have any recommendations, but most likely they are going to tell you that they are working on the issue and to just keep checking back.

We have also seen an anomaly between different sub versions of IE8, where compatibility issues seemed to be less of an impact, but have been unable to track down the specific update / installer to duplicate our results. If we are able to find any additional information on this we will post that here with links and instructions.

To Website Owners

If you happen to be one of the unfortunate ones who own / operate a web site that is not compatible with IE8, again your option is really to change your code.  However, one of the quick fixes circulating is a meta tag compatibility fix that supposedly forces the browser to act as IE7 did. Again you have to edit your source code to apply this.

<head>
<meta
      http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"
      content="IE=EmulateIE7"
/>
</head>

HOWEVER We have tested this code on a couple of different sites, but have not had ANY luck getting it to fix the problems we were seeing.

Ultimately the best solution for those of you who own websites that are having problems with IE8 is to rewrite your code so that it is also standards compliant. If you would like to read more on the standards IE is now compliant with you can check out this site.

Need Help?

If you need help reworking your website so that it works properly in IE8 then we can help you.  Go HERE and enter the code IE8EVAL to have us evaluate your website for free and determine what it will take to get your site back up and running for all browsers.


Set msgTest = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
msgTest.Subject = "Testing smtp authentication"
msgTest.Sender = "testing@highspeedweb.net"
msgTest.From = "testing@highspeedweb.net"
msgTest.To = "you@yourdomain.edu"
msgTest.TextBody = "This is some sample message text.."


Pretty easy so far. Create a message object of type CDO.Message. Give it a subject, a sender, a from email address, a to email address, and some text as the body. Most everyone gets this part right. And then on…


'Tell it to use SMTP (1 is send using local SMTP pickup directory, 2 is SMTP server)
msgTest.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2

'Connection Timeout in seconds (the maximum time CDO will try to establish a connection to the SMTP server)
msgTest.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpconnectiontimeout") = 60


Most people get these right as well, but what they are lacking is this:


'Type of authentication, 0 = NONE, 1 = Basic (Base64 encoded), 2 = NTLM
msgTest.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate") = 1

msgTest.Configuration.Fields.Update
msgTest.Send


Depending on your hosting provider, the user you use to send may be an email address. With our hosting customers it is. You will probably never use NTLM authentication, unless you do something on a corporate network with centralized authentication.

Well, that’s about it. It’s really straight forward, just some gotcha’s in the schemas and configuration fields.

Ok first off the line is CDBurnerXP, which like I said, I’ve had some issues with. It is however a good software and hopefully you’ll have better luck with it then I did. It has many features available with commercial packages, and a decent web site that offers more support and even offers tools such as lightscribe and other types of cover printing.

My next favorite is InfraRecorder, which has become my utility knife of burning software for windows.  It burns data, audio, video, iso’s, and copies disks. It has a light weight interface and works with most of my computers, my laptop excluded.

Express Burn is another software that claims to be the fastest burner in the world. Now personally that isn’t a big selling point to me, and their free version lacks the ability to burn video and other limitations in hopes that you will buy their Express Burn Plus product.  And while I haven’t used this software, I can also say I’m not interested other then to maybe see how fast it is, just because.

Deep Burner comes highly recommended, but again offers a free version in hopes you will buy the pay for version.  The only thing I don’t like about Deep Burner is that they have more then one software to use if you want to burn video’s or even rip disks.  I prefer that there be a single software that does all the tasks I may or may not need.

Well there is nothing special or unique about Live Migration, or at least none that have been revealed at this time. Instead its apparent that Microsoft is very much playing catch up to the already available technology. Though this isn’t really a bad thing.  Ward Ralson says that Live Migration will be included with Server 2008 for free, as opposed to VMotion, which currently is sold as a stand alone product from VMware. (www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 101319).  Ok so free is cool, of course free comes with the windows server 2008 price tag, but if you already have 2008 or plan on moving to that platform then this could help you if you decide to also use Hyper-V.

Having multiple laptops, some of which are under company control and some of which are personal machines, doesn’t come without security risks though.  A worst case scenario would be that a sales persons laptop is stolen, and then the RDP session they use to access their remote desktop, is used to hack our servers.  The ability to push only the applications needed to a remote client helps to mitigate that scenario because there is no remote desktop to manipulate.  Instead only the application itself is called from the remote server and it opens on the desktop as if it were a locally installed program.  Now its also important to mention that this is not the only method you have to make your RDP more secure.  And I’ll try to cover the security options more in depth in a later post, but for now and for the purpose of this article, I’m only going to get into a simple method for publishing your remote application into a “.rdp” shortcut that you can then distribute via ftp, thumb drive, CD-r etc.

To start my simple tutorial, I’m running Windows Server 2008 standard edition, and the application that I’m going to publish will be the free ftp client, Filezilla.  I already have installed all of the Terminal Services tools available, and I’ve chained it to my already running licensing server.

1. click Start and then All Programs.
2. click Administrative Tools
3. click Terminal Services
4. click the TS Remote App Manager
5. on the right side click Add RemoteApp Programs
6. the wizard loads and on the first page all you need to click is Next
7. now you are presented with a list of programs that are installed. Choose the one you want to publish. I’ll pick Filezilla. After you pick then click next.
8. Now click Finish.
9. Now you will see your RemoteApp Programs in a list.
10. right click the application and select “Create .rdp File”
11. on the first page click Next
12. Now you are on a page that allows you to make “Specific Package Settings”. These settings serve my purposes for this tutorial so just click next again.
13. Now click Finish

Now if you have done exactly as I have, Windows Explorer will open to /Program Files/Packaged Programs where you will see the .rdp shortcut to your application. Now you can simply copy this file to an ftp site, a thumb drive or cd-r etc.  And when you double click it from another machine it will prompt you for a user-name and password and then open only that application at your location.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a very basic demonstration of how to make RemoteApp’s work for you. If you would like to read up more on this topic try these articles from Microsoft.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753844.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730673.aspx