bobpeers -> blog

My girlfriends computer has Windows Vista installed in Danish but has the UK version of Office 2003 Professional so I was rather surprised this week that I couldn’t change the spell check language in Word 2003 to Danish.

I had (rather naively as it turns out) just assumed that something costing as much as Office 2003 would also include a pile of dictionaries for spell checking, how wrong could I be.

To achieve what I wanted I’d actually have to buy Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003, which seems hard right now as all the sites I looked at showed it as discontinued!

To put this in context I use OpenOffice on Linux (cost zero) and installing a new dictionary takes me about 1 minutes using yum (cost also zero).

On a similar theme I was recently helping a friend with her computer when she asked me if she should buy Microsoft Word for her pc just so she can read Word attachments that are sent to her. She had very basic requirements and was not at all computer literate.

It struck me that for most people if they are sent a Word document they will of course assume they need Word to view the file, Microsoft Office document formats are so ubiquitous that many people just connect any text file with Word.

The idea that people fork out for Microsoft Word just for this purpose horrifies me when there are many free alternatives available. But of course knowledge is power in my case, many people are not so lucky.

I’ve still been dipping my toes in the world of Virtualization over the last couple of weeks first of all using innoteks Virtualbox and more recently giving VMWare Server a try.

From what I’ve read I expected VMWare to be far more polished (which it was) but I didn’t really find it any more usable than Virtualbox, in fact if anything I found Virtualbox a little faster.

The great thing has been just trying many different operating systems without any risk. I’ve always been a Gnome user but a few of the Linux distros I tried had pretty nice KDE desktops that I might consider using in future. I’ve always like the clean simplicity of Gnome and found KDE too messy, just looking into the KDE menus gives me a headache and the sheer amount of options that can be changed just leaves me confused. Sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

Having said that I see the KDE is a very powerful desktop and includes many apps not found in Gnome, plus in the 3.5 and 4.0 releases it seems much more user friendly.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at the speed of virtual machines even if they are only given 256MB of RAM. Mepis runs great, at least a fast as my native Fedora 8 install with twice the RAM.

Apart from needing more RAM in my laptop it’s made me realise that I also need a bigger hard disk, I replaced mine last year with an 80GB model but since it dual boots Windows XP Professional and Fedora 8 there’s not a massive amount of space left.

By the time you have a few virtual machines installed and have the ISO files lying around as well the space disappears rapidly. On a related not I must have downloaded 20GB of ISO files in the last few weeks trying out the different systems, it’s a good job my internet connection is fast and not capped (which seems a rarety these days).

I thing my next laptop will need at least 4GB of RAM and a 250GB disk to really do justice to Virtualization.

I’ve been wanting to try using virtual machines for quite a while now. I really want to use an Open Source application so I first thought of using the Kernel Based Virtual Machine but that requires virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V) which my 5 year old laptop doesn’t have.

After talking to a work colleague about innotek VirtualBox I thought I’d give it try.

Installing was a breeze using the Fedora 8 rpm provided and after skimming through the manual I tried installing Ubuntu 7.10. This was easy enough but the first thing I noticed was that I really need more RAM. I only have 512MB on my laptop an allocated 256MB to Ubuntu but it’s pretty sluggish and laggy to use. The other thing I didn’t realise is that to install Ubuntu you need to boot from the CD and then click on the Install icon on the desktop, otherwise it’s just like running a Live CD.

Next I thought I’d try Mint 4.0. I’ve read a few good things about this so decided to give it a run. Unfortunately the install crashed soon after booting (which is strange since it’s based on Ubuntu and that booted fine) so I’ll have to wait to see Mint in action.

Next up it’s Slackware 12.0 when I have the time, I’ll post my further impressions with Virtualbox as I progress but so far so good. My only complaint is that use of the Qt toolbox which looks decidedly ugly on Fedora 8.

I installed Vista SP1 on my girlfriends computer yesterday (it’s in Danish which wasn’t one of the original release languages, hence the delay) and was disappointed to find that her computers network problem has not been fixed.

After writing about Microsofts problems with selling Vista to businesses it was funny to read this article where Steve Ballmer describes Vista as a ‘work in progress’.

As the article says, every piece of software is actually a work in progress, we all expect new verisons and enhansments to be released, but for such a figure to say this while at the same time trying to convince corporations to embrace Vista it sounds like for a moment he forgot his marketing spiel and the truth slipped out

With all the rumours about when the next version of Windows, called Windows 7, might be released (sometime from 2009 to 2011 it seems) along with the announcement that Windows XP will still be available to manufacturers of selected systems (most notably small, cheap Laptops like the Asus Eee PC)until June 30th, 2010 it seems that Microsoft is feeling the pressure these days.

On one hand they’re having a hard time convincing businesses to make the switch to Vista while on the other hand there is a growing demand for cheap, portable laptops which just don’t have the power to run Vista. Many of these run Linux as a result, as it’s far better suited to low spec machines. Of course Microsoft had to react to stop this Linux creep into their market share.

On the corporate side in the company I work for there’s just no way we could move to Vista, most of our computers have 512MB of ram with 3GHz Pentium 4 processors that just won’t be up to the job. It would cost us a small fortune to upgrade these computers with no obvious return on investment for doing so.

One of the main complains with Vista seems to be that’s it’s just too resource hungry and slow. Run Vista and XP side by side and XP leaves Vista standing. It may well be more secure but trying to sell this to a consumer when they want something newer and faster is a tough sell.

One of Microsofts main problems is that Windows has just become too complex plus they’re always trying to be backwards compatible.

It seems that on one hand Microsoft hails Vista as a great success while on the other hand they intentionally start rumours about the next version. Exactly why a company would now shift to Vista with the rumours of a new version that’s smaller, faster and will make Vista obsolete is beyond me.

Even for a consumer like myself it makes me think twice about buying a new laptop with Vista installed. I have my issues with Vista and knowing that it may be replaced sooner rather than later certainly makes me think about waiting.

There’s always a few things that bother me regarding IT in my workplace but I thought I’d mention a few of the worst offenders concerning the Internet/Intranet site. I suspect a few of these are common to many sites out there :-)

The Internet Site

1. The company web site does not have any sort of custom ‘page not found’ (404 error), instead it just throws up the normal IIS error page. Very user unfriendly, unprofessional and a great way to loose visitors.
2. Unbelievably the site is only accessible through http://www.mycompany.com. If you go to http://mycompany.com without the www you get this page:
   
3. No favicon so the company logo is not visible in the location bar or in the bookmarks if you bookmark the page

The Intranet Site

1. Again, no custom ‘page not found’.
2. The web server runs IIS 4.0!!!
3. It’s coded using frames making it very difficult to bookmark a page which surely is one of the points of a source of in formation like the Intranet.!
4. Badly coded. Search the phone book for an entry and put an apostrophe in the name (for example O’Hara) and you get the errror [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Syntax error (missing operator) in query expression ‘InStr(name,’o'hara’)>0 ORDER BY name’.

   Firstly the input should be checked and properly escaped, secondly wouldn’t this be much easier using an SQL LIKE statement instead of using the VBScript function InStr and finally I shouldn’t see the standard VBScript error as it should have been handled.
5. It’s packed full of Excel, pdf, Word ,you name it files that could easily have been written in standard HTML. It seems that probably due to lack of time or knowledge people just drop a Word file in and create a link to it. This makes for a very annoying browsing experience.
6. Finally there’s no standard corporate identity across the site. Pages are written by different departments with no guidelines on how to develop a page resulting in a stylistic mess of pages.

Here’s a very useful site on UNIX / Linux commands, pretty exhaustive list.

Unix Toolbox (xhtml)
Unix Toolbox (pdf)

Being the early adopter that I am I’ll be installing Fedora 9 within a day or two of it’s release.
There’s nothing like installing a new release over a perfectly usable, customised and stable system just so I have the latest and greatest :-) Still that’s the fun for me, plus it’s a great learning experience, you learn the most when things break.

I’ve been with Fedora since Fedora Core 4 so I’m pretty good at getting my settings back after an new version is released. Of course I backup all of my .conf files located in /etc/ and I also have a text file with notes since there’s always some things that I just can’t remember (usually with Apache and virtual hosts for some reason).

Over the years I must say that it’s become much easier, partly because I know much more but also because the installer and whole release cycle seems much more polished.

Gone are the days when you’d get missing dependencies using yum at least once a week or cryptic error messages when trying to partition the disk during install. It’s all very smooth and uneventful these days.

This is quite a compliment for how far Linux has come in the last few years, especially since Fedora is intended to be one of the more cutting edge distros.

Here’s my current favorite xkcd comic strips.

If only life were this easy!

A lesson for the unwary.

When writing HTAs to connect to an MS Access database I used to always use VBScript.
The obvious reason for this being that it seemed easier since both are Microsoft technologies plus I initially had no idea how to create or use ActiveXObjects from JavaScript.

After doing this for a while I became very frustrated at the limitations of using VBScript so looked deeper into changing to JavaScript and found that’s it’s actually very easy to use.

As a starter for anyone else in the same position here some framework code showing how to create an ADO connection, open a recordset and execute the command object all using JavaScript.
(I know technically this is JScript, which is Microsofts version of JavaScript)

// path to database
var DBpath="\\\\Server\\Path\\myDB.mdb"

// set up a few object constants
var adLockReadOnly=1
var adOpenForwardOnly=0
var adCmdText=1

// create and open a new connection (MSAccess)
var cnn=new ActiveXObject("ADODB.connection")
cnn.Provider = "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + DBpath
try
    {
    cnn.open
    }
catch(err)
    {
    // could not open connection
    // view details in err.Description and err.Number
    return 0
    }

//open a read only recordset
var rs = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset")
try
	{
	rs.Open("Select * from myTable", cnn, adOpenForwardOnly, adLockReadOnly)
	}
catch(err)
	{
	// could not open recordset
	return 0
	}
while(!rs.EOF)
	{
	// do something
	rs.movenext
	}
rs.close

//insert records with command object
var cmd=new ActiveXObject("ADODB.command")
cmd.ActiveConnection = cnn
cmd.CommandText = "Insert into myTables values(x ,y ,z)"
cmd.CommandType=adCmdText
    try
    {
    cmd.Execute()
    }
    catch(err)
    {
    // could not execute SQL
    return 0
    }