TV - My thoughts on television and the internet

Television is a great entertainment device, but cable/broadcast TV is dead, except for live events. With excessive commercials, demanding life schedules, poor programing, high price of cable, etc., who wants to watch TV the "old" way?

As of today, Hulu, many TV networks, OnDemand, NetFlix, Boxee, Apple TV and the upcoming Google TV are forever changing how we watch television. People can now search for what they want to watch, and most of it is free over the internet via legal sources. And of course, there are also the other channels such as Justin.tv, atdhe.net and Veetle.com.

I've been using the Boxee (http://www.boxee.tv) program to make watching my favorite shows more convenient. I simply click to The Office, and the most recent shows (and reruns) are displayed in a list for me to select the one I want to watch.

Commercials are still present, but minimal. I assume that this is the trade off of the advertisers being able to target better. Believe me when I say, they know more about you than you think about who you are (sex, age, interests), or can at least target ads more specifically than a broadcast TV commercial.

How do you feel about this? I'm not sure that I like it. Privacy is eroding.

But, I can say that I'm excited about the changes coming to the stale television industry.

The FREE computing environment

I'm a big fan of free stuff. I also like the open source community. As the economy waivers, I thought I'd give a FREE computing environment scenario for any interested parties.

Hardware: Well, unfortunately, this is not free. But used PCs can be found on craigslist.

Operating system: I like Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit
Office applications: OpenOffice
Web browser: Firefox & Chrome
Graphics editing: GIMP
Photo manager: Picasa
IM: Built into Ubuntu
Online backup: Dropbox (2gb free)
External hard drive backup: RSync
Video player: VLC
Music player: Built into Ubuntu
FTP: FileZilla
Twitter: TweetDeck

With these applications and the ones available via the Ubuntu Software Update, you have a great personal computer, and you didn't have to spend any money on software.

How to - Add storage to Dell 2900

One customer site that I service has a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with a Perc 6/i RAID controller. The customer has been set up with Microsoft Hyper-V, and two virtual servers (Windows SBS 2003 and Windows 2003) are running on it.

More storage was requested and added. Here's how.

(3) 1TB SATA drives and Dell drive trays were purchased. The drives were installed into the trays and the trays into the server. During boot, CTRL-R is pressed to enter the RAID configuration manager. Once at the console, a VD is created by adding the drives, assigning RAID level and settings, and letting the disk initialize (a couple of hours). Helpful link if you're a novice.

Upon booting into Windows, I used an MMC console to access Disk Management and Share and Storage Management. During the configuration, I chose an MBR disk signature. This threw the disk/volume management off as the MBR doesn't work well for large disks. Thus, I had to do some "diskpart" commands in order to remove the READONLY attribute and to convert the disk to GPT. Reference

After handling those items, I went back in to Share and Storage Management, and I used the Provision action to add 1.82TB of RAID5 storage to the server.

That space will be cut into VHD (virtual hard drives) and assigned to the servers as additional storage space. Ultimately, the customer saves by making better use of their hardware and meeting their storage needs.

Free online backup of data using Dropbox

I've mentioned many times to customers, associates, friends and family... you need to backup your data. No matter how sophisticated or amateur you computer kung-fu, you must backup your data.

Dropbox is FREE and automated. Two words that any computer/network administrator loves to hear.

Check it out - https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTczODQ2Njk

VirtualBox tweaks after Windows 7 upgrade

After performing an upgrade to Windows 7 this weekend, I noticed a couple of issues on my new Windows 7 (64bit) install.

I found that the Virtualbox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter issue (as described here http://johnsonyip.com/wordpress/2010/02/02/fix-virtualbox-host-only-ethernet-adapter-error-in-device-manager-for-windows-in-4-steps/) was exhibited. Thanks for the fellow blogger for the resolution.

Also, I found that the service for the Sun, VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver was removed during the upgrade. I was able to reinstall the service/driver by adding it to the NIC properties (Choose Install, Service, Sun, VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver, then browse to your Program Files, Sun, VirtualBox, drivers folders and find the file it is looking for.

Following the installation of the VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver, I was able to set my VM back to bridged for the machine's network adapter settings.

OSX 10.6.3 Software Update on Dell XPS M1530

For all those developers and testers out there, I would like to report that I have successfully installed the Apple OSX 10.6.3 Software Update on a Dell XPS M1530 laptop.

The installation was smooth and simple.

Android thoughts

I am often asked about mobile phones. I am currently using a Droid on Verizon. I have to say that I've found the Android OS to be very powerful, easy to use, and packed full of features. Hardly anything was left out (except for maybe the ability to create a wifi hotspot).

In regard to the Droid, I do have a few complaints:
- the battery dies quickly so you need to watch the open programs/services to maximize life
- the phone is heavier than most
- no universal multi-touch (like the pinch zoom on the iphone)

Overall, I think that the Android OS for phones is quite amazing. Blackberry and Windows Mobile are going to be have to really step it up to compete. And Apple will continue to have success with the iphone for the die hards, but they have also isolated themselves (maybe by design).

Sonicwall & Outlook POP

We rarely use POP email accounts, but a customer of DELTYME does. A recent support ticket came in stating that they could not receive all of their emails. Outlook would fail part way through the receive process on a few computers.

After some discovery, I found that the Sonicwall Email Filtering, Rapid Email Attachment filter checkbox was the cause of the issue.

Keywords: Outlook, email, cannot receive, receive hang, pop, sonicwall

CRM for small businesses

I often find myself at customer sites meeting with managers and/or owners discussing how to improve their business by using IT more effectively. One area that is often overlooked in the SMB market is Customer Relationship Managemet (CRM). Most small businesses care for and service their customers with a great deal of personal attention, but without a CRM system.

Due to this method of account management, some problems/issues can arise. Here are a few:
- There is no detailed account history, except for what the account manager has documented.
- When an employee leaves, there is no real way to pick up where they left off
- Reporting of KPI's (key performance indicators) is nearly impossible
- A sales pipeline is difficult to collect
- There is no centralized system for working as a team

The extent of what a CRM system should do must be decided by the business owners/managers. They should really understand why CRM is important, not just for giving better service to your customers, but also to the bottom line.

In the SMB market, there are several popular CRM systems. Some are hosted and can offer enterprise level reliability at a reasonable cost. Here are a few that I'd had a chance to use:
- Salesforce
- SugarCRM
- vTiger
- ACT!
- Microsoft CRM
- Microsoft Business Contact Manager

Learn more about CRM!

Send email to myself with Gmail and Outlook

If you want to send email to yourself / myself with Gmail and Outlook, you may need to review your settings in Gmail.

I found that if you do not have all of your sending aliases under Accounts and Import that the Label on the email will be Sent Mail, not Inbox as desired.

Be sure that all of "Send email as" settings include all of the email addresses (aliases) that you will receive email with as well. When Gmail sends and receives the email that you sent to yourself... if the email address in question isn't listed in the "Send email as" settings, the email will only show up in the All Mail and Sent Mail.

But when you have the email address specified in "Send email as" (even if you don't make it your default), Gmail will change the label to be Inbox.

Hence, you can successfully send email to yourself / myself with Gmail and Outlook.