Dear Dr. Theopolis....

Here are some articles I wrote for Novell Cool solutions over the past few months:

Using GroupWise to Keep up with Twitter

IMPORTant People - Using the new import features of the GroupWise 8 address book.

You got your Training in my GroupWise!

My Verizon sales rep dropped off a Blackberry Storm for me to try out for a few days.

I like the physical appearance of the device. It seems fairly solid, and even has some metal parts. The screen is bright, clear and the high resolution makes text very smooth and images crisp. There's a full size headphone jack, like other Blackberries have. Even the clickable screen seems mechanically sound, and I think it is a good idea - if it had been backed up by solid software.

I have been a Netflix customer for a couple years now. I have fluctuated back and forth from the single disc unlimited and the 2 disc unlimited plans since I first subscribed. As many folks know, Netflix introduced the abilityt o watch some movies and tv shows on your computer. The movies and shows are streamed to your PC, not downloaded. This means you must have an internet connection to watch them. I watched a couple movies on my laptop when the service first came out, and thought the quality was pretty good. But, watching a movie on the laptop isn't exactly ideal.

A couple weeks ago, Novell released it's latest version of ZENWorks - ZENWorks Configuration Management (ZCM). I first saw this version at Brainshare 2007 in Salt Lake City. One of the first things that struck me about this new ZEN is that it does not run on NetWare. This is not a big surprise, as Novell has been steadily moving away from NetWare for a couple years now. In fact, while we use a lot of Novell products, we are currently only using NetWare for file and print, backup, and ZENworks.

My son's baseball game got canceled due to to lightning the other night. We went home, and got the kids ready for bed. The storm started to clear, and we saw this nice rainbow. It's hard to see in this scaled down image, but it actually ended in the field on the right side of the image. I could see the color go all the way to the ground. No pot o' gold though. This was also a double rainbow, we could see a second, lighter rainbow above this one. Very cool.

1 day and 22 hours ago I submitted a story to Digg. It was a brief caption and a link to Reverend Ted's blog article on the Novell "Will it Blend?" video. I never thought it would get his many hits, but right now it's sitting at 854 Diggs. It's probably just about tapped out, but it was fun to see this go from being dugg by just a handful of people, to 854. Say what you want about Digg, it is a pretty powerful way of getting information out to a wide audience.

I have been running flavors of Suse full time for about a year now. I have really enjoyed almost every aspect of using Linux as my main OS, but there have been a couple annoying aspects. One of these minor annoyances has been using my Dell convenience base/docking station with my D series notebook. I keep a set of speakers plugged into the station, so I can have nice sound when I am docked. In Windows XP this works fine, and I get audio out of the speakers when I am docked, and out of the laptop speakers when I am not docked.

This is a decent review of OpenSuse and 3 other free versions of Linux. I think the reviewer get's it wrong when talking about installing software on Suse. He says that installing software on OpenSuse is a manual process compared to the Click-n-run in Freespire or the Add / Remove Programs function in Ubuntu. Suse provides YaST for installing software, which provides point and click software installation. In fact, when you add a couple 3rd party software repositories to Yast, you can install just about anything with a simple point and click. Dependencies are mostly resolved using this process as well. Overall a good article to read.

Review: Free Linux Desktops - CRN Test Center set out to locate good examples of free Linux distributions that still have some channel focus and offer robust features, along with upgrades to commercial support. The field was narrowed down to three familiar names in the Linux world, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and the new Freespire, the free version of Linspire. [Digg.com Linux Stories]

Being a network admin IT support type of guy, I am always interested in tools to make my job a little easier. I have been using UltraVNC for a couple years now. Lot's of people have their own "flavor" of VNC they like. UltraVNC has been on the top of my list for a while now, because of some of the features:

-Highly configurable
-File Transfer
-Chat
-Screen scaling
-Web based remote control

I know other version of VNC have a couple of those features, but the file transfer is really slick in UltraVNC. The most current versions will allow folder transfers, and will even automatically create a ZIP file if you select multiple files and folders, and transfer the zip, then unzip it automagically at the other end.

I recently discovered UltraVNC Single click. This is a very nice support tool. Basically you grab a zip file from the ultra VNC site, customize a text file for your settings, change icons if you want, and even add a logo. Then you zip this stuff back up, and run it through a web interface. The web interface spits out an EXE for you, with your customizations baked right in. The file is small - mine is about 160k. You (the support person) runs your VNC viewer in listen mode, and the end user runs the customized EXE. BOOM! Remote control session! Even works when the end user is behind NAT. Have not played with it using NAT at both ends. I have setup my Viewer to prompt me when someone wants to be controlled, and can control multiple machines at the same time. I highly recommend checking this out. (Windows version only, the one downside to this).