Alex in a nutshell

Lookout under Outlook 2007

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Software

— Alex Salamakha @ 1:18 am

Amazing lightning-fast search for Outlook, Lookout, doesn’t work out of the box with Office 2007.

However, you can make it work by following instructions from Mike Belshe, one of Lookout authors:

http://www.belshe.com/2007/12/06/how-to-install-lookout-on-outlook-2007/

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iPhone wireless sync with multiple PCs

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— Alex Salamakha @ 8:39 pm

Since my Dopod d810 died as a result of an accident, I needed to get a new smartphone. The choice is obvious - iPhone 3G. It’s a nearly perfect device, however iTunes sync is sub-optimal. I couldn’t get it to sync consistently at work, where I have Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2007 Server.

Sometimes it would sync, sometimes it wouldn’t. After hours on the phone with Apple support I’ve narrowed down the problem - if Outlook doesn’t talk to Exchange, everything works. As soon as Exchange is in the picture, it becomes an issue. I couldn’t get my iPhone to sync with Exchange directly due to security policies at my workplace.

On top of that, sync with Outlook usually means that my Exchange calendar will contain both business and private events, which is rather sub-optimal, I’d rather keep my work environment business-only.

So ideally I want the following:

Don’t keep any personal info at work machine
Keep one central repository of all contacts and calendars (outside of work)
Sync iPhone with contacts on my home laptop (backup reasons and in case I don’t have an Internet connection for some time)
No wires and as automated as possible

After some digging around and talking to several colleagues, I’ve came up with an optimal way of addressing all my sync needs. Take a look at the high-level diagram of the solution:

iPhone Sync diagram

I already have a Google account, and Google Calendar is an awesome tool, BUT iPhone doesn’t sync with it directly. Here comes NuevaSync. It’s a free service that provides Exchange interface to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Plaxo.

You need:

Create a Google Account. It’s free.
Download Google Calendar Sync utility to synchronise your Outlook/Exchange with Google Calendar. It’s free.
Create a NuevaSync account. It’s free.
Configure your NuevaSync account by providing your Google Account credentials.
Configure your iPhone to work with NuevaSync:
- Click Settings >> Mail, Contacts, Calendar
- Add a new Exchange account with NuevaSync credentials. Click here for full instruction (requires login on NuevaSync web site).
In Settings >> Fetch New Data uncheck Push email to save your battery. Instead select Fetch time more appropriate for your needs. I started with 15 minutes, but found 1 hour to be heaps better for battery life.

That’s about it.

If I get a meeting request in my work inbox while I’m away from my desk, the request trickles through to my iPhone within short time and I can still make it.

Ad-hoc sync with my MacBook Pro works great via iTunes whenever I connect the iPhone to it. Apple did a fabulous job of syncing the iPhone with multiple machines, something I could never get my Windows Mobile phone to do.

I don’t use email sync. I get too many emails at work and I don’t feel like getting them on my iPhone. I get all my personal emails on the iPhone, however. In order to do that I’ve set up all my mailboxes in Google Apps (you can bring your own domain as well) and enabled IMAP via Google Control Panel. iPhone works with IMAP mailboxes very good and I found myself using iPhone mostly for all my email needs. As I do it in small intervals throughout the day, I don’t need to allocate a huge chunck of time every evening to clear my Inbox.

This tip will also work if you have a Windows Mobile device.

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Cool OSX Software

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— Alex Salamakha @ 5:13 am

Previously I’ve blogged about my favourite Windows Mobile applications. Now it’s time to write about my favourite software for OSX. Even though my Macbook Pro came with a whole bunch of useful software, there were few gaps required attention.

Quicksilver. While OSX built-in search facility, Spotlight, is pretty good, Quicksilver simply kicks arse! It’s super fast and finds everything. Amazingly, it’s free. Google for Quicksilver tutorials and you will discover why this is a must-have tool.
Perian. If you watch DivX, AVI, XVID files on your Mac, it’s a must have, especially considering it’s price ($0). Integrates into QuickTime and I haven’t come across a fileit couldn’t play.
VLC Player plays pretty much everything and it’s free.
MacTheRipper is good for grabbing DVDs.
Toast Titanium is an equivalent of Nero in Mac’s world.
TextMate is a fantastic text editor. Not free, but worth every penny.
Cyberduck is a FTP client for Mac. Good. Free.
Read eBooks in CHM format on your Mac? Chmox is the best (and free) tool.
Adium is the best chat client I’ve found. It supports AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac), Jabber (Including Google Talk and LiveJournal), MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan), Bonjour (Compatible with iChat), MySpace IM, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, QQ, Lotus Sametime.

Links back to the Windows’ world:

VMware Fusion is heaps better than Parallels. I use it to run Windows XP and it’s fast enough to bother with BootCamp.
Remote Desktop Connection for Mac. I use it to connect to any Windows box, but mainly my desktop machine.

If you use any other Mac software worth mentioning, please leave a comment here or contact me.

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Firefox 3 solves Russian Fonts problem

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— Alex Salamakha @ 7:27 pm

I’ve recently posted a quick fix to Firefox’s problem with displaying Russian fonts in OSX.
Here is another fix: Install Firefox 3 beta. It works. And it’s a better browser too. Don’t forget to read on how to get your old Firefox 2 extensions work with Firefox 3.

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Setting up home media centre with PlayStation 3

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— Alex Salamakha @ 9:13 am

I’ve been using my old 21″ Philips CRT TV for the past eight years and have been reluctant to replace it because I didn’t think the technologies offered were mature enough and I couldn’t justify the price of the replacement.

However, the time has come. LCD TVs are now descent quality, sharp picture, and reasonably priced.

Sony Australia offered free Playstation 3 (40GB) with any Bravia TV 40″ and above. It was a very sweet offer to resist and I became a happy owner of two fine Sony products.

Since I’m not a gamer, I didn’t care for PS 3 gaming features, but I did care about its media centre capabilities.

It does everything I need. First of all, it plays DVD, BlueRay and DivX. Also, it has a very easy-to-use interface. But wait, there is more. There is a fantastic (and free) program called TVersity, which I run on my desktop and use to stream video, music and images from my desktop to the TV via Playstation 3.

Think about presenting snaps from your latest trip to your friends on a 46″ LCD in your living room instead of printing the pictures in a photo lab and then passing the album around. Kicks arse!

How about playing music in living room from a massive music collection stored on a huge hard drive somewhere in the basement?

How about flicking through your entire collection of movies with your remote?

So, there are three things you need to do when you get yourself a Playstation3:

1) Get a proper remote for your Playstation 3.

2) Get a HDMI cable to connect PS 3 to your LCD panel. Just make sure you get something cheap, don’t fall into the trap of buying $400 Monster cables because they are “better quality”. HDMI is a digital standard, it either works or it doesn’t. I’ve got mine for $13 and very happy about it. If you don’t believe me, read this article in PC World.

3) Install TVersity. That’s about all you need in order to set your media centre up.

Gaming. I’ve played games on PS3 during past 6 weeks of owning it. Once. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, graphics is superb and real on large LCD panel, however, I much prefer playing Wii console on that old and semi-retired 21″ Philips CRT TV with my daughter. It’s so much more fun!!!

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Getting old extensions work with Firefox 3

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— Alex Salamakha @ 8:35 am

I’ve been complaining about Firefox being a memory hog earlier, so I decided to try new Firefox 3 beta 2. It’s been a lot less aggressive in its memory consumption and is quite stable, which is a fantastic result for a beta. On the down side, most of my add-ons stopped working. I can live without many things, but I can’t live without Yahoo del.icio.us and Web Developer add-ons.

Luckily I’ve found this neat trick to enable your old Firefox 2 extensions in new Firefox 3:

1. Navigate to about:config address
2. Right-click and select New >> Boolean
3. Name it extensions.checkCompatibility
4. Set it to false
5. Restart Firefox

All your old add-ons will try to work and most of them will. At least both Yahoo del.icio.us and Web Developer add-ons work just fine for me.

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Firefox the memory hog

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— Alex Salamakha @ 8:06 pm

I use Firefox every day, I was sold on its speed, leanness and extensibility, but it looks like the Firefox team is loosing the plot. My friend James Crisp recently posted the following:

Finally, last week, after Firefox hung yet again using 100% of processor and over 300mb of memory, I decided to give Opera a go.

300MB? How about 1.5GB? I’ve left my Firefox v2.0.0.11 running overnight on my office machine with 3 tabs open and discovered the following in the morning:

WTF, Firefox team? Is it time to give another browser a go?

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Russian fonts in Firefox under OS X Leopard

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— Alex Salamakha @ 8:28 am

One of the annoying problems of OS X Leopard upgrade was Firefox’s problem of presenting Russian characters - all buttons, text boxes and other controls contained question marks instead of characters while web pages were presented well.

This is how you fix this:

Quit Firefox. Go to Applications folder and Right click on Firefox. Select “Show Package Contents” from the menu. Navigate to Contents -> Resources and rename en.lproj directory to ru.lproj directory.

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Running multiple instances of CruiseControl monitor

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— Alex Salamakha @ 8:49 pm

We’re using a customised version of Cruise Control, hence we all stuck with old one-per-project Cruise Control Monitor (v. 0.9.1.940).

Major hassle for me is to monitor a number of projects in tray. This version doesn’t support multiple project configurations with only one entry in the config allowed for a project:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<CruiseControlMonitor xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns=”http://www.sf.net/projects/ccnet”>
<PollingIntervalSeconds>15</PollingIntervalSeconds>
<ProjectName>Name-Of-Your-Project-Here</ProjectName>
…

As a result, every time I restart a machine I need to start 4 instances of CCTray and manually select corresponding projects from a list. Annoying!

Simple fix is:

Create multiple config files, with just ProjectName entry being different
Create however many shortcuts to CCTray you need in your Startup group and specify a corresponding config file as a parameter
Enjoy the view of multiple CruiseControl Monitors sitting in your tray:

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VS.Net 2005 AddIns

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— Alex Salamakha @ 1:27 am

VS.Net add-ins are being installed by default to My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\AddIns folder.I’ve got a roaming profile at my work computer and My Documents folder is located on a remote drive, which, in its turn, causes all the add-ins to fail during load due to trust issues.

Simplest solution is to move add-ins to a new location and then change your VS.Net 2005 settings via Tools >> Options >> Environment >> Add-in/Macros Security:

Hit OK, restart your Visual Studio and voila!

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alex in a nutshell

October 1, 2008

Lookout under Outlook 2007

August 18, 2008

iPhone wireless sync with multiple PCs

March 12, 2008

Cool OSX Software

February 20, 2008

Firefox 3 solves Russian Fonts problem

February 10, 2008

Setting up home media centre with PlayStation 3

Getting old extensions work with Firefox 3

December 17, 2007

Firefox the memory hog

December 1, 2007

Russian fonts in Firefox under OS X Leopard

October 23, 2007

Running multiple instances of CruiseControl monitor

October 4, 2007

VS.Net 2005 AddIns

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