Another Tech Blog

You would think this would be easy, right?  Well it is.  Sort of.

Google in their infinite wisdom provides an application to sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but not your contacts.  I hope this on the way, but for now you need to use a third party app to sync your contacts (more on that later).

So, how does the Calendar sync work?  The setup instructions are here, but in a nutshell, this is what you need to do.

1. Download Google Calendar Sync at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe
2. Once a dialog box appears, click Save File. The downloaded file should open automatically. If it doesn’t, manually open it from your browser’s download window.
3. Click through the install options and install the application on your machine.
4. Once the installation completes, the Settings window will appear
5. Enter your email address and password and select the Sync Option you prefer.
6. Click Save and you are done.

Things should start to sync right away.  You can change any of the sync options by double clicking (or right click, options) on the Google Calendar Sync icon in your system tray.  You can also force a sync by right clicking the system tray icon and choosing Sync.

So what about contacts?  There are a couple of  third party apps out there, and frankly I’ve yet to find one I really like, but gSyncit is pretty good and is cheap – $9.99.  gSyncit is nice because you can sync multiple calendar and contact lists.  The only drawback is that it’s a one man shop, so I’m concerned about long term support.  The other app that seems to have decent buzz is OggSync.  I found this one confusing, but maybe I’m missing something.  My hope is that Google solves this quickly so that I don’t have to rely on third party apps.

Have you ever wondered where Outlook stores data it uses to auto-complete email addresses when you are typing in the To or Cc field?  Microsoft stores this data in a file with the extension .NK2.  The file is stored in each user’s profile in drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  Note that this may be a hidden folder, so you may need to change your view settings to see the file.  The file should be named outlook profile name.nk2.

Every time you enter a new email address when composing an email that address will be added to the nk2 file so that the next time you type the name, the auto-complete feature will try to guess what you are typing and fill in the details for you.  Very handy.

There are a couple of things that you may be thinking you’d like to do with this information.

1) Move the data from computer to computer

2) Edit the entries in the file

3) Reset the file so that is starts from scratch

4) Turn Auto-complete off

All of these are simple enough to do.

1) Move the data from computer to computer.

The file is profile specific, so you need to be sure that the profile exists on both machines.  Once that is done, it’s simply a matter of copying the file from one machine to the other.  Again, the location of the file is in:

drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook profile name.nk2

If you have a new outlook profile that is the destination for the file, just rename the file to the new profile name.  This means that you can copy the same file to multiple users, just rename the file for each profile.

2) Edit the entries in the file.

This is a little trickier because Microsoft does not want you to do this, and I’d recommend making a backup copy of the file before messing around with it.  There are several utilites you can download that will let you edit the file.  Nk2View is a decent one, and is free.  Nk2Info is also free and claims to be able to repair the nk2 file.  Ingressor offers a commercial application to manage and repair the nk2 file.

You can easily remove an entry from the list – simply start typing the name you want to remove, then when the name appears in the suggestion list, highlight it using your arrow keys, then press the delete key to remove it.

3) Reset the file so that all entries are removed.

Microsoft describes the process here.  Basically, you can either flat out delete the file (make sure Outlook is closed first) or you can rename it so that you have a backup.  If the file does not exist it will be recreated when Outlook is restarted.

4) Turn Autocomplete off.

If you don’t want outlook to suggest names for you, you can turn this feature off.  In Outlook:

• Go to Tools, then Options
• From the Options tab, choose the E-mail options button
• Click Advanced E-mail options
• Uncheck “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields.

Working on a client computer for the last two days that is massively infected.  When they handed the machine to me, there was no firewall, no virus protection and windows updates were way out of sync.  Whoo boy.

Windows update was not working at all – one if the viruses had put in their own DNS entries so that when you click on Windows Update, you got sent to Google.  It had also removed DNS entries for all of the update sites for the major anti-virus and anti-spy-ware sites.  Once that was corrected I was able to run several virus and malware scans with updated software.  There were some viruses (50 or so) that were cleaned, several reg hacks that were fixed and the drives were de-fraged, but I’m still having issues.

Right now, there are two problems left.  First, some of the recent windows updates won’t install (sp3 for example).  The installation starts, goes for a few minutes then I get a pop up that says “installation cancelled”.  Frustrating, but I’m assuming this is a virus I have not eradicated completely yet.  The second problem is that the machine will randomly freeze.  I don’t know if this is hardware related (heat? disk? memory?) or part of a virus.  This was the initial complaint from the owner, by the way – that the machine would randomly freeze.

I’m using Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, IO-Bit, and malwarebytes.  Next up, McAfee.

There are tons of little tweaks to XP out there that make the GUI more useful.  One of the things I’ve found is that the default elements of the contextual menus in XP do not always have everything you want in them.  Thankfully, much of these things are customizable.

I love the “Send To” right-click menu item.  It allows you to quickly move files to helpful places – to an email, to a CD/DVD for writing, etc.  The only problem is that I’d like to add to the list of destinations so that I can move files to my frequently used locations easily.  

To add a destination to the Send To list, go to c:\documents and settings\(your user name)\sendto.

This is a hidden folder, so you may have to change your tools\folder options settings to “show hidden files and folders”.

Then just copy a shortcut to the destination you want (directory or program) and you are good to go.  I’ve added frequently used network file locations and Textpad.  It makes simple, repetitive tasks so much faster.

I get asked this a lot.  When you run Task Manager in XP and look at the process list, you see tons of svchost.exe processes running.  You can’t kill them (you don’t really want to) and there’s no obvious reason that there are so many of them.

What are they?  Microsoft describes them like this:

“Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).”

Helpful isn’t it?  Simply put, you can’t run a DLL without a host program.  Since Microsoft needs to run lots of different services that are DLL’s, it created a generic host executable to run them – svchost.exe.  There are lots of instances of svchost for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, redundancy.  If all of the OS DLL’s were under one process alone, if any one of them crashed the host process, the entire operating system would crash.  Second, Microsoft likes to logically group similar services under similar hosts.

So how do you see what’s what?  There are a couple of ways.  In XP, there is a command line utility to view process information.  Run tasklist /SVC from a command line.  The output looks like this:

If you are running Vista or Windows 7, the Task Manager is much more helpful.  You can right click on a svchost process, then choose “Go to Services”.  This will open the services tab and highlight the related services.

There is a great utility called svchost viewer that shows you the services for each svchost process in a nice, easy to read tree view.  Download the program here.  Thanks to HowToGeek for the tip.

This is one of those tweaks for XP that is useful if you have users that have a lot of sensitive information on their machines and you want to be sure that none of that information is left in the Page File forever.  It’s not a panacea, but is extra piece of mind.

There are many third party apps that will write unencrypted information to the Page File (passwords, userid’s, whatever) and since the Page File is never cleared, just overwritten, that data can stay there forever. Luckily, Windows provides a registry key that you can set so that the Page File is cleared when you shutdown the machine.  Since you all have reboot schedules for your sensitive machines (you do, don’t you?) this tweak will ensure that nothing is left to chance. The only downside is that shutdowns will take a bit longer.

In regedit:

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Modify the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value to ‘1’

I have a love hate relationship with the Recycle Bin.  When I need it, I’m glad its there, but for the most part it is just a pain in the rear.  Most people forget to empty it (don’t we all hate taking out the trash?) and end up with loads of files that never really go away.

There is a registry hack you can use (and deploy, although I wouldn’t recommend that) that will bypass the recylce bin when deleting files.

1. Open REGEDIT
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
3. Create a DWORD value with the following specs:

   Value name: NukeOnDelete

   Value: 1

To go back to using the recycle bin, enter 0 for value.

Easy peasy.

I don’t know why this is not getting more attention.  VMware and Landesk‘s Thinstall (now called ThinApp) has been out for close to two years now and I continue to be surprised that it is not more widely adopted. It is a great product that really lives up to the hype.

Application delivery to multiple devices is always a challenge for organizations.  An enterprise with 1000 machines will, without proper controls, have 1000 different configurations.  With IT resources stretched to their breaking point in the current ecconomic environment, it is not practical to sneaker-net software delivery.  What can you do?

You can package applications to create installable MSI’s then use a delivery tool like Landesk or Alteris.  This should be part of the solution, but packaging to MSI’s is not always easy, and done correctly takes lots of time and energy.

For smaller applications you can use auto delivery tools like ClickOnce.  These are great tools – they allow the application to check its version against a “gold” copy and if it is out of date, the new version will be delivered to the desktop automatically.  The problem with these types of tools is if an app has other software dependencies (Adobe, Office PIA’s, whatever) a simple upgrade via ClickOnce will not be enough.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy an executable (a la Linux)  to a machine that contained everything an app needed?  Well, you can with Thinstall.

ThinStall puts a shell OS and whatever components you want around an application then compiles them into a single executable that you can copy to any machine.  When you run the executable, it starts up a VM with its own registry and virtual C drive located in the user’s profile space (no worry about admin right here).  The target machine’s OS can be different than the OS the application needs.  This can be great for legacy apps that are not compatible with newer OS versions.  Also, since the executable runs in  it’s own space, you can run differing versions of the same applicatoin on a single machine.  For example, you can run IE6 and IE7 side by side.

The advantages of this technology are many.  In a Citrix environment, if you run standard installs and have to upgrade MS Office for example, you will have to go through the install on every machine in the cluster.   This can mean downtime and is time consuming.  If you ThinStall the Office suite, upgrades are just a file copy away.  Another advantage is that you can have the executable on a file server and just put shortcuts  on desktops.  Do that, and you only need to update a small number of copies to upgrade large numbers of people.

There are downsides, of course.  The executables are huge when compiled.  Half a gig for a single executable is not uncommon.  There are quirks to the software too – not all applications will work, especially those that require interaction with other applications on the desktop.  For example, if you have an application that uses Excel or Word components, it is difficult to get them to work right.  Also, if you have an application that contains code that can be used by another application on the desktop (think spreadsheet addins included with many market data applications) these too are difficult to get right.

Most applications are a breeze though – use Vmware to run a clean OS, start the Thinstall capture, install the components and the application you need, run the post capture and compile and you are done.  Many apps take less than 15 minutes to complete the package.

This is seriously good stuff.

I get asked this a lot – what is the difference between POP and IMAP, and why would I want one over the other?

To put it simply, IMAP stores email on your mail server, POP stores email on your local email client.

IMAP is better for a TON of reasons.

POP or Post Office Protocol, is the most common protocol to get mail from a server to a client.  The protocol has been around forever and is in use by just about all email providers.  IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol is newer and was designed to plug the gaps left by POP.

POP was designed to work in “offline” mode, meaning that a client would connect to a mail server, download new messags and disconnect.  The messages would then be removed from the server.  This works very well if you connect to your mail server from the same computer all the time, but if you have multiple computers and or mobile devices, POP just doesn’t work well.  Messages once downloaded to one client be it computer or mobile device are then no longer available for download to another device.  There are options to leave messages on the server, but since POP does not have the ability to add state to a message (read, unread etc) leaving the messages on the server is messy.

IMAP was designed to take advantage of the mail’s state in the inbox and to be able to work in “online” mode meaning that the connection between the mail client and the server can be interactive.  Since IMAP can remember the state of a message, I can mark a mail as read on one device and have that information picked up by a different device later on.  It can also sync folders between mail client and mail server.  If you file messages to folders, IMAP will pick up this state change and synchronize between client and server.  This means that when you file a mail on your iPhone, for example, when you go home and look at your mail the filed message will be right where you expect it to be – in the folder in which it was filed.

While POP was great in the early stages of email adoption, IMAP is a more functional way to retrieve your mail.  If you can mange it, use IMAP instead of POP, you will be much happier.

Some resources for you:

http://www.imap.org/papers/imap.vs.pop.brief.html

http://www.imap.org/papers/biblio.html

If you are like me, you have too many email accounts. Work account, personal account, account for public use (spam mostly ends up here), blog email account, side business account, test accounts from various services. Too many to check all the time. What do I do to manage them all? Truth be told, I don’t check most since they are for all intents and purposes inactive. I have 5 or so that I do care about, so I need to see when I have mail in any of them at a glance.

I do this in two ways, the iPhone and through Microsoft Outlook.

Setting up multiple accounts on the iPhone is a snap.  All you do is go to the Settings application, then go to Mail, Contacts and Calendar.  Choose Add Account, then choose your email provider from the list.  iPhone has default settings for MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and MS Exchange.  If your provider is not in the list, just choose Other.

On the next screen, enter your name, email address, password and a description of the account (this is just a label), then touch save.  The iPhone software will look for the account and verify it.  If you are using an account from one of the default services that’s pretty much all you need to do.  If you are adding an account for which the iPhone has no information (a GoDaddy account for example), then you will need to enter the incoming and outgoing server information from your mail provider.  This information is specific to each provider, so go to your provider’s website and search for IMAP/POP settings.  For example, for GoDaddy accounts, the incoming server is pop.secureserver.net and the outgoing server is smtpout.secureserver.net.  Once you have the server information, enter it on the iPhone.  You will also need your userid and password for your mail provider.  In many cases this is just your email address or, if you have web access to your mail, then the the logon credentials you use to get in to your webmail is likely the user name you will need on the iPhone.  Again, check with your email provider to be sure.

Once you have all of the credentials entered, just touch save and you are done.  There are advanced settings you may need to adjust if things are not working (there are several outgoing SMTP ports – the default may not work, so try one of the others), or if you want to use SSL (and your provider provides SSL access) you will need to change port numbers and/or server names.  Check with your mail provider for connection details.  To change the SSL settings, go back to the list of email accounts in the Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings and touch the account you want to change.  Scroll down and touch Advanced.  Turn the SSL slider on and be sure that the port settings from your provider are correct.

If you want to add another account, just go back to the list of email accounts in Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings, click Add Account and go through the steps above for each account you want to add.  Currently I have 5 active accounts on my iPhone.  The nice thing is that the unread email count on the mail icon sums the number of unread emails across all accounts so I know if there is a new mail on any of them.  I can then open the mail app, go to the accounts listing and see which account has new mail.  Very convenient and helpful.

I won’t go into detail in this post, but setting up multiple email accounts in outlook is easy too – just follow the wizards ;)  The Outlook 2007 wizards are especially helpful here, and the 2007 version handles multiple accounts far better than Outlook 2003.