Visual-X addon for Visual Studio

I've started using Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software. Its an Add-In to Visual Studio that helps with variable name completion, formating, function parameter listing, layout, and other essentials for the software engineer. If you do any C#, Visual Basic, or C/C++, you need to look at this.

http://www.wholetomato.com/products/features.html

Mozilla Sunbird can we use it with Exchange

I went through and reviewed the Sunbird project plan about when key features are coming into the product that will make it something we need to be thinking about. Until the product reaches the Version 2.0 status, with support for Multiple People (Meetings), the product is a just a stand alone personal calendar. Their goal is to make it as cross-platform and open-standards first, then add additional support. The first 1.0 version will have the ability to 'accept outlook invites' and limited calendar server support for WebDAV Folders, but not any groupware servers. So it will interoperate for personal calendaring with iCal on MacOSX for example, but not Exchange users.

The key thing the differentiates a 'stand-alone' versus 'enterprise/groupware' calendar application is the ablility to view others free and busy/time, and update your own free/busy time. Shared free/busy requires a central storeage solution, which Exchange provides to us. Lotus Notes, Oracle Calendar all have the same requirements.

I will keep my eye on the project. Interestingly the site doesn't talk about supporting any major 'commercial servers'.

• Sun's ONE calendar server
  
• phpGroupWare
  
• eGroupWare
  
• OpenGroupWare.org (OSS version of Skylix)
  
• Exchange4Linux (formerly Bill's WorkGroup Server)
  

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/roadmap.html - Project Road Map

http://osdir.com/Article1558.phtml - A good review of Sunbird as a Stand-alone calendar client

http://www.webdav.org/ - WebDAV site with good links

http://www.southrivertech.com/index.php?pg=./products/webdrive/index - A WebDrive client.

http://www.twilight-systems.com/flacco/mozcal/ - Connecting to WebDAV

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html#outlook - Does Sunbird support outlook

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html#share - How can I share my calendar

How to rotate the screen in Windows XP

Classify this one under useless tricks and pranks... well I can see an actual use for it... but still I find difficult reason for this to be so easy to do. Probably makes alot of sense with Tablet PC's.

In Excel, I can never remember the key sequence (Ctl-Shift-DownArrow) that selects the current column all the way down to the last entry. It's a time saver, and it would save even more time if I could remember the sequence of keys that does it. I always have to hunt around trying various key sequences until I find it.

Today's sequence of wrong guesses included Ctl-Alt-DownArrow. Whoa! Not what I expected. When did they put that in?

Before you give it a try, reemmber that Ctl-Alt-Up arrow "puts it back," and Ctl-Alt-Left and Ctl-Alt-Right do the other permutations. I did not know about this key sequence. I guess it's in XP so you can mount your display in different orientations.

hint: This causes the screen to rotate its orientation, putting the tool bar on the Top, bottom, or side of the monitor... with the whole time, the tool bar is at the bottom. If you want to move your tool bar, just drag it to the top.

Update: - Apparently this is a video driver feature, not OS. Mostlikely Nvidia.

CinemaNow to Offer Television Episode Downloads

This sounds cool, I would actally look at doing this even for 1-3$ a episode so I didn't have to buy a TiVo. But I own one, but when I miss a show it would be a great way to catch up on a series that I start mid-season.

From gizmodo
CinemaNow to Offer Television Episode Downloads

filed under Portable MediaCinemaNow is set to complete a deal with most of the major television networks (only Paramont/Viacom is a hold out) to provide per-episode downloads of television shows—maybe even before they hit DVD. Up to this point, CinemaNow hasn't had much success (by my estimation), namely because it takes so long to download a high-quality, two-hour movie. People are probably more willing to accept a lower-quality video file for television, though, especially for something like a 30 minute sit-com. The real question will be price, of course. $1 to $3 sounds about right for an episode (especially if we don't ever have to buy that copy again to download it to different devices), but as is typical with legal download services, it'll probably be more expensive than buying the real-world media option (in this case, DVD Season Packs).

CinemaNow Unveils a New Chapter in Television Viewing

Finding users in large Active Directory forests

As I have been getting in and doing more stuff with ADSI programming from .NET, C# and VBScript, its a frequent need to lookup the users after I make changes to them. Also, finding their dn in the directory can sometimes be tricky, especially when you are working in a forest with 10,000 items, and multiple OU's where users can be hidden. Most of the GUI based browsers of Active Directory (like Softerra's LDAP Browser) have issues with returning all the objects in an OU. Fun to watch it scroll then choak. To that end, I found several nice command line utilities for querying Active Directory, and updating it for that matter.

If you install the Windows 2003 Administrator Tool Kit, you will find that several new tools are installed. dsmod, dsget, dsadd, dsmove,dsquery, dsrm. I won't go into the details of each of these handy little utilities, but its much easier to do common things with these tools than learning how to do LDIF export and imports.

One thing I do alot is:

dsquery user -name bsmith

"CN=bsmith,OU=Users,OU=San Diego,DC=company,DC=com"

And you can chain the commands together so you can query for wild card values and perform multiple actions on them by feeding it into dsmod.

Enjoy!

Programatically assigning Delegates in Outlook / Exchange

Currently I am working on a project to move people from another calendaring package (Meeting maker) to Exchange Calendaring. The one thing that we can't seem to automate across is users Proxies. Creating this programatically hasn't been straight forward. I found several links about how to use a ACL.DLL file to provide extra functions that allow you to modify permissions on any folder. This works out great, but the results are not visable via Outlooks "Delegates" tab under Tools->Options->Delegates. So if we setup peoples delegates for them, they will be essentially hidden. Unless we teach people to just goto the Sharing option on the Calendar... you get to this by right clicking the calendar object, and selecting Sharing (in Outlook 2003).

See update below on how to make these changes visable to Outlook.

Here are several links I have found, I had to modify these VBScripts to get the right bit flags for Reviewer, Editor, and None (which is 0) 🙂 A complete ACL.inc file is in the download from the 2nd link (aclasp.zip).

http://www.kbalertz.com/kb_Q295558.aspx

http://www.cdolive.com/sampapps.htm

http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/03/16/216.aspx

http://www.cdolive.com/aclviewer.htm - ACL Viewer - Lets you see these changes.

http://www.codecomments.com/Windows_Server_Scripting/message192844.html

A google on "MSExchangeACLLib Exchange 2003" helped alot to narrow down my search.

UPDATE 2/4/2005:
The following code makes a users be listed in the Delegates Tab in Outlook. It only allows for 1 delegate, but you get the idea and can modify it to use an Add, and query to ensure your not adding dupes:

' VBScript source code

On Error Resume Next

Dim strUser

Dim strOU

Dim strDC
Dim objParent ' GetObject of strOU
strDC = "DC=company,DC=com"

strOU = "OU=Users,OU=San Diego,"

' Person who's calendar/inbox is to be viewed by Delegate

strUser = "myUsername"
' Person to grant delegate access to, this just makes them visable.

strDelegate = "CN=username,OU=Users,OU=San Diego,DC=company,DC=com"
set objParent = GetObject ("LDAP://CN=" & strUser & "," & strOU & strDC)
objParent.Put "publicDelegates",strDelegate

objParent.SetInfo

Directly accessing specific areas of Outlook Web Access (OWA) from the URL

Some people down the road might ask how to reference specific portions of the OWA interface. For example if you wanted to open another users Calendar, or open the browser right to the Calendar, with a specific view.

Here are some good links.

Customizing OWA and how the architecture works (its OWA 2000, but things work fairly close)
http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=19714

Custom URL's to display specific OWA information (email/calendar/contacts/tasks/views)
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=321832

What arcade character are you…

I am a Light Cycle. I drive fast, I turn fast, I do everything fast. I even breakfast. I tend to confuse people with my sudden changes of heart. Sometimes I even confuse myself, which tends to cause problems. What Video Game Character Are You?

How to use your CDMA phone as a modem

The following site explains how to you setup your CDMA based phone as a USB Modem to access the internet from your Laptop or Desktop from anywhere.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000930027824/

Travel plans about to take you beyond the land of broadband? Venturing far afield from the great kingdom of WiFi? You may have been born with 802.11b in your mouth, but you’re going to want to get prepared for that next trip to the sticks. This How-To will show you how to get a decent Internet connection for no cost other than the phone minutes you use while connected. It should also come in handy for you folks not located on the left or right coasts, and for those of us non-urbanites when the coffee shops are closed (stay tuned next week for Phillip Torrone’s USB coffee maker How-To…). And remember, the Motel 6 does not offer WiFi. Get prepared, scout!

Gather ye materials while ye may:

• Laptop running Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
  
• CDMA phone (If you have a GSM phone, see GSM USB modem for OS X on the Mac. Windows users, first configure your phone as a modem, then use a separate dial-up ISP or paid GPRS connection.)
  
• Phone plan: You need to have Sprint PCS Vision enabled to access their 3G network, which gives you access speeds typically somewhere between a 56K modem and DSL/cable. If your carrier is Verizon, you don’t need to pay any extra fee for data transmission, and you have two connection options: the Quick Connect Network, zipping along at 14.4K but dead easy to set up, or the Express Network, which gets you into the same speed range as Sprint PCS but can be funkier to set up.
  
• USB data cable for your phone model (Usually pretty cheap. More on this later.)
  
• Possibly, drivers for your phone (Under OS X, you probably have a built-in driver already. Windows users, we’ll help you track yours down in a bit.)
  

Politics Test

Eeeek... and I've been voting Independent/Republican all these years... De-Nile ain't just a river in Africa.

You are a

Social Liberal
(75% permissive)

and an...

Economic Liberal
(33% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

loc: (93, -63)
modscore: (20, 45)
raw: (2442)

The OkCupid Politics Test
http://www.okcupid.com/politics