Part of the migration at the office is migrating everybody’s mail to the new mail system. Our previous system implemented RPC over HTTPS, allowing remote access to the exchange server using an HTTPS proxy server. This is great for the number of remote users we have. The new company uses RPC over HTTP, but does not have it publically accessible at this time, which means all users have to be “on the network” to access their email, short of using OWA that is.

In doing this, I decided to move our virtual VPN server, back to a physical server due to the load, and the number of connections we’d now have to host again. Configuring remote access on Windows 2003 is usually a case of a few clicks.

We’ve been having a rough week at work. A product release didn’t go so smoothly, and resulted in servers crashing quite consistently throughout the day, and caused us to call a “rollback”. As we had to do this, and had no real signs of what was causing the crashes, we started looking to the logs for guidance…

I recently stumbled across an interesting browser called skyfire. I’d caught an old review of it on LifeHacker, via Gizmodo, at Laptop Mag blog. It detailed some rather impressive numbers for the browser, showing skyfire walked all over the competition¹. So I figured it would be worth a shot…

Because I have a little one¹, we often have issues with lights around the house. Specifically the bathroom. He’s figured he can use a coat hanger to turn the lights on and off². The problem is, he still loves to ask to have the light turned on for him. Today I decided to help both my son, and the electricity bill. I fitted a motion sensing light switch. This has a two fold benefit.

• Saves power as people have a tendency to leave the light one
• Lets my son wander in without having to worry about fighting the light switch

The great thing is they’re really easy to install. WonderHowTo.com has a short video (4 mins) on how to do it.

After our dev team spent a good portion of the week upgrading our Visual Studio 2005 projects to 2008, I had to upgrade our build server. This was pretty easy, after all, it’s just a case of installing software. Software installed fine, so did the service pack. When I went to build one of the solutions, I stumbled upon a small issue, I was missing some library files. Excel library files to be exact. So I installed Office 2003, and tried again. Same error, so I figured I must have missed the files in Visual Studio.

I’ve been using BirdieSync to synchronize my Windows Mobile device with my Google accounts. It’s not a straight through process, in fact involves a couple of steps. First you need Thunderbird, then Sunbird/Lightning, and various plugins to sync to google¹.

I love one-liners¹ to make my life easier. Today I decided to clean up a directory full of CSV files, and compress them down. After all, a 2MB CSV file can be reduced quite substantially, and I had 300 of them.

Yesterday was the start of new beginnings. The company I worked for sold the main application in their suite of products to a competing company. So my last day at JMsolutions was Friday, and starting Monday, I now work for DealerTrack. Press release for the purchase is here. It was a rough day yesterday, as the purchase of AAX resulted in several friends being let go. I managed to trudge through the rest of the day, and get a few things knocked out.

I’m apprehensive, and excited at the same time. New times are coming, and old ones are going. I may get the opportunity to get more of the stuff I wanted to work on, rather than the stuff I had to work on. I may also get a chance to work on new areas, or get back to the networking portion I enjoy so much. We’ll have to see how the tides of change will work.

As a side note, because my shiny handbook says so the disclaimer is here, and probably should have done it a while back for my previous employer (though I don’t think I ever mentioned who I worked for in the past).

I’ve been pondering creativity recently. My mind is bubbling with random ideas, but not sure ideas for what. Today one such idea struck me.

On a recent post by David over on Geeky Ramblings, I’d have to say I agree.