Blackberry Desktop Redirector and ETP.DAT Files

Had a problem with my Blackberry Curve I’ve not quite got round to fixing over the last couple of weeks. Involves a BIS Blackberry being setup (accidentally) with Blackberry Desktop Manager in Enterprise mode.

This results in what looks like corrupt messages coming into the inbox of the Exchange account the desktop with an ‘ETP.DAT’ attachment.

The quick solution is to go into your ‘Options’ – ‘Advanced Options’ – ‘Service Book’ and DELETING the ‘Desktop [MIME]‘ entry.

The great Internet car scam(s) Part 4

Ooh, another email today:

Hello,

I know payment should have gotten to you by now,ples kindly get back to me AsAP

Needless to say no payment has arrived yet.

The great Internet car scam(s) Part 3

OK so despite me telling the guy that I’ve already sold the car he’s still really keen to buy it. I got this email this morning:

How are you today,sorry for the delay my financier caused in this transaction,my client lost his wife which had really made him so down and also the mistake was actually from the zipcode on the address,but it has been rectified and resent to your address.

pls kindly get the funds deposited and inform me as soon as the payment arrives at your premises for further instructions.

I look forward to read from you asap.

Will be nice to see who the cheque’s from (when/if it arrives). If it does then, of course, I’ll cash it. A few days later I’m guessing he’ll tell me the deal is off and he needs the money back, which is where I’ll get stung. So I’ll insist to him that I sent the money back and see what happens.

Fully Flared Premiere

Had to throw this one in: went to Lakai’s Fully Flared premiere in Leicester Square. Ryan from Sidewalk Magazine took some pics and they got a feature on the Sidewalk site – Fully Brewstered. Film was amazing, definitely on the Christmas list. Get it and be wowed by it’s epicness.

Lite-On Media Server DVD Player

This was a useful bit of kit I bought years ago – a DVD player with an ethernet port at the back (it even came with a free wireless adapter). Basically, you plug it all in, install some software onto your PC and you can stream DivX, mpgs, etc from your PC.

Only thing is that if you lose the software for it you can’t stream shit. I normally chuck installation CDs as soon as I’ve double checked they’re available on the manufacturers’ website but in this case I hunted high and low after losing the disc and couldn’t find it anywhere on the web.

After a good year or so it turned up, so I’ve stuck it on my website to share the love. 33mb download here: http://www.markbrewster.com/downloads/lmspc-v141.exe

Grappling with Ubuntu Server 7.10 – Part 3 of 3

Even though I installed Ubuntu as a SAMBA server I still, inexplicably, needed to install SAMBA:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

Edit the smb.conf by typing:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Once in the editor you can navigate down by using CTRL-V. First thing that needs to be done is to change the workgroup to match the one you use on your LAN. Scroll down and modify the ‘workgroup’ entry:

workgroup = MSHOME

Next I changed the ’security’ settings to make it more simple.

security = share

Finally you got to configure your shares so everyone can see them. At the bottom of the smb.conf file I added:

[public]
comment = Server Share
path = /home/public
guest ok = yes
read only = no
writable = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
browseable = yes

CTRL-X to exit (but don’t forget to hit ‘y’ to save your changes). Next you got to restart SAMBA:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

And that’s pretty much it. Browse to your server (via IP) and test everything is ok. Do a few test copies and deletes and away you go. Pretty easy.

This whole setup could be done (from a blank HDD) I would estimate within about 30 minutes. As it stands working all this out took me the best part of 3 days, on and off. I am really beginning to like Linux.

Grappling with Ubuntu Server 7.10 – Part 2 of 3

Next is setting up the ip address to be static and to create the folder I want to share out. This involves needing to edit a text file, but how do you do that?

This was the one thing that put me off trying to configure the server but I guess there’s a good reason that Linux users bang on about the command line all the time. I sorely missed my Windows GUI, but now I am beginning to appreciate the simplicity of Linux. I didn’t need the server to do anything other than sit there and share files, so that’s pretty minimal configuration.

So how do you edit the smb.conf from the command line? There’s a semi-gui based text editor called ‘Nano’ that I foundFor the IP address, open the network config with nano:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

I only have one network adapter so it was pretty obvious what I had to change. By default the server uses DHCP to get an address, so now we change what’s currently there:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

to be static. You need to add your own network settings in here, mine are:

iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.5
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

After saving the config file I rebooted.

Next up is creating the folders.

sudo mkdir /home/public
sudo chmod 777 /home/public

Folders are now created and writeable.

Grappling with Ubuntu Server 7.10 – Part 1 of 3

So I’ve been toying with Ubuntu Server 7.10 as a replacement to the old Windows 2000 server I have at work, mainly due to the expensive issue of licencing. I had to give up on it earlier in the month and ended up buying a RAID’ed NAS as a stopgap measure whilst the server was offline.

Well, now I have a little time spare I am determined to get it working. I come from a solid Windows background and have done plenty of server-based configuration on that platform, but none with the entirely foreign command-line based Linux format. My knowledge is absolutely minimal so I decided to document how I set up the server, in case anyone else happens to be in the same fix. I have a client who requires basically the same setup as myself so am using the server at work as the test rig.

So first I stuck in an old IDE drive for the OS (I’ll deal with the RAID 1 setup later) and booted off the Ubuntu Server setup CDROM. To cut a long story short I chose the SAMBA server option and was faced with a big empty black screen and a login prompt. This server is sitting in the back office so to save myself running back and forth I needed command line access to the server. With some help from ubuntuforums.org all I needed to do was login and then type this command:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Then all I needed was to download putty and connect to the Ubuntu box. This all worked first go. Stoked. Next problem is configuring the folders and shares.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

The IFPI are a little upset that www.thepiratebay.org managed to secure www.ifpi.com, even though it was some time ago:

www.ifpi.com

They are one of the main outfits responsible for the recent arrest of the http://oink.cd admin in the North of England.

Adobe Photoshop Alternatives

Recently I have been looking into low cost (or rather no-cost) alternatives to Adobe’s Photoshop CS2. The open source community has provided me with several alternatives, however, none of them can provide me with some of the requirements I have.

I tend to need to watermark and resize a lot of photos for the web, sometimes several hundred at a time, and I find myself doing this daily. Photoshop (or moreover, Imageready, Photoshop’s web-optimising little brother) provides useful scripting and ‘Droplets’. Droplets are small applications (or scripts, rather, held in an .exe) that fire off repetitive tasks when files are dropped on them. I had these down to a tee with 10-15 optimised Droplets for my every need.  However, the open-source alternatives I looked at (The Gimp (www.gimp.org) and Paint.net) either didn’t have the required functionality or was just too plain complicated (yes, Gimp, I’m talking to YOU).

In the end I have settled (and actually BOUGHT)  a copy of Corel’s ‘Paint Shop Pro X2′ which uses a similar system known as ‘Scriptlets’ to automate tasks. This cost me (or my company, rather) a touch over £70 which, compared to the £500+ Adobe wanted will do very nicely thankyou. One of the gripes I have with the attitudes people have these days is that they associate Photoshop as being THE only image manipulation program. I will agree it is THE must-have program if you are manipulating images all day but when you are just resizing and optimising for day-to-day use there is little point in purchasing (or ‘acquiring’) an application whose features 95% of which will not be used.

At the moment all the scripts are running fine but am having a few problems getting the scriplets to run. As soon as these are up and running I’ll be jumping into the script code to see if I can tweak them and speed them up.