by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 30, 2007 | Front Page
A few of my clients have indicated an interest in moving their mail to Google Apps for Domains, for those living under rocks it’s basically GMail hosted on your own domain. It combines Google Docs (Spreadsheet, Word processor), Calendar, Google Talk and a few other services into one.
So I setup a a test domain a while ago to do a proper evaluation but not against their pay version using the free service. The idea is if the free version is passable but not fatally flawed then the paid version should be fine.
It’s been painful to say the least. First I mistakenly set up a domain that I shouldn’t have since it was already in use and I couldn’t migrate it, my mistake. I figured I’ll be nice and let them know of this and get them to shut it down – a useful exercise since if you do decide to move to them and later want to move away, what you don’t want is your domain in limbo on the Google servers with possible mail routing from inside Google to it and not your real domain.
So first I try and change the primary domain name, can’t, you can add other domains, but it’s impossible to change the primary domain. So I contact them and ask them to shut it down. They contacted me saying no problem, all I need is to send them the PIN code I can get inside the control panel. The thing with these PINs are they keep changing often, so an ex staff member for example can’t claim to be working for you since the PIN won’t be valid anymore, nice feature.
Problem is it takes them longer to respond to support requests than PINs are valid for. So the process goes as follows:
- Ask to close domain
- Get asked for the PIN, supply the PIN
- Support people checks your PIN, it’s not valid anymore because they took too long to check it.
- Get asked for PIN, supply the PIN
- Go back to 3
That’s just pathetic. Combine this with shoddy level of service, there has been several well published extended downtimes in the first month alone and other weird outages. Yesterday for example I couldn’t access any attachments since some automated bot decided I did something wrong and returned a “Lockdown in sector 6!” error, amazingly descriptive that is, needless to say I never heard from support on this issue.
There are other deep rooted issues as well like with the feeds out of calendars etc, but more on that later. I’ll make a few posts here over the next while with my experiences.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 27, 2007 | Front Page
I’ve been giving Ubuntu another go on a Desktop. Last time I tried it my intention was to see if it really was a viable switching target from OS X and it turns out for that specific task It sux, this time I was more looking for a desktop fit for a Unix knowledgeable person so have had more tolerance for some stupid things like not being able to play popular content out the box.
Here is a random list of things that was worth noting to me:
- I got Beryl and XGL going on my little Acer 12″ laptop, it’s really nice but unfortunately I can’t get it going on my desktops because they have ATI cards. I will be buying some Intel based cards for these.
- Laptop support in general is really good, it hibernates and everything works. Getting the Acer buttons for things like enabling Wifi was a right pain, I had to tinker with some kernel modules etc.
- Wifi support has a long way to go, the UI for configuring keys, choosing networks and types is totally useless and I hope it’s something on their list to fix real soon
- GAIM has taken a turn for the worst, you should try Kopete for a good IM client
- Changing the behavior of something as simple as the Backspace key in Firefox can really spoil your day
- They push out a silly amount of updates and like with OS X they’re pretty big, I’m really glad I am not on a modem in the 3rd world using Ubuntu or OS X.
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Easyubuntu is pretty good, Ubuntu needs to take this and put together a paid for package, I’d pay for it.
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Crossover Office is really good, I’ve been running MS Office 2003 using it and been very happy with the results, MS Word is fast, stable and full featured, blows OpenOffice away, currently on the Demo but will buy soon.
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Wine isn’t too bad either, it runs Digiguide without a problem, this was one of the big things that kept me on Windows.
- I do sometimes boot into Windows, I do this via VMWare for simple stuff, I’m booting the the physical NTFS partition inside VMWare and its ok, but my AMD 2600 is pretty crap for this, soon I’ll buy a nice Core 2 DUO machine for this and it will solve my speed problems.
So it seems I’ll be moving off a Windows desktop now, I might still get a 2nd Mac instead of the Ubuntu machine that will be the perfect setup for me – 2 x iMac – but till then this will do well enough.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 12, 2007 | Usefull Things
Nxsy mentioned that he is using Google Bookmarks and GMarks to access it from Firefox and I thought I’d give it a try since I’m really not liking del.icio.us at all anymore.
The problem with del.icio.us isn’t just that the name is untypable and unpronouncable it’s lack of good integration with Firefox just spoils it completely. Yeah they have an extension of their own and there are some others that compliment it, but really it’s a pain. I ended up not using my bookmarks because I couldn’t be bothered with the UI.
So I exported my del.icio.us and imported it into Google Bookmarks, re-tagged everything and now using GMarks I think I’ve used my bookmarks more in the last 2 days than in the previous 3 months combined. I love the home-home quicksearch box,the sidebar is marginally useful – mostly for editing/managing the bookmarks, the drop down list of bookmarks I am not fond of, but the quicksearch and convenient in-browser-ui for managing bookmarks makes this a winner.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 7, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’m running a combination XP and OS X machines at home linked together using Synergy. I’ve been contemplating moving away from XP so thought I’ll give Ubuntu another go.
My drives are pretty full except my OS Boot drive, lots of space there so I thought I’ll resize it and put Ubuntu at the end in a small partition while I test things out. It sounded like a good idea at the time but it turned out to be pretty disastrous.
I used the GParted LiveCD to do the resizing after first running a defrag on the drive. On the surface everything went fine but the XP wouldn’t boot.
I admit not reading up enough about the process but it turns out after doing the resize with GParted you’ll need to force chkdsk the boot disk, the only way to do this involves using the XP Setup CD and it’s recovery console.
My machine has a SATA drive that isn’t directly supported by the XP Setup disk so I need to use a Floppy driver disk, I don’t even have a floppy drive anymore so I was pretty much stuck.
I installed Ubuntu 6.10 in the free space, it worked a charm and I soon had at least something back up to get going but still needed to chkdsk the XP partition. I knew the files were there – Ubuntu mounted it on the Desktop – so it was all good, except something small somewhere causing grief.
I was faced with either buying a Floppy drive and Floppy cables, and finding blank floppies somewhere or finding another solution. Solution came in the form of VMWare Server.
VMWare supports mounting RAW partitions into a VM, so in theory I should be able to create a virtual instance that boots my XP Partition, I tried this and ended up with a Blue Screen and immediate reboot. The problem being that my SATA drive shows up as a SCSI drive in XP under VMWare and my XP did not have the right drivers to load the drive and boot from it, so still I needed to chkdsk the drive.
I took my XP CD, downloaded the VMWare Server drivers and mounted that as a floppy into the VM, booted from the CD and loaded the drivers into the CD, ran the recovery console and got a C:\ prompt. Here I was able to chkdsk the stricken partition and eventually boot right into XP, problem solved.
I took this one step further by creating a new hardware profile in my XP box once it was running, loaded in the VMWare SCSI drivers and now I can boot my XP into fully working state under Ubuntu using VMWare.
So, the short of it, yes you can resize your XP Pro Boot disks, even NTFS ones using Open Source tools, but you need to be 100% sure you can get your recovery console up and running to run chkdsk afterwards, my machine is now happy again and booting Ubuntu and XP.
VMware Kicks Arse.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 4, 2007 | Uncategorized
For yonks now I’ve wanted to do proper 2 way sync of my iCal on my mac and pretty much anything, it’s thus far been a virtual island and therefore useless.
I’ve it syncing with my Windows Mobile 5 devices using The Missing Sync which is ok, but not all I want yet, since I am not always by my phone. It also does not answer the sharing problem, I want to have a shared calendar with my SO and thusfar it was just not possible.
Today the fine people at Spanning Sync opened their public beta of a tool that syncs – bi-directional – Google Calendar and iCal. This means I can have my Google Calendar, share it with my SO and use Spanning Sync on both macs to sync to iCal. iCal is a much better interface to use for her than the web interface so this way everyone is happy.
Spanning Sync is still in Beta, final pricing is not finalised yet but judging by the influx of people to their systems and my own experience I’d say they hit the jackpot.
