BeardmoreWeb

• In class until 8:20 #
• In class until 9:45 and then studying #
• The Price is Right just isn’t the same with Drew Carey #
• I finally signed up for a del.icio.us account www.delicio.us.com/abeardmore #
• update: www.del.icio.us/abeardmore #
• so I guess the www. doesn’t work so here’s the real link that works for my new del.icio.us account http://del.icio.us/abeardmore #

Another Leopard third party software issue: Word 2004 crashes when a user tries to print a document. It even crashes for the File>Print dialog box. Check your mac Office update because Microsoft released an update for this on November 6th 2007 which solves the issue.

Just a quick update, Windows Live Writer 2008 has come out of beta! If you are uncertain what this is, read my previous post about Live Writer.

Check out the Live Writer Blog here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Get Live Writer from this url: http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Photo from Live Writer page

On Tuesday evening Google started rolling out IMAP support to Gmail and Google Apps accounts! This will be a great new feature because it now will allow people to use multiple devices to keep track of their email.

For example: I use my email account on my Mororola Q for quick email checking and then I use Mail.app on my MacBook Pro as my mail email program. This is possible through the IMAP protocol because all email is saved on the server not on the client side.

Before IMAP Google just provided POP which was not the best solution for multiple email clients and that was the reason for my hesitancy for switching to Google Apps. Now they have added the single feature that I needed so now I am switching as soon as possible!

While I was browsing the Google’s services page a few months ago I stumbled upon an awesome tool for small organizations all the way up to large corporations. Most people are familiar with Google’s applications services that include things like GTalk, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, Calendar and many more. These services are amazing because they are all in one place and very easily accessible.

One of the best things to do with these tools is to use them for collaboration on projects. For example: if I create a document, I can easily share it to other people that have Google accounts so we can work together and finish a document. This is great for businesses so that people can quickly work together to finish projects. Another thing that can be done is a group can chat at the same time using GTalk’s VOIP technology. There are pretty much infinite uses for all of Google’s services.

Businesses use more traditional methods for all these tools such as Microsoft Office for document creation and Microsoft Exchange Server for email and collaboration tools. These features are all quite expensive and most startups or nonprofit’s find it pretty difficult to have to purchase all this software.

An alternative for this is that a company or organization could use Google’s applications to do most of the tasks of collaboration for the great price of FREE! Google has released a service that organizations can utilize to create their own groups that they can use just for themselves. www.google.com/a has the details but essentially what you can do is sign up for an account which allows you to administer your organization and it gives you the ability to add users so that they can be under the group and use collaboration tools such as calendar and GTalk. The other really neat thing that can be done is that a person can purchase a domain name relatively inexpensively and be able to set the email to work with Google’s Gmail interface. I love this because then a user can login to one place which can be a custom URL that is setup for your domain name and they can access all these services and it is cordoned off so that only the users that are in the organization have access.

For example, I have adambeardmore.com’s email going to Google’s application service so that I can have email through Google. So instead of having to worry about a server going down or problems with my hosting company’s mail system, Google takes care of this and all data is safely hosted in their data centers. It takes a load off a tech because these critical services are already taken care of so they can concentrate on other things in the organization.

The process of setting this all up is relatively simple and Google’s site has a great step by step walk-through that contains instructions for several different scenarios of setting this system up.

I highly recommend this system to anyone who needs to get a small business or organization up and running quickly and if they don’t have enough capital to purchase all the expensive collaboration software right away. I have only scratched the surface of the power of the system. You really have to check it out yourself to see all the amazing things that can be done with this tool.

Check it out today at www.google.com/a

While browsing DIGG I discovered a great article of one hundred great open source mac software titles!  This list includes web browsers, graphics programs, media players, chat clients and much more!

Again a growing theme on this blog, they are all completely free.  Check it out:

Top 100 best open source mac software — ajaxflakes.com

Try QLab from Figure 53. It allows sound designers to totally pre-program their show without the hassle of showing their soundboard operators how to run different pieces of equipment and have to teach them decent fades. This software application does it all! With a few extra licenses which are very reasonably priced, one can easily run an entire show including video, fog machines, motors and lights all from one Mac running Tiger or Leopard.

The interface is very intuitive with mostly drag and drop. It is very easy to number cues however a person wants! The best thing is that the software is constantly being updated. QLab’s web site www.figure53.com is continuously being updated with new information for support and case studies. The case studies show some truly amazing setups where designers setup QLab to do some pretty cool things with their shows! One case study that was published showed that a one person performance could be run by triggering cues from a rigged cell phone that beamed commands to the computer! This is of course and extreme example, but for the person who simply wants to run sound cues, it is a great piece of software.

At UW-La Crosse we use a FireStudio 410 FireWire audio interface with QLab which allows us to control eight different speakers at the same time! With eight speakers, one could easily make sound pan all around the room immersing the audience in the scene!

The video license allows one (assuming that they have a powerful enough computer) to drive eight different displays at the same time with full video! I would have loved to have this soft of sophistication in my shows in High School!

A plus is that QLab is not very resource intensive at all. I ran Christmas Carol with many sound effects all happening relatively quickly on a PowerMac G3 with zero problems.

Also, since QLab runs on OS X, its stability is great. I have not had one single freeze when working with QLab.

Rock Solid Stability + Great User Interface + Free = One Great Application!

Check it out today at www.figure53.com

Need an application to record or edit sound?  Try Audacity.  I personally think it is one of the best open source tools I have ever used.  It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and doesn’t require too great of resources.  It will do so many amazing things including import and export MP3’s, WAV’s.  It allows you to do multi track editing so when you are doing things such as building sound effects, you can easily adjust one part of the effect instead of having to mix everything down to a single stereo track!  It comes with a ton of built in effects that you only get with the expensive sound programs all for the price of Free!

The Audacity team is constantly making improvements to the software to make it even better all the time.  I use it with my Peavey USB mixer to record whatever I need and it works great.  Audacity also works great with the Snowball from Blue (A USB microphone) and many other USB devices.

Whenever I worked on sound at UW-L be it for the sound design class or for a show, Audacity was my best friend.  It made my life a whole lot easier than using the other programs that people have to pay for!

This software is great for people trying to create podcasts with Windows.  It is very simple to record and edit your audio.  What I usually do when I want to create a podcast is start in Audacity with recording and making editing changes, then I will export the file to MP3 and move it over to Garageband (Mac application) for final touches and to make an enhanced version with pictures.

Check it out at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net

For more documentation go to: www.audacityteam.org/wiki

Sharing a computer with an XP machine as the host and the Guest being a vista machine does not work regularly! I ran across this problem last week when I had just setup a color laser printer on computer running Windows XP. I thought that this should be a piece of cake because Vista should easily find the computer and printer with its more advanced networking discovery. I was wrong! Vista found the computer that I had shared the printer from no problem but then when I tried to add the printer from the XP machine. After sitting there for a few seconds, vista said “Access Denied” in a popup window. First, I thought that I did something wrong so I checked the firewall settings on both computers and also checked their sharing settings and everything was fine.

So I did what every tech does…hit up Google. Turns out, using a printer from an XP host doesn’t work with the normal network printer discovery wizard. Instead, you have to go about setting up the printer a totally different way and then it finally works. What you have to do instead in Vista is when you add a printer from an XP host is select local port instead of network printer. Then a little dialog box will come up. Type in the name of the \\computername\printersharename and then you should be able to connect to it.

Example: \\MYCOMPUTERNAME\PRINTER1

I have no idea why Microsoft couldn’t make the standard print sharing system work but that’s how it is I guess.

Hopefully they fix this soon!

I recently in the past month subscribed to hosted Exchange for my email.  I decided to go with Exchange 2007.  Previous to that I had used Exchange 2003 for about two years and did enjoy my Outlook Web Access experience.  There were a few bugs that were annoying such as the contacts area but that was manageable.  After switching to Exchange 2007 the first thing I notice that I am not able to live without is the month view on the calendar!   I cannot believe that Microsoft did not keep this feature in OWA.  I always view my calendar by month so being limited to viewing my calendar in week view is a HUGE pain!  Seriously, how hard would it be to keep the month view in OWA?  Hopefully when Microsoft sends out their big exchange update they will fix this problem because it is really annoying to me! 

Everything else in the new OWA is top notch with many new enhancements that make it more like Outlook than ever before, my only complaint so far is the calendar!

As of right now, these are the only options available! (Day, Work Week and Week)  Where is my Month View?