What In the World?

Did anyone else read World magazine as a kid? It was National Geographic for the younger crowd. One of my favorite columns was entitled "What in the World." It was a collection of uncommon photos of common items. The challenge was to identify the items in the photo. I'm bringing it back here on the SRG InfoTech Blog. The first person to identify the photo correctly in this blog post will get a free DialGlobal Wireless Mouse. Answers must appear in the comments for this post.

Share

How to Convert an Entire Website to PDF

We are in the throws of completing a website refresh for a client. As part of our process we need to comparatively evaluate the current site to the IA we have created for the new site. We will match on a page by page basis the old site with our current work. Ultimately this will ensure we don't miss anything. As you can imagine, having a single document that itemizes every single page would be incredibly useful. Enter Adobe Acrobat. After doing a little digging online, I discovered a great feature within Acrobat that will crawl an entire website, and convert every single page to a PDF. In Acrobat Pro 9 or higher, click 'File' then 'Create PDF from Web page'. This will bring up a dialog box. Enter the URL of the site you want to convert, and click the globe icon next to 'Capture Multiple Levels'. Click the 'Get Entire Site' check box, click ok, and away you go. Keep in mind a large site will take several hours to convert. The sites we are working on are about 300 pages total, and they have been converting for several hours already. So there you have it!

Share

How to Hide from Google?

A Dreadie/Hacker/Coder known only as Moxie Marlinspike has a new tool for you. He has created a plug-in for Firefox called Googlesharing. Googlesharing routes all of your data through a proxy server where your information gets jumbled with a number of fake identities running on his proxy server. This sounds really cool on the surface, tut this little nugget makes me think that the tool really isn't that worthwhile. "users can exploit any of Google's offerings that don't require logins, such as search, maps or news, without allowing Google to assemble a profile of their activities that can be used for advertising targeting--or, as some users might fear, information that could be subpoenaed by government investigators." So that means if you use Gmail and remain logged in, then use maps, or news, or search, this tool does you no good. Oh well. The Googlesharing logo needs some work too. Someone should probably let Moxie know that when you put a squiggly tail on an arrow, it doesn't look like an arrow any more.

Share

Bing May Become Default Search Engine for the iPhone

Huh? What? Yes, you read the title correctly. Apple is in talks with Microsoft about making it the default search engine on the iPhone. Ever since the Google Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, left the Apple board, Google and Apple have been building up the hate for each other and this is just adding more fuel to the fire.

According to the article, Apple sees Google as a direct threat with their kajillion new Android powered phones. Since WinMo isn't grabbing a lot of the market these days, Apple sees them as a tool they can use against Google. Hmm....

I feel like we are still in the calm before the storm. 2010 should be an interesting year!

Source

Share

21st Century Tech Support

It was Sunday morning at 8:30am, I had already eaten breakfast and talked myself out of, then back into going snowboarding that day. A friend was coming over at 9 and from there we were going up to Summit County for a day on the slopes. Until my phone buzzed.
It was a text message from one of our executives, she could not send or receive email. I quickly logged on to our Exchange Server. The partition that we write most of our log files to was filling up and both email services and event logging services we stopped dead in their tracks. When I tried to launch the event logging service, I got a cryptic error message, and the email service just would not start.
This kind of stuff is not out of the ordinary for most IT Professionals. What was interesting is that 6 co-workers contacted me regarding the issue. All six contacted me by text message.
I spent the next 5 hours troubleshooting the issue to no avail. Troubleshooting a server without any event logs is a difficult task. After several attempts at resolution, it was time to call in Microsoft. Within an hour, Ajay our Microsoft support rep, had the problems solved and mail was back up and running. I thanked him profusely, and asked him why this problem had occurred. Interestingly, he had no answer. He only did break/fix repairs, root cause analysis was not covered under our level of support. Good thing to remember for next time. My fingers are tightly crossed that their won't be a next time!

Share