When Software Attacks!

First thoughts on the Acer Aspire One

You can’t say that things never change. I nipped out to Tesco last night for a few bits of shopping – you know, some beer, spices for cooking, etc – and came back with an Acer Aspire One. As you do… To be fair, I have been looking at them closely, and Tesco are by far the cheapest place to get one. I picked up the 1Gb RAM, 120Gb HDD Linux model for about two hundred and fifty nicker, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Dell Mini 9: A Day In The Life

Colour me impressed. I managed well over four hours’ battery life today and found the Mini 9 a joy to use. I have encountered a snag, however, and it wasn’t one that I expected. You see, I’m now sitting on the 21:30 train from London Kings Cross to Wakefield after having been in the big smoke for a day of meetings. I got onto an empty train and picked a seat with a table – I want to get some work done on the documents required after my meeting and I thought the space would be nice.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, September 30, 2008

First thoughts on the Dell Mini 9

I’m down in London tomorrow, and rather than lug my laptop on the train I’ve borrowed Richard’s shiny new Mini 9. Overall, I’m quite impressed with it. I’m still not sure about the keyboard, even after a couple of hours typing away – the keys are small and some of them are smaller still, which makes typing an interesting experience. However, I’m sure I would get used to it with time.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, September 29, 2008

Browsers are like buses

You wait around for ages and then two come along, all at once! No sooner have I downloaded IE8 beta 2 than Google announce Chrome! I’ve been using IE8 for a few days and I’m quite impressed. I’ve just downloaded Chrome and I have to say, it’s a darn good browser. The feature I most wanted from any tab-based browser and one I’ve mentioned before in the context of IE is present in Chrome - tabs you can drag between windows.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

As you may remember from my earlier post and subsequent follow-up, we have been seeing an issue related to workflows and the Workflow History list in SharePoint 2007. As I’ve already mentioned, the case is with Microsoft and I also said that I would post updates as new information arrived. Today, more detail has emerged and, as promised, I am sharing. Whilst replicating the fault today we were having trouble - one of us had a SharePoint install that failed every time and the other had one which would not fail at all.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, August 28, 2008

Netware 6.5 on Hyper-V

As part of a customer project I needed to create a Netware environment for testing. It’s been a little while since I did any netware management and I quite enjoyed it. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas which I thought I’d write up for the greater good. Netware OS Installing the Netware OS was actually pretty straightforward. There are no integration services offered for Netware so from the outset I knew that I would need to use legacy hardware options in the virtual machine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, August 14, 2008

Configuring ActiveSync on Windows Mobile for Exchange Push

I’m not certain how many of you will find this useful, but I had a question about configuring the Touch Diamond to talk to Exchange which I regrettably failed to notice. It’s an interesting point of debate, now I come to think of it. When I got my Diamond the first thing I did was confgigure ActiveSync directly on the device. Whilst I do connect to my laptop from time to time, I don’t actually have any real sync going on between the two, other than possible for OneNote and Notes.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

SharePoint Website Schematic

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider. After some of my colleagues pestered me to draw it again, I decided to create an electronic version, and since everybody seems to find it so useful I thought I’d post it here as well.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page. A little jiggery-pokery with callstack and custom errors later, we saw that the error referenced a GUID for a task. I then searched the Project Server Publishing DB for the task GUID and subsequently located the project to which it belonged.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn’t notice until today. To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix. However, for anybody considering FBA in their deployment, I would not let this issue stop you. There are two reasons I say that: Normally with FBA you would extend the web application in question, having both FBA and Windows authentication available on the same content via different URLs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 30, 2008