Prior Todo System Attempts

The result is usually “cool,” and I might use it for a day or two. And then, I forget about it. (I use and love the HelpSpot helpdesk software (Lakeview is even a HelpSpot case study!), but there are tasks (and projects) I’d like to manage outside of requests in the helpdesk, and that’s just an at-work solution.) Now that I have an iPhone, although it comes with no built-in task managment program (why? Beats me), I figured someone would have made a system I could use on my desktop, laptop, and iPhone to track todo lists at home, for Lakeview, and for the Indianag A/G District Office where I work one day per week. And when I’m somewhere else, I don’t really want to see what I have to do anywhere but where I am! And oh yeah, I’d like subtasks support, tagging, sorting, searching, start and end due dates, and due time with reminders built in, and probably a few things I’m forgetting. And can you make it free while you’re at it?

I’ve already mentioned that there are a lot of online todo list web applications. On my renewed search for iPhone-compatible todos, I tried the very well-known Remember the Milk service. It has a nice interface and I thought it might just be as good as everyone seems to think, and it had an iPhone interface. Which I never tried, because although there’s a trial, you have to pay for a Pro account to use the iPhone-optimized webapp; I think it’s $25/year and you get a few other benefits as well. But I kept going back to my preference for “free” and wondered if someone else was doing it better. I’ve bookmarked some of my findings using my Delicious keyword “todo”

The other one with a funny name: Toodledo

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered it, but it was probably a Google search or a post comparing services that led me to Toodledo. The name almost turned me off from looking at it at all. It’s a nice play on words but not as “professional” sounding as I was looking for. But hey, Remember the Milk isn’t all suit-and-tie sounding either, so I gave it a shot, especially because it had a free iPhone interface called Slim. The well-done feature comparison chart also helped to convince me to try it out, given it’s completeness compared to every competitor listed (granted, the chart is a bit out of date per a few forum postings especially in relation to Todoist, which I tried briefly after I was already using Toodledo (always on the lookout for something closer to perfection :-) and if you like using the keyboard extensively it may be an excellent option, although I’m not sure about an iPhone version). Of course comparison charts are intended to be biased towards the company making the chart, but the list of features Toodledo had was impressive by itself.

This is going to get long, so for more information I’m breaking the rest out after the jump if you’re reading this on the web!

And then I gave them money

After customizing the fields I wanted to use (most of them, it turns out) and playing with the Contexts feature which lets you save a location or context for each todo item, I started to actually put a few tasks in for the next few days to get a feel for how to use it in a daily workflow. It clicked. I still find some interface things to be not as easy as they could be, but I like Toodledo so much that I’ve purchased a Pro account for $15 per year to unlock some additional features. The fee is more reasonable than any other pro account I’ve encountered for task management, and although my preference is of course for stuff that’s free, the Pro account just added enough value at a small enough price to make it worthwhile (subtasks and longer completed-task history retention were the two that put me over the edge, but the Scheduler and Stats features are also nice). However I haven’t seen the need for a 1GB file storage area that doubles the price, so I stuck with a Pro rather than a Pro Plus account; the file storage and going from 2 years of completed-item retention to forever are the only additional features for the upgraded plan.

Sidenote: Project Management Still Elusive

The definition of what I look for in a productivity app keeps changing. Universally available todo lists with all the features I’ve mentioned were the biggest need I had and Toodledo fills that void nicely. Some people, especially those using the GTD system, use Toodledo to track projects (GTD defines a project as “anything requiring more than one specific action to complete” while I both like that and have an additional one, something like “something I want to get done including collaboration with others” or something along those lines). Toodledo provides task sharing (read-only unless the other user has a Pro account) and you can use Toodledo’s Projects field to track GTD-like projects, but at work I’m still missing something between todo list and helpdesk.

What I’m looking for is Project Management. Something like Microsoft Project without the complexity, on the web, for one to several people working together on multiple projects to use for tasks and collaboration. There are nearly as many options in this space as there are todo list services! The most well-known of these is probably 37signals‘ Basecamp and their associated services (like Backpack, for todos and calendaring–but it’s not free!). Basecamp is nice but their free account only allows for one project, and their paid accounts are more than I’m willing to shell out for right now, and they don’t offer non-profit discounts (I asked). That’s OK, copycats are a dime a dozen, but the problem is finding the one that does everything the way I want it to, at the right price! Unlike Toodledo, I’ve not discovered the perfect-enough solution for this yet, but I’m still looking. My biggest concern is that most project management systems include their own todo list system, and I want to make sure I don’t split my nice Toodledo system and have to check two separate todo lists all the time! I’m keeping this in mind as I evaluate.

Ideally, I’d like a system that coworkers helping me with projects as well as volunteers can log into and update with research findings, progress, and that sort of thing. The ability to collaborate with volunteers is one of the driving reasons I want a web-based system! Projects in this context might be things like:

• Upgrade Microsoft Exchange to 2007 from 2003
• Run wires to X for Y purpose
• Use compressor to blow dust out of all desktops (recurring)
• Upgrade all or most servers to Server 2008 from Server 2003
• Purchase and implement a SAN solution with virtualization

Centrally managing a list like that would be much better than me having to come up with it off the top of my head like I just did! Yes I can just write down a list, and I have a few of those, but that leaves out the collaboration opportunity. One of the few entirely free options I’m contemplating is called ClockingIT. The interface doesn’t seem as clean as some competitors, but it has many features including a Wiki, chat, forums, and files, along with reporting and charting options. And the price is right.

This is one of many possibilities several of us in the Church IT IRC channel (#citrt on the Freenode IRC network) discussed a week or two ago when we went Googling for project management options. No one in the group has a perfect solution but several have none (hence the looking!), and others are using things like Basecamp, Sharepoint (WSS) or Microsoft Project. I refuse to get sucked into using Sharepoint and the other two I’ve already eliminated for reasons above, so that’s why I’m still looking! I’m tracking things that show some promise using my Delicious keyword “projectmanagement” if you care to browse. For churches, TeamWorkLive stands out as another very nice option, although the price is too steep for me right now. I can see this being a great all-church-staff project management tool, if everyone gets on board and you’re OK with the $200/mo for 50 users (or $150/mo for 25 users…there are other plans too).

My Toodledo Workflow

My District Toodledo context (click to enlarge)

This is a brief overview of how I use Toodledo. I have most of the fields except for the sharing-related ones enabled. I used Google’s Chrome browser to create an “Application” out of the Toodledo website so I can easily open a separate Toodledo-only window, preventing it from getting lost amid my many tabs (no, I’m not kidding! Too many tabs to provide an exact count right now though…). I have the same setup on the desktop I use at each office and on my laptop, and I have an iPhone home screen icon set up for the Toodledo Slim iPhone webapp interface (I’m also presently using the Appigo Todo native iPhone app, which is nice, but it is missing several features including subtask and context support that prevent it from being as useful in general, even though it syncs well with Toodledo. Appigo has said they are working to add these features in the near future).

Basics

I have Toodledo set to default to the Contexts tab, since you can select any of the fields to start with by default. This lists all the Contexts I have set up in tabs across the top of the screen, and I can easily select which one to view (the number of tasks in the context is shown in parentheses on the tab but that can optionally be hidden). The main contexts I have (plus a few infrequently used ones) are: Any Computer, Lakeview, District, and Home. I default to sorting tasks by Importance and then Auto. Importance is a foruma defined by Toodledo that takes into account both the priority of a task and how soon it’s due, and assigns each task a numerical value of “importance.” The higher-importance items are shown at the top, and for each task the due date or priority is displayed at the right side (whichever is the reason for the importance level is displayed, due date or priority, per task).

A quick scan shows me what I need to do today and I can pick a next action to work on based on only tasks that I can do (that are in the context I’m presently in; at Lakeview for example). I have keyboard shortcuts enabled which lets me type “n” to create a new task quickly, and I can tab through the fields to set the folder, start and due dates, priorities, context (defaults to the context I’m in) and other settings as applies to that task. The Folder field I’m using kind of as a categorization field and kind of as a “project” field, I’ve not decided 100% how I’m going to use it yet. But that’s an example of flexibility; I can use the Folder field for whatever I want however I want to! There’s also a Tags field which allows for multiple, comma-separated tags which you can view and sort just like any other fields. I’m using tags sparingly right now, but will throw “web,” “order,” “blog,” for categorization, or a person’s name (like my boss) to create an agenda to talk to that person about the next time I see them.

Subtasks

Subtasks, which are a feature of the Pro account I paid for, are nice but not as easy to use as I’d like. Without seeing or using it I’m not sure I could explain it very well so I won’t try for now. Suffice it to say the usability of the interface for subtasks has a ways to go to make it as efficient or easy to use as it needs to be for me to get much use out of it. Like others on the Toodledo forums, I would also like to see the ability to assign an order to subtasks so as each was marked complete, the next one would be “active” until it was complete, and so on. This would make tasks with subtasks very usable as GTD “projects->next actions” which I would like to get into more in-depth as I work toward trying to implement GTD myself (I am currently trying to use some of the GTD concepts but I haven’t dived in to the program all the way). I presently have 55 active todo items in Toodledo, which is the important suff I can’t forget but is not close to the full brain dump GTD requires to really work well!

iPhone

The iPhone interface is mostly full-featured but obviously limited in the amount of information it can display at once, and the lag time for the webapp to refresh is occasionally annoying. However I use it to enter new todo items at least as often as I use a computer, I think, and I edit and mark tasks complete on it as well (it’s nice that I can review pretty much anywhere when I have downtime, without having to be in front of a computer!). The biggest benefit to having an iPhone interface is that I’m more likely to follow through and use the system the more contstant and “anywhere” my access to it is. I don’t want to rely on something that goes away when I’m not at my computer; that’s when I need to be reminded what I need to do the most! Especially as I’m running around the building away from my office. Between Appigo Todo and the Slim webapp, I get what I need to out of the iPhone side of Toodledo access, but it’s not perfect. I am looking forward to the Appigo Todo updates that will add Contexts especially (and subtasks!), and Toodledo developers themselves have mentioned in their forums that they are looking at iPhone native apps themselves but have not released any details about when to expect anything concrete to materialize.

Other Ways to do Toodle

Some other ways that Toodledo provides to interface with their system are email, Twitter, and Jott. I have enough ways to add and view tasks on the go that I don’t think the Twitter integration will be very useful to me despite my extensive use of Twitter. Jott is an excellent service that I’ve used for a long time off and on, but recently they switched to a paid model and left beta status. Basic Jotting is still free but connecting to productivity services like Toodledo requires a paid monthly subscription now. If I get desperate enough to need quick voice-to-todo translation I’ll contemplate a subscription; until then I may use the iPhone Jott app to capture quick items that I can manually enter as a Toodledo task later. Email is one piece that I haven’t really gotten into the swing of using but should be pretty powerful, because you can forward an email to your secret Toodledo email address, changing the subject to the actual todo text (add exclaimation points to bump up the priority, and @context to set a context) and the body of the email becomes the task’s note. This should make creating tasks from emails quick and painless, but like I said I just haven’t started using it heavily yet, even though I need to. The same command-shorthand works to create new tasks via Twitter using a Direct Message, by the way.

There are several other ways to get information out of Toodledo, including iCal subscriptions, Vista and Apple dashboard or sidebar widgets, a Firefox extension and sidebar (the sidebar uses the same Slim interface as the iPhone), and there’s a third-party Outlook Synchronization Tool that does just what it sounds like, using the Toodledo API. I tried this (it does work!) since I use Outlook but the lack of contexts turned me off and I’ve tried and failed to use the Outlook Tasks feature for tracking todo items, so I’m not sure why I wanted to try again :-) You can display your tasks in your Google Calendar in at least two ways (as a drop down item each day to see tasks due that day, or as actual calendar items if you’ve set a due time as well), and you can get text-message or email alerts about an hour before a task with the due time field set is due (for now, you can’t configure how early to remind you, and if on, all tasks with a due time will remind you up to the maximum number of reminders you want per day).

Conclusion

Is Toodledo what I’m going to use long-term? Well, I’ve spent about $25 on Toodledo Pro for a year, and the Appigo Todo and Notebook iPhone Apps. I’ve been using the system for about a month I think, successfully, and with money invested I (hope) I’m nore likely to stick with it longer. Only time will tell! It’s full-featured yet flexible, but it doesn’t quite provide the collaborative project management that I’m also looking for, which may end up being another tool to juggle when I find the right one, rather than replacing Toodledo. Sometimes you just need a nice, smart, flexible list to give your mind some sanity by offloading the “stuff” to the system.

That’s the premise of GTD, and Toodleso is my favorite implementation so far. I just have to be careful to avoid something I recall reading on Merlin Mann’s 43folders blog a while ago (I’m not sure what article) that mentioned it was too easy to spend more time looking at, examining, and setting up a system that you more busy with that than actually using it! I agree, that is easy to slip into sometimes! I guess I’ll just have to stop and use this for while!

In addition to Remote Desktop, you can also open webpages (HTTP or HTTPS, using Internet Explorer or optionally the Gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses if you download xulrunner…see the instructions within mRemote). And connect to SSH sessions using PuTTY, which comes with mRemote, right inside other tabs.

There are other tools out there that do similar things. Royal TS is one, and in fact was the first one I found (see review from 4sysops here). There are others in the original 4sysops post I linked to, which compared six free RDP clients and mentioned a paid one. mRemote does everything I need in a comfortable way that I’m very pleased with, at my favorite price. It works fine with Server 2008 and Vista, and using the smartsize setting so the remote desktop fills whatever resolution is available inside the mRemote window makes for an efficient work area that’s as large as you can fit on your screen!

If you use Remote Desktop on more than just an occasional basis or to connect to more than one system, you need mRemote, or one of the other similar tools if you find it’s a better fit.

What if you’re away from your laptop or desktop and need to Remote Desktop from just about anywhere you can get cellular data coverage with AT&T? Well, you have to have an iPhone too, but I highly recommend WinAdmin for the iPhone to fill that need. That’s a review I wrote as a part of my iPhone Apps reviews over at my personal blog earlier today, and it ties in well with this full-sized mRemote companion :-) (As you might have guessed, writing about WinAdmin actually sparked the idea to blog about mRemote. They complement each other well! Seriously, I think I hear mRemote telling WinAdmin how it thinks of it fondly as a younger brother, whenever my iPhone is next to my laptop :-)

The obligatory “why I haven’t been blogging”: Busy playing with iPhone :-D Too much fun to waste time writing about other stuff (even writing about iPhone Apps has taken a backseat until today!), but I’ve got a few ideas planned and things to write about up ahead. For now, enjoy having a bit less in your feedreader; I know I’ve been falling quite behind in my own blogreading too! Twitter and the #citrt IRC channel are also to blame in large part, but not in a bad way. I’m not the only one; see Jason Powell’s post about it.

I’m going to have to work on getting a server available to play with this at Lakeview, but it came at a great time for the Indiana District Assemblies of God office where I work one day per week: I had a server that I was about to transition into a role as a virtual server host and ESXi was released freely at just the right time to try it out! My server is a ProLiant DL580 G2 model, which isn’t on the “officially supported” HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) for ESXi, but is for the full ESX. Worth a try; I’m not planning on buying support anyway.

After registering, downloading the ISO image file, burning it to a CD, and booting the CD on the target server, the installation process completed without a hitch. It was so quick and easy, there’s no point in describing the process in detail! If you can’t make it install on supported hardware, you shouldn’t be using servers anyway :-) (You can find how-to guides online easily enough if you do need one, and I will mention that you need to change the BIOS on the DL580 G2 to indicate that the supported OS is “Linux” before installing.)

After installing, the server boots and you get a screen that you can’t actually use to do much. It tells you your IP address (if it obtained one using DHCP, which mine did) and lets you set a root password (which I recommend). Then, you need to visit the IP address of the server from a client machine on the network. This page gives you a download link to install the VMware Infrastructure Client, which you’ll need to actually setup and manage ESXi. Connect with the Client to the IP of the server using the username root (and either a blank password or the one you set earlier if you changed it–you did change it, right?).

I’m using an onboard RAID controller with SCSI storage rather than a SAN (I’ve been told ESXi does not support IDE disks but does work with SATA drives if you need it to), so I didn’t need to set up any iSCSI targets or anything like that, although that appears to be very easy if you’re fortunate enough to have a SAN.

One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need the free VMware Converter if you want to convert Virtual Machines from a VMware Server installation to your ESXi box. It’s a rather simple process I haven’t really gone through in production yet so I won’t say more, but you can’t just copy the files over and run them.

So far I’m only running a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl-or-PHP-or-Python) appliance from VirtualAppliances.net, which I absolutely love when I need a quick webserver! Installing this from the Virtual Infrastructure Client is very, very easy. File menu->Virtual Appliance->Import. I used the Import from URL function, and used this VirtualAppliances address to the .ovf file needed to install the appliance. Confirm and wait, it has to download the disks from the internet and transmit them to the ESXi server!

I’m using the LAMP server to run the HelpSpot helpdesk application. Since I had this running in a VMware Server appliance already, I simply used the “scp” command to transmit the web files from the existing appliance to the new one, and moved the MySQL database dump over as well. I logged in as root to the appliance and used “aptitude update” and then was able to use “apt-get install php5-imap” and “apt-get install php5-tidy” which are required or recommended for HelpSpot, and I used the web-based configuration to turn on the Zend engine in the Apache configuration, which HelpSpot requires. It popped up and took off like I’d never moved it! I also copied over the cron entries needed to execute the regular email checks that Helpspot does. Note that I’m leaving off a few steps involving DNS changes and firewall modifications because I gave it a new IP address, but basically the move was very easy and straightforward.

Then I ran into trouble, because I like to experiment :-) In the VMware Infrastructure Client, I right-clicked the LAMP VM and told it to “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools” on the VM (it said the Toold were out of date…wouldn’t want that now, would we?). I used the Automatic option with no Advanced Options. Everything seemed to complete successfully, and I rebooted the appliance. Oops, no network! The eth0 network interface was nowhere to be found! (Using “ifdown eth0” and then “ifup eth0” normally disables and re-enables the Ethernet interface, in case you didn’t know (I didn’t, until recently, thanks to #citrt!), but in this case only the localhost “lo” interface showed up at all.) This could be a problem, since the whole point is to be a “networK” server! I tried asking around in the #citrt Church IT Roundtable channel on IRC, where usually someone knows what to do, but I didn’t get much help on this issue from the folks currently in there when I asked. Time for Google! Without too much effort I’m pointed in the right direction, to this forum thread on the Ubuntu Forums (The VA LAMP appliance is based on Debian linux). User “modifiedmind” had the same problem as the original poster, and then found the solution and posted it later…thanks! I couldn’t quite find what to enter as the argument to the modprobe command, but I managed to track it down and this is what I had to do:

1. Edit the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file on the appliance and delete the last two lines (the one starting “1. PCI device…” and the one beneath it, starting with “SUBSYSTEM==”net”…” (I like using the nano text editor because I’ve never spent the time to learn vi or emacs, so I did an “apt-get install nano” first; make sure to use the -w argument to nano so it doesn’t line-wrap for you, like “nano -w /filename“. Or use whatever text editor you’re comfortable with!)
2. Run this command: /etc/init.d/udev restart
3. Run this command: modprobe -r pcnet32
4. Run this command: modprobe pcnet32
5. Run this command: ifdown eth0
6. Run this command: ifup eth0

That’s it. Back to working order! So far I’m very happy with ESXi and I’m going to do everything I can to use it everywhere possible :-) It also has the capability of adding the higher-end features (HA, VMotion, VirtualCenter Manager) just like you can with ESX, if you’re willing to pay for them. I’ve never used them, this is my first ESX/ESXi experience ever, so I figure I’ll be happy without them as long as I don’t use them to see what I’m missing! The biggest thing that ESXi doesn’t have that the “full” ESX has is a “service console” that lets you control the machine locally. I’ve heard that many people have had great success running ESXi on even non-supported hardware, and it should at least run on anything that ESX will run on without a problem (just don’t try to pay for support!).

I’m using the free WordPress app to compose this post on the iPhone and it seems to be pretty solid so far but it needs some more features like page editing capabilities and not just posts. In time. For now it is good!

So, I’m contemplating those new iPhones. Strongly considering getting one, but I have a few questions. Although the price came way down (now $199 for the 8GB version, and $299 for the 16GB version), the data cost goes up for the 3G service. Original iPhone data plans were $20/mo, but 3G service appears to be tiered at $30/mo for personal accounts and $45/mo for “enterprise” accounts. However, I have been unable to find any good definitions of the difference between the two accounts, other than who is paying for them. In the #citrt channel, Chris Green said yesterday that based on his research, ActiveSync was probably going to be avialable only on the $45/mo corporate plan. I can’t find any details other than price on the Apple or AT&T websites, but I’ve found one or two rumors of a similar setup with some Google searching, but those were some random posts on some forums.

While on the AT&T website, a customer service order chat popped up, and I took the opportunity to ask AT&T directly. They were less than clear, and I’m not sure I believe them, but here’s the conversation:

Michael: Welcome to AT&T online Sales support.  How may I assist you with placing your order today?
David: Actually I have a question. What is the difference between the personal and Enterprise data plans for the new 3G iPhones?
David: Other than $15/month?
Michael: I am sorry, but we do not have the information on the new iphones at this time
Michael: We will have that on July 11th.
David: You have enough information to say there’s a corporate plan for $45 and a 3G personal plan for $30. Why can’t you just define those terms?
Michael: One is business and one is personal
David: Yes but if I have a personal phone, will the Exchange ActiveSync feature work with an Exchange server?
Michael: Yes, but is will not be secure
David: That can’t be true, my ActiveSync account only allows for encryped SSL connections.
Michael: Ok, then you would not be able to use the $30.00 plan you will need the $45.00

Other than an uncanny ability to state the obvious (“One is business and one is personal“), Michael says quite plainly that ActiveSync will be possible but “insecure” for Personal accounts. This would have to be done in the ActiveSync client software on the iPhone, because I’m sure the iPhone allows SSL-encrypted web browsing on any data plan, and since ActiveSync is essentially encrypted SSL traffic, AT&T would be hard pressed (in my opinion, which I’m willing to have corrected) to sniff/block the traffic at the network level. I think they’d have to “remove the Use SSL” checkbox from the ActiveSync config on the iPhone itself based on account type. Or are they talking about the ability to remotely wipe the system only on the Enterprise plan?  I have no idea. But I don’t like the idea that only businesses get encryption; ActiveSync over HTTP is not a good solution for anyone, and it’s certainly not worth a $15/mo premium for essentially the same service.

I suppose only time will tell, unless one of my readers has better or more information than I’ve been able to find. If so, do share!

Don’t forget, it’s pre-release code right now and it requires Vista or XP 32-bit editions only right now, and of course Office 2007 (works with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint only). That said, check it out if you can!

One tip I did manage to track down (found this item on the pssh users archived mailing list) was that I could type a Tab character by typing Shift+Space (extensively useful for auto-completion in the bash shell on a full-sized keyboard, but even more so on a thumb board!). There’s a menu option to type a Tab as well, but that does kind of defeat some of the shortcut-ness I was looking for.

pssh does warn that it doesn’t use the best random number generator out there for encryption. I’m all for extra security, but for the few times I will use this I think a targeted attack that manages to crack my SSH tunnel is unlikely, and there are probably weaker links in our webhost-connection security than Secure Shell.

We eventually evaluated the newer version of Presentation Manager that came out once we found out about it (remember this was in place before I started volunteering, and at the time there wasn’t even a full time sound/tech guy, much less a full time IT person on staff!), and although it did make some improvements we did some searching and evaluating and settled on EasyWorship because of the unparalleled text quality, smooth transitions, video support, and of course, ease-of-use (the very liberal licensing policy was also a big factor). EasyWorship was definitely an excellent decision as the software has been very solid overall and is still very easy to use (I should know, while I was still on the tech team I trained many others to use it!). It’s had its bugs like any other software and there are certainly features we’d like to see added (some of our wish list has been addressed in the time we’ve been using it!), but we’ve been very happy with it for the most part.

Which brings me to this Easter weekend. Because we had so many things going on this weekend, including a big outreach at the local elementary school on Saturday where between one and two thousand people came for free groceries and to win one of 100 bikes in a giveaway, I pitched in on Friday and ordered the Message version of the Bible for use in EasyWorship (a module that was unavailable when we originally purchased EasyWorship with many of the then-available paid Bible translations), because some passages from the Message version were planned for use in the Easter services.

Within an hour of placing the order, I got the confirmation email and a temporary, 10-day license key for the Message version, with the final key to arrive after a manual order review. I forwarded this to Shawn, an awesome friend, fellow local one-man IT guy, and our lead tech team volunteer, and the report came back: it works! But, none of our previously purchased Bible work anymore! Shawn was able to roll back to the previous registration information so we at least had our old Bibles back. By the time all this transpired EasyWorship was closed for the weekend, and a Saturday phone call and email couldn’t rouse them. Shawn did what all good IT guys do in such a situation: he improvised and created a new song and pasted the necessary verses in manually.

Today, Monday, I received the final registration code from EasyWorship, which worked to unlock our new and old purchases, and I also received an apology for them being closed over the weekend and unable to help us in time. Still, the glitch still exists: temporary licenses lock you out of previous orders! If you use EasyWorship, keep this in mind (and order early if you need to, like we should have done). Otherwise, I hope you enjoy using this software as much as I used to and our tech team still does!

In related interesting timing, it appears that EasyWorship is the next class we’re focusing on at the Ministry Technology Institute. Just like my university pursuits, I’m happy for classes where my experience makes things much less difficult. Yes, being challenged is good and I like learning (usually things are only easy because I’ve spent the time and learned a lot already on my own!), but it feels good to get things finished and move on to other things demanding my time!

UPDATE: Within moments of publishing this post, I received a second email from another person at EasyWorship offering to help with our problem. I’m sure that the first reply I received was to my email and the second was from my voicemail (I had hoped one or the other would make it through before weekend services), rather than the second being in response to this post (the response time was too fast for this post to have existed long enough to read and reply!). But EasyWorship is very responsive during the week apparently!

So far this morning, I’ve tried hibernating three or four times, and as promised, TrueCrypt does not block me from hibernating any more. However, my experience resuming from hibernation has been, well…non-existent! After appearing to hibernate normally, when I try to resume I am prompted for my decryption boot password and then Windows boots normally. From scratch. No traces of hibernation present.

My only thought as to why this is happening is perhaps it’s because I decided to use Whole Drive encryption this time, as opposed to System Partition encryption. I didn’t realize when I started the encryption process that the version history was so specific, but it does say that one of the new features is, “Support for hibernation on computers where the system partition is encrypted (previous versions of TrueCrypt prevented the system from hibernating when the system partition was encrypted).” It specifically mentions encryption of the system partition!

I started the decryption process (estimated to complete in 6 hours, much slower than encryption) this morning and when complete, I will attempt re-encrypting just the system partition and see if that fixes the issue. I’ll update this post with information as I discover it!

UPDATE Saturday, March 15th, early morning: Yesterday, I re-encrypted just the system partition with TrueCrypt, but the same problem still occurs. I did discover (thanks to referrer logs) that someone had a similar problem and posted a thread to the official TrueCrypt Forums, linking to this post. Apparently, while the problem does not appear to be widespread, it does seem to still happen for others. I did not get a chance to try any of the suggested workarounds, but I did post an update to that thread with a few more details of my experience in case it helps resolve the issue. About a day after I posted my details, the developers posted a fix in the form of 5.1a Beta, which they requested be tested to see if the problem is fixed. I have installed the beta, but it requires a reboot before taking effect. Update coming later.

UPDATE later Saturday: The beta of 5.1a fixed the problem, and hibernation works now. Happy ending! Apparently there is still a problem with a couple of versions of Vista that are fixed but won’t be released in a beta, per Vertex on the forums:

This is a known issue in Beta 1 that affects users running Windows
Vista Ultimate and Enterprise. According to the developers, it was
discovered and fixed shortly after Beta 1 was released. Beta 2 is
currently unlikely to be released so if you use one of those systems,
you will need to wait for TrueCrypt 5.1a final/stable.

UPDATE: Chris Green linked to more details about the iPhone and ActiveSync straight from Microsoft. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson, VP of for Exchange, said, “We started talking with Apple about licensing Exchange ActiveSync before the launch of the iPhone last year. In fact, I met with Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller almost daily for a period of two weeks ironing out the details of the agreement. The result is a true collaboration between Microsoft and Apple.”

UPDATE at 3:15 pm: Apple has an Enterprise website for the iPhone including a beta signup to test the iPhone with ActiveSync using the iPhone 2.0 software! (hat tip to Jason Lee in the #citrt chat.)

Google also jumped on the synchronization bandwagon with its own Google Calendar Sync utility to keep your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar up to date (two-way or one-way). It’s not ActiveSync and it doesn’t sync with Exchange, but I can see a use for this even for personal use where friends have Google Apps set up and want to sync with their phones, but their phones will only sync with Outlook. Another, over-the-air option I’ve heard about is GooSync, but I don’t have any experience with that yet. It sounds good but I’ve heard mixed opinions. Thanks to Scott, also in the #citrt chat room, for this piece of news!

And don’t forget about the Church IT Podcast episode recording in just a few minutes this afternoon! (It’s at 2 pm Easter via TalkShoe on Thursday the 6^th, so if you’re reading this later–it may be over for this week, come back in two weeks!)

I just found this yesterday, if you can believe I’ve found reason enough to rave already! Earlier this week I also set up the free version of the PacketTrap pt360 Tool Suite, and I’m significantly impressed. While several of the tools are part of a 30-day trial of the $1500 Pro version, the ability to easily map MAC addresses to DNS names and IP addresses is very useful, and the Dashboard, including a widget for viewing the traffic activity levels on switch ports, is nice. It didn’t blow me away like Spotlight on Windows did (and they don’t overlap too much except in some monitoring areas; pt360 is much more network oriented), but I’m keeping it handy in my arsenal for troubleshooting. It’s certainly not worth the $1500 to me for a Pro license, but someone with a much larger network might be able to justify the price tag. Although I believe I’ve run across this before, thanks to Andrew Mitry for linking to this tool in his recent blog post about free tools for IT Managers, where all the links were such high quality (the ones I did and didn’t know about) that I decided this was worth of a test run after all.

(Screenshots are from each products’ respective websites; click for larger versions.)

The main reason was the lack of hibernation support. I tried using standby, which seemed to work sometimes. I would verify that standby mode had been entered, and put the latpop in my bag. Less than 12 hours later, more often than not, the battery was dead and the laptop was off. Even within shorter time periods, I would sometimes take the laptop out of my bag and it would be running! This is dangerous, as carrying around a laptop when it’s off can be done much less gently than should be done when it’s on. And running in my bag prevents good heat dissipation, so it would be practically burning hot in this case (pun intended :-)

So, now hibernation works again. Which has worked well for me 99% of the time since I purchased the laptop. And it’s not encrypted, but it wasn’t in the past either. If they can make whole-disk encryption work with hibernation, and I’m not enthusiastic about the chances of this given the security implications that I think I understand but probably need to read more carefully, I’ll give it another try.

Note: I’m running Windows XP Pro on my laptop. At some point I may try Vista Ultimate, and may perhaps test Vista’s Bitlocker. I’ve heard it’s more complicated. I don’t know if it allows for hibernation or not. There’s an excellent overview of the two together at 4sysops, a blog I highly recommend overall.

UPDATE on March 15th: The problem with hibernation support has been fixed in TrueCrypt’s beta and soon the final release of version 5.1a. I am back to running an encrypted system for now!

In the Windows and Linux versions a special bootloader is available that lets you encrypt your entire system drive. It doesn’t look like that option is available in the OS X version.

What? Whole-drive encryption of the system drive is now available in Windows and/or Linux? (Clarification: Only Windows is supported right now.) This I’ve gotta see. I’ve looked at some laptop disk encryption tools in the past, and they’re nice but generally not cheap (whether software or specialized hardware). But open source is better than cheap, and TrueCrypt is already considered to be high quality. It’s written well (important where security software is concerned) and is in active development. The new version also promises significant speed increases.

I’ve installed the new version on my laptop. Do I dare try out the encryption feature? I do have most (not all) of my data backed up, the important stuff at least. Maybe I’ll investigate this through the weekend, make a decision, and possibly try it out. Possibly. Fire is fun to play with and very powerful, but you have to know what you’re doing!

UPDATED after a night’s sleep: Yes, I dared. Before going to bed I started the process to encrypt the entire system partition on my laptop. I don’t know precisely how long it took; it was projecting 2-3 hours left when I went to bed (shortly after starting it) and was done when I got up. The process is slick, I’ll give them credit for that. They require that you burn a recovery disc (and verify it) before you can continue, just in case, and they also verify that the bootloader works before allowing the encryption process to begin. I haven’t used the system enough to know whether there is a significant speed penalty when the partition is encrypted. It seems a touch sluggish but still responsive, but within the normal operating parameters depending on the day! The biggest downside: hibernation is no longer supported. Standby is an option, but the system will not hibernate (if you try, TrueCrypt stops you and provides a helpful message about why it won’t work). I generally hibernate all the time when not using my laptop. I’ll try using Standby for a while and see how happy I am with it. Not sure if it’s a deal-breaker yet.

As a precaution, the boot loader offers the option to, with the correct password, decrypt the entire disk without needing to boot into Windows, if Windows gets corrupted. There are several other handy “rescue” methods in the boot loader (on the hard drive and on the bootable rescue disc). I am extremely impressed with the quality of the thought and effort put into this whole-disk encryption feature, and although I haven’t tried the Vista Bitlocker method, TrueCrypt certainly sounds a bit easier (but it doesn’t integrate with the TPM chip, if one exists). There are options in the setup to set up encryption to work with multi-boot systems, but it warns that this requires advanced knowledge to set up. And, of course, you need a dual-boot system, which I don’t have at the moment.

UPDATE: The new version 5.1 has hibernation support, and version 5.1a Beta actually makes it work on my laptop. I’m back encrypted!

As you can imagine, the N800 didn’t get much of a workout at work and wasn’t a top priority at home, either. I even forgot the charger when I left work sick on Tuesday, and was left with a dead battery at home all day Wednesday!

I’ve still managed to give the device a pretty good workout, and it’s a very nice little system that has already been handy to have in my pocket on more than one occasion. The main limitation has been that the system is slow when loading large or complex websites, although it will still handle most of them. The onscreen keyboards (for stylus and thumbs) are much poorer than the thumbboard on my Treo 650, where I can almost touch-type at high speed, but the bluetooth keyboard is a huge improvement (over even the Treo usually) when I turn it on.

The HelpSpot helpdesk software runs a touch slow (pun unintentional but fully intended, I’m sure :-) but otherwise is almost completely normal in the Gecko-based web browser. The response field is not as wide as it could be (there are gray bars on the sides where it could expand but doesn’t), but it’s functional. All AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) appears to work properly. Gmail is also slow but usable. WordPress, at least my heavily-plugin-customized version, runs well except when composing a post, when the text editor is slower than molasses. in January. Switching to the WPhone mobile version is much faster and even easier to navigate on the smaller screen. Supposedly, WPhone is optimized to provide an even better interface on the iPhone than on other mobile devices that support AJAX, but this doesn’t carry over to the N800, although I am assuming the browser is more than capable. It’s probably an auto-detection thing.

There is a Nokia N800 WordPress editor called Maemo WordPy which was a bit difficult to figure out initially due to a poor user interface and one or two limitations that should be fixed in future versions. It will do some cool things (in the latest beta) like upload images directly to Flickr and insert that into a post! However, I am using the web-based WPPhone for this post as I mentioned. Copying and pasting links is not the best experience on this thing, so I am going to cheat and do some hotlinking from my full-sized computer before posting :-) (And a bit of proofreading and editing, it turns out!)

Is it perfect? No. Nothing is perfect when you are looking for a 22″ widescreen monitor on a quad-core desktop that all fits in your pocket! But it makes some good compromises and performs well for what I want it to do, at a (very) reasonable price. (Amazon had it for $231 when I bought mine off of eBay for a bit more with an SDHC memory card and Bluetooth keyboard that Amazon also had for $50.)

The iPod Classic 80GB I just grabbed should take the 15GB of podcasts I currently have sitting on my laptop in stride, with plenty of room for a few tunes when I feel like a break (and also a few videos here and there). I keep running into podcast episodes that run over the 74-minute mark (1hr 14 min), and thus won’t fit on a CD. Plus, I’m tired of burning podcasts onto CD, not just because I only listen to them once, but because burning them to CD (fitting as many as possible in each playlist and labeling each disc) is a royal pain. The podcasts I listen to are good enough to be worth the effort, and I’ve patiently waited for over a year to have the money available for an iPod. It’s part Christmas present from my wife, and part me getting rid of about half of the 31 domain names I own (~$10/yr for one is not much, but ~$310 for 31 makes a much bigger dent!).

The domain names I am not renewing are, sadly, some pretty nice domains. Some are reasonably old, and all are reasonably good if you have an interest in the genre (ranging from Christianity to long distance services to Star Trek, and a few others in-between). If I let them expire, they will probably be registered by some domain-squatter and used for advertising, which I’d rather not do. So, I am considering the best way to dispose of the domains from our budget without literally tossing them out! Should I list them on a domain auction site? That’s probably not a bad idea, but I could also list them here. I’m not necessarily looking to make a killing, but a few bucks on top of the registrar transfer fee would help to offset the years I have paid for the domains (some just a few years, but my first domain is from back when Network Solutions had a monopoly and charged $100 for two years up front!). Any thoughts? Should I list them here? I have ten domains that I am for sure not renewing, and they all expire within the next year (some as soon as December).

1. The computer whose mouse and keyboard you want to use is the server. Install Synergy and configure the Server options, and enter Test mode (make sure to use the computer’s network name when creating “screens,” or create a pretty name with an alias that is the network name).
2. Configure the positioning of how each computer’s screen is related to the other (you have to create the link in both directions).
3. Click Start once you’ve finished with Test mode and it works.
4.  The computer you want to control with the server’s keyboard and mouse is the Client. Install Synergy on this computer, too.
5. Enter the network name of the server you already set up, and click Start. Use Test mode to see if it will connect without errors; you can then try it out to see if it works (if the server is running).
6. Click Start once you’ve finished with test mode and it works.
7. Have loads of fun!

I set this up at work, with my desktop as the server and my laptop as the client. Ta-da, now I can use my nicer mouse and Natural keyboard on my laptop, just by moving the cursor off the desktop’s screen! This is really slick.

What is it missing? Security, for one. There is no authentication between the client and server. So someone else running this software on your network could connect depending on how your computer is configured. I assume the traffic can be sniffed and interpreted, if someone were so inclined (but this would likely be difficult, on a switched LAN, and with the need to decipher mouse and keyboard controls). I imagine the keyboard would be much more useful to sniff than the mouse, which would be almost useless. On a home network, this probably isn’t an issue. At work, it depends on your co-workers: if they’re probably never heard of this software and you’re the only IT guy, it is very unlikely they would even know to look for such a thing! One way to slightly increase security would be to use a non-standard port. The default is 24800, but if you change this on the Advanced button, someone running the same software would have to do more work to figure out how to connect (don’t forget to set the same port on client and server!).

The other thing that’s missing is a polished interface. There is a GUI for Windows, but you should probably read the Using Synergy guide on their site the first time through when defining Screens and Links (positions relative to each other). Mac and Linux appear to be configured via text file only, but they do have the steps listed on their site. I haven’t tested this, but it does sound exciting to use a Windows computer’s keyboard and mouse to control a Mac or Linux machine right next to it! Or any of the other directions you could go.

With those caveats, if you have the two computers in close proximity you need to test this, I highly recommend going geek crazy and testing this. Just be sure to keep the computer equipment out from under your chin; it doesn’t generally take kindly to liquids, including drool!

9. Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in todayâ€s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Googleâ€s generic strategy address role specific needs?

Thanks to Vladville for the post with the original link.

One tool mentioned in the podcast this time is called Remote Task Manager, which is a remote control (at a granular level, not just a remote desktop viewer tool) for networked PCs. It sounds very useful and worth checking out the demo when I have the time!

Update in April 2008: If you don’t like the Adobe Reader software, try using Foxit Reader, a free alternative that loads much more quickly. Outlook 2007 PDF Preview is not built in, but Tim Heuer has used Foxit to create Previewer add-ons for Outlook 2007 that work in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. See my original post here about Outlook 2007 PDF Previewer that I updated with links to all of these!