We’ve been using Softouch EasyWorship at Lakeview for so long I’m not sure exactly what the date was when we first started using it. At the time (probably around the turn of the millennium or thereabouts), we’d been using version 1.0 of Presentation Manager for years after I had started volunteering on the tech team running words, and we’d been using it for years before I started! Presentation Manager 1.0 kind of, well, stunk. Or perhaps it was just still living in the ’80s. It was at least reasonably solid, always a plus in the middle of Sunday services! And most worship presentation software at the time was rather immature, anyway.

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!

I often get asked by other churches, often smaller ones, for recommendations on where to buy software or hardware (but primarily software). Usually they want to purchase some Microsoft software, sometimes Adobe products as well. Both companies sell popular software that costs, well, an arm and a leg at retail! The good thing is that they offer huge discounts to churches and non-profit organizations that can prove their status with a §501(c)(3) recognition letter from the IRS. There are companies out there that can beat this charity pricing, the most well-known being TechSoup. However, although TechSoup carries a variety of hardware and software, they often have terms and requirements stating that only non-religious non-profits may not take advantage of their offers! I don’t like this practice but I can’t change it. (The terms vary per vendor so you have to read the fine print.) In addition, TechSoup usually has very specific limits on the quantities you may purchase at their pricing in a certain time period.

Because I recently received a request for a recommendation of where to purchase Microsoft software, I wrote an email reply with information on available options and contact information for the sales representatives that I work with. That was the catalyst for this post, and I’m going to provide some of the same details below:

Microsoft and Adobe Charity Programs

Microsoft’s charity licensing program is called Microsoft Open License Charity. Their price list is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet (or it used to be; thanks to Jason Powell for the link and an excellent post about this topic that also includes some sample pricing on common items), but you may need either extensive training or experience to decipher a lot of it! But a reseller will be happy to give you a price, which I find is often less than the suggested retail (but the reseller price will usually still have wiggle room for negotiation). Suffice it to say you’re wasting money if you can purchase at charity pricing and aren’t. Percentages vary, but expect more than 50% off and up to 90% off is not uncommon.

Adobe didn’t used to have options for non-profit, religious purchasing discounts, but in the last couple of years that has changed. Their discounts are in general over 50% off the retail price of their software, sometimes a lot more than that. They have a website dedicated to non-profits and also have a non-profit blog, although it’s not very active.

The regular charity pricing offered by at least Microsoft and Adobe, unlike the restrictive TechSoup offerings that don’t usually apply to churches anyway, is good for unlimited licenses! The main limitation is that Microsoft requires at least five licenses to be purchased at once to set up a charity pricing agreement, although these can be low-cost licenses (if not otherwise needed) that will not normally negate most of your savings if you need fewer licenses! Adobe’s current program lets you purchase just one license at a time if desired!

There are two vendors that I’ve used for charity pricing, and I use them for just about everything else as well: Zones and Dell:

Zones

I’ve been using Zones as a supplier for somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 years. They have had competitive pricing in most cases and I’ve worked with a single, excellent sales representative, Lisa Shook (formerly Brubaker), for that entire time. The Zones HQ where Lisa works is located in Washington state, but most shipments (to us) ship out of warehouses in Illinois or northern Indiana and even with standard ground shipping arrive here in Indianapolis the next day or, in rare cases, in two days. There may be warehouses closer to you, so it’s worth asking if you’re buying hardware. Keep in mind that software from Microsoft and Adobe, when they’ll allow you to order discs rather than downloading it (and my understanding is that Microsoft recently started requiring you to download disc images for their software), must be shipped directly from Microsoft or Adobe themselvles, although the discs usually arrive within a few days in my experience. Contact me if you are interested in Lisa’s contact information, I won’t post it here so she can spend more time helping me and less time dealing with spam :-)

Update 2010-07-06: Lisa moved on to larger accounts and didn’t hold onto ours any longer, as of close to two years ago. However, her neighbor Eric Inabnit (who she recruited to Zones) took over our account and has been just as excellent! I still highly recommend him. I recommend shooting him an email if you need charity pricing or good non-profit pricing in general on Adobe, Microsoft or hardware (they can resell Dell too). Tell him I sent you! You can also call him at (800) 258-0882 x 3361, or directly at (253) 205-3361. Make sure you talk to him first before another rep gets you set up so he can help you.

Dell

Although I’ve ordered some Dell stuff in the past, I hadn’t really used their business sales division where they resell just about anything (with some limitations) in addition to giving (good!) discounts on their own hardware. I haven’t verify that they carry Adobe charity licensing, but I know they carry Microsoft’s and they seem to be undercutting just about everyone else right now on price, including Zones. They appear to be making little to no money on the licensing side of things to earn your business in other areas, and I’m OK with that. I haven’t made the decision to switch to them for all licensing yet because managing licenses is easier if done through one vendor, and right now that’s Zones for us, but I’m contemplating the situation. Our sales rep at the moment is Lindsey Keen, and again, if you want contact info let me know. Dell ships primarily with DHL, and while systems generally ship out of their Texas HQ (and the most recent one took only one week), I’ve received shipments of non-Dell-branded items from the Kentucky/Tennessee/Ohio areas recently that took only 1-3 days to arrive via ground shipping.

Also, Dell will often have huge discounts they can give you at the end of their fiscal quarters if you talk to their reps, in addition to the deals they usually offer on their website. January was the end of their last quarter, so start tracking from there and see what you can get if you can wait long enough!

Update 2010-07-06: Our Dell rep, Lindsey Keen, left Dell and was replaced by a new rep who has been around for over a year and a half now, Shelton Cammon. He’s great to work with, has a good team, and is often the lowest on Microsoft charity pricing due to Dell’s policies of low- to no-margin software sales. If you do a lot of ordering, ask him to set up a Premier account so you can login and see your approximate pricing with discounts from a website, including ordering (and you can finalize order’s Shelton has quoted you over the phone via Premier as well).

Consistent Computer Bargains

A company I’ve never dealt with simply because I didn’t know about them when I first started with charity pricing is Consistent Computer Bargains. They offer charity pricing programs for both Microsoft and Adobe, and they also have many other products. They are Christian-owned and cater specifically to non-profits and churches. I have heard many good things about them, so although I can’t personally recommend them I would certainly add them to your list of places to investigate.

Purchasing and Credit

Zones and Dell both offer lines of credit, or you can purchase with a credit card. Talk to the reps to get started opening a line of credit, but basically Zones will do Net 30 terms, and Dell will do a form of Net 30 with their Dell Business Credit line for purchases under $500. If your purchase is over $500, Dell will usually do their 60-days-same-as-cash loan. If you pay it off in full within the 60 days, there’s no charge. But let it go one day longer, and you’ve got a multi-year loan with prepayment penalties on your hands! Dell offers several leasing options as well, and Zones offers leasing through their partners. (UPDATE 2010-07-06: After writing this post, I did find out that Dell will also do standard Net 30 credit terms, which is much easier to deal with than the Dell Financial Services loans, which often have brief due dates and high finance charges if not paid off in the free period.)

When you order Microsoft Charity software, most of it requires a volume license key to be entered at install time. Once you have your emailed agreement information from your purchase, you’ll want to head over to the Microsoft eOpen Licensing (now the Volume License Service Center, or VLSC, as eOpen was replaced in 2009) website, log in with (or create) a Microsoft Passport account, and add your agreement information to the system. You can then download licensed software images to burn to disc from this site, and you can view the license keys for the products you have purchased. Adobe volume licensing software will come as an email with a username and password and a link to the site where you an log in and get your license key(s).

Miscellaneous

Keep in mind that if you can’t get something through Zones, Dell, or another reseller, or you can’t get a non-profit discount, try talking to the company directly about a non-profit discount. I would say the majority of software vendors I’ve talked to, and many hardware vendors, are willing to offer at least a 10% discount for non-profits, although I’ve seen it go up to 15%, 20%, or higher. But you usually won’t get this without asking! I don’t have a list of all the software I’ve gotten non-profit discounts on, but I do recall HelpSpot and WebDrive, and SftpDrive offered a very good discount as well. Also check out Remote Desktop Manager, which has a non-profit discount (50% off a site license when I asked, which made it $100 for the pricing at the time!), as it’s my current favorite administrative tool for connecting to remote desktop and LogMeIn sessions remotely (it supports other remote connection types as well) using saved information and tabbed connections (there is a free, useful version as well).

Make sure that you know what Software Assurance (Microsoft) and upgrade insurance (Adobe) is and whether you want it or not. I usually recommend it on server products, like Windows Server, Small Business Server, Exchange Server, etc. but on desktop products (Windows XP/Visa, Office) it’s a bit of a tougher decision, although I do recommend it for Adobe products. The idea is you pay more up front and then a recurring fee (every two years in the case of the Microsoft and Adobe programs, I believe), and you can upgrade to future versions of the software you’ve purchased without having to pay full price when a new version is released. The sales reps should be able to give you the details and pricing.

Other well-known vendors are CDW and TechDepot. I don’t have experience with them, but they’re certainly options if you want to investigate further and compare prices and service.

Updated Info on Mac Office 2008 pricing; also Home Use Program

UPDATED May 23: Thanks to Jason Powell for pointing out something I have not yet run into: Mac Office 2008 is not available at Microsoft charity pricing from Apple. In fact, Apple and others are selling Mac Office 2008 at prices above $200 per license, while the charity vendors I’ve listed in this post (and others) are carrying it for under $60 (no typo!). Check out Jason Powell’s post on the topic for more details. Thanks Jason! (Update 2010-07-06: I’m not sure of all the details, but you can also use Mac Office with a volume licensed version of Office for Windows, as long as the version is ‘the same or lower’ though I’m not sure of the specifics. Do some research, but keep in mind you can “trade” OSes in some cases if you have licenses from one you want to use on another!)

Also, I didn’t mention it here at all, but I’ll throw in that if you buy Software Assurance for your Microsoft products, some of them come with home use rights (the Home Use Program, or HUP) that let your users get separate licenses to the same software you bought for use at home, generally for very low cost. This is something you can activate through your eOpen licensing management portal (when it’s actually working). Microsoft Office has been the most well-known software available through this program, but Jason also posted that Office for Mac is also a part of the Home Use Program now! I’m just starting to dig into the HUP program myself but it’s certainly a good deal! And one good reason to pay for Software Assurance, although I’ve certainly heard arguments in both directions.

Mumbo-Jumbo

Disclaimer: The licensing programs described here are based on my understanding of the programs through my own use and purchasing, reading agreements, and discussions with resellers familiar with the options. However, it’s all just my (non-legal) opinion and you should independently verify all terms and legalities as they apply to your situation. Be careful as Microsoft licensing guidelines can be and have been interpreted differently even by different Microsoft representatives themselves! If you can decipher the straight legalese in their licensing on your own, you’re a better man than me. And if you’re a woman and can decipher it, well you’re already a better woman than me, so no contest :-)

TrueCrypt just released version 5.1, adding support for hibernation (see prior post) to an encrypted system partition (thanks to Joel for letting me know). They’ve also increased AES encryption speed by 30-90% and a few other nice tweaks and fixes. I went ahead and upgraded last night and started encrypting my drive before I went to bed last night, which only took 2 hours on my 100GB hard drive if their estimate is to be believed! (I believe it; in 10 minutes it had encrypted 10% of the drive.) I was excited to try TrueCrypt again with hibernation support, because listening to Steve Gibson rave about it on Security Now gave me a bit more insight than I’d taken the time to read about before.

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.

Thanks to Rob Shaw from Greenwood Christian Church for commenting on my last post about Postini and letting me know that Google has released Postini at non-profit pricing for their two lower-tier (Message Filtering, $3/year/user before 66% discount, and Message Security, $12/year/user before 66% discount) messaging solutions! Their highest tier, Message Discovery, adds message archiving and is normally $25/user/year with one year of message retention. Message Discovery can still be purchased by non-profits with the discount for orders over $1500, with web-based ordering coming soon still, but web-based ordering for smaller shops has been released for those two lower tiers!

That’s great news Rob, thanks for the heads-up!

I couldn’t wait for the final release. I’ve been running the WordPress Trunk development version from the Subversion repository since late December, on my laptop. I’ll occasionally update to the latest trunk revision and take a quick look in Xampp to see how progress is coming, since WordPress 2.5 includes a complete redesign of the administration area. The final release date is this coming Monday, March 10th (UPDATE: see this post by Ryan Boren for my source. UPDATE 2: Release date has been delayed by a week to Monday, March 17th, tentatively; it’s hard to wait (unless you’re running the beta!) but this is a good thing, they are still doing a ton of work on it!). But I wanted to play with some live data, and I’m too lazy to install all my plugins and export/import all my posts to my test environment, so I decided: it’s close enough, let’s do a backup and install a 2.5 Beta nightly build on this very blog!

You are reading the result of yesterday’s work. I have not found any incompatibilities with my theme. I’ve used the new auto-upgrade feature to upgrade about 5 Plugins to newer versions from right within the administration panel, which works in most cases (depending on the Plugin), and is very, very awesome given the number of WordPress installations I help maintain! I also replaced the aging WP-Cache Plugin with the excellent WP Super Cache, a worthy replacement and an even easier install!

Comment Spam

The Akismet anti-spam Plugin was disabled without me noticing for some reason (I could have clicked it accidentally, I have no idea if it was a result of the upgrade). After getting eight spam comments (only half caught in moderation automatically) within an hour that I had to deal with manually, Akismet was re-enabled in short order with just a click! (Do spammers count as neighbors for that Bible verse? I hope not…although I guess we could “hate the spam, love the spammer,” right? :-)

Administration Area

The color scheme and layout of the Administration area has certainly changed. Some people love it, others hate it. I like more than I dislike. Some things work better, or differently, or more accessibly. Having all areas of the Write Panel available only by scrolling down will take a little getting used to. But the Manage interfaces for Posts and Pages has improved and displays more information in a smaller area, with excellent additional filtering options.

One of the first things to notice when editing a new or old post is that the TinyMCE visual text editor has been replaced with the new version 3 of the same. I’m enjoying the upgrade tremendously! It works more smoothly, has more options, and has no bugs I can find yet! It adds a full screen composition mode, which makes concentrating on writing a post without distraction that much easier, and it’s available with a toggle toolbar button or the shortcut Alt+Shift+G. On the extended options bar (click the far-right toolbar button in the editor), most of the options remain the same but the Help is excellent if you need it, and there is an “Insert / Edit Embedded Media” button that lets you do just that from a variety of media types, with a preview.

But the best media addition is the Add Media buttons above the editor itself, allowing you to easily insert images, video, audio, and media (like PDF files, etc.) by linking to a URL or uploading. I haven’t tested this much but the interface is slick and I believe it will embed YouTube videos, for example, without you needing to know all the codes or install a Plugin (like I said, I haven’t tested this and I’m not 100% sure). You can also browse the Media Library (also available under its own Manage panel) to insert existing media. This is an area badly in need of improvement and they’ve done a great job!

In addition, you can now Manage tags (without an additional Plugin, although I still like and use Simple Tags), and the Comments area has been redesigned. Everywhere you go in the Administration area you can see how many moderated comments await your approval, with the balloon count up next to the Comments tab. The method for editing Sidebar Widgets has completely changed. The interface for adding tags to posts has changed slightly. And numerous other changes that are slipping my mind at the moment! So far I have not run into any plugins that refuse to work entirely in 2.5, and I have a lot of plugins installed! (Somewhere in the ballpark of 30 I think).

Conclusion

Come Monday, what do I recommend? Backup your database (and files), do the upgrade, test and see how it works. You can always go back with the backup. If you’re not comfortable with it, wait a couple of weeks to see if the bugs get worked out and make sure that the Plugins you are using have been tested with 2.5 before making the jump. And keep in mind, this is the first attempt at an Administration redesign since 1.x somewhere, so the design itself is like a beta. I’m sure it will get refined in future releases. But I’m enjoying a much more bug-free visual editor, options that make more sense, and a more navigable interface right now!

All I can say is: it’s about time. The only reason I can see for Apple not including ActiveSync capabilities (push email, calendar, and more synchronized directly with an Exchange server, just like Windows Mobile devices and some Palm devices) when the iPhone was released was that they needed the money from iPhone sales to pay Microsoft’s licensing fees. Or something, I really have no idea, I was just unimpressed with this oversight, which made the iPhone anywhere from less useful to not useful to anyone whose company ran an Exchange server. But when this update is released for the iPhone, it should get a lot easier to support iPhone’s on an enterprise level! This is one more thing I’ll be able to say “yes” to as needed, even though I’ve only had one or two requests internally so far. Oh yeah, and they’re releasing an SDK for the iPhone as well, so developers can build native applications. I think the ActiveSync announcement is a bigger deal, actually, but that’s yet to be seen and is just my opinion. (And you know what they say about opinions. “If you read blogs, you obviously value the opinions of others.” Well, that’s probably not what you were expecting…) Thanks to Andrew Mitry for the link, in the #citrt chat room.

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!)

With one month left and heeding Tony’s warning that it’s down to the wire, I finally registered for MinistryTECH! I still have to book travel/hotel etc. but at least this takes care of the registration itself. I took care of the Roundtable registration the day it opened, so I’m at opposite ends of the spectrum! If you aren’t registered, I want to see you there so go do so :-) Instead of linking to the Roundtable website, I’m going to leave it as an exercise for you. It’s in many other posts on my blog, at at least one link above, and all over many other blogs I link to, so if you can’t find a link to the upcoming Church IT Roundtable, well, you’re not computer savvy enough to attend, sorry ;-)  (It’s so easy, that you may not be qualified even if you can find it!)

Why have I never heard of this before?! It’s called Spotlight on Windows from Quest Software, it’s free, and it’s worth more like a million bucks or so. If you manage a Windows server, or servers, please install and try this software now. I’ve never before seen a free–and easy-to-install–tool that gives such immediate visual, animated and color-coded feedback on all areas of remote (or local) physical system health combined with such extensive and easy-to-use drill-down details. The graphics aren’t just pretty, they’re easy to understand. You can practically take one glance at a server’s overview page and tell whether you need to order more RAM, go Gigabit, or get faster disks (or if a disk is filling up). You may actually want to wait a little longer to place that order so you can watch the trends (or just review the history after it’s been running for a while), but while you’re doing that you can set up your Event Log monitoring and alerts with specific filters. And if you want to know if that network slowdown was due to hardware congestion, yep, I’m going to point you toward the Spotlight on Windows. Thanks to Confessions of a freeware junkie for the pointer to this cool tool.

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.)

No, seriously. Has it been a year? On February 28th, 2007, I made the first post in this blog. From no subscribers to a few (thanks to generous initial links from Jason Powell and Tony Dye) to consistently over 100 (along with thousands of web hits), it’s been quite a year! October of 2007, during and after the Fall 2007 Church IT Roundtable, was the first month I surpassed 100 subscribers. Jason Powell, of course, has recently surpassed 1,000; I seem to track pretty closely at 1/10th his readership, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Besides giving me an outlet to polish my writing–a never-ending process–this blog marked the beginning of the end of isolation for this Church IT guy! Little did I know, until I stumbled upon Jason Powell’s blog in some way I don’t even recall now, that there was a growing group of Church IT-ers getting to know each other online, while remaining somewhat isolated by positions that are generally volunteer or, perhaps most often with the online group, one-man IT department positions that make peers hard to come by on a regular basis. There are certainly exceptions, the churches where Jason Powell, Jason Lee and Clif Guy work included along with others, where churches are large enough to have two, three, or more IT staff, and those churches also tend to lead the way in creating and contributing to the online community (well, Jason Lee’s new to the blogging scene but has certainly started off strong). Do those guys just have the spare time, now that they have staff to do their grunt work, to spend online? (I hope you see the wit behind that fallacy–there are numerous one-man IT shop bloggers and many of the aforementioned IT Directors have bloggers on their staff, among many other reasons my question does not have merit! Arguably, one-man IT shops need the online community more than those with an on-site team!)

But I digress, because my initial question was if this blog has existed for one year already. Because I’m not sure. I managed to, unintentionally, begin this blog one year and one day before a leap year Feb. 29th. So, which is it? The 28th is the anniversary of my first post, but the 29th is the last day of the twelfth month. But don’t worry, I promise I won’t duplicate this post tomorrow, if you promise not to read it! Ironically, outside of Church IT I actually had a blog before Jason Powell (the brief 2002 foray he mentions notwithstanding), who made his first post back on Feb. 19th, 2005 (congrats!), while I started my personal blog just under four months before that, back on November 9th, 2004 (at around 2 am…not far off the time of day this blog started). It was the same day, coincidentally, that Firefox 1.0 was released. My personal blog was going rather strong until May of 2005, when a multi-month quiet period followed my engagement, and I was otherwise occupied. It picked up a little bit after the wedding (not immediately, of course…), and then, right about the time our son was born and I set up a blog just for him…it went completely dead and has thus mostly stayed. This blog is definitely more focused than my personal blog (mostly), and is about stuff I’m passionate about and work with on a daily basis. It’s been a little slower of late, but I’m looking forward to a summer free of most schoolwork where even a long workday can end happily without school deadlines looming that evening or the next. I’m taking a web design class this semester, so while I’m not debuting a new blog theme yet, I may take on the creation (or customization) of something over the summer. That, or I’ll be so fed up with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) by then, it’ll have to wait a bit longer…

Anyway: To the next year of online ChIT! (Hmmm…does that mean all this stuff is ChIT Chat?) And thanks for reading.

Last night, I decrypted my laptop. Eleven days ago, I posted about TrueCrypt’s new whole-disk encryption. I encrypted my laptop and started using it. Speed didn’t seem to be an issue (or much of one, maybe it was a little bit slower overall, but that’s just my perception). But it also disabled Hibernation, forcing me to use Standby mode.

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!