Archive for November, 2007

We get signal. Main screen turn on.

Published
by
Keith Garner
on November 14, 2007
in Internet and Tools
. 1 Comment

aybabtu.pngMy travels for NAR are usually a day or two, and I’m back before I start to get missed.  However, there are a few times a year (*cough* mid-year *cough* annual) where I’m gone for a week or so.  With two young children at home, its a bit of a challenge not seeing them all week.  So, what’s a good way to see people when on the road?  Video conferencing to the rescue.

Strangely, this is one area of technology I haven’t ever really played with.  On the advice of Mark, I decided to look at SIP based solutions since anything that follows the standard should interact with each other regardless of platform.  Mark suggested ekiga for Windows and Linux.  For OS X, a buddy of mine had pointed me at XMeeting.

Now that I had the software, I needed to create an account for my wife and myself at a SIP registrar.  You can set up a free account at ekiga.net, and then you’re off to the conferencing races.

As to be expected, your results will vary with how fast your net connection at the time is.  The video from home was a bit blocky, but you could tell who the people were and read their facial expressions.  The limiting factor there is probably that I only have a 768kbit up channel from our cable provider.  ekiga is originally on Linux, but the win32 port works great, so the homeside on my wife’s computer was set.  XMeeting works well, but its echo cancellation could be much better.  Its only at version 0.3.4, so hopefully that will improve with future releases.

Anyway, Daddy was seen by the kids, and all were happy.  This is something I’ll be doing at every trip now that it works so well.

The Final Countdown!!

Published
by
Chris McKeever
on November 12, 2007
in Conferences
. 1 Comment

frontier.JPG

Now this is exciting! Tonight (Monday) at 2:30am, the Frontier Hotel is being Imploded! Start off with some fireworks, and then right into an amazing implosion. It has been worked on for something like a year in preparation.

A couple of bits of trivia, the Frontier was the second hotel on the strip and the first place that Elvis performed on the strip (maybe even in Vegas?).

This is gonna be a fun night!


THE FINAL COUNTDOWN (by Europe)

Music Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

It’s Alive!! Muwhahaha!

Published
by
Chris McKeever
on November 12, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

wifi.jpg

Location: Wi-Fi HotSpot: Venetian – Level 4 thoroughfare.

The CRT Wi-Fi hotspot is up and running! Its a great place to take a break, check your email and hold a quick meeting. Pat V., Dick, and Charles have already been spotted! Probably one of the few times this week that they’ll have a moment to break like that.

If you head up there, take a moment to say hello to the CRT folks – we are around the corner in the blogger’s lounge. Come by, write a quick blog, or let us talk your head off on how blogging can be incorporated into your online marketing.

If you are laptop-less (shame on you), head to Venetian Level 3 for the Women Council or REALTORS Cyber Cafe! Tell them Chris from CRT sent ya!

Beware of the Leopard, Part 2

Published
by
Andrew Tillman
on November 7, 2007
in Reviews
. 0 Comments

So I have been using Leopard now for a little over a week. All in all the experience has been a good one, but with some niggling issues.

1. Time Machine, I’ve had some issues with TM in the week I’ve been working on it.

- When it works it’s great. But it seems that the first backup of the day slows my machine to a crawl for a long time. After the first backup of the day, all the incremental backups run just fine. I improved this a bit by taking certain files and folder out of TM. The ones that I took out where Parallels VMs, and files that I have under source control.

- I also had to fiddle with the folders TM backed up along with Spotlight. I had Spotlight NOT index my TM folders (I don’t want to see them in the results of searches). The problem with this is that when I want to find a file I need to recover I won’t be able to use Spotlight to help me. What I really want is for Spotlight to be smart about TM backups. I want my TM backups to be index, but to not appear in search results. But I would like to be able to easily search TM backups in Spotlight when needed, but for Spotlight to show the file as a backup and also to show which backup it was found in. In this mode I would also like to be able to recover the file if needed. I guess I want better integration between Spotlight and TimeMachine, which would seem like a no brainer to me.

2. Mail. Faster and more useful then the one in Tiger, but I’ve noticed some stability problems, and the way some of the new features work is not very compelling to me.

- MailActOn Plugin just stops working at times. I need to restart Mail to get it to work.

- Mail sometimes hangs. I am forced to Force Quit Mail and restart. Sometimes, when it hangs, it hangs hard (usually when TM is backing up, so I think they are interferring with each other). When this happens Force Quit doesn’t work, and I have to restart the whole Mac to fix it.

- Notes & Todos. When I got the Leopard version of MailTags, one of the things they took out was Events and ToDos. This bothers me now. The way Notes and ToDo and Events are handled in the new Mail is not as useful as the way MailTags did it. If I store a ToDo on my IMAP server, it puts that ToDo in a Calendar called ‘calendar’ in the group CRT. I don’t want this. I want it to create the ToDo in my Work calendar. As a result I have configured Mail to store all nots and ToDos in my local computer. This allows me to create ToDos from Mail in the correct calendar, but I cannot tie them to a mail message. The notes are OK, but I have yet to use them. It might take me some time to see this feature being useful.

So, after a week I can see where the problems in Leopard are. I still think this upgrade is useful. But like all upgrades, Apple will have to do some work to fix all the kinks.

Bloggers Lounge Update

Published
by
Ian Smith
on November 5, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

Compass graphic

We’ve already said the Bloggers Lounge was going to be on the 4th level in room 4605. If you’re not familiar with Venetian that probably doesn’t help much so here’s a floor plan. Room 4605 is in the Zeno section.

Here’s the link:
Floor Plan

Beware of the Leopard, Part 1.

Published
by
Andrew Tillman
on November 1, 2007
in Reviews
. 2 Comments

So today I joined the Apple masses in upgrading my work Mac to Leopard. I figured I’d give my first day impressions.

1. The upgrade itself was painless. While some people have had problems with the upgrade I fortunately did not run into any.

2. The new Finder has a new look. I like Cover view and the sources sidebar. It seems that Apple is going to unify their look-and-feel around the iTunes model. I will need to work with Leopard more to give a better review.

3. Time Machine got setup with almost no effort. It recogized my USB hard drive and asked me if I wanted to use that drive for time machine. All I had to do was tell it what not to backup. The rest it did on it’s own. I will need to use this over time to see if it holds up.

4. iCal. I like iCal’s new look. I am also looking forward to see how iCal works with CalDAV. The only issue I had was a little trouble with Spanning Sync. Nothing serious, but I did need to upgrade to the latest version.

5. Mail. This is the app that I use the most during the day, and therefore the app I noticed the changes the most.

- All my plugins where deactivated when I started Mail. This was annoying. I use MailTags and Mail Act-On heavily and have come to count on them. However I was able to get both those plugins working again, had I not I would have seriously considered going back to Tiger.

- IMAP seems to be much faster. One of the annoying things with Mail Act-On was that it took some time to finish actions that required a IMAP write back to the server. Now these actions are much faster. It seems that Mail has improved it IMAP support. It even supports IDLE without a plugin!

- Reminders in Mail are nice. Since I use a Ticker file with MailTags due dates I have turned Mail into a little GTD program. The only problem I have is there seems to be no way for me to tell Mail to hide ToDos until they are due today or past due. I also cannot view them at the same time as my Today tickler folder. I’d like to have one view to see everything I need to do.

- RSS in Mail is also nice. While I still plan to keep using Vienna for most of my RSS needs, I do plan on moving some of my RSS feeds to Mail. All of the RETS.org feeds can go in there, and since MailTags works with RSS articles I can incorporate them into my Today folder.

That’s it so far. I have yet to use Spaces, and I really need more time with Time Machine, Finder and Mail to see give a more detailed review. I plan on posting again after Annual, and we can see how well Leopard works on a travel laptop.