Dave McComb's Blog

Working with new technology on a daily basis, I invariably come across some really great software programs that make my life a whole lot easier. I decided to start a blog series titled “Software I Can’t Live Without.” And yes, the title pretty much says it all.  I’ll be featuring programs that are either indispensable to me or are really cool and useful. I hope that these reviews help you to find some programs that also become indispensable to you.

The first program that I had to feature is KeePass Password Safe. This is one that I only started using three months ago and now don’t know how I ever managed to get along without it. Oh wait, I didn’t. I would have some Excel spreadsheets with passwords, forget others, use the same password for many different web sites, etc.  Now, with this program, I easily store all my account information in one secure place and have secure and unique passwords for all the web sites I visit.

KeePass allows you to create entries for all your web site passwords, pin numbers, credit card information, etc. – pretty much anything you would like to store in a secure manner. It stores this information in a secure AES and Twofish encrypted database that you only have to remember one master password to open.  In addition to storing passwords, it also allows you to auto-generate long secure passwords, which can then be copied from the program when needed. You can also create groups, enable enhanced protection and memory protection, and much more.  The best thing is that it’s free!  Not only that, the code is open source, so the software can be evaluated to make sure there are no backdoors or security problems. There’s also a number of plugins which further extend its functionality. The main downloads on the site are for Windows, but there are also ports and builds for Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, PocketPC, Blackberry and more.

It’s very easy to use, but like any new program it takes some time to make it part of your routine. Once you do, I’m sure you’ll also wonder how you ever lived without it.

I also mentioned ZumoDrive along with KeePass in the title of this post.  ZumoDrive is a cloud-storage solution that works on Windows, Mac OS and iPhone. It’s a bit unique from other cloud-storage solutions in that the files you store there do not also take up physical space on your hard drive. ZumoDrive sets up a “fake” local drive (Z: by default on Windows) and then streams those files over the Internet when you need them. They’re not actually local, even though it looks like they are.  This is great for devices like the iPhone or NetBooks that do not have a lot of storage capacity of their own. They give you 1GB of free storage, and larger plans start at only $2.99 per month.

The way to combine KeePass and ZumoDrive is to store the KeePass database on your ZumoDrive cloud-storage drive.  KeePass operates exactly the same way as always, but now your encrypted database is stored on the cloud and you can access it from your home computer, work computer, laptop or iPhone and it will always be in sync and backed up automatically.

These are both great products and they both have some great uses!  Hope this post helps you to better manage and secure your accounts.

I know that there are many Twitter client programs out there, but I think that one of the most efficient ways to quickly read through all of the Twitter updates of people you follow is through an RSS reader (Google Reader is my favorite).  However, the Twitter RSS feed for your home page is an authenticated feed (requires a username and password) and many RSS readers do not support authenticated feeds.

Luckily, there is a quick hack to make this work thanks to the FreeMyFeed web site. FreeMyFeed handles authenticated RSS feeds and will give you a non-authenticated feed in its place that works perfectly in any RSS reader.  Here’s the steps you need to take:

1. Head over to http://freemyfeed.com
2. For “feed url” enter: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
3. Enter your Twitter username and password in the appropriate boxes.
4. Click submit and you’ll be taken to a page that provides you with your new non-authenticated RSS link.  Copy that to your favorite RSS reader or  simply use one of their provided links to add it automatically.

That’s it. You now have your Twitter updates in a convenient, easier to read format.

I was trying to update some of my RedHat EL 5 servers to the latest updates by running:

yum update

Unfortunately, I kept running into unresolved dependency errors like these:

--> Missing Dependency: libebook-1.2.so.9 is needed by package 1:control-center-2.16.0-16.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libecal-1.2.so.7 is needed by package gnome-panel-2.16.1-7.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: ghostscript is needed by package ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1.1.noarch (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: ghostscript is needed by package libgnomeprint22-2.12.1-10.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libebook-1.2.so.9 is needed by package 1:control-center-2.16.0-16.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libgs.so.8 is needed by package ImageMagick-6.2.8.0-4.el5_1.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libebook-1.2.so.9 is needed by package gnome-panel-2.16.1-7.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libedataserver-1.2.so.7 is needed by package 1:control-center-2.16.0-16.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libedataserverui-1.2.so.8 is needed by package gnome-panel-2.16.1-7.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: evolution-data-server >= 1.1.4 is needed by package gnome-panel-2.16.1-7.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libedataserver-1.2.so.7 is needed by package gnome-panel-2.16.1-7.el5.i386 (installed)

Turns out the resolution was simple. All you need to do is clean out the yum dbcache with the following command:

yum clean dbcache

Then, re-run the yum update command. If that does not work, try running the command:

yum clean all

That should take care of these dependency errors.

I have 9 different email accounts set up in Microsoft Outlook (mostly free Google Apps IMAP accounts), and while it works great for receiving and replying to messages, I have found myself often sending from the “default account” in Outlook rather than the account I meant to send from.  The reason is that when you compose a new message, if you do not select the Account, it uses the default one.

I really wanted to force Outlook to prompt me for the account to use when sending email, but after some searching, it appears that is not possible.  Maybe it will be in the next version of Outlook.

The best option I could find was to set up deferred delivery in Outlook.  This cause Microsoft Outlook to delay sending your email for a specified number of minutes (I chose 5 minutes).  While this is not an ideal solution, it does allow me to quickly go in and change the ones that I remember – usually right after I send them.  So, it’s better than nothing, plus it allows me to pull back emails that I may have written too hastily as well.

These are two useful Windows commands that I use frequently:

1. shutdown -r -t 1
   When you use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a Windows XP or windows Vista PC, the reboot option is not available on that PC. Well, often times you need to reboot the PC, so using the command above will do that.  The “-r” option tells the PC to reboot and the “-t 1” tells it to reboot in 1 second rather than the default 30 seconds. No reason to wait around, right? Running shutdown /? will give you a list of ll the options available.
2. net statistics server
   Running this command on a Windows XP or Server 2000/2003 machine will give you a number of statistics, but I most often use it to determine how long a machine has been running since its last reboot. (Like the uptime command on Linux.)  This does not work in Vista but if you run the task manager, you can see the uptime in the Performance tab under “System.”

As I said, these are two that I use frequently and that may be helpful for you too.

All of a sudden, Quickbooks 2009 would no longer email invoices.  It started failing with the error “Quickbooks cannot connect to the remote server because part of your company data is currently in use.” In addition, I could not print to a printer nor could I even open the “Printer setup…” menu.

I found this tech article about the problem and proceeded to follow the steps to make the PDF converter compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows.  I rebooted my PC and when I re-opened Quickbooks, I could get into the “Printer Setup…” menu.  However, I got the error, “You cannot print directly to the QuickBooks PDF Converter. Try using QuickBooks Save as PDF menu option.”

I was about to go look this up, when I checked the printer setup options again and restarted QuickBooks. When I restarted, everything worked fine. I’m not sure what that was, but it seems to be working fine now.

Hope this helps.

One of our clients was having a problem with email messages sent from a colleague’s Blackberry always ending up in her spam folder.

To resolve this, we added Blackberry’s IP address ranges to our spam filter’s whitelist IPs.  Here are the IP address ranges to allow:

206.51.26.1-206.51.26.255
193.109.81.1-193.109.81.255
204.187.87.1-204.187.87.255
216.9.248.48-216.9.248.52

That seems to be a comprehensive list.