Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with.  I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ - and many paid utilities thought the same :)  I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail.  Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”.  Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!

I found an open-source utility called HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) that does exactly what I needed.  Website saved!

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“I’m trying to think, but nothing happens.” - Curly

Crib notes, quick guides, Cliff Notes, cheat sheets - whatever you choose to call them, they come in handy when the web developer brain goes ___________ .

The guys at Smashing Magazine (we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.) have provided probably over 100 cheat sheets from Ajax to CCS, MySQL to XML. One could print them all out and fill several notebooks full of cheat sheets, but that’s not being environmentally green (unless you’re really green.)

Whether you’ve forgotten the name of a function or the property of a cascading style sheet - handy cheat sheets deliver the information you are looking for - immediately. Most cheat sheets are available as .pdf or .png-files, so you can print them and use them every day for whatever projects you’re currently working on. We present an extensive overview of useful cheat sheets we’ve found in the Web.

Cheat sheets for web developers

So, here’s our setup:

1) Email: This actually works really well. We use IMAP and the Blackberry (through Sprint) has a nice service that allows us to connect to our IMAP server. The Blackberry checks the IMAP Server every 15 minutes and alerts me to the new messages. I set my blackberry up to be the master and it reconciles every 15 minutes. WARNING: This means that my blackberry is actually deleting messages from my IMAP (and to be literal, it is expunging them - so they aren’t even in my trash folder). I chose this option so I don’t have hundreds of emails waiting on me when I get back to the office. Remember, I can’t sync (but that comes later).

2) Local PIM (personal information management): This includes contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes. Simply put, forget about using them. We have two issues that we’re up against. First, we use Thunderbird - so we don’t have a good option for calendar, tasks, and notes. I hope their progress with Sunbird and Lightning continues! The calendar isn’t as hopeless as Tasks/Notes since the Blackberry can sync with iCal formatted calendars. If you use an iCal compatible Calendar, then you can have your events.

As for locally stored contacts, I couldn’t find an easy solution to sync to the Blackberry. The best idea I had was to use Plaxo’s Thunderbird client and access via the web (premium service)

3) Groupware Server: If you are using an OpenSource Groupware product, there are more options available for syncing the blackberry. For basic calendars & tasks, the Blackberry will sync with any iCal formatted calendar. To do this, you will need an application like PocketMac.

For a more robust solution, the best option is to setup a Groupware solution that is compatible with a SyncML server like funambol. There are many solutions available (and even some services like Zyb). We use eGroupware and it integrates with SyncML. For the Blackberry, SyncBerry [$29.95] provides Over-The-Air (OTA) synchronization with Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks (InfoLog). Once the SyncML server is setup, there are two options for syncing Thunderbird. One is an community supported Mozilla extension of funambol and the other is a ‘beta’ application called TSync. This ensures that the Blackberry & Thunderbird are both sync’d to the corporate groupware package/service.

Note: I’m writing this article as I research these solutions. We haven’t implemented the SyncML server, so I can’t vouch for the success of this piece.

4) Internet Access (Phone): This is my favorite part! First, the 8703e has a beautiful screen and it is very easy to access web pages. For our company, we disabled images & their placeholders to increase load speeds. Since we haven’t implemented SyncML, everyone simply accesses eGroupware via the phone’s web browser. It isn’t pretty, but it’s functional (especially if you make the calendar display in list view).

** BONUS**
This phone actually acts as a wireless Modem on the Sprint Network!!! All of the research I’ve conducted has been through the phone - connected via a USB cable. The 8703e on Sprint’s EDVO network is getting an average of 340kbps - easily enough for basic web usage.

All in all, I think the Blackberry will be a fantastic solution once we have eGroupware+SyncML+SyncBerry+Thunderbird/funambol. In fact, CentreSource will begin providing Nashville clients with installations of the OpenSource combination upon successful implementation.

Until then, it is a great tool for checking IMAP email and accessing the web (via the phone and as a modem).

Now Apple emerges with a new strategy - allow Windows to run on the Mac Hardware! They recently released software, dubbed Boot Camp, that makes this process easy. This strategy allows lovers of Mac hardware to still have access to the safety of Windows. Significance: Windows users can now enjoy the beauty of Mac Hardware.

The real beauty is that Windows users now have an easy, safe way to experience the Mac OS. This should translate to a higher adoption rate for Apple’s Mac OS. Cheaper hardware and the ability to run both Mac & Windows OS’s - that is a pretty compelling case for Apple. No wonder their shares went up 8% upon announcement.

This, of course, renders the message useless to any poor administrator trying to track down a problem that a user is reporting. When someone, for example, forwards a message and says “Hey, I keep getting this spam message — can you do something about it?”, this is what it looks like from Outlook:

-----Original Message-----
From: Michelle Spitzer [mailto:Michelle.Spitzer@ptassoc.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 10:00 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Live webcast: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for
Associations

Can anything be done based on this? Nope. There is approximately zero information of value for any troubleshooting in this. The result is that helpdesks have to resort to convoluted instructions, for example here, where they have a simple 7 step process for the user to dig up the headers from the bowels of the Outlook menus, copy them, and manually paste into a message to report.

It was really a silly decision on behalf of Microsoft. There was no reason to remove the headers — they could have at least merely hidden them. But hey, I guess Microsoft figured we’d all be using MAPI by now rather than that pesky open standard, SMTP, anyway, right?

Enter puttycyg — it allows you to use putty as a raw terminal emulator (i.e. without telnet or ssh) in running your cygwin shell. From puttycyg’s README:

RATIONALE

The Windows Console is an inadequate terminal emulator. It is impossible
to resize horizontally without pulling up a dialog box. It is impossible
to send an ASCII NUL. Basic keyboard options do not exist such as
configuring the ASCII character sent by the Backspace key.

Some solutions for these problems already exist. One can use xterm or rxvt
instead of the Console. One can also telnet or ssh to the local machine
over the loopback interface using almost any terminal emulator including
PuTTY.

However, one should be able to use Cygwin with a decent terminal emulator
without having to install Cygwin/X or to install telnetd or sshd.

Pretty cool.

Through basic troubleshooting, we determined that this .mdb file had many ‘Linked’ tables that were using a static network path mapped through drive E:\. The problem was occurring on a new machine that I quickly noticed did not have a mapped drive ‘E:\’ because E: was assigned to a secondary CD-R drive. For this machine, access to the network drive was a UNC path.

To remedy the problem, I had to have the MS Office XP disk to install the ‘Linked Table Manager’. Once this was installed, I updated all linked tables to use the UNC path and not the static E:\ path. To my relief, it corrected the ‘Disk or network error.’ problem.

It’s amazing how every resource on the Internet didn’t help me address the most simple problem :)

Microsoft has taken a new approach to security in particular in the enforcement side. They took a clean computer. Infected it with a common malicious code. That code turned the computer into a Spam zombie. A Spam zombie is a computer that is connected to the Internet that has been infected and checks in with the zombie controllers to let them tell it what to do. Microsoft documented 5 Million connections used to send over 18 million Spam messages in less then 3 weeks. This was just one computer. There are reported to be thousands of Spam zombies out there. Microsoft cordoned their Spam zombie off the net so it could not be used to actually send the Spam. Microsoft filed a lawsuit and contacted ISP’s to try to discover who is really sending the Spam.

Why didn’t I think of that? Oh right, I don’t have the millions of dollars to buy resources and file lawsuits. I just hope that Microsoft is investing as much in securing their operating system as they are tracking down these zombies — after all the zombies wouldn’t exist if their operating system weren’t so easily targetted by them.

First up is a dangerous inconsistency in how Microsoft Windows handles file deletion. On your average workstation, when you “delete” a file, it’s not actually deleted, but rather just relocated to the Recycling Bin. However, when you delete a file or files from a share on a server, these files are not copied to the Recycling Bin. They are in fact just deleted. This is probably because Windows engineers figured it wouldn’t be practical to transfer all that data over the network to the workstation Recycling Bin (I guess). Why they didn’t just have the deleted files be relocated to a recycling bin on the server is beyond me.

In any event, the ramifications are that users in Windows are generally not overly-cautious in deleting files because they generally have the safety net of the Recycling Bin. This dependency is dangerous when they encounter shared files because that safety net disappears. I just had a client call me with precisely this situation — he had deleted (accidentally) an entire folder from a share and was asking why it wasn’t in his Recycling Bin. Naturally we could retrieve it from a backup, but not everyone is so lucky.

At first I thought there was something I was overlooking here — surely Windows wouldn’t leave people hanging in such an obvious way, but alas, as some quick research has confirmed that this it’s true.

One of the many ways in which Samba has a leg up on Windows for filesharing is that Samba allows you to account for this problem by using the “recycle” vfs object so that files are never deleted, but are instead moved to a directory. Example config:

[RecycleShare]
comment = Share with Recycling
path = /var/lib/samba/share/
vfs objects = recycle
recycle: repository = .recycle/%U
recycle: versions=True
recycle: keeptree=True
recycle: exclude = *.TMP *.tmp *.temp *.cache ~$*.doc
recycle: maxsize = 0