According to London’s Time Out magazine:

The ‘Golf Sale’ board guys, however, are already starting to disappear and, from September [2007], will be refused licences. “They are just more visual clutter; we don’t think they add anything to the ambience of the West End.”

I installed Windows 7 Professional (32-bit) on my main desktop PC the other week, having been using the Release Candidate on and off on both my main PC and one of our laptops for a good few months.

What an improvement over Windows XP (of which I have been a fan for many a year); and a tremendous improvement over Windows Vista (which I used for all of 1 week before upgrading my laptop to the Release Candidate and then Windows 7 Professional).

I’ve now installed it on one desktop and two laptops and each time the process was simplicity itself. The installer correctly identified all my hardware and installed the latest drivers for everything (apart from my Creative X-Fi soundcard the drivers for which I installed myself). From start to finish in less than an hour is pretty impressive.

However, despite the shiny finish and the months of beta testing by the public there are still a few rough edges, which will be hopefully corrected in a forthcoming upgrade. Like this typo in the Windows 7 Sync Center (sic):

Windows Mobile-based device
Synhronizing….

There’s a sight you don’t see as often as you used to, the infamous Twitter Fail Whale.

Is Twitter down is incorrectly reporting: No. (But then it depends on what it’s doing to determine that answer. The Fail Whale is showing so there’s something being served from the Twitter servers.)

Down for everyone or just me is reporting “It’s not just you! http://twitter.com looks down from here.”

Now, I wouldn’t mind quite so much, except that earlier this evening I was locked out of my Twitter account for attempting to connect too often with ‘the wrong password’.

Even though it was the correct password. Even though I’d just reset my password. Even though I’d just successfully logged into Twitter in Firefox with my new, correct password — the new, correct password that was replacing the old, also correct password.

Despite all that Twitter still wouldn’t let me login in Google Chrome. Or TweetDeck. Or Facebook. Which was odd because I was already logged in in Firefox. How can I be both locked out and logged in at the same time? Come on Twitter, sort it out!

(Speaking of which: why is Facebook so unbelievably difficult to use when you’re trying to locate the settings to switch off the Twitter application so that it doesn’t keep attempting to login to Twitter with the wrong password?)

I guess I’ll have to wait until the morning to see if the lock has been removed and I can successfully login once again.

How frustrating…

Update: 23:45

At last! I’m in again. Although TweetDeck is now fluctuating the Twitter status between “Internal Server Error”, “There is a problem – don’t panic” and “All Good”.

Now, there’s a happy sight: all 3 main computers at Potting Shed HQ happily talking to one another on the local area network.

The two laptops (Gareth-laptop and Jane-laptop) are both running Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100), the desktop (Study) is still running Windows XP SP3.

At first my laptop wouldn’t appear in the list of workgroup PCs on the study PC, and vice versa — although each could ping the other and connect successfully by entering the UNC address (e.g. \\computername\foldername). I wondered if it was an issue with the NodeType setting in the registry.

As soon as I changed the NodeType setting on the XP machine it was picked up on my laptop. It could very well be co-incidence but I’m not complaining.

A reboot of all three PCs certainly didn’t do any harm.

So … I wish I could have categorically reported what I did to make it work, but as with so many things in life it appears that all I had to do was switch it off and switch it back on again.

For humans, I believe, they call that ’sleep’. I’m retiring to bed now to switch myself off for the duration of the night.

Are you listening Reuben and Joshua?

One of the most useful devices I have in my study is my trusty Fellowes cross-cut shredder.

Sadly it’s not quite so hardcore that it handles CD-ROMs or credit cards but here’s a video to show you how to cut up your credit cards so that they cannot be used to glean any personal data from it.

There’s a really interesting article in this month’s PC Plus magazine about the war against spam which gave me the impetus to try to do something about those annoying spam messages that appear in my inbox with my email address in the ‘from’ field, like this:

123greetings.com [gareth@garethjmsaunders.co.uk]

Anti-spam software

I use Cloudmark Desktop, a spam blocking add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007. It’s unobtrusive and pretty reliable, eliminating about 99% of all spam that gets delivered to my inbox. (In the last 4 days I’ve received 166 junk mail messages.)

But it has been those last 1% of messages that have been really annoying me these last few weeks, the ones that have been sent out to look as though they have come from my email account.

So I did a bit of investigating and have discovered a way that I can also send those messages to the Junk E-mail folder while retaining those emails that have genuinely been sent my myself (test emails or those that I’ve CC-ed or BCC-ed to myself for archiving purposes).

Outlook rules

Like most email clients Outlook allows you to define rules (sometimes known as filters).

Rules help you manage your e-mail messages by performing actions on messages that match a specific set of conditions. After you create a rule, Microsoft Outlook applies the rule when a message arrives in your Inbox or when you send a message.

1. Rules and Alerts…

In Outlook 2007 you can access the rules wizard by going to Tools > Rules and Alerts…

Not surprisingly, this brings up the Rules and Alerts window:

2. Email headers

And now for the science bit… It occurred to me that I needed to create a rule that did two things:

1. Flag any emails that have my email address in the sender’s address.
2. Check to see if I really did send those or not.

So within any message supposedly sent from myself I needed to look for some kind of unique value that could prove to Outlook that I really did send those emails. For that information I turned to the email headers.

In Outlook 2007 these are located on the Options panel, by clicking the tiny arrow at the bottom right of the panel:

As well as the information that you can immediately read within an email there is a lot of hidden data, known as ‘headers’, also transferred with each email; information such as where the email message was sent from, its return path (where the email should be sent if the recipient presses “Reply”).

Here’s an example from a random item of spam I received yesterday:


X-POP3-From: surveyingxq@rossiter.com
Return-path: <surveyingxq @rossiter.com>
Envelope-to: gareth@garethjmsaunders.co.uk
Delivery-date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:17:47 +0100
Received: from laubervilliers-000-11-22-33.w444-555.abo.wanadoo.fr ([123.145.156.178]:25793 helo=SpeedTouch.LAN)
by server.mymailhost.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.54)
id 1MxJqT-0000Xc-4O
for gareth@garethjmsaunders.co.uk; Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:17:46 +0100
Received: from 123.145.156.178 by mail.rossiter.com; Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:17:43 +0100
Message-ID: <000d01ca4b36$00064ad0$6400a8c0@surveyingxq>
From: "123greetings.com" <gareth @garethjmsaunders.co.uk>
To: </gareth><gareth @garethjmsaunders.co.uk>
Subject: You've received a postcard
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:17:43 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0006_01CA4B36.00064AD0"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180</gareth></surveyingxq>


I can immediately identify a number of values here that prove to me that I didn’t send this email:

1. The return-path is wrong. It’s not set to my email address.
2. The HELO value is also wrong — “HELO” is the SMTP command that the sending machine uses to identify itself to the receiving machine — it should be set to the network name of my PC, which for arguments’ sake we’ll call ‘GARETH-PC’.
3. The X-Mailer value is also wrong. I don’t use Microsoft Outlook Express.
4. I also noticed that this email didn’t have an Organization set in the headers. Now I know that I have set the organization information in my email account, so that’s another value I can check for.

So against any of these four items I can check any message that has been supposedly sent to me and determine whether I really have sent it or not.

3. My rules

So I have built up my rule piece by piece to read:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
with gareth@garethjmsaunders.co.uk in the sender’s address
move it to the Junk E-mail folder
except if the message header contains ‘helo=GARETH-PC’ or ‘my_alternative_isp.com’ or ‘Organization: My organization name’

And that’s it. Remarkably, it seems to work quite effectively. In the last few days that I’ve been using it I’ve had only 1 spam message left in my inbox. Everything else has been suitably and efficiently whisked away to the Junk E-mail folder. Long may that continue.

About 3-4 weeks ago my beloved O₂ Xda Orbit phone started to act erratically, randomly switching itself off according to its own unfathomable set of rules. It was okay when plugged in, but it was getting increasingly impractical pulling an extension cable along Market Street when I went out for lunch.

I figured that resetting the Xda Orbit to factory settings was what it needed and spent an evening reinstalling everything. To no avail. It would still randomly switch itself o…

Zest

I put up with it over a weekend and telephoned O₂ the following Monday morning and ordered a very similar device, the O₂ Xda Zest; a rebranded Asus Crystal.

There was so much that I liked about the Xda Orbit: the built-in GPS, WiFi, GPRS Web browsing, FM radio and I could synchronize it with my PCs at both home and work. The Xda Zest seemed to offer much the same, only with a much improved screen (proper VGA 480 x 640 pixels) and a much, much faster CPU.

Except the FM radio.

And, as I discovered to my cost, synchronizing with two PCs!

Windows Mobile 6.1 flaw

You see, I naively followed the assumption that the next version of something would be a little better than the previous version of that something. That’s how advertising has reeled me in so often during these last 30+ years.

“Ooh! look! A new one. It must be better. I want it!”

Isn’t that how it usually works?

Seemingly no-one told the Windows Mobile team that. Because it seems that there was a fundamental flaw in Windows Mobile 6.1: it wouldn’t synchronize with two PCs! Even though that’s one of its key features.

Which seems a bit like buying a new car, getting it home and discovering that it drives on A-roads but not your local streets. You can use it at work, but not at home.

Getting Nothing Done (GND)

Which for many people wouldn’t be a problem, but for the last 3 years that’s been the backbone of my organization system. No matter where I’ve been, at work, at home, out-and-about, I’ve always had a full picture of my appointments, commitments, contacts, tasks and priorities.

When I worked from home, in the parish, things were in many ways easier: I had one PC with which I synchronized my Psion 5mx. It was an almost flawless system. But the introduction of a second base, my office, added a new level of complexity. Windows Mobile 6.0 (just about) handled it admirably using ActiveSync (though quite often more correctly spelled ‘ActiveSink’!). Windows Mobile 6.1, however, has let me down quite spectacularly. And not just me, as a quick Web search will prove.

For the last 3 weeks or so, however, I’ve been at sixes and sevens. Thankfully, because I’ve been backing up my Outlook PST files more often than usual, I’ve not actually lost any data but on more than one occasion I’ve ended up with a lot (a LOT) of duplicated data which is just as time-consuming to deal with.

And all the while not entirely sure of the whole picture of my life, which is rather unsettling for someone who is usually so on top of things.

What to do?

So where do I go now? How do I recover my sense of being-on-top-of-things?

1. Sync my Psion with both

   I tried that, but again the Psion wasn’t really designed to be synchronized with more than one PC. I get errors, so have to re-sync from scratch and end up either duplicating data or reintroducing data that I’ve already deleted on one of the platforms.

2. Google Calendar

   I’ve tried to synchronize my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar using Google’s own Google Calendar Sync. But it didn’t synchronize all my events, and what about my tasks?

   I’m going to try out XTNDConnect PC to synchronize Outlook with Google Calendar and see how that works; I’ve already tried it synchronizing Outlook with Windows Mobile 6.1 but it duplicated everything!

   Outlook 2007 will allow me to subscribe to an iCalendar feed, such as that offered by Google Calendar, which is great for when I’m at my desktop — but what about when I’m out-and-about with my my phone (or Psion)?

3. Remember the Milk

   I then tried Remember the Milk to synchronize my Windows Mobile Pocket Outlook tasks with this online task application. But I have over 100 tasks and it didn’t copy over the categories.

   One “inbox” task list of 120 tasks really wasn’t useful.

4. Psion

   At the moment I’m currently synchronizing both work and home calendars with different Agenda files on my Psion. It’s not ideal but at least I still have all my data in one place.

5. Hosted Microsoft Exchange

   I have also been considering buying a hosted Microsoft Exchange account. That way — I guess — I could access all my data from work, home or on the move on my phone or via the Web. But I don’t have any experience of Exchange so would welcome people’s comments/thoughts.

It’s been a frustrating time, but I am willing to move on and use something else … I’ve just not found the right solution yet.

This evening — while I should have been cycling around the back roads of the East Neuk of Fife or repeatedly lifting moulded discs of iron — I instead sat in front of my main desktop PC, booted into the Windows 7 partition and began to familiarize myself with it a little more.

To be fair, I was trying to fend off a chest infection.

For the last few weeks we’ve been running the laptop on Windows 7 exclusively. But on my main PC the primary partition is still running XP and I’ve only booted into it every now and then, when time has offorded me that luxury.

Pre-ordered

This week, however, I pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home E for our trusty Lenovo 3000 C100 laptop, and a copy of Windows 7 Professional E for my desktop PC. And both for less than the regular price of Windows 7 Home E!

Microsoft are clearly encouraging folks to upgrade to the new operating system as soon as possible. And I don’t blame them, from what I’ve seen of Windows 7 so far it’s well worth even the full price.

With October only three months away I reckoned that it was about time that I begin to make sure that all of my vital software works okay in Windows 7.

Installing

Installing Windows 7 on the Lenovo laptop was a breeze. I had already upgraded the RAM to 2GB (from 512MB) and stuck in a larger 160GB hard drive (from 40GB) so it was simply a case of running the installation DVD and seeing what it would make of my not-exactly-cutting-edge hardware.

The bulk of the installation was finished within about 20 minutes.

Windows 7 found drivers for almost all my hardware, prompted me for the WEP key to connect to the WiFi and discovered my Windows XP network workgroup. It was an almost faultless experience.

Moreover when Windows 7 couldn’t find any newer drivers for the integrated soundcard and trackpad it happily accepted the Windows XP drivers. Astounding!

It means that the installation process should be a pretty straightforward and effortless affair for even the most inexperienced PC user, since Microsoft aren’t offering an upgrade option in Europe and so anyone wanting Windows 7 will need to backup their PC, wipe it clean and install Windows 7 afresh … which is not a bad way to go, in my opinion.

Gotchas … so far

Adobe Acrobat 7

The first installation casualty was Adobe Acrobat 7. I simply can’t get it to work within Windows 7 so have resorted to the freeware PDF Creator from SourceForge.

UltraMon

The second was UltraMon … that is until this week. UltraMon is one of my must-have applications for working with multiple-monitor setups.

UltraMon manages wallpaper, desktop icons, stretches the taskbar across all your monitors and adds really handy ’send to other monitor’ and ’stretch across all monitors’ buttons next to the minimize, maximize and close buttons in the top right-hand corner of each window.

Until now the XP/Vista edition hasn’t worked with Windows 7, but version 3.0.6 brings with it Windows 7 support. And I’m relieved to report that I’m impressed.

The evaluation continues, but I can’t immediately see anything that I’ll be terribly disappointed with (except perhaps the absence of an ‘Up’ button on the Explorer toolbar!) As I tweeted a few minutes ago: “Windows 7 feels like the kind of OS where you can simply focus on getting things done.”

This is something I come across quite often in my job, when I ask people what browser they use. A lot of people genuinely don’t know. The most recent answers I had were: “Windows?” and “I’ve got Office, is that it?”

What is a browser?

For those who’re unsure, a browser — or a Web browser — is the program you use to view Web pages.

It’s likely what you’re using right now to read this blog (apart from you geeks using an RSS feed reader … but that’s a whole other ballpark of worms that I’m not going to get into right now!).

Right now, why not go to the Help option on your toolbar and click on the About option. That’ll tell you the browser that you’re using (or whatever other application you’re reading this from!).

Mine says that I’m using Mozilla Firefox 3.5. Go me!

Image from Webappers

Most people using Windows will have some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer installed by default; but not after October if you buy a new PC with Windows 7 installed. But there are loads of other ‘flavours’ of browser:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari

Each browser claims to do things better than the next: load pages quicker, run code faster, adhere to Web standards better. I certainly recommend you check out some of those other browsers. Why not start with those 4 above?

Joshua (left) with Reuben, taken on 26 April 2009.

I can hardly believe that it’s been nearly 7 months since Reuben and Joshua were born. (It will be 7 calendar months a week tomorrow.) On the whole, it’s been a really amazing journey so far.

I’ve often thought that I should be writing this down, if not on my blog then in a private journal, but I’ve just been too tired. And those few occasions where I have had the space I’ve either not had the inspiration or have had too many other priorities clamouring for attention — the little things of everyday life that I took for granted with my oceans of available time.

The hardest thing

Before Reuben and Joshua were born when I spoke with parents about caring for babies they all said the same thing: that the hardest thing would be the lack of sleep.

But it’s not. The hardest thing that I found was the crying.

And the babies’ crying came a close second!

Seriously though, it took me a good 3-4 months to get used to their crying. To not take it personally, and to really begin to listen to what it was; listening to the nuances of their cries, which cries mean “I’m tired” or “I’m hungry” or simply “I’m winding down towards sleep now”.

Until then, and the lack of sleep really didn’t help, I found myself getting more and more wound up and angry at myself for feeling annoyed that they wouldn’t sleep when really that’s what I most wanted to do. That was the hardest bit really.

Thankfully, things are a lot easier now. I’m much calmer and am getting more sleep; I’m probably getting about 5 hours a night which is all I really need, to be honest. Reuben and Joshua are also sleeping longer now from around 19:00 – 23:00 when we wake them for a night/dream feed. Then they sleep through to anywhere between 04:30 and 07:00.

The best thing

The best thing though is simply Reuben and Joshua. They are adorable! We could not hope for two more wonderfully content and lovely babies.

It’s funny, I don’t think of them as babies — I just think of them as a very young Reuben and Joshua. And we don’t call them “the twins” either. They are always “Reuben and Joshua” (and always in that order, it’s a chronological thing!).

I love spending time with them.

Someone gave us a page-a-day calendar that has all these baby-related quotations on them. Yesterday’s said

Children spell ‘love’: t-i-m-e.

And I thought, well that’s not strictly true, is it? Apostrophes have quite complex grammatical rules that most children probably don’t fully grasp. And that sentence doesn’t take into account non-English speaking children. A child in France, for example, wouldn’t spell ‘love’ like that. Or in Germany.

Recent developments

There have been so many changes over the last few months, but last week Reuben and Joshua both began to sit up, which has transformed them from these flailing babies lying on the floor — and beginning to roll over onto their fronts and back again — to beginning to really look like little boys. It’s been a delight to watch.

This morning they took their first breakfasts sitting in their new Ikea high chairs.

It’ll be exciting to see what tomorrow brings. I promise I’ll start to blog more … but for now, I’ve got a sermon to finish for Sunday!