I’m sure you, like myself, have a few hundred passwords which I use on a fairly regular basis. I sure hope that you shy way from a single password across all sites or a template based password where you reuse the same password but switch up a single digit or two. Both of which are generally considered a very bad idea, especially when dealing with your online banking or similar sites.
In the past, I tried to move my entire life and toolset onto a Pen drive. I have had a varying level of success across the board with it failing miserably with the larger tools like Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, and similar applications. Typically those that have a heavy dependency on the registry. In my perfect world everything would be local configuration files -this push to the registry (away from ini files) was a mistake IMHO.
For the longest time there was really only a single solution in the marketplace for reliable and safe Password Management tools. That was RoboForm from Siber Systems. It was so vital for me that I purchased their USB Version “RoboForm2Go”. Over these past few years it treated me quite well and I still highly recommend using it for those that want an offline/portable installation-free solution. For example if your one of those paranoid (safe) types that don't want some external site hosting your credentials…
A few months ago I realized that the majority of my daily use of my “Portable environment” was specifically for RoboForm and nothing else. The ole 80-20 rule applies. I took a good long look at that fact and decided that I wanted to minimize the hassle of carrying around the USB Pen drive, getting it running, etc.. on a daily basis. I also noticed that I would have liked to share this data with a few machines, simultaneously. This forced me into looking into an online solution. At a minimum it would plug into Firefox and store all passwords (safely) on a remote site; and be reliable/available 24x7. A colleague recommended me to check out LastPass. Since this met my minimum requirements, and then some I decided to give it a run for its money.
I can safely say that I have managed to completely make the transition to LastPass with no issues. The online service is extremely reliable and their FireFox and IE integration is stellar.
I also find myself using the Windows Mobile version of their product. It needs work but it provides easy access to my data with a few clicks – you will need to upgrade to their premium product for this to work – its only $1 per month and you get a bunch of devices supported plus a few other “features”.
Great job done by the LastPass team.
A pretty big request we are seeing in our support department is for our customers to have a better understanding of the folder structure of the DotNetNuke Product. Here is a document which I was able to put together with help from the team.
PDF Download: 5.4.2 Install Folder Structure
I hope you find it useful as well and please let me know if you have anything to add.
As of few weeks ago some of you may have noticed the slight update in our Canadian office address – and yes I’m just getting around to blogging about it now.
The new address is…
211 - 9440 202nd street
Langley, BC V1M 4A6
Canada
[map]
We had the opportunity to come view the place while the contractors were doing some improvements…
Candice, Charles, Jenni and Jaspreet admiring the building directory in the lobby.
Our support department is getting a serious upgrade! Those support folks, always so demanding! :)
Here is a good shot from reception across most of the space. What you don’t see is the few offices on the left side, and a boardroom to the immediate left. Pretty much the full Canadian group present and accounted for!
Our soon-to-be and much-awaited-for kitchen space! Server room is just to the left, and its actually in its own room. Konstantine is so happy now!
Joe and Shaun in deep contemplation…
Keivan, overly excited about a place to work out.
So that’s the tour. Ill try to take some new photos now that we are all moved in and post them up once I’m back from my mini-vacation.
Eric, over at the Boston DNN User Group has graciously invited me to give a presentation to his User Group on May 17th.
Come join me for an open discussion on “DotNetNuke – A look inside”. I will cover topics like how we are adopting the Agile methodologies at a corporate level, how we are best utilizing Scrum, a sneak peek at the roadmap for 2010, and how YOU can participate with the future direction of the product.
If you are currently a partner or a customer of DotNetNuke please feel free to attend and reach out, I’m sure Eric would love the extra attendance! I would love to start putting faces to the names of so many of you.
We just posted up two positions for the Vancouver/Lower Mainland area:
Engineering - Senior Developer
https://www.bctechnology.com/scripts/show_job.cfm?id=78592
Engineering - Test/QA Manager
https://www.bctechnology.com/scripts/show_job.cfm?id=78591
If you feel you are qualified feel free to apply now!
Being a big fan of both Office 2010 and Xobni I was disappointed when the previous version Xobni just didn't work for Outlook 2010; until now. They recently released a version which works great; in fact it seems to be one of the better releases to date. As some of you may recall those previous versions leaving a slightly-bad taste in your mouth with respect to overall machine impact. Kudo’s to the team for doing a great job.
Don’t know what Xobni is? Here is a brief screen shot tour...
After the installation and initial email index is compete you will see the above view added to the right side of your inbox. In the view above you will notice that I have an email from my good friend Joe Brinkman. Xobni pulls his record and gathers data around him. On the top is the business card and contact information I have on file for him. Statistics around his time of day which he is most active. Recent conversations between us, file exchanged and our shared network of colleagues.
By clicking on any of the conversations, files, or people in the network will switch context to each item in detail. This entire summary view is probably where Xobni really proves its value. How many times do you go searching around trying to find those hidden files which folks send to you? Well you can stop that, now.
Just under Joe’s photo (above) you will notice a few tabs. The first is the Analytics tab (I will get into more detail later on), then the actions tab, which you can schedule time with Joe, or email him directly. The next tab brings in his LinkedIn information – you need to establish that relationship outside of this tool and then connect the dots in this tool. Facebook is the next tab which follows the same relationship building requirements as does LinkedIn. Finally the last tab is twitter. Initially it will perform a search for you and allow you to associate Joe with his twitter account. Nice way to link in all aspects of a persons online social communities.
Here are screen shots of each item…
Analytics
Actions
Linked In
Facebook
Twitter
The next interesting piece is the detailed Analytics which Xobni provides. If you hit the “More” button in the Xobni area in the ribbon bar and choose “Xobni Analytics” you will get a dialog which a variety of reports to be able to dig into your communication stream.
Here is an overview of each chart…
Today’s summary – Incoming and outgoing emails for the day, and volume per person.
Mail Traffic – Broken down by day, week, month, year, hourly average, daily average and monthly average (and filtered by Date Range, and Sent/Received). For example, I chose Daily Average and no other filters and I see that I’m receiving 30 emails on average, and sending 15.
Time to respond – Shows how fast my response time is for emails. Back in December my turn around time hit 1 hour 30 min (very poor). Since then I seem to be averaging about a 30 minute turn around time. You can also dig down for each of your contacts and how long you take to respond to each of them. Joe, for example, my median time to respond is 18 minutes.
Also, at the bottom of this chart you can filter the data down by a variety of criteria. For example I filtered mine down to just DNN Corp employees and my max average turn around time drops to 1 hour in December, and 20 min more recently.
Unique Contacts – Raw counts of unique contacts which you have sent and received email with.
“Follow Up” Delay – This represents how long each of your contacts are getting back to you. For example Joe takes about 4 hours to respond.
Analytics
The single most important piece of information i look at on a very regular basis is the Analytics overview chart for each contact:
Notice that Joe peeks at around 3 – 4pm PST time. Now, if you consider Outlook users’ habits when using outlook most people will work on the inbox from the top down. Outlook’s default sort order is the latest emails on top. Thus if I have a high priority item for Joe, my best chance of getting it on the top of his job jar is holding off till about 3:30 or quarter to 4.
You will actually notice that Joe is actually not normal. He is super aggressive with his email all day. The guy is a workhorse!
Here are more examples where this concept may have a larger impact:
For this person, I will not expect a response to emails sent after 1pm until the next morning around 8am.
This allows me to set my own internal expectations around his habits.
Here is someone that rarely looks at their email, and its usually limited to their lunch break. Interesting enough, using the “Follow Up” Delay chart I notice that this person's Median Time to Follow-up is just under 20 hours. So what does this mean to me? First off I would say email is probably not their forte. I would probably pick up the phone and call first - use email as a mechanism to follow-up with details. This person does most of their work offline and on the phone.
Since most people lack the ability to change their habits which have formed over decades I see this as a solution for me to improve the way in which I deal with them. Part of my ability to effectively communicate means changing my habits to suit the individual. It is not up to me to judge if that is right or wrong; in the end all that should matter is getting the job done.
This last example is one I find interesting. This contact is our build server. Whenever change occurs in our source repository it sends out a success/fail email to the entire group. You will notice that peek times for emails happen near the end of the day. Indicative of the development team’s source control commit habits.
Lastly, to buy or to not to buy, that is the question. As of yet, I have not forked over the cash for their product. I get so much use out of the base product and just cant see how the additional features justify the cost. With that said I have only had a very high level review of the additional features. Let me know if you feel that your purchase of the product was worth it, and why.
DotNetNuke 5.3.0 Released!
New Features
- Templated User Profiles - User profile pages are now publicly viewable, and layout is controlled by the Admin.
- Photo field in User Profile - Users can upload a photo to their profile. We also added support for User Specific data storage.
- User Messaging - Users can send direct messages to other system users. This also includes an out-of-the-box asynchronous, provider based, message platform. You will see more of this in future releases.
- Search Engine Sitemap Provider - The sitemap now allows module admins to plug in sitemap logic for individual modules.
- Taxonomy Manager - Administrators can create flat or hierarchical taxonomies that can be shared and used across modules. Supporting SEO and Social features at the core is an important piece for DotNetNuke moving forward.
(Last Minute Update: 5.3.1 will be released with some last minute updates early next week)
DotNetNuke as a Scalable Content management System (CMS)
Power, Reliability & Feature Richness – DotNetNuke an Open Source Framework
How to Search Engine Optimize dotnetnuke
dotnetnuke Training Video – Setting DNN Security
DotNetNuke Module Template [CS] (Free)
XsltDb - DotNetNuke XSLT module with database and ajax support (Free)
Create a non-Award Winning DotNetNuke Skin (part 1, part 2, part 3)
Test Driven example module nearly refactored to Web Forms MVP
Ajax Search v1.0.0 Released! (Live Demo)
Tutorials: Backup DNN, Restore DNN, Move DNN from Backup (By Mitchel Sellers)
A tag cloud based on the new 5.3 Taxonomy
Engage: Tell-a-Friend 1.1 released (FREE module)
549 DotNetNuke Videos: DNN Creative Magazine Issue 54 Out Now http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/112/threadid/355615/scope/posts/Default.aspx
Moving along in my adventure with my Home Theatre PC I decided to add in support for my D-Link DCS Wireless Cameras. Here are the steps that I took in order to get that online.
1. Install the Cameras, and configure them appropriately.
2. (Optional) Install the WHS Add-In [More Info]. This allows for Snapshot/Video storage.
3. On your HTPC, run the D-Link D View Cam installation [Direct Download], [Product Page] (See bottom of this post for v3 Info)
4. Walk through the wizard to find and setup your Cameras in the software. Since I changed the passwords on each camera, I had to set each individually once the Wizard found both of them.
Here is a preview of my setup:
Side Note: If you didn't notice I actually switched from RDP administration for the HTPC over to UltraVNC. I really didn't like how RDP forces the desktop (on the TV) to log off.
5. Next step is to configure your remote to work with EventGhost to essentially Task Switch over to the Dlink View Application. Not covered here is the Logitec remote control setup, but if you are familiar with that application then choose a spare button and map that into EG. I chose Yellow, with a name of “Security”.
In EventGhost, I created a new Macro, (Launch Application), and pointed it to: “C:\Program Files\D-Link\D-Link D-ViewCam\Bin\DVC2.0.exe” and a working directory of “C:\Program Files\D-Link\D-Link D-ViewCam\Bin\”
Maximized window, normal priority.
Now, on your remote point it at your IR Receiver and press the button which you programmed in for “Security”. It should show up in the Log on the left of EventGhost.
Click and drag that new event into the new Macro we just created. Binding that event to the action which we want it to take.
Note: You may also want to add a “Find Window”, “Bring to Front”, and Maximize actions in that Macro as well. Force it be front and center.
Last minute update…
After looking around for more information on the DLink D-View Cam software I managed to stumble upon their forums, and specifically one discussion for version 3 of the Software. Download v3 here, Manual.
In order to get this running, I first exited the application (right click the system tray icon, exit) and then uninstalled the v2 software and ran the v3 installation. I love the Single Video, Full Screen and Auto Scan set to 5 seconds.
Don't forget to update EventGhost to point to the new install.
Here is the Screenshot for v3.
[backup] [reboot] [test]
Its as easy as that to add Security Monitoring to your Home Theater Experience!
I managed to get round one completed for integrating Skype into my Home Theater Experience. Here are the steps:
1. Install the Microphone and Web Camera onto the HTPC
Note: You might want to grab a decent quality Web Camera, especially if your using it in a larger living room/viewing space.
2. Install Skype and use its wizard to setup the hardware integration, full with Speakers, Microphone and Web Camera. I setup a new/free account for this machine. Since all of my calls will be incoming and from the Skype network (friends and family) the free account is perfect.
3. In Skype, to go Tools, Options, and in the Advanced tab, Choose “HotKeys”. In HotKeys “Enable Keyboard Shortcuts” should be checked, and “Answer Call”, “Answer Call with Video” and “Hang Up” all should be checked as well. Take note of each Hotkey listed in the grid.
Save your changes and minimize the Skype Application.
4. Next we will need to have EventGhost to respond to your custom commands from your remote, and relay those to the custom Skype HotKeys. Here is my EG setup:
Take note in the above screen shot about Starting Skype, responding to the Blue button on my Remote, and the Green is set to Start XBMC. This allows me to task switch between the two applications.
I also have the “Maximize Skype” node which will detect whenever Skype starts or the Window becomes activated which will in turn maximize that Window. This is used for full screen viewing during Video Calls.
Finally the last two macros for Answering and Hang Up of Skype are mapped to custom buttons on my Logitec (you can use whichever buttons you like for this).
“Answer Skype via Hotkeys”, includes the HotKeys of: {Ctrl+Alt+PageUp} and if you do NOT have video you can use {Alt+PageUp}
“Hang Up Skype via Hotkeys”, includes the HotKeys of: {Alt+PageDown}
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