some personal, more technical – by Thomas Einwaller
As I wrote some months ago in this post, a special IT policy rule for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server exists that defines if the facebook app (and other social networking apps) are allowed to access the address book and other areas of the BlackBerry device. In some older versions of the BlackBerry Enterprise server (4.x) this policy did not exists and the access was disabled per default.
This KB article describes how to add the policy to older servers so that it is possible to allow access in the IT policy again. The same procedure works for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, which was released last week. This version has only about 45 IT policy rules and the rule “Disable Organizer Data Access for Social Networking Applications” is missing too.
I am just preparing our Windows 2003 Small Business Server to be upgraded to Small Business Server 2008. Therefor I tried to install the VMware converter tools to convert the old server to a virtual machine before upgrading it.
My problem was that the installer always complained about not being able to start the converter service with the following message:
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone — Error 1920
Service VMware vCenter Converter Server (vmware-converter-server) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.
After doing some web research with finding a lot of useless tips I found this blog post showing up a very easy solution: I had to add a group called “Domain Admins” because it did not exist on the German version of our Small Business Server. This is why I always try to install the original English version of operating systems when available and our new Small Business Server 2008 will be in English.
I upgraded my home server from Ubuntu Hardy Heron to Karmic Koala last weekend and some things went wrong. Oddly one of the harddisks in my raid got faulty – so I am trying to rebuild my raid.
The second thing was that the keyboard layout was totally messed up when connecting to my tightvnc server. Luckily I found this forum post with the solution. I just had to run the following command:
gconftool --set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/layouts --type List --list-type String [aa]
I have to admit that I do not fully understand what that command really does, but it fixed my problem.
In: Blackberry
21 Dec 2009After giving up hope just the day before I was surprised on Friday when the local shop of my mobile carrier called me and told me that the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 was available. I packed my things together, drove down to the city and grabbed it. Now here it is lying right next to my old Bold 9000:
I am using this really nice gadget now since three days and these are the things that I like the most:
So far I am very happy with the Bold 9700. I think it is a legitimate successor to my Bold 9000 which I used to call “the best BlackBerry I ever had” – until I got the Bold 9700
Since some days the ORF (the Austrian national public service broadcaster) started his video on demand site http://tvthek.orf.at/. I found it quite nice but to make use of it I had to install the Windows Media Player Firefox plugin otherwise it did only work in the Internet Explorer.
Another problem my grandma had with it was that the Windows Media player always stopped directly after starting the video in the browser. Opening the URL in the standalone Windows Media Player application showed the error that the protocol was not supported. Doing a quick google search for that error brought up this Microsoft knowledge base article. After opening a command line running under the Administrator account issuing the following command resolved the problem:
regsvr32 wmnetmgr.dll
In: Uncategorized
27 Nov 2009Yesterday I decided to use another design for my blog. I think the old one was more that a year old
I hope you like it!
In: Blackberry| Downloads| Software| Windows
11 Nov 2009Yesterday a friend of mine told me that he received an error message while trying to install the BlackBerry Desktop Manager 5.0.1 under Windows 7 64 Bit. I told him that the Desktop Manager installed and runs correctly on my system (which is the same) so we tried to find out what caused his problem. The error message said something like:
An error occurred while registering the module C:\Program Files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\IS71 Connectors\OE Connector\OLKExpress5.dll. HRESULT -2147010895. Please contact support.
After looking into the Connectors folder I found out that it contains various dll for connecting to different applications to sync with. I always had Outlook 2007 installed on my systems which he had not. So it seems like the BlackBerry Desktop Manager tries to install the connector dll for Outlook Express – which does not exist on Windows 7 anymore – it is called Windows Mail now.
I will try to contact RIM to tell them that the Desktop Manager installer is not fully compatible with Windows 7.
I was happy the first time I used the built in backup feature of Windows 7 RC1. It was a very easy tool that allowed me to backup my whole system (or just selected partitions) to another external disk or a network share.
Today I tried to backup my current Windows 7 installation before updating the firmware of my Intel Postville SSD – but I was not able to creat the backup. I always got the following error message:
There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on storage location. Make sure that for all volume to be backup up, the minimum disk space required for shadow copy creation is available. This applies to both the backup storage destination and volume included in the backup. Minimum requirement for Volumes less than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 50 megabyte of free space. For volumes more than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 320 megabytes of free space. Recommended at least 1 gigabytes free of disk space on each volumes if volumes size is more than 1 gigabytes (0×80780119)
I figured out that the hidden volume created by the Windows 7 setup caused this error. It is only 100 megabytes of size and has only 37 megabytes free. I was not able to deselect it or to free space on it. So now I am giving Macrium Reflect – Free Edition a try – I hope this does the trick, so far it looks pretty nice.
Some weeks ago I tried to install the android client of our time tracking system timr on my HTC Magic using Eclipse. Normally the Android Debug Bridge (adb) recognizes connected Android phones and the dialog in Eclipse allows you to select on which device you want to install the application you are trying to debug.
In the case of the G1 this works very well but the HTC Magic did not appear in the dialog and I could not select it. Some research showed that the driver that was installed from Windows for the device was not correct. I head to use the great USBDeview tool to remove the installed driver. This allowed me to install the driver from usb_driver directory in the Android SDK. After that the device showed up in the Eclipse dialog and I was able to select it for installation.
In: Uncategorized
29 Sep 2009Today I noticed that the new iTunes version 9.0.1.8 shows three small media control buttons in the preview window of the Windows 7 task bar. That is a nice feature because I to not have to aim at the small icon in the notification area for pause/play/forward/previous:
