I am a packrat, I keep everythign or at least try to keep everything and that of course includes any computer stuff. I have a folder on my home computer called Bills Business and I dump anything to do with online marketing in there, it is sitting at 4.5 gigs Anyway at work I currently have 3371 read messaages in my inbox (not very GTD) and a ton more in my Outlook PST files. That backgrounder will kind of tell you why I care about indexing.

I have tried lots of apps to try to do quick searching of my Outlook because the built in search for Outlook is horribly slow. I have tried the built in Microsoft Search, Google Desktop Search and a couple of others but I always get performance issues. There never seems to ber a way to index stuff on my PC without it slowing down everything on my computer.

Xobni seems to have changed that. Xobni is a free plugin for Outlook that Microsoft is apparently trying to buy that will index all of your mail as well as data mining your people and conversations so that you can know more about your conversations and easily get a chance to have contact info related to your Outlook contacts / email.

Xobni is just in public beta right now but it seems to be really stable and is very unobtrusive, Xobni just sits as a compressed sidebar in the right side of your Outlook available by one mouse click. Xobni also has indexed all of my email really quickly and has not slowed down my computer at all and with a simple search window at the top of Xobni I am able to search quickly and instantly get results.

So Microsoft is nice and civil in saying that the deal is dead. There were talks this weekend between Steve Ballmer with Microsoft and Jerry Yang with Yahoo. There is apparently a difference of Microsoft willing to go to $33 per share and Yahoo only accepting $37 a share.

So they are close but not close enough. Steve Ballmer does not look like he will bother trying to steal Yahoo by buying up all the shares so I have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking.

Is Microsoft really just walking away? Are they looking at some other companies? Some people have said that Microsoft should go after Ask.com or AOL but they are not really in need of marketshare, what Microsoft really needs is online apps and the love of web users.

This next week should be interesting. If Steve Ballmer has some kind of deal in his back pocket I am sure we will see it soon. I feel bad for those stockholders of Yahoo, I would imagine the shares will plummet on Monday morning.

Stay tuned for all of the news. I know that I am watching Tech Crunch close as they broke this story before anyone.

Today is the day I have been waiting for for a few months now as Microsoft has released windows XP SP3.

You can get it now from Windows Update by clicking to this Microsoft Download Link

The latest service pack is really mostly a bunch of bug fixes all rolled up into one package but I have found on all of the PCs that I have installed it on that it seems to have sped them up, not a lot perhaps but still the operating system is a little faster. The other great thing about the new Windows XP Service Pack 3 is that now we can do installs of Windows XP a lot faster. The last few installs that I have done have taken about three hours because even with an install of Windows XP with Service pack 2 there are still about 92 updates as well as that huge Internet Explorer 7 change.

so I can rejoice to this Service Pack upgrade for Windows XP today but this will probably be that last one as Microsoft will now start pushing hard to get rid of Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.

By the way There is still some life left for support of Windows XP support will go on for a few years yet. Mainstream regular support will go until April 14, 2009, after that date Windows XP will begin its “Extended Support” period that will last for 5 years until April 8, 2014.

I am home sick today and am really missing some of the nice things that I have at work, especially my dual monitors.

I work on a laptop so I have the laptop screen at home and at work and even though the resolution of 1280 x 800 is OK, with the extra monitor it is great. I know that there is always some resistance to getting people dual monitors but any Windows power user I believe has tyo really like the whole dual monitor setup.

Having things like copy and paste and drag and drop at your disposal is great on one monitor but is opened up to  a whole new level once you have that extra screen to place from and to.

I am not sure that I use my duals in the best way possible, actually I am sure I am not but there are a few good ways that I use my monitors

Having six or seven programs open all of the time I always use the laptop screen as my workspace and then have things like RDP sessions, or Firefox windows that I am using for supplemental info to drag onto my primary workspace.

Is this normal? Does anyone have better methods? I seem to never remember being taought how to best use dual monitors and instead just got excited to have them and started using or not using them effectively.

Today at home…I am missing that extra screen real estate.

Well I thought that Twitter was back yesterday and I guess I am getting updates from a few more people then I was before. Apparnetly there is an issue where Twitter is trying to resync two databases as some people are saying that his may take a week. I guess we will find out live when it is back up for real.

During this long outage Micheal Arrington at Tech Crunch has posted how important Twitter has become to him over the last couple of months.

Dave Winer is always spinning something interesting and he is suggesting today that everyone link Friend feed to Twitter and having tweets pushed out in RSS feeds instead of just going straight to the Twitter servers.

Twitter has been growing rapidly over the last few months but as we have seen in tech for a long time there is always some kind of kludge or hack that can fix problems in technology. I am not sure how popular Dave Winers fix will become but the whole idea of Microblogging is very disruptive and very exciting.

Maybe Twitter is just an evolution from IRC and ICQ and more popular messenger products over the last few years but the concept is here to stay.

I have been having trouble with Twitter all weekend. There was a server upgrade that they were doing at Twitter on friday night and since then I have only been getting updates from about three of the people that i am following.

I have never been more productive

Anyway, checking the support - help at Twitter it seems that lots of people are having exactly this problem and they are working to get it fixed. I am looking forward to it.

Hey if you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

If you have not jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are wondering why you would bother then I can explain a bit. It took me a year to figure out what Twitter really is supposed to be for. Basically you signup and get you twitter page. Now you can follow others and they can follow you. Find people with the same interests and then you can see the updates that they send to you and you can reply directly to them. Update what you are doing, ask questions, offer commentary. Twitter it like a big party where you are one of a bunch of people and no one owns any one conversation.

To make things easier using Twitter you can you a Firefox plugin called Twitterfox or just the Thwirl Windows desktop app for Twitter

Well Yahoo decided that once wasn’t enough and this morning they sent another press release out saying that they still don’t want to join Microsoft.

I would like to see how Microsoft could embrace and extend all of these cool Yahoo products so I am hoping that this deal gets done and done soon.

Apparently the quarterly results for Yahoo will come out on April 17th, Yahoo will get the deal done before then if the results are going to be bad and will stall some more if the results are great, rumor is that the results are bad.

I am so excited that Virgin and Google have announced that they are going to start colonizing Mars.

Although I am very excited to live on earth and have seen many places and had lots of plans here it would be wonderful to make a brand new start on a new planet.

I do have a few questions though:

1. what kind of temperatures should I expect in summer and winter? I am under the impression that winter is really cold on Mars and I suspect I will be OK since i live in Calgary already.

2. What are the schools like? I have two kids, one is 8 and the other is 4. They both need a school and I am not sure how good the schools on mars are like. Do the martians run them? Heck I guess we will be martians.

3. What is the state of TCP/IP going to neighboring planets. I heard an awful rumor that the latency would stop internet access as we know it on Mars and my son really likes to play video games.

4. What kind of electricity will I need. I know that all of my appliances and stuff are set for north american power but it would be really embarrassing to bring my big old 50 inch rear projection TV that weighs so much and then find out that the power doesn’t work.

5. On last thing. Is there good fresh fruit or am I going to have to grow my own garden. I am not much of a gardener or handyman and that would be a bit of a deal breaker.

Anyway. I am really excited and even though I didn’t sign up yet I am going to be talking to my wife tonight and giving notice at work tomorrow so I am really hoping that soon I can catch a flight.

Well if you read this blog for any length of time, you probably recognize that I use Wordpress as the publishing platform. Wordpress is open source and very constantly developed and Matt, the guy that created and runs this platform is young enough not to be scared of big change.

Well today there is another big change with the change of Wordpress to version 2.5 from 2.3. Usually we do not look at a point change in software as much more than a minor feature release and bug patches but in this case there is a lot more.

The interface for Wordpress has been completely rewritten by some of the best minds in Web Interface design. The interface has completely changed and the ease of use has been simplified as well. There are new features like a picture gallery within posts and easier posting interface but the change is a bit daunting for a casual user.

I am not too sure about plugin support yet as I have not moved any of my major blogs to the new Wordpress 2.5 but I will be moving this blog over to Wordpress 2.5 this morning. Wish me luck.

What are your impressions of these big changes? Do you like it? Do you have problems? I am interested in seeing before I have broken plugins or any other downsides. As we as tech guys always know, it is usually better to wait a couple of days or week before implementing a major release of software instead of regressing back to an earlier version.

I ran into problems a few months back with some blogs that I had running Movable Type and never recovered, I moved to Wordpress instead.

I ran into an issue with the Zebra printer in after hours when on call a few days ago and these are the steps that I took to eventually fix the problem. The Zebra printer was a 4Z M Plus. I have had all kinds of problems with these printers over the years, mostly because they are not very strongly built as network printers. First of all is the fact that the printer will only work at a speed of 10Half.

Here was the process in the middle of the night.

1.       Isolated the problem. The problem was that printing worked but 5 minutes later it stopped working for no apparent reason. I logged onto the print servers and there was one print job from the printer hung on one print server. I deleted the print job and tried printing a test page to the printer from the same print server. The print job hung.

2.       I looked at the print server logs. It seemed that there was problem for the last hour on all print jobs on the hg01 server. I stopped and restarted the print spooler service. I printed a test page and it went through. I then logged onto the web interface of the printer and saw that my print job went through.

3.       Called back the users and told them all was fixed. It wasn’t and none of the jobs was printing. I tried again and it did not work. The web interface of the Zebra printer though did show the job has having printed. The printing was apparently working from the application as well as locally on the print server.

4.       Additional Print server checks. Went back to the printer server to see if there were any problems and saw a datawindow error for that printers driver in the system log.

5.       Replaced and fixed driver on the print server. Went to the printer properties for the non working Zebra printer and changed the driver to a different printer, hit apply, switched back to the right driver and hit apply again. Printed a test page from the print server

6.       Heard cheering on the phone and after testing within the application the printer was actually working.

One other step that has worked in the past was to changed the IP of the printer through the web interface and then on both print servers. I also did this but in this case it had not fixed the problem.