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Outlook shows some appointments off by 1 hour

October 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Well, it’s that time of the year again, Daylight Savings is about to end, and Outlook decides that some of my recurring appointments now happen 1 hour later.

Mind you, not all of them. I still have lunch appointments at 12PM, but I now have a recurring alarm to go home at 6PM instead of 5PM. That sounds like my boss is getting me to work an extra hour, but fortunately the recurring appointment “Commute to work” is starting at 8:30AM instead of 7:30AM…

Oh, and my Blackberry synchronizes with Outlook, but somehow manages to correct the braindead appointments to their correct time.

This seems to happen pretty much twice every year, ever since the US government decided to extend DST by a couple of weeks. We’ve patched all our servers and clients, ran conversion tools left and right, but it still happens. Creating a new appointment doesn’t really fix the problem – I have to wait until next week to make that appointment, and by mid-November they’ll be off again!

Luckily some Googling brought me to this post, and although it mainly discusses problems with Exchange and the Blackberry Enterprise Server, it does contain a reference to a Microsoft tool for Outlook (KB931667). To my surprise this tool was updated in August 2008 (hasn’t it been a couple of years since the change in DST?). After installing and running the tool, it found 13 appointments to fix. When I gave it the go-ahead and fix these culprits, the problem magically disappeared!

My only fear now is that I have to run this again on November 2nd… we’ll see.

Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Firefox equivalent of Internet Explorer’s Every Time I visit the Web page

April 1, 2009 By 4 Comments

We have a little rotating web page setup in our break room, and have been using a dial indicator to show our performance in bookings and shipments. However, due to the nature of the set-up (a page, showing a flash file, that is configured by an XML file), it turned out to be necessary in Internet Explorer to use the option “Every time I visit the webpage” on the “Check for newer versions of stored pages:” setting in the Temporary Internet Files and History Settings.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 7 still can’t handle CSS properly, so some of the tables looked horrible. Switching to Firefox fixed that problem. But now the old data was showing. And where is that “Newer versions of stored pages” setting in Firefox???

It’s hiding in the config. In the address bar, type

about:config

Then find the setting browser.cache.check_doc_frequency, and change it to 1. This will duplicate the Internet Explorer behavior (as far as loading cached page goes, mind you!).

The options for this setting are as follows:

ValueDescription
0Check for a new version of a page once per session
1Check for a new version every time a page is loaded
2Never check for a new version – always load the page from cache
3Check for a new version when the page is out of date (Default)
Filed Under: Linux, Macintosh, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Tomcat uses 100% of CPU

March 30, 2009 By 3 Comments

As I posted last week, I installed Nagios and the monitoring clients on a couple of machines. One of the machines I started monitoring was the machine we use to provide some internal webservices access to Progress databases. And this machine turned out to have a problem: 100% CPU usage!

Further investigation narrowed this down to TomCat using 99-100% capacity (basically anything it can get!). I’ve only seen this once before, with Microsoft Access, but since TomCat isn’t a Microsoft product, I assumed there was something wrong with my setup. A little bit of digging revealed two possible solutions:

  1. There’s a bug in the Java engine. Apparently there is a Memory leak in the use of StringBuffer.toString() in version 1.4.1, and fixed in version 1.4.1_05. This bug was submitted way back in 2002, so I assume if I download a new version of Java I should be OK. And since I’m running a 1.6 version, I don’t think this is the issue.
  2. The AJP connector is misbehaving. I found a post (unfortunately can’t remember where…) pointing to this connector as the culprit, and the solution was to explicitly state some of the default values for the parameters, with the exception of the connectionTimeout parameter. Instead of stating the obvious to TomCat, I decided to modify server.xml, and modify the AJP connector just enough so that it knows the connectionTimeout is 5000ms instead of eternity.
    <Connector port=”8009″
    enableLookups=”false” redirectPort=”8443″ protocol=”AJP/1.3″
    connectionTimeout=”5000″
    />

After implementing that last solution, the CPU usage for the machine dropped from 100% to about 9%.

Filed Under: Network, Windows Tagged With: , , , , ,

Nagios – how to determine the name of a service in Windows

March 27, 2009 By 23 Comments

I’ve recently set up Nagios on one of our test servers, and the Windows client for Nagios allows you to monitor services (whether they started, stopped, etc.). However, the name of the service to monitor isn’t always the same as the name in the Services application in Administrative Tools.

To find out the name of the service, you’ll have to look at the registry:

  1. Open up regedit (Run, regedit)
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  3. Navigate to SYSTEM
  4. Navigate to CurrentControlSet
  5. Navigate to Services
  6. Find the service you plan on monitoring. The name of the node is the name you need to enter on the Nagios server as the name of the service.
Filed Under: Linux, Network, Windows Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Google tasks available on mobile phone and desktop

March 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google tasks are now available on your mobile phone. With all the applications Google has available, they’re becoming a serious contender for my desktop Outlook.

Wish list for Tasks:

  1. Synchronize with Outlook Tasks
  2. Give me context ability (filter on @Calls, @Home, @Work, etc.)

Also, Google tasks is available as a stand-alone application by using the Chrome browser. Navigate to https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig in Chrome, use the Create Application Shortcuts in Chrome, and if needed resize the window. Alternative is to use the Adobe AIR version of Google Tasks.

Filed Under: Network, Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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