Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold

I just ran across a story about symbolics.com, the very first registered domain on the Internet being sold. It was originally registered back in March of 1985.

Hothardware.com has the story. I've always been fascinated about how domain names work. I registered my first domain back in 1995, tvvbbs.com, for the "The Virtual Village", a bulletin board system I was running at the time. I was able to provide my users with Internet email boxes - cutting edge at the time. Unfortunately, I had to shut down the BBS and I let the registration lapse.

Heck, the domain name I have here, azb.com, was registered by me back on 02/08/98. I had wanted something short for email, and that's what I had been using it for all these years.  It's only recently that I decided to do something substantial on the web with it.

DOS Tricks in XP and Windows 7

The other day, I was helping a user over the phone with an operation involving numerous CSV files that had to be combined. The best way to do this is by good old DOS copy commands. She had the files in a folder on her desktop. I had her open a command prompt and then I stepped her through on how to change directories, drilling down to where that folder was on her desktop.

After we finished, I thought that there might be a more efficient way to do the same thing. I created a folder on my desktop and then opened a command prompt and typed in "cd", plus a space -

Then I left clicked on the folder on my desktop and dragged it to the command prompt and dropped it there -

As you can see, the whole path to the folder is filled in for you, complete with the quotation marks that people usually forget.  All I had to do was hit enter and I was in the folder at the command prompt -

This does not work in Vista, it was disabled by Microsoft. Interestingly, I tried it in Windows 7, and it works just like it did in XP. Go figure.

Blackberry Tour Spring Lock Case

I stopped at a Verizon store today to see if  I could pick up a spring lock case for my Tour. I had stopped at two Sprint stores the other day and they did not have any. I don't like the case that comes with the Tour on either Sprint or Verizon. The Verizon store did have one, and I paid my $19.99 and left without opening the package. When I got back to the office, I was in for a surprise. This was my own fault for not paying attention, by the way.

When I bought my spring lock case for my Verizon Curve back in April of 2008, $19.99 bought me a Seidio spring lock case with a beautiful rubberized outer shell, and a cloth lining inside. It felt solid and the belt clip felt like it wouldn't break off very easily.

The model they have for the Tour at Verizon is not a Seidio, and is made of a very lightweight translucent plastic, and there is no lining inside ( can you say "scratched screen"). Worst of all, the belt clip looks and feels like it wouldn't take much to rip it off. I've shot some pictures (below) to try and show the difference. This one will be going back. Looks like I'll be spending $29.99 to buy the real deal from Seidio.

Sprint Blackberry Tour 9630

I just picked up a Sprint Blackberry Tour 9630. In doing so, I also moved from Verizon. The Tour is a large step up from my Blackberry Curve. The screen is only slightly larger, but the resolution is 480 x 360 in comparison to the Curve's 320 x 240. The Tour is slightly longer, wider, and heavier than the Curve,  but the difference is minimal. The camera in the tour is also 3.2 mega pixels compared to the Curve's 2 mega pixels. The difference in the resolution is considerable when looking at pictures taken by each camera. I'll be posting some pix taken with the Tour soon.

Woot! Server Migration

I finished our server migration yesterday. We had been running Small Business Server 2003 Standard (OEM - Grrr, don't get me started, wasn't my choice). This was migrated to new hardware running Small Business Server 2003 R2 Standard (Not OEM!)  I used Jeff Middleton's "Swing Migration" from sbsmigration.com . Well worth the money and very easy to follow. There are a lot of settings and permissions that need to be brought over, and it is very time consuming using Microsoft's standard methods. Since I am the only IT resource in our agency, this was a life saver. When we migrated from Small Business Server 4.5 to Small Business Server 2003 four and half years ago, we hired a consultant to "help" and it was a 2 day marathon.

I Won!

Last Friday, I attended a BBQ hosted at one of the local FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) Lodges. Lots of good food and there was a "bags" tournament. They also raffled off a few items and I won an Electronic Evidence Field CollectionKit, a first responder kit for seizing electronic evidence. Apparently they are produced by a local firm, E-Kit Training and Supply . Needless to say, I will find this useful in my forensic work and I'll have to see how it works on the next case.

Blackberry Server Move

As part of my job as network administrator, I installed a Blackberry Professional Server a couple of years ago. Blackberry Professional Server is the lightweight version of RIM's Blackberry Enterprise Server. Either version of the server allows a business to synchronize their Blackberry devices with an Exchange or Domino server.

In my case, I installed it on our SBS2003 server. SBS2003 is an "all in one" solution for small business that has Exchange server as part of it's installation. Everything runs on one server. I am planning on moving the SBS2003 to a VMWare server that I am currently running on a new Dell 2950 with 32GB of memory. Lots of room for virtual machines!

In preparation for the move, I had to move the Blackberry Professional Server to it's own virtual server. The first roadblock I ran into was that the Blackberry Professional Server would not run on the Windows server 64bit virtual machine I had set up. I had to trash that setup and recreate under Windows server 32bit.

I found an excellent writeup in the Crackberry forums for moving a Blackberry Enterprise Server using the "knife-edge" (minimal down time) method:

http://forums.crackberry.com/f50/moving-blackberry-enterprise-server-exchange-new-server-74177/

This guide proved invaluable to me and resulted in a successful move with minimal downtime. The only thing I would change ( and where I had a problem) was instruction number 2 under "Move the database".

While the instructions were "osql -E", I had to change it to:

"osql -E -S windowsservername\sqldatabaseinstancename"

in order to get it to work. Other than that, easy-peasy.

Google Voice

I got my Google Voice invitation the other day. As part of the sign up, you are able to pick your own phone number. In my case, I was able to get a phone number in my area code, with an exchange located in my town and the last four numbers match my home address!

Google bought the old Grand Central system and has contracted with Level 3 for the phone numbers. I'm excited about this as Google's system allows you to route all your phone calls, home, mobile, work, etc., through one phone number.

You can access Google Voice with a mobile app and read your voice mails on line., because Google actually transcribes your voice mails. of course, you can listen to them, just like any other voice mail system. The service I'm looking forward to is call screening and blocking.

http://google.com/voice