Question/Issue
"Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) no longer syncs with Outlook when 64-bit Outlook 2010 is installed on 64-bit Windows.WMDC also no longer syncs with Outlook if you are using a Click-to-Run installation of Outlook.Upgrading 32-bit Outlook 2007 to 64-bit Outlook 2010 could also result in data loss during first sync with WMDC.

The WMDC will not be upgraded to work with 64-bit Outlook 2010 or Outlook Click-to-Run.

Workaround
"If you need the functionality of WMDC and you have already installed 64-bit Outlook 2010 or Click-to-Run, uninstall Office 2010 and install the standard installation of 32-bit Office 2010.

Otherwise, install the standard installation of 32-bit Office 2010 if you want to continue to use WMDC."

Basically, they released a 64-bit version of outlook and then tell everyone not to install it! and the answer is..wait for Windows Phone 7 that will sync fine. So what do we do in the interim?? I have been forced to now use a 3rd party outlook to Gmail sync, and then sync my phone with gmail, but that is not really a solution.

While they say they are not bringing out a solution, I certainly hope they do, as there are a lot of angry users on the forums currently discussing this very issue!

First thing that I did was look and see what else Samsung had to offer, and came across the Android based Galaxy Spica. I have always had Android at the back of my mind, but whilst I was running with my windows based device, I did not look at it in detail. Coming across the Spica really opened my eyes up to Android, and so I went on fact finding mission to identify what phones are available. This led me to fond out the following phones that are available:

• Samsung Galaxy Spica
• HTC Magic
• HTC Tattoo
• HTC Hero
• HTC Desire
• HTC Legend
• Sony Erricson Xperia X10 (still coming)
• Motorola Milestone (still coming)
• Samsung S (still coming)

The next step was obviously, to see what is available on my service providor, Vodacom. At the time on initial investigation, they were waiting for release of the Desire and Legend, and they had the Magic,Tattoo and Hero range. They did not offer the Samsung and I am not really interested on the Xperia (because of poor reviews). The Magic,Tatto and Hero range are now old phones, so i decided to eliminate them from my shortlist, and rather get a current phone ( I am not sure if you can get them now anyway). Further investigation ensued.

Since, I have been happy with Samsung, I first contacted Samsung and asked when it would be available on the Vodacom Network - April/May I was told. I also followed up with regards to the HTC legend and desire, and according to the folks at AndroidZA website, those would be available mid May.  I must point ot that at that point in my investigation (late April), the Samsung Galaxy Spica and the HTC Desire and Legend were all available on MTN. Goal 1 for MTN. The Samsung had been available a lot earlier. Despite all that, I forgot about it for a couple of weeks and waited for the respective phones to arrive.

When the HTC legend and Desire arrived, they arrived with a hefty  handset price, even on the upper contracts (Talk 500). As we speak (end of May) the pay in for the desire is R1600 on a Talk 500. I prefer not to pay money for my handset over and above the R800 odd that is spent monthly on the contract alone, so this is not an option. At this time I also confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy Spica is not going to be released on Vodacom. Goal 2 for MTN. Around this time AndroidZA published a blog comparing the different prices for Android based phones and the figures were quite alarming. MTN offer the top of the range desire and legend for no pay in fee right down to their Talk 200 equivalent package, while Vodacom is asking anything up to R4000. Goal 3 to MTN.  In fact users on a Talk 200 even have to Pay in R700 for the old and poorly rated HTC Tattoo.

So, right now, if I want a Android based phone on the Vodacom network, I must be prepared to either pay in R1600, or get an old outdated phone. It is only correct of me to mention that Vodacom SP did offer me a R500 discount on the pay in fee (like that is meant to mean something!). The real annoying thing is that if they offered the Samsung, I would take it today!

So now my options are, pay in, wait until the pay in drops to maybe something reasonable like R500, wait for the new Samsung S, or wait for the Xperia X10 (but that has no multi-touch), or go with an old outdated phone!. Gola 4 and match to MTN. Come on Vodacom, get with it!

I acquired a Garmin EtrexLegend and after much procrastination decided that it was time to produce a handlebar mount. I found  a very useful  instructable www.instructables.com/id/yet-another-gps-handlebar-mount/   which gave me a good idea on how to start. I was however not happy with the mounting arrangement or the way in which the GPS is held secure. I started with a piece of scrap aluminium plate which I had in my Pandora's box. I measured the width of the Garmin and then using a vernier I measured the thickness of the device. I allowed for a 5mm overlap at each end (to grip the Garmin in the vertical) and  using the thickness and the length of the Garmin, marked out the dimensions on the aluminium plate.  I Used a newly acquired and very useful 1.0mm thick steel cutting wheel on an angle grinder to cut out the required shape.  These discs do however require a bit more respect than their thicker cousins, as they catch very easily. The edges where smoothed on the grind stone and with a file.

The next step was to bend the plate into the required shape. This a little tricky as the end result precluded the use of the bench vice for the entire process. I also made use of a piece of scrap timber to assist in the bending process. The aluminium bends reasonably easily, and all it requires is that the plate is held true to the drawn lines in the vice. If this is not done, the end result may be un-useable as the ends will be skew and the GPS will not be held securely.  The final bends had to be made using the scrap wood and a G-clamp.  The bent ends were clamped to the workbench, and the lip formed lifting the end with a screwdriver and then tapping the lip into shape with a hammer and a piece of scrap wood.

All that remained was to drill appropriate holes and then secure into the handlebar stem using cable ties. The configuration of the stem allowed for a very secure fit.  Single fixer stems would not be suitable.

The GPS slides into the mount from the side and is held in place with a slice from a  motorcycle inner tube. The inner tube allows access to all of the controls in the side of the GPS.

I have given the setup a couple of tests, and it works very well. It has not been in the way, and has added a new dimension to the rides, as the trip computer is far more comprehensive than the Cateye. Although I have not yet tried to upload a trail, it has come in very handy when slightly disoriented in the Hilton plantations. It was however only of use after the fact when a dog attacked and tried to make a meal of my left calf!! The site is now marked and we will avoid it in future. The next step will be to decide on a new route and then see if I can upload and follow it without disrupting the riding too much.

I thought I would give it a try and got underway three days ago. In these three days, I am astounded by my increased productivity! The differences between the way I usually worked, and the way I work with this technique are not great, but the subtle shifts mean that I have accomplished tasks that I have been putting off because they did not seem important or they were boring, I have done the work better and faster than I might have done otherwise, and the LifeHacker article was right - the timer really does decrease deadline anxiety - mostly I guess because the deadlines are met. The main differences are:

The periods and breaks are timed with a countdown clock and for best results Cirillo suggests that the clock be audibly ticking. Fortunately, I work on my own but I can see this might be irritating to co-workers. As far as I can see that is the only drawback for now, and I am going to keep going with this for a while.

This blog took two pomodoros to write.

The other day, however, we acquired some new laptops and I found myself in a bit of a quandary with regard to my OS. Windows 7 was officially on being released at the end of October, so I was faced with the choice of installing Vista 64-bit, or Windows 7 RTM. Considering that the RTM version is the same as the official release version, I decided to take the "7" plunge and downloaded the 64-bit version from the partner website..and BOY, am i glad i did that!

I am normally quite reluctant to install first releases and usually wait for the SP1 release before installing a new OS, but I figured Vista represented a SP1 and SP2 release and windows 7 should be quite stable. I have also not felt this hype for an OS since 95 or Windows 2000 were first released, and I really think it is worth it. I also think that for the first time, Windows 7 really competes with the likes of Ubuntu on stability, performance and usability. Of course Linux will always be faster, but I can notice a significant improvement on speed when compared to our Vista 64-bit machine.

So what is it that makes Windows 7 a worthwhile experience:

1. They have taken Vista and basically overhauled it and taken all the bad things away and replaced them with more usability
2. Windows explorer/My computer has improved and is customisable (although not as easy to use as good old XP explorer)
3. The new taskbar with Aero peek is very nice - especially the ability to right click and access recent documents/websites etc.
4. the searching/indexing functionality just works! This also makes running apps a real breeze as you just start typing the name and there it is. SQL server is there after "SQ"
5. I have had no problems with drivers or software and I am running the 64-bit version. Even Arcmap works!
6. From a development perspective, we get IIS7 and the ability to have multiple sites - a big plus in my books

Obviously with all the aero etc  functionality you need a bit of extra hardware to handle the additional RAM requirement. That said I am running Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz and 4Gb Ram and it runs very smoothly. Also, your C partition needs to be reasonably big as after all my software has been installed (office, SQL server, Visual Studio, GIS programs etc) I have used 35Gb of my C drive. But we were expecting that.

My one gripe is that we still have these stupid placeholder folders for those of us that show all system folders etc etc. why show us a "Documents and Settings" folder if we cant click on it is above me. It takes us all of about a couple of days to be trained into the new location of our "appdata" folder or our "temp" folder.

All in all, so far a really good experience and I hope it continues that way. For the first time in about 10 years...well done Microsoft - you have done something right.

Not wanting to invest in software, and also wanting to keep OS size down to a minimum, we decided on Linux as an OS. Since we had a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on disk, we installed that and then started the search for some software. A quick search on Google immediately started to bring up some links to the open source backuppc software. After reading some articles and browsing the website, we decided that this would do the job for us. Basically our requirements were:

1. Automatic scheduled backups
2. Cutomisable schedules per client
3. Connectivity to Windows and Linux clients
4. Historic backups with incremental updates
5. Compression

Needless to say, backuppc offered all of this and more. In fact each client backup can be setup with separate configurations. The basic info as stipulated on their website (as at August 2009) lists as follows:

• A clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PCs are stored only once resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk I/O.
• One example of disk use: 95 latops with each full backup averaging 3.6GB each, and each incremental averaging about 0.3GB. Storing three weekly full backups and six incremental backups per laptop is around 1200GB of raw data, but because of pooling and compression only 150GB is needed.
• Optional compression support further reducing disk storage. Since only new files (not already pooled) need to be compressed, there is only a modest impact on CPU time.
• No client-side software is needed. The standard smb protocol is used to extract backup data on WinXX clients. On linux clients, tar over ssh/rsh/nfs is used to backup the data. With version 2.0.0, rsync is also supported on any client that has rsync or rysncd.
• A powerful web (http/cgi) user interface allows administrators to view log files, configuration, current status and allows users to initiate and cancel backups and browse and restore files from backups.
• A full set of restore options is supported, including direct restore (via smbclient, tar, or rsync/rsyncd) or downloading a zip or tar file.
• Supports mobile environments where laptops are only intermittently connected to the network and have dynamic IP addresses (DHCP).
• Flexible configuration parameters allow multiple backups to be performed in parallel, specification of which shares to backup, which directories to backup or not backup, various schedules for full and incremental backups, schedules for email reminders to users and so on. Configuration parameters can be set system-wide or also on a per-PC basis.
• Users are sent periodic email reminders if their PC has not recently been backed up. Email content, timing and policies are configurable.
• Tested on Linux, Freenix and Solaris hosts, and Linux, Win95, Win98, Win2000 and WinXP clients.
• Detailed documentation.
• Open Source hosted by SourceForge and freely availble under GPL.

We really liked their first point. As a GIS organisation we inadvertently have multiple copies of our basedata directories on different desktop and laptop machines. The result of this is wasted storage. Knowing that identical files will only be referenced once is a huge plus in my books!

After deciding that this what we were after, I started the install process - which was REALLY easy. I fired up Synaptic Packet Manager, choose backuppc, and chose install. As part of the install it asked me I wanted to install apache (webserver), as well as samba(windows filesharing), which I did. At the end of the install I was given a link to the configuration webpage (http://localhost/backuppc) and a username and password, with instructions on how to change the password.

I then logged into the website and very quickly worked out how to add some hosts, and configure those hosts. I wont go into the detail of that, but it is very well documented on the web. With the windows computers I was able to add backup shares to full drives such as d$ or c$ and specify a authorised username and password to allow this. I am also able to add file/directory inclusions and exclusions (as would be expected).

The main configuration file allows me to setup blackout periods (i.e. when backups must not happen) and wakeup hours (when to wakeup network computers and start backups or check the status of the backup.

So far I have been extremely impressed with ts speed and the ease at which it connects to both our windows and linux servers and PC's. The only faults I may have are:

1. The fact that network credentials are stored unencrypted
2. Laptop PC's that are on and off the networks battle to get an initial backup set, and the software keeps resetting and starting from new. To get this right I had to leave the laptops unattended for an evening while it completed a full backup.

Other than that - I will give BackupPC an 8/10. Great software that does what it says, and very easy to setup.

It is very difficult to describe all the options or show everything available through screenshots - but I have included some screenshots from the project website.

A while back, while working on a rural settlements database, we were asked to consider the SAGNS database as a reference for settlement names. The data that we received was, to put it mildly, very poor. Locations were in the sea, in the northern hemisphere, in South America and for 50% of the database - nowhere at all. added to that, the alphanumeric data was full of mistakes and errors.

it therefore came as no surprise, when we were asked recently to check a name with the same database. I decided to go to their website to request the latest database (in the vain hope that they had done some updating and error-checking) when I was presented with:

Thanks for the warning Google!

Seems to be a trend as the the ANC website was recently hacked, offering, amongst other things "free porn"

Baiscally it boils down to the hacker using the Gmail password recovery which emailed the password to that Gmail account users secondary mail account. When requesting the password recovery tool,  Gmail offers a reminder as to which email account it is in the form of *******@h******.com. The hacker then guessed it to be a hotmail account and through a process of gathering this users personal information online, worked out the full email. He then went onto hotmail and realised this email was no longer active. Why? because hotmail de-activates emails that have not been accessed in 9 months. after registering the account, he re-did the gmail password recovery and was soon browsing the twitter employee's personal gmail account. Through that he was able to gain access to passwords for a host of other sites etc. As they mention in the article, it is like domino's

Ekahau offers a range of features depending on the version you choose (from Free to Survey professional). From their website, the primary features are listed as:

"Ever wondered how far your wireless goes, or how far do the neighbouring wireless networks extend to? Ekahau HeatMapper will display the coverage area of all the access points in the area - on a map. You can display the combined coverage of the access points, or analyze them one-by-one"

"Want to know where other wireless access points are located? After performing the site survey, HeatMapper will accurately the Wi-Fi access points in your facility - and anything that's leaking in from the outside."

I immediately though this looked like a really cool application that essentially allows for a spatial representation of a wireless network. I downloaded it that day and did some small tests around the office, and the forgot about it for a couple of weeks. until i was trying to use my home wireless in an obscure part of my house. Inside my house, I have a reasonable idea of where I can or cannot connect, but have not really checked out my property, so I though this was a perfect time to give Ekahau Heat Mapper a real test.

When you right-click to finish, the software summarises all you points and interpolates them to a heat map of signal strength. You can then export the output out to an image. With the free version you cannot save your survey. A portion of the output of my survey is shown below:

 
P.s for those wishing to hack my network - it is not open!

The only real drawbacks of the free version I would say are:
1. You cannot turn your path off when you are plotting your locations (i.e. I would like to save a image of my heat map without those ghastly green arrows)
2. It does not handle double stories - but I can understand this as it is not an simply task to handle spatially.

I would expect that the survey versions of the software can handle this.

I imagine it would be quite an interesting task to do for free/pay for public hotspots such as an airport. Additionally, a community contributed view of open wireless AP's may be interesting to see in a heat map format such as this!

What we first did is create a database driven layer control, enabling the user to turn layers and labels on or off. The url is then passed to the server with the appropriate layers defined

i.e. - &LAYERS = Imagery, Conservation, Compartments, Rivers

This handled the display of layers and labels.

The next step was to provide tools for changing the label field, label size, outline colour, colour and layer transparency (as seen in the second diagram. This all done by URL substitution. The basics of this can be read at http://mapserver.org/cgi/controls.html.

Layer Colour and Outline Colour

From the above link we were easily able to work out how to change the colour and outline colour which is simply a matter of adding the following to your url:

&map.layer[Compartments].class[0].style[0]=COLOR+R+G+B
or
&map.layer[Compartments].class[0].style[0]=OUTLINECOLOR+R+G+B

where R=Red, G=Green and B=Blue, and the [0] represents the first style in the first class

Opacity

Transparency/opacity is a layer specific attribute in your map file, so this would be added to your url as:

&map.layer[Compartments]=OPACITY+64

Label Size and Label Field

Changing the Label items gave me a bit more trouble than the layer specific attributes, and eventually after consulting with the mailing list, I was able to find out how to do this. First off, you need Mapserver 5.4 or greater as a lot of the required functionality has been added only recently.

Changing the Label Size uses the LABEL+SIZE parameter and would be added like:

&map.layer[Compartments].class[0]=LABEL+SIZE+7

Changing the label field was a little more complicated and required us to make a modification to our map file first. at the "layer" level the "VALIDATION" item needs to be added - i.e.

VALIDATION 
      'labelitem' '^Compt_No|Age|Area_ha|Species|Pd_yy|Method$'
END
LABELITEM 'COMPT_NO'

The validation item provides a regular expression of all the available label fields that can be passed through the URL. These are then changed by simply adding the following to the URL

&map.layer[Compartments]=LABELITEM+Species

or Method or Area_ha etc.

Therefore, a final fully customised URL with modification to the layer properties of a particular layer may look something like:

http://server/cgi-bin/mappage.aspx?mf=mapfile.map&map.layer[Compartments].class[0].style[0]= COLOR+102+153+153&map.layer[Compartments].class[0].style[1]= OUTLINECOLOR+204+102+51&map.layer[Compartments]= OPACITY+75&map.layer[Compartments= LABELITEM+Species&map.layer[Compartments].class[0]= LABEL+SIZE+8+END&LAYERS= Compartments&TRANSPARENT= true&SERVICE= WMS
&VERSION= 1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&STYLES=&EXCEPTIONS= application%2Fvnd.ogc.se_inimage&FORMAT= image%2Fpng&SRS=EPSG%3A2054&BBOX= -83995.61806901402, -3310657.473814449, -71185.38193098598, -3303694.526185551&WIDTH= 1452&HEIGHT= 789

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the release of OpenLayers 2.8, the latest stable release of OpenLayers.

The 2.8 release adds a number of important features, the full list of which can be found in the Release Notes, at http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.8/Notes. Some of the highlights include:

• Support for multi-layer vector feature selection
• Support for drawing text on vector layers
• Several new controls
• 5 new layer types, including OSM, ArcXML, and more.
• The long-awaited WFS protocol support, and related improvements

... and many other new features and bug fixes that you can see detailed in the release notes linked above.

For information on possible changes that will need to be made between this version of OpenLayers and previous versions, please look at the Release notes, available at the Release Notes information:- http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.7/Notes#CompatibilityNotes

Looks like it is time to upgrade.

LoadModule aspdotnet_module "modules/mod_aspdotnet.so"

You then need to add a pointer to the Asp.net Client files like this:

#AddHandler fro asp.net
 AddHandler asp.net asax ascx ashx asmx aspx axd config cs csproj licx rem resources resx soap vb vbproj vsdisco webinfo 
 
 AliasMatch /aspnet_client/system_web/(\d+)_(\d+)_(\d+)_(\d+)/(.*) "C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v$1.$2.$3/ASP.NETClientFiles/$4" 
  <Directory "C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v*/ASP.NETClientFiles"> 
    Options FollowSymlinks 
    Order allow,deny 
    Allow from all 
  </Directory>

And then finally, you configure your virtual host:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    ServerName server.aspnetsite
    DocumentRoot "D:/httpd/aspnetsite"
   
   AspNetMount / "D:/httpd/aspnetsite" 
   #Alias / "D:/httpd/aspnetsite" 
   <Directory "D:/httpd/aspnetsite"> 
   Options FollowSymlinks ExecCGI 
   Order allow,deny 
   Allow from all 
   DirectoryIndex Default.htm Default.html Default.aspx default.aspx
</Directory> 

</VirtualHost>

As you can see, I have mounted using the root (/). This is because I want my site to run from the root of my virtual host. If I wanted it to run form a virtual directory, I would have had "/Virtual" and then I would need to uncomment the "Alias" and specift "/Virtual" for that as well.

Hope this helps out for those who need it!

1. Existing virtual application under the root stopped working
2. Links from dasBlog and the existing website would need to be re-directed to the updated URL

The first problem was easy to fix as we have implemented the location web.config setting to handle this. For those who are not aware of how to allow your site to have virtual directories underneath, you just need to add the wrap your <system.web> in a location setting - i.e:

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
      <system.web>
      </system.web>
</location>

We did have one issue with existing application that were DotNet 3.5. For some reason we needed to comment out the following in the web.config. still not sure of the exact reason why.

<sectionGroup name="scripting" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35">
<section name="jsonSerialization" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingJsonSerializationSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="Everywhere" />
<section name="profileService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingProfileServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />
<section name="authenticationService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />

The handling of broken URL's was fixed very easily with Casey Neehouse's 404 Redirect Control. It is not readily available for download, but if you get hold of him on his website or on the umbraco forum he will send it onto you. Easy to implement and does what its meant to do!

So, there we have, a brand new theme and an up to date umbraco installation!

1. The developers of these FOSS products we are using are really clever!
2. The OSGEO team is doing a fantastic job in the promotion of FOSS products
3. Bearing in mind that this is a developer's conference, there was a lot of geek speak that went right over the head, but there was definitely some new technologies to look up
4. Some very interesting comparisons of Mapserver vs Geoserver. This has prompted me to consider not relying entirely on Mapserver, but also using Geoserver.
5. I learnt a bit about how to use tilecache properly!
6. A product that I have overlooked, Sextante, is absolutely brilliant, and I am really looking forward to playing with it in combination with gvSIG.

And what did I think was lacking?

1. I was disappointed to see no presentation on featureserver

And the South African perspective?

This I found the most interesting observation. There was a lot of talk about South Africa taking initiative in implementing FOSS solutions, but in reality this is going to take a VERY long time. Of Course it will be up to us to educate them. From what I could tell, the only national government representatives were the NSIF and DLA. NSIF seems to be taking some initiative with open source, but they really need to focus on their implementation model, or else all there effort will fail. For a national metadata collection framework to work, they need to hands on assist local and district municipalities over a 2 to 3 year timeframe. From what I could tell, that is not their plan. Of course they will do roadshows, but that will not publish the metadata.

I was pleased to see representatives from local and district municipalities and hopefully they will stand up and shout to national government. The real problem of course is that local government falls under DTLGA, and there was absolutely no representation from DTLGA (that I could see anyway). This is the department that is primarily responsible for GIS data management and implementation at a provincial level, and I am really disappointed that no-one was here to see the excitement, vigour and technical experience that is associated with FOSS GIS software.

We will of course using this fantastic software, and hopefully with some time, we will be able to readily implement in government...lets hope!