Timberline Employee Blog

Microsoft recently released Pro Photo Tools for XP and Vista as a free download.

MS Pro Photo Tools is an easy way to edit your photos meta-data information. You photos already have several items stamped on them from your camera but they probably do not have longitude and latitude in the photo.

“Why would I want that?”, you ask?

Latitude and Longitude is how we mark a spot on the map. Say you are looking at your photos and you can’t remember where they were taken then this, or a similar program, is for you.

You will need a GPS so you can download a track log to your computer. Many hand-held GPS units will allow you to do this. I have had great luck with Garmin hand-held units. You will need to take your GPS with you and have it on while you are taking your photos.

For best luck synchronize the time on your camera and gps before shooting.

After you do a test photo shoot you will need to get your data to your computer. Copy your photos to a working directory on your pc. Then you can use a program like EasyGPS to download your track log as a gpx file. The makers of EasyGPS are the same people who have pushed the gpx format and made it popular.

Open up Pro Photo Tools and open your images. Load up your track log and now you can attach latitude and longitude info to your photos.

If you don’t want automated location information you can even skip the GPS and add this information using the built-in Microsoft Virtual Earth to select your location.

When you are done save your work.

Now how do I view the locations?

Version 1 of MS Pro Photo Tool’s will let you view photos on a map but it doesn’t auto center on a selected photo which makes it difficult to use to view already tagged photos. I had to resort to a third party program to view geotagged photos. Google’s Picasa/Google Earth combination work nicely. You can also click through to a Google map using Apple’s Leopard operating system on geotagged photos.

qmail in some circles has had a bad rap because of its overly restrictive licensing policies and possibly its punctuation problem. Overly restrictive? Yes, it could only be distributed in source form. In order to use it you must compile it yourself. You could not distribute it compiled form and you couldn’t distribute patched sources for qmail.

Daniel J. Berstein recently made a public announcement that qmail, and the rest of what he has written and proviced to the public, is now placed in the Public Domain.

Watching the video I get the feeling that it is a reactive protest to other freely distributive licenses such as BSD and the GPL varriants. Whatever the reason, this means that all Linux projects like CentOS and Fedora can now distribute qmail without any licensing problems.

Now projects like QmailToaster and Dag Wieer’s RPM repository can now distribute compiled rpms instead of src.rpms.

For more than two decades I have been convinced that IBM PC clone based personal computers were the most cost effective way to compute. Fifteen years ago I operated a small local BBS on DOS and OS/2 operating systems. On that BBS we featured Fidonet messages and its accompanying Filebone freeware and shareware files.

One day I noticed a set of floppy images in my in folder. I found out that day that Linux was born. I tried it and discarded it. Almost a decade later, I now have Linux on 95% of the servers I build. The turning point for Linux was when easy CDROM based distributions started coming complete with GUI interfaces. GUI, while unnecessary for servers, is entirely necessary for self taught knowledge if only for multiple windows. Multiple windows can be opened and viewed at the same time. A help window and an application window or terminal window open at the same time can do wonders over a plain terminal or DOS window with ‘help’ or ‘man’. Sure you can swap to different screens but reading cryptic help messages and remembering after swapping screens can sometimes be problematic.

About this point I’ve used Macs for school and only very minimally for work. The online community has had a lot of OS Snobs. I never took Apple seriously, guilty of reverse snobbery. As far as I knew the added monetary cost of Mac equipment has either caused these people to be snobs because they spent too much and it had to get out of thier systems -or- they were already rich snobs. Either way, not for me at this time. Most of the applications I could find were all for purchase and expensive.

Windows from the ground up has been great as a single user multitasking operating system. It truly wasn’t good until WFW 3.11 when networking was introduced as part of the Windows package. And it truly hasn’t been great afterwords. Windows 98 is the closest thing to great that Microsoft has had since. I’m basing that in time to install, patch, load helper programs and plug-ins, and secure. Windows ME flopped. Windows XP added a lot of eye candy. Everybody likes eye candy and the Games. Windows XP does do better at the gaming experience except for Dungeon Keeper 2 which must be played on Windows 98 (I’m still looking to see if Leopard and Wine can do it.).

So lets go jump to 2004. Linux is great for file, web, and email servers. If you are not locked into vendor browsers and readers, Linux also makes for a good desktop. Windows XP is great at a user ‘experience’ but is poor on time invested on up-keep.  What is this OSX people have been talking about? Is it really built up on a Linux/Unix type foundation? It sounds interesting. Let me look up online what I can find out… Hmm still too much OS Snobbery clouding out the people who want to help.

Jump back to 2007. Vista. Before Microsoft it was singular. You could only look at one vista. Now Microsoft has pluralized Vista into too many options. The parties involved at Microsoft who pluralized Vista into more than three platforms probably work at Apple or even for somebody that Microsoft stomped upon to get to where it is at. I had a notebook with Vista on it. I returned it to the store I bought it. I have a PC with a free Vista upgrade. The upgrade is still sitting on my desk unopened. Vista has more eye candy and dashboard plug-ins than XP, but nobody can convince me of its main selling point, security. Microsoft as a business is built on upgrading, how do you convince people must upgrade unless what they have is unsecure? The face of computing has evolved since Microsoft incorporated but the business model in this arena has not. Driver support and corporate lock-in aside, ultimately for me it came down to the number of versions of Vista that turned me away. Vista caused me to to not buy a notebook, or rather Vista caused me to return the notebook I purchased. This must cost the manufacturer even more. Not only a lost sale, but a return to process.

What now? I finally need to replace some old equipment. Boot camp? What is Boot camp? This is starting to sound promising in the computing world. There is a notebook designed to run Windows XP and is being actively marketed and it is called Mac.

I picked up a MacBook Pro, upgraded to Leopard (OSX 10.5), ran the Boot Camp install, and installed XP from my own disks. All the necessary XP drivers are included on the Leopard disks. I found out later I needed the non Leopard restore disks to install iLife 08.

I’m quite happy now. Windows XP games and business apps work. My new notebook has Wireless N and bluetooth. If I install VMware Fusion, I can even run Dungeon Keeper 2. If I wanted to, I could even skip boot camp and run everything in VMware Fusion. I have found a lot of freeware ported from the same free software movements that are propelling Linux.

That would be the floppy disk. The last widely used version was a 3.5 inch disk in a hard shell. Inside it may have been floppy but anybody could quickly figure out that actually folding this disk would lead to its immediate destruction.

Flash drives and other media formats have done in the floppy disk. With emphasis now towards digital media content, typically the floppy disk can’t hold a single song under medium to high quality encoding. 

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and MS-DOS 6.22 was distributed on less than a dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. The Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems would have only taken around 450 floppy disks if distributed that way.  Windows Vista, if distributed on floppy disks would take over 2000.

Even the smallest flash drives you can find for free hold 50 times the space these disks can hold. A common flash drive size is now 4GB which is approximately 2500 times the size of a 1.44MB floppy disk.

So what do you do with all your old floppy disks?

Shoretel 7 now offers wav ringtones on Shoretel IP phones.

It is a bit tricky to implement. First you will need a wav file in an approved format. I used Audacity for the sound manipulation. After you chopped up your sound bite to a small enough clip do the following to make it usable on the Shoretel IP Phones.

1. Select the whole track.
2. Click on Tracks/Stereo to Mono (if you have a stereo track)
3. In the bottom left Project Rate selection box select either 8000 or 16000
4. Now export. Click File / Export As / Wav and give it a name and place to live.

Now take this new wav file over to your shoretel server and find your ftp root directory. Create a folder called ringtones and drop the wav file there.

Important. Check to see you can ftp this back. Open your browse your ftp server and see if you can open this file. In Internet Explorer type ftp://”your server name or ip address” and search for the file you dropped in.

Find an IP phone you want to change and get its mac address. It is likely the first half starts with 001049.  Now back at the ftproot folder create a file called shore_<your mac addess>.txt.  For example, shore_001049012BF4.txt is a valid file name. Inside this file place two lines.

WaveRinger1 L/rg 1.1.1.1/ringtone/customexternal.wav
WaveRinger2 L/r1 1.1.1.1/ringtone/custominternal.wav

Replace 1.1.1.1 with your servers IP address
Replace customexternal.wav with the ringtone filename for outside calls.
Replace custominternal.wav with the ringtone filename for internal calls.

You must also check to see if you can open this file by ftp as well. You may have to go and change permissions to be able to see these files. If you can’t see it, your phone can’t see it either.  This is what was stopping me the first day I tried the ringtones out.

Do not change any other files in this directory. You could make your phone system not work if you change the wrong file here.

Consult your Shoretel 7 Administrator’s Guide lists how to change ringtones for all of your ST530’s, or ST210’s, etc., all at the same time and how you can assign sounds to ringtones 2-4.  Only one set of two ringtones may be downloads to a phone at a time.