Sweex external harddisk enclosure ST011

I bought a Sweex ST011 external harddisk enclosure in order to connect and reuse some old harddisk. My brother in law bought a similar device during the holiday and installed it in a breeze.

I'm just in the middle of getting this thing working. Status so far is that the device is recognised by Windows XP Pro but the disk is not visible.

It seems more people are having the same problem

http://www.hebig.com/archives/001911.shtml

One of the solutions mentioned is:

How to get XP Computer Management to let you partition the USB extertnal Drive Pictures and text from following link:http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/usb_hard-drive.html

Words only:Installing the Hard Drive in Windows XP

Unfortunately you can't just put a drive in the case, plug it in and it will work. You will need to initialize and format the drive before it will show up in "My Computer" or Windows explorer.
Go into -> control panel-> Administrative tools-> Computer Management-> Disk Management.
Select the new hard drive which should appear like the drive pictured below
click the left pane of the hard drive, not the space section (see below)
left pane right pane (space)
right click and select "initialize disk"click "OK"
right click the right part of the display - the partition display part, and select "New Partition". This starts the New Partition Wizard. Select Primary Partition. Leave partition size alone unless you want several partitions let windows choose the drive letter or change it to what you want. If you want use NTFS or change to the file system you need. Use the default allocation unit if that fits your needs or use another if that will better fit your storage needs. If you are storing large files, larger allocation units will give better performance. Finish the wizard.
Formatting will take quite awhile for larger disks. Have coffee or any other favored beverage, or two. When finished, the drive will appear as below, "Healthy".
The drive will now show up in "My Computer" and Windows explorer, etc.
Ready for use!


I will post if this works for me.

iTunes not just for iPods

iTunes is a great music player and organizer. Unfortunately iTunes is made to only synchronize with iPods. Not everyone own an iPod, though Apple certainly would have loved that. How great would it not be if you could synchronize your non-iPod MP3 player, your Playstation Portable and your Walkman phone with your iTunes Library? Enter: iTunes Agent!

Sharepoint Roadmap

Download the original from Microsoft

Application Portfolio Management (APM) Scenario

Application Portfolio Management (APM) Scenario: Sidney Higa, CIO of Wide World Importers, desperately needed to get more visibility into her application portfolio. More than 70 percent of the annual IT budget went to supporting existing applications across the organization, and Sidney needed a better understanding of how this expense contributed to the business. Sidney wanted to rationalize her portfolio, but she did not have a solid grasp of the number of applications deployed at Wide World Importers, and what business value they provided. She did know that different applications were used in silos across lines of business and geographies, and wanted to understand if there were redundant applications that could be consolidated or retired altogether.
As a first step, Sidney instructed her team to create an inventory of all the applications at Wide World Importers in the Portfolio Builder module of Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. The team agreed on which key metrics and standard descriptive attributes to capture in order to effectively evaluate the applications, including metrics for annual cost, architectural fit, process contribution, risk, and operational performance. The team then began to create the inventory.
One important metric, the process contribution assessment, included mapping each application to the standard library of organizational business processes. That information populated Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 report templates, enabling Sidney’s team to identify functional overlap between applications that support the same business processes, and to highlight opportunities for better application integration. After running the report, Sidney noticed some key processes were supported by multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, suggesting a functional overlap and a potential opportunity to rationalize these ERP applications.
Upon completing the application repository, Sidney now had reliable visibility into the status of her application portfolio, with the core data and a foundation to effectively rationalize the portfolio and make application life cycle decisions.

Retrieving RSS feeds through proxy

An excellent simple solution for retrieving RSS feeds in Sharepoint is the webpart created by George Tsiokos

For proxy servers & faster performance, I recommend downloading Wget to automatically retrieve RSS feeds from outside the company to a locally run web server. Wget can retrieve remote RSS feeds through proxies that require authentication. You can create a batch file that runs Wget against all external RSS feeds, and configure it to run as a scheduled task. Then, point msxsl to the local web server's cached copy to generate the DWP file. In this configuration, WSS-RSS will retrieve the RSS feed from your local web server for display in SharePoint. You should also lower SharePoint's cache time of WSS-RSS because it is retrieving the feed locally. Because the latency and bandwidth favor your local network, performance will be greatly improved.

Some uses for RSS on Sharepoint

A Sharepoint user reported:

"I've got SharePoint running to administer a development effort, and having an RSS feed of 'cases closed in the last 7 days' coming from our bug tracker appearing on the SharePoint front page is EXCELLENT. "

Bugs or changes or whatever.

Wireless Distribution System (WDS) / Repeater / Bridge

I'm using the Linksys WRT54G wireless router for a couple of years now. I'm still using a wired connection to my attic where a number of old PC's are located. Investing in those machines is not worthwhile so I was wondering if I could place a second WRT54G in the attic and connect the old PC's and hub to it. As I found out I need a concept WDS for bridging/repeating the connection.

Standard my WRT54G v2 has no configuration settings for this.

An option is to flash an Open Source firmware from OpenWRT.

This is an ASCII art for what WDS can be useful.

                / - - - Wireless Clients
               |
INTERNET-----WRT54G_1- - - - - -WRT54G_2 - - - - - Wireless Clients
             | | | |            | | | |
            4 clients          4 clients

----- Cable link
- - - Wlan link

With WDS you can connect wireless clients to all APs