Month: March 2008

Winmail.dat Viewers (Mac and Windows)

I occasionally run into a winmail.dat file that I can’t open (typically because some outlook user has “rich text” as their default email type. Although, occasionally they aren’t sure how this happened and the default is HTML or plain text.

I wanted to post on two utilities (one for MacOSX and one for Windows) that allows you to open these files and see the attachments contained within these annoying files. Thanks Microsoft!

Windows:
Winmail Opener
http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/

MacOSX:
TNEF’s Enough:
http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/index.html

Useful little programs for getting around these problematic files, and definitely a lifesaver when you have a winmail.dat and need the contents.

SyncServer Unexpectedly Quit (resolved)

I believe that I have finally resolved the problem on my MacBook when starting Mail.app that it would display this error message “SyncServer has unexpectedly quit” with a relaunch button.

After doing a few google searches I found a site that referenced this problem a way to resolve it.
Link

Since, I wasn’t using .Mac for anything the solution was to:
1) Delete the following folder: /Users//Library/Application Support/SyncServices/
2) Reboot

Bluetooth AV Controls under Windows with iTunes

In this post, I wanted to document the steps that I had to follow to enable the A/V controls (play, pause, next song, previous song) buttons of my Motorola-S9 headset with my windows computer using iTunes.

Setup used:

  • Motorola S9 headset
  • Dell Latitude D830
  • Dell internal Bluetooth adapter (2.0 adapter with A2DP and AVRCP profiles)
  • Standard Drivers from Dell’s site (Toshiba drivers)
  • iTunes (v7.6.1.9)

I successfully paired the Motorola S9 headset with the Dell Laptop and it appeared as a Headset (Device Class: Audio/Video Wearable Headset Device, and Service Claass: Audio Sink). Once complete, I could listen to the music from my laptop but could not control the playback.

I confirmed that the Dell Bluetooth adapter in the Latitude D830 has the A2DP and AVRCP profiles so that it should allow the audio playback controls, however it wasn’t working. After digging online at both the iTunes site and the Dell site I had determined there must be an incompatibility with the setup that I was using. However, when I was unable to make Windows Media Player work as well… I figured there had to be a configuration issue.

I opened up the Bluetooth Settings window (double-click on the bluetooth icon in the systray, near the clock) and started looking everywhere for a setting to enable this. I found it under Bluetooth->options and on the General tab at the bottom is “AV Remote Control Service” but it wasn’t checked. So I checked the box and then tried the headset Play button and lo and behold Windows Media player popped up. So now it was talking using the AVRCP controls but how do I make it talk to iTunes instead.

So I checked the other tabs under Bluetooth->options and found on the “Other” tab the section for AV Player Selection with a button “AV Player…”. Clicking on the button you are presented with a window that allows you to pick the program for each of the following:

  • Play music file
  • Play CD Audio
  • Play DVD

And below that is a setting for where it displays the “command” that it was requested to do. I selected iTunes for the Music File and CD Audio and set the Display position to Bottom-Right where all my other alerts appear and clicked OK.

Success! The Motorola S9 now correctly controls iTunes for Play, Pause, Next Track, Previous Track.

I hope this helps someone else, as I was surprised that I could get the S9 to work just fine with my iMac but couldn’t get it working with iTunes under Windows. Apple probably has all the services enabled by default, where it seems that Dell doesn’t enable the PAN Networking service, nor the all important AV Remote Control Service.

easyPages v0.22 is available for download

You can download it here: http://snydersoft.com/easyPages/

I recently updated easyPages to include a few enhancements:

  • Added file icons for MSProject, WinZip, and Unknown filetypes
  • Display last modified time in format “(Updated DD-MMM-YYYY HH:MM)” after file names
  • Display “new” icon if the file was updated in the last 14days

easyPages is a PHP script that creates a listing of the documents/folders that are contained in the same directory on the webserver as this script. The resources directory contains all the necessary graphics. This script was created originally as a way for me to quickly post new documents to my Intranet pages at work, without needing to edit the HTML/PHP to create new links to them.

easyPages requires a web server with PHP 4 or higher installed.

Installation:
Extract the easyPages*_Script_and_Graphics.zip file to a folder in your webspace
Create subfolders (beside the index.php) and they will appear when you browse to that folder on your web server.

There is a “Sample_Files” folder in the .zip that will also help you get started with creating the file structure.

Limitations:
Currently, easyPages-v0.22 only supports one level of sub-folders.

Download is available at http://snydersoft.com/easyPages/

Twitter and WordPress

I wanted to document one of the hacks that I have made to a the Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget.

Edit to “Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget”

I wanted a line break after the time, so I added the following line:
li.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));

As the last line inside the following “if” statement:
if ( showTimeFirst == 1) {

I also attempted to hack up the Twitter Updater to provide a nicer URL to twitter that would then appear nice in the above mentioned Twitter SideBar Widget… but ran into some issues. I have determined that I need to make the change to the Sidebar Widget and detect the URL and then place it into a ““. A project for another day.

Default to Standards mode

I am very excited to hear that Microsoft has decided to reverse it’s decision on the default behavior of IE 8. This is great news for the Web and should keep us moving in a more standards based web platform. Every good decision like this helps to further the standards movement within browsers and keeps raising the level of functionality available to web developers/designers.

Twitter’n

Now that I have successfully moved to my new web hosting provider, I am ready to get back to blogging more regularly. The move was relatively easy, but took time to get everyone to play nicely and move the DNS records and get WordPress upgraded and all the old articles restored.

One of the first things I have decided to play with is Twitter. I am going to use the IM -> twitter interface for the common updates, since I don’t have a text-messaging plan on my phone anymore. Since I always have IM open at work, and they have a nice interface from GTalk->Twitter… why not.