Contacts appear twice in Outlook Address Book List

I recently ran into a problem after moving someone’s Outlook pst file to a new computer. (This was actually moving from Outlook with Office XP, to Outlook 2003). I replaced the default Outlook.pst file from the new installation with the one I had saved from the old computer. (Which, under Windows XP, was stored in C:\Documents and Settings\<profilename>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook ) After doing this, the existing email, calendar and contacts were appearing fine in Outlook. However, when creating a new mail message, and then clicking the “To” button, an error message appeared saying that no contacts were available.  For some reason, although the contacts were available, there were not accessible to this process.

The first step in solving this problem was to select Contacts, then right-click on the Contacts icon under My Contacts. I selected Properties, then the Outlook Address Book tab. On this screen, I selected the checkbox for “Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book”. After clicking OK, and then repeating the process of a new email message, and clicking the “to” button, I still got the error message. However, when I clicked the droplist for the “Show names from the:” field, there were now TWO entries for Contacts. The first was empty, but the second appropriately showed the contacts. Functional, but clunky.

To solve this problem, I had to go to the main Outlook screen, and select Tools/Email Accounts… Then I selected View or change existing directories or address books. With the lone address book highlighted, I clicked the “Change…” button. On the screen that appeared, there were two Contact list entries. With the top one highlighted, I clicked “Remove Address Book”. After closing and re-opening Outlook, problem solved! One address book/contact list, accessible as expected.

Windows Update problem after Windows XP SP3

A lot of people are apparently having a problem with failed Windows Update patch installations on machines with Windows XP Service Pack 3. The problem occurs regardless of whether Automatic Updates are configured or if instead the user manually visits the Windows Update site. The updates can be downloaded, but almost immediately after the installation is attempted, the following error message appears (in the case of using Automatic Updates):

Some updates could not be installed

The following updates were not installed:

<list of updates appears here>

(This problem does not appear to be dependent on any particular update.)

There is a Microsoft support article that describes steps that resolves this problem, although note that the description contained in the support article does not appear to directly describe the SP3 condition which apparently causes this particular problem. The specific cause has to do with a orphaned DLL that exists on the machine, but does not have a correctly correlated registry entry.

The Microsoft support article is here.

FYI, I used Method #1 of the two described in the article. Worked great for me!

Slower computers staggered by AVG 8.0 after system boot

I recently upgraded an older computer (733 MHz Pentium III; yes, very old!) from free AVG 7.5 to AVG 8.0. I then noticed some problems with the computer responding extremely slowly. Opening the Process Manager revealed that the problem was the process avgrsx.exe. It was taking up about 85% to 90% of the processor.

It turns out that when the system is booted, AVG 8.0 automatically performs a system scan. On slower computers like the one I’m describing, this process can really swamp the processor; in my case, for the first five or six minutes after bootup. After the scan is complete, the processor overhead for avgrsx.exe drops to zero except when opening an application, etc.

I’ve seem some reports that indicate that disabling the Link Scanner feature resolves this problem. I have not found this to be the case; perhaps people trying this “fix” happened to try it right around the time that the machine completes its initial scan, and thus saw the processor utilization fall about the same time.

Great little utility to print directory trees, folders and filenames

A friend of mine just pointed me to a really cool little freeware tool that solved an annoying problem I’ve run into many times over the years. If you have ever needed to capture or print out a list of files in a folder, or an entire directory tree from a Windows computer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Of all the things that are possible from the Windows interface, this has never been straightforward. In the past, I’ve often resorted to taking a screenshot of the Explorer window, but this often is impractical as it is only possible if you have a fairly short structure to print out.

The tool is called YourDir. Like many freeware tools, the interface is a bit non-standard, but it outputs printouts, images, or .csv files, and you can choose to include files, or instead just output the directory tree. Overall it’s a breeze to use and neatly solves an annoying problem, so despite the slightly odd interface it provides a pretty ideal example of a useful utility. It’s really small (68 kB extracted) and as a standalone executable, requires no install.

Current version is 1.7; you can find it via Download.com here.

LG EnV won’t recognize .mp3 files

My wife really likes her LG EnV phone. One of the features she uses heavily is the .mp3 playback, along with a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones. But at first, I was going crazy because I couldn’t get songs to be reliably recognized when they were added to the my_music folder on the microSD card. I thought perhaps there wasn’t a proper “refresh” or “rebuild” of the music database when starting the phone up with the new files on it. After a lot of wasted time, I finally discovered that the problem was with the .mp3 filenames (or more accurately, with the EnV’s music player’s handling of .mp3 filenames). If the filenames contain more than about 30 characters, the phone simply will not recognize the files.

Note this is the filenames (as in MyArtist-MySong.mp3) that you see as you are copying files to the microSD card, NOT the ID3 tags that are read by most music players. There also seemed to be a potential problem with some odd characters. So bottom line: make sure the files you put on the microSD card have filenames with 30 characters or less, and only contains basic characters such as alphanumerics, underscore, hyphen, etc.

Erratic PPTP VPN behavior with iTunes and Bonjour

After a lot of head-scratching, I discovered that recent problems I was having with VPN connectivity was related to installing iTunes.

(Quick list of specifics of my case: Windows XP client, Windows built-in PPT VPN client, connecting to Net Integrations Technologies servers; all servers with identical VPN termination configurations)

I found that all of a sudden, while I could still successfully establish a VPN connection to all of the networks I had always worked with, for some of them, none of the resources could be accessed. So, even though I had the tunnel established, I could not even ping, by name or IP address, any device within that network. For other networks, things worked perfectly, as they always had done.

By trial and error, I eventually discovered that a recent update to iTunes, somewhere around version 7.6 (which apparently includes Bonjour) was the problem. Bonjour is a “zero configuration” network discovery technology that supports the ability to easily recognize other network devices and applications on a local network. It turns out that Bonjour makes changes to your local route table that certain VPN clients do not like. Apple somewhat cryptically notes: Some VPN Clients interfere with Bonjour although it doesn’t point out the more irritating inverse behavior.

Because Bonjour is a separate service, it may be possible to stop the Bonjour service when VPN connectivity is desired; it may also be possible to simply uninstall Bonjour, and leave iTunes functioning without Bonjour. I have not yet tested these possibilities, so YMMV.

Criticize yourself!

Against a backdrop of relentless self-affirmation over the last couple of decades, a primary skill has fallen by the wayside (and unnecessarily so!). It is the ability to take a look at oneself, and honestly recognize that you suck. Not overall, not as an entire person, but in particular skills or characteristics.

Why should this be so hard? No one can possibly excel at everything, or even most things. Further, only by recognizing shortcomings can anything be done about them. Even taking the shortsighted, selfish point of view that an individual would be prefer to not be viewed negatively in any way, the best way to avoid this perception is to figure it out yourself and change it (if possible) before others notice. And yet, time after time, people frantically attempt to excuse or deny their weaknesses, which only makes the problem more obvious to others.

I believe this tendency can be traced to the ubiquitous and mindless mandate to “believe in yourself”. I’m not trying to say that “believing in yourself” is a bad thing. The problem is in equating “believing in yourself” with “everything I do is great and I’m great at everything”. Can’t we teach ourselves and our kids to recognize that all of us suck at different things? That successful people not only build on their strengths, but also seek to identify, and then address their weaknesses? That the shame is not in having weaknesses, but instead in denying them?

Clinton the Manager vs. Obama the Leader? Who cares?

You’ve probably been seeing a lot of stories that distill the Democratic presidential race down to this: because there are so few policy differences between the candidates, the relevant question is whether you looking for an effective manager (where Clinton would like to be perceived as stronger) or an inspirational leader (where Obama looks stronger). Never mind the actual accuracy of this alignment… we all know that is irrelevant.

But really, does any of this matter? At the end of the day, people tend to vote by identity politics and by intangibles, while policy positions or even managerial style be damned.

There’s no doubt a large percentage of people support candidates they identify with. Thus, the depressing reality is that a significant portion of women who support Clinton do so primarily because she is female, and significant portion of blacks who support Obama do so primarily because they share his race. (As an aside, this clearly applies in all directions; a lot of old white men will vote for an old white guy primarily because he’s NOT black or female, especially in a general election against Clinton or Obama.)

For those whose support is not already locked in by identity, another significant chunk of voters make their decisions based on meaningless soft intangibles; appearance, tone of voice, mannerisms. I suspect Ms. Clinton is at a serious disadvantage within this group, and this group alone may prove her undoing.

However, over-emphasizing these “identity and intangibles” drivers is also a risk. The unfortunate result of the above is that the media absorbs and assumes these factors as not just a tendency, but a total reality. The soft underbelly of this blanket assumption has been exposed in the media handling of black women voters, who are ALL portrayed as being helplessly torn between supporting one or the other of their political identities for its own sake (“are you black first or a woman first?”). These stories often are presented with nary a whiff of expectation that ANY African-American women might actually be concerned with whatever policy or governance style differences may be found to exist between the Democratic candidates.

It’s a disgrace that there are indeed way too many voters who think no further than their own race, gender, and irrelevant superficialities; but perhaps a bigger disgrace is that all voters (especially black women voters) are being painted by the media with the same brush.

Wiping data from a Blackberry 7100t

I needed to find a quick reference on how to reset my T-Mobile Blackberry 7100t before turning it in for an upgrade rebate. Although I found quite a few references for resetting many other Blackberry devices to clear personal data, I never did find specific instructions for this process for my model.

Finally, after poking around, I found it under:

Settings/Security

Edit the password field as if to change the password, and one of the available options will be “Wipe Handheld”. Select this, and you will be prompted to enter “blackberry’ to confirm. Wait a minute or two, and everything will be cleared and reset.

Installing a second wireless access point in a home network

Recently I decided to add an extra wireless access point to my home network, because I had poor coverage in certain areas. I’m pretty technically adept, but I’m also a strong advocate of leeching shamelessly from the experience of others who have gone before me, thus avoiding unnecessary pain So, while I had a decent idea of the best way to set this up, I went Googling for some confirmation of my plan of how to approach things. I was suprised that I couldn’t quickly find relevant info. Hence, after successfully getting set up, I decided to post this for the next person in my shoes.

First, some assumptions. The following is based on these specifics of my situation, so if your requirements are different, your mileage may vary.

Assumption 1: Typical home network with existing wireless; a single high-speed internet connection, feeding into a consumer wireless router/firewall/switch, with various computers attaching to the wireless router via wireless and/or wired connections.

Assumption 2: You simply want an additional wireless access point; i.e. you don’t need or want an additional subnetwork or routing.

Assumption 3: You don’t care to spend the money ($100+) to add a wireless network extender. These things exist, but unless you can’t use Assumption 4, they really don’t provide any benefit over an additional generic access point other than ease of setup (which we intend to address below).

Assumption #4: You have a wired ethernet connection to your existing home network available to the spot where you’d like to place your new wireless access point. (If not, you might want to reconsider Assumption 3.)

Assumption 5: You’re not interested in the bandwidth trade-offs and vendor-specific requirements associated with utilizing Wireless Distribution Systems (WDS).

Assumption 6: Because at this point you can usually find wireless routers cheaper than actual standalone wireless access points, you’ve got a wireless router for this purpose. (Wow, the assumptions are almost longer than the real info!)

What we’re essentially doing here is dumbing down your new wireless router to act like a plain-Jane access point (but with some extra switch ports).

Step 1: Physically connect a PC/laptop to the new wireless router. Do NOT use the WAN/Internet port; use one of the LAN/switch ports.

Step 2: Log in to the web administration interface of the new wireless router (see its accompanying documentation for default IP address and username/pass).

Step 3: Assign an IP address to the new wireless router that is on the same subnetwork as your existing home network, but not in the range given out by your existing wireless router or used by any other existing device on your network. For example, (using Linksys defaults as a reference) if your home network is 192.168.1.x, your existing wireless router’s IP address is 192.168.1.1, and the current DHCP range is 192.168.1.100 through 192.168.1.199, assign the new wireless router something like 192.168.1.2. You might be required to relogin to the web interface at the new address.

Step 4: Turn off DHCP on the new router. (You only want one DHCP service giving out IP addresses for your network)

Step 5: Configure desired wireless security (WEP, WPA, etc.)

Step 6: I shouldn’t have to say this one, but make sure to change the default password for the web admin interface.

Step 7: Connect one of the LAN/switch ports to the available wired ethernet connection to your network (see Assumption 4). Don’t plug anything into the WAN/Internet port of the new wireless router.

Step 8: Create profiles on the appropriate computers to access the new wireless router.

That should do it!