blog.rimann.org

Missing permissions tab in Outlook 2003

mario@rimann.org — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:55:00 +0200

Recently we had a problem with Outlook 2003 on one of our team members computer: He tried to share his own calendar to the rest of the team. But following the written guide he had, he ended up missing the permission tab. So he couldn't set the appropriate permissions.

We tried to re-configure his mail profile, even re-installed the whole office installation. Nothing helped. Even asking Google for "calendar share outlook"didn't bring up any help.

After a second run of search queries, we've found a simple and quick solution:

Go to the Add-In manager of Outlook and make sure, that both Exchange related Add-Ins are activated. You can find the detailed instructions to bring back thepermission tabs in KC's blog post.

Thanks for sharing this tip on the net! Helped me a lot!

Probably the last pictures from T3DD08

mario@rimann.org — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:48:00 +0200

Well, after thinking that I've already uploaded my photos from T3DD08, I was asked where my images are available. So I found out that I've completely forgot to upload them...

I took this as an opportunity to test flickr - and finally I managed to upload some nice shots. Hope you enjoy them!

You can now find my photos from T3DD08 on flickr.

Articles on Unit Testing in T3N Magazin

mario@rimann.org — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:37:00 +0200

T3N-Magazin issue 12 (sold starting this week) contains two articles that I wrote. Both cover the topic of unit testing, but each of them is focused on different things:

The first one is a general introduction on Unit Testing (why one should start using it) and also about the basic technologies like Fixtures and so on.

The second one then focuses on Unit Testing within the TYPO3 Framework, mainly on testing TYPO3 extensions.

Currently those articles are available in German only (the main language of the whole magazine). Maybe they will be published in an English translation somewhen...

Anyway, I hope that many of the readers can use the information in my articles to improve their development process. And (of course) I'm looking forward to any feedback on my writing!

Book review: Presentation Zen

mario@rimann.org — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:40:00 +0200

During the last weeks I read the book "Presentation Zen" from Garr Reynolds. With all the descriptions and those hundreds of examples, the book helped me a lot on understanding how to prepare for a presentation.

Following some of the principles from this book, I've changed my way of working on a presentation radically. Preparing a talk "the new way" is much cooler than with those old and ugly bullet lists.

Finally I held a presentation on Unit Testing during a conference with slides that did not contain any single bullet list, almost no text but some nice images. And hey, it worked out pretty well! I felt comfortable (besides beeing nervous as hell) - and the audience seemded to like the talk that much that they voted for me so that I won the best paper award at the end of the conference.

This book also changed my feeling when watching presentations from other persons. This week I was at a company's presentation about their services and stuff. C'mon - 10 entries in a bullet-list, some of them multi-line and that on one single slide. It's just a pain in the eyes...

Well, I can just recomment this book for everyone that has to prepare slides from time to time (and who hasn't to do that?)! It's worth every cent of it!

Unit Testing is like cooking!

mario@rimann.org — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:24:00 +0200

During the TYPO3 Developer Days 2008 in Elmshorn near Hamburg I had a talk about Unit Testing in general but also together with TYPO3. During the preparation I had some cool ideas which led to stuff like the title "Unit Testing is like cooking", funny slides and also some action during the presentation (Unit Testing with humans).

I'd like to thank all the persons which were involved in the preparation phase, but also all the visitors of T3DD08 that came to listen my talk (especially to all the volunteers that helped with the action part). Last but not least I'd like to thank all the guys that voted for my talk at the "Best Paper Award" which endet up in winning the Award at the end.

You can download the slides here.

Human difficulties in System Administration

mario@rimann.org — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:32:00 +0200

Today is a day that makes me feel very bad about my job. There are just to many things that come together today. Each of those problems alone could be handled - but the immense mass of concurrent issues drives me crazy. But it's not about the number of issues, but about the source of problem: They all rely on layer 8 of the ISO/OSI model (for the non techies: This means the problem comes from the humans that try to use the IT equipment).

This post is mainly for calming down and flushing some things that I have in my head - and to amuse some of my readers...

There is a blog post from a German System Administrator who writes about the reasons for not giving out administrative priviledges to the users of the network he's maintaining. It's written in German - sorry for all others. But how he writes his text is almost the same as I feel right now: Beeing pissed-off of stupid users that don't event think about using their brains...

Mini-Story #1 - Why do we train staff for certain procedures?

There is someone new in the team. On his first day he got a new notebook and some advice. One point in this short information was "If you ever have any problems with your equipment, write an email to our helpdesk. This ensures that your issue will be taken care of as soon as possible by one of the sysadmins on duty." He agreed.
30 minutes later, the same guy called one of the sysadmins on his direct phone line with something like "Hey, I'd like to have XY installed on my notebook".

Mini-Story #2 - Different understanding of priorities

Another staff member has a notebook from the company. This one is configured and working fine without problems. Now he bought a MacBook on his own. We're open and everyone can use the equipment he likes. But the internal IT department does not support Mac. No problem as long as the users are able to configure their stuff. This young man wasn't and started to make hotline terror via MSN, Email and personal appearance in the IT office.
It took some harsh words until he understood that this issue is somewhat priority 27 as long as he has a working company-notebook on his desk... (Other question: Why does he have time to try-and-error on his private notebook during work time for almost a whole day?)

BZD Staff Directory v0.6.1 released

mario@rimann.org — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:23:00 +0200

Short after the release of v0.6.0 of the BZD Staff Directory Extension I got some bugreports of which one related to the core functionality of the extension. Those bugs could be fixed and I directly released v0.6.1 which is available in the TER.

There are no security relevant changes in this release, but still I encourage anyone that uses this extension to upgrade to the current version.

Installation of ImageMagick on Mac OS X 10.5

mario@rimann.org — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:21:00 +0200

After struggling with the manual installation of both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagickon my MacBook recently, I was looking for other ways of installation. MacPorts was the option I tried first - but failed (IM was installed fine buddidn't work - GM could not be installed via MacPorts without some hacking due tomissing file in SourceForge repository - then installation went through but with the same result as with IM).

Finally Oliver gave me a great idea: And I found a working solution: The t3[dmg] installer which installs a whole MAMP setup including TYPO3, a starter-template and ImageMagick. And oh wonder - it worked out very smoothly! Thanks to the author (which is not named on it's own website -->?)!

TYPO3 4.2 released today!

mario@rimann.org — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:00:00 +0200

Great news: TYPO3 v4.2 was released today! Thanks to all the developers that helped to bring up this release!

HP ColorLaserJet 4600 PCL Error

mario@rimann.org — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:44:00 +0200

At work we have an HP Color LaserJet 4600 that made some strange problems during the last months. The worst of all, the error was not persistent and could not be reproduced that easily. Some print jobs went through without any problem - but others stopped after some pages and a printed (!) error message telling us

PCL XL error, ERROR: ExtraData, Operator: ReadImage, Position:

First we thought it might be the printer's memory or the firmware. Both of them didn't affect the issue. So we asked our friend Google for a solution what led us to an entry in the HP forums that describes this issue.

The forum entry proposes to change from PCL6 driver back to the PCL5 driver. So far a great idea - HP is known for his good drivers and the driver repository on their website. But not in this case:

PCL6 drivers are available for WinXP/Server 2003 for 32bit and 64bit systems
PCL5 is only available in 32bit (but we're running those drivers on a 64bit server system

The solution for us was now to switch to the current PostScript driver for this printer. That's working out pretty well :-)