WTF is the deal? Office 2008 (Mac)

Okay, my company is 90% PC's, I have a couple of Mac-heads and unfortunately they are the Pres & VP. Now they want to know if they should be upgrading to office 2008 because of the Exchange support. Our mail server is Exchange, so it is a valid question. Well we have been down this "Exchange Support" crap before, 2004 was supposed to have great Exchange support, well it turned out to be a crappy OWA or IMAP product. The public folder action was crappy and overall it sucked. Well I was able to find that out using the trial version of 2004, but Microsoft has gotten smart and muck like not giving a preview to critics before the release of a crappy movie...they do not have any evaluation or trial version of 2008.

How the hell am I supposed to evaluate Entourage? (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008) I am a MSDN subscriber, but no Mac software is included. Microsoft has really screwed the pooch when it comes to Office for Mac. The freaking own part of Apple, why the hell wouldn't they have the Office for Mac product equal to the PC version. Especially the Exchange support, it is their own mail product! If you make the stuff work together without workarounds or changing the way a person works, they could have office an all PC's and Mac's in an office.

It really has to be a huge example of the right hand not knowing what the hell the other hand is doing. It is really disappointing. I am not a Mac-Head, I am a PC-user, but even I see the inherent value in making it work and available to people to try.

I am so freaking frustrated right now. It just isn't right and there is no one to complain to. Telling a CSR that you won't be purchasing because you can evaluate the software...well, you might as well be talking to a wall, they could give a f**k if you buy it or not.

Argh.

Monday morning - up early and installing...

So I am starting to install the software for the project and although I have installed PHP before, it is something that, if you haven't done it a lot, you really need to have a guide to make sure you do skip something. A great install guide is here http://www.peterguy.com/php/install_IIS6.html#phpConfigure .

After installing the files and configuring the .ini and IIS, I loaded test.php and everything is working brilliantly! (test one down.)

Ran the MySQL 5.0 install…3 minutes. Easy peesy

Ran the MySQL GUI toolkit (choose that over the phpmyadmin program) and other 2 minutes.

So that stuff is all setup, I went in and inspected the MySQL setup and it seems to be all okay, I didn’t change anything from the original install.

So my next step is to install the phpwiki…

So I am finally using iTunes...

I signed up for a package of Mac training sessions through the Apple Developer Connection.  There are like 100 training sessions and I could use Mac training so I bought it.  But in order to view them, you have to download them via iTunes.  So I broke down and installed it on my iLamp ( iMac g4 700 15” flat screen).  Anywho, I got it installed and got the sessions downloading and so I think to myself, I will check out some of the podcasts, they are free…

 

Okay, I am addicted to podcasts, mostly the video ones, but some audio ones.  This is part of my problem at this company, I use adopt new technology kicking and screaming because we just do use any of it and I forget all the cool new stuff I check out cause I can’t utilize any of it here!  Anyway…So I figure I will copy my music from my PC to my Mac and use it as a stereo, cause I sure don’t use it all that much now…

 

So I copy the music onto a flash drive and onto my Mac.  Fire up iTunes and…nothing.  It doesn’t find any of the mew tracks.  So I figured out that the new tracks are all in .wma.  So I download a freeware program called Switch (http://nch.com.au/switch) and install that…well I go to convert the first song and find out that, because I don’t have the Windows Media component for Quicktime (called Flip4Mac WMV) installed, it can’t be converted until I install it…Whew.  Well I go to Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx (it is another free download) and download and install it.  I fired up Switch again and so far so good, it is converting my files as I types this.  Hopefully I am well on my way to listening to my music on my Mac.

 

 

So I had this idea for a blog...

I am what they call a one-man-band...I play all the intruments and sing. Is it a good band? Well I guess that is for the listener.

I work at a small software development company and I am the entire I.T. department. I wear quite a few hats. Money is tight as you can expect at a small company but expectations are still high enough that sometimes you have to just sit back and be amazed at what you need to do.

Do these people think that equipment and service just appear? Does education grow on trees? Training? Experience?

I am lucky that my bosses really don't think like that or treat me badly. I have a pretty good amount of automony and as long as they don't see a problem, I must be doing my job. FYI, that is a job pitfall too...I will write about that some other time.

Anyway, I am starting a new project and I thought that it would be a good place to start a blog of how things happen in a one-person IT dept.

Project wiki:

I need to set up and test a wiki-type site for one of our new programs. So I set up a test sever with IIS and now I need to set the environment up to install and configure a wiki-site.

Install PHP
Install MySQL
Install MySQL-admin toolkit
Install PHPwiki

Cost for all of this? zero. We are treading into open source territory for this project. I will post more later.