Marius Lardizabal – IT Consulting

Today I’ve made another faithful decision. I’ve decided to reformat my new Dell Inspiron 1525 and install Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 and man oh man I am pumped.

I’ve been contemplating on moving to linux for quite sometime now but because I got inspired on how receptive one major client of mine to open-source that I just had to start migrating now.

I’m still installing, I’ll post again about the results of my experiment.

If this proves successful I may have to consider moving our other laptops and desktops as well.

Till then…

PS If you like to try it out as well but are afraid to install anything on your machine, the Ubuntu CD comes with Live-CD, which allows the OS to run on your system without installing anything and you can experience Ubuntu first hand no-strings attached.

After some self-debate I’ve decided to take the plunge and uninstalled MS Office from all our laptops and workstations at home.

We’ve switched to OpenOffice and I am so happy.

On top of that I’ve managed to make all our e-mails, tasks, calendars and notes accessible on any laptop and PC around the house actually anywhere we go as long as there is net access.

Thanks to Firefox, Google (Gmail, Notes, Calendar and Docs), Thunderbird and Lightning.

The only other thing I need to sort out is how to centrally share our contacts and address book. Originally we had a readonly PST file that was located in a shared folder. If one machine had it opened all the rest had to wait for it to be released.

So far the only viable option I can think of that is free is Plexo but I haven’t decided yet.

If you are interested in how I did it, it’s quite simple really, all I had to do was signup an account with Google and used that account on all our laptops and workstations. When one machine created an entry into the calendar it synced with Google Calendar which in turn synced the other machines.

Google notes on the other hand just required an add-on to Firefox, which is our preferred browser anyway.

As for the e-mail, instead of using POP3 I’ve decided to use IMAP at least that way mails are left at the servers and any machine can read them.

I will for sure donate more to the cause, long live OPEN SOURCE, long live GOOGLE!!!

This past week I’ve been trying to run a couple of batch commands via ASP.Net they run perfectly fine on my box but when it was released to IIS 6.0 Windows 2003 server it never worked.

So I made a couple of experiments and lot of googling and ended up with the following:

My original code was

ProcessStartInfo p = new ProcessStartInfo("C:\blahblah.cmd');
Process proc = Process.Start(p);
proc.WaitForExit(5000); //wait for 5 secs then exit
proc.Close();

My new code became

ProcessStartInfo p = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe");
p.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
p.RedirectStandardInput = true;
p.RedirectStandardError = true;

Process proc = Process.Start(p);
StreamReader reader = File.OpenText("C:\blahblah.cmd');
StreamWriter writer = proc.StandardInput;
while(reader.Peek() != -1)
{
   writer.WriteLine(reader.ReadLine());
}
writer.Close();
reader.Close();
proc.Close();

And it worked like a charm.

Thanks to Brendan Tompkins for the idea check his solution here,