This may work to get a lot of site-owners using Google products that they weren’t necessarily using before, and in theory could help their visibility, traffic, and revenue in the long run.

"Website owners generate more traffic to their websites by optimizing them using Webmaster Tools," says Google Search Group Product Manager Rajat Mukherjee. "They can engage their users with inline Web Elements, including maps, news, videos and conversations. Custom Search and Site Search provide Google-quality search on their websites for better user retention. AdSense helps website owners monetize their sites with relevant advertising. And besides providing these valuable services to millions of customers, hosting companies can also generate additional revenues through referral programs."

This also marks the first commercial control panel to offer Google Services for Websites, allowing the hosting companies to monetize the services, according to Parallels. "These significant updates enable shared hosting companies to generate new revenue streams and deliver better services to their small business customers," says Parallels President Jack Zubarev.

Google Services for Websites was announced last year. Other partners include DomainHost, GoDaddy, FatCow, Aplus.net, and about 15 others. Such partnerships provide hosting providers with a few bells and whistles to offer their customers.

This weekend I was wondering if it would be possible to sync my Nokia 6680 with Microsoft Entourage. Back in my Windows days, I used to sync my phone with Microsoft Exchange using the Nokia PC Suite. Unfortunately, that suite is Windows only. Now, it is possible to run Nokia PC Suite on a Mac using Parallels, but I found that method too much of a workaround, there must be more elegant ways to do this.

Luckily, Apple equips OS X with a syncing tool called iSync. This software supports a lot of mobile phones and other handheld devices, including my Nokia 6680. That’s good news. Now, how to get appointments from Entourage on my phone? This requires a number of steps:

1. Get appointments from Entourage into iCal
2. Connect phone and computer using Bluetooth
3. Do the actual syncing

Let’s start off with step number 1. This step is needed because in the end we will be using iSync to communicate to the phone. Events in iCal are in a format iSync understands, it has no native support for Entourage.

• In Entourage, enable ‘synchronise events and tasks’ with iCal (under prefs > sync services)
• A new calendar will be created in iCal called Entourage, which will contain all Entourage appointments. Note that I needed to restart both Entourage and iCal before iCal was actually updated.

We now have our appointments in iCal, which is a format iSync understands. Next, we need to make our computer aware of our phone. We will be using Bluetooth for this.

• First of all, make sure Bluetooth is on on your phone and it is set to de ‘discoverable’, otherwise your computer won’t be able to find it.
• We will also need to enable Bluetooth on our computer (click the Bluetooth icon under ‘System Preferences > ‘Hardware’ or directly in the system menubar).
• Next, you can either ‘pair’ your computer and phone using the Bluetooth preference panel, or by using iSync. I used the first option, by clicking ‘Set up Bluetooth Device…’.




• Add your phone to the known Bluetooth devices by following the on-screen instructions. somewhere in the process, you will be presented with a number you have to enter on your phone, which is required to enable future communication between the two devices.
• You can also add your computer to the ‘authorised’ devices on your phone, so you won’t have to click ‘yes’ on your phone each time a synchronisation is started. Consult your phone’s manual on how to do this.
• After communication has been set up, you probably have to install the iSync agent on your phone. This is simple ‘click-yes-and-next-a-few-times’ process.

After these steps, a new ‘phone’ icon will be added to the list of devices iSync knows. Click this icon to see what and how will be synced between your phone and computer.

You should now have a working setup, where iSync connects to your phone and syncs the events from iCal to your phone and vice versa. You may need to click ‘allow’ when presented with a security dialog asking you if Entourage is allowed to update iCal.

Now that your phone and computer know each other, you can set Bluetooth on your phone to be ‘non-discoverable’ (but not ‘off’).

If you want to sync Entourage and your phone, launch iSync and click ‘Sync Devices’, making sure Bluetooth on your computer is on.

You can use AppleScript to further simplify this task. There’s a nice script that does just that on macosxhints – don’t just use the one mentioned at the top of the page, but scroll down a little to find a script that utilises a simple utility to enable Bluetooth first if needed, then launches iSync, automatically starts the syncing process and quits iSync afterwards.

Save this Applescript as an application and put a link to it in your dock. Now, syncing your computer and phone is just a single click of the mouse.

The less-expensive versions of Microsoft’s latest operating system will not be eligible to run on a Mac using virtualization software like the popular Parallels suite.

Ben Rudolph of Parallels recently blogged about some licensing terms in Vista that may make Mac fans who prefer to run Mister Bill’s operating system on a piece of Apple’s hardware with OS X dig a little deeper into their credit limits.

Terms in Vista’s End User License Agreements limit which versions may be run legally in a virtual environment, such as that provided by Parallels. Rudolph covered the essential points:

Microsoft has released a new EULA (End User License Agreement) that states that only certain versions of Vista – Business and Ultimate (and Enterprise for corporate customers) are eligible to be run in a virtual machine.

The EULA says that Home Basic and Home Premium CANNOT be run in a virtual machine. Here’s the tecnical legalese from the EULAs: For Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions: “USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.”

The EULA for the other versions of Vista permits its use in virtual environments.

Customers will have to pay a little more for a higher-end version of the operating system.

Vista Business costs $100 more than Vista Home Basic, $60 more than Home Premium.

Virtualization is not limited to the Mac platform running Parallels. Enterprises running other hardware and OSes may prefer to virtualize for stability or security reasons.

Making it more expensive for those customers to get Vista won’t help Microsoft if it means losing some of those sales.

But it seems that people who really want Vista running in a VM will pay Microsoft’s price. —

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Well, it’s not a toy. Although small (the “big” download is 70MB), it includes a lot of the things I’d want to have in a live CD: word processor, spreadsheet, paint and draw, ssh, vnc, remote desktop and much more – I was really surprised to see what was available immediately.

Puppy Linux runs in RAM, so it’s very fast – even in an emulator (I ran it in Parallels Workstation).

When Puppy first boots, you need to select a keyboard and configure your ethernet card.

If you have anything remotely capable of having a file system available (CD, USB pen drive or a hard drive), you can save Puppy info to that and it will load that on the next boot (and of course you can over-ride that if you need to).

Perhaps most surprising to me was that Puppy comes with a full set of videos explaining how to use, upgrade and configure your system.

If all that isn’t enough, there are piles of add-on packages available. However, it can be a little hard to find what you are looking for and as no compiler is included, you can’t just download source and roll your own.

A HOWTO makes reference to an add-on file called “usr_devx.sfs” that gives you a C/C++ environment. I could not find that anywhere.. references to it, but nowhere to download it.

I don’t like that this comes up in a root desktop with no password by default. That’s just wrong. But other than that, this is a good distro.

Download a live CD image from the Puppy Linux site.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

That’s smart, and I wish more distro’s would do this.

I downloaded the iso image (one cd only for this unless you need multi-language support) and installed it into a Parallels VM

The install was quick – less than half an hour total. Moments later I logged in to a KDE 3.5 desktop. Based on previous experience with Parallels, I’d guess this would be 15 minutes on real hardware – maybe less.

Linux users won’t feel terribly out of place here: BSD is of course different, but there is so much in common at the application level that it could take you a few minutes to realize this isn’t Linux. A good clue came when I opened a terminal window and saw a “%” prompt. Ayup, BSD tends to use csh, and that’s the default here.

Fortunately you can rid yourself of that nonsense very quickly: there’s a big “Download Software” icon on your desktop; click on that and it will take you to a website where you can download various PBI files. These are self-contained installation files: in other words, they have everything they need to install the software on your system – no searching for dependencies that some developer assumed you’d have. Just download the pbi, double click on it, and you are done. I downloaded and installed Bash immediately.

There are disadvantages to pbi files. You’ll end up with multiple library versions, which gets messy if there is a security upgrade. You also have to be very trusting of the source of the pbi: you get nothing in the way of authentication or even MD5 verification. PC-BSD therefore also offers the more tradition BSD “ports” method of getting software. To initialize that, go to Kmenu ->Computer -> PC-BSD Settings -> System. Click on the Tasks tab, and choose Fetch Ports. After that’s done, you have the traditional ports software install available to you.

This is a nicely done BSD. Give it a try.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Both of these are based on work developed at the University of Maryland called Tree Maps. There are references at that link to many other implementations and similar projects on Windows and Linux.

When you want to see disk usage, a graphical view is intuitive and easy to understand. For example, here’s how GrandPerspective sees my home folder:

GrandPerspective is very simple: the larger the rectangle, the larger the file it is representing. You click on the rectangle to see the path and name of the file. The only options available are to change the colors to have them selected by depth, directory, name or extension. That’s it: this is a simple and very direct application.

Disk Inventory X is more ambitious. Like GrandPerspective, it displays rectangles based on the sizes of files. But it also shows much more information:

(Click to see image)

All of the gold rectangles in that image are Parallels Workstation documents (the same files are the large blue boxes in the GrandPerspective view). Notice to the right that documents of that type consume a total of 14.2GB of my hard drive. I can also see that I have 20.5MB of PDF files and so on. That’s helpful information.

I can’t really say that one of these is better than the other: it depends on what I’m looking for. The simplicity of GrandPerspective is attractive for a quick overview, but Disk Inventory X includes information GrandPerspective doesn’t have. I’ll keep them both.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com