Read all about it in the Daily Tweet! Turn your Twitter stream into a newspaper

If you find keeping up with your Twitter stream hard going, as the updates whizz by and you waste time frantically scrolling up and down trying to find the connected tweets, don't despair: there is a more leisurely way to enjoy them.

It's still in alpha, but paper.li have put together a pretty impressive service, although they do warn that "newspapers" may be deleted at any time while they readjust the old load balancers and walk that dangerous tightrope walk that new services do. That's OK though, because creating a replacement newspaper is so easy, it's too trivial to be worth explaining (even for this trivial blog).
So why not give it a try? Long time Twitterers will enjoy seeing tweets in a new format and perhaps long time sceptics will be converted by something that actually looks useful and readable.
Only time will tell.

Further Reading

• Paper.li - Reading Twitter As If It Were A Newspaper (killerstartups.com)
• TweetyMail.com - Mixing Email With Twitter (killerstartups.com)
• tDash.org - A New Twitter Client (killerstartups.com)
• ManageFlitter.com - Tidy Up Your Twitter Account (killerstartups.com)
• Twitter and theregister. Why it doesn't work (go.theregister.com)

Fun and Games with Error 1316 - yet another reason why we don't want or need the Windows Installer

This morning I was trying to upgrade my Sametime 7.5.1 to Sametime 8.0.2 to see if I could fix (once and for all) some long running issues with external group loading and Voice Suite.
After downloading the ST 8.0.2 binaries, I closed my ST 7.5.1 and double-clicked on the sametime802.msi to start the install. Assuming it would auto-detect the existing, older version of Sametime on my system, and let me choose an upgrade option, I was a bit surprised it just exited, telling me to uninstall the old version first.

So, like an obedient little end-user, off I went to Start > Run > control > Add/Remove Programs (it's an XP Pro system) and found the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 entry. I clicked remove and after about 2 seconds, I got this message:

Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file

C:\Windows\Installer\sametime802.msi

Now, you could get this error with almost any program that you were trying to install over the top of itself, upgrade or uninstall - it basically seems to occur when the msi entry is missing from the registry (I think, at least, it was that in my case) - it's not a Sametime specific issue.

Image via Wikipedia

You're obviously not going to get this if the program doesn't use or need msi, and I think software companies really shouldn't ever use the Windows Installer (msi). I'm not sure why any of them do, because it's terrible and a common source of problems. I remember myself and a work colleague having a nightmare with upgrading Symantec from version 9 to 10 a few years back on about 50 machines. I almost always failed with a cryptic error code, and in the end we had to run NONAV to completely remove every trace of Symantec 9 before we could get the version 10 installer to complete.


Anyway, I digress. If you're still reading, you obviously want to know how to get your program installed/upgraded/uninstalled, so I'll stop drivelling on... Here's how:

1. Go and grab yourself a copy of the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from Microsoft  (note: you can read all about it here)
2. Double-click on the executable file you just downloaded - it should be called msicuu2.exe
3. You'll get the usual startup (unless you're a Windows 7 and possibly Vista user, where you'll just get a VBScript error instead ;-) and then you'll get presented with a list of all the programs you have installed that use msi, which looks like this:

4. Select the program you wish to remove, and click "Remove"
5. You'll see a typical Microsoft "Are you sure?" screen, but it explains that you are not actually uninstalling the program, but are in fact just removing the entry from the msi (Windows Installer) database:

6. Click OK, and you're done. You can now proceed to do whatever it was you were trying to do before, and it should work - no more Error 1316!

Further Reading

• How to resolve Common "Windows Installer" Problems (microsoft.com)
• Microsoft releases slew of stability-oriented Windows fixes (arstechnica.com)
• IBM adds meeting functionality to Sametime (v3.co.uk)
• Error 1316. A network error occurred (jakeludington.com)
• Windows Installer 4.5 - Download Free (techblissonline.com)
• RADVISION Enhances IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 with High Definition Multiparty Conferencing and Telepresence Connectivity (eon.businesswire.com)
• Optimizing your Windows Registry (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Software FYI: Windows Error Code Lookup Tool (winextra.com)
• How Do You Get Users To Read Error Messages? (ask.slashdot.org)

Some Top Tools for Sysadmins

Image via Wikipedia

 jEdit
The world's most powerful editor and a pretty good IDE for too many languages to mention. Once you try the regular expression hypersearch function you won't ever look back.

Notepad2
For a super-lightweight, blindingly quick and simple replacement for Window's default editor, you can't go wrong with this baby. It's a genuine, simple replacement for notepad, unlike Notepad++, which (IMO) does too much to be really quick and simple, and too little to compete with jEdit or UltraEdit32. 

Beyond Compare
While jEdit has a comparison plugin - jDiff, it doesn't begin to compare (sorry) with Scootersoftware's minor masterpiece. This will compare directories, files of all types and all kinds of archives (even war, bin, cat and jar files, to name but a few). Old versions are available for free.

Fiddler2
While some might argue this isn't really in the domain of a typical sysadmin, I think understanding exactly why a page is throwing an HTTP error 500 code, or why a certain component renders slowly or never loads at all is pretty useful, especially since the post-financial crisis sysadmin typically has to take on many jobs that would normally fall to developers, webmasters and software engineers.

Radmin
While there's are a lot of remote control software out there, I've never tried one that is quite as good for remote administration of multiple Windows clients. Free is great, but sometimes, you only get what you pay for.

ZipGenius
While the version for 64-bit Windows 7 leaves a lot to be desired (they are still working on shell integration), ZipGenius rules on 32-bit Windows systems. Incorporating 7-zip binaries, as well as many others, such as C.A.K.E, UnRar and UnAce,there is little or nothing that ZipGenius can't open. It's missing the ability to simply GZIP files (it TARs and GZIPs them instead).

PuTTY
A free Telnet and SSH client that still can't be beat for its simplicity and power. Put it on a stick and shake it at every problem you've got.

Filezilla
The ubiquitous FTP client that's so obvious that we forget it's even there. There's a lot of competition in this area, but its still a winner for me. It's my FTP server of choice too.

phpMyAdmin
OK, so not all sysadmins use MySQL - but they should. There's every reason to have at least one instance of MySQL running, most sysadmins these days are at least part time solution developers. If there's a reason to have MySQL, there's a reason to have phpMyAdmin.

SQuirrel SQL Client
For every other DB, there's SQuirrel SQL. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Derby, posegreSQL - you name it, they have a driver for it.

Eclipse
There are so many plugins for Eclipse, and so many tools that can run on its framework, that there is no way a serious sysadmin should be without this. Want to put together a website with some PHP? Try the PHP perspective. Need to glue some disparate applications together, use the perl perspective. Got JVMs heapdumping? Use the memory profiler, load up some verbose gc logs and away you go. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. You can say it does a bit of everything, and none of it very well. But it is flexible, and its free.

Clonezilla
Backup and clone a system to many computers thanks to Clonezilla's use of multicasting. No need for the slavish one-at-a-time approach that can make a sysadmin suicidal, and that can only be a good thing.

LogMeIn
This has to be the biggy. You're offsite. You're online. You need to assist your client right now. They could be 40km away, or they could be 4,000km away. This one is priceless. Maybe you have to get to your work desktop while working from home without access to a VPN. If you're company allows it, use it. If it doesn't, invest in one of the many expensive alternatives - WebEx, Sametime Unyte, AOS.

Yes, I know, I'm missing something. Please tell me what it is and where to get it.

Further reading

• "Radmin Wanted" Campaign Completed with Striking Results (prweb.com)
• Everything - A Super Fast Portable File Search (techie-buzz.com)
• File Server OneHTTPD (ghacks.net)
• The 40 Most Popular Tools For Your System Admin Bag (sunbeltsoftware.com)
• tlbox - System Administration Tools (tlbox.com)