After we upgraded our Instant Messaging to the new version of Microsoft Office Communications Server, I have been told to install Office Communicator 2007 in order to be able to connect from outside of our firewall. The new version of OCS apparently requires two seperate connections: one if you are inside the firewall, and one if you are outside on the internet. Why OCS requires two different IP addresses to work this way, I have no idea.

“So what?” you ask. Due to the general crappiness of Office Communicator, and the fact that I use many different IM services, I have been using Miranda for a long time now.

Miranda is an open-source IM platform that supports pretty much every Instant Messaging protocol out there. I use it for Google Talk (Jabber), AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, and SIP which is OCS’s communications protocol.

I used to use a program called Trillian but support for it was spotty at best and the program wasn’t nearly as flexible as Miranda. Plus, Miranda is updated much more frequently and has many more plugins available for it. One major problem I had was that whenever my laptop went into Standby mode, Trillian would not reconnect to OCS. With a few plugins such as KeepStatus, Miranda will reconnect for me.

The SIP Plugin for Miranda does not support the concept of internal and external servers which I now need. So what I did was download the source code and add it myself. The solution I came up with is to alternate between both servers when trying to connect. Since I use the KeepStatus PlugIn, Miranda will retry the connection until it finally connects. This is not the perfect solution but it was the easiest for me to implement, not knowing the plugin code well.

If this solution sounds like it will work for you, and you are interested in the plugin, let me know and I will post it here.

Ever since I got an 8525 Windows Mobile smartphone from Cingular (now AT&T Wireless), I’ve been really into modifying it and developing for it. The phone itself is pretty incredible. Being able to check email and/or web sites whenever you want gets addicting after a while. It would be very hard to go back to my old disconnected days. Some people say its bad to be too connected, but my feeling is you can always ignore it if you want.

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If you use a dual monitor or switch resolutions a lot, you have probably come across this problem. You’re using your Windows application and it pops up a dialog box. Only problem is, the dialog box is off of the screen. D’oh! That has happened to me on multiple occasions until one time when I had enough and googled it. Turns out there is a nice easy solution.

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The problem is this: How do you get MediaWiki which runs on top of  XAMPP to be secure using Active Directory?

We wanted to secure our MediaWiki site so that users can log in using their Active Directory account. In addition we wanted only some users to be able to read the Wiki pages and a smaller subset of those users to be able to edit pages.

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