I’m looking forward to next Tuesday nights meeting of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association.  The subject is going to be using open source software on your desktop as a replacement for Windows, whether personal use, business use or both.

I’m so fed up with computer problems that I’ve actually considered buying a Mac, but I have a hard time believing that it would help me in the long run, and it certainly wouldn’t be economical.

I want to move to an open source environment where every problem has a solution – but just may not have been invented yet.  There already seem to be open source applications out there that do everything I could possibly want, and I’m hoping that this presentation will give me an up-to-date overview for 2008.

Here’s the Meetup group details
Here’s the OCCA website

and here are the full details of the meeting:

When:
August 26, 2008
6:00 – 7:00 Dinner/Networking
7:00 – 9:00 Meeting/Presentation

Where:
Rheinlander German Restaurant
5035 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland OR 97213

What:
Open Source Software On The Desktop

You’ve heard and read the Linux hype, you may even be running Firefox, but what’s the 4-1-1 on Linux and Open Source Software? Is it ready for the desktop? or the laptop? for Business? for Grandma?

This presentation will address those questions and more:

• What is Open Source Software? What is Linux? and why should I care?
• Are there any ready-to-use open source applications?
• How can I make money if the software is free?
• and more!

This presentation will be “only mildly technical” and audience questions and answers are welcome. Linux and open source applications will be demonstrated live.

Jesse Black, Yellow Crayon Computer Services Jesse Black is Chief Technologist at Yellow Crayon LLC, a Portland-area computer services firm serving individuals and small businesses. He is also co-host of TVLinux, the long-running community television series which promotes Linux and other open source applications. Jesse has used both Linux and Microsoft Windows on a daily basis for several years.

Live Search is finally showing backlink counts and locations again. In March of 2007, Microsoft announced that they were no longer able to support backlink checks through their search platform.

The reason (they said) was because they noticed too many automated queries, and they claimed that they would be “doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible…” but they never seemed to get around to it until now.

I’m not sure what they’ve done to eliminate automated queries, (and in fact to me it looks like they they didn’t do anything), but it appears to be fixed, although it operates just a little bit differently.
Tthe big difference? You now have to put a “+” sign in front of the link: or linkdomain: command and it’s now working again…

+linkdomain:domain.com or +link:domain.com

Nice! (or “big deal!” depending on the mood you’re in…

You’re not alone…
Users all over the country are finding out daily that suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, they are unable to send mail if they want people to reply to their business or personal e-mail addressed other than one that is @comcast.net. This is because Comcast is blocking port 25 , which is your default port for sending email through your mail software.

The error message says (fill in your own X):
The connection to the server has failed. Account: ‘XXXX’, Server: ‘xxx.xxx.xxx.xx’, Protocol: SMTP, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Socket Error: 10060, Error Number: 0x800CCC0E

Gee that’s helpful, isn’t it?
If you are using mail.yourdomain.com for your SMTP outgoing mail server, then you get an error saying “unable to connect to the mail server” even though it just successfully connected to the mail server to retrieve your incoming mail. After wasting time calling your web host, and going through various troubleshooting techniques, they tell you to call Comcast.

To make matters worse, users are finding out one at a time, because Comcast is slowly rolling out these changes user by user in individual markets around the country. This month, it’s apparently Portland Oregon’s turn, where I live.

To cut to the chase, here’s the solution:
Change the port your computer is using for SMTP outgoing mail, from Port 25 to one that your hosting provider will allow. In most cases, this seems to be port 587 for Portland providers.

To do this in Outlook -

• Go to tools – e-mail accounts – view or change existing account
• Sselect the appropriate mail account and hit the change button
• Go to the more settings button, and into the Advanced tab
• Change your default port 25, to port 587, and you should be back in business in most cases.

Still broken?

• Added note from comments below – Some people in the midwest for whom 487 didn’t work succesfully chaged to 465 and picked SSL under the “use the following type of encrypted connection” drop down. They did not check the “this server requires an encrypted connection” box.

In Outlook express -

• Go to tools – accounts – Mail tab
• Choose Properties box – Advanced Tab – and from there you can do the same

The reason Comcast claims to be doing this is in an effort to prevent spam being sent by zombie/spyware/virus laden computers using their bandwidth and their Internet connection.

I suspect they are really doing it to limit liability for any future potential lawsuits, and not really to save bandwidth, but I have no problem with that.

The problem with Comcast doing this is that they do not seem to be telling all of their support people, and do not be notifying their customers. This has been going on around the country for MONTHS.

Instead, it takes the end user hours of frustrating time on the phone spent with lower-level tech-support who have no idea that this change has even taken place.

One can only guess how many individual users are still frustrated at this very moment because they are being forced to do their business e-mail from home using their @comcast.net accounts, after uninformed Comcast agents are able to help them?

As a web host, we were forced to spend hours dealing with Comcast before we got an actual answer, and we still lost a couple of hosting customers over it, who were convinced that it must be our fault, since Comcast told them it was.

Great customer service. If there was any competing product in my market I would switch in a heartbeat. I tried once before in 2005 after nearly an entire summer of poor Comcast connectivity.

Thanks Comcast, for valuing our time so very little, in your quest to make mega millions.