V4S is a new product from Orb Networks which allows users of the product to send voice messages to family and friends from within a Web browser or directly from within the Skype interface. Notifications of new messages can be received by e-mail or SMS and thus can be played wherever you’re at. The product is free and so it already beats Skype’s Voicemail product, in my humble opinion. Courtesy of their FAQ page, here’s some technical specs that you may have been wondering about:

You can listen to your messages on ANY Web-connected device with a streaming audio player (e.g. Windows, Real, QuickTime, MPlayer, mobile 3gp player supporting the streaming of .sdp files, etc.).

This means you can listen to your messages – without having to download ANYTHING onto these devices:

• Windows PCs
• Macs
• Linux devices
• Mobile phones (works great on Nokia Series 60 and Windows Smartphones)
• PocketPCs (PalmOS devices do not yet have a streaming audio player)

Something that was recently introduced to WordPress.com bloggers is the statistics function. With it, you’re able to view who’s reading which entry, who’s coming from which site, and more. There’s even a nifty little Flash chart which shows traffic from day-to-day. I have to say that I’m truly addicted now. It’s like a very condensed version of Google’s latest release, Google Analytics. There’s a “stats” tab in your WP dashboard in case you’re wondering where you can find it.

Hop on over to Macromedia.com and the odds are pretty good that you’ll find something interesting…the Adobe logo in the upper left corner. The merger is complete and Adobe has already revealed new product Suites:

The Adobe Design Bundle including

• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Adobe Illustrator CS2
• Adobe InDesign CS2
• Adobe GoLive CS2
• Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional
• Macromedia Flash Professional 8.0

The Adobe Web Bundle including

• Everything above and
• Macromedia Dreamweaver 8
• Fireworks 8
• Contribute 3
• FlashPaper 2

Everything you see here has already been released both in Adobe Creative Suite 2 back in May and Macromedia’s Studio 8 back in September. This is, however, the first official release from the Adobe/Macromedia merger. I’m still VERY anxious to see what new features will be applied to each and every one of these products for their next release.

Yes, according to the Microsoft offices based in Shanghai, the issue has been resolved. However, there’s not much more to report as the details of the agreement are confidential. Is that all the information I’ve got for you? Yup. You can read the complete article at ChinaDaily.com but I’ve pretty much summed it up in about two sentences. If any details come out of the agreement I’ll be sure and give them to you.

The open-source, PHP/MySQL-based blogging software we’ve all come to love has officially released the next part of the “Strayhorn” series of releases: the loooooong-awaited 2.0. With the new release comes a re-designed Web site as well. Check out both at http://www.wordpress.org.

Once I get my hosting together, I’ll be moving Fans of Tech BACK over to my own domain (www.fansoftech.com) and I will be working with this new release of WordPress to get it up and running.

My move to WordPress.com came about for two reasons. First, I had an immediate desire to switch over from the Nucleus blogging platform. No complaints, really, as it had a plethora of cool features but I guess I just wasn’t impressed with the interface - at all. Second, I was DYING to give the invitation-only WordPress.com a try. I figured that I could do a temporary switch and then I could move FoT back to my own home once I got settled in with a custom install of WordPress after I got my own hosting situation worked out and after WP released 2.0.

As of 8:00 on Friday, December 23, Microsoft has officially decided that it no longer wishes to be involved with the 24-hour television news channel it created with NBC. NBC has said that they will continue to produce the channel by its’ lonesome and that they have no plans to remove the letters “MS” from the channel’s name…at least for now. Microsoft hasn’t completely removed itself from the struggling news channel, however, as it plans to keep its’ hold of MSNBC.com - the most popular news source currently online.

Here’s hoping that everyone had a fantastic Christmas this year. God bless everyone and I hope you’ll continue to read Fans of Tech in the new year.

P.S. - Drop me a line and let me know what you got! My gadget gift was the Creative Zen Sleek MP3 player. I refuse to give Apple the satisfaction of purchasing an iPod…just so you know. Anyhoo, I’ll be posting a review of the Zen online in the next couple of weeks. Thus far, I’m quite pleased with it.

While re-installing Google Desktop 2.0 on my desktop, I noticed that, in the preferences page, there was a link to a landing new account page for Gmail that I had never noticed before: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/landing.html

This is an beautiful new “introduction to Gmail” page highlighting all the reasons you should sign up for an account. An excellent design highlighting all of Gmail’s wonderful feature including a part about offering 2,600 megabytes of storage…and growing. Actually, Gmail just surpassed the 2.6 gig mark so I guess the page can’t be all that old.

It shows an effort towards what I believe to be a beautification effort on Google’s part. The functionality of each and every one of Google’s products is nothing less than extraordinary but they are a tad…shall I say…plain?

Keep it up, I say.

I’ve been meaning to start posting, for a while now, errors that I encounter either here at work or at home that require some kind of investigation and then publish the answer, if any, that I find. Today’s entry comes from work. Hours after having resolved a phone outage our e-mail (clients using Outlook 2003 connecting to Exchange Server 2003) just STOPS working out of nowhere. No updates applied, no reboots - it just stopped working.

Clients who were NOT operating in Cached Exchange Mode would receive this error when trying to open Outlook:

“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook Window. The set of folders could not be opened.”

Users that WERE operating with Cached Exchange Mode would still see their messages but were not able to either send or receive messages. Messages sent were returned immediately with this message:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: test
Sent: 12/1/2005 12:49 PM

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

‘##########@#####.com’ on 12/1/2005 12:49 PM
This message could not be sent. Try sending the message again later, or contact your network administrator. The Microsoft Exchange server is currently busy. If this message is still displayed in 30 minutes, contact your Exchange server administrator. Error is [0×80040111-0×80040111-0×000520].

After an hour of Googling (and coming across thread after thread with problems posted but no solution - please people, learn to come back and tell others what was wrong!) I eventually discovered (thanks to a helpful tech at Access Systems) that two services on the Windows Server that were scheduled to start automatically had suddenly stopped working: “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” and “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant.” Once I restarted these two services which took only about 30 seconds, tops, everything was working fine again - no reboot required.

Anyways, I hope someone is able to find this information useful.

UPDATE: Although this was a temporary solution…it turned out that we had actually reached our mailbox store limit of 16 gigabytes. It turns out that Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003 eliminates this particular limitation but an update at this time was not an option. So, my only option was to temporarily stop the Simple Mail Transfer Porotocol (SMTP) service on the Exchange server and then archive some of the largest-sized mailboxes. This brought us down below the 16gig limit until we were able to apply that SP2 patch. You gotta love those Microsoft folks…always thinking ahead.

I found an article this morning at the Chicago Tribune stating that Skype will be releasing a BETA version of version 2.0 sometime today.  Sure enough, they weren’t lying.  (You never can tell with that Chicago Tribune……just kidding.)  2.0 is available for download now and you can find all of the new features and changes in the official Skype changelog.