Exchange Calendars in Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning

This post shows how you may add your Exchange Server calendar to Thunderbird with Lightning Add-on.

1. Install Thunderbird with Lightning. 

Download Thunderbird from Mozilla. The most recent reversions, such as, version 38.6.0 has already included Lightning.

2. Install the Exchange Calendar Lightning Add-on

The Exchange Calendar Lightning Add-on was previously the Exchange EWS Provider Add-on for Lightning that was developed at 1st Setup. It is now being maintained and developed by Ericsson.

Download the binary build of the recent version from its release channel. For instance, you can download directly the binary build of the per-release v3.6-beta1, exchangecalendar-v3.6.0-beta1.xpi.  Save the xpi file and note the location.

Now, you can install the Lightning Add-on.

1. On Thunderbird, switch to the Calendar Tab by pressing "CTRL-SHIFT-C".
2. Then go to "Tools", then "Add-ons", "Settings", "Install Add-on from File ...", and finally, select the downloaded xpi file to install. Upon completion, restart Thunderbird. 

3. Add an Exchange Calendar to Thunderbird. 

This step turns out to be a trick part. If you network administrator is cooperative and publicizes the settings for your Exchange Server, your life can be easier. Unfortunately, it has been not my case. Below are the steps you may try.

(1). Set up Exchange Calendar in Thunderbird using Exchange's autodiscovery function

You may follow the instruction provided by the developers of the Exchange Calendar Lightning Add-on and attempt to set up your Exchange calendar in Thunderbird Lighting.  The instruction is "How to Add Your Calendar to Thunderbird".

If this attempt fails, you may try the second approach below.

(2). Set up Set up Exchange Calendar in Thunderbird mannually

When you come to this step, the last attempt must have failed. However, it still sometimes provide you with a piece of useful information, that is, the "Primary email address" that may not necessarily be what you think it should be.

You may follow the steps outlined in "Add a Microsoft Office 365 Calendar" at 1-st Setup.

However, I found that in my case the "Primary email address" and the "Username" were different and the Username must take the form of "myusername@mycompany.com" while the "Primary email address" takes the form of "myusername@mycompanyaltname.onmicrosoft.com".

You may have to try both combinations to see which one works for you.

Reference

1. Leah S., "Office 365 (Thunderbird) - Exchange Calendar and Tasks Add-On for Lightning," https://kb.wisc.edu/office365/page.php?id=29243, retrieved on February 29, 2016
2. Leah S., "Office 365 (Thunderbird) - Configure Thunderbird," https://kb.wisc.edu/office365/page.php?id=28427, retrieved on February 29, 2016
3. Mozilla Support Forum, "Thunderbird does not work with office 365,"  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1059850, retrieved on February 29, 2016
4. Mozilla Developers, "Thunderbird Lightning User Interface," https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lightning-user-interface#w_switching-between-mail-tabs-and-lightning-tabs, retrieved on February 29, 2016
5. 1st Setup Admin, "Add a Microsoft Office 365 Calendar," http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/wp_super_faq/add-a-microsoft-office-365-calendar/, retrieved on February 29, 2016
6. 1st Setup Admin, "Exchange EWS Provider Add-on for Lightning," http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-calendar-and-tasks-add-on-for-thunderbird-lightning/ , retrieved on February 29, 2016
7. Ericsson Exchange Calendar Team on Github, "How to Add Your Calendar to Thunderbird," https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar/wiki/How-to-Add-Your-Calendar-to-Thunderbird, retrieved on February 29, 2016
8. Ericsson Exchange Calendar Team on Github, "Exchange Calendar Lightning Add-on Release," https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar/releases, retrieved on February 29, 2016

Funding STEM at the Cost of Liberal Arts?

Again, STEM or not? I saw an article in New York Times on funding STEM at the cost of liberal arts. This argument has been going on for a while and this New York Times article is not going to be the last one. Many feel very strong about this, for it or against it.

I am using this post as a bookmark for this type of news articles. I'll come back and add more ...

A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding, By PATRICIA COHENFEB. NY Times. 21, 2016.

On Exception Handling

Exception and error handling is a subtle and important issue. This is just a note on a few good reads on exception handling.

• Exception-Handling Antipatterns by chrisadamson
• Three Rules for Effective Exception Handling by chrisadamson
• Best Practices for Exception Handling by Gunjan Doshi 
• Exception Handling: Common Problems and Best Practice with Java 1.4, by Andreas Müller and Geoffrey Simmons
• Error Handling in Node.js
• Best practices in EJB exception handling by Srikanth Shenoy

Tools for Writing

This is just a bookmark on a number of writing tools,

• Jupyter Notebook. "The Jupyter Notebook is a web application for interactive data science and scientific computing."
• Authorea. Authorea is the collaborative editor for research. Write and manage your documents in one place, for free. 
•  Overleaf. Overleaf is a collaborative writing and publishing system for writing and previewing in LaTex.

Cannot Start VirtualBox Virtual Machine after an Upgrade

Having upgraded Oracle Virtualbox on a Windows host, I found that I could not start any Virtual Machine instances. VirtualBox displays a dialogue window with the error message shown below,

Examining the virtual machine log file, i.e., Logs\VBoxHardening.log in the Virtual Machine instance directory, I found the following error message near the end of the log file,

1660.6c38: supR3HardenedVmProcessInit: Opening vboxdrv stub...
1660.6c38: Error opening VBoxDrvStub:  STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND
1660.6c38: supR3HardenedWinReadErrorInfoDevice: NtCreateFile -> 0xc0000034
1660.6c38: Error -101 in supR3HardenedWinReSpawn! (enmWhat=3)
1660.6c38: NtCreateFile(\Device\VBoxDrvStub) failed: 0xc0000034 STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND (0 retries)

Driver is probably stuck stopping/starting. Try 'sc.exe query vboxdrv' to get more information about its state. Rebooting may actually help.

The message indicates that Windows service vboxdrv, i.e., the Virtual Box Driver has some problem. Following the advice in the log, I issue sc.exe query vboxdrv in a Windows Command Prompt window,

C:\>sc start vboxdrv
[SC] StartService: OpenService FAILED 1060:

The specified service does not exist as an installed service.
C:\>

which indicates that Windows service vboxdrv does not exist. To fix the issue, I reinstalled the driver vboxdrv from the directory C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\vboxdrv. From the Windows GUI, you can right click the VBoxDrv.inf and choose "install".
If the installation is successful and you query the driver status again, you should see something similar below,

C:\>sc query vboxdrv

SERVICE_NAME: vboxdrv
        TYPE               : 1  KERNEL_DRIVER
        STATE              : 4  RUNNING
                                (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, IGNORES_SHUTDOWN)
        WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)
        SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)
        CHECKPOINT         : 0x0
        WAIT_HINT          : 0x0
C:\>

Now I can launch the virtual machine instances.

HTTPS Everywhere Arrives at Blogger!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post on how we may preserve privacy while browsing the Web. One particular technology that we can rely on is HTTPS, for which, I mentioned The Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin. See the blog post for more discussion.

Today, I am happy to learn that Google has rolled out the HTTPS support to Blogspot based their blog post released on September 30, 2015.

This is fantastic!

Let us push HTTPS Everywhere!

As indicated in the Google's blog post,

"

Blogspot authors should be aware that if they choose to encrypt at this time, some of the current functionality of their blog may not work over HTTPS. This can be a result of template, gadgets, and blog post content, and is often caused by mixed content errors, some of which may be fixable by the author themselves.

"

If you blog site rely on your own web services that are availed via the HTTP protocol, you may have to make it available via the HTTPS protocol. You actually can obtain free SSL certificates for your web services, at least from two providers at the time this post is written.

Well, having stated the above, although I enabled HTTPS on this blog site, I have not be able to tested all the posts and functionality. Readers, if you happen to spot a "mixed content" error on this blog site, please let me know. I am most appreciative for that.

Improving Windows Desktop Search for PDF and Other Binary Files

Windows Search, formerly Windows Desktop Search, may not index content and metadata of binary files, such as, those of PDF files without assistance of some additional software although it does index the files based on their names.

To enable Windows Search to index content and metadata of binary files, we need to install some additional software to help the Windows Search. Windows Search supports iFilter. With the matching iFilter add-in installed, Windows Search can index content and metadta of binary files of certain types. The iFilter.org site lists a number of iFilter add-ins for a few types of binary files, e.g., ZIP, CAB, CHM, DjVu, and PDF files.

Below we show how we can enable indexing content and metadata of  PDF files.

First, we can check whether PDF iFilter exists. The following steps are carried out on a Windows 10 host.

1. Open "Windows Control Panel"
2. Search and open "Indexing Options"
3. Open "Advanced" from "Indexing Options" 
4. Choose "File Types"
5. Locate the "pdf" file type.
   
   
   
   
   
   Above figure shows that "Registered iFILTER is not found", which means that iFilter add-in is not installed and Windows Search do not index content and metadata of PDF files.

To enable indexing content and metadata of PDF files, we can choose and install Adobe PDF iFilter. If the PDF iFilter is installed, repeating the above step, Windows will indicate that the iFilter is intalled as illustrated in the figure below.

 To force Windows Search to index content and metadata of PDF files immediately upon the  installation of the PDF iFilter, we can check and uncheck PDF file types from the "File Types" tab of the "Advanced Options" of the "Indexing Options" as follows,

1. Open "Control Panel", "Indexing Option", then "Advanced Option", and finally, the "File Types" tab
2. Locate the "pdf" file type
3. Uncheck the "pdf" file type
4. Click "OK"
5. Window pops up a dialogue window stating "Rebuilding the index might take a long time to complete. Some views and search results might be incomplete until rebuilding is finished." Click "Cancel" on this dialogue window.
6. Windows will return to "Indexing Option". Now click on "Advanced" again to open the "Advanced Options"
7. On the Advanced Options, choose "File Types"
8. Locate the "pdf" file type again
9. Check the "pdf" file type
10. Click on "OK" to confirm
11. Window now pops up again the dialogue window stating "Rebuilding the index might take a long time to complete. Some views and search results might be incomplete until rebuilding is finished." Click "OK" on this dialogue window to confirm. Windows starts rebuilding the index. Depending on the amount files on the disk, it may take a long time to rebuild the index. 
12. You can safely close the "Indexing Option". Windows index continues to rebuild the index in background.