Comments on: Marco Polo Makes your Laptop Smarter

By: Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:44:16 +0000

Holy hell, I’ve been looking for something that does this for ages. Guess I should re-subscribe to your blog now that I’ve found something useful on it, huh…

Of course I’m kidding – I read feeds about as often as I blog, which is almost never :)

By: Keri Henare

Keri Henare — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:41:13 +0000

I found Marco Polo recently and I think that it’s just great.

We have an internal subversion and testing server in the office which is also accessible externally.

I have Marco Polo execute a bash script that toggles the IP for the various host names in my hosts file.

It has worked flawlessly.

By: lrwro

lrwro — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:56:10 +0000

sounds great, have to try it asap. Thanks for sharing.

By: Mike G.

Mike G. — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:58:34 +0000

I had used a trial version of ‘LocationX’ which I had liked but couldn’t justify the cost (post trial period) over the convenience. I, for some reason, couldn’t find a free equivalent (with all the features) that I had liked… until now. Thanks for the link Mike.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:35:02 +0000

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s how I’m currently managing it, but there’s an unfortunate bug somewhere (either in Adium, MSN Messenger’s servers, or our corporate proxy) which kicks you off as soon as someone else in the office opens Adium. I’ve been trying to self-diagnose it as much as I can and I’ve posted debug logs and packet traces to the Adium bug reporting area, but no resolution yet. :(

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:33:03 +0000

Andy: MSNBC has actually managed to stay pretty hands-off with regard to our creative execution, so that’s good. It’s tough have to deal with another set of objectives on top of our own (MSNBC community plus Newsvine community), but aside from that, it’s been just fine. WIth regard to the network thing, it’s a bit of a pain but it’s not atypical for companies with more than about 50 employees. As soon as you have a lot of people to worry about and a lot of source code repositories to safeguard and all that stuff, Corporate IT becomes more than just “let’s hook up a Qwest DSL line and a wireless router” (which is all we did before). :)

By: Jonathan E

Jonathan E — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:30:45 +0000

Hey Mike, about port blocking – if you use Adium as your “multi-protocol IM client” just go into the account settings for your accounts and set the ports to 80. Have you tried this already?

Usually this will work with AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo and probably anything else as it just uses the same (default) port as your browser would to access any website.

By: Andy Borgmann

Andy Borgmann — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:17:35 +0000

I’m the CEO of Newsvine, but not the CEO of MSNBC. :) Our office is wired with their network now. It’s not quite the same at the Microsoft network since the two companies are separate, but it’s close. But yeah, I’m not a big fan of port-blocking and proxies in general. Can’t do anything about it, unfortunately.

This is very sad.

I was thinking the same thing as PanMan, but then it hit me that I bet you were under MSNBC policy now. Which brings up an interesting question: since being a part of MSNBC, do you feel it has limited the creativity and the capability of the office? You probably can’t answer, but I figured I would ask.

P.S. I love this Marco Polo thing. My laptop has a dynamic IP address assigned at home, but at work I have it on a public, static IP address to act as a development server. This will come in handy.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:19:18 +0000

PanMan: I’m the CEO of Newsvine, but not the CEO of MSNBC. :) Our office is wired with their network now. It’s not quite the same at the Microsoft network since the two companies are separate, but it’s close. But yeah, I’m not a big fan of port-blocking and proxies in general. Can’t do anything about it, unfortunately.

With regard to Windows, Marco Polo *is* open source so maybe some enterprising person wants to try porting it?

By: David Szymakowski

David Szymakowski — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:47:50 +0000

I second the motion for a tool like that for windows.

By: Brian Stucki

Brian Stucki — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:32:38 +0000

Thanks for the highlight. I’ve been searching for something like this for a while now.

(I’m interested to see if it will automatically create an SSH tunnel to my colocated Mac when I’m on a new network for security in surfing. )

By: PanMan

PanMan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:22:54 +0000

Sounds like a great tool, and one that should exist for windows.
But, why don’t you have full internet access at your workplace?
I thought having not-full internet is more something for old telco places, than new startup places? And you can’t blame someone else, being the CEO, right? :)
Just interested why a startup wouldn’t have full access.

By: Andy Hume

Andy Hume — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:23:30 +0000

Same problem here at the latest London MSFT office. Good tip.

By: Tiffehr

Tiffehr — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:54:19 +0000

I was just grumping about this on the MSFT geek bus. Awesome. Thanks, Mike D!