Bryant Likes has published his solution to show SQL Server Reporting Services stuff in SharePoint. For the latest releases, you can visist the GotDotNet Workspace. Nice work Bryant!
[Via Jan Tielens’ Bloggings]
Bryant has done something that really takes advantage of Sharepoint’s SQL capability. There are several alternatives out there so I will have to go through the choices when I have more time.
SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam classifier written in Python.
The Version 1.0 release candidate (both source and Windows binary installer) is now available!
This is another sourceforge program I use daily. The Junk email filter in Outlook 2003 seems to be doing a good job but this catches the rest. I will wait until the stable version is released. All spam programs can detect spam but the good ones avoid false positives.
I downloaded and installed ISA SP2 last week. I did not encounter any problems. Today I downloaded the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter and in the process of downloading the deployment guide. They highly recommend that you read it before installing. That ruins all the fun!
Exchange 2003 SP1 is 100 MB. I decided to order it instead. I have more of an issue with spam than I do with Exchange fixes. I can wait for these fixes.
Archives ~ 14 April 2004 ~ Authentic Boredom
Okay, this i missed! This list by cameron is what he believes are responsible for 80% of the website design innovation. This is an excellent start at improving your knowlege of website design. I have read many of their contributions in the past so I respect their work. They are very good and I am not, enough said!
Yea, this is bad news for dual booters like me. The Bugzilla Bug 115980: will not boot to windows partition using grub menu that this post refers to is pretty lengthy.
schwatoo writes “It seems Fedora Core doesn’t like to boot alongside Windows 2K or XP. According to a bug first reported in February on Fedora’s bugzilla site …
[Via Slashdot]
Yea, this is bad news for dual booters like me. The Bugzilla Bug 115980: will not boot to windows partition using grub menu that this post refers to is pretty lengthy. The first entry is on 17-Feb-2004 and it is still open. Evidently the new kernel used in Fedora Core 2 does not read the disk geometry correctly and as a result something(parted?) in the installation process corrupts the partition table. I was planning on upgrading to Core 2 but I will wait until they figure this one out.
Design by Fire: Design Eye for the Usability Guy
Further, in the spirit of sharing, I decided I’d gather up some knowledgeable designers and help Nielsen in return with a little bit of design advice. The Design Fab Five, right here, right now.
Great article on redesigning Jakob Nielsen’s website, useit.com. Everyone likes to take their shot at making Jakob’s site a little lot more attractive without losing the usability that Jakob recommends. Many of their recommendations are appropiate for almost any website.
wehuberconsultingllc.com
Welcome to the new wehuberconsultingllc.com website. My fascination with phpWebSite has led me to create this site using that package. As a low cost CMS I think it has a lot of features that will appeal to a lot clients. Sometimes the best way to explain a package is to demonstrate it so I plan on incorporating the features I find most intriguing. Some of the projects I am looking at are:
1. Create a new theme modeled after ideas I got from meyerweb, alistapart, glish.com, and wordpress.
2. Create an Amazon bookstore
3. Create a best practice/FAQ for SBS
4. Create and update a web link that has influenced the most.
It’s official. WordPress 1.2 is out. I updated the files on myweblog using the CVS version since I was almost already there. Whew! Along the way to 1.2 I found several bugs. I know they fixed them so I hope they did not slip back in.
It has been hard for me to blog here on a regular basis due to various errors in WordPress. I am using the bleeding edge(i.e. CVS version) so I am at fault. My problems originally centered around using w.bloggar. First I got an error message saying I did not post for an unspecified reason. I tried it a second time before I figured out that the first actually got through. So I checked the CVS for an updated version of XMLRPC. I found one, so I updated my files. A day or so later I could not delete a post. Some more files had changed in the CVS, so I updated. A couple days later I found I could no login using w.bloggar. I had been using the b2 configuration. The forum said try a custom version. It didn’t work either. Some more files had changed in the CVS, so I updated. You catch the drift. 
Now let us see if we can post this…
The minutes from the Atom/W3C discussion in New York have been posted online. Unfortunately the default formatting is pretty difficult to follow. I found it a lot easier to figure out who was saying what after applying the following CSS (using the test styles bookmarklet):
abbr { display: block; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; font-weight: bold; } abbr:after { content: " - " attr(title); }
[Via Simon Willison’s Weblog]
Open source presents a large potential competitive advantage for hardware and software vendors, and vendors of complementary or substitute services. Linux has contributed greatly to the adoption and success of OSS. Companies such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Oracle, and recently, Novell, have invested in, and legitimized the use of Linux for enterprise applications — including datacenter operations.
Open source presents a large potential competitive advantage for hardware and software vendors, and vendors of complementary or substitute services. Linux has contributed greatly to the adoption and success of OSS. Companies such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Oracle, and recently, Novell, have invested in, and legitimized the use of Linux for enterprise applications — including datacenter operations.
Linux-related services deliver more than $1 billion in annual revenue to both IBM and HP. Oracle strongly promotes and likewise derives revenue from the Linux platform, with the so-called “unbreakable Linux” guarantee. In an attempt to catch the Linux wave, companies such as Computer Associates and Peoplesoft are porting their applications to Linux on ambitious timeframes.
In this article, we examine seven open source strategies that can give your company a competitive advantage. (Editor’s note: Each of the following links will take you directly to a particular section of the story.)
The Optimization Strategy
The Dual License Strategy
The Consulting Strategy
The Subscription Strategy
The Patronage Strategy
The Hosted Strategy
The Embedded Strategy
I have always been a fan of “almost free” software. Most of the news focuses on the inroads made by the server software, Linux, Apache, Mysql, and Perl/PHP/Python. Recently I have been surprised to find out that I am using primarily “free” software throughout the day and it is client software rather than server software. Up until two years ago I would always read Anchordesk for the reviews on some of latest “free” software. At this moment I am using WordPress via the Firefox browser. I use Firefox and Internet Explorer and consider both of them “almost free”. I occasionally use Tortoisecvs to update the WordPress files and Jedit to edit the files. WordPress on the other hand uses the opensource software, Mysql and PHP to do most of the heavy lifting. Rssbandit, my favorite news aggregator, also is sourceforge software. I use Pdfcreator to create Pdf files, Eraser to permanently erase files, bloggar to post to my weblogs, Filezilla as my ftp client, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use commercial software but I do not live in Microsoft Office like some people. I use Outlook daily but the other programs I use occasionally. I have Dreamweaver but I find myself using Jedit more often for the quick edits since it does a nice job displaying PHP, CSS, and HTML code. I use Quicken and QuickBooks daily but I am in and out pretty quickly. Norton Anti-Virus runs all the time but I do not interact with it. What I have found is that I have stretched my upgrade cycle for all of the commercial programs I do not use daily. The more features you can find and use in opensource software the less you upgrade. Commercial software providers have had this problem for a long time. I think if my usage is a good indicator of the public then it has become a major problem.
glish.com : CSS layout techniques
I am starting a process of updating the main www.wehuberconsultingllc.com site and the Legacy Farm website. I would like to use phpwebsite is the basis of both sites and create custom templates to achieve an almost table-less design. I don’t know how I missed this site, glish.com, but it is a great starting point. I don’t mind standing on the shoulders of others or telling everyone who did most of the work.
I was doing a quick review of a new design for a website so I went back to the Fedora box to check it with Mozilla. The colors were a bit unusual and I started to wonder how the site would look to a color blind person. Then I remembered the great Mozilla plug-in called Checky. So I installed Checky and ran the color blind test. It was okay but I really liked the convience of Checky. So when I went back to the XP box I installed Firefox and the Checky extension. Nice browser!
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
[Via One Hand Clapping]
Spam filter, Exchange 2003 SP1 to launch at TechEd
Look to late May for a bounty of new messaging tools from Microsoft, including the release of the IMF and the first service and feature pack for Exchange Server 2003. Looks like it will be shipped in two parts, bug fixes and new enhancements. The big enhancement is the Intelligent Messaging Filter.
Today I imported 25 postings from my old blog. I used the import-rss script but the import screwed up the html elements by replacing the < tag with < and the > tag with >. So I searched the beta support and found a recommendation by someone to add a html_entity_decode function call on the content and description. I also added it to the title. Then I renamed the file from import-rss.php to import-rss1.php and changed the link in the file to point to the new name when it gets invoked as step 1. This time the posts looked good.
I am still in awe of the ease with which I installed phpwebsite and wordpress. Today I decided to upgrade the wordpress to the 1.2 beta. I checked out a copy of the beta from the cvs using tortoisecvs a couple of days ago. Today I updated my copy and then used the synchronize option of UnlimitedFTP to synchronize my updated directory with the website. I then ran the upgrade procedure in the wp-admin directory and I was done. Pretty slick. I wanted the lastest version installed since I was planning on migrating selected categories of my other blog over here. One of the changes in the beta has to do with storing the dates and times. It would be nice to get this done right the first time!
Another view point on the soul of a man though I do not think it so easy to find.
I think each of us has a kernel, under all the layers of experience and pain, that’s ageless and perfect. Some people call this a heart, the organ that pumps blood thru our bodies. Others call it a spirit, the essence of the person. Whatever you call it, it’s there, and you can easily find it.
I bit the bullet last week and set up a host with godaddy. The price and features looked good and I had been pleased with godaddy’s service. Then I tried to install phpwebsite. I could not get it to install and naturally they were of no help. I searched the web and did not find any help so I started to debug the php code. It took me awhile but I finally narrowed the problem down to the set_ini statement that godaddy had disabled for security reasons. The set_ini function is used by phpwebsite to modify the include path so that PHP can find the Pear library. After a few more emails to see if they would either modify the settings for my host to allow me to use set_ini or install the Pear library as a system library, I gave up and started searching for a new host provider. There were several “independent” reviews available out on the web so I scanned the lists and several of the top rated sites. I sent off a few emails to the sales departments inquiring about their PHP settings but ended up narrowing my list down to those top-rated sites that supplied the Fantastico application installer. Fantastico is an amazing CPanel/PHP based Web application that integrates with CPanel and allows clients like me the ability to automagically install a variety of Open Source Applications including phpwebsite and wordpress. So I called bluehost.com and they encouraged me to try it out since there was a money back guarantee. Within about ten minutes I had created a website, installed both phpwebsite and wordpress, and completed my initial testing. Now that is slick! On top of that the CPanel application provides a slew of nice features such as ssh/script access and secure browser based file transfers. They did not skimp on hosting features either. You get 1GB of diskspace, 10 databases, perl/php, and slew of other features. This all comes at a very competitive price of $6.95 a month. Wow! I am impressed. I knew deep down that setting up a web site is not that hard. The hard part is selecting the right host provider. Click here to checkout or signup for bluehost.com.