Month: May 2006

Blackberry versus the SmartPhones

Yea, I know I am a bad boy. I use a Blackberry rather than a SmartPhone. SmartPhone is real intriguing but the Blackberry works for me. The big reason I got the Blackberry was to synchonize my address book with Outlook. It is hard to call someone when the updated phone number is not on your phone but is still back in your office. A PDA is a solution but I prefer the phone format. The secondary reason was to read my Yahoo email in my spare time. A month ago I decided to setup my Blackberry to download my business email, too. Blackberry works fine with OWA. An updated calendar and task list is nice but not critical I have occasionally used the web browser and Opera Mini but they are painfully slow.

Although my phone is only two years old I have started looking at replacements. The biggest feature I am interested in is faster web access via T-Mobile and a phone modem capability for my laptop. The new phones are nice but I can wait.

SOS Online Backup 1.3 (beta) review by PC Magazine

SOS Online Backup 1.3 (beta) review by PC Magazine
With SOS Online Backup, you can start small, protecting a handful of really important files, and scale all the way up to 100GB. It keeps previous versions of files forever. And continuous backup means your files are always backed up.

I finally signed up for this today using the special PCMag offer of $35 for 1GB. I setup a trial account two days ago when I ran into credit card issues. Yesterday the fraud division of my credit card asked me if I really wanted to allow SOS Online Backup to charge my credit card. SOS Backup is an Australian firm. It was nice of my credit card company to ask. Offsite backup is attractive and if the client is as good as they say it will be, this will be a nice solution. The features I was looking for are:

  1. Secure file transfer. SOS uses https.
  2. Encrypted storage.
  3. A good client that only updates the changed files in a directory.
  4. Future client will have client support for SQL and Exchange.

This is a service I am surprised that Yahoo or Google does not offer. For information on the $35 a year offer look for the link at the end of the PCMag review. My plan is to use this offsite storage to store copies of the several QuickBooks company files I use and the Habitrak data base there.

RE: about your URL

Providers all sorts of information like loading time, uptime, Cacheability, Readability etc. Its a Keeper…

[Via digg]

The site’s address is abouturl.com.

NewsForge | Portable open source software

NewsForge | Portable open source software

Since I use several of the open source packages on this list, I have to say that I approve of the selections and will take a look at the ones I do not presently use. For the ultimate in portability I have Firefox and Open Office installed on a USB stick. Most of the packages I use lean toward enhancing security via encryption. Some of the packages on the list I use are:

  • KeePass – password manager
  • TrueCrypt – encrypted file system

Some of the other open source packages listed at the bottom that I use are XAMPP and Notepad++. Although it is not open source, VMplayer/VMServer, really help in this area by allowing you to run Linux on a virtual machine and reach the rest of open source universe.

Windows Defender Beta 2 and WSUS

I guess it was last week that Windows Spyware told me I should upgrade to Windows Defender Beta 2. I upgraded but it did not seem to be able to get current spyware definitions. That was an annoyance but since I was running it on my server I put off finding the problem. I rarely access the internet from the server so it was a low priority.

Today(Sunday) I was looking at applying any patches and possilbly rebooting so I decided to research the problem. The first thing I figured out was that the recommendations from the troubleshooting page did not work for me. Hmm…at the bottom of the screen it talked about getting updates through automatic updates. Well, that was different. I was in WSUS recently and there weren’t any Windows Defender updates detected. So I went back in and went to Options-Synchronization Options and started poking about. The first thing I figured out that I needed to change the Products and click on Windows Defender. I synchronized the server and then tried to update Windows Defender. I was was not successful. So I went back to the Options-Synchronization Options-Update classifications and clicked on a new category, Definition Updates. I synchronized the server again and then did a custom view of Windows Defender Definition Updates. There were updates for me to approve! So I approved the last update and tried to update Windows Defender. It worked!

Okay, setting up Windows Defender is different than Microsoft’s Spyware. There is a lot more configuration to do if you use WSUS. To make sure than I did not have spend any more time caring and feeding Windows Defender I had to do one more thing. I went into Automatic Approval Options and set it up to automatically approve for installation the Definition Updates.

More phpWebsite theme changes and hacks

Well it took me a long time but I finally got around to researching and fixing some annoyances. This all started with some text in the right column that flowed over into the center/left column. In this case it was a calendar event. So I went looking for the likely suspect, an unnecessary table, and replaced it with a div in my theme. One of the nice things about phpWebsite is that you can overide the default layout in your theme.

Since I was mucking around I decided to go after some other annoyances. In this case I cleaned up the layout for the Announcements and Article summaries by getting rid of extra fields. The “Read” field does not a value for Announcements and the “Print” and “Email” icons are annoyances for the articles especially since I have a print.css and the icons cause the page to not validate. In this case less is more.

While I was at it I turned off the login block since I am the only one who uses it and I know how to get to it.

My final fix was to modify the template for the backend feed. I was not getting my feed graphic to show up in RSS Bandit. I found that the variable in the template was specified incorrectly for the URL feed. The module creates a thumbnail for the feed and it was too small for me. So I faked it out by manually replacing the thumbnail with a slightly larger one.

My version of CSS Reboot

I recently saw that another CSS Reboot was going to happen on May 1st so I was inspired to try a new 3 column, hacked WordPress theme from Andreas Viklund. My hacking was minor. I inserted my photo in the header.

RE: Opera Mini 2.0 released

Opera Software today announced a new version of its awesome micro HTML-browser for non-smartphones, Opera Mini 2.0.

Lots of new features like: change browser’s visual skin, search engine improvements, speed dial for bookmarks, and quick horizontal and vertical panning when browsing backwards or forwards.

[Via digg]

I tried using several previous versions of Opera Mini on my Blackberry in the past and the quirky usability killed me. The thumbwheel was useless. Performance was sluggish, too! This version fixed those quirks. You can use the thumbwheel to click on a link now. Usability has dramatically improved and the performance is pretty good. So far I like it and I suspect I will start using it over the built-in browser.

More Hacking widget.php for WordPress

I finally to extract most of my hacks from widget.php that I mentioned in Hacking widget.php for WordPress. I created a widget plug-in called Verse of the Day with the changes since they are for the most unique to the Verse of the Day feed. Despite removing most of my hacks I did leave in one small hack. The widget.php has an IF statement in the widget_rss function that refers to a show_summary field. Since the field is never set in the program logic, it is always false. I wanted it to be true so it would show the RSS item description. In this case I wanted it to show the Quote of the Day from quotationspage.com. I could have forced the show_summary field to be true but by removing the IF statement logic I got another desirable feature and used less code.

Hacking widget.php for WordPress

I started playing with widgets a little more seriously since I found a fix for my XAMPP installation. On a lark I decided to try and use the builtin RSS widget. I didn’t get the results I expected. The feed I was planning on using is a single item RSS feed that does not have a link in the item element. It does have a guid with the correct http link. The content is in a content:encoded element. So the stuff is in the wrong place for this widget. The RSS widget wants a link element and the content in the description element. What I wanted was a display of the first item with a title linking back to the original website and its content with only the < a > and < br / > html tags allowed through.

So I started looking over the widget.php and the other supplied widgets. I ended up hacking the original RSS widget for my tests. Despite not knowing what I am doing I was able to modify the widget and get the required results pretty quickly. The hardest part was getting the strip_tags function to let the line break tag, < br / >, through as an allowed tag. I am using the optional “allowed tag” parameter with this function. I had to add the slash character(/) to get it to pass the line breaks through. Adding a space before the slash character like I normally would enter a line break caused the function to remove the line break.