Link to Use an XHTML Sitemap for Better Indexing
I just finished adding a Sitemap page to my blog using the instructions on post I have linked to above. Chris did a great job. The instructions were easy and having a single page of all my pages is pretty handy. I think Google has done a fine job indexing my blogs but occasionally I have had trouble searching for a post I have made in the past.
This week’s edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, which is a joint edition with the Giving Carnival, is now up at Donor Power Blog and Tactical Philanthropy. You can read it either place. The selected posts are the same, but Jeff and Sean added their own comments to their versions. The posts take a look at what donors and nonprofits wish the other knew about each other and provide some fascinating scenarios for nonprofits to think about. What do donors really want to know? Are donors always right? Do donors even remember they’ve given to you? Check out the carnival.
More Resources from Kivi: How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report – A Four-Week E-Course You Can Start Today
Link to Carnival #33: Communicating with Donors
The BusinessBlogWire pointed me at this site via their Blogtipping roundup. Kivi has some excellent nonprofit advice on her site. As Treasurer for a nonprofit I was modestly interested in her advice on how to write a nonprofit annual report. Our Development Director had mentioned he was interested in writing an annual report a couple of months ago. I liked the idea but loathed the fact that it would involve a lot of my time since I was the custodian of information. As Treasurer my plate has been overflowing for several months. My workload has forced me to beg off of strategic plan meetings even though I have a vested interest that this strategic plan be a plan that can be implemented. Strategic plans and annual reports go hand in hand. It is hard to plan for success if you do not keep score.
My problem with strategic plans is that board members try to be so nice. They never seem to say a bad word about strategic plans they think are unrealistic. In their hearts they want to be wrong and the strategic plan to work. Their dilemma is that they already know that there are plenty of situations that will cause them to say and act differently than where the strategic plan is pointing them. The words they speak and the actions they take will not mimic the hope in their heart. Breaking this status quo is the grand challenge.
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.
Link to WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2
Just when you thought it was smart to perform changed files upgrades, they find a security breach and recommend you flatten your installation and start over with a clean install. Oh well!
Data sheets for hard drives have always included a specification for reliability expressed in hours: commonly known as MTBF (mean time between failures), or sometimes the mean time to failure. Same difference: One way assumes that a drive will be fixed, and the other, replaced. Nowadays, this number is around a million hours for an “enterprise” hard drive. Some drives are rated at 1.5 million hours.
Now, that’s a good stretch to time. After all, a year is only 8,760 hours. One million hours comes to a bit more than 114 years. Some may be scratching their heads, since the hard drive itself has only been around for 50 years (IBM’s giant 350 Disk Storage Unit for its RAMAC computer). This can be confusing.
Instead, the MTBF is a statistical measure based on a calculation extrapolated from less-lengthy readings. It all means that drives are very reliable, with a failure rate well under 1 percent per year. Go Team Storage!
However, several papers covering large-scale storage presented at FAST ’07, the USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies, held recently in San Jose, Calif., are kicking up a stir online about MTBF.
The Best Paper award was handed to “Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?” by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Their study tracked a whopping set of drives used at large-scale storage sites, including high-performance computing and Web servers. The data suggests that a number of common wisdoms surrounding disk reliability are wrong.
For example, they found that annual disk replacements rates were more in the range of 2 to 4 percent and were as high as 13 percent for some sites. Yikes.
Source: Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce?
I found this fascinating article about MTBF and disk failures yesterday. I have known for some time that you must take the MTBF figures with a grain of salt. Disk drives appear to fail more often than what the MTBF figures would leave you to believe. The differences between “enterprise” disk drives and “retail” disk drives appear to be indistinguishable in the real world. Yet as an IT professional we will always recommend the component with the higher perceived quality even though we have misgivings about the statistics. For most businesses the cost of down time due to a disk failure is much higher than the additional cost for quality. Although we hate to admit it, there is a significant subjective component to our component recommendation.
A while back I decided that Version Control software was a better way for me to manage web site changes. This adds a little bit more documentation and incremental control over the daily backups. For small shops Version Control looks like overkill but it is simple to use. So I bit the bullet and setup a Subversion repository on my Windows-based computer. Initially I thought I would only keep my theme customizations and content in the repository but I eventually decided to keep the entire directory. Today I decided to document the process I use to update a website. In this case I am upgrading WordPress from 2.1 to 2.1.1 with a zipped file of changed files. I will be using several open source programs in addition to Subversion and TortoiseSVN. I will be using WinMerge to compare directories and FileZilla to upload the files. There are many suitable programs for these tasks. These are the ones I used.
Use TortoiseSVN to retrieve a clean working copy from the repository.
In my case the updated 2.1.1 files are in a zip file which follows the WordPress directory structure. I download the file and expand it into directories. I also print the updated file list. I am going to use the file list as my check list for the rest of the process. Stuff happens!
I use WinMerge as a quick check to compare the directories. I have projects set up to automate my comparison settings. It should show that the files I am updating are the ones on the file list. Surprisingly I find I am missing a couple of files shown on the changed file list. I opt to download the full source and add the missing updated files to my updates. I use WinMerge to copy the changed files over the repository files.
In this step I use FileZilla and the file list to upload the changed files. It is a real plus that my host provider allows me to use sFTP. Every extra bit of security helps keep the hackers away. Since this is a minor update I will leave all of my plugins active during the upgrade. WordPress recommends that you deactivate your plugins before updating in case you run into problems. I sort the local directory based on Last Modified date so that the changed files are on the top and easier to find. I move from directory to directory updating the changed files. FileZilla continually reminds me that I am overwriting existing files. That is good. There are only four directories and twenty file so the process goes quickly. When I have finished uploading the files I go to my browser and click on the Site Admin link in WordPress. It prompts me with links to complete the upgrade. This is normal. I follow the links and finish updating the site within a minute. I do a quick check of the website to make sure everything is still working. I have finished updating the web site.
I use TortoiseSVN to commit the changes and with a description. When I am finished I use TortoiseSVN to check the log and make sure that the description I just added makes sense. This is probably the last time I will look at the description until I need to understand it sometime in the future. I am happy with what I wrote so I move on to my other projects.
Technorati tags: web design, open-source, wordpress
Problem
I want to have a one-pixel one-color solid border around a table and its cells. Adding
border="1"to thetabletag isn’t suitable, because it looks horrific in most of the browsers.
Source: One-pixel table border with CSS
I was confronted with this same problem in phpWebsite. I was using a table to display the pedigree of a horse with the border set by using border="1". I am not sure what it was doing but it looked pretty ugly. His solution for a default one-pixel border looked pretty simple and elegant and I was determined to figure out a way to use it.
table
{
border-color: #600;
border-width: 0 0 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
}
td
{
border-color: #600;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 0;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #FFC;
}
When I tried to use this code as the default definitions for table and td elements used by phpWebsite I found it affected multiple areas I did not want changed. I needed to refine its use via selectors and the ID selector was my first choice. I had used the Class selector before and it involved a lot more work adding it on table and td elements. The design of phpWebsite uses section templates for creating formatted content on web pages. So I added the above CSS code to my site CSS but prefaced it with the #mytable ID so that I would override the default table definitions only in #mytable blocks. Then I created a new section template to wrap a <div id="mytable"> around the existing content. All I needed to do was go back and update the existing sections containing the tables to use the new template. Within a fairly short time all of my tables had their ugly border replaced with a simple 1 pixel border.
Technorati tags: phpwebsite, css
From the SBS2K group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sbs2k/
Hello,
> What they don’t know is that I turned the server off for a
> day, and that one desktop is still being updated.
The Clients will update, automatically, from the Internet if they cannot communicate direclty with the CSM SMB server. We have changed this to be the default behavior in 3.5. You can check this here:
Security Settings | Select a Group | Configure | Client Privileges | Update Settings
[x] Download from the Trend Micro ActiveUpdate Server
It is now enabled by default in 3.5 and above.
> because he understands that it should be able to run on
> the Windows XP Pro system.
Prior to GM release we run a final check called FCSE, First Customer Ship Experience, and I personally did the following on Windows XP Professional and had no issues.
2.0 upgrade to 3.5
3.0 SP1 upgrade to 3.5
3.5 New installation
Let me check with Support on this issue.
Regards,
William Kam
Product Management
Trend Micro, Ltd.
https://SMB-PORTAL.TRENDMICRO.COM (External User Group Portal)
Although I am running version 3.5 on the company server, I did not think my laptop was updating until I connected with the local network via vpn. When I checked my configuration I found that the setting to allow the client to update from the ActiveUpdate server was not enabled. It is now enabled since I prefer to have my laptop up to date.
My experience with Trend Micro has been mixed. I run Client Server Messaging Security for SMB version 3.5 on our company server. I generally have had good experiences with the client. Major client updates can get a little hairy. My experience is that all of the anti-virus vendors are okay but the other vendors are a little more intrusive. The most serious problems I faced occured with the server interface under version 3.0. Several SBS consultants said they were staying with 2.0 until the interface situation improved. SP1 improved the situation somewhat. I found the interface to be quirky but workable since clients do not access it and I did not need to use it very often. I upgraded to version 3.5 from 3.0 SP1. It took a long time to upgrade but it worked without a problem. The server interface has improved. It is stable and a joy to use.
Technorati tags: sbs, small business server
Getting an “Event ID 5” error on “DefaultAppPool”?
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Active Server Pages
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5
Date: 14/05/2004
Time: 4:32:55 AM
User: N/A
Computer: 001DC001
Description:
Error: The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ because of the following error: Could not create a Disk Cache Sub-directory for the Application Pool. The data may have additional error codes..Try these fixes:
A. Add the NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE account to
C:\WINDOWS\Help\iisHelp\common with “Read and Execute,” “List Folder Contents” and “Read”.B. Add the NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE account to
C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\ASP Compiled Templates with Full Control.C. Add the NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE account to C:\WINDOWS\IIS Temporary Compressed Files with Full Control.
Thanks David S. for the suggestion! 🙂
Event 5 is more of an annoyance than an error so I implemented this today. I do not know how long I have had this “error” but the only symptom is this error message. I restarted IIS and I did not get the error message. My final test will be when I reboot.
ISA Server detected routes through adapter WAN that do not correlate with the network element to which this adapter belongs. For best practice, the address range of an ISA Server network should match the address ranges routable through the associated network adapter as defined in the routing table. Otherwise valid packets may be dropped as spoofed. (This alert may occur momentarily when you create a remote site network. You may safely ignore this message if it does not reoccur.) The address ranges in conflict are: 172.16.255.255-172.16.255.255;.
While I was fixing problems I decided to clean up this configuration error. I have a DMZ that uses IP addresses, 172.16.0.0 through 172.16.0.255. Evidently ISA needs 172.16.255.255 so it inserts a route on the WAN adapter for it and then complains about the route being in the wrong place. I added this single address to the DMZ network and this configuration error went away.
Yesterday was a miserable day. We lost power for eight hours due to an ice storm and I spent most of the day taking care of business in the barn since our employees were not going to make it in. When I finally got some time to look at my server, it was complaining that it was running low on disk space on the OS partition and that an external drive I was storing volume snaps had been forced down. Microsoft had just let loose gobs of patches. So late in the day I decided to clean up the server.
Then the fun began. The Firewall service crashed with the following message.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server 2004
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 2/15/2007
Time: 11:03:56 AM
User: N/A
Computer: myserver
Description: Faulting application wspsrv.exe, version 4.0.2165.610, stamp 442d48f1, faulting module w3filter.dll, version 4.0.2165.610, stamp 442d48dd, debug? 0, fault address 0x00094cff.
This did not seem too serious until I realized that my workstation could no longer see the server. My search of the internet came up with nothing so I removed the most recent patches and rebooted. It still failed. The server’s browser could not get to local https sites and the LAN card was showing no incoming traffic. This was getting pretty ugly.
The symptoms on my workstation were ugly, too. All of the programs(e.g. TrendMicro and Firewall client) that regularly communicate with the server were not communicating with the server. When I ran ipconfig, it showed that DHCP was not working. The LAN card status showed that there were no incoming packets. Fortunately I can let this server be down for awhile, so I went to bed.
Today I searched the internet for some more clues. I found a reference for a similar problem that pointed me in the direction of the ISA cache and it recomended disabling BITS on the ISA Cache rules. That didn’t work. Since I was out of ideas I decided to disable the cache. I started the firewall service and it worked. Just for kicks I enabled the cache and started the firewall service again. It worked! It must have been something in the cache.
I decided to turn off the visual editor in WordPress today. It has an annoying habit of removing the <p> and <br /> tags when you switch to the code tab. This would not be a problem if it did not remove the blank lines inside a <blockquote> tag, too. This problem occurs when you start out on the visual tab, go to the code tab, return to the visual tab and then go back to the code tab. The second time you go to the code tab the blank line disappears. The end result is a paragraph with all of the sentences bunched together in one paragraph. Yea, it looks pretty ugly. I cannot see how this could be per design, so I submitted this as a bug.
I found that if you use the manual editor, the <p> and <br /> tags and the line spacing get stored with the post correctly. This change should work out for me since I write most of my posts using LiveWriter and I use the manual editor primarily to tweak the html.
The problem that started me on this merry chase was a subtle line spacing issue with paragraphs inside a blockquote. I did not know that my CSS for paragraphs inside a blockquote used margin: 0px; and this margin value removed the blank line that normally follows a paragraph. Changing this code to margin: 0 0 15px; restored the normal paragraph spacing. Of course, the source of this problem is obscured if the visual editor keeps stripping out the <p> tag.
Arthur Sulzberger is the owner and chairman of the New York Times. And he has now shocked us all by telling an Israeli newspaper “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”Let me repeat that so you don’t miss the magnitude of that statement! “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”
Update: Here’s a link to what seems to be the original newspaper article.
Sulzberger says the site development costs for the Internet are nothing compared to the huge print investment costs. Furthermore, he said, “…we live in the Internet world…” indicating that the paper is going to have to learn to survive there. It’s the future, and he realizes it.
For fans of e-readers this is especially exciting news. It would seem to accelerate the race for e-reader devices and content systems that can adequately collect and present daily and weekly publications. Clearly, such delivery mechanisms are in their infancy, but with so much at stake so soon, there will surely be a lot of activity and technological advances.We might find that UMPCs and e-ink both gain a lot more traction as this newspaper revolution begins.
From UPI, via a tip from Pride of Lions. Thanks!
Link to NY Times owner – Print version irrelevant or gone in 5 years!
About twenty years ago I was taking a course for my MBA in which we did a competitive analysis of the newspaper industry. We concluded that it was on an irreversible decline when compared to the competitive advantages of the other media. This was before the Internet! I watched with amusement over the years how the newspapers have adapted to the onslaught from the different media services. Local newspapers, local radio, and local TV stations have shown remarkable agility in targeting their advertising market. For local businesses the advertising opportunities offered by local newspapers, local radio, and local TV are still the most cost effective way to market certain products. The price of local advertising has gone down in response to the lower market share but there are certain segments of the population that are not reachable via the Internet. The local media organizations have responded by making their organizations more efficient and agile. As long as there is local advertising revenue and local media is willing to adjust their prices in response to completive pressures, they will continue to find ways to survive another day.
Large “national” newspapers have a more severe problem as they compete more directly with both national TV news and the Internet. As an example I was an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal for many years. It taught me a lot about business. About ten years ago I dropped my printed subscription because the Internet version was more convenient. About two years ago I dropped my online subscription primarily because I could read most of the information it felt was significant from free news sources. The breadth, depth, and quality of the news available via the Internet is truly amazing. National and international news was the domain governed by large “national” newspapers and the major television networks. The news available via the Internet has a significant competitive advantage over these media outlets and has forced these organizations to assume a lesser role. This lesser role along with other demographics has translated into lower subscriptions and advertising revenue. Eventually these organizations will have to re-organize to confront the realities of the smaller advertising market segment they serve.
Printed newspapers will continue to decline with the biggest impact occurring on the large “national” newspapers because of their competition with national TV networks and the Internet. I believe that the “national” newspapers will eventually revert to local newspapers due to cost issues and the competitive advantages of the Internet. First hand reporting on national and international issues by these large organizations will be the first to feel the change in business direction. The need to reduce costs will out weigh the need for first hand reporting. Someone else will have to provide this service. This change will be painful but necessary if they are to survive. Despite these competitive pressures I doubt printed newspapers will disappear any time soon.
I finally called Tech Support and we found out that there is a hotfix out related to RPC Issues in ISA 2004, also there is an “SBS Protected Networks Access Rule” . Rt click it and “configure RPC protocol and uncheck the “Enforce strict RPC compliance”. This will allow DCOM to pass.
Source: Outlook by the sound : RPC server is unavailable since SP1
Okay this should not be that difficult but I found a way to screw it up. I started to suffer these problems when I installed SP1 for SBS Premium in 2005(?). The most prominent symptom of this problem is that you suffer Autoenrollment errors on the client and 537 login audit failures on the server. The 537 errors are kerberos errors but they are particularly ambiguous. This was an annoying problem in my case but surprisingly everything still works. From a different source than the one listed above, I unchecked the “Enforce strict RPC compliance” box. The problem is that there are two boxes, one in the System Policy and another the box on the “SBS Protected Networks Access Rule”. I unchecked the box in the System Policy and it did not fix my problem. So I spent a lot of hours after installing SP1 trying to figure out why I was still getting errors. Over the last two days I have been rebuilding my desktop computer so I made another attempt to clear up this problem. Lo and behold, I found this in one of my searches. Unchecking the box on “SBS Protected Networks Access Rule” appears to have fixed the Autoenrollment errors and 10009 DCOM errors on the client. It also fixes the 537 audit failures on the server.
Microsoft internal documentation reveals workaround for Vista Upgrade DVDs with no need for a previous version of Windows
Link to Workaround Discovered For Clean Install With Vista Upgrade DVDs
Original article can be found at Workaround Discovered For “Clean Install” With Vista Upgrade DVDs at Dailytech.com. Clean installs are a useful fix for a variety of difficult to solve problems but I find it very curious that Microsoft does not require the original disk.
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.idproxy.net, launched today, is my attempt at speeding up the process. It uses Yahoo!’s Browser-Based Authentication API to allow you to sign in with a Yahoo! account, then lets you create one or more OpenIDs (of the form something.idproxy.net) to use with sites that support the OpenID standard.
In effect, it lets you use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID.
Source: idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
Okay, I got distracted again. This time it was OpenID. It did not take me too long to setup an Open ID using my Yahoo! account and figure out how to authorize logins. It took me a little longer to figure out why I may want to use Open ID.
The primary advantage of using Open ID is with posting comments on other people’s web sites who require that you prove your identity before you make a comment. This can get pretty cumbersome to manage if you have a lot of sites that require you to setup a userid and password. For me Open ID is marginally useful but it is an interesting step in the right direction of managing your online identity.
For kicks I decided to try out the latest version of the WordPress OpenID plugin. It kind of works. The problems I have noticed so far are:
Depending on your version of PHP and whether the GMP and BCMath libraries, this plugin works differently but it does work. Since OpenID probably has value, my solution to the login form problem was to hack the user-interface.php file and comment out lines 107-114. I am not sure what the code thought it should be doing at that point but I know the form works as designed without that code messing it up.
Download details: Microsoft Office Outlook Tool: Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e343a233-b9c8-4652-9dd8-ae0f1af62568&displaylang=en&tm
To install this download:
Instructions for use:
After you are done installing the tool, it will automatically launch for you.
Note that if you have created non-recurring appointments on your Calendar since you updated your Windows time zones, you should click the Details button once the tool has reported that its scan is complete and uncheck any such appointments before continuing. Additionally, after running the tool, make sure to go to your calendar and review your calendar items to ensure that they appear at the correct times.
This is the standalone mailbox tool…and I’m not sure I understand what it’s doing?
Stuffa,
Enabling that perf counter for the PerfProc.Dll addresses this issue and
enables SyncToy to run.We will take a look at alternative means of determining whether SyncToy is
already running for possible inclusion in a future release.For those interested, the registry entry for PerfProc is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\PerfProc\Performance
As you might expect, the Disable Performance Counteres REG_DWORD = 0 for not
disabled and = 1 for disabled.I hope this helps.
george
Source: SyncToy not running – throws System.InvalidOperationException-Usenet Gateway
Reading a blog about a similar problem I decided to finally see if I could finally find an answer to an annoyance I have with Synctoy. Other than this annoyance I really like Synctoy. I changed the Disable Performance Counters to 0 in the CurrentControlSet rather than the ControlSet001 and it fixed my problem. From what others have written about this problem, this is the typical solution recommended but it did not work for some people.
WP Lightbox JS is a WordPress plugin that enable you to use Lightbox JS script to overlay images on the current page. This plugin also adds a “Lightbox JS†quicktag to the post window in the WordPress admin section.
What is Lightbox JS
Overview
Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
Benefits
Places images above your current page, not within. This frees you from the constraints of the layout, particularly column widths.
Keeps users on the same page. Clicking to view an image and then having to click the back button to return to your site is bad for continuity (and no fun!).
Source: WP lightbox JS WordPress plugin
After upgrading to the latest version of ImageManager I added WP Lightbox JS to provide a more user friendly way to look at the enlarged pictures. For an example look at Windows 2003 Terminal Services – What licenses do I need? Examples both with and without SBS 2003.
This download is a utility that runs on Windows Vista and Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” to restore older backups, made using the “NT Backup” application on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. NT Backup has been replaced in Windows Vista or Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” with different applications, which are not compatible with the .bkf files that NT Backup created.
Link to Windows NT Backup – Restore Utility
Wow, I did not realize that they changed backup formats and Vista’s backup would not read the XP backup files!
Current Version: 2.3.9 (WordPress 2.1 supported)
NOTE, the plugin is only tested with WordPress 2.0 and WordPress 2.1
The ImageManager plugin integrates the stand alone PHP ImageManager + Editor with WordPress. The ImageManager provides an interface for browsing and uploading image files on/to your server. The Editor allows for some basic image manipulations such as, cropping, rotation, flip, and scaling.
View the flash demo.
Feature list
Reminder to myself. Give this guy a donation! He fixed it to work with WP 2.1. The simple image editing provided by this plugin is all I need most of the time.