Author: Bill

RE: Distribution Release: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Right on schedule, Ubuntu 6.06, a distribution with long term support features, has been released: “Ubuntu, which has become one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions in recent years, launched its latest version on June 1 following months of intense testing. The new release is titled Ubuntu….

[Via DistroWatch.com News]

Yup! I downloaded this puppy. I have been pretty happy with Ubuntu 5.10 so I was curious what 6.06 would bring. Actually I have not found anything significant to me. In fact it seemed a little slower. I used azureus and left it on for an additional four hours till I have given as much as I had received.

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.

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.

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.

WP-Andreas09 – Webgazette.co.uk – Change is the only constant…

WP-Andreas09 – Webgazette.co.uk – Change is the only constant…

I been thinking about revamping some of my blogs. I found this theme somewhere and it looked interesting. So I downloaded it. After a little playing around I think I may use it after modifying one of the color schemes to a little more my style.

apache friends – xampp for windows 1.5.2

apache friends – xampp for windows

The good news is that there is a new version, 1.5.2. The bad news is that I did not find a way to upgrade. I ended up uninstalling the old version and installing a new version. For me that was not a big loss. I had been playing around with a private blog and ftp server. I opted to not save the Mysql files used by the blog. The ftp server was the critical element for me since I use it to transfer files between PCs at a non-profit I help out. I have other ways to transfer files but ftp is real convenient and fast.
Now for the gotchas! To uninstall you need to uninstall the services first. At least for me the uninstall/install process did not work without messages until I uninstalled the services. There were several files that were locked until I uninstalled the services. Maybe its just me but I do not like seeing message windows saying the installation process cannot update files that are in use.

  1. Go to the Apache directory and run the batch file, apache_uninstallservice.
  2. Go to the Mysql directory and run the batch file, mysql_unistallservice.
  3. To uninstall Filezillaserver service you run the executable and it will ask you if you want to shutdown the service. Click on the Yes button. Run the executable a second time and it will ask you if you want to start the service. Click on the No button. A second window will appear and it will ask if you want to Uninstall Service. Click on the Yes button to uninstall the service.

Now when you install the XAMPP the files will be updated and the services will be installed with the standard messages.

GB2006 PC

I finally bit the bullet and ordered replacement part for my “Ghetto Box” PC. “Ghetto Box” is not meant to be deragotory. I envision that this box would have all of the characteristics an office worker needs. Since game playing  and video editing is not on the agenda this box should be quite adequate with today’s office software.

AMD makes some nice processors and are generally winning the price to performance gig. I have been happy with the boxes I have put together with AMD processors in the past. However, I am looking for a processor less than $100. The Celeron from Intel is less inexpensive the AMD folks and remarkbly powerful so it has caught my fancy.  I have been really pleased with the reliability I have gotten from my old Intel 815 motherboard and PIII.  The Intel chipset has earned my favor.

My selection for the box is a MSI 865GVM3 motherboard($52 Newegg) matched up with Celeron 326($57 Newegg). I put in 512 MB of Corsair Value memory to round out the package. As you can see this box will be inexpensive.  I tested it out with my existing disk drives but I ended up getting a refurbished SATA drive for a longer term solution.  The motherboard has a built-in Intel graphics adapter which I have found to be plenty adequate for my needs.  I picked the MSI motherboard because it supports the LGA775 processors, has the Intel chipset/video driver, and is less expensive than Intel. You can see that this all fits into a very modest budget.

So what am I going to do with this box? I am going to load server software on it. No kidding! Its going to be my “dogfood server”, my beta server, my linux server, my backup workstation, etc. I already loaded up a NFR W2K server on it and it is pretty snappy at doin’ nothing. I do not planning on recommending this as a production server but I do think I can test out new server software without any issues. I still think this combinaton is a nice upgrade/repair for the cost sensitive market.

RE: Installing CRM on SBS

Yes, you CAN do that with CRM : The new ultimate guide to installing CRM 3.0 SBE:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/crm/archive/2006/04/14/90886.aspx

Handy Andy once again comes through with the ultimate screenshot guide to setting up CRM on SBS

[Via E-Bitz – SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS “Diva”]

Someday when things are a little less hectic I will get around to installing and understanding Microsoft’s CRM.
bill

nLite – Deployment Tool for Unattended Windows

nLite – Deployment Tool for Unattended Windows – About

I finally got back to nLite and preparing a modified XP installation disk with SP2 and the hot fixes already applied. The last time I played with creating an updated XP installation CD-ROM,  I was creating the CD-ROM and testing it with a VM on my P700 desktop. It was painfully slow! With my new Centrino Duo laptop the entire operation is much faster. I am now using version 1.07rc7 and the lastest update pack from Ryanfm. For this ISO I also decided to add Acrobat and Firefox to the preinstallation and .Net 1.1 Framework and Java to post installation tasks. Everything was installed without a problem and no required reboots. I have been planning on rebuilding my desktop again so this will be a real time saver.

gpg4win – EMail-Security using GnuPG for Windows

gpg4win – EMail-Security using GnuPG for Windows
I saw that there was new update for GnuPG so I went over to the site to check it out. In the download information they recommended checking out gpg4win for a consolidated install package for GnuPG and several useful utilities. Most of the utilities I have used in the past were buggy, hard to install correctly, and with a very slow update schedule. Recently I had started using the explorer add-in, GPGee, and was pleasantly surprised. It made checking GPG signatures relatively painless. At gpg4win I found an install package with all of the packages, GnuPG and GPGee, I wanted to install on my laptop and a couple more, GPGol and GPGA, I was interested in trying out.

GPGcol is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook to integrate GnuPG and thus OpenPGP encryption and digital signatures. After restarting Outlook 2003 I found the tab in the preferences. When I changed my mail editor away from Word I saw the buttons for signing and encrypting with GPG. There was also a menu entry under tools for GPA.

The GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA) is a graphical user interface for the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard). Managing keys with GnuPG has always been the hard part for me in working with GnuPG. Since I use GnuPG so infrequently I always had to return to my cheat sheet to remember how to import or refresh a user key using the command line. GPA is a GUI frontend to the GnuPG commands and seems to do the job without much fuss.

At least for me the consolidated installation via gpg4win is major step forward in improving the user experience. Finding the right tool to make GnuPG more user friendly has always been a hit or miss proposition for the occasional user. Some of the tools existed but were poorly maintained. Gpg4win has a nice collection of stable GnuPG utilities that installs easily and makes using GPG signatures and encryption easier.