phpWebSite 9.3-2 to 9.3.3

I updated the mainsite to the latest version of phpWebSite. I was hoping to clear up some minor problems I am experiencing with blank screens in the control panel and xhtml validation. I learned a lot about the hazards of the upgrade process but I did not fix my problems. You have to be very careful when you copy folders. I wiped out a customized theme and my config.php on my local box.

I encountered some interesting problems. I had to re-initialize my site theme after trying out the new w3c theme. I was getting two blocks of everything. It would not of been that big a problem but the blank screen problem reared its ugly head when I tried to move blocks around. I had to use the back key to re-display the screen. I am still stuck with extra data going to the w3c validator and creating errors. It appears on the “Read More” link of the announcements.

Can Linux Do What Netscape Couldn’t?

Linux Pipeline | How-To | Can Linux Do What Netscape Couldn’t?

The Pillars of Microsoft’s Power
Many people assume that the core to Microsoft’s power is the monopoly control it has over the operating system and productivity suite. As a result, competitors including IBM, Novell and Sun focus on that software, and fail miserably.

That’s because those products aren’t Microsoft’s strength. The products are a visible representation of Microsoft’s power but they aren’t a source of power in themselves. If they were, they would have been displaced years ago by something else.

Microsoft’s power lies in three groups of people. You can confirm this by going to three events. Those events are the Microsoft PDC, WinHEC, and Tech-Ed conferences. We will look at each pillar in turn.

I enjoyed reading his viewpoint because he brings up some significant points. His pillars are the Developers, Hardware Manufacturers, and IT Buyers. Overall I find those particular pillars to be a bit weak. From my viewpoint I consider:

  1. The developers of both groups are equal though I like the progress the Open Source folks have made since I find I am using alot of their software on a day to day basis.
  2. The hardware manufacturers definitely follow Microsoft’s lead but I think that describing them as a pillar is a bit strong. I definitely would install SBS2K on a certified hardware platform and prefer that my workstations be installed on certified platforms. On the other hand Linux is more tolerant of non-certified hardware than W2K and NT. The volume and quality of Linux hardware drivers developed or are being developed makes this a minor point. The lack of stable, quality drivers was more of an issue some years back. I can even find a driver for Minolta Desklaser 2200 for Pete’s sake!
  3. Calling IT buyers a pillar is even more debatable. Licensing cost issues continue to be big problems so I consider this a weakness for Microsoft. I do think that Microsoft can manage this problem and at the right price Microsoft will be the preferred solution. When you consider the cost of training and support the Microsoft solution is a better value for many businesses. Linux advocates continue to fight an uphill battle to change an established corporate standard when the only advantage offered is a lower license cost.

Intel Whitebox Price Drops

A couple of years ago I bought an Intel replacement motherboard to fix an annoying problem I was experiencing. I opted for a motherboard that was certified for Windows 2K it has worked flawlessly. As a result I believe hardware certification is important for critical Microsoft PCs. Intel has done a great job with hardware certification so I have been following Intel’s server motherboard offerings as an alternative to Dell, Compaq, and IBM. Recently I noticed that TigerDirect.com was selling build to order servers that used Intel motherboards. They will build to order P4 servers based on the S875WP1-LX motherboard and Xeon servers based on SE7505CW2 motherboard. In the most recent catalog these servers have considerable price drops are now a very attractive alternative to the Big Three. The big change has been in the dual Xeon pricing but the fully configured P4 systems have also got a nice price cut. Hmm…

SBS fixes

SBS fixes

The other big update that is in the pipeline is our XP SP2 compatibility fix. This is in testing right now – we’re investigating making this update available through Windows Update so all SBS 2003 customers become aware of it. Our plan is to make it available same day (or earlier) than XP SP2 becomes available. The main thing this will do is modify the group policy on the server to allow the ICF firewall on XP and 2000 clients, and to pre-set certain exceptions on clients through group policy.

Software Recommendations – wehuberconsultingllc.com

Sign Up with bluehost.com

I searched the web hosting reviews and sent out a couple emails before I decided on bluehost.com. I was very pleased with the web functionality included, the cost, and the service. Of the features that separated this provider from the rest of the pack was the inclusion of CPanel and the Fantastico installer. Since I am a fan of several open source packages I was really pleased to use Fantastico to install phpWebSite and WordPress. I had previously battled with another host provider on relaxing the security enough that I could run phpWebSite. After multiple emails I finally figured out there was an easier way. You go to a provider who provides an installation script like Fantastico.

Several other features I have used and really like are:

  1. Awstats is included for analyzing web stats. Once again I am a fan of another open source package. They provide several packages to analyze web stats but this is the one I like the most. I used Webtrends on a different host provider and this is better and faster.
  2. Web FTP is included. They include several packages you can use to upload your files and synchronize your files. Web FTP is not any better than a separate FTP client but they are handy.
  3. A Filemanger is provided. I haven't seen this provided at other host providers but this is really handy. I have used this to uncompress files, move files, and edit files on the web server. I have even used this to upload a single file from my PC. This saves a lot of time when tweaking html, css, and php code.
  4. phpMyAdmin is provided to manage MySql. This is the standard for managing MySql. It was a little hard to find.
  5. A backup script is provided. This is a handy way to backup the entire site including the databases into a compressed file. It even sends you an email when the backup is complete. Wow!
  6. SpamAssassin is provided to filter out the spam. So far I have found no false positives and a lot of spam has been filtered.


Click here for more information or to signup for bluehostcom.

Add folder to My Places

To get more functionality out of Sharepoint I finally added some folders I commonly use to “My Places”. I created Meeting Workspace for the Board Meeting Documents but it was inconvenient to navigate to it. I also had separate sites for general documents about Habitat and our farm. Sharepoint’s folder structure is not easy to navigate from within Word or Excel if you have multiple sites. Creating a “My Place” folder solved this problem.

AT&T having network problems

I was puzzled and annoyed for most of the day with slow internet response times. I rebooted my workstation and server but I am pretty sure it was outside of my control. It finally cleared up this evening while I was cooking dinner. It bothered me because my intranet access was affected. My intranet uses several webparts that access the Internet so I guess my web page had to wait for each of those webparts to time out. I need to re-evaluate my design.

Importing bills into QuickBooks Pro

I have been trying out several variations of loading transactions into QuickBooks to minimize the manual entries required to convert from Peachtree to QuickBooks. I tried loading checks and matching them to bills but that did not work as expected. I have now decided to load the bills and use the “Pay Bills” portion of QuickBooks to create the corresponding checks. I have imported Vendors, Customers, Classes, Items, and Accounts lists into my spreadsheet so I can validate the fields in Excel. My plan is to import and reconcile one month at a time. Today I successfully imported a transaction that charges the item to the correct item, account, house(i.e. Customer), class, and vendor. This data is necessary to get the reports to come out correctly. Importing an itemized bill is a little different than the examples so I had to try a couple variations until I got it to work. The example provided by Intuit showed how to import a non-itemized bill. Looks like I am ready to go.

my phpWebSite Hacks

I am starting a document on my phpWebSite hacks. I have two hacks to put in it right now, mailto hack and the explicit label hack for Bobby/508 approval.

my phpWebSiteHacks

It bugged me since I installed phpWebSite that it did not pass the 508 validators such as Bobby. They would flag the username and password box as not having an explicit label. To use an explicit label you have to find the code that dynamically creates the form input statement and modify it to include a “id=” parameter. Once the input statement includes the “id=” parameter you can add a label statement with a “for=” parameter that links to the input statement in the template, loginBox.tpl. Finding the code to change took some work although once I started using Jedit’s Hypersearch the job went faster. Some of the form input statements used by phpWebSite are created in EZelement.php and some are created in Form.php. I changed them in both places since I found the EZelement code first. The input statements for the login and password are in the formTextField and formPassword functions in Form.php. I set the id field to the same value as the $name. Then I changed the loginBox.tpl template in the mod-Users-templates-forms directory to add the two label statements referencing the id fields. Now Bobby says I am cool.

When I installed the Mailto module, it did not work. For some unknown reason I ended up at the Create Event screen when I tried to add a mailing address. After some debugging I finally figured out a fix that works for me. I suspect it will work without problems for everyone. The mailto module allows people to send email to you without having to post an email address on the website. Although sometimes I think I am already on all of spam mailing lists I still would like to avoid any more increases in spam from automated webcrawlers. The fix was simple. It appears that two templates had an error in it. The generated html did not have a at the end of two different forms in edit.tpl and mail.tpl. I made a SWAG that two templates needed a to generate the proper code. It worked and I am happy even though I do not know why the default theme worked. My customized themes would bring up a Create Event form. I posted my fix on sourceforge so hopefully others can check it out.

phpWebSite XHTML, Bobby, and RSS validation

For a couple of weeks I have been trying to chase down some validation errors with my phpWebSite installations. The way I think is that testing for valid code is easy and probably saves you time in the long run. I have used IE favlets in the past but my current favorite web development platform is the Web Developer add-in for Firefox.

PhpWebSite is advertised as producing valid xhtml and accessible code so this should have been a no brainer. Well, I ran it through the W3C html validator and it comes up with errors on the announcements. It tacks on an extra field when it is read by w3c which somehow gets stripped out when you view the source in your browser. I did not find the problem on phpWebSite project page so maybe the cleared up this problem in 9-3.3.

The accessibility errors are simple but hard to find. Bobby requires an explicit label for a form fields. I was able to add an implicit label but that satisifies the 508 validator used by Cynthia. To use an explicit label I need the input statement to use an “id=” parameter. The input statement appears to be generated dynamically.

The RSS validator cannot seem to find the RSS output. It fails with a 404 error code which means that it could not find the file. I can see the output in my RSS aggregator so I am confused.

Importing transactions into QuickBooks

I finally got around to working on importing transactions into QuickBooks. It was actually easier than I expected.

  1. I imported an IIF example into a new Excel 2003 spreadsheet as a template.
  2. I exported the chart of accounts, customers, and vendors lists from QuickBooks.
  3. I imported the lists into the new spreadsheet as separate worksheets.
  4. I imported the downloaded data into a new worksheet.
  5. Using the IIF example as the template I linked the cells in the template back to the downloaded data and created data validation lists for account and vendor cells using the lists that I had imported.
  6. I cleaned up the account and vendor cells and then saved as a text(tab-delimited) file.
  7. I then went into QuickBooks and imported the file.

An alternative to this is to use a spreadsheet add-in from Big Red Consulting. I looked at their products and tried one out. Their products have a slicker interface and several of their products are specifically tailored to certain tasks(e.g. ebay into QuickBooks). I encountered a little funkiness with the add-in I tried out and that got me to wondering how hard could this be. Ultimately I decided to code my own because I was curious if this was as easy as I thought it should be. Since I was working on this for a non-profit I volunteer with, I opted for intellectual pursuit solution and was pleasantly surprised with this simplistic solution. It is not as slick as Big Red but I know what everything is doing and it works.

Configuring Firefox to use the firewall properly

I finally figured out why I could not login to bluehost.com using Firefox. When I would try to login to administer one of my sites I would get a timeout. I could login using IE so it was not a high priority item. I found that if I added the automatic proxy configuration script to the Firefox configuration I could get in. It is interesting that the ISA Firewall client without the script allowed general browsing on port 80 but not on other ports. To adminster a bluehost.com hosted site you need access to port 2082. I have learned a lot about the intricacy of the ISA firewall over the last couple of years but I continue to view ISA as a mysterious black box. Some of the things I have learned about ISA are just not intuitive to me. On the plus side I think it is a very good firewall. Whenver I have had a configureation issue the firewall, the firewall was more secure than I planned. Annoying but safe!

Mailto module fix for phpWebsite

Yesterday I tried a few third party modules for phpWebsite. Some of them worked but did not fit what I wanted to do and some just did not work(i.e. showinmain). One of them worked but only for the default theme(mailto). The symptom was that I could not add a mailing address and I could not send mail. For some unknown reason I ended up at the Create Event screen when I tried to add a mailing address. After some debugging I finally figured out a fix that works for me. I suspect it will work without problems for everyone. The mailto module allows people to send email to you without having to post an email address on the website. Although sometimes I think I am already on all of spam mailing lists I still would like to avoid any more increases in spam from automated webcrawlers. The fix was simple. It appears that two templates had an error in it. The generated html did not have a </form> at the end of two different forms in edit.tpl and mail.tpl. I made a SWAG that two templates needed a {END_FORM} to generate the proper code. It worked and I am happy even though I do not know why the default theme worked. My customized themes would bring up a Create Event form. I posted my fix on sourceforge so hopefully others can check it out.

Scaling up for the Spam Onslaught

After moving our farm website over to bluehost.com I waw somewhat surprised to find out how much spam I was getting in the default account. It was way too much to delete manually and I was really short on time so I made an executive decision to enable Spam Assassin to start segregating the mail and pick up the pieces later. Enabling Spam Assassin was very easy with bluehost.com. I clicked a few buttons to select the default settings and off it went. I was not surprised to see it quickly put almost all the mail into the spam folder.

A few days later when I had more time I configured Mailwasher Pro to read the spam folder. Mailwasher Pro is my favorite tool to sift through spam for false positives and delete spam. I have trained Mailwasher to identify my “good” mail but I also use a combination of regex rules to catch the stuff that falls through the cracks. I sent a couple emails to myself from different email accounts and the good stuff is getting through and the bad stuff is getting diverted.

I have since looked at the statistics in Mailwasher Pro. Prior to the switch over I was deleting about 300 to 350 spam emails a day. After the switch over I had several days in which I deleted over 1000 spam emails a day. I am sure glad I am deleting this stuff on the mail server and not letting this junk steal my limited bandwidth.

Moving Legacy Farm website to bluehost.com

Over the last couple of days I have been moving our farm web site from Interland to bluehost.com. The folks are Interland have been okay but way overpriced for the features. I have made the move much more complicated because I opted to convert the site over to phpwebsite in the move. To make this even more difficult I opted to create a tableless 2 column design layout I borrowed from glish.com and integrate the css list navigation menu I was already using. In the next couple of posts I will document my outline for making the new theme and changes to the website. To start things off the reasons for moving were:

  1. Use Announcements to replace my manually entered News and RSS feed
  2. Use Photoalbum for organizing my horse photos
  3. Use Whats Related to show customers other horses and links they might be interested in.
  4. There are several interesting developments in phpwebsite that I may use in the future

RE: IMF Archive Manager

Here’s an Exchange blog I haven’t seen before but I found in the SBS mailing list. Looks like it has some nice utilities and info.

Daryl Maunder has written an IMF Archive Manager application which he has kindly allowed me to make available here. It’s a web-based application for managing the files archived by the IMF. The zip file that you download contains a set of ASP web pages and a readme Word document.

Once you have installed the application, just navigate to http://servername/spam – this URL, of course, assumes the default virtual directory name of ‘spam’. You will see a screen like the one below – I’ve created a sample spam message to show you what it looks like.

IMF Archive Manager

From here, you can choose to View, Resubmit or Delete any individual message, or even delete all archived mail.

No warranty, express or implied, is provided. This code is supplied here “as is”.

[Via MS Exchange Blog ]

Scheduled POP3 connector e-mail message downloads may not occur on your Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer

833992 – Scheduled POP3 connector e-mail message downloads may not occur on your Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer

The Imbdownl.exe process may use 25, 50, or 100 percent of the CPU resources that are shown in Task Manager. If you end the Imbdownl.exe process, the scheduled downloads will occur.

I ran into this problem today. I got an email telling me of low idle time on the server. When I looked at the CPU utilization I found somebody called imbdownl.exe using almost all of it. I did a quick search and found this patch. I then found that I had downloaded the patch earlier in the year but had not applied it. I think my reasoning was that I wanted to see the problem first. Mission accomplished!

Changes to Yahoo Plus

Today I was somewhat surprised to see some changes to Yahoo Plus. I know they are competing with Google but I really have not paid much attention to the details. Today Yahoo told me that I had 2 GB of mailbox space and they had removed the paid advertisements. I really could not care less about the disk space. As part of my procedure of controlling spam I constantly check the Inbox and the Bulk folder to make sure the spam algorithms used by Yahoo and Mailwasher Pro are correctly identifying the good mail and the spam. I did not plan on using the 25 MB they had allocated me before yesterday so the 2 GB is overkill. The removal of the ads makes for a nicer interface that loads quicker. I get a lot of mail so the faster the interface the faster I can get through the email and on to other work.