It's Alive

I got my PC setup this evening in the office of my new house. Just had to register the free DNS service I use with the new IP address here and the site is back up and running. I can't sit at my desk for another week and a half though cause I cannot put large rugs down on the newly finished hardwood floors yet. I need the rug so I can roll around on my office chair without damaging the floor.

Getting things in the house and unpacked has been a little slower than I was hoping because I screwed my back up pretty good. I've been self medicating with some old pain medicine for relief. I was able to mow the lawn this evening though. It was getting pretty tall and really needed to be done.

My parents came up this weekend and I was able to get a ton of things done. We got everything from my old apartment moved, redid the electric box (see spreadsheet for more details), got the cable and Internet turned on with cable wired to all of the rooms, a couple trips to Home Depot for supplies, and a lot of much needed yard work done. I'm sure I'm missing something.

This week I'm having my new living room and patio furniture delivered, the outside and inside sprayed for bugs, some roof and guttering work done, and of course more moving stuff inside and unpacking.

Site Down for Awhile

Today, I'll be packing up the computer that hosts this website and moving it to my new house. I'll be pulling the plug this evening and things probably won't be up until Sunday or Monday (assuming I don't run into problems).

Office Space

The office space where I work (map) has been reorganized to reduce the cost of our lease. With this reorganization, I got to move from a cubicle to an office. I like it so much better. I am able to close the door when needed for private conversations and keep things quiet when I need to concentrate on something. It was also a coincidence that I got a new computer with a 22" wide screen LCD:

More pics of my new office.

Maintenance Complete

All of the upgrades went fairly smoothly. The only trick is to get Apache to load PHP (my picture gallery uses PHP to render its contents). The following are the upgrades:

• MySQL - version 5.0.11 to version 5.0.41
• PHP - version 5.0.4 to version 5.2.3
• Apache - version 2.0.54 to version 2.2.4

So far, everything appears to be working and Apache hasn't crashed at all since upgrading.

Maintenance This Weekend

I've been having problems with my HTTP server crashing regularly so I'll be upgrading Apache, PHP, and MySQL this weekend to the latest versions. Depending on how many problems I have, my site could be down for a significant time this weekend. I've ghosted my current disk so I can resort back to that if I screw it up too bad :)

Upgraded Gallery to 2.2.1

I upgrade my picture gallery from Gallery 2.0 to 2.2.1 the day before yesterday. You can see the new stuff they added with this version. I haven't had a chance to play with anything yet though.

Upgraded minime to Windows Vista

minime is the name of my laptop (see previous post). I have recently upgraded it from Windows XP to Windows Vista. At the time I got it, Windows Vista had not yet been released. However, part of the deal was that I would get a free upgrade (not including shipping) when Dell released their OEM version of Windows Vista.

To start things off, I made a complete backup of my laptop with a trial version of Norton Ghost. This was merely a precaution in case I wanted to go back to Windows XP. I saved the backup to an old 60GB external USB drive I bought in college. It took about 4 hours to make the complete backup.

After the backup, I ran a special CD from Dell that prepared the computer for the upgrade. It had to uninstall some of the programs that were known to be an issue with the upgrade. These apps would later be reinstalled by this process after the upgrade. Finally, the last thing left to do was to run the Windows Vista CD. This took at least 3 hours. I was pretty surprised on how long it took.

There were a few problems and tweaks I ran into after installing Vista:

• Had to uninstall and reinstall the network printer I share between my laptop and PC.
• Had to change the compatibility mode for some apps to Windows XP in order for them to run.
• Had to apply a special patch for Sonic Solutions DLA for it to run under Vista. This is the DVD software.
• Had to reinstall the touchpad software for the scroll to work.Had to reinstall Google Desktop for it to work.

I haven't had time to fully explore all the new stuff, but here's what I've liked so far:

• The side bar. Right now, I have Weatherbug, a meter that shows the usage of each core of the CPU and memory, stocks, network strength, a calculator, and a calendar in my side bar.
• The Flip 3D feature. This is a really cool way to switch between open programs. More about Flip 3D.
• The windows are semi-translucent.
• The desktop icons changed based on their contents (recycle bin, folders, etc.).
• Hovering your mouse over items in the task bar shows a preview of what it actually looks like.
• The task manager is much better and more granular. For instance, it shows the file image on the file system where the process was spawned from.

Another new thing is the Windows Experience Index. This is basically an analysis of your hardware and how well it conforms to the Vista operating system. This also allows software vendors to require a certain number in order to run their software. The score ranges from 1.0 to 5.9. Your score is equal to the lowest subscore. Mine is 3.6:

Funniest Nerdcore Rap Ever

Lyrics: http://www.monzy.com/intro/killdashnine_lyrics.html

Mo 'Puters, Mo Problems

What they say is true, "mo 'puters, mo problems". Ever since I got my laptop, I have had nothing but problems. At least the problems were not with the laptop itself though.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the wireless Internet connection wasn't working for shit. So, yesterday, I decided to cough up the 50 buck and by a new router. I got the linksys WRT54G:

It plugged in and worked pretty quickly. The wireless connection to my laptop was fast and constant. Now, the next thing I wanted to do was enable file and print sharing so that I could easily pull files off of my desktop and use the printer that is hooked to my desktop from my laptop. This ended up being much more of headache than anticipated.

The idea of setting up file and print sharing is really easy. You basically run the Windows network wizard and specify the same workgroup for all computers involved. I did this about eight times and still nothing would work. After many hours of banging my head and trying to figure out what the problem was, I found that my netBIOS service was not running. netBIOS is required in the LAN for file and print sharing. There was something corrupted with it and when I ran "nbtstat -n", it indicated that it could not be loaded. Usually, you would see a NetBIOS Local Name Table. Anyways, I tried everything, I even reinstalled the TCP/IP protocol that Windows ships with (this is not straightforward). Finally, the resolution was to uninstall and reinstall my network card. This fixed it! There must have been something corrupted in the registry that was preventing the netBOIS from loading.

Then, my next problem was with using passive FTP through my linksys router to my desktop. I need this working because this is how I publish my blog from Blogger to my web server. The only thing that changed was the wireless router, and Linksys support couldn't tell me what was wrong or how to fix it. The way passive FTP works is that it sends, as part of the response, an IP address and a port. The IP address is the internal IP to my network and thus is not available outside my network. So, there is a special setting on my FileZilla FTP Server where you can tell it the IP address of the router, which is available to the Internet. You also have to forward port 21 and a user defined range of ports for the passive part of FTP via the router. I had all of this setup perfectly and it was working with my old router. After trying everything in the book, I disabled the special setting on my FTP server that replaces the IP address with the actual IP of my router. I couldn't believe this, but it actually fixed it! The only thing that I can figure is that the new router is smarter than the old one and knows to swap internal IP addresses with the router IP address for outgoing requests and this was screwing things up somehow. Argh!

All I did was get a new dang router. I better not have any more computer problems for a while. I've met my quota for at least the next year.

New Bundle of Joy Has Arrived: My Laptop

Yay! I got my laptop today and started playing with it a little at work today. I almost wished I didn't get it today because I had class tonight and didn't get to play near as much as I wanted to. Regardless, I ended up messing with it from the time I got home until the absolute last minute before I had to go to class. Similarly, I worked on it when I got home from class until I went to bed at about 1AM.

The thing that really pissed my off was the wireless connection. I have a really old linksys b wireless router and the connection on my laptop kept disconnecting. Roque gave it to me before he left back to Uruguay. Who knows how old it is or what it's been through. Anyways, when I connected to the neighbor's wireless, unbeknownst to them, I had no problem whatsoever and the connection was constant. Guess all those times that Megan complained about the wireless connection on her PC not working too well were actually valid. Looks like I have to buy a new wireless router :(

In other news, this made us really laugh at work today:

Study: Dolphins Not So Intelligent On Land

New Laptop

I have been wanting a laptop for quite some time now. There is a really good deal with Dell now through their EPP (Employee Purchase Program) where you can get 30% off $1299 and higher in addition to a few other discounts. I built my laptop and finally pulled the trigger. Here are the specs for what I got:

• Inspiron E1505, Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7200 (4MB/2.00GHz/667MHz)
• 15.4 Inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WSXGA+, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 2GB, DDR2, 533MHz 2 Dimm for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 256MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400 HyperMemory, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, English without Media, for Inspiron
• Backup media for XP Media Center,Inspiron
• Integrated 10/100 Network Cardand Modem, for Inspiron
• 8X DVD+/-RW Drive for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• Integrated High Definition Audio, Inspiron
• Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card (54Mbps) for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 53 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 2 Year Limited Warranty
• Warranty Support,1 Year Extended
• Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Extended Year
• Type 3- Third Party At HomeService, 24x7 TechnicalSupport, 1 Year Extended
• Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Initial Year
• Type 3- Third Party At HomeService, 24x7 TechnicalSupport, Initial Year
• Warranty Support,Initial Year
• Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module (2.0 + EDR),for Inspiron
• Express Upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium, Free plus S and H payable at redemption

It is going to take about eight days to build and the delivery arrival estimate is Friday, November 10, 2006 - Tuesday, November 14, 2006. I don't think I can wait that long!

IE 7

I went ahead and downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 7 today. The interface seems slicker and there is a lot of add-ons to download and choose from. The best thing though is definitely the tabbed browsing. This is something that Firefox has always done and IE just started with this 7 release.

I always like to have a lot of heterogenous windows open and being able to group all of the IE windows into one is going to be nice so my Taskbar doesn't get too cluttered. So far, the most useful thing seems to be holding Ctrl and clicking a hyperlink. This opens a new tab within the same browser instead of opening a whole new browser or replacing the existing page with the link that was clicked.

All of the new stuff and label locations is going to take a while to get used, but I think it will be worth it. Hey, in the future I can probably look back on this and laugh because MSNBC-Google-McDonald's Internet Explorathon v37 will be the dominating browser :)

New Google Toy

Being that I still have this in Beta, not yet ready to be unleashed, I just added a Google search bar in the right column (I also made the Google map longer, because bigger is better, right?). This new search leverages the Google AJAX Search API. I'm still tweaking the CSS stuff so that it looks right in the site, but so far I'm really impressed.

After you commit the search, I have programmed it so there are five tabs displayed in the main column: This Blog, The Web, The News, Videos, and All Blogs. These correspond to the different domains that can apply to the search you made and can toggle between them. The neatest thing about this is the AJAX technology allows the results to just be "pushed" on top of the existing content in the main column seamlessly and without refreshing the page. The same goes for toggling between the different search domain tabs (This Blog, Videos, etc.).

Here's my current list for the main things I need to tweak/add before I'm taking this thing out of Beta:

• Fix the new search so that the results colors, styles, etc. look good with the site.
• Add feed links for both the blog piece and my photo gallery.
• Create a subtitle.
• Integrate my calendar into the site.
• Finish new BIRT report design for my movies.