Well, I haven’t had time to customize my textpattern blog, in fact, there’s been some php errors for a few months… probably because of a recent server update. Therefore, I decided to bring my WordPress blog back up.

I’m happy to see that WordPress is still working without errors. I may even stay getting some more posts online, since there is a nice Android application for WordPress and I now have an Android.

I look forward to writing again and hope that somebody may find my posts interesting.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I started out in this business as a computer technician and I still do it some, as a consultant. The first computer I ever fixed was an IBM Compatible (remember when they were called that… heh) Packard Bell 386. I don’t remember how much RAM it had or the size of the hard drive, but I do remember it had a 2400 Baud modem that we never got to use (there was no ISP’s in the small town I grew up in).

I had been saving money for a couple of months, so I could buy… a computer game! I didn’t really care what game, I just wanted a computer game. I ended up buying Ninja Gaiden 2 (the coolest looking game that I had enough cash for). I read the instructions on the way home from Wal-Mart (30 minutes of wide open freeway away). When we finally arrived, I was ready to play, but… it was bed time. The next day, my dad went to work (he worked 12 hour shifts at the power plant) and I proceeded to install my new game… some indiscernible amount of time later, I was playing Ninja Gaiden 2 (not very well, I was never very good at video games, when I was little).

Well, a couple of hours later, I was stuck. So I decided to take a break and switch back to normal computing mode (you know… Windows 3.1) and play around a little while. Well, during the install, I guess I overwrote the autoexec.bat file. Of course, I didn’t know that… I didn’t know what I did. All I knew, is that when I turned on the computer that morning, Windows came up… now, when I turn on the computer, all I got was C:\ and a blinking cursor… Oh shoot… my dad is going to kill me… I broke the computer…

Okay, calm down, think… Okay, the computer came with a bunch of books (really thick books, I was around 10 years old at the time). I have until 7 PM before dad gets home, and if the computer wasn’t back to how it was before he went to work, I wasn’t going to sit down for a month (or much worse, touch another computer until I was 18). Well, time to dig in. So, I start looking through the manuals for a solution.

Now, I don’t really know what happened between that moment and 7 PM, but I know there was a lot of rebooting and popping disks in and out and I’m pretty sure I read 80% of both the DOS and Windows manuals. I think I may have re-installed both DOS and Windows. However, the important thing is, by the time my father walked in the house after work, I was moving and resizing program manager windows to make the screen look the same as it did when he left for work.

Anyways, that’s my story, what’s yours?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Well, I finally got the sitewide alert for Navajo County working to well enough to call it done. It started out as a text file in the root directory of the server, if it was present a new box would show at the top of every page on the site with the text in the box displayed in bold with a yellow background. Ugly, but simple and effective.

Well, now I’ve got a table in the database that holds html and is updated by a CKEditor control. It uses integrated authentication so that only specific users have access to update it and it logs when it was last edited and by whom.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been troubleshooting a coworkers computer for the past 2 days, trying to figure out why the Vista install freezes when it is trying to partition the disk.

It’s an old case and power supply, but almost everything else in the computer is new (installed by the coworker/client), so naturally, I assume that something is defective or installed incorrectly.

I start by reseating all of the cables, still a no go. I go into the bios to check the configuration and find that the hard drive is set as slave, fix that, still a no go.

This is where I hitting it with diagnostics. The hard drive doesn’t show any SMART errors and all tests with Data Lifeguard Tools pass. On to the memory… MemTest86 doesn’t come up with anything.

Now I am starting to think it might be the disc, but the thing looks immaculate, I can’t see a scratch or other physical defect on it. Well, maybe it can’t partition the hard drive for some reason, so I use partition magic to cut out 100 GB of the 500 GB Western Digital and format it with NTFS. It still won’t install… In fact, now I don’t get any UI screens, just a mouse pointer on a pure black screen… weird.

Well, in order to be thorough, I thought I’d try one of my XP install discs that I’ve used before… Lo and behold, the system now has a working operating system.  What a hassle, all because of a bad disc with no visible flaws.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I’ve been using Google Buzz since it was activated on my account yesterday and I really like it… but, I usually do like cool new stuff from Google. The real question is going to be, “Can I get my friends and family to start buzzing, or even follow my buzz?” So far, that answer is a resounding, “No.”

I have 1 family member and 1 friend that has joined buzz and followed me. I also have 1 family member and 1 friend that have followed me, but don’t seem to have buzz’s themselfves (not sure how that works). Anyway, I’ll ride the buzz and see what happens. At least there’s a lot of good technical talk on there right now (Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, and Kevin Rose, just to name a few).

Popularity: 12% [?]

New Server Setup

First of all, this blog is now running on it’s own machine, powered by Debian 5.0 aka Lenny. The installation had a few problems, of course, which will be discussed in a later post.

Google Wave

Well, I finally got my invite to Wave, and I’m loving it, although, it would be a lot better if more people I know used it. I got my wife to use it (somewhat reluctantly) but almost nobody else I know has or even wants to wave.

I’ve got 6 invites left, so if anybody wants one, let me know in the comments before any of my facebook friends or coworkers do and they’re yours. Make sure you use your correct email address. Also, the invites don’t go out right away and I’ve heard that gmail accounts generally receive them faster than other email accounts.

I’m also working on a Google Wave client for Windows Mobile. It’s still very early in the development stages, more about this later.

Navajo County Web Site Redesign

Once again, the powers that be are asking for a Web site redesign. I like a lot of their ideas and am looking forward to it. I’ve started by making the width 960 pixels, but haven’t had time to do much else. We’re going to try moving the menu to the top of the page (above the header).

The county has signed up for a facebook and twitter account, so now I need to find a way to incorporate badges or something for those into the redesigned site. I’m also creating some javascript tools to make the text bigger or smaller, show a printable or emailable version of the page (it already prints without the background, header, or sidebar).

New Site for NAYFL

I’m creating a new site for the Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League (NAYFL). I’m building a database to store scores and schedules, which I’ll use to automatically update the standings on the site. I think I’ll be writing the site in PHP, I was thinking about going with Ruby on Rails, but I don’t think there’s enough database integration to the site to warrant that. I’ll post more details about the database setup later.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for Google Wave to go public… I just hope I get an invite in the first wave, but I didn’t hear about it until just a short time ago. Google is supposed to open it to the public (limited invites, though) a week from tomorrow.

Open-sourcing it and allowing federation will be what makes it big… Honestly, how long do you think it will be before Microsoft takes it and tries to one-up Google? I was wondering how it was going to work with Internet Explorer, as IE doesn’t support HTML 5, but it seems Google has built a Chrome Frame plugin for IE.

I first read about this on Erictric, who argues that Wave is starting to fizzle even before it’s open to the public. I must say, I disagree. I think, come next week, it’s going to be all over the blogosphere and twitter… and then, yea, wave.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Well, I just finished redesigning and updating Holbrook Youth Football’s Web site. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I think it looks 100 times better.

All of the image editing was done in GIMP and I used JetBrains’ new Web IDE to develop the whole site. It worked great, my only annoyance was that it creates xhtml files with .xhtml as the extension. Testing it in Internet Explorer with that extension got me a download, rather than a rendered page. It was probably a problem with IE (and may only be because I was accessing local files), but with most of today’s users still using IE, I need it to work.

I’ll be taking over the development of Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League’s Web site, as well. I’ll probably start the redesign on it in a few days. As of right now, it doesn’t even come up in Google when you search for the name of the organization… I’ll have to try to remedy that.

Let me know what you think and a big thanks to all of the sponsors and volunteers for helping Holbrook’s youth.

Popularity: 7% [?]

For those of you who, like myself, are just now boiling eggs for Easter, here’s what I use… There’s a trick I saw on Emeril Live a long time ago that has always given me done and easy to peel eggs that aren’t green in the middle.

The “Lucky 13″ Boiled Egg

1. Put the eggs in a pot of cool water over high heat. Bring them to a boil and let them boil for 2 minutes.
2. Take them off the heat and cover for 11 minutes.
3. Put them in an ice bath or some really cold water. (If you don’t use ice, you’ll need to change your water a few times while they cool.)

Voila, the perfect boiled egg using Emeril’s “Lucky 13″ method.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Well, I finally figured it out. It appears that the OpenID plugin is not compatible with the Contact Form ][ plugin I was using.

It's always worked great with registration and stuff, but never worked for me to use it as my OpenID server. I had figured it had something to do with me not having curl support built into PHP.

I just figured I'd check the error log today, right after I tried it again, and saw a lot of errors with various plugins. Well, I don't know if I can live without all those plugins, but let's deactivate them and see if it works. Wow, it worked...

After activating them again one at a time, I found it was Contact Form ][ that was causing the problems. Great, I went and found a different contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, and it is working great, as is OpenID.

Popularity: 2% [?]