Well, a couple of months ago, I made Navajo County’s Parcel Search start getting data from the new Assessor’s database. They have moved from the Arizona Department of Revenue’s CCIS to Colorado Customware Inc’s RealWare product, affectionately known as CCI. All things said and done, it wasn’t too bad of a process.

Obstacle 1

Where is the data located?

With a lot of help from Mohave County’s Systems & Database Admin, Gary Waters, this step wasn’t too bad. I realized what I needed was the DataMart schema… but I didn’t quite understand how I was supposed to populate it. Gary kept telling me about this job they have that populates it nightly, but I couldn’t even find (in Oracle Enterprise) where Oracle keeps it’s jobs. I eventually found a query that would list them for me, but we had no such job.

The next day, or thereabouts, Jeff, one of the other Navajo County programmers, noted that he had found a DataMart application and had populated the schema. As he was explaining how to install it (it’s included in the advanced RealWare install), I realized I had seen it there when I was installing RealWare on my machine, duh. Oh well, all in a day’s work, I guess.

With the help of the SQL scripts that Gary sent along, I started to piece together how the data was arranged in the database. On to… (Continue reading…)

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Error 404

http://www.google.com/chrome

Update: Woohoo, it’s released, and so far, so good. I like it.

UGH!?! Give me Chrome… I need Chrome… If you haven’t heard already (Lord knows how you got here), Google is releasing a browser tomorrow (Tuesday). Google Chrome is set to be a major improvement over current browsers (even Firefox, although it likely won’t take Firefox long to build in the best features).

This is huge, why else would Arrington talk about it not once or even twice, but three times in less than four hours… did I mention it hasn’t even been made available, yet. It’s on just about every other tech blog I read, as well. Anyway, here’s the comic book Google released about it, if you’re interested (it’s kind of long, but a great read if you’re like me). You can also read about it on The Official Google Blog or on Google Blogoscoped.

Now, I know this can’t be intentional, but it’s very annoying, and I can’t see any easy way to make it go away. It looks like this is being caused by some Microsoft style CSS, as the page loads fine in Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, however, renders the ad right over the top of other content. I sure hope they get this fixed over at lifehacker. I do like a lot of their articles.

UPDATE: It looks like this is happening all over the web with these annoying “Mojave Experiment” ads. A refresh usually fixes it. I haven’t really looked into the CSS that is creating this issue, but I’m sure it something Microsoft designed for IE and threw in compatibility with Firefox as an afterthought.

Well, I thought it was kind of weird that I stopped getting comments all of the sudden… even spam comments have been absent (for quite some time, now that I think about it). Well, Frank, from futtta’s blog informed me earlier tonight that my comments weren’t working. It was claiming that all the required fields weren’t filled (name and email).

Well, I got to work investigating the offending code, and it seems there was a name attribute missing from the input tag for email in comments.php for the finestripes theme. I simply added the attribute name="email" to the necessary input tag and it started working. Now, I guess it’s time to get Akismet up to date.

Sorry, Frank, for misspelling your blog’s name in my last post.

After my recent upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, I tried hitting the upgrade.php script, but was met with a blank page… That’s weird. So, I tried the home page… same thing… weird. Okay, I open my server log and find a php error:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 464

After googling, I found a post on futtta’s blog that described the same error. I fixed it the same way as he describes, by downloading the tarball and copying the a fresh copy of widgets.php over my offending copy. Viola, everything works as it should now, cept my search box seems a bit tweaked. I’ll have to check that out after I feed the kids.

The Motorola Q9c is awesome. The keys are really easy to hit… I rarely fat-finger it, even with my big ole thumbs. In fact, I’m typing this post on it right now. Pocket IE still sucks in WM6, but Opera mobile is great on the Q9c, definitely worth the money.

My only real peeve about it is that Verizon locked the GPS. Currently, in order to use it, you have to pay $10/month for VZNavigator. However, there is a forum, http://www.everythingq.com/forum/moto-q-hacks/verizon-q9c-gps-hack-21606.html, full of people hard at work trying to open it up for Google Maps and Live Search.

One more difficulty that I just noticed… creating links. Maybe there is a good blog writing tool for Windows Mobile 6 out there somewhere. We’ll see.

We are raffling tickets for this beautiful blanket. Honestly, it is the most beautiful crocheted blanket I have seen (and I’ve seen a lot of crocheted blankets). This is to raise money for my daughter to go to the Cinderella pageant in Laughlin, NV, this June. We are selling the tickets for $2 each or 3 for $5. Please stop me when you see me or send me a message if using the contact page if you would like to buy some. Northeast AZ locals only, please.

The drawing will be held May 4th. Thank you for your support.

I remember, just 3 years ago, some of my coworkers were making fun of me because I said that, given the opportunity, I would have a home network. Heh, you don’t see too many houses that don’t have some sort of computer network, now. Needless to say, I’ve got my home network and love being able to hack from my living room, the kitchen, and even the kids bedroom. Just today, I setup a new Linksys WRT54G on my network. It’s replacing the router / wireless access point functionality of the my SBG900. The default firmware was sort of limited, it didn’t even include WDS. That happened to be my main reason for purchasing the router. We recently got a computer desk for the playroom and stuck a computer in there for the kids (kids need the Internet, too). I didn’t want to run a cable from the router in the computer room to the computer in the playroom (Summer wouldn’t have liked an ethernet cable running across her kitchen, either). I happened to have a spare Speedstream 6520 (which has WDS if you have the right firmware), so instead of buying a wireless nic for the computer, I decided a router would give me more options (not to mention extending my wireless range to the bedroom and the backyard). However, my new router didn’t have WDS.

In walks DD-WRT… To be completely honest, I’ve been looking at DD-WRT for a while now, and wanted a router to put it on. I was really just watching ebay, but ended up charging a new one to our Dell account. I wasn’t completely surprised that WDS wasn’t on my WRT when it got here, it wasn’t in the feature list, but the latest version of the WRT54G will take the DD-WRT custom firmware, and WDS is on DD-WRT’s feature list. Anyway, I setup a NAT pass-through for my router, got all of my port-forwards, and reserved addresses configured, and even got the built in Dynamic DNS client configured to update my domain names. Unfortunately, the Speedstream only supports WEP when you are using WDS, so I MAC locked the wireless as a second layer of protection.

I just came across Psi today while trying to find a way to sign out a session of Google Talk running on my home computer (I was at work). My wife was sending me messages and I was only getting some of them, it was really getting annoying. Anyway, it turns out the feature is not yet available in the Google Talk client, but I saw Psi in the available clients on the Google Talk page… and I hadn’t seen it before.

Psi is a free instant messaging application designed for the Jabber IM network including Google Talk. Fast and lightweight, Psi is fully open-source and compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

I was browsing the site and noticed a lot of features that looked great to me (I’m sort of a feature hound… even for features I’ll never use). Encryption, multi-user chats, and remote client control… could it really be, the exact feature I’m looking for?

Always-on security

Using the same SSL technology that makes it possible for you to safely shop on the web, Psi automatically encrypts its communication with compatible IM servers to provide a secure connection over untrusted networks like public WiFi access points. For advanced security needs, Psi can also encrypt messages end-to-end with OpenPGP.

Leading the way

Psi’s developers are actively involved in the Jabber community, working hard to ensure that Psi fully supports the standards for features like avatars, multi-user chats (with full admin control), remote client control, and more. It’s standards like these that allow people to communicate smoothly with each other on the Jabber network, and Psi ensures that you’ll never miss a beat.

There’s a couple of things I miss from Google Talk, I like the chat display more, being able to search contacts, and having the email button right in the chat window. However, the remote client control makes it worth the switch by itself, not to mention all of the other features built into Psi (adjustable auto away, auto offline, and connect through proxy). To enable remote client control, you’ll need to check the little box in the advanced page of the options.

You can also make it portable (not a huge deal, since all you need to do is log into your inbox in GTalk to do the same thing, but it will give you remote client control).

When searching for the remote sign out for the Google Talk client, I saw quite a few forum posts from people who wanted this feature and were switching to other messaging platforms because of the missed messages and such. I wanted to let everybody know about this great product.

Way to go Psi Team.

I think I’ve finally gotten all set up again. I’m now running OpenSuse 10.3 on VMware Server. I upgraded my computer. I’ve got the latest release of Wordpress running and a theme that I really like. Isn’t it great looking… and yes, those are my three beautiful children in the header image. For those that have slow connections, I apologize for the large size of the picture (almost 100K), I couldn’t justify reducing the quality of the picture.

I had too much trouble with Microsoft Virtual Server to keep it around after my hard drive change. Almost everytime my computer had an unscheduled reboot (my power went out), it dropped the virtual network card and created a new one which drove opensuse crazy.  I’ve had no such problems with VMware server. It was also a lot easier getting the VMware tools running than it was getting Virtual Machine Additions to work properly. So now my time is syncing and all (my clock was running a little slow before I installed it). Getting the mail setup correctly threw me a little. Opensuse 10.3 uses Postfix by default, and I had only setup sendmail, and my ISP requires authentication for outgoing mail now. I eventually found the necessary instructions. It was actually a lot easier to set up than I thought it would be. I ended up using my ISP’s SMTP server as a relay and SMTP AUTH to get me logged into it. (Continue reading…)