Technology

Content Management System

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I am looking for a content management system to use at work. We want something that will be easy to allow end users manage and update content on. So the goal is to get something setup by technology that we can simply hand off and not worry about the management of the site. At first we thought a wiki was good enough to setup, but media wiki required too much learning curve to use. This project is a side research project right now, but it would be nice to figure something out and get it up sometime soon. I think I am going to play with a few CMS’s on my own website and see how the functionality looks.

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Windows Vista RC1 Take 2

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I know I said I thought I was pre-determined to not like Vista in my original post about it, but there are plenty of annoying things that just scream out at me. Some stuff looks nice also, but all that I have found that I like are all UI things. No real substance.

My first major complaint is that the control panel is different. For example all the elements you could previously get via the display control panel are now separated. So you have to go looking for the control panel option for the screen saver, screen size, desktop, etc. It is annoying. I also looked for 15 minutes and could not find where the option to NOT let Vista log me out after an extended period of time is kept. In XP and older versions it was configured in the screen saver options.

The major thing that drives me crazy is how you have to install software. Since at work everything is on a network drive I have to say ok to launching something from the network, and then I have to say it is ok to install something, since Microsoft likes to ask me if I really want to do what I am telling the OS to do. That is nice in theory, but if you get too many dialog box’s you tend to just say yes to them and not read them. I thought they (MSFT) figured that out with 2003, but apparently they didn’t learn their lesson. In fact they decided to take it a step further. Jayson says this all the time, but by turning off all the options of a browser by default does not make it more secure. Users will just say yes to the warning box when they try to run something. They will also look less at each box the more of them they get.

Now on a good note, I was surprised how quick Office 2003 applications such as word and excel opened when launched. I didn’t get a chance to use the apps since I really don’t work on a windows box anymore, but I was happy with the snappy performance. Of course the performance better be that nice on a 64bit AMD 3000+ with 2gigs of RAM.

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Mooing Macbook Pro

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My Macbook Pro has been causing me problems for almost a month now. It sounds much louder than it should during normal operation. Every once in a while (more often than not now a days) it will start getting much louder like an engine for a while. After a while it eventually goes back to normal, but as I said normal is still way too loud. Last week I got fed up with the sound (when my office is quiet all I hear is this dam laptop and it drives me crazy) and had it taken in to a Apple service center. I got it back in the middle of this week, and early on it was apparent that the replaced fan did not do much good. Yesterday when it started sounding really loud again I knew whatever they replaced didn’t fix the issue.

I called Apple support today and spend almost an hour on the phone. At first the level 1 support guy was giving me the normal song and dance about how they need to bring it to a depot and take a look at it. He couldn’t shed any light on what was going on. Something must have clicked because after a while he put me on hold and sent me to a specialist. I actually spoke to someone who knew what he was doing. Now it is hard to explain a noise problem. The system functions without any issues, but it is just abnormally loud. I can’t localize the sound. It seems random when it gets really loud, but it is constantly emitting a low hum that it should not. I know it shouldn’t because at work we have a few Macbooks and Macbook Pro‘s. My luck that my personal computer would be messed up. The guy I spoke to supposedly made some special notes on my ticket and I am now waiting for a box to arrive to send it in. They said something about the logic board, but they will run it for a while when they get it to see if the can reproduce the issue. I hope they can, but based off of how often it happens to me I don’t think there will be a problem with them reproducing it.

Now I have to go without my work computer for probably another week. It isn’t too bad since I have my personal Macbook I will bring to the office. The downside is that I normally leave my Macbook on at home when I am at work and run a bunch of different processes. I shouldn’t complain too much since I at least have a laptop to use. I know I get a bit spoiled with the gear I have access to at work. I just hope this unit comes back and works. More news when the unit comes back!

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Photo Albums

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The driving force to get me to try a new web hosting provider that I mentioned in my post “Spoke Too Soon” was to get an easy to use web album management system installed. Not simply using some client side image formatting system like I had been using. Granted my most recent photo layout tool, RapidWeaver was good. It was the latest in a long line of editing tools such as Frontpage, the generic export feature of iPhoto, some php photo album generator, picasa, and more. The ability to have a true photo management system powered by mySQL running on a server sounded great. I stumbled upon Gallery by accident the other day.

Once I looked it over a bit and found a hosting provider that would script the setup in a minute I setup a new hosting account. I was uploading photo’s in 5 minutes. Now I haven’t got everything exactly the way I would like it, but I am working on it.

Now I will continue to use RapidWeaver for my general website creation, but since most of my content is photo albums Gallery will come in handy.

More updates after I get more content into the system.

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First Thoughts on Windows Vista RC1

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I downloaded RC1 of Windows Vista over the weekend. I have been hesitant to test it out, but I finally broke down and got it. This is the first release of Windows since I have had a computer that I will not use as my main OS. I don’t count Windows ME in that last statement. I may not want to use XP anymore, but before I became a Mac fan I used it. 2000 was good, NT 4 was stable, but not much hardware would run on it. 98 (all flavors) was slow and crashed, but it was an improvement over 95. 95 was better than windows 3.1, but still wasn’t awesome. The more that I look back the more I realize the pain I went through over the years with these OS’.

I look at Vista in a different light since I look at it not to be my new electronic home, but to see what it is about and see if or when it will have a place at the company I work at. I honestly go into evaluating it, not expecting to like it. I admit I am biased against it based off of everything I have read. My initial assessments reaffirm that fact.

I decided to test it on a physical machine, since I was concerned about the performance of it in a virtual machine. I took a brand new HP desktop that we are deploying and tried to install the Vista DVD. First thing I learned is that our brand new AMD 64bit desktops don’t have DVD drives in the stock configuration. My trusty external drive came in handy. I then learned after 2 attempts that I could not install vista by booting the computer and getting the DVD to load. It started to work, but every time the install UI tried to load the dam computer blue screened. This happened twice until gave up and just loaded the XP build I had on it and just started the install from within windows. I don’t like to do this, and when the process was done I had a windows.old directory. What I would give for a clean install!!!

The install once I finally got it to work, seemed to take forever to run. It honestly took like 2 hours on brand new hardware with 2 gigs of ram. I wasn’t sure about this hardware being fully compatible with Vista since it has an integrated video card on the mother board. Everything did finally install.

Initial performance thoughts are mixed. It didn’t seem faster than XP. The UI did seem sort of cartoonish. It is like they tried for the slick UI that the mac has (and newer linux distributions) but just didn’t get it. They did have some cute UI features like blurring some of the text of items that are visible behind some transparent windows.

The install pains I had alone where not a good start. I didn’t get to do much further testing on it before I went home for the night. I am interested to see how bad IE 7 is. Jayson put a version of IE 7 on an XP box and had only bad things to say about it. I will see if I have time tomorrow to do more testing. I will have a follow up posting with more feedback. For now I can safely say unless Leopard is total crap I will stick with the Mac for now.

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Enigma in Flash

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I was a history major, and my favorite area of study was WWII. I also have always been fascinated with codes and cryptography. Even before I went into technology I did a term paper on the German Enigma cypher machine. That is why I thought it was very cool when I saw a link on Digg to this Enigma machine in Flash.

OKGXLNFLSKLOATYONBNKJCVFBXCDYZJYBJXJZEVCPQQMSOSWWM or shall I say ILIKEDTHESITESOMUCHTHATICREATEDTHISTEXTUSINGENIGMA

Nifty. I wish my free time projects would be as cool as this!

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VMware on a Mac?

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The rumors are flying that VMware will be announcing something at Macworld this week. Rumors are rumors, but VMware has said they have been testing their product on the Intel Macs. I for one would be very happy with an announcement being a mac user who uses VMware on a daily basis at work. VMware Workstation and VMware server tools running on the mac would give me one less reason to need a windows machine. Well honestly it would really be one less linux machine since I got fed up with my windows desktop at work last week and ended up trying to reinstall windows xp 3 times before giving up and putting Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on my computer.

I will keep my fingers crossed this week!!!

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The Perpetual Upgrade

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Since I am perpetually upgrading I am now sporting a new Apple Macbook Pro. Well honestly it is not mine. it is my new work computer. I have given up the small size of my Powerbook 12″ for the power and the Core Duo intel chip of the 15″ Macbook Pro. It is big, but that means the screen is also big. I am hoping not to carry it home every day like I did with the Powerbook. That may make me not care so much about the size. Every so often I swap back and forth between wanting a nice size screen and a small form factor. Neither are perfect, so I never know what I want. I am at a point where I want a nice size screen so I can work off the laptop anywhere.

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Outlook to the Mac

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Last year I found software that would export mail in my outlook pst files to plain old text and html files. That was great for archiving. I exported everything so I can keep it in a universal format such as plain text instead of being reliant on Microsoft’s outlook pst file format. I was very happen until recently when Andrew showed me O2M. It is a tool that exports outlook pst data into mbox files so I can then import them into Mail or Entourage on my Mac. This is also very helpful since now I can keep all my old mail in the mail program that I actually use. I have been cleaning up my PST files so I can port them over to Apple Mail. My results so far have been great. Well worth the $10 for the tool!

My only problem now is that I have (will have) everything in Apple Mail. I hope there is a tool where I can extract mail from that program and port it to something else? I like having my options open even if I don’t have an immediate plan to move off of Apple Mail.

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The Evil Empire Is Evil, But Has Good Signal

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After an issue with really poor signal at our new office while setting up some gear we have decided to ditch our Nextell’s. I like the direct connect, but having the phones work and recieving email all the time on the Blackberry’s are more important than having a cool feature. So we took the plunge and got Verizon Wireless phones. I personally don’t like the heavy handed tacktics they use to keep customers (2 year deals, and limited time frames to upgrade phones) but their service is still probibly the best in NYC. I finally ported my number from my personal T-Mobile line over and now am very happy with my new Treo 700P on the EVDO data service.

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