Web/Tech

Google Apps

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I remember when Howard & Gus were talking up Gmail when it came out. A gig of storage for life free they said. It was a closed beta so you had to have friends who had an in get you an invite. In a short period of time (shorter than I expected) I had an invite. I was like why do I need this? I want and use my own domain’s personal email. Why would I want @gmail.com in my address? I mean the idea was very interesting but I didn’t think it was for me.

Not too much time went by and people were still talking about Gmail. I figured I need to use my invite so I can at least secure the username that I like to use, so I did. As predicted I haven’t used Gmail that much. I do route mail to it that I don’t want in my regular mailbox’s, but I could go weeks without logging into the account. That was until a month or so ago.

Recently Google offered Google Apps for free. Google Apps is a collection of web applications that you can use with your own domain. They have cool features like Google Talk, Calendar, etc. What got me interested was Gmail. Now they offer a Gmail front end that you can use for your own mail domain. Better yet it is free for personal use. I get 100 accounts with as of this writing 5.8 gigs of space. Now this information on its own would be interesting but nothing more. In fact when I first read about Google Apps I setup a mail domain pointing to the system and played around with it, but nothing more. I like to get my mail via IMAP, and Google didn’t offer that. The final clincher for me was when they announced that Google Apps would support IMAP, also for free. For the past week I have been routing some mail to my domain I had them hosting mail for, and so far I haven’t had any hiccups (fingers crossed). Because of that I am beginning the task of routing all my mail to Google Apps.

I can be a cynic. I know that, but I am very impressed by how this tool has evolved. I am even eying the Premier version of the service to get some of the more advanced features. I am not sure if I need them so the free service is fine for now. It is just too bad that I wasted some money moving to a new email hosting provider in September. They are great, but they can’t compete with 5gigs free IMAP storage.

AOL For Free?

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I went online tonight to do some research for my mom and dad regarding their AOL accounts. First I realized that my dad has been a member since 1996. Wow, time has flow. I was poking around his account for him so I can figure out how to keep his email address (and my mom’s) but not pay the BYOP monthly charge of $14.95. They have been paying that to keep the simplicity of AOL for years after they switched to Road Runner cable. Now a days they don’t use the service for anything more than checking email, so why pay for all those extra features. It turns out that AOL got wise and is now offering a basic BYOP plan for free, as long as you don’t use any premium features. That works perfectly for them. I was set to move them to google apps. I even had a domain name bought and configured for them before I figured out I didn’t need to move them. Lets hope that there is no hidden gotcha’s to this change, but from AOL’s web page it doesn’t look like there is.

Not having to cancel their account is also very helpful for me too. I totally forgot that my AIM screen name is in fact an screen name attached to my dad’s account. The screen name pre-dated my use (or the existence for that matter) of AIM. I used to use it for some web hosting back in the day. I haven’t logged into the AOL software in so long (for the record it hasn’t been on my computer in years) that I forgot that it was a screen name and not a stand alone AIM name. I might have had problems if i canceled the account and wanted to use the screen name for AIM. Not having to deal with the issue is a good thing, especially since I don’t really want to change it. It is like a phone number, it hasn’t changed in years and everyone I know has it.

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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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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More Data Cleanup

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I moved all my files off of one of my firewire drives this week. This was so I can format it to work on my Mini. Dam NTFS not working on the mac. It took 36 hours to robocopy the data off of the firewire drive onto another USB drive. Even-though it was a USB 2.0 drive, I think it was running at 1.1 speeds. 36 hours was an awfully long time to copy 90 gigs of stuff. Even if it was mostly small files.

I am in the process of backing up old backup files to DVD’s. I am also just deleting tons of old crap that I don’t need anymore.

Backup’s

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I am well above average when it comes to backing my files up on the computer. Of course there is always something you forget to backup. I have been burned more than once by loosing important information. Last month I started using rsycn a bit to backup my files. I am trying to get a bit more advanced in how I use the tool.

I also decided instead of backing up my data to a firewire drive attached to my Powerbook that I would backup the data to another firewire drive connected to my desktop. In order to do that I am moving files around on my desktop to allow me to use the firewire drive as a backup only drive.

ISO’s and virtual machines sure do take up allot of space.

Technology Certifications

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I loved this post on slashdot. The poster asks why IT certifications are good. Some very interesting points of view. I am in the industry, and I have no certifications. I am not saying that is good or bad. I have just seen tons of people with no experience and a certification (or little experience) think they know everything. As I said when I did contracting, some MCSE’s wouldn’t know a domain controller if it fell on their head. And other guys I know with no certification but years of experience would be (and often are) the first people I call for help.

I guess what I read from this is a certification is nice, but nothing beats experience. Having both is really great also.

Linux Is Addictive

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For years I have been getting poked and prodded by Gus to do more with linux. Of course he would say this as he gave me a workload no 2 people could handle. Over the past few months Jayson and Danny have been getting into the act of wanting to push our linux use, personal and professional. Now I got Brian, Chris and Kai also saying we should play more with Linux.

Jayson took it upon himself to setup a web server at his house. it is an old dell box I had lying in my closet. I have yet to put any applications onto it, but he has a website, blog, wiki, and mail system running on it so far. His enthusiasm is addictive. I have been working on a virtual machine that I can host my stuff in, but I am thinking that won’t be enough. I could just host my stuff with him. That was the idea of giving him the box in the first place, but then I think what fun would that be?

I want to play with my own personal wiki. The other stuff he has done I don’t really want. The mail server sounds good, but I am not sure if I want to put mail (i rely on mail allot) on a system that I don’t fully understand yet.

What everyone doesn’t (or does) understand is that I want to learn, it is just not super simple!