Epnix.Com

Well for the most part all went well with moving the forums from utopianguild’s .org site to the .com site. One. Thing I had forgotten we I first got started with it was when I did the exports out of mySQL that i was going to a older version and needed to make it compatible.  Which, btw,  means someone should probably look into getting that upgraded.  Nothing wrong with it security /patch wise as it’s up to date , but there have been improvements in efficiency and such.  Anyhow by not making it compatible when I tried to do the import it would throw an error.  I wish the error would have been something along the lines of  “it’s not compatible” instead of the cryptic mess it tossed.  Another wonderful thing about mySQL is the export features.  If the system doesn’t like the export cause maybe there are to many records or such, it just saves a empty file.  Yep just changed the title of this post to “Things about mySQL that make me go gray faster”.  The good news is, I’ve gone though this before so I recognized the problems which jogged my memory and changed accordingly.

Today however, as I type this, some new problems are cropping up within the forums.  One is when I go to the system tab in PHPbb3 , even though I ran the update, it’s showing as not updated.  Just on that tab though.  The main tab says that everything is just fine.  Also, at least one user isn’t seeing the forum listing right away….

UPDATE: Kind of multitasking, typing this as I am working on the forums.  Tish pointed out on the system tab that the update didn’t complete right, so I went to update it, and BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM Now I have nothing.  WTFH !!!!!!!!!  Why is it that what should be the easyest of things end up taking days to resolve. It’s always something new.. Gerr…….

UPDATE #2: Stupid .htaccess files.  Granted that’s what happens when you use a system designed for Apache on IIS, but somethings I have no control over.  Still fighting with the system, but at least it has a pulse.

UPDATE #3: OK so I can’t ever do a automatic update on this server, it’s always going to be a well probably though some other program like Dreamweaver or Expressions Web that will allow me to download and replace files in a local set then upload the changes.  The Autoupdate HAS to put the that file in there, but the hosting servers does not allow for it. The very pressence of said file makes the site unreachable.  Nice eh?  UGH! Hopefuly we got all the files updated this time, and everything will work well.

Well got the upgrade to WordPress installed, which is always a good thing, though I’m not sure if it will post to my Facebook page or not.  Hopefuly I didn’t accidently delete something important, guess we’ll see shortly after I hit the publish key.  Also with the update I picked up a new theme for the blog, I had the other one for a bit, time for something new.

I still have some house keeping to do, but most of that will happen when I get the other blog going.  I know I have a hard enough time keeping up with one blog, how the heck am I going to keep up with 2.  Well part of it has been my instance of getting the other site working, so I don’t post anything cause I need to get the other site working.  This of course leads to frustration cause I couldn’t seem to get it working (though I’ve made some great progress as of late), which then lead to me not working on it at all, and not posting at all for….. Months.   Hopefuly that won’t contiue to be the case, and I can get posts moved, and categories trimmed and shaped up.  Then I’ll be back to posting happly on which ever topic moves me.

Enough typing for now, have work to do.  Now to see if this carry’s over to face book (crossing fingers).

While talking to a friend of mine (yes, believe it or not I do have a few friends) he asked if I had seen the new Safari web browser.  I will admit, I don’t follow Apple stuff to much. I’m not a hater, or a die hard Microsoft user, I just no Apply fan boi.  So really I didn’t even know that Safari is up to version 4, or that it had a major release a few weeks ago.  I was informed that it was really cool, and looked great, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

It’s kind of funny though, to go to the Apple website you wouldn’t know that the software was recently released. As a matter of fact to look at the website as I type this, there is no mention what-so-ever about the release that happened in July 8th (today being the 17th so 9 days later).  After a little bit of searching I found the page (if your interested its apple.com/safari It can also be found by clicking the downloads link on the anywhere in the apple site), and took a look at the marketing spiel.  One thing I beginning to hate about companies and their use of the word Innovation.  They don’t seem to care if a technology or setup is out there or not.  As long as it wasn’t done “Their Way”, then they are providing innovation to the market.  The example here is:

With Top Sites, Safari keeps a running tally of the websites you visit and automatically creates a graphically rich page that displays up to 24 thumbnails of your  favorites.

This is not Innovation in itself as the Google browser, Chrome, has had this since release I do believe.  Now they didn’t have it on a stylish solid background, with the thumbnails looking like they curve around the screen. All that though is just display, displaying a users top sites is not a Apple Innovation.  The items below on the page are not even innovative, really they are nothing more then the normal progression of features.  HTML 5 is a up coming recommendation (though not fully set yet) the same with CSS3.  Really the only thing on the page that is possibly innovative is the WebKit project as it is a true derivative work of the KDE project’s KHTML software library.  Also, you would think that companies would word security statements a little bit better. A few months ago, at a “security conference” a Mac was hacked into in under 10 seconds via a Safari 3.2 library.  So reading that a software package has “be built From the ground up with security in mind” tends to make me nervous.  Let me mention again, that yes I’m tearing about the marketing speak on Safari page, but they are not the only ones guilty of this.  So I’m not being a hater, just it happens to be the site I’m talking about right now.

With the negative marketing speak out of the way, I’ve downloaded and installed the software on my laptop, and fired it up.  If anything can be said about the products Apple releases, they look great.  Safari is no exception to this.  Really, if Apple really wants’ to innovate the market, they should leave the feature creep to the other developers  and just show the world how to make those functions work and look good.  Safari’s version of top sites looks many times better then Chromes version, same with the history search that uses page thumbnails so you can see which page on a site your selecting.  Apple lists 150 features for the Safari browser on their website, some new, others not, but since this is my first run with safari, I guess they will be new to me. 

One feature that I need to check out a bit more is the Speculative Loading.  Basically Safari is going to try to guess which page or document your going to go to next and pre-load it ahead of time.  This probably ties in with Apples claim that Safari is faster then the competition.  It might not actually be faster in processing information, it might have just had a head start getting it.  Where as this has some obvious benefits in the rendering category, I have to wonder what it’s going to due to my cell phone bill.  You see many times when I’m on the web with my laptop, I tend to be in places that don’t have wi-fi access.  So instead of Wi-Fi, I’m tethered to my Blackberry under Verizon’s plan. I get 6GB a month of bandwidth, which, since I tend not to be on YouTube or Hulu when I’m tethered, has been more then enough (I will admit though, I really wish there was more bandwidth usage for my money so I can view more video.  But then who doesn’t wish they had more when there is a hard and set limit.)  My concern is though, say I’m on a news site with links to Video that I wouldn’t normally click on cause I’m using the tethered cell connection, that Safari may still be downloading all that information anyhow.  I’m going to have to remember to test that.

Well looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me to test out this browser.  Granted I’m sure if I do some surfing, someone else has already done the work for me, but what fun is that?!

Recently I decided that I needed to try a few things out on my laptop, cause, you know, I’m a glutton for punishment apparently.  Really though it was due to my install of Windows7 on my lap top when Release Candidate 1 (RC1) came out.  My laptop is a convertible tablet, so yes it works like a normal laptop, but the display can swing around and close, monitor side up and be a stylus or touch screen tablet.  The fact that it can be a tablet is the reason I bought it, instead of a fancy, shinny, and a few other pretty adjectives 17” multimedia wonder.  The problem was, when I did a upgrade install of windows 7 from Vista, when using the stylus the cursor would go spastic, jumping around where it was touching.  And as far as a touch screen, that wasn’t working at all.  At first, it was no big deal, as I was still able to use it as a normal laptop, but in the back of my mind it was bothering me.  Well the “pre-installed games” limited duration came up, and the anti-virus needed to be upgraded (Norton 360 version 2, didn’t work on Windows 7) so it seemed like a good time to torment myself.

With the reinstall I wanted to do 2 things;

1. See if a fresh install of windows worked better then my upgrade install.
2. See how well Linux worked on this laptop.

I should have listed them in the opposite order, as that’s how I did the installs.  Browsing over to Ubuntu I downloaded the ISO of the latest version of the distribution (9.04), backed up my laptop and installed away.  I could have done some form of “Nifty” Dual boot system, but I figured eh, why fight with it.  Since the goal here was to see how well it worked, I wanted to give it plenty of space for the best case scenario.  The “out of box” experience wasn’t to bad, most things worked, including the wireless network.  What didn’t work was the touch screen and stylus, I didn’t have any audio, and the buttons around the edge of the display didn’t do anything.  Still it wasn’t a bad start, considering that most laptops have a lot of proprietary hardware that require a bit of tweaking to get to work properly.  A quick trip to Google led me to quite  a few posts regarding my laptop and Ubuntu.  It didn’t take long for me to have sound working (just typed one command, one line of text, save and reboot, done) and a few more minutes later I could use the stylus for some text input.  For the most part I stopped there.  The fix that enabled the stylus was suppose to also enable touch capabilities, also the procedure for getting the display to rotate was going to take a bit. But I was pretty confident I saw what I was going see as far as how well the laptop would work.

Now before any of the Linux faithful decided to jump all over me, yes I know that I could with a little bit of effort and a day or 2 could probably get just about everything working, and be a “sort of” happy Linux user.  I’m not knocking Linux here, just looking at it strickly from my requirements for a OS right now on this laptop. In my investigating of the the issues I also looked up the software possibilities for touch and stylus.  And the selection is rather low, and is really still in development.  Going back to my original intent behind the laptop was usage as a tablet so really that’s what I was considering as I said I saw what I was going to see, I had cell writer, and Journal (I think that’s the one, I can’t remember now) and while it was good, and worked well, it just wasn’t developed enough yet.  For one thing, I was hoping the Journal software would convert the chicken-scratch that I wrote to text, like Microsoft One Note.  Beyond that, I really like Linux, it’s fast, Compiz-Fusion (best video I could find), is everything windows Aero wishes is would be when it grows up, the software carries the right price tag and all that.  Regardless it was time to move on.

Windows 7 Had been installed on this laptop once before, it was done as a upgrade, which took hours.  I was rather annoyed with it especially since I had a few things that didn’t work.  Granted these issues were quickly forgotten as Win7 worked in all other ways.  Due to that install I knew I had some driver incompatibilities.  There was a message to that fact as I was doing the install, and of course I wanted to get rid of all that “wonderful” additional software that HP graciously gave me with the laptop.  Of course half of this was already taken care of since I completely wiped out windows when I had installed Linux.  So it was easy enough to pop the Win7 disk in and start from scratch.  Instead of hours, it took less then a hour.  Come to think of it, I think I had Windows installed, patched, and was downloading the drivers for the display buttons (the only think that wasn’t working after the initial install) in less then a hour.  In about 30 minutes to a hour later I have Office and OneNote installed.  I was trucking along.  Yes, as soon as Windows came up from install, I had both stylus and touch screen input available working perfectly.  Of course it wasn’t perfect, As I mentioned, I still needed to download the drivers for the buttons around the display, particularly the one that let me rotate the display.  Also, the fingerprint reader won’t work with the default windows software.  It took me maybe 2 minutes to fix the first issue, haven’t looked into the 2nd one yet, just wasn’t important yet.  Yes, I’d like to not have to type out password all the time, (yes I’m one of those, who like to password protect my windows account even on my home PC’s.) especially when I’m in tablet mode. That Aside though, windows 7 passed as far as what I needed for usability.  Plus for the few things that didn’t work, it was going to take a lot less time to get them fixed that what I was looking at Ubuntu.  So Windows 7 it is on this laptop…. For now at least.

Along with the patching of Windows 7, there was a optional item for Microsoft Live.  Contained within that package is a program called Windows Live Writer, which is what I’m using to type the blog post up.  To be honest that’s really what got me to actually get a update in, but I’ll save that story for another day.

Mike

I have a bit of a laundry list of things I want to do this weekend, but for some reason I can foresee only a small hand-full getting done. Why? well it’s not ally how long it’s going to take to complete each task, as individually they shouldn’t take that long (well except for overhauls for 2 websites which will probably take a whole weekend each, but lets forget about those for now).  The problem is that they mostly involve my favored tool and toy, my computer.  You know, the piece of equipment that is suppose to make our lives easier, and allow us to get things done faster.  Instead it seems to promote a form of block where time and space comes to a complete stand still immediately around you, while the rest of the world plods on.  This is demonstrated as one looks at the clock and finds they have been working on that one quick thing for roughly 5 hours. 

I’ve been trying to pick apart this phenomenon and it this last case I came up with this sequence of events.

I got a blackberry for Christmas, a week later it turned into a not so wonderful paper weight.  Verizon did replace it, however, I never backed up my address bookthat I had copied over from my old phone, nor had I synced it with outlook.  I did have a printed list, thank you print copies, and after getting home from work (and taking a bit of a nap) I decided to re-add the names.  This should have only taken a hour tops, as I really don’t have a lot of people in my (accordingto outlook I have 25 names in my address book)  So REALLY this shouldn’t take that long.  then all I would have to do is sync up the phone to outlook and done … Right?  Well I get to one person that is also here on Facebook, and I think, hay, why don’t I get their picture off their facebook profile to use as their caller picture.  Of course when I log in, I see that I’ve been “Kidnapped”.  For those that don’t know, Kidnap is a Facebook program that seems to be tied in with the travel channel, and is now one of the few apps I’ll use.  What happens is one of your friends kidnaps you to their evil lair using one of a verity of possible methods (the more you play, the more points you get, the more points you get the more methods you get).  To escape you have to answer a trivia question about the city the kidnappers lair is.  Which is why I like it, because I’m leaning nifty little facts about places around the globe.  See! I don’t totally hate being educated   Anyhow, as I said, seeing as I was kidnapped I “HAD to” escape.  Now, I don’t know if it’s “cheating” or not.  Personally I think it’s the intention of the app to get you to hit the “cheat-sheet” button cause from that point the Travel channel can now start advertising to you. which is why I do it all the time, hmmm someone let me know if I’m wrong.  Anyhow so I hit the cheat-sheet and start researching the answer, finding that, and answering the question leads me to go off and kidnap a few people also.  You know I get points for escaping, so I feel obligated to give others the opportunity to get the same.

With that done, I’m back to the task of getting the picture, however I also then notice status updates, and of course the fact I haven’t updated mine in 2 days.  So first things first comment on how I have a lot to accomplish, but feel like I’m getting no where (Yes Amy, thinks for pointing out that part of the problem was I was on facebook kidnapping people, I know, I know) , then comment on other peoples statuses… then comment on other comments and so on.  Then check the groups.  Oh look a few posts on the blackberry group.  I go to check them out and respond to one.  In the process though I forget the same of the group within Research In Motion(RIM)  that creates the toolkit to make themes on the blackberry (Plazmic).  Now I want to post this response cause I know the answer and like to be helpful, contrary to popular belief some people may have.  Course this means I need to open another tab in the browser and go to the blackberry sites forums and find the post that has the name of the organization that I’m looking for.

Logging in over at blackberry support forums, I see a few posts that interest me, again one question that I know the answer to, and one that I want to know the answer to.  Time continues to tick away as I read though comment after comment on the one.  The good news is I really did know the complete answer to the other one so it, for a change, only took a few seconds to answer.  Then I get back to the process of hunting down the name of the group that makes the theme toolkit.  I do finally find it (it was on page 3 all the posts) and slap my forehead for forgetting.  OF course at this point a more focused person would go back to facebook and answer the question to move back on task.  Ok more the likely a more focused person wouldn’t have been sidetracked to begin with, but I lets forget about that as I didn’t do either.

No instead I think I should check to see if in the past 2 days Plazmic released the tool kit.  So I open another tab in IE and head over to plazmics forms.  First thing I see is that, No, the toolkit is not yet ready (quick rant, as posted in other places… COME ON PLAZMIC.  The Strom has been out for 2 months now, and the Curve 8900 has started rolling out, you should know this as your a division of RIM, what’s taking so long for the CDK????  Ok rant done) Anyhow, I had to add my thoughts to a growing post of people waiting for the toolkit to be released. 

Now with information found, and verified, I can close the Plazmic tab, close the Blackberry tab… ok  Maybe not close that one, cause I’ll just want to go back later anyhow. Tab over to Facebook, answer the post about theme’s now head back to my main page to get that picture… oh look, more updates…….

After finally going though the updates and the returned kidnapper’s I finallyget the picture, and get back into outlook… Total round trip time…… about a hour or so.  With the picture added, I move on to the next address… hay look, they’re in facebook also…… Rinse and repeat.

So all in all it only took me a few hours to add 25 names to my address book, and I wonder why I never seem to get anything done.  The good news about all this.  It gave me something to blog about… look 2 checkmarks off my list for tonight. and it’s only 11pm *sigh*

Edit: Oh and I forgot, i wanted to post this in the middle of the blog, but it didn’t seem right.  I was listening to the Rush CD – Rush in Rio while writing this (and well getting other things done.  Neal Pert is a beast on the drums, ever watch him?  favored songs on the album, ok I like them all but Driven, Resist, and O Baterista (Neals drum solo) really stick out.

A leaked version of the Windows 7 Beta got out about a week a head of it’s public release.  Of course that statement alone brings to mind 2 questions.  One, Couldn’t people just wait another week? and two, which is probably more to the truth, How does something leak from Microsoft labs? They probably have more security protocols then Fort Knox, and the employees stock options are making stupid money.  So it seems hard to believe that this could have made it out with out somebodies knowledge.  Odd isn’t it, that this leak happened a week before CES (Consumer Electronics Show) of which Microsoft was / is a keynote speaker for.  Generating a little buzz before you get on stage? Course one thing for sure, I wouldn’t blame them, that’s what marketing departments are for, to come up with stuff like that.

Well with that said, I, along with like 2 million other people or so (would love to see the download / install numbers) went out and Downloaded the official realase this past weekend, and I’m typing this post from the PC It’s installed on.  So far it has proven (I hope) to be indeed beta software, for every couple of cool or even just working features, there’s a gotcha waiting in the wings.  Granted if we’re looking at a Aug, at the earliest release, then there is still plenty of time to work out most of those issues. 

I’m sure, if anybody cares that doesn’t have the beta, you can do a quick google search and find out about all the new features.  So I don’t want to go over that, as its already widely covered.  Instead I’ll pick on something that near and dear to mine and a few friends of mine, and that is about computer games on Windows 7.  Well on that front, it’s been pretty hit or miss.  I’m making sure to submit feedback on this stuff in hopes that it can be fixed before launch.  Because, to be honest, I like everything else about the OS (bugs aside) and really want to pick it up.

So I started with 4 games of verying popularity, ok they are the more recent stuff in my library, and I really don’t have the budget for to many more right now.

• World of Warcraft (with it’s over 11 millon subscribers will probably be installed on a Windows 7 Machine or 2)
• Warhammer Online: A new comer to the MMO set with a few million subs also, Different enough from WoW to find a solid place in the market as long as they keep building on what they have.
• Universe at War: One of the few (maybe close to the first) XBox / PC games that the players from each platform could play against each other Via Games for Windows Live.  Though some would also say, that’s what killed the game.
• Fallout 3: Post Apocalyptic goodness, Won a few awards, rabid following, don’t know what else to say about it, just good.

I didn’t have a problem installing any of these games, I say that with a bit of glee (Chuck: there shall be no Glee) as it pretty much went down hill from there. With one exception, Warhammer online.  Installed and launched (played) with out a problem at all.  And the real funny thing is, I had the least bit of hope for it.  The other three had problems with patching when the game started, Fallout would crash as soon as I hit the play button.

That’s kind of the ugly part.  For the most part I was able to get these games up and running, but adding the Users group to the folders and giving them full control.  This, of course, probably kills off some of the security features within Windows 7.  I suppose many gamers are computer savy enough to understand what I just said to do, but that not all, and we need to make those others happy also. 

Now Fallout 3 is still giving me a little grief when I exit out, but from reading the forums, others are having the same issues on Vista and XP.  So that’s probably more of a game problem then the Beta OS. 

Other then that, Everything is chugging away pretty good, Getting great Frame-rates in Warcraft and warhammer, no lockups when playing.  I can only comment based on what I’ve been told about gaming on Vista PC’s but from what I see, Windows 7 is working as good as XP.  So as soon as the other issues are resolved, yes, I think Windows 7 could indeed be a good gaming platform.

I don’t know what exactly possessed me to create a Facebook account in the first place.  I vaguely, distinctly remember creating the account.  Looking at the confirmation e-mail it was after midnight a few nights ago.  I was tired after work, and was asleep early (like 7pm) which of course meant I was up and wide awake at 11:30 pm. Not having to work the next day I powered up the computer and started checking out stuff.  Maybe it was the questions a few people asked me about Facebook & MySpace earlier, or that a few months ago i was going to check the both out as part of a class I was working on, either way the account was made.

That was a few days ago.  The account wasn’t forgotten, but just wasn’t a priority. That was before I opened e-mail tonight. I originally had sat down to read up on a few things for work, kind of a big project, and I needed to retrain myself on a few things.  Course I hit e-mail first, its what I do when I get home and power up the PC.  And sure enough e-mails from Facebook, this person and that person wanted to add me as a friend.  What scared me even more… unlike other systems I’ve checked out, I actually knew them.  Ok more like remembered them from mushsmsyga years ago.

I’m not the Uber Techie, Not a Designer extrodinare or anything like that.  I always felt I qualified for just a hack that could get a lot of different jobs done.  But to have people that I knew looking at that overly blank Facebook page, well I couldn’t have that.  Crash course time in Facebook.  In the next 3 – 4 hours, I re-established my twitter, flickr, Blog (Don’t believe me, check the posts beyond the past couple of days The only think active on my twitter spot was BOL ).  Then figured out how to attach them to via apps and plug-ins to the Facebook page.  On the whole, I’m kind of happy with what I managed to do.  I know, for the tech-heads out there, I’ve bearly scratched the surface, but it’s good for me.  Now all I have to do is keep it up to date somewhat and interesting.  I think it’s that last part thats going to be the biggest challange.

I suppose I should try to get at least 30 mins of reading in before I call it a night. It’s only midnight…. I wonder what I could sign up for tonight???

I have to get this off my mind to start off with….

I find it utterly amazing the “backlash” over the price drop of the iPhone. There is a reason that early adoption of technology is usually considered being on the “bleeding edge” cause your bound to get hurt from time to time. It just the way that it is. People were proudly declaring that they had picked up their $600 toy 2 months ago. Parading it around, saying how it was SOOOOOOO worth every penny of it. At the time, being the Uber elite was worth the price (you know one of these days I’m going to learn how to add that umlaut, or however its spelled, without going into the HTML, which I won’t do cause I’m being lazy). The price was going to drop eventually any how, what difference does it make if it was today, tomorrow, or another month or two from now. Eventually people were going to be able to get that iPhone for at least half, if not more then what you payed for it 2 months ago. I know why it’s a problem, cause it isn’t worth it for $100 a month to be able to say, “I have something you don’t have”? That’s the only reason I can think of. You only wanted to pay $30′ish a month to say that.
Whatever, as it stands Apple caved and is giving out some credits for the early adopters.

I will admit though, I do feel sorry for the people who got the lower end model that’s been dropped completely. I’d consider some form of refund for them, or at least some low cost upgrade for them. It’s one thing to say, “we need to sell more so we’re lowering our prices” (no not in anyway an exact quote, more of my interpretation of the announcement, same with the next line) but to find out the product that you bought was so not worth the company’s time and energy that they are dropping it already, yeah even I would find that more then just a little annoying.

Well, enough about Apple for now, I’m sure there are soooo many more blog and forum posts on it, that I really don’t need to add much more. On to my Web 2.0 make over.
OK, so, I didn’t get much of a chance today to continue to work on this blog out side of this post. If you must know, which I guess is the reason for blogs, it’s because I had a back log of Buzz Out Loud’s to listen to. And yes, I can multi-task, but I can’t concentrate on every thing I need to do or can do with service X and still pay attention to what Tom and Molly (and a whole bunch of other people the past couple of weeks) where saying. And really I wanted to get caught up. I need to get the car radio adaptor for my player so I can listen to these pod-casts on my way to and from work. Or get a working tape cartridge (yes my car has a tape deck not a CD player, it not a clunker just a little older) that I can connect to it. My ride, one way, to work is about 30 mins. Which granted is shorter then some people out there, but not as short as the 5 min drive to another job I once had. This would help in keeping up with my favorite pod-casts.
Before anybody says it, no, even though a tech pod cast and reading a technical manual don’t mix for me. I can drive and listen just fine, with no chance of a distracted driving accident on my part.

Just as a side note, I deleted a rather large disertation on my theory on how the brain works, and how distracted driving accidents happen to some people but not others, and it had nothing to do with luck. Saving a good 10 mins of your life on somthing you might not have wanted to read. For those who might be interested, I’ll make a seperate page someday and retype it.