Recent Comments in the sidebar...

I was looking for better ways to display comments on my blogger blog here... I never liked that there is a little # of comments link at the bottom of each post and one needs to click to see them. I found this widget:
http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/08/create-your-oen-recent-comments-widgets.html
And you can see the results here on the sidebar on the right.

Do we like? I'm not sure yet...

I found this widget from this post:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-10-blogger-hacks-and-tips/

PHP and MySQL at home

I'm a coder/scripter... I'm not the person who deals with or likes to deal with installations of programming/scripting environments which made trying to "serve the web" from home last summer so frustrating.

But I had to get back to that... because I had a new project I wanted to work on that required using PHP and MySQL. So I had to get all that set up. Since I had downloaded (and thought I installed all that) months ago, there have been new releases of both. I went back to mysql.com and php.net and downloaded: mysql-essential-5.0.51a-win32.msi and php-5.2.3-win32-installer.msi respectfully.

Configuring PHP worked well - there are changes to the httpd.conf file found in Apache's setup directory but MySQL was driving me crazy until a friend pointed out that I didn't have the "mysql" extension installed. I had to reinstall PHP with the mysql extension. Once that happened, all was well!

I wish I had seen the following website before I began:
http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/

It's fantastic and would have saved me a couple hours. :)

My Favorite Websites Roundup - 2007

Here's a roundup of my favorite websites from this 2007... (this doesn't include the fact that I'm a facebook and del.icio.us addict)

1. mint.com I can't believe how many hours I've wasted in the past with software like Quicken. This is the best money management tool I've ever used. It's so simple, so easy and so useful. This is my favorite of this list of favorites.


2. animoto.com Have a few pics that you want to turn into a video? Use this site. It's quick and easy. I just wish it had the ability to use songs that are a little more popular. Or, for personal use only, I wish I could any music in my collection. Still - given the easy and cost (free for short videos) - it's really neat-o! Click here to see one of the little videos I made.


3. MIT Open Courseware. Now I just need A LOT more free time.


4. Retrievr Ok, I haven't had a need to use this site, but I think it's very cool. It allows you to search images by sketch. Try it. It's fun!


5. Napkin Folding Guide. I've been considering hosting a dinner party just so I can use the info on this site.


6. Portrait Illustration Maker. I've searched from the beginning to the end of the internet for a good FREE avatar maker. This is the one I like the best. :)

Yes, over the course of 2007 I bookmarked many many more good, interesting and useful sites. But these were the best. (Especially mint.com) Enjoy and Happy New Year!

Treo 755p vs Blackberry 8703e

I've recently had the opportunity to compare my Treo 755p to a Crakbe... I mean Blackberry 8703e.

I got the Blackberry for work - meaning work forced it into my hand to make me even more accessible to them. So now I'm carrying around two devices - except that outside of normal working hours I ignore the Blackberry and inside the work day, I (mostly) ignore my Treo.

Long story short: I would again buy the Treo for personal use.

However, for work, the Blackberry is the better device. This is because at work, we use Outlook, and the Blackberry is well in sync with email, the calendar and contacts. I even started to use the Outlook to-do list for work related things. Beyond those items, I also use Google Maps on the berry, the internet browser a little bit and it's my work cell phone.

The screen is nice - it's a little wider than the Treo and it looks great. I'm just not used to the fact that it's not a touch screen - I keep trying to touch it and nothing happens. :) The keyboard is also wider, but I have fairly small hands and fingers, so I've never had a problem with keyboards on any of these devices.

As a phone, it seems much better than older versions of Blackberrys that co-workers of mine have had. I don't feel like I've had any more of a problem hearing others or that they've had a problem hearing me.

One interesting feature that I do like - the device knows when it's in it's holster. So you can have different ring tone and vibration settings for new emails and phone calls depending on whether or not it's in the holster.

As for the wheel on the side - I like it in some apps (like email), but I find it to be a pain in other apps like the calendar (when I want to just press on the screen to change days).

But the worst thing, is that the Blackberry doesn't and won't have all the 3rd party apps I use daily on my Treo. But I've been a Palm OS person for so long... it's almost like giving a Wii to someone who was on her 3rd generation of Playstation. :) (ok, not quite - but you can't use your playstation games on your Wii)

Upgrading from the Treo 650 to the Treo 755p

The short version: I'm glad I did it.

The longer version:

I've been using the Treo 650 on the Sprint network for more than 2 years now. I've been using various Palm OS devices for amost 10 years, so when I decided to start thinking about upgrading, I wasn't about to switch to a windows device or even the iPhone. The Palm OS devices does everything I need and more (it does everything the iPhone does and more and in some cases better but it just doesn't look as slick).

The big reason was the fact that over the past couple of years, Sprint had upgraded it's network to EDVO and my old Treo 650 couldn't take advantage of the higher speeds. In fact, I was only getting about 70-80 kpbs on the old device. On the 755p, I'm getting 200+. It makes a huge difference, especially when using Google Maps. (You can test the speed of your mobile browser with this speedtest: text.dslreports.com ) I use Google Maps all the time now, without hesitation and it's great.

I had some initial problems when I received the device - a couple of the buttons were simply not working (including the "Applications" button and one of the side volume buttons). Exchanging it at my local Sprint store was relatively painless once I had the proper paperwork - but required two trips to my local Sprint store (grrr).

Syncing up my data to the new phone was as easy as it's always been... I didn't need to upgrade anything on my desktop (Palm Desktop hasn't changed in a VERY long time).

My only problem after syncing was that my caller Id didn't seem to be working completely. A little internet research revealed that it might be a problem with one of my apps - Ringo. Sure enough, removing that app removed the problem. The newest version of Ringo has 755 support and it's been working fine since I installed it. I love that each one of my friends and family (and colleagues) have their own unique MP3 ring.

The reviews I read about the 755 talked about better sound quality... I haven't noticed much of a difference, but then again, I didn't ever think it was too bad on the 650 except for when driving. But I drive a Jeep Wrangler - it's always too noisy and I never hear anything well.

The redesign is nice... the big antenna is now internal which means it fits better in my purse! (A geek-girl has to think about these things, you know!) The fact that the buttons are slightly different just means I need to get used to something new. Also no big deal.

The improved camera is nice. The quality of my indoor shots noticeably improved. I'm also now able to take advantage of services like ScanR.com which let you take pics of business cards, whiteboards and documents and return a vcard or pdf.

The fact that it came with a Voice Memo application is nice. I really think it's time for voice dialing and other voice applications to come standard on these devices.

...and except for the minor hiccup with Ringo, all my other old apps are running just fine.

All in all... I'm a happy camper.

That Tag Cloud Thing...

You may have noticed the Tag Cloud up above. I learned how to do it from a fabulous post on "How to make an awesome Tag Cloud!"

But if anyone can offer any suggestions on how to work with the formatting in the new Blogger, I'd appreciate it. It looks great as a sidebox, but I want it up top like you see it and I'd like to be able to space it better from the edge of the box.

Geek needs help!

From Home You Too Can Server The Web! (or spend the day trying...)

I spent a long (and frustrating - but geeky and educational) day with my computer yesterday. I decided I was going to install a web server on my home PC.

You see, on the website I use for my business I have a special place were I set up a set of forums just for me and my employees using XOOPS ( see http://www.xoops.org/ ). It's fantastic and we've come to rely on it as our primary mode of communication between shifts and from day to day. It's mostly a just set of PHP scripts.

Twice in the past month, it's gone down - which is a huge pain in the tushy for me and my employees. Just the PHP-based forum was inaccessible, not the publicly available website - and I realized that there was some problem going on with my hosting company and the execution of PHP scripts. But the hosting company has been less than helpful in trying to get my issues resolved and I decided I needed to move our PHP based forum elsewhere.

So I thought... why not set up a web server on my home computer and do it from there? It's low traffic, so I could support it, and if something went wrong I would have much more control over the troubleshooting effort. It would also give me an excuse to learn a little more about web serves, MySQL (also necessary to run XOOPS) and PHP.

I found a great article on setting this up at home from LifeHacker and I followed the steps as outlined in the article.

My comments on that article: I did need to do the "netstat -a -o" procedure written into the notes and it didn't help. The only http process that was running was inetstat.exe and if you go to http://www.processlibrary.com/ you'll see that it is a necessary service running on the machine (and appeared to instantly restart whenever I killed it). At that point, I rebooted my computer and when it came up, Apache was running just fine.

My next problem was that I couldn't access my new served stuff from any other computer. I was following another LifeHacker article. I tried from a laptop I have on the same wireless network and I tried through an internet proxy site http://www.atunnel.com/ (as was recommended in one of the article comments). I have a Linksys router, and it took a while to find where my "Port forwarding" settings were (they're under "Applications & Gaming") and there's not a pick-list for the Application, so I tried typing in "http" and tried "HTTP" since there was no guidance on what was supposed to go in this field. Overall, I was disappointed in the help documentation that came with the router.

I also had to punch a hole through the Norton Firewall I have running. The advanced rules settings lets you open port 80 to the world or a limited number of computers.

But in the end, it turned out that my ISP doesn't allow web servers. When I was searching the web for suggestions on how to get this to work, I found many people with the same problems, but few suggestions on what to do next. I found some suggestions regarding checking with your ISP - and when I went to my ISP's website, I was lucky enough to find a FAQ entry about this - they simply don't allow it. I also checked the website for the ISP I use for my business, thinking that we could do the same thing there, but there was nothing written in the FAQ or help that said either way. (Note to others: just check with your ISP first before starting.)

Poop.

So for now, I do need our forum hosted someplace else. But in the meantime, this was a very educational experience - and I can still run my web server locally and download PHP and MySQL and have a version that I can tweak and troubleshoot. Just more things to play with.