I haven't mentioned it yet, but I have been planning on attending the Second (or is it Third) annual .LAN event. This is a LAN Party gathering that I like to think I helped make happen, but I'm not sure how much I helped this year..

Anyways, .LAN is this weekend, 9/12-9/14, and I am PUMPED. I'm taking my video camera, and digital cam down to document the event, and I will hopefully have images posted afterwords.

I don't know if I will get a break to blog about anything this weekend, but I will be in front of the PC for at least 36 hours, so there is a chance..

As I mentioned in the last post, I installed Windows Home Server on my old Media center machine. I ended up having to upgrade the RAM to 1.5 GB, mainly because I wanted to run a virtual machine on it as well.

The WHS install was fairly smooth. but very long. It took about 67 minutes to install the OS, then it rebooted a handful of times while it applied patches and got itself set up. There was very little input required, which was nice as I was able to just kind of "forget" about the install.

My first impressions of WHS have been pretty high. I am impressed at the level that you can run backups daily, and it is very easy to integrate into your existing network. Once installed, Several shares are set up by default. In the "Software" Share is the installer to connect your PCs to the server, which automatically sets up backups and gives you access to the shares. It also syncs your passwords between windows and the server.

Another great feature is remote access. This sets up a website where you can access all of your shares form anywhere you can get internet. It also checks port forwarding on your router during the setup and will attempt to automatically configure your router if uPNP is enabled.

Since the install, I have forced Windows Media Player 11 to install on the OS (not an easy task) and have been having issues with my Video drivers, which isn't surprising since it is running an ATI 9600 Pro AIW card. I'm fearing that I might have to buy a new TV tuner.

I also got Windows Media Center 2005 running on Home Server successfully, but I can't really test it until I get my Tuner drivers working.

I finally got my hands on a Copy of Windows Home Server, and last Night I planned on installing it on a Virtual Machine to play with, and potentially use it for my media center/server.

Home server is built on Sever 2003, so I set the VM specs as they would be FOR Server 2003. This included 384MB of ram, and I used a standard 8 GB SCSI VHDD.

The first issue I ran into was setup complaining about my RAM. Apparently WHS needs 512 Minimum. This worried me, as My Media center only had 512.

I shut down the VM and adjust memory and tried again. This time it complained that It couldn't locate the SCSI drive, and I had no hard drives to install to. I shut down again and rebuilt the VM using an 'IDE' drive.

3rd boot: This time I received an error that I have to have a HDD with AT LEAST 65GB of space. I looked at my VM setup, and decided to fore go the VM testing.

This thing is getting put straight on to the Media Center.

The weekend was pretty uneventful for me. I had to leave work early on Friday and take Mary to the Doctor because she was sick, so we spent pretty much the whole 3 day weekend watching Heroes on Netflix. I must say, that show is like crack.. It's so well written that the end of every episode has you saying "I need more!".

So I exaggerated a little, while we did watch all 23 episodes of season 1, and 3 of season 2, I did actually get a lot done on Nanobyte. Nothing that is tangible to the site visitors, but I can now use the admin interface to edit menus, permissions, decide who sees which menu entries, and some other fun stuff like that. My next task is to make uploaded images automatically resize and display, so I dont have to hardcode the image size into posts.

We also made it to Sams Club. We had a free coupon to check the place out, and my In-Laws decided to get a membership. They went to the member services desk and were treated so rudely they decided not to get a membership based on that one employee's actions. That was about the highlight of that trip..

That is about it - I'm looking into turning my Media Center PC into a Windows Home Server system with MCE components integrated into it so I'll let you know how that goes.

/crosses fingers
/fly

I finally got around to formalizing my subversion repositories, and made them public now that I am not embarrassed to let people see them.

The repositories can be viewed at svn.wiredbyte.com. I believe I have anonymous checkouts enabled, but no one can commit (otherwise i think I would lose track of my project quite quickly). Links to checkout projects are listed on the main page of the SVN site.

I have 2 projects currently for Nanobyte - Nanobyte (the CMS itself) and Gallery (A Module).

The SVN browser also has RSS feeds so you can keep track of changes made. The svn site is powered by WebSVN. This is easily my favotrite web-based SVN browser ever!

Well it has been a few days since I last posted, and I blame it on my lack of time. I'm not saying I got too busy to write, but when I was thinking about it, I was actually too busy. I always have things I'd love to talk about, but I never write them down. I'm going to start making myself a list, and hopefully stay on top of said list.

I know I have talked about several webmail clients in the past. I originally got started in webmail with the classic: SquirrelMail.

Squirrelmail is very basic, and does exactly what it was written for - to be a purely HTML driven webmail client that is compatible on any browser.

Over the years I have experimented with many clients. My last few endeavors have brought me to: Horde (IMP), Roundcube, egroupware and finally SugarCRM.

I used Horde for quite some time. It was great to have the calendaring, tasks, contacts and email all under the same hood, and I was using sync4j to sync all of this with Outlook. I was doing some updates, and ended up breaking my Horde installation (which on Dreamhost is not easy to get going I must say). I then started using roundcube, but I missed the sync features and left it for another groupware package.

Egroupware has many features, but it doesn't feel like it is mature yet. It has collaboration apps list a project manager, timesheets, document repository and others, but it is all simple and not really useful. The information I would liek to have had wasn't stored or required, and I felt that it had a ways to go.

Yesterday I stumbled onto SugarCRM. This has it all. Email, calendar, notes, tasks, project management and best of all - a huge community behind it. It can sync wiht outlook using a variety of methods, and feels much more mature. It is mainly AJAX driven, but seems to degrade gracefully if JS is turned off. If you are looking for a free open source project collaboration suite, I would suggest taking a peek.

I've been struggling for some time trying to figure out a way to write 1 form.tpl file and have all the code passed to it to generate what I need.
Today I found what I needed! HTML_Quickforms. Below is the code I use to generate the user edit form.
A great tutorial to get started with QuickForms can be found at: DevArticles.

How many IT techs does it take to take a starter out of a 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse?

Apparently 2 - 1 to hold the flashlight and one to bash his hand on every hose clamp under the hood repeatedly.

About a week ago, I replaced the brakes in my car, as I had worn all the way through one of the brake pads. We replaced the front Brake Calipers, Rotors and Pads. 3 days later, I parked the car and Mary went to take it out. It wouldn't start.

I spent some time troubleshooting and decided to start with the battery. I took the battery out and had it tested. It was good. In fact - it was better than good. 12.7 Volts. The tech that tested the battery stated that it is most likely my starter. I asked him if it could be a bad battery cable, and he said that it is not possible or likely.

A few days later, Nick and I began the process of removing the starter. Now, on most cars this is pretty simple, but on the Eclipse, the starter is under the exhaust manifold, making it IMPOSSIBLE to reach by most standard methods.

2 hours later, and several times through the instructional video on YouTube, we finally got the starter removed. We took it in to the shop, and they hooked it up for testing. This also came out positive. The starter was perfectly healthy. I asked again if the issue could be the battery cable, and was given the same answer - no. This time I was told that it would be the ignition switch that was the cause.

Last night I decided that I would replace the battery cable while on a 3-day wait for the ignition switch. I ended up having to cut the battery cable off. i took it in and bought a new one. Once I got the new one installed, I inserted the key into my ignition and turned.

Low and behold, the car made no effort to fight me, and started almost immediately.

Let this be a lesson, just because someone who knows more about you on a subject does not mean they are always right. Battery cables in a car CAN and WILL go bad.

The first Nanobyte module is currently in the works, and the module interface on the CMS in in place for the most part. I have enabled the module for demonstration purposes, and it is far from perfect.

The module is based on the code used by an old jQuery UI demo photo gallery, that I believe is no longer live.

View the Gallery

Update: Fixed the Link to the gallery.

As I mentioned in my last post, this site is blocked at my new job, becuase it is categorized as internet messaging. Fortiguard - as I requested - recategorized this site from internet messaging to Information Technology. The next day at work, I tried to get to a subdomain - portal.wiredbyte.com - and was blocked becuase it had been categorized as PORN. I don't know how Fortiguard categorizes sites, but I think they need to work on it.

If you have a site that Fortiguard has incorrectly cagoizedyou can submt a request to havit reheckd on thier site.

Among other news, I just spent $250 redoing my car brakes, replacing calipers, rotors and pads, and 3 days later the starter seems to have gone out, so now my car has great brakes, but won't start. Wonderful.

I got the modules functionality of Nanobyte working in its early stages yesterday. If a module gets enabled, you can view it using a link or URL, but I haven't finished the functionality yet.. it's getting there!