Month: November 2005

fixed pricing

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every few years a new must have service appears in the marketplace that is not a one time purchase but a reoccurring price. before one leaves their home, the bills come in for all these services. for example:

$ 9.95/month napster music
$24.99/month sirius satellite radio
$24.99/month brinks home security monitoring
$12.95/month TiVo
$39.99/month mobile phone service
$16.95/month OnStar in-vehicle system

so these basic services will set you back around $130 a month, and that still does not include other utilities (gas, electric, water, and phone), automobile services, magazines and newspapers, and cable/satellite television. will 2006 finally bring in the monthly computer rental, where over a large broadband pipe, you get to use a computer with many applications, but administer nothing?

upgrade to joomla from mambo

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dot upgrades are simple, but platform upgrades take some time. i was able to switch from mambo server to joomla server without much data loss, but i did loose a day of hits. sure, the default locations of my installations had changed, so the quick upgrade was out of the question. here are my steps going from mambo 4.5.3 to joomla 1.0.3 for those who want to try.

always start with a current backup of the mySQL database exporting all relevant tables and in the structure tab selecting add drop table, add auto_increment value, enclose table and field names with backquotes, complete inserts, use hexadecimal for binary fields, save as file, with no compression. from there you might have to change the default location of the site and run a the installer script on the original mambo SQL called migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql to make the administrator panel work again. after a few hours of recovery, you’ll have your very own joomla server up and running. goodbye miro and mambo.

using phpmyadmin i also had to cut and paste the text into the script window, since the browse text file failed every time.

long road to upgrade

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so i thought it would be simple upgrading wordpress from version 1.5.1 to 1.5.2, by simply backing up the mySQL database, writing over the old files, and coming back up, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. now 7 hours later, wordpress and my blog are back online. yes, you should always have a production and test environment, but i thought i knew what i was doing.

my mistake was simple, but fatal. all i had to do was use phpmyadmin to drop the new blank data, and restore the old data from my last backup. when i tried if first, i got an error #1064, and something about bad syntax. i did a google search, and found many suggestions as bleak as it’s all over, to try a second time. after around five times, i thought if i reinstall the basic components it would work, so i removed mySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin, joomla, wordpress, and started from scratch.

i’m using a very robust server from westhost, and everything seemed to be working. i even installed perl and python for good measure, but when i got to PHP version 4.x and even PHP version 5.x it was failing to install. this is a remote install using a powerful site control panel. on occasion it would time out, but i would in the past log right back in to try the install. after 45 minutes of install/uninstall frustration, i decided it was not my multiple browsers, but something on my host computer. i wrote around 11 AM to westhost support, and finally around 4 PM got the fix.

so now with a clean install of the underlying architecture, i thought for sure i could get wordpress up again, but i got the same syntax error. using a fine text editor, textwrangler, i tried my last attempt to cut and paste the table definitions into phpmyadmin, and that solved the odd syntax errors. i don’t know if the browser upload function added special characters or removed backquotes, or what, but a simple text paste solved my seven hour site down warning.

i will be more dutiful next time i want to upgrade my site technology. i will not blame PHP or mySQL and concentrate only on the application.

giving thanks

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next week americans around the globe will sit down and give thanks to God for all, thanksgiving 2005. be it katrina, rita, 9/11, dover PA school board, alito, or limbaugh milestones, it is all good, and God deserved the propers. a trend over the last five years, is moving from the big breasted turkey dinner, to a heritage bird, or what the first few thanksgivings might have served, instead of the genetically engineered and bred bird that goes on most peoples plates.

www.marysturkeys.com
www.reeseturkeys.com
www.heritagefoodsusa.com
www.heritageturkeyfoundation.org
www.slowfoodusa.org

short distance travel

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it’s that time of year to make arrangements to get to CES in las vegas and macworld expo in san francisco. in previous years, these events collided on the same days, but as apple computer moves into the consumer electronics space with ipods, both shows, both in january are important events. apple also plays a hand in the music show called NAMM in late january too.

what you see a macworld you get to use immediately, but what you see at CES comes in october, so i expect to see blu-ray and hi-def recording devices. for all those that are going, do use the best internet technology to find the best prices on flights, trains, and places to stay. i start with kayak, then move to orbitz and travelocity. some airlines only book direct like southwest.

x64 as future

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as software solutions seem to move toward open standards, hardware platforms are moving this way as well. just one year ago, we had various CPU’s that dictate a specific OS platform. there was ultraSPARC, AMD x64, PowerPC, intel itanium 2, and intel x86 EM64T. now as industries converge, the move toward an industry standard hardware platform has begun.

sun microsystems has open solaris for the x64 platform, microsoft was windows XP x64, red hat linux runs on x64, novell SUSU linux runs on x64, and coming next year, mac OS X will run on x64. each hardware vendor can optimize the hardware by selecting various ASIC’s and components to maximize applications to make their respective OS shine. we are just eight months away from the mac OS X tiger x64 release, and data centers around the globe are preparing for the transition.

the move to standardization

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at the 2005 annual sun microsystems stockholder meeting scott mcnealy, CEO, gave a optimistic view of the next generation of computing. in a matter of a few short years, we’ve moved through the stone age of computing, the iron age, the industrial age, and skipped through the internet and information age, and landed squarely into the participation age.

sun in june 2005 started a share ad campaign, with employees, industry partners, and visionaries. in the new age of participation computing users bid, podcast, download, school, and live on the web. every device, from a handheld, desktop, and light bulb have IP addresses to communication on the participation highway. sun wants to build the infrastructure for the next data center, in direct competition with IBM.

sun has some compelling strengths like complete control of solaris OS and hardware, even though they are moving aggressively into standardized hardware based on X64 architecture. as a company, like other industries, green computing (low cost, low energy density, low administration, high performance) is also a factor.

their technologies to make this all happen are display over IP, star office, java desktop, and java enterprise system.