Gang–I wanted shamelessly promote a friend of mine who has recently stated a new tech blog to help you get your Cisco on.  Visit him at All Time Defense

Bryan (or Mad Dog, as he is known to his friends), has a great deal of experience with Cisco security products and is now inviting you to walk with him (in a purely plutonic sense) down the road of Cisco Voice Over IP.

Personally, I think you should read his blog early and often.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Hello, Everyone!  I wanted to point out some less-than-obvious functionality that most blogs feature.  In particular, the RSS feed.  It seems that people who use it love it…and people who don’t use it…well, really don’t know much about it.  SO–at the risk of sounding pedantic, here goes.

RSS stands for “Really Simply Syndication” and can be thought of simply like a morning newspaper.  That is, if we can even remember what a newspaper is in our day and age .  A newspaper did/does a fantastic job of compiling bits of information and delivering it as a package to one’s door.  An RSS feed is essentially the same–whenever a web or other RSS enabled content is updated, an RSS Client notices the change and grabs the new content for the user.  SO, if you have “subscribed” to this site’s RSS feed, you have probably received this particular post inside your client without having to visit the site itself.

Which is very cool and very convenient.  If you aren’t currently familiar with this technology, I’ll give some tips later on.

More to the point many Content Management Systems (CMS) have this built in.  Such as Wiki, manufacturer websites, on-line stores, community forums, and many others.  I realized that most people just aren’t using the technology recently while setting up a professional organization chapter website.  I made sure that the other members were aware of not just the main RSS feed, but all the other feeds that were buried within the site–like Recent Changes on the Wiki that is it’s own discrete feed.  (This article is actually an edited cross-post of the one I wrote there.)

Anyway.  The I’ll get to the point.  Use an RSS client.  Here’s how:

Clicking on the link above in a modern web browser like Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 will expose the built in RSS client.

The simple fact is, that using a browser as an RSS feed reader is rather less like an RSS Client and rather more like a plain old book mark.  Which seems to be a little silly.  There are two other ways to subscribe to RSS feeds.

The first is via a stand alone client.  There are a few of these, most are free and pretty sturdy.  If forced to use one, I would personally go for RSSBandit, which can be found at here.

However, my personal choice for catching RSS feeds is to bring them into my email client.  That is the logical place for me to receive updated information on a random basis.  My email client is always open and does a great job of notifying me when there is something new.

There are many email clients with RSS clients built right in.  Among these are Microsoft Outlook 2007, which is an excellent product for many reasons.  Also is the robust and feature-rich Mozilla Thunderbird–which if not for Outlook, would be my choice of email clients on the Windows platform.  For Linux, one of the many common plug-ins for the excellent Evolution email client handles RSS reading.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of email clients in the world today are Microsoft Outlook 2003, which does not have a native RSS reader.  So, to add this functionality in, we will have to install a plug-in.  I have been using RSSPopper for Outlook for six months and believe that I can recommend it without reservation.  RSSPopper can be downloaded from http://www.rsspopper.com

After a simple install and a quick restart of Outlook 2003, it is up and running.  Now it is possible to configure some feeds.

Click on the RSSPopper button that has been installed in your Outlook toolbar, and select “Edit Feeds”.  Click the “New>>” button on the right hand side Feed Info window, and select “New RSS/Atom Feed…”.

With the “Feed Information” box ready, select the entire feed URL to the feed and paste it into the Link field.  BTW, you might have noticed–RSSPopper supports more than just RSS and Atom.  I can be used to keep your Outlook synchronized with a web-based calendar via iCal support.

Now, simply click the “Get From Feed” button, which should bring back the feed Title.  Click OK twice and away you have a new feed. Sharp eyes will see XML logo badges or RSS badges on many websites–I have nearly 30 or so feeds I monitor daily.  It helps me stay informed.

Good Luck!  And keep watching for XML or RSS badges on websites!

Popularity: 45% [?]

Ordinarily, I try to keep this blog about tech stuff, but well, I have to break from the norm for just a minute! Forgive the self-indulgence.  This kind of stuff doesn’t happen every day.  Ok, not to me anyway :).

He’s pretty great, isn’t he?  Unfortunately he has my hair–in fact after he received his first bath, he looked like he had a bad run-in with a Van de Graaf generator.

Now back to our regularly scheduled geekdom…Huh?  Oh, I guess we can apply a bit of Internet meme here.  Lessee… in the first picture, the caption could definitely be “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!”

Oh, now that I think about it–check out the birth announcement.

For those who don’t know:  At the hospital, the day after a birth they come around with a strange-looking cart that seems to come from a high-tech medical TV show.  It is actually a downward pointing camera that is specifically designed to separate new exhaused and stressed parents from their revenue.

Because the hospital needs more revenue.

So they take some pictures of every baby and then try to sell them back in a variety of sizes and formats.  One of which is the birth announcement format.  No thanks!  With my trusty Canon A620 and a little time on my laptop, I had created what I considered an excellent birth announcement.

I first took several shots of the baby at a fairly high resolution.  Loading these into Fireworks, I touched them up a bit with the Dodge tool.  This helped even out his complexion a bit–it’s pretty hard work to be born.  I cropped out an oval shape that feathered out on the edge and just dropped it to black and white.

Secondly, I used another favorite program to whip up a quick vector image for the scallops.  Basically a bunch of identical circles with the top half whacked away.  I saved that as a windows meta file and imported it into Fireworks.  Once there, I copied it and flipped one upside down for the bottom border.  Then on both I filled with the baby-blue color, applied a slight sideways drop-shadow and small bevel to the edge.  (BTW, it’s good to remember to keep the light unified–so the shadow and the bevel both appear to be lighted from the same source.)

Next, I placed the text on the blue spaces with the font I wanted.  I wanted to dress it up a bit, so I added a white outlined box, changed the line to dashes and fattened them up a bit.  I then applied a grain texture to them to simulate thread.

So far my only cost is about 45 minutes of time.  Ah, but here’s where the magic happens!

The hospital wants a parent to pay $40 to over $100 for a set of birth announcements!  And who knows how long they will take to be delivered…  With my method, I got 55 of them professionally printed on glossy photograph stock for $9 and had them in my hands an hour later.

“How?” you might ask.

Wal-Mart.

I created an account, uploaded my final announcement jpeg, and was done.  Well, mostly.  My wife, in a spurt of craftiness, bought some brown ribbon (with little footballs on it) that we put on the top left corner of each announcement.  If fact, that is the reason behind the space there.

Anyway.

Technology is grand.

Popularity: 47% [?]

Yep. Stupid title–and that’s what one feels like, sometimes, working on new sites inside Vista. So why do it?

Well, there are three things really:

1. I’m not a programmer–C, .Net, or otherwise. We aren’t counting scripting like batch files, Perl, and VBS. Neither are we counting markups like HTML, and for that matter, PHP. For all the wildly fantastic functionality, the learning cliff may never be scaled by the likes of me. Hi, Chris!
2. And, thanks to Meestah Bryan, I have access to a great open source server with full cPanel authority. For roughly zero cost. Hard to argue with that…
3. Lastly, I’m a bit spendthrift (read: cheap). With the open source Content Management Systems (CMS) the only expense is time for the first one or two. Now that I have a pretty solid understanding of how PHP and MySQL work together, I’m free to try out anything that catches my eye.
4. Don’t taze me, bro!

Please don’t misunderstand–I actually rather like Vista. Or at least I would far prefer to use it over XP. Honestly, I think that the rants complaining about things like the User Access Control are indicative of inflexibility to change rather than an issue with the functionality. Why, in this world of malware, wouldn’t you want to know when some process is trying to install something?

On the other hand, there are some things that are obviously broken. Why does it take 45 seconds to move a 30k file to a new location? Yes, I know the technical changes from Windows XP in this aspect–but does that make it better? And, apparently, SP1 isn’t as hot at fixing this as I’ve hoped. It’s the little files that get ya.

And we are about to move around tons of little bitty files. More’s the pity.

I personally just live with it just to have access to a few required applications in the Windows world. Here’s some software, that if it ran on Ubuntu, might make me leave Vista behind. Macromedia Fireworks, for example, in addition to Photoshop make an unbeatable, two-fisted, graphical ecosystem. Full, native VST support on Ardour would allow me to consider it rather than the Cakewalk Sonars and Ableton Live studio softwares of the world.

And world peace.

As you might be able to tell, I’m a bit of a WordPress fan. The 3rd Party Plug-in community is incredibly vast and deep. I’ve never had a need that couldn’t immediately be filled by some plug-in. Usually in a only a few minute of searching.

I also love Joomla–the extension community isn’t quite as large as WordPress, but I still haven’t run up against a single brickwall (save for some version 1.0 to 1.5 problems). Check out this site that I did with Joomla 1.5 for the local ISACA chapter we are attempting to form: www.isaca-ozarks.org

On the same site, I used a really light-weight Wiki engine, called WikkaWiki. I have used the full-blown (as in Wikipaedia) MediaWiki in the past as well.

All are easy to setup and easy to use.

Another great thing about WordPress, Joomla, and the rest are all of the free templates that can be used to customize your site. All of which are great, but I like to do something a bit more customized. So, I need to be able to edit and test locally rather than breaking my production (giggle) website. Also, with Joomla, you will probably need a healthy assortment of extensions to get your job done–these will need to be tested to make sure they all play nicely with the version of Joomla and with each other. The point is: You will need an easy way to do this locally on a development installation.

This is where the WAMP group comes in–bénissez leurs chers petits coeurs!

A quick download of WampServer and an install, and voila, you have an PHP development server. So, go and grab a copy of Joomla, unzip it into the www folder, and…uh…go to bed. Yeah, there are zillions of tiny php files inside the Joomla archive. It has taken one of my Vista machines up to 4 hours to extract it. Seriously.

However, once it is done, you can setup your MySQL database inside the WAMP control panel and follow the Joomla documentation to install.

Let me also recommend TortoiseSVN for managing your development. I use it to roll back changes (read: goofs) and for version creation. Can save a lot of headaches, like when you accidentally overwrite the final version of your CSS with a bum one.

Not that it has ever happened to me personally. Just saying.

Here’s some ideas for WAMPServer, even if you don’t need an Internet site:

• Host a Wiki on your home network so the whole family has access to notes, projects, collaboration, mindmaps, Christmas lists, etc. If you setup a good firewall (read: Endian ), then you can even securely access this via the Internet.
• Host a Joomla site on your home network with jEvents installed so you can have a family calendar. Use a Joomla iframe Wrapper to give the kids access to only certain websites.
• Learn how to create quick and easy sites so you can give your development time away to non-profit organizations.

Have fun!

Popularity: 48% [?]

Man. Life is suddenly busy. Lemme give out with some cool stuff, though.

The latest version of Ubuntu Linux is head and shoulders above the previous iteration. I’m used to Linux being rather slow and dodgey. This just isn’t. It runs extremely well.

If you want to give it a go, grab the ISO and burn it to a CD. If you are using Vista–and you should be. Don’t give me any of that nonsense “Hatin’ on Vista” mumbo-jumbo. So, since you are wise and up-to-date, use your Vista hard drive management to resize your partition down a few gigs. 8GB is more than enough to taste Ubuntu.

Boot the Ubuntu Live CD, and start the install wizard. Even on my ATi-based machine, it ran well, and detected most devices.

Actually, it “detected” all of the devices, but some of them required “restricted” drivers. I had to go into the “Software Sources” applet, and open it up to use “3rd Party” and “Proprietary” drivers. I guess they can’t enable this by default.  If you for some reason didn’t want to use “proprietary” drivers (uh? why?) it would kinda be too late by the time you got the choice, catch?

Oh, and do a “sudo apt-get install preload” to help performance a little more.

Once I did that, I was in tall cotton.

Compiz-Fusion was a bit harder. I’m not going to walk you through it–a quick google search will give you all you need to follow these steps:

1. Allow root to log in locally, then switch users.
2. Edit /etc/x11/xorg.cofig so that the “Composite” setting is “1″ rather than the default of “0″.
3. Run from a terminal the command “sudo apt-get install xgl-xserver”. Or is that “xserver-xgl”? Anyway…
4. Go to the Appearance applet and turn on the “extra” effects.
5. Profit!!!

I love the “shaky” window effect when I’m dragging stuff around. Does not seem to add any performance hit in regular usage. However, I can’t do the cube effect with this little ATi card–it isn’t powerful enough.

<sigh>Doesn’t that look cool!?!?!

Popularity: 42% [?]