technology – Page 20 – frans goes blog

IT in the garden

Lying in our garden swing, I can currently see six wifi access points — that’s urban nature for you! 🙂 Comparing LCD screen and paper (Luontokuva magazine), it is clear that traditional paper is still far superior when reading anything outside. The screen in AA1 is very good, but still very pale in sunlight. Wonder if e-ink/ebook reader screen would make a real difference to the benefit of IT? At the moment — closing this webtop and app is the best way to relax, so: enjoy the summer, everyone!

Installing WordPress on Windows 2008 Server

I am a GUI person by heart, and have had my fair share of frustrations on trying to configure Linux through the various config files. While I am currently pretty satisfied on how reliably Apache and WordPress run on this Ubuntu setup, I’d also see whether I will get over some printer driver and sharing issues by installing a Windows server. To test this, I ordered another HP Proliant ML110 server (this one was running Xeon, a G5 setup). Physically all seems very similar to the system I am currently having the Linux.

I will know from experience this will take its time, and I try not to hurry. I have a functioning production environment in Linux, after all. Quickly thinking it through, it seems I need to set up at least the following:

install an IIS web server role
configure some additional features, such as rewrite rules
make sure I have sendmail or similar mail capabilities running
install MySQL and phpMyAdmin or similar tool
configure MySQL database for WordPress
install WordPress
set up the themes, widgets and other plugins
import the WordPress database contents from the old Linux installation to the new Windows Server one
make sure that all firewall rules, NAT redirections and such are pointing to right internal IPs and ports correctly for the new server to start functioning.

A time estimate for all this? No idea. I guess it might go smoothly, but with the usual hassles etc. I’d guess something around 40-50 hours of installation work and processes. Should perhaps be one or two months, if I use plenty of my free time to implement this. This day’s saldo? I have now the Server 2008 Web edition running (a trial version download, lets see how this works out), and I also managed to input the new MAC address into my router’s fixed address table so that I now have a fixed internal server IP where I can start building upon. I managed to also find a couple of helpful web resources that I should read and apply to my case next:

Any tips and tricks that I should take into consideration are also very welcome!

Microsoft envisions the future

It is always (well, almost always) fun to see how people illustrate the future; and usually we can learn a lot by studying the past future visions. Microsoft has a bit more money than most of us, and can thus create rather fancy futuristic videos:

Some of these things appear rather likely, incremental evolutions from the present paradigms of interactive and augmented computing. Some were a bit unclear to me — what was the point, how that was supposed to work. And in general, the feeling was a bit similar to after watching Minority Report — fascinated, but also a bit put off, in classic dystopian style.

Moblogging with a camera phone

I have been playing with some mobile tools in my kitchen and living room (the mobile weekend of a family man, I know). The camera phone that I am mostly using, Nokia N95 8GB, just got a new firmware, V 31.0.015, which brought along some nice additional or enhanced features. These include better integration to online photo sharing services. I am using Flickr, and now it is just one click away to share a photo through the default Internet service provider. Also, I noticed that the phone screen automatically tilts to vertical/horisontal (this sensor tech might have been in the previous firmware, too, I am not sure). In the background I am running Location Tagger, which captures the GPS coordinates into the photos’ metadata in a format Flickr can also read. You need to be close to a window for this to work indoors, of course. The app can cache the location data, though, which is handy. I have also Fring now running in the background, which is a mobile instant messenger program that is able to tap into Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and SIP Internet phone services, to start with. The downside now is that there is always something “interesting” going on in the damned device, so I might turn this off at some point. But the always-connected, automatically location tagging camera is something that I’d like to see in my SLR/main system, too, to look into the future.

Moving to Windows 7

During weekend, I invested my two free hours to install the Windows 7 Beta (talk about leisure time, there). I was pleasantly surprised that the first public beta already seems so ready. I think that if I can get all my utility programs to run under it, I will probably move directly away from Vista (too many issues in that OS version still). The multiboot Win7/Vista/Ubuntu needed some tweaking — nice instructions are e.g. here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1035999

Remap special Thinkpad keys in Vista?

While I am still waiting for a chance to replace my sub-standard T500 with another laptop, I need to figure out ways to live with it. It is slow, but apparently getting a memory upgrade from 2GB to 3 or 4GB should speed up the Vista considerably. There is nothing you can do to the painful display, it stays as bad as it is. But there are also those couple of annoying little [previous page] and [next page] keys next to the arrow keys. Those are useless, and I want to remap them to [page up] and [page down] instead — that is how similarly positioned keys are used in Acer Aspire One, for example. But I cannot find any way to do that in Thinkpad running Vista. There is a special keyboard customization utility coming along with all other ThinkVantage software, but that allows a rather limited set of keyboard shortcuts to be programmed. And as far as I can see, those forward/backward keys are not supported by the customize utility — which is very silly. I can find instructions how to do the remapping in Thinkpads running Linux (e.g. in http://blog.vrplumber.com/index.php?/archives/2232-Need-to-figure-out-key-remapping-under-KDEX.html) using piece of software called xmodmap. I cannot find anything similar for Vista — but surely there must be a similar Windows utility somewhere?

Good laptop, is there one?

I have had my fair amount of troubles with the new Lenovo T500 lately, and as the display also creates terrible headaches if I use it for more than couple of hours (yes, I got my eyes examined also — it is the display), I need to find a laptop that would actually work. Here’s a couple of requirements: it should have a good display (no back-light bleeding, bright, decent resolution, good viewing angles), precise keyboard for touch-typing, light-weight (but not necessary an ultra-portable, but the lighter the better, of course), powerful enough to handle at least some of the recent (if not the latest and greatest) games and media, and finally also carry enough battery power to keep on going for at least 4 hours on a row, preferably more. What options do we have? Apparently at least a few. Macbook Air is out (cannot handle the OS, and lack of connectivity & options); Lenovo has X301, which appears to be a great, lighweight machine, but it is also rather expensive. Sony Vaios have good reputation as stylish, powerful and quality PCs, and they have recently introduced a new Z series which appears to make a serious attempt to be all-around decent machines. Then there is the mixed bag of LG, Fujitsu-Siemens, Dell, Asus, HP/Compaq, and others — none really having any of their works in the news lately (which does not mean that they wouldn’t have the thing I am looking for — I just have not heard of them). A recent interesting device was X360 from Samsung, which is clearly a Korean attempt to compete with Lenovo X300/301 and Macbook Air, but has not got quite as stellar reviews. The price is much lower too, of course. So, here is my current top three — do you know of any decent alternatives that I have left out?

Current contestants:

Office 2007 with WordPress blogging

I have finally updated to Office 2007, and learning its tricks takes its time. One nice feature I noticed was that it allows you to register your own blog and publish blog notes directly from within Word. Here is link to the instructions: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA101640211033.aspx. They do not mention it there, but for WordPress you should choose MetaWeblog API (not Atom) for it to work. If you can see a picture below, then it also supports upload of pictures:

Ok, it supports photo uploads, but it does not scale photos. And it is not also possible to set the categories / tags from Word, as far as I can see. But nice to get this much, at least.

Vista no longer able to access CD or DVD drive

I suddenly had a weird problem with Vista today, that took some valuable time (more sensibly otherwise spent) to fix — here is a quick note if you face something similar. If a CD extracting program (e.g. CDex or similar) starts to complain about a missing ‘wnaspi32.dll’, check whether you are able to see the DVD/CD station in My Computer at all. If not, then you might have a corrupted Windows Registry (yikes!) But the fix to that is actually pretty simple: I followed these Microsoft instructions (the manual version) that relate to Windows XP, but the “delete UpperFilters entry” trick seemed to fix also my Vista Home Premium 32bit just fine. Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/en-us

Planet Earth in HD

There are only few Full HD television series or movies I have got so far, and the king of them all currently is the four-disc Blu-Ray box of Planet Earth series by BBC. To a friend of nature documentaries, the selection of ‘spectacular’ animal species and situations (starting with the amazing Emperor Penguins guarding their single egg through the Antarctic winter), but the use of moving, flying cameras and HD video makes the planet really come to you in a way I have not experienced in any other visual media before. It is pity though that the localised version on sale here in Finland does not include the great Finnish language narrations that were prepared when the series was broadcast on the air by YLE, the national broadcast corporation. I really like and respect David Attenborough, but while we watch these with our family, it would be nicer to have Finnish audio, rather than the subtitles over the HD image. Particularly as the subtitles these disks carry have much inferior translations than what YLE used in their broadcast versions. I have wondered even before why BBC/2 entertain does not use the expertise of YLE when putting DVD versions of their series on sale here in Finland, and in this HD version the use of subtitles only is even a worse choice. I also truly miss the making-of documentary and the extra three “Planet Earth: The Future” episodes (those were included in the DVD release but omitted from the Blu-Ray box.) The series itself, nevertheless, is mind-blowing, and will truly fullfil its promise to show us our planet as we have never seen it before. bbc_planet_earth_blu-ray-box